Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

After a year he also has thoughts that seem frivolous to him. I’ll stay, he thinks. As long as Judith is powerless, as long as the successor doesn’t show up. I’ll teach myself something about all this. About the eggs and the constant feed problem. About leading 200 Africans by the hand. Surely something of this will be meaningful even after I go back home.

After half a year he writes to his father and tells him that he will be staying in Africa for an indefinite period. Of his studies and his ambition to become the defender of mitigating circumstances, he writes only: I’m still young . The letter is an epistle of digression, a personal tall tale, in which he twists and distorts the facts.

It’s a belated thank you, he thinks. A thank you for all the escapades with the sea charts in the house by the river.

I’m involved in an adventure , he writes. An adventure that grew from the energy source that is possibly the true essence of adventure: coincidences that became intertwined, in which I was permitted to take part.

As a worthy cargo to lower down into Célestine’s hold, he sends a crocodile tooth.

Here the reptile’s teeth protect against danger , he writes. I’m sending you an amulet that can protect you from misplaced blows of your axe or a falling tree you otherwise wouldn’t have escaped.

One night he can’t sleep. When he goes to the kitchen to get a drink of water, he hears Judith crying in her locked room. And maybe this is when the first inkling flits past, as he stands in the warm darkness outside her door. The idea that he will stay in Africa. A door that stands ajar in his mind, a glimpse into a future that was never intended.

A year has passed. The hippo that he never sees sighs down by the river. A shiny cobra coils one morning in the wet grass before his feet. In the night he can see fires burning on the horizon, and the distant sound of drums reaches him like a language that is hard to decipher.

The elephant grass burns and the animals flee. He imagines that he is watching a distant battlefield, a war that has gone on since the mists of prehistoric time.

I, he thinks, I, Hans Olofson, am just as afraid of the unknown as I was when I stepped out of the plane into a world made utterly white by the sun. I realise that I’m surrounded by catastrophe, a temporarily postponed end of time, as two epochs collide. I know that I’m white, one of the candles that is seen much too clearly, one of those who must perish on this continent. And yet I stay.

I’ve tried to safeguard myself, to remain a nonentity in this test of strength. I stand outside, a temporary visitor, without involvement or guilt. Could it be pointless? The white man’s ultimate fancy? Yet I can see quite clearly that my fear is not the same as when I first stood in this white sun.

I no longer believe that every black is whetting his panga so he can slit my throat while I sleep. Today my fear is directed: against the murderous gangs that ravage this land, against the hit men who might also be hiding on this farm. But I don’t justify my lack of understanding by seeing a murderer in every black I meet. The workers on the farm are no longer nameless, threatening faces that all look the same.

One evening after Judith has begun to get her strength back, Ruth and Werner Masterton come to visit. It’s a lengthy dinner, and they sit for a long time behind the locked doors and empty their glasses.

Olofson gets drunk that evening. He doesn’t say much, huddling in a corner, feeling like an outsider again. Late that evening Ruth and Werner decide to spend the night. The attacks on solitary cars have increased again, and at night the white man is a hunted quarry.

On his way to bed, Hans meets Judith outside her door. He convinces himself that she is standing there waiting for him; she is tipsy too, with wandering eyes that remind him of his father.

She holds out her hand, grabs him, pulls him into her room, and they perform a love act on the cold stone floor that is equally helpless and violent. As he grasps her skinny body, he thinks of the room upstairs, the dead animals’ bone yard.

Afterwards she pulls away as if he had struck her. Not a single word, he thinks. How can one make love without saying a single word?

The next day he has a hangover and feels terrible, and he recalls her body as something harsh and repulsive. In the dawn they say goodbye to Ruth and Werner. She avoids his eye, pressing the broad-brimmed hat down on her brow.

One year has passed.

The nightly web of sound of the cicadas has become familiar. The smells of charcoal, dried fish, sweat, and stinking rubbish heaps surround him as though they had always been there. But the entirety, the black continent, becomes increasingly elusive the more he thinks he understands. He senses that Africa is not actually a unified entity; at least not something that he, with his ingrained notions, can comprehend and penetrate.

There are no simple passwords here. Wooden gods and forefathers speak as distinctly here as the living people. European truth loses its validity on the endless savannah.

He still sees himself as an apprehensive traveller, not as one of those purposeful and well-equipped pathfinders. And yet he is where he is. Beyond the ridges of fir trees, beyond the Finnish forests, on the other side of the river and the bridge.

One day in October, when he has worked for Judith for a year, she comes walking towards him in the overgrown garden. It’s Sunday, and there is only an old man busy watering the garden. Olofson is spending the day trying to fix an attachment to the pump that brings the water from the Kafue to their house.

Against the light he sees her face and is instantly worried. I don’t want to hear what she has to say, he thinks. They sit down in the shade of the big tree, and he can tell that she has prepared this conversation, for Luka shows up with coffee.

‘There is a point of no return,’ she says, ‘in every person’s life. Something one does not want, something one fears but can’t avoid. I have come to the realisation that I can’t do this any more: not the farm, not Africa, or this life. That’s why I’m making you a proposal now. Something you can think about, you don’t have to decide right away. I’ll give you three months, and what I tell you will require you to make a decision. Soon I will be leaving here. I’m still sick, the fatigue is suffocating me, and I don’t think I’ll ever regain my strength. I’m going to Europe, maybe to Italy. Beyond that I have no plans. But my offer is that you take over my farm. It makes a profit, there’s no mortgage on it, and there are no indications that it will lose its value. Forty per cent of the profits will be mine for as long as I live. That’s the price you have to pay me if you take over the farm. If you should sell the farm within ten years, seventy-five per cent of the profits will go to me. After ten years the amount is reduced to fifty per cent, and after twenty years to nothing. It would be easiest for me, of course, to sell the farm immediately. But something is preventing me: a sense of responsibility, I think, to those who work here. Maybe I can’t stand the thought of Duncan being forced off the land that will one day be his grave. For a year I’ve seen you on my farm. I know that you’ll be able to take it over...’

She falls silent and Olofson feels that he wants to sign a deed of transfer at once. An absolutely unreserved joy fills him. The voice from the brickworks which he carries inside him begins to speak. To be needed, to be somebody...

‘This is unexpected,’ is all he says.

‘I’m afraid of losing the only thing that is irreplaceable,’ she says. ‘My will to live. The simple power that makes me get out of bed when the sun comes up. Everything else can probably be replaced. But not that.’