The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  'But you are welcome to search the house anyway,' Olofson adds quickly. 'It's easy to make a mistake. I don't want to cause any difficulties.'

  The officer looks relieved, and Olofson decides that now he has made another friend, perhaps someone he may find useful in future.

  'My name is Kaulu,' says the police officer.

  'Please come in,' says Olofson.

  After barely half an hour the officer comes out of the house leading his men.

  'Might one ask what you are looking for?' asks Olofson.

  'Activities inimical to the state are always under way,' says the officer gravely. 'The value of the kwacha is continually being undermined by illegal foreign exchange transactions.'

  'I understand that you have to intervene,' says Olofson.

  'I shall tell my supervisor of your accommodation,' replies the police officer and gives him a salute.

  'Please do,' says Olofson. 'You're welcome to visit anytime.'

  'I'm quite fond of eggs,' shouts the officer as Olofson watches the dilapidated vehicles drive off in a cloud of dust.

  Suddenly he understands something about Africa, an insight into the young Africa, the anguish of the independent states. I ought to laugh at this inadequate search of the premises, he thinks. At the young police officer who surely comprehends nothing. But then I would be making a mistake, because this inadequacy is dangerous. In this country people are hung, young policemen torture people, kill people with whips and truncheons. Laughing at this helplessness would be the same as putting my life at risk.

  The arc of time grows, and Hans Olofson continues to live in Africa.

  When he has been in Kalulushi for nine years, a letter arrives to inform him that his father has died in a fire. One cold night in January of 1978 the house by the river burned down.

  The cause was never clarified. You were sought for the funeral, but your whereabouts was not discovered until now. One other person died in the fire, an elderly widow named Westlund. It is also believed that the fire started in her flat. But of course, this will never be known. Nothing was left; the building burned to the ground. What will happen with the inventory of your father's estate, I am not at liberty to say.

  The letter is signed with a name that vaguely reminds him of one of his father's foremen at the lumber company.

  Slowly he lets the grief seep in. He sees himself in the kitchen, sitting across the table from his father. The heavy odour of wet wool. Célestine stands in her case, but now she is a smoking wreck burned black. There is also the charred sea chart of the approaches to the Strait of Malacca.

  He glimpses his father under a sheet on a stretcher. Now I'm alone, he thinks. If I choose not to return, my mother will remain an enigma, in the same way as the fire.

  His father's death becomes a burden of guilt, a feeling of betrayal, of having given up. Now I'm alone, he thinks again. I'll have to bear this loneliness as long as I live.

  Without really knowing why, he gets in his car and drives to Joyce Lufuma's mud hut. She is standing there pounding corn, and she laughs and waves when she sees him coming.

  'My father is dead,' he says.

  At once she senses his grief and begins to moan, casting herself to the ground, wailing out the pain that is actually his.

  Other women come over, hear that the white man's father is dead in a distant land, and instantly join the lamenting chorus. Olofson sits down beneath a tree and forces himself to listen to the women's appalling lamentations. His own pain is wordless, an anxiety that digs its nails into his body.

  He returns to his car, hears the women shrieking behind him, and thinks that Africa is giving Erik Olofson his tribute. A sailor who drowned in the sea of the Norrland forests.

  As if on a pilgrimage he sets off on a journey to the sources of the Zambezi River in the northwest corner of the country. He travels to Mwinilunga and Ikkelenge, sleeps overnight in his car outside the mission infirmary at Kalenje Hill, and then continues along the almost impassable sand track that leads to the long valley where the Zambezi has its source. He walks for a long time through the dense, desolate bush until he reaches it.

  A simple stone cairn marks the spot. He squats down and sees how individual drops of water fall from broken blocks of stone. A rivulet no wider than his hand winds through the stones and bush grass. He cups his hand in the rivulet and thus stops the flow of the Zambezi River.

  He doesn't leave until late in the afternoon, knowing he must reach his car before it grows dark. By then he has decided to stay in Africa. There is nothing left to return to in Sweden. From his grief he also gathers the strength to be realistic. He will never be able to transform his farm into the political model of his dreams. Even though he once firmly vowed never to lose himself in idealistic labyrinths, he ended up doing just that.

  A white man can never help Africans develop their country from a superior position, he thinks. From below, from inside, one can surely contribute to expertise and new working patterns. But never as a bwana. Never as someone who holds all power in his hands. Africans see through words and actions – they see the white man as owner, and they gratefully accept the wage increases he gives them, or the school he builds, or the sacks of cement he is willing to forgo. His thoughts of influence and responsibility they regard as irrelevant whims, random gestures which increase the possibility for the individual foreman to make off with some extra eggs or spare parts that he can later sell.

  The long colonial history has freed the Africans from all illusions. They know the capriciousness of the whites, their constant exchange of one idea for another, while demanding that the black man be enthusiastic. A white man never asks about traditions, even less about the opinions of their ancestors. The white man works quickly and hard, and haste and impatience are viewed by the black man as a sign of low intelligence. Thinking long and precisely is the black man's wisdom.

  At the source of the Zambezi he seeks the way to a new starting point, free of suppositions. I have run my capitalistic farm under the guise of a socialist dream, he thinks. I have occupied myself with an impossibility, incapable of realising even the most fundamental contradictions that exist. The starting point was always mine: my ideas, never the Africans' thoughts, never Africa.

  From the profit that the blacks produce, I pass on a share to those workers that is more than Judith Fillington or the other farmers ever did. The school I built, the school uniforms I pay for, are their own achievements, not mine. My most important function is to keep the farm operating and not permit too much pilfering or absenteeism. Nothing more. The only thing I can do is someday turn over the farm to a workers' collective, transferring ownership itself. But this too is an illusion. The time is not ripe for it. The farm would fall into disrepair, some people would get rich, and others would be shoved out into even greater poverty. What I can do is to continue to run the farm as I do today, but without disrupting the great tranquillity with whims and ideas that will never amount to anything for the Africans. Their future is their own creation. I contribute to the production of food, and that is always time well spent. I know nothing about what the Africans think of me. I'll have to ask Peter Motombwane, maybe also ask him to investigate it by talking to my workers. I wonder what Joyce Lufuma and her daughters think.

  He returns to Kalulushi with a feeling of calm. He realises that he will never understand the underlying currents of life. Sometimes it's necessary to stop asking certain questions, he thinks. There are some answers that simply don't exist.

  As he turns in the gates to the farm, he thinks of Egg-Karlsson, who evidently survived the fire. In my childhood I lived next door to an egg dealer, he thinks. If anyone had told me back then that one day I would be an egg dealer in Africa, I wouldn't have believed it. That would have been unreasonable to believe.

  I'm still the same person today. My income is large, my farm is solid. But my life is a quagmire.

  One day perhaps Mr Pihri and his son will come and tell me that they can no longer handl
e my papers. The authorities will declare me an undesirable. I live here with no actual rights; I'm not a citizen with roots legally planted in Africa. I could be deported without notice, the farm confiscated.

  A few days after his return from the Zambezi he looks up Patel in Kitwe and arranges increased transfers of foreign currency to the bank in London.

  'It's becoming harder and harder to handle,' says Patel. 'The risks of discovery are increasing all the time.'

  'Ten per cent harder?' asks Olofson. 'Or twenty per cent harder?'

  'I would say twenty-five per cent harder,' replies Patel in a worried voice.

  Olofson nods and leaves the dark back room with its odours of curry and perfume. I'm putting my trust in an increasingly complex tangle of bribes, illegal financial transactions and corruption, he thinks. I scarcely have any choice. It's hard to imagine that the corruption in this country is more widespread than it is in Sweden. The difference lies in the candour of it. Here everything is so obvious. In Sweden the methods are more evolved, a more refined and well-concealed pattern. But that is probably the only difference.

  The arc of time is expanding. Hans Olofson loses a tooth, and just afterwards one more.

  He turns forty and invites his many white and few black friends to a party. Peter Motombwane declines and never gives an explanation. Olofson gets very drunk during this party. He listens to incomprehensible speeches from people he scarcely knows. Speeches that praise him, pouring out a foundation of veneration for his African farm. They're thanking me because I've started running my farm without extravagant thoughts about its function as a future model, he thinks. Not a true word is being spoken here.

  On wobbly legs he stands up at midnight to thank his guests because so many of them came. Suddenly he realises that he has begun speaking in Swedish. He hears his old language, and he hears himself make a raging attack on the racist arrogance that characterises the whites who still live in this African land. He raves on in Swedish with a friendly smile.

  'A pack of scoundrels and whores is what you are,' he says, raising his glass.

  'How nice,' an elderly woman tells him later. 'Mixing the two languages like that. But of course we're wondering what you said.'

  'I hardly recall,' Olofson replies, and steps outside in the dark alone.

  Something whimpers at his feet and he discovers the German shepherd puppy he got as a present from Ruth and Werner Masterton.

  'Sture,' he says. 'Your name is Sture from now on.'

  The puppy whimpers and Olofson calls Luka.

  'Take care of the puppy,' he says.

  'Yes, Bwana,' says Luka.

  The party degenerates into a Walpurgis Night. Drunken people lie sprawled in the various rooms, an ill-matched couple has taken over Olofson's own bed, and in the garden someone is shooting a pistol at bottles that a terrified black servant is lining up on a garden table.

  Olofson suddenly feels aroused, and he begins to hover about a woman from one of the farms that lies furthest from his own. The woman is fat and swollen, her skirt is hitched up above her knees, and her husband is asleep under a table in the room that was once Judith Fillington's library.

  'I'd like to show you something,' says Olofson.

  The woman gives a start from her half-doze and follows him up to the second floor of the house, to the room where skeletons once filled all the walls. He lights a lamp and closes the door behind him.

  'This is what you wanted to show me?' she says with a laugh. 'An empty room?'

  Without replying he presses her against the wall, pulls up her skirt, and forces himself inside her.

  'An empty room,' she says again and laughs.

  'Imagine that I'm black,' Olofson says.

  'Don't say that.'

  'Imagine that I'm black,' he says again.

  When it's over she clings to him and he smells the sweat from her unwashed body.

  'One more time,' she says.

  'Never,' says Olofson. 'It's my party, and I decide.' He goes quickly, leaving her alone.

  Pistol shots echo from the garden and he suddenly can't stay there any longer. He staggers out into the darkness, deciding that the only person he wants to be near is Joyce Lufuma.

  He gets in his car and leaves his house and his party with a screech of tyres. Twice he drives off the road, but manages to avoid flipping over, and finally pulls in front of her house.

  The yard is silent and dark. He sees the disrepair in the headlights of his car, and he turns off the motor and sits in the dark. The night is warm and he feels his way to his usual spot under the tree.

  We all have a lonesome, abandoned dog sitting and barking inside us, he thinks. Its paws are different colours, its tail may be cut off. But we all have that dog inside us.

  He wakes up at dawn when one of Joyce's daughters stands looking at him. He knows she is twelve years old; he can remember when she was born.

  I love this child, he thinks. In her I can recognise something of myself, the child's magnanimity, an ever-present readiness to show consideration for others.

  Gravely she watches him, and he forces himself to smile.

  'I'm not sick,' he says. 'I'm just sitting here resting.'

  When he smiles she smiles back at him. I can't abandon this child, he thinks. Joyce and her daughters are my responsibility, no one else's.

  He has a headache and feels bad; the hangover is pounding in his chest and he shudders when he recalls the hopeless fornication in the empty room. I might just as well have mounted one of the skeletons, he says to himself. The humiliation I subject myself to seems to have no limits.

  He drives back to his house and sees Luka picking up shards of glass in the garden, and he realises he also feels ashamed in front of Luka. Most of the guests have disappeared, only Ruth and Werner Masterton are left. They're sitting on the terrace drinking coffee. The German shepherd puppy he named Sture is playing at their feet.

  'You survived,' says Werner with a smile. 'The parties seem to be getting more and more intense, as if a day of judgement were imminent.'

  'Who knows?' Olofson says.

  Luka walks past below the terrace. He's carrying a pail full of broken bottles. They follow him with their gaze, watch him vanish towards the pit in the ground where he dumps the rubbish.

  'Drop by and say hello sometime,' says Ruth as she and Werner get up to return to their farm.

  'I will,' Olofson says.

  A few weeks after the party he comes down with a severe attack of malaria, worse than any he has had before. The fever dreams hound him.

  He imagines that he is being lynched by his workers. They rip off his clothes, pound him bloody with sticks and clubs, and drive him before them towards Joyce Lufuma's house. There he senses his salvation, but she meets him with a rope in her hand, and he awakes just as he realises that she and her daughters are coming to hoist him up in the tree, with the rope fastened in a noose around his neck.

  When he recovers and pays his first visit to Joyce, he suddenly remembers the dream. Maybe it's a sign after all, he thinks. They accept my assistance, they are dependent on it. They have every reason to hate me, I forget that far too often. I forget the simplest antagonisms and truths.

  The arc of time extends further over his life, the personal river he carries inside him. Often he returns in his thoughts to a frozen winter night, to the remote site he has never visited. He imagines his father's grave. Now that he has been in Africa for eighteen years he ought to start looking for a spot for his own grave.