The Eye Of The Leopard (11 page)

'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 ...

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.'

'Now you've seen the sea,' says Erik. 'And this is not a good
place to talk. The bus is rattling so damned loudly.'

The next day Erik Olofson goes back to clearing the horizon.
Impatiently he hacks with his axe at a single branch that refuses
to be separated from the trunk. He puts all his bodily strength
behind the blow, hacking furiously at the branch.

I'm hacking at myself, he thinks. Chopping off these damned
roots that are binding me here. The boy is almost fourteen. In a
few years he can take care of himself. Then I can go back to sea,
to the ships, to the cargoes.

He chops with his axe, and with each blow it's as though he's
striking his fist against his brow and saying: I must ...

Hans is running through the bright summer evening of
Norrland. Walking takes too long, he's in a hurry now. The soft,
waterlogged earth is burning ...

In a grove in the woods past the abandoned brickworks he builds
an altar to Sture. He can't imagine him either alive or dead, he's
just gone, but he builds an altar out of pieces of board and moss.
He has no idea what he's going to do with it. He thinks of asking
Janine, initiating her into his secret, but he refrains. Visiting the
altar once each day and seeing that no one has been there will suffice.
Even though Sture doesn't know it, they're sharing one more secret.

He dreams that the house where he lives is cast off its moorings
and floats down the river, never again to return ...

He bolts through the summer, runs along the river until he
is out of breath and sweaty. When nothing else is left there is
always Janine.

One evening when he comes running, she isn't home. For a
brief moment he worries that she too is gone. How could he lose
another person who supports his world? But he knows that she's
at one of the Joyous Fellowships at the church, and so he sits
down on her front steps to wait.

When she arrives she's wearing a white coat over a light-blue
dress. A breeze passes through his body, a sudden apprehension.

'Why are you blushing?' she asks.

'I'm not blushing,' he replies. 'I never do.'

He feels caught red-handed. Shove it in your nose, he thinks
furiously. Shove it in the hole.

That evening Janine starts talking about the trip.

'Where would someone like me go?' says Hans. 'I've been to
Gävle. I probably won't go any further. But I could try to stow
away on the train to Orsa. Or go to the tailor and ask him to
sew on a pair of wings.'

'I'm serious,' says Janine.

'I am too,' says Hans.

'I want to go to Africa,' says Janine.

'Africa?'

For Hans that is an unfathomable dream.

'Africa,' she says again. 'I would go to the countries by the big
rivers.'

She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window
flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance. She tells him
about the dark moments. About the anguish that makes her long
to go to Africa. There she wouldn't attract attention everywhere
she went with her missing nose. There she wouldn't always be
surrounded by male loathing and revulsion.

'Leprosy,' she says. 'Bodies that rot away, souls that atrophy in
despair. There I would be able to work.'

Hans tries to imagine the Realm of the Noseless, tries to see
Janine among the deformed human bodies.

'Are you going to be a missionary?' he asks.

'No, not a missionary. Maybe I would be called one. But I
would work to alleviate suffering,' she says. 'It's possible to travel
without actually travelling. A departure always begins inside yourself.
It was probably the same for Harry Johanson and his wife
Emma. For fifteen years they prepared for a journey that they
probably never thought would happen.'

'Who is Harry Johanson?' Hans asks.

'He was born in a poor cottage outside Röstånga,' says Janine.
'He was the next-youngest of nine children. When he was ten
years old he decided to be a missionary. That was in the late
1870s. But not until twenty years later, in 1898, after he had married
and he and Emma had had four children, were they able to set
off. Harry had turned thirty and Emma was a few years younger,
and they left on a ship from Göteborg. In Sweden there were
followers of the Scottish missionary Fred Arnot who tried to
build up a network of mission stations along the routes that
Livingstone had travelled in Africa. From Glasgow they sailed
with an English ship and arrived in Benguella in January of 1899.
One of their children died of cholera during the passage, and
Emma was so sick that she had to be carried ashore when they
reached Africa.

'After a month of waiting, they set off together with three
other missionaries and over 100 black bearers on a 1200-mile
journey, straight through uncharted country. It took them four
years to reach Mutshatsha, where Fred Arnot had determined
that the new mission station should be located. They had to wait
for a whole year by the Lunga River before the local chieftain
gave them permission to pass through his lands.

'The whole time they were plagued with illness, lack of food,
impure water. After four years, when Harry finally reached
Mutshatsha, he was alone. Emma had died of malaria, and the
children had perished from various intestinal diseases. The three
other missionaries had also died. Harry himself was dazed by
malaria when he arrived along with those of the bearers who
hadn't left years before. His loneliness must have been indescribable.
And how did he manage to hold on to his faith in God
when his entire family had been obliterated on the way to spread
God's message?

'Harry lived for almost fifty years in Mutshatsha. By the time
he died, an entire community had grown up around the little hut
which was the beginning of the mission station. There was an
infirmary, an orphanage, a building for older women who had
been driven out of their villages because of accusations of witchcraft.
When Harry Johanson died he was called
Ndotolu
, the wise
man. He was buried on the hill to which he had retired during
his last years and built a modest little hut. When he died there
were English doctors and another Swedish missionary family in
Mutshatsha. Harry Johanson died in 1947.'

'How do you know all this?' Hans asks.

'An old woman who once visited Harry in Mutshatsha told
me,' Janine replies. 'She went there as a young woman to work at
the mission station, but she got sick and Harry forced her to go
back to Sweden. She visited our congregation last year and I had
a long talk with her about Harry Johanson.'

'Say it once more,' says Hans. 'The name.'

'Mutshatsha.'

'What was he doing there, anyway?'

'He arrived as a missionary. But he became the wise man. The
doctor, the carpenter, the judge.'

'Say it one more time.'

'Mutshatsha.'

'Why don't you go there?'

'I probably don't have what Harry Johanson had. And Emma,
although she never made it there.'

What was it that Harry Johanson had? Hans wonders as he
walks home in the bright summer evening. He pictures himself
dressed in Harry Johanson's clothes; behind him is a long line of
bearers. Before the safari crosses the river he sends out scouts to
check whether crocodiles are lurking on the sandbanks. When
he reaches the house where he lives, four years have passed and
the safari has reached Mutshatsha. He's all alone; there are no
bearers left, they have all deserted him. As he walks up the steps
he decides that the altar he built for Sture in the grove behind
the brickworks will be called Mutshatsha ...

He opens the door and the dream of Harry Johanson and
Mutshatsha retreats and leaves him, because in the kitchen sits
Erik Olofson, drinking with four of the town's most notorious
drunks.
Célestine
has been taken from her case, and one of the
drunks is sitting there picking at the meticulously constructed
rigging with fumbling fingers. A man who hasn't even taken off
his dirty rubber boots is asleep on top of Hans's bed.

The drunks stare at him curiously, and Erik Olofson gets
up, wobbling, and says something that is drowned in the crash
of a bottle hitting the floor. Usually Hans feels sad and ashamed
when his father starts drinking and goes into one of his spells,
but now he feels only fury. The sight of the full-rigger on the
table, as if it had run aground among glasses and bottles and
ashtrays, makes him so outraged with sorrowful anger that he
is perfectly calm. He walks over to the table, picks up the ship,
and stares into the glazed eyes of the drunk who was picking
at it.

'You keep your filthy mitts off her,' he says.

Without waiting for a reply he puts the ship back in its case.
Then he goes into his room and kicks at the snoring man lying
on his bed.

'Get up! Up, God damn it!' he says, and he doesn't stop until
the man wakes up.

His father is holding on to the door frame, with his trousers
half falling off, and when he sees his flickering eyes he starts to
hate him. Hans chases the dazed drunk into the kitchen and
slams the door behind him, right in front of his father. He tears
off the bedspread and sits down, and feels his heart pounding in
his chest.

Mutshatsha, he thinks.

In the kitchen the chairs scrape, the outer door is opened,
voices mutter and then there is silence. At first he thinks that his
father has left with the drunks for town. But then he hears a
shuffling and a thud from the kitchen. When he opens the door
he sees his father crawling around with a rag in his hand, trying
to wipe the dirt off the floor. He looks like an animal. His trousers
have slipped down so his bottom is bare. A blind animal crawling
around and around ...

'Pull up your trousers,' he says. 'Stop crawling around. I'll clean
the damned floor.'

He helps his father up, and when Erik Olofson loses his
balance they wind up on the kitchen sofa in an involuntary
embrace. When Hans tries to pull himself loose his father holds
on to him. At first he thinks his father wants to fight, but then
he hears him snuffling and whimpering and hiccuping, and realises
he is sobbing violently. He has never seen him do this before.