The Eye Of The Leopard (25 page)

He thinks back to his conversation with Peter Motombwane,
and makes his decision. He calls in one of the clerks waiting
outside the hut.

'Go and fetch me Eisenhower Mudenda,' he says. 'At once.'

The man stands there, uncertain.

'What are you waiting for?' Olofson shouts. 'Eisenhower
Mudenda!
Sanksako
! You'll get a kick in the
mataku
if he isn't here
in five minutes.'

A few minutes later Eisenhower Mudenda stands inside the
dark hut. He's breathing hard and Olofson can tell that the man
has been running.

'Sit down,' says Olofson, pointing at a chair. 'But wipe yourself
off first. I don't want chicken shit on the chair.'

Mudenda quickly wipes himself off and sits down on the edge
of the chair. His disguise is excellent, Olofson thinks. An insignificant
old man. But none of the Africans on this farm dares cross
him. Even Motombwane is afraid of him.

For a brief moment he hesitates. The risk is too great, he
thinks. If I start this back fire, there will be chaos. And yet he
knows it is necessary; he has made his decision.

'Someone has killed one of my dogs,' he says. 'His head was
nailed to a tree. But you probably know this already, don't you?'

'Yes,
Bwana
,' replies Mudenda.

The lack of expression, Olofson thinks. It says everything.

'Let's speak openly, Eisenhower,' Olofson says. 'You've been here
for many years. For thousands of days you have gone to your hen
house, and countless eggs have passed through your hands. Of
course I know you're a sorcerer, a man who can do
muloji
. All the
blacks are afraid of you, and none of them will say a word against
you. But I'm a
bwana
, a
mzungu
that your
muloji
won't work on.
Now I'm thinking of asking you for something, Eisenhower. You
must regard this as an order, in the same way as if I tell you to
work on your day off. Someone on this farm killed my dog. I
want to know who it was. Maybe you already know. But I want
to know too, and I want to know soon. If you don't tell me, I'll
have to assume that you were the one who did it. And then you'll
be sacked. Not even your
muloji
can prevent that. You'll have to
leave your house, and you will never be allowed to show your
face on the farm again. If you do, the police will take you away.'

I should have talked to him outside in the sun, thinks Olofson.
I can't see his face in here.

'I can give
Bwana
his answer right now,' says Mudenda, and
Olofson thinks he can hear something hard in his voice.

'Even better. I'm listening.'

'Nobody on this farm killed a dog,
Bwana
,' Mudenda says.
'People came in the night and then left again. I know who they
are, but I can't say anything.'

'Why not?' Olofson asks.

'My knowledge comes to me in visions,
Bwana
,' Mudenda
replies. 'Only sometimes can one reveal his visions. A vision can
be turned into a poison that will kill my brain.'

'Use your
muloji
,' Olofson says. 'Create a counter-poison, tell
me about your vision.'

'No,
Bwana
,' Mudenda says.

'Then you are fired,' says Olofson. 'At this instant your work
on my farm is ended. By tomorrow, at dawn, you and your family
must be out of your house. Now I'll pay you the wages I owe
you.'

He places a pile of notes on the table.

'I will go,
Bwana
,' says Eisenhower Mudenda. 'But I will come
back.'

'No,' Olofson says. 'Not if you don't want the police to take
you away.'

'The police are black too,
Bwana
,' says Eisenhower Mudenda.

He picks up the stack of bank notes and vanishes into the
white sunlight. A test of power between reality and superstition,
thinks Olofson. I have to believe that reality is stronger.

That night he barricades himself in his house and again waits
for something to happen. He sleeps fitfully on top of the covers
of his bed. The dead and dismembered bodies of Werner and
Ruth wake him time and time again. Exhausted and pale, he lets
Luka in at dawn. Black rain clouds are looming on the horizon.

'Nothing is as it should be,
Bwana
,' Luka says gravely.

'What?' Olofson asks.

'The farm is silent,
Bwana
,' replies Luka.

Olofson gets into his car and drives quickly towards the hen
houses. The work stations are abandoned. Not a person in sight.
The eggs are ungathered, the feed chutes empty. Empty egg
cartons lean against the wheels of the lorries. The keys are in the
ignition.

The test of power, he thinks. The witch doctor and I appear
in the arena. In a rage he gets back into his car. With screeching
brakes he stops among the low mud houses. The men are sitting
in groups at their fires, the women and children in the doorways.
Naturally they've been waiting for me, he thinks. He calls over
some of the older foremen.

'Nobody is working,' he says. 'Why not?'

The reply is silence, hesitant glances, fear.

'If everyone returns to work at once I won't even ask the reason,'
he says. 'No one will be fired, no one will have his wages docked.
But everyone has to return to work now.'

'We can't,
Bwana
,' says one of the oldest foremen.

'Why not?' Olofson asks again.

'Eisenhower Mudenda is no longer on the farm,
Bwana
,' the
foreman goes on. 'Before he left he called us together and said
that every egg that is now laid is a snake egg. If we touch the
eggs we will be bitten by poisonous fangs. The farm will be overrun
with snakes.'

Olofson thinks for a moment. Words won't help, he realises. He
has to do something, something they can see with their own eyes.

He gets into his car and returns to the hen houses and gathers
a carton of eggs. When he comes back he assembles the foremen
around him. Without a word he crushes egg after egg, letting the
whites and the yolks drip to the ground. The men shrink back,
but he continues.

'No snakes,' he says. 'Normal eggs. Who sees a snake?'

But the foremen are unreachable.

'When
we
touch the eggs,
Bwana
, there will be snakes.'

Olofson holds out an egg, but no one dares touch it.

'You will lose your jobs,' he says. 'You will lose your houses,
everything.'

'We don't believe that,
Bwana
.'

'Do you hear what I'm saying?'

'The hens must have feed,
Bwana
.'

'I'll find other workers. People are queueing up to work on a
white farm.'

'Not when they hear about the snakes,
Bwana
.'

'There aren't any snakes.'

'We think there are,
Bwana
. That's why we're not working.'

'You're afraid of Eisenhower Mudenda. You're afraid of his
muloji
.'

'Eisenhower Mudenda is a smart man,
Bwana
.'

'He's no smarter than any of you.'

'He speaks to us through our forefathers,
Bwana
. We're
Africans, you're a white
bwana
. You can't understand.'

'I'll sack you all if you don't go back to work.'

'We know that,
Bwana
.'

'I'll get workers from another part of the country.'

'Nobody will work on a farm where the hens lay snake eggs,
Bwana
.'

'I'm telling you, there are no eggs with snakes in them!'

'Only Eisenhower Mudenda can take away the snakes,
Bwana
.'

'I've fired him.'

'He's waiting to come back,
Bwana
.'

I'm losing, Olofson thinks. I'm losing the way the white man
always loses in Africa. There's no way to start a back fire against
superstition.

'Send for Mudenda,' he says and walks back to his car and
drives to his mud hut.

Suddenly Mudenda stands like a silhouette in the doorway
against the bright white sunlight.

'I won't ask you to sit down,' says Olofson. 'You have your job
back. Actually I ought to force you to show the workers that
there aren't any snakes in the eggs. But I won't do that. Tell the
workers you have lifted your
muloji
. Go back to work, that's all.'

Eisenhower Mudenda walks out into the sun, and Olofson
follows him.

'One more thing you should know. I don't admit that I'm
defeated. One day there won't be any more
muloji
, and the blacks
will turn against you and crush your head with their wooden
clubs. I don't intend to come to your rescue.'

'That will never happen,
Bwana
,' says Eisenhower Mudenda.

'Hens will never lay eggs with snakes inside,' replies Olofson.
'What will you do when someone asks to see one of these snakes?'

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

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 orchestra 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.'