Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

At the airport, disorder and chaos reign: incredibly complicated entry documents to fill out, badly spelled instructions, African immigration officers who seem unfazed by anything as mundane as time or organisation. Hans Olofson stands in a queue for a long time, only to be brusquely shunted to another queue when he finally reaches the brown counter on which black ants are hauling invisible particles of food. He realises that he has joined the queue intended for returning residents, those with Zambian passports or residence permits. Sweat pours out, strange foreign smells fill his nose, and the stamp he finally obtains in his passport is upside down, and he sees that the date of his arrival is wrong. He is handed a new form by an unbelievably beautiful African woman, brushes her hand quickly, and then truthfully fills in the amount of foreign cash he is bringing in.

At customs there is seemingly insurmountable chaos; suitcases are tossed off noisy carts pushed along by excited Africans. Among the pile of cardboard boxes he finally finds his suitcase, half squashed, and when he bends down to pull it out someone bumps into him and sends him sprawling. When he turns around there is no one apologising, no one seems to have noticed that he fell, only a billowing mass of people pushing towards the customs agents who are angrily ordering everyone to open their bags. He is sucked into this human surge, shoved back and forth like a pawn in some game, and then suddenly all the customs agents vanish and no one asks him to open his battered suitcase. A soldier with a submachine gun and a frayed uniform scratches his forehead with the muzzle of his weapon, and Olofson sees that he is hardly more than seventeen. A creaky swinging door opens and he steps out on to African soil in earnest. But there is no time for reflection; porters grab at his suitcase and his arms, taxi drivers yell out offers of their services. He is dragged off to an indescribably dilapidated car on which someone has painted the word TAXI on one of the doors in sloppy, garish letters. His bag is stuffed into a baggage compartment which already contains two hens with their feet tied together, and the boot lid is held in place by an ingeniously bound steel wire. He tumbles into a back seat with no springs at all, so that it feels as if he is sitting right on the floor. A leaky plastic container of petrol is leaning against one knee, and when the taxi driver climbs into the driver’s seat with a burning cigarette in his mouth, Olofson for the first time begins to hate Africa.

This car will never start, he thinks in desperation. Before we even get out of the airport it will explode... He watches the driver, who can’t be more than fifteen years old, join two loose wires next to the steering wheel; the engine responds reluctantly, and the driver turns to him with a smile and asks where he wants to go.

Home, he wants to answer. Or at least away, away from this continent that makes him feel totally helpless, that has ripped from him all the survival tools he had acquired during his previous life...

His thoughts are interrupted by a hand groping at his face, stuck in through the window which has no glass in it. He gives a start, turns around, and looks straight into two dead eyes, a blind woman who is feeling his face with her hand and wants money.

The driver shouts something in a language that Olofson doesn’t understand, the woman replies by starting to screech and wail, and Olofson sits on the floor of the car unable to do a thing. With a screech of tyres the driver leaves the begging woman behind, and Olofson hears himself yelling that he wants to be taken to a hotel in the city.

‘But not too expensive!’ he shouts.

He never hears the driver’s reply. A bus with stinking exhaust and a violently racing engine squeezes past and drowns out the driver’s voice.

His shirt is sticky with sweat, his back already aches from the uncomfortable sitting position, and he thinks he should have settled on the price before he let himself be forced into the car.

The incredibly hot air, filled with mysterious smells, blows into his face. A landscape drenched with sun as if it were an overexposed photograph rushes past his eyes.

I’ll never survive this, he thinks. I’m going to be killed in a car crash before I’ve even understood that I’m really in Africa. As if he had unconsciously made a prophecy, the car loses one of its front wheels at that instant and careens off the road into a ditch. Olofson strikes his head against the steel edge of the front seat and then heaves himself out of the car, afraid that it’s going to explode.

The driver gives him a surprised look and then squats down in front of the car and looks at the axle, which is bereft and gaping. From the roof of the car he then takes a spare tyre, patched and completely bald. Olofson leans over the red dirt and watches the driver put on the spare tyre as if in slow motion. Ants are crawling on his legs and the sun is so sharp that the world turns white before his eyes.

In order to hold on, regain an inner balance, he searches for something he can recognise. Something that reminds him of Sweden and the life he is used to. But he finds nothing. Only when he closes his eyes are the foreign African odours mixed with vague memories.

The spare tyre is put on and the journey continues. With wobbly movements of the steering wheel the driver pilots the car towards Lusaka, which will be the next stage in the nightmare that Olofson’s first meeting with African soil has become. The city is a clamorous chaos of broken-down cars, swerving cyclists, and peddlers who seem to have laid out their wares in the middle of the street. There’s a stench of oil and exhaust, and at a traffic light Olofson’s taxi stops next to a lorry piled high with flayed animal carcasses. Black and green flies instantly swarm into the taxi, and Olofson wonders if he will ever find a hotel room, a door to close behind him.

But finally there is a hotel. The taxi comes to a stop under blooming jacaranda trees; an African in an outgrown, frayed uniform succeeds in prising open the door and helping Olofson to his feet. He pays the driver what he asks, even though he realises the amount is preposterous. Inside he has to wait for a long time at the front desk before they can work out whether there are any vacant rooms. He fills out an endless registration form and thinks that he’d better learn his passport number by heart, since this is already the fourth time he has had to repeat it. He keeps his suitcase between his legs, certain that thieves are lurking everywhere. Then he waits for half an hour in a queue to exchange money, and fills out another form with the feeling that he has seen it before.

A rickety lift transports him upwards and a porter in worn-out shoes carries his suitcase. Room 212 at the Ridgeway Hotel at last becomes his first breathing space on this new continent, and in impotent rebellion he strips off his clothes and crawls naked between the sheets.

The world traveller, he thinks. Nothing but a scared rabbit.

There’s a knock at the door and he jumps up as if he had committed a crime by getting into bed. He wraps the bedspread around him and opens the door.

An old, shrunken African woman in a cleaning smock asks if he has any laundry to be done. He shakes his head, replies with exaggerated politeness, and suddenly realises he has no idea how he is expected to behave towards an African.

He lies down in bed again after drawing the curtains. An air-conditioning unit rattles and all of a sudden he begins to sneeze.

My wet socks in Sweden, he thinks. The wetness I brought with me. I’m nothing but an endless string of weaknesses. Anxiety is hereditary in my life. From the snowstorm a figure has emerged, someone who is continually threatened by his lack of inner direction.