“This lady is a visitor,” Mr Bobologo announced, somewhat obviously, thought Mma Ramotswe.
One of the girls muttered something, which may have been a greeting but which was difficult to make out. The other one on the lower bunk nodded her head, while the girl sitting on the middle bunk managed a weak smile.
“You have a nice house here,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Are you happy?”
The girls exchanged glances.
“Yes,” said Mr Bobologo. “They are very happy.”
Mma Ramotswe watched the girls, who did not appear inclined to contradict Mr Bobologo.
“And do you get good food here, ladies?” she asked.
“Very good food,” said Mr Bobologo. “These good-time bar girls do not eat properly. They just drink dangerous liquor. When they are here they are given good, Botswana cooking. The food is very healthy.”
“It is good to hear you telling me all this,” Mma Ramotswe said, pointedly addressing her remark to the girls.
“That is all right,” said Mr Bobologo. “We are happy to talk to visitors.” He touched Mma Ramotswe’s elbow and pointed out into the corridor. “I must show you the kitchen,” he said. “And we must allow these girls to get on with their work.”
It was not very apparent to Mma Ramotswe what this work was, and she had to suppress a smile as they walked back down the corridor towards the kitchen. He really was a most irritating man, this Mr Bobologo, with his tendency to speak for others and his one-track mind. Mma Holonga had struck Mma Ramotswe as being a reasonable woman, and yet she was seriously entertaining Mr Bobologo as a suitor, which seemed very strange. Surely Mma Holonga, with her wealth and position, could find somebody better than this curious teacher with his ponderous, didactic style.
They now stood at the door of the kitchen, in which two young women, barefoot and wearing light pink housecoats, were chopping vegetables on a large wooden chopping board. A pot of stew was boiling on the stove—boiling too vigorously, thought Mma Ramotswe—and a large cup of tea was cooling on the table. It would be good to be offered tea, she thought longingly, and that very cup looked just right.
“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.
<
br /> “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
THE 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.
Mma Makutsi, of course, had another language tucked away in her background. Her mother had been a speaker of Ikalanga, because she had come from Marapong, where they spoke a dialect of Ikalanga called Lilima. That made life very complicated, thought Mma Ramotswe, because that meant that she spoke a minor version of a minor language. Mma Makutsi had been brought up speaking both Setswana, her father’s language, and this strange version of Ikalanga, and then had learned English at school, because that was how one got on in life. You could never even get to the Botswana Secretarial College if you spoke no English, and you would certainly never get anywhere near ninety-seven per cent unless your English was almost faultless, like the English that schoolteachers used to speak.
Mma Ramotswe had more or less forgotten that Mma Makutsi spoke Ikalanga until one day she had used an Ikalanga word in the middle of a sentence, and it had stuck out.
“I have hurt my gumbo,” Mma Makutsi had said.
Mma Ramotswe had looked at her in surprise. “Your gumbo?”
“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. “When I was walking to work today, I stepped into a pothole and hurt my gumbo.” She paused, noticing the look of puzzlement on Mma Ramotswe’s face. Then she realised. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Gumbo is foot in Ikalanga. If you speak Ikalanga, your foot is your gumbo.”
“I see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is a very strange word. Gumbo.”
“It is not strange,” said Mma Makutsi, slightly defensively. “There are many different words for foot. It is foot in English. In Setswana it is
lonao, and in Ikalanga it is gumbo, which is what it really is.”
Mma Ramotswe laughed. “There is no real word for foot. You cannot say it is really gumbo, because that is true only for Ikalanga-speaking feet. Each foot has its own name, depending on the language which the foot’s mother spoke. That is the way it works, Mma Makutsi.”
That had ended the conversation, and no more was said of gumbos.
These, and other, thoughts went through Mma Ramotswe’s head as she stood outside the office that morning, stretching, and allowing her mind to wander this way and that. After a few minutes, though, she decided that it was time to get back into the office. Mma Makutsi would have finished addressing the letters by now, and she wanted to tell her about yesterday’s visit to the House of Hope. There was a lot to be said about that, and she thought it would be useful to discuss it with her assistant. Mma Makutsi often came up with very shrewd observations, although in the case of Mr Bobologo no particular shrewdness was required to work out what his motives were. And yet, and yet … One could not say that he was an insincere man. He was patently sincere when it came to bar girls, but marriage, perhaps, was another matter. Mma Makutsi might have valuable insights into this, and this would help clarify the situation in Mma Ramotswe’s mind.
Mma Ramotswe opened her eyes and started to make her way back into the office. She was intercepted in the doorway, though, by Mma Makutsi, who looked anxious.
“There is something wrong,” Mma Makutsi whispered to her. “There is something wrong with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. Back there.” She gestured towards the garage. “There is something wrong with him.”
“Has he hurt himself?” Mma Ramotswe always dreaded the possibility of an accident, particularly with those careless apprentices being allowed to raise cars on ramps and do other dangerous things. Mechanics hurt themselves, it was well-known, just as butchers often had parts of fingers missing, a sight which always made Mma Ramotswe’s blood run cold, although the enthusiasm of the butchers for their great chopping knives—the guilty blades, no doubt—seemed undiminished.
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