An Elegy for Easterly (25 page)

By the time I had finished my story, my Prado friend and I had become firm friends.
Muri vahombe,
m'dhara
, he said, You are really something. We dropped off the others and he insisted on buying me a drink. He even gave me back the million that I had paid him for the lift. I only got home well after seven that night – we ended up drinking first at Londoner's then at Tipperary's. He drove me home afterwards and we parted on the friendliest terms.

Shaky called me just as I was waving him off. I was in such fine spirits that I had almost forgotten the soured petrol deal.

Diamonds,
m'dhara
, Shaky said. I am with someone who knows someone who can get us into diamonds.

I walked into the house with the phone to my ear and listened as he talked about the diamonds that had been discovered in Marange and that would make us, him and me, rich beyond all our dreams. 

Acknowledgements

The stories in this volume originally appeared as follows: ‘At the Sound of the Last Post' in
African Pens:
New Writing from Southern Africa
and in
Prospect
, under the title ‘Oration for a Dead Hero'; ‘An Elegy for Easterly' in
Jungfrau: Stories from the Caine Prize
2006
; ‘Something Nice from London' and ‘The Annexe Shuffle' in
Per Contra
; ‘The Mupandawana Dancing Champion' and ‘In the Heart of the Golden Triangle' in the Weaver Press anthologies
Laughing
Now
and
Women Writing Zimbabwe
. I am grateful to my first editors at these publications, particularly Will Skidelsky and Miriam N. Koitzin who took a chance on an unknown writer and set me firmly on this path.

I also wish to thank everyone at Janklow & Nesbit (UK), and particularly Clare Paterson, agent extraordinaire, without whom none of this would have been possible, Rebecca Folland who successfully sold me to
the world, Jenny McVeigh who brought me to Janklow and Eric Simonoff who made me want to stay.

At Faber, many thanks are due to my fantastic editors Mitzi Angel and Lee Brackstone for their good humour, their patience and their eagle eyes, and for loving these stories while making them better. Thank you to everyone involved with this book at both Faber and at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, especially Helen Francis, David Watkins, Chantal Clarke, Becky Fincham, Sarita Varma and Jeff Seroy. I also thank publisher Stephen Page for welcoming me so warmly to Faber.

Then there are the many friends who gave me rooms of my own and more, who rooted for me at every turn, who endured the I-want-to-be-a-writer lament for far longer than they deserved, and who are required to buy at least five books each now that I have mentioned them by name: Victoria Donaldson, Ingrid Cox-Lockhart, Martin Mbugua Kimani, Itai Madamombe, Sybilla Fries, Barbara and Gilbert Walter, Athita Komindr, Ian Donovan, Lisa Jacobs, Bonnie Galvin, Niall Meagher, Tom Sebastian, Hunter Nottage, Fernando Pierola, Pamela Collet, Chuma Nwokolo, Dirk Mueller-Ingrand, Nemdi and Olufemi Elias, Rob Campbell, Donata Rugarabamu, Bathsheba Okwenje, Marlon Zakeyo, Delice Gwaze, Ali Menzies, Maureen Chitewe, Jessie Majome, Thoko Moyo,
Suzana Vukadinovic, Steve Thom, Luigi Principi, Werner Zdouc, Lindy Nleya, Justin Fox, Molara Wood, Silvia Candido, Gugulethu Moyo, Muhtar Bakare, Binyavanga Wainaina, Shailja Patel, Munyaka Makuyana and Darrel Bristow-Bovey.

I also wish to thank Stephen Chan, Irene Staunton, Dolores and Anthony Fleischer and the South African Centre of International PEN, Helen and Nick Elam, Jamal Mahjoub, Veronique Tadjo, Susan Tiberghien, Eunice Scarfe and everyone at the Geneva Writers' Group, my many friends at the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, and my wonderful colleagues at the Advisory Centre on WTO Law, and in particular, Carol Lau, Leo Palma and Frieder Roessler. Finally, I wish to thank Jane Hirshfield and Oliver Mtukudzi for allowing me to use their words, John Coetzee for his generosity and Silas Chekera for everything.

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. She lives with her son, Kush, in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an organisation that provides legal aid on international trade law to developing countries. She is currently completing
The Book of Memory
, her first novel.