“Not very,” Maya said. “At least, it looks alive.”
“It looks like a ghost,” Vimbai said. “Only I don’t believe in ghosts.” It wasn’t entirely untrue—Vimbai was never superstitious, and when she examined her belief system, she discovered that it was not sufficiently undermined to admit the possibility of ghosts. Or it was mere inertia, because if psychic energy babies indeed lived in phone wires and god knows what other hidden places, than there was no reason for ghosts not to exist either. And after all, weren’t phantom limbs also ghosts of a sort? “Do you mind if I look at your . . . the phantom limbs?” she said out loud.
“Help yourself,” Felix said. “Feel free to take any you like—I don’t really need them; only it doesn’t feel right to throw them away.”
Vimbai studied the limbs—smooth like blown glass, with the same sleek appearance, they seemed mannequins, although no mannequin had ever exhibited that many purely human imperfections and malformations. There were deformed nails, ingrown hairs, bones too visible just under the soap skin. There were hammertoes and hitchhiker’s thumbs, varicose veins, barely healed razor cuts and an occasional pimple or a scar. She touched one leg, cut off just below the knee, and almost jumped at the sensation of cool smooth and—most importantly—solid form under her fingertips, at the subtle humming of electricity just under the imaginary skin.
She didn’t know what she wanted with a phantom limb, but she carefully picked up the half-leg and carried it to her room. It fit nicely by the window, next to the space heater. There was a cold stab of draft coming from the window where the frame didn’t quite touch the wall, and Vimbai turned the heater on, letting its pink glow fall on the convex surface of the phantom calf. She sat at her desk and looked outside, where the leaden hem of the surf nipped at the frozen shore, and listened to the quiet rustling of the Psychic Energy Baby exploring the creaky old house.
Saturday came, and Vimbai drove reluctantly home. The street—so quiet on this cold day, so helplessly suburban—already felt alien. Like in a dream, the sidewalk familiar down to every crack and pockmark, the leafless peach trees in the front yard, the woven mat on the steps were just as she remembered them, seen clearly through the fisheye lens of separation. This is what coming home feels like, Vimbai thought, this is how her parents feel when they go to visit relatives in Harare—only even more so, their time and distance greater hundred-fold, thousand-fold than Vimbai’s.
When she came in, she realized that her parents’ house smelled of clean linen and a faint whiff of vanilla and nutmeg—something she never noticed when she lived here. She was separate from it now, separate enough to notice its smell. Separate enough to look at the kitchen table and admire the gleaming of white bowls in the slanted pale winter sunlight that poured into the kitchen through a large bay window. The things she had never noticed before, but now suddenly did.
At dinner, her parents talked the familiar talk—the department and the hospital, Africana studies and Zimbabwe politics. So Vimbai kept to her own thoughts and ate, rarely lifting her gaze off her plate. It was so easy to fall back into this pattern.
Vimbai’s mother still complained about the new head of Africana Studies. “And he also said just the other day that Mugabe is the worst thing that ever happened to Zimbabwe. I told him that colonialism was really up there among the shitty things.”
“But you hate Mugabe,” Vimbai’s father said mildly. “Why are you defending him?”
“I’m not,” mother said. “I’m just sick and tired of hearing about African corruption. Sick and tired.”
Vimbai made a small noise of sympathy. One of the things she had learned from her mother was that one did not disparage one’s people or culture in front of outsiders. It’s different for them, her mother said. They don’t know what it’s like, they have no sympathy, no kinship. They look and they criticize, they look for cracks, they look for proof of something they are already thinking in their hearts—that we are worse than them, that we should not be allowed to govern ourselves. So you argue and you don’t show weakness. And you don’t ever, ever agree with them if they speak poorly of your people. What if they are right, Vimbai had asked then. They are never right, her mother answered. They may appear to be right because of the words they use, but their hearts are wrong. To be right, you need to know, to understand, to have a kinship of spirit.
“I do hate what he did to the country though,” father said. It wasn’t news, and Vimbai nodded along, as one would to a familiar tune. This one was called ‘The Land Reform’. Whatever they said, it always betrayed the Africa inside of them.
Vimbai ate her stew, the beef boiled flavorless and the rice—flavorless to begin with. She had nothing to contribute. Even though she knew the issues, she never felt them deep in her bones, resonating through the drum that was the internal Africa. She cringed at the sudden fear that one day soon her mother would be defending Mugabe and his cabinet from her, from Vimbai—and she thought that really, that was the price of growing up, cutting away the tenuous umbilicus that still attached her to her parents and, by extension, to the Africa within them. And soon she will have to find her own place in the world, somewhere in the dunes and the ocean, among the horseshoe crabs and phantom limbs and psychic energy babies.
Vimbai watched the scar on her mother’s forehead—an almost invisible white line, so thin you wouldn’t notice it unless you knew it was there. Vimbai knew. She remembered when her mother first showed it to her, along with the similar marks cut into her wrists and her ankles. Vimbai’s father had more prominent scars, symmetrically bisecting his cheeks. Muti, Vimbai’s mother said. When I was a little girl, my mother took me to a n’anga, a healer, and he put these marks on me for protection.
Vimbai used to have nightmares for months afterward, dreaming of a man with the razorblades that would cut her up (her own razorblades, much much later, an entirely different matter). That it was for her own good somehow made it worse, and she woke up crying, and her mother had to reassure her that they would never do anything like this to Vimbai. Still, the only time she visited Harare and they had to take her to a healer for her upset stomach, Vimbai had hyperventilated so badly that she almost passed out. Her mother’s mother was still alive then.
Her father interrupted the stream of memory that threatened to sweep her along, take her into a different space. “What are you thinking about, muroora?”
“Grandma,” Vimbai answered.
Her parents traded a look. “You remember her?” mother said.
Vimbai nodded. “Of course. I was what, thirteen?”
“Yes,” mother said. “I really wish you’d get to know her better.”
Vimbai wanted to say that she didn’t, that anyway the old woman barely spoke English, and Vimbai’s Shona could, if one was inclined to kindness, be described as lacking. Besides, grandma harbored an alarming number of strange beliefs, and tried to use Vimbai’s short time in Harare to transfer the jumble of superstition and ignorance into her young mind. But she didn’t say it out loud, of course—one did not speak ill of the dead, and even Vimbai accepted it as right. However, in her heart she had not forgiven the scars on her mother’s face and limbs. “Did she really believe in ghosts?” she said, infusing her voice with proper respect.
“Spirits. Most people of her generation do,” mother said. “Why?”
Vimbai smiled. “No reason. I was just thinking about ghosts. For that class I’m taking, about pre-Christian beliefs.”
Her mother raised her eyebrows and started clearing the table. Vimbai helped, all the while thinking back to when she was little, and her mother embraced her freely and called her sahwira—girlfriend, and told her stories she had learned as a girl from her mother. Now, they moved past each other, stacks of dishes and empty bowls in their hands preoccupying their attention on the way to the sink. Vimbai shuddered as she imagined her grandmother, now a vadzimu, an ancestral spirit, summoned by a casual mention. Moving between them like a breath of cold air, pushing them away from each other, lacking even the tentative warmth of the Psychic Energy Baby who waited for Vimbai at home, and possibly cried.
Chapter 4
When she drove home, the image of her grandmother solidified, until the tall wrinkled woman with white hair was sitting primly in the passenger seat of Vimbai’s car. She had just left the Atlantic City Expressway and headed east, for the dunes. The vadzimu shivered a bit in this cold, and Vimbai studied her from the corner of her eye. The house in the dunes was close enough now, and in its sphere Vimbai could cope with ghosts and phantoms and ancestral spirits.
“Hello, grandmother,” she said. “Did you come to give me protection?”
She hoped that vadzimu did not come because of some great danger—perhaps, it was not a vadzimu at all, since such ancestral spirits manifested in dreams. Maybe she was dreaming—the thought was reassuring, even though Vimbai hoped that she did not lose her ability to tell dreams from reality. Or maybe it was a chipoko, a simple ghost.