Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Olofson sees that even a black face can radiate pallor.

Amanda Reinhardt bends over the child, touches his forehead, talking all the while with the women.

The anteroom of death, he thinks. The kerosene lamps are the flames of life...

Suddenly a shriek breaks out from all the women squatting around the bed. One of the women, hardly more than eighteen years old, throws herself over the child in the bed, and her wail is so penetrating and shrill that Olofson feels the need to flee. The lamentation, the roars of pain that fill the room, strike him with a paralysing effect. With a giant leap he wants to leave Africa behind.

‘So does death look,’ says Amanda Reinhardt in his ear. ‘The child has died.’

‘From what?’ asks Olofson.

‘Measles,’ she replies.

The women’s shrieking rises and falls. Never before has he experienced the voice of grief as in this dirty room with its unearthly light. Someone is pounding on his eardrums with sledgehammers.

‘They will scream all night,’ says Amanda Reinhardt. ‘In this heat the burial must take place tomorrow. Then the women will lament for some more days. Maybe they faint from exhaustion, but they continue.’

‘I never thought such a wailing existed,’ says Olofson. ‘This must be the ancient sound of pain.’

‘Measles,’ says Amanda Reinhardt. ‘You have surely had this disease. But here children die of it. They came from a distant village. The mother walked five days and carried her child. Had she come earlier we could have maybe saved him, but she went first to the witch doctor in the village. When it was too late she came here. Actually it is not measles that kills. But the children are malnourished, their resistance is poor. When the child dies it is the end of a long chain of causes.’

Olofson leaves the infirmary alone. He has borrowed her kerosene lamp and tells her he will find his own way. He is followed by the screams of the wailing women. Outside his door sits Joseph by his fire.

This man I will remember, Olofson thinks. This man and his beautiful sisters...

The next day he drinks coffee again with Patrice LeMarque.

‘What do you think of Harry Johanson now?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know,’ says Olofson. ‘Mostly I’m thinking about the child who died yesterday.’

‘I’ve already buried him,’ replies LeMarque. ‘And I’ve got the pumping station going too.’

‘How do I get out of here?’ Olofson asks.

‘Tomorrow Moses is driving to Kitwe in one of our cars. You can ride along with him.’

‘How long will you stay here?’ Olofson asks.

‘As long as I live,’ says LeMarque. ‘But I probably won’t live as long as Harry Johanson. He must have been very special.’

At dawn Olofson is awakened by Joseph.

‘Now I’m travelling home,’ he tells him. ‘To another part of the world.’

‘I will wait at the white men’s doors, Bwana ,’ replies Joseph.

‘Say hello to your sisters!’

‘I already have, Bwana . They are sad that you’re leaving.’

‘Why don’t they come and say goodbye then?’

‘They are, Bwana . They’re saying goodbye, but you don’t see them.’

‘One last question, Joseph. When will you chase the whites out of your country?’

‘When the time is ripe, Bwana .’

‘And when is that?’

‘When we decide that it is, Bwana . But we won’t chase all the mzunguz out of the country. Those who want to live with us can stay. We aren’t racists like the whites.’

A Jeep drives up to the building. Olofson puts his suitcase in it. The driver, Moses, nods to him.

‘Moses is a good driver, Bwana ,’ says Joseph. ‘He just drives off the road once in a while.’

Olofson gets into the front seat and they turn on to the road. Now it’s over, he thinks. Janine’s dream and Harry Johanson’s grave...

After a few hours they stop to rest. Olofson discovers that the two dead bodies he’d seen in the morgue are packed in the boot of the Jeep. At once he feels sick.

‘They’re going to the police in Kitwe,’ says Moses, noticing his distress. ‘All murder victims must be examined by the police.’

‘What happened?’

‘They are brothers. They were poisoned. Their maize field was probably too big. Their neighbours were jealous. Then they died.’

‘How?’

‘They ate something. Then they swelled up and their stomachs burst open. It smelled terrible. The evil spirits killed them.’

‘Do you really believe in evil spirits?’

‘Of course,’ says Moses with a laugh. ‘We Africans believe in sorcery and evil spirits.’

The journey continues.

Olofson tries to convince himself that he is going to go back to his legal studies. He clings once more to his decision to become the defender of extenuating circumstance. But I’ve never clarified what it would mean to spend my life in courtrooms, he thinks. Where I’d have to try to distinguish what is a lie from what is truth. Maybe I should do as my father did. Maybe I should go and chop down horizons in a forest of paragraphs. I’m still searching for a way out of the confusion that marks my beginning...

The long trip from Mutshatsha is coming to an end. I must decide before I land at Arlanda again, he thinks. That’s all the time I have left.

He shows Moses the way to Ruth and Werner’s farm.

‘First I drive you, then I drive the corpses,’ says Moses.

Olofson is glad that he doesn’t call him Bwana .

‘Say hello to Joseph when you return.’

‘Joseph is my brother. I’ll say hello to him.’

Just before two o’clock in the afternoon they arrive...

The sea. A bluish-green wave that moves towards infinity.

A frozen wind blows from the Kvarken Straits. A sailboat with an uncertain helmsman is becalmed on the swells with sails flapping. Seaweed and mud blow their musty odour in Hans Olofson’s face, and even though the sea isn’t as he had imagined it, the reality is overwhelming.

They beat into a stiff wind along a spit of land outside Gävle, Hans and his father. In order to divert his son from the pain of constantly thinking of Sture, Erik Olofson has asked for a week off to take Hans to the sea. One day in the middle of June they depart with the country bus from town, change in Ljusdal, and reach Gävle late in the evening.

Hans finds a worn-out toy boat made of bark that someone has thrown away and stuffs it inside his jacket. His father dreams about the banana boats he once sailed on. The face of a sailor emerges from the woodcutter’s, and he realises once again that the sea is his world.

To Hans, the sea is constantly changing its face. It’s never possible to completely capture the surface of the water with his gaze. Somewhere there is always an unexpected movement, the interplay of the sun and clouds glitters and changes continuously and tirelessly. He can’t get his fill of looking at the sea rolling and grunting, tossing wave-tops back and forth, flattening during a calm, and once again foaming and singing and moaning.

The thought of Sture is there, but it’s as if the sea has flooded over it, slowly covering up the last of the pain and the most gnawing grief. The muddled feeling of guilt, of having acted as the invisible hands that heaved Sture off the bridge span, sinks away, leaving only a churning unrest, like a pain that can’t decide whether to strike or not.

Already Sture has begun to change from a living person to a memory. With each passing day the contours of his face grow dimmer, and although Hans can’t express it, he realises that life, the life that goes on all around him, will always be the most important thing. He senses that he is on his way into something unknown, where new and disquieting powers are beginning to emerge.