Chapter twenty - one

The witch doctor's wife

A dusty track, hardly in use, enough to break the springs; a hill, a tumble of boulders, just as the sketch map drawn by Mr Charlie Gotso had predicted; and above, stretching from horizon to horizon, the empty sky, singing in the heat of noon. Mma Ramotswe steered the tiny white van cautiously, avoiding the rocks that could tear the sump from the car, wondering why nobody came this way. This was dead country; no cattle, no goats; only the bush and the stunted thorn trees. That anybody should want to live here, away from a village, away from human contact, seemed inexplicable. Dead country.
Suddenly she saw the house, tucked away behind the trees, almost in the shadow of the hill. It was a bare earth house in the traditional style; brown mud walls, a few glassless windows, with a knee-height wall around the yard. A previous owner, a long time ago, had painted designs on the wall, but neglect and the years had scaled them off and only their ghosts remained.
She parked the van and drew in her breath. She had faced down fraudsters; she had coped with jealous wives; she had even stood up to Mr Gotso; but this meeting would be different. This was evil incarnate, the heart of darkness, the root of shame. This man, for all his mumbo-jumbo and his spells, was a murderer.
She opened the door and eased herself out of the van. The sun was riding high and its light prickled at her skin. They were too far west here, too close to the Kalahari, and her unease increased. This was not the comforting land she had grown up with; this was the merciless Africa, the waterless land.
She made her way towards the house, and as she did so she felt that she was being watched. There was no movement, but eyes were upon her, eyes from within the house. At the wall, in accordance with custom, she stopped and called out, announcing herself.
"I am very hot," she said. "I need water." There was no reply from within the house, but a rustle to her left, amongst the bushes. She turned round, almost guiltily, and stared. It was a large black beetle, a setotojane, with its horny neck, pushing at a minute trophy, some insect that had died of thirst perhaps. Little disasters, little victories; like ours, she thought; when viewed from above we are no more than setotojane. "Mma?"
She turned round sharply. A woman was standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on a cloth.
Mma Ramotswe stepped through the gateless break in the wall.
"Dumela Mma," she said. "I am Mma Ramotswe." The woman nodded. "Eee. I am Mma Notshi." Mma Ramotswe studied her. She was a woman in her late fifties, or thereabouts, wearing a long skirt of the sort which the Herero women wore; but she was not Herero—she could tell.
"I have come to see your husband," she said. "I have to ask him for something."
The woman came out from the shadows and stood before Mma Ramotswe, peering at her face in a disconcerting way.
"You have come for something? You want to buy something from him?"
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "I have heard that he is a very good doctor. I have trouble with another woman. She is taking my husband from me and I want something that will stop her."
The older woman smiled. "He can help you. Maybe he has something. But he is away. He is in Lobatse until Saturday. You will have to come back some time after that."
Mma Ramotswe sighed. "This has been a long trip, and I am thirsty. Do you have water, my sister?"
"Yes, I have water. You can come and sit in the house while you drink it."

IT WAS a small room, furnished with a rickety table and two chairs. There was a grain bin in the corner, of the traditional sort, and a battered tin trunk. Mma Ramotswe sat on one of the chairs while the woman fetched a white enamel mug of water, which she gave to her visitor. The water was slightly rancid, but Mma Ramotswe drank it gratefully.
Then she put the mug down and looked at the woman.
"I have come for something, as you know. But I have also come to warn you of something."
The woman lowered herself onto the other chair.
"To warn me?"
"Yes," said Mma Ramotswe. "I am a typist. Do you know what that is?"
The woman nodded.
"I work for the police," went on Mma Ramotswe. "And I have typed out something about your husband. They know that he killed that boy, the one from Katsana. They know that he is the man who took him and killed him for muti. They are going to arrest your husband soon and then they will hang him. I came to warn you that they will hang you also, because they say that you are involved in it too. They say that you did it too. I do not think they should hang women. So I came to tell you that you could stop all this quickly if you came with me to the police and told them what happened. They will believe you and you will be saved. Otherwise, you will die very soon. Next month, I think."
She stopped. The other woman had dropped the cloth she had been carrying and was staring at her, wide-eyed. Mma Ramotswe knew the odour of fear—that sharp, acrid smell that people emit through the pores of their skin when they are frightened; now the torpid air was heavy with that smell.
"Do you understand what I have said to you?" she asked.
The witch doctor's wife closed her eyes. "I did not kill that boy."
"I know," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is never the women who do it. But that doesn't make any difference to the police. They have evidence against you and the Government wants to hang you too. Your husband first; you later. They do not like witchcraft, you know. They are ashamed. They think it's not modern."
"But the boy is not dead," blurted out the woman. "He is at the cattle post where my husband took him. He is working there. He is still alive."

MMA RAMOTSWE opened the door for the woman and slammed it shut behind her. Then she went round to the driver's door, opened it, and eased herself into the seat. The sun had made it burning hot—hot enough to scorch through the cloth of her dress—but pain did not matter now. All that mattered was to make the journey, which the woman said would take four hours. It was now one o'clock. They would be there just before sunset and they could start the journey back immediately. If they had to stop overnight because the track was too bad, well, they could sleep in the back of the van. The important thing was to get to the boy.
The journey was made in silence. The other woman tried to talk, but Mma Ramotswe ignored her. There was nothing she could say to this woman; nothing she wanted to say to her.
"You are not a kind woman," said the witch doctor's wife finally. "You are not talking to me. I am trying to talk to you, but you ignore me. You think that you are better than me, don't you."
Mma Ramotswe half-turned to her. "The only reason why you are showing me where this boy is is because you are afraid.
You are not doing it because you want him to go back to his parents. You don't care about that, do you? You are a wicked woman and I am warning you that if the police hear that you and your husband practise any more witchcraft, they will come and take you to prison. And if they don't, I have friends in Gaborone who will come and do it for them. Do you understand what I am saying?"
The hours passed. It was a difficult journey, out across open veld, on the barest of tracks, until there, in the distance, they saw cattle stockades and the cluster of trees around a couple of huts.
"This is the cattle post," said the woman. "There are two Basarwa there—a man and a woman—and the boy who has been working for them."
"How did you keep him?" asked Mma Ramotswe. "How did you know that he would not run away?"
"Look around you," said the woman. "You see how lonely this place is. The Basarwa would catch him before he could get far."
Something else occurred to Mma Ramotswe. The bone—if the boy was still alive, then where did the bone come from?
"There is a man in Gaborone who bought a bone from your husband," she said. "Where did you get that?"
The woman looked at her scornfully "You can buy bones in Johannesburg. Did you not know that? They are not expensive."

THE BASARWA were eating a rough porridge, seated on two stones outside one of the huts. They were tiny, wizened people, with the wide eyes of the hunter, and they stared at the intruders. Then the man rose to his feet and saluted the witch doctor's wife.
"Are the cattle all right?" she asked sharply.
The man made a strange, clicking noise with his tongue. "All right. They are not dead. That cow there is making much milk."
The words were Setswana words, but one had to strain to understand them. This was a man who spoke in the clicks and whistles of the Kalahari.
"Where is the boy?" snapped the woman.
"That side," replied the man. "Look."
And then they saw the boy, standing beside a bush, watching them uncertainly. A dusty little boy, in torn pants, with a stick in his hand.
"Come here," called the witch doctor's wife. "Come here."
The boy walked over to them, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. He had a scar on his forearm, a thick weal, and Mma Ramotswe knew immediately what had caused it. That was the cut of a whip, a sjambok.
She reached forward and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"What is your name?" she asked gently. "Are you the teacher's son from Katsana Village?"
The boy shivered, but he saw the concern in her eyes and he spoke.
"I am that boy. I am working here now. These people are making me look after the cattle."
"And did this man strike you?" whispered Mma Ramotswe. "Did he?"
"All the time," said the boy. "He said that if I ran away he would find me in the bush and put a sharpened stick through me."
"You are safe now," said Mma Ramotswe. "You are coming with me. Right now. Just walk in front of me. I will look after you."
The boy glanced at the Basarwa and began to move towards the van.
"Go on," said Mma Ramotswe. "I am coming too."
She put him in the passenger seat and closed the door. The witch doctor's wife called out.
"Wait a few minutes. I want to talk to these people about the cattle. Then we can go."
Mma Ramotswe moved round to the driver's door and let herself in.
"Wait," called the woman. "I am not going to be long."
Mma Ramotswe leaned forward and started the engine. Then, slipping the van into gear, she spun the wheel and pressed her foot on the accelerator. The woman shouted out and began to run after the van, but the dust cloud soon obscured her and she tripped and fell.
Mma Ramotswe turned to the boy, who was looking frightened and confused beside her.
"I am taking you home now," she said. "It will be a long journey and I think we shall have to stop for the night quite soon. But we will set off again in the morning and then it should not be too long."
She stopped the van an hour later, beside a dry riverbed. They were completely alone, with not even a fire from a remote cattle post to break the darkness of the night. Only the starlight fell on them, an attenuated, silver light, falling on the sleeping figure of the boy, wrapped in a sack which she had in the back of the van, his head upon her arm, his breathing regular, his hand resting gently in hers, and Mma Ramotswe herself, whose eyes were open, looking up into the night sky until the sheer immensity of it tipped her gently into sleep.

AT KATSANA Village the next day, the schoolmaster looked out of the window of his house and saw a small white van draw up outside. He saw the woman get out and look at his door, and the child—what about the child—was she a parent who was bringing her child to him for some reason?
He went outside and found her at the low wall of his yard. "You are the teacher, Rra?"
"I am the teacher, Mma. Can I do anything for you?" She turned to the van and signalled to the child within. The door opened and his son came out. And the teacher cried out, and ran forward, and stopped and looked at Mma Ramotswe as if for confirmation. She nodded, and he ran forward again, almost stumbling, an unlaced shoe coming off, to seize his son, and hold him, while he shouted wildly, incoherently, for the village and the world to hear his joy.
Mma Ramotswe walked back towards her van, not wanting to intrude upon the intimate moments of reunion. She was crying; for her own child, too—remembering the minute hand that had grasped her own, so briefly, while it tried to hold on to a strange world that was slipping away so quickly. There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away. But you can't do that, she thought. You just can't.

Chapter twnty - two

Mr J.L.B. Matekon

Even A vehicle as reliable as the little white van, which did mile after mile without complaint, could find the dust too much. The tiny white van had been uncomplaining on the trip out to the cattle post, but now, back in town, it was beginning to stutter. It was the dust, she was sure of it.
She telephoned Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, not intending to bother Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, but the receptionist was out to lunch and he answered. She need not worry, he said. He would come round to look at the little white van the following day, a Saturday, and he might be able to fix it there on the spot, in Zebra Drive.
"I doubt it," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is an old van. It is like an old cow, and I will have to sell it, I suppose."
"You won't," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Anything can be fixed. Anything."
Even a heart that is broken in two pieces? he thought. Can
they fix that? Could Professor Barnard down in Cape Town cure a man whose heart was bleeding, bleeding from loneliness?

MMA RAMOTSWE went shopping that morning. Her Saturday mornings had always been important to her; she went to the supermarket in the Mall and bought her groceries and her vegetables from the women on the pavement outside the chemist's. After that, she went to the President Hotel and drank coffee with her friends; then home, and half a glass of Lion Beer, taken sitting out on the verandah and reading the newspaper. As a private detective, it was important to scour the newspaper and to put the facts away in one's mind. All of it was useful, down to the last line of the politicians' predictable speeches and the church notices. You never knew when some snippet of local knowledge would be useful.
If you asked Mma Ramotswe to give, for instance, the names of convicted diamond smugglers, she could give them to you: Archie Mofobe, Piks Ngube, Molso Mobole, and George Excellence Tambe. She had read the reports of the trials of them all, and knew their sentences. Six years, six years, ten years, and eight months. It had all been reported and filed away.
And who owned the Wait No More Butchery in Old Naledi? Why, Godfrey Potowani, of course. She remembered the pho-tograph in the newspaper of Godfrey standing in front of his lew butchery with the Minister of Agriculture. And why was :he Minister there? Because his wife, Modela, was the cousin of one of the Potowani women who had made that dreadful fuss at the wedding of Stokes Lofinale. That's why. Mma
Ramotswe could not understand people who took no interest in all this. How could one live in a town like this and not want to know everybody's business, even if one had no professional reason for doing so?

HE ARRIVED shortly after four, driving up in his blue garage bakkie with tlokweng road speedy motors painted on the side. He was wearing his mechanic's overalls, which were spotlessly clean, and ironed neatly down the creases. She showed him the tiny white van, parked beside the house, and he wheeled out a large jack from the back of his truck.
"I'll make you a cup of tea," she said. "You can drink it while you look at the van."
From the window she watched him. She saw him open the engine compartment and tap at bits and pieces. She saw him climb into the driver's cab and start the motor, which coughed and spluttered and eventually died out. She watched as he removed something from the engine—a large part, from which wires and hoses protruded. That was the heart of the van perhaps; its loyal heart which had beaten so regularly and reliably, but which, ripped out, now looked so vulnerable.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni moved backwards and forwards between his truck and the van. Two cups of tea were taken out, and then a third, as it was a hot afternoon. Then Mma Ramotswe went into her kitchen and put vegetables into a pot and watered the plants that stood on the back windowsill. Dusk was approaching, and the sky was streaked with gold. This was her favourite time of the day, when the birds went dipping and swooping through the air and the insects of the night started to shriek. In this gentle light, the cattle would be walking home and the fires outside the huts would be crackling and glowing for the evening's cooking.
She went out to see whether Mr J.L.B. Matekoni needed more light. He was standing beside the little white van, wiping his hands on lint.
"That should be fine now," he said. "I've tuned it up and the engine runs sweetly. Like a bee."
She clapped her hands in pleasure.
"I thought that you would have to scrap it," she said.
He laughed. "I told you anything could be fixed. Even an old van."
He followed her inside. She poured him a beer and they went together to her favourite place to sit, on the verandah, near the bougainvillaea. Not far away, in a neighbouring house, music was being played, the insistent traditional rhythms of township music.
The sun went, and it was dark. He sat beside her in the comfortable darkness and they listened, contentedly, to the sounds of Africa settling down for the night. A dog barked somewhere; a car engine raced and then died away; there was a touch of wind, warm dusty wind, redolent of thorn trees.
He looked at her in the darkness, at this woman who was everything to him—mother, Africa, wisdom, understanding, good things to cat, pumpkins, chicken, the smell of sweet cattle breath, the white sky across the endless, endless bush, and the giraffe that cried, giving its tears for women to daub on their baskets; O Botswana, my country, my place.
Those were his thoughts. But how could be say any of that to her? Any time he tried to tell her what was in his heart, the words which came to him seemed so inadequate. A mechanic cannot be a poet, he thought, that is not how things are. So he simply said:
"I am very happy that I fixed your van for you. I would have been sorry if somebody else had lied to you and said it was not worth fixing. There are people like that in the motor trade."
"I know," said Mma Ramotswe. "But you are not like that."
He said nothing. There were times when you simply had to speak, or you would have your lifetime ahead to regret not speaking. But every time he had tried to speak to her of what was in his heart, he had failed. He had already asked her to marry him and that had not been a great success. He did not have a great deal of confidence, at least with people; cars were different, of course.
"I am very happy sitting here with you . . ."
She turned to him. "What did you say?"
"I said, please marry me, Mma Ramotswe. I am just Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, that's all, but please marry me and make me happy."
"Of course I will," said Mma Ramotswe.

Alexander McCall Smith - Tears of the giraffe


Chapter one

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's house

MR J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, found it difficult to believe that Mma Ramotswe, the accomplished founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, had agreed to marry him. It was at the second time of asking; the first posing of the question, which had required immense courage on his part, had brought forth a refusal-gentle, and regretful-but a refusal nonetheless. After that, he had assumed that Mma Ramotswe would never remarry; that her brief and disastrous marriage to Note Mokoti, trumpeter and jazz aficionado, had persuaded her that marriage was nothing but a recipe for sorrow and suffering. After all, she was an independent-minded woman, with a business to run, and a comfortable house of her own in Zebra Drive. Why, he wondered, should a woman like that take on a man, when a man could prove to be difficult to manage once vows were exchanged and he had settled himself in her house? No, if he were in Mma Ramotswe's shoes, then he might well decline an offer of marriage, even from somebody as eminently reasonable and respectable as himself.
But then, on that noumenal evening, sitting with him on her verandah after he had spent the afternoon fixing her tiny white van, she had said yes. And she had given this answer in such a simple, unambiguously kind way, that he had been confirmed in his belief that she was one of the very best women in Botswana. That evening, when he returned home to his house near the old Defence Force Club, he had reflected on the enormity of his good fortune. Here he was, in his mid-forties, a man who had until that point been unable to find a suitable wife, now blessed with the hand of the one woman whom he admired more than any other. Such remarkable good fortune was almost inconceivable, and he wondered whether he would suddenly wake up from the delicious dream into which he seemed to have wandered.
Yet it was true. The next morning, when he turned on his bedside radio to hear the familiar sound of cattle bells with which Radio Botswana prefaced its morning broadcast, he realised that it had indeed happened and that unless she had changed her mind overnight, he was a man engaged to be married.
He looked at his watch. It was six o'clock, and the first light of the day was on the thorn tree outside his bedroom window. Smoke from morning fires, the fine wood smoke that sharpened the appetite, would soon be in the air, and he would hear the sound of people on the paths that criss-crossed the bush near his house; shouts of children on their way to school; men going sleepy-eyed to their work in the town; women calling out to one another; Africa waking up and starting the day. People arose early, but it would be best to wait an hour or so before he telephoned Mma Ramotswe, which would give her time to get up and make her morning cup of bush tea. Once she had done that, he knew that she liked to sit outside for half an hour or so and watch the birds on her patch of grass. There were hoopoes, with their black and white stripes, pecking at insects like little mechanical toys, and the strutting ring-neck doves, engaged in their constant wooing. Mma Ramotswe liked birds, and perhaps, if she were interested, he could build her an aviary. They could breed doves, maybe, or even, as some people did, something bigger, such as buzzards, though what they would do with buzzards once they had bred them was not clear. They ate snakes, of course, and that would be useful, but a dog was just as good a means of keeping snakes out of the yard.
When he was a boy out at Molepolole, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had owned a dog which had established itself as a legendary snake-catcher. It was a thin brown animal, with one or two white patches, and a broken tail. He had found it, abandoned and half-starved, at the edge of the village, and had taken it home to live with him at his grandmother's house. She had been unwilling to waste food on an animal that had no apparent function, but he had won her round and the dog had stayed. Within a few weeks it had proved its usefulness, killing three snakes in the yard and one in a neighbour's melon patch. From then on, its reputation was assured, and if anybody was having trouble with snakes they would ask Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to bring his dog round to deal with the problem.
The dog was preternaturally quick. Snakes, when they saw it coming, seemed to know that they were in mortal danger. The dog, hair bristling and eyes bright with excitement, would move towards the snake with a curious gait, as if it were standing on the tips of its claws. Then, when it was within a few feet of its quarry, it would utter a low growl, which the snake would sense as a vibration in the ground. Momentarily confused, the snake would usually begin to slide away, and it was at this point that the dog would launch itself forward and nip the snake neatly behind the head. This broke its back, and the struggle was over.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew that such dogs never reached old age. If they survived to the age of seven or eight, their reactions began to slow and the odds shifted slowly in favour of the snake. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's dog eventually fell victim to a banded cobra, and died within minutes of the bite. There was no dog who could replace him, but now . . . Well, this was just another possibility that opened up. They could buy a dog and choose its name together. Indeed, he would suggest that she choose both the dog and the name, as he was keen that Mma Ramotswe should not feel that he was trying to take all the decisions. In fact, he would be happy to take as few decisions as possible. She was a very competent woman, and he had complete confidence in her ability to run their life together, as long as she did not try to involve him in her detective business. That was simply not what he had in mind. She was the detective; he was the mechanic. That was how matters should remain.

HE TELEPHONED shortly before seven. Mma Ramotswe seemed pleased to hear from him and asked him, as was polite in the Setswana language, whether he had slept well.
"I slept very well," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I dreamed all the night about that clever and beautiful woman who has agreed to marry me."
He paused. If she was going to announce a change of mind, then this was the time that she might be expected to do it.
Mma Ramotswe laughed. "I never remember what I dream," she said. "But if I did, then I am sure that I would remember dreaming about that first-class mechanic who is going to be my husband one day."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled with relief. She had not thought better of it, and they were still engaged.
"Today we must go to the President Hotel for lunch," he said. "We shall have to celebrate this important matter."
Mma Ramotswe agreed. She would be ready at twelve o'clock and afterwards, if it was convenient, perhaps he would allow her to visit his house to see what it was like. There would be two houses now, and they would have to choose one. Her house on Zebra Drive had many good qualities, but it was rather close to the centre of town and there was a case for being farther away. His house, near the old airfield, had a larger yard and was undoubtedly quieter, but was not far from the prison and was there not an overgrown graveyard nearby? That was a major factor; if she were alone in the house at night for any reason, it would not do to be too close to a graveyard. Not that Mma Ramotswe was superstitious; her theology was conventional and had little room for unquiet spirits and the like, and yet, and yet...
In Mma Ramotswe's view there was God, Modimo, who lived in the sky, more or less directly above Africa. God was extremely understanding, particularly of people like herself, but to break his rules, as so many people did with complete disregard, was to invite retribution. When they died, good people, such as Mma Ramotswe's father, Obed Ramotswe, were undoubtedly welcomed by God. The fate of the others was unclear, but they were sent to some terrible place-perhaps a bit like Nigeria, she thought-and when they acknowledged their wrongdoing they would be forgiven.
God had been kind to her, thought Mma Ramotswe. He had given her a happy childhood, even if her mother had been taken from her when she was a baby. She had been looked after by her father and her kind cousin and they had taught her what it was to give love-love which she had in turn given, over those few precious days, to her tiny baby. When the child's battle for life had ended, she had briefly wondered why God had done this to her, but in time she had understood. Now his kindness to her was manifest again, this time in the appearance of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, a good kind, man. God had sent her a husband.

AFTER THEIR celebration lunch in the President Hotel-a lunch at which Mr J.L.B. Matekoni ate two large steaks and Mma Ramotswe, who had a sweet tooth, dipped into rather more ice cream than she had originally intended-they drove off in Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's pickup truck to inspect his house.
"It is not a very tidy house," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, anxiously. "I try to keep it tidy, but that is a difficult thing for a man. There is a maid who comes in, but she makes it worse, I think. She is a very untidy woman."
"We can keep the woman who works for me," said Mma Ramotswe. "She is very good at everything. Ironing. Cleaning. Polishing. She is one of the best people in Botswana for all these tasks. We can find some other work for your person."
"And there are some rooms in this house that have got motor parts in them," added Mr J.L.B. Matekoni hurriedly. "Sometimes I have not had enough room at the garage and have had to store them in the house-interesting engines that I might need some day."
Mma Ramotswe said nothing. She now knew why Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had never invited her to the house before. His office at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors was bad enough, with all that grease and those calendars that the parts suppliers sent him. They were ridiculous calendars, in her view, with all those far-too-thin ladies sitting on tyres and leaning against cars. Those ladies were useless for everything. They would not be good for having children, and not one of them looked as if she had her school certificate, or even her standard six. They were useless, good-time girls, who only made men all hot and bothered, and that was no good to anybody. If only men knew what fools of them these bad girls made; but they did not know it and it was hopeless trying to point it out to them.
They arrived at the entrance to his driveway and Mma Ramotswe sat in the car while Mr J.L.B. Matekoni pushed open the silver-painted gate. She noted that the dustbin had been pushed open by dogs and that scraps of paper and other rubbish were lying about. If she were to move here-if-that would soon he stopped. In traditional Botswana society, keeping the yard in good order was a woman's responsibility, and she would certainly not wish to be associated with a yard like this.
They parked in front of the stoop, under a rough car shelter that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had fashioned out of shade-netting. It was a large house by modern standards, built in a day when builders had no reason to worry about space. There was the whole of Africa in those days, most of it unused, and nobody bothered to save space. Now it was different, and people had begun to worry about cities and how they gobbled up the bush surrounding them. This house, a low, rather gloomy bungalow under a corrugated-tin roof, had been built for a colonial official in Protectorate days. The outer walls were plastered and whitewashed, and the floors were polished red cement, laid out in large squares. Such floors always seemed cool on the feet in the hot months, although for real comfort it was hard to better the beaten mud or cattle dung of traditional floors.
Mma Ramotswe looked about her. They were in the living room, into which the front door gave immediate entrance. There was a heavy suite of furniture-expensive in its day- but now looking distinctly down-at-heel. The chairs, which had wide wooden arms, were upholstered in red, and there was a table of black hardwood on which an empty glass and an ashtray stood. On the walls there was picture of a mountain, painted on dark velvet, a wooden kudu-head, and a small picture of Nelson Mandela. The whole effect was perfectly pleasing, thought Mma Ramotswe, although it certainly had that forlorn look so characteristic of an unmarried man's room.
"This is a very fine room," observed Mma Ramotswe.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni beamed with pleasure. "I try to keep this room tidy," he said. "It is important to have a special room for important visitors."
"Do you have any important visitors?" asked Mma Ramotswe.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni frowned. "There have been none so far," he said. "But it is always possible."
"Yes," agreed Mma Ramotswe. "One never knows."
She looked over her shoulder, towards a door that led into the rest of the house.
"The other rooms are that way?" she asked politely.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. "That is the not-so-tidy part of the house," he said. "Perhaps we should look at it some other time."
Mma Ramotswe shook her head and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni realised that there was no escape. This was part and parcel of marriage, he assumed; there could be no secrets-everything had to be laid bare.
"This way," he said tentatively, opening the door. "Really, I must get a better maid. She is not doing her job at all well."
Mma Ramotswe followed him down the corridor. The first door that they reached was half open, and she stopped at the doorway and peered in. The room, which had obviously once been a bedroom, had its floors covered with newspapers, laid out as if they were a carpet. In the middle of the floor sat an engine, its cylinders exposed, while around it on the floor there were littered the parts that had been taken from the engine.
"That is a very special engine," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, looking at her anxiously. "There is no other engine like it in Botswana. One day I shall finish fixing it."
They moved on. The next room was a bathroom, which was clean enough, thought Mma Ramotswe, even if rather stark and neglected. On the edge of the bath, balanced on an old white face-cloth, was a large bar of carbolic soap. Apart from that, there was nothing.
"Carbolic soap is very healthy soap," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I have always used it."
Mma  Ramotswe  nodded.   She  favoured  palm-oil  soap, which was good for the complexion, but she understood that men liked something more bracing. It was a bleak bathroom, she thought, but at least it was clean.
Of the remaining rooms, only one was habitable, the dining room, which had a table in the middle and a solitary chair. Its floor, however, was dirty, with piles of dust under the furniture and in each corner. Whoever was meant to be cleaning this room had clearly not swept it for months. What did she do, this maid? Did she stand at the gate and talk to her friends, as they tended to do if not watched closely? It was clear to Mma Ramotswe that the maid was taking gross advantage of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and relying on his good nature to keep her job.
The other rooms, although they contained beds, were cluttered with boxes stuffed with spark plugs, windscreen-wiper blades, and other curious mechanical pieces. And as for the kitchen, this, although clean, was again virtually bare, containing only two pots, several white enamelled plates, and a small cutlery tray.
"This maid is meant to cook for me," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "She makes a meal each day, but it is always the same. All that I have to eat is maizemeal and stew. Sometimes she cooks me pumpkin, but not very often. And yet she always seems to need lots of money for kitchen supplies."
"She is a very lazy woman," said Mma Ramotswe. "She should be ashamed of herself. If all women in Botswana were like that, our men would have died out a long time ago."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. His maid had held him in thrall for years, and he had never had the courage to stand up to her. But now perhaps she had met her match in Mma Ramotswe, and she would soon be looking for somebody else to neglect.
"Where is this woman?" asked Mma Ramotswe. "I would like to talk to her."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at his watch. "She should be here soon," he said. "She comes here every afternoon at about this time."

THEY WERE sitting in the living room when the maid arrived, announcing her presence with the slamming of the kitchen door.
"That is her," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "She always slams doors. She has never closed a door quietly in all the years she has worked here. It's always slam, slam."
"Let's go through and see her," said Mma Ramotswe. "I'm interested to meet this lady who has been looking after you so well."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni led the way into the kitchen. In front of the sink, where she was filling a kettle with water, stood a large woman in her mid-thirties. She was markedly taller than both Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe, and, although rather thinner than Mma Ramotswe, she looked considerably stronger, with bulging biceps and well-set legs. She was wearing a large, battered red hat on her head and a blue housecoat over her dress. Her shoes were made of a curious, shiny leather, rather like the patent leather used to make dancing pumps.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni cleared his throat, to reveal their presence, and the maid turned round slowly.
"I am busy . . ." she started to say, but stopped, seeing Mma Ramotswe.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni greeted her politely, in the traditional way. Then he introduced his guest. "This is Mma Ramotswe," he said.
The maid looked at Mma Ramotswe and nodded curtly.
"I am glad that I have had the chance to meet you, Mma," said Mma Ramotswe. "I have heard about you from Mr J.L.B. Matekoni."
The maid glanced at her employer. "Oh, you have heard of me," she said. "I am glad that he speaks of me. I would not like to think that nobody speaks of me."
"No," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is better to be spoken of than not to be spoken of. Except sometimes, that is."
The maid frowned. The kettle was now full and she took it from under the tap.
"I am very busy," she said dismissively. "There is much to do in this house."
"Yes," said Mma Ramotswe. "There is certainly a great deal to do. A dirty house like this needs a lot of work doing in it."
The large maid stiffened. "Why do you say this house is dirty?" she said. "Who are you to say that this house is dirty?"
"She . . ." began Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, but he was silenced by a glare from the maid and he stopped.
"I say that because I have seen it," said Mma Ramotswe. "I have seen all the dust in the dining room and all the rubbish in the garden. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni here is only a man. He cannot be expected to keep his own house clean."
The maid's eyes had opened wide and were staring at Mma Ramotswe with ill-disguised venom. Her nostrils were flared with anger, and her lips were pushed out in what seemed to be an aggressive pout.
"I have worked for this man for many years," she hissed. "Every day I have worked, worked, worked. I have made him good food and polished the floor. I have looked after him very well."
"I don't think so, Mma," said Mma Ramotswe calmly. "If you have been feeding him so well, then why is he thin? A man who is well looked-after becomes fatter. They are just like cattle. That is well-known."
The maid shifted her gaze from Mma Ramotswe to her employer. "Who is this woman?" she demanded. "Why is she coming into my kitchen and saying things like this? Please ask her to go back to the bar you found her in."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni swallowed hard. "I have asked her to marry me," he blurted out. "She is going to be my wife."
At this, the maid seemed to crumple. "Aiee!" she cried. "Aiee! You cannot marry her! She will kill you! That is the worst thing you can do."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni moved forward and placed a comforting hand on the maid's shoulder
"Do not worry, Florence," he said. "She is a good woman, and I shall make sure that you will get another job. I have a cousin who has that hotel near the bus station. He needs maids and if I ask him to give you a job he will do so."
This did not pacify the maid. "I do not want to work in a hotel, where everyone is treated like a slave," she said. "I am not a do-this, do-that maid. I am a high-class maid, suitable for private houses. Oh! Oh! I am finished now. You are finished too if you marry this fat woman. She will break your bed. You will surely die very quickly. This is the end for you."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni glanced at Mma Ramotswe, signalling that they should leave the kitchen. It would be better, he thought, if the maid could recover in private. He had not imagined that the news would be well received, but he had certainly not envisaged her uttering such embarrassing and disturbing prophecies. The sooner he spoke to the cousin and arranged the transfer to the other job, the better.
They went back to the sitting room, closing the door firmly behind them.
"Your maid is a difficult woman," said Mma Ramotswe.
"She is not easy," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "But I think that we have no choice. She must go to that other job."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. He was right. The maid would have to go, but so would they. They could not live in this house, she thought, even if it had a bigger yard. They would have to put in a tenant and move to Zebra Drive. Her own maid was infinitely better and would look after both of them extremely well. In no time at all, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would begin to put on weight, and look more like the prosperous garage owner he was. She glanced about the room. Was there anything at all that they would need to move from this house to hers? The answer, she thought, was probably no. All that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni needed to bring was a suitcase containing his clothes and his bar of carbolic soap. That was all.

Chapter two

A client arrives

It would have to be handled tactfully. Mma Ramotswe knew that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would be happy to live in Zebra Drive-she was sure of that-but men had their pride and she would have to be careful about how she conveyed the decision. She could hardly say: "Your house is a terrible mess; there are engines and car parts everywhere." Nor could she say: "I would not like to live that close to an old graveyard." Rather, she would approach it by saying: "It's a wonderful house, with lots of room. I don't mind old engines at all, but I am sure you will agree that Zebra Drive is very convenient for the centre of town." That would be the way to do it.
She had already worked out how the arrival of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni could be catered for in her house in Zebra Drive. Her house was not quite as large as his, but they would have more than enough room. There were three bedrooms. They would occupy the biggest of these, which was also the qui-etest, being at the back. She currently used the other two rooms for storage and for sewing, but she could clear out the storage room and put everything it contained in the garage. That would make a room for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's private use. Whether he wished to use it to store car parts or old engines would be up to him, but a very strong hint would be given that engines should stay outside.
The living room could probably stay more or less unchanged. Her own chairs were infinitely preferable to the furniture she had seen in his sitting room, although he may well wish to bring the velvet picture of the mountain and one or two of his ornaments. These would complement her own possessions, which included the photograph of her father, her daddy, as she called him, Obed Ramotswe, in his favourite shiny suit, the photograph before which she stopped so often and thought of his life and all that it meant to her. She was sure that he would have approved of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He had warned her against Note Mokoti, although he had not tried to stop the marriage, as some parents might have done. She had been aware of his feelings but had been too young, and too infatuated with the plausible trumpet player, to take account of what her father thought. And, when the marriage had ended so disastrously, he had not spoken of his presentiment that this was exactly what would happen, but had been concerned only about her safety and her happiness-which is how he had always been. She was lucky to have had such a father, she thought; today there were so many people without a father, people who were being brought up by their mothers or their grandmothers and who in many cases did not even know who their father was. They seemed happy enough, it seemed, but there must always be a great gap in their lives. Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo, crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not.
Mma Ramotswe was given to philosophical speculation, but only up to a point. Such questions were undoubtedly challenging, but they tended to lead to further questions which simply could not be answered. And at that point one ended up, as often as not, having to accept that things are as they are simply because that is the way they are. So everybody knew, for instance, that it was wrong for a man to be too close to a place where a woman is giving birth. That was something which was so obvious that it hardly needed to be stated. But then there were these remarkable ideas in other countries that suggested that men should actually attend the birth of their children. When Mma Ramotswe read about that in a magazine, her breath was taken away. But then she had asked herself why a father should not see his child being born, so that he could welcome it into the world and share the joy of the occasion, and she had found it difficult to find a reason. That is not to say it was not wrong-there was no question that it was profoundly wrong for a man to be there-but how could one justify the prohibition? Ultimately the answer must be that it was wrong because the old Botswana morality said that it was wrong, and the old Botswana morality, as everybody knew, was so plainly right. It just felt right.
Nowadays, of course, there were plenty of people who appeared to be turning away from that morality. She saw it in the behaviour of schoolchildren, who strutted about and pushed their way around with scant respect for older people. When she was at school, children respected adults and lowered their eyes when they spoke to them, but now children looked straight at you and answered back. She had recently told a young boy-barely thirteen, she thought-to pick up an empty can that he had tossed on the ground in the mall the other day. He had looked at her in amazement, and had then laughed and told her that she could pick it up if she liked as he had no intention of doing so. She had been so astonished by his cheek that she had been unable to think of a suitable riposte, and he had sauntered away, leaving her speechless. When she was young, a woman would have picked up a boy like that and spanked him on the spot. But today you couldn't spank other people's children in the street; if you tried to do so there would be an enormous fuss. She was a modern lady, of course, and did not approve of spanking, but sometimes one had to wonder. Would that boy have dropped the can in the first place if knew that somebody might spank him? Probably not.

THOUGHTS ABOUT marriage, and moving house, and spanking boys, were all very well but everyday life still required to be attended to, and for Mma Ramotswe, this meant that she had to open up the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency on Monday morning, as she did on every working morning, even if there was very little possibility of anybody coming in with an enquiry or telephoning. Mma Ramotswe felt that it was important to keep one's word, and the sign outside the agency announced that the opening hours were from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, every day. In fact, no client had ever consulted her until well into the morning, and usually clients came in the late afternoon. Why this should be, she had no idea, although she sometimes reflected that it took people some time to build up the courage to cross her threshold and admit to whatever it was that was troubling them.
So Mma Ramotswe sat with her secretary, Mma Makutsi, and drank the large mug of bush tea which Mma Makutsi brewed for them both at the beginning of each day. She did not really need a secretary, but a business which wished to be taken seriously required somebody to answer the telephone or to take calls if she was out. Mma Makutsi was a highly skilled typist-she had scored 97 percent in her secretarial examinations-and was probably wasted on a small business such as this, but she was good company, and loyal, and, most important of all, had a gift for discretion.
"We must not talk about what we see in this business," Mma Ramotswe had stressed when she engaged her, and Mma Makutsi had nodded solemnly. Mma Ramotswe did not expect her to understand confidentiality-people in Botswana liked to talk about what was happening-and she was surprised when she found out that Mma Makutsi understood very well what the obligation of confidentiality entailed. Indeed, Mma Ramotswe had discovered that her secretary even refused to tell people where she worked, referring only to an office "somewhere over near Kgale Hill." This was somewhat unnecessary, but at least it was an indication that the clients' confidences would be safe with her.
Early morning tea with Mma Makutsi was a comforting ritual, but it was also useful from the professional point of view. Mma Makutsi was extremely observant, and she also listened attentively for any little snippet of gossip that could be useful. It was from her, for instance, that Mma Ramotswe had heard that a medium-ranking official in the planning department was proposing to marry the sister of the woman who owned Ready Now Dry Cleaners. This information may have seemed mundane, but when Mma Ramotswe had been engaged by a supermarket owner to discover why he was being denied a licence to build a dry-cleaning agency next to his supermarket, it was useful to be able to point out that the person making the decision may have an interest in another, rival dry-cleaning establishment. That information alone stopped the nonsense; all that Mma Ramotswe had needed to do was to point out to the official that there were people in Gaborone who were saying- surely without any justification-that he might allow his business connections to influence his judgement. Of course, when somebody had mentioned this to her, she had disputed the rumour vehemently, and had argued that there could be no possible connection between his dry-cleaning associations and the difficulty which anybody else might be having over getting a licence to open up such a business. The very thought was outrageous, she had said.
On that Monday, Mma Makutsi had nothing of significance to report. She had enjoyed a quiet weekend with her sister, who was a nurse at the Princess Marina Hospital. They had bought some material and had started to make a dress for the sister's daughter. On Sunday they had gone to church and a woman had fainted during one of the hymns. Her sister had helped to revive her and they had made her some tea in the hall at the side of the church. The woman was too fat, she said, and the heat had been too much for her, but she had recovered quickly and had drunk four cups of tea. She was a woman from the north, she said, and she had twelve children up in Francistown.
"That is too much," said Mma Ramotswe. "In these modern days, it is not a good thing to have twelve children. The Government should tell people to stop after six. Six is enough, or maybe seven or eight if you can afford to feed that many."
Mma Makutsi agreed. She had four brothers and two sisters and she thought that this had prevented her parents from paying adequate attention to the education of each of them.
"It was a miracle that I got 97 percent," she said.
'If there had only been three children, then you would have got over 100 percent," observed Mma Ramotswe.
"Impossible," said Mma Makutsi. "Nobody has ever got over 100 percent in the history of the Botswana Secretarial College. It's just not possible."

THEY WERE not busy that morning. Mma Makutsi cleaned her typewriter and polished her desk, while Mma Ramotswe read a magazine and wrote a letter to her cousin in Lobatse. The hours passed slowly, and by twelve o'clock Mma Ramotswe was prepared to shut the agency for lunch. But just as she was about to suggest that to Mma Makutsi, her secretary slammed a drawer shut, inserted a piece of paper into her typewriter and began to type energetically. This signalled the arrival of a client. A large car, covered in the ubiquitous thin layer of dust that settled on everything in the dry season, had drawn up and a thin, white woman, wearing a khaki blouse and khaki trousers, had stepped out of the passenger seat. She glanced up briefly at the sign on the front of the building, took off her sunglasses, and knocked on the half-open door.
Mma Makutsi admitted her to the office, while  Mma Ramotswe rose from her chair to welcome her.
"I'm sorry to come without an appointment,"  said the woman. "I hoped that I might find you in."
"You don't need an appointment," said Mma Ramotswe warmly, reaching out to shake her hand. "You are always welcome."
The woman took her hand, correctly, Mma Ramotswe noticed, in the proper Botswana way, placing her left hand on her right forearm as a mark of respect. Most white people shook hands very rudely, snatching just one hand and leaving their other hand free to perform all sorts of mischief. This woman had at least learned something about how to behave.
She invited the caller to sit down in the chair which they kept for clients, while Mma Makutsi busied herself with the kettle.
"I'm Mrs Andrea Curtin," said the visitor. "I heard from somebody in my embassy that you were a detective and you might be able to help me."
Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow. "Embassy?"
"The American Embassy," said Mrs Curtin. "I asked them to give me the name of a detective agency."
Mma Ramotswe smiled. "I am glad that they recommended me," she said. "But what do you need?"
The woman had folded her hands on her lap and now she looked down at them. The skin of her hands was mottled, Mma Ramotswe noticed, in the way that white people's hands were if they were exposed to too much sun. Perhaps she was an American who had lived for many years in Africa; there were many of these people. They grew to love Africa and they stayed, sometimes until they died. Mma Ramotswe could understand why they did this. She could not imagine why anybody would want to live anywhere else. How did people survive in cold, northern climates, with all that snow and rain and darkness?
"I could say that I am looking for somebody," said Mrs Curtin, raising her eyes to meet Mma Ramotswe's gaze. "But then that would suggest that there is somebody to look for. I don't think that there is. So I suppose I should say that I'm trying to find out what happened to somebody, quite a long time ago. I don't expect that that person is alive. In fact, I am certain that he is not. But I want to find out what happened."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "Sometimes it is important to know," she said. "And I am sorry, Mma, if you have lost somebody."
Mrs Curtin smiled. "You're very kind. Yes, I lost somebody."
"When was this?" asked Mma Ramotswe.

"Ten years ago," said Mrs Curtin. "Ten years ago I lost my son."
For a few moments there was a silence. Mma Ramotswe glanced over to where Mma Makutsi was standing near the sink and noticed that her secretary was watching Mrs Curtin attentively. When she caught her employer's gaze, Mma Makutsi looked guilty and returned to her task of filling the teapot.
Mma Ramotswe broke the silence. "I am very sorry. I know what it is like to lose a child."
"Do you, Mma?"
She was not sure whether the question had an edge to it, as if it were a challenge, but she answered gently. "I lost my baby. He did not live."
Mrs Curtin lowered her gaze. "Then you know," she said.
Mma Makutsi had now prepared the bush tea and she brought over a chipped enamel tray on which two mugs were standing. Mrs Curtin took hers gratefully, and began to sip on the hot, red liquid.
"I should tell you something about myself," said Mrs Curtin. "Then you will know why I am here and why I would like you to help me. If you can help me I shall be very pleased, but if not, I shall understand."
"I will tell you," said Mma Ramotswe. "I cannot help everybody. I will not waste our time or your money. I shall tell you whether I can help."
Mrs Curtin put down her mug and wiped her hand against the side of her khaki trousers.
"Then let me tell you," she said, "why an American woman is sitting in your office in Botswana. Then, at the end of what I have to say, you can say either yes or no. It will be that simple. Either yes or no."

CHAPTER THREE

THE BOY WITH AN AFRICAN HEART

I CAME to Africa twelve years ago. I was forty-three and Africa meant nothing to me. I suppose I had the usual ideas about it-a hotchpotch of images of big game and savannah and Kilimanjaro rising out of the cloud. I also thought of famines and civil wars and potbellied, half-naked children staring at the camera, sunk in hopelessness. I know that all that is just one side of it-and not the most important side either-but it was what was in my mind.
My husband was an economist. We met in college and married shortly after we graduated; we were very young, but our marriage lasted. He took a job in Washington and ended up in the World Bank. He became quite senior there and could have spent his entire career in Washington, going up the ladder there. But he became restless, and one day he announced that there was a posting available to spend two years here in Botswana as a regional manager for World Bank activities in this part of Africa. It was promotion, after all, and if it was a cure for restlessness then I thought it preferable to his having an affair with another woman, which is the other way that men cure their restlessness. You know how it is, Mma, when men realize that they are no longer young. They panic, and they look for a younger woman who will reassure them that they are still men.
I couldn't have borne any of that, and so I agreed, and we came out here with our son, Michael, who was then just eighteen. He had been due to go to college that year, but we decided that he could have a year out with us before he started at Dartmouth. That's a very good college in America, Mma. Some of our colleges are not very good at all, but that one is one of the best. We were proud that he had a place there.
Michael took to the idea of coming out here and began to read everything he could find on Africa. By the time we arrived he knew far more than either of us did. He read everything that van der Post had written-all that dreamy nonsense-and then he sought out much weightier things, books by anthropologists on the San and even the Moffat journals. I think this is how he first fell in love with Africa-through all those books, even before he had set foot on African soil.
The Bank had arranged a house in Gaborone, just behind State House, where all those embassies and high commissions are. I took to it at once. There had been good rains that year and the garden had been well tended. There was bed after bed of cannas and arum lilies; great riots of bougainvillaea; thick kikuyu-grass lawns. It was a little square of paradise behind a high white wall.
Michael was like a child who has just discovered the key to the candy cupboard. He would get up early in the morning and take Jack's truck out onto the Molepolole Road. Then he would walk about in the bush for an hour or so before he came back for breakfast. I went with him once or twice, even though I don't like getting up early, and he would rattle on about the birds we saw and the lizards we found scuttling about in the dust; he knew all the names within days. And we would watch the sun come up behind us, and feel its warmth. You know how it is, Mma, out there, on the edge of the Kalahari. It's the time of day when the sky is white and empty and there is that sharp smell in the air, and you just want to fill your lungs to bursting.
Jack was busy with his work and with all the people he had to meet-Government people, US aid people, financial people and so on. I had no interest in any of that, and so I just contented myself in running the house and reading and meeting some of the people I liked to have coffee with in the mornings. I also helped with the Methodist clinic. I drove people between the clinic and their villages, which was a good way of seeing a bit of the country apart from anything else. I came to know a lot about your people that way, Mma Ramotswe.
I think that I can say that I had never been happier in my life. We had found a country where the people treated one another well, with respect, and where there were values other than the grab, grab, grab which prevails back home. I felt humbled, in a way. Everything about my own country seemed so shoddy and superficial when held up against what I saw in Africa. People suffered here, and many of them had very little, but they had this wonderful feeling for others. When I first heard African people calling others-complete strangers- their brother or their sister, it sounded odd to my ears. But after a while I knew exactly what it meant and I started to think the same way. Then one day, somebody called me her sister for the first time, and I started to cry, and she could not understand why I should suddenly be so upset. And I said to her: It is nothing. I am just crying. I am just crying. I wish I could have called my friends "my sisters," but it would have sounded contrived and I could not do it. But that is how I felt. I was learning lessons. I had come to Africa and I was learning lessons.
Michael started to study Setswana and he made good progress. There was a man called Mr Nogana who came to the house to give him lessons four days a week. He was a man in his late sixties, a retired schoolteacher, and a very dignified man. He wore small, round glasses, and one of the lenses was broken. I offered to buy him a replacement because I did not think that he had much money, but he shook his head and told me that he could see quite well and, thank you, it would not be necessary. They would sit on the verandah and Mr Nogana would go over Setswana grammar with him and give him the words for everything they saw: the plants in the garden, the clouds in the sky, the birds.
"Your son is learning quickly," he said to me. "He has got an African heart within him. I am just teaching that heart to speak."
Michael made his own friends. There were quite a few other Americans in Gaborone, some of whom were of a similar age to him, but he did not show much interest in these people, or in some of the other young expatriates who were there with diplomatic parents. He liked the company of local people, or of people who knew something about Africa. He spent a lot of time with a young South African exile and with a man who had been a medical volunteer in Mozambique. They were serious people, and I liked them too.
After a few months, he began to spend more and more time with a group of people who lived in an old farmhouse out beyond Molepolole. There was a girl there, an Afrikaner-she had come from Johannesburg a few years previously after getting into some sort of political trouble over the border. Then there was a German from Namibia, a lanky, bearded man who had ideas about agricultural improvement, and several local people from Mochudi who had worked in the Brigade movement there. I suppose that you might call it a commune of sorts, but then that would give the wrong idea. I think of communes as being the sort of place where hippies congregate and smoke dagga. This was not like that at all. They were all very serious, and what they really wanted to do was to grow vegetables in very dry soil.
The idea had come from Burkhardt, the German. He thought that agriculture in dry lands like Botswana and Namibia could be transformed by growing crops under shade-netting and irrigating them with droplets of water on strings. You will have seen how it works, Mma Ramotswe: the string comes down from a thin hosepipe and a droplet of water runs down the string and into the soil at the base of the plant. It really does work. I've seen it done.
Burkhardt wanted to set up a cooperative out there, based on that old farmhouse. He had managed to raise some money from somewhere or other and they had cleared a bit of bush and sunk a borehole. They had managed to persuade quite a number of local people to join the cooperative, and they were already producing a good crop of squash and cucumbers when I first went out there with Michael. They sold these to the hotels in Gaborone and to the hospital kitchens too.
Michael began to spend more and more time with these people, and then eventually he told us that he wanted to go out there and live with them. I was a bit concerned at first-what mother wouldn't be-but we came round to the idea when we realised how much it meant to him to be doing something for Africa. So I drove him out there one Sunday afternoon and left him there. He said that he would come into town the following week and call in and see us, which he did. He seemed blissfully happy, excited even, at the prospect of living with his new friends.
We saw a lot of him. The farm was only an hour out of town and they came in virtually every day to bring produce or get supplies. One of the Botswana members had been trained as a nurse, and he had set up a clinic of sorts which dealt with minor ailments. They wormed children and put cream on fungal infections and things like that. The Government gave them a small supply of drugs, and Burkhardt got the rest from various companies that were happy to dispose of time-expired drugs which would still work perfectly well. Dr Merriweather was at the Livingstone Hospital then, and he used to call in from time to time to see that everything was in order. He told me once that the nurse was every bit as good as most doctors would be.
The time came for Michael to return to America. He had to be at Dartmouth by the third week of August, and in late July he told us that he did not intend to go. He wanted to stay in Botswana for at least another year, he said. He had contacted Dartmouth, without our knowing it, and they had agreed to defer his taking up his place for a year. I was alarmed, as you can imagine. You just have to go to college in the States, you see. If you don't, then you'll never get a job worth anything. And I had visions of Michael abandoning his education and spending the rest of his life in a commune. I suppose many parents have thought the same when their children have gone off to do something idealistic.
Jack and I discussed it for hours and he persuaded me that it would be best to go along with what Michael proposed. If we attempted to persuade him otherwise, then he could just dig in further and refuse to go at all. If we agreed to his plan, then he might be happier to leave when we did, at the end of the following year.
"It's good work that he's doing," Jack said. "Most people of his age are utterly selfish. He's not like that."
And I had to agree he was right. It seemed completely right to be doing what he was doing. Botswana was a place where people believed that work of that sort could make a difference. And remember that people had to do something to show that there was a real alternative to what was happening in South Africa. Botswana was a beacon in those days.
So Michael stayed where he was and of course when the time came for us to leave he refused to accompany us. He still had work to do, he said, and he wanted to spend a few more years doing it. The farm was thriving; they had sunk several more boreholes and they were providing a living for twenty families. It was too important to give up.
I had anticipated this-I think we both had. We tried to persuade him, but it was no use. Besides, he had now taken up with the South African woman, although she was a good six or seven years older than he was. I thought that she might be the real drawing factor, and we offered to help her come back with us to the States, but he refused to entertain the notion. It was Africa, he said, that was keeping him there; if we thought that it was something as simple as a relationship with a woman then we misunderstood the situation.
We left him with a fairly substantial amount of money. I am in the fortunate position of having a fund which was set up for me by my father and it meant very little to leave him with money. I knew that there was a risk that Burkhardt would persuade him to give the money over to the farm, or use it to build a dam or whatever. But I didn't mind. It made me feel more secure to know that there were funds in Gaborone for him if he needed them.
We returned to Washington. Oddly enough, when we got back I realised exactly what it was that had prevented Michael from leaving. Everything there seemed so insincere and, well, aggressive. I missed Botswana, and not a day went past, not a day, when I would not think about it. It was like an ache. I would have given anything to be able to walk out of my house and stand under a thorn tree or look up at that great white sky. Or to hear African voices calling out to one another in the night. I even missed the October heat.
Michael wrote to us every week. His letters were full of news about the farm. I heard all about how the tomatoes were doing and about the insects which had attacked the spinach plants. It was all very vivid, and very painful to me, because I would have loved to have been there doing what he was doing, knowing that it made a difference. Nothing I could do in my life made a difference to anybody. I took on various bits of charitable work. I worked on a literacy scheme. I took library books to housebound old people. But it was nothing by comparison with what my son was doing all those miles away in Africa.
Then the letter did not arrive one week and a day or two later there was a call from the American Embassy in Botswana. My son had been reported as missing. They were looking into the matter and would let me know as soon as they had any further information.
I came over immediately and I was met at the airport by somebody I knew on the Embassy staff. He explained to me that Burkhardt had reported to the police that Michael had simply disappeared one evening. They all took their meals together, and he had been at the meal. Thereafter nobody saw him. The South African woman had no idea where he had gone and the truck which he had bought after our departure was still in its shed. There was no clue as to what had happened.
The police had questioned everybody on the farm but had come up with no further information. Nobody had seen him and nobody had any idea what might have happened. It seemed that he had been swallowed up by the night.
I went out there on the afternoon of my arrival. Burkhardt was very concerned and tried to reassure me that he would soon turn up. But he was able to offer no explanation as to why he should have taken it into his head to leave without a word to anyone. The South African woman was taciturn. She was suspicious of me, for some reason, and said very little. She, too, could think of no reason for Michael to disappear.
I stayed for four weeks. We put a notice in the newspapers and offered a reward for information as to his whereabouts. I travelled backwards and forwards to the farm, going over every possibility in my mind. I engaged a game tracker to conduct a search of the bush in the area, and he searched for two weeks before giving up. There was nothing to be found.
Eventually they decided that one of two things had happened. He had been set upon by somebody, for whatever reason, possibly in the course of a robbery, and his body had been taken away. Or he had been taken by wild animals, perhaps by a lion that had wandered in from the Kalahari. It would have been quite unusual to find a lion that close to Molepolole, but it was just possible. But if that had happened, then the game tracker would have found some clue. Yet he had come up with nothing. No spoor. No unusual animal droppings. There was nothing.
I came back a month later, and again a few months after that. Everybody was sympathetic but eventually it became apparent that they had nothing more to say to me. So I left the matter in the hands of the Embassy here and every so often they contacted the police to find out if there was any fresh news. There never was.
Six months ago Jack died. He had been ill for a while with pancreatic cancer and I had been warned that there was no hope. But after he had gone, I decided that I should try one last time to see if there was anything I could do to find out what happened to Michael. It may seem strange to you, Mma Ramotswe, that somebody should go on and on about something that happened ten years ago. But I just want to know. I just want to find out what happened to my son. I don't expect to find him. I accept that he's dead. But I would like to be able to close that chapter and say goodbye. That is all I want. Will you help me? Will you try to find out for me? You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away. Never.

FOR A few moments after her visitor had finished her story, Mma Ramotswe sat in silence. What could she do for this woman? Could she find anything out if the Botswana Police and the American Embassy had tried and failed? There was probably nothing she could do, and yet this woman needed help and if she could not obtain it from the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency then where would she be able to find it?
"I shall help you," she said, adding, "my sister."

CHAPTER FOUR
AT THE ORPHAN FARM

MR J.L.B. Matekoni contemplated the view from his office at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. There were two windows, one of which looked directly into the workshop, where his two young apprentices were busy raising a car on a jack. They were doing it the wrong way, he noticed, in spite of his constant reminders of the dangers involved. One of them had already had an accident with the blade of an engine fan and had been lucky not to lose a finger; but they persisted with their unsafe practices. The problem, of course, was that they were barely nineteen. At this age, all young men are immortal and imagine that they will live forever. They'll find out, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni grimly. They'll discover that they're just like the rest of us.
He turned in his chair and looked out through the other window. The view in this direction was more pleasing: across the backyard of the garage, one could see a cluster of acacia trees sticking up out of the dry thorn scrub and, beyond that, like islands rising from a grey-green sea, the isolated hills over towards Odi. It was mid-morning and the air was still. By midday there would be a heat haze that would make the hills seem to dance and shimmer. He would go home for his lunch then us it would be too hot to work. He would sit in his kitchen, which was the coolest room of the house, eat the maizemeal and stew which his maid prepared for him, and read the Botswana Daily News. After that, he inevitably took a short nap before he returned to the garage and the afternoon's work.
The apprentices ate their lunch at the garage, sitting on a couple of upturned oil drums that they had placed under one of the acacia trees. From this vantage point they watched the girls walk past and exchanged the low banter which seemed to give them such pleasure. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had heard their conversation and had a poor opinion of it.
"You're a pretty girl! Have you got a car? I could fix your car tor you. I could make you go much faster!"
This brought giggles and a quickening step from the two young typists from the Water Affairs office.
"You're too thin! You're not eating enough meat! A girl like you needs more meat so that she can have lots of children!"
"Where did you get those shoes from? Are those Mercedes-Benz shoes? Fast shoes for fast girls!"
Really! thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He had never behaved like that when he was their age. He had served his apprenticeship in the diesel workshops of the Botswana Bus Company and that sort of conduct would never have been tolerated. But this was the way young men behaved these days and there was nothing he could do about it. He had spoken to them about it, pointing out that the reputation of the garage depended on them just as it did on him. They had looked at him blankly, and he had realised then that they simply did not understand. They had not been taught what it was to have a reputation; the concept was completely beyond them. This realization had depressed him, and he had thought of writing to the Minister of Education about it and suggesting that the youth of Botswana be instructed in these basic moral ideas, but the letter, once composed, had sounded so pompous that he had decided not to send it. That was the difficulty, he realised. If you made any point about behaviour these days, you sounded old-fashioned and pompous. The only way to sound modern, it appeared, was to say that people could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and no matter what anybody else might think. That was the modern way of thinking.

MR J.L.B. Matekoni transferred his gaze to his desk and to the open page of his diary. He had noted down that today was his day to go to the orphan farm; if he left immediately he could do that before lunch and be back in time to check up on his apprentices' work before the owners came to collect their cars at four o'clock. There was nothing wrong with either car; all that they required was their regular service and that was well within the range of the apprentices' ability. He had to watch them, though; they liked to tweak engines in such a way that they ran at maximum capacity, and he would often have to tune the engines down before they left the garage.
"We are not meant to be making racing cars," he reminded them. "The people who drive these cars are not speedy types like you. They are respectable citizens."
"Then why are we called Speedy Motors?" asked one of the apprentices.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had looked at his apprentice. There were times that he wanted to shout at him, and this perhaps was one, but he always controlled his temper.
"We are called Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors," he replied patiently, "because our work is speedy. Do you understand the distinction? We do not keep the customer waiting for days and days like some garages do. We turn the job round quickly, and carefully, too, as I keep having to tell you."
"Some people like speedy cars," chipped in the other apprentice. "There are some people who like to go fast."
"That may be so," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "But not everyone is like that. There are some people who know that going fast is not always the best way of getting there, is it? It is better to be late than the late, is it not?"
The apprentices had stared at him uncomprehendingly, and he had sighed; again, it was the fault of the Ministry of Education and their modern ideas. These two boys would never be able to understand half of what he said. And one of these days they were going to have a bad accident.

HE DROVE out to the orphan farm, pressing vigorously on his horn, as he always did, when he arrived at the gate. He enjoyed his visits for more than one reason. He liked to see the children, of course, and he usually brought a fistful of sweets which he would distribute when they came flocking round him. But he also liked seeing Mrs Silvia Potokwane, who was the matron in charge. She had been a friend of his mother's, and he had known her all his life. For this reason it was natural that he should take on the task of fixing any machinery which needed attending to, as well as maintaining the two trucks and the battered old minibus which served as the farm's transport. He was not paid for this, but that was not to be expected. Everybody helped the orphan farm if they could, and he would not have accepted payment had it been pressed on him.
Mma Potokwane was in her office when he arrived. She leaned out of the window and beckoned him in.
"Tea is ready, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni," she called. "There will be cake too, if you hurry."
He parked his truck under the shady boughs of a monkey-bread tree. Several children had already appeared, and skipped along beside him as he made his way to the office block.
"Have you children been good?" asked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, reaching into his pockets.
"We have been very good children," said the oldest child. "We have been doing good things all week. We are tired out now from all the good things we have been doing."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni chuckled. "In that case, you may have some sweets."
He handed a fistful of sweets over to the oldest child, who received them politely, with both hands extended, in the proper Botswana fashion.
"Do not spoil those children," shouted Mma Potokwane from her window. "They are very bad children, those ones."
The children laughed and scampered off, while Mr J.L.B. Matekoni walked through the office door. Inside, he found Mma Potokwane, her husband, who was a retired policeman, and a couple of the housemothers. Each had a mug of tea and a plate with a piece of fruitcake on it.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sipped on his tea as Mma Potokwane told him about the problems they were having with one of their borehole pumps. The pump was overheating after less than half an hour's use and they were worried that it would seize up altogether.
"Oil," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "A pump without oil gets hot. There must be a leak. A broken seal or something like that."
"And then there are the brakes on the minibus," said Mr Potokwane. "They make a very bad noise now."
"Brake pads," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "It's about time we replaced them. They get so much dust in them in this weather and it wears them down. I'll take a look, but you'll probably have to bring it into the garage for the work to be done."
They nodded, and the conversation moved to events at the orphan farm. One of the orphans had just been given a job and would be moving to Francistown to take it up. Another orphan had received a pair of running shoes from a Swedish donor who sent gifts from time to time. He was the best runner on the farm and now he would be able to enter in competitions. I hen there was a silence, and Mma Potokwane looked expec-lantly at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
"I hear that you have some news," she said after a while. "I hear that you're getting married."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked down at his shoes. They had told nobody, as far as he knew, but that would not be enough to stop news getting out in Botswana. It must have been his maid, he thought. She would have told one of the other maids and they would have spread it to their employers. Everybody would know now.
"I'm marrying Mma Ramotswe," he began. "She is . . ."
"She's the detective lady, isn't she?" said Mma Potokwane. "I have heard all about her. That will make life very exciting for you. You will be lurking about all the time. Spying on people."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni drew in his breath. "I shall be doing no such thing," he said. "I am not going to be a detective. That is Mma Ramotswe's business."
Mma Potokwane seemed disappointed. But then, she brightened up. "You will be buying her a diamond ring, I suppose," she said. "An engaged lady these days must wear a diamond ring to show that she is engaged."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stared at her. "Is it necessary?" he asked.
"It is very necessary," said Mma Potokwane. "If you read any of the magazines, you will see that there are advertisements for diamond rings. They say that they are for engagements."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was silent. Then: "Diamonds are rather expensive, aren't they?"
"Very expensive," said one of the housemothers. "One thousand pula for a tiny, tiny diamond."
"More than that," said Mr Potokwane. "Some diamonds cost two hundred thousand pula. Just one diamond."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked despondent. He was not a mean man, and was as generous with presents as he was with his time, but he was against any waste of money and it seemed to him that to spend that much on a diamond, even for a special occasion, was entirely wasteful.
"I shall speak to Mma Ramotswe about it," he said firmly, to bring the awkward topic to a close. "Perhaps she does not believe in diamonds."
"No," said Mma Potokwane. "She will believe in diamonds. All ladies believe in diamonds. That is one thing on which all ladies agree."

MR J.L.B. Matekoni crouched down and looked at the pump. After he had finished tea with Mma Potokwane, he had fol-lowed the path that led to the pump-house. It was one of those peculiar paths that seemed to wander, but which eventually reached its destination. This path made a lazy loop round some pumpkin fields before it dipped through a donga, a deep eroded ditch, and ended up in front of the small lean-to that protected the pump. The pump-house was itself shaded by a stand of umbrella-like thorn trees, which, when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni arrived, provided a welcome circle of shade. A tin-roofed shack, like the pump-house was, could become impossibly hot in the direct rays of the sun and that would not help any machinery inside.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni put down his tool box at the entrance to the pump-house and cautiously pushed the door open. He was careful about places like this because they were very well suited for snakes. Snakes seemed to like machinery, for some reason, and he had more than once discovered a somnolent snake curled around a part of some machine on which he was working. Why they did it, he had no idea; it might have been something to do with warmth and motion. Did snakes dream about some good place for snakes? Did they think that there was a heaven for snakes somewhere, where everything was down at ground level and there was nobody to tread on them?
His eyes took a few moments to accustom themselves to the dark of the interior, but after a while he saw that there was nothing untoward inside. The pump was driven by a large flywheel which was powered by an antiquated diesel engine. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. This was the trouble. Old diesel engines were generally reliable, but there came a point in their existence when they simply had to be pensioned off. He had hinted at this to Mma Potokwane, but she had always come up with reasons why money should be spent on other, more pressing projects.
"But water is the most important thing of all," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "If you can't water your vegetables, then what are the children going to eat?"
"God will provide," said Mma Potokwane calmly. "He will send us a new engine one day."
"Maybe," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "But then maybe not. God is sometimes not very interested in engines. I fix cars for quite a few ministers of religion, and they all have trouble. God's servants are not very good drivers."
Now, confronted with the evidence of diesel mortality, he retrieved his tool box, extracted an adjustable spanner, and began to remove the engine casing. Soon he was completely absorbed in his task, like a surgeon above the anaesthetised patient, stripping the engine to its solid, metallic heart. It had been a fine engine in its day, the product of a factory somewhere unimaginably far away-a loyal engine, an engine of character. Every engine seemed to be Japanese these days, and made by robots. Of course these were reliable, because the parts were so finely turned and so obedient, but for a man like Mr J.L.B. Matekoni those engines were as bland as sliced white bread. There was nothing in them, no roughage, no idio-syncracies. And as a result, there was no challenge in fixing a Japanese engine.
He had often thought how sad it was that the next generation of mechanics might never have to fix one of these old engines. They were all trained to fix the modern engines which needed computers to find out their troubles. When somebody came in to the garage with a new Mercedes-Benz, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's heart sank. He could no longer deal with such cars as he had none of these new diagnostic machines that one needed. Without such a machine, how could he tell if a tiny silicon chip in some inaccessible part of the engine was sending out the wrong signal? He felt tempted to say that such drivers should get a computer to fix their car, not a live mechanic, but of course he did not, and he would do his best with the gleaming expanse of steel which nestled under the bonnets of such cars. But his heart was never in it.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had now removed the pump engine's cylinder heads and was peering into the cylinders themselves. It was exactly what he had imagined; they were both coked up and would need a rebore before too long. And when the pistons themselves were removed he saw that the rings were pitted and worn, as if affected by arthritis. This would affect the engine's efficiency drastically, which meant wasted fuel and less water for the orphans' vegetables. He would have to do what he could. He would replace some of the engine seals to staunch the oil loss and he would arrange for the engine to be brought in some time for a rebore. But there would come a time when none of this would help, and he thought they would then simply have to buy a new engine.
There was a sound behind him, and he was startled. The pump-house was a quiet place, and all that he had heard so far was the call of birds in the acacia trees. This was a human noise. He looked round, but there was nothing. Then it came again, drifting through the bush, a squeaking noise as if from an unoiled wheel. Perhaps one of the orphans was wheeling a wheelbarrow or pushing one of those toy cars which children liked to fashion out of bits of old wire and tin.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni wiped his hands on a piece of rag and stuffed the rag back into his pocket. The noise seemed to be coming closer now, and then he saw it, emerging from the scrub bush that obscured the twists of the path: a wheelchair, in which a girl was sitting, propelling the chair herself. When she looked up from the path ahead of her and saw Mr J.L.B. Matekoni she stopped, her hands gripping the rims of the wheels. For a moment they stared at one another, and then she smiled and began to make her way over the last few yards of pathway.
She greeted him politely, as a well-brought-up child would do.
"I hope that you are well, Rra," she said, offering her right hand while her left hand laid across the forearm in a gesture of respect.
They shook hands.
"I hope that my hands are not too oily," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I have been working on the pump."
The girl nodded. "I have brought you some water, Rra. Mma Potokwane said that you had come out here without anything to drink and you might be thirsty."
She reached into a bag that was slung under the seat of the chair and extracted a bottle.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni took the water gratefully. He had just begun to feel thirsty and was regretting his failure to bring water with him. He took a swig from the bottle, watching the girl as he drank. She was still very young-about eleven or twelve, he thought-and she had a pleasant, open face. Her hair had been braided, and there were beads worked into the knots. She wore a faded blue dress, almost bleached to white by repeated washings, and a pair of scruffy tackles on her feet.
"Do you live here?" he asked. "On the farm?"
She nodded. "I have been here nearly one year," she answered. "I am here with my young brother. He is only five."
"Where did you come from?"
She lowered her gaze. "We came from up near Francistown. My mother is late. She died three years ago, when I was nine. We lived with a woman, in her yard. Then she told us we had to go."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. Mma Potokwane had told him the stories of some of the orphans, and each time he found that it made his heart smart with pain. In traditional society there was no such thing as an unwanted child; everybody would be looked after by somebody. But things were changing, and now there were orphans. This was particularly so now that there was this disease which was stalking through Africa. There were many more children now without parents and the orphan farm might be the only place for some of them to go. Is this what had happened to this girl? And why was she in a wheelchair?
He stopped his line of thought. There was no point in speculating about things which one could do little to help. There were more immediate questions to be answered, such as why was the wheelchair making such an odd noise.
"Your chair is squeaking," he said. "Does it always do that?"
She shook her head. "It started a few weeks ago. I think there is something wrong with it."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went down on his haunches and examined the wheels. He had never fixed a wheelchair before, but it was obvious to him what the problem was. The bearings were dry and dusty-a little oil would work wonders there- and the brake was catching. That would explain the noise.
"I shall lift you out," he said. "You can sit under the tree while I fix this chair for you."
He lifted the girl and placed her gently on the ground. Then, turning the chair upside down, he freed the brake block and readjusted the lever which operated it. Oil was applied to the bearings and the wheels were spun experimentally. There was no obstruction, and no noise. He righted the chair and pushed it over to where the girl was sitting.
"You have been very kind, Rra," she said. "I must get back now, or the housemother will think I'm lost."
She made her way down the path, leaving Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to his work on the pump. He continued with the repair and after an hour it was ready. He was pleased when it started the first time and appeared to run reasonably sweetly. The repair, however, would not last for long, and he knew that he would have to return to dismantle it completely. And how would the vegetables get water then? This was the trouble with living in a dry country. Everything, whether it was human life, or pumpkins, was on such a tiny margin.

CHAPTER FIVE
JUDGMENT-DAY JEWELLERS

MMA POTOKWANE was right: Mma Ramotswe was, as she had predicted, interested in diamonds.
The subject came up a few days after Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had fixed the pump at the orphan farm.
"I think that people know about our engagement," said Mma Ramotswe, as she and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sat drinking tea in the office of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. "My maid said that she had heard people talking about it in the town. She said that everybody knows."
"That is what this place is like," sighed Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I am always hearing about other people's secrets."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. He was right: there were no secrets in Gaborone. Everybody knew everybody else's business.
"For example," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, warming to the theme, "when Mma Sonqkwena ruined the gearbox of her son's new car by trying to change into reverse at thirty miles an hour, everybody seemed to hear about that. I told nobody, but they seemed to find out all the same."
Mma Ramotswe laughed. She knew Mma Sonqkwena, who was possibly the oldest driver in town. Her son, who had a profitable store in the Broadhurst Mall, had tried to persuade his mother to employ a driver or to give up driving altogether, but had been defeated by her indomitable sense of independence.
"She was heading out to Molepolole," went on Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, "and she remembered that she had not fed the chickens back in Gaborone. So she decided that she would go straight back by changing into reverse. You can imagine what that did to the gearbox. And suddenly everybody was talking about it. They assumed that I had told people, but I hadn't. A mechanic should be like a priest. He should not talk about what he sees."
Mma Ramotswe agreed. She appreciated the value of confidentiality, and she admired Mr J.L.B. Matekoni for understanding this too. There were far too many loose-tongued people about. But these were general observations, and there were more pressing matters still to be discussed, and so she brought the conversation round to the subject which had started the whole debate.
"So they are talking about our engagement," she said. "Some of them even asked to see the ring you had bought me." She glanced at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni before continuing. "So I told them that you hadn't bought it yet but that I'm sure that you would be buying it soon."
She held her breath. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was looking at the ground, as he often did when he felt uncertain.
"A ring?" he said at last, his voice strained. "What kind of ring?"
Mma Ramotswe watched him carefully. One had to he circumspect with men, when discussing such matters. They had very little understanding of them, of course, but one had to be careful not to alarm them. There was no point in doing that. She decided to be direct. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would spot subterfuge and it would not help.
"A diamond ring," she said. "That is what engaged ladies are wearing these days. It is the modern thing to do."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni continued to look glumly at the ground.
"Diamonds?" he said weakly. "Are you sure this is the most modern thing?"
"Yes," said Mma Ramotswe firmly. "All engaged ladies in modern circles receive diamond rings these days. It is a sign that they are appreciated."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked up sharply. If this was true-and it very much accorded with what Mma Potokwane had told him-then he would have no alternative but to buy a diamond ring. He would not wish Mma Ramotswe to imagine that she was not appreciated. He appreciated her greatly; he was immensely, humbly grateful to her for agreeing to marry him, and if a diamond were necessary to announce that to the world, then that was a small price to pay. He halted as the word "price" crossed his mind, recalling the alarming figures which had been quoted over tea at the orphan farm.
"These diamonds are very expensive," he ventured. "I hope that I shall have enough money."
"But of course you will," said Mma Ramotswe. "They have some very inexpensive ones. Or you can get terms . . ."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni perked up. "I thought that they cost thousands and thousands of pula," he said. "Maybe fifty thousand pula."
"Of course not," said Mma Ramotswe. "They have expensive ones, of course, but they also have very good ones that do not cost too much. We can go and take a look. Judgment-day Jewellers, for example. They have a good selection."
The decision was made. The next morning, after Mma Ramotswe had dealt with the mail at the detective agency, they would go to Judgment-day Jewellers and choose a ring. It was an exciting prospect, and even Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, feeling greatly relieved at the prospect of an affordable ring, found himself looking forward to the outing. Now that he had thought about it, there was something very appealing about diamonds, something that even a man could understand, if only he were to think hard enough about it. What was more important to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was the thought that this gift, which was possibly the most expensive gift he would ever give in his life, was a gift from the very soil of Botswana. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was a patriot. He loved his country, just as he knew Mma Ramotswe did. The thought that the diamond which he eventually chose could well have come from one of Botswana's own three diamond mines added to the significance of the gift. He was giving, to the woman whom he loved and admired more than any other, a tiny speck of the very land on which they walked. It was a special speck of course: a fragment of rock which had been burned to a fine point of brightness all those years ago. Then somebody had dug it out of the earth up at Orapa, polished it, brought it down to Gaborone, and set it in gold. And all of this to allow Mma Ramotswe to wear it on the second finger of her left hand and announce to the world that he, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, the proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, was to be her husband.

THE PREMISES of Judgment-day Jewellers were tucked away at the end of a dusty street, alongside the Salvation Bookshop, which sold Bibles and other religious texts, and Mothobani Bookkeeping Services: Tell the Taxman to go away. It was a rather unprepossessing shop, with a sloping verandah roof supported by whitewashed brick pillars. The sign, which had been painted by an amateur sign-writer of modest talent, showed the head and shoulders of a glamorous woman wearing an elaborate necklace and large pendant earrings. The woman was smiling in a lopsided way, in spite of the weight of the earrings and the evident discomfort of the necklace.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe parked on the opposite side of the road, under the shade of an acacia tree. They were later than they had anticipated, and the heat of the day was already beginning to build up. By midday any vehicle left out in the sun would be almost impossible to touch, the seats too hot for exposed flesh, the steering wheel a rim of fire. Shade would prevent this, and under every tree there were nests of cars, nosed up against the trunks, like piglets to a sow, in order to enjoy the maximum protection afforded by the incomplete panoply of grey-green foliage.
The door was locked, but clicked open obligingly when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sounded the electric bell. Inside the shop, standing behind the counter, was a thin man clad in khaki. He had a narrow head, and both his slightly slanted eyes and the golden tinge to his skin suggested some San blood-the blood of the Kalahari bushmen. But if this were so, then what would he be doing working in a jewellery shop? There was no real reason why he should not, of course, but it seemed inappropriate. Jewellery shops attracted Indian people, or Kenyans, who liked work of that sort; Basarwa were happier working with livestock-they made great cattlemen or ostrich hands.
The jeweller smiled at them. "I saw you outside," he said. "You parked your car under that tree."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew that he was right. The man spoke correct Setswana, but his accent confirmed the visible signs. Underneath the vowels, there were clicks and whistles struggling to get out. It was a peculiar language, the San language, more like the sound of birds in the trees than people talking.
He introduced himself, as was polite, and then he turned to Mma Ramotswe.
"This lady is now engaged to me," he said. "She is Mma Ramotswe, and I wish to buy her a ring for this engagement." He paused. "A diamond ring."
The jeweller looked at him through his hooded eyes, and then shifted his gaze sideways to Mma Ramotswe. She looked back at him, and thought: There is intelligence here. This is a clever man who cannot be trusted.
"You are a fortunate man," said the jeweller. "Not every man can find such a cheerful, fat woman to marry. There are many thin, hectoring women around today. This one will make you very happy."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni acknowledged the compliment. "Yes," he said. "I am a lucky man."
"And now you must buy her a very big ring," went on the jeweller. "A fat woman cannot wear a tiny ring."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked down at his shoes.
"I was thinking of a medium-sized ring," he said. "I am not a rich man."
"I know who you are," said the jeweller. "You are the man who owns Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. You can afford a good ring."
Mma Ramotswe decided to intervene. "I do not want a big ring," she said firmly. "I am not a lady to wear a big ring. I was hoping for a small ring."
The jeweller threw her a glance. He seemed almost annoyed by her presence-as if this were a transaction between men, like a transaction over cattle, and she was interfering.
"I'll show you some rings," he said, bending down to slide a drawer out of the counter below him. "Here are some good diamond rings."
He placed the drawer on the top of the counter and pointed to a row of rings nestling in velvet slots. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni caught his breath. The diamonds were set in the rings in clusters: a large stone in the middle surrounded by smaller ones. Several rings had other stones too-emeralds and rubies-and beneath each of them a small tag disclosed the price.
"Don't pay any attention to what the label says," said the jeweller, lowering his voice. "I can offer very big discounts."
Mma Ramotswe peered at the tray. Then she looked up and shook her head.
"These are too big," she said. "I told you that I wanted a smaller ring. Perhaps we shall have to go to some other shop."
The jeweller sighed. "I have some others," he said. "I have small rings as well."
He slipped the tray back into its place and extracted another. The rings on this one were considerably smaller. Mma Ramotswe pointed to a ring in the middle of the tray.
"I like that one," she said. "Let us see that one."
"It is not very big," said the jeweller. "A diamond like that may easily be missed. People may not notice it."
"I don't care," said Mma Ramotswe. "This diamond is going to be for me. It is nothing to do with other people."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt a surge of pride as she spoke. This was the woman he admired, the woman who believed in the old Botswana values and who had no time for showiness.
"I like that ring too," he said. "Please let Mma Ramotswe try it on."
The ring was passed to Mma Ramotswe, who slipped it on her finger and held out her hand for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to examine.
"It suits you perfectly," he said.
She smiled. "If this is the ring you would like to buy me, then I would be very happy."
The jeweller picked up the price tag and passed it to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "There can be no further discount on this one," he said. "It is already very cheap."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was pleasantly surprised by the price. He had just replaced the coolant unit on a customer's van and this, he noticed, was the same price, down to the last pula. It was not expensive. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the wad of notes which he had drawn from the bank earlier that morning and paid the jeweller.
"One thing I must ask you," Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said to the jeweller. "Is this diamond a Botswana diamond?"
The jeweller looked at him curiously.
"Why are you interested in that?" he asked. "A diamond is a diamond wherever it comes from."
"I know that," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "But I would like to think that my wife will be wearing one of our own stones."
The jeweller smiled. "In that case, yes, it is. All these stones are stones from our own mines."
"Thank you," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I am happy to hear that."

THEY DROVE back from the jeweller's shop, past the Anglican Cathedral and the Princess Marina Hospital. As they passed the Cathedral, Mma Ramotswe said: "I think that perhaps we should get married there. Perhaps we can get Bishop Makhulu himself to marry us."
"I would like that," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "He is a good man, the Bishop."
"Then a good man will be conducting the wedding of a good man," said Mma Ramotswe. "You are a kind man, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. It was not easy to respond to a compliment, particularly when one felt that the compliment was undeserved. He did not think that he was a particularly good man. There were many faults in his character, he thought, and if anyone was good, it was Mma Ramotswe. She was far better than he was. He was just a mechanic who tried his best; she was far more than that.
They turned down Zebra Drive and drove into the short drive in front of Mma Ramotswe's house, bringing the car to a halt under the shade-netting at the side of her verandah. Rose, Mma Ramotswe's maid, looked out of the kitchen window and waved to them. She had done the day's laundry and it was hanging out on the line, white against the red-brown earth and blue sky.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni took Mma Ramotswe's hand, touching, for a moment, the glittering ring. He looked at her, and saw that there were tears in her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I should not be crying, but I cannot help it."
"Why are you sad?" he asked. "You must not be sad."
She wiped away a tear and then shook her head.
"I'm not sad," she said. "It's just that nobody has ever given me anything like this ring before. When I married Note he gave me nothing. I had hoped that there would be a ring, but there was not. Now I have a ring."
"I will try to make up for Note," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I will try to be a good husband for you."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "You will be," she said. "And I shall try to be a good wife for you."
They sat for a moment, saying nothing, each with the thoughts that the moment demanded. Then Mr J.L.B. Matekoni got out, walked round the front of the car, and opened her door for her. They would go inside for bush tea and she would show Rose the ring and the diamond that had made her so happy and so sad at the same time.

CHAPTER SIX
A DRY PLACE

SITTING IN her office at the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no. She did not really want to take on the search for a solution to what happened to Mrs Curtin's son; Clovis Andersen, the author of her professional bible, The Principles of Private Detection, would have described the enquiry as stale. "A stale enquiry," he wrote, "is unrewarding to all concerned. The client is given false hopes because a detective is working on the case, and the agent himself feels committed to coming up with something because of the client's expectations. This means that the agent will probably spend more time on the case than the circumstances should warrant. At the end of the day, nothing is likely to be achieved and one is left wondering whether there is not a case for allowing the past to be buried with decency. Let the past alone is sometimes the best advice that can be given."
Mma Ramotswe had reread this passage several times and had found herself agreeing with the sentiments it expressed. There was far too much interest in the past, she thought. People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? There were many wrongs in the past, but did it help to keep bringing them up and giving them a fresh airing? She thought of the Shona people and how they kept going on about what the Ndebele did to them under Mzi-likazi and Lobengula. It is true that they did terrible things- after all, they were really Zulus and had always oppressed their neighbours-but surely that was no justification for continuing to talk about it. It would be better to forget all that once and for all.
She thought of Seretse Khama, Paramount Chief of the Bamgwato, First President of Botswana, Statesman. Look at the way the British had treated him, refusing to recognize his choice of bride and forcing him into exile simply because he had married an Englishwoman. How could they have done such an insensitive and cruel thing to a man like that? To send a man away from his land, from his people, was surely one of the cruellest punishments that could he devised. And it left the people leaderless; it cut at their very soul: Where is our Khama? Where is the son of Kgosi Sekgoma II and the mohuma-gadi Tehogo? But Seretse himself never made much of this later on. He did not talk about it and he was never anything but courteous to the British Government and to the Queen herself. A lesser man would have said: Look what you did to me, and now you expect me to be your friend!
Then there was Mr Mandela. Everybody knew about Mr Mandela and how he had forgiven those who had imprisoned him. They had taken away years and years of his life simply because he wanted justice. They had set him to work in a quarry and his eyes had been permanently damaged by the rock dust. But at last, when he had walked out of the prison on that breathless, luminous day, he had said nothing about revenge or even retribution. He had said that there were more important things to do than to complain about the past, and in time he had shown that he meant this by hundreds of acts of kindness towards those who had treated him so badly. That was the real African way, the tradition that was closest to the heart of Africa. We are all children of Africa, and none of us is better or more important than the other. This is what Africa could say to the world: it could remind it what it is to be human.
She appreciated that, and she understood the greatness that Khama and Mandela showed in forgiving the past. And yet, Mrs Curtin's case was different. It did not seem to her that the American woman was keen to find somebody to blame for her son's disappearance, although she knew that there were many people in such circumstances who became obsessed with finding somebody to punish. And, of course, there was the whole problem of punishment. Mma Ramotswe sighed. She supposed that punishment was sometimes needed to make it dear that what somebody had done was wrong, but she had never been able to understand why we should wish to punish I hose who repented for their misdeeds. When she was a girl in Mochudi, she had seen a boy beaten for losing a goat. He had confessed that he had gone to sleep under a tree when he should have been watching the herd, and he had said that he was truly sorry that he had allowed the goat to wander. What was the point, she wondered, in his uncle beating him with a mopani stick until he cried out for mercy? Such punishment achieved nothing and merely disfigured the person who exacted it.
But these were large issues, and the more immediate problem was where to start with the search for that poor, dead American boy. She imagined Clovis Andersen shaking his head and saying, "Well, Mma Ramotswe, you've landed yourself with a stale case in spite of what I say about these things. But since you've done so, then my usual advice to you is to go back to the beginning. Start there." The beginning, she supposed, was the farm where Burkhardt and his friends had set up their project. It would not be difficult to find the place itself, although she doubted whether she would discover anything' But at least it would give her a feeling for the matter, and that, she knew, was the beginning. Places had echoes-and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.

AT LEAST she knew how to find the village. Her secretary, Mma Makutsi, had a cousin who came from the village nearest to the farm and she had explained which road to take. It was out to the west, not far from Molepolole. It was dry country, verging on the Kalahari, covered with low bushes and thorn trees. It was sparsely populated, but in those areas where there was more water, people had established small villages and clusters of small houses around the sorghum and melon fields. There was not much to do here, and people moved to Lobatse or Gaborone for work if they were in a position to do so. Gaborone was full of people from places like this. They came to the city, but kept their ties with their lands and their cattle post. Places like this would always be home, no matter how long people spent away. At the end of the day, this is where they would wish to die, under these great, wide skies, which were like a limitless ocean.
She travelled down in her tiny white van on a Saturday morning, setting off early, as she liked to do on any trip. As she left the town, there were already streams of people coming in for a Saturday's shopping. It was the end of the month, which meant payday, and the shops would be noisy and crowded as people bought their large jars of syrup and beans, or splashed out on the coveted new dress or shoes. Mma Ramotswe liked shopping, but she never shopped around payday. Prices went up then, she was convinced, and went down again towards the middle of the month, when nobody had any money.
Most of the traffic on the road consisted of buses and vans bringing people in. But there were a few going in the opposite direction-workers from town heading off for a weekend back in their villages; men going back to their wives and children; women working as maids in Gaborone going back to spend their precious days of leisure with their parents and grandparents. Mma Ramotswe slowed down; there was a woman standing at the side of the road, waving her hand to request a lift. She was a woman of about Mma Ramotswe's age, dressed smartly in a black skirt and a bright red jersey. Mma Ramotswe hesitated, and then stopped. She could not leave her standing there; somewhere there would be a family waiting for her, counting on a motorist to bring their mother home.
She drew to a halt, and called out of the window of her van. "Where are you going, Mma?"
"I am going down that way," said the woman, pointing down the road. "Just beyond Molepolole. I am going to Silokwolela."
Mma Ramotswe smiled. "I am going there too," she said. "I can take you all the way."
The woman let out a whoop of delight. "You are very kind, and I am a very lucky person."
She reached down for the plastic bag in which she was carrying her possessions and opened the passenger door of Mma Ramotswe's van. Then, her belongings stored at her feet, Mma Ramotswe pulled out into the road again and they set off. From old habit, Mma Ramotswe glanced at her new travelling companion and made her assessment. She was quite well dressed-the jersey was new, and was real wool rather than the cheap artificial fibres that so many people bought these days; the skirt was a cheap one, though, and the shoes were slightly scuffed. This lady works in a shop, she thought. She has passed her standard six, and maybe even form two or three. She has no husband, and her children are living with the grandmother out at Silokwolela. Mma Ramotswe had seen the copy of the Bible tucked into the top of the plastic bag and this had given her more information. This lady was a member of a church, and was perhaps going to Bible classes. She would be reading her Bible to the children that night.
"Your children are down there, Mma?" asked Mma Ramotswe politely.
'Yes," came the reply. "They are staying with their grandmother. I work in a shop in Gaborone, New Deal Furnishers. You know them maybe?"
Mma Ramotswe nodded, as much for the confirmation of her judgement as in answer to the question.
"I have no husband," she went on. "He went to Francistown and he died of burps."
Mma Ramotswe gave a start. "Burps'? You can die of burps?"
'Yes. He was burping very badly up in Francistown and they took him to the hospital. They gave him an operation and they found that there was something very bad inside him. This thing made him burp. Then he died."
There was a silence. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke. "I am very sorry."
"Thank you. I was very sad when this happened, as he was a very good man and he had been a good father to my children. But my mother was still strong, and she said that she would look after them. I could get a job in Gaborone, because I have my form two certificate. I went to the furniture shop and they were very pleased with my work. I am now one of the top salesladies and they have even booked me to go on a sales training course in Mafikeng."
Mma Ramotswe smiled. "You have done very well. It is not easy for women. Men expect us to do all the work and then they take the best jobs. It is not easy to be a successful lady."
"But I can tell that you are successful," said the woman. "I can tell that you are a business lady. I can tell that you are doing well."
Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. She prided herself on her ability to sum people up, but she wondered whether this was not something that many women had, as part of the intuitive gift.
"You tell me what I do," she said. "Could you guess what my job is?"
The woman turned in her seat and looked Mma Ramotswe up and down.
"You are a detective, I think," she said. "You are a person who looks into other people's business."
The tiny white van swerved momentarily. Mma Ramotswe was shocked that this woman had guessed. Her intuitive powers must be even better than mine, she thought.
"How did you know that? What did I do to give you this information?"
The other woman shifted her gaze. "It was simple," she said. "I have seen you sitting outside your detective agency drinking tea with your secretary. She is that lady with very big glasses. The two of you sit there in the shade sometimes and I have been walking past on the other side of the road. That is how I knew."
They travelled in comfortable companionship, talking about their daily lives. She was called Mma Tsbago, and she told Mma Ramotswe about her work in the furniture shop. The manager was a kind man, she said, who did not work his staff too hard and who was always honest with his customers. She had been offered a job by another firm, at a higher wage, but had refused it. Her manager found out and had rewarded her loyalty with a promotion.
Then there were her children. They were a girl of ten and a boy of eight. They were doing well at school and she hoped that she might be able to bring them to Gaborone for their secondary education. She had heard the Gaborone Government Secondary School was very good and she hoped that she might be able to get a place for them there. She had also heard that there were scholarships to even better schools, and perhaps they might have a chance of one of those.
Mma Ramotswe told her that she was engaged to be married, and she pointed to the diamond on her finger. Mma Tsbago admired it and asked who the fiance was. It was a good thing to marry a mechanic, she said, as she had heard that they made the best husbands. You should try to marry a policeman, a mechanic or a minister of religion, she said, and you should never marry a politician, a barman, or a taxi driver. These people always caused a great deal of trouble for their wives.
"And you shouldn't marry a trumpeter," added Mma Ramotswe. "I made that mistake. I married a bad man called Note Mokoti. He played the trumpet."
"I'm sure that they are not good people to marry," said Mma Tsbago. "I shall add them to my list."

THEY MADE slow progress on the last part of the journey. The road, which was untarred, was pitted with large and dangerous potholes, and at several points they were obliged to edge dangerously out into the sandy verge to avoid a particularly large hole. This was perilous, as the tiny white van could easily become stuck in the sand if they were not careful and they might have to wait hours for rescue. Rut at last they arrived at Mma Tsbago's village, which was the village closest to the farm that Mma Ramotswe was seeking.
She had asked Mma Tsbago about the settlement, and had been provided with some information. She remembered the project, although she had not known the people involved in it. She recalled that there had been a white man and a woman from South Africa, and one or two other foreigners. A number of the people from the village had worked there, and people had thought that great things would come of it, but it had eventually fizzled out. She had not been surprised at that. Things fizzled out; you could not hope to change Africa. People lost interest, or they went back to their traditional way of doing things, or they simply gave up because it was all too much effort. And then Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.
"Is there somebody in the village who can take me out there?" asked Mma Ramotswe.
Mma Tsbago thought for a moment.
"There are still some people who worked out there," she said. "There is a friend of my uncle. He had a job out there for a while. We can go to his place and you can ask him."

THEY WENT first to Mma Tsbago's house. It was a traditional Botswana house, made out of ochre mud bricks and surrounded by a low wall, a lomotana, which created a tiny yard in front of and alongside the house. Outside this wall there were two thatched grain bins, on raised legs, and a chicken house. At the back, made out of tin and leaning dangerously, was the privy, with an old plank door and a rope with which the door could be tied shut. The children ran out immediately, and embraced their mother, before waiting shyly to be introduced to the stranger. Then, from the dark interior of the house, there emerged the grandmother, wearing a threadbare white dress and grinning toothlessly.
Mma Tsbago left her bag in the house and explained that she would return within an hour. Mma Ramotswe gave sweets to the children, which they received with both palms upturned, thanking her gravely in the correct Setswana manner. These were children who would understand the old ways, thought Mma Ramotswe, approvingly-unlike some of the children in Gaborone.
They left the house and drove through the village in the white van. It was a typical Botswana village, a sprawling collection of one- or two-room houses, each in its own yard, each with a motley collection of thorn trees surrounding it. The houses were linked by paths, which wandered this way and that, skirting fields and crop patches. Cattle moved about listlessly, cropping at the occasional patch of brown, withered grass, while a pot-bellied herd-boy, dusty and be-aproned, watched them from under a tree. The cattle were unmarked, but everybody would know their owner, and their lineage. These were the signs of wealth, the embodied result of somebody's labours in the diamond mine at Jwaneng or the beef-canning factory at Lobatse.
Mma Tsbago directed her to a house on the edge of the village. It was a well-kept place, slightly larger than its immediate neighbours, and had been painted in the style of the traditional Botswana house, in reds and browns and with a bold, diamond pattern etched out in white. The yard was well-swept, which suggested that the woman of the house, who would also have painted it, was conscientious with her reed broom. Houses, and their decoration, were the responsibility of the woman, and this woman had evidently had the old skills passed down to her.
They waited at the gate while Mma Tsbago called out for permission to enter. It was rude to go up the path without first calling, and even ruder to go into a building uninvited.
"Ko, Ko!" called out Mma Tsbago. "Mma Potsane, I am here to see you!"
There was no response, and Mma Tsbago repeated her call. Again no answer came, and then the door of the house suddenly opened and a small, rotund woman, dressed in a long skirt and high-collared white blouse, came out and peered in their direction.
"Who is that?" she called out, shading her eyes with a hand. "Who are you? I cannot see you."
"Mma Tsbago. You know me. I am here with a stranger." The householder laughed. "I thought it might be somebody else, and I quickly got dressed up. But I need not have bothered!"
She gestured for them to enter and they walked across to meet her.
"I cannot see very well these days," explained Mma Potsane. "My eyes are getting worse and worse. That is why I didn't know who you were."
They shook hands, exchanging formal greetings. Then Mma Potsane gestured across to a bench which stood in the shade of the large tree beside her house. They could sit there, she explained, because the house was too dark inside.
Mma Tsbago explained why they were there and Mma Pot-sane listened intently. Her eyes appeared to be irritating her, and from time to time she wiped at them with the sleeve of her blouse. As Mma Tsbago spoke, she nodded encouragement.
"Yes," she said. "We lived out there. My husband worked there. We both worked there. We hoped that we would be able to make some money with our crops and for a while it worked. Then . . ." She broke off, shrugging despondently.
"Things went wrong?" asked Mma Ramotswe. "Drought?"
Mma Potsane sighed. "There was a drought, yes. But there's always a drought, isn't there? No, it was just that people lost faith in the idea. There were good people living there, but they went away."
"The white man from Namibia? The German one?" asked Mma Ramotswe.
"Yes, that one. He was a good man, but he went away. Then there were other people, Batswana, who decided that they had had enough. They went too."
"And an American?" pressed Mma Ramotswe. "There was an American boy?"
Mma Potsane rubbed at her eyes. "That boy vanished. He disappeared one night. They had the police out here and they searched and searched. His mother came too, many times. She brought a Mosarwa tracker with her, a tiny little man, like a dog with his nose to the ground. He had a very fat bottom, like all those Basarwa have."
"He found nothing?" Mma Ramotswe knew the answer to this, but she wanted to keep the other woman talking. She had so far only heard the story from Mrs Curtin's viewpoint; it was quite possible that there were things which other people had seen which she did not know about.
"He ran round and round like a dog," said Mma Potsane, laughing. "He looked under stones and sniffed the air and muttered away in that peculiar language of theirs-you know how it is, all those sounds like trees in the wind and twigs breaking. But he found no sign of any wild animals which may have taken that boy."
Mma Ramotswe passed her a handkerchief to dab her eyes. "So what do you think happened to him, Mma? How can somebody just vanish like that?"
Mma Potsane sniffed and then blew her nose on Mma Ramotswe's handkerchief.
"I think that he was sucked up," she said. "There are sometimes whirlwinds here in the very hot season. They come in from the Kalahari and they suck things up. I think that maybe that boy got sucked up in a whirlwind and put down somewhere far, far away. Maybe over by Ghanzi way or in the middle of the Kalahari or somewhere. No wonder they didn't find him."
Mma Tsbago looked sideways at Mma Ramotswe, trying to catch her eye, but Mma Ramotswe looked straight ahead at Mma Potsane.
"That is always possible, Mma," she said. "That is an interesting idea." She paused. "Could you take me out there and show me round? I have a van here."
Mma Potsane thought for a moment. "I do not like to go out there," she said. "It is a sad place for me."
"I have twenty pula for your expenses," said Mma Ramotswe, reaching into her pocket. "I had hoped that you would be able to accept this from me."
"Of course," said Mma Potsane hurriedly. "We can go there. I do not like to go there at night, but in the day it is different."
"Now?" said Mma Ramotswe. "Could you come now?"
"I am not busy," said Mma Potsane. "There is nothing happening here."
Mma Ramotswe passed the money over to Mma Potsane, who thanked her, clapping both hands in a sign of gratitude. Then they walked back over her neatly swept yard and, saying goodbye to Mma Tsbago, they climbed into the van and drove off.

CHAPTER SEVEN
FURTHER PROBLEMS WITH THE ORPHAN-FARM PUMP

ON THE day that Mma Ramotswe travelled out to Silokwolela, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt vaguely ill at ease. He had become accustomed to meeting Mma Ramotswe on a Saturday morning to help her with her shopping or with some task about the house. Without her, he felt at a loose end: Gaborone seemed strangely empty; the garage was closed, and he had no desire to attend to the paperwork that had been piling up on his desk. He could call on a friend, of course, and perhaps go and watch a football match, but again he was not in the mood for that. Then he thought of Mma Silvia Potokwane, Matron in Charge of the Orphan Farm. There was inevitably something happening out there, and she was always happy to sit down and have a chat over a cup of tea. He would go out there and see how everything was. Then the rest of the day could take care of itself until Mma Ramotswe returned that evening.
Mma Potokwane spotted him, as usual, as he parked his car under one of the syringa trees.
"I see you!" she shouted from her window. "I see you, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni!"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni waved in her direction as he locked the car. Then he strode towards the office, where the sound of cheerful music drifted out of one of the windows. Inside, Mma Potokwane was sitting beside her desk, a telephone receiver to her ear. She motioned for him to sit down and continued with her conversation.
"If you can give me some of that cooking oil," she said, "the orphans will be very happy. They like to have their potatoes fried in oil and it is good for them."
The voice at the other end said something, and she frowned, glancing up at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, as if to share her irritation.
"But you cannot sell that oil if it is beyond its expiry date. So why should I pay you anything for it? It would be better to give it to the orphans than to pour it down the drain. I cannot give you money for it, and so I see no reason why you shouldn't give it to us."
Again something was said on the other end of the line, and she nodded patiently.
"I can make sure that the Daily News comes to photograph you handing the oil over. Everybody will know that you are a generous man. It will be there in the papers."
There was a further brief exchange and then she replaced the receiver.
"Some people are slow to give," she said. "It is something to do with how their mothers brought them up. I have read all about this problem in a book. There is a doctor called Dr. Freud who is very famous and has written many books about such people."
"Is he in Johannesburg?" asked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
"I do not think so," said Mma Potokwane. "It is a book from London. But it is very interesting. He says that all boys are in love with their mother."
"That is natural," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Of course boys love their mothers. Why should they not do so?"
Mma Potokwane shrugged. "I agree with you. I cannot see what is wrong with a boy loving his mother."
"Then why is Dr. Freud worried about this?" went on Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Surely he should be worried if they did not love their mothers."
Mma Potokwane looked thoughtful. "Yes. But he was still very worried about these boys and I think he tried to stop them."
"That is ridiculous," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Surely he had better things to do with his time."
"You would have thought so," said Mma Potokwane. "But in spite of this Dr Freud, boys still go on loving their mothers, which is how it should be."
She paused, and then, brightening at the abandonment of this difficult subject, she smiled broadly at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
"I am very glad that you came out today. I was going to phone you."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. "Brakes? Or the pump?"
"The pump," said Mma Potokwane. "It is making a very strange noise. The water comes all right, but the pump makes a noise as if it is in pain."
"Engines do feel pain," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "They tell us of their pain by making a noise."
"Then this pump needs help," said Mma Potokwane. "Can you take a quick look at it?"
"Of course," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

IT TOOK him longer than he had expected, but at last he found the cause and was able to attend to it. The pump reassembled, he tested it, and it ran sweetly once more. It would need a total refit, of course, and that day would not be able to be put off for much longer, but at least the strange, moaning sound had stopped.
Back in Mma Potokwane's office, he relaxed with his cup of tea and a large slab of currant cake which the cooks had baked that morning. The orphans were well fed. The Government looked after its orphans well and gave a generous grant each year. But there were also private donors-a network of people who gave in money, or kind, to the orphan farm. This meant that none of the orphans actually wanted for anything and none of them was malnourished, as happened in so many other African countries. Botswana was a well-blessed country. Nobody starved and nobody languished in prison for their political beliefs. As Mma Ramotswe had pointed out to him, the Batswana could hold their heads up anywhere- anywhere.
"This is good cake," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "The children must love it."
Mma Potokwane smiled. "Our children love cake. If we gave them nothing but cake, they would be very happy. But of course we don't. The orphans need onions and beans too."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. "A balanced diet," he said widely. "They say that a balanced diet is the key to health."
There was silence for a moment as they reflected on his observation. Then Mma Potokwane spoke.
"So you will be a married man soon," she said. "That will make your life different. You will have to behave yourself, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni!"
He laughed, scraping up the last crumbs of his cake. "Mma Ramotswe will watch me. She will make sure that I behave myself well."
"Mmm," said Mma Potokwane. "Will you be living in her house or in yours?"
"I think it will be her house," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "It is a bit nicer than mine. Her house is in Zebra Drive, you know."
"Yes," said the Matron. "I have seen her place. I drove past it the other day. It looks very nice."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked surprised. "You drove past specially to take a look?"
"Well," said Mma Potokwane, grinning slightly. "I thought that I might just see what sort of place it was. It's quite big, isn't it?"
"It's a comfortable house," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I think that there will be enough room for us."
"Too much room," said Mma Potokwane. "There will be room for children."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni frowned. "We had not been thinking of that. We are maybe a bit old for children. I am forty-five. And then . . . Well, I do not like to talk about it, but Mma Ramotswe has told me that she cannot have children. She had a baby, you know, but it died and now the doctors have said to her that. . ."
Mma Potokwane shook her head. "That is very sad. I am very sad for her."
"But we are very happy," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Even if we do not have children."
Mma Potokwane reached over to the teapot and poured her guest another cup of tea. Then she cut a further slice of cake-a generous helping-and slid it onto his plate.
"Of course, there is always adoption," she said, watching him as she spoke. "Or you could always just look after a child if you didn't want to adopt. You could take . . ." She paused, raising her teacup to her lips. 'You could always take an orphan." Adding hurriedly: "Or even a couple of orphans."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stared at his shoes. "I don't know. I don't think I would like to adopt a child. But. . ."
"But a child could come and live with you. There's no need to go to all the trouble of adoption papers and magistrates," said Mma Potokwane. "Imagine how nice that would be!"
"Maybe ... I don't know. Children are a big responsibility."
Mma Potokwane laughed. "But you're a man who takes responsibility easily. There you are with your garage, that's a responsibility. And those apprentices of yours. They're a responsibility too, aren't they? You are well used to responsibility."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni thought of his apprentices. They, too, had just appeared, sidling into the garage shortly after he had telephoned the technical trades college and offered to give two apprenticeships. He had entertained great hopes of them, but had been disappointed virtually from the beginning. When he was their age he had been full of ambition, but they seemed to take everything for granted. At first he had been unable to understand why they seemed so passive, but then all had been explained to him by a friend.
"Young people these days cannot show enthusiasm," he had been told. "It's not considered smart to be enthusiastic." So this is what was wrong with the apprentices. They wanted to be thought smart.
On one occasion, when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt particularly irritated at seeing the two young men sitting unenthusiastically on their empty oil drums staring into the air he had raised his voice at them.
"So you think you're smart?" he shouted. "Is that what you think?"
The two apprentices had glanced at one another. "No," said one, after a few moments. "No, we don't." He had felt deflated and had slammed the door of his office. It appeared that they lacked the enthusiasm even to respond to his challenge, which just proved what he had thought anyway.
Now, thinking of children, he wondered whether he would have the energy to deal with them. He was approaching the point in life when he wanted a quiet and orderly time. He wanted to be able to fix engines in his own garage during the day and to spend his evenings with Mma Ramotswe. That would be bliss! Would children not introduce a note of stress into their domestic life? Children needed to be taken to school and put in the bathtub and taken to the nurse for injections. Parents always seemed so worn out by their children and he wondered whether he and Mma Ramotswe would really want that.
"I can tell that you're thinking about it," said Mma Potokwane. "I think your mind is almost made up."
"I don't know ..."
"What you should do is just take the plunge," she went on. "You could give the children to Mma Ramotswe as a wedding present. Women love children. She will be very pleased. She'll be getting a husband and some children all on the same day! Any lady would love that, believe me."
"But . . ."
Mma Potokwane cut him short. "Now there are two children who would be very happy to go and live with you," she said. "Let them come on trial. You can decide after a month or so whether they can stay."
"Two children? There are two?" stuttered Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I thought . . ."
"They are a brother and sister," Mma Potokwane went on hurriedly. "We do not like to split up brothers and sisters. The girl is twelve and the boy is just five. They are very nice children."
"I don't know ... I would have to . . ."
"In fact," said Mma Potokwane, rising to her feet. "I think that you have met one of them already. The girl who brought you water. The child who cannot walk."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. He remembered the child, who had been very polite and appreciative. But would it not be rather burdensome to look after a handicapped child? Mma Potokwane had said nothing about this when she had first raised the subject. She had slipped in an extra child-the brother-and now she was casually mentioning the wheelchair, as if it made no difference. He stopped himself. He could be in that chair himself.
Mma Potokwane was looking out of the window. Now she turned to address him.
"Would you like me to call that child?" she asked. "I am not trying to force you, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, but would you like to meet her again, and the little boy?"
The room was silent, apart from a sudden creak from the tin roof, expanding in the heat. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked down at his shoes, and remembered, for a moment, how it was to be a child, back in the village, all those years ago. And remembered how he had experienced the kindness of the local mechanic, who had let him polish trucks and help with the mending of punctures, and who by this kindness had revealed and nurtured a vocation. It was easy to make a difference to other people's lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.
"Call them," he said. "I would like to see them."
Mma Potokwane smiled. "You are a good man, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni," she said. "I will send word for them to come. They will have to be fetched from the fields. But while we are waiting, I'm going to tell you their story. You listen to this."

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CHILDREN'S TALE

YOU MUST understand, said Mma Potokwane, that although it is easy for us to criticize the ways of the Basarwa, we should think carefully before we do that. When you look at the life they lead, out there in the Kalahari, with no cattle of their own and no houses to live in; when you think about that and wonder how long you and I and other Batswana would be able to live like that, then you realize that these bushmen are remarkable people.
There were some of these people who wandered around on the edge of the Makadikadi Salt Pans, up on the road over to the Okavango. I don't know that part of the country very well, but I have been up there once or twice. I remember the first time I saw it: a wide, white plain under a white sky, with a few tall palm trees and grass that seemed to grow out of nothing. It was such a strange landscape that I thought I had wandered out of Botswana into some foreign land. But just a little bit farther on it changes back into Botswana and you feel comfortable again.
There was a band of Masarwa who had come up from the Kalahari to hunt ostriches. They must have found water in the salt pans and then wandered on towards one of the villages along the road to Maun. The people up there are sometimes suspicious of Basarwa, as they say that they steal their goats and will milk their cows at night if they are not watched closely.
This band had made a camp about two or three miles outside the village. They hadn't built anything, of course, but were sleeping under the bushes, as they often do. They had plenty of meat-having just killed several ostriches-and were happy to stay there until the urge came upon them to move.
There were a number of children and one of the women had just given birth to a baby, a boy. She was sleeping with him at her side, a little bit away from the others. She had a daughter, too, who was sleeping on the other side of her mother. The mother woke up, we assume, and moved her legs about to be more comfortable. Unfortunately there was a snake at her feet, and she rested her heel on its head. The snake bit her. That's how most snakebites occur. People are asleep on their sleeping mats and snakes come in for the warmth. Then they roll over onto the snake and the snake defends itself.
They gave her some of their herbs. They're always digging up roots and stripping bark off trees, but nothing like that can deal with a lebolobolo bite, which is what this must have been. According to the daughter, her mother died before the baby even woke up. Of course, they don't lose any time and they prepared to bury the mother that morning. But, as you might or might not know, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, when a Mosarwa woman dies and she's still feeding a baby, they bury the baby too. There just isn't the food to support a baby without a mother. That's the way it is.
The girl hid in the bush and watched them take her mother and her baby brother. It was sandy there, and all they could manage was a shallow grave, in which they laid her mother, while the other women wailed and the men sang something. The girl watched as they put her tiny brother in the grave too, wrapped in an animal skin. Then they pushed the sand over them both and went back to the camp.
The moment they had gone, the child crept out and scrabbled quickly at the sand. It did not take her long, and soon she had her brother in her arms. There was sand in the child's nostrils, but he was still breathing. She turned on her heels and ran through the bush in the direction of the road, which she knew was not too far away. A truck came past a short time later, a Government truck from the Roads Department. The driver slowed, and then stopped. He must have been astonished to see a young Mosarwa child standing there with a baby in her arms. Of course he could hardly leave her, even though he could not make out what she was trying to tell him. He was going back to Francistown and he dropped her off at the Nyangabwe Hospital, handing her over to an orderly at the gate.
They looked at the baby, who was thin, and suffering badly from a fungal disease. The girl herself had tuberculosis, which is not at all unusual, and so they took her in and kept her in a TB ward for a couple of months while they gave her drugs. The baby stayed in the maternity nursery until the girl was better. Then, they let them go. Beds on the TB ward were needed for other sick people and it was not the hospital's job to look after a Mosarwa girl with a baby. I suppose they thought that she would go back to her people, which they usually do.
One of the sisters at the hospital was concerned. She saw the girl sitting at the hospital gate and she decided that she had nowhere to go. So she took her home and let her stay in her backyard, in a lean-to shack that they had used for storage but which could be cleared out to provide a room of sorts. This nurse and her husband fed the children, but they couldn't take them into the family properly, as they had two children of their own and they did not have a great deal of money.
The girl picked up Setswana quite quickly. She found ways of making a few pula by collecting empty bottles from the edge of the road and taking them back to the bottle store for the deposit. She carried the baby on her back, tied in a sling, and never let him leave her sight. I spoke to the nurse about her, and I understand that although she was still a child herself, she was a good mother to the boy. She made his clothes out of scraps that she found here and there, and she kept him clean by washing him under the tap in the nurse's backyard. Sometimes she would go and beg outside the railway station, and I think that people sometimes took pity on them and gave them money, but she preferred to earn it if she could.
This went on for four years. Then, quite without warning, the girl became ill. They took her back to the hospital and they found that the tuberculosis had damaged the bones very badly. Some of them had crumbled and this was making it difficult for her to walk. They did what they could, but they were unable to prevent her from ending up unable to walk. The nurse scrounged around for a wheelchair, which she was eventually given by one of the Roman Catholic priests. So now she looked after the boy from the wheelchair, and he, for his part, did little chores for his sister.
The nurse and her husband had to move. The husband worked for a meat-packing firm and they wanted him down in Lobatse. The nurse had heard of the orphan farm, and so she wrote to me. I said that we could take them, and I went up to Francistown to collect them just a few months ago. Now they are with us, as you have seen.
That is their story, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. That is how they came to be here.

MR J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. He looked at Mma Poto-kwane, who met his gaze. She had worked at the orphan farm for almost twenty years-she had been there when it had been started-and was inured to tragedy-or so she thought. But this story, which she had just told, had affected her profoundly when she had first heard it from the nurse in Francistown. Now it was having that effect on Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as well; she could see that.
"They will be here in a few moments," she said. "Do you want me to say that you might be prepared to take them?"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni closed his eyes. He had not spoken to Mma Ramotswe about it and it seemed quite wrong to land her with something like this without consulting her first. Was this the way to start a marriage? To take a decision of such momentum without consulting one's spouse? Surely not.
And yet here were the children. The girl in her wheelchair, smiling up at him and the boy standing there so gravely, eyes lowered out of respect.
He drew in his breath. There were times in life when one had to act, and this, he suspected, was one of them.
"Would you children like to come and stay with me?" he said. "Just for a while? Then we can see how things go."
The girl looked to Mma Potokwane, as if for confirmation.
"Rra Matekoni will look after you well," she said. "You will be happy there."
The girl turned to her brother and said something to him, which the adults did not hear. The boy thought for a moment, and then nodded.
"You are very kind, Rra," she said. "We will be very happy to come with you."
Mma Potokwane clapped her hands.
"Go and pack, children," she said. "Tell your housemother that they are to give you clean clothes."
The girl turned her wheelchair round and left the room, accompanied by her brother.
"What have I done?" muttered Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, under his breath.
Mma Potokwane gave him his answer.
"A very good thing," she said.