Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

For Hans Olofson, death is much too complicated to be compared to a restaurant owner. Thinking of death as a person of flesh and blood, with a hat and coat and sniffling nose, is too simple. If death had a face, clothes and shoes, it wouldn’t be any harder to conquer than one of the scarecrows that Under the horse dealer uses to protect his berry bushes. Death is more vague, a cool breeze that suddenly wafts across the river without rippling the water. He won’t come any closer than that to death this spring, until the great catastrophe occurs and death blows its shrillest trumpet.

And yet it’s something he will always remember. Much later, when the African night closes in on him, and his childhood is just as distant as the land he now inhabits, he remembers what they talked about, on the boulder by the river or in Janine’s kitchen. As if in a fleeting dream, he remembers the year when Janine taught them to dance and they stood in the darkness outside her house and heard her playing ‘A Night in Tunisia’...

In Kitwe a laughing African comes running to meet them.

Hans Olofson sees that he has trainers on his feet, with no holes, and the heels have not been cut off.

‘This is Robert,’ says Ruth. ‘Our chauffeur. The only one on the farm we can count on.’

‘How many employees do you have?’ asks Olofson.

‘Two hundred and eighty,’ replies Ruth.

Olofson crawls into the back seat of a Jeep that seems much the worse for wear.

‘You have your passport, don’t you?’ asks Werner. ‘We’ll be going through several checkpoints.’

‘What are they looking for?’ Olofson asks.

‘Smuggled goods headed for Zaire,’ says Ruth, ‘or South African spies. Weapons. But actually they just want to beg for food and cigarettes.’

They reach the first roadblock just north of Kitwe. Crossed logs, covered with barbed wire, cut off the lanes of the road. A dilapidated bus stops just before they arrive, and Olofson sees a young soldier with an automatic rifle chase the passengers out of it. There seems to be no end to the Africans who come pouring out, and he wonders how many can actually fit inside. While the passengers are forced to line up, a soldier climbs up on the roof of the bus and starts tearing apart the shapeless pile of bundles and mattresses. A goat that was tied up suddenly kicks its way loose, jumps down from the roof of the bus, and disappears bleating into the bush by the side of the road. An old woman begins to shriek and wail and a tremendous commotion breaks out. The soldier on the roof yells and raises his rifle. The old woman wants to chase her goat but is restrained by other soldiers who suddenly appear from a grass hut beside the road.

‘Coming right after a bus is a nightmare,’ says Ruth. ‘Why didn’t you overtake it?’

‘I didn’t see it, madame,’ replies Robert.

‘The next time you’ll see the bus,’ says Ruth, annoyed. ‘Or you can look for a new job.’

‘Yes, madame,’ Robert answers.

The soldiers seem tired after searching the bus and wave the Jeep through without inspecting it. Olofson sees a moonscape spreading before them, high hills of slag alternating with deep mine pits and blasted crevices. He realises that now he is in the midst of the huge copper belt that stretches like a wedge into Katanga province in Zaire. At the same time he wonders what he would have done if he hadn’t met the Mastertons. Would he have got off the train in Kitwe? Or would he have stayed in the compartment and returned with the train to Lusaka?

They pass through more roadblocks. Police and drunken soldiers compare his face to his passport photo, and he can feel terror rising inside him.

They hate the whites, he thinks. Just as much as the whites obviously hate the blacks...

They turn off the main road and suddenly the earth is quite red. A vast, undulating fenced landscape opens before the Jeep.

Two Africans open a wooden gate and offer hesitant salutes. The Jeep pulls up to a white two-storey villa with colonnades and flowering bougainvillea. Olofson climbs out, thinking that the white palace reminds him of the courthouse in his distant home town.

‘Tonight you’ll be our guest,’ says Werner. ‘In the morning I’ll drive you to Kalulushi.’

Ruth shows him to his room. They walk down cool corridors; tiled floors with deep rugs. An elderly man appears before them. Olofson sees that he is barefoot.

‘Louis will take care of you while you’re here,’ says Ruth. ‘When you leave you can give him a coin. But not too much. Don’t upset him.’

Olofson is troubled by the man’s ragged clothes. His trousers have two gaping holes in the knees, as if he has spent his life crawling on them. His faded shirt is frayed and patched.

Olofson looks out a window at a large park extending into the distance. White wicker chairs, a hammock in a giant tree. Somewhere outside he hears Ruth’s excited voice, a door slamming. From the bathroom he hears water running.

‘Your bath is ready, Bwana ,’ says Louis behind him. ‘The towels are on the bed.’

Olofson is suddenly agitated. I have to say something, he thinks. So he understands that I’m not one of them, merely a temporary visitor, who is not used to being assigned a personal servant.

‘Have you been here long?’ he asks.

‘Since I was born, Bwana ,’ Louis replies.

Then he vanishes from the room, and Olofson regrets his question. A master’s question to a servant, he thinks. Even though I mean well I make myself look insincere and common.

He sinks down in the bathtub and asks himself what escape routes are still left to him. He feels like a conman who has grown tired of not being unmasked.

They’re helping me carry out a meaningless assignment, he thinks. They’re ready to drive me to Kalulushi and then help me find the last transport out to the mission station in the bush. They’re going to a lot of trouble for something that’s just an egocentric impulse, a tourist trip with an artificial dream as its motive.

The dream of Mutshatsha died with Janine. I’m plundering her corpse with this excursion to a world where I don’t belong at all. How can I be jealous of a dead person? Of her will, of her stubborn dream, which she clung to despite the fact that she could never realise it? How can an atheistic, unbelieving person take over the dream of being a missionary, helping downtrodden and poverty-stricken people with a religious motive as the foremost incentive?

In the bathtub he decides to return, ask to be driven back to Kitwe. Come up with a credible explanation for why he has to change his plans.

He dresses and goes out into the large park. Under a tall tree that spreads a mighty shadow there is a bench that is carved out of a single block of stone. He scarcely manages to sit down before a servant brings him a cup of tea. All at once Werner Masterton stands before him, dressed in worn overalls.

‘Would you like to see our farm?’ he asks.

They climb into the Jeep, which has been newly washed. Werner puts his big hands on the wheel after pulling a worn sunhat down over his eyes. They drive past long rows of hen houses and fields. Now and then he brakes to a stop and black workers instantly come running. He barks out orders in a mixture of English and a language that is unknown to Olofson.

The whole time Olofson has a feeling that Werner is balancing on an ice floe beneath which an outbreak of rage might erupt at any moment.

‘It’s a big farm,’ he says as they drive on.

‘Not that big,’ says Werner. ‘If it were a different time I would probably have expanded the acreage. Nowadays you never know what’s going to happen next. Maybe they’ll confiscate all the farms from the whites. Out of jealousy, or displeasure at the fact that we’re so infinitely more skilled than the black farmers who started after independence. They hate us for our skill, our ability to organise, our ability to make things work. They hate us because we make money, because our health is better and we live longer. Envy is an African inheritance. But the reason they hate us most is that magic doesn’t work on us.’