"Why are you sad?" he asked. "You must not be sad."
She wiped away a tear and then shook her head.
"I'm not sad," she said. "It's just that nobody has ever given me anything like this ring before. When I married Note he gave me nothing. I had hoped that there would be a ring, but there was not. Now I have a ring."
"I will try to make up for Note," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "I will try to be a good husband for you."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "You will be," she said. "And I shall try to be a good wife for you."
They sat for a moment, saying nothing, each with the thoughts that the moment demanded. Then Mr J.L.B. Matekoni got out, walked round the front of the car, and opened her door for her. They would go inside for bush tea and she would show Rose the ring and the diamond that had made her so happy and so sad at the same time.
CHAPTER SIX
A DRY PLACE
SITTING IN her office at the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no. She did not really want to take on the search for a solution to what happened to Mrs Curtin's son; Clovis Andersen, the author of her professional bible, The Principles of Private Detection, would have described the enquiry as stale. "A stale enquiry," he wrote, "is unrewarding to all concerned. The client is given false hopes because a detective is working on the case, and the agent himself feels committed to coming up with something because of the client's expectations. This means that the agent will probably spend more time on the case than the circumstances should warrant. At the end of the day, nothing is likely to be achieved and one is left wondering whether there is not a case for allowing the past to be buried with decency. Let the past alone is sometimes the best advice that can be given."
Mma Ramotswe had reread this passage several times and had found herself agreeing with the sentiments it expressed. There was far too much interest in the past, she thought. People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? There were many wrongs in the past, but did it help to keep bringing them up and giving them a fresh airing? She thought of the Shona people and how they kept going on about what the Ndebele did to them under Mzi-likazi and Lobengula. It is true that they did terrible things- after all, they were really Zulus and had always oppressed their neighbours-but surely that was no justification for continuing to talk about it. It would be better to forget all that once and for all.
She thought of Seretse Khama, Paramount Chief of the Bamgwato, First President of Botswana, Statesman. Look at the way the British had treated him, refusing to recognize his choice of bride and forcing him into exile simply because he had married an Englishwoman. How could they have done such an insensitive and cruel thing to a man like that? To send a man away from his land, from his people, was surely one of the cruellest punishments that could he devised. And it left the people leaderless; it cut at their very souclass="underline" Where is our Khama? Where is the son of Kgosi Sekgoma II and the mohuma-gadi Tehogo? But Seretse himself never made much of this later on. He did not talk about it and he was never anything but courteous to the British Government and to the Queen herself. A lesser man would have said: Look what you did to me, and now you expect me to be your friend!
Then there was Mr Mandela. Everybody knew about Mr Mandela and how he had forgiven those who had imprisoned him. They had taken away years and years of his life simply because he wanted justice. They had set him to work in a quarry and his eyes had been permanently damaged by the rock dust. But at last, when he had walked out of the prison on that breathless, luminous day, he had said nothing about revenge or even retribution. He had said that there were more important things to do than to complain about the past, and in time he had shown that he meant this by hundreds of acts of kindness towards those who had treated him so badly. That was the real African way, the tradition that was closest to the heart of Africa. We are all children of Africa, and none of us is better or more important than the other. This is what Africa could say to the world: it could remind it what it is to be human.
She appreciated that, and she understood the greatness that Khama and Mandela showed in forgiving the past. And yet, Mrs Curtin's case was different. It did not seem to her that the American woman was keen to find somebody to blame for her son's disappearance, although she knew that there were many people in such circumstances who became obsessed with finding somebody to punish. And, of course, there was the whole problem of punishment. Mma Ramotswe sighed. She supposed that punishment was sometimes needed to make it dear that what somebody had done was wrong, but she had never been able to understand why we should wish to punish I hose who repented for their misdeeds. When she was a girl in Mochudi, she had seen a boy beaten for losing a goat. He had confessed that he had gone to sleep under a tree when he should have been watching the herd, and he had said that he was truly sorry that he had allowed the goat to wander. What was the point, she wondered, in his uncle beating him with a mopani stick until he cried out for mercy? Such punishment achieved nothing and merely disfigured the person who exacted it.
But these were large issues, and the more immediate problem was where to start with the search for that poor, dead American boy. She imagined Clovis Andersen shaking his head and saying, "Well, Mma Ramotswe, you've landed yourself with a stale case in spite of what I say about these things. But since you've done so, then my usual advice to you is to go back to the beginning. Start there." The beginning, she supposed, was the farm where Burkhardt and his friends had set up their project. It would not be difficult to find the place itself, although she doubted whether she would discover anything' But at least it would give her a feeling for the matter, and that, she knew, was the beginning. Places had echoes-and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.
AT LEAST she knew how to find the village. Her secretary, Mma Makutsi, had a cousin who came from the village nearest to the farm and she had explained which road to take. It was out to the west, not far from Molepolole. It was dry country, verging on the Kalahari, covered with low bushes and thorn trees. It was sparsely populated, but in those areas where there was more water, people had established small villages and clusters of small houses around the sorghum and melon fields. There was not much to do here, and people moved to Lobatse or Gaborone for work if they were in a position to do so. Gaborone was full of people from places like this. They came to the city, but kept their ties with their lands and their cattle post. Places like this would always be home, no matter how long people spent away. At the end of the day, this is where they would wish to die, under these great, wide skies, which were like a limitless ocean.
She travelled down in her tiny white van on a Saturday morning, setting off early, as she liked to do on any trip. As she left the town, there were already streams of people coming in for a Saturday's shopping. It was the end of the month, which meant payday, and the shops would be noisy and crowded as people bought their large jars of syrup and beans, or splashed out on the coveted new dress or shoes. Mma Ramotswe liked shopping, but she never shopped around payday. Prices went up then, she was convinced, and went down again towards the middle of the month, when nobody had any money.
Most of the traffic on the road consisted of buses and vans bringing people in. But there were a few going in the opposite direction-workers from town heading off for a weekend back in their villages; men going back to their wives and children; women working as maids in Gaborone going back to spend their precious days of leisure with their parents and grandparents. Mma Ramotswe slowed down; there was a woman standing at the side of the road, waving her hand to request a lift. She was a woman of about Mma Ramotswe's age, dressed smartly in a black skirt and a bright red jersey. Mma Ramotswe hesitated, and then stopped. She could not leave her standing there; somewhere there would be a family waiting for her, counting on a motorist to bring their mother home.