The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  I hate this chaos, he thinks. It's impossible to get an overview. Here I am at the mercy of chance and people sliding along on boards.

  He buys a ticket to Kitwe and walks out on the platform. A train with a diesel locomotive is waiting, and he looks despondently at what awaits him: run-down carriages, already overfilled, like bursting cardboard boxes with toy figures in them, and broken windowpanes.

  He notices two white people climbing into the carriage behind the locomotive. As if all white people were his friends in this black world, he hurries after them and almost falls on his face when he trips over a man lying stretched out on the platform asleep.

  He hopes he has bought a ticket that gives him access to this carriage. He makes his way forward to the compartment where the white people he has been following are busy stowing their bags on the baggage racks.

  Entering a compartment on a train in Sweden can often feel like intruding in someone's private living room, but in this compartment he is met by friendly smiles and nods. He imagines that with his presence he is reinforcing a disintegrating and everdiminishing white army.

  Before him are an older man and a young woman. Father and daughter, he guesses. He stows his suitcase and sits down, drenched in sweat. The young woman gives him an encouraging look as she takes out a book and a pocket torch.

  'I come from Sweden,' he says, with a sudden urge to talk to someone. 'I assume that this is the train for Kitwe?'

  'Sweden,' says the woman. 'How nice.'

  The man has lit his pipe and leans back in his corner.

  'Masterton,' he says. 'My name is Werner, and this is my wife Ruth.'

  Olofson introduces himself and feels a boundless gratitude at finding himself together with people who have decent shoes on their feet.

  The train starts up with a jolt and the uproar in the station increases in a violent crescendo. A pair of legs is visible outside the window as a man climbs up on to the roof. After him come a basket of chickens and a sack of dried fish which rips open and spreads a smell of decay and salt.

  Werner Masterton looks at his watch.

  'Ten minutes too early,' he says. 'Either the driver is drunk or he's in a hurry to get home.'

  Diesel fumes waft by, fires are burning along the tracks, and the lights of Lusaka slowly fall behind.

  'We never take the train,' says Masterton from the depths of his corner. 'About once every ten years. But in a few years there will hardly be any trains left in this country. Since independence everything has fallen apart. In five years almost everything has been destroyed. Everything is stolen. If this train suddenly stops tonight, which it most certainly will do, it means that the driver is trying to sell fuel from the locomotive. The Africans come with their oil cans. The green glass in the traffic lights has disappeared. Children steal them and try to palm them off on tourists as emeralds. But soon there won't be any tourists left either. The wild animals have been shot, wiped out. I haven't heard of anyone seeing a leopard in more than two years.' He gestures out into the darkness.

  'There were lions here,' he says. 'Elephants wandered free in huge herds. Today there is nothing left.'

  The Mastertons have a large farm outside Chingola, Olofson learns during the long night's journey to Kitwe. Werner Masterton's parents came from South Africa in the early 1950s. Ruth was the daughter of a teacher who moved back to England in 1964. They met while visiting friends in Ndola and married despite the great age difference.

  'Independence was a catastrophe,' says Masterton, offering whisky from his pocket flask. 'For the Africans, freedom meant that nobody had to work any more. No one gave orders, no one considered they might have to do something that wasn't demanded of them. Now the country survives on its income from copper mining. But what happens when prices drop on the world market? No investment has been made in any alternatives. This is an agricultural country. It could be one of the world's best, since the soil is fertile and there is water available. But no efforts are being made. The Africans have grasped nothing, learned nothing. When the British flag was struck and they raised their own, it was the beginning of a funeral procession that is still going on.'

  'I know almost nothing about Africa,' says Olofson. 'What little I do know I've already begun to doubt. And I've only been here two days.'

  They give him an inquisitive look and he suddenly wishes he could have offered a different reply.

  'I'm supposed to visit a mission station in Mutshatsha,' he says. 'But I don't really know how to get there.'

  To his surprise, the Mastertons immediately take up the question of how he can complete his expedition. He quickly surmises that perhaps he has presented a problem that can be solved, in contrast to the one Werner Masterton has just laid out. Perhaps black problems have to be solved by the blacks, and the whites' problems by the whites?

  'We have some friends in Kalulushi,' says Werner. 'I'll take you there in my car. They can help you to continue from there.'

  'That's too much to ask,' replies Olofson.

  'That's the way it is,' says Ruth. 'If the mzunguz don't help each other, no one will. Do you think that any of the blacks climbing on the roof of this train car would help you? If they could, they'd steal your trousers right off you.'

  Ruth lays out a meal from her baggage and invites Hans to join them.

  'Didn't you even bring water with you?' she asks. 'The train could be a day late. There's always something that breaks down, something missing, something they forgot.'

  'I thought there would be water on the train.'

  'It's so filthy that not even a munto will drink it,' says Werner, spitting into the darkness. 'This would be a good country to live in if it weren't for the blacks.'

  Olofson decides that all whites in Africa probably espouse racist views just to survive. But is that true of missionaries too?

  'Isn't there any conductor coming?' he asks, to avoid responding to this last remark.

  'There may not be one,' replies Ruth. 'He may have missed his train. Or else some distant relative died and he went to the funeral without letting anyone know. The Africans spend a great deal of their lives going to and from funerals. But maybe he will come. Nothing is impossible.'

  These people are the remnants of something utterly lost, thinks Olofson. Colonialism is completely buried today, with the exception of South Africa and the Portuguese colonies. But the people remain. A historical epoch always leaves behind a handful of people for the following period. They keep looking backwards, dreaming, aggrieved. They look at their empty hands and wonder where the instruments of power have gone. Then they discover these instruments in the hands of the people they previously only spoke to when giving out orders and reprimands. They live in the Epoch of Mortification, in the twilight land of ruin. The whites in Africa are a wandering remnant of a people that no one wants to think about. They have lost their foundation, what they thought was permanent for all eternity ...

  One question remains obvious. 'So things were better before?'

  'What answer can we give to that?' says Ruth, looking at her husband.

  'Answer with the truth,' says Werner.

  A weak, flickering lamp casts the compartment in darkness. Hans sees a lampshade covered with dead insects. Werner follows his gaze.

  'For a lampshade like that a cleaning woman would have been given the sack,' he says. 'Not the next day, not after a warning, but instantly, kicked out on the spot. A train as filthy as this one would have been an impossibility. In a few hours we'll be in Kabwe. Before, it was called Broken Hill. Even the old name was better. The truth, if you want to know, is that nothing has been maintained or become better. We're forced to live in the midst of a process of decay.'

  'But –' says Olofson, before he is interrupted.

  'Your "but" is premature,' says Ruth. 'I have a feeling that you want to ask whether the blacks' lives are better. Not even that is true. Who could take over from all the Europeans who left the country in 1964? There was no preparation, only a boundl
ess arrogance. A bewitched cry for independence, their own flag, maybe soon their own currency.'

  'Taking responsibility requires knowledge,' Werner continues. 'In 1964 there were six blacks with university degrees in this country.'

  'A new era is created out of the preceding one,' Olofson counters. 'The education system must have been poor.'

  'You're starting from the wrong assumptions,' says Ruth. 'No one was thinking about anything as dramatic as what you call a new era. Development would continue, everyone would be better off, not least the blacks. But without chaos taking over.'

  'A new era doesn't create itself,' Olofson insists. 'What did actually happen?'

  'Treachery,' says Ruth. 'The mother countries deceived us. All too late we realised we had been abandoned. In Southern Rhodesia they understood, and there everything has not gone to hell as it has here.'

  'We've just been in Salisbury,' says Werner. 'There we could breathe. Maybe we'll move there. The trains ran on time, the lampshades weren't full of insects. The Africans did what they do best: follow orders.'

  'Freedom,' says Olofson, and then has no idea what to say next.

  'If freedom is starving to death, then the Africans are on the right track in this country,' says Ruth.

  'It's hard to understand,' says Olofson. 'Hard to comprehend.'

  'You'll see for yourself,' Ruth goes on, smiling at him. 'There's no reason for us not to tell you how things stand, because the truth will be revealed to you anyway.'

  The train screeches to a stop, and then everything is quiet. Cicadas can be heard in the warm night and Olofson leans out into the darkness. The starry sky is close and he finds the brightly glowing constellation of the Southern Cross.

  What was it he had thought when he left Sweden? That he was on his way to a distant, faintly gleaming star?

  Ruth Masterton is engrossed in a book with the help of her shaded pocket torch, and Werner is sucking on his extinguished pipe. Olofson feels called upon to take stock of his situation.

  Janine, he thinks. Janine is dead. My father drank himself into a wreck that will never again go to sea. My mother consists in her entirety of two photographs from Atelier Strandmark in Sundsvall. Two pictures that instil fear in me, a woman's face against a backdrop of merciless morning light. I live with an inheritance of the smell of elkhound, of winter nights and an unwavering sense of not being needed. The moment I chose not to conform to my heritage, to become a woodcutter like my father and marry one of the girls I danced with to Kringström's orchestra in the draughty People's Hall, I also rejected the only background I had. I passed the lower-school examination as a pupil none of the teachers would ever remember, I endured four terrible years in the county capital and passed a meaningless student examination so that I wouldn't be a failure. I did my military service in a tank regiment in Skövde, again as a person no one ever noticed. I nourished the hope of becoming a lawyer, the sworn defender of extenuating circumstances. I lived for over a year as a lodger in a dark flat in Uppsala, where a fool sat across from me every day at the breakfast table. The present confusion, indolence and fear within the Swedish working classes have found in me a perfect representative.

  Still, I haven't given up. The failed law studies were only a temporary humiliation – I can survive that. But the fact that I have no dream? That I travel to Africa with someone else's dream, someone who is dead? Instead of grieving I set off on a journey of penance, as if I were actually to blame for Janine's death.

  One winter night I crept across the cold iron spans of the river bridge. The moon hung like a cold wolf 's eye in the sky, and I was utterly alone. I was fourteen years old and I didn't fall. But afterwards, when Sture was supposed to follow me ...

  His thoughts burst. From somewhere he hears a person snoring. He traces the sound to the roof of the train car.

  In a sudden flare-up of rage, he gives himself two alternatives: either continue his law studies or return to the frozen landscape of his childhood.

  The journey to Africa, to the mission station in Mutshatsha, will fade away. In every person's life there are ill-considered actions, trips that never needed to be taken. In two weeks he will return to Sweden and leave the Southern Cross behind. The parentheses will then be closed.

  Suddenly Werner Masterton is standing by his side and looking out into the darkness.

  'They're selling diesel fuel,' he says. 'I just hope they don't miscalculate, so we wind up stuck here. Within a year the wandering hunter ants will have transformed this train into a deformed steel skeleton ...'

  After an hour the train jolts to a start.

  Later they stop for an inexplicably long time at Kapiri Mposhi. In the dawn light Olofson falls asleep in his corner. The conductor never appears. Just as the morning's heat breaks through, the train screeches into Kitwe.

  'Come with us,' says Ruth. 'Then we'll drive you to Kalulushi.'

  Chapter Seven

  One day Janine teaches them to dance.

  The rest of the town expects her to whine and complain, but she chooses to go in a completely different direction. In music she sees her salvation. She decides that the affliction so deeply incised in her body will be transformed into music. In Hamrin's music shop she purchases a slide trombone and begins to practise daily. Hurrapelle tries for the longest time to persuade her to choose a more pleasing instrument, like the guitar, mandolin, or possibly a small bass drum. But she persists, forgoing the possible joy of joining in the concerts of the Free Church, and practises by herself in her house by the river. She buys a Dux gramophone and searches often and eagerly through the record selection at the music shop. She is entranced by jazz, in which the trombone often has a prominent role. She listens, plays along, and she learns. On dark winter evenings, when the door-knocking with her magazines is over for the day, and the congregation doesn't have a prayer meeting or other fellowship, she loses herself in her music. 'Some of These Days', 'Creole Love Call', and not least 'A Night in Tunisia' flow from her trombone.

  She plays for Sture and Hans. Astonished, they watch her the first time, barefoot on the kitchen floor, with the gramophone spinning in the background and the brass instrument pressed to her lips. Sometimes she deviates from the melody, but usually the notes are woven together with the orchestra that is pressed into the grooves of the record.

  Janine with her trombone ...

  Janine with her noseless face and her incredible gesture of inviting them into her house instead of calling the police, transforms that year, 1957, into a fairy tale they doubt they will ever experience again.

  For Sture the move from the cathedral and residence in a city in Småland to this market town had seemed a nightmare. In a desolate and snowed-in Norrland he would go under, he was convinced of that. But he found a warrior and together they found Janine ...

  Hans creates a huge dream for himself which he can crawl inside like a voluminous overcoat. He realises at once that he loves her; in his dreams he furnishes her with a nose and transforms her into his vicarious mother.

  Even though Janine is their common property, separate walls close tightly around their experiences. One cannot share everything; secrets must be carefully kept to oneself. A piece of crucial wisdom on life's arduous path is to learn which dreams can be shared and which must be kept inside one's own secret rooms.

  Janine watches, listens and senses. She sees Sture's tendency towards arrogance and bullying, she senses Hans's longing for his absent mother. She sees the chasms that exist there, the huge differences. But one evening she teaches them to dance.