The Eye Of The Leopard (20 page)

The arc of time grows, and Hans Olofson continues to live in
Africa.

When he has been in Kalulushi for nine years, a letter arrives
to inform him that his father has died in a fire. One cold night
in January of 1978 the house by the river burned down.

The cause was never clarified. You were sought for the funeral, but
your whereabouts was not discovered until now. One other person died
in the fire, an elderly widow named Westlund. It is also believed that the
fire started in her flat. But of course, this will never be known. Nothing
was left; the building burned to the ground. What will happen with the
inventory of your father's estate, I am not at liberty to say.

The letter is signed with a name that vaguely reminds him of
one of his father's foremen at the lumber company.

Slowly he lets the grief seep in. He sees himself in the kitchen,
sitting across the table from his father. The heavy odour of wet
wool.
Célestine
stands in her case, but now she is a smoking wreck
burned black. There is also the charred sea chart of the approaches
to the Strait of Malacca.

He glimpses his father under a sheet on a stretcher. Now I'm
alone, he thinks. If I choose not to return, my mother will remain
an enigma, in the same way as the fire.

His father's death becomes a burden of guilt, a feeling of
betrayal, of having given up. Now I'm alone, he thinks again. I'll
have to bear this loneliness as long as I live.

Without really knowing why, he gets in his car and drives to
Joyce Lufuma's mud hut. She is standing there pounding corn,
and she laughs and waves when she sees him coming.

'My father is dead,' he says.

At once she senses his grief and begins to moan, casting herself
to the ground, wailing out the pain that is actually his.

Other women come over, hear that the white man's father is
dead in a distant land, and instantly join the lamenting chorus.
Olofson sits down beneath a tree and forces himself to listen to
the women's appalling lamentations. His own pain is wordless,
an anxiety that digs its nails into his body.

He returns to his car, hears the women shrieking behind him,
and thinks that Africa is giving Erik Olofson his tribute. A sailor
who drowned in the sea of the Norrland forests.

As if on a pilgrimage he sets off on a journey to the sources
of the Zambezi River in the northwest corner of the country. He
travels to Mwinilunga and Ikkelenge, sleeps overnight in his car
outside the mission infirmary at Kalenje Hill, and then continues
along the almost impassable sand track that leads to the long
valley where the Zambezi has its source. He walks for a long
time through the dense, desolate bush until he reaches it.

A simple stone cairn marks the spot. He squats down and
sees how individual drops of water fall from broken blocks of
stone. A rivulet no wider than his hand winds through the stones
and bush grass. He cups his hand in the rivulet and thus stops
the flow of the Zambezi River.

He doesn't leave until late in the afternoon, knowing he must
reach his car before it grows dark. By then he has decided to stay
in Africa. There is nothing left to return to in Sweden. From his
grief he also gathers the strength to be realistic. He will never be
able to transform his farm into the political model of his dreams.
Even though he once firmly vowed never to lose himself in idealistic
labyrinths, he ended up doing just that.

A white man can never help Africans develop their country
from a superior position, he thinks. From below, from inside, one
can surely contribute to expertise and new working patterns. But
never as a
bwana
. Never as someone who holds all power in his
hands. Africans see through words and actions – they see the
white man as owner, and they gratefully accept the wage increases
he gives them, or the school he builds, or the sacks of cement he
is willing to forgo. His thoughts of influence and responsibility
they regard as irrelevant whims, random gestures which increase
the possibility for the individual foreman to make off with some
extra eggs or spare parts that he can later sell.

The long colonial history has freed the Africans from all illusions.
They know the capriciousness of the whites, their constant
exchange of one idea for another, while demanding that the black
man be enthusiastic. A white man never asks about traditions,
even less about the opinions of their ancestors. The white man
works quickly and hard, and haste and impatience are viewed by
the black man as a sign of low intelligence. Thinking long and
precisely is the black man's wisdom.

At the source of the Zambezi he seeks the way to a new
starting point, free of suppositions. I have run my capitalistic
farm under the guise of a socialist dream, he thinks. I have occupied
myself with an impossibility, incapable of realising even the
most fundamental contradictions that exist. The starting point
was always mine: my ideas, never the Africans' thoughts, never
Africa.

From the profit that the blacks produce, I pass on a share to
those workers that is more than Judith Fillington or the other
farmers ever did. The school I built, the school uniforms I pay
for, are their own achievements, not mine. My most important
function is to keep the farm operating and not permit too much
pilfering or absenteeism. Nothing more. The only thing I can do
is someday turn over the farm to a workers' collective, transferring
ownership itself. But this too is an illusion. The time is not
ripe for it. The farm would fall into disrepair, some people would
get rich, and others would be shoved out into even greater poverty.
What I can do is to continue to run the farm as I do today, but
without disrupting the great tranquillity with whims and ideas
that will never amount to anything for the Africans. Their future
is their own creation. I contribute to the production of food, and
that is always time well spent. I know nothing about what the
Africans think of me. I'll have to ask Peter Motombwane, maybe
also ask him to investigate it by talking to my workers. I wonder
what Joyce Lufuma and her daughters think.

He returns to Kalulushi with a feeling of calm. He realises
that he will never understand the underlying currents of life.
Sometimes it's necessary to stop asking certain questions, he
thinks. There are some answers that simply don't exist.

As he turns in the gates to the farm, he thinks of Egg-Karlsson,
who evidently survived the fire. In my childhood I lived next door
to an egg dealer, he thinks. If anyone had told me back then that
one day I would be an egg dealer in Africa, I wouldn't have
believed it. That would have been unreasonable to believe.

I'm still the same person today. My income is large, my farm
is solid. But my life is a quagmire.

One day perhaps Mr Pihri and his son will come and tell me
that they can no longer handle my papers. The authorities will
declare me an undesirable. I live here with no actual rights; I'm
not a citizen with roots legally planted in Africa. I could be
deported without notice, the farm confiscated.

A few days after his return from the Zambezi he looks up
Patel in Kitwe and arranges increased transfers of foreign currency
to the bank in London.

'It's becoming harder and harder to handle,' says Patel. 'The
risks of discovery are increasing all the time.'

'Ten per cent harder?' asks Olofson. 'Or twenty per cent harder?'

'I would say twenty-five per cent harder,' replies Patel in a
worried voice.

Olofson nods and leaves the dark back room with its odours
of curry and perfume. I'm putting my trust in an increasingly
complex tangle of bribes, illegal financial transactions and corruption,
he thinks. I scarcely have any choice. It's hard to imagine
that the corruption in this country is more widespread than it is
in Sweden. The difference lies in the candour of it. Here everything
is so obvious. In Sweden the methods are more evolved, a
more refined and well-concealed pattern. But that is probably the
only difference.

The arc of time is expanding. Hans Olofson loses a tooth, and
just afterwards one more.

He turns forty and invites his many white and few black friends
to a party. Peter Motombwane declines and never gives an explanation.
Olofson gets very drunk during this party. He listens to
incomprehensible speeches from people he scarcely knows.
Speeches that praise him, pouring out a foundation of veneration
for his African farm. They're thanking me because I've started
running my farm without extravagant thoughts about its function
as a future model, he thinks. Not a true word is being spoken
here.

On wobbly legs he stands up at midnight to thank his guests
because so many of them came. Suddenly he realises that he has
begun speaking in Swedish. He hears his old language, and he
hears himself make a raging attack on the racist arrogance that
characterises the whites who still live in this African land. He
raves on in Swedish with a friendly smile.

'A pack of scoundrels and whores is what you are,' he says,
raising his glass.

'How nice,' an elderly woman tells him later. 'Mixing the two
languages like that. But of course we're wondering what you said.'

'I hardly recall,' Olofson replies, and steps outside in the dark
alone.

Something whimpers at his feet and he discovers the German
shepherd puppy he got as a present from Ruth and Werner
Masterton.

'Sture,' he says. 'Your name is Sture from now on.'

The puppy whimpers and Olofson calls Luka.

'Take care of the puppy,' he says.

'Yes,
Bwana
,' says Luka.

The party degenerates into a Walpurgis Night. Drunken
people lie sprawled in the various rooms, an ill-matched couple
has taken over Olofson's own bed, and in the garden someone is
shooting a pistol at bottles that a terrified black servant is lining
up on a garden table.

Olofson suddenly feels aroused, and he begins to hover about
a woman from one of the farms that lies furthest from his own.
The woman is fat and swollen, her skirt is hitched up above her
knees, and her husband is asleep under a table in the room that
was once Judith Fillington's library.

'I'd like to show you something,' says Olofson.

The woman gives a start from her half-doze and follows him up
to the second floor of the house, to the room where skeletons once
filled all the walls. He lights a lamp and closes the door behind him.

'This is what you wanted to show me?' she says with a laugh.
'An empty room?'

Without replying he presses her against the wall, pulls up her
skirt, and forces himself inside her.

'An empty room,' she says again and laughs.

'Imagine that I'm black,' Olofson says.

'Don't say that.'

'Imagine that I'm black,' he says again.

When it's over she clings to him and he smells the sweat from
her unwashed body.

'One more time,' she says.

'Never,' says Olofson. 'It's my party, and I decide.' He goes
quickly, leaving her alone.

Pistol shots echo from the garden and he suddenly can't stay
there any longer. He staggers out into the darkness, deciding that
the only person he wants to be near is Joyce Lufuma.

He gets in his car and leaves his house and his party with a
screech of tyres. Twice he drives off the road, but manages to
avoid flipping over, and finally pulls in front of her house.

The yard is silent and dark. He sees the disrepair in the headlights
of his car, and he turns off the motor and sits in the dark.
The night is warm and he feels his way to his usual spot under
the tree.

We all have a lonesome, abandoned dog sitting and barking
inside us, he thinks. Its paws are different colours, its tail may be
cut off. But we all have that dog inside us.

He wakes up at dawn when one of Joyce's daughters stands
looking at him. He knows she is twelve years old; he can remember
when she was born.

I love this child, he thinks. In her I can recognise something
of myself, the child's magnanimity, an ever-present readiness to
show consideration for others.

Gravely she watches him, and he forces himself to smile.

'I'm not sick,' he says. 'I'm just sitting here resting.'

When he smiles she smiles back at him. I can't abandon this
child, he thinks. Joyce and her daughters are my responsibility,
no one else's.

He has a headache and feels bad; the hangover is pounding
in his chest and he shudders when he recalls the hopeless fornication
in the empty room. I might just as well have mounted one
of the skeletons, he says to himself. The humiliation I subject
myself to seems to have no limits.

He drives back to his house and sees Luka picking up shards
of glass in the garden, and he realises he also feels ashamed in
front of Luka. Most of the guests have disappeared, only Ruth
and Werner Masterton are left. They're sitting on the terrace
drinking coffee. The German shepherd puppy he named Sture
is playing at their feet.

'You survived,' says Werner with a smile. 'The parties seem to
be getting more and more intense, as if a day of judgement were
imminent.'

'Who knows?' Olofson says.

Luka walks past below the terrace. He's carrying a pail full of
broken bottles. They follow him with their gaze, watch him vanish
towards the pit in the ground where he dumps the rubbish.

'Drop by and say hello sometime,' says Ruth as she and Werner
get up to return to their farm.

'I will,' Olofson says.

A few weeks after the party he comes down with a severe
attack of malaria, worse than any he has had before. The fever
dreams hound him.

He imagines that he is being lynched by his workers. They
rip off his clothes, pound him bloody with sticks and clubs, and
drive him before them towards Joyce Lufuma's house. There he
senses his salvation, but she meets him with a rope in her hand,
and he awakes just as he realises that she and her daughters are
coming to hoist him up in the tree, with the rope fastened in a
noose around his neck.