The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  'It's your turn now,' he says, sitting down on his jacket.

  But Sture has already prepared his escape. When he realised that Hans would make it down from the bridge span without falling into the river, he searched feverishly for a way to get out of it.

  'I will,' he replies. 'But not now. I didn't say when.'

  'When will you do it?' asks Hans.

  'I'll let you know.'

  They head home in the spring evening. Hans has forgotten all about the flowers. There are plenty of flowers, but only one bridge span ...

  The silence grows between them. Hans wants to say something, but Sture is lost in his own thoughts and impossible to reach. They part quickly outside the courthouse gate ...

  The last day of school comes with a light, hovering fog that rapidly thins and vanishes in the sunrise. The schoolrooms smell newly scrubbed, and Headmaster Gottfried has been sitting in his room since five in the morning preparing his commencement address for the pupils he will now be sending out into the world. He is cautious with the vermouth this morning, so filled is he with melancholy and reflection. The last day of the school year is a reminder of his own mortality in the midst of all the effervescent anticipation that his pupils feel ...

  At seven-thirty he walks out on the steps. He sincerely hopes he won't see a pupil arrive without a relative. Nothing makes him so upset as to see a child arrive alone on the last day of school.

  At eight o'clock the school bell rings and the classrooms are brimming with expectant silence. Headmaster Gottfried walks down the corridor to visit all the classes. Schoolmaster Törnkvist appears before him and announces that a pupil is missing from the commencement class. Sture von Croona, the son of the district judge. Headmaster Gottfried looks at his watch and decides to ring the district judge.

  But not until it's time to march over to the church does he hurry into his office and ring the district court. His hands are sweaty and no matter how he tries to tell himself that there will be an explanation, he feels very uneasy ...

  Sture left in plenty of time that morning. Unfortunately his mother couldn't go with him because she was struck by a bad migraine. Of course Sture went to school, says the judge over the telephone.

  Headmaster Gottfried hurries to the church. The last children are already on their way into the vestibule with their parents and he stumbles and practically runs as he tries to understand what could have happened to Sture von Croona.

  But it isn't until he is holding in his hand the prize book that is intended for Sture that he seriously begins to fear that something might have happened.

  At the same moment he sees the doors to the vestibule cautiously being opened. Sture, he thinks, until he sees that the father is standing there, District Judge von Croona.

  Headmaster Gottfried speaks about a deserved rest, the mustering of strength and preparation for the coming year of study; he calls on them to consider all of life's shifting situations, and then there is no more. In a few minutes the church is empty.

  The district judge looks at him, but Headmaster Gottfried can only shake his head. Sture did not show up for graduation.

  'Sture doesn't just disappear,' says the district judge. 'I'll contact the police.'

  Headmaster Gottfried nods hesitantly and feels the torment increasing.

  'Perhaps he still ...'

  He gets no further. The district judge is already leaving the church with determined steps.

  But no search needs to be organised. Only an hour after the end of school, Hans Olofson finds his missing friend.

  His father, who had attended the graduation, has already changed into his work clothes again and headed out to his logging. Hans is enjoying the great freedom that lies before him, and he strolls down to the river.

  It occurs to him that he hasn't seen Sture today. Maybe he just played truant on the last day and devoted himself to coaxing an unknown star from the heavens.

  He sits down on his usual boulder by the river and decides that he's pleased to be alone. The coming summer requires a good deal of reflection. Ever since he conquered the huge span of the iron bridge he feels that it's easier to be by himself.

  His gaze is caught by something shining red underneath the bridge. He squints, thinking that it's a scrap of paper caught on the branches along the bank.

  But when he goes over to investigate what the shining red thing is, he finds Sture. It's his red summer jacket, and he is lying there at the edge of the river. He has fallen from one of the bridge spans and broken his back. Helpless, he has lain there since the early morning hours when he awoke and decided to conquer the bridge span in secret. He had wanted to explore any hidden difficulties in solitude, and once it was done he planned to accompany Hans to the bridge and show him that he too could conquer the iron beams.

  He hurried down to the bridge in the damp dawn. For a long time he regarded the huge spans before he started to climb.

  Somewhere along the way he was gripped by pride. Much too rashly he raised his upper body. A gust of wind came out of nowhere and he swayed, lost his grip, and plunged from the bridge. He hit the water hard, and one of the stones in the riverbed cracked his spine. Unconscious, he was carried by an eddy towards the shore, where his head lolled above the water surface. The cold water of the river gave him hypothermia, and when Hans found him he was almost dead.

  Hans pulls him out of the water, calls to him without getting an answer, and then runs screeching up to the streets of town. As he runs along the riverbank, summer dies. The great adventure vanishes in a gigantic cloud passing before the sun. Howling, he reaches the town. Frightened people draw back as if he were a mad dog.

  But Rönning the junk dealer, who was a volunteer in the Winter War in Finland and has experienced much worse situations than a wildly gesticulating young man, grabs hold of him and bellows at him to tell him what has happened. Then the townsfolk rush to the river.

  The taxi that is also used as an ambulance comes skidding through the gravel down towards the iron bridge. The district judge and his wife are informed about what has happened, and at the hospital the lone and always weary doctor begins to examine Sture.

  He's alive, he's breathing. The concussion will pass. But his spine is broken; he is paralysed from the neck down. The doctor stands for a moment at the window and looks across the ridges of the forest before he goes out to the waiting parents.

  At the same time Hans Olofson is vomiting into the toilet of the police station. A policeman holds him by the shoulders, and when it's over, a cautious interview begins.

  'The red jacket,' he keeps repeating over and over. 'I saw the jacket lying in the river.'

  At long last his father comes hurrying from the forest. Rönning the junk dealer drives them home and Hans crawls into bed. Erik Olofson sits on the edge of his bed until long after midnight, when his son finally falls asleep.

  All night long the lights are burning in the spacious upper floor of the courthouse.

  A few days after the accident, Sture disappears from town.

  Early one morning Sture is carried out on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance which quickly drives off to the south. The vehicle sprays gravel when it passes through Ulvkälla. But the hour is early, Janine is asleep, and the car disappears towards the endless forests of Orsa Finnmark.

  Hans Olofson never gets a chance to visit his fallen brother in arms. At dusk on the day before Sture is driven away, he wanders restlessly around the hospital, trying to figure out which room Sture is lying in. But everything is secret, concealed, as if the broken spine were contagious.

  He leaves the hospital and wanders down towards the river, drawn inexorably to the bridge, and inside he feels a great burden of guilt. The accident was his creation ...

  When he discovers that Sture has been driven out of town early one morning, to a hospital far away, he writes a letter that he stuffs into a bottle and flings into the river. He watches it float down towards the point at People's Park and then he runs across the river
to the house where Janine lives.

  There is A Joyous Spring Fellowship at her church that evening, but now that Hans is standing like a white shadow in her doorway, of course she stays home. He sits down on his usual chair in the kitchen. Janine sits down across from him and looks at him.

  'Don't sit on that chair,' he says. 'That's Sture's.'

  A God that fills the earth with meaningless suffering, she thinks. Breaking the back of a young boy just as summertime is bursting forth?

  'Play something,' he says without raising his head to look at her.

  She takes out her trombone and plays 'Creole Love Call' as beautifully as she can.

  When she finishes and blows the saliva out of the instrument, Hans gets up, takes his jacket, and leaves.

  Far too small a person in a far too large and incomprehensible world, she thinks. In a sudden flare-up of wrath she puts the mouthpiece to her lips and plays her lament, 'Siam Blues'. The notes bellow like tortured animals and she doesn't notice Hurrapelle step through the doorway and gaze at her in dismay as she rocks on her bare feet in time with her music. When she discovers him she stops playing and pounces on him with furious questions. He is forced to listen to her doubts in the God of reconciliation, and he has a sudden sense that the hole below her eyes is threatening to swallow him up.

  He squats there in silence and lets her talk herself out. Then he carefully chooses his words and coaxes her back to the true path once again. Even though she doesn't put up any resistance, he's still not sure whether he has succeeded in infusing the powers of faith into her again. He decides at once to keep her under close observation for a while, and then asks her whether she isn't going to take part in the evening's Joyous Fellowship. But she is mute, just shakes her head and opens the door for him to go. He nods and vanishes out into the summertime.

  Janine is far away in her own thoughts and it will be a long time before she comes back ...

  Hans plods homeward through the dandelions and moist grass. When he stands underneath the beams of the river bridge he clenches his fists.

  'Why didn't you wait?' he yells.

  The message in the bottle rocks towards the sea ...

  Chapter Ten

  After a journey of two hours on his way to the mission station in Mutshatsha, the distributor of the car Hans is riding in becomes clogged with silt.

  They have stopped in a forlorn and desiccated landscape. Olofson climbs out of the car, wipes his filthy, sweaty face, and lets his gaze wander along the endless horizon.

  He senses something of the great loneliness that it is possible to experience on the dark continent. Harry Johanson must have seen this, he thinks. He came from the other direction, from the west, but the landscape must have been the same. Four years his journey took. By the time he arrived his entire family had perished. Death defined the distance in time and space. Four years, four dead ...

  In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in gigantic catapults across the world. The time allotted to us is no more than that of our forefathers, but we have augmented it with our technology. We live in an era when the mind is less and less often allowed to be amazed by distance and time ... And yet that's not true, he laments. In spite of everything, it has been ten years since I heard Janine for the first time tell the story of Harry Johanson and his wife Emma, and their trek towards the mission station of Mutshatsha.

  Now I'm almost there and Janine is dead. It was her dream, not mine. I'm a pilgrim in disguise, following someone else's tracks. Friendly people are helping me with lodging and transportation, as if my task were important.

  Like this David Fischer, bent over the distributor of his car. Early that morning Werner Masterton had turned into David's courtyard. A couple of hours later they were on their way to Mutshatsha. David Fischer is about his own age, thin and balding. He reminds Olofson of a restless bird. He keeps looking around, as if he thinks he's being followed. But of course he will help Hans Olofson make it to Mutshatsha.

  'To the missionaries at Mujimbeji,' he says. 'I've never been there, but I know the way.'

  Why doesn't anybody ask me? Olofson wonders. Why does no one want to know what I'm going to do in Mutshatsha?

  They travel through the bush in David Fischer's rusty military Jeep. The top has been put up, but the dust seeps in through the cracks. The Jeep pitches and skids in the deep sand.

  'The distributor will probably silt up again,' yells Fischer over the roar of the engine.

  The bush surrounds Hans Olofson. Now and then he glimpses people in the tall grass. Or maybe it's only shadows, he thinks. Maybe they're not really there.

  Then the distributor silts up, and Olofson stands in the oppressive heat and listens to the African silence. Like a winter night in my home town, he thinks. Just as still and deserted. There it was the cold, here it's the heat. And yet they are so similar. I could live there, could have endured. So I can probably live here too. Having grown up in Norrland, in the interior of Sweden, seems to be an excellent background for living in Africa ...

  Fischer slams down the bonnet, casts a glance over his shoulder, and sets about taking a piss.

  'What do Swedes know about Africa?' he asks out of the blue.

  'Not a thing,' Olofson replies.

  'Even those of us who live here don't understand it,' says Fischer. 'Europe's newly awakened interest in Africa, after you've already abandoned us once. Now you're coming back, with a guilty conscience, the saviours of the new age.'

  All at once Olofson feels personally responsible. 'My visit is utterly futile,' he replies. 'I'm not here to save anyone.'

  'Which country in Africa receives the most support from Europe?' asks Fischer. 'It's a riddle. If you guess right you'll be the first.'

  'Tanzania,' Olofson suggests.

  'Wrong,' says Fischer. 'It's Switzerland. Anonymous numbered accounts are filled with contributions that make only a quick round trip to Africa. And Switzerland is not an African country ...'

  The road plunges steeply down towards a river and a ramshackle wooden bridge. Groups of children are swimming in the green water, and women are kneeling and washing clothes.

  'Ninety per cent of these children will die of bilharzia,' Fischer yells.

  'What can be done?' Olofson asks.

  'Who wants to see a child die for no reason?' Fischer shouts. 'You have to understand that this is why we're so bitter. If we had been allowed to continue the way we were going, we probably would have got the better of the intestinal parasites as well. But now it's too late. When you abandoned us, you also abandoned the possibility for this continent to create a bearable future.'

  Fischer has to slam on the brakes for an African who jumps on to the road and waves his arms, trying to get a ride. Fischer honks the horn angrily and yells something to the man as they pass.

  'Three hours, then we'll be there,' Fischer shouts. 'I hope you'll at least think about what I said. Of course I'm a racist. But I'm not a stupid racist. I want the best for this country. I was born here and I hope to be allowed to die here.'

  Olofson tries to do as Fischer asks, but his thoughts slip away, lose their hold. It's as if I'm travelling in my own recollections, he thinks. Already this journey seems remote, as if it were a distant memory ...

  Afternoon arrives. The sun shines straight into the car's front windscreen. Fischer comes to a stop and shuts off the engine.

  'Is it the distributor again?' asks Olofson.

  'We're here,' says Fischer. 'This must be Mutshatsha. The river we just crossed was the Mujimbeji.'

  When the dust settles, a cluster of low, grey buildings appears, grouped round an open square with a well. So this is where Harry Johanson ended up, he thinks. This is where Janine headed in her lonely dream ... From a distance he sees an old white man approaching with slow steps. Children flock round the car, naked or wearing only rags.