Precious and Grace

  The journalist and the photographer arrived together, barely an hour after Mma Makutsi had made her telephone call. The journalist was called Bandie Mokwena, and she was known not only for her feature articles but also for her recent marriage to Quicktime Tsabong, a jaunty and well-liked sports commentator on Radio Botswana. They were the perfect media couple, much photographed themselves at charity events and public occasions. Quicktime had accompanied the Botswana team to the last Olympic Games, and wore the Olympic rings symbol on his blazer to remind people of the fact. Bandie, although quieter than her colourful husband, had a natural charm that set her interview subjects at ease and elicited facts that a less friendly manner would simply fail to uncover.

  The photographer was a young man with a rather effusive manner. He looked at Mma Makutsi critically, asking her to move around the office until she was in the right light before he started to photograph her.

  “I think I should stand over here,” said Mma Makutsi, positioning herself in front of her certificate from the Botswana Secretarial College. “Do you think this would do?”

  “Okay, that’s good,” said the photographer. “Now smile, honey. Show those teeth to the readers. That’s perfect; snap, snap. Perfect.”

  The interview was conducted over a cup of tea prepared by Mma Ramotswe. Bandie addressed all her questions to Mma Makutsi. “It complicates matters to have too many names in a piece,” she said. “So we’ll stick to you, Mma, if Mma Ramotswe doesn’t mind.”

  She did not mind, and listened, bemused at times, to Mma Makutsi’s telling of the story.

  “This lady had a broken heart,” Mma Makutsi explained. “All the time she was in Canada she was pining, pining for Botswana. And now she wants to come back and see all her old friends. That quest brought her to our door, and it will be our pleasure to help her. I shall not rest until I bring these two ladies together so that they can talk about those old times.

  “The place where you are born, you see, is very special. If you are born in Botswana, you are very lucky, as from your very first day you will have the sun of Botswana on your face. You will have the sounds of Botswana in your ears. You will have the smell of Botswana in your nose.”

  That was a lot for a small baby to deal with, thought Mma Ramotswe, but she agreed with the general sentiment. There were blessings to be counted, and Mma Makutsi was right to list them. She would have added the sound of cattle coming home in the evening and the smell of their sweet breath. She knew that these were the things that her father said he would miss as he lay on his bed of illness.

  “This lady has been thinking of these things for many years,” continued Mma Makutsi. “Now she has come to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to help her find the people she knew as a child, in particular a lady who looked after her. Please look at the picture and ask yourself: Am I this lady?”

  It all came out in a flood, and it surprised not only her audience, but Mma Makutsi herself.

  “That was very moving,” said Bandie, as she transcribed the words in her notebook. “The readers will all hope that Rosie steps forward.”

  Mma Ramotswe had been thinking. “I’m not sure whether the readers all need to ask themselves whether they are that lady,” she said. “They will know, surely, what their name is. So if you are called Alice, for instance, you will know that it cannot be you.”

  Mma Makutsi looked to Bandie for support, but the journalist, after a few moments’ thought, agreed with Mma Ramotswe. “That’s a good point, Mma,” she said. “I think you should say: If you are called Rosie, are you the Rosie this lady is looking for?”

  Mma Makutsi pouted. “But that lady may not be called Rosie any longer,” she said. “People change their names. So perhaps I should say: If you have at any time been called Rosie, then are you the Rosie this lady is looking for?”

  “That is even better,” said Bandie. She looked impressed. “You ladies are very exact. Perhaps that comes from being detectives.”

  “That is true,” said Mma Makutsi. “We are very careful with our words.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled.

  “And one other thing,” said Mma Makutsi. “When you print my photograph, could you please refer to me as a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College?”

  Bandie looked up at the certificate on the wall.

  “Ninety-seven per cent, Mma,” said the photographer. “Did you see it?”

  “That’s an amazing mark,” said Bandie.

  “Thank you,” said Mma Makutsi.

  “I must tell Quicktime about it,” Bandie went on. “He’s interested in all sorts of records—not just sporting ones. He told me once about a boy in his class at school who got one hundred per cent in all his Cambridge exams.” She waited for a reaction, but none was forthcoming. “One hundred per cent, Mma!”

  Mma Makutsi sniffed. “School is one thing; college is another.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Bandie quickly. “I’m not saying that one is equal to the other. But it was nonetheless quite an achievement for that boy—one hundred per cent in everything.” She paused. “He was called Brainbox Tefolo, Quicktime said. A very suitable name for a boy like that.”

  —

  MMA RAMOTSWE KNEW that the newspaper article might help and could, if they were lucky, bring an immediate result—at least in the search for Rosie. But there was more to the request that Susan had made of them. A reunion with Rosie might be her main ambition, but she had been at pains to stress that she was keen to find her old house and some of the children with whom she had been at school at Thornhill. These would not be easy things to discover, thought Mma Ramotswe, but she could at least make a start on the task while they were waiting for the outcome of the article.

  They agreed on a division of labour. Mma Makutsi would handle any responses they had to the article, which would appear, Bandie assured them, in the following day’s edition of the newspaper. While she was doing this, Mma Ramotswe and Charlie, who was due back the following day from a family funeral, would set about the task of finding the house in which Susan’s family had lived. That done, they might be able to trace some of the neighbours from those days, and in this way start piecing together Susan’s cherished past. She was not optimistic, though; thirty years was a long time in human affairs anywhere, but it was a particularly long time in a city like Gaborone, which had grown so quickly. A sleepy small town, no more than a handful of streets, had become a city, with all that this entailed. It was still recognisably the same place, though, and its character had remained intact. So whatever they were able to serve up to Susan, even if it was only a few fragments, would, she imagined, ring true and bring back to her at least some of the childhood she was so keen to re-create.

  That evening when she went home, Mma Ramotswe found Motholeli and Puso busy with Fanwell’s dog. Puso had resurrected an ancient floor brush and was grooming the dog, while his sister had refilled his water bowl and was feeding him scraps of bread spread with beef dripping.

  Mma Ramotswe was touched by the sight. There was something particularly appealing, she thought, about children lavishing care on an animal. They were repaying, in a way, the love and care given to them; showing that the message that we should look after one another had not fallen on stony ground. A child who loved a pet was showing the love that would in due course be given to another, and that was a reassurance. Love was like rain; there could be periods of drought when it seemed that love would never return, would never make its presence felt again. In such times, the heart could harden, but then, just as droughts broke, so too could love suddenly appear, and heal just as quickly and completely as rain can heal the parched land.

  “Fanwell’s dog is very happy here,” said Puso. “Look at him, Mma. He is smiling.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked at the dog. Puso was right: its mouth seemed fixed in a wide, gum-revealing grin.

  “We should give him a name,” she said. “We cannot call him Fanwell’s dog.”

  “We could call him Zebra,” said M
otholeli. “This is Zebra Drive and he lives here now. Zebra would be a good name for him.”

  Puso agreed. “Is that all right with you, Mma?” he asked. “Can we call him Zebra?”

  She had been more concerned with Motholeli’s saying the dog now lived here. It is too late, she thought; Zebra is no longer temporary—he is permanent.

  She left the children and went inside. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had arrived back from the garage a few minutes before her, and had put on the kettle.

  “You go and sit on the verandah, Mma,” he said. “I will bring you your tea. We can talk there.”

  She imagined that he would want to talk about Zebra, and about the dog’s precise status. She rehearsed in her mind what she would say. Permanent. Perhaps that single-word answer would be best. Or she might say, “The children have decided the matter for us.” That had the merit of truth, but it seemed, in a way, to be transferring responsibility for the decision to them rather than accepting it herself. Perhaps she might say, “What alternative do we have?” And then she would wait to see if he could come up with something, which she doubted he would be able to do.

  She need not have worried.

  “That dog seems to have settled quite well,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni as he took his first sip of tea. “He’ll be a useful guard dog.”

  “Yes,” she said. She had not anticipated he would be that accepting. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni liked dogs well enough, but had expressed concern about the responsibility of keeping one. But then there had been a spate of break-ins recently—small thefts of garden tools and the like, but it was enough for him to be concerned. Cautiously, she asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”

  He shrugged. “Not really—these break-ins, you see…It’s the one thing that will deter a burglar. You can build fences as high as you like, you can put big locks on your gates, but it is always dogs that look after your property.”

  She looked into her teacup. There had been a time when locks had been virtually unknown in Botswana, when you could leave your possessions anywhere with the confidence that they would be there when you returned, when there was no point in stealing because people would see you with some item that they knew you did not own and would draw their own conclusions. That had changed, at least in the towns; it was different in the country, where the old ways still prevailed.

  What would her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, make of high, locked gates? She gazed out into the yard; dusk was settling on the town, covering the trees and buildings with its gentle, cooling mantle; there was the smell of wood-smoke, of cooking somewhere. She could hear his voice: What are these gates for, Precious? Why do these people want to close themselves off from their brothers and their sisters? It would be hard to explain that people no longer thought of others as their brothers and sisters, although she did; she would never abandon the presumption that we were bound one to another in that way.

  She moved on from the subject of the dog. She had been thinking of Mr. Polopetsi and his scheme. It seemed to her that everybody to whom she had spoken knew about it and that she was the only one who had not been approached. Had Mr. Polopetsi also confided in Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni?

  “Mr. Polopetsi, Rra,” she began.

  He laughed. “Mr. Twenty-Five Per Cent, you mean.”

  For a moment she was unable to say anything.

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. “He will have spoken to you about it, Mma?”

  She shook her head. “No, Rra. It looks as if he’s spoken to everybody else, though.”

  She wondered whether Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had invested anything. Surely he would have told her about it—they kept most of their money in a joint account, but they both had separate savings accounts for the occasional individual treat. She did not think, though, that his savings account had more than a couple of thousand pula in it at present; there had been the new roof for the garage and a needy aunt up in Francistown—these were exactly the sorts of things that drained a bank account.

  “You didn’t…”

  His laughter cut her short. “Invest in Mr. Polopetsi’s great scheme? Certainly not. To begin with, he actually asked for ten thousand pula, Mma. Ten thousand pula? We don’t have that at the moment and, if we did, I’m afraid I would never entrust it to Polopetsi Enterprises, or whatever it’s called.”

  “The Fat Cattle Club,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That’s what he calls it.”

  “Fat Cattle indeed,” muttered Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Does Mr. Polopetsi know anything about cattle? I know that he’s very good at chemistry, but cattle…” He paused. “The trouble, Mma Ramotswe, is that everybody in this country thinks that he or she is a big cattle expert. Speak to anybody and they’ll start going on about cattle. They’ll tell you what’s best for cattle; they’ll explain to you all about the different sorts of salt licks; they’ll talk for ages about breeding and horns and diseases that cattle get in their hooves, and ticks too…There’s no limit to the knowledge that people have about cattle, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe knew what he meant. Cattle were at the heart of Botswana society, the ultimate unit of wealth, the form of property that people appreciated above all else. It did not matter if you had money in the bank; what really counted was the cattle, and many people measured themselves, and others, by how many they had. People were odd about cattle.

  “Well,” she said, “he’s already made his own twenty-five per cent. He told Mma Potokwane about it.”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “I don’t believe it, Mma. Fattening cattle at the moment is a loss-making business—look at the price of feed. I had that man from Molepolole in the garage the other day. He deals in animal feeds, and he says that farmers are finding it difficult to pay him these days. He asked me for credit because his truck repair was going to be so expensive…A new differential, new suspension, and other things too.” He shook his head at the litany of cost. “An engine is not a cheap thing, Mma.” She had heard him say that so often—sometimes to his garage clients, as he broke bad news; sometimes to her; sometimes to friends. He spoke from experience, but always with sympathy.

  “No, Rra, you are right: an engine is not a cheap thing.” Nothing was cheap, she thought—even the things that were said to be free. Love itself was not cheap—it came with a price tag of its own, a price tag that, at the extreme end, was a broken heart. Freedom was not cheap—its price tag was watchfulness and courage. Even fresh air, the air we breathed each day, had its price tag, it seemed—one we were only now beginning to understand and was all about not destroying the things that gave us that fresh air—the trees, the greenery.

  She looked at him; she knew that she did not have to ask whether he agreed to give credit. He always did. “You helped him, Rra, I suppose.”

  “Yes. How could I not?”

  “No, you had to help him.” She frowned. “I am worried about Mr. Polopetsi, Rra. I’m afraid that he’s going to end up in…” She had been going to say “in difficulty,” but Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni said “in prison.”

  And that made her reach her decision. Her already lengthy list of things to do had just grown by one item: Speak to Mr. Polopetsi.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEY LIKE THIS PLACE VERY MUCH

  CHARLIE CAME BACK from the funeral in his grandfather’s village the following morning. He was full of village news—the sorts of stories that always emanated from such places: whose house had been attacked by termites; who had married whom; who had gone off to Lobatse and who had come back, and why. Mma Ramotswe listened patiently. She knew the appeal of such matters, and she was pleased that Charlie, belonging as he did to a generation brought up outside the villages, should be enthusiastic about what happened in such places. This was the spirit of the country being passed on—it was as simple, and important, as that. But there was business to be done, and she gently reminded him of that.

  “Very interesting, Charlie,” she said. “But we have work to do. We have a pressing case: a foreign client.”

  Charlie’s attention wa
s immediately engaged. “I am ready, Mma Ramotswe. I am fresh and ready to go. Whatever needs to be done—I am the one, Mma. Tell me, Mma.”

  He sat before her in the client’s chair, leaning forward eagerly to hear every detail. She told him about Susan’s visit and the account she had given of her childhood in Botswana. Charlie nodded as she spoke; he understood.

  “There are many people like that,” he said. “They come to Botswana and they fall in love—not with a person, Mma, but with a country. They like this place very much.”

  “She was born here, of course.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “That is different. But it is also the same.”

  She did not press him on the distinction, but continued by telling him of Susan’s specific requests. “These are not the usual sorts of things a detective agency has to look into, Charlie.”

  Charlie grinned. “No, Mma, this is not about bad husbands, or wives who become too friendly with other men. It is not that sort of thing.”

  From behind him, Mma Makutsi, who had been busy filing, joined in. “There is more to our work than that, Charlie.” She paused amidst a shuffling of paper. “Even if that’s the only sort of thing that some people seem to think about.”

  Mma Ramotswe’s expression told Charlie that she did not want him to engage with Mma Makutsi. He closed his eyes briefly, as if struggling with something. “Go on, Mma. Tell me more.”

  She reached for the envelope into which she had slipped Susan’s photograph. “There is this,” she said, laying it on the desk between them. “This is the photo of Mma Susan as a small girl. This lady is her nursemaid.”