The Eye Of The Leopard (31 page)

'A person like you doesn't deserve to live,' says Olofson. 'I ought
to kill you here and now.'

'But you won't,' says Håkansson, getting to his feet. 'Now you
have to go. Check in at the Elephant's Head and get some sleep.
Tomorrow you won't be so upset.'

Olofson snatches the pictures back and leaves; Håkansson
follows him.

'I'm going to send some of these pictures to Sida,' Olofson
says. 'Somebody will have to take action.'

'The pictures can never be traced to me,' replies Håkansson.
'An embarrassing complaint from a Swedish egg farmer who has
lived in Africa too long. The matter will be stamped, filed away
and disappear.'

Furious, Olofson gets into his car, turns the key and switches
on the headlights. Håkansson is standing in his silk pyjamas,
gleaming white in the African night. I can't get to him, thinks
Olofson. He puts the car in reverse.

Then he quickly changes his mind, shoves it into first gear,
stomps on the accelerator, and speeds straight towards Håkansson.
Olofson shuts his eyes as he runs over him. There is only a soft
thud and a jolt to the chassis. Without looking back he keeps
going towards the gate. The night watchman is asleep, the burnt
rubber boot is stinking. Olofson pushes open the gates and leaves
Kabwe.

In this country they hang murderers, he thinks in despair. I'll
have to say it was an accident and I got so confused that I just
drove off without reporting what happened. I was recently
subjected to a terrifying attack myself, I'm tired, burned out. He
drives towards Kalulushi with a feeling that he should regret what
he's done, but he can't. He's sure that Lars Håkansson is dead.

At dawn he drives off the main road and stops; the sun is
rising over an endless moorland. He burns the photos of Peggy
and Marjorie and lets the ashes drift away on the warm wind.

He has killed two people, maybe even a third. Peter
Motombwane was probably the best man in this country, he
thinks. Lars Håkansson was a monster. Killing a human being
is something incomprehensible. If I'm going to survive I have to
tell myself that I atoned for Peter Motombwane by driving my
car straight at Håkansson. Something is restored, even though
it changes nothing.

For two weeks he waits for the police; anxiety gnaws at him
to the point of dissolution. He leaves as much as he can to his
foremen and says he's suffering from constant malaria attacks.
Patel visits his farm and Olofson asks him for some sleeping pills.
Then he sleeps dreamlessly and often wakes up only when Luka
has been standing at the kitchen door pounding for a long time.

He thinks that he ought to visit Joyce Lufuma, speak to her,
but he doesn't know what to say. I can only wait, he thinks. Wait
for the police to come in a broken-down car and get me. Maybe
I'll have to give them some petrol so they can take me away.

One morning two weeks later Luka tells him that Peggy and
Marjorie have returned on the bus from Lusaka. Terror paralyses
him. Now the police are coming, he thinks. Now it's all over.

But the only ones who come are Peggy and Marjorie. They
stand in the sunshine outside the dark mud hut where he sits
with his papers. He goes out to them and asks why they came
back from Lusaka.

'
Mzunguz
came and said that
Bwana
Lars had died,' says
Marjorie. 'We couldn't live in our house any more. A man who
comes from the same country as you gave us money to come back
here. Now we are here.'

He drives them home. 'Nothing is too late,' he says. 'I'll arrange
it some other way. You will have the nursing training as we
planned.'

We share a secret even though they don't know it, he thinks.
Maybe they have a feeling that Håkansson's death has something
to do with me and the pictures. Or maybe they don't.

'How did
Bwana
Lars die?' he asks.

'An accident, said the man from your country,' replies Peggy.

'Didn't any police officers come?'

'No police,' says Peggy.

A sleeping night watchman, he thinks. I didn't see any other
cars. Maybe Håkansson was the only one at the guest house. The
night watchman in Lusaka is afraid of getting involved. Maybe
he didn't even say I was there the night it happened. Peggy and
Marjorie have certainly not said anything, and nobody has asked
them about what happened that night in Kabwe. Maybe there
wasn't even any enquiry. An inexplicable accident, a dead Swedish
aid expert is flown home in a coffin. An item in the papers, Sida
attends the funeral. People wonder, but say to themselves that
Africa is the mysterious continent.

Suddenly he realises that no one is going to accuse him of
Lars Håkansson's death. A Swedish aid expert dies in strange
circumstances. The police investigate, find pornographic photos,
and the case is quickly closed. The development of a network of
link stations for telecommunications will not be served by
disclosing suspicions that a crime has been committed. The link
stations have set me free, he thinks. He sits underneath the tree
at Joyce Lufuma's mud house. Peggy and Marjorie have gone to
collect wood, the youngest daughters fetch water. Joyce is
pounding maize with a heavy wooden pole.

The future for Africa depends on the plight of Africa's women,
he thinks. While the men out in the villages sit under the shade
of a tree, the women are working in the fields, having children,
carrying fifty-kilo sacks of maize for miles on their heads. My
farm is not the real picture of Africa, with men making up the
primary work force. Africa's women carry the continent on their
heads. Seeing a woman with a large burden on her head gives an
impression of power and self-confidence. No one knows the back
problems that result from these loads they carry.

Joyce Lufuma is perhaps thirty-five years old. She has borne
four daughters and she still has enough strength to pound the
maize with a thick pole. In her life there has never been room
for reflection, only work, life-sustaining work. She has perhaps
vaguely imagined that at least two of her daughters would be
granted the chance to live another life. Whatever dreams she has
she invests in them. The pole that pounds the maize thumps like
a drum. Africa is a woman pounding maize, he thinks. From this
starting point, all ideas of the future for this continent must be
derived.

Joyce finishes pounding and begins to sieve her corn meal. Now
and then she casts a glance at him, and when their eyes meet she
laughs and her white teeth shine. Work and beauty go together,
he says to himself. Joyce Lufuma is the most beautiful and dignified
woman I have ever met. My love for her is born of respect.
The sensual reaches me through her unbroken will to live. There
her wealth is so much greater than mine. Her toil to keep her
children alive, to be able to give them food and not to see them
waste away from malnutrition, not to have to carry them to graveyards
out in the bush.

Her wealth is boundless. In comparison with her I am a very
poor person. It would be wrong to claim that my money would
increase her well-being. It would only make her work easier. She
would not have to die at the age of forty, worn out by her labours.

The four daughters return in a row, carrying water buckets
and wood. This I must remember, he thinks, and abruptly realises
that he has decided to leave Africa. After nineteen years the decision
has formulated itself. He sees the daughters coming along
a path, their black bodies erect to help their heads balance their
burdens; he sees them and thinks about the time he lay behind
a dilapidated brickworks outside the town in Sweden.

I came here, he thinks. When I lay behind a rusty brick furnace
I wondered what the world looked like. Now I know. Joyce Lufuma
and her four daughters. It took me over thirty years to reach this
insight.

He shares their meal, eating
nshima
and vegetables. The charcoal
fire flares, Peggy and Marjorie tell about Lusaka. They have
already forgotten Lars Håkansson and his camera, he thinks.
What is past is past. For a long time he sits by their fire, listening,
saying little. Now that he has decided to sell his farm, leave, he
is no longer in a hurry. He isn't even upset that Africa has
conquered him, devoured him to a point where he can no longer
go on. The starry sky above his head is perfectly clear. Finally he
is sitting alone with Joyce; her daughters are asleep inside the
mud house.

'Soon it will be morning again,' he says, and he speaks in her
own language, Bemba, which he has learned passably well during
all the years he has been in Africa.

'If God wills, one more day,' she replies.

He thinks of all the words that don't exist in her language.
Words for happiness, the future, hope. Words that wouldn't be
possible because they do not represent the experiences of these
people.

'Who am I?' he asks her.

'A
bwana mzungu
,' she replies.

'Nothing more?' he asks.

She looks at him and doesn't understand. 'Is there anything
more?' she asks.

Maybe not, he thinks. Maybe that's all I am, a
bwana mzungu
.
A strange
bwana
who doesn't have any children, not even a wife.
He decides to tell her the absolute truth.

'I will be going away from here, Joyce. Other people will take
over the farm. But I will take care of you and your daughters.
Maybe it's better if you return with your children to the regions
around Luapula where you came from. There you have family,
your origins. I will give you money so you can build a house and
buy enough
limas
of farmland so that you can live a good life.
Before I leave I have to arrange for Peggy and Marjorie to finish
their nursing studies. Maybe it would be better if they went to
the school in Chipata. It isn't too far from Luapula, and not as
big as Lusaka. But I want you to know that I'm leaving, and I
want to ask you not to tell anyone yet. The people on the farm
might be worried, and I don't want that.'

She listens to him attentively, and he speaks slowly to show
her that he is serious.

'I'm going back to my homeland,' he goes on. 'In the same way
as you might return to Luapula.'

All at once she smiles at him, as if she has understood the
real meaning of his words.

'Your family is waiting for you there,' she says. 'Your wife and
your children.'

'Yes,' he says. 'They are waiting there, and they have waited a
long time.'

She asks eagerly about his family, and he creates one for her,
three sons and two daughters, a wife. She could never understand
anyway, he thinks. The white man's life would be incomprehensible
to her.

Late in the night he gets up and walks to his car. In the beam of
the headlights he sees her close the door to the mud house. Africans
are hospitable, he thinks. And yet I have never been inside her house.

The German shepherds come to meet him outside his house.
He will never have dogs again, he thinks. I don't want to live
surrounded by noisy sirens and animals trained to go for the
throat. It's not natural for a Swede to keep a revolver under his
pillow, to check every night that it's loaded, that the magazine
rotates its cartridges. He walks through the silent house and
wonders what there is for him to go back to. Eighteen years
might be too long. He has little idea what has happened in
Sweden in all these years. He sits down in the room he calls his
work room, turns on a lamp and checks that the curtains are
drawn.

When I sell the farm I will have stacks of
kwacha
banknotes
that I can't take with me or even exchange. Patel can surely help
me with some, but he will see the opportunity and demand an
exchange fee of at least fifty per cent. I have money in a bank in
London, even though I don't really know how much. When I
leave I will do so empty-handed.

Again he doubts that his departure is necessary. I could accept
the revolver under the pillow, he thinks. The terror that is always
present, the uncertainty that I have lived with this long. If I stay
here another fifteen years I can retire, maybe move to Livingstone
or Sweden. Others besides Patel can help me get the money out
to secure my remaining years.

I have nothing to go back to in Sweden. My father is long
dead, and hardly anyone in my home town will remember who
I am. How will I survive in a winter landscape now that I've
grown used to Africa's heat – exchange my sandals for ski boots?

For a moment he toys with the thought of returning to his
studies, using his middle years to complete his law degree. For
twenty years he has worked at shaping his life, yet he has remained
in Africa because of chance events. Going back to Sweden would
not be a return. I would have to start all over again. But with what?

He wanders restlessly about his room. A hippo bellows from
the Kafue. How many cobras have I seen during my years in
Africa? he asks himself. Three or four a year, countless crocodiles,
hippos and pythons. In all these years only a single green
mamba, which had sneaked into the hen house. I ran over an ape
with my car outside Mufulira once, a big male baboon. In Luangwa
I saw lions and thousands of elephants,
pocos
and kudus have
leaped high through the grass and sometimes crossed my path.
But I have never seen a leopard, only sensed its shadow on that
night Judith Fillington asked me to help her with her farm.

When I leave here Africa will fade away like an extraordinary
dream, stretched out to encompass a decisive part of my life.
What am I actually going to take with me? A hen and an egg?
That tree branch with inscriptions that I found down by the river
one time, a witch doctor's forgotten staff? Or will I take Peter
Motombwane's holy
panga
with me, and show people the weapon
that sliced up two of my friends and that one night was going
to be raised over my own throat? Should I fill my pockets with
the red dirt?