The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  The wooden house where Hans's accomplice lives has a mighty fir tree. Fenced in by stone posts and well-polished steel wire stands the district court and courthouse, a white building with a columned portico and wide double doors. The ground floor is the courtroom, and the judge lives upstairs. For over a year the building stood empty, after old Judge Turesson died. Then one day a fully packed Chevrolet drove into the courtyard of the courthouse, and the town peeked expectantly through its curtains. From the gleaming car poured the family of the new district judge. One of the children running around in the yard was named Sture. He became Hans Olofson's friend.

  One afternoon, when Hans is wandering aimlessly down by the river, he sees a boy he doesn't know sitting on one of his special boulders, a look-out over the steel bridge and the south bank of the river. He hides behind a bush and watches the interloper, who seems to be busy fishing.

  The boy is the son of the new judge. Pleased, he summons up all the contempt he can muster. Only an idiot or a stranger from another parish would think it possible to catch fish in the river at this time of year.

  Von Croona. That's the family's name. A noble name, he has heard. A family, a name. Not ordinary, like Olofson. The new judge has ancestors reaching back into the mists of historical battlefields.

  Hans decides that because of this the judge's son must be a really unpleasant devil. He steps out of the bushes and shows himself.

  The boy on the rock regards him with curiosity.

  'Are there any fish here?' he asks.

  Hans shakes his head and decides he ought to hit him. Chase him away from his private rock. But he stops short, because the nobleman is looking him straight in the eye, with absolutely no sign of embarrassment. He reels in his fishing line, pulls the piece of worm off the hook, and stands up.

  'Are you the one who lives in the wooden house?' he asks, and Hans nods.

  And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they fall in together along the path. Hans leads the way, and the nobleman follows a few steps behind. Hans directs and points out things; he knows the paths, the ditches, the rocks. Finally they reach the pontoon bridge that leads over to the People's Park and then take a short cut across the common until they come to Kyrkogatan. Outside Leander Nilsson's bakery they stop to watch two dogs mating. At the water tower Hans shows him the spot where Rudin the madman set fire to himself a few years earlier, in protest at Head Physician Torstenson's refusal to admit him to the hospital for his stomach troubles.

  With undisguised pride Hans tries to recount the most hairraising events that he knows in the town's history. Rudin wasn't the only madman.

  He directs their steps towards the church and points out the hollow space in the masonry of the south wall. As recently as the previous year one of the trusted deacons, in a fit of acute crisis of faith, tried to demolish the church one late January evening. With a pick and sledgehammer he resolutely set to work on the thick wall. The commotion naturally prompted the police to be called in, and Constable Bergstrand was forced to button up his winter coat and venture out into the snowstorm to arrest the man.

  Hans tells the story and the nobleman listens.

  From that day on a friendship grows between this ill-matched pair, the nobleman and the son of a woodcutter. Together they surmount the vast differences between them. Not all of them, of course; there is always a no-man's-land they can never enter together, but they grow as close to each other as possible.

  Sture has his own room up in the attic of the courthouse. A large, bright room, with an abundance of curious equipment, maps, Meccano constructions, and chemicals. There are no toys, only two model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.

  Sture points to a picture hanging on the wall. Hans sees a bearded man who reminds him of one of the portraits of the old pastors that hang in the church. But Sture explains that this is Leonardo, and he wants to be just like him someday. Inventing new things, creating what people never even imagined they needed ...

  Hans listens without fully understanding. But he senses the passion in what he hears, and thinks he recognises in it his own obsessive dream of getting the miserable wooden house to cut its moorings and float away down the river towards the sea he has never yet seen.

  In this attic room they act out their mysterious games. Sture seldom visits Hans at home. The stuffy smell of elkhounds and wet woollens bothers him. He says nothing of this to Hans. Sture has been brought up not to offend anyone unnecessarily; he knows where he belongs and he's glad he doesn't have to live in Hans's world.

  Early that first summer they begin to go on nightly excursions. A ladder raised towards the attic window enables Sture to escape without anyone hearing him, and Hans bribes the elkhounds with bones he has saved and sneaks out the door. In the summer night they stroll through the sleeping town, investing all their pride in never being discovered. Cautious shadows in the beginning, they develop a less and less restrained audacity. They slip through hedges and broken fences, listen at open windows, climb up on each other's shoulders and press their faces against the windows where the few night-time lamps in the town are still burning. They see drunken men in filthy underwear sleeping in musty flats; on one golden but sadly never repeated occasion they witness a railway worker cavorting with Oscaria the shoe salesgirl in her bed.

  They rule the deserted streets and courtyards.

  One night in July they commit a ritual break-in. They enter the bicycle shop near the chemist's, the Monarch Specialist, and move some bicycles around in the display window. Then they hastily leave the shop without taking anything. It's the break-in itself that tempts them, pulling off a bewildering mystery. Wiberg the bicycle dealer will never figure out what happened.

  But they steal things too, of course. One night, from an unlocked car outside the Tourist Hotel, they snatch an unopened bottle of booze and ramble through their first bout of drunkenness, sitting on the boulder down by the river.

  They follow each other, first one leading, then the other. They never fight, but they don't share all their secrets. For Hans it's a constant source of humiliation that Sture has so much money. When the feeling of subordination grows too strong, Hans decides that his own father is a good-for-nothing who never had enough sense to secure himself a real income.

  For Sture the secret is the reverse. In Hans he sees a capable warrior, but he's also thankful that he doesn't have to be him.

  Perhaps they both have an inkling that their friendship is an impossibility. How long can the camaraderie be stretched before it snaps? The abyss is there, they both sense how close it is, but neither wants to confront the catastrophe.

  A streak of malice develops in their friendship. Where it comes from neither of them knows; suddenly it's just there. And it's towards the Noseless One in Ulvkälla that they direct their dark weapons.

  In her youth the Noseless One was struck by a thyroid fever which necessitated an operation on her nose. But the accident and emergency surgeon at the time, Dr Stierna, was having a bad day. The woman's nose disappeared completely under his knife and fumbling fingers, and she had to return home with a hole between her eyes. She was seventeen at the time and twice tried to drown herself, but both times she floated to shore. She lived alone with her mother, a seamstress, who died less than a year after the disastrous operation.

  If Pastor Harry Persson of the Free Church, nicknamed Hurrapelle, hadn't taken pity on her, she would certainly have succeeded in taking her own life. But Hurrapelle brought her to the wooden pews in the Baptist church, which lay between the town's two dominant dens of iniquity, the beer café and the People's Hall. At the church she was surrounded by a community she hadn't known existed. In the congregation there were two elderly nurses who weren't scared off by the Noseless One and her hole between the eyes, into which she stuck a handkerchief. They had served as missionaries in Africa for many years, mostly in the basin of the Belgian Congo, and there they experienced horrors far worse than a missing nose. They bore with them the memories
of bodies rotted with leprosy and the grotesquely swollen scrotums of elephantiasis. For them the Noseless One was a grateful reminder that Christian mercy could work wonders even in such a godless land as Sweden.

  Hurrapelle sent the Noseless One out on endless door-to-door rounds with the congregation's magazines in her hand, and no one refused to buy what she had to sell. Soon she had become a goldmine for Hurrapelle, and within six months he could even afford to trade in his rusty old Vauxhall on a brand-new Ford.

  The Noseless One lived in a secluded house in Ulvkälla. One night Sture and Hans stood outside her darkened window. They listened in silence before they went home across the river bridge.

  The next night they returned and nailed a dead rat to her front door. Her deformity led them to torment her for a few intense weeks that summer.

  One night they threw an anthill they had dug up through her open kitchen window. Another night they splashed varnish all over her currant bushes and finished by putting a crow with its head cut off in her letterbox, along with some pages torn out of a well-thumbed and sticky issue of Cocktail that they had found in a dustbin. Two nights later they came back, this time equipped with a pair of Nyman, the courthouse caretaker's, hedge clippers. Their plan was to butcher her flowers.

  While Hans stood watch by the corner of the house, Sture attacked one of the well-tended flower beds. Then the front door opened and the Noseless One stood there in a light-coloured bathrobe and asked them, quite calmly, without being sad or angry, why they were doing these things.

  They had an escape route planned. But instead of disappearing like two hares in a hunt they just stood there as though struck by a sight they couldn't escape.

  An angel, thinks Hans Olofson much later, many years after vanishing into the tropical night of Africa. He remembers her like an angel descended from heaven, now that she is dead and he has set out on the journey to fulfil her dream that he has taken as his own.

  In the summer night the Noseless One stands in the doorway, her white bathrobe gleaming in the early grey light of dawn. She waits for their answer, which never comes.

  Then she moves aside and asks them to come in. Her gesture is not to be refused. With bowed heads they pad past her, into her freshly scrubbed kitchen. Hans recognises at once the odour of soap, from his father's furious scrubbing, and he has a fleeting thought that maybe the Noseless One also scrubs her way through sleepless, haunted nights.

  Her kindness makes them weak, defenceless. If fire and fuming sulphur had spewed out of the hole where her nose used to be, they could have dealt with the situation more easily. A dragon can be more easily conquered than an angel.

  The smell of soap is mixed with the scent of bird cherry trees from outside her open kitchen window. A clock ticks softly on the wall. The marauders crouch down with their gaze fixed firmly on the linoleum. There in the kitchen, it is as quiet as if a prayer service were in progress. And perhaps the Noseless One is silently appealing to Hurrapelle's God to counsel her on how she can make the two shipwrecked vandals explain why one morning she came out to a kitchen crawling with angry ants.

  In the minds of the two warrior brothers there is a great emptiness. Their thoughts are locked like frozen gears. What is there to explain? Their impetuous desire to torment her has no tangible cause. The roots of evil grow in the dark subterranean soil that can scarcely be viewed, let alone explained.

  They crouch in the kitchen of the Noseless One, and after they sit in silence long enough, she lets them go. To the end she holds them there with her kindness, and she asks them to come back when they think they can explain their actions.

  The meeting with the Noseless One becomes a turning point. They return to her kitchen often, and slowly a great intimacy develops among the three. That year Hans turns thirteen and Sture fifteen. They are always welcome at her house. As if by silent agreement, they don't talk about the crow with its throat cut or the crawling ants. A wordless apology is given, forgiveness is received, and life turns the other cheek.

  Their first discovery is that the Noseless One has a name. It isn't just any old name, either; it's Janine, a name that emanates a foreign, mysterious fragrance.

  She has a name, a voice, a body. She hasn't yet turned thirty. She is still young. They begin to sense the vague shimmer of beauty when they succeed in looking past and beyond the gaping hole below her eyes. They sense a heartbeat and lively thoughts, desires and dreams. And as if it were the most natural thing in the world she pilots them through her life story, lets them accompany her to the appalling moment when she realises that the surgeon has carved off her entire nose, follow her twice into the black water of the river and feel the ropes from the weights snap just at the instant her lungs are about to burst. They follow her like invisible shadows to Hurrapelle's penitent bench, listen to the mysterious embrace of salvation, and finally stand next to her when she discovers the ants crawling across the kitchen floor.

  That year a strange love blooms among those three. A wildflower in the house just south of the river ...

  Chapter Six

  On a dirty map Hans Olofson puts his finger on the name Mutshatsha.

  'How do I get there?' he asks.

  It is his second morning in Africa, his stomach is unsettled, and the sweat is running down inside his shirt.

  He is standing at the front desk of the Ridgeway Hotel. Behind the desk is an elderly African with white hair and tired eyes. His shirt collar is frayed and his uniform unwashed. Olofson can't resist the temptation of leaning over the counter to see what the man has on his feet.

  On the way down in the lift he'd thought, if the condition of the African continent is the same as the shoes of its inhabitants, the future is already over and all is irretrievably lost. He senses a vague unrest growing inside him from all the worn-out shoes he has seen.

  The old man is barefoot. 'Maybe there's a bus,' he says. 'Maybe a lorry. Sooner or later a car will come by, I'm sure.'

  'How do I find the bus?' asks Olofson.

  'You stand by the side of the road.'

  'At a bus stop?'

  'If there is a bus stop. Sometimes there is. But usually not.'

  Olofson realises that the vague answer is the most detailed one he will get. He senses something tentative, ephemeral in the lives of the blacks, so distant and foreign from the world he comes from.

  I'm afraid, he thinks. Africa scares me, with its heat, its odours, its people with bad shoes. I'm much too visible here. My skin colour shines as if I were a burning candle in the dark. If I leave the hotel I'll be swallowed up, vanish without leaving a trace ...

  The train to Kitwe is supposed to depart in the evening. Olofson spends the day in his room. He stands at the window for long stretches. He sees a man in ragged clothes cutting grass around a big wooden cross with a long, broad-bladed knife. People pass by with shapeless bundles on their heads.

  At seven in the evening he leaves his room and has to pay for the night he won't be spending in it. When he emerges from the hotel screaming taxi drivers fall upon him.

  Why do they make such a damned racket? he thinks, and the first wave of contempt washes over him.

  He walks towards the car that seems the least dilapidated and puts his suitcase in the back seat with him. He has hidden his money in his shoes and underwear. When he sits down in the back seat he immediately regrets his choice of hiding places. The banknotes are sticky and cling to his body.

  At the railway station there is, if possible, even greater chaos than at the airport. The taxi lets him off in the midst of a surging sea of humanity, bundles of clothes, chickens and goats, water sellers, fires, and rusted cars. The station is almost completely dark. What few lightbulbs there are have burned out or have been stolen.

  He barely manages to pay the taxi driver before he is surrounded by filthy children offering their services as porters or begging for money. Without knowing what direction he should take, he hurries off, his feet already hurting from the wads of notes. He disc
overs a gaping hole in a wall above which a rickety sign says Ticket Counter. The waiting room is packed with people, it smells of urine and manure, and he gets into something that appears to be a queue. A man with no legs comes sliding along on a board and tries to sell him a dirty ticket to Livingstone, but Olofson shakes his head, turns away, and retreats within himself.