Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

I’m waiting for something, he thinks. And while he waits he searches assiduously for flotsam along the beaches. Erik Olofson walks a little to one side, as if he doesn’t want to bother him. Erik is tormented by the fact that his own waiting never seems to end. The sea reminds him of his own ruin...

They stay at a cheap hotel next to the railway station. When his father has fallen asleep, Hans creeps out of bed and sits on the wide window seat. From there he has a view over the little square in front of the station.

He tries to picture the room in the distant hospital where Sture is lying. An iron lung, he heard. A thick black hose in his throat, an artificial throat that breathes for Sture. His spine is broken, snapped in two, like a perch killed by a fisherman.

He tries to imagine what it would be like not to be able to move, but of course he can’t, and suddenly he can’t stand the anxiety, but casts it aside.

I don’t like it, he thinks. I crawled across the arch of the bridge and I didn’t fall off. What the hell was he doing there, all alone, in the morning fog? He should have waited for me...

The days by the sea pass quickly. After a week they have to go home. In the rattling bus he suddenly calls to his father.

‘What about Mamma?’ he shouts. ‘Why don’t you know where she is?’

‘There are lots of things a person can never know,’ Erik says defensively, surprised at the unexpected question.

‘Pappas disappear,’ shouts Hans. ‘Not mammas.’

‘Now you’ve seen the sea,’ says Erik. ‘And this is not a good place to talk. The bus is rattling so damned loudly.’

The next day Erik Olofson goes back to clearing the horizon. Impatiently he hacks with his axe at a single branch that refuses to be separated from the trunk. He puts all his bodily strength behind the blow, hacking furiously at the branch.

I’m hacking at myself, he thinks. Chopping off these damned roots that are binding me here. The boy is almost fourteen. In a few years he can take care of himself. Then I can go back to sea, to the ships, to the cargoes.

He chops with his axe, and with each blow it’s as though he’s striking his fist against his brow and saying: I must...

Hans is running through the bright summer evening of Norrland. Walking takes too long, he’s in a hurry now. The soft, waterlogged earth is burning...

In a grove in the woods past the abandoned brickworks he builds an altar to Sture. He can’t imagine him either alive or dead, he’s just gone, but he builds an altar out of pieces of board and moss. He has no idea what he’s going to do with it. He thinks of asking Janine, initiating her into his secret, but he refrains. Visiting the altar once each day and seeing that no one has been there will suffice. Even though Sture doesn’t know it, they’re sharing one more secret.

He dreams that the house where he lives is cast off its moorings and floats down the river, never again to return...

He bolts through the summer, runs along the river until he is out of breath and sweaty. When nothing else is left there is always Janine.

One evening when he comes running, she isn’t home. For a brief moment he worries that she too is gone. How could he lose another person who supports his world? But he knows that she’s at one of the Joyous Fellowships at the church, and so he sits down on her front steps to wait.

When she arrives she’s wearing a white coat over a light-blue dress. A breeze passes through his body, a sudden apprehension.

‘Why are you blushing?’ she asks.

‘I’m not blushing,’ he replies. ‘I never do.’

He feels caught red-handed. Shove it in your nose, he thinks furiously. Shove it in the hole.

That evening Janine starts talking about the trip.

‘Where would someone like me go?’ says Hans. ‘I’ve been to Gävle. I probably won’t go any further. But I could try to stow away on the train to Orsa. Or go to the tailor and ask him to sew on a pair of wings.’

‘I’m serious,’ says Janine.

‘I am too,’ says Hans.

‘I want to go to Africa,’ says Janine.

‘Africa?’

For Hans that is an unfathomable dream.

‘Africa,’ she says again. ‘I would go to the countries by the big rivers.’

She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance. She tells him about the dark moments. About the anguish that makes her long to go to Africa. There she wouldn’t attract attention everywhere she went with her missing nose. There she wouldn’t always be surrounded by male loathing and revulsion.

‘Leprosy,’ she says. ‘Bodies that rot away, souls that atrophy in despair. There I would be able to work.’

Hans tries to imagine the Realm of the Noseless, tries to see Janine among the deformed human bodies.

‘Are you going to be a missionary?’ he asks.

‘No, not a missionary. Maybe I would be called one. But I would work to alleviate suffering,’ she says. ‘It’s possible to travel without actually travelling. A departure always begins inside yourself. It was probably the same for Harry Johanson and his wife Emma. For fifteen years they prepared for a journey that they probably never thought would happen.’

‘Who is Harry Johanson?’ Hans asks.

‘He was born in a poor cottage outside Röstånga,’ says Janine. ‘He was the next-youngest of nine children. When he was ten years old he decided to be a missionary. That was in the late 1870s. But not until twenty years later, in 1898, after he had married and he and Emma had had four children, were they able to set off. Harry had turned thirty and Emma was a few years younger, and they left on a ship from Göteborg. In Sweden there were followers of the Scottish missionary Fred Arnot who tried to build up a network of mission stations along the routes that Livingstone had travelled in Africa. From Glasgow they sailed with an English ship and arrived in Benguella in January of 1899. One of their children died of cholera during the passage, and Emma was so sick that she had to be carried ashore when they reached Africa.

‘After a month of waiting, they set off together with three other missionaries and over 100 black bearers on a 1200-mile journey, straight through uncharted country. It took them four years to reach Mutshatsha, where Fred Arnot had determined that the new mission station should be located. They had to wait for a whole year by the Lunga River before the local chieftain gave them permission to pass through his lands.

‘The whole time they were plagued with illness, lack of food, impure water. After four years, when Harry finally reached Mutshatsha, he was alone. Emma had died of malaria, and the children had perished from various intestinal diseases. The three other missionaries had also died. Harry himself was dazed by malaria when he arrived along with those of the bearers who hadn’t left years before. His loneliness must have been indescribable. And how did he manage to hold on to his faith in God when his entire family had been obliterated on the way to spread God’s message?

‘Harry lived for almost fifty years in Mutshatsha. By the time he died, an entire community had grown up around the little hut which was the beginning of the mission station. There was an infirmary, an orphanage, a building for older women who had been driven out of their villages because of accusations of witchcraft. When Harry Johanson died he was called Ndotolu , the wise man. He was buried on the hill to which he had retired during his last years and built a modest little hut. When he died there were English doctors and another Swedish missionary family in Mutshatsha. Harry Johanson died in 1947.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Hans asks.

‘An old woman who once visited Harry in Mutshatsha told me,’ Janine replies. ‘She went there as a young woman to work at the mission station, but she got sick and Harry forced her to go back to Sweden. She visited our congregation last year and I had a long talk with her about Harry Johanson.’