The Eye Of The Leopard Read online

  'Now you've seen the sea,' says Erik. 'And this is not a good place to talk. The bus is rattling so damned loudly.'

  The next day Erik Olofson goes back to clearing the horizon. Impatiently he hacks with his axe at a single branch that refuses to be separated from the trunk. He puts all his bodily strength behind the blow, hacking furiously at the branch.

  I'm hacking at myself, he thinks. Chopping off these damned roots that are binding me here. The boy is almost fourteen. In a few years he can take care of himself. Then I can go back to sea, to the ships, to the cargoes.

  He chops with his axe, and with each blow it's as though he's striking his fist against his brow and saying: I must ...

  Hans is running through the bright summer evening of Norrland. Walking takes too long, he's in a hurry now. The soft, waterlogged earth is burning ...

  In a grove in the woods past the abandoned brickworks he builds an altar to Sture. He can't imagine him either alive or dead, he's just gone, but he builds an altar out of pieces of board and moss. He has no idea what he's going to do with it. He thinks of asking Janine, initiating her into his secret, but he refrains. Visiting the altar once each day and seeing that no one has been there will suffice. Even though Sture doesn't know it, they're sharing one more secret.

  He dreams that the house where he lives is cast off its moorings and floats down the river, never again to return ...

  He bolts through the summer, runs along the river until he is out of breath and sweaty. When nothing else is left there is always Janine.

  One evening when he comes running, she isn't home. For a brief moment he worries that she too is gone. How could he lose another person who supports his world? But he knows that she's at one of the Joyous Fellowships at the church, and so he sits down on her front steps to wait.

  When she arrives she's wearing a white coat over a light-blue dress. A breeze passes through his body, a sudden apprehension.

  'Why are you blushing?' she asks.

  'I'm not blushing,' he replies. 'I never do.'

  He feels caught red-handed. Shove it in your nose, he thinks furiously. Shove it in the hole.

  That evening Janine starts talking about the trip.

  'Where would someone like me go?' says Hans. 'I've been to Gävle. I probably won't go any further. But I could try to stow away on the train to Orsa. Or go to the tailor and ask him to sew on a pair of wings.'

  'I'm serious,' says Janine.

  'I am too,' says Hans.

  'I want to go to Africa,' says Janine.

  'Africa?'

  For Hans that is an unfathomable dream.

  'Africa,' she says again. 'I would go to the countries by the big rivers.'

  She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance. She tells him about the dark moments. About the anguish that makes her long to go to Africa. There she wouldn't attract attention everywhere she went with her missing nose. There she wouldn't always be surrounded by male loathing and revulsion.

  'Leprosy,' she says. 'Bodies that rot away, souls that atrophy in despair. There I would be able to work.'

  Hans tries to imagine the Realm of the Noseless, tries to see Janine among the deformed human bodies.

  'Are you going to be a missionary?' he asks.

  'No, not a missionary. Maybe I would be called one. But I would work to alleviate suffering,' she says. 'It's possible to travel without actually travelling. A departure always begins inside yourself. It was probably the same for Harry Johanson and his wife Emma. For fifteen years they prepared for a journey that they probably never thought would happen.'

  'Who is Harry Johanson?' Hans asks.

  'He was born in a poor cottage outside Röstånga,' says Janine. 'He was the next-youngest of nine children. When he was ten years old he decided to be a missionary. That was in the late 1870s. But not until twenty years later, in 1898, after he had married and he and Emma had had four children, were they able to set off. Harry had turned thirty and Emma was a few years younger, and they left on a ship from Göteborg. In Sweden there were followers of the Scottish missionary Fred Arnot who tried to build up a network of mission stations along the routes that Livingstone had travelled in Africa. From Glasgow they sailed with an English ship and arrived in Benguella in January of 1899. One of their children died of cholera during the passage, and Emma was so sick that she had to be carried ashore when they reached Africa.

  'After a month of waiting, they set off together with three other missionaries and over 100 black bearers on a 1200-mile journey, straight through uncharted country. It took them four years to reach Mutshatsha, where Fred Arnot had determined that the new mission station should be located. They had to wait for a whole year by the Lunga River before the local chieftain gave them permission to pass through his lands.

  'The whole time they were plagued with illness, lack of food, impure water. After four years, when Harry finally reached Mutshatsha, he was alone. Emma had died of malaria, and the children had perished from various intestinal diseases. The three other missionaries had also died. Harry himself was dazed by malaria when he arrived along with those of the bearers who hadn't left years before. His loneliness must have been indescribable. And how did he manage to hold on to his faith in God when his entire family had been obliterated on the way to spread God's message?

  'Harry lived for almost fifty years in Mutshatsha. By the time he died, an entire community had grown up around the little hut which was the beginning of the mission station. There was an infirmary, an orphanage, a building for older women who had been driven out of their villages because of accusations of witchcraft. When Harry Johanson died he was called Ndotolu, the wise man. He was buried on the hill to which he had retired during his last years and built a modest little hut. When he died there were English doctors and another Swedish missionary family in Mutshatsha. Harry Johanson died in 1947.'

  'How do you know all this?' Hans asks.

  'An old woman who once visited Harry in Mutshatsha told me,' Janine replies. 'She went there as a young woman to work at the mission station, but she got sick and Harry forced her to go back to Sweden. She visited our congregation last year and I had a long talk with her about Harry Johanson.'

  'Say it once more,' says Hans. 'The name.'

  'Mutshatsha.'

  'What was he doing there, anyway?'

  'He arrived as a missionary. But he became the wise man. The doctor, the carpenter, the judge.'

  'Say it one more time.'

  'Mutshatsha.'

  'Why don't you go there?'

  'I probably don't have what Harry Johanson had. And Emma, although she never made it there.'

  What was it that Harry Johanson had? Hans wonders as he walks home in the bright summer evening. He pictures himself dressed in Harry Johanson's clothes; behind him is a long line of bearers. Before the safari crosses the river he sends out scouts to check whether crocodiles are lurking on the sandbanks. When he reaches the house where he lives, four years have passed and the safari has reached Mutshatsha. He's all alone; there are no bearers left, they have all deserted him. As he walks up the steps he decides that the altar he built for Sture in the grove behind the brickworks will be called Mutshatsha ...

  He opens the door and the dream of Harry Johanson and Mutshatsha retreats and leaves him, because in the kitchen sits Erik Olofson, drinking with four of the town's most notorious drunks. Célestine has been taken from her case, and one of the drunks is sitting there picking at the meticulously constructed rigging with fumbling fingers. A man who hasn't even taken off his dirty rubber boots is asleep on top of Hans's bed.

  The drunks stare at him curiously, and Erik Olofson gets up, wobbling, and says something that is drowned in the crash of a bottle hitting the floor. Usually Hans feels sad and ashamed when his father starts drinking and goes into one of his spells, but now he feels only fury. The sight of the full-rigger on the table, as if it had run aground among glasses and bottles an
d ashtrays, makes him so outraged with sorrowful anger that he is perfectly calm. He walks over to the table, picks up the ship, and stares into the glazed eyes of the drunk who was picking at it.

  'You keep your filthy mitts off her,' he says.

  Without waiting for a reply he puts the ship back in its case. Then he goes into his room and kicks at the snoring man lying on his bed.

  'Get up! Up, God damn it!' he says, and he doesn't stop until the man wakes up.

  His father is holding on to the door frame, with his trousers half falling off, and when he sees his flickering eyes he starts to hate him. Hans chases the dazed drunk into the kitchen and slams the door behind him, right in front of his father. He tears off the bedspread and sits down, and feels his heart pounding in his chest.

  Mutshatsha, he thinks.

  In the kitchen the chairs scrape, the outer door is opened, voices mutter and then there is silence. At first he thinks that his father has left with the drunks for town. But then he hears a shuffling and a thud from the kitchen. When he opens the door he sees his father crawling around with a rag in his hand, trying to wipe the dirt off the floor. He looks like an animal. His trousers have slipped down so his bottom is bare. A blind animal crawling around and around ...

  'Pull up your trousers,' he says. 'Stop crawling around. I'll clean the damned floor.'

  He helps his father up, and when Erik Olofson loses his balance they wind up on the kitchen sofa in an involuntary embrace. When Hans tries to pull himself loose his father holds on to him. At first he thinks his father wants to fight, but then he hears him snuffling and whimpering and hiccuping, and realises he is sobbing violently. He has never seen him do this before.

  Sorrow and glistening eyes, a quavering voice that has turned thick, that much he knows. But never this open surrender to tears. What the hell is he going to do now? Hans wonders, with his father's sweaty and unshaven face against his neck.

  The elkhounds are skulking restlessly underneath the kitchen table. They have been kicked and stepped on and haven't had any food all day. The kitchen stinks of closed-in sweat, fuming pipes, and spilled beer.

  'We have to clean up,' says Hans, tearing himself loose. 'You go and lie down and I'll clean up the mess.'

  Erik Olofson slumps down in the corner of the sofa and Hans starts washing the floor.

  'Take the dogs out,' mumbles Erik.

  'Take them out yourself,' says Hans.

  The fact that Shady, the most contemptuous and feared drunk in town, had been allowed to stretch out in the kitchen makes him feel sick. They can stay in their hovels, he thinks, with their old hags and brats and beer bottles ...

  His father is asleep on the sofa. Hans places a quilt over him and takes out the dogs and chains them up near the woodpile. Then he goes to his altar in the woods.

  It's already night, the light summer night of Norrland. Outside the People's Hall some youths are talking loudly around a shiny Chevrolet. Hans returns to his safari, counts his bearers, and gives the order to march.

  Missionary or not, a certain authority is required so that the bearers won't succumb to idleness and maybe even start stealing supplies. They should be encouraged with glass beads and other trinkets at regular intervals, but also forced to witness punishments for neglect when necessary. He knows that during the many months, perhaps years, that the safari will be under way, he can never permit himself to sleep with more than one eye closed at a time.

  As they pass the hospital the bearers begin to shout that they have to rest, but he keeps driving them. Not until they reach the altar in the woods does he let them put down the large bundles they are carrying on their heads ...

  'Mutshatsha,' he says to the altar. 'Together we will travel to Mutshatsha one day, when your spine has healed and you can get up again ...'

  He sends the bearers on ahead so he can have peace and quiet to meditate. Travelling might mean deciding to conquer something, he thinks vaguely. Conquer the doubters who didn't believe he would get away, never even as far as Orsa Finnmark. Or conquer the ones who had travelled even further, vanished even deeper into the wilderness. And conquer his own indolence, cowardice, fear.

  I conquered the river bridge, he thinks. I was stronger than my own fear ...

  He strolls homeward through the summer night. There are so many more questions than answers. Erik Olofson, his incomprehensible father. Why is he starting to drink again? After they went to the sea together and saw that it was still there? In the middle of summer, when the snow and cold is gone? Why does he let the drunks in the house, let them get their hands on Célestine?

  And why did Mamma leave, anyway? Outside the People's Hall he stops and looks at the remnants of the poster for the last movie programme of the spring.

  Run for Your Life, he reads. That's it, run for your life. And he runs on silent feet through the warm summer night. Mutshatsha, he thinks. Mutshatsha is my password ...

  Chapter Twelve

  Hans Olofson says goodbye to Moses and watches the car bearing the dead men vanish in a cloud of dust.

  'You stay as long as you like,' says Ruth, who has come out on to the porch. 'I won't ask why you're back so soon. All I'm saying is that you can stay.'

  When he enters his old room, Louis is already busy filling the bathtub. Tomorrow, he thinks, tomorrow I will re-examine myself, decide what I'm going back to.

  Werner Masterton has gone to Lubumbashi to buy bulls, Ruth tells him as they sit with their whisky glasses on the veranda.

  'Such hospitality,' says Olofson.

  'Here it's necessary,' says Ruth. 'We can't survive without one another. Forsaking a white person is the only mortal sin we recognise. But no one commits it. It's especially important that the blacks understand this.'

  'Perhaps I'm wrong,' says Olofson, 'but I feel there is a state of war here. It isn't visible, but it's here.'

  'Not a war,' says Ruth, 'but a difference that is essential to maintain, using force if necessary. Actually it's the whites that are left in this country who are the ultimate guarantee of the new black rulers. They use their newly won power to shape their lives like ours. The district governor borrowed from Werner the plans for this house. Now he's building a copy, with one difference: his house will be bigger.'

  'At the mission station in Mutshatsha an African talked about a hunt that was ripening,' says Olofson. 'The hunt for the whites.'

  'There's always someone who shouts louder than others,' replies Ruth. 'But the blacks are cowardly. Their method is assassination, never open warfare. The ones who shout aren't the ones you have to worry about. It's the ones who are silent that you have to keep a watchful eye on.'

  'You say that the blacks are cowardly,' says Olofson, feeling the beginnings of intoxication. 'To my ears that sounds as if you think it's a racial defect. But I refuse to believe it.'

  'Maybe I said too much,' says Ruth. 'But see for yourself. Live in Africa, then return to your own country and tell them what you experienced.'

  They eat dinner, alone at the big table. Silent servants bring platters of food. Ruth directs them with glances and specific hand gestures. One of the servants spills gravy on the tablecloth. Ruth tells him to go.

  'What will happen to him?' asks Olofson.

  'Werner needs workers in the pig sties,' replies Ruth.

  I ought to get up and leave, Olofson thinks. But I won't do anything, and then I'll acquit myself by saying that I don't belong, that I'm only a casual passing guest ...

  He has planned to stay for several days with Ruth and Werner. His plane ticket permits him to return no sooner than a week after arriving. But without his noticing, people gather around him, taking up the initial positions for the drama that will keep him in Africa for almost twenty years. He will ask himself many times what actually happened, what powers lured him, wove him into a dependent position, and in the end made it impossible for him to stand up and go.