Tati Monyena walked with her to the ward, and introduced her again to the nurses she had already met. One smiled when she saw Mma Ramotswe in her white coat. Another looked at her in astonishment, and then frowned and turned away. They were busy, though, and had no time to speak to her. There was a man in a bed near the window who was breathing heavily, making a sound which was like that of gravel being walked upon. One of the nurses took his pulse and adjusted his pillow. There was a small framed photograph on the table beside him, left by a relative no doubt, a reminder, a little thing for a very ill person to have with him on his journey, along with all those other memories that make up the life of a man.

For the first little while, Mma Ramotswe felt like the intruder she was. It was an almost indecent feeling—that one was watching something that one should not be watching, like looking at another person in a moment of great privacy, but that feeling wore away as she stood by a window and watched the nurses at work. They were matter-of-fact in their manner: drugs were given, temperatures taken, entries made on charts. It was like an office, she thought, with its series of small tasks to be methodically carried out. That nurse over there, she thought, the one with the glasses, would be Mma Makutsi herself. And that young man who brought in the drugs trolley and who made some muttered comment to one of the nurses could be Charlie, and the drugs trolley, with its well-oiled, silent wheels, his Mercedes-Benz.

After three quarters of an hour, when she had begun to feel tired, Mma Ramotswe drew a chair over to the place where she had been standing. It was near a bed occupied by a silent, sleeping man. He had tubes inserted into his arms, and wires disappearing into the sleeve of his nightgown. He slept regardless, his face composed, peaceful, all pain, if he had been experiencing it, forgotten. She watched him and thought of her father, Obed Ramotswe, and of how he met his end, in just such a bed, and of how it had seemed to her at the time that a whole Botswana had died with him. But it had not. That fine country, with its good people, was still there; it was there in the face of this elderly man with his head upon that pillow and the sunlight, the warm, friendly sun of Africa, slanting through the window and falling upon him now in his last days.