The Eye Of The Leopard (13 page)

'Maybe the leopard will come tonight,' he says to Werner when
they say goodbye.

'Musukutwane thinks so,' says Werner. 'If the leopard has any
weakness it's the same as that of a human being: an unwillingness
to lose prey that is already caught.'

Werner promises to cancel Olofson's return trip for him.

'Come back soon,' says Ruth.

Judith pulls a dirty cap over her brown hair and with great
difficulty jams the car into first gear.

'We never had children, my husband and I,' she blurts out as
they drive through the gates of the farm.

'I couldn't help overhearing,' says Olofson. 'What actually
happened?'

'Stewart, my husband, came out to Africa when he was fourteen,'
Judith says. 'His parents left England during the Depression in 1932,
and their savings were just enough for a one-way trip to Capetown.
Stewart's father was a butcher, and he did well. But his mother
suddenly began going out in the middle of the night and preaching
to the black workers in the shanty towns. She went insane and
committed suicide only a few years after they arrived in Capetown.
Stewart was always afraid that he would wind up like his mother.
Every morning when he woke up he searched for signs that he was
starting to lose his mind. He would often ask me if I thought he
was doing or saying anything odd. I never thought he had inherited
anything from his mother; I think he fell ill from his own fear. After
independence here, with all the changes, and the blacks who could
now make their own decisions, he lost heart. Still, I was unprepared
when he disappeared. He left no message, nothing ...'

After a little over an hour they arrive. 'Fillington Farm' Olofson
reads on a cracked wooden sign nailed to a tree. They turn in
through a gate opened by an African in ragged clothes, pass by rows
of low incubation buildings, and stop at last outside a house of
dark-red brick. A house that was never completed, Olofson can see.

'Stewart was always fixing up the house,' she says. 'He would
tear things down and add things on. I don't think he ever liked
the house; he probably would rather have pulled it down and
started again.'

'A castle out in the African bush,' says Olofson. 'A strange
house. I didn't think there were any like this.'

'Welcome,' she says. 'Call me Judith and I'll call you Hans.'

She shows him to a large, bright room with odd angles and a
sloping ceiling. Through the window he looks out over a partially
overgrown yard with dilapidated garden furniture. German shepherds
run restlessly back and forth in a fenced dog run.

'
Bwana
,' says someone behind him.

A Masai, he thinks as he turns around. I've always imagined
them like this. Kenyatta's men. This is how they looked, the Mau-Mau
warriors, the ones who drove the English out of Kenya.

The African who stands before him is very tall, his face noble.

'My name is Luka,
Bwana
.'

Can one have a servant who is nobler than oneself? Olofson
wonders. An African warrior who runs one's bath?

He notices Judith standing in the doorway. 'Luka will take care
of us,' she says. 'He reminds me of what I forget.'

Later, when they are sitting in the dilapidated wooden furniture
drinking coffee, she tells him about Luka.

'I don't trust him,' she says. 'There's something wily about him,
even though I've never caught him stealing or lying. But he does
both, naturally.'

'How should I treat him?' asks Olofson.

'Firmly,' says Judith. 'The Africans are always looking for your
weak point, those moments when you can be talked into something.
Give him nothing; find something to complain about the
first time he washes your clothes. Even if there's nothing; then
he'll know that you make demands ...'

Two large tortoises are asleep at Olofson's feet. The heat gives
him a churning headache, and when he sets down his coffee cup,
he sees that his table is a stuffed elephant foot.

I could live here the rest of my life, he thinks. The impulse is
immediate, it overwhelms his consciousness and he can't formulate
a single objection. I could put twenty-five years of my life
behind me. Never again have to be reminded of what came before.
But which of my roots would die if I tried to transplant them
here, to this red earth? Why leave the meadowlands of Norrland
for the sandy red soil they have here? Why would I want to live
on a continent where an inexorable process of eviction is under
way? Africa wants the whites out, I've understood that much. But
they persevere, build their forts to defend themselves using racism
and contempt as their tools. The whites' prisons are comfortable,
but they are still prisons, bunkers with bowing servants ...

His thoughts are interrupted. Judith looks at the coffee cup
in her hand.

'The porcelain is a reminder,' she says. 'When Cecil Rhodes
received his concessions over what today is called Zambia, he sent
his employees into the wilderness to conclude agreements with the
local chieftains. Perhaps also to obtain their help in finding unknown
ore deposits. But these employees, who sometimes had to travel for
years through the bush, were also supposed to be the vanguard of
civilisation. Each expedition was like sending out an English manor
house with bearers and ox carts. Every evening when they made
camp, the porcelain service was unpacked. A table was set up with
a white tablecloth, while Cecil Rhodes bathed in his tent and changed
into his evening clothes. This service once belonged to one of the
men who cleared the way for Cecil Rhodes's dream of an unbroken
British territory from the Cape to Cairo.'

'Everyone is occasionally seized by impossible dreams,' says
Olofson. 'Only the craziest try to realise them.'

'Not the madmen,' replies Judith. 'There you are mistaken. Not
the madmen, but the intelligent and far-sighted ones. Cecil Rhodes's
dream was not an impossibility; his problem was that he was all
alone, at the mercy of impotent and capricious British politicians.'

'An empire that rests upon the most precarious of all foundations,'
says Olofson. 'Oppression, alienation in one's own country.
Such an edifice must collapse before it's even completed. There
is one truth that's impossible to avoid.'

'And what's that?' asks Judith.

'The blacks were here first,' says Olofson. 'The world is full of
various judicial systems, and in Europe it's based on Roman law.
In Asia there are other legal forms, in Africa, everywhere. But
natural law is always followed, even if the laws are given a political
interpretation. The Indians of North America were almost
totally wiped out in a couple of hundred years. And yet their
natural law was written into the American law ...'

Judith bursts into laughter. 'My second philosopher,' she says.
'Duncan Jones is also steeped in ephemeral philosophical reflections.
I've never understood a word of it, even though I tried to
in the beginning. Now he has drunk his brain into mush, his
body shakes, and he chews his lips to shreds. Maybe he'll live a
few more years before I have to bury him. Once he was a man
with dignity and resolve. Now he lives in an eternal twilight zone
of alcohol and decay. The Africans think he is being transformed
into a holy man. They're afraid of him. He's the best watchdog
I could have. And now you arrive, my next philosopher. Maybe
Africa tempts some people to start ruminating.'

'Where does Duncan Jones live?' Olofson asks.

'I'll show you tomorrow,' says Judith.

Olofson lies awake for a long time in his irregular room with
its sloping roof. A scent that reminds him of winter apples pervades
it. Before he puts out the light he gazes at a big spider web, motionless
on one of the walls. Somewhere a roof beam is complaining
and he feels transported back to the house by the river. He listens
to the German shepherds that Luka has let outside. They run
restlessly around the house, making one circuit after another.

A short time, he thinks. A temporary visit to lend a helping
hand to people with whom he has nothing in common, but who
have taken care of him during his journey to Africa. They have
abandoned Africa, but not each other, he thinks. That will also
turn out to be their ruin ...

In his dreams the leopard appears, the one he waited for last
night in a grass blind. Now it races into the space inside him,
searching for a quarry that Olofson left behind. The leopard
searches through his internal landscape, and he suddenly sees
Sture before him. They are sitting on the boulder by the river
and watching a crocodile that has crawled up on a sand bank,
right by the huge stone caissons of the river bridge.

Janine is balancing on one of the iron beams with her trombone.
He tries to hear what she's playing, but the night wind
carries away the tune.

Finally there is only the leopard's watchful eye, observing him
from the dream chamber. The dream falls away, and when he
awakens in the African dawn he will not remember it.

It is a day in late September of 1969. Hans Olofson will remain
in Africa for eighteen years ...

When he opens his eyes in the dark, the fever is gone.
There is only a wailing and whining sound inside
his head.

I'm still alive, he thinks. I'm not dead yet. The malaria has not
yet conquered me. I still have time to understand why I have
lived before I die ...

The heavy revolver presses against one cheek. He turns his
head and feels the cold barrel against his forehead. A faint smell
of gunpowder, like cow manure burned out in a pasture, pricks
his nose.

He is very tired. How long was he asleep? A couple of minutes
or twenty-four hours? He has no idea. He listens to the darkness,
but the only thing he hears is his own breathing. The heat
is stifling. The sheet is incapable of absorbing all the sweat he
has produced.

Now is my chance, he thinks. Before the next fever attack is
upon me. Now is when I have to get hold of Luka, who has
betrayed me and left me to the bandits so they can slit my throat.
Now is when I can catch him and scare him into running on his
silent feet through the night to bring help. They are out there in
the dark, with their automatic weapons and pickaxes and knives,
and they're waiting for me to get delirious again before they come
in here and kill me ...

And yet he doesn't seem to care whether the malaria kills him
or the bandits. He listens to the night. The frogs are croaking.
A hippopotamus sighs down by the river.

Is Luka sitting outside the door, on his haunches, waiting? His
black face concentrating, turned inward, listening to his forefathers
speaking inside him? And the bandits? Where are they
waiting? In the dense thickets of hibiscus beyond the gazebo that
blew down last year in a violent storm that came after everyone
thought the rainy season was over?

One year ago, he thinks. For ten years he has lived here by the
Kafue River. Or fifteen years, maybe more. He tries to tally them
up but he's too tired. And he was only supposed to stay here two
weeks. What actually happened? Even time is betraying me, he
thinks.

He can see himself descend from the aeroplane at Lusaka
International Airport that day so inconceivably long ago. The
concrete was completely white, the heat hung like a mist over
the airport, and an African pushing a baggage cart laughed as
he stepped on to Africa's burning soil.

He remembers his anxiety, his instant suspicion towards Africa.
Back then he left behind the adventure he had imagined ever
since childhood. He had always imagined that he would step out
into the unknown with a consciousness that was open and utterly
free of anxiety.

But Africa crushed that idea. When he stepped out of the
aeroplane and found himself surrounded by black people, foreign
smells, and a language he didn't understand, he longed to go
straight back home.

The trip to Mutshatsha, the dubious pilgrimage to the final
goal of Janine's dream – he carried it out under a compulsion he
had imposed on himself. He still recalls the humiliating feeling
that terror was his only travelling companion; it overshadowed
everything else in his mind. The money sticking to him inside
his underpants, the terrified creature huddled in the hotel room.

Africa conquered the sense of adventure within him as soon
as he took his first breath on the soil of this foreign continent.
He began planning his return at once.

Fifteen or ten or eighteen years later, he is still there. His
return ticket is somewhere in a drawer full of shoes and broken
wristwatches and rusty screws. Many years ago he discovered it
when he was looking for something in the drawer; insects had
attacked the envelope and made the ticket illegible.

What actually happened?

He listens to the darkness. Suddenly he feels as if he's lying
in his bed in the wooden house by the river again. He can't tell
if it's winter or summer. His father is snoring in his room and
he thinks that soon, soon, the moorings of the wooden house
will be cut and the house will drift away down the river, off
towards the sea ...

What was it that happened? Why did he stay in Africa, by
this river, on this farm, where he was forced to witness the murder
of his friends, where he soon felt he was surrounded only by the
dead?

How has he been able to live so long with a revolver under
his pillow? It isn't normal for a person who grew up by a river
in Norrland – in a town and a time where nobody ever thought
of locking the door at night – to check that his revolver is loaded
every night, that no one has replaced the cartridges with blanks.
It isn't normal to live a life surrounded by hate ...

Once again he tries to understand. Before the malaria or the
bandits have conquered him he wants to know ...

He can feel that a new attack of fever is on its way. The whining
in his head has stopped abruptly. Now he can hear only the frogs
and the sighing hippo. He takes a grip on the sheet so he can
hold on tight when the fever rolls over him like a storm surge.

I have to hang on, he thinks in despair. As long as I keep my
will the fever won't be able to vanquish me. If I put the pillow
over my face they won't hear me yell when the hallucinations
torment me.

The fever drops its cage around him. He thinks he sees the
leopard, which only visits him when he's sick, lying at the foot
of the bed. Its cat face is turned towards him. The cold eyes are
motionless.

It doesn't exist, he tells himself. It's just racing around in my
head. With my will I can conquer the cat as well. When the fever
is gone the leopard won't exist any more. Then I'll have control
over my thoughts and dreams. Then it won't exist any more ...

What happened? he wonders again.

The question echoes inside him. Suddenly he no longer knows
who he is. The fever drives him away from his consciousness.
The leopard watches by the bed, the revolver rests against his
cheek.

The fever chases him out on to the endless plains ...