Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

On that occasion he left the game, sneaked away from the others, vanished among the fir trees surrounding the dead brickworks, and went down to the river.

The forest was quiet; the swarms of mosquitoes had not yet taken over the town, which lay where the river made a bend on its long journey to the sea. A crow squawked its loneliness at the top of a crooked fir and then flapped away over the ridge where Hedevägen wound its way to the west. The moss under his feet was spongy. He had grown tired of the game, and on his way to the river everything changed. For as long as he had not established his own identity, was just somebody among all the others, he had possessed a timeless immortality, the privilege of childhood, the most profound manifestation of childishness. At the very moment that the unfamiliar question of why he was who he was crept into his head, he became a definite person and thus mortal. Now he had defined himself; he was who he was and would never be anyone else. He realised the futility of defending himself. Now he had a life ahead of him, in which he would have to be who he was.

By the river he sat down on a rock and looked at the brown water slowly making its way towards the sea. A rowboat lay chafing at its cable and he realised how simple it would be to disappear. From the town, but never from himself.

For a long time he sat by the river, becoming a human being. Everything had acquired limits. He would play again, but never the same way as before. Playing had become a game, nothing more.

Now he clambers over the rocks on the riverbank until he can see the house where he lives. He sits down on an uprooted tree that smells of rain and dirt and looks at the smoke curling out of the chimney.

Who can he tell about his great discovery? Who can be his confidant?

He looks at the house again. Should he knock on the draughty door to the ground floor flat and ask to speak with Egg-Karlsson? Ask to be admitted to the kitchen where it always smells of rancid fat, wet wool, and cat piss? He can’t talk to Egg-Karlsson, who doesn’t speak to anyone, just shuts his door as if he’s closing an eggshell of iron around himself. All Hans knows about him is that he’s a misanthrope and bull-headed. He rides his bicycle to the farmhouses outside town and buys up eggs, which he then delivers to various grocers. He does all his business in the early morning, and for the rest of the day he lives behind his closed door.

Egg-Karlsson’s silence pervades the house. It hovers like a mist over the neglected currant bushes and the shared potato patch, the front steps, and the stairs to the top floor where Hans lives with his father.

Nor does he consider confiding in old lady Westlund who lives across from Egg-Karlsson. She would sweep him up in her embroidery and her Free Church evangelism, never listening to him, but proceeding at once to fling her holy words at him.

All that remains is the little attic flat he shares with his father. All he can do is go home and talk to his father, Erik Olofson, who was born in Åmsele, far from this cold hole in the interior of melancholy southern Norrland, this town that lies hidden away in the heart of Härjedal. Hans knows how much it hurts his father to have to live so far from the sea, to have to make do with a sluggish river. With a child’s intuition he can see that a man who has been to sea can never thrive where the dense, frozen grey forest conceals the open horizons. He thinks of the sea chart that hangs on the kitchen wall, showing the waters around Mauritius and Réunion, with a glimpse of the east coast of Madagascar on the fading edge of the chart, and the sea floor indicated in places, its inconceivable depth 4,000 metres. It’s a constant reminder of a sailor who wound up in the utterly wrong place, who managed to make landfall where there wasn’t any sea.

On the shelf over the stove sits a full-rigger in a glass case, brought home decades ago from a dim Indian shop in Mombasa, purchased for a single English pound. In this frigid part of the world, inhabited by ice crystals instead of jacarandas, people have moose skulls and fox tails as wall decorations. Here it should smell of sour rubber boots and lingonberries, not the distant odour of the salty monsoon sea and burned-out charcoal fires. But the full-rigger sits there on the stove shelf, with its dreamy name Célestine . Long ago Hans decided that he would never marry a woman who wasn’t named Célestine. It would be a form of betrayal; to his father, to the ship, to himself.

He also senses a murky connection between the full-rigger in its dusty case and the recurring nights when his father scrubs out his fury. A sailor finds himself driven ashore in a primeval Norrland forest, where no bearings can be taken, no ocean depths sounded.

The boy senses that the sailor lives with a stifled cry of lamentation inside. And it’s when the longing grows too strong that the bottles end up on the table, the sea charts are taken out of the chest in the hall, the seven seas are sailed once more, and the sailor metamorphoses into a wreck who is forced to scrub away his longing, transformed into hallucinations dissolved in alcohol.

The answers are always found in the past.

His mother disappeared, was simply gone one day. Hans was so little then that he has no memory either of her or of her departure. The photographs that lie behind the radio in father’s unfinished logbook, and her name, Mary, are all he knows.

The two photographs instil in him a sense of dawn and cold. A round face with brown hair, her head tilted a little, maybe a hint of a smile. On the back of the photographs it says Atelier Strandmark, Sundsvall .

Sometimes he imagines her as a figurehead on a ship that was wrecked in a heavy storm in the southern seas and has since lain on the bottom in a watery grave 4,000 metres down. He imagines that her invisible mausoleum lies somewhere on the sea chart that hangs on the kitchen wall. Maybe outside Port Louis, or in the vicinity of the reef off the east coast of Madagascar.

She didn’t want to leave. That’s the explanation he gets. On the rare occasions that his father talks about her departure, he always uses the same words.

Someone who doesn’t want to leave. Quickly, unexpectedly she disappeared, that much he understands. One day she’s gone, with a suitcase. Someone saw her get on the train, towards Orsa and Mora. The vastness of Finnmark closed in around her disappearance.

For this disappearance he can manage only a wordless despair. And he assumes that they share the guilt, he and his father. They didn’t die. They were left behind, never to receive a sign of life.

He’s not sure whether he misses her, either. His mother is two photographs, not a person of flesh and blood who laughs, washes clothes, and tucks the covers under his chin when the winter cold penetrates the walls of the building. The feeling he bears is a kind of fear. And the shame of having been found unworthy.

He decides early on to share the contempt that the decent town has hung like shackles around his runaway mother. He goes along with the decent people, the grown-ups. Enclosed in an iron grip of constancy they pass their life together in the building where the beams scream out their distress during the long drawnout winters. Sometimes Hans imagines that their house is a ship that has dropped anchor and is waiting for the wind to come up. The chains of the elkhounds out by the woodshed are actually anchor chains, the river a bay of the open sea. The attic flat is the captain’s cabin, while the lower flat belongs to the crew. Waiting for the wind takes a long time, but occasionally the anchors are hauled up from the deep. And then the house sets off under full sail to race down the river, saluting one last time where the river bends at the People’s Park, before the wind carries them away. Towards an Away that doesn’t entail a return.