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who tried to have everyone evicted from their homes in Sandpiper Drift so he could build another golf course? I thought he was in prison.”
    â€œHe just got out. His sentence was shortened for good behavior.”
    â€œI wonder if Monica knows,” said Francina.
    Monica, who had helped uncover the fraud that had almost caused the residents of the small neighborhood on the inland edge of the lagoon to lose their homes, had been banned from the golf resort for life. A hostile standoff had existed between the residents of Lady Helen and the resort management ever since Mr. Yang went to prison. Even the two residents of Lady Helen who had washed dishes at the resort and acted as the town’s spies had been too disgusted to return. What on earth was Mama Dlamini doing fraternizing with the enemy?
    â€œIf she performs well she’ll be made head chef of the five star restaurant,” said Mrs. Shabalala, answering her daughter-in-law’s unspoken question.
    â€œI see,” said Francina, when, in fact, she didn’t.
    â€œYou of all people should understand what that might mean to a woman who grew up poor in a village in KwaZulu-Natal.”
    There were still mornings Francina wanted to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming when she saw the shadow cast on the shiny floor of her shop by the gold lettering of the name on the window. But her mother-in-law’s observation was only partly astute, because Jabulani Dressmakers was more than enough for Francina, and the café should have been enough for Mama Dlamini. If the woman became head chef at the resort, where would she set her sights next? On cooking for the president? Francina was in favor of ambition if the goal was self-improvement, but runaway ambition was dangerous. And it appeared that Mama Dlamini was afflicted with the dangerous kind. How could Francina not tell Monica?
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    The flat-topped mountain rising above Cape Town, with its veil of soft white clouds, never failed to impress Francina. Johannesburg had its flat-topped golden mine dumps, but the sight of them had depressed Francina whenever she’d returned from a visit to her beloved province of KwaZulu-Natal. Johannesburg had been her address for more than twenty years, and yet it had never been home. She had resided there to earn a living, because there weren’t any jobs close to her village. Her situation had not been different from that of thousands of men who had left their families in the villages to go to Johannesburg to work underground in the gold mines.
    It was not natural for men to live in dormitories, separated from their wives for eleven months of the year. Johannesburg was full of girls who had forgotten the lessons their mothers had taught them back in the villages, who did not think twice about going out with another woman’s husband. A girl could be seduced by a man who offered a distraction from a life of drudgery pushing a broom down deserted office corridors. How different things might have been if people did not have to leave home to find employment. How many individuals might have been saved from this terrible disease, this pandemic that was stealing more than eight hundred people a day, most in the prime of life?
    Hercules said that one day this would all be a chapter in a history textbook, the type of textbook that he used in his classes, teaching his pupils. People didn’t realize, he claimed, that they were a part of history in the making, and that the course of history could be changed. If Francina gave Hercules half a chance, he could go on for hours about how this war could have been avoided if only so-and-so had done this instead of that, or the citizens of that country could have been living like kings if only they’d realized sooner that their such-and-such head of state was leading them toward starvation. But to change the path of history, Francina believed, required strong leaders, and no matter where in the world