in her room when a cleared throat stopped her in her tracks. She turned towards the open door of the study.
‘The dress itself is good,’ said her father, crossing his arms over his round belly so that his shoulders were level with his earlobes. ‘Whether it suits you is another question altogether.’
It looked suspiciously like her father had been lying in wait for her. He was sitting in his study, but his chair faced the open door to the corridor, his haunches spilling out on either side of his seat, a fat ankle resting on his knee. Isa looked past him into the room. No books, no shelves, no desk for the chair. The only other piece of furniture in there was the sunken, rumpled bed where he lay from morning to night, sipping from his stein, swallowing his daily river of gin only to piss it out again in the loo next door.
Sometimes, that river would return more abruptly, in a spastic waterfall from his mouth that Simon would have to mop up. This was technically an inside-the-house job and should have fallen to Enela. But, ‘Awe. Nakana. I’ve refused,’ the old maid would protest like a spoiled child, unwilling to touch any part of a muzungu who no longer bothered with bathing and reeked of fermented sugars. That smell lingered in the threshold now, hanging in the air with his pronouncements.
‘This dress looks too bright,’ he mused. ‘Is white even a suitable colour for you?’
‘Why are you so full of poison?’ Isa cried, then turned and swept off down the corridor.
* * *
The Colonel had been making digs like this ever since Isa and Balaji had announced their engagement. He had missed his chance to express outright disapproval of the match, and this was his only way to let his feelings out. Those feelings were not kind. The Colonel had retired a decade earlier, after the North Power Cavern of Kariba Dam was complete and management had been ‘Zambianised’, which meant that most of the positions had been given to native Africans. He had resented being displaced by those men, most of whom he had trained himself. He had handed them all the technical knowledge about engineering that he had garnered over years of experience, and they had repaid him by pushing him out!
What did those idiots know of the delicate balance of stone and water? What did they know about watching your own work, your own men, get dashed to pieces by the terrible force of the Zambezi? Eighty-six labourers had died building Kariba Dam! Their names were still engraved in the wall at the Church of Santa Barbara. A worthy martyrdom for the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. The Colonel was still mighty proud of that dam, even if the country had robbed him of even that old man’s prerogative: gloating.
Retirement had worked its peculiar lethargic magic on Federico. His wife had weaned him from her bed years ago. The servants treated him like a chore. His daughter pitied him though she had barely graduated from secondary school, had no job prospects, and was about to marry some wog trader. Federico had even given up on entertaining expats – no more parties for him to laugh or snooze or slosh his way through. Nowadays, he just lay around, festering in memories. These were mostly of Sibilla.
Sometimes he remembered her in the old country, the young girl who had spun in Signora Lina’s parlour, who had plucked his heart and made him a murderer. Sometimes he remembered her here, when it was still an oddly shaped colonial territory in the middle of Africa, their wedding day in Siavonga: the Church of Santa Barbara redolent of fresh concrete, Sibilla’s hair covered with the white tulle layers she’d sewn by hand, the very wedding dress which their daughter had just been flaunting. It was too white on Isa, Federico thought, patting under his chair for his stein. Not because she wasn’t a virgin, though he doubted that she was. But because on her it looked nothing like the sensuous, smoky grey it had made layered over Sibilla’s hair. He had noticed that its wrists were yellow now too – Sibilla’s perfume must have stained them all those years ago. He could almost smell it: citrus, gardenia, a hint of something earthy.
He thought of their honeymoon at the Victoria Falls Hotel – the tremendous roar of the water around them like static. They had loved each other desperately then,