The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

  Tati Monyena walked with her to the ward, and introduced her again to the nurses she had already met. One smiled when she saw Mma Ramotswe in her white coat. Another looked at her in astonishment, and then frowned and turned away. They were busy, though, and had no time to speak to her. There was a man in a bed near the window who was breathing heavily, making a sound which was like that of gravel being walked upon. One of the nurses took his pulse and adjusted his pillow. There was a small framed photograph on the table beside him, left by a relative no doubt, a reminder, a little thing for a very ill person to have with him on his journey, along with all those other memories that make up the life of a man.

  For the first little while, Mma Ramotswe felt like the intruder she was. It was an almost indecent feeling—that one was watching something that one should not be watching, like looking at another person in a moment of great privacy, but that feeling wore away as she stood by a window and watched the nurses at work. They were matter-of-fact in their manner: drugs were given, temperatures taken, entries made on charts. It was like an office, she thought, with its series of small tasks to be methodically carried out. That nurse over there, she thought, the one with the glasses, would be Mma Makutsi herself. And that young man who brought in the drugs trolley and who made some muttered comment to one of the nurses could be Charlie, and the drugs trolley, with its well-oiled, silent wheels, his Mercedes-Benz.

  After three quarters of an hour, when she had begun to feel tired, Mma Ramotswe drew a chair over to the place where she had been standing. It was near a bed occupied by a silent, sleeping man. He had tubes inserted into his arms, and wires disappearing into the sleeve of his nightgown. He slept regardless, his face composed, peaceful, all pain, if he had been experiencing it, forgotten. She watched him and thought of her father, Obed Ramotswe, and of how he met his end, in just such a bed, and of how it had seemed to her at the time that a whole Botswana had died with him. But it had not. That fine country, with its good people, was still there; it was there in the face of this elderly man with his head upon that pillow and the sunlight, the warm, friendly sun of Africa, slanting through the window and falling upon him now in his last days.

  She shifted in her chair and looked at her watch. It was almost eleven o’clock. The nurses, or some of them, would surely have their tea soon; but not today, perhaps, when they all seemed to be so busy. She closed her eyes for a moment, in comfortable drowsiness, feeling the sun from the window on her face. Eleven o’clock.

  The double swing doors at the end of the ward were opened, and a woman in a light green working dress, the uniform of the hospital’s support staff, bent down to put a doorstop in place. Behind her was a floor-polishing machine, a big, ungainly instrument like an over-sized vacuum cleaner. The woman glanced at Mma Ramotswe as she pushed her floor polisher in, and then she bent down and switched it on. There was a loud whining sound as the machine’s circular pad rubbed at the sealed concrete of the floor, and a smell of polish too, from some automatic dispenser attached to the handle. This was a well-run hospital, thought Mma Ramotswe; and a well-run hospital would also be battling against dirt on floors. That was where the invisible enemies were, was it not?—the armies of germs waiting for their chance.

  She watched the woman fondly. She was a traditionally built cleaning lady doing an important, but badly paid job. There was no doubt that a number of children would be dependent on that job, on the money that it brought for their food, their school clothes, their hopes for a future. And here was this solid, reliable woman doing her job, as women throughout Botswana would be doing their various jobs at that very moment; her floor polisher whirring, its long electrical cable trailing behind it and out of the door into the corridor.

  She was Mma Ramotswe, and she noticed things. She noticed the length of the cable, and all its coils, and she wondered whether there were not places in the ward where the polisher might be plugged in. Surely that would be easier, and would mean that this long cable could not threaten to trip people up in the ward or in the corridor. That would be far more sensible.

  She looked about her. The ward was full of plugs, one at the head of each bed. And into each of these plugs there were fitted the lights, the injection pumps, the appliances that helped the patients to breathe …

  She rose to her feet. The cleaning woman had now almost drawn level with her and they had exchanged a friendly glance, followed by a smile. She approached the woman, who looked up from her work and raised an eyebrow in enquiry before she bent down and switched off the polisher.

  “Dumela, Mma.”

  The greeting was exchanged. Then Mma Ramotswe leaned forward and whispered to her urgently. “I must talk to you, Mma. Please can we go outside and talk? I won’t keep you for long.”

  “What, now?” The woman had a soft, almost hoarse voice. “Now? I am working now, Mma.”

  “Mr Monyena,” said Mma Ramotswe, pointing in the direction of Tati Monyena’s office. “I am doing something for him. I am allowed to speak to anybody in working hours. You need not worry.”

  The woman nodded. The mention of Tati Monyena’s name had reassured her, and she pushed her polisher to one side and followed Mma Ramotswe out of the ward. They went outside, to sit on a bench beneath a tree. A goat had strayed into the hospital grounds and was nibbling at a patch of grass. It watched them for a few moments and then returned to its task of grazing. It was becoming hot again. The cleaner said, “This is the end of winter.”

  They sat down. “Yes, winter is over now, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. Then she said, “I noticed that you have a long cable on your polisher, Mma. It goes right out of the ward and into the corridor. Wouldn’t it be easier to connect it to one of the plugs inside each ward?”

  The cleaner picked up a twig from the ground at her feet and began to twist it. She was not nervous, though; that would have shown, and it did not.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “That’s what I used to do. But then they told me not to. I was given very strict instructions. I should not use any of the plugs in the ward.”

  Mma Ramotswe felt herself swaying. It was as if she was about to faint. She drew a deep breath, and the swaying feeling went away. Yes. Yes. Yes.

  “Who told you, Mma?” she asked. It was a simple question, but she had to struggle to get it out.

  “Mr Monyena himself,” said the cleaner. “He told me. He called me into his office and went on and on about it. He said …” She paused.

  “Yes? He said?”

  “He said that I was not to talk about it. I’m sorry I forgot. I did tell him that I would not talk about it. I shouldn’t be talking to you, Mma. But …”

  “But I have his full authority,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  “He is a kind man, Tati Monyena,” said the cleaner. And then, after thinking for a moment, she added, “He is my cousin, you know.”

  Which makes you mine, thought Mma Ramotswe.

  SHE WALKED BACK to Tati Monyena’s office, divested of her white coat, which she carried slung over her right arm. He was in, his door ajar, and he welcomed her warmly.

  “It’s lunch time,” he said breezily, rubbing his hands together. “Well timed, Mma Ramotswe! We can have some lunch in the canteen. They do very good food, you know. Cheap, too.”

  “I need to talk to you, Rra,” she said, putting the coat down on the chair before his desk.

  He patted his stomach. “We can talk over lunch, Mma.”

  “Privately?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “Yes, if that is what you want. There is a special table at one end that we can use. Nobody will disturb us.”

  They walked in silence to the canteen. Tati Monyena tried to make casual conversation, but Mma Ramotswe found herself too involved in her own thoughts to respond very much. She was trying to make sense of something, and the sense was not apparent. He knew, she thought; he knew. But if he knew, then why ask her? An outside whitewash—that was what he wanted.

  They helped themselves at the hot-food counter
and made their way over to a small, red-topped table at the far end of the canteen. Tati Monyena, sensing that something important was coming, had now become edgy. As he lowered his tray onto the table, Mma Ramotswe could not help but notice that there was a tremor in his hands. He is shaking because he senses that I know something, she thought. Now he is feeling dread. There will be no senior job for him now. This was not the part of her job that she liked: the painful spelling out of the truth, the exposure.

  She looked down at her plate. There was a piece of beef on it, some mashed potatoes, and green peas. It was a good lunch.

  Suddenly, without having thought about it beforehand, she felt impelled to say grace. “Do you mind if I say grace for us?” she said quietly.

  He gave his assent. “That would be good,” he said. His voice sounded strained.

  Mma Ramotswe lowered her head. The smell of the beef was in her nostrils; and that of the mashed potatoes too, a slightly chalky, earthy smell. “We are grateful for this good food,” she said. “And we are grateful for the work of this hospital, which is good work. And if there are things that go wrong in this place, then we remember that there is always mercy. As mercy is shown to all of us, so we can show it to our brothers and sisters.”

  She did not really know why she said this, but she said it, and when she stopped, and was silent, Tati Monyena was silent too, so that she heard his breathing from across the table. “That is all,” she said, and looked up.

  When she saw his eyes, she did not need to tell him that she had found out what had happened.

  “I saw you talking to the cleaner,” he said. “From my office. I saw you talking to her.”

  Mma Ramotswe kept her gaze upon him. “If you knew, Rra, all along, then why …”

  He raised his fork, and then put it down again. It was as if he had been somehow defeated, and there was no point now in eating. “I found out by chance, only by chance. I asked who had been present in the ward just before the third patient went and one of the nurses happened to mention that the cleaner had left the ward just before it happened. She always polished the floor there at the same time on a Friday morning. So I spoke to her and asked her to tell me exactly what she did in the ward.”

  Mma Ramotswe encouraged him. She was keen to hear his description of events, and relieved to find out that it tallied with what the cleaner had told her. This meant that he was no longer lying.

  “She told me,” Tati Monyena went on. “She told me that she plugged her polisher in near the door. Near the bed by the window. I asked her how she did this and she said that she simply unplugged the plugs that were already in. Just for a few minutes, she said. Just for a few minutes.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked down at her mashed potatoes. They were getting cold, and would become hard, but this was no time for such thoughts. “And so she unplugged the ventilator,” she said. “Just long enough for the patient to become late. And then she plugged it back in. But the damage had been done.”

  “Yes,” said Tati Monyena, shaking his head with regret. “That machine is not the most modern machine. It has an alarm, which probably sounded, but with the whirring sound of that old floor polisher nobody would hear it. Then, when the nurses checked, they found that the machine was still operating properly, but the patient was gone. It was too late.”

  Mma Ramotswe reflected on this. “So did the cleaner know what had happened?”

  “She knew that there had been an incident in the ward,” Tati Monyena replied. “But of course she did not know that it had anything to do with her. She …” He stopped. He was looking at Mma Ramotswe with an expression that said only one thing, Please understand.

  She picked up her fork and dug it into the potatoes. A little skin had formed on the top, a powdery white skin. “You didn’t want her to know that she had killed somebody, Rra? Is that it?”

  His voice was urgent as he replied; urgent, and full of relief that she should understand. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Mma. Yes. She is a very good woman. She has small children and no husband. The husband is late. You’ll know why. He was ill with that for a long time, Mma, a long time. She herself is on … on treatment. She is one of the best workers we have in the hospital, and you can ask anybody, anybody. They will all say the same.”

  “It is not just because she is your cousin?”

  This took him by surprise, and he looked aghast. “That is true,” he said. “But what I said about her is also true. I did not want her to suffer. I know how she would feel if she found out that she was responsible for somebody’s death. How would you feel, Mma, if you knew that about yourself? And she would lose her job. It wouldn’t be my decision, it would be the decision of somebody back there …” He gestured through the window, in the direction of Gaborone. “Somebody in a big office would say that she had been responsible for the deaths of three people and should be fired. They would say, carelessness. They wouldn’t blame me, though, or the head of the medical staff, or anybody else; they would blame the person at the bottom, that lady. Fire the cleaner, and end the matter there.”

  Mma Ramotswe took a mouthful of potato. It was slightly bitter in the mouth, but that was what truth was sometimes like too. She could think about this problem, and then think about it again, looking at it from every direction. Whichever way one thought of it, though, it would still have the same feel to it, would still raise the same questions. Three people had died. They were all elderly people, she had found out, and none of them had dependants. Nothing could be done to help them now, wherever they were. And, if they were anything like the elderly people of Mochudi whom she had known, people of Obed Ramotswe’s generation, they would not be ones to want to make difficulties for the living. They would not want to see that woman put out of her job. They would not wish to add to her difficulties; that poor woman who was working so hard, with that other thing hanging over her head, that uncertain sentence.

  “You made the right decision, Rra,” she said to Tati Monyena. “Now let us eat our lunch and talk about other matters. Relatives, for example. They are always doing something new, aren’t they?”

  Now he knew what her grace had meant, and he wanted to say something about that, to thank her for her mercy, but he could not talk. He expressed his relief in tears, which he mopped at, embarrassed, with a handkerchief that she supplied, wordlessly. There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride—for the people who worked in that hospital, who looked after others, who took risks themselves of infection, of disease—from an accidental cut, a needle injury incurred at work; there were many tears of pride to be shed for them, for their bravery. And one of them, she thought, was Dr Cronje.

  THE NEXT DAY, Mma Ramotswe dictated a report for Tati Monyena’s superiors, which Mma Makutsi took down in shorthand, ending each sentence with a flourish of her pencil, as if to express satisfaction at the outcome. She had told her assistant what had happened at the hospital, and Mma Makutsi had listened, open-mouthed. “Such a simple explanation,” she said. “And nobody thought of it until you did, Mma Ramotswe.”

  “It was just something I saw,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I did not do anything very special.”

  “You are always very modest,” said Mma Makutsi. “You never take any credit for these things. Never.”

  Mma Ramotswe was embarrassed by praise, and so she suggested that they continue with the report, which ended with the conclusion that no further action was required in respect of incidents in which nobody was to blame.

  “But is that true?” asked Mma Makutsi.

  “Yes, it is true,” said Mma Ramotswe, adding, “No blame can be laid at that woman’s door. In fact, she deserves praise, not blame, for her work. She is a good worker.”

  She looked at Mma Makutsi with a look that she ra
rely used, but which was unambiguously one which closed a matter entirely.

  “Well,” said Mma Makutsi, “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I am,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  The report was finished, typed by Mma Makutsi—in an error-free performance, as one might expect of such a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College. Then it was time for tea, as it so often was.

  “You told that woman, Teenie, about the key to the supplies?” said Mma Ramotswe. “I wonder how that went. It’s a test of Mma Potokwane’s advice, I suppose.”

  Mma Makutsi laughed. “Oh, Mma, I forgot to tell you. She telephoned me. She did as I suggested and put that man in charge of all the supplies. The next day, everything was gone. The whole lot. And he had gone too.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked into her cup. She wanted to laugh, but prevented herself from doing so. This result was both a success and a failure. It was a success in that it demonstrated to the client beyond all doubt who the thief was; it was a failure in that it showed that trust does not always work. Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever. “Oh well,” she said. “That settles that. Mma Potokwane’s advice sounded good, though.”

  Mma Makutsi agreed that it did, and they talked for a few minutes about the various affairs of the office until Mr J.L.B. Matekoni came in for his tea. He was wiping his hands on a cloth and smiling. He had been struggling with a particularly difficult gearbox and at long last he had solved the problem. Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window, at that square of land, at the acacia tree that fingered into the empty sky; a little slice of her country that she loved so much, Botswana, her place.

  Mma Ramotswe smiled at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He was such a good man, such a kind man, and he was her husband.