Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

I, Hans Olofson, have taught myself to endure the greatest loneliness. Never before had I been surrounded by so many people who demand my attention, my decisions, but who at the same time watch over me in the dark; invisible eyes that follow me expectantly, waiting.

But my most vivid memory is still that moment when I descended from the plane at Lusaka International Airport eighteen years ago. I keep returning to that moment, to gather courage, the power to survive; back to a time when I still knew my own intentions...

Today my life is a journey through days coloured by unreality. I live a life that belongs neither to me nor to anyone else. I am neither successful nor unsuccessful in what I set out to accomplish.

What possesses me is a constant amazement at what actually did happen. What was it that really brought me here, made me take that long journey from the remote interior of Norrland, still covered in snow, to an Africa that had not summoned me? What is it in my life that I have never understood?

The most curious thing is that I’ve been here for so long. I was twenty-five when I left Sweden, and now I’m forty-three. My hair began turning grey long ago; my beard, which I never manage to shave off, is already completely white. I’ve lost three teeth, two in the lower jaw and one in the top left. The tip of my ring finger on my right hand is severed at the first knuckle, and sometimes I suffer from pain in my kidneys. I regularly dig out white worms that have bored underneath the skin on the soles of my feet. In the first few years I could scarcely bring myself to carry out these operations using sterilised tweezers and nail scissors. Now I grab a rusty nail or a knife that’s lying about and carve out the parasites living in my heels.

Sometimes I try to view all these years in Africa as a wrinkle in my life, one which will some day turn out to never have happened. Maybe it’s an insane dream that will be smashed apart when I finally manage to extricate myself from the life I’m living here. Someday this wrinkle in my life will have to be smoothed out...

In his attacks of fever, Olofson is flung against invisible reefs that tear his body apart. For brief moments the storm subsides, and he rocks on the waves and feels himself quickly turning into a block of ice. But just when he thinks the cold has reached his heart and frozen his last heartbeat to stillness, the storm returns and the fever slings him once more against the burning reefs.

In the restless, shredded dreams that rage like demons in his mind he keeps returning to the day he came to Africa. The white sun, the long journey that brought him to Kalulushi, and to this night, eighteen years later.

Like a malevolent figure, with no head or neck, the fever attack stands before him. With one hand he clutches his revolver, as if it were his last salvation.

The malaria attacks come and go.

Hans Olofson, once raised in a grim wooden house on the banks of the Ljusna River, shakes and shivers under his wet sheet.

From his dreams the past emerges, a reflection of the story he has still not given up hope of someday understanding...

Through the swirling snow he returns to his childhood.

It is midwinter 1956. It’s four in the morning and the cold whines and prises at the beams of the old wooden house. That’s not the sound that wakes him, but rather a stubborn scraping and muttering from the kitchen. He wakes as abruptly as only a child can, and he knows at once that his father has started scrubbing again. Dressed in his blue-trimmed pyjamas with their permanent snuff stains, with thick rag socks on his feet that are already soaked through from all the hot water he is madly sloshing across the floor, his father chases his demons through the winter night. He has chained up the two grey elkhounds out by the woodshed, hauling on the frozen chains as he stands half-naked in the freezing cold, while the water slowly comes to a boil on the stove.

And now he scrubs, a raging assault on the dirt that is visible to no one but himself. He throws the boiling water on cobwebs that suddenly flare up on the walls, then dumps a whole bucket over the hood of the stove because he’s convinced that a knot of filthy snakes is hiding there.

All this the son lies in bed and watches, a twelve-year-old with the woollen blanket pulled up over his chin. He doesn’t need to get up and tiptoe across the cold planks of the floor to watch it happen. He knows all about it. And through the door he hears his father’s muttering and nervous laughter and desperate outbursts of rage.

It always occurs at night.

The first time he woke up and padded out to the kitchen he was five or six years old. In the pale light from the kitchen lamp with its misty shade he saw his father squelching around in the water, with his brown hair in wild disarray. And he understood, without putting it into words, that he was invisible. It was another kind of vision that occupied his father as he raced about with his scrubbing brush. His father was looking at something that only he could see. It terrified the boy, more so than if his father had suddenly raised an axe over his head.

Now, as he lies in bed listening, he knows that the coming days will be calm. His father will lie motionless in his bed before he finally gets up, pulls on his rough work clothes, and heads out into the forest again, where he cuts trees for Iggesund or Marma Långrör.

Neither father nor son will utter a word about the night-time scrubbing. For the boy in the bed it will fade like a malevolent apparition, until he again awakes in the night to the sound of his father scrubbing away his demons.

But now it is February 1956. Hans Olofson is twelve years old, and in a few hours he will get dressed, munch a few slices of rye bread, take his knapsack and head out into the cold on his way to school.

The darkness of night is a split personality, both friend and foe. From the blackness he can haul up nightmares and inconceivable horrors. The spasms of the roof beams in the hard frost are transformed into fingers that reach out for him. But the darkness can also be a friend, a time in which to weave thoughts about what will come, what people call the future.

He imagines how he will leave this lonely wooden house by the river for the last time, how he will run across the bridge, disappear past the arches of the bridge, out into the world, almost all the way to Orsa Finnmark.

Why am I who I am? he thinks. Why me and not somebody else?

He knows precisely the first time that he had this crucial thought. It was a bright summer evening, and he was playing in the abandoned brickworks behind the hospital. They had divided themselves into friends and enemies, hadn’t defined the game any more than that, and they alternately attacked and defended the windowless, half-razed factory building. They often played there, not just because it was forbidden, but because the building provided endlessly adaptable stage sets for their games. Its identity was forgotten, and with their games they lent constantly changing faces to the ruin. The dilapidated brickworks was defenceless; the shadows of the people who had once worked there were no longer present to protect it. Those who played there ruled. Only seldom did a bellowing father come and drag his child away from the wild game. There were shafts to plunge into, rotten steps to fall through, rusty kiln doors that could slam shut on hands and feet. But the boys playing there knew the dangers, avoided them, and had explored the safe paths through the endless building.

And it was there on that bright summer evening, as he was lying hidden behind a rusty, collapsed brick kiln, waiting to be discovered and captured, that he had asked himself for the first time why he was who he was and not someone else. The thought had made him both excited and upset. It was as if an unknown being had crept into his head and whispered to him the password to the future. After that, all his thoughts, the very process of thinking, seemed to come from a voice that was external, that had crept into his head, left its message, and then disappeared.