The Eye Of The Leopard (2 page)

Through the swirling snow he returns to his childhood.

It is midwinter 1956. It's four in the morning and the
cold whines and prises at the beams of the old wooden
house. That's not the sound that wakes him, but rather a stubborn
scraping and muttering from the kitchen. He wakes as
abruptly as only a child can, and he knows at once that his father
has started scrubbing again. Dressed in his blue-trimmed pyjamas
with their permanent snuff stains, with thick rag socks on his
feet that are already soaked through from all the hot water he
is madly sloshing across the floor, his father chases his demons
through the winter night. He has chained up the two grey
elkhounds out by the woodshed, hauling on the frozen chains
as he stands half-naked in the freezing cold, while the water
slowly comes to a boil on the stove.

And now he scrubs, a raging assault on the dirt that is visible
to no one but himself. He throws the boiling water on cobwebs
that suddenly flare up on the walls, then dumps a whole bucket
over the hood of the stove because he's convinced that a knot of
filthy snakes is hiding there.

All this the son lies in bed and watches, a twelve-year-old with
the woollen blanket pulled up over his chin. He doesn't need to get
up and tiptoe across the cold planks of the floor to watch it happen.
He knows all about it. And through the door he hears his father's
muttering and nervous laughter and desperate outbursts of rage.

It always occurs at night.

The first time he woke up and padded out to the kitchen he
was five or six years old. In the pale light from the kitchen
lamp with its misty shade he saw his father squelching around
in the water, with his brown hair in wild disarray. And he
understood, without putting it into words, that he was invisible.
It was another kind of vision that occupied his father as
he raced about with his scrubbing brush. His father was looking
at something that only he could see. It terrified the boy, more
so than if his father had suddenly raised an axe over his head.

Now, as he lies in bed listening, he knows that the coming days
will be calm. His father will lie motionless in his bed before he
finally gets up, pulls on his rough work clothes, and heads out into
the forest again, where he cuts trees for Iggesund or Marma Långrör.

Neither father nor son will utter a word about the night-time
scrubbing. For the boy in the bed it will fade like a malevolent
apparition, until he again awakes in the night to the sound of his
father scrubbing away his demons.

But now it is February 1956. Hans Olofson is twelve years old,
and in a few hours he will get dressed, munch a few slices of rye
bread, take his knapsack and head out into the cold on his way
to school.

The darkness of night is a split personality, both friend and
foe. From the blackness he can haul up nightmares and inconceivable
horrors. The spasms of the roof beams in the hard frost
are transformed into fingers that reach out for him. But the darkness
can also be a friend, a time in which to weave thoughts about
what will come, what people call the future.

He imagines how he will leave this lonely wooden house by
the river for the last time, how he will run across the bridge,
disappear past the arches of the bridge, out into the world, almost
all the way to Orsa Finnmark.

Why am I who I am? he thinks. Why me and not somebody
else?

He knows precisely the first time that he had this crucial
thought. It was a bright summer evening, and he was playing in
the abandoned brickworks behind the hospital. They had divided
themselves into friends and enemies, hadn't defined the game any
more than that, and they alternately attacked and defended the
windowless, half-razed factory building. They often played there,
not just because it was forbidden, but because the building
provided endlessly adaptable stage sets for their games. Its identity
was forgotten, and with their games they lent constantly
changing faces to the ruin. The dilapidated brickworks was
defenceless; the shadows of the people who had once worked
there were no longer present to protect it. Those who played
there ruled. Only seldom did a bellowing father come and drag
his child away from the wild game. There were shafts to plunge
into, rotten steps to fall through, rusty kiln doors that could slam
shut on hands and feet. But the boys playing there knew the
dangers, avoided them, and had explored the safe paths through
the endless building.

And it was there on that bright summer evening, as he was
lying hidden behind a rusty, collapsed brick kiln, waiting to be
discovered and captured, that he had asked himself for the first
time why he was who he was and not someone else. The thought
had made him both excited and upset. It was as if an unknown
being had crept into his head and whispered to him the password
to the future. After that, all his thoughts, the very process
of thinking, seemed to come from a voice that was external, that
had crept into his head, left its message, and then disappeared.

On that occasion he left the game, sneaked away from the
others, vanished among the fir trees surrounding the dead brickworks,
and went down to the river.

The forest was quiet; the swarms of mosquitoes had not yet
taken over the town, which lay where the river made a bend on
its long journey to the sea. A crow squawked its loneliness at the
top of a crooked fir and then flapped away over the ridge where
Hedevägen wound its way to the west. The moss under his feet
was spongy. He had grown tired of the game, and on his way to
the river everything changed. For as long as he had not established
his own identity, was just
somebody
among all the others, he had
possessed a timeless immortality, the privilege of childhood, the
most profound manifestation of childishness. At the very moment
that the unfamiliar question of why he was who he was crept into
his head, he became a definite person and thus mortal. Now he
had defined himself; he was who he was and would never be anyone
else. He realised the futility of defending himself. Now he had a
life ahead of him, in which he would have to be who he was.

By the river he sat down on a rock and looked at the brown
water slowly making its way towards the sea. A rowboat lay
chafing at its cable and he realised how simple it would be to
disappear. From the town, but never from himself.

For a long time he sat by the river, becoming a human being.
Everything had acquired limits. He would play again, but never
the same way as before. Playing had become a game, nothing
more.

Now he clambers over the rocks on the riverbank until he can
see the house where he lives. He sits down on an uprooted tree
that smells of rain and dirt and looks at the smoke curling out
of the chimney.

Who can he tell about his great discovery? Who can be his
confidant?

He looks at the house again. Should he knock on the draughty
door to the ground floor flat and ask to speak with Egg-Karlsson?
Ask to be admitted to the kitchen where it always smells of rancid
fat, wet wool, and cat piss? He can't talk to Egg-Karlsson, who
doesn't speak to anyone, just shuts his door as if he's closing an
eggshell of iron around himself. All Hans knows about him is
that he's a misanthrope and bull-headed. He rides his bicycle to
the farmhouses outside town and buys up eggs, which he then
delivers to various grocers. He does all his business in the early
morning, and for the rest of the day he lives behind his closed
door.

Egg-Karlsson's silence pervades the house. It hovers like a mist
over the neglected currant bushes and the shared potato patch,
the front steps, and the stairs to the top floor where Hans lives
with his father.

Nor does he consider confiding in old lady Westlund who
lives across from Egg-Karlsson. She would sweep him up in her
embroidery and her Free Church evangelism, never listening to
him, but proceeding at once to fling her holy words at him.

All that remains is the little attic flat he shares with his father.
All he can do is go home and talk to his father, Erik Olofson,
who was born in Åmsele, far from this cold hole in the interior
of melancholy southern Norrland, this town that lies hidden away
in the heart of Härjedal. Hans knows how much it hurts his
father to have to live so far from the sea, to have to make do with
a sluggish river. With a child's intuition he can see that a man
who has been to sea can never thrive where the dense, frozen
grey forest conceals the open horizons. He thinks of the sea chart
that hangs on the kitchen wall, showing the waters around
Mauritius and Réunion, with a glimpse of the east coast of
Madagascar on the fading edge of the chart, and the sea floor
indicated in places, its inconceivable depth 4,000 metres. It's a
constant reminder of a sailor who wound up in the utterly wrong
place, who managed to make landfall where there wasn't any sea.

On the shelf over the stove sits a full-rigger in a glass case,
brought home decades ago from a dim Indian shop in Mombasa,
purchased for a single English pound. In this frigid part of the
world, inhabited by ice crystals instead of jacarandas, people have
moose skulls and fox tails as wall decorations. Here it should
smell of sour rubber boots and lingonberries, not the distant
odour of the salty monsoon sea and burned-out charcoal fires.
But the full-rigger sits there on the stove shelf, with its dreamy
name
Célestine
. Long ago Hans decided that he would never marry
a woman who wasn't named Célestine. It would be a form of
betrayal; to his father, to the ship, to himself.

He also senses a murky connection between the full-rigger in
its dusty case and the recurring nights when his father scrubs out
his fury. A sailor finds himself driven ashore in a primeval Norrland
forest, where no bearings can be taken, no ocean depths sounded.

The boy senses that the sailor lives with a stifled cry of lamentation
inside. And it's when the longing grows too strong that the
bottles end up on the table, the sea charts are taken out of the
chest in the hall, the seven seas are sailed once more, and the sailor
metamorphoses into a wreck who is forced to scrub away his
longing, transformed into hallucinations dissolved in alcohol.

The answers are always found in the past.

His mother disappeared, was simply gone one day. Hans was
so little then that he has no memory either of her or of her
departure. The photographs that lie behind the radio in father's
unfinished logbook, and her name, Mary, are all he knows.

The two photographs instil in him a sense of dawn and cold.
A round face with brown hair, her head tilted a little, maybe a
hint of a smile. On the back of the photographs it says
Atelier
Strandmark, Sundsvall
.

Sometimes he imagines her as a figurehead on a ship that was
wrecked in a heavy storm in the southern seas and has since lain
on the bottom in a watery grave 4,000 metres down. He imagines
that her invisible mausoleum lies somewhere on the sea
chart that hangs on the kitchen wall. Maybe outside Port Louis,
or in the vicinity of the reef off the east coast of Madagascar.

She didn't want to leave. That's the explanation he gets. On
the rare occasions that his father talks about her departure, he
always uses the same words.

Someone who doesn't want to leave. Quickly, unexpectedly
she disappeared, that much he understands. One day she's gone,
with a suitcase. Someone saw her get on the train, towards Orsa
and Mora. The vastness of Finnmark closed in around her disappearance.

For this disappearance he can manage only a wordless despair.
And he assumes that they share the guilt, he and his father. They
didn't die. They were left behind, never to receive a sign of life.

He's not sure whether he misses her, either. His mother is two
photographs, not a person of flesh and blood who laughs, washes
clothes, and tucks the covers under his chin when the winter cold
penetrates the walls of the building. The feeling he bears is a kind
of fear. And the shame of having been found unworthy.

He decides early on to share the contempt that the decent
town has hung like shackles around his runaway mother. He goes
along with the decent people, the grown-ups. Enclosed in an iron
grip of constancy they pass their life together in the building
where the beams scream out their distress during the long drawnout
winters. Sometimes Hans imagines that their house is a ship
that has dropped anchor and is waiting for the wind to come up.
The chains of the elkhounds out by the woodshed are actually
anchor chains, the river a bay of the open sea. The attic flat is
the captain's cabin, while the lower flat belongs to the crew. Waiting
for the wind takes a long time, but occasionally the anchors are
hauled up from the deep. And then the house sets off under full
sail to race down the river, saluting one last time where the river
bends at the People's Park, before the wind carries them away.
Towards an Away that doesn't entail a return.

In an attempt to understand, he creates for himself the only
rational explanation for why his father remains in this parched
town, every day grabbing his tools and heading out into the forest
that prevents him from seeing the ocean, or taking a bearing, or
gazing at distant horizons.

Out there, he chops down the forest. Plodding through the
heavy snow, chopping down tree after tree, stripping the bark
from the trunks and slowly opening the landscape to the endless
horizon. The sailor driven ashore has set himself a task – to clear
a path back to a distant shoreline.

But Hans Olofson's life is more than just melancholy motherlessness
and a woodcutter's bouts of alcoholism. Together they
study his father's detailed world maps and sea charts, go ashore in
ports his father has visited, and explore in their imagination places
that still await their arrival. The sea charts are taken down from
the wall, rolled out, and weighted down with ashtrays and chipped
cups. The evenings can be long, because Erik Olofson is a good
storyteller. By the age of twelve Hans possesses an exhaustive
knowledge of places as distant as Pamplemousse and Bogamaio;
he has glimpsed the innermost secrets of seafaring, mysterious
ships that vanished in their own enigma, pirate captains and sailors
of the utmost benevolence. The secret world and the construct of
regulations, so difficult to grasp, with which trading companies and
private shippers have to live and comply, he has stratified in his
mind without fully understanding them; yet it is as though he has
touched on a great and decisive source of wisdom. He knows the
smell of soot in Bristol, the indescribable sludge in the Hudson
River, the Indian Ocean's variable monsoons, the threatening beauty
of icebergs, and the rattle of palm fronds.