Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

She shows him to a large, bright room with odd angles and a sloping ceiling. Through the window he looks out over a partially overgrown yard with dilapidated garden furniture. German shepherds run restlessly back and forth in a fenced dog run.

‘ Bwana ,’ says someone behind him.

A Masai, he thinks as he turns around. I’ve always imagined them like this. Kenyatta’s men. This is how they looked, the Mau-Mau warriors, the ones who drove the English out of Kenya.

The African who stands before him is very tall, his face noble.

‘My name is Luka, Bwana .’

Can one have a servant who is nobler than oneself? Olofson wonders. An African warrior who runs one’s bath?

He notices Judith standing in the doorway. ‘Luka will take care of us,’ she says. ‘He reminds me of what I forget.’

Later, when they are sitting in the dilapidated wooden furniture drinking coffee, she tells him about Luka.

‘I don’t trust him,’ she says. ‘There’s something wily about him, even though I’ve never caught him stealing or lying. But he does both, naturally.’

‘How should I treat him?’ asks Olofson.

‘Firmly,’ says Judith. ‘The Africans are always looking for your weak point, those moments when you can be talked into something. Give him nothing; find something to complain about the first time he washes your clothes. Even if there’s nothing; then he’ll know that you make demands...’

Two large tortoises are asleep at Olofson’s feet. The heat gives him a churning headache, and when he sets down his coffee cup, he sees that his table is a stuffed elephant foot.

I could live here the rest of my life, he thinks. The impulse is immediate, it overwhelms his consciousness and he can’t formulate a single objection. I could put twenty-five years of my life behind me. Never again have to be reminded of what came before. But which of my roots would die if I tried to transplant them here, to this red earth? Why leave the meadowlands of Norrland for the sandy red soil they have here? Why would I want to live on a continent where an inexorable process of eviction is under way? Africa wants the whites out, I’ve understood that much. But they persevere, build their forts to defend themselves using racism and contempt as their tools. The whites’ prisons are comfortable, but they are still prisons, bunkers with bowing servants...

His thoughts are interrupted. Judith looks at the coffee cup in her hand.

‘The porcelain is a reminder,’ she says. ‘When Cecil Rhodes received his concessions over what today is called Zambia, he sent his employees into the wilderness to conclude agreements with the local chieftains. Perhaps also to obtain their help in finding unknown ore deposits. But these employees, who sometimes had to travel for years through the bush, were also supposed to be the vanguard of civilisation. Each expedition was like sending out an English manor house with bearers and ox carts. Every evening when they made camp, the porcelain service was unpacked. A table was set up with a white tablecloth, while Cecil Rhodes bathed in his tent and changed into his evening clothes. This service once belonged to one of the men who cleared the way for Cecil Rhodes’s dream of an unbroken British territory from the Cape to Cairo.’

‘Everyone is occasionally seized by impossible dreams,’ says Olofson. ‘Only the craziest try to realise them.’

‘Not the madmen,’ replies Judith. ‘There you are mistaken. Not the madmen, but the intelligent and far-sighted ones. Cecil Rhodes’s dream was not an impossibility; his problem was that he was all alone, at the mercy of impotent and capricious British politicians.’

‘An empire that rests upon the most precarious of all foundations,’ says Olofson. ‘Oppression, alienation in one’s own country. Such an edifice must collapse before it’s even completed. There is one truth that’s impossible to avoid.’

‘And what’s that?’ asks Judith.

‘The blacks were here first,’ says Olofson. ‘The world is full of various judicial systems, and in Europe it’s based on Roman law. In Asia there are other legal forms, in Africa, everywhere. But natural law is always followed, even if the laws are given a political interpretation. The Indians of North America were almost totally wiped out in a couple of hundred years. And yet their natural law was written into the American law...’

Judith bursts into laughter. ‘My second philosopher,’ she says. ‘Duncan Jones is also steeped in ephemeral philosophical reflections. I’ve never understood a word of it, even though I tried to in the beginning. Now he has drunk his brain into mush, his body shakes, and he chews his lips to shreds. Maybe he’ll live a few more years before I have to bury him. Once he was a man with dignity and resolve. Now he lives in an eternal twilight zone of alcohol and decay. The Africans think he is being transformed into a holy man. They’re afraid of him. He’s the best watchdog I could have. And now you arrive, my next philosopher. Maybe Africa tempts some people to start ruminating.’

‘Where does Duncan Jones live?’ Olofson asks.

‘I’ll show you tomorrow,’ says Judith.

Olofson lies awake for a long time in his irregular room with its sloping roof. A scent that reminds him of winter apples pervades it. Before he puts out the light he gazes at a big spider web, motionless on one of the walls. Somewhere a roof beam is complaining and he feels transported back to the house by the river. He listens to the German shepherds that Luka has let outside. They run restlessly around the house, making one circuit after another.

A short time, he thinks. A temporary visit to lend a helping hand to people with whom he has nothing in common, but who have taken care of him during his journey to Africa. They have abandoned Africa, but not each other, he thinks. That will also turn out to be their ruin...

In his dreams the leopard appears, the one he waited for last night in a grass blind. Now it races into the space inside him, searching for a quarry that Olofson left behind. The leopard searches through his internal landscape, and he suddenly sees Sture before him. They are sitting on the boulder by the river and watching a crocodile that has crawled up on a sand bank, right by the huge stone caissons of the river bridge.

Janine is balancing on one of the iron beams with her trombone. He tries to hear what she’s playing, but the night wind carries away the tune.

Finally there is only the leopard’s watchful eye, observing him from the dream chamber. The dream falls away, and when he awakens in the African dawn he will not remember it.

It is a day in late September of 1969. Hans Olofson will remain in Africa for eighteen years...

When he opens his eyes in the dark, the fever is gone. There is only a wailing and whining sound inside his head.

I’m still alive, he thinks. I’m not dead yet. The malaria has not yet conquered me. I still have time to understand why I have lived before I die...

The heavy revolver presses against one cheek. He turns his head and feels the cold barrel against his forehead. A faint smell of gunpowder, like cow manure burned out in a pasture, pricks his nose.

He is very tired. How long was he asleep? A couple of minutes or twenty-four hours? He has no idea. He listens to the darkness, but the only thing he hears is his own breathing. The heat is stifling. The sheet is incapable of absorbing all the sweat he has produced.

Now is my chance, he thinks. Before the next fever attack is upon me. Now is when I have to get hold of Luka, who has betrayed me and left me to the bandits so they can slit my throat. Now is when I can catch him and scare him into running on his silent feet through the night to bring help. They are out there in the dark, with their automatic weapons and pickaxes and knives, and they’re waiting for me to get delirious again before they come in here and kill me...