Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

One question remains obvious. ‘So things were better before?’

‘What answer can we give to that?’ says Ruth, looking at her husband.

‘Answer with the truth,’ says Werner.

A weak, flickering lamp casts the compartment in darkness. Hans sees a lampshade covered with dead insects. Werner follows his gaze.

‘For a lampshade like that a cleaning woman would have been given the sack,’ he says. ‘Not the next day, not after a warning, but instantly, kicked out on the spot. A train as filthy as this one would have been an impossibility. In a few hours we’ll be in Kabwe. Before, it was called Broken Hill. Even the old name was better. The truth, if you want to know, is that nothing has been maintained or become better. We’re forced to live in the midst of a process of decay.’

‘But—’ says Olofson, before he is interrupted.

‘Your “but” is premature,’ says Ruth. ‘I have a feeling that you want to ask whether the blacks’ lives are better. Not even that is true. Who could take over from all the Europeans who left the country in 1964? There was no preparation, only a boundless arrogance. A bewitched cry for independence, their own flag, maybe soon their own currency.’

‘Taking responsibility requires knowledge,’ Werner continues. ‘In 1964 there were six blacks with university degrees in this country.’

‘A new era is created out of the preceding one,’ Olofson counters. ‘The education system must have been poor.’

‘You’re starting from the wrong assumptions,’ says Ruth. ‘No one was thinking about anything as dramatic as what you call a new era. Development would continue, everyone would be better off, not least the blacks. But without chaos taking over.’

‘A new era doesn’t create itself,’ Olofson insists. ‘What did actually happen?’

‘Treachery,’ says Ruth. ‘The mother countries deceived us. All too late we realised we had been abandoned. In Southern Rhodesia they understood, and there everything has not gone to hell as it has here.’

‘We’ve just been in Salisbury,’ says Werner. ‘There we could breathe. Maybe we’ll move there. The trains ran on time, the lampshades weren’t full of insects. The Africans did what they do best: follow orders.’

‘Freedom,’ says Olofson, and then has no idea what to say next.

‘If freedom is starving to death, then the Africans are on the right track in this country,’ says Ruth.

‘It’s hard to understand,’ says Olofson. ‘Hard to comprehend.’

‘You’ll see for yourself,’ Ruth goes on, smiling at him. ‘There’s no reason for us not to tell you how things stand, because the truth will be revealed to you anyway.’

The train screeches to a stop, and then everything is quiet. Cicadas can be heard in the warm night and Olofson leans out into the darkness. The starry sky is close and he finds the brightly glowing constellation of the Southern Cross.

What was it he had thought when he left Sweden? That he was on his way to a distant, faintly gleaming star?

Ruth Masterton is engrossed in a book with the help of her shaded pocket torch, and Werner is sucking on his extinguished pipe. Olofson feels called upon to take stock of his situation.

Janine, he thinks. Janine is dead. My father drank himself into a wreck that will never again go to sea. My mother consists in her entirety of two photographs from Atelier Strandmark in Sundsvall. Two pictures that instil fear in me, a woman’s face against a backdrop of merciless morning light. I live with an inheritance of the smell of elkhound, of winter nights and an unwavering sense of not being needed. The moment I chose not to conform to my heritage, to become a woodcutter like my father and marry one of the girls I danced with to Kringström’s orchestra in the draughty People’s Hall, I also rejected the only background I had. I passed the lower-school examination as a pupil none of the teachers would ever remember, I endured four terrible years in the county capital and passed a meaningless student examination so that I wouldn’t be a failure. I did my military service in a tank regiment in Skövde, again as a person no one ever noticed. I nourished the hope of becoming a lawyer, the sworn defender of extenuating circumstances. I lived for over a year as a lodger in a dark flat in Uppsala, where a fool sat across from me every day at the breakfast table. The present confusion, indolence and fear within the Swedish working classes have found in me a perfect representative.

Still, I haven’t given up. The failed law studies were only a temporary humiliation — I can survive that. But the fact that I have no dream? That I travel to Africa with someone else’s dream, someone who is dead? Instead of grieving I set off on a journey of penance, as if I were actually to blame for Janine’s death.

One winter night I crept across the cold iron spans of the river bridge. The moon hung like a cold wolf’s eye in the sky, and I was utterly alone. I was fourteen years old and I didn’t fall. But afterwards, when Sture was supposed to follow me...

His thoughts burst. From somewhere he hears a person snoring. He traces the sound to the roof of the train car.

In a sudden flare-up of rage, he gives himself two alternatives: either continue his law studies or return to the frozen landscape of his childhood.

The journey to Africa, to the mission station in Mutshatsha, will fade away. In every person’s life there are ill-considered actions, trips that never needed to be taken. In two weeks he will return to Sweden and leave the Southern Cross behind. The parentheses will then be closed.

Suddenly Werner Masterton is standing by his side and looking out into the darkness.

‘They’re selling diesel fuel,’ he says. ‘I just hope they don’t miscalculate, so we wind up stuck here. Within a year the wandering hunter ants will have transformed this train into a deformed steel skeleton...’

After an hour the train jolts to a start.

Later they stop for an inexplicably long time at Kapiri Mposhi. In the dawn light Olofson falls asleep in his corner. The conductor never appears. Just as the morning’s heat breaks through, the train screeches into Kitwe.

‘Come with us,’ says Ruth. ‘Then we’ll drive you to Kalulushi.’

One day Janine teaches them to dance.

The rest of the town expects her to whine and complain, but she chooses to go in a completely different direction. In music she sees her salvation. She decides that the affliction so deeply incised in her body will be transformed into music. In Hamrin’s music shop she purchases a slide trombone and begins to practise daily. Hurrapelle tries for the longest time to persuade her to choose a more pleasing instrument, like the guitar, mandolin, or possibly a small bass drum. But she persists, forgoing the possible joy of joining in the concerts of the Free Church, and practises by herself in her house by the river. She buys a Dux gramophone and searches often and eagerly through the record selection at the music shop. She is entranced by jazz, in which the trombone often has a prominent role. She listens, plays along, and she learns. On dark winter evenings, when the door-knocking with her magazines is over for the day, and the congregation doesn’t have a prayer meeting or other fellowship, she loses herself in her music. ‘Some of These Days’, ‘Creole Love Call’, and not least ‘A Night in Tunisia’ flow from her trombone.

She plays for Sture and Hans. Astonished, they watch her the first time, barefoot on the kitchen floor, with the gramophone spinning in the background and the brass instrument pressed to her lips. Sometimes she deviates from the melody, but usually the notes are woven together with the orchestra that is pressed into the grooves of the record.