Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘Say it once more,’ says Hans. ‘The name.’

‘Mutshatsha.’

‘What was he doing there, anyway?’

‘He arrived as a missionary. But he became the wise man. The doctor, the carpenter, the judge.’

‘Say it one more time.’

‘Mutshatsha.’

‘Why don’t you go there?’

‘I probably don’t have what Harry Johanson had. And Emma, although she never made it there.’

What was it that Harry Johanson had? Hans wonders as he walks home in the bright summer evening. He pictures himself dressed in Harry Johanson’s clothes; behind him is a long line of bearers. Before the safari crosses the river he sends out scouts to check whether crocodiles are lurking on the sandbanks. When he reaches the house where he lives, four years have passed and the safari has reached Mutshatsha. He’s all alone; there are no bearers left, they have all deserted him. As he walks up the steps he decides that the altar he built for Sture in the grove behind the brickworks will be called Mutshatsha...

He opens the door and the dream of Harry Johanson and Mutshatsha retreats and leaves him, because in the kitchen sits Erik Olofson, drinking with four of the town’s most notorious drunks. Célestine has been taken from her case, and one of the drunks is sitting there picking at the meticulously constructed rigging with fumbling fingers. A man who hasn’t even taken off his dirty rubber boots is asleep on top of Hans’s bed.

The drunks stare at him curiously, and Erik Olofson gets up, wobbling, and says something that is drowned in the crash of a bottle hitting the floor. Usually Hans feels sad and ashamed when his father starts drinking and goes into one of his spells, but now he feels only fury. The sight of the full-rigger on the table, as if it had run aground among glasses and bottles and ashtrays, makes him so outraged with sorrowful anger that he is perfectly calm. He walks over to the table, picks up the ship, and stares into the glazed eyes of the drunk who was picking at it.

‘You keep your filthy mitts off her,’ he says.

Without waiting for a reply he puts the ship back in its case. Then he goes into his room and kicks at the snoring man lying on his bed.

‘Get up! Up, God damn it!’ he says, and he doesn’t stop until the man wakes up.

His father is holding on to the door frame, with his trousers half falling off, and when he sees his flickering eyes he starts to hate him. Hans chases the dazed drunk into the kitchen and slams the door behind him, right in front of his father. He tears off the bedspread and sits down, and feels his heart pounding in his chest.

Mutshatsha, he thinks.

In the kitchen the chairs scrape, the outer door is opened, voices mutter and then there is silence. At first he thinks that his father has left with the drunks for town. But then he hears a shuffling and a thud from the kitchen. When he opens the door he sees his father crawling around with a rag in his hand, trying to wipe the dirt off the floor. He looks like an animal. His trousers have slipped down so his bottom is bare. A blind animal crawling around and around...

‘Pull up your trousers,’ he says. ‘Stop crawling around. I’ll clean the damned floor.’

He helps his father up, and when Erik Olofson loses his balance they wind up on the kitchen sofa in an involuntary embrace. When Hans tries to pull himself loose his father holds on to him. At first he thinks his father wants to fight, but then he hears him snuffling and whimpering and hiccuping, and realises he is sobbing violently. He has never seen him do this before.

Sorrow and glistening eyes, a quavering voice that has turned thick, that much he knows. But never this open surrender to tears. What the hell is he going to do now? Hans wonders, with his father’s sweaty and unshaven face against his neck.

The elkhounds are skulking restlessly underneath the kitchen table. They have been kicked and stepped on and haven’t had any food all day. The kitchen stinks of closed-in sweat, fuming pipes, and spilled beer.

‘We have to clean up,’ says Hans, tearing himself loose. ‘You go and lie down and I’ll clean up the mess.’

Erik Olofson slumps down in the corner of the sofa and Hans starts washing the floor.

‘Take the dogs out,’ mumbles Erik.

‘Take them out yourself,’ says Hans.

The fact that Shady, the most contemptuous and feared drunk in town, had been allowed to stretch out in the kitchen makes him feel sick. They can stay in their hovels, he thinks, with their old hags and brats and beer bottles...

His father is asleep on the sofa. Hans places a quilt over him and takes out the dogs and chains them up near the woodpile. Then he goes to his altar in the woods.

It’s already night, the light summer night of Norrland. Outside the People’s Hall some youths are talking loudly around a shiny Chevrolet. Hans returns to his safari, counts his bearers, and gives the order to march.

Missionary or not, a certain authority is required so that the bearers won’t succumb to idleness and maybe even start stealing supplies. They should be encouraged with glass beads and other trinkets at regular intervals, but also forced to witness punishments for neglect when necessary. He knows that during the many months, perhaps years, that the safari will be under way, he can never permit himself to sleep with more than one eye closed at a time.

As they pass the hospital the bearers begin to shout that they have to rest, but he keeps driving them. Not until they reach the altar in the woods does he let them put down the large bundles they are carrying on their heads...

‘Mutshatsha,’ he says to the altar. ‘Together we will travel to Mutshatsha one day, when your spine has healed and you can get up again...’

He sends the bearers on ahead so he can have peace and quiet to meditate. Travelling might mean deciding to conquer something, he thinks vaguely. Conquer the doubters who didn’t believe he would get away, never even as far as Orsa Finnmark. Or conquer the ones who had travelled even further, vanished even deeper into the wilderness. And conquer his own indolence, cowardice, fear.

I conquered the river bridge, he thinks. I was stronger than my own fear...

He strolls homeward through the summer night. There are so many more questions than answers. Erik Olofson, his incomprehensible father. Why is he starting to drink again? After they went to the sea together and saw that it was still there? In the middle of summer, when the snow and cold is gone? Why does he let the drunks in the house, let them get their hands on Célestine ?

And why did Mamma leave, anyway? Outside the People’s Hall he stops and looks at the remnants of the poster for the last movie programme of the spring.

Run for Your Life , he reads. That’s it, run for your life. And he runs on silent feet through the warm summer night. Mutshatsha, he thinks. Mutshatsha is my password...

Hans Olofson says goodbye to Moses and watches the car bearing the dead men vanish in a cloud of dust.

‘You stay as long as you like,’ says Ruth, who has come out on to the porch. ‘I won’t ask why you’re back so soon. All I’m saying is that you can stay.’

When he enters his old room, Louis is already busy filling the bathtub. Tomorrow, he thinks, tomorrow I will re-examine myself, decide what I’m going back to.

Werner Masterton has gone to Lubumbashi to buy bulls, Ruth tells him as they sit with their whisky glasses on the veranda.

‘Such hospitality,’ says Olofson.

‘Here it’s necessary,’ says Ruth. ‘We can’t survive without one another. Forsaking a white person is the only mortal sin we recognise. But no one commits it. It’s especially important that the blacks understand this.’