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  HOW TO BE A

  REVOLUTIONARY

  HOW TO BE A

  REVOLUTIONARY

  A Novel

  by C. A. Davids

  First published by Verso 2021

  © C. A. Davids 2021

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-087-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-088-4 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-089-1 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940994

  Typeset in Electra by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  To those who walked beside me:

  My grandmother, Florence

  My uncle, Gerald

  My husband, Micah

  And to Zenda, Rejane and Crystal

  “I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

  Till China and Africa meet

  And the river jumps over the mountain

  And the salmon sing in the street.”

  “As I walked out one evening,” W. H. Auden

  CONTENTS

  1. SHANGHAI

  2. CAPE TOWN 1989

  3. SHANGHAI

  4. CHINA 1958

  5. SHANGHAI

  6. HARLEM 1953

  7. CAPE TOWN 1989

  8. SHANGHAI

  9. CHINA 1958 to 1962

  10. CAPE TOWN 1989

  11. CHINA 1960s

  12. SHANGHAI

  13. HARLEM 1953

  14. SHANGHAI

  15. CHINA 1989

  16. CAPE TOWN 1989

  17. SHANGHAI

  18. SHANGHAI BOOK CLUB

  19. CAPE’S CONFESSION

  20. BENEATH YELLOW MOUNTAIN

  21. THE AMERICAN HOUSE

  22. THE SHANGHAI BOOK CLUB

  23. CAPE’S CONFESSION

  24. BENEATH YELLOW MOUNTAIN

  25. THE AMERICAN HOUSE

  26. THE SHANGHAI BOOK CLUB

  27. CAPE’S CONFESSION

  28. BENEATH YELLOW MOUNTAIN

  29. THE AMERICAN HOUSE

  30. THE SHANGHAI BOOK CLUB

  31. CAPE’S CONFESSION

  32. BENEATH YELLOW MOUNTAIN

  33. THE AMERICAN HOUSE

  34. THE SHANGHAI BOOK CLUB

  A NOTE ON HISTORICAL REFERENCES

  1

  SHANGHAI

  The repetitive beat of typewriter keys always amplified at around one a.m., because this was the time when life on the street below stilled. Shanghai never became truly quiet. Only in the slip of time between midnight and four a.m. did the traffic recede and the noise temporarily wane. All day long the din of construction filled the air as cranes and gantries, as common to the sky as birds and planes to other cities, crisscrossed the grey. Bamboo scaffolding woven intricately as fine cotton gave shape to the vertical city, while beneath, shift workers arrived all day long, the hum and thrust of metal always in the distance.

  In those months when I was new to the city and its unfathomable sounds, I knew this was the time, if any, that I would hear him typing.

  The procession of taps and clicks was followed by a quick ring, a slow zip; familiar sounds that had echoed throughout my childhood when my mother brought home extra work. It kept time to my weakening eyelids until, as always, I lost the battle. There was no music now in the beat that seeped through the skin of cement, and I knew my neighbour from above used only one finger. Ayi said he was a man; she’d seen him smoking on the balcony one morning. At least I think she said this. She didn’t speak a word of English and I’d learned only the most perfunctory Mandarin: hello, goodbye, thank you, excuse me, how much for that … no, that, and so on. A combination of signs, gestures, and incomprehensible words stitched together my and Ayi’s communication about the work she had to do when she came to clean. We never said much more, and I only gleaned the bit of information about my neighbour when something crashed one morning in the apartment above, surprising us both. Ayi responded in a stream of furious indignation, gesturing my neighbour’s chain smoking and, I guessed, his goatee.

  Anyway, I was certain he was a man from the way his pee hit the bowl in a steady hard stream at four a.m.

  The typing kept me awake but also strangely comforted. It made up in some small way for the empty space beside me.

  ~

  I had just unpacked the few groceries that I’d bought at the international store: bread, coffee, a bottle of South African wine that I’d already opened, and imported milk (the scandal where mela-mine had been added to dairy products to increase their weight had only just passed, people had died and everyone was still on edge).

  The knocking startled me. No one besides Ayi came to my door, and the roaring bronze lion head above the polished knocker was unused.

  “Good evening.”

  Words emerged from the draughty passageway that sounded studied, wooden: “… I would appreciate your assistance.”

  I didn’t open the door fully, even though I felt safe in the apartment, in the city.

  “You speak English? I am looking for a word please.” I opened the door a fraction more so I could see him properly. He must have been in his early sixties I decided from the skein of silver hair that hung around his ears, while his hands, delicate and careful, were cupped before him in a question.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I am looking for a word … something like ‘sad,’ but not ‘sad,’” he said, shaking this idea from his head. “Something more rich.”

  “You are writing something in English?” I asked. He nodded. “… Then it depends how you will use the word. What’s the context?” I said, smiling now but maintaining the door at 45 degrees. I was equally perplexed and intrigued by the stranger and wondered why, of all the doors he might have approached, he’d come to mine.

  “No …” his face broke into a bemused smile, “I am sorry cannot give.”

  Sometimes it felt as if I were speaking into a body of water here: words spoken but the meaning distorted, warped in translation, even with people who had a strong command of English, so I was learning to adapt.

  “I mean to say I need to understand how you will use the word, so I can give you the best one.” I tilted my head. He followed suit.

  “I understand,” he said, “but cannot give.”

  “Well … maybe you should come inside,” I swung the door fully open, and for months after couldn’t say why I’d invited the stranger into my home. I’d made no friends in the city; hadn’t even gone to the welcome for new consular staff a few weeks earlier, and I was coming to think of my solitariness as a choice, as a decision.

  He made his way into the living room and towards the windows that held the Huangpu River and its smoky vista, a filament of pink dragged right across the sky.

  “It’s a good view,” I said.

  “Mine the same,” he replied.

  “Oh, really, you’re in the same block?” I asked, at which he pointed up. “On a higher floor?”

  “One up. My view same, but better,” he smiled again.

  Maybe I’d misunderstood.

  “You live above me?”

  “Yes, right above. One up,” he said, his pointer nudging the air.
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  My grasp about the man began to solidify: It was him—my inconsiderate neighbour, my pertinacious typist—coming over to ask for a word? I wasn’t angry … perhaps mildly annoyed but curious; after all, hadn’t his life become part of mine, leaking into my sleep, establishing some sense of routine?

  I said, “I hear you sometimes.”

  “What?”

  “Typing … the typing in the middle of the night.” He watched my fingers pounding invisible letters and hitting a nonexistent type bar.

  “You can hear … no, you are mistaken …” he stammered. “This is not me. I do not possess.”

  “Really? But I was certain the sounds were coming from above,” I said, bewilderment and, I suppose, an involuntary challenge rising in my voice.

  We stared at each other.

  Of course I had already been schooled, warned even, about the intricate set of formalities and courtesies that presided over social interactions in China. The city’s non-Chinese spoke about face-saving in wary tones; a tower of books had been written about it and the dreadful perils that awaited those who didn’t pretend an error or fib or omission or far worse hadn’t been seen, though it clearly had been. I’d thought the matter of face-saving exaggerated, dramatized to keep foreigners on their toes. Yet now, confronted with the understanding that offence was about to be caused, or already had been, I felt my face heating, and backtracking, I said in mitigation,

  “Erm, you know … I’d just opened a bottle of wine when you knocked at the door. Could I offer you a glass … we should sit down … I can’t finish a bottle all by myself.” I walked to the kitchen without waiting for his answer.

  When I returned to the living room, he was holding a book in his hand. One eye was screwed tight, the other scanning its back as his fingers tiptoed up the spine.

  “Oh, that’s a book of letters that Langston Hughes wrote … actually, to someone from my country,” I said, checking the cover. “You know Langston Hughes?”

  “Of course, have read.”

  “Oh.” I tried not to show how pleased I was; almost irrationally so.

  “You from … where?”

  “South Africa,” I said.

  He drank the wine quickly, without stopping, and when he was done, said in the practiced tone that I’d first heard at the door, “Thank you for your kindness.” He gave a deep nod, almost a bow, and left without waiting for my reply or the word for which he had first come.

  ~

  Do I believe in serendipity? Of course not, and yet I picked him out days later. Not in a likely place like the garden or the stairwell, but out there in a city crammed with 22 million human souls. Even in Johannesburg, with a quarter of those numbers, I knew I could go years without bumping into anyone familiar, even a careless husband.

  How utterly unprepared I’d been for weekends when infinitely tall, boundless apartment blocks burst, dumping industrious people—contained for the whole week—into the streets, parks and shopping centres with a clamorous joy. That Saturday I couldn’t navigate the long avenue to Super Brand Mall, where I’d started going regularly for a meal or to do the weekly shop. In our multitudes, like caravans of shrews, we attached ourselves to someone before or behind us and, in this way, foraged for food and bargains.

  The mall was no less jammed, and slowly I felt myself going under, drowning in a tightly packed phalanx of human bodies, more than I had ever seen. I elbowed my way across the mall, peeking into windows as I competed for space and the few breaths of air, until, giving up, I walked out into the hot damp afternoon. I must have walked for five minutes or more, uncertain where I was going but trying only to get ahead of the throngs that knotted everywhere, even at intersections.

  I saw him then, standing on the pavement and speaking loudly on an old mobile phone that dwarfed his hand. He was about to enter the city’s tallest building. Did I follow him in because I was so sick of my own company already? I let the escalator fill between us, but like everywhere else it was almost impossible to move, and by the time I alighted on the second floor, he was gone.

  The building I’d just entered housed one of the priciest hotels in Shanghai. By then I’d already developed a penchant for the mostly grand buildings, discovered on solitary walks. My aimless wanderings allowed me to fit the city together, piecing street to suburb, and to explore the expensive caverns which gave me uninterrupted time to ruminate about my semi-dissolved marriage. I’d only told Andrew about the job one month before moving.

  What? Shanghai? But what about my work here?

  I didn’t think you would want to go with, Andrew, I’d said.

  What?

  You could stay.

  So, what then, we have a long-distance marriage?

  I’m not sure that would work.

  I’m confused.

  I leave next month. We’ll sort it out, I said, turning to finish the email I’d started writing.

  In the weeks that followed, between his work trips and my preparations, I’d found it easier than I’d imagined—maybe than I’d hoped—to avoid him.

  I took an elevator to the 24th floor and sat at the window in the wood-panelled coffee shop of the City International. The only other people were a man and woman, dressed immaculately in designer wear. She: seated beside an angle-poised lamp, diamond clusters on her fingers and ears that hooked stray strands of light, refracted and wrapped the pair in their own glamour. Her face, though, was a mask of modern dermatology and a lifetime of avoiding the sun: creaseless and characterless too. I guessed she was around my age, late thirties or older, from the way her movements were measured, deliberate. He was dressed like an American rapper minus the effortlessness, the street cred: head-to-toe gold and cream logos, the peak of his cap tipped to ten o’clock.

  This was the way I occupied my first months in the city. Watching. Waiting, too. What for? I had no idea. Any case, there was nothing to see from the windows but the wide stretch of smog anaesthetizing everything so it was as pallid twenty-odd floors above the world as it was down below. I’d brought my book with me and picked up from where I’d left off.

  ~

  Maybe thirty minutes had passed by the time they walked in: the typist with a younger man. Thunder was stripping the afternoon of its peace and the room had gone a docile sepia; stray arcs of light drifted across the wallpaper. The coffee shop was empty and staff hovered about cleaning up spills, straightening tablecloths and preparing the place for an influx of patrons that I knew, as did they, would not arrive anytime soon.

  The men took a table at the other end of the room and ordered tea. Their conversation or rather their argument was so intense, so animated that I could barely look away, for fear that I’d miss some detail that might decode what was happening before me. All the while their bodies jutted and shifted at irregular angles, miming their disagreement. They rose after about ten minutes, tea still unpoured, scraped their chairs (gratuitously?) along the cool marble floors, then turned and without saying another word went their separate ways.

  As he passed by our eyes met. My neighbour paused, but he didn’t recognize me, or so he pretended.

  2

  CAPE TOWN

  1989

  From above the city was a watercolour painted in azure oceans, golden sands, dark emerald forests.

  Tourists were resolute in telling Beth that Cape Town was the most beautiful city in all the world, with its curious arrangement of Fynbos flora, its scraggy strange beauty over peaks and plains, the flat mountain, two oceans, its forests, wine farms, charming Victorian buildings. So, so pretty.

  What no one said was that over there … no, over there, where the eye never falls naturally … further still … it was nothing but a charcoal sketch. A smudge of humanity.

  The dick-shaped map of the Peninsula was indecent, but no local needed a map; it was the city that had shaped their bones, its seawater that ran in their miscegenated veins.

  The same tourists—aunties and uncles actually—had long ago joined the run
to Melbourne or London or Toronto, leaving apartheid and its low-level war behind them. They only ever returned with new accents for biannual pilgrimages, to remind themselves why they’d left and to gorge on samoosas (no one makes them like this … all we see are mince-less pastry hats), bags of chips (we miss it even more than family), biscuits (just not the same back there). The tourists would rearrange your living space while subtly demanding outings to all the beauteous far- flung spots; only remembering when they reached the destination that they still weren’t welcome, still weren’t allowed because they, like you, were still the same shade of inferior. And when they returned to your unspeakable neighbourhood, hidden like an arsehole, they’d shield their eyes in renewed shame.

  So no, no one could tell Beth. She knew everything there was to know about the place. Recreation in the suburb of Water Falls consisted of an embankment beside a lake that washed up dead bodies every month and a post-apocalyptic park with swings that shifted eerily in the breeze, merry-go-rounds that turned with not a person in sight; at least not until sunset, when the zombies, reeling on a cocktail of chemicals, emerged to sit in wait for the decent, and certainly, the indecent.

  Beth wasn’t stupid, not even close. How could anything be yours—say like a city into which you’d been fool enough to be born—intimately yours, and not belong to you at all? The wrongness of it burned.

  ~

  She ran the toe of a dog-chewed takkie along the perimeter of the loose cement block. Beth weighed up whether she should turn back or not. If she went home, she’d have to accept that this had been a failed mission. Shit, who was she to think she could ever be a revolutionary? She’d probably worn the wrong clothes, too: the oldest jeans she had, a red T-shirt she’d found at the back of her cupboard, and the filthiest takkies she owned. Beth worked her foot beneath the loose cement tile and started fiddling, balancing it on her toe before dropping it back down. If she turned her head thirty degrees, she didn’t need to look directly at the group to study them at the entrance to the hall. They were the real thing. From a township school, with authentic T-shirts with slogans and everything: A injury to one is a injury to all; Phantsi Bantu Education Phantsi, above a fisted salute.