The Eye Of The Leopard (14 page)

One day in late September 1969.

He has promised to stay and help Judith Fillington
with her farm, and when he wakes up the first morning
in the room with the odd angles, he sees that some overalls with
patched knees are lying on his chair.

Luka, he thinks. While I sleep he carries out her orders. Silently
he places the overalls on a chair, looks at my face, disappears.

He looks out the window, out over the vast farm. An unexpected
elation fills him. For a brief moment he seems to have
conquered his fear. He can stay for a few weeks and help her.
The trip to Mutshatsha is already a distant memory. Staying on
Judith's farm is no longer following in Janine's footsteps ...

During the hot morning hours Olofson listens to the gospel
according to chickens. He and Judith sit in the shade of a tree
and she instructs him.

'Fifteen thousand eggs per day,' she says. 'Twenty thousand
laying hens, additional colonies of at least 5,000 chicks who
replace the hens that no longer lay and then go to slaughter. Every
Saturday morning at dawn we sell them. The Africans wait in
silent queues all night long. We sell the hens for four
kwacha
, and
they resell the hens at the markets for six or seven
kwacha
...'

She looks like a bird. A restless bird who keeps expecting the
shadow of a falcon or eagle to drop down over her head. He has
put on the overalls that lay on the chair when he awoke. Judith
is wearing a pair of faded, dirty khaki trousers, a red shirt that
is far too big, and a hat with a wide brim. Her eyes are inaccessible
in the shadow of the brim.

'Why don't you sell them at the markets yourself?' he asks.

'I concentrate on survival,' she says. 'I'm already close to cracking
under the workload.'

She calls to Luka and says something that Olofson doesn't
understand. Why do all the whites act impatient, he wonders, as
if every black man or woman were insubordinate or stupid?

Luka returns with a dirty map, and Olofson squats down next
to Judith. With one finger she shows him on the map where her
farm delivers its eggs. He tries to remember the names: Ndola,
Mufulira, Solwezi, Kansanshi.

Judith's shirt is open at the neck. When she leans forward he
can see her skinny chest. The sun has burned a red triangle down
towards her navel. Suddenly she straightens up, as if she were
aware that he was no longer looking at the map. Her eyes remain
hidden under the hat.

'We deliver to the shops of the state cooperative,' she says. 'We
deliver to the mining companies, always big orders. At most a
thousand eggs per day go to local buyers. Every employee gets
one egg a day.'

'How many people work here?' Olofson asks.

'Two hundred,' she replies. 'I'm trying to learn all their names
by paying out the wages myself. I take deductions for drunkenness
and for those who miss work without having a good excuse.
I give out warnings and fines, I hire and fire, and I rely on my
memory to guarantee that no one who is sacked comes back
under a false name to be hired again. Of the 200 who work here,
twenty are night watchmen. We have two laying houses, each
manned by an assistant foreman and ten workers in shifts. In
addition we have butchers, carpenters, drivers, and manual
labourers. Only men, no women.'

'What will I be doing?' asks Olofson. 'I know what the chickens
eat and where the eggs are delivered, but what will I do?'

'Follow me like a shadow. Listen to what I say, check that it
gets done. Everything we want done has to be repeated, ordered
a second time, and then checked.'

'Something must be wrong,' Olofson says. 'Something the
whites have never understood.'

'Love the blacks if you want,' says Judith. 'But take my advice.
I've lived among them my whole life. I speak their language, I
know how they think. I get doctors for their children when the
medicine man fails, I pay for their funerals when they don't have
any money. I send the smartest children to school at my expense.
When the food runs out I organise transport of sacks of maize
to their houses. I do everything for them. But anyone who is
caught stealing a single egg I turn over to the police. I fire a man
who is drunk, I kick out the night watchmen who fall asleep.'

Olofson slowly begins to realise the scope of the operation.
The dominion of a single woman, Africans who subordinate
themselves because they have no alternative. Two different types
of poverty, face to face at a common meeting point. The terror
of the whites, their truncated lives as left-over colonialists in a
burned-out empire. The ash heap of loneliness in a new or resurrected
black colony.

The poverty of the whites is their vulnerability. Their lack of
alternatives becomes apparent when they arrange to meet the
Africans. Even a garden like this one, with the barely visible dream
of a Victorian park embedded in the greenery, is a fortified bunker.
Judith Fillington's last bastion is her hat, which conceals her eyes.

The poverty and vulnerability of the blacks is the poverty of
the continent. Broken and destroyed living patterns, their origins
lost in the mists of the past, replaced by insane empire builders
who changed into their dinner jackets deep in the rainforests and
on the plains of elephant grass. This world of stage sets still exists.
Here the Africans are trying to shape their future. Perhaps they
have endless patience. Perhaps they still have doubts about how
the future should look, how these stage sets can be dissolved and
obliterated. But what happens when they burst?

Hans Olofson decides he must work out a contingency plan,
an escape route. I'm only here for a short visit, he thinks. I'm
doing a favour for a strange woman, as if I were helping her up
after a fall on the street. But the whole time I remain outside the
actual event. I don't get involved, I can't be held responsible ...

Judith gets up abruptly. 'Work is waiting,' she says. 'Most of
your questions you can probably answer yourself. Africa belongs
to each individual, it's never shared.'

'You know nothing about me,' he says. 'My background, my
life, my dreams. And yet you're prepared to grant me enormous
responsibility. From my Swedish point of view it's incomprehensible.'

'I'm alone,' she replies. 'Abandoned by a man I never even had
a chance to bury. Living in Africa means always being forced to
take full responsibility.'

Much later he will remember his first days at Judith Fillington's
farm as an unreal journey into a world he seems to understand
less and less, the more his insight grows. Surrounded by the faces
of the black workers, he feels that he is in the midst of an ongoing
but not yet triggered catastrophe.

During those days he discovers that feelings secrete different
odours. He can sense hate in a bitter smell, like manure or vinegar,
everywhere; wherever he follows Judith like a shadow the smell
is always nearby. When he wakes in the night, the smell is there,
a faint current through the malaria net that hangs above his bed.

Something has to happen, he thinks. An outbreak of rage at
the impotence and poverty. Not having an alternative is like having
nothing at all, he thinks. Not being able to see anything beyond
poverty except more poverty ...

He decides that he has to get away, leave Africa before it's too
late. But after a month he is still there. He lies in his room with
the sloping ceiling and listens to the dogs restlessly patrolling
around the house. Every evening before he goes to bed, he sees
Judith check that the doors and windows are locked. He sees how
she first turns out the light in each room before she goes in to
draw the heavy curtains. She is always listening, stopping suddenly
in the midst of a step or a movement. She takes a shotgun and a
heavy elephant gun into her bedroom every night. During the day
the weapons are locked inside a steel cabinet, and he sees that she
always carries the keys with her.

After a month he realises that he has begun to share her fear.
With the rapidly falling twilight the strange house is transformed
into a bunker of silence. He asks whether she has found a
successor, but she shakes her head.

'In Africa anything important takes a long time,' she replies.

He begins to suspect that she hasn't written any classified ads,
hasn't made contact with the newspapers that Werner Masterton
suggested. But he refrains from giving vent to his suspicion.

Judith fills him with awed respect, perhaps even devotion. Hans
follows her from dawn to dusk, follows her unceasing effort, which
means that 15,000 eggs leave the farm each day, despite run-down
and mistreated lorries, a continual shortage of the maize waste
that makes up the primary fodder, and sudden outbreaks of viral
diseases which during one night can take the lives of all the hens
in one of the oblong, walled-off stone buildings where they are
forced into steel cages. One night she wakes him up, pulling open
his door and shining a torch into his face, and tells him to get
dressed at once.

Outside the house with its locked doors a frightened night
watchman is shouting that hunter ants have got into one of the
chicken coops, and when they reach the site Olofson sees terrified
Africans using burning bundles of twigs to swat at the endless
columns of ants. Without hesitation Judith takes the lead, forcing
the ants to change direction, and she screams at him when he
doesn't understand what she wants him to do.

'Who am I?' he asks her early one morning. 'Who am I to the
blacks?'

'A new Duncan Jones,' she replies. 'Two hundred Africans are
searching for your weak spot right now.'

Two weeks pass before he meets the man he has come to
replace. Each day they go past the house where he sits locked in
with his bottles, transforming himself into a holy man. The house
is on a hill right by the river, surrounded by a high wall.

A rusty car, maybe a Peugeot, is sometimes parked outside
the wall. It's always parked as though it had been abandoned in
haste. The boot stands open, and the corner of a filthy blanket
hangs out of one door.

He imagines a state of siege, a final battle that will be fought
around this hill, between the black workers and the lone white
man inside in the dark.

'The night watchmen are afraid,' says Judith. 'They can hear
him wailing in the night. They're afraid, but at the same time
they feel a sense of security. They think that his metamorphosis
to a holy man will mean that the bandits will stay away from
this farm.'

'The bandits?' Olofson asks.

'They're everywhere,' she replies. 'In the slums outside Kitwe and
Chingola there are plenty of weapons. Gangs spring up and are
destroyed, and new ones appear in their place. White farmers
are attacked, cars with whites are stopped on the roads. The
police are almost certainly involved, as well as workers on the farms.'

'What if they come here?' he asks.

'I rely on my dogs,' she says. 'Africans are afraid of dogs. And
I have Duncan wailing in the night. Superstition can be good if
you know how to use it. Maybe the night watchmen believe he's
being transformed into a snake.'

Then one morning he meets Duncan Jones for the first time.
He is standing supervising the loading of empty feed sacks into
a battered lorry when the black workers stop working. Duncan
Jones comes walking slowly towards him. He is dressed in dirty
trousers and a ripped shirt. Olofson sees a man who has slashed
his face with his straight razor. A suntanned face, skin like tanned
leather. Heavy eyelids, grey hair that is tangled and filthy.

'Don't ever take a piss before all the sacks are loaded and the
back door locked,' says Duncan Jones, coughing. 'If you go to take
a piss before that, you have to expect that at least ten sacks will
disappear. They sell the sacks for one
kwacha
each.'

He holds out his hand.

'There's just one thing I don't understand,' he says. 'Why has
Judith waited so long to find my successor? Everyone has to be
put out to pasture eventually. The only ones spared are those
who die young. But who are you?'

'I'm a Swede,' says Olofson. 'I'm only here temporarily.'

Duncan Jones opens his face in a smile and Olofson looks
straight into a mouth full of black stumps of teeth.

'Why does everyone who comes to Africa have to apologise?'
he asks. 'Even those who were born here say that they're only
here for a short visit.'

'In my case it's true,' says Olofson.

Jones shrugs his shoulders. 'Judith deserves it,' he says. 'She
deserves all the help she can get.'

'She put an ad in the paper,' says Olofson.

'Who can she get?' says Jones. 'Who would move here? Don't
abandon her. Never ask me for advice, I don't have any. Maybe I
had some once, advice I should have taken myself. But it's all
gone now. I'll live for another year. Hardly longer than that ...'

Suddenly he bellows at the Africans who are silently watching
his meeting with Hans Olofson.

'Work!' he yells. 'Work, don't sleep!'

Instantly they grab hold of their sacks.

'They're afraid of me,' says Jones. 'I know they think I'm about
to dissolve and be resurrected in the figure of a holy man. I'm
about to become a
kashinakashi
. Or maybe a snake. How do I know?'

Then he turns and leaves. Olofson watches him stop and press
one hand against the small of his back, as if a pain has suddenly
struck him. That evening, as they are eating dinner, Olofson
mentions the meeting.

'Maybe he will succeed in reaching some kind of clarity,' she
says. 'Africa has set him free from all dreams. For Duncan, life is
an undertaking that has been arbitrarily assigned. He is drinking
himself consciously and methodically towards the big sleep.
Without fear, I think. Maybe we should envy him. Or maybe we
should feel pity that he so utterly lacks hope?'