The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  He sets down his coffee cup. 'I'll show you his grave. Then I must go back to my work. Our pumping station has broken down.'

  They walk along a winding path that leads up a hill. Through the dense thickets they glimpse the reflection of the river.

  'Don't go there without Joseph,' says LeMarque. 'There are many crocodiles in the river.'

  The terrain levels out and forms a mesa on top of the high hill. Olofson finds himself facing a simple wooden cross.

  'Harry Johanson's grave,' says LeMarque. 'Every four years we have to put up a new cross because the termites eat them. But he wanted to have a wooden cross on his grave. We comply with his wish.'

  'What did he dream about?' asks Olofson.

  'I don't think he had much time for dreaming. A mission station in Africa requires constant practical work. One has to be a mechanic, carpenter, farmer, businessman. Harry Johanson was good at all those things.'

  'What about religion?'

  'Our message is planted in the maize fields. The gospel is an impossibility if it is not involved in daily life. Conversion is a matter of bread and health.'

  'But in spite of everything, conversion is the crucial thing? Conversion from what?'

  'Superstition, poverty, and sorcery.'

  'Superstition I can understand. But how can one convert someone from poverty?'

  'The message instils confidence. Wisdom requires the courage to face life.'

  Hans Olofson thinks of Janine. 'Was Harry Johanson happy?' he asks.

  'Who knows the innermost thoughts of another human being?' says LeMarque.

  They head back the way they came.

  'I never met Harry Johanson, after all,' says LeMarque. 'But he must have been a colourful and wilful person. The older he got, the less he felt he understood. He accepted that Africa remained a foreign world.'

  'Can a person live long in a foreign world without trying to recreate it so that it resembles the world he left behind?'

  'We had a young priest from Holland here once. Courageous and strong, self-sacrificing. But one day, with no warning, he got up from the dinner table and walked straight out into the bush. Purposefully, as if he knew where he was going.'

  'What happened?'

  'He was never seen again. His goal must have been to be swallowed up, never to return. Something in him snapped.'

  Olofson thinks of Joseph and his sisters and brothers. 'What do the blacks really think?' he asks.

  'They get to know us through the God we give them.'

  'Don't they have their own gods? What do you do with them?'

  'Let them disappear on their own.'

  Wrong, Olofson thinks. But maybe a missionary has to ignore certain things in order to endure.

  'I'll find someone who can show you around,' says LeMarque. 'Unfortunately almost everyone who works here is out in the bush right now. They're visiting the remote villages. I'll ask Amanda to show you around.'

  Not until evening is Olofson shown the infirmary. The pale man, whose name is Dieter, informs him that Amanda Reinhardt, who LeMarque thought would show him around, is busy and asks his forgiveness.

  When he returns from Johanson's grave Joseph is sitting by his door. He notices at once that Joseph is frightened.

  'I won't say anything,' he says.

  'Bwana is a good bwana,' says Joseph.

  'Stop calling me Bwana!' 'Yes, Bwana.'

  They walk down to the river and search for crocodiles without seeing any. Joseph shows him Mutshatsha's extensive maize cultivation. Everywhere he sees women with hoes in their hands, bent over the earth.

  'Where are all the men?' he asks.

  'The men are making important decisions, Bwana. Maybe they are also busy preparing the African whisky.'

  'Important decisions?'

  'Important decisions, Bwana.'

  After eating the food served to him by the lame man, he sits down in the shade of Harry Johanson's tree. He doesn't understand the emptiness that pervades the mission station. He tries to imagine that through him Janine really has accomplished her long journey. The inactivity makes him restless. I have to return home, he thinks. Return to what I'm supposed to do, whatever that might be ...

  In the twilight, Amanda Reinhardt suddenly appears in his doorway. He had been lying on top of his bed and dozed off. She has a kerosene lamp in her hand, and he sees that she is short and chubby. From her broken English he gathers that she is German.

  'I am sorry you are left alone,' she says. 'But we are so few here just now. There is so much to do.'

  'I've been lying here thinking of Harry Johanson's tree,' Olofson says.

  'Who?' she asks.

  At that moment an excited African appears from the shadows. He exchanges a few sentences with the German woman in the language Olofson doesn't understand.

  'A child is about to die,' she says. 'I must go.'

  In the doorway she stops short and turns around. 'Come with me,' she says. 'Come with me to Africa.'

  He gets up from the bed and they hurry towards the infirmary, which lies at the foot of Johanson's hill. Olofson shrinks back as he steps into a room full of iron beds. A few kerosene lamps cast a dim light over the room. Olofson sees that there are sick people lying everywhere. On the beds, between the beds, under the beds. In several beds lie mothers intertwined with their sick children. Cooking vessels and bundles of clothing make the room almost impassable, and the intense smell of sweat and urine and excrement is stupefying. In a bed made of bent iron pipes tied together with steel wire lies a child of three or four years old. Around the bed women are squatting.

  Olofson sees that even a black face can radiate pallor.

  Amanda Reinhardt bends over the child, touches his forehead, talking all the while with the women.

  The anteroom of death, he thinks. The kerosene lamps are the flames of life ...

  Suddenly a shriek breaks out from all the women squatting around the bed. One of the women, hardly more than eighteen years old, throws herself over the child in the bed, and her wail is so penetrating and shrill that Olofson feels the need to flee. The lamentation, the roars of pain that fill the room, strike him with a paralysing effect. With a giant leap he wants to leave Africa behind.

  'So does death look,' says Amanda Reinhardt in his ear. 'The child has died.'

  'From what?' asks Olofson.

  'Measles,' she replies.

  The women's shrieking rises and falls. Never before has he experienced the voice of grief as in this dirty room with its unearthly light. Someone is pounding on his eardrums with sledgehammers.

  'They will scream all night,' says Amanda Reinhardt. 'In this heat the burial must take place tomorrow. Then the women will lament for some more days. Maybe they faint from exhaustion, but they continue.'

  'I never thought such a wailing existed,' says Olofson. 'This must be the ancient sound of pain.'

  'Measles,' says Amanda Reinhardt. 'You have surely had this disease. But here children die of it. They came from a distant village. The mother walked five days and carried her child. Had she come earlier we could have maybe saved him, but she went first to the witch doctor in the village. When it was too late she came here. Actually it is not measles that kills. But the children are malnourished, their resistance is poor. When the child dies it is the end of a long chain of causes.'

  Olofson leaves the infirmary alone. He has borrowed her kerosene lamp and tells her he will find his own way. He is followed by the screams of the wailing women. Outside his door sits Joseph by his fire.

  This man I will remember, Olofson thinks. This man and his beautiful sisters ...

  The next day he drinks coffee again with Patrice LeMarque.

  'What do you think of Harry Johanson now?' he asks.

  'I don't know,' says Olofson. 'Mostly I'm thinking about the child who died yesterday.'

  'I've already buried him,' replies LeMarque. 'And I've got the pumping station going too.'

  'How do I get out of here?' Olofson
asks.

  'Tomorrow Moses is driving to Kitwe in one of our cars. You can ride along with him.'

  'How long will you stay here?' Olofson asks.

  'As long as I live,' says LeMarque. 'But I probably won't live as long as Harry Johanson. He must have been very special.'

  At dawn Olofson is awakened by Joseph.

  'Now I'm travelling home,' he tells him. 'To another part of the world.'

  'I will wait at the white men's doors, Bwana,' replies Joseph.

  'Say hello to your sisters!'

  'I already have, Bwana. They are sad that you're leaving.'

  'Why don't they come and say goodbye then?'

  'They are, Bwana. They're saying goodbye, but you don't see them.'

  'One last question, Joseph. When will you chase the whites out of your country?'

  'When the time is ripe, Bwana.'

  'And when is that?'

  'When we decide that it is, Bwana. But we won't chase all the mzunguz out of the country. Those who want to live with us can stay. We aren't racists like the whites.'

  A Jeep drives up to the building. Olofson puts his suitcase in it. The driver, Moses, nods to him.

  'Moses is a good driver, Bwana,' says Joseph. 'He just drives off the road once in a while.'

  Olofson gets into the front seat and they turn on to the road. Now it's over, he thinks. Janine's dream and Harry Johanson's grave ...

  After a few hours they stop to rest. Olofson discovers that the two dead bodies he'd seen in the morgue are packed in the boot of the Jeep. At once he feels sick.

  'They're going to the police in Kitwe,' says Moses, noticing his distress. 'All murder victims must be examined by the police.'

  'What happened?'

  'They are brothers. They were poisoned. Their maize field was probably too big. Their neighbours were jealous. Then they died.'

  'How?'

  'They ate something. Then they swelled up and their stomachs burst open. It smelled terrible. The evil spirits killed them.'

  'Do you really believe in evil spirits?'

  'Of course,' says Moses with a laugh. 'We Africans believe in sorcery and evil spirits.'

  The journey continues.

  Olofson tries to convince himself that he is going to go back to his legal studies. He clings once more to his decision to become the defender of extenuating circumstance. But I've never clarified what it would mean to spend my life in courtrooms, he thinks. Where I'd have to try to distinguish what is a lie from what is truth. Maybe I should do as my father did. Maybe I should go and chop down horizons in a forest of paragraphs. I'm still searching for a way out of the confusion that marks my beginning ...

  The long trip from Mutshatsha is coming to an end. I must decide before I land at Arlanda again, he thinks. That's all the time I have left.

  He shows Moses the way to Ruth and Werner's farm.

  'First I drive you, then I drive the corpses,' says Moses.

  Olofson is glad that he doesn't call him Bwana.

  'Say hello to Joseph when you return.'

  'Joseph is my brother. I'll say hello to him.'

  Just before two o'clock in the afternoon they arrive ...

  Chapter Eleven

  The sea. A bluish-green wave that moves towards infinity.

  A frozen wind blows from the Kvarken Straits. A sailboat with an uncertain helmsman is becalmed on the swells with sails flapping. Seaweed and mud blow their musty odour in Hans Olofson's face, and even though the sea isn't as he had imagined it, the reality is overwhelming.

  They beat into a stiff wind along a spit of land outside Gävle, Hans and his father. In order to divert his son from the pain of constantly thinking of Sture, Erik Olofson has asked for a week off to take Hans to the sea. One day in the middle of June they depart with the country bus from town, change in Ljusdal, and reach Gävle late in the evening.

  Hans finds a worn-out toy boat made of bark that someone has thrown away and stuffs it inside his jacket. His father dreams about the banana boats he once sailed on. The face of a sailor emerges from the woodcutter's, and he realises once again that the sea is his world.

  To Hans, the sea is constantly changing its face. It's never possible to completely capture the surface of the water with his gaze. Somewhere there is always an unexpected movement, the interplay of the sun and clouds glitters and changes continuously and tirelessly. He can't get his fill of looking at the sea rolling and grunting, tossing wave-tops back and forth, flattening during a calm, and once again foaming and singing and moaning.

  The thought of Sture is there, but it's as if the sea has flooded over it, slowly covering up the last of the pain and the most gnawing grief. The muddled feeling of guilt, of having acted as the invisible hands that heaved Sture off the bridge span, sinks away, leaving only a churning unrest, like a pain that can't decide whether to strike or not.

  Already Sture has begun to change from a living person to a memory. With each passing day the contours of his face grow dimmer, and although Hans can't express it, he realises that life, the life that goes on all around him, will always be the most important thing. He senses that he is on his way into something unknown, where new and disquieting powers are beginning to emerge.

  I'm waiting for something, he thinks. And while he waits he searches assiduously for flotsam along the beaches. Erik Olofson walks a little to one side, as if he doesn't want to bother him. Erik is tormented by the fact that his own waiting never seems to end. The sea reminds him of his own ruin ...

  They stay at a cheap hotel next to the railway station. When his father has fallen asleep, Hans creeps out of bed and sits on the wide window seat. From there he has a view over the little square in front of the station.

  He tries to picture the room in the distant hospital where Sture is lying. An iron lung, he heard. A thick black hose in his throat, an artificial throat that breathes for Sture. His spine is broken, snapped in two, like a perch killed by a fisherman.

  He tries to imagine what it would be like not to be able to move, but of course he can't, and suddenly he can't stand the anxiety, but casts it aside.

  I don't like it, he thinks. I crawled across the arch of the bridge and I didn't fall off. What the hell was he doing there, all alone, in the morning fog? He should have waited for me ...

  The days by the sea pass quickly. After a week they have to go home. In the rattling bus he suddenly calls to his father.

  'What about Mamma?' he shouts. 'Why don't you know where she is?'

  'There are lots of things a person can never know,' Erik says defensively, surprised at the unexpected question.

  'Pappas disappear,' shouts Hans. 'Not mammas.'