Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

He confides almost everything to Janine. Not everything, that would be impossible. Thoughts and feelings that he can scarcely acknowledge to himself, those remain secret. This applies especially to Hans’s increasingly agitated and vulnerable discovery of the strange desires that are boiling inside him.

Today she has her red nose on. Usually the hole underneath her eyes is covered by a white handkerchief, stuffed into the hole so that he can see the red scars left by the scalpel, and the sight of naked flesh under her eyes becomes something forbidden, hinting at something quite different.

He imagines her naked, with the trombone at her lips, and then he blushes with excitement. He has no idea whether she senses what he’s thinking. He wishes that she would, as often as he wishes the opposite.

She plays a new tune she has learned, ‘Wolverine Blues’, which she has put on her gramophone. Hans keeps the beat with a darning egg, yawns and only half listens.

When she finishes he can’t stay any longer. Nothing is calling him but he’s still in a hurry. Ever since he finished school he has been running. Something is urging him on, exciting and enticing him.

The house stands where it always has stood. Light snow covers the potato patch that nobody ever digs in. In one of the lighted windows he sees his father’s shadow. Hans suddenly feels sorry for him. He tries to imagine the way his father must have stood on the afterdeck of a ship heading into a warm trade wind. Far off, against the last ribbons of the sunset, glow the faint lights from the next port of call.

But when he walks into the kitchen there’s a knot in his stomach, because his father is sitting at the table with glazed eyes and before him stands a half-empty bottle. Hans knows that his father has begun to drink himself into a stupor again.

Why is life so damned hard? he thinks. Bare ice to slip on wherever you turn...

This winter even Under finally reveals himself as something other than a well-meaning horse dealer in galoshes. There is malice behind the friendly mask.

Hans learns that the friendliness has a price. Beneath the voluminous overcoat lurks a reptile. Gradually he begins to understand that in the horse dealer’s world he is nothing more than a strong pair of arms and obedient legs. When Visselgren is struck by arthritis in the middle of February, the good times are over for him. The horse dealer buys him a one-way ticket back to Skänninge and drives him to the station. Under doesn’t even bother to get out of the car and thank him for all his hard work. Back at the stable he rants for a long time about Visselgren’s duplicity, as if his shortness should be regarded as a character defect.

New employees come and go, and eventually it’s only the Holmström twins and Hans who remain of the old crew. Hans is starting to think the same thoughts as he had as he was pulling the cart between the warehouse and the freight office.

Has he ended up back there again? If so, where is the Honour and Community of Work in the daily drudgery that he thought was the great Goal of life?

A few weeks after Visselgren’s departure, the horse dealer comes into the stable late one afternoon with a black box under his arm. The Holmström brothers have already left in their decrepit Saab, and Hans is alone getting the stable ready for the night.

The horse dealer heads towards a seldom used stall where a worn-out Northern Swedish horse is crouched in a corner. He had only just purchased him for a few symbolic notes, and Hans was wondering why the horse hadn’t already been sent to the slaughterhouse.

From the black box the horse dealer takes out something that most resembles the transformer for an electric train. Then he calls Hans over and tells him to bring him an extension cord. The horse dealer is humming, pulling off his big coat, and Hans does as he is told.

And what is he told to do?

The old horse has to be tied with chains while steel clamps are fastened to his ears. Then the electricity passes through the cables, and the animal convulses under the shocks of the current. Under contentedly turns the little knob on the metre, as if he were directing a toy train, and Hans helplessly promises himself never to forget the horse’s tormented eyes. For almost an hour the torture continues, while Under orders Hans to check that the chains are tight so the horse won’t get loose.

He hates the damned horse dealer who is tormenting this broken-down horse. He realises that Under must have a prospective buyer in the background even for this worn-out animal. With electricity and steel clamps a trace of vitality is infused back into the horse, a strength based only on fear.

‘He’ll be practically young again,’ says Under, turning up the current a bit.

The horse foams at the mouth, his eyes are popping out of their sockets. Hans wishes he could put the steel clamps on the horse dealer’s nose and then turn up the current until he begged for mercy. But of course he doesn’t do that. He does as he’s told. Then it’s all over. The horse stands facing the wall and the horse dealer regards his work. Then he grabs Hans by the shirt as if he had set his teeth in him.

‘This is just between us,’ he says. ‘Between you and me and the horse. Get it?’

From his pocket he draws a crumpled five-krona note and presses it into Hans’s hand. Later, as he tears the note to bits outside the church wall he wonders whether the purpose of life will ever be revealed to him. Who needs him — Hans Olofson? And what is he needed for, except to drag a cart or work in a winter stable where helpless horses are tortured?

I have to get away, he thinks. Away from that damned horse dealer. But what will he do instead? Are there really any answers in life? Who can whisper the password in his ear? He walks home in the winter night in February 1959. For a dizzying second life is a breath in the mouth of eternity. Thinking you can cheat time will just drive you crazy. He stops outside the wooden house. The cold glitters in the snow.

The plough, the anchor, the moorings. To be myself and no one else, he thinks. But then what? Onward, and just keep going? He goes upstairs in the silent house, unlaces his ski boots. His father is snoring and sighing in his room. Like restless flocks of birds his thoughts gather in his mind after he gets into bed. He tries to catch them, examine them one by one, but all he sees are the terrified eyes of the horse and the horse dealer cackling like an evil troll. Life is a dizzying second, he thinks before he falls asleep.

In his dream Célestine grows out of her case and surges towards the backdrop of a world he doesn’t recognise at all, and finally he chops through her moorings.

Does time have a face?

How can one tell when it’s waving and saying goodbye?

One day he realises that he has been with Judith Fillington for a year. The rainy season has passed. Again the motionless heat presses down on him and the African earth.

And the questions he asked himself? They’re still there, but one puzzlement has only been exchanged for another. After a year he is no longer surprised that he is where he is, but instead by how the time could have passed so quickly. After her malaria attack Judith had been stricken by a long drawn-out fatigue that lasted half a year. A parasite, identified far too late, bored into her internal organs and made this fatigue even worse. Olofson saw no possibility of leaving. It would have meant abandoning her, the exhausted woman who lay in the bed that was much too large. He considered it mysterious that she dared to turn over the care of the farm, just like that, to his untrained hands.

One day he discovers that he is waking in the mornings with a quite new and unfamiliar happiness. For the first time in his life he feels he has an objective, even if it’s only to see the lorries full of eggs pull away in a cloud of red dust. Maybe there’s nothing more important than this, he thinks. To produce food and know that someone is always waiting for it.