Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘I thought I’d talk to you first.’

‘Good Lord...’

‘What is it?’

‘We have to get out of here. We can’t live here. We have to get out and discover the world again!’

‘I’m starting to get too old, I think.’

‘You’re getting old by stomping around in the woods.’

‘I’m not stomping around in the woods! I’m working.’

‘I know. But still.’

Maybe there’s still time, Hans thinks. Maybe he’ll take off again. He carries the sea inside him, I know that now. Hans hurries over to Janine’s to tell her. I’ll never have to see him crawling around scrubbing the kitchen at night, with water up to his neck.

He stops on the river bridge and looks down in the water where the ice floes rock their way towards the sea. Far off in the distance is the world, the new world that’s waiting for the conqueror of the new era. The world which he will discover with Janine.

But somewhere along the way they turn off in different directions. For Hans the change takes the form of a period of waiting for something. His pilgrimage, with or without his father Erik Olofson, will take place in a world that others are putting in order for him.

Janine’s thoughts are different. She makes the crucial discovery that incredible poverty is neither a whim of nature nor a law decreed by fate. She sees people who consciously choose a barbaric evil as the tool for their own gain. So they part ways at the centre of the world.

Hans emerges from his period of waiting. Janine discovers that her conscience requires action, more than just the intercessions for sufferers in which she takes part under Hurrapelle’s leadership. The question deepens, and never leaves her in her dreams. And she begins to search for a means of expression. A personal crusade, she thinks. A solitary crusade, in order to tell of the world that exists beyond the fir ridges.

Slowly a decision matures, and without saying anything to Hans she decides to take up her post on the street corner. She knows that she must carry out her plan alone. Until she has stood there for the first time she won’t share her crusade with anyone.

On that particular Saturday morning in March, Hans spends his time in the forestry officer’s garage. Along with one of the officer’s sons he has worked in vain to try to revive an old motorcycle. Not until late in the afternoon, when he stops at Pettersson’s kiosk, does he hear about what happened. His heart tightens when he hears what Janine has done. He feels that he has been exposed. Surely everyone knows that he sneaks up to her door, even though he tries to avoid being seen when he walks through her gate. He begins at once to hate her, as if her real intention had been to pull him into her own humiliation. He knows that he has to distance himself from her at once, to separate from her.

‘No one should care about a woman without a nose,’ he says.

They had agreed that he would visit her that evening. But now he spends the evening at the People’s Hall instead. He dances with every girl he meets, spitting out the most disparaging remarks about Janine that he can think of when he is crowded and jostled in the men’s toilet. When Kringström’s band finishes up with ‘Twilight Time’ he feels that he has presented a sufficient defence. Now nobody will think that he has a secret life with the placardcarrying lunatic. He goes out to the street, wipes the sweat off his brow, and stands in the shadows watching the couples leave. The night is full of shouts and giggles. He rocks back and forth on his feet, dizzy from all the lukewarm aquavit. That damn bitch, he thinks. She would have yelled at me and asked me to help hold her sign if I happened to pass by.

Suddenly he decides to visit her one last time and tell her what he’s thinking. So as not to be discovered he sneaks like a criminal across the bridge and waits for a long time outside her gate before he slips into the shadows.

She welcomes him without reproach. He was supposed to come but didn’t. No more than that.

‘Did you wait for me?’ he asks.

‘I’m used to waiting,’ she replies. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

He hates her and he desires her. But at the same time he knows that tonight he brings with him the opinion of the town, and he tells her that he will never come back if she stands on the street corner again.

A cold wind blows through her heart. She had thought he would encourage her, agree that what she was doing was right. That’s how she had interpreted their conversation about the way the world was cracking under the winds of change. Sorrow sinks like a lead weight on to her head. Now she knows that she will be left alone again. But not yet, because his desire takes over, and once again they are entwined with each other.

Their last time together becomes a long drawn-out agony. Hans returns to the starting point, the chopped-off crow’s head that he and Sture put in her letterbox. Now it’s her head he’s swinging at. He spits and swears at her, breaks arrangements, and paints her black for anyone who will listen.

In the midst of this chaos he passes his secondary school examination. With an intense outburst of concentrated energy he succeeds in getting unexpectedly high marks. Rector Bohlin has seen to it that an application is sent to the college in the county seat. When he puts on the grey graduation cap, he decides to keep studying. Now he doesn’t have to wait for his father to fling away the axe of indecision, now he’s in charge of his own future. With one single motion he can set himself free.

On the evening after the exam he stands outside Janine’s door. She’s waiting with flowers for him, but he doesn’t want her damned flowers. He’s going to leave this place and now he’s here for the last time. He hangs his grey cap over the picture of the Virgin Mary sitting in her window. But to the last day, all summer long, he visits her. And yet the secret that will be her last he never will know.

The final break-up, the end, is irresolute and forlorn. One evening in the middle of August he visits her and now it is really for the last time. They meet briefly in her kitchen, with few words, as if it were their first time, when he stood there with his hedge clippers in his hand. He says he’ll write, but she tells him it would be better if he didn’t. It’s best to let everything dissolve, blow away with the wind.

He leaves her house. Behind him he hears the notes of ‘Some of These Days’.

The next day his father accompanies him to the train station. Hans looks at his father, grey and indecisive.

‘I’ll come home sometime,’ he says. ‘And you can always come to visit.’

Erik Olofson nods. He’ll certainly come to visit. ‘The sea...’ he says and falls silent.

But Hans doesn’t hear him. He’s waiting patiently for the tram to take him away.

For a long time his father stays at the station, and he tells himself that the sea still does exist, after all. If only he... Always that ‘if only’. Then he goes home to the house by the river, and lets the sea roar out of his radio.

The month of the rowan berries. A Sunday morning in September. A bank of fog lies heavy over the town as it slowly begins to awake. There’s a chill in the air and the gravel crunches as a lone man turns off the main road and takes a short cut down the slope to the river. The People’s Park on its promontory shines forlornly like a half-razed ruin in the grey morning light. In the horse dealer’s pastures the horses are grazing in the fog. Noiselessly they move like ships waiting for the wind.

The man unties a rowboat at the river bank and sits down at the oars. He rows out into the sound between the point of the People’s Park and the south bank of the river. There he throws out an anchor that grips the rocks on the river bed. He tosses out a line and waits.