Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘ Bwana ,’ he says. ‘Something has happened.’

‘What?!’ shouts Olofson and feels the panic rising.

Before Luka can reply, he discovers it for himself. Something is nailed to the mangrove tree that stands facing the drive, a windbreak planted by Judith Fillington and her husband many years earlier. At first he can’t see what it is; then he has an idea but doesn’t want to believe what he suspects. With his revolver in his hand he slowly approaches the tree.

Lashed fast with barbed wire to the tree trunk is the severed head of a German shepherd. The dog he received from Ruth and Werner, the one he named Sture. The head grins at him, the tongue cut out, the eyes open and staring.

Olofson feels terror well up inside him. The finger has pointed in the dark. Luka’s terror — he must know what it means. I’m living among insane savages, he thinks desperately. I can’t read them; their barbaric signs are unintelligible.

Luka is sitting on the stone steps to the terrace. Olofson can see that he’s so scared he’s shaking. The sweat is glinting on his black skin.

‘I don’t intend to ask you who did this,’ Olofson says. ‘I know what answer I will get — that you don’t know. Nor do I think it was you, since I can see that you’re afraid. I don’t think you would be trembling over your own actions. Or at least you wouldn’t reveal yourself to me. But I want you to tell me what it means. Why would someone chop off the head of my dog and lash it to a tree during the night? Why would someone cut out the tongue of a dog that’s already dead and can’t bark any more? Whoever did this wants me to understand something. Or is the intention just to frighten me?’

Slowly Luka’s answer comes, as if each word he utters were a mine threatening to explode.

‘The dog is a gift from dead people, Bwana . Now the dog is dead too. Only the owner lives. A German shepherd is what mzunguz most often use to protect themselves, since Africans are afraid of dogs. But he who kills a dog shows that he is not afraid. Dead dogs protect no mzungu . Cutting out the tongue prevents the dead dog from barking.’

‘The people who gave him to me are dead,’ Olofson says. ‘The gift has had his head cut off. Now only the owner remains. The last link in this chain is still alive, but he is defenceless. Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘The leopards are hunting at daybreak,’ Luka mutters.

Olofson sees his eyes, wide open from something he carries inside him.

‘It wasn’t a leopard that did this,’ he says. ‘It was people like you, black people. No mzungu would fasten a severed dog’s head to a tree.’

‘The leopards are hunting,’ Luka mumbles again, and Olofson sees that his terror is real.

A thought occurs to him.

‘Leopards,’ he says softly. ‘People who have turned themselves into leopards? Dressed in their skins to make themselves invulnerable? Maybe it was people in leopard skins who came in the night to Ruth and Werner Masterton.’

His words increase Luka’s anxiety.

‘Leopards see without being seen,’ Olofson says. ‘Maybe they can hear at long distances too. Maybe they can read people’s lips. But they can’t see or hear through stone walls.’

He gets up and Luka follows him. We have never been this close to each other, Olofson thinks. Now we are sharing the burden of each other’s fear. Luka senses the threat. Perhaps because he works for a white man, has the trust of a white man, and receives many advantages? Maybe a black man who works for a mzungu is unreliable in this country. Luka sits down on the edge of a kitchen chair.

‘Words travel in the dark, Bwana ,’ he says. ‘Words that are hard to understand. But they are there, and they come back. Someone speaks them, and no one knows whose voice it is.’

‘What are the words?’ Olofson asks.

‘They speak of unusual leopards,’ says Luka. ‘Leopards who have begun to hunt in packs. The leopard is a lone hunter, dangerous in his loneliness. Leopards in packs are many more times as dangerous.’

‘Leopards are predators,’ Olofson says. ‘Leopards are looking for the prey?’

‘The words speak of people who gather in the dark,’ says Luka. ‘People who turn into leopards that will chase all the mzunguz out of the country.’

Olofson remembers something that Peter Motombwane told him.

‘ Mzunguz ,’ he says. ‘Rich men. But there are both black and white men that are rich, aren’t there?’

‘The whites are richer,’ says Luka.

One question remains, even though Olofson already knows what Luka’s answer will be.

‘Am I a rich man?’ he asks.

‘Yes, Bwana ,’ Luka replies. ‘A very rich man.’

And yet I will stay here, he thinks. If I’d had a family I would have sent them away. But I’m alone. I have to stay put or else give up completely. He puts on a pair of gloves, takes down the dog’s head, and Luka buries it down by the river.

‘Where’s the body?’ Olofson asks.

Luka shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, Bwana . In a place where we can’t see it.’

At night he stands guard. He dozes fitfully in a chair behind barricaded doors. Guns with their safeties off lie across his knee, stacks of extra ammunition are stashed at various spots in the house. He pictures himself making his last stand in the room where the skeletons were once stored.

In the daytime he visits the surrounding farms, telling people Luka’s vague story about the pack of leopards. His neighbours supply him with other pieces to the puzzle, even though no one else has received a warning sign.

Before independence, during the 1950s, there was something known as the leopard movement in certain areas of the Copperbelt; an underground movement that mixed politics and religion and threatened to take up arms if the federation was not dissolved and Zambia gained independence. But no one had heard of the leopard movement using violence.

Olofson learns from the farmers who have spent long lives in the country that nothing ever actually dies. For a long-vanished political and religious movement to reappear is not unusual; it only increases the credibility of Luka’s words. Olofson declines to take on volunteers as reinforcements in his own house. At twilight he barricades himself in and eats his lonely dinner after he has sent Luka home.

He waits for something to happen. The exhaustion is a drain on him, the fear is eating deep holes in his soul. And yet he is determined to stay. He thinks about Joyce and her daughters. People who live outside all underground movements, people who each day must fight for their own survival.

The rain is intense, thundering against his sheet-metal roof through the long, lonely nights.

One morning a white man stands outside his house, a man whom he has never seen before. To Olofson’s astonishment he addresses him in Swedish.

‘I was prepared for that,’ says the stranger with a laugh. ‘I know you’re Swedish. Your name is Hans Olofson.’

He introduces himself as Lars Håkansson, an aid expert, sent out by Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to monitor the development of satellite telecommunications stations paid for by Swedish aid funds. His mission turns out to be more than merely stopping by to say hello to a countryman who happens to live in Kalulushi. There is a hill on Olofson’s property that is an ideal location for one of the link stations. A steel tower topped by a satellite dish. A fence, a passable road. A total area of 400 square metres.

‘Naturally there is payment involved, if you’re prepared to relinquish your property,’ Håkansson says. ‘We can arrange for you to get your money in real currency, of course: dollars, pounds or D-marks.’