The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  Kringström's orchestra, which had played at every Saturday night dance since 1943, has testily accepted the challenge emanating from the increasingly discontented youth and has reluctantly begun to alter its repertoire. One Saturday in early spring they surprise everyone, not least themselves, by striking up a tune that might be related to the new music pouring in from the USA.

  On this very evening Sture and Hans are hanging around outside the People's Hall. Impatiently they are waiting until they're big enough to buy their own tickets and step on to the crowded dance floor. The music comes through the walls, and Sture decides it's time they learned how to dance.

  Later that evening, when they are frozen and stiff, they wander down by the river bridge, race each other and yell underneath the iron span, and they don't stop until they are standing outside Janine's door. Music is coming through the walls. She's playing tonight ...

  When she realises that they want to learn to dance, she is ready at once to teach them. Before the surgeon deformed her face, she had danced quite often. But she has not moved across a dance floor since. With a firm grip around the waist and simple repeated steps to the left and right, she leads them into the rhythmic stamping of the waltz and foxtrot. She keeps pressing them to her, one after the other, and sweeps around on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Whoever is not dancing runs the gramophone, and soon the windows are fogged up from their efforts to follow and keep track of the steps.

  From a kitchen cabinet she pulls out a bottle of homemade booze. When they ask where she got hold of it she just laughs. She offers each of them only a little glass, but keeps on drinking until she gets drunk. She lights a cigar and blows smoke out her nose hole, while claiming to be the world's only female locomotive. She tells them that sometimes she imagines how she will leave Hurrapelle's penitent bench and vanish into the world of carnival sideshows. She will never be a prima donna on the slack wire, but perhaps a freak who can elicit horror from the crowd. Exhibiting deformed people for money is a tradition that has been lost in the mists of time. She tells them about the Laughing Kid, who had the corners of his mouth sliced open to his ears and was then sold to a carnival troupe and made his owners rich.

  From a kitchen drawer she takes out a red clown nose which she fastens with an elastic string around her head, and dumbstruck they watch this woman who radiates so many contradictory powers. What is hardest to understand but also most disturbing is how Janine can live this double life: the barefoot dance on the kitchen floor, the booze in the cupboard; the hard pews in Hurrapelle's church.

  But her salvation is no fabrication. She has her God securely placed in her heart. Without the fellowship that the congregation once extended to her she would no longer be alive. This is not to say that she is attracted to or professes all the beliefs of the congregation. Raising money to send missionaries to distant Bantu tribes in Africa she considers not only meaningless but a serious violation of the decree that all faith must be voluntary. When the women of the congregation meet in sewing circles for the production of table runners to sell at fairs, she stays home and sews her own clothes. She is a restless element in the congregation's world, but as long as she can single-handedly collect the majority of its annual income by knocking on doors, she does not hesitate to indulge her freedoms. Hurrapelle makes regular attempts to coax her into the sewing circle, but she refuses. Since he's afraid she might begin to waver in her faith, or even worse, move her God to a competing congregation, he doesn't press the issue. When the members of the congregation complain about her self-indulgent behaviour, he deals sternly with the criticism.

  'The least of my children,' he says. 'Think of her suffering. Think how much good she is doing for our congregation ...'

  The evenings with Janine during that year become an unbroken series of peculiar encounters. Against a background of 'Some of These Days' she holds her hand over the two vandals who in the malevolence of ignorance once decided to torment the life out of her.

  Both of them, each in his own way, find in her something of the mystery they had previously sought in vain in the town. The house by the south bank of the river becomes a journey out into the world ...

  On the evening she starts teaching them to dance, they experience for the first time the exciting sensation of being close to a warm, sweaty female body.

  And the thought occurs to her – maybe not just at that moment, but later – that she would like to take off her clothes and stand stark naked before them, to be seen just once, even if it's only by two skinny, half-grown boys.

  At night come the dark powers that are never permitted to surface and burn. To cry out her distress and follow Hurrapelle's admonition always to surrender to God, who keeps His ear in constant readiness; that would be impossible. There the religious thread breaks, and then she has no one but herself to cling to. The greatest of all the sorrows she has to bear is that she has never had the chance to sink into an embrace, even in the dirty back seat of a car parked on a remote logging road.

  But she refuses to complain. She has her trombone. In the dawn of winter mornings she stands in her kitchen and plays 'Creole Love Call'.

  And the boys who brought the sack of ants – she always lets them in. When she teaches them to dance she feels happy that she could overcome their childish shyness ...

  During the late winter and early spring of 1957, Sture and Hans spend many evenings at her house. They often don't go home until the winter night has driven its frozen ship towards midnight.

  Spring arrives again. One day the unassuming but eagerly awaited yellow crowns of the coltsfoot begin to glow in a dirty ditch. Hurrapelle stands one morning in the back room of the Baptist church and searches in a cardboard box for handbills announcing the Spring Meeting. Soon it will be time for even the sermon placards to change their skin.

  But spring is deceptive, because its beauty barely conceals the fact that death is hiding in the eye of the coltsfoot blossom.

  For Sture and Hans, death is an invisible insect that eats away at life and every event. Long evenings they sit on the boulder by the river or in Janine's kitchen and ponder how death actually ought to be understood and described. Sture suggests that death ought to be like Jönsson, the restaurant owner, who stands on the doorstep of the Grand Hotel and welcomes his guests in a black, greasy tuxedo. How easily he could then drip poison into the black soup or the sauce on the roast beef. He would lurk by the swinging doors to the kitchen and the tablecloths would be transformed into stained shrouds ...

  For Hans Olofson, death is much too complicated to be compared to a restaurant owner. Thinking of death as a person of flesh and blood, with a hat and coat and sniffling nose, is too simple. If death had a face, clothes and shoes, it wouldn't be any harder to conquer than one of the scarecrows that Under the horse dealer uses to protect his berry bushes. Death is more vague, a cool breeze that suddenly wafts across the river without rippling the water. He won't come any closer than that to death this spring, until the great catastrophe occurs and death blows its shrillest trumpet.

  And yet it's something he will always remember. Much later, when the African night closes in on him, and his childhood is just as distant as the land he now inhabits, he remembers what they talked about, on the boulder by the river or in Janine's kitchen. As if in a fleeting dream, he remembers the year when Janine taught them to dance and they stood in the darkness outside her house and heard her playing 'A Night in Tunisia' ...

  Chapter Eight

  In Kitwe a laughing African comes running to meet them.

  Hans Olofson sees that he has trainers on his feet, with no holes, and the heels have not been cut off.

  'This is Robert,' says Ruth. 'Our chauffeur. The only one on the farm we can count on.'

  'How many employees do you have?' asks Olofson.

  'Two hundred and eighty,' replies Ruth.

  Olofson crawls into the back seat of a Jeep that seems much the worse for wear.

  'You have your passport, don't you?' asks W
erner. 'We'll be going through several checkpoints.'

  'What are they looking for?' Olofson asks.

  'Smuggled goods headed for Zaire,' says Ruth,'or South African spies. Weapons. But actually they just want to beg for food and cigarettes.'

  They reach the first roadblock just north of Kitwe. Crossed logs, covered with barbed wire, cut off the lanes of the road. A dilapidated bus stops just before they arrive, and Olofson sees a young soldier with an automatic rifle chase the passengers out of it. There seems to be no end to the Africans who come pouring out, and he wonders how many can actually fit inside. While the passengers are forced to line up, a soldier climbs up on the roof of the bus and starts tearing apart the shapeless pile of bundles and mattresses. A goat that was tied up suddenly kicks its way loose, jumps down from the roof of the bus, and disappears bleating into the bush by the side of the road. An old woman begins to shriek and wail and a tremendous commotion breaks out. The soldier on the roof yells and raises his rifle. The old woman wants to chase her goat but is restrained by other soldiers who suddenly appear from a grass hut beside the road.

  'Coming right after a bus is a nightmare,' says Ruth. 'Why didn't you overtake it?'

  'I didn't see it, madame,' replies Robert.

  'The next time you'll see the bus,' says Ruth, annoyed. 'Or you can look for a new job.'

  'Yes, madame,' Robert answers.

  The soldiers seem tired after searching the bus and wave the Jeep through without inspecting it. Olofson sees a moonscape spreading before them, high hills of slag alternating with deep mine pits and blasted crevices. He realises that now he is in the midst of the huge copper belt that stretches like a wedge into Katanga province in Zaire. At the same time he wonders what he would have done if he hadn't met the Mastertons. Would he have got off the train in Kitwe? Or would he have stayed in the compartment and returned with the train to Lusaka?

  They pass through more roadblocks. Police and drunken soldiers compare his face to his passport photo, and he can feel terror rising inside him.

  They hate the whites, he thinks. Just as much as the whites obviously hate the blacks ...

  They turn off the main road and suddenly the earth is quite red. A vast, undulating fenced landscape opens before the Jeep.

  Two Africans open a wooden gate and offer hesitant salutes. The Jeep pulls up to a white two-storey villa with colonnades and flowering bougainvillea. Olofson climbs out, thinking that the white palace reminds him of the courthouse in his distant home town.

  'Tonight you'll be our guest,' says Werner. 'In the morning I'll drive you to Kalulushi.'

  Ruth shows him to his room. They walk down cool corridors; tiled floors with deep rugs. An elderly man appears before them. Olofson sees that he is barefoot.

  'Louis will take care of you while you're here,' says Ruth. 'When you leave you can give him a coin. But not too much. Don't upset him.'

  Olofson is troubled by the man's ragged clothes. His trousers have two gaping holes in the knees, as if he has spent his life crawling on them. His faded shirt is frayed and patched.

  Olofson looks out a window at a large park extending into the distance. White wicker chairs, a hammock in a giant tree. Somewhere outside he hears Ruth's excited voice, a door slamming. From the bathroom he hears water running.

  'Your bath is ready, Bwana,' says Louis behind him. 'The towels are on the bed.'

  Olofson is suddenly agitated. I have to say something, he thinks. So he understands that I'm not one of them, merely a temporary visitor, who is not used to being assigned a personal servant.

  'Have you been here long?' he asks.

  'Since I was born, Bwana,' Louis replies.

  Then he vanishes from the room, and Olofson regrets his question. A master's question to a servant, he thinks. Even though I mean well I make myself look insincere and common.

  He sinks down in the bathtub and asks himself what escape routes are still left to him. He feels like a conman who has grown tired of not being unmasked.

  They're helping me carry out a meaningless assignment, he thinks. They're ready to drive me to Kalulushi and then help me find the last transport out to the mission station in the bush. They're going to a lot of trouble for something that's just an egocentric impulse, a tourist trip with an artificial dream as its motive.

  The dream of Mutshatsha died with Janine. I'm plundering her corpse with this excursion to a world where I don't belong at all. How can I be jealous of a dead person? Of her will, of her stubborn dream, which she clung to despite the fact that she could never realise it? How can an atheistic, unbelieving person take over the dream of being a missionary, helping downtrodden and poverty-stricken people with a religious motive as the foremost incentive?

  In the bathtub he decides to return, ask to be driven back to Kitwe. Come up with a credible explanation for why he has to change his plans.

  He dresses and goes out into the large park. Under a tall tree that spreads a mighty shadow there is a bench that is carved out of a single block of stone. He scarcely manages to sit down before a servant brings him a cup of tea. All at once Werner Masterton stands before him, dressed in worn overalls.

  'Would you like to see our farm?' he asks.

  They climb into the Jeep, which has been newly washed. Werner puts his big hands on the wheel after pulling a worn sunhat down over his eyes. They drive past long rows of hen houses and fields. Now and then he brakes to a stop and black workers instantly come running. He barks out orders in a mixture of English and a language that is unknown to Olofson.

  The whole time Olofson has a feeling that Werner is balancing on an ice floe beneath which an outbreak of rage might erupt at any moment.

  'It's a big farm,' he says as they drive on.

  'Not that big,' says Werner. 'If it were a different time I would probably have expanded the acreage. Nowadays you never know what's going to happen next. Maybe they'll confiscate all the farms from the whites. Out of jealousy, or displeasure at the fact that we're so infinitely more skilled than the black farmers who started after independence. They hate us for our skill, our ability to organise, our ability to make things work. They hate us because we make money, because our health is better and we live longer. Envy is an African inheritance. But the reason they hate us most is that magic doesn't work on us.'

  They drive by a peacock ruffling its gaudy feathers.

  'Magic?' Olofson asks.

  'An African who is successful always risks being the target of magic,' says Werner. 'The witchcraft that is practised here can be extremely effective. If there's one thing that the Africans can do, it's mixing up deadly poisons. Salves that are spread on a body, herbs that are camouflaged as common vegetables. An African spends more time cultivating his envy than cultivating his fields.'

  'There's a lot I don't know,' says Olofson.

  'In Africa knowledge does not increase,' says Werner. 'It decreases, the more you think you understand.'

  Werner breaks off and furiously slams on the brakes.

  A piece of fence has broken off, and when an African comes running, Olofson sees to his astonishment that Werner grabs him by the ear. This is a grown man, maybe fifty years old, but his ear is caught in Werner's rough hand.

  'Why isn't this fixed?' he yells. 'How long has it been broken? Who broke it? Was it Nkuba? Is he drunk again? Who's responsible for this? It has to be fixed within the hour. And Nkuba must be here in an hour.'

  Werner shoves the man aside and returns to the Jeep.

  'I can be away for two weeks,' he says. 'More than two weeks, and the whole farm would fall apart, not just a bit of fence.'

  They stop by a small rise in the midst of a vast grazing pasture, where Brahma cattle move in slow herds. On top of the small hill is a grave.

  JOHN MCGREGOR, KILLED BY BANDITS 1967, Olofson reads on a flat gravestone.

  Werner squats down and lights his pipe. 'The first thing a man thinks about when settling on a farm is to choose his gravesite,' he says. 'If I'm no
t chased out of the country I'll lie here one day too, along with Ruth. John McGregor was a young Irishman who worked for me. He was twenty-four years old. Outside Kitwe they had set up a fake roadblock. When he realised he had been stopped by bandits and not police, he tried to drive off. They shot him down with a submachine gun. If he had stopped they would only have taken the car and his clothes. He must have forgotten he was in Africa; you don't defend your car here.'