Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

The door opens when he touches the handle, and a musty smell of camphor wafts towards him. He slides one hand over the wall to find a light switch. A bare lightbulb in the ceiling comes on. He sees a thigh bone that he surmises is from an elephant or a cape buffalo. A crocodile with the extended ribs of a reptile. Various skulls and horns, some of them broken, lie jumbled together. He imagines that the animals were once locked alive in this room and slowly rotted away, until all that remained were bones and skulls.

Her husband’s room, he thinks. A little boy’s dream of what a grown man’s room would be. In a dusty window niche lies a notebook. He can make out the pencil handwriting passably well and realises he is looking at poems. Quivering poetic fragments, written with a pencil that is so faint it could never have been intended that the text survive...

A rucksack full of ants was all that remained, he thinks. That is poetry too, the epitaph of a man who disappeared. Depressed, he leaves the room.

Once again he listens outside Judith’s door and then goes into his own room. A faint odour from her body is still between the sheets. The imprint of fever. He places her shotgun next to the bed. I don’t want to take over from her, he thinks. Yet one of her weapons stands by my bed.

All at once he is homesick, childishly so; he feels abandoned. Now I have seen Africa, he thinks. What I’ve seen I haven’t understood, but I’ve still seen it. I’m no explorer; expeditions into the unknown tempt me only in my imagination.

Once I climbed over a bridge span, as if I were riding on the axis of the earth itself. I left something behind up there on that cold iron span. It was the longest journey I ever took in my life... It’s possible that I’m still up there, with my fingers gripping the cold iron. Maybe I never really came down. I’m still up there, wrapped in my terror.

He gets into bed and turns off the light. The sounds stream forth from the darkness, the padding dogs, the hippo sighing from the river.

Just before he falls asleep he is wide awake for a moment. Someone is laughing out in the dark. One of the dogs barks and then all is quiet again.

In the silence he remembers the brickworks. The ruin where he became aware of his consciousness for the first time. In the laughter that reaches him from the night he thinks he senses a continuation of that moment. The ruin of the brickworks clarified his existence. The fortified bedroom in the house by the Kafue River, surrounded by large dogs, reveals certain conditions. The laughter that penetrates the night describes the world he temporarily happens to inhabit.

This is how it looks, he thinks. Earlier I knew without knowing. Now I see how the world has capsized, I see the poverty and misery that are the real truth. Perched high on the river bridge there were only the stars and the expansive horizon of fir trees. I wanted to get away from there and now I have done so. Being here must mean that I’m in the centre of a time that belongs to me. I have no idea who was laughing. Nor can I determine whether the laugh is a threat or a promise. And yet I know.

Soon he must leave this place. His return ticket is his main insurance. In a place where the world is divided, where the world is fixed, he doesn’t have to be involved. He stretches out his hand in the dark and runs his fingers along the cold barrel of the shotgun. The hippo sighs down by the river.

All of a sudden he’s in a hurry to get home. Judith will have to look for Duncan Jones’s successor without his help. The visa that Mr Pihri extracted from his friends and was paid for with 500 eggs will never be used...

But he is wrong; Hans Olofson is wrong. Like so many times before, his assessments turn on their own axis and come back to the starting point as their opposites. The return ticket has already begun to decompose.

Hans Olofson’s dreams are almost always reminders.

Through his dreams, his subconscious self ensures that he forgets nothing. Often there is a recurrent prelude, as if his dreams were drawing aside the old worn curtain for the very same music. The music is the winter night, the clear, starry midwinter cold.

He is out there, Hans Olofson, still barely grown. He is standing somewhere by the church wall beneath a street lamp. He is a lonely, sad shadow against all the white of that stern winter night...

How could he have known? He couldn’t peek into the veiled world of the future when he finally finished his last day of school, flung his school books under the bed and marched away to his first full-time job as the youngest man in the warehouse of the Trade Association. Back then the world was exceedingly knowable and whole. Now he was going to earn his own money, pull his own weight, learn to be a grown-up.

What he would later recall about his time at the Trade Association was the constant hauling of goods up the hill to the train station. The cart he was given was neglected and worn-out, and with a continuous curse inside him he would drag and pull it in a perpetual circuit between the freight office and the warehouse. He quickly learned that swearing didn’t make the hill any easier to overcome. Swearing was revenge and helpless rage, and as such possibly a source of strength, but it didn’t flatten out the hill.

He decides that the hellhole that is the Trade Association’s warehouse can’t represent the truth. The Honour of Work and the Community of Work must look different.

And there is a difference in going to work for Under, the horse dealer who needs a helper because one of his stable boys has been badly bitten on the arm by an angry stallion.

Hans Olofson makes his entrance into the strange world of the horse dealer one day in late September, when there is already snow in the air. Winter preparations are in full swing; stalls have to be rebuilt and expanded, the leaky roof has to be fixed, the harnesses checked, the supply of horseshoes and nails inventoried. Late autumn is the time to prepare for hibernation; horses as well as people have to sleep, and Hans stands with a sledgehammer in his hand and knocks out one of the cross-walls in the stable. Under wanders around in his galoshes in the cement dust and dispenses advice. Visselgren, a short man from the south of Sweden, who Under discovered at the Skänninge marketplace, sits in one corner mending a pile of harnesses, and winks at Hans. The immensely strong Holmström twins pull down one of the cross-walls by themselves. Horses couldn’t have done it any better. Under saunters contentedly back and forth.

In the world of Under there is a continual switching between absentminded indifference and sound opinions which he passionately defends. The very foundation of his world view is that nothing is initially a given, other than when it comes to horses. Casting modesty aside, he views himself as a member of the elite who carry the world on their shoulders. Without horse dealing, chaos would rule, and wild horses would take over the world as the new barbaric rulers. Hans swings his heavy sledgehammer and is happy to have escaped the worn-out cart. Now this is living!

For one year he is part of this strange community. His assignments are always changing; the days differ sharply but enticingly.

One evening he runs across the river bridge to Janine’s house. On this very evening she has adorned herself with the red nose, and she is sitting at the kitchen table polishing her trombone when he stamps the snow off his feet on the steps.

He stopped knocking long ago. Janine’s house is a home, a different home from the wooden house by the river, but still his home. A little leather bag hanging above the kitchen table spreads the fragrance of cumin. Janine, who no longer has a sense of smell, still remembers cumin from the time before the botched operation.