The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  'I don't wander around in the woods.'

  'You know what I mean. When I finish school we'll leave this place.'

  'And go where?'

  'Maybe we can ship out on the same vessel.'

  'On a Vaxholm boat?'

  'What the hell do I know? But I want to go further. I'm going out in the world.'

  'Then I'll wait till you've finished school.'

  'Don't wait! You have to go now.'

  'That won't work.'

  'Why not?'

  'It's already too late.'

  'Too late?'

  'Time ran out.'

  'When?'

  'About six months ago.'

  'Six months ago?'

  'Yes.'

  'And you're only telling me now? Why didn't you go?'

  'I thought I'd talk to you first.'

  'Good Lord ...'

  'What is it?'

  'We have to get out of here. We can't live here. We have to get out and discover the world again!'

  'I'm starting to get too old, I think.'

  'You're getting old by stomping around in the woods.'

  'I'm not stomping around in the woods! I'm working.'

  'I know. But still.'

  Maybe there's still time, Hans thinks. Maybe he'll take off again. He carries the sea inside him, I know that now. Hans hurries over to Janine's to tell her. I'll never have to see him crawling around scrubbing the kitchen at night, with water up to his neck.

  He stops on the river bridge and looks down in the water where the ice floes rock their way towards the sea. Far off in the distance is the world, the new world that's waiting for the conqueror of the new era. The world which he will discover with Janine.

  But somewhere along the way they turn off in different directions. For Hans the change takes the form of a period of waiting for something. His pilgrimage, with or without his father Erik Olofson, will take place in a world that others are putting in order for him.

  Janine's thoughts are different. She makes the crucial discovery that incredible poverty is neither a whim of nature nor a law decreed by fate. She sees people who consciously choose a barbaric evil as the tool for their own gain. So they part ways at the centre of the world.

  Hans emerges from his period of waiting. Janine discovers that her conscience requires action, more than just the intercessions for sufferers in which she takes part under Hurrapelle's leadership. The question deepens, and never leaves her in her dreams. And she begins to search for a means of expression. A personal crusade, she thinks. A solitary crusade, in order to tell of the world that exists beyond the fir ridges.

  Slowly a decision matures, and without saying anything to Hans she decides to take up her post on the street corner. She knows that she must carry out her plan alone. Until she has stood there for the first time she won't share her crusade with anyone.

  On that particular Saturday morning in March, Hans spends his time in the forestry officer's garage. Along with one of the officer's sons he has worked in vain to try to revive an old motorcycle. Not until late in the afternoon, when he stops at Pettersson's kiosk, does he hear about what happened. His heart tightens when he hears what Janine has done. He feels that he has been exposed. Surely everyone knows that he sneaks up to her door, even though he tries to avoid being seen when he walks through her gate. He begins at once to hate her, as if her real intention had been to pull him into her own humiliation. He knows that he has to distance himself from her at once, to separate from her.

  'No one should care about a woman without a nose,' he says.

  They had agreed that he would visit her that evening. But now he spends the evening at the People's Hall instead. He dances with every girl he meets, spitting out the most disparaging remarks about Janine that he can think of when he is crowded and jostled in the men's toilet. When Kringström's band finishes up with 'Twilight Time' he feels that he has presented a sufficient defence. Now nobody will think that he has a secret life with the placardcarrying lunatic. He goes out to the street, wipes the sweat off his brow, and stands in the shadows watching the couples leave. The night is full of shouts and giggles. He rocks back and forth on his feet, dizzy from all the lukewarm aquavit. That damn bitch, he thinks. She would have yelled at me and asked me to help hold her sign if I happened to pass by.

  Suddenly he decides to visit her one last time and tell her what he's thinking. So as not to be discovered he sneaks like a criminal across the bridge and waits for a long time outside her gate before he slips into the shadows.

  She welcomes him without reproach. He was supposed to come but didn't. No more than that.

  'Did you wait for me?' he asks.

  'I'm used to waiting,' she replies. 'It doesn't matter.'

  He hates her and he desires her. But at the same time he knows that tonight he brings with him the opinion of the town, and he tells her that he will never come back if she stands on the street corner again.

  A cold wind blows through her heart. She had thought he would encourage her, agree that what she was doing was right. That's how she had interpreted their conversation about the way the world was cracking under the winds of change. Sorrow sinks like a lead weight on to her head. Now she knows that she will be left alone again. But not yet, because his desire takes over, and once again they are entwined with each other.

  Their last time together becomes a long drawn-out agony. Hans returns to the starting point, the chopped-off crow's head that he and Sture put in her letterbox. Now it's her head he's swinging at. He spits and swears at her, breaks arrangements, and paints her black for anyone who will listen.

  In the midst of this chaos he passes his secondary school examination. With an intense outburst of concentrated energy he succeeds in getting unexpectedly high marks. Rector Bohlin has seen to it that an application is sent to the college in the county seat. When he puts on the grey graduation cap, he decides to keep studying. Now he doesn't have to wait for his father to fling away the axe of indecision, now he's in charge of his own future. With one single motion he can set himself free.

  On the evening after the exam he stands outside Janine's door. She's waiting with flowers for him, but he doesn't want her damned flowers. He's going to leave this place and now he's here for the last time. He hangs his grey cap over the picture of the Virgin Mary sitting in her window. But to the last day, all summer long, he visits her. And yet the secret that will be her last he never will know.

  The final break-up, the end, is irresolute and forlorn. One evening in the middle of August he visits her and now it is really for the last time. They meet briefly in her kitchen, with few words, as if it were their first time, when he stood there with his hedge clippers in his hand. He says he'll write, but she tells him it would be better if he didn't. It's best to let everything dissolve, blow away with the wind.

  He leaves her house. Behind him he hears the notes of 'Some of These Days'.

  The next day his father accompanies him to the train station. Hans looks at his father, grey and indecisive.

  'I'll come home sometime,' he says. 'And you can always come to visit.'

  Erik Olofson nods. He'll certainly come to visit. 'The sea ...' he says and falls silent.

  But Hans doesn't hear him. He's waiting patiently for the tram to take him away.

  For a long time his father stays at the station, and he tells himself that the sea still does exist, after all. If only he ... Always that 'if only'. Then he goes home to the house by the river, and lets the sea roar out of his radio.

  The month of the rowan berries. A Sunday morning in September. A bank of fog lies heavy over the town as it slowly begins to awake. There's a chill in the air and the gravel crunches as a lone man turns off the main road and takes a short cut down the slope to the river. The People's Park on its promontory shines forlornly like a half-razed ruin in the grey morning light. In the horse dealer's pastures the horses are grazing in the fog. Noiselessly they move like ships waiting for the wind.

 
The man unties a rowboat at the river bank and sits down at the oars. He rows out into the sound between the point of the People's Park and the south bank of the river. There he throws out an anchor that grips the rocks on the river bed. He tosses out a line and waits.

  After an hour he decides to try further down towards the point. He lets the anchor drift under the keel of the boat as he rows. But abruptly it catches, and when he finally pulls it loose he sees that an almost rotten piece of cloth has been pierced by his hook. A bit of a woman's blouse, he can see. Pensively he rows back to shore.

  The bit of cloth lies on a table at the police station, with Hurrapelle standing looking at it. He nods.

  The hastily assembled river-dragging crew doesn't have to search long. On the second pass the two rowboats make through the sound, one of their hooks catches on something at the bottom. From the shore Hurrapelle watches Janine return.

  The doctor examines the body one last time before he finishes the autopsy. When he has washed his hands, he stands by the window and looks out over the fir ridges coloured red by the setting sun. He wonders whether he is the only one who knows Janine's secret. Without knowing why, he decides not to include it in the autopsy report. Even though this is not proper procedure, he doesn't think it will change anything. He knows that she drowned. Around her waist there was a thick steel wire and in her clothing were irons and heavy pieces of drainpipe. No crime was committed. So he doesn't need to report that Janine was carrying a child when she died.

  In the house by the river Erik Olofson sits poring over a sea chart. He adjusts his glasses and pilots his vessel with his index finger through the Strait of Malacca. He smells the sea, sees the glimmering lanterns from distant vessels on an approaching course. In the background the carrier waves from the shortwave radio hiss through the ether. Maybe it's still possible, he thinks. A little ship that takes goods along the coast? Maybe it's still possible.

  And what about Hans? He doesn't remember who told him. But someone heard about it, and Hans learns that Janine is dead. The woman who stood every Saturday with her placard on the corner between the People's Hall and the hardware shop. In the night he leaves the room in his boarding house, which he already detests, and wanders restlessly through the dark town. He tries to convince himself that no one is to blame. Not him, nor anybody else. But still, he knows. Mutshatsha, he thinks. You wanted to go there, Janine, that was your dream. But you never went and now you're dead.

  I once lay behind a broken-down kiln in the old brickworks and realised that I was myself and no one else. But since then? Now? He asks himself how he can stand four years in this distant college. Inside him an incessant struggle is going on between belief in the future and resignation. He tries to cheer himself up. Living must be like continually preparing for new expeditions, he thinks. It's either that or I'll become like my father.

  All at once he decides. Someday he will go to Mutshatsha. Someday he will make the journey that Janine never made. That thought becomes instantly holy for him. The most fragile of all Goals has revealed itself to him. The dream of another which he is taking over.

  Cautiously he tiptoes up the stairs to his room. He recognises the smell of old lady Westlund's flat. Apples, sour drops. On the table the books lie waiting for him. But he is thinking of Janine. Maybe growing up means realising one's loneliness, he thinks. He sits motionless for a long time.

  He feels as if he were again sitting on the huge span of the iron bridge. High overhead, the stars.

  Below him Janine ...

  PART III

  THE LEOPARD'S EYE

  Chapter Twenty

  In Hans Olofson's dreams the leopard is hunting.

  The terrain is a landscape slipping away, the African bush displaced to become his internal space. The perspective is changing constantly. Sometimes he's in front of the leopard, sometimes behind it, and at times he becomes the leopard himself. In the dream it is always dusk. Surrounded by the tall elephant grass he stands far out on a savannah. The horizon frightens him. A threat coming ever closer is the leopard's landscape, which returns night after night in his restless mind.

  Sometimes he wakes up abruptly and thinks he understands. He is not being pursued by a lone leopard, but two. In his internal landscape the leopard is breaking with its nature as a lone hunter and joining with another animal. He never manages to discern what kind of weapons he is carrying during his recurrent nocturnal hunts. Is he setting out snares or does he carry a spear with a hand-wrought iron point? Or is he following the leopard empty-handed? The landscape stretches away in his dreams as an endless plain where he senses an indistinct river bed at the distant edge of his vision. He burns the tall elephant grass to drive out the leopard. Sometimes he also thinks he spies the leopard's shadow, like a rapid movement against the moonlit terrain. The rest is silence, his own breathing echoing inside the dream.

  The leopard is bringing a message, he thinks when he wakes. A message I haven't yet managed to decipher.

  When the malaria attack forces his mind into hallucinations, he sees the leopard's watchful eye.

  It's Janine, he thinks in confusion. It's her eye I see; she's looking up at me from the bottom of the river as I'm balancing on the span of the iron bridge. She has drawn a leopard skin over her shoulders so I won't know it's her.

  But she's dead, isn't she? When I left Sweden and put all my old horizons behind me, she had already been gone for seven years. Now I've been in Africa for almost eighteen years.

  The malaria attack flings him up from his lethargy, and when he awakes he doesn't know where he is. The revolver resting against his cheek makes him remember. He listens to the darkness.

  I'm surrounded by bandits, he thinks desperately. It's Luka who lured them here, severed the telephone line, cut off the electricity. They're waiting outside in the dark. Soon they will come to tear open my chest and carry off my still beating heart.

  Summoning all his remaining strength, he sits up in bed so that his back is resting against the bedstead. Why don't I hear anything, he wonders. The silence ...

  Why aren't the hippos sighing by the river? Where's that damned Luka? He yells into the dark, but no one answers. He has the pistol in his hands.

  He waits.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Werner Masterton's severed head lies in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Two forks are stuck in his eyes. In the dining room sits Masterton's headless body at the table, the chopped-off hands lie on a tray in front of him, the white tablecloth is drenched in blood.

  In the bedroom Olofson finds Ruth Masterton with her throat slit, her head almost detached from her body. She is naked, one of her thighbones smashed by a powerful axe-blow. Flies swarm over her body and he thinks that what he is seeing can't be real.

  He notices that he is weeping from terror, and when he comes out of the house he collapses to the ground. The waiting Africans shrink back, and he screams at them not to go in. He calls to Robert to fetch the neighbours, call the police, and suddenly in despair he fires his shotgun into the air.

  Late in the afternoon he returns home, paralysed, apathetic. He still can't face the rage that he knows will come. For the whole long day the rumour has spread in the white colony, cars have come and gone, and one opinion is soon discernible. Ruth and Werner Masterton did not fall victim to normal bandits. Even though their car is gone, valuables vanished, this senseless double murder is something more, a dammed-up hatred that has found its release. This is a racial murder, a political murder. Ruth and Werner Masterton have met their fate at the hands of selfappointed black avengers.

  At the house of one of the Mastertons' neighbours the white colony quickly gathers for a meeting to discuss broader security measures. But Olofson doesn't attend; he says he can't face it. Someone at the meeting suggests visiting Olofson that evening to report on what has been decided. But he refuses the visit; he has his dogs and his weapons, he knows how to be careful.