Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

After an hour he decides to try further down towards the point. He lets the anchor drift under the keel of the boat as he rows. But abruptly it catches, and when he finally pulls it loose he sees that an almost rotten piece of cloth has been pierced by his hook. A bit of a woman’s blouse, he can see. Pensively he rows back to shore.

The bit of cloth lies on a table at the police station, with Hurrapelle standing looking at it. He nods.

The hastily assembled river-dragging crew doesn’t have to search long. On the second pass the two rowboats make through the sound, one of their hooks catches on something at the bottom. From the shore Hurrapelle watches Janine return.

The doctor examines the body one last time before he finishes the autopsy. When he has washed his hands, he stands by the window and looks out over the fir ridges coloured red by the setting sun. He wonders whether he is the only one who knows Janine’s secret. Without knowing why, he decides not to include it in the autopsy report. Even though this is not proper procedure, he doesn’t think it will change anything. He knows that she drowned. Around her waist there was a thick steel wire and in her clothing were irons and heavy pieces of drainpipe. No crime was committed. So he doesn’t need to report that Janine was carrying a child when she died.

In the house by the river Erik Olofson sits poring over a sea chart. He adjusts his glasses and pilots his vessel with his index finger through the Strait of Malacca. He smells the sea, sees the glimmering lanterns from distant vessels on an approaching course. In the background the carrier waves from the shortwave radio hiss through the ether. Maybe it’s still possible, he thinks. A little ship that takes goods along the coast? Maybe it’s still possible.

And what about Hans? He doesn’t remember who told him. But someone heard about it, and Hans learns that Janine is dead. The woman who stood every Saturday with her placard on the corner between the People’s Hall and the hardware shop. In the night he leaves the room in his boarding house, which he already detests, and wanders restlessly through the dark town. He tries to convince himself that no one is to blame. Not him, nor anybody else. But still, he knows. Mutshatsha, he thinks. You wanted to go there, Janine, that was your dream. But you never went and now you’re dead.

I once lay behind a broken-down kiln in the old brickworks and realised that I was myself and no one else. But since then? Now? He asks himself how he can stand four years in this distant college. Inside him an incessant struggle is going on between belief in the future and resignation. He tries to cheer himself up. Living must be like continually preparing for new expeditions, he thinks. It’s either that or I’ll become like my father.

All at once he decides. Someday he will go to Mutshatsha. Someday he will make the journey that Janine never made. That thought becomes instantly holy for him. The most fragile of all Goals has revealed itself to him. The dream of another which he is taking over.

Cautiously he tiptoes up the stairs to his room. He recognises the smell of old lady Westlund’s flat. Apples, sour drops. On the table the books lie waiting for him. But he is thinking of Janine. Maybe growing up means realising one’s loneliness, he thinks. He sits motionless for a long time.

He feels as if he were again sitting on the huge span of the iron bridge. High overhead, the stars.

Below him Janine...

In Hans Olofson’s dreams the leopard is hunting.

The terrain is a landscape slipping away, the African bush displaced to become his internal space. The perspective is changing constantly. Sometimes he’s in front of the leopard, sometimes behind it, and at times he becomes the leopard himself. In the dream it is always dusk. Surrounded by the tall elephant grass he stands far out on a savannah. The horizon frightens him. A threat coming ever closer is the leopard’s landscape, which returns night after night in his restless mind.

Sometimes he wakes up abruptly and thinks he understands. He is not being pursued by a lone leopard, but two. In his internal landscape the leopard is breaking with its nature as a lone hunter and joining with another animal. He never manages to discern what kind of weapons he is carrying during his recurrent nocturnal hunts. Is he setting out snares or does he carry a spear with a hand-wrought iron point? Or is he following the leopard empty-handed? The landscape stretches away in his dreams as an endless plain where he senses an indistinct river bed at the distant edge of his vision. He burns the tall elephant grass to drive out the leopard. Sometimes he also thinks he spies the leopard’s shadow, like a rapid movement against the moonlit terrain. The rest is silence, his own breathing echoing inside the dream.

The leopard is bringing a message, he thinks when he wakes. A message I haven’t yet managed to decipher.

When the malaria attack forces his mind into hallucinations, he sees the leopard’s watchful eye.

It’s Janine, he thinks in confusion. It’s her eye I see; she’s looking up at me from the bottom of the river as I’m balancing on the span of the iron bridge. She has drawn a leopard skin over her shoulders so I won’t know it’s her.

But she’s dead, isn’t she? When I left Sweden and put all my old horizons behind me, she had already been gone for seven years. Now I’ve been in Africa for almost eighteen years.

The malaria attack flings him up from his lethargy, and when he awakes he doesn’t know where he is. The revolver resting against his cheek makes him remember. He listens to the darkness.

I’m surrounded by bandits, he thinks desperately. It’s Luka who lured them here, severed the telephone line, cut off the electricity. They’re waiting outside in the dark. Soon they will come to tear open my chest and carry off my still beating heart.

Summoning all his remaining strength, he sits up in bed so that his back is resting against the bedstead. Why don’t I hear anything, he wonders. The silence...

Why aren’t the hippos sighing by the river? Where’s that damned Luka? He yells into the dark, but no one answers. He has the pistol in his hands.

He waits.

Werner Masterton’s severed head lies in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Two forks are stuck in his eyes. In the dining room sits Masterton’s headless body at the table, the chopped-off hands lie on a tray in front of him, the white tablecloth is drenched in blood.

In the bedroom Olofson finds Ruth Masterton with her throat slit, her head almost detached from her body. She is naked, one of her thighbones smashed by a powerful axe-blow. Flies swarm over her body and he thinks that what he is seeing can’t be real.

He notices that he is weeping from terror, and when he comes out of the house he collapses to the ground. The waiting Africans shrink back, and he screams at them not to go in. He calls to Robert to fetch the neighbours, call the police, and suddenly in despair he fires his shotgun into the air.

Late in the afternoon he returns home, paralysed, apathetic. He still can’t face the rage that he knows will come. For the whole long day the rumour has spread in the white colony, cars have come and gone, and one opinion is soon discernible. Ruth and Werner Masterton did not fall victim to normal bandits. Even though their car is gone, valuables vanished, this senseless double murder is something more, a dammed-up hatred that has found its release. This is a racial murder, a political murder. Ruth and Werner Masterton have met their fate at the hands of self-appointed black avengers.