The Eye Of The Leopard (5 page)

That year a strange love blooms among those three. A wildflower
in the house just south of the river ...

On a dirty map Hans Olofson puts his finger on the
name Mutshatsha.

'How do I get there?' he asks.

It is his second morning in Africa, his stomach is unsettled,
and the sweat is running down inside his shirt.

He is standing at the front desk of the Ridgeway Hotel. Behind
the desk is an elderly African with white hair and tired eyes. His
shirt collar is frayed and his uniform unwashed. Olofson can't
resist the temptation of leaning over the counter to see what the
man has on his feet.

On the way down in the lift he'd thought, if the condition of
the African continent is the same as the shoes of its inhabitants,
the future is already over and all is irretrievably lost. He senses
a vague unrest growing inside him from all the worn-out shoes
he has seen.

The old man is barefoot. 'Maybe there's a bus,' he says. 'Maybe
a lorry. Sooner or later a car will come by, I'm sure.'

'How do I find the bus?' asks Olofson.

'You stand by the side of the road.'

'At a bus stop?'

'If there is a bus stop. Sometimes there is. But usually not.'

Olofson realises that the vague answer is the most detailed
one he will get. He senses something tentative, ephemeral in the
lives of the blacks, so distant and foreign from the world he comes
from.

I'm afraid, he thinks. Africa scares me, with its heat, its odours,
its people with bad shoes. I'm much too visible here. My skin
colour shines as if I were a burning candle in the dark. If I leave
the hotel I'll be swallowed up, vanish without leaving a trace ...

The train to Kitwe is supposed to depart in the evening.
Olofson spends the day in his room. He stands at the window
for long stretches. He sees a man in ragged clothes cutting grass
around a big wooden cross with a long, broad-bladed knife. People
pass by with shapeless bundles on their heads.

At seven in the evening he leaves his room and has to pay for
the night he won't be spending in it. When he emerges from the
hotel screaming taxi drivers fall upon him.

Why do they make such a damned racket? he thinks, and the
first wave of contempt washes over him.

He walks towards the car that seems the least dilapidated and
puts his suitcase in the back seat with him. He has hidden his
money in his shoes and underwear. When he sits down in the
back seat he immediately regrets his choice of hiding places. The
banknotes are sticky and cling to his body.

At the railway station there is, if possible, even greater chaos
than at the airport. The taxi lets him off in the midst of a surging
sea of humanity, bundles of clothes, chickens and goats, water
sellers, fires, and rusted cars. The station is almost completely
dark. What few lightbulbs there are have burned out or have
been stolen.

He barely manages to pay the taxi driver before he is
surrounded by filthy children offering their services as porters or
begging for money. Without knowing what direction he should
take, he hurries off, his feet already hurting from the wads of
notes. He discovers a gaping hole in a wall above which a rickety
sign says Ticket Counter. The waiting room is packed with people,
it smells of urine and manure, and he gets into something that
appears to be a queue. A man with no legs comes sliding along
on a board and tries to sell him a dirty ticket to Livingstone, but
Olofson shakes his head, turns away, and retreats within himself.

I hate this chaos, he thinks. It's impossible to get an overview.
Here I am at the mercy of chance and people sliding along on
boards.

He buys a ticket to Kitwe and walks out on the platform. A
train with a diesel locomotive is waiting, and he looks despondently
at what awaits him: run-down carriages, already overfilled,
like bursting cardboard boxes with toy figures in them, and broken
windowpanes.

He notices two white people climbing into the carriage behind
the locomotive. As if all white people were his friends in this black
world, he hurries after them and almost falls on his face when he
trips over a man lying stretched out on the platform asleep.

He hopes he has bought a ticket that gives him access to this
carriage. He makes his way forward to the compartment where
the white people he has been following are busy stowing their
bags on the baggage racks.

Entering a compartment on a train in Sweden can often feel
like intruding in someone's private living room, but in this compartment
he is met by friendly smiles and nods. He imagines that
with his presence he is reinforcing a disintegrating and everdiminishing
white army.

Before him are an older man and a young woman. Father and
daughter, he guesses. He stows his suitcase and sits down,
drenched in sweat. The young woman gives him an encouraging
look as she takes out a book and a pocket torch.

'I come from Sweden,' he says, with a sudden urge to talk to
someone. 'I assume that this is the train for Kitwe?'

'Sweden,' says the woman. 'How nice.'

The man has lit his pipe and leans back in his corner.

'Masterton,' he says. 'My name is Werner, and this is my wife
Ruth.'

Olofson introduces himself and feels a boundless gratitude at
finding himself together with people who have decent shoes on
their feet.

The train starts up with a jolt and the uproar in the station
increases in a violent crescendo. A pair of legs is visible outside
the window as a man climbs up on to the roof. After him come
a basket of chickens and a sack of dried fish which rips open and
spreads a smell of decay and salt.

Werner Masterton looks at his watch.

'Ten minutes too early,' he says. 'Either the driver is drunk or
he's in a hurry to get home.'

Diesel fumes waft by, fires are burning along the tracks, and
the lights of Lusaka slowly fall behind.

'We never take the train,' says Masterton from the depths of
his corner. 'About once every ten years. But in a few years there
will hardly be any trains left in this country. Since independence
everything has fallen apart. In five years almost everything has
been destroyed. Everything is stolen. If this train suddenly stops
tonight, which it most certainly will do, it means that the driver
is trying to sell fuel from the locomotive. The Africans come with
their oil cans. The green glass in the traffic lights has disappeared.
Children steal them and try to palm them off on tourists as emeralds.
But soon there won't be any tourists left either. The wild
animals have been shot, wiped out. I haven't heard of anyone
seeing a leopard in more than two years.' He gestures out into
the darkness.

'There were lions here,' he says. 'Elephants wandered free in
huge herds. Today there is nothing left.'

The Mastertons have a large farm outside Chingola, Olofson
learns during the long night's journey to Kitwe. Werner
Masterton's parents came from South Africa in the early 1950s.
Ruth was the daughter of a teacher who moved back to England
in 1964. They met while visiting friends in Ndola and married
despite the great age difference.

'Independence was a catastrophe,' says Masterton, offering
whisky from his pocket flask. 'For the Africans, freedom meant
that nobody had to work any more. No one gave orders, no one
considered they might have to do something that wasn't demanded
of them. Now the country survives on its income from copper
mining. But what happens when prices drop on the world
market? No investment has been made in any alternatives. This
is an agricultural country. It could be one of the world's best,
since the soil is fertile and there is water available. But no efforts
are being made. The Africans have grasped nothing, learned
nothing. When the British flag was struck and they raised their
own, it was the beginning of a funeral procession that is still
going on.'

'I know almost nothing about Africa,' says Olofson. 'What
little I do know I've already begun to doubt. And I've only been
here two days.'

They give him an inquisitive look and he suddenly wishes he
could have offered a different reply.

'I'm supposed to visit a mission station in Mutshatsha,' he says.
'But I don't really know how to get there.'

To his surprise, the Mastertons immediately take up the question
of how he can complete his expedition. He quickly surmises
that perhaps he has presented a problem that can be solved, in
contrast to the one Werner Masterton has just laid out. Perhaps
black problems have to be solved by the blacks, and the whites'
problems by the whites?

'We have some friends in Kalulushi,' says Werner. 'I'll take you
there in my car. They can help you to continue from there.'

'That's too much to ask,' replies Olofson.

'That's the way it is,' says Ruth. 'If the
mzunguz
don't help each
other, no one will. Do you think that any of the blacks climbing
on the roof of this train car would help you? If they could, they'd
steal your trousers right off you.'

Ruth lays out a meal from her baggage and invites Hans to
join them.

'Didn't you even bring water with you?' she asks. 'The train
could be a day late. There's always something that breaks down,
something missing, something they forgot.'

'I thought there would be water on the train.'

'It's so filthy that not even a
munto
will drink it,' says Werner,
spitting into the darkness. 'This would be a good country to live
in if it weren't for the blacks.'

Olofson decides that all whites in Africa probably espouse
racist views just to survive. But is that true of missionaries too?

'Isn't there any conductor coming?' he asks, to avoid responding
to this last remark.

'There may not be one,' replies Ruth. 'He may have missed his
train. Or else some distant relative died and he went to the funeral
without letting anyone know. The Africans spend a great deal of
their lives going to and from funerals. But maybe he will come.
Nothing is impossible.'

These people are the remnants of something utterly lost, thinks
Olofson. Colonialism is completely buried today, with the exception
of South Africa and the Portuguese colonies. But the people
remain. A historical epoch always leaves behind a handful of
people for the following period. They keep looking backwards,
dreaming, aggrieved. They look at their empty hands and wonder
where the instruments of power have gone. Then they discover
these instruments in the hands of the people they previously only
spoke to when giving out orders and reprimands. They live in
the Epoch of Mortification, in the twilight land of ruin. The
whites in Africa are a wandering remnant of a people that no
one wants to think about. They have lost their foundation, what
they thought was permanent for all eternity ...

One question remains obvious. 'So things were better before?'

'What answer can we give to that?' says Ruth, looking at her
husband.

'Answer with the truth,' says Werner.

A weak, flickering lamp casts the compartment in darkness.
Hans sees a lampshade covered with dead insects. Werner follows
his gaze.

'For a lampshade like that a cleaning woman would have been
given the sack,' he says. 'Not the next day, not after a warning,
but instantly, kicked out on the spot. A train as filthy as this one
would have been an impossibility. In a few hours we'll be in
Kabwe. Before, it was called Broken Hill. Even the old name was
better. The truth, if you want to know, is that nothing has been
maintained or become better. We're forced to live in the midst of
a process of decay.'

'But –' says Olofson, before he is interrupted.

'Your "but" is premature,' says Ruth. 'I have a feeling that you
want to ask whether the blacks' lives are better. Not even that is
true. Who could take over from all the Europeans who left the
country in 1964? There was no preparation, only a boundless arrogance.
A bewitched cry for independence, their own flag, maybe
soon their own currency.'

'Taking responsibility requires knowledge,' Werner continues.
'In 1964 there were six blacks with university degrees in this country.'

'A new era is created out of the preceding one,' Olofson counters.
'The education system must have been poor.'

'You're starting from the wrong assumptions,' says Ruth. 'No
one was thinking about anything as dramatic as what you call a
new era. Development would continue, everyone would be better
off, not least the blacks. But without chaos taking over.'

'A new era doesn't create itself,' Olofson insists. 'What did actually
happen?'

'Treachery,' says Ruth. 'The mother countries deceived us. All
too late we realised we had been abandoned. In Southern Rhodesia
they understood, and there everything has not gone to hell as it
has here.'

'We've just been in Salisbury,' says Werner. 'There we could
breathe. Maybe we'll move there. The trains ran on time, the
lampshades weren't full of insects. The Africans did what they
do best: follow orders.'

'Freedom,' says Olofson, and then has no idea what to say next.

'If freedom is starving to death, then the Africans are on the
right track in this country,' says Ruth.

'It's hard to understand,' says Olofson. 'Hard to comprehend.'

'You'll see for yourself,' Ruth goes on, smiling at him. 'There's
no reason for us not to tell you how things stand, because the
truth will be revealed to you anyway.'

The train screeches to a stop, and then everything is quiet.
Cicadas can be heard in the warm night and Olofson leans out
into the darkness. The starry sky is close and he finds the brightly
glowing constellation of the Southern Cross.

What was it he had thought when he left Sweden? That he
was on his way to a distant, faintly gleaming star?

Ruth Masterton is engrossed in a book with the help of her
shaded pocket torch, and Werner is sucking on his extinguished
pipe. Olofson feels called upon to take stock of his situation.