The Kalahari Typing School for Men

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mma Ramotswe laughed. She had immediately taken to this man, whoever he was; he was the opposite of Mr. Buthelezi. You could not imagine this man being photographed in a wide-brimmed hat.

  “I must tell you my name,” said the man. “I am Molefelo, and I come from Lobatse. I am a civil engineer, but I have a hotel down there, too. I used to build things, but now I just sit in an office and run them. It is not as much fun, I’m afraid.”

  Mma Ramotswe listened politely. She had heard vaguely of Mr. Molefelo, she thought. She knew Lobatse, and she had probably been to his hotel once or twice with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni when they had gone down there together to visit her cousin. In fact, the last time she had been there, she had eaten a meal which had made her very ill; but this was not the time to mention that, she thought.

  “We can go into the office,” she said, pointing to the door. “It will be more comfortable to sit down. My assistant will make us tea and we can talk.”

  Mr. Molefelo glanced towards the door of the agency, where Mma Makutsi could be seen, peering out at them.

  “I wonder if we could stay outside,” he said hesitantly. “It is such a pleasant day and.…” He paused before continuing. “Actually, Mma, what I have to say is very private. Very, very private. I wonder if we could talk about it outside? We could take a walk, perhaps. I could talk to you while we were walking.”

  Mma Ramotswe had encountered embarrassment before in her clients and understood that it was often no use trying to reassure them. If there was something which was really private, the presence of another often inhibited them. Of course, there was nothing—or almost nothing—that she had not heard. Nothing would astonish her, although there were occasions on which she marvelled at the ability people had to complicate their lives.

  “I’m happy to go for a walk,” she said to Mr. Molefelo. “I will just tell my assistant that I am going, and then I am ready.”

  THEY WALKED along a path that led back from the garage in the direction of the dam. There were thorn bushes and the sweet smell of grazing cattle. As they walked, Mr. Molefelo talked, and Mma Ramotswe listened.

  “You may wonder, Mma, why I am telling you this, but I think you should know that I am a man who has changed. Something happened to me two months ago which has made me think about everything, about my whole life and how I’ve led it, and about how I should lead the rest of it. Do you know what I’m talking about?

  “You are not talking to a particularly bad man, or anything like that. You are talking to a man who is probably much like other men. Just an average sort of man. There are thousands of men like me in Botswana. Ordinary men. Not very clever and not very stupid. Just ordinary men.”

  “You are being modest,” interrupted Mma Ramotswe. “You are an engineer, aren’t you? That is a clever thing to be.”

  “Not really. You have to be able to do mathematics and technical drawing, maybe. But beyond that, it’s mostly common sense.” He was silent for a moment before continuing. “But that’s not the point about being ordinary. The point about being ordinary is that the average man does some bad things in his life and some good things. There are probably no men who have done no bad things. Probably not one.”

  “Nor women,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Women are just as bad as men. Sometimes they are worse.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Mr. Molefelo. “I do not know many women very well. I do not know how women behave. But that is not the point. I was talking about men, and I think I do know how men behave.”

  “You have done a bad thing?” asked Mma Ramotswe bluntly. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Mr. Molefelo nodded. “I have. But don’t worry, it was not too bad—I haven’t killed anybody or anything like that. I’ll tell you about the bad thing I did—although I haven’t told anybody else, you know. But first I should like to tell you about what happened a few months ago. Then you will understand why I want to talk to you.

  “As I told you, I have a hotel down in Lobatse. This has done quite well—it is a good place for weddings—and I have used the money I made from it to buy land. I bought land down near the border with Namibia, right down there. It takes me four hours’ driving from Lobatse to get there, and so I can’t go down every week. I have a man, though, who looks after it for me, and there are some families who live on the land and do work for me.”

  “And this man, is he good with cattle? That is very important,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  “Yes, he is good with cattle. But he is also good with ostriches. I have a good flock of ostriches down there and some fine birds. Big ones. Strong. It’s a good place for ostriches.”

  Mma Ramotswe did not know about ostriches. She had seen them, of course, and she knew that many people were keen on them. But in her mind, they were a poor substitute for cattle. She imagined a Botswana covered with ostriches rather than cattle. What a strange place that would be; undignified, really.

  “My ostriches are well known for their good meat,” Mr. Molefelo went on. “But they are also good breeders. I have one who is very kind to the hens and has many children. He is a very fine ostrich, and I keep him in a special paddock so that he does not fight. I have seen him kick, you know. Ow! If he kicked a man, he would divide him in two. I’m not exaggerating. Two pieces. Down the middle.”

  “I shall be very careful,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  “I saw a man kicked by an ostrich once. He was the brother of one of the men who works on my farm, and he was not very strong. A long time ago, when he was a child, he was trodden upon by some cattle and hurt his back. He did not grow up straight, because his spine was twisted. So he could not do much work. Then he got TB, and that made him even worse. All that coughing, I suppose, makes you very weak.

  “He came to see his brother one day, and they gave him some beer, although this weak man was not used to drinking. He liked the beer, and it made him feel brave for once in his life. So he went over to the ostrich pen and climbed over the tall fence that we use to keep the ostriches in. There was an ostrich nearby who was watching him, and he was very surprised when a man ran up to him waving his arms. The ostrich tried to run away, but he caught his wing in the fence and was slow. So the man caught him, and that was when the ostrich kicked him.

  “I had heard all this shouting when the man climbed over the fence, and I came to see what was happening. I saw him trying to seize the ostrich’s tail feathers, and then I saw him going up in the air and landing down with a thump. He never got up, but lay there while the ostrich looked at him. And that was the end of that man.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked down at the ground, thinking of this poor man with his twisted spine. “I am sorry to hear about that man,” she said. “There are many sad things that happen, and sometimes we do not hear about them. All the time, there are these sad things that God sends Africa.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Molefelo. “You are right, Mma. The world is very cruel to us sometimes.”

  They walked on a few paces, thinking about what Mma Ramotswe had said. Then Mr. Molefelo continued. “I must now tell you what happened to me just a few months ago. This is not just a story that I am telling you; it is so that you can understand why I have come to see you.

  “I went down to my farm with my wife and my two sons. They are strong boys—one is this high and one is this high.” He gestured with the palm of his hand held upwards; it was never a good idea to show the height of a person with the palm facing downwards, as this could push the spirit down. “We were going to stay there for a week, but something happened on the second night which changed that. Some men came to the farm from over the border. They came at night, riding on their horses. They were ostrich rustlers.”

  Mma Ramotswe stopped and looked at Mr. Molefelo in astonishment.

  “There are ostrich rustlers? They steal your ostriches?”

  Mr. Molefelo nodded. “They are very dangerous men. They come in bands with their guns, and they chase the ostriches back over the border into Namibia. The Nam
ibians say that they are trying to catch them, but there are never enough policemen. Never. They say they will look for them, but how do you find men like that who live out in the bush, in camps? They are like ghosts. They come and go at night, and you will find a ghost more easily than you will find those men. They are men who have no names, no family, nothing. They are like leopards.

  “I was sleeping in the house when they came. I am not a heavy sleeper, and I heard a noise down in the ostrich paddocks. So I got out of bed to see whether there was some creature coming to eat the ostriches—a lion, perhaps, or a hyena. I took a big torch and my rifle, and I walked down the path that led from the house to the paddocks. I did not need to switch on the torch, as there was a very large moon, which made shadows on the ground.

  “I had almost reached the paddock when I was suddenly knocked to the ground. I dropped my rifle and my torch, and my face was in the dirt. I remember breathing the dust and coughing, and then I was kicked in the side, painfully, and a man pulled my head up and looked at me. He had a rifle in his hand—not my rifle—and he put the barrel at my head and said something to me. I did not understand him, as he was not speaking in Setswana. It may have been Hereto or one of the languages they speak over there. It could even have been Afrikaans, which quite a lot of them use down there, not just the Boers.

  “I thought I was going to die, and so I thought of my sons. I wondered what would happen to them when they no longer had a father. Then I thought of my own father, for some reason, and I remembered walking with him through the bush, just as we are doing now, Mma, and talking to him about cattle. I thought that I would like to do that with my own sons, but I had been too busy, and now it was too late. These were strange thoughts. I was not thinking of myself but of other people.”

  Mma Ramotswe stooped down to pick up an interesting-looking stick. “I can understand that,” she said, examining the stick, “I’m sure that I would think the same.”

  But would she? She had never been in that position; she had never been in danger at all, really, and she had no idea what would go through her mind. She would like to imagine that she would think of her father, Obed Ramotswe, the Daddy, that great man; but perhaps if matters came to such a pass, the mind would do the wrong thing and start thinking about mundane issues, like the electricity bill. It would be sad to leave this life on such a note, worrying about whether the Botswana Electricity Corporation had been paid. The Botswana Electricity Corporation would never think about her, she was sure.

  “This man was very rough. He pulled my head back. Then he made me sit up, with the gun still pointing at my head, while he called out to one of his friends. They came out of the shadows, on their horses, and they stood about me, with the horses breathing against me. They talked among themselves, and I realised that they were discussing whether or not to shoot me. I am sure that they were talking about this, although I could not understand their language.

  “Then I saw a light and heard somebody in the distance call out in Setswana. It was one of my men, who must now have woken up and had shouted out to the others. This made the man who was holding me hit me on the side of the head with his rifle. Then he stood up and ran over to a tree where he had tied his horse. There was more shouting from my men, and I heard them start the engine of the truck. One of the men who had surrounded me shouted out something to the others, and they rode off. I was left alone, feeling the blood run down the side of my face. I still have a scar, which you can see, look, just here between my cheek and my ear. That is my reminder of what happened.”

  “You were a lucky man to have escaped,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They could easily have shot you. If you weren’t here talking to me, I would have thought the story ended quite differently.”

  Mr. Molefelo smiled. “I thought that, too. But it did not. And I was able to go back to see my wife and my sons, who started to cry when they saw their father with blood streaming down his face. And I was crying, too, I think, and shaking all over like a dog who’s been thrown in the water. And I was like this for more than a day, I think. I was very ashamed. A man should not behave like that. But I was like a frightened little boy.

  “We went back to Lobatse so that I could see one of the doctors there who knew how to stitch up faces. He gave me injections and drew the wound together. Then I went back to work and tried to forget about what had happened. But I could not, Mma. I kept thinking about what this meant for my life. I know that this may sound strange to you, but it made me think about everything I had done. It made me weigh up my life. And it made me want to tie things up, so that next time—and I hope there will not be a next time—the next time I faced death like that, I could think: I have set my life in order.”

  “That is a very good idea,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We should all do that, I think. But we never do. For example, my electricity bill—”

  “Those are small things,” Mr. Molefelo interjected. “Bills and debts are nothing, really. What really counts are the things that you have done to people. That is what counts. And that is why I’ve come to see you, Mma. I want to confess. I do not go to the Catholic Church, where you can sit in a box and tell the priest all about the things you have done. I cannot do that. But I want to talk to somebody, and that is why I have come to see you.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood. Shortly after opening the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, she had discovered that part of her role would be to listen to people and to help them unburden themselves of their past. And indeed her subsequent reading of Clovis Andersen had confirmed this. Be gentle, he had written. Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement on them, but listen. Just listen.

  They had reached a place where the path dipped down into a dried-up watercourse. There was a termite mound to one side of it, and on the other, a small expanse of rock rising out of the red earth. There was the chewed-up pith of sugarcane lying to the side of the path and a fragment of broken blue glass, which caught the sun. Not far away a goat was standing on its hind legs, nibbling at the less accessible leaves of a shrub. It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions—small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  OLD TYPEWRITERS, GATHERING DUST

  M MA MAKUTSI watched Mma Ramotswe set off for her walk with Mr. Molefelo and said to herself: “This is one of the limitations of being only an assistant detective. I miss the important things. I hear about the clients at one remove. I am really just a secretary, not an assistant detective.” And, turning to the pile of garage bills which was now ready for dispatch, she thought: “I am not really an assistant garage manager, either; I am a garage secretary, which is a different thing altogether.”

  She rose from her desk to make herself a cup of bush tea. Even if a client had arrived—and there was no guarantee that the consultation taking place on the walk would mature into a full-scale, paid investigation—the future of the agency, and of her job, looked doubtful. There was also the question of money. She knew that Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni paid her as generously as they could, but after she had paid her increasingly expensive rent and sent money home to her parents and aunts in Bobonong, there was virtually nothing left for her to spend on herself. She was aware of the fact that some of her dresses were wearing thin and that her shoes would need resoling before too long. She did her best to keep her appearance smart, but it was difficult on a tight budget. At the moment, all that she had in her savings account was two hundred and thirty-eight pula and forty-five thebe. That would not be enough for a pair of good new shoes or a couple of dresses. And once she had spent that, there wou
ld be nothing left to buy the medicines that she might need for her brother.

  Mma Makutsi realised that the only way of improving her situation was to take on extra work in her spare time. The driving school had been a good idea, but the more she thought about it, the more she realised that it would not work. She imagined what would happen if she were to speak about it to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. He would be supportive, of course, but she could hear his response, even before he made it.

  “The insurance will be too expensive,” he would point out. “If you are going to let learners drive a car, you have to pay a very high premium. The insurance companies know that they will crash.”

  He would tell her what the extra premium was likely to be, and she would be shocked by the figure. If that was what she would have to pay, then her earlier calculations were all wrong. They would have to charge very much more for each lesson, and that would cut out any advantage they might have over the large driving schools, which could use economies of scale. So the idea, which had seemed to offer a real prospect of extra money, would have to be abandoned, and she would have to start thinking of alternatives.

  It was while she was typing a letter to one of the garage’s recalcitrant debtors that the idea occurred to her. It was such a strikingly good idea that it took over her train of thought and became incorporated in the letter itself:

  “Dear Sir,” she typed, “We have written to you before on 25/11 and 18/12 and 14/2 about the outstanding sum of five hundred and twenty-two pula in respect of the repair of your vehicle. We note that you have not paid this sum and we have therefore no alternative but to.… Isn’t it an interesting thing that most typists are women? When I was at the Botswana Secretarial College, it was only women, and yet men have to type if they want to use computers, which they do if they are engineers or businessmen or work in banks. I have seen them sitting in banks trying to type with one finger and wasting a lot of time. Why do they not learn to type properly? The answer to that is that they are ashamed to say they cannot type and they do not want to go and have to learn with a class full of girls. They are worried that the girls would be better at typing than they are! And they would be! Even those useless girls who only got fifty percent at the college. Even they would be better than men. So why not have a special class for men—a typing school for men? They could come after work and learn to type with other men. We could hold this class in a church hall, perhaps, so that when the men came to it, people would think that they were just going to a church meeting. I could teach it myself. I would be the principal and would give the men a special certificate at the end of the course. This is to certify that Mr. So-and-So completed the course on typing for men and is now a proficient typist. Signed, Grace P. Makutsi, Principal, Kalahari Typing School for Men.”