The Fading Diamond
Botswana | Fable 5
The new fare is chalked over the old one, and the seven still shows through under the twelve.
Tegobo reads the board twice from near the head of the combi queue, in the blue polo he ironed flat on the kitchen table before sunrise. The arithmetic refuses to improve. Ten pula in his pocket, one soft brown note, warm from his mother’s apron. She pressed it on him at the gate this morning with both hands, the way she hands over anything she cannot spare. Twelve into town. Twelve back.
At the tuck-shop counter a radio is talking about the Strait again: tankers riding at anchor, the price of a barrel, a minister appealing for calm. The conductor has heard the bulletin so many times his lips move along with it. A woman argues with her hands; he points at the chalkboard, then across the road at the filling station, where the pump price has been re-stickered three times since June.
The BGCSE is in October. The library in town keeps ten years of past papers behind the issue desk, and it has a long table where nobody sends him to fetch water or mind the pots. Six kilometres. He steps out of the queue, and the woman moves up gladly into his place.
The road out of the ward runs past the new junior secondary, the newest thing between here and town: blue glass, solar panels angled like raised hands, a fence still bright with galvanising. Inside the fence the grass stands to the knee, gone to seed. Two groundsmen sit in the shade of the guard hut with their slashers across their laps, playing morabaraba with bottle tops, keeping the hours nobody has paid them for since May. The foundation stone by the gate reads OPENED BY HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC. The grass has closed over the date.
He walks. Combis pass him in pulls of hot air, full. Near the flyover a billboard still promises DIAMONDS FOR DEVELOPMENT above a photograph of a graduate in her gown; the paper has begun to lift at one corner, and under it shows an older advertisement, a bank, also smiling. The sky over Kgale Hill is high and dry. Pula, the money is called. Rain.
Where the plots turn to offices, the De Beers building stands with its glass still clean and its sign taken down; the sun has printed a pale ghost of the letters on the wall where it hung. Through the window, chairs are stacked seat to seat around a dead pot plant, and a notice taped inside the glass has bleached past reading.
His father drove a haul truck at Jwaneng for nineteen years. He resoles shoes outside the rank now, and he speaks of the mine the way other men speak of a brother who has gone quiet. The government wanted a larger share of the stones. The company wanted the old arrangement. And the stones themselves lost half their price to diamonds grown in a week, in a factory, under lights, so the office closed while the two sides went on dividing a smaller and smaller thing.
All morning he has been doing sums: the fare and the litre, the barrel and the carat, the wages owed to the men with the slashers. Somewhere past the empty office he stops doing them. The exam in October has his name on it, and the exam has never heard of the Strait of Hormuz. That is what he tells himself, and the telling carries him the last two kilometres.
The library sits back from the avenue behind two flame trees, brick, with trim painted the light blue of the flag. The opening hours are on a board beside the door. Saturday, eight to one. The morning is only half spent.
In the dark glass of the door he meets himself: the collar of the polo gone grey with road dust, a long stain of sweat down the chest. He straightens the collar the way his mother taught him and takes the handle.
The door does not move.