Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘Will it fire?’ he asks.

‘Of course it’ll fire,’ replies his father. ‘Do you think I’d buy a weapon I couldn’t use?’

‘How should I know?’

‘No, how would you know?’

‘Exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. But I quit that damned horse dealer.’

‘You never should have started working for him. What did I tell you?’

‘You didn’t tell me anything, did you?’

‘I told you to stay at the Trade Association!’

‘What does that have to do with it?’

‘You’re not listening to what I’m saying.’

‘Well, what does it have to do with anything?’

‘Here you come home and say I never tell you anything.’

‘I never should have started at that warehouse. And now I’m finished with that damned horse dealer.’

‘What did I tell you?’

‘You didn’t say a thing.’

‘Didn’t I tell you to stay at the warehouse?’

‘You should have told me never to start!’

‘Why would I say that?’

‘I already told you! Aren’t you going to ask what I plan to do instead?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then ask me!’

‘I shouldn’t have to ask. If you’ve got something to say, then say it. This handle will never get clean.’

‘I can see it shining.’

‘What do you know about mother-of-pearl revolver handles? Do you know what mother-of-pearl is?’

‘Not really.’

‘See what I mean?’

‘I’m going to start at secondary school. I’ve already applied. And my grades are good enough.’

‘All right.’

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Do you think it’s a good idea?’

‘I’m not the one going there.’

‘God damn it...’

‘Don’t swear.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re too young.’

‘How old do you have to be to swear?’

‘Well...’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I think you should have stayed at the warehouse. That’s what I’ve always said...’

The spring, the summer, are so short, so fleeting, and now it’s time for the rowan berries, when Hans Olofson will be walking through the gates of the secondary school. What sort of ambition does he have? Not to be the best, but not the worst either. To be somewhere in the middle of the stream, always far from the deep current. He doesn’t intend to take the lead and swim on ahead.

Hans will be a pupil that teachers forget. He sometimes seems slow, almost sluggish. A pupil who can usually answer, and be right most of the time. But why doesn’t he ever raise his hand, even when he knows the answer? In geography he possesses knowledge about the oddest places. He can talk about Pamplemousse as though he has been there. And Lourenço Marques, wherever that is.

Hans never drowns in the flood of knowledge through which he swims for four long years. He makes himself inaccessible and as invisible as possible in the middle ranks of the class. There he stakes out his territory and arranges his hiding place. It serves as a protective cover against a strange hesitant feeling.

What does he actually hope to get out of these four years? It’s not as though he had any plans for the future. The dreams he harbours are so different. With quiet obsession he hopes that each lesson will reveal the Goal to him. He dreams of the decisive moment, when he can close his books, get up and leave, never to return. Attentively he watches the teachers, searching for his signpost.

But life being what it is, many other fires are also burning inside him during those last years he lives by the river. He is entering that age when every person is his own pyromaniac, equipped with a piece of flint in an otherwise incomprehensible world. It’s the passions that flare up and die down, that again gather speed to devour him, yet always let him climb out of the ashes alive.

The passions release powers that leave him bewildered. This is the time when he seems to burst the final membranes that bind him to his childhood, to the time that perhaps both began and ended in the ruins of the brickworks, when he discovered that he was precisely himself and no one else, a specific ‘I’ and no other.

And these passions flame to the insipid music of Kringström’s band. They have a bass and drums, clarinet, guitar and accordion. With a sigh they strike up ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, weary unto death, after a thousand years of incessant playing in the draughty dance rotunda of the People’s Hall. Kringström, who barely remembers his own first name, suffers from chronic bronchitis caused by a lifetime standing in the heat of the smoky stoves and the cross-draught of doors eternally opened and closed. Once, in his lost youth, he had intended to be a composer. Not a heavy-hipped man of gravity who wrote down notes for posterity, but the creator of light and popular tunes — he would be a master of pop songs. But what did he become? What remains of life’s wan smile? The melodies were utterly lost, they never appeared on his accordion, no matter how much he prayed for inspiration, how much he practised his fingering. Everything had already been written, and so he put together his band in order to survive. People are now stomping on the boards of the dance rotunda, where they will play until the moment that eternity shoves them off the last precipice. The music that once was a dream has become an affliction.

Kringström coughs and envisions a horrendous death from lung cancer. But he plays on, and when the last note dies out he receives his listless applause. Below the bandstand, as usual, hooting and drunken youngsters hang around, not knowing any dance steps, but all the more willing to hurl jeers if the music isn’t to their liking. Long ago Kringström’s band stopped throwing pearls before swine; his music falls from the instruments like granite. With ear plugs he mutes the sound as best he can, hearing only enough so he doesn’t lose the beat. They take a break as often as they can, and drag it out as long as they dare. In a dreary back room where a single lightbulb dangles from the ceiling and a torn poster depicting a snake charmer is peeling from the wall, they drink coffee laced with schnapps, sitting in silence, and take turns peeking out the door and keeping an eye on the instruments. If any of the drunken youths were to get the idea of staggering up on to the bandstand and sinking their teeth into a clarinet...

After ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ comes ‘Diana’, and then they have to speed it up so the audience won’t start snarling. And Kringström’s band thumps away at something that’s supposed to be ‘Alligator Rock’, and he feels as though an evil being is standing behind him pounding him on the head with a sledgehammer. On the dance floor the young people are jumping and bounding like mad, and Kringström feels that he is spending his life in an insane asylum. After this musical outburst come two slow numbers, and sometimes Kringström takes his revenge on the demanding youth by playing a waltz. Then the dance floor thins out, and the noisy mob crowds through the swinging doors that lead to the café, where it’s easy to mix aquavit from hip flasks into lukewarm Loranga soda.

Hans Olofson also enters this world. Most often he comes with the Holmström twins. They still haven’t found their chosen crafts and left the horse dealer to his fate. Their patrimony, the future planned out for them, will have to wait another year, and when the autumn evenings start to turn cold they head for the Saturday dances at the People’s Hall. They park their Saab and bump into Hans Olofson, loitering against a wall, unsure as to whether he dares go inside. They take him under their wing, drag him along behind the beauty parlour and offer him some schnapps. The fact that he stood up to the horse dealer and told him that he was quitting has made a deep impression. Most who leave Under’s stable are simply kicked out. But Hans Olofson took a stand, and for that he has earned a snort and their protection.