Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

The arc of time is expanding. Hans Olofson loses a tooth, and just afterwards one more.

He turns forty and invites his many white and few black friends to a party. Peter Motombwane declines and never gives an explanation. Olofson gets very drunk during this party. He listens to incomprehensible speeches from people he scarcely knows. Speeches that praise him, pouring out a foundation of veneration for his African farm. They’re thanking me because I’ve started running my farm without extravagant thoughts about its function as a future model, he thinks. Not a true word is being spoken here.

On wobbly legs he stands up at midnight to thank his guests because so many of them came. Suddenly he realises that he has begun speaking in Swedish. He hears his old language, and he hears himself make a raging attack on the racist arrogance that characterises the whites who still live in this African land. He raves on in Swedish with a friendly smile.

‘A pack of scoundrels and whores is what you are,’ he says, raising his glass.

‘How nice,’ an elderly woman tells him later. ‘Mixing the two languages like that. But of course we’re wondering what you said.’

‘I hardly recall,’ Olofson replies, and steps outside in the dark alone.

Something whimpers at his feet and he discovers the German shepherd puppy he got as a present from Ruth and Werner Masterton.

‘Sture,’ he says. ‘Your name is Sture from now on.’

The puppy whimpers and Olofson calls Luka.

‘Take care of the puppy,’ he says.

‘Yes, Bwana ,’ says Luka.

The party degenerates into a Walpurgis Night. Drunken people lie sprawled in the various rooms, an ill-matched couple has taken over Olofson’s own bed, and in the garden someone is shooting a pistol at bottles that a terrified black servant is lining up on a garden table.

Olofson suddenly feels aroused, and he begins to hover about a woman from one of the farms that lies furthest from his own. The woman is fat and swollen, her skirt is hitched up above her knees, and her husband is asleep under a table in the room that was once Judith Fillington’s library.

‘I’d like to show you something,’ says Olofson.

The woman gives a start from her half-doze and follows him up to the second floor of the house, to the room where skeletons once filled all the walls. He lights a lamp and closes the door behind him.

‘This is what you wanted to show me?’ she says with a laugh. ‘An empty room?’

Without replying he presses her against the wall, pulls up her skirt, and forces himself inside her.

‘An empty room,’ she says again and laughs.

‘Imagine that I’m black,’ Olofson says.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Imagine that I’m black,’ he says again.

When it’s over she clings to him and he smells the sweat from her unwashed body.

‘One more time,’ she says.

‘Never,’ says Olofson. ‘It’s my party, and I decide.’ He goes quickly, leaving her alone.

Pistol shots echo from the garden and he suddenly can’t stay there any longer. He staggers out into the darkness, deciding that the only person he wants to be near is Joyce Lufuma.

He gets in his car and leaves his house and his party with a screech of tyres. Twice he drives off the road, but manages to avoid flipping over, and finally pulls in front of her house.

The yard is silent and dark. He sees the disrepair in the headlights of his car, and he turns off the motor and sits in the dark. The night is warm and he feels his way to his usual spot under the tree.

We all have a lonesome, abandoned dog sitting and barking inside us, he thinks. Its paws are different colours, its tail may be cut off. But we all have that dog inside us.

He wakes up at dawn when one of Joyce’s daughters stands looking at him. He knows she is twelve years old; he can remember when she was born.

I love this child, he thinks. In her I can recognise something of myself, the child’s magnanimity, an ever-present readiness to show consideration for others.

Gravely she watches him, and he forces himself to smile.

‘I’m not sick,’ he says. ‘I’m just sitting here resting.’

When he smiles she smiles back at him. I can’t abandon this child, he thinks. Joyce and her daughters are my responsibility, no one else’s.

He has a headache and feels bad; the hangover is pounding in his chest and he shudders when he recalls the hopeless fornication in the empty room. I might just as well have mounted one of the skeletons, he says to himself. The humiliation I subject myself to seems to have no limits.

He drives back to his house and sees Luka picking up shards of glass in the garden, and he realises he also feels ashamed in front of Luka. Most of the guests have disappeared, only Ruth and Werner Masterton are left. They’re sitting on the terrace drinking coffee. The German shepherd puppy he named Sture is playing at their feet.

‘You survived,’ says Werner with a smile. ‘The parties seem to be getting more and more intense, as if a day of judgement were imminent.’

‘Who knows?’ Olofson says.

Luka walks past below the terrace. He’s carrying a pail full of broken bottles. They follow him with their gaze, watch him vanish towards the pit in the ground where he dumps the rubbish.

‘Drop by and say hello sometime,’ says Ruth as she and Werner get up to return to their farm.

‘I will,’ Olofson says.

A few weeks after the party he comes down with a severe attack of malaria, worse than any he has had before. The fever dreams hound him.

He imagines that he is being lynched by his workers. They rip off his clothes, pound him bloody with sticks and clubs, and drive him before them towards Joyce Lufuma’s house. There he senses his salvation, but she meets him with a rope in her hand, and he awakes just as he realises that she and her daughters are coming to hoist him up in the tree, with the rope fastened in a noose around his neck.

When he recovers and pays his first visit to Joyce, he suddenly remembers the dream. Maybe it’s a sign after all, he thinks. They accept my assistance, they are dependent on it. They have every reason to hate me, I forget that far too often. I forget the simplest antagonisms and truths.

The arc of time extends further over his life, the personal river he carries inside him. Often he returns in his thoughts to a frozen winter night, to the remote site he has never visited. He imagines his father’s grave. Now that he has been in Africa for eighteen years he ought to start looking for a spot for his own grave.

He walks over to the hill where Duncan Jones has already rested for many years, and he lets his gaze wander. It’s late afternoon and the sun is coloured red by the invisible soil that whirls over the African continent. He sees his long white hen houses against the light, workers on their way home from the day’s work. It’s October, just before the long rain begins to fall. The ground is scorched and dry, only scattered cactuses glow like green patches in the desiccated landscape. The Kafue is almost empty of water. The riverbed is laid dry, except for a narrow trickle in the middle of its furrow. The hippopotamuses have sought out distant water holes, and the crocodiles will not come back until the rain has returned.

He clears the weeds from Duncan Jones’s grave and squints towards the sun, seeking his own future gravesite. But he won’t make a decision; that would be tempting Death to come to him too soon. But what is the past? Who can make sense of his allotted time?

No one remains unaffected for almost twenty years, surrounded by African superstition, he thinks. An African would never search for his gravesite, not to mention select it. That would be like sending a resounding summons to Death.