Free Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

the side of my face. I still have a scar, which you can see, look, just here between my cheek and my ear. That is my reminder of what happened.”
    “You were a lucky man to have escaped,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They could easily have shot you. If you weren’t here talking to me, I would have thought the story ended quite differently.”
    Mr. Molefelo smiled. “I thought that, too. But it did not. And I was able to go back to see my wife and my sons, who started to cry when they saw their father with blood streaming down his face. And I was crying, too, I think, and shaking all over like a dog who’s been thrown in the water. And I was like this for more than a day, I think. I was very ashamed. A man should not behave like rthat. But I was like a frightened little boy.
    “We went back to Lobatse so that I could see one of the doctors there who knew how to stitch up faces. He gave me injections and drew the wound together. Then I went back to work and tried to forget about what had happened. But I could not, Mma. I kept thinking about what this meant for my life. I know that this may sound strange to you, but it made me think about every thing I had done. It made me weigh up my life. And it made me want to tie things up, so that next time—and I hope there will not be a next time—the next time I faced death like that, I could think:
I have set my life in order
.”
    “That is a very good idea,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We should all do that, I think. But we never do. For example, my electricity bill—”
    “Those are small things,” Mr. Molefelo interjected. “Bills and debts are nothing, really. What really counts are the things that you have done to people. That is what counts. And that is why I’ve come to see you, Mma. I want to confess. I do not go to the Catholic Church, where you can sit in a box and tell the priest all about the things you have done. I cannot do that. But I want to talk to somebody, and that is why I have come to see you.”
    Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood. Shortly after opening the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, she had discovered that part of her role would be to listen to people and to help them unburden themselves of their past. And indeed her subsequent reading of Clovis Andersen had confirmed this.
Be gentle
, he had written.
Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement on them, but listen. Just listen
.
    They had reached a place where the path dipped down into a dried-up watercourse. There was a termite mound to one side of it, and on the other, a small expanse of rock rising out of the redearth. There was the chewed-up pith of sugarcane lying to the side of the path and a fragment of broken blue glass, which caught the sun. Not far away a goat was standing on its hind legs, nibbling at the less accessible leaves of a shrub. It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions—small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.

CHAPTER SIX

OLD TYPEWRITERS, GATHERING DUST
    M MA MAKUTSI watched Mma Ramotswe set off for her walk with Mr. Molefelo and said to herself: “This is one of the limitations of being only an assistant detective. I miss the important things. I hear about the clients at one remove. I am really just a secretary, not an assistant detective.” And, turning to the pile of garage bills which was now ready for dispatch, she thought: “I am not really an assistant garage manager, either; I am a garage secretary, which is a different thing altogether.”
    She rose from her desk to make herself a cup of bush tea.