Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Luka leaves. Something is making Olofson nervous. Not until many years later will he understand why.

Who whispers the password in his ear? Who reveals what his Goal will be? How does he find a direction in life that is not merely a point of the compass? This year too, 1959, springtime finally breaks through the obstinate barriers of cold, and Hans Olofson has decided that one more leave-taking is necessary. His decision is vague and hesitant, but he knows that he can’t escape the admonition that he has given himself.

One Saturday evening in May, when Under comes roaring up in his Buick in a cloud of dust, Hans screws up his courage and goes out to meet him. At first the horse dealer doesn’t understand what the boy is muttering about. He tries to brush him off, but Hans is stubborn and doesn’t back down before he has delivered his message. When Under grasps that the boy is standing there stammering out his resignation, he flies into a rage. He raises his hand to deal a box on the ear, but the boy is quick to scamper away. The only thing left for Under is to dispense a symbolic humiliation, and he pulls out a wad of money and peels off one of the lowest value, a fiver, and tosses it in the gravel.

‘You’re being paid according to your services. But it’s a damned shame that the authorities don’t print notes worth even less. You’re being overpaid...’

Hans picks up the note and goes into the stable to say goodbye to the horses and the Holmström twins.

‘What will you do now?’ ask the brothers, who are washing themselves under the cold tap in preparation for Saturday night.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘Something will turn up.’

‘We’re going to move on next winter too,’ the brothers tell him as they change their mucking-out boots for black dancing shoes.

They offer him aquavit.

‘That damned horse dealer,’ they say, passing around the bottle. ‘If you see a Saab, it’s us! Don’t forget it.’ He runs across the river bridge in the spring night to tell Janine of his decision. Because she hasn’t yet returned from one of Hurrapelle’s Joyous Spring Fellowships, he strolls about in her garden and thinks about the time he and Sture splashed varnish all over her currant bushes. He shudders at the memory, wishing he hadn’t been reminded of that thoughtless act.

Is there anything that can be understood? Isn’t life, which is so difficult to manage, nothing but a series of incomprehensible events lurking behind the corners as one passes? Who can ever deal with the dark impulses hidden inside? Secret rooms and wild horses, he thinks. That’s what you have to carry around.

He sits down on the steps and wonders about Sture. He’s out there somewhere. But is he in a distant hospital or on one of the furthest stars in the universe? Many times he thought of asking Nyman the courthouse caretaker, but it never came to anything. There are many reasons not to find out. He doesn’t want to know for sure. He can see the horrifying images far too clearly in his mind. An iron pipe, thick as the pipe on a coffee pot, rammed down his throat. And the iron lung? What can that be? He sees a big black beetle opening up its body and enclosing Sture under its shiny wings.

But not to be able to move? Day after day? For his whole life? He tries to imagine it by sitting on Janine’s porch, completely still, but it doesn’t work. He can’t comprehend it. That’s why it’s good that he doesn’t know for sure. Then a little door still remains to be pushed open. A little door to the idea that Sture may have recovered, or that the iron bridge and the river and the red jacket were all a dream.

There’s a crunching on the gravel, and Janine appears. He has been so deep in thought that he didn’t hear her open the gate. Now he jumps up as if he has been caught in the act of doing something forbidden.

Janine stands there in her white coat and light-blue dress. In the dusk the light falls so that her white nose handkerchief under her eyes takes on the same colour as her skin.

Something passes by, a shiver. Something that is more important than all the world’s evil horse dealers. How long ago was it? Two months already. One morning, Under had flung a terrified stable girl in among the horses, a girl he had found on a lonely horse farm deep in the forests of Hälsingland. A girl who wanted to get away, who knew about horses, and who he’d stuffed in the back seat of his Buick.

Hans Olofson had loved her boundlessly. For the month she was at the stable he had circled round her like an attentive butterfly, and every evening he had stayed behind just to be alone with her. But one day she was gone. Under had taken her back, cursing her parents for pestering him with calls about how she was doing.

Hans had loved her, and in the twilight when he can’t see the nose handkerchief he loves Janine too. But he’s afraid of her ability to read his thoughts. So he gets up quickly, spits in the gravel, and asks where the hell she has been.

‘We had a spring fellowship,’ she says.

She sits down next to him on the steps and they watch a sparrow hopping about in a footprint in the gravel. Her thigh touches his leg. The stable girl, he thinks. Marie, or Rimma as they called her. One time he stayed behind, hiding behind the hay, and watched her take off her clothes and wash naked by the water pump. He was just about to rush forward, force himself on her, and let himself be swallowed up by the inconceivable mystery.

The sparrow crouches in the footprint. Janine hums and touches her leg to his. Doesn’t she understand what she’s doing? The wild horses are tugging and twitching where they are chained in his secret stalls. What will happen if they break loose? What can he do then?

Suddenly she gets up, as if she understood his thoughts.

‘I’m cold,’ she says. ‘The church is draughty, and today he talked for so long.’

‘Hurrapelle?’

She laughs at him. ‘He’s probably the only one who doesn’t know his nickname,’ she says. ‘He would certainly be upset if he did.’

In the kitchen he tells her about quitting his job with the horse dealer. But what is really the truth? How did it all happen? He hears himself describe how he was excited and shouting, while the horse dealer was puny as a trembling dwarf. But wasn’t he the one who squeaked and mumbled, hardly able to make himself understood? Is he the one who’s too little, or is it that the world is too big?

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asks.

‘I’ll probably have to go to high school and think a little,’ he replies.

And that is precisely what he decides to do. He knows his marks are good enough: Headmaster Gottfried told him that, although it might be hard to convince Erik Olofson of the usefulness of going back to a worn-out school bench.

‘Do it,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you’ll do well.’

But he’s still feeling defensive. ‘If it doesn’t work out then I’ll leave town,’ he says. ‘There’s always the sea. I’ll never go back to the horse dealer. He can get somebody else to torture his horses.’

On the way home from Janine’s house he goes down to his boulder. The spring flood is roaring and a huge log has lodged on the point at People’s Park. Life is hard, he thinks.

Tonight is as good as any other to tell his father about his decision. He’ll sit there until the tram rattles across the river bridge and disappears into the woods. The springtime river dances.

Erik Olofson is sitting polishing his little pearl-handled revolver when Hans comes home. He bought the revolver from a Chinese man he met in Newport; it cost him nine dollars cash and a jacket. Hans sits down across the kitchen table from his father and watches him carefully rub the gleaming handle.