The House of Discarded Dreams (4 page)

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.

“No,” the spirit whispered. “ I was sent by the clan spirits, the
mhondoro
, to tell you a story. Listen, and learn well—
ngano
is how children learn.”

The house loomed closer now, its windows yellow loving eyes, and under their steady staring Vimbai felt entranced as she parked the car. Her breath escaped in small careful puffs as she unbuckled the seat belt, but the cool and hard hand of the ghost lay on her wrist, transfixing her in her seat. A cold lump formed in her stomach, and Vimbai thought that really, it was shell shock, she simply did not have time to absorb everything that had been happening to her; as she thought that, her breath quickened and beading of sweat started forming on her forehead, until the
vadzimu
spoke.

There was a time once, a long time ago, when a hare decided to take the moon from the sky and put it in his home so that there would always be light. Hares are clever creatures, and our hare (whom we shall call Hare) realized that the sky and the moon were a high way up, and to get to the moon he would have to work at night, and he would have to come up with a clever plan to get there.

Hare waited for nightfall, and climbed the tallest tree in the forest. When he was halfway there, he came across a baboon who was slumbering in the branches. Everyone knows that baboons are dense and quarrelsome creatures, so Hare tried to avoid disturbing the Baboon and hopped over to another branch. He miscalculated his jump in the darkness, and almost fell. As Hare scrambled back onto the branch, he woke up Baboon.

“Hey,” Baboon said. “What’s all this racket?”

“It’s just me, Old Uncle,” Hare replied.

Baboon opened one bloodshot eye and gave Hare a mistrustful look. “And what would you be doing in the tree in the middle of the night, Old Grandfather?”

“I’m picking figs to feed my children,” Hare lied. “I work in the field all day, and can only go fruit-picking at night.”

Baboon went back to sleep, and Hare climbed up up up, all the way to the top of the tallest tree. By the time he got there, the moon rose, and Hare saw that it was just a thin crescent, hanging upside down. “That’ll be good enough,” Hare said to himself, and reached up. But the moon was still too far—it hung just inches away from Hare’s paws, and smiled and laughed at his efforts to reach it (for that, it had to turn right side up.)

Hare shook his fist at the sky and threatened to give the moon such a beating, but the moon just laughed and remained wisely out of his reach. The noise woke Baboon who had been dozing off in the branches below. “Huh,” Baboon said to himself. “Looks like Old Grandfather Hare is trying to get the moon, not the figs. I bet I could get it myself and then make him pay me a princely sum in figs.”

But the crescent moon remained too far even for Baboon and his long arms, and the next night it did not get any closer. Only when the sickle grew thicker, it started to travel lower in the sky—as everyone knows, the bigger the moon, the heavier it is, and its weight pulls it closer to the ground. Because of that, the full moon is so low in the sky that its round belly can touch the tops of tall trees on a good night.

So on the day the moon was finally full and fat, both Hare and Baboon climbed to the top of the tallest tree. The moon was not laughing anymore, and only looking at them with its white fearful eyes. Baboon’s arms were longer, and he grabbed the moon by its pudgy sides, and immediately yelped in pain.

“What’s the matter, Old Uncle?” Hare asked and snickered.

Baboon sucked on his burned fingers. “It’s hot,” he said. “It burns like fire.”

Hare, who was quite clever, picked a few leaves off the treetop—they were large and leathery like all fig leaves are, and perfect for carrying coals or other hot burning things. He grabbed the moon with its paws wrapped in leaves, but the moon slipped out like a silvery fish—the leaves were too smooth and slick.

“Let me do it,” Baboon said. “You’re doing it wrong, Old Grandfather.”

“No,” Hare argued. “It was my idea, and it is my moon, and my leaves.”

Baboon reached for the moon again, burning his fingers the second time (I told you that baboons are none too bright), and Hare maneuvered the leaves this way and that, and he wove a basket in which to carry the moon. Only by the time the basket was finished, the moon had rolled across the sky, away from the treetop.

“I guess we’ll never get the moon,” Baboon said. “I thought I was quick and strong enough, but I was wrong.”

“And I thought I was clever enough,” Hare said.

They came down from the tree. In the clearing nearby, they saw a puddle of dark water and a tortoise who came to take a drink of water. Tortoise did not want the moon, he just wanted a drink; but as he drank, the moon reflected in the puddle, and its reflection, cool now, filled Tortoise’s mouth and his belly with its milky light. Tortoise smiled and went home, shining like the moon among the trees.

Vimbai led the ghost into the house by the hand. Maya was at work and Felix, judging by the lights in his windows, remained cloistered in his room, doing whatever it was that he did—Vimbai imagined that he played with the phantom limbs as one would with dolls, or with whatever unpleasant things he pulled out of the black hole of his hair.

“There you go, grandma,” Vimbai said. “You’re welcome to stay here.”

The ghost shuffled into the kitchen, looking disapprovingly at the empty coffee cups and saucers stained with syrup piled in the sink.

“It’s Felix’s turn to do the dishes,” Vimbai said, apologetic. “Only he procrastinates.”

The
vadzimu
heaved a tremulous sigh and glided up to the sink. Vimbai was about to argue but then realized it was silly to get into a tug of war about dirty dishes with her grandmother’s ghost. The dishes clattered and the water poured, and the ghost stopped paying any mind to Vimbai. She hung around the kitchen for a while, unsure whether she should offer help. Then she decided to check on the Psychic Energy Baby, and snuck upstairs cringing at the creaking of the stairs under her socked feet.

Peb was in Felix’s room, attaching a pair of phantom hands to itself.

“Should he be doing this?” Vimbai asked Felix.

He rolled his left eye up, and his right one leftward, giving Vimbai an impression of uncertainty. “Let it do what it wants—it stopped crying just now.”

“I brought a ghost with me,” Vimbai said. “It’s my grandmother, so be nice to her.”

“Okay,” Felix said. “Ghosts sure do like you.”

“Me? I thought it was the house.”

“The house likes you too,” Felix said. “But we sure never had so many ghosts before you moved in.”

Vimbai perched on the windowsill, her back against the glass. “Do you mean I’m bringing them in?”

“You just told me you brought one with you.” Felix pointed at Peb. “And you found this one in the phone.”

Vimbai considered. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just moved here to be close to the ocean and to the horseshoe crabs.”

Felix nodded. “I remember. Maya said you’re a student. How’s that working out for you?”

“Okay,” Vimbai said. “I’ve been cutting classes a lot lately . . . I don’t know what it is about this place, but I keep dreaming that I’m someone else, somewhere else, and nothing seems as important anymore. Is it weird that I’m saying that?”

“Not weird,” Felix said. “I found it, you know. And when Maya showed up, things under the porch started shifting.”

“What things under the porch?” Vimbai asked, alarmed. “I’ve been here for a month and never saw any things under the porch.”

“Neither have I,” Felix said. “But I hear them, and I know they’re there and that they’re Maya’s.”

“What are they?”

“Dunno. The point is, the house chooses.”

“What for?” Vimbai asked. The house creaked and whispered in her ears, lulling her, convincing her that everything was as it should be, everything was perfectly normal. “Why does it choose and why us?”

“Dunno,” Felix repeated, and shot her an irritated look. “Go play with the baby or something, okay? My head hurts.”

Of course, Vimbai reasoned, it was easy to believe that they were special somehow, chosen, different, lost and adopted princes and princesses and their true parents would soon reclaim them and reveal their hidden destinies—isn’t it what every book we read as children taught us to expect from life? Of course Felix decided that the house chose them for some unknown purpose, but in reality everything was much more banal. It appealed to them for whatever reasons, and they all came with baggage: Felix had his hair and Vimbai her ghosts, and Maya . . . Maya had whatever lived under the porch.

Peb had festooned itself with several hands and feet, and they remained attached to its transparent body through some otherworldly adhesion. Peb resembled an exotic fish decorated with grotesque appendages and outgrowths. Its skin stretched and shimmered with reflected light like a soap bubble, and Vimbai could not help but pick up the unsightly thing. “Come along,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to my grandma.”

Peb babbled in response, talking about ethereal planes and dizzying stars. It seemed to miss other dimensions, too black or too fiery to describe.

“It’s okay,” Vimbai consoled. “You’ll learn to like it here, and my grandmother knows so many stories—
ngano
, the folktales that tell children how to live in the world, and
nyaya
, the myths people make up to pass the time.”

The
vadzimu
was done with the dishes and sat on the stool by the counter, her eyes hollow and her wrinkled hands folded in her lap. Such fragile birdlike hands, Vimbai thought, dry like twigs, wrapped in the cured leather of old skin that spent decades in the tropical sun. Vimbai barely remembered this woman, how she was in life—just her own passing embarrassment at the old woman’s superstitions, and just as ephemeral a regret that they spoke different languages and thus were unlikely to connect.

Vimbai noticed with a measure of satisfaction that the ghost, at least, was more fluent in English. If it had also grown less superstitious remained to be seen.

“Grandmother,” Vimbai said. “Look at this—it’s a psychic energy baby.”

The old woman looked and reached out, instinctively—as if there was really nothing else to do with babies but to pick them up and hold them, no matter how ethereal and burdened with unnecessary extremities; no matter how dead one was. And even after Vimbai went to bed that night, she heard quiet singing and cooing from the kitchen, along with the thin gurgling voice of the Psychic Energy Baby.

That night the tides had grown especially, inexcusably high—through her sleep Vimbai heard the lapping of the waves somewhere very close to the porch of the house, and through her sleep she thought that the sea was pulled so close by the gravity of the moon that sloshed happily in the darkness of Tortoise’s belly. She dreamt of Tortoise, his smiling face smeared with moonlight, white and thick as milk, the oceans of the world following on his heels—oceans always followed wherever the moon went, tortoise or no.

Meanwhile, the waves whispered into the yard, their salty tongues singeing the roots of the few arbor vitae planted near the house; they poured under the porch spooking those who lived under it and chasing them up the steps, where they remained, wet and shivering, their backs pressed against the closed door and their fur growing slow icicles. They listened for Maya’s sleeping breath in the depths of the house and whimpered softly.

The gentle fingers of the ocean pried the house from its foundation, carefully shaking loose every brick and every cinderblock, never upsetting the balance. The waves lifted the house on their backs arching like those of angry cats, and took it with them, away from the shore. In the darkness, the lighthouses shone like predatory eyes, and everyone in the house slept except for the
vadzimu
, who remained alert and awake, singing to the sleeping Peb, curled up in her lap like a cat, in a language no one but her understood.

The night continued much longer than usual—before the sun rose, the house had drifted far into the ocean, where water lay smooth as silk, wrinkling occasionally under the sleeping breath of the wind.