Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (19 page)

“These girls are chopping vegetables,” said Mr
Bobologo solemnly. “And there is stew for our meal tonight.”

“So I see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I see, too, that they
have just made tea.”

“It is better for them to drink tea
than strong liquor,” intoned Mr Bobologo, looking disapprovingly at one
of the girls, who cast her eyes downwards, in shame.

“Those are
my views too,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Tea refreshes. It clears the
mind. Tea is good at any time of the day, but especially at mid-day, when it is
so hot.” She paused, and then added, “As it is today.”

“You are right, Mma,” said Mr Bobologo. “I am a great
drinker of tea. I cannot understand why anybody would want to drink anything
else when there is tea to be had. I have never been able to understand
that.”

Mma Ramotswe now used an expression which is common in
Setswana and which indicates understanding, and firm endorsement of what
another has said. “Eee, Rra,” she said, with great depth of
feeling, drawing out the vowels. If anything could convey to this man that she
needed a cup of tea, this would. But it did not.

“This habit of
drinking coffee is a very bad thing,” went on Mr Bobologo. “Tea is
better for the heart than coffee is. People who drink coffee strain their
hearts. Tea has a calming effect on the heart. It makes the heart go more
slowly. Thump, thump. That is what the heart should sound like. I have always
said that.”

“Yes,” agreed Mma Ramotswe, weakly.
“That is very true.”

“That is why I am in favour of
tea,” pronounced Mr Bobologo with an air of finality, as might a speaker
at a kgotla meeting make his concluding statement.

They stood there in
silence. Mr Bobologo looked at the girls, who were still chopping vegetables
with an air of studied concentration. Mma Ramotswe looked at the cup of tea.
And the girls looked at the vegetables.

AFTER THEY
had finished inspecting the kitchen—which was very clean, Mma Ramotswe
noticed—they went out and sat on the verandah. There was still no tea,
and when Mma Ramotswe, in a last desperate bid, mentioned that she was thirsty,
a glass of water was called for. She sipped on this in a resigned way,
imagining that it was bush tea, which helped slightly, but not a great
deal.

“Now that you have seen the House of Hope,” said Mr
Bobologo, “you can ask me anything you like about it. Or you can tell me
what you think. I don’t mind. We have nothing to hide in the House of
Hope.”

Mma Ramotswe lifted her glass to her lips, noticing the
greasy fingerprints around its rim, the fingerprints of those girls in the
kitchen, she imagined. But this did not concern her. We all have fingerprints,
after all.

“I think that this is a very good place,” she
began. “You are doing very good work.”

“Yes, I
am,” said Mr Bobologo.

Mma Ramotswe looked out at the garden, at
the rows of beans. A large black dung beetle was optimistically rolling a tiny
trophy, a fragment of manure from the vegetable beds, back towards its home
somewhere—a small bit of nature struggling with another small bit of
nature, but as important as anything else in the world.

She turned to
Mr Bobologo. “I was wondering, Rra,” she began. “I was
wondering why the girls come here. And why do they stay, if they want to be bar
girls in the first place?”

Mr Bobologo nodded. This was clearly
the obvious question to ask. “Some of them are very young and are sent
here by the social work department or the police when they see them going into
bars. Those girls have to stay, or the police will take them back to their
village.

“Then there are the other bad girls, the ones our people
meet down at the bus station or outside the bars. They may have nowhere to
stay. They may be hungry. They may have been beaten up by some man. They are
ready to come here then.”

Mma Ramotswe listened carefully. The
House of Hope might be a rather dispiriting place, but it was better than the
alternative.

“This is very interesting. Most of us are doing
nothing about these things. You are doing something. That is very good.”
She paused. “But how did you come to do this work, Rra? Why do you give
up all your time to this thing? You are a busy teacher, and you have much to do
at the school. Instead, you very kindly come and give up all your time to this
House of Hope.”

Mr Bobologo thought for a moment. Mma Ramotswe
noticed that his hands were clasped together; her question had unsettled
him.

“I will tell you something, Mma,” he said after a few
moments. “I would not like you to speak about it, please. Will you give
me your word that you will not speak about it?”

Instinctively Mma
Ramotswe nodded, immediately realising that this would put her in difficulty if
he said something that she needed to report to her client. But she had agreed
to keep his secret, and she would honour that.

Mr Bobologo spoke
quietly. “Something happened to me, Mma. Something happened some years
ago, and I have not forgotten this thing. I had a daughter, you see, by my wife
who is late. She was our first born, and our only child. I was very proud of
her, as only a father can be proud. She was clever and did well at Gaborone
Secondary School.

“Then one day she came back from school, and
she was a different girl. Just like that. She paid no attention to me and she
started to go out at night. I tried to keep her in and she would scream at me
and stamp her feet. I did not know what to do. I could not raise a hand to her,
as there was no mother, and a father does not strike a motherless child. I
tried to reason with her, and she just said that I was an old man and I did not
understand the things that she now understood.

“And then she
left. She was just sixteen when this happened. She left, and I looked
everywhere and asked everybody about her. Until one day I heard that she had
been seen over the border, down in Mafikeng, and that this place where she had
been seen, this place …” He faltered, and Mma Ramotswe reached out
to him, in a gesture of sympathy and reassurance.

“You can carry
on when you are ready, Rra,” she said. But she already knew what he was
going to say and he need not have continued.

“This place was a
bar down there. I went there and my heart was hammering within me. I could not
believe that my daughter would be in such a place. But she was, and she did not
want to talk to me. I cried out to her and a man with a broken nose, a young
man in a smart suit, a tsotsi type, came and threatened me. He said,
Go
home, uncle. Your daughter is not your property. Go home, or pay for one of
these girls, like everybody else.
Those were his words, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe was silent. Her hand was on his shoulder, and it remained
there.

Mr Bobologo raised his head and looked up into the sky, high
above the shade netting. “And so I said to myself that I would work to
help these girls, because there are other fathers, just like me, who have this
awful thing happen to them. These men are my brothers, Mma. I hope that you
understand that.”

Mma Ramotswe swallowed. “I understand
very well,” she said. “I understand. Your heart is broken, Rra. I
understand that.”

“It is broken inside me,” echoed Mr
Bobologo. “You are right about that, Mma.”

There was not
much else to be said, and they made their way down the path to Mma
Ramotswe’s tiny white van, parked under a tree. But as they walked, Mma
Ramotswe decided to ask another question, more by way of making conversation
than to elicit information.

“What are your plans for the House of
Hope, Rra?”

Mr Bobologo turned and looked back at the house.
“We are going to build an extension there at the side,” he said.
“We shall have new showers and a room where the girls can learn sewing.
That is what we are going to do.”

“That will be
expensive,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Extensions always seem to cost more
than the house itself. These builders are greedy men.”

Mr
Bobologo laughed. “But I will shortly be in a position to pay,” he
said. “I think that I may be a rich man before too long.”

Had Mma Ramotswe been less experienced than she was, had she not been the
founder of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, this remark would have
caused her to falter, to miss her step. But she was an experienced woman, whose
job had shown her all of human life, and so she appeared quite unperturbed by
what he had said. But these last few words that Mr Bobologo uttered—every
one of them—fell into the pond of memory with a resounding splash.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BAD MEN ARE JUST LITTLE BOYS, UNDERNEATH

T
HE FOLLOWING morning at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, when
the morning rush had abated, Mma Ramotswe decided to stretch her legs. She had
been sitting at her desk, dictating a letter to a client, while Mma
Makutsi’s pencil moved over the page of her notepad with a satisfactory
squeak. Shorthand had been one of her strongest subjects at the Botswana
Secretarial College, and she enjoyed taking dictation.

“Many
secretaries these days don’t have shorthand,” Mma Makutsi had
remarked to Mma Ramotswe. “Can you believe it, Mma? They call themselves
secretaries, and they don’t have shorthand. What would Mr Pitman
think?”

“Who is this Mr Pitman?” asked Mma Ramotswe.
“What is he thinking about?”

“He is a very famous
man,” said Mma Makutsi. “He invented shorthand. He wrote books
about it. He is one of the great heroes of the secretarial
movement.”

“I see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Perhaps
they should put up a statue to him at the Botswana Secretarial College. In that
way he would be remembered.”

“That is a very good
idea,” said Mma Makutsi. “But I do not think they will do it. They
would have to raise the money from the graduates, and I do not think that some
of those girls—the ones who do not know anything about shorthand, and who
only managed to get something like fifty per cent in the exams—I do not
think they would pay.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded vaguely. She was not
particularly interested in the affairs of the Botswana Secretarial College,
although she always listened politely when Mma Makutsi sounded off about such
matters. Most people had something in their lives that was particularly
important to them, and she supposed that the Botswana Secretarial College was
as good a cause as any. What was it in her own case, she wondered? Tea? Surely
she had something more important than that; but what? She looked at Mma
Makutsi, as if for inspiration, but none came, and she decided to return to the
subject later, in an idle moment, when one had time for this sort of unsettling
philosophical speculation.

Now, the morning’s dictation finished
and the letters duly signed, Mma Ramotswe arose from her desk, leaving Mma
Makutsi to address the envelopes and find the right postage stamps in the mail
drawer. Mma Ramotswe glanced out of the window; it was precisely the sort of
morning she appreciated—not too hot, and yet with an empty, open sky,
flooded with sunlight. This was the sort of morning that birds liked, she
thought; when they could stretch their wings and sing out; the sort of morning
when you could fill your lungs with air and inhale nothing but the fragrance of
acacia and the grass and the sweet, sweet smell of cattle.

She left the
office by the back door and stood outside, her eyes closed, the sun on her
face. It would be good to be back in Mochudi, she thought, to be sitting in
front of somebody’s house peeling vegetables, or crocheting something
perhaps. That’s what she had done when she was a girl, and had sat with
her cousin, who was adept at crocheting and made place mat after place mat in
fine white thread; so many place mats that every table in Botswana could have
been covered twice over, but which somebody, somewhere, bought and sold on.
These days she had no time for crocheting, and she wondered whether she would
even remember how to do it. Of course, crocheting was like riding a bicycle,
which people said that you never forgot how to do once you had learned it. But
was that true? Surely there were things that one might forget how to do, if
enough time elapsed between the occasions on which one had to do whatever it
was that one had forgotten. Mma Ramotswe had once come across somebody who had
forgotten his Setswana, and she had been astonished, and shocked. This person
had gone to live in Mozambique as a young man and had spoken Tsonga there, and
had learned Portuguese too. When he came back to Botswana, thirty years later,
it seemed as if he were a foreigner, and she had seen him look puzzled when
people used quite simple, everyday Setswana words. To lose your own language
was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way. We must not lose
Setswana, she thought, even if we speak a great deal of English these days,
because that would be like losing part of one’s soul.