Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Hans can feel the schnapps warming his blood, and he follows the twins into the crowd. Superintendent Gullberg stands by the ticket cage and watches the hullabaloo with suspicious eyes. He ejects those who are too obviously drunk, which usually results only in lame protests. But he knows that one litre after another of brandy and schnapps is being carried past him in handbags and roomy overcoats. They slip through the eye of the needle, step into the smoky heat, the world of malfunctioning lightbulbs. The Holmström twins are no great dancers, but with sufficient schnapps in their bellies they can offer a fairly well-executed fox trot. At once they run into some ladies they know from some faraway summer lodgings, and Hans finds himself abandoned.

He knows how to dance — Janine taught him that. But she never taught him to dare ask a girl to dance. He has to go through this trial by fire alone, and he steps on his own toes in fury over not being able to ask one of the female flock waiting in desire and dread along the wall of the dance rotunda, which is never called anything but ‘the mountain wall’. On the dance floor the Enviable Ones are already gliding past, the Beauties and the Willing, those who are always asked to dance and hardly ever manage to return to ‘the mountain wall’ before they’re swept off again. They dance with the men of sure steps, the men who own cars and have the right looks. Hans sees last year’s ‘Lucia’ glide past in the arms of Julin the driver, who operates one of the Highway Department’s big road graders. The sweat stinks, the bodies are steaming, and Hans rages at standing there like an oaf.

Next time, he thinks. Next time I’ll cross the water.

But once he has decided on the daughter of the district nurse, taken his bearings and set his feet in the right direction, it’s already too late. Like angels to the rescue the Holmström brothers come clamouring, flushed and hot after intense efforts on the dance floor. In the men’s room they refresh themselves with some lukewarm schnapps and dirty stories. From one of the locked toilet stalls they hear the loud song of someone throwing up.

Then they head out again, and now Hans is in a hurry. Now it’s sink or swim, now he has to conquer the ‘mountain wall’ to avoid going under from self-loathing. On unsteady legs he pushes across the dance floor just as Kringström starts off an infinitely slow version of ‘All of Me’. He stops in front of one of the bridesmaids from the year before. She follows him out into the fray, where they shove their way on to the overcrowded dance floor.

Many years later, in his house on the banks of the Kafue, with a loaded pistol under his pillow, he recalls ‘All of Me’, the smoking heat of the stove, and the bridesmaid he pushed along the dance floor. When he wakes in the African night, drenched with sweat, afraid of something he dreamed or perhaps something he heard outside in the dark, he returns there. He can see everything, exactly the way it was.

Now Kringström is starting up a new dance. ‘La Paloma’ or ‘Twilight Time’, he can’t remember which. He has danced with the bridesmaid, had a few more snorts from the Holmström brothers’ flask, and now he’s going to dance again. But when he stops in front of her on his unsteady legs she shakes her head and turns away. He reaches out his hand to grab hold of her arm, but she pulls away. She grimaces and says something, but the drums are banging and when he leans forward to hear what she’s saying, he loses his balance. Without knowing how it happened, he finds himself all at once with his face among feet and shoes. When he tries to get back up, he feels a strong hand on his collar lifting him up. It’s Superintendent Gullberg, who vigilantly spotted the intoxicated youth crawling about on the floor and decided that he should be put out in the street at once.

In the African night he can recall the humiliation, and it’s just as awful as when it happened.

He staggers away from the People’s Hall through the autumn night, knowing that the only person he can turn to in his misery is Janine. She wakes up when he pounds on her door, roughly torn out of a dream in which she was a child again. She opens the door groggily and there’s Hans, standing wide-eyed.

She slowly thaws him out, as always waiting patiently. She can see that he’s drunk and miserable, but she waits, leaving him alone with his silence. As he sits in her kitchen and the image of his defeat becomes clearer, it assumes grotesque proportions. No one could have been subjected to greater disgrace, whether it was madmen who tried to set fire to themselves or who stood in the winter night determined to tear down the church with a frozen crowbar. There he had lain among the feet and shoes. Tossed out like a cat by the scruff of his neck.

She spreads out a sheet and a blanket in the room with the gramophone and tells him to lie down. Without a word he staggers in and falls on the sofa, out cold. She closes the door and then lies in her own bed, unable to sleep. She tosses restlessly, waiting for something that never happens.

When Hans wakes up in the morning, with temples pounding and mouth parched, he is thinking about a dream: the door opened, Janine came into his room and stood naked looking at him. The dream is like a polished prism, as clear as an image from reality. It penetrates the fog of contrition. It must have happened, he thinks. She must have come in here last night, with no clothes on.

He gets up from the sofa and goes into the kitchen for a drink of water. The door to her room is closed, and when he listens he can hear her snoring softly. The clock on the wall says quarter to five, and he crawls back on to the sofa to fall asleep and dream or forget that he exists.

When he wakes up a few hours later it’s already dawn and Janine is sitting in her robe at the kitchen table, knitting. When he sees her he wants to take the knitting out of her hands, untie her robe, and bury himself in her body. The door to this house on the south side of the river will be closed for good; he will never leave this house again.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asks.

She knows, he thinks. It won’t do any good to lie. Nothing will do any good; the difficulties of life are looming before him like enormous icebergs. What is he actually imagining — that he can find a password that will make it possible to control this damned life?

‘You’re thinking about something,’ she says. ‘I can tell by your face. Your lips are moving as if you’re talking to someone. But I can’t hear what you’re saying.’

‘I’m not thinking,’ he says. ‘What would I be thinking about? Maybe I’m incapable of thinking!’

‘You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,’ she says.

Again he thinks that he’s going to go over to her and undo the sash of her robe. Instead, he borrows a jumper from her and vanishes into the frosty landscape of autumn.

At the People’s Hall, Superintendent Gullberg’s wife is busy cleaning up. She peevishly opens the back door when he knocks. His coat is still hanging on its hook like an abandoned skin. He hands her his cloakroom number.

‘How can anyone forget his coat?’ she asks.

‘It’s possible,’ replies Hans Olofson and leaves. He realises that there is a kind of forgetfulness that is quite vast.

The seasons change, the river freezes over and then one day floods its banks. No matter how much his father chops at them, the fir forests remain motionless on the horizon. The tram clatters across the bridge, and season after season Hans trudges to Janine’s house. The river of knowledge on which he floats, year after year, reveals no Goal to him. But he keeps waiting.

He stands outside Janine’s house. The notes from her slide trombone trickle out through a half-open window. Every day he stands there and every day he decides to untie the sash of her robe. More and more often he chooses to visit her when he can expect her not to be dressed. Early on Sunday mornings he knocks on her door; other times he stands on her steps long past midnight. The sash tied around her robe glows like fire.