Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Olofson gives Joseph some money. ‘Your sisters are beautiful.’

‘They would like to marry you, Bwana .’

Olofson crawls into his hard bed. Before he falls asleep he hears Joseph already snoring outside the door.

He wakes up with a start. The pale man is standing over him.

‘Father LeMarque has returned,’ he says in a toneless voice. ‘He would like to meet you.’

Olofson dresses hastily. He feels bad, his head is pounding from the African whisky. In the early dawn he follows the pale man across the red dirt. So the missionaries travel by night, he thinks. What is he going to tell me about why he came here?

He enters one of the grey buildings. At a simple wooden table sits a young man with a bushy beard. He is dressed in a torn undershirt and dirty shorts.

‘Our guest,’ he says with a smile. ‘Welcome.’

Patrice LeMarque comes from Canada, he tells Hans Olofson. The lame man has brought two cups of coffee and they sit at the back of the building in the shade of a tree. At the Mutshatsha mission station there are missionaries and health care personnel from many countries.

‘But none from Sweden?’ Olofson asks.

‘Not at the moment,’ replies LeMarque. ‘The last one was here about ten years ago. A Swedish nurse who came from a city I think was called Kalmar.’

‘The first one came from Röstånga. Harry Johanson.’

‘Have you really come all this way to see his grave?’

‘I stumbled upon his story when I was quite young. I won’t be finished with him until I have seen his grave.’

‘Harry Johanson sat in the shade of this very tree,’ LeMarque says. ‘When he wanted to be alone and meditate, he used to come here, and no one was allowed to bother him. I’ve also seen a photograph of him sitting in this spot. He was short but he was physically very strong. He also had a keen sense of humour. Some of the older Africans still remember him. When he was angry he could lift a baby elephant over his head. That’s not true, of course, but as an illustration of his strength the image is good.’

He sets down his coffee cup. ‘I’ll show you his grave. Then I must go back to my work. Our pumping station has broken down.’

They walk along a winding path that leads up a hill. Through the dense thickets they glimpse the reflection of the river.

‘Don’t go there without Joseph,’ says LeMarque. ‘There are many crocodiles in the river.’

The terrain levels out and forms a mesa on top of the high hill. Olofson finds himself facing a simple wooden cross.

‘Harry Johanson’s grave,’ says LeMarque. ‘Every four years we have to put up a new cross because the termites eat them. But he wanted to have a wooden cross on his grave. We comply with his wish.’

‘What did he dream about?’ asks Olofson.

‘I don’t think he had much time for dreaming. A mission station in Africa requires constant practical work. One has to be a mechanic, carpenter, farmer, businessman. Harry Johanson was good at all those things.’

‘What about religion?’

‘Our message is planted in the maize fields. The gospel is an impossibility if it is not involved in daily life. Conversion is a matter of bread and health.’

‘But in spite of everything, conversion is the crucial thing? Conversion from what?’

‘Superstition, poverty, and sorcery.’

‘Superstition I can understand. But how can one convert someone from poverty?’

‘The message instils confidence. Wisdom requires the courage to face life.’

Hans Olofson thinks of Janine. ‘Was Harry Johanson happy?’ he asks.

‘Who knows the innermost thoughts of another human being?’ says LeMarque.

They head back the way they came.

‘I never met Harry Johanson, after all,’ says LeMarque. ‘But he must have been a colourful and wilful person. The older he got, the less he felt he understood. He accepted that Africa remained a foreign world.’

‘Can a person live long in a foreign world without trying to recreate it so that it resembles the world he left behind?’

‘We had a young priest from Holland here once. Courageous and strong, self-sacrificing. But one day, with no warning, he got up from the dinner table and walked straight out into the bush. Purposefully, as if he knew where he was going.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was never seen again. His goal must have been to be swallowed up, never to return. Something in him snapped.’

Olofson thinks of Joseph and his sisters and brothers. ‘What do the blacks really think?’ he asks.

‘They get to know us through the God we give them.’

‘Don’t they have their own gods? What do you do with them?’

‘Let them disappear on their own.’

Wrong, Olofson thinks. But maybe a missionary has to ignore certain things in order to endure.

‘I’ll find someone who can show you around,’ says LeMarque. ‘Unfortunately almost everyone who works here is out in the bush right now. They’re visiting the remote villages. I’ll ask Amanda to show you around.’

Not until evening is Olofson shown the infirmary. The pale man, whose name is Dieter, informs him that Amanda Reinhardt, who LeMarque thought would show him around, is busy and asks his forgiveness.

When he returns from Johanson’s grave Joseph is sitting by his door. He notices at once that Joseph is frightened.

‘I won’t say anything,’ he says.

‘ Bwana is a good bwana ,’ says Joseph.

‘Stop calling me Bwana !’ ‘Yes, Bwana .’

They walk down to the river and search for crocodiles without seeing any. Joseph shows him Mutshatsha’s extensive maize cultivation. Everywhere he sees women with hoes in their hands, bent over the earth.

‘Where are all the men?’ he asks.

‘The men are making important decisions, Bwana . Maybe they are also busy preparing the African whisky.’

‘Important decisions?’

‘Important decisions, Bwana .’

After eating the food served to him by the lame man, he sits down in the shade of Harry Johanson’s tree. He doesn’t understand the emptiness that pervades the mission station. He tries to imagine that through him Janine really has accomplished her long journey. The inactivity makes him restless. I have to return home, he thinks. Return to what I’m supposed to do, whatever that might be...

In the twilight, Amanda Reinhardt suddenly appears in his doorway. He had been lying on top of his bed and dozed off. She has a kerosene lamp in her hand, and he sees that she is short and chubby. From her broken English he gathers that she is German.

‘I am sorry you are left alone,’ she says. ‘But we are so few here just now. There is so much to do.’

‘I’ve been lying here thinking of Harry Johanson’s tree,’ Olofson says.

‘Who?’ she asks.

At that moment an excited African appears from the shadows. He exchanges a few sentences with the German woman in the language Olofson doesn’t understand.

‘A child is about to die,’ she says. ‘I must go.’

In the doorway she stops short and turns around. ‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘Come with me to Africa.’

He gets up from the bed and they hurry towards the infirmary, which lies at the foot of Johanson’s hill. Olofson shrinks back as he steps into a room full of iron beds. A few kerosene lamps cast a dim light over the room. Olofson sees that there are sick people lying everywhere. On the beds, between the beds, under the beds. In several beds lie mothers intertwined with their sick children. Cooking vessels and bundles of clothing make the room almost impassable, and the intense smell of sweat and urine and excrement is stupefying. In a bed made of bent iron pipes tied together with steel wire lies a child of three or four years old. Around the bed women are squatting.