Alexander McCall Smith: Tears of the Giraffe

We returned to Washington. Oddly enough, when we got back I realised exactly what it was that had prevented Michael from leaving. Everything there seemed so insincere and, well, aggressive. I missed Botswana, and not a day went past, not a day, when I would not think about it. It was like an ache. I would have given anything to be able to walk out of my house and stand under a thorn tree or look up at that great white sky. Or to hear African voices calling out to one another in the night. I even missed the October heat.

Michael wrote to us every week. His letters were full of news about the farm. I heard all about how the tomatoes were doing and about the insects which had attacked the spinach plants. It was all very vivid, and very painful to me, because I would have loved to have been there doing what he was doing, knowing that it made a difference. Nothing I could do in my life made a difference to anybody. I took on various bits of charitable work. I worked on a literacy scheme. I took library books to housebound old people. But it was nothing by comparison with what my son was doing all those miles away in Africa.

Then the letter did not arrive one week and a day or two later there was a call from the American Embassy in Botswana. My son had been reported as missing. They were looking into the matter and would let me know as soon as they had any further information.

I came over immediately and I was met at the airport by somebody I knew on the Embassy staff. He explained to me that Burkhardt had reported to the police that Michael had simply disappeared one evening. They all took their meals together, and he had been at the meal. Thereafter nobody saw him. The South African woman had no idea where he had gone and the truck which he had bought after our departure was still in its shed. There was no clue as to what had happened.

The police had questioned everybody on the farm but had come up with no further information. Nobody had seen him and nobody had any idea what might have happened. It seemed that he had been swallowed up by the night.

I went out there on the afternoon of my arrival. Burkhardt was very concerned and tried to reassure me that he would soon turn up. But he was able to offer no explanation as to why he should have taken it into his head to leave without a word to anyone. The South African woman was taciturn. She was suspicious of me, for some reason, and said very little. She, too, could think of no reason for Michael to disappear.

I stayed for four weeks. We put a notice in the newspapers and offered a reward for information as to his whereabouts. I travelled backwards and forwards to the farm, going over every possibility in my mind. I engaged a game tracker to conduct a search of the bush in the area, and he searched for two weeks before giving up. There was nothing to be found.

Eventually they decided that one of two things had happened. He had been set upon by somebody, for whatever reason, possibly in the course of a robbery, and his body had been taken away. Or he had been taken by wild animals, perhaps by a lion that had wandered in from the Kalahari. It would have been quite unusual to find a lion that close to Molepolole, but it was just possible. But if that had happened, then the game tracker would have found some clue. Yet he had come up with nothing. No spoor. No unusual animal droppings. There was nothing.

I came back a month later, and again a few months after that. Everybody was sympathetic but eventually it became apparent that they had nothing more to say to me. So I left the matter in the hands of the Embassy here and every so often they contacted the police to find out if there was any fresh news. There never was.

Six months ago Jack died. He had been ill for a while with pancreatic cancer and I had been warned that there was no hope. But after he had gone, I decided that I should try one last time to see if there was anything I could do to find out what happened to Michael. It may seem strange to you, Mma Ramotswe, that somebody should go on and on about something that happened ten years ago. But I just want to know. I just want to find out what happened to my son. I don't expect to find him. I accept that he's dead. But I would like to be able to close that chapter and say goodbye. That is all I want. Will you help me? Will you try to find out for me? You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away. Never.

FOR A few moments after her visitor had finished her story, Mma Ramotswe sat in silence. What could she do for this woman? Could she find anything out if the Botswana Police and the American Embassy had tried and failed? There was probably nothing she could do, and yet this woman needed help and if she could not obtain it from the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency then where would she be able to find it?

"I shall help you," she said, adding, "my sister."

MR J.L.B. Matekoni contemplated the view from his office at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. There were two windows, one of which looked directly into the workshop, where his two young apprentices were busy raising a car on a jack. They were doing it the wrong way, he noticed, in spite of his constant reminders of the dangers involved. One of them had already had an accident with the blade of an engine fan and had been lucky not to lose a finger; but they persisted with their unsafe practices. The problem, of course, was that they were barely nineteen. At this age, all young men are immortal and imagine that they will live forever. They'll find out, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni grimly. They'll discover that they're just like the rest of us.

He turned in his chair and looked out through the other window. The view in this direction was more pleasing: across the backyard of the garage, one could see a cluster of acacia trees sticking up out of the dry thorn scrub and, beyond that, like islands rising from a grey-green sea, the isolated hills over towards Odi. It was mid-morning and the air was still. By midday there would be a heat haze that would make the hills seem to dance and shimmer. He would go home for his lunch then us it would be too hot to work. He would sit in his kitchen, which was the coolest room of the house, eat the maizemeal and stew which his maid prepared for him, and read the Botswana Daily News. After that, he inevitably took a short nap before he returned to the garage and the afternoon's work.

The apprentices ate their lunch at the garage, sitting on a couple of upturned oil drums that they had placed under one of the acacia trees. From this vantage point they watched the girls walk past and exchanged the low banter which seemed to give them such pleasure. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had heard their conversation and had a poor opinion of it.

"You're a pretty girl! Have you got a car? I could fix your car tor you. I could make you go much faster!"

This brought giggles and a quickening step from the two young typists from the Water Affairs office.

"You're too thin! You're not eating enough meat! A girl like you needs more meat so that she can have lots of children!"

"Where did you get those shoes from? Are those Mercedes-Benz shoes? Fast shoes for fast girls!"

Really! thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He had never behaved like that when he was their age. He had served his apprenticeship in the diesel workshops of the Botswana Bus Company and that sort of conduct would never have been tolerated. But this was the way young men behaved these days and there was nothing he could do about it. He had spoken to them about it, pointing out that the reputation of the garage depended on them just as it did on him. They had looked at him blankly, and he had realised then that they simply did not understand. They had not been taught what it was to have a reputation; the concept was completely beyond them. This realization had depressed him, and he had thought of writing to the Minister of Education about it and suggesting that the youth of Botswana be instructed in these basic moral ideas, but the letter, once composed, had sounded so pompous that he had decided not to send it. That was the difficulty, he realised. If you made any point about behaviour these days, you sounded old-fashioned and pompous. The only way to sound modern, it appeared, was to say that people could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and no matter what anybody else might think. That was the modern way of thinking.