The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  'Bandits?' Olofson asks.

  Werner shrugs. 'The police came and said they had shot some suspects during an escape attempt. Who knows if they were the same people? The important thing for the police was that they could record somebody as the guilty party.'

  A lizard stands motionless on the gravestone. From a distance Olofson sees a black woman moving with infinite slowness along a gravel road. She seems to be on her way directly into the sun.

  'In Africa death is always close by,' says Werner. 'I don't know why that is. The heat, everything rotting, the African with his rage just beneath the skin. It doesn't take much to stir up a crowd of people. Then they'll kill anyone with a club or a stone.'

  'And yet you live here,' says Olofson.

  'Perhaps we'll move to Southern Rhodesia,' Werner replies. 'But I'm sixty-four years old. I'm tired, I have difficulty pissing and sleeping, but maybe we'll move on.'

  'Who will buy the farm?'

  'Maybe I'll burn it down.'

  They return to the white house and out of nowhere a parrot flies and perches on Olofson's shoulder. Instead of announcing that his journey to Mutshatsha is no longer necessary, he looks at the parrot nipping at his shirt. Sometimes timidity is my main psychological asset, he thinks in resignation. I don't even dare speak the truth to people who don't know me.

  The tropical night falls like a black cloth. Twilight is an ephemeral, hastily passing shadow. With the darkness he feels as though he is also taken back in time.

  On the big terrace that stretches along the front of the house, he drinks whisky with Ruth and Werner. They have just sat down with their glasses when headlights begin to play over the grazing meadows, and he hears Ruth and Werner exchange guesses about who it might be.

  A car comes to a stop before the terrace and a man of indeterminate age steps out. In the light from shaded kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling, Olofson sees that the man has red burn marks on his face. His head is completely bald and he is dressed in a baggy suit. He introduces himself as Elvin Richardson, a farmer like the Mastertons.

  Who am I? Olofson thinks. An accidental travelling companion on the night train from Lusaka?

  'Cattle rustlers,' says Richardson, sitting down heavily with a glass in his hand.

  Olofson listens as if he were a child engrossed in a story.

  'Last night they cut the fence down near Ndongo,' says Richardson. 'They stole three calves from Ruben White. The animals were clubbed and slaughtered on the spot. The night watchmen didn't hear a thing, of course. If this goes on, we'll have to organise patrols. Shoot a couple of them so they know we mean business.'

  Black servants appear in the shadows on the terrace. What are the blacks talking about? Olofson wonders. How does Louis describe me when he sits by the fire with his friends? Does he see my uncertainty? Is he whetting a knife intended expressly for me? There doesn't seem to be any dialogue between the blacks and the whites in this country. The world is split in two, with no mutual trust. Orders are shouted across the chasm, that's all.

  He listens to the conversation, observing that Ruth is more aggressive than Werner. While Werner thinks that maybe they should wait and see, Ruth says they should take up arms at once.

  He gives a start when one of the black servants bends over him and fills his glass. All at once he realises that he is afraid. The terrace, the rapidly falling darkness, the restless conversation; all of it fills him with insecurity, that same helplessness he felt as a child when the beams of the house by the river creaked in the cold.

  There are preparations for war going on here, he thinks. What scares me is that Ruth and Werner and the stranger don't seem to notice it ...

  At the dinner table the conversation suddenly shifts character, and Olofson feels more at ease sitting in a room where lamps ward off the shadows, creating a light in which the black servants cannot hide. The conversation at the dinner table turns to the old days, to people who are no longer here.

  'We are who we are,' says Richardson. 'Those of us who choose to stay on our farms are surely insane. After us comes nothing. We are the last.'

  'No,' says Ruth. 'You're wrong. One day the blacks will be begging at our doors and asking us to stay. The new generation can see where everything is headed. Independence was a gaudy rag that was hung on a pole, a solemn proclamation of empty promises. Now the young people see that the only things that work in this country are still in our hands.'

  The alcohol makes Olofson feel able to speak.

  'Is everyone this hospitable?' he asks. 'I might be a hunted criminal. Anyone at all, with the darkest of pasts.'

  'You're white,' says Werner. 'In this country that's enough of a guarantee.'

  Elvin Richardson leaves when the meal is over, and Olofson realises that Ruth and Werner retire early. Doors with wroughtiron gates are carefully barred shut, German shepherds bark outside in the darkness, and Olofson is instructed how to turn off the alarm if he goes into the kitchen at night. By ten o'clock he is in bed.

  I'm surrounded by a barrier, he thinks. A white prison in a black country. The padlock of fear around the whites' property. What do the blacks think, when they compare our shoes and their own rags? What do they think about the freedom they have gained?

  He drifts off into a restless slumber.

  He jumps awake when a sound pierces his consciousness. In the dark, he doesn't know for a moment where he is.

  Africa, he thinks. I still know nothing about you. Perhaps this is exactly how Africa looked in Janine's dreams. I no longer recall what we talked about at her kitchen table. But I have a feeling that my normal judgements and thoughts are insufficient or perhaps not even valid out here. Another kind of seeing is required ...

  He listens to the darkness. He wonders whether it is the silence or the sound that is imagined. Again he is afraid.

  There is a catastrophe enclosed within Ruth and Werner Masterton's friendliness, he thinks. This entire farm, this white house, is enclosed by an anxiety, an anger that has been dammed up for much too long.

  He lies awake in the dark and imagines that Africa is a wounded beast of prey that still does not have the strength to get up. The breathing of the earth and the animals coincides, the bush where they hide is impenetrable. Wasn't that the way Janine imagined this wounded and mangled continent? Like a buffalo forced to its knees, but with just enough power left to keep the hunters at bay.

  Maybe she with her empathy could probe more deeply into reality than I can, tramping about on the soil of this continent. Maybe she made a journey in her dreams that was just as real as my meaningless flight to the mission station in Mutshatsha.

  There may be another truth as well. Is it true that I hope I'll meet another Janine at this mission station? A woman who can replace the one who is dead?

  He lies awake until dawn suddenly breaks through the dark. Out the window he sees the sun rise like a red ball of fire over the horizon. Suddenly he notices Louis standing by a tree, watching him. Even though the morning is already quite warm, he shivers. What am I afraid of? he thinks. Myself or Africa? What is Africa telling me that I don't want to know?

  At a quarter past seven he bids farewell to Ruth and takes his place next to Werner in the front seat of the Jeep.

  'Come back again,' says Ruth. 'You're always welcome.'

  As they drive out through the farm's big gate where the two Africans helplessly salute, Olofson notices an old man standing in the tall elephant grass next to the road, laughing. Half hidden, he flashes past. Many years later this image will resurface in his consciousness.

  A man, half hidden, laughing soundlessly in the early morning ...

  Chapter Nine

  Would the great Leonardo have wasted his time picking flowers?

  They're sitting in the attic room of the courthouse, and suddenly the great silence is there between them. It's late spring in 1957 and school is almost over for the year.

  For Sture, elementary school is at an end, and middle school awaits. Han
s Olofson has another year before he has to make up his mind. He has toyed with the idea of continuing his studies. But why? No child wants to stay a child; they all want to be grown-ups as soon as possible. Yet what does the future actually have to offer him?

  For Sture, the path already seems laid out. The great Leonardo hangs on his wall, urging him on. Ashamed, Hans crouches over his own hopeless dream, to see the wooden house cast off its moorings and drift away down the river. When Sture plies him with questions, he has no idea how to answer. Will he go out in the forest and chop his way to the horizon like his father? Hang up his wet rag socks to dry eternally over the stove? He doesn't know, and he feels envy and unrest as he sits with Sture in the attic room, and the late spring blows in through the open window. Hans has come to suggest that they pick flowers for the last day of school.

  Sture sits leaning over an astronomical chart. He makes notes, and Hans knows that he has decided to discover an unknown star.

  When Hans suggests flowers, the silence spreads. Leonardo didn't waste his time going out in the fields hunting for table decorations.

  Hans wonders with suppressed fury how Sture can be so damned certain. But he doesn't say a word. He waits. Waiting for Sture to finish one of the important tasks he has set himself has become more and more common this spring.

  Hans senses that the distance between them is growing. Soon the only thing left of their old familiar friendship will be the visits to Janine. He has a feeling that Sture is about to leave. Not the town, but their old friendship. It bothers him. Mostly because he doesn't understand why, what has happened.

  Once he asks Sture straight out.

  'What the hell is supposed to have happened?' Sture replies.

  After that he doesn't ask again.

  But Sture is also changeable. Now, he suddenly flings aside the astronomical chart impatiently and gets up.

  'Shall we go then?' he says.

  They slide down the riverbank and sit under the wide expanse of the river bridge's iron beams and stone caissons. The spring flood surges past their feet; the usual soft gurgle has been replaced by the roar of the river's whirlpools. Sture heaves a rotten tree stump into the river, and it floats away like a half-drowned troll.

  Without knowing where it comes from, Hans is attacked by a sudden fury. The blood pounds in his temples and he feels that he has to make himself visible to the world.

  He has often fantasised about completing a test of manhood, climbing across the river on one of the curved bridge spans that are only a couple of decimetres thick. Climbing up to a giddy height, knowing full well that a fall would mean his death.

  Undiscovered stars, he thinks furiously. I'll climb closer to the stars than Sture ever will.

  'I was thinking I'd climb across the bridge span,' he says.

  Sture looks at the gigantic iron arches.

  'It can't be done,' he says.

  'The hell it can't,' says Hans. 'You just have to do it.'

  Sture looks at the bridge span again.

  'Only a child would be that stupid,' he says.

  Hans's heart turns a somersault in his chest. Does he mean him? That climbing across bridge spans is for little children?

  'You don't dare,' he says. 'God damn it, you don't dare.'

  Sture looks at him in astonishment. Usually Hans's voice is almost soft. But now he's loud and talking in a harsh, brusque way, as if his tongue had been replaced by a piece of pine bark. And then the challenge, that he doesn't dare ...

  No, he wouldn't dare. To climb up on one of the bridge arches would be to risk his life for nothing. He wouldn't get dizzy; he can climb a tree like a monkey. But this is too high; there's no safety net if he should slip.

  Of course he doesn't say this to Hans. Instead he starts to laugh and spits contemptuously into the river.

  When Hans sees the gob of spit he decides. Sture's derisive accusation of childishness can only be countered on the iron beams.

  'I'm going to climb it,' he says in a quavering voice. 'And damned if I won't stand up on the span and piss on your head.'

  The words rattle around in his mouth, as if he were already in the utmost distress.

  Sture looks at him incredulously. Is he serious? Even if the trembling Hans, on the verge of tears, looks nothing like a grown-up, an intrepid climber prepared to scale an impossible mountain face, there is something in his shaking obsession that makes Sture hesitate.

  'Go ahead and do it,' he says. 'Then I'll do it after you.'

  Now, of course, there's no turning back. Quitting now would expose Hans to boundless humiliation.

  As though on his way to his execution, Hans scrambles up the riverbank until he reaches the bridge abutment. He takes off his jacket and climbs up on one of the iron spans. When he raises his eyes he sees the gigantic iron arch vanish into the distance, merging with the grey cloud cover. The distance is endless, as if he were on his way up to heaven. He tries to persuade himself to be calm, but it only makes him more agitated.

  Desperately, he starts slithering upwards, and deep down in his gut he realises that he has no idea why he needs to climb across this damned bridge span. But now it's too late, and like a helpless frog he crawls up the iron arch.

  It has finally dawned on Sture that Hans is serious, and he wants to yell to him to come down. But at the same time he feels the forbidden desire to wait and see. Maybe he will witness how somebody fails in attempting the impossible.

  Hans closes his eyes and climbs further. The wind sings in his ears, the blood pounds in his temples, and he is utterly alone. The bridge span is cold against his body, the heads of the rivets scrape against his knees, and his arms and fingers have already gone completely numb. He forces himself not to think, just to keep climbing, as if it were one of his usual dreams. And yet he seems to be climbing up over the axis of the earth itself ...

  He feels the bridge span under him begin to flatten out, but this doesn't calm him, it only increases his terror. Now he sees in his mind's eye how high up he is, how far away in his great loneliness. If he falls now, nothing can save him.

  Desperately he keeps crawling forward, clinging to the span, floundering his way metre by metre back towards the ground. His fingers grip the steel like claws, and for a dizzying second he thinks that he has been turned into a cat. He feels something warm but doesn't know what it is.

  When he reaches the bridge abutment on the other side of the river and cautiously opens his eyes and realises that it's true, that he has survived, he hugs the bridge span as if it were his saviour. He lies there before jumping down to the ground.

  He looks at the bridge and knows he has conquered it. Not as some external enemy, but as an enemy within himself. He wipes off his face, flexes his fingers to get the feeling back, and sees Sture come walking across the bridge with his jacket in his hand.

  'You forgot to piss,' says Sture.

  Did he? No, he didn't! Now he knows where the sudden warmth came from up on the cold steel span. It was his body giving way. He points at the dark patch on his trousers.

  'I didn't forget,' he says. 'Look here! Or do you want to smell it?'

  Then comes his revenge.