Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Africa, he thinks. I still know nothing about you. Perhaps this is exactly how Africa looked in Janine’s dreams. I no longer recall what we talked about at her kitchen table. But I have a feeling that my normal judgements and thoughts are insufficient or perhaps not even valid out here. Another kind of seeing is required...

He listens to the darkness. He wonders whether it is the silence or the sound that is imagined. Again he is afraid.

There is a catastrophe enclosed within Ruth and Werner Masterton’s friendliness, he thinks. This entire farm, this white house, is enclosed by an anxiety, an anger that has been dammed up for much too long.

He lies awake in the dark and imagines that Africa is a wounded beast of prey that still does not have the strength to get up. The breathing of the earth and the animals coincides, the bush where they hide is impenetrable. Wasn’t that the way Janine imagined this wounded and mangled continent? Like a buffalo forced to its knees, but with just enough power left to keep the hunters at bay.

Maybe she with her empathy could probe more deeply into reality than I can, tramping about on the soil of this continent. Maybe she made a journey in her dreams that was just as real as my meaningless flight to the mission station in Mutshatsha.

There may be another truth as well. Is it true that I hope I’ll meet another Janine at this mission station? A woman who can replace the one who is dead?

He lies awake until dawn suddenly breaks through the dark. Out the window he sees the sun rise like a red ball of fire over the horizon. Suddenly he notices Louis standing by a tree, watching him. Even though the morning is already quite warm, he shivers. What am I afraid of? he thinks. Myself or Africa? What is Africa telling me that I don’t want to know?

At a quarter past seven he bids farewell to Ruth and takes his place next to Werner in the front seat of the Jeep.

‘Come back again,’ says Ruth. ‘You’re always welcome.’

As they drive out through the farm’s big gate where the two Africans helplessly salute, Olofson notices an old man standing in the tall elephant grass next to the road, laughing. Half hidden, he flashes past. Many years later this image will resurface in his consciousness.

A man, half hidden, laughing soundlessly in the early morning...

Would the great Leonardo have wasted his time picking flowers?

They’re sitting in the attic room of the courthouse, and suddenly the great silence is there between them. It’s late spring in 1957 and school is almost over for the year.

For Sture, elementary school is at an end, and middle school awaits. Hans Olofson has another year before he has to make up his mind. He has toyed with the idea of continuing his studies. But why? No child wants to stay a child; they all want to be grown-ups as soon as possible. Yet what does the future actually have to offer him?

For Sture, the path already seems laid out. The great Leonardo hangs on his wall, urging him on. Ashamed, Hans crouches over his own hopeless dream, to see the wooden house cast off its moorings and drift away down the river. When Sture plies him with questions, he has no idea how to answer. Will he go out in the forest and chop his way to the horizon like his father? Hang up his wet rag socks to dry eternally over the stove? He doesn’t know, and he feels envy and unrest as he sits with Sture in the attic room, and the late spring blows in through the open window. Hans has come to suggest that they pick flowers for the last day of school.

Sture sits leaning over an astronomical chart. He makes notes, and Hans knows that he has decided to discover an unknown star.

When Hans suggests flowers, the silence spreads. Leonardo didn’t waste his time going out in the fields hunting for table decorations.

Hans wonders with suppressed fury how Sture can be so damned certain. But he doesn’t say a word. He waits. Waiting for Sture to finish one of the important tasks he has set himself has become more and more common this spring.

Hans senses that the distance between them is growing. Soon the only thing left of their old familiar friendship will be the visits to Janine. He has a feeling that Sture is about to leave. Not the town, but their old friendship. It bothers him. Mostly because he doesn’t understand why, what has happened.

Once he asks Sture straight out.

‘What the hell is supposed to have happened?’ Sture replies.

After that he doesn’t ask again.

But Sture is also changeable. Now, he suddenly flings aside the astronomical chart impatiently and gets up.

‘Shall we go then?’ he says.

They slide down the riverbank and sit under the wide expanse of the river bridge’s iron beams and stone caissons. The spring flood surges past their feet; the usual soft gurgle has been replaced by the roar of the river’s whirlpools. Sture heaves a rotten tree stump into the river, and it floats away like a half-drowned troll.

Without knowing where it comes from, Hans is attacked by a sudden fury. The blood pounds in his temples and he feels that he has to make himself visible to the world.

He has often fantasised about completing a test of manhood, climbing across the river on one of the curved bridge spans that are only a couple of decimetres thick. Climbing up to a giddy height, knowing full well that a fall would mean his death.

Undiscovered stars, he thinks furiously. I’ll climb closer to the stars than Sture ever will.

‘I was thinking I’d climb across the bridge span,’ he says.

Sture looks at the gigantic iron arches.

‘It can’t be done,’ he says.

‘The hell it can’t,’ says Hans. ‘You just have to do it.’

Sture looks at the bridge span again.

‘Only a child would be that stupid,’ he says.

Hans’s heart turns a somersault in his chest. Does he mean him? That climbing across bridge spans is for little children?

‘You don’t dare,’ he says. ‘God damn it, you don’t dare.’

Sture looks at him in astonishment. Usually Hans’s voice is almost soft. But now he’s loud and talking in a harsh, brusque way, as if his tongue had been replaced by a piece of pine bark. And then the challenge, that he doesn’t dare...

No, he wouldn’t dare. To climb up on one of the bridge arches would be to risk his life for nothing. He wouldn’t get dizzy; he can climb a tree like a monkey. But this is too high; there’s no safety net if he should slip.

Of course he doesn’t say this to Hans. Instead he starts to laugh and spits contemptuously into the river.

When Hans sees the gob of spit he decides. Sture’s derisive accusation of childishness can only be countered on the iron beams.

‘I’m going to climb it,’ he says in a quavering voice. ‘And damned if I won’t stand up on the span and piss on your head.’

The words rattle around in his mouth, as if he were already in the utmost distress.

Sture looks at him incredulously. Is he serious? Even if the trembling Hans, on the verge of tears, looks nothing like a grown-up, an intrepid climber prepared to scale an impossible mountain face, there is something in his shaking obsession that makes Sture hesitate.

‘Go ahead and do it,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll do it after you.’

Now, of course, there’s no turning back. Quitting now would expose Hans to boundless humiliation.

As though on his way to his execution, Hans scrambles up the riverbank until he reaches the bridge abutment. He takes off his jacket and climbs up on one of the iron spans. When he raises his eyes he sees the gigantic iron arch vanish into the distance, merging with the grey cloud cover. The distance is endless, as if he were on his way up to heaven. He tries to persuade himself to be calm, but it only makes him more agitated.