The Eye Of The Leopard (16 page)

A rucksack full of ants was all that remained, he thinks. That
is poetry too, the epitaph of a man who disappeared. Depressed,
he leaves the room.

Once again he listens outside Judith's door and then goes into
his own room. A faint odour from her body is still between the
sheets. The imprint of fever. He places her shotgun next to the bed.
I don't want to take over from her, he thinks. Yet one of her weapons
stands by my bed.

All at once he is homesick, childishly so; he feels abandoned.
Now I have seen Africa, he thinks. What I've seen I haven't understood,
but I've still seen it. I'm no explorer; expeditions into the
unknown tempt me only in my imagination.

Once I climbed over a bridge span, as if I were riding on the
axis of the earth itself. I left something behind up there on that
cold iron span. It was the longest journey I ever took in my life ...
It's possible that I'm still up there, with my fingers gripping the
cold iron. Maybe I never really came down. I'm still up there,
wrapped in my terror.

He gets into bed and turns off the light. The sounds stream
forth from the darkness, the padding dogs, the hippo sighing
from the river.

Just before he falls asleep he is wide awake for a moment.
Someone is laughing out in the dark. One of the dogs barks and
then all is quiet again.

In the silence he remembers the brickworks. The ruin where
he became aware of his consciousness for the first time. In the
laughter that reaches him from the night he thinks he senses a
continuation of that moment. The ruin of the brickworks clarified
his existence. The fortified bedroom in the house by the
Kafue River, surrounded by large dogs, reveals certain conditions.
The laughter that penetrates the night describes the world he
temporarily happens to inhabit.

This is how it looks, he thinks. Earlier I knew without knowing.
Now I see how the world has capsized, I see the poverty and
misery that are the real truth. Perched high on the river bridge
there were only the stars and the expansive horizon of fir trees.
I wanted to get away from there and now I have done so. Being
here must mean that I'm in the centre of a time that belongs to
me. I have no idea who was laughing. Nor can I determine whether
the laugh is a threat or a promise. And yet I know.

Soon he must leave this place. His return ticket is his main
insurance. In a place where the world is divided, where the world
is fixed, he doesn't have to be involved. He stretches out his hand
in the dark and runs his fingers along the cold barrel of the
shotgun. The hippo sighs down by the river.

All of a sudden he's in a hurry to get home. Judith will have
to look for Duncan Jones's successor without his help. The visa
that Mr Pihri extracted from his friends and was paid for with
500 eggs will never be used ...

But he is wrong; Hans Olofson is wrong. Like so many times
before, his assessments turn on their own axis and come back to
the starting point as their opposites. The return ticket has already
begun to decompose.

Hans Olofson's dreams are almost always reminders.

Through his dreams, his subconscious self ensures
that he forgets nothing. Often there is a recurrent
prelude, as if his dreams were drawing aside the old worn curtain
for the very same music. The music is the winter night, the clear,
starry midwinter cold.

He is out there, Hans Olofson, still barely grown. He is standing
somewhere by the church wall beneath a street lamp. He is a lonely,
sad shadow against all the white of that stern winter night ...

How could he have known? He couldn't peek into the veiled
world of the future when he finally finished his last day of school,
flung his school books under the bed and marched away to his
first full-time job as the youngest man in the warehouse of the
Trade Association. Back then the world was exceedingly knowable
and whole. Now he was going to earn his own money, pull
his own weight, learn to be a grown-up.

What he would later recall about his time at the Trade
Association was the constant hauling of goods up the hill to the
train station. The cart he was given was neglected and worn-out,
and with a continuous curse inside him he would drag and
pull it in a perpetual circuit between the freight office and the
warehouse. He quickly learned that swearing didn't make the
hill any easier to overcome. Swearing was revenge and helpless
rage, and as such possibly a source of strength, but it didn't flatten
out the hill.

He decides that the hellhole that is the Trade Association's
warehouse can't represent the truth. The Honour of Work and
the Community of Work must look different.

And there is a difference in going to work for Under, the horse
dealer who needs a helper because one of his stable boys has been
badly bitten on the arm by an angry stallion.

Hans Olofson makes his entrance into the strange world of
the horse dealer one day in late September, when there is
already snow in the air. Winter preparations are in full swing;
stalls have to be rebuilt and expanded, the leaky roof has to
be fixed, the harnesses checked, the supply of horseshoes and
nails inventoried. Late autumn is the time to prepare for hibernation;
horses as well as people have to sleep, and Hans stands
with a sledgehammer in his hand and knocks out one of the
cross-walls in the stable. Under wanders around in his galoshes
in the cement dust and dispenses advice. Visselgren, a short
man from the south of Sweden, who Under discovered at the
Skänninge marketplace, sits in one corner mending a pile of
harnesses, and winks at Hans. The immensely strong
Holmström twins pull down one of the cross-walls by themselves.
Horses couldn't have done it any better. Under saunters
contentedly back and forth.

In the world of Under there is a continual switching between
absentminded indifference and sound opinions which he passionately
defends. The very foundation of his world view is that nothing
is initially a given, other than when it comes to horses. Casting
modesty aside, he views himself as a member of the elite who
carry the world on their shoulders. Without horse dealing, chaos
would rule, and wild horses would take over the world as the new
barbaric rulers. Hans swings his heavy sledgehammer and is happy
to have escaped the worn-out cart. Now this is living!

For one year he is part of this strange community. His assignments
are always changing; the days differ sharply but enticingly.

One evening he runs across the river bridge to Janine's house.
On this very evening she has adorned herself with the red nose,
and she is sitting at the kitchen table polishing her trombone
when he stamps the snow off his feet on the steps.

He stopped knocking long ago. Janine's house is a home, a
different home from the wooden house by the river, but still his
home. A little leather bag hanging above the kitchen table spreads
the fragrance of cumin. Janine, who no longer has a sense of smell,
still remembers cumin from the time before the botched operation.

He confides almost everything to Janine. Not everything, that
would be impossible. Thoughts and feelings that he can scarcely
acknowledge to himself, those remain secret. This applies especially
to Hans's increasingly agitated and vulnerable discovery of
the strange desires that are boiling inside him.

Today she has her red nose on. Usually the hole underneath
her eyes is covered by a white handkerchief, stuffed into the hole
so that he can see the red scars left by the scalpel, and the sight
of naked flesh under her eyes becomes something forbidden,
hinting at something quite different.

He imagines her naked, with the trombone at her lips, and
then he blushes with excitement. He has no idea whether she
senses what he's thinking. He wishes that she would, as often as
he wishes the opposite.

She plays a new tune she has learned, 'Wolverine Blues', which
she has put on her gramophone. Hans keeps the beat with a
darning egg, yawns and only half listens.

When she finishes he can't stay any longer. Nothing is calling
him but he's still in a hurry. Ever since he finished school he has
been running. Something is urging him on, exciting and enticing
him.

The house stands where it always has stood. Light snow covers
the potato patch that nobody ever digs in. In one of the lighted
windows he sees his father's shadow. Hans suddenly feels sorry
for him. He tries to imagine the way his father must have stood
on the afterdeck of a ship heading into a warm trade wind. Far
off, against the last ribbons of the sunset, glow the faint lights
from the next port of call.

But when he walks into the kitchen there's a knot in his
stomach, because his father is sitting at the table with glazed eyes
and before him stands a half-empty bottle. Hans knows that his
father has begun to drink himself into a stupor again.

Why is life so damned hard? he thinks. Bare ice to slip on
wherever you turn ...

This winter even Under finally reveals himself as something
other than a well-meaning horse dealer in galoshes. There is malice
behind the friendly mask.

Hans learns that the friendliness has a price. Beneath the
voluminous overcoat lurks a reptile. Gradually he begins to
understand that in the horse dealer's world he is nothing more
than a strong pair of arms and obedient legs. When Visselgren
is struck by arthritis in the middle of February, the good times
are over for him. The horse dealer buys him a one-way ticket
back to Skänninge and drives him to the station. Under doesn't
even bother to get out of the car and thank him for all his hard
work. Back at the stable he rants for a long time about Visselgren's
duplicity, as if his shortness should be regarded as a character
defect.

New employees come and go, and eventually it's only the
Holmström twins and Hans who remain of the old crew. Hans
is starting to think the same thoughts as he had as he was pulling
the cart between the warehouse and the freight office.

Has he ended up back there again? If so, where is the Honour
and Community of Work in the daily drudgery that he thought
was the great Goal of life?

A few weeks after Visselgren's departure, the horse dealer
comes into the stable late one afternoon with a black box under
his arm. The Holmström brothers have already left in their
decrepit Saab, and Hans is alone getting the stable ready for
the night.

The horse dealer heads towards a seldom used stall where a
worn-out Northern Swedish horse is crouched in a corner. He had
only just purchased him for a few symbolic notes, and Hans was
wondering why the horse hadn't already been sent to the slaughterhouse.

From the black box the horse dealer takes out something that
most resembles the transformer for an electric train. Then he
calls Hans over and tells him to bring him an extension cord.
The horse dealer is humming, pulling off his big coat, and Hans
does as he is told.

And what is he told to do?

The old horse has to be tied with chains while steel clamps
are fastened to his ears. Then the electricity passes through the
cables, and the animal convulses under the shocks of the current.
Under contentedly turns the little knob on the metre, as if he
were directing a toy train, and Hans helplessly promises himself
never to forget the horse's tormented eyes. For almost an hour
the torture continues, while Under orders Hans to check that
the chains are tight so the horse won't get loose.

He hates the damned horse dealer who is tormenting this
broken-down horse. He realises that Under must have a prospective
buyer in the background even for this worn-out animal. With
electricity and steel clamps a trace of vitality is infused back into
the horse, a strength based only on fear.

'He'll be practically young again,' says Under, turning up the
current a bit.

The horse foams at the mouth, his eyes are popping out of
their sockets. Hans wishes he could put the steel clamps on the
horse dealer's nose and then turn up the current until he begged
for mercy. But of course he doesn't do that. He does as he's told.
Then it's all over. The horse stands facing the wall and the horse
dealer regards his work. Then he grabs Hans by the shirt as if
he had set his teeth in him.

'This is just between us,' he says. 'Between you and me and
the horse. Get it?'

From his pocket he draws a crumpled five-krona note and
presses it into Hans's hand. Later, as he tears the note to bits
outside the church wall he wonders whether the purpose of life
will ever be revealed to him. Who needs him – Hans Olofson?
And what is he needed for, except to drag a cart or work in a
winter stable where helpless horses are tortured?

I have to get away, he thinks. Away from that damned horse
dealer. But what will he do instead? Are there really any answers
in life? Who can whisper the password in his ear? He walks home
in the winter night in February 1959. For a dizzying second life is
a breath in the mouth of eternity. Thinking you can cheat time
will just drive you crazy. He stops outside the wooden house. The
cold glitters in the snow.

The plough, the anchor, the moorings. To be myself and no
one else, he thinks. But then what? Onward, and just keep going?
He goes upstairs in the silent house, unlaces his ski boots. His
father is snoring and sighing in his room. Like restless flocks of
birds his thoughts gather in his mind after he gets into bed. He
tries to catch them, examine them one by one, but all he sees are
the terrified eyes of the horse and the horse dealer cackling like
an evil troll. Life is a dizzying second, he thinks before he falls
asleep.

In his dream
Célestine
grows out of her case and surges towards
the backdrop of a world he doesn't recognise at all, and finally
he chops through her moorings.