Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Hans pulls him out of the water, calls to him without getting an answer, and then runs screeching up to the streets of town. As he runs along the riverbank, summer dies. The great adventure vanishes in a gigantic cloud passing before the sun. Howling, he reaches the town. Frightened people draw back as if he were a mad dog.

But Rönning the junk dealer, who was a volunteer in the Winter War in Finland and has experienced much worse situations than a wildly gesticulating young man, grabs hold of him and bellows at him to tell him what has happened. Then the townsfolk rush to the river.

The taxi that is also used as an ambulance comes skidding through the gravel down towards the iron bridge. The district judge and his wife are informed about what has happened, and at the hospital the lone and always weary doctor begins to examine Sture.

He’s alive, he’s breathing. The concussion will pass. But his spine is broken; he is paralysed from the neck down. The doctor stands for a moment at the window and looks across the ridges of the forest before he goes out to the waiting parents.

At the same time Hans Olofson is vomiting into the toilet of the police station. A policeman holds him by the shoulders, and when it’s over, a cautious interview begins.

‘The red jacket,’ he keeps repeating over and over. ‘I saw the jacket lying in the river.’

At long last his father comes hurrying from the forest. Rönning the junk dealer drives them home and Hans crawls into bed. Erik Olofson sits on the edge of his bed until long after midnight, when his son finally falls asleep.

All night long the lights are burning in the spacious upper floor of the courthouse.

A few days after the accident, Sture disappears from town.

Early one morning Sture is carried out on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance which quickly drives off to the south. The vehicle sprays gravel when it passes through Ulvkälla. But the hour is early, Janine is asleep, and the car disappears towards the endless forests of Orsa Finnmark.

Hans Olofson never gets a chance to visit his fallen brother in arms. At dusk on the day before Sture is driven away, he wanders restlessly around the hospital, trying to figure out which room Sture is lying in. But everything is secret, concealed, as if the broken spine were contagious.

He leaves the hospital and wanders down towards the river, drawn inexorably to the bridge, and inside he feels a great burden of guilt. The accident was his creation...

When he discovers that Sture has been driven out of town early one morning, to a hospital far away, he writes a letter that he stuffs into a bottle and flings into the river. He watches it float down towards the point at People’s Park and then he runs across the river to the house where Janine lives.

There is A Joyous Spring Fellowship at her church that evening, but now that Hans is standing like a white shadow in her doorway, of course she stays home. He sits down on his usual chair in the kitchen. Janine sits down across from him and looks at him.

‘Don’t sit on that chair,’ he says. ‘That’s Sture’s.’

A God that fills the earth with meaningless suffering, she thinks. Breaking the back of a young boy just as summertime is bursting forth?

‘Play something,’ he says without raising his head to look at her.

She takes out her trombone and plays ‘Creole Love Call’ as beautifully as she can.

When she finishes and blows the saliva out of the instrument, Hans gets up, takes his jacket, and leaves.

Far too small a person in a far too large and incomprehensible world, she thinks. In a sudden flare-up of wrath she puts the mouthpiece to her lips and plays her lament, ‘Siam Blues’. The notes bellow like tortured animals and she doesn’t notice Hurrapelle step through the doorway and gaze at her in dismay as she rocks on her bare feet in time with her music. When she discovers him she stops playing and pounces on him with furious questions. He is forced to listen to her doubts in the God of reconciliation, and he has a sudden sense that the hole below her eyes is threatening to swallow him up.

He squats there in silence and lets her talk herself out. Then he carefully chooses his words and coaxes her back to the true path once again. Even though she doesn’t put up any resistance, he’s still not sure whether he has succeeded in infusing the powers of faith into her again. He decides at once to keep her under close observation for a while, and then asks her whether she isn’t going to take part in the evening’s Joyous Fellowship. But she is mute, just shakes her head and opens the door for him to go. He nods and vanishes out into the summertime.

Janine is far away in her own thoughts and it will be a long time before she comes back...

Hans plods homeward through the dandelions and moist grass. When he stands underneath the beams of the river bridge he clenches his fists.

‘Why didn’t you wait?’ he yells.

The message in the bottle rocks towards the sea...

After a journey of two hours on his way to the mission station in Mutshatsha, the distributor of the car Hans is riding in becomes clogged with silt.

They have stopped in a forlorn and desiccated landscape. Olofson climbs out of the car, wipes his filthy, sweaty face, and lets his gaze wander along the endless horizon.

He senses something of the great loneliness that it is possible to experience on the dark continent. Harry Johanson must have seen this, he thinks. He came from the other direction, from the west, but the landscape must have been the same. Four years his journey took. By the time he arrived his entire family had perished. Death defined the distance in time and space. Four years, four dead...

In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in gigantic catapults across the world. The time allotted to us is no more than that of our forefathers, but we have augmented it with our technology. We live in an era when the mind is less and less often allowed to be amazed by distance and time... And yet that’s not true, he laments. In spite of everything, it has been ten years since I heard Janine for the first time tell the story of Harry Johanson and his wife Emma, and their trek towards the mission station of Mutshatsha.

Now I’m almost there and Janine is dead. It was her dream, not mine. I’m a pilgrim in disguise, following someone else’s tracks. Friendly people are helping me with lodging and transportation, as if my task were important.

Like this David Fischer, bent over the distributor of his car. Early that morning Werner Masterton had turned into David’s courtyard. A couple of hours later they were on their way to Mutshatsha. David Fischer is about his own age, thin and balding. He reminds Olofson of a restless bird. He keeps looking around, as if he thinks he’s being followed. But of course he will help Hans Olofson make it to Mutshatsha.

‘To the missionaries at Mujimbeji,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been there, but I know the way.’

Why doesn’t anybody ask me? Olofson wonders. Why does no one want to know what I’m going to do in Mutshatsha?

They travel through the bush in David Fischer’s rusty military Jeep. The top has been put up, but the dust seeps in through the cracks. The Jeep pitches and skids in the deep sand.

‘The distributor will probably silt up again,’ yells Fischer over the roar of the engine.

The bush surrounds Hans Olofson. Now and then he glimpses people in the tall grass. Or maybe it’s only shadows, he thinks. Maybe they’re not really there.

Then the distributor silts up, and Olofson stands in the oppressive heat and listens to the African silence. Like a winter night in my home town, he thinks. Just as still and deserted. There it was the cold, here it’s the heat. And yet they are so similar. I could live there, could have endured. So I can probably live here too. Having grown up in Norrland, in the interior of Sweden, seems to be an excellent background for living in Africa...