The Eye Of The Leopard

by Henning Mankell

  Suddenly she gets up, as if she understood his thoughts.

  'I'm cold,' she says. 'The church is draughty, and today he talked for so long.'

  'Hurrapelle?'

  She laughs at him. 'He's probably the only one who doesn't know his nickname,' she says. 'He would certainly be upset if he did.'

  In the kitchen he tells her about quitting his job with the horse dealer. But what is really the truth? How did it all happen? He hears himself describe how he was excited and shouting, while the horse dealer was puny as a trembling dwarf. But wasn't he the one who squeaked and mumbled, hardly able to make himself understood? Is he the one who's too little, or is it that the world is too big?

  'What are you going to do now?' she asks.

  'I'll probably have to go to high school and think a little,' he replies.

  And that is precisely what he decides to do. He knows his marks are good enough: Headmaster Gottfried told him that, although it might be hard to convince Erik Olofson of the usefulness of going back to a worn-out school bench.

  'Do it,' she says. 'I'm sure you'll do well.'

  But he's still feeling defensive. 'If it doesn't work out then I'll leave town,' he says. 'There's always the sea. I'll never go back to the horse dealer. He can get somebody else to torture his horses.'

  On the way home from Janine's house he goes down to his boulder. The spring flood is roaring and a huge log has lodged on the point at People's Park. Life is hard, he thinks.

  Tonight is as good as any other to tell his father about his decision. He'll sit there until the tram rattles across the river bridge and disappears into the woods. The springtime river dances.

  Erik Olofson is sitting polishing his little pearl-handled revolver when Hans comes home. He bought the revolver from a Chinese man he met in Newport; it cost him nine dollars cash and a jacket. Hans sits down across the kitchen table from his father and watches him carefully rub the gleaming handle.

  'Will it fire?' he asks.

  'Of course it'll fire,' replies his father. 'Do you think I'd buy a weapon I couldn't use?'

  'How should I know?'

  'No, how would you know?'

  'Exactly.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Nothing. But I quit that damned horse dealer.'

  'You never should have started working for him. What did I tell you?'

  'You didn't tell me anything, did you?'

  'I told you to stay at the Trade Association!'

  'What does that have to do with it?'

  'You're not listening to what I'm saying.'

  'Well, what does it have to do with anything?'

  'Here you come home and say I never tell you anything.'

  'I never should have started at that warehouse. And now I'm finished with that damned horse dealer.'

  'What did I tell you?'

  'You didn't say a thing.'

  'Didn't I tell you to stay at the warehouse?'

  'You should have told me never to start!'

  'Why would I say that?'

  'I already told you! Aren't you going to ask what I plan to do instead?'

  'Sure.'

  'Then ask me!'

  'I shouldn't have to ask. If you've got something to say, then say it. This handle will never get clean.'

  'I can see it shining.'

  'What do you know about mother-of-pearl revolver handles? Do you know what mother-of-pearl is?'

  'Not really.'

  'See what I mean?'

  'I'm going to start at secondary school. I've already applied. And my grades are good enough.'

  'All right.'

  'Is that all you have to say?'

  'What do you want me to say?'

  'Do you think it's a good idea?'

  'I'm not the one going there.'

  'God damn it ...'

  'Don't swear.'

  'Why not?'

  'You're too young.'

  'How old do you have to be to swear?'

  'Well ...'

  'So what do you think?'

  'I think you should have stayed at the warehouse. That's what I've always said ...'

  The spring, the summer, are so short, so fleeting, and now it's time for the rowan berries, when Hans Olofson will be walking through the gates of the secondary school. What sort of ambition does he have? Not to be the best, but not the worst either. To be somewhere in the middle of the stream, always far from the deep current. He doesn't intend to take the lead and swim on ahead.

  Hans will be a pupil that teachers forget. He sometimes seems slow, almost sluggish. A pupil who can usually answer, and be right most of the time. But why doesn't he ever raise his hand, even when he knows the answer? In geography he possesses knowledge about the oddest places. He can talk about Pamplemousse as though he has been there. And Lourenço Marques, wherever that is.

  Hans never drowns in the flood of knowledge through which he swims for four long years. He makes himself inaccessible and as invisible as possible in the middle ranks of the class. There he stakes out his territory and arranges his hiding place. It serves as a protective cover against a strange hesitant feeling.

  What does he actually hope to get out of these four years? It's not as though he had any plans for the future. The dreams he harbours are so different. With quiet obsession he hopes that each lesson will reveal the Goal to him. He dreams of the decisive moment, when he can close his books, get up and leave, never to return. Attentively he watches the teachers, searching for his signpost.

  But life being what it is, many other fires are also burning inside him during those last years he lives by the river. He is entering that age when every person is his own pyromaniac, equipped with a piece of flint in an otherwise incomprehensible world. It's the passions that flare up and die down, that again gather speed to devour him, yet always let him climb out of the ashes alive.

  The passions release powers that leave him bewildered. This is the time when he seems to burst the final membranes that bind him to his childhood, to the time that perhaps both began and ended in the ruins of the brickworks, when he discovered that he was precisely himself and no one else, a specific 'I' and no other.

  And these passions flame to the insipid music of Kringström's band. They have a bass and drums, clarinet, guitar and accordion. With a sigh they strike up 'Red Sails in the Sunset', weary unto death, after a thousand years of incessant playing in the draughty dance rotunda of the People's Hall. Kringström, who barely remembers his own first name, suffers from chronic bronchitis caused by a lifetime standing in the heat of the smoky stoves and the cross-draught of doors eternally opened and closed. Once, in his lost youth, he had intended to be a composer. Not a heavy-hipped man of gravity who wrote down notes for posterity, but the creator of light and popular tunes – he would be a master of pop songs. But what did he become? What remains of life's wan smile? The melodies were utterly lost, they never appeared on his accordion, no matter how much he prayed for inspiration, how much he practised his fingering. Everything had already been written, and so he put together his band in order to survive. People are now stomping on the boards of the dance rotunda, where they will play until the moment that eternity shoves them off the last precipice. The music that once was a dream has become an affliction.

  Kringström coughs and envisions a horrendous death from lung cancer. But he plays on, and when the last note dies out he receives his listless applause. Below the bandstand, as usual, hooting and drunken youngsters hang around, not knowing any dance steps, but all the more willing to hurl jeers if the music isn't to their liking. Long ago Kringström's band stopped throwing pearls before swine; his music falls from the instruments like granite. With ear plugs he mutes the sound as best he can, hearing only enough so he doesn't lose the beat. They take a break as often as they can, and drag it out as long as they dare. In a dreary back room where a single lightbulb dangles from the ceiling and a torn poster depicting a snake charmer is peeling from the wall, they drink coffee laced with schna
pps, sitting in silence, and take turns peeking out the door and keeping an eye on the instruments. If any of the drunken youths were to get the idea of staggering up on to the bandstand and sinking their teeth into a clarinet ...

  After 'Red Sails in the Sunset' comes 'Diana', and then they have to speed it up so the audience won't start snarling. And Kringström's band thumps away at something that's supposed to be 'Alligator Rock', and he feels as though an evil being is standing behind him pounding him on the head with a sledgehammer. On the dance floor the young people are jumping and bounding like mad, and Kringström feels that he is spending his life in an insane asylum. After this musical outburst come two slow numbers, and sometimes Kringström takes his revenge on the demanding youth by playing a waltz. Then the dance floor thins out, and the noisy mob crowds through the swinging doors that lead to the café, where it's easy to mix aquavit from hip flasks into lukewarm Loranga soda.

  Hans Olofson also enters this world. Most often he comes with the Holmström twins. They still haven't found their chosen crafts and left the horse dealer to his fate. Their patrimony, the future planned out for them, will have to wait another year, and when the autumn evenings start to turn cold they head for the Saturday dances at the People's Hall. They park their Saab and bump into Hans Olofson, loitering against a wall, unsure as to whether he dares go inside. They take him under their wing, drag him along behind the beauty parlour and offer him some schnapps. The fact that he stood up to the horse dealer and told him that he was quitting has made a deep impression. Most who leave Under's stable are simply kicked out. But Hans Olofson took a stand, and for that he has earned a snort and their protection.

  Hans can feel the schnapps warming his blood, and he follows the twins into the crowd. Superintendent Gullberg stands by the ticket cage and watches the hullabaloo with suspicious eyes. He ejects those who are too obviously drunk, which usually results only in lame protests. But he knows that one litre after another of brandy and schnapps is being carried past him in handbags and roomy overcoats. They slip through the eye of the needle, step into the smoky heat, the world of malfunctioning lightbulbs. The Holmström twins are no great dancers, but with sufficient schnapps in their bellies they can offer a fairly well-executed fox trot. At once they run into some ladies they know from some faraway summer lodgings, and Hans finds himself abandoned.

  He knows how to dance – Janine taught him that. But she never taught him to dare ask a girl to dance. He has to go through this trial by fire alone, and he steps on his own toes in fury over not being able to ask one of the female flock waiting in desire and dread along the wall of the dance rotunda, which is never called anything but 'the mountain wall'. On the dance floor the Enviable Ones are already gliding past, the Beauties and the Willing, those who are always asked to dance and hardly ever manage to return to 'the mountain wall' before they're swept off again. They dance with the men of sure steps, the men who own cars and have the right looks. Hans sees last year's 'Lucia' glide past in the arms of Julin the driver, who operates one of the Highway Department's big road graders. The sweat stinks, the bodies are steaming, and Hans rages at standing there like an oaf.

  Next time, he thinks. Next time I'll cross the water.

  But once he has decided on the daughter of the district nurse, taken his bearings and set his feet in the right direction, it's already too late. Like angels to the rescue the Holmström brothers come clamouring, flushed and hot after intense efforts on the dance floor. In the men's room they refresh themselves with some lukewarm schnapps and dirty stories. From one of the locked toilet stalls they hear the loud song of someone throwing up.

  Then they head out again, and now Hans is in a hurry. Now it's sink or swim, now he has to conquer the 'mountain wall' to avoid going under from self-loathing. On unsteady legs he pushes across the dance floor just as Kringström starts off an infinitely slow version of 'All of Me'. He stops in front of one of the bridesmaids from the year before. She follows him out into the fray, where they shove their way on to the overcrowded dance floor.

  Many years later, in his house on the banks of the Kafue, with a loaded pistol under his pillow, he recalls 'All of Me', the smoking heat of the stove, and the bridesmaid he pushed along the dance floor. When he wakes in the African night, drenched with sweat, afraid of something he dreamed or perhaps something he heard outside in the dark, he returns there. He can see everything, exactly the way it was.

  Now Kringström is starting up a new dance. 'La Paloma' or 'Twilight Time', he can't remember which. He has danced with the bridesmaid, had a few more snorts from the Holmström brothers' flask, and now he's going to dance again. But when he stops in front of her on his unsteady legs she shakes her head and turns away. He reaches out his hand to grab hold of her arm, but she pulls away. She grimaces and says something, but the drums are banging and when he leans forward to hear what she's saying, he loses his balance. Without knowing how it happened, he finds himself all at once with his face among feet and shoes. When he tries to get back up, he feels a strong hand on his collar lifting him up. It's Superintendent Gullberg, who vigilantly spotted the intoxicated youth crawling about on the floor and decided that he should be put out in the street at once.

  In the African night he can recall the humiliation, and it's just as awful as when it happened.

  He staggers away from the People's Hall through the autumn night, knowing that the only person he can turn to in his misery is Janine. She wakes up when he pounds on her door, roughly torn out of a dream in which she was a child again. She opens the door groggily and there's Hans, standing wide-eyed.

  She slowly thaws him out, as always waiting patiently. She can see that he's drunk and miserable, but she waits, leaving him alone with his silence. As he sits in her kitchen and the image of his defeat becomes clearer, it assumes grotesque proportions. No one could have been subjected to greater disgrace, whether it was madmen who tried to set fire to themselves or who stood in the winter night determined to tear down the church with a frozen crowbar. There he had lain among the feet and shoes. Tossed out like a cat by the scruff of his neck.

  She spreads out a sheet and a blanket in the room with the gramophone and tells him to lie down. Without a word he staggers in and falls on the sofa, out cold. She closes the door and then lies in her own bed, unable to sleep. She tosses restlessly, waiting for something that never happens.

  When Hans wakes up in the morning, with temples pounding and mouth parched, he is thinking about a dream: the door opened, Janine came into his room and stood naked looking at him. The dream is like a polished prism, as clear as an image from reality. It penetrates the fog of contrition. It must have happened, he thinks. She must have come in here last night, with no clothes on.

  He gets up from the sofa and goes into the kitchen for a drink of water. The door to her room is closed, and when he listens he can hear her snoring softly. The clock on the wall says quarter to five, and he crawls back on to the sofa to fall asleep and dream or forget that he exists.

  When he wakes up a few hours later it's already dawn and Janine is sitting in her robe at the kitchen table, knitting. When he sees her he wants to take the knitting out of her hands, untie her robe, and bury himself in her body. The door to this house on the south side of the river will be closed for good; he will never leave this house again.

  'What are you thinking?' she asks.

  She knows, he thinks. It won't do any good to lie. Nothing will do any good; the difficulties of life are looming before him like enormous icebergs. What is he actually imagining – that he can find a password that will make it possible to control this damned life?