The Miracle at Speedy Motors

CHAPTER TEN THE DOCTOR’S HOUSE

MR. J.L.B. MATEKONI had not told Mma Ramotswe that he had set up an appointment for Motholeli to see the doctor from Selebi-Phikwe. He did not wish to deceive her, but his suspicion that she would not approve had been proved right.

“There is no point,” she said. “We know that, Rra. We have been told.”

He had rehearsed his arguments to the contrary, and he had used them. There was such a thing as a second opinion, he pointed out; there were plenty of cases in which one doctor had given up and then another doctor had achieved a cure. Were there? she asked. And did he know of anywhere this thing that Motholeli had, this precise thing, had been cured?

He knew that he was no match for Mma Ramotswe; it was something to do with the sort of mind she had, a detective’s mind, which would always come up with arguments that he, a mere mechanic, would never be able to refute. But there were second opinions, and he held his ground.

“It’s the same with cars,” he argued. “If you brought a car into the garage and Charlie told you that he thought you needed a new gearbox, wouldn’t you want a second opinion? And might not that second opinion be quite different from Charlie’s?”

That was a powerful example, as far as it went; but Mma Ramotswe did not think that it went very far. “Charlie is not a proper mechanic, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni,” she said. “Nobody would listen to his opinion in the first place.” She paused, letting the point sink in. She was being gentle here, because she knew that he wanted desperately to believe that this doctor could do something. “Those doctors at the Princess Marina knew what they were doing. And Dr. Moffat as well. He said the same thing too, didn’t he? Wouldn’t you prefer to listen to Dr. Moffat rather than Charlie?”

He had let the matter ride at that, but he was still determined, and the next day he had lifted Motholeli gently into his truck.

“It’s best if you don’t discuss this with Mma Ramotswe,” he had said to her. “There is a doctor I would like you to see, but I don’t think Mma Ramotswe likes him very much.”

Motholeli had been puzzled. “Why does she not like him?” she asked. “Is he unkind?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni laughed. “Of course not! He is a very kind doctor who has said that he will just take a look at your legs to see if there is anything he can do to help. He probably won’t be able to do anything, I’m afraid, but I think we should see him, don’t you?”

She did. She had become reconciled to being in a wheelchair, adapting in the way children will adapt to virtually any adversity. This, in her eyes, was how the world was, and she had neither moped nor railed against her illness. At the same time, she still dreamed that she could walk, and these dreams came quite frequently; not daydreams, but sleeping dreams in which she suddenly slipped out of the wheelchair and simply walked like other children.

“I am happy to see this doctor,” she said. “I know…”

“Yes,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “We must not go with any hopes. But we can at least go.”

Now, sitting in the passenger seat of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s truck, Motholeli gave an anxious glance at her wheelchair, which was in the open back of the vehicle and was bouncing about as the truck negotiated the dirt road which led to the doctor’s house.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni reassured her that it would be safe. “We are almost there,” he said. “That is Mr. Mgang’s house over there, you see, and that means we are only a mile from the doctor’s place.”

The road curved round to the right, back in the direction of town. On either side of the road was scrub bush of a neglected and desolate nature, half-heartedly grazed by a small herd of thin cattle, dusty even after the first fall of rain, dotted with stunted acacias and discouraged thorn bushes. The road was now little more than a track, so deeply rutted in the centre that it was safer to drive with the wheels on one side up on the thick verge of sand. A lesser vehicle might quickly be bogged down and sink in this sand, but not Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s truck, with its wide tyres and its low-ratio gears.

The doctor’s gate appeared without warning in the fence. Beyond it, another track, but not a very long one, leading to the house itself, which was set down beside a small stand of eucalyptus trees; a house which must once have been a farmhouse, back in the nineteen-fifties, in Bechuanaland Protectorate days, before Botswana. Along the front of the house ran a verandah, with squat white-painted pillars supporting a sloping tin roof that had been painted deep red. Here and there, where the weather had made its mark, the paint had worn off and the corrugated surface of the tin below was revealed, rusty patches of discolouration. A single telephone wire ran from the roof of the house to a pole by a water tank, and then to another pole, marching off to join other wires near the side of the road. Oddly, inconsequentially, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni muttered, “That carried my voice.” And Motholeli, looking up, said, “What?”

“That telephone wire,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “It carried my voice when I phoned the doctor to make your appointment.”

She frowned. “Yes. And is that him, that man? Is that the doctor?”

He had come out and was watching them from the shade of the verandah, a tall man, his tight greying hair looking almost white against the dark of his skin.

“Where is he from?” asked Motholeli. “Is he a Motswana?”

“He is half Motswana,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Motswana mother, Zambian father. But he has lived here a long time. He is a very clever doctor, I think. He is called Dr. Mwata.”

They parked by the side of the house and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni unloaded the wheelchair from the back. Then he picked up Motholeli and helped her gently into the chair. This is why I am here, he thought; this is why I have come here.

Dr. Mwata had emerged from the verandah and was looking down at Motholeli. “So this is the young lady,” he said.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni fingered the crease on his trousers. He had changed out of his garage clothes into freshly ironed khaki trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. “She is called Motholeli,” he said. “She…” He tailed off. He was awed by the doctor’s presence, which was a powerful one; by his big hands; by the gold-rimmed glasses he wore; and by the fact that he was a man of education, a graduate of a university somewhere, the beneficiary of years of training.

“Come inside,” said the doctor. “This way.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni pushed the wheelchair round to the front of the house and with the help of the doctor lifted it up the three low steps onto the verandah. Then they followed the doctor through the front door and down a short corridor. The floor of the corridor was lined with wide planks which had been recently varnished and reflected the little light that penetrated the gloom of the interior.

“This is a fine house,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni nervously.

“It is too old,” said the doctor. “But it will last me out. Then the white ants will finish their job of eating it. They are waiting for that.”

“They will eat the whole country one day,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “They are waiting for us to let them.”

The doctor laughed. “They do not like the creosote I use,” he said. “That spoils their appetite.”

He opened a door and led them into a large room furnished with a desk and a few chairs; a bookcase under the window was stuffed with yellowing journals and papers. There was a kitchen table of some sort, raised up by the positioning of bricks beneath its legs so that it was high enough to be an examination couch. A sheet had been draped over this; a sheet with a red line through it, signifying hospital ownership.

Suddenly Motholeli started to cry. The doctor became aware of it first and bent down to comfort her. “You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “There is nothing to be frightened of.” He turned to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Perhaps it might have been better if the mother…”

“The mother is late. There is just my wife, and she…”

The doctor nodded. “The child will be all right,” he said. And with that he leaned over and lifted Motholeli out of the chair and placed her on the table. She reached out and held on to the sleeve of his shirt. Her head was bent.

“Maybe…” began Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Maybe…” He did not know what to do. He could not bear her sobbing, which was louder now.

“Hush,” said Dr. Mwata. “There is nothing to cry about. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“No,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “This will not hurt.”

Motholeli looked at him. She was trying to stifle her sobs, and was succeeding now.

“There,” said Dr. Mwata. “There, you see.”

He had taken a small rubber hammer out of his pocket and was tapping at her knees. Then he slipped off her shoes and pinched the skin of her ankles. “Can you feel that?” he asked. “Or this? Over here? This?”

The examination continued for ten minutes or so. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked away, staring out of the window, his back turned so that the doctor might conduct his examination in private. There was an old metal windmill outside, and the wooden blades were turning slowly in the breeze, driving a borehole pump; he could hear the mechanical sucking noise, the rattling of a loose spar on the windmill tower; this was not a well-kept place, but the doctor must be busy, even if he had retired. You could not expect an educated man to worry about pumps and boreholes; there were plenty of other people to attend to such things. In the distance, towards the South African border, the clouds were building up again; there would be more rain, he thought, which was a good sign. Yesterday’s storm had laid the dust, and if rain followed later today it would begin to fill the rivers and dams. They could at least hope.

Dr. Mwata cleared his throat. “That is all I need to see,” he said, patting Motholeli on the shoulder. “You have been a very good girl. Now the Daddy can lift you off the table.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni stepped forward and placed the child back in her wheelchair. He was occasionally referred to as the Daddy by people who did not know, but the word remained strange in his ears.

Dr. Mwata now took Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s arm. “You and I should go for a walk, Rra.” He turned to Motholeli. “I will ask the lady in the kitchen to make you something to drink. She will look after you for a little while. The Daddy and I will not be long.”

He went to the door and called out down the corridor. A few moments later a woman appeared. She was a large woman wearing a housecoat and a pair of commodious blue slippers. She stared at Motholeli while her employer gave instructions. “You must give this girl some milk. And bread with plenty of honey on it.”

The men went outside, leaving the house from the back door. The yard at the back was neglected too—a patch of land which merged, without fence or marker, into the scrub bush. A few bricks had been placed in the ground in a circle, a forlorn attempt at decoration or the abandoned beginning of a flower bed; apart from that there was nothing.

“This is a nice place,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. He did not know what to say; I am just a mechanic, he thought.

The doctor glanced at him and then looked away. “We could walk over that way. There is a water tank.” He paused. “We will have rain later on, I think.”

“I think so too,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Your cattle—”

“They are not mine,” the doctor interrupted him. “They belong to my son. He is the one who has cattle. I have never had a cattle post. Nothing like that.”

“You are a doctor. You don’t have time for that. You have more important things to do.”

The doctor nodded. “Maybe. But sometimes the things that doctors do may not seem to be all that important. When I was a doctor up on the mines, most of the time I was giving medicals to men before they were signed on. I had to make them run a mile in the heat and then take their pulse. I looked in their mouths for obvious signs of infection, into their eyes, while all the time, you know, the thing that was going to do the real damage was invisible. No microscope would show you it was there. But it was there. And it was years before we knew what it was and what it would do to our people.” He stopped walking and looked at Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Do you know what I’m talking about, Rra?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni did not meet his eyes. He looked at the ground. “I do.”

They had stopped walking while the doctor spoke; now they resumed. “I lost heart,” said Dr. Mwata. “What could I do? We had the drugs, but could we ever get them to people in time? And then they came and said to me that I was too old to carry on. But I did not want to leave medicine altogether. And so I have found a way of helping, particularly those people who have been told by other doctors that nothing can be done. I take on lost causes, you could say. Like that saint. What do they call him? St. Jude, I think. The Catholics have this saint who will help them when nobody else will.”

They were nearing the water tank, a low-built, half-crumbling concrete construction to which an old lead pipe ran up from the ground.

“Do you think that you can help her?” asked Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Do you?”

They were at the side of the tank. At the edge of the concrete, where it rose up from the sandy soil, a snake had abandoned its old skin, the slough a gossamer tube, twisted by the wind, but still a perfect mould of the creature that had been within. Dr. Mwata reached down and picked it up, delicately holding it so that the sun shone through the crinkle of tiny scales.

“What sort of snake do you think this came from, Mr. Matekoni?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “I cannot tell,” he said.

“It is a puff adder,” said Dr. Mwata. “Look at this bit here—you can tell from that. See?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni shuddered. “I am glad that he is no longer in his skin,” he said.

This remark appeared to amuse Dr. Mwata. “Yes, indeed. I have had to treat people for bites from these,” he said. “Very nasty. The venom kills tissues. You never fully recover from one of these bites. The muscle around the bite will always be in pretty bad shape. Even with treatment.” He dropped the skin, which floated down to the ground. He looked at Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “You ask whether I can do anything. Well, the answer is yes. I think so.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni stood quite still. He was aware, though, that the wind had picked up and that the high purple clouds which he had seen in the distance were coming their way. But this was not a time to think about rain; this was a time to think about what the doctor had said. He could help. There was something he could do.

“You can help? You can perform an operation, Rra?”

Dr. Mwata shook his head. “We must get back to the house, Rra. No, I cannot perform an operation, but I do know of a place, a place in Johannesburg, where there are people who work with people who are paralysed. They work with them and see whether they can get the mind to tell the body to move. They could see her and try. I know them. I have sent people to them before and I have had good results.”

“They could walk?”

Dr. Mwata hesitated. “Yes. They were able to walk.”

“And Motholeli?”

“Maybe.” He was silent, licking the tip of a finger and holding it up into the wind. It was the sort of wind that preceded rain; stronger now, cooler. Suddenly he said, “Do you believe in miracles, Mr. Matekoni?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was tongue-tied. Did he believe in miracles? He was not sure. He had seen old engines start when he never thought they would; he had seen cars continue against all the mechanical odds. These were the miracles of the world of mechanics, but there was always a reason, a mechanical reason, to explain them. “I don’t think so,” he said.

The doctor seemed surprised. “But you want one to happen, don’t you?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought about this. Did he want a miracle to happen? Of course he did. He gave his answer. “Yes.”

“And do you think miracles are free?” asked Dr. Mwata. He spoke quietly, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni almost did not hear him.

“Yes, surely…”

The doctor looked at him quizzically, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni realised that this was not the answer that he had expected.

“No. Maybe they aren’t free.”

Dr. Mwata seemed satisfied with this answer. “Precisely.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked up at the sky. He thought that he had felt the first drop of rain, but it could not have been that, as the sky directly above was still clear. “How much does a miracle cost?” he asked.

“Twenty-five thousand pula,” said Dr. Mwata.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was aware that Dr. Mwata was watching his reaction to this information. The doctor’s body, he thought, those long limbs, had become tense. And he noticed too that when he said, “Yes, I shall pay,” the tension disappeared, as if a taut string had suddenly been cut. But this means nothing, he told himself. If there was a chance of a miracle—the remotest chance—he would take it. And was it unreasonable that one should have to pay for a miracle, when all else in this life seemed to cost money, except love, perhaps, which cost nothing, could often be unconditional, and, what was more, made one want to believe in the possibility of miracles?