The Eye Of The Leopard (21 page)

When he recovers and pays his first visit to Joyce, he suddenly
remembers the dream. Maybe it's a sign after all, he thinks. They
accept my assistance, they are dependent on it. They have every
reason to hate me, I forget that far too often. I forget the simplest
antagonisms and truths.

The arc of time extends further over his life, the personal river
he carries inside him. Often he returns in his thoughts to a frozen
winter night, to the remote site he has never visited. He imagines
his father's grave. Now that he has been in Africa for eighteen
years he ought to start looking for a spot for his own grave.

He walks over to the hill where Duncan Jones has already
rested for many years, and he lets his gaze wander. It's late afternoon
and the sun is coloured red by the invisible soil that whirls
over the African continent. He sees his long white hen houses
against the light, workers on their way home from the day's work.
It's October, just before the long rain begins to fall. The ground
is scorched and dry, only scattered cactuses glow like green patches
in the desiccated landscape. The Kafue is almost empty of water.
The riverbed is laid dry, except for a narrow trickle in the middle
of its furrow. The hippopotamuses have sought out distant water
holes, and the crocodiles will not come back until the rain has
returned.

He clears the weeds from Duncan Jones's grave and squints
towards the sun, seeking his own future gravesite. But he won't
make a decision; that would be tempting Death to come to him
too soon. But what is the past? Who can make sense of his
allotted time?

No one remains unaffected for almost twenty years, surrounded
by African superstition, he thinks. An African would never search
for his gravesite, not to mention select it. That would be like
sending a resounding summons to Death.

I'm really standing on this hill because the view from here is
beautiful. Here is the treeless landscape, the endless horizons that
my father always looked for. Maybe I think it's so beautiful because
I know that it's mine.

Here is the beginning and perhaps the end too, a chance
journey and even more chance meetings led me here. He decides
to pay another visit to Mutshatsha.

In all haste he sets out. It's the middle of the rainy season and
the roads are like liquid mud. Yet he drives fast, as if he were
fighting to escape from something. A despair breaks through the
barriers. Janine's trombone echoes in his mind.

He never makes it to Mutshatsha. All at once the road is gone.
With his front wheels balanced over a precipice, he looks straight
down into a ravine that has opened up. The road has collapsed,
and there is no longer a road to Mutshatsha. When he tries to
turn the car around, it gets stuck in the mud. He breaks branches
from bushes and lays them under the wheels, but the tyres can't
get a firm purchase. In the brief twilight the rain arrives with a
roar, and he sits in his car and waits. Maybe no one will come
by, he thinks. While I sleep the car might be invaded by wandering
ants and when the rainy season is over only my skeleton, picked
clean, will be left, polished like a piece of ivory.

In the morning the rain stops and he gets help with the car
from some people in a nearby village. Late in the afternoon he
arrives back at the farm.

The arc of time expands but suddenly begins to bend towards
the earth again.

In the shadows people are grouping around him, and he doesn't
notice what's happening. It is January 1987. He has now been in
Africa for eighteen years.

The rainy season this year is intense and drawn out. The Kafue
floods over its banks, the torrential rains threaten to drown his
hen houses. Transport lorries get stuck in the mud; power poles
topple and cause long power cuts. This is a rainy season like none
he has ever experienced before.

At the same time there is more unrest in the country. Throngs
of people are on the move; hunger riots strike the cities in the
copper belt and Lusaka. One of his egg vans is stopped on its
way to Mufulira by an excited mob who empties its cargo. Shots
are fired in the night and the farmers refrain from leaving their
homes.

Early one morning when Olofson goes to his little office, he
finds that someone has flung a large rock through a window of
the mud hut. He questions the night watchmen but no one has
heard or seen anything.

One older worker stands at a distance and watches as Olofson
carries out the questioning. Something in the old African's face
makes him break off abruptly and send the night watchmen home
without any sort of punishment. He senses something menacing
but can't say what it is. The work is being done, but a heavy mood
rests over the farm.

One morning Luka is gone. When Olofson opens the door
to the kitchen at dawn as usual, Luka isn't there. This has never
happened before. Mists roll over the farm after the night's rain.
He calls for Luka but no one comes. He asks questions, but
nobody knows, nobody has seen Luka. When he drives to his
house, he finds it open with the door flapping in the wind.

In the evening he cleans the firearms he once took over from
Judith Fillington, and the revolver he bought ten years earlier
from Werner Masterton, the revolver he always keeps under his
pillow. During the night he sleeps restlessly, the dreams are
hounding him, and suddenly he wakes up with a start. He thinks
he hears footsteps in the house, footsteps upstairs, above his head.
In the dark he grabs the revolver and listens. But it's only the
wind slithering through the house.

He lies awake, the revolver resting on his chest. In the dark,
just before dawn, he hears a car drive up in front of the house
and then loud pounding on the front door. With the revolver
in his hand he calls through the door and recognises the voice
of Robert, Ruth and Werner Masterton's foreman. He opens
the door and realises once again that even a black man can look
pale.

'Something has happened,
Bwana
,' says Robert, and Olofson
sees that he is terrified.

'What happened?' he asks.

'I don't know,
Bwana
,' replies Robert. 'Something. I think it
would be good if
Bwana
could come.'

He has lived in Africa long enough to be able to distinguish
gravity in an African's enigmatic way of expressing himself.

He dresses quickly, stuffs his revolver in his pocket, and grabs
his shotgun. He locks the house carefully, wonders again where
Luka is, and then gets into his car and follows Robert. Black rain
clouds are scudding across the sky when the two cars turn up
towards the Mastertons' house.

I came here once, he thinks, in another time, as a different
person. He recognises Louis among the Africans standing outside
the house.

'Why are they standing here?' he asks.

'That's just it,
Bwana
,' says Robert. 'The doors are locked. They
were locked yesterday too.'

'Maybe they went on a trip,' says Olofson. 'Where's their car?'

'It's gone,
Bwana
,' Robert replies. 'But we don't think that they
left.'

He looks at the house, its immovable façade. He walks around
the house, calls out to their bedroom. The Africans follow him
at a distance, expectantly. All at once he is afraid without knowing
why. Something has happened.

He feels a vague fear of what he is about to see, but he asks
Robert to fetch a crowbar from the car. When he breaks open
the front door the alarm sirens don't go off. As the front door
yields he discovers that the telephone line to the house has been
cut next to the outer wall.

'I'm going in alone,' he says, taking the safety off his gun and
pushing the door aside.

What he finds is worse than he could have imagined. As if in
a macabre film, he steps into a slaughterhouse, where human
bodies lie hacked up all over the floor.

He never will understand why he didn't pass out at the sight
of what he saw.

And afterwards?

What is left?

The last year before Hans Olofson leaves the heavy
fir ridges behind, leaves his father Erik Olofson behind in his
mute dream of a distant sea that calls inside him. The last year
that Janine is alive.

On an early Saturday morning in March 1962, she takes up
position on the corner between the hardware shop and the People's
Hall. It's the very heart of town, the one corner that no one can
avoid. In the early morning she raises a placard above her head.
On it is a text in black letters that she wrote the night before.

Something unheard of is about to happen. A rumour is
growing and threatening to boil over. There are a few people who
dare acknowledge that Janine and her lonely placard express a
sensible opinion that has been lacking for too long. But their
voices disappear in the icy March wind.

The right-thinking ones mobilise. A person who doesn't even
have a nose? Everyone has assumed that she was resting securely
in the embrace of Hurrapelle. But now here she stands, the woman
who ought to be living unnoticed and hiding her ugly face. Janine
knows what thoughts are spreading like wildfire.

And she has also learned something from Hurrapelle's monotonous
exhortations. She knows how to resist when the wind
changes and entrenched beliefs fumble for a foothold. She is
driving a stake into the slumbering anthill on this early morning.
People hurry along the streets, coats flapping, and they read what
she has written. Then they hurry on to grab their neighbour by
the collar and ask what that crazy woman can possibly mean. Is
a noseless shrew going to tell us what to think? Who asked her
to raise this unseemly barricade?

The old men come staggering out from the beer tavern to
witness the spectacle with their own eyes. They don't care about
the fate of the world, but nevertheless they become her mute
supporters. Their need for revenge is boundless. Whoever drives
a stake into the heart of the anthill deserves all the support imaginable.
Blinking at the light they stumble out of the pilsner's dark
room. With glee they note that nothing looks the same this
morning. They understand at once that Janine needs all the
support she can get, and one daring fellow staggers across the
street and offers her a beer, which she amiably declines.

At that moment Hurrapelle comes skidding to a stop in his
new car, alerted by an agitated member of the congregation who
woke him with the shrill ring of his telephone. And he does what
he can to stop her. He entreats her, entreats as much as he can.
But she only shakes her head; she's going to stay there. When he
realises that her decision is unshakeable, he goes to his church
to take counsel with his God about this difficult matter.

At the police station they are consulting the legal texts.
Somewhere there must be a paragraph that permits an intervention.
But it can hardly be called 'reckless endangerment', can it? It's
not 'incitement to riot' or 'assault with a deadly weapon' either. The
policemen sigh over the gaps in the law books, leafing feverishly
through the thick text, while Janine stands at her post on the corner.

Suddenly something reminds them of Rudin, who several years
before had set fire to himself. That's where the solution lies! Taking
into custody a person who is incapable of taking care of herself.
Sweaty fingers leaf further, and finally they are ready to intervene.

But when the police officers come marching and the crowd
eagerly waits to see what's going to happen, Janine calmly takes
down her placard and walks away. The police gape, disconcerted,
the crowd of people grumbles, and the old men from the tavern
applaud with satisfaction.

When calm has been restored it is possible to argue about
what she had written on her shameless placard: 'No to the atom
bomb. Only one Earth.' But who wants a bomb on their head?
And what did she mean by 'Only one Earth.'? Are there supposed
to be more? If the truth is to be preached, people refuse to have
it served up by just anyone who claims to have been warned, and
least of all by some woman with no nose.

Janine walks with her head held high even though she usually
looks down at the ground. She is thinking of standing on her
corner again next Saturday, and no one will be able to stop her.
Far from the arenas where the world plays out in earnest, she
will make her small contribution in accordance with her abilities.
She walks across the river bridge, tosses her hair, and hums
'A Night in Tunisia'. Under her feet dance the first ice floes of
the spring thaw. She has proven herself in her own eyes and she
has dared to act. She has someone who desires her. If everything
is transitory after all, at least she has experienced this outpouring
of life, when the pain was completely suppressed.

There is a movement in their life, this last year that Hans
Olofson lives in the house by the river. Like a slow displacement
of the Earth's axis, a movement so slight that it's not noticeable
at first. But even to this isolated town in the sticks, a swell comes
rolling in to tell them about a world outside which will no longer
tolerate being relegated to endless darkness. The perspective has
begun to shift, the quaking from distant wars of liberation and
uprisings penetrates through the walls of the fir ridges.

Together they sit in Janine's kitchen and learn the names of
the new nations. And they notice the movement, the vibration
from distant continents where people are rising up. With amazement,
and a certain amount of alarm, they see how the world is
changing. An old world in dissolution, where rotten floors are
collapsing to reveal indescribable misery, injustice, atrocity. Hans
begins to understand that the world he soon intends to enter will
be a different one to his father's. Everything will have to be discovered
anew, the sea charts revised, the changed names replacing
the old ones.

He tries to talk with his father about what he's witnessing.
Tries to encourage him to whack his axe into a stump and go
back to sea. Usually the conversation ends before it has really
begun. Erik Olofson is defensive and doesn't want to be reminded.
But then something unexpected happens.

'I'm going to Stockholm,' Erik Olofson says as they're eating
dinner.

'Why?' Hans asks.

'I have a matter to take care of in the capital.'

'You don't know anybody in Stockholm, do you?'

'I got an answer to my letter.'

'What letter?'

'The letter I wrote.'

'You don't write letters, do you?'

'If you don't believe me, we won't talk about this any more.'

'What letter?'

'From the Vaxholm Company.'

'The Vaxholm Company?'

'Yes. The Vaxholm Company.'

'What's that?

'A shipping company. They handle transport throughout the
Stockholm archipelago.'

'What do they want with you?'

'I saw an advert somewhere. They need seamen. I thought it
might be something for me. Domestic harbours and coastal traffic
in the inland waters.'

'Did you apply for a job?'

'Are you listening to me?'

'So what did they say?'

'They want me to come to Stockholm and present myself.'

'How can they tell by looking at you that you're a good sailor?'

'They can't. But they can ask questions.'

'About what?'

'Why I haven't been to sea in so many years, for instance.'

'What are you going to say?'

'That the children are grown and can take care of themselves.'

'The children?'

'I thought it would sound better if I said I had more than one.
Seamen are supposed to have a lot of children, that's always been
the case.'

'And what are the names of these children?'

'I'll think of something. I just have to come up with some
names. Maybe I can borrow a photo from somebody.'

'So you're going to borrow a picture of someone else's children?'

'What's the difference?'

'It makes a hell of a lot of difference!'

'I probably won't even have to prove they're mine. But I know
how ship owners are. It's best to be prepared. There was a ship
owner in Göteborg one time who demanded that anyone who
wanted to go out on his boats had to be able to walk on his
hands. The Seamen's Association protested, of course, but he had
it his way.'

'Can you walk on your hands?'

'No.'

'What are you telling me, anyway?'

'That I have an appointment in Stockholm.'

'When are you leaving?'

'I haven't decided yet.'

'What do you mean?'

'Maybe I'll say the hell with it.'

'Of course you have to go! You can't keep wandering around
in the woods.'

'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.