Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘What will I be doing?’ asks Olofson. ‘I know what the chickens eat and where the eggs are delivered, but what will I do?’

‘Follow me like a shadow. Listen to what I say, check that it gets done. Everything we want done has to be repeated, ordered a second time, and then checked.’

‘Something must be wrong,’ Olofson says. ‘Something the whites have never understood.’

‘Love the blacks if you want,’ says Judith. ‘But take my advice. I’ve lived among them my whole life. I speak their language, I know how they think. I get doctors for their children when the medicine man fails, I pay for their funerals when they don’t have any money. I send the smartest children to school at my expense. When the food runs out I organise transport of sacks of maize to their houses. I do everything for them. But anyone who is caught stealing a single egg I turn over to the police. I fire a man who is drunk, I kick out the night watchmen who fall asleep.’

Olofson slowly begins to realise the scope of the operation. The dominion of a single woman, Africans who subordinate themselves because they have no alternative. Two different types of poverty, face to face at a common meeting point. The terror of the whites, their truncated lives as left-over colonialists in a burned-out empire. The ash heap of loneliness in a new or resurrected black colony.

The poverty of the whites is their vulnerability. Their lack of alternatives becomes apparent when they arrange to meet the Africans. Even a garden like this one, with the barely visible dream of a Victorian park embedded in the greenery, is a fortified bunker. Judith Fillington’s last bastion is her hat, which conceals her eyes.

The poverty and vulnerability of the blacks is the poverty of the continent. Broken and destroyed living patterns, their origins lost in the mists of the past, replaced by insane empire builders who changed into their dinner jackets deep in the rainforests and on the plains of elephant grass. This world of stage sets still exists. Here the Africans are trying to shape their future. Perhaps they have endless patience. Perhaps they still have doubts about how the future should look, how these stage sets can be dissolved and obliterated. But what happens when they burst?

Hans Olofson decides he must work out a contingency plan, an escape route. I’m only here for a short visit, he thinks. I’m doing a favour for a strange woman, as if I were helping her up after a fall on the street. But the whole time I remain outside the actual event. I don’t get involved, I can’t be held responsible...

Judith gets up abruptly. ‘Work is waiting,’ she says. ‘Most of your questions you can probably answer yourself. Africa belongs to each individual, it’s never shared.’

‘You know nothing about me,’ he says. ‘My background, my life, my dreams. And yet you’re prepared to grant me enormous responsibility. From my Swedish point of view it’s incomprehensible.’

‘I’m alone,’ she replies. ‘Abandoned by a man I never even had a chance to bury. Living in Africa means always being forced to take full responsibility.’

Much later he will remember his first days at Judith Fillington’s farm as an unreal journey into a world he seems to understand less and less, the more his insight grows. Surrounded by the faces of the black workers, he feels that he is in the midst of an ongoing but not yet triggered catastrophe.

During those days he discovers that feelings secrete different odours. He can sense hate in a bitter smell, like manure or vinegar, everywhere; wherever he follows Judith like a shadow the smell is always nearby. When he wakes in the night, the smell is there, a faint current through the malaria net that hangs above his bed.

Something has to happen, he thinks. An outbreak of rage at the impotence and poverty. Not having an alternative is like having nothing at all, he thinks. Not being able to see anything beyond poverty except more poverty...

He decides that he has to get away, leave Africa before it’s too late. But after a month he is still there. He lies in his room with the sloping ceiling and listens to the dogs restlessly patrolling around the house. Every evening before he goes to bed, he sees Judith check that the doors and windows are locked. He sees how she first turns out the light in each room before she goes in to draw the heavy curtains. She is always listening, stopping suddenly in the midst of a step or a movement. She takes a shotgun and a heavy elephant gun into her bedroom every night. During the day the weapons are locked inside a steel cabinet, and he sees that she always carries the keys with her.

After a month he realises that he has begun to share her fear. With the rapidly falling twilight the strange house is transformed into a bunker of silence. He asks whether she has found a successor, but she shakes her head.

‘In Africa anything important takes a long time,’ she replies.

He begins to suspect that she hasn’t written any classified ads, hasn’t made contact with the newspapers that Werner Masterton suggested. But he refrains from giving vent to his suspicion.

Judith fills him with awed respect, perhaps even devotion. Hans follows her from dawn to dusk, follows her unceasing effort, which means that 15,000 eggs leave the farm each day, despite run-down and mistreated lorries, a continual shortage of the maize waste that makes up the primary fodder, and sudden outbreaks of viral diseases which during one night can take the lives of all the hens in one of the oblong, walled-off stone buildings where they are forced into steel cages. One night she wakes him up, pulling open his door and shining a torch into his face, and tells him to get dressed at once.

Outside the house with its locked doors a frightened night watchman is shouting that hunter ants have got into one of the chicken coops, and when they reach the site Olofson sees terrified Africans using burning bundles of twigs to swat at the endless columns of ants. Without hesitation Judith takes the lead, forcing the ants to change direction, and she screams at him when he doesn’t understand what she wants him to do.

‘Who am I?’ he asks her early one morning. ‘Who am I to the blacks?’

‘A new Duncan Jones,’ she replies. ‘Two hundred Africans are searching for your weak spot right now.’

Two weeks pass before he meets the man he has come to replace. Each day they go past the house where he sits locked in with his bottles, transforming himself into a holy man. The house is on a hill right by the river, surrounded by a high wall.

A rusty car, maybe a Peugeot, is sometimes parked outside the wall. It’s always parked as though it had been abandoned in haste. The boot stands open, and the corner of a filthy blanket hangs out of one door.

He imagines a state of siege, a final battle that will be fought around this hill, between the black workers and the lone white man inside in the dark.

‘The night watchmen are afraid,’ says Judith. ‘They can hear him wailing in the night. They’re afraid, but at the same time they feel a sense of security. They think that his metamorphosis to a holy man will mean that the bandits will stay away from this farm.’

‘The bandits?’ Olofson asks.

‘They’re everywhere,’ she replies. ‘In the slums outside Kitwe and Chingola there are plenty of weapons. Gangs spring up and are destroyed, and new ones appear in their place. White farmers are attacked, cars with whites are stopped on the roads. The police are almost certainly involved, as well as workers on the farms.’

‘What if they come here?’ he asks.

‘I rely on my dogs,’ she says. ‘Africans are afraid of dogs. And I have Duncan wailing in the night. Superstition can be good if you know how to use it. Maybe the night watchmen believe he’s being transformed into a snake.’