Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘It’s still unexpected,’ he says. ‘I realise you’re tired, I see it every day. But at the same time I can tell that your strength is coming back.’

‘Each day brings nothing but revulsion,’ she replies. ‘And you can’t see that. Only I can feel it. You must understand that I’ve been preparing for this moment for a long time. For years I’ve been putting money into banks in London and Rome. My lawyer in Kitwe has been informed. If you say no, I’ll sell the farm. There will be no shortage of prospective buyers.’

‘Mr Pihri will miss you,’ he says.

‘You can take over Mr Pihri,’ she says. ‘His eldest son will become a policeman too. You can also take over the young Mr Pihri.’

‘It’s a big decision,’ he says. ‘I really should have gone home long ago.’

‘I haven’t seen you leave,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen you stay. Your three months begin right now, here in the shadow of this tree.’

‘Then you’ll come back?’ he asks.

‘To sell or to pack,’ she replies. ‘Or both.’

Her preparations have been thorough. Four days after their conversation, Olofson drives her to the airport in Lusaka. He accompanies her to the check-in counter and then stands in the warm night on the roof terrace and watches the big jet plane accelerate with a roar and take off towards the stars.

Their leave-taking was simple. It should have been me, he thinks. In all fairness it should have been me who finally left this place... He stays overnight at the hotel he once hid inside. To his surprise he discovers that he has been given the same room, 212. Magic, he thinks. I forget that I’m in Africa.

A restless anxiety sends him down to the bar, and he looks for the black woman who offered herself to him last time. When he isn’t noticed quickly enough, he shouts sharply at one of the waiters who is standing idle by the bar.

‘What have you got today?’ he asks.

‘There isn’t any whisky,’ replies the waiter.

‘So there’s gin? But is there any tonic?’

‘We have tonic today.’

‘So you have gin and tonic?’

‘There is gin and tonic today.’

He gets drunk and renames the property in his mind: Olofson Farm .

Soon a black woman is standing next to his table. In the dim light he has a hard time making out her face.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I would like company. Room 212. But not now, not yet.’

He sees her hesitate, wondering if she should wait at his table or not.

‘No,’ he says. ‘When you see me go up the stairs, wait for another hour. Then come.’

After he has eaten, he starts up the stairs, but doesn’t see her. She sees me though, he thinks.

When she knocks on the door he discovers that she is very young, hardly more than seventeen. But she is experienced. She walks into the room and demands an immediate agreement.

‘Not the whole night,’ he says. ‘I want you to go.’

‘A hundred kwacha ,’ she says. ‘Or ten dollars.’

He nods and asks her name.

‘Whatever name you want,’ she says.

‘Maggie,’ he suggests.

‘My name is Maggie,’ she says. ‘Tonight my name is Maggie.’

He has sex with her, and feels the meaninglessness. Beyond the arousal there is nothing, a room that has been empty for far too long. He breathes in the scents from her body, the cheap soap, the perfume that reminds him of something sour. She smells like an apple, he thinks. Her body is like a musty flat I remember from my childhood.

It is over quickly; he gives her the money and she gets dressed in the bathroom.

‘I’ll be here another time,’ she says.

‘I like the name Janine,’ he says.

‘Then my name will be Janine,’ she replies.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Never again. Now go.’

When he goes into the bathroom he discovers she has taken the toilet paper and his soap. They steal, he thinks. They would cut out our hearts if only they could.

By twilight of the next day he is back on the farm. He eats the dinner Luka has prepared for him. I’m going to run this farm differently, he thinks. Through my example the constant arguments about the necessity of the whites will disappear. The man I appoint to be my overseer must be black. I will build my own school for the workers’ children, I won’t offer them help only when they’re to be buried.

The truth about this farm today, or Ruth and Werner’s farm, is the underpaid labour, the worn-out workers. Judith’s money in the European banks is the wages that were never paid.

I’m going to transform this farm, and I’ll dedicate the school I’m going to build to Janine. When I leave the farm it will be in commemoration of the moment when the ideas of the white farmers were finally refuted.

But he also realises that even as he starts out he is prosperous. The farm represents a fortune. Even if he doubles the workers’ wages the hens will keep laying directly into his own pockets.

Impatiently he waits for daybreak. He walks through the silent rooms and stops in front of the mirrors and looks at his face. He utters a moan that echoes through the empty house.

At dawn he opens the door. Faint bands of mist are drifting over the river. Luka is waiting outside, as well as the gardeners and the woman who washes his clothes. When he sees their silent faces he shudders. Their thoughts are clear enough...

Eighteen years later he remembers that morning. As if the memory and the present have merged. He can recall the mist that drifted over the Kafue, Luka’s inscrutable face, the shudder that went through his body.

When almost everything is already past, he returns to that moment, October 1970. He remembers wandering through the silent house and the plans he made for the future. In the reflection of that night he looks back on the many years, a lifetime of eighteen years in Africa.

Judith Fillington never came back. In December 1970 he has a visit from her lawyer, to his surprise an African and not a white man, who delivers a letter from Naples, asking for his decision. He gives it to Mr Dobson, who promises to telegraph it to her and return as soon as possible with the papers to be signed. At the New Year, signatures are exchanged between Naples and Kalulushi. At the same time Mr Pihri comes to visit with his son.

‘Everything will be the same as always,’ says Hans Olofson.

‘Trouble should be avoided,’ replies Mr Pihri with a smile. ‘My son, young Mr Pihri, saw a used motorcycle for sale in Chingola a few days ago.’

‘My visa will have to be renewed soon,’ says Olofson. ‘Of course young Mr Pihri needs a motorcycle.’

In mid-January a long letter arrives from Judith, postmarked Rome. I have understood something, she writes. Something I never dared realise before. During my whole life in Africa, from my earliest childhood, I grew up in a world that depended on the differences between blacks and whites. My parents took pity on the blacks, on their poverty. They saw the necessary development, they taught me to understand that the whites’ situation would only prevail for a limited time. Maybe two or three generations. Then an upheaval would take place; the blacks would take over the whites’ functions, and the whites would see their imagined importance reduced. Maybe they would even dwindle to an oppressed minority. I learned that the blacks were poor, their lives restricted. But I also learned that they have something we don’t have. A dignity that will someday turn out to be the deciding factor. I realise now that I have denied this insight, perhaps especially after my husband disappeared without a trace. I blamed the blacks for his disappearance; I hated them for something they didn’t do. Now that Africa is so far away, now that I have decided to live the rest of my life here, I can dare once more to acknowledge the insight I previously denied. I have seen the brute in the African, but not in myself. A point will always come in everyone’s life when the most important thing must be turned over to someone else.