The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

CHAPTER NINETEEN THE PROPER PLACE OF MERCY

IT SEEMED TO MMA RAMOTSWE that a rather unusual, and unsettling, period had come to an end. If one believed those columns in magazines about the stars—and she had never understood how people could imagine that the stars had anything to do with our tiny, distant lives—then some heavenly bodies somewhere must have moved into a more favourable alignment. Perhaps the good planets had drifted from their normal position—which was directly above Botswana, and particularly above Zebra Drive, Gaborone, Botswana—and had now made their way back. For everything seemed to be in the process of satisfactory resolution. Mma Makutsi no longer spoke of resignation and seemed quite content with her new, vaguely defined post of associate detective; Charlie was back in the fold, the unfortunate No. 1 Ladies’ Taxi Service no longer in existence, and, as a matter of tact, no longer mentioned, even by Mma Makutsi; Mr J.L.B. Matekoni seemed to have lost interest in conducting enquiries and had had his ridiculous anxieties laid to rest. Everything, in fact, seemed to have settled down; which was exactly the way Mma Ramotswe liked it to be. The world was full of uncertainty, and if the life of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, together with the lives of those associated with those two concerns, were all on an even keel, then at least some of that uncertainty was held at bay.

The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them—wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the rich and the strong of those simple things that the poor needed, those scraps which would make their life more bearable; this happened, and could make even the reading of a newspaper an exercise in sorrow. There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily, so easily avoidable; but one could not think just of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one’s time in tears—and the unkindnesses would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?

Yet one had to be careful in thinking about such matters. It was easy to dream, but daily life, with its responsibilities and problems, was still there, and in Mma Ramotswe’s case at least one pressing matter was still on her mind. This was her enquiry into the affairs of the hospital at Mochudi, and those three unexplained deaths. Or were they unexplained? It seemed to Mma Ramotswe that a perfectly credible explanation had been offered in each case. Ultimately we all died from heart failure, one way or another, even if there were all sorts of conditions which precipitated this. The hearts of these three had simply stopped because they could no longer breathe—or so claimed the medical reports they had shown her. And if everybody knew why these three patients were finding it difficult to breathe, then surely that was the end of the matter? Did they know that? It was hard for Mma Ramotswe to decide, because the doctors, it seemed, could not agree. But then there would always be disputes by experts as to why one thing happened and another did not. Even mechanics did this, as Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had often demonstrated. He would shake his head over the work of other mechanics who had attended to cars before they were brought to him. How could anybody have thought that a particular problem was a transmission problem when it was so clearly to do with something quite different, some matter of rods and rings and all the other complicated bits and pieces which made up the innards of a car?

Mma Ramotswe felt helpless in the face of medical uncertainty. It was not for her to make a pronouncement about why somebody died, and if that was the case, as it undoubtedly was, then she felt that all that she could do here was to exclude, if possible, some non-medical factor, something unusual that had resulted in three people all becoming late at the same time of the week and in the same bed. It was for this reason that she decided that the only thing to do—indeed the final thing that she intended to do in this particular investigation—would be to go to the hospital on a Friday at ten o’clock, which was one hour before the incidents had taken place, and to find out if there was anything to be noticed. One would have thought that the hospital authorities, and in particular Tati Monyena, would have thought of doing something like this, but then it had often struck Mma Ramotswe that people who were in the middle of things just did not pick up what might be glaringly obvious to those outside. She often saw things which other people missed—a fact which rather bemused her; that is why I have found my calling, she said to herself; I am called to help other people because I am lucky enough to be able to notice things. Of course, she knew where that particular ability came from—its roots were back in those early years under the tutelage of her cousin, who trained her to keep her eyes open, to notice all the little things that were happening when one did something as simple as go for a walk in the bush. Here, along the path, would be the tracks of the animals that had passed that way; there were the tiny prints of a duiker, the skittish miniature buck with its delicate miniature hooves; there were the signs of the labours of the dung beetle, pushing its trophy, so much bigger than itself, leaving those marks in the sand. And there, look, somebody had come this way while he was eating and had thrown the maize cob down on the ground, not all that long ago because the ants had not yet come to take possession of it. The cousin had an eye for these things, and the habit had been engrained in Mma Ramotswe’s mind. At the age of ten, she had known by heart the number plate of virtually every car in Mochudi and had been able to say who had driven in the direction of Gaborone on any morning. “You have eyes like mine,” said the cousin. “And that is a good thing.”

Tati Monyena had responded enthusiastically to Mma Ramotswe’s suggestion that she should visit the ward that Friday. “Of course,” he said. “Of course. That is a very good idea, Mma. I shall give you a white coat if I can find one which is…” He had stopped himself, but Mma Ramotswe knew what he had been going to say, but had not, was if I can find one big enough. She did not mind. It was a good thing, in her view, to be of her particular construction, even if the manufacturers of white hospital coats failed to make adequate provision for the needs of those of traditional build.

“That will be fine,” she responded quickly. “I will not get in the way. I will just watch.”

“I shall tell the staff,” he said. “You have my full authority. Full authority.”

He was there to greet her when she arrived. He had been watching from his window, she thought, which suggested to her a certain anxiety on his part. That was interesting, but not really significant. This whole issue was not one which a hospital administrator would like; it had required an unsettling enquiry, it made people uneasy; there were far more important things to do. And of course there was probably a personal factor, as there so often was. Mma Ramotswe had asked about and had discovered that the next promotion for Tati Monyena would be to the post of Chief Administrator, a post which was already occupied by somebody else. But the woman who was in that post was also ambitious and there was a job in the Ministry of Health in Gaborone itself for which people thought she was the obvious candidate. That job was in the hands of a long-serving incumbent who was only eighteen months away from retirement and a return to a comfortable brick house he had built for himself in Otse. The last thing that Tati Monyena would want would be all these desirable changes to be disturbed by an administrative hiccup, a scandal of some sort. So of course the poor man would be looking out of his window and waiting for the arrival of the woman who was to put this whole awkward matter to bed, whose word would be final. Nothing untoward, she would say in her report. The end.

He greeted Mma Ramotswe outside and led her to his office. She saw a white coat on the chair. “For me?”

“Yes, Mma Ramotswe,” he said. “It might be…it might be a slightly tight fit, I’m afraid. But it will mean that you will be unobtrusive. It’s amazing how easy it is to wander about a hospital with a white coat on. Nobody will ask you what you’re doing. You can do what you like.”

He said this with a smile as he handed the coat to her. As she slipped it on, though, his words lingered. Nobody will ask you what you’re doing. You can do what you like. If, for any reason, there was a mischief-maker in the hospital, then the way would be wide open for such a person to do what he liked. The thought had a strangely chilling effect. It would take a particular sort of evil, she imagined, to prey on patients in a hospital; but such things happened—the unimaginable did occur. Fortunately she had never encountered it, but perhaps that innocence of experience would inevitably be shattered if one was a detective, which, after all, she claimed to be. But I’m not that sort of detective, she told herself; not that sort…

In her white coat, tight at the arms, she remembered how on another occasion, at the very beginning of her career, she had impersonated a nurse to deal with the bogus father of Happy Bapetsi. That had worked, and the greedy imposter, who had claimed to be Happy’s father, had been sent to Lobatse whence he had come, Mma Ramotswe’s denunciations ringing in his ears. That had been a simple investigation, though, requiring no more than the wisdom of Solomon, and she had always had a clear idea of what she had to say, the lines she had to deliver. Her current circumstances were of course very different. She had no idea what she was going to say or do, or indeed of what she was looking for. She was searching for something unusual, something which had occurred at the same time on three Fridays, but she could not imagine what this might be. When she had asked the staff in the ward if anything special happened at that time of the morning, and on Fridays in particular, they had looked blank. “We have our tea round about then,” one said. She had seized at this. Would nobody be looking after the patients while the nursing staff gossiped over a cup of tea? Her question had been anticipated. “We take turns to have tea,” somebody else had quickly assured her. “Always. Always. This means that there is always somebody on duty. Always. That is the rule.”

Tati Monyena walked with her to the ward, and introduced her again to the nurses she had already met. One smiled when she saw Mma Ramotswe in her white coat. Another looked at her in astonishment, and then frowned and turned away. They were busy, though, and had no time to speak to her. There was a man in a bed near the window who was breathing heavily, making a sound which was like that of gravel being walked upon. One of the nurses took his pulse and adjusted his pillow. There was a small framed photograph on the table beside him, left by a relative no doubt, a reminder, a little thing for a very ill person to have with him on his journey, along with all those other memories that make up the life of a man.

For the first little while, Mma Ramotswe felt like the intruder she was. It was an almost indecent feeling—that one was watching something that one should not be watching, like looking at another person in a moment of great privacy, but that feeling wore away as she stood by a window and watched the nurses at work. They were matter-of-fact in their manner: drugs were given, temperatures taken, entries made on charts. It was like an office, she thought, with its series of small tasks to be methodically carried out. That nurse over there, she thought, the one with the glasses, would be Mma Makutsi herself. And that young man who brought in the drugs trolley and who made some muttered comment to one of the nurses could be Charlie, and the drugs trolley, with its well-oiled, silent wheels, his Mercedes-Benz.

After three quarters of an hour, when she had begun to feel tired, Mma Ramotswe drew a chair over to the place where she had been standing. It was near a bed occupied by a silent, sleeping man. He had tubes inserted into his arms, and wires disappearing into the sleeve of his nightgown. He slept regardless, his face composed, peaceful, all pain, if he had been experiencing it, forgotten. She watched him and thought of her father, Obed Ramotswe, and of how he met his end, in just such a bed, and of how it had seemed to her at the time that a whole Botswana had died with him. But it had not. That fine country, with its good people, was still there; it was there in the face of this elderly man with his head upon that pillow and the sunlight, the warm, friendly sun of Africa, slanting through the window and falling upon him now in his last days.

She shifted in her chair and looked at her watch. It was almost eleven o’clock. The nurses, or some of them, would surely have their tea soon; but not today, perhaps, when they all seemed to be so busy. She closed her eyes for a moment, in comfortable drowsiness, feeling the sun from the window on her face. Eleven o’clock.

The double swing doors at the end of the ward were opened, and a woman in a light green working dress, the uniform of the hospital’s support staff, bent down to put a doorstop in place. Behind her was a floor-polishing machine, a big, ungainly instrument like an over-sized vacuum cleaner. The woman glanced at Mma Ramotswe as she pushed her floor polisher in, and then she bent down and switched it on. There was a loud whining sound as the machine’s circular pad rubbed at the sealed concrete of the floor, and a smell of polish too, from some automatic dispenser attached to the handle. This was a well-run hospital, thought Mma Ramotswe; and a well-run hospital would also be battling against dirt on floors. That was where the invisible enemies were, was it not?—the armies of germs waiting for their chance.

She watched the woman fondly. She was a traditionally built cleaning lady doing an important, but badly paid job. There was no doubt that a number of children would be dependent on that job, on the money that it brought for their food, their school clothes, their hopes for a future. And here was this solid, reliable woman doing her job, as women throughout Botswana would be doing their various jobs at that very moment; her floor polisher whirring, its long electrical cable trailing behind it and out of the door into the corridor.

She was Mma Ramotswe, and she noticed things. She noticed the length of the cable, and all its coils, and she wondered whether there were not places in the ward where the polisher might be plugged in. Surely that would be easier, and would mean that this long cable could not threaten to trip people up in the ward or in the corridor. That would be far more sensible.

She looked about her. The ward was full of plugs, one at the head of each bed. And into each of these plugs there were fitted the lights, the injection pumps, the appliances that helped the patients to breathe…

She rose to her feet. The cleaning woman had now almost drawn level with her and they had exchanged a friendly glance, followed by a smile. She approached the woman, who looked up from her work and raised an eyebrow in enquiry before she bent down and switched off the polisher.

“Dumela, Mma.”

The greeting was exchanged. Then Mma Ramotswe leaned forward and whispered to her urgently. “I must talk to you, Mma. Please can we go outside and talk? I won’t keep you for long.”

“What, now?” The woman had a soft, almost hoarse voice. “Now? I am working now, Mma.”

“Mr Monyena,” said Mma Ramotswe, pointing in the direction of Tati Monyena’s office. “I am doing something for him. I am allowed to speak to anybody in working hours. You need not worry.”

The woman nodded. The mention of Tati Monyena’s name had reassured her, and she pushed her polisher to one side and followed Mma Ramotswe out of the ward. They went outside, to sit on a bench beneath a tree. A goat had strayed into the hospital grounds and was nibbling at a patch of grass. It watched them for a few moments and then returned to its task of grazing. It was becoming hot again. The cleaner said, “This is the end of winter.”

They sat down. “Yes, winter is over now, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. Then she said, “I noticed that you have a long cable on your polisher, Mma. It goes right out of the ward and into the corridor. Wouldn’t it be easier to connect it to one of the plugs inside each ward?”

The cleaner picked up a twig from the ground at her feet and began to twist it. She was not nervous, though; that would have shown, and it did not.

“Oh yes,” she said. “That’s what I used to do. But then they told me not to. I was given very strict instructions. I should not use any of the plugs in the ward.”

Mma Ramotswe felt herself swaying. It was as if she was about to faint. She drew a deep breath, and the swaying feeling went away. Yes. Yes. Yes.

“Who told you, Mma?” she asked. It was a simple question, but she had to struggle to get it out.

“Mr Monyena himself,” said the cleaner. “He told me. He called me into his office and went on and on about it. He said…” She paused.

“Yes? He said?”

“He said that I was not to talk about it. I’m sorry I forgot. I did tell him that I would not talk about it. I shouldn’t be talking to you, Mma. But…”

“But I have his full authority,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“He is a kind man, Tati Monyena,” said the cleaner. And then, after thinking for a moment, she added, “He is my cousin, you know.”

Which makes you mine, thought Mma Ramotswe.

SHE WALKED BACK to Tati Monyena’s office, divested of her white coat, which she carried slung over her right arm. He was in, his door ajar, and he welcomed her warmly.

“It’s lunch time,” he said breezily, rubbing his hands together. “Well timed, Mma Ramotswe! We can have some lunch in the canteen. They do very good food, you know. Cheap, too.”

“I need to talk to you, Rra,” she said, putting the coat down on the chair before his desk.

He patted his stomach. “We can talk over lunch, Mma.”

“Privately?”

He hesitated for a moment. “Yes, if that is what you want. There is a special table at one end that we can use. Nobody will disturb us.”

They walked in silence to the canteen. Tati Monyena tried to make casual conversation, but Mma Ramotswe found herself too involved in her own thoughts to respond very much. She was trying to make sense of something, and the sense was not apparent. He knew, she thought; he knew. But if he knew, then why ask her? An outside whitewash—that was what he wanted.

They helped themselves at the hot-food counter and made their way over to a small, red-topped table at the far end of the canteen. Tati Monyena, sensing that something important was coming, had now become edgy. As he lowered his tray onto the table, Mma Ramotswe could not help but notice that there was a tremor in his hands. He is shaking because he senses that I know something, she thought. Now he is feeling dread. There will be no senior job for him now. This was not the part of her job that she liked: the painful spelling out of the truth, the exposure.

She looked down at her plate. There was a piece of beef on it, some mashed potatoes, and green peas. It was a good lunch.

Suddenly, without having thought about it beforehand, she felt impelled to say grace. “Do you mind if I say grace for us?” she said quietly.

He gave his assent. “That would be good,” he said. His voice sounded strained.

Mma Ramotswe lowered her head. The smell of the beef was in her nostrils; and that of the mashed potatoes too, a slightly chalky, earthy smell. “We are grateful for this good food,” she said. “And we are grateful for the work of this hospital, which is good work. And if there are things that go wrong in this place, then we remember that there is always mercy. As mercy is shown to all of us, so we can show it to our brothers and sisters.”

She did not really know why she said this, but she said it, and when she stopped, and was silent, Tati Monyena was silent too, so that she heard his breathing from across the table. “That is all,” she said, and looked up.

When she saw his eyes, she did not need to tell him that she had found out what had happened.

“I saw you talking to the cleaner,” he said. “From my office. I saw you talking to her.”

Mma Ramotswe kept her gaze upon him. “If you knew, Rra, all along, then why…”

He raised his fork, and then put it down again. It was as if he had been somehow defeated, and there was no point now in eating. “I found out by chance, only by chance. I asked who had been present in the ward just before the third patient went and one of the nurses happened to mention that the cleaner had left the ward just before it happened. She always polished the floor there at the same time on a Friday morning. So I spoke to her and asked her to tell me exactly what she did in the ward.”

Mma Ramotswe encouraged him. She was keen to hear his description of events, and relieved to find out that it tallied with what the cleaner had told her. This meant that he was no longer lying.

“She told me,” Tati Monyena went on. “She told me that she plugged her polisher in near the door. Near the bed by the window. I asked her how she did this and she said that she simply unplugged the plugs that were already in. Just for a few minutes, she said. Just for a few minutes.”

Mma Ramotswe looked down at her mashed potatoes. They were getting cold, and would become hard, but this was no time for such thoughts. “And so she unplugged the ventilator,” she said. “Just long enough for the patient to become late. And then she plugged it back in. But the damage had been done.”

“Yes,” said Tati Monyena, shaking his head with regret. “That machine is not the most modern machine. It has an alarm, which probably sounded, but with the whirring sound of that old floor polisher nobody would hear it. Then, when the nurses checked, they found that the machine was still operating properly, but the patient was gone. It was too late.”

Mma Ramotswe reflected on this. “So did the cleaner know what had happened?”

“She knew that there had been an incident in the ward,” Tati Monyena replied. “But of course she did not know that it had anything to do with her. She…” He stopped. He was looking at Mma Ramotswe with an expression that said only one thing, Please understand.

She picked up her fork and dug it into the potatoes. A little skin had formed on the top, a powdery white skin. “You didn’t want her to know that she had killed somebody, Rra? Is that it?”

His voice was urgent as he replied; urgent, and full of relief that she should understand. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Mma. Yes. She is a very good woman. She has small children and no husband. The husband is late. You’ll know why. He was ill with that for a long time, Mma, a long time. She herself is on…on treatment. She is one of the best workers we have in the hospital, and you can ask anybody, anybody. They will all say the same.”

“It is not just because she is your cousin?”

This took him by surprise, and he looked aghast. “That is true,” he said. “But what I said about her is also true. I did not want her to suffer. I know how she would feel if she found out that she was responsible for somebody’s death. How would you feel, Mma, if you knew that about yourself? And she would lose her job. It wouldn’t be my decision, it would be the decision of somebody back there…” He gestured through the window, in the direction of Gaborone. “Somebody in a big office would say that she had been responsible for the deaths of three people and should be fired. They would say, carelessness. They wouldn’t blame me, though, or the head of the medical staff, or anybody else; they would blame the person at the bottom, that lady. Fire the cleaner, and end the matter there.”

Mma Ramotswe took a mouthful of potato. It was slightly bitter in the mouth, but that was what truth was sometimes like too. She could think about this problem, and then think about it again, looking at it from every direction. Whichever way one thought of it, though, it would still have the same feel to it, would still raise the same questions. Three people had died. They were all elderly people, she had found out, and none of them had dependants. Nothing could be done to help them now, wherever they were. And, if they were anything like the elderly people of Mochudi whom she had known, people of Obed Ramotswe’s generation, they would not be ones to want to make difficulties for the living. They would not want to see that woman put out of her job. They would not wish to add to her difficulties; that poor woman who was working so hard, with that other thing hanging over her head, that uncertain sentence.

“You made the right decision, Rra,” she said to Tati Monyena. “Now let us eat our lunch and talk about other matters. Relatives, for example. They are always doing something new, aren’t they?”

Now he knew what her grace had meant, and he wanted to say something about that, to thank her for her mercy, but he could not talk. He expressed his relief in tears, which he mopped at, embarrassed, with a handkerchief that she supplied, wordlessly. There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride—for the people who worked in that hospital, who looked after others, who took risks themselves of infection, of disease—from an accidental cut, a needle injury incurred at work; there were many tears of pride to be shed for them, for their bravery. And one of them, she thought, was Dr Cronje.

THE NEXT DAY, Mma Ramotswe dictated a report for Tati Monyena’s superiors, which Mma Makutsi took down in shorthand, ending each sentence with a flourish of her pencil, as if to express satisfaction at the outcome. She had told her assistant what had happened at the hospital, and Mma Makutsi had listened, open-mouthed. “Such a simple explanation,” she said. “And nobody thought of it until you did, Mma Ramotswe.”

“It was just something I saw,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I did not do anything very special.”

“You are always very modest,” said Mma Makutsi. “You never take any credit for these things. Never.”

Mma Ramotswe was embarrassed by praise, and so she suggested that they continue with the report, which ended with the conclusion that no further action was required in respect of incidents in which nobody was to blame.

“But is that true?” asked Mma Makutsi.

“Yes, it is true,” said Mma Ramotswe, adding, “No blame can be laid at that woman’s door. In fact, she deserves praise, not blame, for her work. She is a good worker.”

She looked at Mma Makutsi with a look that she rarely used, but which was unambiguously one which closed a matter entirely.

“Well,” said Mma Makutsi, “I suppose you’re right.”

“I am,” said Mma Ramotswe.

The report was finished, typed by Mma Makutsi—in an error-free performance, as one might expect of such a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College. Then it was time for tea, as it so often was.

“You told that woman, Teenie, about the key to the supplies?” said Mma Ramotswe. “I wonder how that went. It’s a test of Mma Potokwane’s advice, I suppose.”

Mma Makutsi laughed. “Oh, Mma, I forgot to tell you. She telephoned me. She did as I suggested and put that man in charge of all the supplies. The next day, everything was gone. The whole lot. And he had gone too.”

Mma Ramotswe looked into her cup. She wanted to laugh, but prevented herself from doing so. This result was both a success and a failure. It was a success in that it demonstrated to the client beyond all doubt who the thief was; it was a failure in that it showed that trust does not always work. Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever. “Oh well,” she said. “That settles that. Mma Potokwane’s advice sounded good, though.”

Mma Makutsi agreed that it did, and they talked for a few minutes about the various affairs of the office until Mr J.L.B. Matekoni came in for his tea. He was wiping his hands on a cloth and smiling. He had been struggling with a particularly difficult gearbox and at long last he had solved the problem. Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window, at that square of land, at the acacia tree that fingered into the empty sky; a little slice of her country that she loved so much, Botswana, her place.

Mma Ramotswe smiled at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He was such a good man, such a kind man, and he was her husband.

“That engine I’ve been working on will run so sweetly,” he remarked as he poured his tea.

“Like life,” she said.