The Eye Of The Leopard

by Henning Mankell

  His thoughts are interrupted. Judith looks at the coffee cup in her hand.

  'The porcelain is a reminder,' she says. 'When Cecil Rhodes received his concessions over what today is called Zambia, he sent his employees into the wilderness to conclude agreements with the local chieftains. Perhaps also to obtain their help in finding unknown ore deposits. But these employees, who sometimes had to travel for years through the bush, were also supposed to be the vanguard of civilisation. Each expedition was like sending out an English manor house with bearers and ox carts. Every evening when they made camp, the porcelain service was unpacked. A table was set up with a white tablecloth, while Cecil Rhodes bathed in his tent and changed into his evening clothes. This service once belonged to one of the men who cleared the way for Cecil Rhodes's dream of an unbroken British territory from the Cape to Cairo.'

  'Everyone is occasionally seized by impossible dreams,' says Olofson. 'Only the craziest try to realise them.'

  'Not the madmen,' replies Judith. 'There you are mistaken. Not the madmen, but the intelligent and far-sighted ones. Cecil Rhodes's dream was not an impossibility; his problem was that he was all alone, at the mercy of impotent and capricious British politicians.'

  'An empire that rests upon the most precarious of all foundations,' says Olofson. 'Oppression, alienation in one's own country. Such an edifice must collapse before it's even completed. There is one truth that's impossible to avoid.'

  'And what's that?' asks Judith.

  'The blacks were here first,' says Olofson. 'The world is full of various judicial systems, and in Europe it's based on Roman law. In Asia there are other legal forms, in Africa, everywhere. But natural law is always followed, even if the laws are given a political interpretation. The Indians of North America were almost totally wiped out in a couple of hundred years. And yet their natural law was written into the American law ...'

  Judith bursts into laughter. 'My second philosopher,' she says. 'Duncan Jones is also steeped in ephemeral philosophical reflections. I've never understood a word of it, even though I tried to in the beginning. Now he has drunk his brain into mush, his body shakes, and he chews his lips to shreds. Maybe he'll live a few more years before I have to bury him. Once he was a man with dignity and resolve. Now he lives in an eternal twilight zone of alcohol and decay. The Africans think he is being transformed into a holy man. They're afraid of him. He's the best watchdog I could have. And now you arrive, my next philosopher. Maybe Africa tempts some people to start ruminating.'

  'Where does Duncan Jones live?' Olofson asks.

  'I'll show you tomorrow,' says Judith.

  Olofson lies awake for a long time in his irregular room with its sloping roof. A scent that reminds him of winter apples pervades it. Before he puts out the light he gazes at a big spider web, motionless on one of the walls. Somewhere a roof beam is complaining and he feels transported back to the house by the river. He listens to the German shepherds that Luka has let outside. They run restlessly around the house, making one circuit after another.

  A short time, he thinks. A temporary visit to lend a helping hand to people with whom he has nothing in common, but who have taken care of him during his journey to Africa. They have abandoned Africa, but not each other, he thinks. That will also turn out to be their ruin ...

  In his dreams the leopard appears, the one he waited for last night in a grass blind. Now it races into the space inside him, searching for a quarry that Olofson left behind. The leopard searches through his internal landscape, and he suddenly sees Sture before him. They are sitting on the boulder by the river and watching a crocodile that has crawled up on a sand bank, right by the huge stone caissons of the river bridge.

  Janine is balancing on one of the iron beams with her trombone. He tries to hear what she's playing, but the night wind carries away the tune.

  Finally there is only the leopard's watchful eye, observing him from the dream chamber. The dream falls away, and when he awakens in the African dawn he will not remember it.

  It is a day in late September of 1969. Hans Olofson will remain in Africa for eighteen years ...

  PART II

  THE CHICKEN FARMER

  IN KALULUSHI

  Chapter Thirteen

  When he opens his eyes in the dark, the fever is gone. There is only a wailing and whining sound inside his head.

  I'm still alive, he thinks. I'm not dead yet. The malaria has not yet conquered me. I still have time to understand why I have lived before I die ...

  The heavy revolver presses against one cheek. He turns his head and feels the cold barrel against his forehead. A faint smell of gunpowder, like cow manure burned out in a pasture, pricks his nose.

  He is very tired. How long was he asleep? A couple of minutes or twenty-four hours? He has no idea. He listens to the darkness, but the only thing he hears is his own breathing. The heat is stifling. The sheet is incapable of absorbing all the sweat he has produced.

  Now is my chance, he thinks. Before the next fever attack is upon me. Now is when I have to get hold of Luka, who has betrayed me and left me to the bandits so they can slit my throat. Now is when I can catch him and scare him into running on his silent feet through the night to bring help. They are out there in the dark, with their automatic weapons and pickaxes and knives, and they're waiting for me to get delirious again before they come in here and kill me ...

  And yet he doesn't seem to care whether the malaria kills him or the bandits. He listens to the night. The frogs are croaking. A hippopotamus sighs down by the river.

  Is Luka sitting outside the door, on his haunches, waiting? His black face concentrating, turned inward, listening to his forefathers speaking inside him? And the bandits? Where are they waiting? In the dense thickets of hibiscus beyond the gazebo that blew down last year in a violent storm that came after everyone thought the rainy season was over?

  One year ago, he thinks. For ten years he has lived here by the Kafue River. Or fifteen years, maybe more. He tries to tally them up but he's too tired. And he was only supposed to stay here two weeks. What actually happened? Even time is betraying me, he thinks.

  He can see himself descend from the aeroplane at Lusaka International Airport that day so inconceivably long ago. The concrete was completely white, the heat hung like a mist over the airport, and an African pushing a baggage cart laughed as he stepped on to Africa's burning soil.

  He remembers his anxiety, his instant suspicion towards Africa. Back then he left behind the adventure he had imagined ever since childhood. He had always imagined that he would step out into the unknown with a consciousness that was open and utterly free of anxiety.

  But Africa crushed that idea. When he stepped out of the aeroplane and found himself surrounded by black people, foreign smells, and a language he didn't understand, he longed to go straight back home.

  The trip to Mutshatsha, the dubious pilgrimage to the final goal of Janine's dream – he carried it out under a compulsion he had imposed on himself. He still recalls the humiliating feeling that terror was his only travelling companion; it overshadowed everything else in his mind. The money sticking to him inside his underpants, the terrified creature huddled in the hotel room.

  Africa conquered the sense of adventure within him as soon as he took his first breath on the soil of this foreign continent. He began planning his return at once.

  Fifteen or ten or eighteen years later, he is still there. His return ticket is somewhere in a drawer full of shoes and broken wristwatches and rusty screws. Many years ago he discovered it when he was looking for something in the drawer; insects had attacked the envelope and made the ticket illegible.

  What actually happened?

  He listens to the darkness. Suddenly he feels as if he's lying in his bed in the wooden house by the river again. He can't tell if it's winter or summer. His father is snoring in his room and he thinks that soon, soon, the moorings of the wooden house will be cut and the house will drift away down the river, off towards
the sea ...

  What was it that happened? Why did he stay in Africa, by this river, on this farm, where he was forced to witness the murder of his friends, where he soon felt he was surrounded only by the dead?

  How has he been able to live so long with a revolver under his pillow? It isn't normal for a person who grew up by a river in Norrland – in a town and a time where nobody ever thought of locking the door at night – to check that his revolver is loaded every night, that no one has replaced the cartridges with blanks. It isn't normal to live a life surrounded by hate ...

  Once again he tries to understand. Before the malaria or the bandits have conquered him he wants to know ...

  He can feel that a new attack of fever is on its way. The whining in his head has stopped abruptly. Now he can hear only the frogs and the sighing hippo. He takes a grip on the sheet so he can hold on tight when the fever rolls over him like a storm surge.

  I have to hang on, he thinks in despair. As long as I keep my will the fever won't be able to vanquish me. If I put the pillow over my face they won't hear me yell when the hallucinations torment me.

  The fever drops its cage around him. He thinks he sees the leopard, which only visits him when he's sick, lying at the foot of the bed. Its cat face is turned towards him. The cold eyes are motionless.

  It doesn't exist, he tells himself. It's just racing around in my head. With my will I can conquer the cat as well. When the fever is gone the leopard won't exist any more. Then I'll have control over my thoughts and dreams. Then it won't exist any more ...

  What happened? he wonders again.

  The question echoes inside him. Suddenly he no longer knows who he is. The fever drives him away from his consciousness. The leopard watches by the bed, the revolver rests against his cheek.

  The fever chases him out on to the endless plains ...

  Chapter Fourteen

  One day in late September 1969.

  He has promised to stay and help Judith Fillington with her farm, and when he wakes up the first morning in the room with the odd angles, he sees that some overalls with patched knees are lying on his chair.

  Luka, he thinks. While I sleep he carries out her orders. Silently he places the overalls on a chair, looks at my face, disappears.

  He looks out the window, out over the vast farm. An unexpected elation fills him. For a brief moment he seems to have conquered his fear. He can stay for a few weeks and help her. The trip to Mutshatsha is already a distant memory. Staying on Judith's farm is no longer following in Janine's footsteps ...

  During the hot morning hours Olofson listens to the gospel according to chickens. He and Judith sit in the shade of a tree and she instructs him.

  'Fifteen thousand eggs per day,' she says. 'Twenty thousand laying hens, additional colonies of at least 5,000 chicks who replace the hens that no longer lay and then go to slaughter. Every Saturday morning at dawn we sell them. The Africans wait in silent queues all night long. We sell the hens for four kwacha, and they resell the hens at the markets for six or seven kwacha ...'

  She looks like a bird. A restless bird who keeps expecting the shadow of a falcon or eagle to drop down over her head. He has put on the overalls that lay on the chair when he awoke. Judith is wearing a pair of faded, dirty khaki trousers, a red shirt that is far too big, and a hat with a wide brim. Her eyes are inaccessible in the shadow of the brim.

  'Why don't you sell them at the markets yourself?' he asks.

  'I concentrate on survival,' she says. 'I'm already close to cracking under the workload.'

  She calls to Luka and says something that Olofson doesn't understand. Why do all the whites act impatient, he wonders, as if every black man or woman were insubordinate or stupid?

  Luka returns with a dirty map, and Olofson squats down next to Judith. With one finger she shows him on the map where her farm delivers its eggs. He tries to remember the names: Ndola, Mufulira, Solwezi, Kansanshi.

  Judith's shirt is open at the neck. When she leans forward he can see her skinny chest. The sun has burned a red triangle down towards her navel. Suddenly she straightens up, as if she were aware that he was no longer looking at the map. Her eyes remain hidden under the hat.

  'We deliver to the shops of the state cooperative,' she says. 'We deliver to the mining companies, always big orders. At most a thousand eggs per day go to local buyers. Every employee gets one egg a day.'

  'How many people work here?' Olofson asks.

  'Two hundred,' she replies. 'I'm trying to learn all their names by paying out the wages myself. I take deductions for drunkenness and for those who miss work without having a good excuse. I give out warnings and fines, I hire and fire, and I rely on my memory to guarantee that no one who is sacked comes back under a false name to be hired again. Of the 200 who work here, twenty are night watchmen. We have two laying houses, each manned by an assistant foreman and ten workers in shifts. In addition we have butchers, carpenters, drivers, and manual labourers. Only men, no women.'

  'What will I be doing?' asks Olofson. 'I know what the chickens eat and where the eggs are delivered, but what will I do?'

  'Follow me like a shadow. Listen to what I say, check that it gets done. Everything we want done has to be repeated, ordered a second time, and then checked.'

  'Something must be wrong,' Olofson says. 'Something the whites have never understood.'

  'Love the blacks if you want,' says Judith. 'But take my advice. I've lived among them my whole life. I speak their language, I know how they think. I get doctors for their children when the medicine man fails, I pay for their funerals when they don't have any money. I send the smartest children to school at my expense. When the food runs out I organise transport of sacks of maize to their houses. I do everything for them. But anyone who is caught stealing a single egg I turn over to the police. I fire a man who is drunk, I kick out the night watchmen who fall asleep.'

  Olofson slowly begins to realise the scope of the operation. The dominion of a single woman, Africans who subordinate themselves because they have no alternative. Two different types of poverty, face to face at a common meeting point. The terror of the whites, their truncated lives as left-over colonialists in a burned-out empire. The ash heap of loneliness in a new or resurrected black colony.

  The poverty of the whites is their vulnerability. Their lack of alternatives becomes apparent when they arrange to meet the Africans. Even a garden like this one, with the barely visible dream of a Victorian park embedded in the greenery, is a fortified bunker. Judith Fillington's last bastion is her hat, which conceals her eyes.

  The poverty and vulnerability of the blacks is the poverty of the continent. Broken and destroyed living patterns, their origins lost in the mists of the past, replaced by insane empire builders who changed into their dinner jackets deep in the rainforests and on the plains of elephant grass. This world of stage sets still exists. Here the Africans are trying to shape their future. Perhaps they have endless patience. Perhaps they still have doubts about how the future should look, how these stage sets can be dissolved and obliterated. But what happens when they burst?

  Hans Olofson decides he must work out a contingency plan, an escape route. I'm only here for a short visit, he thinks. I'm doing a favour for a strange woman, as if I were helping her up after a fall on the street. But the whole time I remain outside the actual event. I don't get involved, I can't be held responsible ...

  Judith gets up abruptly. 'Work is waiting,' she says. 'Most of your questions you can probably answer yourself. Africa belongs to each individual, it's never shared.'

  'You know nothing about me,' he says. 'My background, my life, my dreams. And yet you're prepared to grant me enormous responsibility. From my Swedish point of view it's incomprehensible.'