The Eye Of The Leopard (22 page)

Their last time together becomes a long drawn-out agony.
Hans returns to the starting point, the chopped-off crow's head
that he and Sture put in her letterbox. Now it's her head he's
swinging at. He spits and swears at her, breaks arrangements, and
paints her black for anyone who will listen.

In the midst of this chaos he passes his secondary school examination.
With an intense outburst of concentrated energy he
succeeds in getting unexpectedly high marks. Rector Bohlin has
seen to it that an application is sent to the college in the county
seat. When he puts on the grey graduation cap, he decides to
keep studying. Now he doesn't have to wait for his father to fling
away the axe of indecision, now he's in charge of his own future.
With one single motion he can set himself free.

On the evening after the exam he stands outside Janine's door.
She's waiting with flowers for him, but he doesn't want her damned
flowers. He's going to leave this place and now he's here for the
last time. He hangs his grey cap over the picture of the Virgin
Mary sitting in her window. But to the last day, all summer long,
he visits her. And yet the secret that will be her last he never will
know.

The final break-up, the end, is irresolute and forlorn. One
evening in the middle of August he visits her and now it is really
for the last time. They meet briefly in her kitchen, with few words,
as if it were their first time, when he stood there with his hedge
clippers in his hand. He says he'll write, but she tells him it would
be better if he didn't. It's best to let everything dissolve, blow away
with the wind.

He leaves her house. Behind him he hears the notes of 'Some
of These Days'.

The next day his father accompanies him to the train station.
Hans looks at his father, grey and indecisive.

'I'll come home sometime,' he says. 'And you can always come
to visit.'

Erik Olofson nods. He'll certainly come to visit. 'The sea ...'
he says and falls silent.

But Hans doesn't hear him. He's waiting patiently for the tram
to take him away.

For a long time his father stays at the station, and he tells
himself that the sea still does exist, after all. If only he ... Always
that 'if only'. Then he goes home to the house by the river, and
lets the sea roar out of his radio.

The month of the rowan berries. A Sunday morning in
September. A bank of fog lies heavy over the town as it slowly
begins to awake. There's a chill in the air and the gravel crunches
as a lone man turns off the main road and takes a short cut down
the slope to the river. The People's Park on its promontory shines
forlornly like a half-razed ruin in the grey morning light. In the
horse dealer's pastures the horses are grazing in the fog. Noiselessly
they move like ships waiting for the wind.

The man unties a rowboat at the river bank and sits down at
the oars. He rows out into the sound between the point of the
People's Park and the south bank of the river. There he throws
out an anchor that grips the rocks on the river bed. He tosses
out a line and waits.

After an hour he decides to try further down towards the
point. He lets the anchor drift under the keel of the boat as he
rows. But abruptly it catches, and when he finally pulls it loose
he sees that an almost rotten piece of cloth has been pierced by
his hook. A bit of a woman's blouse, he can see. Pensively he rows
back to shore.

The bit of cloth lies on a table at the police station, with
Hurrapelle standing looking at it. He nods.

The hastily assembled river-dragging crew doesn't have to
search long. On the second pass the two rowboats make through
the sound, one of their hooks catches on something at the bottom.
From the shore Hurrapelle watches Janine return.

The doctor examines the body one last time before he finishes
the autopsy. When he has washed his hands, he stands by the
window and looks out over the fir ridges coloured red by the setting
sun. He wonders whether he is the only one who knows Janine's
secret. Without knowing why, he decides not to include it in the
autopsy report. Even though this is not proper procedure, he doesn't
think it will change anything. He knows that she drowned. Around
her waist there was a thick steel wire and in her clothing were irons
and heavy pieces of drainpipe. No crime was committed. So he
doesn't need to report that Janine was carrying a child when she
died.

In the house by the river Erik Olofson sits poring over a sea
chart. He adjusts his glasses and pilots his vessel with his index
finger through the Strait of Malacca. He smells the sea, sees the
glimmering lanterns from distant vessels on an approaching
course. In the background the carrier waves from the shortwave
radio hiss through the ether. Maybe it's still possible, he thinks.
A little ship that takes goods along the coast? Maybe it's still
possible.

And what about Hans? He doesn't remember who told him.
But someone heard about it, and Hans learns that Janine is dead.
The woman who stood every Saturday with her placard on the
corner between the People's Hall and the hardware shop. In the
night he leaves the room in his boarding house, which he already
detests, and wanders restlessly through the dark town. He tries
to convince himself that no one is to blame. Not him, nor anybody
else. But still, he knows. Mutshatsha, he thinks. You wanted to
go there, Janine, that was your dream. But you never went and
now you're dead.

I once lay behind a broken-down kiln in the old brickworks
and realised that I was myself and no one else. But since then?
Now? He asks himself how he can stand four years in this distant
college. Inside him an incessant struggle is going on between belief
in the future and resignation. He tries to cheer himself up. Living
must be like continually preparing for new expeditions, he thinks.
It's either that or I'll become like my father.

All at once he decides. Someday he will go to Mutshatsha.
Someday he will make the journey that Janine never made. That
thought becomes instantly holy for him. The most fragile of all
Goals has revealed itself to him. The dream of another which he
is taking over.

Cautiously he tiptoes up the stairs to his room. He recognises
the smell of old lady Westlund's flat. Apples, sour drops. On the
table the books lie waiting for him. But he is thinking of Janine.
Maybe growing up means realising one's loneliness, he thinks.
He sits motionless for a long time.

He feels as if he were again sitting on the huge span of the
iron bridge. High overhead, the stars.

Below him Janine ...

In Hans Olofson's dreams the leopard is hunting.

The terrain is a landscape slipping away, the African bush
displaced to become his internal space. The perspective is
changing constantly. Sometimes he's in front of the leopard, sometimes
behind it, and at times he becomes the leopard himself. In
the dream it is always dusk. Surrounded by the tall elephant grass
he stands far out on a savannah. The horizon frightens him. A
threat coming ever closer is the leopard's landscape, which returns
night after night in his restless mind.

Sometimes he wakes up abruptly and thinks he understands.
He is not being pursued by a lone leopard, but two. In his
internal landscape the leopard is breaking with its nature as a
lone hunter and joining with another animal. He never manages
to discern what kind of weapons he is carrying during his recurrent
nocturnal hunts. Is he setting out snares or does he carry
a spear with a hand-wrought iron point? Or is he following the
leopard empty-handed? The landscape stretches away in his
dreams as an endless plain where he senses an indistinct river
bed at the distant edge of his vision. He burns the tall elephant
grass to drive out the leopard. Sometimes he also thinks he spies
the leopard's shadow, like a rapid movement against the moonlit
terrain. The rest is silence, his own breathing echoing inside the
dream.

The leopard is bringing a message, he thinks when he wakes.
A message I haven't yet managed to decipher.

When the malaria attack forces his mind into hallucinations,
he sees the leopard's watchful eye.

It's Janine, he thinks in confusion. It's her eye I see; she's looking
up at me from the bottom of the river as I'm balancing on the
span of the iron bridge. She has drawn a leopard skin over her
shoulders so I won't know it's her.

But she's dead, isn't she? When I left Sweden and put all my
old horizons behind me, she had already been gone for seven
years. Now I've been in Africa for almost eighteen years.

The malaria attack flings him up from his lethargy, and when
he awakes he doesn't know where he is. The revolver resting
against his cheek makes him remember. He listens to the darkness.

I'm surrounded by bandits, he thinks desperately. It's Luka
who lured them here, severed the telephone line, cut off the electricity.
They're waiting outside in the dark. Soon they will come
to tear open my chest and carry off my still beating heart.

Summoning all his remaining strength, he sits up in bed so
that his back is resting against the bedstead. Why don't I hear
anything, he wonders. The silence ...

Why aren't the hippos sighing by the river? Where's that
damned Luka? He yells into the dark, but no one answers. He
has the pistol in his hands.

He waits.

Werner Masterton's severed head lies in a pool of blood
on the kitchen floor. Two forks are stuck in his eyes.
In the dining room sits Masterton's headless body
at the table, the chopped-off hands lie on a tray in front of him,
the white tablecloth is drenched in blood.

In the bedroom Olofson finds Ruth Masterton with her
throat slit, her head almost detached from her body. She is
naked, one of her thighbones smashed by a powerful axe-blow.
Flies swarm over her body and he thinks that what he is seeing
can't be real.

He notices that he is weeping from terror, and when he comes
out of the house he collapses to the ground. The waiting Africans
shrink back, and he screams at them not to go in. He calls to
Robert to fetch the neighbours, call the police, and suddenly in
despair he fires his shotgun into the air.

Late in the afternoon he returns home, paralysed, apathetic.
He still can't face the rage that he knows will come. For the whole
long day the rumour has spread in the white colony, cars have
come and gone, and one opinion is soon discernible. Ruth and
Werner Masterton did not fall victim to normal bandits. Even
though their car is gone, valuables vanished, this senseless double
murder is something more, a dammed-up hatred that has found
its release. This is a racial murder, a political murder. Ruth and
Werner Masterton have met their fate at the hands of selfappointed
black avengers.

At the house of one of the Mastertons' neighbours the white
colony quickly gathers for a meeting to discuss broader security
measures. But Olofson doesn't attend; he says he can't face it.
Someone at the meeting suggests visiting Olofson that evening
to report on what has been decided. But he refuses the visit; he
has his dogs and his weapons, he knows how to be careful.

When he returns to his house it has started to rain, a torrential
pounding rain that cuts visibility almost to zero. He thinks
he glimpses a black shadow disappearing behind the house as he
turns into the courtyard. For a long time he stays sitting in the
car with the windscreen wipers working frantically. I'm afraid, he
realises. More afraid than I've ever been before. The ones who
murdered Ruth and Werner have also stabbed their knives into
me. He takes the safety off his gun and runs through the rain,
unlocks the door and slams it hard behind him.

The rain booms on the sheet-metal roof, the German shepherd
he was given when he turned forty is sitting strangely motionless
on the kitchen floor. Immediately he has the feeling that someone
has been inside the house while he was gone. Something in the
dog's behaviour troubles him. Usually it meets him with energetic
joy, but now it is inexplicably quiet.

He looks at the dog given to him by Ruth and Werner
Masterton and realises that real life is turning into a nightmare.
He squats down in front of the dog and scratches behind his ear.

'What is it?' he whispers. 'Tell me what it is, show me if something
has happened.'

He walks through his house, still with his pistol ready, and
the dog follows him quietly. The feeling that someone has been
inside the house doesn't leave him, even though he can't see that
anything is missing or has been moved. And yet he knows.

He lets the dog out to join the others.

'Keep watch now,' he says.

All night long he sits in a chair with his weapons close by.
There is a hatred that is boundless, a hatred for the whites which
he only now comprehends. Nothing suggests that he would be
spared from being enveloped by this hatred. The price he pays
for the good life he has led in Africa is that he now sits awake
with his weapons next to him.

At dawn he dozes off in his chair. Dreams take him back to
his past. He sees himself laboriously trudging through snow
metres deep, a pack on his back and wearing ski boots that are
always too big. Somewhere he glimpses Janine's face,
Célestine
in
her case.

He wakes up with a jolt and realises that someone is pounding
on the kitchen door. He takes the safety off his gun and opens
the door. Luka stands outside. Out of nowhere comes the fury
and he points his gun at Luka, presses the cold barrel against his
chest.

'The best explanation you've ever given me,' he shouts. 'That's
what I want. And I want it now. Otherwise you'll never come
inside my house again.'

His outburst, the pistol with the safety off, doesn't seem to
faze the dignified black man standing before him.

'A white snake cast itself at my breast,' he says. 'Like a flame
of fire it bored through my body. In order not to die I was forced
to seek out a
kashinakashi
. He lives a long way from here, he's
hard to find. I walked without stopping for a day and a night.
He welcomed me and freed me of the white snake. I came back
at once,
Bwana
.'

'You're lying, you damned Negro,' says Olofson. 'A white snake?
There aren't any white snakes, and there aren't any snakes that
can bore through a person's chest. I'm not interested in your
superstitions, I want to know the truth.'

'What I'm saying is true,
Bwana
,' says Luka. 'A white snake
forced its way through my chest.'

In rage Olofson strikes him with the barrel of his pistol. Blood
runs from the torn skin on Luka's cheek, but he still fails to
disturb the man's unflappable dignity.

'It's 1987,' Olofson says. 'You're a grown man, you've lived among
mzunguz
your whole life. You know that the African superstition
is your own backwardness, ancient notions that you are too weak
to free yourself from. This too is something the whites have to
help you with. If we weren't here, you would all kill each other
with your illusions.'

'Our president is an educated man,
Bwana
,' says Luka.

'Perhaps,' says Olofson. 'He has banned sorcery. A witch doctor
can be sent to prison.'

'Our president always has a white handkerchief in his hand,
Bwana
,' Luka goes on, unperturbed. 'He keeps it to make himself
invulnerable, to protect himself from sorcery. He knows that he
can't prevent what is real just by prohibiting it.'

He's unreachable, Olofson thinks. He's the one I should fear
most, since he knows my habits.

'Your brothers have murdered my friends,' he says. 'But you
know that, don't you?'

'Everyone knows it,
Bwana
,' says Luka.

'Good people,' Olofson says. 'Hard-working people, innocent
people.'

'No one is innocent,
Bwana
,' says Luka. 'It's a sad event, but
sad events must happen sometimes.'

'Who killed them?' Olofson asks. 'If you know anything, tell
me.'

'Nobody knows anything,
Bwana
,' Luka replies calmly.

'I think you're lying,' says Olofson. 'You always know what's
going on, sometimes even before it happens. But now you don't
know anything, all of a sudden nothing at all. Maybe it was a
white snake that killed them and cut off their heads?'

'Maybe it was,
Bwana
,' says Luka.

'You've worked for me almost twenty years,' Olofson says. 'I've
always treated you well, paid you well, given you clothes, a radio,
everything you asked for and even things you didn't ask for. And
yet I don't trust you. What is there to prevent you from smashing
a
panga
into my head one morning instead of serving me my
coffee? You people cut the throats of your benefactors, you talk
about white snakes, and you turn to witch doctors. What do you
think would happen if all the whites left this country? What
would you eat?'

'Then we would decide,
Bwana
,' Luka says.

Olofson lowers his pistol. 'One more time,' he says. 'Who killed
Ruth and Werner Masterton?'

'Whoever did it knows,
Bwana
,' says Luka. 'No one else.'

'But you have an idea, don't you?' says Olofson. 'What's going
on in your head?'

'It's an unsettled time,
Bwana
,' Luka replies. 'People have nothing
to eat. Our lorries filled with eggs are hijacked. Hungry people
are dangerous just before they become completely powerless. They
see where the food is, they hear about the meals the whites eat,
they are starving.'

'But why Ruth and Werner?' Olofson asks. 'Why them of all
people?'

'Everything must begin somewhere,
Bwana
,' Luka says. 'A direction
must always be chosen.'

Of course he's right, Olofson thinks. In the dark a bloody
decision is reached, a finger points in an arbitrary direction, and
there stands Ruth and Werner Masterton's house. Next time the
finger could be pointing at me.

'One thing you should know,' he tells Luka. 'I've never killed
anyone. But I won't hesitate. Not even if I have to kill you.'

'I'll keep that in mind,
Bwana
,' says Luka.

A car comes slowly along the muddy, rutted road from the
hen houses. Olofson recognises Peter Motombwane's rusty
Peugeot.

'Coffee and tea,' he says to Luka. 'Motombwane doesn't like
coffee.'

They sit on the terrace.

'You've been expecting me, of course,' Motombwane says, as
he stirs his tea.

'Actually, no,' Olofson replies. 'Right now I'm expecting both
everything and nothing.'

'You forget that I'm a journalist,' says Motombwane. 'You forget
that you're an important person yourself. You were the first to
see what happened.'

Without warning Hans Olofson begins to sob; a violent
outburst of sorrow and fear is released from inside him.
Motombwane waits with his head bowed, his gaze directed at
the cracked stone floor of the terrace.

'I'm tired,' Olofson says when the fit has passed. 'I see my
friends dead, the first people I met when I came to Africa. I see
their maimed bodies, an utterly inconceivable violence.'

'Or perhaps not,' Motombwane says slowly.

'You'll get your details,' Olofson says. 'You'll get all the gore
you think your readers can stand. But first you have to explain
to me what happened.'

Motombwane throws out his hands. 'I'm no policeman,' he
says.

'You're an African,' Olofson says. 'Besides, you're intelligent,
you're educated, and you surely don't believe in superstition any
longer. You're a journalist. You have the background to explain
this to me.'

'Much of what you say is true,' Motombwane replies. 'But you're
wrong if you think I'm not superstitious. I am. With my mind I
turn away from it, but in my heart it will always be part of me.
One can move to a foreign land, as you have done, one can seek
his fortune, shape his life. But no one can ever totally leave his
origins behind. Something will always remain, as more than a
memory, as a living reminder of who you really are. I don't pray
to the gods carved from wood, I go to doctors in white coats
when I get sick. But I also listen to the voices of my ancestors;
I wrap a black band around my wrist as protection before I board
an aeroplane.'

'Why Werner and Ruth?' Olofson asks. 'Why this senseless
bloodbath?'

'You're on the wrong track,' replies Motombwane. 'You're not
thinking logically because you've chosen the wrong starting point.
Your white brain is deceiving you. If you want to understand you
have to think black thoughts. And that's not something you can
do, in the same way that I can't formulate white thoughts. You
ask why it should be Werner and Ruth who were killed. You
might just as well ask why not. You talk about a senseless double
murder. I'm not altogether sure that it was. Decapitation prevents
people from haunting, severed hands prevent people from taking
revenge. It's perfectly obvious that they were killed by Africans,
but it was not as senseless as you imagine.'

'So you think it was a normal robbery-murder,' says Olofson.

Motombwane shakes his head. 'If it had occurred a year ago
I would have thought so,' he replies. 'But not now, not with the
unrest that is growing in our country with each day that passes.
Opposing political forces grow in this unrest. I think that Ruth
and Werner fell victim to killers who actually wanted to sink
their
pangas
into the heads of the black leaders in this country.
There are also black
mzunguz
. You erroneously think that it means
white man
, when it actually means
rich man
. Because it was natural
to associate wealth with whites, the original meaning of the word
has been lost. Today I think it's important to reclaim the real
meaning of the word.'

'Give me an explanation,' Olofson says. 'Draw me a political
weather map, a conceivable picture, of what might have happened.'

'The first thing you have to understand is that what I do is
dangerous,' says Motombwane. 'The politicians in our country
are unscrupulous. They guard their power by letting their dogs
run free. There is one single efficient organ in this country, well
organised and constantly active, and that is the president's secret
police. The opposition is watched by a fine-meshed net of
informers. In every town, in every company there is someone who
is connected to this secret police. Even on your farm there is at
least one man who once a week reports to an unknown superior.
That's what I mean when I say it's dangerous. Without your
knowing it, Luka could be the man who reports from here.

'No opposition must be permitted to grow. The politicians
who rule today regard our land as prey. In Africa it's easy simply
to disappear. Journalists who have been too critical and didn't
listen to the words of warning have vanished; newspaper editors
have been selected for their loyalty to the party, and this means
that nothing is printed about the vanished journalists in the
papers. I can't make it any plainer than that. There is an undercurrent
of events in this country that nobody knows about.
Rumours spread, but there is no way to confirm them. People
are murdered through arranged suicides. Massacred corpses on
railway tracks, soaked with alcohol, become accidents due to
drunkenness. Alleged robbers who are shot down during escape
attempts may be people who tried to take over the state-controlled
labour unions. The examples are endless.