Tears of the Giraffe

  “And you found something?” asked Mma Makutsi, as she poured the hot water into the old enamel teapot and swirled it around with the tea leaves.

  “I found a feeling,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I felt that I knew something.”

  Mma Makutsi listened to her employer. What did she mean by saying that she felt she knew something? Either you know something or you don’t. You can’t think that you might know something, if you didn’t actually know what it was that you were meant to know.

  “I am not sure …” she began.

  Mma Ramotswe laughed. “It’s called an intuition. You can read about it in Mr Andersen’s hook. He talks about intuitions. They tell us things that we know deep inside, but which we can’t find the word for.”

  “And this intuition you felt at that place,” said Mma Makutsi hesitantly. “What did it tell you? Where this poor American boy was?”

  “There,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “That young man is there.”

  For a moment they were both silent. Mma Makutsi lowered the teapot onto the formica tabletop and replaced the lid.

  “He is living out there? Still?”

  “No,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He is dead. But he is there. Do you know what I am talking about?”

  Mma Makutsi nodded. She knew. Any sensitive person in Africa would know what Mma Ramotswe meant. When we die, we do not leave the place we were in when we were alive. We are still there, in a sense; our spirit is there. It never goes away. This was something which white people simply did not understand. They called it superstition, and said that it was a sign of ignorance to believe in such things. But they were the ones who were ignorant. If they could not understand how we are part of the natural world about us, then they are the ones who have closed eyes, not us.

  Mma Makutsi poured the tea and handed Mma Ramotswe her mug.

  “Are you going to tell the American woman this?” she asked. “Surely she will say: ‘Where is the body? Show me the exact place where my son is.’ You know how these people think. She will not understand you if you say that he is there somewhere, but you cannot point to the spot.”

  Mma Ramotswe raised the mug to her lips, watching her secretary as she spoke. This was an astute woman, she thought. She understood exactly how the American woman would think, and she appreciated just how difficult it could be to convey these subtle truths to one who conceived of the world as being entirely explicable by science. The Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind. They did not understand other people. They thought that everyone looked at things in the same way as Americans did, but they were wrong. Science was only part of the truth. There were also many other things that made the world what it was, and the Americans often failed to notice these things, although they were there all the time, under their noses.

  Mma Ramotswe put down her mug of tea and reached into the pocket of her dress.

  “I also found this,” she said, extracting the folded newspaper photograph and passing it to her secretary. Mma Makutsi unfolded the piece of paper and smoothed it out on the surface of her desk. She gazed at it for a few moments before looking up at Mma Ramotswe.

  “This is very old,” she said. “Was it lying there?”

  “No. It was on the wall. There were still some papers pinned on a wall. The ants had missed them.”

  Mma Makutsi returned her gaze to the paper.

  “There are names,” she said. “Cephas Kalumani. Oswald Ranta. Mma Soloi. Who are these people?”

  “They lived there,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They must have been there at the time.”

  Mma Makutsi shrugged her shoulders. “But even if we could find these people and talk to them,” she said, “would that make any difference? The police must have talked to them at the time. Maybe even Mma Curtin talked to them herself when she first came back.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded her head in agreement. “You’re right,” she said. “But that photograph tells me something. Look at the faces.”

  Mma Makutsi studied the yellowing image. There were two men in the front, standing next to a woman. Behind them was another man, his face indistinct, and a woman, whose back was half-turned. The names in the caption referred to the three in the front. Cephas Kalumani was a tall man, with slightly gangly limbs, a man who would look awkward and ill at ease in any photograph. Mma Soloi, who was standing next to him, was beaming with pleasure. She was a comfortable woman—the archetypical, hardworking Motswana woman, the sort of woman who supported a large family, whose life’s labour, it seemed, would be devoted to endless, uncomplaining cleaning: cleaning the yard, cleaning the house, cleaning children. This was a picture of a heroine; unacknowledged, but a heroine nonetheless.

  The third figure, Oswald Ranta, was another matter altogether. He was a well-dressed, dapper figure. He was wearing a white shirt and tie and, like Mma Soloi, was smiling at the camera. His smile, though, was very different.

  “Look at that man,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Look at Ranta.”

  “I do not like him,” said Mma Makutsi. “I do not like the look of him at all.”

  “Precisely,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That man is evil.”

  Mma Makutsi said nothing, and for a few minutes the two of them sat in total silence, Mma Makutsi staring at the photograph and Mma Ramotswe looking down into her mug of tea. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke.

  “I think that if anything bad was done in that place, then it was done by that man. Do you think I am right?”

  “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. “You are right.” She paused. “Are you going to find him now?”

  “That is my next task,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I shall ask around and see if anybody knows this man. But in the meantime, we have some letters to write, Mma. We have other cases to think about. That man at the brewery who was anxious about his brother. I have found out something now and we can write to him. But first we must write a letter about that accountant.”

  Mma Makutsi inserted a piece of paper into her typewriter and waited for Mma Ramotswe to dictate. The letter was not an interesting one—it was all about the tracing of a company accountant who had sold most of the company’s assets and then disappeared. The police had stopped looking for him but the company wanted to trace its property.

  Mma Makutsi typed automatically. Her mind was not on the task, but her training enabled her to type accurately even if she was thinking about something else. Now she was thinking of Oswald Ranta, and of how they might trace him. The spelling of Ranta was slightly unusual, and the simplest thing would be to look the name up in the telephone directory. Oswald Ranta was a smart-looking man who could be expected to have a telephone. All she had to do was to look him up and write down the address. Then she could go and make her own enquiries, if she wished, and present Mma Ramotswe with the information.

  The letter finished, she passed it over to Mma Ramotswe for signature and busied herself with addressing the envelope. Then, while Mma Ramotswe made a note in the file, she slipped open her drawer and took out the Botswana telephone directory. As she had thought, there was only one Oswald Ranta.

  “I must make a quick telephone call,” she said. “I shall only be a moment.”

  Mma Ramotswe grunted her assent. She knew that Mma Makutsi could be trusted with the telephone, unlike most secretaries, who she knew used their employers’ telephones to make all sorts of long-distance calls to boyfriends in remote places like Maun or Orapa.

  Mma Makutsi spoke in a low voice, and Mma Ramotswe did not hear her.

  “Is Rra Ranta there, please?”

  “He is at work, Mma. I am the maid.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mma. I must phone him at work. Can you tell me where that is?”

  “He is at the University. He goes there every day.”

  “I see. Which number there?”

  She noted it down on a piece of paper, thanked the maid, and replaced the re
ceiver. Then she dialled, and again her pencil scratched across paper.

  “Mma Ramotswe,” she said quietly. “I have all the information you need.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked up sharply.

  “Information about what?”

  “Oswald Ranta. He is living here in Gaborone. He is a lecturer in the Department of Rural Economics in the University. The secretary there says that he always comes in at eight o’clock every morning and that anybody who wishes to see him can make an appointment. You need not look any further.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled.

  “You are a very clever person,” she said. “How did you find all this out?”

  “I looked in the telephone directory,” answered Mma Makutsi. “Then I telephoned to find out about the rest.”

  “I see,” said Mma Ramotswe, still smiling. “That was very good detective work.”

  Mma Makutsi beamed at the praise. Detective work. She had done the job of a detective, although she was only a secretary.

  “I am happy that you are pleased with my work,” she said, after a moment. “I have wanted to be a detective. I’m happy being a secretary, but it is not the same thing as being a detective.”

  Mma Ramotswe frowned. “This is what you have wanted?”

  “Every day,” said Mma Makutsi. “Every day I have wanted this thing.”

  Mma Ramotswe thought about her secretary. She was a good worker, and intelligent, and if it meant so much to her, then why should she not be promoted? She could help her with her investigations, which would be a much better use of her time than sitting at her desk waiting for the telephone to ring. They could buy an answering machine to deal with calls if she was out of the office on an investigation. Why not give her the chance and make her happy?

  “You shall have the thing you have wanted,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You will be promoted to assistant detective. As from tomorrow.”

  Mma Makutsi rose to her feet. She opened her mouth to speak, but the emotion within her strangled any words. She sat down.

  “I am glad that you are pleased,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential.”

  Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AT NIGHT IN GABORONE

  ALONE In her house in Zebra Drive, Mma Ramotswe awoke, as she often did, in the small hours of the morning, that time when the town was utterly silent; the time of maximum danger for rats, and other small creatures, as cobras and mambas moved silently in their hunting. She had always suffered from broken sleep, but had stopped worrying about it. She never lay awake for more than an hour or so, and, since she retired to bed early, she always managed at least seven hours of sleep a night. She had read that people needed eight hours, and that the body eventually claimed its due. If that were so, then she made up for it, as she often slept for several hours on a Saturday and never got up early on Sunday. So an hour or so lost at two or three each morning was nothing significant.

  Recently, while waiting to have her hair braided at the Make Me Beautiful Salon she had noticed a magazine article on sleep. There was a famous doctor, she read, who knew all about sleep and had several words of advice for those whose sleep was troubled. This Dr Shapiro had a special clinic just for people who could not sleep and he attached wires to their heads to see what was wrong. Mma Ramotswe was intrigued: there was a picture of Dr Shapiro and a sleepy-looking man and woman, in dishevelled pyjamas, with a tangle of wires coming from their heads. She felt immediately sorry for them: the woman, in particular, looked miserable, like somebody who was being forced to participate in an immensely tedious procedure but who simply could not escape. Or was she miserable because of the hospital pyjamas, in which she was being photographed; she may always have wished to have her photograph in a magazine, and now her wish was to be fulfilled—in hospital pyjamas.

  And then she read on, and became outraged. “Fat people often have difficulty in sleeping well,” the article went on. “They suffer from a condition called sleep apnoea, which means that their breathing is interrupted in sleep. Such people are advised to lose weight.”

  Advised to lose weight! What has weight to do with it? There were many fat people who seemed to sleep perfectly well; indeed, there was a fat person who often sat under a tree outside Mma Ramotswe’s house and who seemed to be asleep most of the time. Would one advise that person to lose weight? It seemed to Mma Ramotswe as if such advice would be totally unnecessary and would probably simply lead to unhappiness. From being a fat person who was comfortably placed in the shade of a tree, this poor person would become a thin person, with not much of a bottom to sit upon, and probably unable to sleep as a result.

  And what about her own case? She was a fat lady—traditionally built—and yet she had no difficulty in getting the required amount of sleep. It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas as to how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.

  There were two main targets, Mma Ramotswe thought. First, there were fat people, who were now getting quite used to a relentless campaign against them; and then there were men. Mma Ramotswe knew that men were far from perfect—that many men were very wicked and selfish and lazy, and that they had, by and large, made rather a bad job of running Africa. But that was no reason to treat them badly, as some of these people did. There were plenty of good men about—people like Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, Sir Sereste Khama (First President of Botswana, Statesman, Paramount Chief of the Bangwato), and the late Obed Ramotswe, retired miner, expert judge of cattle, and her much-loved Daddy.

  She missed the Daddy, and not a day went by, not one, that she did not think of him. Often when she awoke at this hour of the night, and lay alone in the darkness, she would search her memory to retrieve some recollection of him that had eluded her: some scrap of conversation, some gesture, some shared experience. Each memory was a precious treasure to her, fondly dwelt upon, sacramental in its significance. Obed Ramotswe, who had loved his daughter, and who had saved every rand, every cent, that he made in those cruel mines, and had built up that fine herd of cattle for her sake, had asked for nothing for himself. He did not drink, he did not smoke; he thought only of her and of what would happen to her.

  If only she could erase those two awful years spent with Note Mokoti, when she knew that her Daddy had suffered so much, knowing, as he did, that Note would only make her unhappy. When she had returned to him, after Note’s departure, and he had seen, even as he had embraced her, the scar of the latest beating, he had said nothing, and had stopped her explanation in its tracks.

  “You do not have to tell me about it,” he said. “We do not have to talk about it. It is over.”

  She had wanted to say sorry to him—to say that she should have asked his opinion of Note before she had married him, and listened, but she felt too raw for this and he would not have wanted it.

  And she remembered his illness, when his chest had become more and more congested with the disease which killed so many miners, and how she had held his hand at his bedside and how, afterwards, she had gone outside, dazed, wanting to wail, as would be proper, but silent in her grief; and how she had seen a Go-Away bird staring at her from the bough of a tree, and how it had fl
uttered up, on to a higher branch, and turned round to stare at her again, before flying off; and of a red car that at that moment had passed in the road, with two children in the back, dressed in white dresses, with ribbons in their hair, who had looked at her too, and had waved. And of how the sky looked—heavy with rain, purple clouds stacked high atop one another, and of lightning in the distance, over the Kalahari, linking sky to earth. And of a woman who, not knowing that the world had just ended for her, called out to her from the verandah of the hospital: Come inside, Mma. Do not stand there! There is going to be a storm. Come inside quickly!

  NOT FAR away, a small plane on its way to Gaborone flew low over the dam and then, losing height, floated down over the area known as the Village, over the cluster of shops on the Tlokweng Road, and finally, in the last minute of its journey, over the houses that dotted the bush on the airstrip boundary. In one of these, at a window, a girl sat watching. She had been up for an hour or so, as her sleep had been disturbed, and she had decided to get up from her bed and look out of the window. The wheelchair was beside the bed and she was able to manoeuvre herself into it without help. Then, propelling herself over to the open window, she had sat and looked out into the night.

  She had heard the plane before she saw its lights. She had wondered what a plane was doing coming in at three in the morning. How could pilots fly at night? How could they tell where they were going in that limitless darkness? What if they took a wrong turn and went out over the Kalahari, where there were no lights to guide them and where it would be like flying within a dark cave?

  She watched the plane fly almost directly above the house, and saw the shape of the wings and the cone of brightness which the landing light of the plane projected before it. The noise of the engine was loud now—not just a distant buzz—but a heavy, churning sound. Surely it would wake the household, she thought, but when the plane had dropped down on to the airstrip and the engine faded, the house was still in silence.