How to Raise an Elephant Read online

  Mma Makutsi glared at the young man. “You’re talking nonsense, Charlie. Nobody is going to take my car. I need it to get into work and Phuti uses his car for his furniture business. Our cars would be…”

  “Exempt?” offered Mma Ramotswe.

  “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. “That’s the word: exempt.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked down at her desk. Everybody wanted to look after the world, but nobody wanted to give up anything they already had. Mma Makutsi was right when she said there were too many cars, but the business of reducing the number of cars would never be easy. That was particularly so in Africa, where so many people had never had the chance to own a car, and now, just as they were able to afford one, along came people who said they should not have one. And the same thing applied to beef, she thought. Many people had not been able to afford much meat in the past; now, when they could, people who had been eating meat for a long time said it was time for everybody to stop. There was something unfair in that, she thought, and yet we only had one world, and only one Botswana in that world, and we had to look after them both.

  But now Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was off to the garage—in his truck, which was not particularly economical to run and not at all green, she suspected—and she had just fed the children, and at that moment the removal van happened to draw up outside the neighbours’ house. In such circumstances all that one could do was to tell the children to hurry up and finish their breakfast and get ready for school. Puso, of course, could walk there, as the school was just round the corner, but Motholeli, who was in a wheelchair, could not. On occasion, Puso would push her to school, taking pride in helping his sister, but in this hot weather, with all the dust the heat seemed to bring, Mma Ramotswe preferred to take the chair in her van. She would do that this morning, she thought, and then return to the house so that she could keep an eye on what was going on next door.

  She was back at the house after the school run just in time to see the men, who had been perched on the tailgate of the removal van, eating sandwiches, now roll up their sleeves and begin to unload the furniture. This was the interesting part—more interesting, perhaps, than the actual meeting of the new neighbours themselves, whom she had already spotted over the fence when they were viewing their intended purchase. She felt a thrill of excitement, but then, a moment or two later, she felt something quite different. This was doubt. Should she allow herself to take such an interest in the household possessions of her new neighbours, or was this no more than nosiness—the sort of thing that idle village people loved to do because they had nothing better with which to fill their time? The otherwise unoccupied took a great interest in what everybody else had and did. And then they went off and talked about it, sometimes stirring up feelings of jealousy among those whose lives were less exciting and less blessed with material goods. Envy was a real problem in villages, where there were plenty of people ready to resent those who had more than they did. It was not an edifying characteristic, and if Botswana had any faults, then this was one of them. It did not help, and people who encouraged it should feel real shame.

  She thought about this, and almost persuaded herself that she should turn away and drive off to work, leaving the removal men to do their heaving and carrying unobserved. But then she thought: No harm will be done if I watch, but do not tell anybody about anything I might see. She thought about this for a few moments, closing her eyes, the better to facilitate judgement. Decisions made with closed eyes were, Mma Ramotswe thought, often weightier, more balanced. And now she made up her mind: if she watched, but did not speak about, what was unfolding next door, it would be a perfectly acceptable compromise between natural curiosity and a decent respect for the privacy of others. Her decision made, she settled on her verandah, in a cool spot away from the slowly rising morning sun, with a cup of freshly brewed red bush tea to hand. In that position she watched as the drama of the arrival took place.

  * * *

  —

  MMA RAMOTSWE WATCHED as the kitchen effects emerged. There was a large fridge, of newish manufacture, which required three men to carry it in, and this was followed by a fancy-looking cooker. This required careful manhandling out of the van and lifting onto a sturdy-looking trolley. On this it was wheeled round to the back of the house from where various shouted instructions emerged as men manoeuvred it into the kitchen. Next came boxes of pots and pans, handles sticking out of splits in the cardboard, and several boxes given over, she thought, to current provisions, judging by the trail of flour that one of them left as it was carried in. Mma Ramotswe smiled at that. It would be a good clue for a detective, she thought, and could imagine what Clovis Andersen, author of The Principles of Private Detection, might write about that. If you find a trail of flour, you can be reasonably sure that somebody has been making their way into or out of a kitchen. Beyond that conclusion, of course, there would be little one could say.

  It took a good hour for the kitchen furniture and equipment to be offloaded and installed. It was now time for Mma Ramotswe to go to work, but she was enjoying herself far too much to do that. There were one or two matters to be dealt with in the office that morning, though none of them was urgent. Mma Makutsi would be there and she could deal with any new business that arose—not that this was likely. For some reason it was a quiet time, and new clients were few and far between. It might be the weather, Mma Ramotswe thought: the heat had been building up steadily, and in hot conditions people tended to behave themselves. Suspected unfaithfulness, the bread and butter of any private detective agency, was seasonal: the hot weather seemed to inhibit it, while the cooler weather brought it on. Clovis Andersen said nothing about this in his book, but then he was used to a climate in which people had the energy to engage in affairs at any time of the year. Here, who could be bothered, in the heat, to flirt with anybody, let alone embark on something more serious?

  Of course, temptation could strike at any time, and in any circumstances, and there would always be a trickle of enquiries, no matter what the season was. The previous day they had heard from a prospective client, a woman in Lobatse who had witnessed a small child running up to her husband in a shopping mall. The child had shouted “Daddy, Daddy” and flung his arms around her husband’s legs. “Silly child,” the husband had said. “He has mistaken me for his daddy.” But he had been flustered—far more than one might expect an innocent person to be in such circumstances. The child had been retrieved by a young girl who was clearly a nanny, and had been dragged away protesting and still shouting “Daddy!” Could the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency look into this matter? Of course they could, and Mma Makutsi had agreed to drive down to Lobatse the following week and interview the client about her concerns. “My husband is a good man,” the woman had said, “but you know what men are like, Mma. They are not good all the time.”

  “The only men who are good all the time,” Mma Makutsi had said, “are the saints, and they are all dead now, Mma.”

  Charlie, who had overheard this conversation in the office, had scowled. “You have no right to talk about men like that,” he protested. “There are many men who are good all the time. Many, Mma.”

  “Name one,” said Mma Makutsi, adding, “Apart from Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, of course. He is a very good man on a permanent basis.”

  Charlie tried a different tack. “And women? Are women always good, Mma?”

  Mma Makutsi did not reply immediately. Mma Ramotswe, who was amused by this exchange, decided to keep out of it.

  At last Mma Makutsi said, “Women are human, Charlie. That is well known.” She glanced at Mma Ramotswe as she said this. “That is well known” was Mma Ramotswe’s phrase—the clincher of any argument, the settler of any point of dispute. But there were occasions when Mma Makutsi employed it, although she always glanced at Mma Ramotswe as she did so, as if to confirm she had the licence to use it.

  “So,” said Charlie, “if they are human, then they will be j
ust as bad as men. All humans are equal, I think. Isn’t that what the Constitution of Botswana says?”

  “This has nothing to do with the Constitution of Botswana, Charlie,” snapped Mma Makutsi. “This is psychology, and there has never been any doubt that women have better psychology than men when it comes to”—she waved a hand in the air—“when it comes to these things.”

  “What things, Mma?”

  “To behaviour,” said Mma Makutsi. “Women are always thinking of what is best for children, for instance. They think: What is going to make children strong and happy? What is going to make sure that there is food on the table? What is best for everybody? Those are the questions that women are always asking.”

  “And men?” Charlie demanded. “Do men not think about those things too?”

  Mma Makutsi replied that men sometimes thought about those things, but they often acted impulsively because they were impatient. Or they acted without thinking because…well, they didn’t think in the same way as women. They thought that something needed to be done, and they did it. They did not think about the consequences.

  And that was where the discussion had ended, as the office telephone had rung with another call, and human psychology was left for another day. Now, on her verandah, watching the removal men, Mma Ramotswe thought about the exchange between Mma Makutsi and Charlie, and reflected on the fact that there could be discussions between two people where both were wrong. You might even embody that in one of Clovis Andersen’s rules, she thought: Do not think that in any case where there are two competing arguments one of them has to be right: both can be wrong.

  Her thoughts were disturbed by a shout from one of the removal men, who had stumbled while carrying a small table. The table had landed on his foot and he had shouted out in pain. One of the other men had laughed, calling out some comment about carelessness. Mma Ramotswe was concerned; the man was crouched down now, rubbing his foot, clearly in considerable pain. Instinctively she rose from her seat and made her way to her gate.

  “Are you all right, Rra?” she asked.

  He looked up. He was a man of about forty, with the lightish brown skin that suggested a touch of San blood somewhere in his ancestry. His shirt was soaked in sweat, under the armpits, along the chest, around the collar.

  “I have hurt my foot a bit,” he said. “But I think it will be all right, Mma.”

  He stood up now, wincing slightly as he tested his weight on his foot.

  “I have some of that stuff you can rub on your foot,” Mma Ramotswe said. “You know that green ointment? Zam-Buk? The one that is very good for bruises?”

  He shook his head. “That is kind of you, Mma, but we must finish this load.” He looked inside the van, and Mma Ramotswe followed his gaze. There were still a few items remaining—bedroom furniture, she noted. She saw a wardrobe, still tied to the side of the van’s interior to prevent its toppling over; two chests of drawers; a standing mirror. And then there were the beds. She counted them. One, two, three, four.

  The man was looking up at the sky. “When is it going to rain, Mma?”

  Mma Ramotswe sighed. “I ask myself that every morning, Rra. I go out into my garden and I look at my beans and I think, When is it going to rain? And the beans are thinking that too, I believe.”

  The man laughed. “And the grass. And the cattle. And the snakes down in their holes. They are coughing, I think, because of all the dust—the snakes are coughing.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “That is a very odd thought, Rra. I can imagine a snake would have a long cough—a very long cough.”

  She looked into the van again. One of the other men was untying the beds, making them ready for removal. Four beds. Four single beds.

  On impulse she asked, “Are there only four beds, Rra?”

  He glanced into the van. “Yes, there are four. We loaded four, and we shall be unloading four. That is how it works, Mma.”

  She thought, Single beds. She looked at the man. “No double bed,” she muttered.

  The comment had not been addressed to him, but he answered. “We do not ask about these things, Mma. We are removal men. You give us the furniture; we put it in the van; we drive wherever: one hundred kilometres, two hundred, one thousand if you want to go and live up in Zambia. We will take your things anywhere.”

  He looked at her, and then said, “We do not think about these things, Mma—not in our job.”

  She lowered her eyes, chastened. She felt that she wanted to tell him that she was not a gossip, that she was not one of those people who pried into the affairs of others. She wanted to explain to him that she was a detective and that it had become second nature to her to look at the world and then wonder what lay behind the things one saw. But she did not say any of this, because she felt ashamed, and he had his work to do, and she should leave them to it now.

  He thanked her for the offer of the ointment and returned to his work. She went back to her verandah, where she finished her cup of red bush tea, and prepared to drive into the office. No double bed, she thought. And this was followed by the thought: This is not my business. It was important to think that particular thought, she reminded herself as she drove off towards the Tlokweng Road and the premises of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. There are things in this world that are one’s business, and things that are not. It was sometimes a challenge to find exactly where the boundary between these two lay, and to act accordingly. That was the challenge. Yet here it was obvious: whether or not one’s new neighbours slept in a double bed was no business of anybody but themselves. Others should not even think about it. So she told herself not to think about it, which of course is the surest way of guaranteeing that you will think about exactly the thing you do not wish to think about.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LATE PEOPLE TALK TO US

  MMA MAKUTSI had not been idle. “Since you are so late this morning, Mma Ramotswe,” she said, “I have used the time to go through old files. I have taken out ones that we can get rid of now, I think.”

  Mma Ramotswe crossed the office and deposited her bag on her shelf and the keys to her van on her desk. Glancing at Mma Makutsi’s desk she saw a pile of brown manila files, papers protruding here and there from between the covers. The sight made her think of the hours of work that each of these represented, and also of what lay behind each and every folder: the human emotions, the plans, the disappointments—and, in some cases at least, the triumphs. One or two of them, she noticed, had a familiar large red sticker on the outside denoting Payment of Final Bill Pending. That was a forlorn hope, now, she thought. And then there were the green stickers—not many—that signified More Developments Possible. Again, that was unlikely, Mma Ramotswe told herself. She tried to think of recent developments in any of these old cases, and could think of none. Perhaps a rewording of the sticker might be called for: More Developments Possible, but Unlikely would be more realistic, she felt.

  “You have been very busy, Mma,” she said.

  Mma Makutsi studied her fingernails in a vaguely prim manner. “Well, I thought that it would be a good idea to tackle something that we’ve been talking about for some time now.” She paused, looking up from her fingernails. “Talking about, yes, but not getting done.”

  Mma Ramotswe was not sure whether there was a note of reproach in Mma Makutsi’s voice. It was true that they had been planning to go through the filing cabinet in order to weed out dormant files, and on one or two occasions had almost embarked upon the task, only to be interrupted by the arrival of a client or the ringing of the telephone. There were other routine administrative tasks that needed to be tackled but that had been put off for one reason or another; this one, though, was more pressing than the others as the filing cabinet was now almost full and more recent files had been stacked, in no particular order, on a shelf next to the well-thumbed copy of Clovis Andersen’s The Principles of Private Detection. />
  Mma Makutsi picked up one of the files. “This one, for example, Mma. Remember that man who ran the store and said his wife was having an affair? And then his wife came into the office and said the same thing about him? And we had to sit there with a straight face?”

  Mma Ramotswe did remember, and she laughed at the recollection. “And then they both decided that it was a mistake and got back together.”

  There was more. Mma Makutsi lifted up the file and held it over the wastepaper bin. “And then they argued about who should pay the bill, and neither of them paid.”

  “I think we can throw that one away, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Case closed.”

  The file fell into the bin. It was almost like an act of forgiveness, although there were no witnesses, save the two of them. Mma Ramotswe found herself raising her eyes briefly, almost guiltily, to the ceiling. At school in Mochudi, all those years ago—in that small school perched on top of the hill, with the village beneath it and the sound of cattle bells drifting up on the breeze—there, standing before the class, her teacher, the infinitely patient Mma Kenosi, had told them about the Recording Angel who noted down everything: “And I mean everything, boys and girls, that you do. So even if you do a good deed and nobody is there to witness it, that will be written down.” And at that, she would raise her eyes heavenwards, and thirty-five pairs of eyes watching her would be raised in unison, as if in an orchestrated display. The habits of childhood, instilled by the Mma Kenosis of this life, may be overwritten by the demands of the years, but some vestiges remained—thoughts, ways of doing things, odd beliefs, superstitions…these things had a power over you that ensured their survival, even if it was in weakened form. And so it was that Mma Ramotswe thought briefly of the Recording Angel as Mma Makutsi tipped the defunct file into the bin. She had long since abandoned belief in such a person, because a moment’s thought was enough to explode the notion: How could anybody keep an eye on the millions—no, billions—of good, and bad, deeds that people did every day? Such a task was clearly impossible, even if you believed in angels, which she did not. Well, not completely: there were times when you wanted to believe in angels, and when you might just allow yourself a few moments of such a belief. When you were in danger, perhaps, you might secretly wish for angelic assistance, and might be forgiven for believing in something that you didn’t believe in. Or when you wanted something so badly—that a grievously ill friend might be relieved of her suffering, one way or another, for example; then you might clutch at such a belief. And when your silent prayer was answered, was it not tempting to think that an angel had brought about that which you wanted? Was this not just an ordinary human way of thinking—or hoping, perhaps?