“That was hard,” he said.
“Very. But he came back to Botswana. Then he became late.” She realised that she had, in these few words, summed up the life of the man who meant more to her than any other. Yet anybody’s life story could be told in such a way, her own as much as anyone else’s. She had married a bad man and then been abandoned. She had lost her baby. She had loved her father, and when he died she had opened a detective agency. She had married again, this time to a good man. That was her life in a few sentences.
He started to talk again. “I was left some money by my uncle, and I had also saved hard. So I had enough to stop working for the mining company and buy a small farm. It is not bad land—not the best, but it is good enough for me. We—that is my wife and I—were very happy with it. I bought some cattle and have been living down there.”
She nodded encouragingly. It was the commonest dream in Botswana: a small patch of land to call one’s own and a herd of cattle. A man who achieved that had achieved everything. Of course it was beyond the reach of most, and sights were lowered accordingly. A share in a small herd of cattle, even half a cow, was as much as many could aspire to. She had been in a room once, a single room lived in by a family struggling to survive financially, and had seen, pinned on the wall, a grubby photograph of a cow. She had known immediately that this was the family’s most precious possession—the thing that transformed that mean room into a home.
“So I have had some cattle,” Mr. Moeti went on. “Then one died.”
“I am sorry, Rra.”
“Thank you.” He went on: “It did not die of any disease, Mma. Its legs were cut. Like this.” He made a sawing motion against his wrist. “It went down on the ground and I found it the next morning. This thing, you see, happened at night.”
This thing happened at night. The words made her shiver.
“And then, a week or so ago, it happened again. Another beast down. Same reason.” He looked at her. “Now you see, Mma, why I am anxious. That is the thing that is making me anxious.”
“Of course. Oh, Rra, this is very bad. Your cattle …”
“And it could get worse,” he muttered. “If somebody cuts the legs of your cattle, then might they not cut your legs too?”
She was quick to reassure him. “Oh, I don’t think so, Rra.”
“Don’t you, Mma?” There was a note of desperation in his voice. “You may not think that here in the middle of Gaborone, in this place with all its sunlight. But would you say that at night, out at my place, where the only light at night is the light of the moon and stars? And they can’t help you, Mma. The moon and stars are no help.”
She made a conciliatory gesture. “No, you’re right, Rra. I can see why you are frightened.” She paused. Why had he come to her, rather than to the authorities? “You have been to the police?”
He shook his head. “What can they do? They will say to me: somebody has killed your cattle, and then they will go away. How can they do anything more than that?”
It was a common view, even if a misguided one. The Botswana Police did act, and the courts did work, even if in other, less fortunate countries one might not be able to say the same thing with great conviction. “They might be able to—if you gave them some idea of who was doing it.”
His response came quickly. “I can’t. I have no idea.”
“You have enemies, Rra? Enemies from the past? Mining enemies?”
He appeared not to have expected this suggestion, and he frowned. “Why would I have enemies from mining? I was just the man who did the recruiting. I had nothing to do with what happened in the mines.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t. I just think that it’s important to consider who may have a reason to do this to you. Is there anybody like that?”
It is hard, she thought; it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hate of others.
He shook his head. “I have no idea, Mma. And that is why I have come to you. You are the one to find out these things and save my cattle. I am asking you to do that, Mma Ramotswe, because everybody says that you are the lady to help people.”
YOU ARE THE LADY to help people. The words came back to her as she made her way home that evening. It was pleasing to know that people thought that of you, but worrying too. You could not help everybody—nobody could—because the world was too full of need and troubles, a wide ocean of them, and one person could not begin to deal with all that. And yet, even if you were just one person, and even if you could never solve everybody’s problems, when somebody came to you and looked frightened, you could not say, Go away, I cannot do anything for you. You say, instead, Yes, I will do what I can. And then, when you go home from work at the end of the day, you sit on your small verandah watching the day turn to dusk, nursing a cup of red bush tea in your hands, and wonder what on earth you can possibly do to help.
CHAPTER FOUR
RICH PEOPLE HAVE MANY CATTLE
THAT EVENING was one of the nights in the week that Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Store, came to eat dinner at the modest rented house of his officially betrothed fiancée, Grace Makutsi, associate detective at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Their dinner arrangements had changed since the accident in which Phuti had lost his right foot and a small portion of his leg. Rescued from the clutches of his jealous aunt, during the rest of his recuperation he had been looked after by Mma Potokwane, who had found him a spare room in the back of her home at the orphan farm. At first Mma Makutsi had come to see him at the Potokwane house and had meals with him there, but this arrangement was never entirely satisfactory from her point of view.
“It’s not that I don’t like Mma Potokwane,” she had said. “She is a very great lady—one of the greatest ladies in Botswana. But …”
“You do not need to say it,” said Phuti. “She is also a very bossy lady. A good but bossy lady. I think there are many people like that.”
Mma Makutsi smiled. “Yes. Have you noticed how she tells us to eat up after she has put the food on the table? It is as if she is talking to one of the children. ‘Eat up now—leave nothing on your plate.’ Have you noticed that?”
Phuti had. “And she even told me the other day that I could have another piece of cake if I was good. I think she forgets that we are adults.”
“I think that maybe the time has come for us to have dinner at my house again,” said Mma Makutsi. “Do you think that you can drive yet?”
Phuti had shaken his head. He did not yet feel able to do that, he explained, although he hoped that it would not be long. The prosthetic foot he had been provided with by the hospital was taking a bit longer than he had imagined to get used to, and it would be a few weeks, he felt, before he could drive his car again. “But I have somebody from the furniture store who can drive me. He is one of our regular drivers, and we can transfer him from those duties. He is a very safe driver—you will not be worried.”
Mma Makutsi had been not so much worried as impressed. Having a driver whom one could casually allocate to new duties was something that seemed to belong to an entirely different world, to a plane of existence of which she had only the slightest inkling. She knew that the Radiphuti family was well-to-do, and she knew that when she and Phuti were married her life would change in certain respects, but she was not yet used to the idea.
“He will drive you all the time?” she asked.
Phuti shrugged. “Yes, if I want that.”
If I want that. That, she had thought, was the difference. She had never really been in a position to have what she wanted, and now … She imagined what it would be like. If you saw a pair of shoes, you could simply take out your purse and buy them. If you wanted a fridge for your house, or a stove, you could simply go to a shop where they had these things and say, “I will have that one, please. And that one too.” She paused. Would she do this? She thought not. Now that she was in a position to indulge such whims, she f
ound that she had no desire to do so, except, perhaps, for the shoes … Shoes, of course, were different, and yes, the future looked very positive on the shoe front.
With the driver now available to take Phuti to dinner at his fiancée’s house, Phuti had informed Mma Potokwane that he would be eating dinner with Mma Makutsi at her place.
“Is that wise?” Mma Potokwane had asked.
He had looked puzzled, and she had gone on to explain. “You are still recovering from your accident, Rra,” she said. “You need very good food.”
“But she can make that for me,” he protested. “Mma Makutsi is a very good cook.”
Mma Potokwane had backed off. “Oh, I am not suggesting she is not a good cook, Rra. It is really just a question of experience. I have many years of experience of cooking for other people. It is not something that anybody can do. Mma Makutsi is a very good secretary, but I do not think that they taught cooking at the Botswana Secretarial College.”
He had stood up for his fiancée. “She is an associate detective, Mma,” he said firmly. “And she learned to cook at home, not at secretarial college.”
Mma Potokwane had recognised defeat. She would never have been bettered in such a discussion by another woman, but Phuti Radiphuti was a man, and Mma Potokwane came from a generation of women that was reticent about arguing with men. “But you will still have breakfast here, Rra?”
“I shall, Mma Potokwane. And thank you for that. Thank you for looking after me so well.”
She had smiled broadly. “I have been happy to do that, Rra. And I am so pleased that you are getting better at walking now. Soon you will be one hundred per cent again.”
“I hope that I shall not need a stick for much longer.”
She hoped that too, she said, although a stick lent a man a certain air of authority. “In my village,” she said, “we had a headman who always walked with a stick. He said that it was very useful for beating small boys with if they misbehaved. That is not how headmen conduct themselves these days. Things have changed.”
“They have,” said Phuti. “It is not good to beat people, I think.”
Mma Potokwane had looked thoughtful, wistful perhaps. “Maybe not,” she said hesitantly. “Even if they deserve it, maybe not.”
DINNER THAT EVENING was a rich oxtail stew made with onions, carrots and mashed potatoes. Phuti arrived at six, and he and Mma Makutsi spent a pleasant half hour sitting at the table waiting for the stew to be ready and discussing the events of the day. Although Mma Makutsi respected the confidentiality of her clients, she did not think that this prevented passing on information to fiancés and spouses, who could be expected to be discreet about what they heard. She knew that Mma Ramotswe discussed her cases with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and she understood why this was necessary. “You have to be able to talk to your husband,” Mma Ramotswe had said to her. “If you don’t, then everything gets bottled up inside you and pop! it explodes.”
Mma Makutsi imagined Mma Ramotswe exploding. It would be like a large bottle of fizzy drink shaken up and then, as she put it so vividly, going pop! “One cannot go pop,” she had said. “It is not good for you.”
“No,” said Mma Ramotswe, “it is not. That is why it’s important to be able to talk to somebody.”
“Phuti is very careful about these things,” said Mma Makutsi. “If I tell him something, he never passes it on to anybody else. He sits there and listens, and then he comes up with some remark that is very helpful. He says, ‘What about this?’ or, ‘What about that?’ You know how men are, Mma. They often say ‘what about something or other.’ ”
Now, as she served the oxtail stew, she told Phuti about Mma Ramotswe’s meeting with Botsalo Moeti. He listened quietly, and was silent for a moment when she had finished.
“Envy,” he said.
She waited for him to explain further.
“Just envy,” he said. “That’s all.”
She had not thought of that. Mma Ramotswe had discussed the case with her on her return to the office, and they had both agreed that Mr. Moeti must have incurred the enmity of somebody who was cruel and spiteful enough to cut the tendons of his cattle; they had not thought of envy. But Mma Makutsi knew all about that; she had grown up in rural Botswana, and knew just how powerful envy could be in the country and in the villages. It was a familiar story.
“Somebody with fewer cattle,” she suggested.
Phuti nodded. “Or no cattle at all. Somebody who sees this Moeti doing well and growing fat. Somebody who thinks that it is not fair that he should have what he himself does not have. You know how it is, Grace.”
“I do. I have lived in the country. I remember a man having his grain store burned down because he had a much better crop than some other people.”
Phuti thought this a very apt example. “And who burned it down? You don’t need to tell me: it was somebody who had a bad crop because they were too lazy to weed the ground or take away the stones. That is the sort of person who is envious.”
“So if Mma Ramotswe were to ask Mr. Moeti who is the laziest person in the district, then that will be the person she should look out for?”
Phuti smiled at the suggestion. “That’s one way, I suppose.”
Mma Makutsi warmed to the theme. “Sometimes the best answer to a difficult problem is the simplest one,” she said. “We had a case once when we had to find out who was stealing government food at a college. The answer was the husband of one of the cooks. And how did we find this out? We saw how fat he was getting.”
Phuti chuckled. “There you are. It seems that people give themselves away most of the time. They cannot hide things.”
“Not from the eyes of a detective,” said Mma Makutsi, with an air of satisfaction. “We are trained to spot things, you see.”
The conversation moved on to the wedding. A date had at last been set and preparations were being made. The bride price—a tricky issue—had finally been resolved, with a payment of twenty cattle being made by the Radiphuti family to the senior male member of the Makutsi family, Mma Makutsi’s father being long dead. The negotiations had been unusually prolonged, that same male person, an uncle with a curious broken nose, having initially made an outrageous demand for ninety-seven cattle, or the cash equivalent, on the grounds that the Radiphuti family was well off and Mma Makutsi had achieved the mark of ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College. This embarrassing demand had eventually been dropped, but only after Mma Makutsi had endured an emotionally draining meeting with her uncle, during which she accused him of threatening her future happiness.
“You cannot ask for that, Uncle,” she said.
“Why not? They are rich. Rich people have many cattle. Everybody knows that. And where do they get all that money? From other people—from ordinary people. So there is nothing wrong in getting some of it back.”
She had defended the Radiphuti family. “They are rich because they have worked hard. That store of theirs started very small—they have built it up through hard work.”
He appeared not to hear. “They can still give some of the money back.”
“It is their money, Uncle. They did not steal it. They earned it.”
“Rich people think that they can take all the money in the country and put it in their banks in Gaborone. I am just trying to fight back for ordinary people—that is all.”
It was no use arguing with him, so she simply issued a threat. “I am not going to stand by and be shamed by this sort of thing. If you are going to ask for that many cattle, then I am going to call this marriage off. I can easily find a poor man to marry.”
The prospect of losing the bride price altogether had alarmed him. “All right, I will only ask for twenty-five cattle.”
“Twenty.”
He had accepted this ungraciously, and the negotiations had resumed. Twenty cattle was still excessive, but it was a figure to which the Radiphuti family could agree.
That done, there was now no
impediment to the marriage, and the preparations could begin in earnest. As was customary, there would be two celebrations: one in Gaborone at the home of the Radiphutis, and the other in Bobonong at the home of the Makutsi uncle with the broken nose. Phuti had tactfully offered to pay for both, and his offer had been rapidly accepted by the uncle. “It is right that they should pay for our party too,” he said. “With all that money they can easily afford it. I hope that they will give us some new chairs too, for the guests to sit on. We only have four chairs, and there will be two hundred people there. Four chairs will not be enough.”
“You must not say anything to Phuti about this,” warned Mma Makutsi. “You cannot expect people to give you chairs. I will ask him, though, whether he can lend us some.”
“He has many chairs in that big store of his,” sniffed the uncle. “He should give us some.”
The guest list, as at all weddings, of whatever size, was also proving difficult. On the Radiphuti side there were three hundred and twenty relatives, and that excluded distant cousins who would certainly feel offended if not invited. If this class of distant relatives was included, then the number went up to five hundred and sixteen, with a few places being kept in reserve for relatives of whose existence the family was currently ignorant but who would step forward once the invitations had been issued. Fortunately the Makutsi side was much smaller, with eighty-three relatives appearing on the list agreed by Mma Makutsi and her uncle. To this grand total would have to be added friends and colleagues: Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, of course, but also Mr. Polopetsi, who still worked in the garage occasionally, and, more controversially, Charlie and Fanwell. Fanwell’s grandmother had asked whether she could come, as it was a long time since she had been to a wedding and she had heard a great deal about Mma Makutsi from her grandson.
“All Botswana then!” Mma Makutsi had sighed. “The whole country. Maybe we should just put an advertisement in the Botswana Daily News and say that the whole country can come to the wedding and eat as much beef as it can manage. Maybe that is our patriotic duty now.”
The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party Page 4
