“SO, MMA,” announced Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni over the breakfast table. “So, there we are.”
Mma Ramotswe nodded. She was not sure exactly what he meant, but she saw nothing to disagree with in what he had said. “Yes,” she replied, shelving the freshly washed cooking pot in which she had prepared his sorghum porridge. “Here we are.”
“The first day of your holiday,” he went on, licking a small amount of butter off a finger. “That is always a good feeling, isn’t it? It’s like a Saturday with a whole lot of other Saturdays stretching out beyond it. Just like that, don’t you think, Mma?”
She was not quite sure she agreed. It was actually a Wednesday, as she had finally left the office late on a Tuesday afternoon, and as far as she could make out the day had nothing about it that distinguished it from any other Wednesday.
“One thing I do know, Rra,” she said. “I feel that I should be going off to work, although I realise that I don’t have to.”
He chuckled. “A lady of leisure—that’s what they call ladies who have nothing to do, isn’t it? A lady of leisure.” He paused, looked at his watch, and then rose to his feet. “There are many ladies like that in Gaborone, I think. You see them in their cars, driving around, but I’m not sure that they have anywhere to drive to. Some of them, I think, just drive round the block several times and then go home. That makes them feel they’ve been out.”
There was a lot she could say about that observation. She might start by pointing out that the women in question had, in fact, plenty to do; that they were driving purposefully to do something useful at the other end of their journey; or that they were actually driving to their work as doctors or accountants or even the pilots of Air Botswana planes; or that they were in the middle of ferrying children about; or that they were going to shops to buy the supplies that they would subsequently cook for their men who never bothered to help in the kitchen. She could point all that out and then remind Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni that it might only be men who formed the view that these people were driving around aimlessly because they—the men in question—had no idea what women really did, but she said none of that because she knew that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was not one of those men who belittled women and that his remark had not been intended unkindly, and that, when all was said and done, it was probably just a little bit true: there were at least some women in Gaborone who had nothing to do but to drive around in that way. So she left all of this unsaid and went on, instead, to say, “I will not drive around like that, Rra—you know that, surely.”
He was quick to agree. “Of course not, Mma. You will have many things to do, I think. You’ll…”
The unfinished sentence hung heavily in the air, and Mma Ramotswe thought: I cannot let it be like that. She would never be one of those ladies of leisure with their driving round aimlessly until it was time for lunch with other ladies of leisure. No, she would do something with this holiday; she would…She faltered. It was difficult to think what she could possibly do. It was too hot to do any work in the garden, other than in the first half hour or so of light before the sun floated up above the line of acacia trees that made the horizon. Once that happened it would be too late; the very earth that one worked would become too hot to touch, and the only place to be, if one were outside, would be in the pool of shade cast by a tree.
Of course she could always go for morning tea at the President Hotel. She could sit out on the verandah, which was blissfully shaded, and watch people in the square down below, but there was a limit to how much time you could sit there, eking the last drop out of the teapot, before the waiters began to fuss about you and encourage you to give up your table to somebody else.
Apart from that, what was there to do? Her friends would all be busy, as they had things to do during the day—jobs to go to or children to look after—and of course none of them would be on holiday. But an idea came to her nonetheless, and now it struck her as being exactly the sort of thing one should do if one found oneself on holiday.
“I shall go to see Mma Potokwane,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I have not been out to see her for some time, and I think I should.”
A slightly doubtful expression crossed Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s face. “A visit to Mma Potokwane? Well, perhaps…but don’t you think that might not be the most restful thing to do, Mma? Whenever I go out there I am given something to do—fix the pump, please; make the windscreen wipers on the minibus work again, if you don’t mind; could you look at a light switch in one of the houses, now that you’re here, as it’s sending out sparks when you turn it on, and I am worried about sparks when there are children about, Rra, as I’m sure you’ll understand…That sort of thing, Mma.”
Mma Ramotswe smiled. “That is because she knows you can do all those things, Rra. It is different when I go out there. Then she likes to eat fruit cake and talk. That is a good way of passing the time if you’re on holiday—eating fruit cake and talking.”
“That is all right, then,” he conceded. “But remember, Mma, holidays are for doing even less than that. They are also a good time not to eat fruit cake and not to talk.”
“I shall try to remember that,” said Mma Ramotswe. And then a thought occurred to her. “Of course, they are also a good time not to have to do work in the kitchen.”
He began to show his agreement, but faltered. “Within reason, Mma,” he said. “But you are right about that. Women have so much work to do in a house and they deserve a holiday from that; of course they do. But…”
She waited. “But what, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni?”
“But they cannot stop altogether, because if they did, then what would happen to the men, Mma? What would they do?”
“That is what women sometimes wonder, Rra,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “They would never…they would never leave us altogether, would they, Mma? These ladies who call themselves feminists, are they saying that all women should get up and walk away? Is that what they want, do you think?”
Mma Ramotswe tried not to laugh at his sudden anxiety. She understood why some women should want to walk away—she herself had walked away from the dreadful Note Mokoti—and there were many of her sisters who would do well to walk away from their drunken and abusive husbands. But there were also many men—and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was one of them—who had done nothing to deserve such a response. “Of course not, Rra. There may be some ladies who say that all women should walk away from men altogether, but they are very few in number, I think.”
He still looked worried. “Are there any such ladies in Botswana, Mma?”
She nodded. “Yes, there are, Rra. There are ladies like that.”
He shook his head in dismay. “Are they happy, do you think, Mma?”
“They say they are.”
“But do you think they really are? Happy inside?”
She hesitated. “I think some of them are, Rra. And some of them, anyway—not all of them, but some of them—may not like men very much, Rra. They may prefer to be with other women, you see.”
He stared at her. “Somebody told me that one day. I have heard such a thing.”
She shrugged. “Different people like different things, Rra.”
He lowered his voice, although there was nobody else present. “Do you know any ladies like that, Mma?”
She nodded. “Yes, I do, Rra. They are just like anybody else, you see—they are ordinary people.”
He looked at her doubtfully. “Except for…well, they are unlike other ladies who are fond of the company of men.”
“You could say that. But these days, Rra, things like that are not very important. There are parts of Africa, I’m afraid, that are being a bit unkind about these things and do not want people to be happy…in the way they want to be happy.”
“That is very unkind.”
They had negotiated the trickiest part of the conversation and come out on the other side more easily than she had imagined. She loved her husband, not least for his kindness, which had been evident in what he had just said. Unfortunately, there were many men who were not so kind, and they were often the ones who were in a position to make others unhappy; and would continue to do so, she imagined, until women asserted themselves more and then gently, very gently, took the reins of government into their own hands, or at least took their fair share of power—which was exactly half. Would that ever happen, she wondered? She thought it might be beginning—there were places where it was and they were working well. As long as the right sort of women became involved, of course, and not people like…She shuddered. She did not like to think of Violet Sephotho, but every so often she did.
“Violet Sephotho,” she muttered.
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked up sharply. “Is she one of those ladies, Mma?”
Mma Ramotswe smiled. “I do not think so, Rra. She is one who is always chasing men.”
“I hope that the men she chases are fast runners,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni.
“Some of them cannot run fast enough, Rra. Then they are caught. It is the same way in which a lioness catches one of those tiny antelopes they like to eat…”
“Duiker,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Their meat is very sweet.”
Mma Ramotswe remembered something. “I have heard certain ladies being referred to as man-eaters, Rra. Have you heard that expression?”
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. “I have heard it.”
“I think that people might call her that,” she said. “They might call her ‘The Great Man-Eater of the Kalahari.’ ”
He glanced at his wife. She was a kind woman—none kinder in Botswana—and it was unusual for her to make an uncharitable remark. And even as he thought this, Mma Ramotswe felt a sudden pang of guilt. Nicknames were popular, but they were often cruel. Did Violet Sephotho deserve such a cutting nickname? The answer, she realised, was probably yes. But no, that was no excuse. “Perhaps we should not call her that,” she said, sounding a bit disappointed.
“Perhaps not,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, adding, “Even if it does suit her rather well, Mma.”
He looked at his watch. “It is time for me to go to work,” he said. “I am not on holiday.”
“I will make you some lunch,” offered Mma Ramotswe. “That will give me something to do.”
“I shall be back at lunch time, then.” He paused. “Don’t look for things to do, Mma Ramotswe. Remember that this is a holiday and you must not look for things to do on a holiday.”
She promised him she would not. “I am already beginning to unwind,” she said. “I am like a big spring that is unwinding slowly.”
“That is good,” he said. “That is exactly how it should be.”
BUT THAT WAS NOT HOW IT WAS—at least not on that first day of the holiday, and indeed not on the second or third day either. Shortly after Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had driven off to work in his battered green truck, Mma Ramotswe found her way into the kitchen. She looked about her, at the cutting boards and the cupboards, at the stove with the discoloured heating plates, at the stacks of crockery on the shelves. Kitchens were quick to look shabby, and although Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had painted theirs barely eighteen months ago, it was already looking slightly down at heel. Part of the problem, of course, was the absence of proper ventilation. Modern kitchens—and hers could not really be described as such—had extractor fans that took all the smoke and smells out. Mma Makutsi’s kitchen in her new house was like that: she had two large metal hoods coming down from the ceiling in just the right place to catch the steam laden with fats that would otherwise be deposited on the walls and ceiling, the fingerprint of countless meals. That steam was ushered out of Mma Makutsi’s kitchen, but in Mma Ramotswe’s it swirled about until it settled in a thin layer over everything. If you fried a lot of foods—as Mma Ramotswe had to admit to doing—then you soon noticed the effect.
“Open a window,” suggested Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “That’s what I do in the garage when I run an engine. I open a window to let out all the carbon monoxide.”
She admitted that this would help, but it was not a complete solution. The trouble with opening a window in Botswana was that even if you let certain things out, you also let other things in—and sometimes those things you let in were things it would be decidedly better to keep out. There were mosquitoes, for example, that loved open windows, even if the window was fitted with a metal mesh screen precisely to keep them out. Such screens were an inconvenience to mosquitoes, but nothing more than that; inevitably there were holes at the corners or there were places where the tiny wires that made up the screen had buckled or moved, creating a good place for mosquitoes to fly through.
Then there were those large black insects with wings. You never learned what these insects were; they made a lot of noise with the beating of their wings, and they had sharp points protruding from their heads, but they did not appear to belong to any known category of insect. Some people said that they were harmless and that it was bad luck to step on them and crush them; others said that if you let them crawl around your house they would just find a place to set up their own homes and breed their own families. “People have been pushed out by those insects,” somebody once told Mma Ramotswe. “I know a woman who let one or two of them come into the house and then did not deal with them. Then two days later there were five hundred, and a few days after that all her walls were covered with them and she had to move out.”
Mma Ramotswe did not believe that story; people exaggerated for effect, especially when it came to the creatures they encountered. If people said that they almost stepped on a snake in the bush, then that snake would always be a black mamba—it would never be one of those more numerous, but less dramatic, grass snakes. Those ordinary snakes were scared of people and would do anything to avoid an encounter, but they, for dramatic reasons, seemed never to feature in people’s stories.
Mind you, that was no reason to be complacent about black mambas. Most people had seen one at one time or another, as black mambas were to be found now and then, along with cobras, puff adders, and other potentially lethal snakes.
As she looked around at her kitchen that morning, Mma Ramotswe wondered whether there were any places where a black mamba might lurk if it were to decide to come into the house. It was not at all fanciful to entertain such a possibility: snakes did come into houses, especially during the hot weather when even a cold-blooded creature like a snake might find the blast of the midday sun too hot to bear. She remembered a snake coming into the house in Mochudi when she was a girl and Obed Ramotswe spotting it. He had whispered to her to stand quite still while he reached for his sjambok, that hide whip used to drive mules and oxen. The snake, though, had seen his movement and had raised its head, ready to strike. Fortunately, it had thought better of it, and had turned tail and shot out of the house. She had not seen a snake in the house since then, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.
She noticed that there was a small hole between the floor and the base of one of the cupboards. She had not seen it before, and it occurred to her that the bottom of a cupboard, the dark place below, would be an ideal place for a snake to hide. Coiled up in such a refuge, cool and concealed, a snake would be well placed to take advantage of any scraps of food that might fall off the well-stocked shelves above…if snakes liked such things. Presumably they did. And of course there was nothing a snake liked more than a hen’s egg, and there were always plenty of eggs in that particular cupboard. It would be simplicity itself for a reasonably lengthy snake—and black mambas were often as long as a person is tall—to slide the upper part of its body up to the bowl of eggs, open wide its hinged jaws, and swallow one. A black mamba might find such living quarters highly congenial and might live there for months, for years indeed, before the unfortunate householder detected his presence. And that would be the point at which the uninvited guest said to his unwilling host: “I’m sorry, but now it’s time for you to go,” and those wicked little fangs would be exposed and…She shuddered.
She crossed the kitchen to stand immediately in front of the cupboard. Very gently, she eased open the cupboard door and gazed at the shelves on which the various foodstuffs were stacked. Right at the top were the sweet things—the jars of produce she bought from the sale of work out at Kgali Junction: melon jam, cumquat spread, marmalade made out of bitter oranges from the Cape. There was the tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, with its picture of a contented lion on the label; there was the box of sugar lumps; there was the sticky cordial that she had made for the children.
On the shelf below, she kept tinned foods: sardines from the fisheries of Namibia, bully beef from the factory down at Lobatse, tins of baked beans in tomato sauce. And then, on the shelf below, were the perishables—the packets of flour, the container into which she decanted the maize meal, and the bowl of eggs. She bought these eggs from a man who called round on his bicycle every week, a man who wore a crumpled hat not unlike the hat that her late father had worn; she could never turn down a man in a hat like that. He told her that they came from his hens at Mochudi, and she had bought them on the grounds that Mochudi eggs would have been the eggs she ate as a child, but then one day she discovered a supermarket stamp on one of them and her faith in the egg-man had been dented. His prices were still competitive, though, and she liked him in spite of his unreliability on that point.
She looked at the eggs. Suddenly she noticed that one of them had two small holes—two puncture holes—on its top. It was, she thought, exactly the sort of mark a snake would make if it had tried, and failed, to swallow an egg. She looked more closely, nestling the egg in the palm of her hand while she peered at the tiny punctures. The shell was slightly speckled at that point, with fragments of white mixed with the brown, and she decided, with a surge of relief, that these were not holes at all but imperfections in the surface: the egg itself was quite intact.
She replaced the egg and gazed at the food cupboard, trying to remember when it was that she had last tidied it. Never, she thought; I have never tidied the food cupboard. The thought made her smile. How many women were there in Botswana walking about with the guilty knowledge that they had never tidied the food cupboard? Everybody had some secret or other—something they had never confessed to another, even to those who were closest to them. In her work, Mma Ramotswe had learned this and had discovered, too, that even the most inconsequential of secrets could weigh heavily on a person’s soul. An act of selfishness, some small unkindness, could seem every bit as grave as a dreadful crime; an entirely human failing, a weakness in the face of temptation, could be as burdensome as a major character flaw: the size of the secret said nothing about its weight on the soul.
She tried to think of any other secrets she might have, but she could think of nothing. She had a weakness for fat cakes, but then that was hardly a secret to anybody who knew her, and indeed half the population of Botswana—no, more than that—almost the entire population had that weakness. Perhaps further secrets would surface. And as for her friends, what about them? What secrets did Mma Makutsi have? The answer to that came to her quickly: Mma Makutsi had more shoes than she would own up to having. She had claimed the other day she possessed only six pairs, but Mma Ramotswe was sure that this was not true. And Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni: What were his secrets? None, she thought—apart, perhaps, from the subject of at least some of his dreams. He was quite happy to tell her when he had had a dream about gearboxes and engines—which was almost every night, as far as she could work out—but there were some mornings when he said he did not remember what he had been dreaming. She was not convinced, but never pressed him on the matter.
And then there was Puso. He was such an odd little boy, with such an active imagination; one might suppose that his was a life filled with secrets, but she knew that this was far from true. Puso still had the honesty of childhood and tended to reveal without hesitation what was in his mind. But there was a secret—and now she remembered it. Puso drank the bathwater when he was still in it. She had seen him doing it, and had been about to admonish him when she stopped herself. Children needed at least some corners in their lives where there was no adult footfall. That might be one.
She reached out to the top shelf of the cupboard for a packet of spices. The date by which the contents were to be consumed was printed on the packaging. It was more or less exactly three years earlier. She picked up a jar of apricot jam. The children did not like apricots, and she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni were not great jam-eaters. She opened the jar: a crust of mould, cream and beige in colour, covered the jam, which could not even be seen beneath it. She shuddered: mould looked the way it did for a reason—it was a warning. She put the jar down on the floor, the beginning of what was to be a large stack of out-of-date or inedible foods.
The task of tidying the food cupboard took close to two hours, at the end of which the shelves were transformed, the foodstuffs arrayed in neat rows. It was just the sort of cupboard that a house-proud woman would keep—akin, she thought, to the well-ordered files in which Mma Makutsi took such pride.
It was half past ten on the first morning of her holiday. She had tidied the food cupboard, drunk two cups of red bush tea, and given her teeth a slightly longer-than-usual brushing. Now what? She walked into the living room and gazed out of the window, through the verandah, to the garden beyond. The day was well under way, the sun high in the sky, and there was not very much she could do in the garden in that heat. Even the verandah might be a bit uncomfortable, she felt, in spite of the shade it provided.
She sat down in one of the living-room chairs and looked about her. The room was tidy and the floor, made of squares of smooth cement, had been polished only a couple of days ago by Rose, her part-time cleaner. She had applied red polish until the floor was like a smooth red mirror, as slippery and almost as reflective. She looked up at the ceiling for cobwebs or for fly-spots: the white ceiling-boards, although buckled here and there, were pristine. The maid had cleaned even there.
Mma Ramotswe sighed. There was nothing to do in the house and nothing to do in the garden. She could read something, of course, but the magazines in her living room were well thumbed and familiar. There were several old copies of Reader’s Digest and a Drum magazine from over the border, but even had she been in the mood to read she would have found nothing new there. She had read the Reader’s Digests from cover to cover, and Drum was more for the eyes than for the mind, in spite of the irresistible headline displayed so prominently on its cover: “Man Mysteriously Loses Nose.” Even yesterday’s Botswana Daily News, brought home in the evening by Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, had been thoroughly perused. And there was never anything really surprising in the newspaper because people were always doing the same things. People show no inclination to change, thought Mma Ramotswe; they do the things they’ve always done time and time again. It would be more newsworthy if people did not do the things one expected of them. That would be news indeed: “Finance Minister Makes No New Promises,” or “No Sign of an Increase in Crime This Year,” or “Minister of Water Affairs Says Nothing About Possible New Pipeline.” People would be most interested to read real news like that.
She glanced at her watch. The last ten minutes had been very slow, and now it was only twenty to eleven. At this rate a day would seem like a week; a week would seem an eternity. No, she would not spend any more time sitting about the house, even if she was on holiday. She would go to the President Hotel and have mid-morning tea, with perhaps one or two of their fish-paste sandwiches to keep hunger at bay before she returned to cook Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s lunch. There was always a group of ladies having tea at the President Hotel—she had seen them there—and she knew one or two of them slightly. She could join them and enjoy a bit of stimulating conversation. Time always passed much faster when there was talk to be listened to.