then the dam wouldn’t happen, that we would just give up. Our hands were tied – we had to send in the police.’
Federico thought the police should have been sent in sooner. Somewhere in the passage from Europe to Africa, from Sergeant to Colonel, he had lost his idealism. Why did the British keep treating the natives like wayward children? They held long indabas, gave them money, took them to parcel out their new land – all to no avail. As if the Tonga, with quills in their noses and clay in their hair, with their topless women who knocked out their front teeth for fashion, weren’t destined to live off the land anyway. What did it matter where that land was?
* * *
With Federico at the dam all day, Sibilla had too much time and too few tasks on her hands. These days, when he left for the office after breakfast, she would linger in her robe at the crude wooden dining table and ruminate. Why had he wanted her to keep thinking she was beneath him, like Cinderella? Why had he let her believe that she was of poor birth, that she had no father, that he had saved her from his brother? If even one of them was not true, could she be sure of the rest?
Young Enela was traipsing in and out of the room, clearing the plates. Sibilla reached into her robe and pulled out the postcard she’d bought at the hotel gift shop. It had become a talisman for her, its edges ribbed with fretting. She stared at in wonder. This was her grandfather, Pietro Gavuzzi (1870–1945), in his jaunty hat and vest. He stood arms akimbo before a crude building with a peaked roof and a wrap-around veranda – the original hotel – beside a giant sign that said VICTORIA FALLS. She had considered inscribing the postcard, sending it to her mother or to the Signora. Dear Aunt Lina…But that was not possible. Sibilla and Federico often lay awake all night calculating how long they could pull off this theft of the Colonel’s life. It was only a matter of time before someone found that corpse in the tomato patch.
Sibilla turned the postcard over and read the : Percy M. Clark, 1904. She sounded the name out loud. It did not seem Italian.
‘Oh-oh, you know that one, Ba Kalaki?’
Sibilla looked up. Enela was standing next to her, a set of plates balanced on her forearm. She had overhead Sibilla say the name.
‘No. Do you know him?’
‘Yes, please! Ba Kalaki had a shop those sides at Mosi-oa-Tunya. And my uncle, he was working for him…’ The words faded as the girl waltzed into the kitchen with her tower of dishes.
The natives here seemed to refer to every male in the community as a father or an uncle or a grandfather. But regardless of his relation to Enela, if this ‘uncle’ of hers had known the man who took the photograph, Mr Clark, maybe he had known Sibilla’s grandfather, too. The maternal line had been severed, but maybe she could trace the paternal line after all. Enela came back into the dining room, wiping her hands down her apron.
‘Can you take me to your uncle?’ Sibilla asked.
‘To Bashi Bernadetta? Ah-ah? For what?’ But before Sibilla could reply, Enela’s frown released and she abruptly relented. ‘Okay, it’s okay. We can go.’
An hour later, they were bumping along a dirt road in one of the Impresit vehicles, Sibilla clad in gumboots and swathed in shawls. The driver’s presence seemed to mute Enela. As soon as they got out and began the last stretch to the village on foot, however, she raised the topic of dam displacement. Sibilla knew, from Federico’s scattered remarks, that the Tonga did not want to leave their homes. Enela explained that, while most of the villagers had agreed to go after the police had come, the old people still wished to remain. They had the right, they said, to stay with the dead, even if they would all be drowned when the river flooded.
‘The dead?’ Sibilla asked.
‘The dead are the spirits,’ said Enela. ‘But we also have the white God. And other gods – the animals. And Nyami Nyami, that is the god that is swimming in the Zambezi…’
As Enela described this rivergod, with its serpentine body and whirlpool head, Sibilla’s hair bristled under her shawls. She knew the African witch doctors sometimes decorated themselves with raffia. Did the Tonga think she was