The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

CHAPTER ELEVEN DR CRONJE

WHILE MMA MAKUTSI dealt with her diminutive client, Mma Ramotswe made the brief drive out to Mochudi; forty minutes if one rushed, an hour if one meandered. And she did meander, slowing down to look at some cattle who had strayed onto the verge of the road. She was her father’s daughter after all, and Obed Ramotswe had never been able to pass by cattle without casting his expert eye over them. She had inherited some of that ability, a gift really, even if her eye would never be as good as his had been. He had cattle lineages embedded in his memory, like a biblical narrative setting out who begat whom; he knew every beast and their qualities. And she had always dreamed that when he died, at the very moment at which that bit of the old Botswana went, the cattle had somehow known. She understood that this was impossible, that it was sentimental, but the thought had given her comfort. When we die there are many farewells, spoken and unspoken—and the imagined farewell of the cattle was one of these.

The cattle by the roadside were not in particularly good condition, Mma Ramotswe thought. There was little grazing for them at this time of the year, with the rains a few months away and such grass as there was dry and brittle. The cattle would find something, of course, leaves, bits and pieces of vegetation that would provide some sustenance; but these beasts looked defeated and listless. They would not have a good owner, Mma Ramotswe concluded as she continued on her journey. To start with, they should not be out on the verge like that. Not only was that a risk to the cattle themselves, but it was a terrible danger to anybody driving on the road at night. Some cattle were the colour of night and seemed to merge perfectly into the darkness; a driver coming round a corner or surmounting a hump in the road might suddenly find himself face-to-face with one of these cattle and be unable to stop in time. If that happened, then those in the car could be impaled on the horns of the cow as it was hurled through the windscreen—that had happened, and often. Mma Ramotswe shuddered, and concentrated on the winding strip of tar ahead. Cattle, goats, children, other drivers—there were so many perils on the road.

By the time she arrived in Mochudi, her dawdling on the road had made her late. She looked at her watch. It was twelve o’clock and she had arranged to meet the doctor at a restaurant on the edge of the town fifteen minutes earlier; he had to have an early lunch, he explained, as he would be on duty at the hospital at two. She wondered if he would wait; she had telephoned him out of the blue and asked to see him—there were many who would decline an invitation of that sort, but he had agreed without any probing into what her business with him might be. All she had said was that she was a friend of Tati Monyena; that, it seemed, was enough.

Mochudi had a number of restaurants, most of them very small affairs, one small room at the most, or a rickety bench outside a lean-to shack serving braised maize cobs and plates of pap; simple fare, but filling and delicious. Then there were the liquor restaurants, which were larger and noisier. Some of these stayed one step ahead of the police and the tribal authorities, and were regularly being closed down for the disturbance they created and their cavalier attitude to licencing hours. Mma Ramotswe did not like these, with their dark interiors and their groups of drinkers engaged in endless and heated debates over their bottles of beer; that was not for her.

There was one good restaurant, though, one that she liked, which had a garden and tables in that garden. The kitchens were clean, the food wholesome, and the waitresses adept at friendly conversation. She went there from time to time when she felt that she needed to catch up on Mochudi news, and she would spin out her lunch to two or three hours, talking or just sitting under one of the trees and looking up at the birds on the branches above. It was a good place for birds, a bird restaurant, and the more confident amongst their number would flutter down to the ground to peck at the crumbs of food under the tables, minute zebra finches, bulbuls, plain birds that had no name as far as she knew.

The tiny white van drew up in front of the restaurant and Mma Ramotswe alighted. A wide acacia tree stood at the entrance to the restaurant garden, an umbrella against the sun, and a dog sat just outside the lacy shadow of the tree, his eyes half closed, soaking up the winter sun. A couple of flies walked across the narrow part of his nose, but he did not flinch. Mma Ramotswe saw that only one of the outside tables was occupied, and she knew immediately that it was the doctor. Half Xhosa, half Afrikaner. It could only be him.

“Dr Cronje?”

The doctor looked up from the photocopied article he had been reading. Mma Ramotswe noticed the graphs across the page, the tables of results. Behind the things that happened to one, the coughs and pains, the human fevers, there were these cold figures.

He started to rise to his feet, but Mma Ramotswe urged him not to. “I am sorry to be late. It is my fault. I drove very slowly.” She noticed that the doctor had green eyes; green eyes and a skin that was very light brown, the colour of chocolate milk, a mixture of Africa and Europe.

“Drive slowly,” he mused. “If only everyone would do that, we’d be less busy in the hospital, Mma Ramotswe.”

A waitress appeared and took their order. He put his papers away in a small folder and then turned his gaze to Mma Ramotswe. “Mr Monyena told us that you might want to speak to people,” he said. “So here I am. He’s the boss.”

He spoke politely enough, but there was a flatness in his tone. That explains it, thought Mma Ramotswe. That explains why he came.

“So he told you that I have been asked to look into those unexplained deaths,” she said. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” he said. “Though why we need anybody else to do that beats me. We had an internal enquiry, you know. Mr Monyena was on that himself. Why have another one?”

Mma Ramotswe was interested. Tati Monyena had not told her about an internal enquiry, which must have been an oversight on his part.

“And what did it conclude?” she asked.

Dr Cronje rolled his eyes up in a gesture which indicated contempt for internal enquiries. “Nothing,” he said. “Absolutely nothing. The trouble was that some people could not bring themselves to admit the obvious. So the enquiry petered out. Technically it hasn’t been wound up.”

The waitress now brought them their drinks: a pot of bush tea for Mma Ramotswe and a cup of coffee for the doctor. Mma Ramotswe poured her tea and took a first sip.

“What do you think it should have decided?” she asked. “What if you had been on it?”

The doctor smiled—for the first time, thought Mma Ramotswe—and it was not a smile that lasted long.

“I was,” he said.

“You were?”

“I was a member of the enquiry. It was the hospital superintendant, Mr Monyena, one of the senior staff nurses, somebody nominated by Chief Linchwe, and me. That was it.”

Mma Ramotswe took another sip of tea. Somebody had started to play music inside the restaurant, and for a few seconds she thought she recognised the tune as one that had been played by Note Mokoti, her former husband. She caught her breath; Note was over, gone, but when she heard his music, the tunes he liked to play, which she sometimes did, a tinge of pain could come. But it was a different tune, something like one that he played, but different.

“When you say that there was something very obvious that people could not admit, what was that, Rra?”

The doctor reached out and touched the rim of his coffee cup, idly drawing a finger round it. “Natural causes,” he said. “Cardiac and pulmonary failure in two of the cases. Renal in the other. Case closed, Mma…Mma…”

He had already used her name, but she supplied it again. “Ramotswe.”

“Ramotswe. Sorry.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Then the doctor looked up into the tree, as if trying to find something. She saw the green eyes moving, searching. The green eyes were from the Afrikaner, but the softness of his face, a masculine softness but a softness nonetheless, came from the mother, came from Africa.

“So there’s really nothing further to be done about it,” Mma Ramotswe said gently.

The doctor did not reply for a moment; he was still looking up into the tree above them. “In my view, no,” he said. “But that won’t stop the talk, the pointing of fingers.”

“At?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“Me,” he said. He looked down again and their eyes met. “Yes, me. There are people in the hospital who say that I’m bad luck. They look at me in that way…you know, that way which people use here. As if they’re a bit frightened of you. They say nothing, but they look.”

It was hard for Mma Ramotswe to respond to this. She had a sense that Dr Cronje was one of those people who did not fit in—wherever they were. They were outsiders, treated with a reserve which could easily become suspicion, and that suspicion could easily blossom into a whispering campaign of ugly rumours. But what puzzled her was why she herself should have this uneasy feeling about him, which she did. Why should she feel this discomfort in his presence when she knew next to nothing about him? It was intuition again; useful sometimes but on other occasions a doubtful benefit.

“People are like that,” she said at last. “If you come from somewhere else, they can be like that. It is not easy to be a stranger, is it?”

He looked at her as she spoke; it seemed to her that he was surprised that she should speak like this, with such frankness. “No,” he said, and then paused before he continued. “And that is what I have been all my life. All of it.”

The waitress arrived with their plates. There was stew, and a plate of vegetables for each of them.

He looked at his plate. “I shouldn’t talk like this, Mma. I have nothing to complain about, really. This is a good place.”

Mma Ramotswe lifted up her fork, and then put it down again. She reached across and laid a hand upon his wrist. He looked down at where her hand rested.

“You mustn’t be sad, Rra,” she said.

He frowned, and laid down his knife.

“I wish I could go home,” he said. “I love this country. I love it. But it’s not home for me.”

“Well you could go home,” Mma Ramotswe said. She nodded in the direction of the border, not far across a few miles of scrub bush, behind the hills. “You could go home now, couldn’t you? There’s nothing stopping you.”

“That place is not home any more,” he said. “I left it so long ago, I don’t feel at home there.”

“And this place? Here?”

“It’s where I live. But I can’t ever belong here, can I? I will never be from this place. I will never be one of these people, no matter how long I stay. I’ll always be an outsider.”

She knew what he meant. It was all very well for her, she thought; she knew exactly where she came from and where she belonged, but there were many people who did not, who had been uprooted, forced out by need or victimisation, by being simply the wrong people in the wrong place. There were many such people in Africa, and they ate a very bitter fruit; they were extra, unwanted persons, like children who are not loved.

She wanted to say something to this man, this lonely doctor, but she realised there was little comfort she could give him. Yet she could try.

“Don’t think, Rra,” she said, “that what you are doing, your work in the hospital up there, is not appreciated. Nobody might ever have said thank you to you, but I do now, Rra. I say thank you for what you do.”

He had lowered his gaze, but now he looked at her, and she found herself staring into those unnerving green eyes.

“Thank you, Mma,” he said. And then he picked up his knife and fork and began to eat.

Mma Ramotswe watched discreetly as she started on her own plate of food. She saw the way his knife moved, delicately, with precision.

MR J.L.B. MATEKONI talked to Charlie that afternoon.

“You can stop work today, Charlie,” he said. “I have made up your final pay packet.”

Charlie wiped his hands on a piece of paper towel. “This stuff isn’t as good as lint, Boss,” he said, frowning at the towel. “Lint gets grease off much better.”

“Paper towel is the modern thing,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Paper towel and that scouring powder. That is very good for grease.”

“Well, I won’t need that any more,” said Charlie. “Except maybe when I service the taxi.”

“Don’t forget to do that,” warned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “It is an old car. Those old cars need regular oil changes. So change your oil every two months, Charlie. You will never regret that.”

The apprentice beamed with pleasure. “I will, Boss.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at him from under his eyebrows. He doubted that the car would be well looked after, but he had steeled himself to let Charlie get on with his plans. And now it had come to the point where he would say goodbye and hand over the car. There was an agreement to be signed, of course, because Charlie did not have the money to pay for the vehicle and it would have to be paid off month by month for almost three years. Even then, he wondered whether he would ever see the money, or all of it, as of the two apprentices Charlie had always been the more financially irresponsible one and always tried to borrow towards the end of the month when money got tight.

Charlie glanced at the document which Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had drawn up and that had been typed out by Mma Makutsi that afternoon. He would pay six hundred pula a month until the cost of the car had been covered. He would make sure that it was insured. If he could not keep up the payments he would give the car back to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who would pay the book price for it. That was all.

“You should read that carefully,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “It is a legal document, you know.”

But Charlie reached out for a pen from his employer’s top pocket. He left a small grease stain on the edge of the fabric. “That’s fine by me, Boss,” he said. “You would never try to cheat me. I know that. You are my father.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni watched Charlie as he signed with a flourish and handed over the piece of paper. There were greasy fingerprints on the document where the apprentice had held it. I have tried to teach him, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said to himself. I have tried my best.

They went outside to where the old Mercedes-Benz was parked. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni handed over the keys to Charlie. “It’s insured on my policy for the next two weeks,” he said. “Then it’s up to you.”

Charlie looked at the keys. “I can hardly believe this, Boss. I can hardly believe it.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni bit his lip. He had looked after this boy, every day, every day, for years now. “I know you’ll do your best, Charlie,” he said quietly. “I know that.”

A door opened in the building behind them and Mma Makutsi appeared. Charlie put the keys in his pocket and looked nervously at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

“I have come to say goodbye,” Mma Makutsi said. “And to wish you good luck with the business, Charlie. I hope that it goes well with you.”

Charlie had been staring at the ground. Now he looked up and smiled. “Thank you, Mma. I will try.”

“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. “I am sure that you will. And here’s another thing. I’m sorry, Rra, if I have ever been unkind to you. I am sorry for that.”

Nobody spoke. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who was holding the piece of paper which Charlie had signed, busied himself with folding it neatly and putting it into his pocket, a task which seemed to take a long time, and had to be re-done. Somewhere, on the road behind the garage, an engine revved up, coughed, and then died away into silence.

“That needs fixing,” said Charlie, laughing nervously. Then, he looked at Mma Makutsi, and smiled at her. “If you need my taxi, Mma,” he said, “I will be proud to drive you.”

“And I will be proud to go in it,” she said. “Thank you.”

After that, there was little more to be said. Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.