Хеннинг Манкелль: The Eye of the Leopard

In an attempt to understand, he creates for himself the only rational explanation for why his father remains in this parched town, every day grabbing his tools and heading out into the forest that prevents him from seeing the ocean, or taking a bearing, or gazing at distant horizons.

Out there, he chops down the forest. Plodding through the heavy snow, chopping down tree after tree, stripping the bark from the trunks and slowly opening the landscape to the endless horizon. The sailor driven ashore has set himself a task — to clear a path back to a distant shoreline.

But Hans Olofson’s life is more than just melancholy motherlessness and a woodcutter’s bouts of alcoholism. Together they study his father’s detailed world maps and sea charts, go ashore in ports his father has visited, and explore in their imagination places that still await their arrival. The sea charts are taken down from the wall, rolled out, and weighted down with ashtrays and chipped cups. The evenings can be long, because Erik Olofson is a good storyteller. By the age of twelve Hans possesses an exhaustive knowledge of places as distant as Pamplemousse and Bogamaio; he has glimpsed the innermost secrets of seafaring, mysterious ships that vanished in their own enigma, pirate captains and sailors of the utmost benevolence. The secret world and the construct of regulations, so difficult to grasp, with which trading companies and private shippers have to live and comply, he has stratified in his mind without fully understanding them; yet it is as though he has touched on a great and decisive source of wisdom. He knows the smell of soot in Bristol, the indescribable sludge in the Hudson River, the Indian Ocean’s variable monsoons, the threatening beauty of icebergs, and the rattle of palm fronds.

‘Here the wind murmurs in the trees,’ says Erik Olofson. ‘But in the tropics there is no murmuring. The palm leaves rattle.’

He tries to imagine the difference, striking his fork against a glass, but the palms simply refuse to clatter or rattle. They still murmur in his ears, like the firs he is surrounded by.

But when he tells his teacher that palms clatter and that there are water lilies as big as the centre circle on the ice-hockey rink outside the elementary school, he is ridiculed and called a liar. Red in the face, Headmaster Gottfried comes storming out of the musty office where he quells his distaste for teaching by imbibing vermouth assiduously. He grabs Hans by the hair and threatens him with what happens to anyone who is on an excursion to the land of lies.

Afterwards, alone in the schoolyard in the spotlight of derision, he decides never again to share any of his exotic knowledge. In this hellhole of filthy snow and wooden houses, no one understands a thing about the truths that must be sought at sea.

His eyes red and swollen, he comes home, boils potatoes, and waits for his father. Maybe this is when he makes his decision. That his life will be an unbroken journey. Standing over the pot of potatoes, the holy spirit of his journey takes possession of him. His father’s smelly rag socks hang on the stove.

Sails, he thinks. Patched, mended sails...

That night, as he lies in bed, he asks his father to tell him one more time about the water lilies on Mauritius. And he falls asleep, assured that Headmaster Gottfried will burn in hell for not believing a sailor’s report.

Later that evening, Erik Olofson drinks his coffee, sunk in the rickety chair next to the radio. He lets the waves of the ether hiss softly, as if he doesn’t really want to listen. As if the hissing is message enough. The breathing of the sea, far away. The photographs burn in the logbook. All alone, he must guide his son. And no matter how much he reveals to the boy, the forest still seems to tighten around him. Sometimes he thinks that this is the true great defeat of his life, that despite everything he endures.

But for how long? When will he splinter, like a glass that has been heated for too long?

The ether waves hiss and he thinks again about why she left him, left their son. Why did she act like a man? he wonders. Fathers are the ones who leave and disappear. Not mothers. Least of all after conceiving a precise and premeditated plan of escape. How much about another person can you ever understand? Especially someone who lives close to you, in the inner circle of your own life.

In the pale light of the radio Erik Olofson tries to comprehend.

But the questions return, and the next evening are still hanging on their hooks. Erik Olofson tries to force his way into the core of a lie. Tries to understand, tries to endure.

Finally both of them are asleep, the sailor from Åmsele and his twelve-year-old son. The beams writhe in the midwinter darkness. A lone dog runs along the river in the moonlight. The two elkhounds lie curled up next to the stove in the kitchen, shaggy, with ears that prick up and fall again as the beams scrape and complain.

The house by the river sleeps. The dawn is far off on this night in Sweden in 1956.

He can recall his departure for Africa like a dim shadow play.

He imagines the memories he bears to be a forest which was once open and clean, but which has become more and more overgrown. He has no tools for clearing the brush and scrub in this landscape. The growth of his memories is constant, the landscape harder and harder to take in.

Still, something does remain of that early morning in September 1969 when he left all his horizons behind and flew out into the world.

The Swedish sky was heavy that morning. An endless carpet of rain clouds hung over his head as he boarded an aeroplane for the first time. As he walked across the tarmac the damp seeped through his shoes.

I’m leaving Sweden with wet socks, he thought. If I ever make it to Africa I might bring along an autumn greeting in the form of a cold.

On the way to the plane he had turned around, as if someone might be there after all, waving goodbye to him. But the shadowy grey figures on the roof terrace of Arlanda didn’t belong to him. His departure was noticed by no one.

As he checked in he suddenly felt an urge to snatch the ticket back, yell that it was all a mistake, and leave the airport. But he said thank you when they handed the ticket back to him, along with his boarding card and the wish for a pleasant trip.

His first stop on the way to foreign horizons was London. Then Cairo, Nairobi, and finally Lusaka.

He imagined that he might just as well be on his way to a distant constellation, the Lyre or one of the faintly glowing fixed stars in Orion’s Belt.

All he knew about Lusaka was that the city was named after an African elephant hunter.

My objective is as unreasonable as it is ridiculous, he thought. Who in the world but me is on his way to a strange mission station deep in the bush of northwest Zambia, far beyond the roads to Kinshasa and Chingola? Who travels to Africa with a fleeting impulse as his only carry-on luggage? I have no detailed itinerary, nobody accompanied me to the airport, nobody will be meeting me. This journey I am about to begin is merely an escape...

He remembers that this is what he thought, and then there are only the vague shadows of memory. The way he sat in the plane holding on to himself with a cramplike grip. The vibrating fuselage, the whine of the jet engines, the machine gathering speed.

With a slight bow Hans Olofson made the climb into the air.

Twenty-seven hours later, precisely according to the schedule, he landed at Lusaka International Airport.

Naturally there was no one there to meet him.

There is nothing remarkable about Hans Olofson’s first encounter with the African continent, nothing unusual. He is the European visitor, the white man with his pride and his fear, who defends himself against what is foreign by instantly condemning it.