The Eye Of The Leopard (6 page)

Janine, he thinks. Janine is dead. My father drank himself into
a wreck that will never again go to sea. My mother consists in
her entirety of two photographs from Atelier Strandmark in
Sundsvall. Two pictures that instil fear in me, a woman's face
against a backdrop of merciless morning light. I live with an
inheritance of the smell of elkhound, of winter nights and an
unwavering sense of not being needed. The moment I chose not
to conform to my heritage, to become a woodcutter like my
father and marry one of the girls I danced with to Kringström's
orchestra in the draughty People's Hall, I also rejected the only
background I had. I passed the lower-school examination as a
pupil none of the teachers would ever remember, I endured four
terrible years in the county capital and passed a meaningless
student examination so that I wouldn't be a failure. I did my
military service in a tank regiment in Skövde, again as a person
no one ever noticed. I nourished the hope of becoming a lawyer,
the sworn defender of extenuating circumstances. I lived for over
a year as a lodger in a dark flat in Uppsala, where a fool sat
across from me every day at the breakfast table. The present
confusion, indolence and fear within the Swedish working classes
have found in me a perfect representative.

Still, I haven't given up. The failed law studies were only a
temporary humiliation – I can survive that. But the fact that I
have no dream? That I travel to Africa with someone else's dream,
someone who is dead? Instead of grieving I set off on a journey
of penance, as if I were actually to blame for Janine's death.

One winter night I crept across the cold iron spans of the river
bridge. The moon hung like a cold wolf 's eye in the sky, and I
was utterly alone. I was fourteen years old and I didn't fall. But
afterwards, when Sture was supposed to follow me ...

His thoughts burst. From somewhere he hears a person
snoring. He traces the sound to the roof of the train car.

In a sudden flare-up of rage, he gives himself two alternatives:
either continue his law studies or return to the frozen landscape
of his childhood.

The journey to Africa, to the mission station in Mutshatsha,
will fade away. In every person's life there are ill-considered actions,
trips that never needed to be taken. In two weeks he will return
to Sweden and leave the Southern Cross behind. The parentheses
will then be closed.

Suddenly Werner Masterton is standing by his side and looking
out into the darkness.

'They're selling diesel fuel,' he says. 'I just hope they don't miscalculate,
so we wind up stuck here. Within a year the wandering
hunter ants will have transformed this train into a deformed steel
skeleton ...'

After an hour the train jolts to a start.

Later they stop for an inexplicably long time at Kapiri Mposhi.
In the dawn light Olofson falls asleep in his corner. The conductor
never appears. Just as the morning's heat breaks through, the train
screeches into Kitwe.

'Come with us,' says Ruth. 'Then we'll drive you to Kalulushi.'

One day Janine teaches them to dance.

The rest of the town expects her to whine and
complain, but she chooses to go in a completely different
direction. In music she sees her salvation. She decides that the
affliction so deeply incised in her body will be transformed into
music. In Hamrin's music shop she purchases a slide trombone
and begins to practise daily. Hurrapelle tries for the longest time
to persuade her to choose a more pleasing instrument, like the
guitar, mandolin, or possibly a small bass drum. But she persists,
forgoing the possible joy of joining in the concerts of the Free
Church, and practises by herself in her house by the river. She
buys a Dux gramophone and searches often and eagerly through
the record selection at the music shop. She is entranced by jazz,
in which the trombone often has a prominent role. She listens,
plays along, and she learns. On dark winter evenings, when the
door-knocking with her magazines is over for the day, and the
congregation doesn't have a prayer meeting or other fellowship, she
loses herself in her music. 'Some of These Days', 'Creole Love Call',
and not least 'A Night in Tunisia' flow from her trombone.

She plays for Sture and Hans. Astonished, they watch her the
first time, barefoot on the kitchen floor, with the gramophone
spinning in the background and the brass instrument pressed to
her lips. Sometimes she deviates from the melody, but usually
the notes are woven together with the orchestra that is pressed
into the grooves of the record.

Janine with her trombone ...

Janine with her noseless face and her incredible gesture of
inviting them into her house instead of calling the police, transforms
that year, 1957, into a fairy tale they doubt they will ever
experience again.

For Sture the move from the cathedral and residence in a city
in Småland to this market town had seemed a nightmare. In a desolate
and snowed-in Norrland he would go under, he was convinced
of that. But he found a warrior and together they found Janine ...

Hans creates a huge dream for himself which he can crawl
inside like a voluminous overcoat. He realises at once that he
loves her; in his dreams he furnishes her with a nose and transforms
her into his vicarious mother.

Even though Janine is their common property, separate walls
close tightly around their experiences. One cannot share everything;
secrets must be carefully kept to oneself. A piece of crucial
wisdom on life's arduous path is to learn which dreams can be
shared and which must be kept inside one's own secret rooms.

Janine watches, listens and senses. She sees Sture's tendency
towards arrogance and bullying, she senses Hans's longing for his
absent mother. She sees the chasms that exist there, the huge
differences. But one evening she teaches them to dance.

Kringström's orchestra, which had played at every Saturday
night dance since 1943, has testily accepted the challenge emanating
from the increasingly discontented youth and has reluctantly begun
to alter its repertoire. One Saturday in early spring they surprise
everyone, not least themselves, by striking up a tune that might
be related to the new music pouring in from the USA.

On this very evening Sture and Hans are hanging around
outside the People's Hall. Impatiently they are waiting until they're
big enough to buy their own tickets and step on to the crowded
dance floor. The music comes through the walls, and Sture decides
it's time they learned how to dance.

Later that evening, when they are frozen and stiff, they wander
down by the river bridge, race each other and yell underneath the
iron span, and they don't stop until they are standing outside Janine's
door. Music is coming through the walls. She's playing tonight ...

When she realises that they want to learn to dance, she is
ready at once to teach them. Before the surgeon deformed her
face, she had danced quite often. But she has not moved across
a dance floor since. With a firm grip around the waist and simple
repeated steps to the left and right, she leads them into the
rhythmic stamping of the waltz and foxtrot. She keeps pressing
them to her, one after the other, and sweeps around on the
linoleum of the kitchen floor. Whoever is not dancing runs the
gramophone, and soon the windows are fogged up from their
efforts to follow and keep track of the steps.

From a kitchen cabinet she pulls out a bottle of homemade
booze. When they ask where she got hold of it she just laughs.
She offers each of them only a little glass, but keeps on drinking
until she gets drunk. She lights a cigar and blows smoke out her
nose hole, while claiming to be the world's only female locomotive.
She tells them that sometimes she imagines how she will
leave Hurrapelle's penitent bench and vanish into the world of
carnival sideshows. She will never be a prima donna on the slack
wire, but perhaps a freak who can elicit horror from the crowd.
Exhibiting deformed people for money is a tradition that has
been lost in the mists of time. She tells them about the Laughing
Kid, who had the corners of his mouth sliced open to his ears
and was then sold to a carnival troupe and made his owners rich.

From a kitchen drawer she takes out a red clown nose which
she fastens with an elastic string around her head, and dumbstruck
they watch this woman who radiates so many contradictory powers.
What is hardest to understand but also most disturbing is how
Janine can live this double life: the barefoot dance on the kitchen
floor, the booze in the cupboard; the hard pews in Hurrapelle's
church.

But her salvation is no fabrication. She has her God securely
placed in her heart. Without the fellowship that the congregation
once extended to her she would no longer be alive. This is
not to say that she is attracted to or professes all the beliefs of
the congregation. Raising money to send missionaries to distant
Bantu tribes in Africa she considers not only meaningless but a
serious violation of the decree that all faith must be voluntary.
When the women of the congregation meet in sewing circles for
the production of table runners to sell at fairs, she stays home
and sews her own clothes. She is a restless element in the congregation's
world, but as long as she can single-handedly collect the
majority of its annual income by knocking on doors, she does
not hesitate to indulge her freedoms. Hurrapelle makes regular
attempts to coax her into the sewing circle, but she refuses. Since
he's afraid she might begin to waver in her faith, or even worse,
move her God to a competing congregation, he doesn't press the
issue. When the members of the congregation complain about
her self-indulgent behaviour, he deals sternly with the criticism.

'The least of my children,' he says. 'Think of her suffering.
Think how much good she is doing for our congregation ...'

The evenings with Janine during that year become an unbroken
series of peculiar encounters. Against a background of 'Some of
These Days' she holds her hand over the two vandals who in the
malevolence of ignorance once decided to torment the life out of
her.

Both of them, each in his own way, find in her something of
the mystery they had previously sought in vain in the town. The
house by the south bank of the river becomes a journey out into
the world ...

On the evening she starts teaching them to dance, they experience
for the first time the exciting sensation of being close to a
warm, sweaty female body.

And the thought occurs to her – maybe not just at that
moment, but later – that she would like to take off her clothes
and stand stark naked before them, to be seen just once, even if
it's only by two skinny, half-grown boys.

At night come the dark powers that are never permitted to
surface and burn. To cry out her distress and follow Hurrapelle's
admonition always to surrender to God, who keeps His ear in
constant readiness; that would be impossible. There the religious
thread breaks, and then she has no one but herself to cling to.
The greatest of all the sorrows she has to bear is that she has
never had the chance to sink into an embrace, even in the dirty
back seat of a car parked on a remote logging road.

But she refuses to complain. She has her trombone. In the
dawn of winter mornings she stands in her kitchen and plays
'Creole Love Call'.

And the boys who brought the sack of ants – she always lets
them in. When she teaches them to dance she feels happy that
she could overcome their childish shyness ...

During the late winter and early spring of 1957, Sture and Hans
spend many evenings at her house. They often don't go home until
the winter night has driven its frozen ship towards midnight.

Spring arrives again. One day the unassuming but eagerly
awaited yellow crowns of the coltsfoot begin to glow in a dirty
ditch. Hurrapelle stands one morning in the back room of the
Baptist church and searches in a cardboard box for handbills
announcing the Spring Meeting. Soon it will be time for even
the sermon placards to change their skin.

But spring is deceptive, because its beauty barely conceals the
fact that death is hiding in the eye of the coltsfoot blossom.

For Sture and Hans, death is an invisible insect that eats away
at life and every event. Long evenings they sit on the boulder
by the river or in Janine's kitchen and ponder how death actually
ought to be understood and described. Sture suggests
that death ought to be like Jönsson, the restaurant owner, who
stands on the doorstep of the Grand Hotel and welcomes his
guests in a black, greasy tuxedo. How easily he could then drip
poison into the black soup or the sauce on the roast beef. He
would lurk by the swinging doors to the kitchen and the tablecloths
would be transformed into stained shrouds ...

For Hans Olofson, death is much too complicated to be compared
to a restaurant owner. Thinking of death as
a person
of flesh and
blood, with a hat and coat and sniffling nose, is too simple. If death
had a face, clothes and shoes, it wouldn't be any harder to conquer
than one of the scarecrows that Under the horse dealer uses to
protect his berry bushes. Death is more vague, a cool breeze that
suddenly wafts across the river without rippling the water. He won't
come any closer than that to death this spring, until the great catastrophe
occurs and death blows its shrillest trumpet.

And yet it's something he will always remember. Much later,
when the African night closes in on him, and his childhood is
just as distant as the land he now inhabits, he remembers what
they talked about, on the boulder by the river or in Janine's
kitchen. As if in a fleeting dream, he remembers the year when
Janine taught them to dance and they stood in the darkness
outside her house and heard her playing 'A Night in Tunisia' ...