He came late to pick me up at JFK airport, my father. In 2005, after the terror of 9/11, parents were pretty scared to let their children fly by themselves under the care of the airline—except Mama, of course! I had been on two connecting flights from Bulawayo, first at O. R. Tambo in Jo’burg, where I’d wandered off and the plane had almost left me, and then at Gatwick in London, where the British Airways stewardess in whose care I’d been put dumped me in a room full of candy, where I did what any sensible eleven-year-old would do and stuffed myself silly, crunching through M&Ms and Oreos and Cadbury chocolates and Belgian creams like a Pac-Man on steroids.
And then we were gliding over New York City, and I felt the thrill of being an astral thing. I tried to make out the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper in the early morning darkness as we descended into JFK, but the stars were outdone by the skyglow of man-made constellations winking up at us like cyborg kin from the cosmos below.
The next moment, I was on solid ground, my sneakers squeaking across dull parquet floors, blinking back tears under the blunt lights of the airport, my father nowhere to be seen. I must have felt the abysmal terror of being without him even then, unable to locate his face. It was a wondrous thing, that face, a solid, pecan vista on which I could trace my own button nose, with its fleshy alae, and plump lips that, when he smiled, revealed, just as my own did, a constellation of pearly teeth dipping into a galaxy of wine-dark gums.
I looked up at the dour-faced airport officer in whose care I’d been put, and then bent over and vomited a sludge of candy right onto his polished shoes.
He leapt back, his lips upended in dismay. “Why, you li’l n—”
And then, there he was, ambling down the airport corridor in black jeans and a tan leather jacket, the gold rims of his oval specs catching the light. I fluttered my eyes at him. I had not expected to feel so shy. He seemed impossibly tall, his gangly legs launching him in lofty strides. I remained standing beside the angry officer, next to a dark curio store with feather headdresses and wooden Indian dolls pressed against the glass, watching first his face and then his approaching feet.
“Hello, missy,” he said in English.
Hello, missy.
I smiled through my tears. We had always used English together, he and I.
He gave my cheek a gentle tug. And then he frowned. “What’s the matter?”
The officer, who had quietened down, began to speak real fast and aggressive again, gesticulating at me and then at the gooey mess at his feet. My father, too, began to speak, his voice rising to a dangerous pitch as he yelled, “She’s just a child, a child!”
I beamed, basking in his celestial warmth. He turned to walk away, and I followed him, slipping my hand in his. Together we were swept up by the sea of airport strangers, the surly officer rapidly fading into an insignificant spec.
It was the first time it was just the two of us, together like that. I could not remember when he had last visited home. We wrote each other often; he had started writing me letters from the time I could read and write, sharing stories from his childhood, which sounded like fables, for I could not imagine him, this colossal, hopelessly cosmopolitan man, now a professor of astronomy, as a half-naked rascal once-upon-a-time slinking away from the evening fire in his father’s homestead to crouch behind the cattle kraal and study the night sky.
There he would remain for hours, the garlicky scent of aloe vera filling his nostrils, the cicadas a resounding orchestra, somewhere in that blue-blackness the click-click of the bats, and above all this, a glittery panorama stretching in all directions, kissing the heavens and the earth, with the umThala, the Milky Way, arching across the sky like the patch of hair left on an infant’s head after the rest has been rubbed off.
Here, his sentences would become loopy and self-indulgent. I would read in one long exhalation, gasping for breath, about the marvel of isiLimela, the Digging Stars, Pleiades, the first of which winked in the eastern night sky in September, hot-blue fireflies heralding the spring rains. My father would track them, crouching with his lanky, eight-year-old body held taut, trembling, emitting a sigh when he was finally able to pin-point a shimmering light one night, and then two the next, and then four, and so on, until six, sometimes seven glow-worms hovered overhead, webbing the obsidian sky with their blue, gossamer light.
Then he got a scholarship to attend the village school run by the Catholic missionaries and stopped rising with the Digging Stars to latch a pair of oxen to the plough, catching the last of them disappearing in the western skies as he and his siblings trudged barefoot across the crumbly soil headed for the fields, the star so crisp and hot-blue he would instinctively stretch out a gangly arm as though to pluck it. Instead, he began to rise to the regiments of an alarm clock, a red, plastic, screeching thing gifted him by Father Pius.
Years later, as an adult, while trudging through a snowstorm in downtown Manhattan, or just after one of his lectures to a stuffy room full of ambivalent freshmen, or entombed in the gloomy subway, he would look about, dazed, as though he expected to find himself out in the Sahara bush under the infinite expanse of a bespangled night sky. He would jerk up, startled to find himself where he was, a smothering weight crushing his chest. Once, he whispered, “What am I doing here?” and a scraggly homeless man yelled back, “Why don’t you go back to Africa!” This rejoinder was so unexpected, so strangely percipient, that he burst out laughing. The homeless man, too, began to laugh. They laughed together, like that, for a good, long minute.
I did not know what to make of this. I was too young for nostalgia. Why did he share these stories with me? He must have known I would not understand them. I would frown and frown at his perplexing letters, flattered by his adult attention, my head throbbing not with the dawn of understanding but a foggy migraine.
Now, stumbling to keep up with his long strides as we made our way through that monstrosity of an airport, I felt stiff. There was a clumsiness to our bodies. He kept yanking my small hand encased in his large, sweaty palm, lurching me forward, straining to look behind us, ahead of us, all around us, his eyes flitting from side to side. Finally, he hailed a cab.
“How was your flight?” he said, easing me into the backseat.
“It was nice,” I said, my voice hiccupping as the cab lurched forward.
“You didn’t get lost?” He looked out the window, scouting the crowds etched in oblique shadows by the dawn light.
“Hmm-hmm.”
“Tired?” He looked over his shoulder out the window at the back.
“Hmm-hmm.”
We were quiet for a while as the cab nosed out of JFK. We spent a good thirty minutes in that chaotic airport jam, my father tense beside me, squinting out the windows. Then the cab eased onto the freeway and his body loosened, and the air lightened between us.
“Your mother has been calling and calling,” he said, ruffling my braids. “She thought they would forget you in London.”
I chuckled.
“I heard you took second place this year at school.”
My body stiffened. I had never taken second place before. I was my father’s daughter and my father’s daughter always took first place. He had always been a man who soared, my father, an African fish eagle gliding above the soils of southwestern Zimbabwe, red and wet after the rains, surveying below the smaller birds and the frogs and the crickets chirping and croaking. Mama never tired of going on about his galactic brilliance, how it had stood him apart from the boys who vied for her affections. She had seen from a kilometer away that he was a young man headed somewhere and she’d intended to go with him. When he’d glided away from that rural backdrop in Plumtree all the way to a research school out in the Midwest known as The Program, it had been with the understanding that she’d glide with him. But he went away, and went away, and went away, and when he eventually came back, all he talked about was this astrophysics thing he had studied at The Program and the equations he had pioneered to search our galaxy for planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. And though Mama tried to listen and laugh a coquettish laugh and ask polite questions, it was clear he had become something strange and opaque and—here she hesitated—awe-full that dazzled the mind but hurt the heart to see.
“You take after him,” she would say, a resolute frown creasing her forehead.
And though, now that I think of it, she may not have meant this as a compliment, her words made me beam, and simper, and walk about squint-eyed one summer demanding a telescope and a pair of oval gold-rimmed spectacles for my birthday.
The cab had come to a halt outside the Greystone Apartments. I turned away from my father and made a face as we alighted upon that rimy Manhattan cold. I was trying to think why I’d taken second place in school. We stood side by side on the pavement and watched as the cab sped off. I looked up into his face: a distant light blinking down at me from the ether. I opened my mouth but didn’t know what to say. Closed it. Flinched. Looked away.
“Don’t worry too much about it,” he said, squeezing my hand, like he knew what I was feeling. “You’ll do better next time, won’t you?”
I nodded. There was hot air blowing in my face. I didn’t know where it was coming from. It made me feel hot inside. I blinked back furious tears. My father hunched his shoulders and peered up and down the street, scanning the cars that skidded past in the snow, their tires spinning. Then he wrapped his big, gloved hand on the back of my neck and ushered me through a set of revolving doors into the Greystone building, across a marble foyer and into a stainless-steel elevator, which ferried us all the way to the top floor.
How could I have known it wasn’t my father’s modest professor salary that paid for those stunning floor-to-ceiling glass penthouse views that hovered us starlike over Manhattan? I did not yet know that excellence comes at a hefty price, that it’s not enough to be just clever or gifted or even industrious. The glass walls coaxed in blocks of the furtive December morning sun, splashing it craftily over the awards displayed on the granite mantle, the oakwood side tables, the marble fireplace. Everything sparkled. The sunlight was everywhere, spilling ponderously over the incongruous items that populated the apartment—a lurid, ceramic bowl on the quartz island, brimming with fist-sized mangoes; a glaring red kettle that overpowered the stainless-steel appliances in the kitchen; a purple love seat that clashed with the alabaster couch in the lounge; a rumpled Super Mario–themed duvet in the smaller bedroom my father ushered me into.
“It’s bigger than your bedroom back home, yes?” he said, beaming.
I winced; comparing his penthouse to Mama’s vanilla-colored cottage, with its humble rooms and box windows, felt like a slight. I tried not to think of Mama, tried not to think of how my father had left us. He led me from room to room, showing off his binoculars and his telescope and his fancy science stuff. But when he tried to catch my gaze, thrusting an astrophotography camera in my face, I turned away from him and tucked my face into my chest.
It was the space suit encased in a glass box behind the large mahogany desk in his home office and the huge framed picture on the wall that brought me back to him. The space suit was made from shiny white material, like nylon. It had a transparent globular visor for the head and a pair of grey boots fastened to the trouser legs. A pair of white gloves with thick black fingers protruded from the sleeves. A bright blue valve shimmered on the suit’s broad thick chest. Beneath this was a navy-blue patch with a red-and-yellow star. I squinted at the sky-blue lettering on the white badge fastened to the left breast of the space suit.
“F. SIZIBA 2004,” I mouthed. I turned to my father. “That’s you!”
“Yes, that’s the Sokol-KV2,” he said, beaming. “The Russian space suit.”
I turned to the framed picture on the wall behind the space suit. There was my father, floating in space. I reeled into the mahogany desk behind me.
“Are you all right?” said my father, placing his hands on my shoulders.
No, I was not all right. I squinted at the photo and tilted my head and tried to catch my breath. A few indeterminate noises escaped my lips. He was in some sort of spaceship or space gadget or something like that, decked in the space suit. The bulbous visor made his head look frighteningly large, like something was wrong with it. It filled me with fright. It didn’t help that he seemed to be floating, suspended in the air with his legs off the ground. But he was smiling and waving at the camera.
I struggled with my face. Something awful attempted to fix itself on there, and I tried to resist it. Through a round window behind him in the photo you could see a grid of solar panels and beyond this, our planet Earth. How strange and fragile it looked; a blue spherical dome swathed in whorly clouds suspended in an infinite darkness. A burst of rays sparkled overhead, bathing the solar panels in shimmery golden light and the Earth beyond in sparkling shades of azure. I could make out brown landmasses protruding like scars amid that brilliant blue and its white fluff.
I must have emitted a squeal or a sigh, for my father walked over to the picture and caressed it. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” he said, putting on his lecturing voice. “Tommy was so jealous when he heard the millionaire Dennis Tito had gone up to the International Space Station. I knew he’d do something crazy, like offer the Russians a bunch of money to take him up there, too. He asked if I wanted to go with him. I couldn’t believe it! But that’s Tommy for you, a serial exhibitionist.
“I mean, of course I wanted to go. But you start to think of all the things that could go wrong up there. You really start to contend with the possibility of your death. During those months training for the trip at the Star City complex in Moscow, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the ways I could go. I mean, space is really hostile. Don’t believe all those sublime pictures you see on TV. I kept imagining something going wrong, some breach of the space station that would eject us into the vacuum of space —our bodies would fry and the air would get sucked out of our lungs!
“And then I went up there and all I could think of was our home, right there before my very eyes. Its thin biosphere was a translucent blue. And I felt, this is our planet. I felt it viscerally. This is our planet and I’m seeing it with my own two eyes, and you know what? There are no countries! I couldn’t see any borders. I half expected to see country flags rising from the oceans like geological formations. But all I could see were landmasses surrounded by all that blue. And you know another thing? The rivers didn’t wind sinuously across the land like a writhing snake, like Father Pius taught us! The water actually spreads its tentacles across the continents like the branches of a tree! I traced those tendrils of water with my eyes. I watched the sun rise and set sixteen times each day. It was an utterly radical experience.”
I, too, wanted to have a radical experience. “When are we going to see the Statue of Liberty?” I said.
“I have been thinking about what it means to exist in the world and yet be unthinkable,” said my father. “You and I, we were unthinkable, once. We are unthinkable even now, sometimes.”
I nodded politely. I didn’t know what he was going on about. He was at it again, telling cryptic stories I was too young, or perhaps daft, to understand. I followed him into the kitchen. Right there on the kitchen counter sitting next to a pile of books was … a pan. Yes, a frying pan, glistening with oil residue in the buttery morning light. Next to it stood a half-open carton of eggs and a bottle of olive oil. My eyes lit up. I begged him, my daddy, to let me cook for him, to let me do something for him, I may have been eleven, but I knew how to cook. Puleease, I made eggs all the time whenever I got home from school before Mama got there.
He wrinkled his nose and smiled that smile adults smile when they are teetering between saying yes and no, when that inner child they once were is calling out to them to loosen up and not be so adult about everything. I saw my chance and went for the jugular—please, please, please—head tilted to the side—pleasepleasepleaaaaaase—hands brought up demurely in mock prayer—prettypuuuleeeeaaaaase. It was the batting of the eyelashes, like the rosy-cheeked, damsel-diva Darla in Little Rascals, that did it.
He caved, slumping his shoulders, his smile wide as he placed the pan on the gas stove and poured the oil and fiddled with the knobs. A bluish flame flickered to life, licking the base of the pan. He hovered over the stove and made a show of checking the heat, making a teasing face as I tap-tapped the shell with a fork, once, twice, gently, a little harder, until it cracked open and the contents splattered shrilly in the hot oil.
The yolk merged with the white and the eggs came out burnt, with a crispy brown coating at the bottom. My father ate them still, straight from the pan, curling the eggs over a fork and sliding them into his mouth. He chewed contemplatively, his lips vaselined by the oil. He saw that I was watching him, that I was holding my breath. He frowned. I frowned. Then his face broke open, and he gave me a thumbs up. Making a chirping little noise, I leaned over and planted a kiss on the back of his hand, brushing my wet lips against the wispy hair on his knuckles.
“Have some,” he offered, pronging the eggs from the pan and bringing the fork to my lips. “I bet you’re hungry after your long flight.”
I leaned forward and slurped the burnt eggs into my mouth.
Just then, the front door swung open and in strutted a tall woman with the most beautiful mane of hair I’d ever seen. A lanky boy huffed in behind her.
“Hi,” he said, raising his hand in a little wave.
I paid him no mind. I was busy staring at the woman’s hair, admiring its black sheen, the way it sat silky against her milky brown skin. She dropped the plastic bags she was carrying, shrugged out of her magenta winter coat and removed her woolen hat, setting her mane free. Only then did I see her edges, where tufts of kinky, plaited hair sprouted beneath the silky mane. It wasn’t her own hair, then, but a weave. I gasped, feeling bruised, and cheated, somehow.
“Mon Dieu!” she said, flinging her silky weave out of her face, her syrupy eyes on my father. “What a fucking morning!”
She strode across the room to my father. They were almost the same height. She was a giraffe. She leaned into him, elongating her neck until their lips touched.
I watched them, the wonder of only a moment before—the eggs, the childish kiss, the marvelous spontaneity of it all—dissipating, and he was, again, my father who lived overseas.
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