The Eye Of The Leopard

by Mankell Henning

  The next day a dead cobra is lying on the front seat of Olofson's car. Eggshells are scattered around the dead snake ...

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Africa is still far away. But Hans Olofson is on his way. He still visits new, hostile territories, he has left the house by the river far behind, passed a student examination in the county seat and is now at the university in Uppsala, where he is supposed to be studying law.

  To finance his studies he works three afternoons a week at Johannes Wickberg's gun shop in Stockholm. He knows more about the philosophy of skeet shooting than about the Code of Land Laws. He knows much more about the history of superior Italian shotguns, about the viscosity of weapons grease at low temperatures, than he does about Roman Law, which is the foundation of everything.

  Now and then big-game hunters come into the gun shop, and they ask different and considerably odder questions than those he has to answer in the introductory law course. Are there black lions? He doesn't think so. But one day a man stands before him who claims to be called Stone, and insists that the black lion exists in the remote Kalahari Desert. Stone has come from Durban to see Wickberg. But Wickberg has gone to the customs house to solve a problem with the import of ammunition from the United States, and Hans Olofson is alone in the shop.

  Stone's real name is Stenberg, and even though he has lived in Durban for many years, he comes originally from Tibro. For more than an hour he stays in the shop and tells Hans how he imagines his death. For many years he has suffered from a mysterious itch on his legs that keeps him wide awake at night. He has shown his affliction to doctors and to tall witch doctors, but nothing has helped. When he discovers that most of his internal organs have been severely attacked by parasites, he realises that his time is limited.

  In the early 1920s he ventured out into the world as one of the promoters of Swedish ballbearings. He wound up staying in South Africa, dumbfounded by all the night sounds and the endless plains of the Transvaal. Eventually he left ballbearings behind and established an office for big-game hunting, Hunters Unlimited, and changed his name to Stone. But he still buys his guns from Wickberg, and so he travels to Sweden once a year, to Tibro to tend his parents' grave, and to Stockholm to buy weapons. He stands there in the shop telling all this to Hans Olofson. And when he leaves, Hans is certain that black lions do exist.

  It's a day in the middle of April, 1969, as Stone stands there telling Hans about his life. For nine months Hans has travelled back and forth between Uppsala and Stockholm, between future studies and making a living. After nine months he still feels that he is in enemy territory, that he came from the north as an illegal immigrant and that one day he will be unmasked and chased back to his origins.

  When he left the county seat behind, it was like finally climbing out of his own personal Iron Age. His tools were sharp and cold, and the teachers' questions hung over his head like raised axes. He had experienced the four years of study as if he were living on the dole. The scent of elkhound had never left him, the rented room had eaten its way into him, the flowered wallpaper had been carnivorous. He had made few friends in this scrubbed emptiness. But he had forced himself to persevere, and finally he passed an exam that surprised everyone, including himself. He felt as though his marks did not reflect his knowledge but instead were proof of his determination, as if he were an orienteer or an athlete.

  That's also where the idea of studying law originates. Since he has no desire to be a woodcutter, he decides that maybe he can be a lawyer. He has a vague sense that the law might give him the tools to survive. The laws are rules that have been tested and interpreted down through the generations. They clarify the boundaries of decency, specify how the unimpeachable person may act. But perhaps another horizon is also hiding there. Maybe he could become the sworn spokesman of mitigating circumstance?

  He once felt as though his whole life ought to be viewed as a mitigating circumstance. From my upbringing I received neither self-knowledge nor a sense of purpose, he thought. Now I try to move through hostile terrain without surrendering to confusion. Maybe the fact that I didn't remain in the place of my birth could be regarded as a mitigating circumstance. But why didn't I stay there? Why didn't I grab a pickaxe and bury the roots, marry one of the bridesmaids?

  My inheritance is a dusty full-rigger in a glass case, the smell of wet woollen socks drying over the stove. A mother who couldn't stand it any longer and vanished on a train heading south; a haggard seaman who managed to drift ashore where there wasn't any sea.

  As the defender of mitigating circumstance perhaps I can remain unnoticed. I, Hans Olofson, possess an incontrovertible talent. The art of finding the best hiding places.

  The summer after his examination he returns to the house by the river. There is no one to meet him at the station, and when he enters the kitchen it smells newly scrubbed, and his father is sitting at the table regarding him with glazed eyes.

  He sees that he is beginning to resemble his father more and more. The face, the tangled hair, the stooping spine. But do I also resemble him inside? If so, where will I drift ashore?

  In a surge of responsibility he tries to take care of his father, who is obviously drinking more often and more than before. He sits down across from him at the kitchen table and asks if he isn't going to take off soon. What happened to the boat that sailed along the coast?

  He barely receives an answer. His father's head hangs as if his neck were already broken.

  One single time Hans crosses the bridge to Janine's house. It's late at night, the bright Norrland night, and he thinks he hears her trombone for a brief dreadful moment. The neglected currant bushes glow. He leaves the place and never returns. He avoids her grave in the churchyard.

  One day he bumps into Nyman the courthouse caretaker. On an impulse he asks about Sture. Nyman knows. After ten years Sture is still lying motionless in bed in a hospital for the incurable outside Västervik.

  Restlessly he wanders along the river. He walks with his tornup roots in his hand, searching for a suitable plot of ground to set them down in. But in Uppsala it's all pavement, isn't it? How can he plant them there?

  At the beginning of August he can finally take off, and he does so with a great sense of relief. Again circumstances lead him further away. If he hadn't had Ture Wickberg as a classmate he wouldn't have been given the chance to finance his studies by working in Ture's uncle's gun shop in Stockholm.

  His father accompanies him to the station, and stands on the platform carefully watching his son's two suitcases. Suddenly Hans feels a great fury. Who would steal his luggage?

  The train lurches forward and Erik Olofson raises his hand awkwardly to wave goodbye. Hans sees him moving his mouth but he can't hear what he's saying. As the train rattles across the iron bridge, Hans is standing at the window. The iron beams whirl past, the water of the river runs towards the sea. Then he closes the window, as if he were lowering an iron curtain. He is alone in the gloom of the compartment. He has a fleeting sensation that he is in a hiding place where no one will ever find him.

  But the conductors of Swedish Railways do not place philosophical importance on closed, dark compartments. The door flies open and Hans feels caught out in the depths of a great secret, and he hands over his ticket as if begging for mercy. The conductor punches it and tells him how to change trains in the early dawn.

  In a wounded and lacerated world there is no room for the scared rabbits of anxiety, he thinks. The feeling refuses to let him go, even when he has commuted back and forth between Uppsala and Stockholm for almost ten months.

  Hans finds a place to live with a man who has a passionate love of fungi and works as a lecturer in biology. A lovely attic room in an old wooden building becomes his new hiding place. The building lies in an overgrown garden, and he decides that the lecturer has planted his own private jungle.

  Time reigns supreme in the house. Clocks hang on all the walls. Hans imagines the clockwork menagerie, a ticking, rattling, sighing or
chestra that calibrates time and the noble insignificance of life. In window niches the sand runs through hourglasses that are constantly turned over. An elderly mother wanders about in the ticking rooms, taking care of the clocks.

  The clocks were inherited, he is told. The lecturer's father, an eccentric inventor who in his youth made a fortune on combine harvesters, spent his life passionately collecting timepieces.

  The first months of that autumn he will remember as a long drawn-out agony when he seemed to understand nothing. The law seems an unknown cuneiform script for which he completely lacks a personal code. Each day he is prepared to give up, but he mobilises his maximum endurance and finally succeeds, in early November, in cracking the shell and penetrating into the darkness behind the words.

  At about the same time he decides to change his appearance. He grows a beard and clips his hair to a downy fringe all over his skull. In photo booths he turns the stool into position, feeds in one-krona coins, and then studies his features. But behind his new look he can still see the face of Erik Olofson.

  He imagines dejectedly how his coat of arms might look. A snowdrift, a chained elkhound, against a background of infinite forests. He will never escape it.

  One time when he is alone in the ticking house he decides to investigate the secrets of the fungus-loving lecturer and his timekeeping mother. Perhaps I could raise this to a lifelong mission, he thinks. Peeping. I will take on the form of a field mouse and break out of my ingenious system of secret passages. But he finds nothing in the chiffoniers and chests of drawers.

  He sits down among the ticking clocks and with an utter seriousness attempts to understand himself. He has wound up here, from the brickworks, via the span of the iron bridge. But after that? Onward, to become a lawyer, the defender of mitigating circumstance, simply because he wouldn't be any good as a woodcutter. I possess neither meekness nor impatience, he thinks. I was born into a time when everything is splitting apart. I have to make a decision. I must make up my mind to continue with what I decided to do. Maybe I will find my mother. My indecision is in itself a hiding place, and there's a risk that I'll never find my way out.

  On precisely this day in April when Stone from Tibro has told Hans about his internal parasites and the black lions in the Kalahari, a telegram lies waiting for him when he returns to the house of the clocks. It's from his father, telling him that he's coming to Stockholm on the morning train.

  His rage is instant. Why is he coming here? He'd thought that his father was securely chained up beyond the fir ridges. Why is he on his way here? The telegram gives no reason.

  Early in the morning he hurries to Stockholm and is waiting on the platform when the Norrland train pulls in. He sees his father cautiously peering out from one of the last cars. In his hand he holds the bag that Hans himself used when he travelled to the county seat. Under his arm he has a package wrapped in brown paper.

  'Well now, there you are,' says Erik Olofson when he spies his son. 'I didn't know if the telegram had arrived.'

  'What would you have done then? And what are you doing here?'

  'It's those Vaxholm boats again. They need seamen now.'

  Hans leads him to a cafeteria in the station.

  'Do they serve pilsner here?' his father asks.

  'No, no pilsner. You'll have coffee. Now tell me!'

  'There isn't much to tell. I wrote and got an answer. I have to be at their office at nine o'clock.'

  'Where are you going to live?'

  'I thought there might be some sort of boarding house.'

  'What have you got in the package? It's leaking!'

  'A moose steak.'

  'A moose steak?'

  'Yep.'

  'It's not hunting season now, is it?'

  'Well, it's a moose steak anyway. I brought it for you.'

  'There's blood dripping out of the package. People will think you murdered somebody.'

  'Who would that be?'

  'Good Lord.'

  They find a room at the Central Hotel. Hans watches his father unpack his clothes. He recognises them all, has seen them all before.

  'Make sure you give yourself a good shave before you go there. And no pilsners!'

  His father hands him a letter and Hans sees that the Vaxholm boats have an office on Strandvägen.

  After Erik has shaved they set off.

  'I borrowed a picture of Nyman's children. It's so fuzzy you can't really see anything. So it'll do fine.'

  'Do you still think you can show pictures of other people's children?'

  'Sailors are supposed to have a lot of children. It's expected.'

  'Why didn't you tell my mother that?'

  'I thought I'd ask around about her. You haven't seen her, by any chance, have you?'

  Hans stops dead in his tracks. 'What do you mean by that?'

  'Just wondering.'

  'Why would I have seen her? Where would I have seen her?'

  'There are a lot of people living here. She must be somewhere.'

  'I don't understand what you mean.'

  'Then we won't talk about it any more.'

  'I don't even know what she looks like.'

  'You've seen pictures, though.'

  'But they're twenty-five years old. People change. Would you recognise her if she came walking down the street?'

  'Of course I would.'

  'The hell.'

  'Then we won't talk about it any more.'

  'Why have you never tried to find her?'

  'You don't run after people who just up and leave like that.'

  'But she was your wife! My mother!'

  'She still is.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'We never got divorced.'

  'You're still married?'

  'I should think so.'

  When they reach Strandvägen and there's still half an hour to go before nine o'clock, Hans takes his father into a café.

  'Do they serve pilsner here?'

  'No pilsners. You'll have coffee. And now let's take it from the top. I'm twenty-five years old, I've never seen my mother other than in bad photographs. I don't know a thing about her except that she got fed up and left. I've wondered, I've worried, I've missed her and I've hated her. You've never said a word. Not one word.'

  'I've been thinking about her too.'

  'What?'

  'I'm not that good with words.'

  'Why did she leave? You must know. You must have brooded about it for as long as I have. You didn't get a divorce, didn't remarry. In some way you've continued to live with her. Deep inside you've been waiting for her to come back. You must have some explanation, don't you?'

  'What time is it?'

  'You have to answer!'

  'She must have been someone else.'

  'What do you mean, "someone else"?'

  'Someone other than I thought.'

  'And what exactly did you think?'

  'I don't remember.'

  'Good Lord.'

  'It won't do any good to worry about it.'

  'For twenty-five years you haven't had a woman.'

  'What do you know about that?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'That has nothing to do with it. What time is it? You have to show up on the dot with ship owners.'