An Elegy for Easterly

Enjoy the first lines from each story in the book:

At the Sound of the Last Post

The bugle call shatters the stillness of the shrine. Its familiar but haunting melancholy cannot fail to move. Even the President seems misty-eyed behind his glasses. Close to him in the widow’s place of honour, I am aware of his every movement. I watch him without moving my eyes. Perhaps it is not mist in his eyes but the film of my own sudden tears. The badges sprinkled on his sash office shimmer and recede against the green of the material.

An Elegy for Easterly

It was the children who first noticed that there was something different about the woman they called Martha Mupengo. They followed her, as they often did, past the houses in Easterly Farm, houses of pole and mud, of thick black plastic sheeting for walls and clear plastic for windows, houses that erupted without City permission, unnumbered houses identified only by reference to the names of their occupants. They followed her past MaiJames’s house, MaiToby’s house, past the house occupied by Josephat’s wife, and her husband Josephat when he was on leave from the mine, past the house of the newly arrived couple that no one really knew, all the way past the people waiting with plastic buckets to take water from Easterly’s only tap.

The Annexe Shuffle

Emily sees Ezekiel shake his arms and hands around his head. Ezekiel is haunted by the buzzing of a thousand phantom mosquitoes. They fly close to his ear; it is always the same ear, the right ear. He swipes at them but this only increases their agitation. He longs to hit one, just one, and see the satisfying streak of blood across the wall. Sometimes he slaps a hand against one, again, again, but he hits nothing but the wall, and more often, himself. He has to be bandaged often.

Something Nice from London

The little boy in the orange shirt tells me that his grandmother says that his mummy is bringing him something nice from London. ‘Your mummy will bring you something nice from London too,’ he asserts, with all the gravity of a child whose concerns coincide with those of the world. He runs off before I can reply, and I watch him tear up and down the observation platform that overlooks the arrival hall of our airport. The Chinese built this airport when the old one became too small for the tourists that poured into the country in their thousands. No tourists visit us now. Our almost total isolation means that we have no camera-toting, free-spending visitors to pour dollars and pounds, Euros, yen and Yuan into our empty coffers. We have an international airport in name only; the twice-weekly flight to and from London provides the only direct link we have to the world beyond our continent.

In the Heart of the Golden Triangle

You hear your mother say to MaiMufundisi that her daughter has a big, big house deep in the golden triangle. ‘Right in the heart of the golden triangle,’ you hear her say. In the golden triangle, you live a stone’s throw from the Governor of the Central Bank. In the street behind the French Ambassador’s residence, your house is next to the residence of the British High Commissioner. You try to remember that you are to call him the British Ambassador now, because your President pulled your country out of the Commonwealth.

The Mupandawana Dancing Champion

When the prices of everything went up ninety seven times in one year, M’dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead. In a space of only six months, he became famous twice over, as the best coffin maker in the district and as the Mupandawana Dancing Champion.

Our Man in Geneva wins a Million Euros

Our man in Geneva sits before his computer and blinks at the messages in his inbox. ‘Brother, size matters,’ says a message from K. P. Rimmer. ‘Give her an opportunity to spread rumours about your enormous size. Make her happy by delaying your explosions tonight.’ ‘Don’t be a two pump chump,’ says Karl Lumsky. ‘Millions of men are facing this issue, and the smartest ones already got an answer. Safe, efficient and covering all aspects, Extra-Time will help you forget the premature nightmare.’

The Maid from Lalapanzi

You should not play outside in the rain when you are wearing red,’ SisiBlandina said to Munya and me. ‘Lightning likes things that are red and it will hunt you out and strike you down and burn you from inside out. ‘And you must not sit out on the road otherwise you will grow festering boils on your bottoms. She told story upon story of the fates that awaited us if we did things we were not supposed to do, and she had the proof, for these things had happened to people she knew in Lalapanzi.

My Aunt Juliana's Indian

Mr Vaswani of Vaswani Brothers General Dealers was the first Indian that I saw closely enough to count the teeth in his mouth and the buttons on his shirt. I had seen Indians before; they were hard to miss, the women in fabrics of gossamer lightness, splashes of colour on Salisbury’s pavements, and, like their men, as brown as we but with hair that slipped and slithered like white people’s. Until I saw Mr Vaswani, I had never been close enough to them to see the colour of their irises.

The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie's Bridegroom

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie’s bridegroom. They look at Rosie’s own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband’s sickness screams out its presence from every pore? Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair; it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.

My Cousin-Sister Rambanai

My cousin-sister Rambanai came back from America with two suitcases crammed with too-tight clothes in vivid shades of pink and a new accent. The clothes eventually faded from frequent washes with Cold Power and from hanging in the harshness of the Harare sun, but the accent did not. Her new voice rose and fell in our house as she talked of her life in the States, the problems she had juggling her nine-to-five job with an insurance broker in downtown Dallas and her hectic social life, the leaky fawcet in her duplex. ‘Take this route,’ she said, only she pronounced it rout instead of root. And our housemaid SisiDessy said to her friend Memory the housemaid from next door that Rambanai sounded just like someone on television.

The Negotiated Settlement

Thulani did not immediately notice the darkness. Only when he was in the house and reached for the wall switch in the entrance corridor to produce an empty click did he realise that there was no electricity. Load shedding. He walked to the kitchen, singing snatches of Oliver Mtukudzi, ‘Zvimwe hazvibvunzwi, zvimwe hazvibvunzweiwe.’ After all these years in Harare, his Ndebele tongue still couldn’t get around the Shona zv and nzw sounds. It probably never would. He abandoned singing, and hummed as he groped for a candle where they kept them above the fridge. He lit one and opened the microwave oven. Isitshwala and stewed meat and leaf vegetables again.

Midnight at the Hotel California

It is hard to remember that there was ever a time when you could buy a half dozen eggs, a packet of Colcolm sausages, two loaves of bread, a packet of Tanganda tea and still have change from a ten dollar note for two Castle Laagers and a packet of Everest. I was thinking of those days as I walked from Mbare to Tynwald today. I had gone to Mbare to collect my car, but my mechanic Lovemore had not finished with it. A couple more days, m’dhara, he said. I had to contend with that. Shaky called while I was in Mbare and said that he knew someone who knew someone who could get me a good deal on fifty litres of petrol. It is a super deal m’dhara, he said, it is only valid today, take it or leave it. I could not leave it; this was the only thing in my pipeline. Just ten days ago, I had had to suspend another deal – some moron thought he was doing me the world’s greatest favour by offering me nine hundred billion for a four-stroke diesel generator, he actually expected that I would smile and say Jesu wangu, but I said, forget it, there can be no deal for such a low price, and he said, you will not be able sell it for more, and I said, I would rather hang on to it in that case, simbi haiore, m’dhara, uye haidyi sadza.