Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

‘There aren’t any snakes.’

‘We think there are, Bwana . That’s why we’re not working.’

‘You’re afraid of Eisenhower Mudenda. You’re afraid of his muloji .’

‘Eisenhower Mudenda is a smart man, Bwana .’

‘He’s no smarter than any of you.’

‘He speaks to us through our forefathers, Bwana . We’re Africans, you’re a white bwana . You can’t understand.’

‘I’ll sack you all if you don’t go back to work.’

‘We know that, Bwana .’

‘I’ll get workers from another part of the country.’

‘Nobody will work on a farm where the hens lay snake eggs, Bwana .’

‘I’m telling you, there are no eggs with snakes in them!’

‘Only Eisenhower Mudenda can take away the snakes, Bwana .’

‘I’ve fired him.’

‘He’s waiting to come back, Bwana .’

I’m losing, Olofson thinks. I’m losing the way the white man always loses in Africa. There’s no way to start a back fire against superstition.

‘Send for Mudenda,’ he says and walks back to his car and drives to his mud hut.

Suddenly Mudenda stands like a silhouette in the doorway against the bright white sunlight.

‘I won’t ask you to sit down,’ says Olofson. ‘You have your job back. Actually I ought to force you to show the workers that there aren’t any snakes in the eggs. But I won’t do that. Tell the workers you have lifted your muloji . Go back to work, that’s all.’

Eisenhower Mudenda walks out into the sun, and Olofson follows him.

‘One more thing you should know. I don’t admit that I’m defeated. One day there won’t be any more muloji , and the blacks will turn against you and crush your head with their wooden clubs. I don’t intend to come to your rescue.’

‘That will never happen, Bwana ,’ says Eisenhower Mudenda.

‘Hens will never lay eggs with snakes inside,’ replies Olofson. ‘What will you do when someone asks to see one of these snakes?’

The next day a dead cobra is lying on the front seat of Olofson’s car. Eggshells are scattered around the dead snake...

Africa is still far away. But Hans Olofson is on his way. He still visits new, hostile territories, he has left the house by the river far behind, passed a student examination in the county seat and is now at the university in Uppsala, where he is supposed to be studying law.

To finance his studies he works three afternoons a week at Johannes Wickberg’s gun shop in Stockholm. He knows more about the philosophy of skeet shooting than about the Code of Land Laws. He knows much more about the history of superior Italian shotguns, about the viscosity of weapons grease at low temperatures, than he does about Roman Law, which is the foundation of everything.

Now and then big-game hunters come into the gun shop, and they ask different and considerably odder questions than those he has to answer in the introductory law course. Are there black lions? He doesn’t think so. But one day a man stands before him who claims to be called Stone, and insists that the black lion exists in the remote Kalahari Desert. Stone has come from Durban to see Wickberg. But Wickberg has gone to the customs house to solve a problem with the import of ammunition from the United States, and Hans Olofson is alone in the shop.

Stone’s real name is Stenberg, and even though he has lived in Durban for many years, he comes originally from Tibro. For more than an hour he stays in the shop and tells Hans how he imagines his death. For many years he has suffered from a mysterious itch on his legs that keeps him wide awake at night. He has shown his affliction to doctors and to tall witch doctors, but nothing has helped. When he discovers that most of his internal organs have been severely attacked by parasites, he realises that his time is limited.

In the early 1920s he ventured out into the world as one of the promoters of Swedish ballbearings. He wound up staying in South Africa, dumbfounded by all the night sounds and the endless plains of the Transvaal. Eventually he left ballbearings behind and established an office for big-game hunting, Hunters Unlimited, and changed his name to Stone. But he still buys his guns from Wickberg, and so he travels to Sweden once a year, to Tibro to tend his parents’ grave, and to Stockholm to buy weapons. He stands there in the shop telling all this to Hans Olofson. And when he leaves, Hans is certain that black lions do exist.

It’s a day in the middle of April, 1969, as Stone stands there telling Hans about his life. For nine months Hans has travelled back and forth between Uppsala and Stockholm, between future studies and making a living. After nine months he still feels that he is in enemy territory, that he came from the north as an illegal immigrant and that one day he will be unmasked and chased back to his origins.

When he left the county seat behind, it was like finally climbing out of his own personal Iron Age. His tools were sharp and cold, and the teachers’ questions hung over his head like raised axes. He had experienced the four years of study as if he were living on the dole. The scent of elkhound had never left him, the rented room had eaten its way into him, the flowered wallpaper had been carnivorous. He had made few friends in this scrubbed emptiness. But he had forced himself to persevere, and finally he passed an exam that surprised everyone, including himself. He felt as though his marks did not reflect his knowledge but instead were proof of his determination, as if he were an orienteer or an athlete.

That’s also where the idea of studying law originates. Since he has no desire to be a woodcutter, he decides that maybe he can be a lawyer. He has a vague sense that the law might give him the tools to survive. The laws are rules that have been tested and interpreted down through the generations. They clarify the boundaries of decency, specify how the unimpeachable person may act. But perhaps another horizon is also hiding there. Maybe he could become the sworn spokesman of mitigating circumstance?

He once felt as though his whole life ought to be viewed as a mitigating circumstance. From my upbringing I received neither self-knowledge nor a sense of purpose, he thought. Now I try to move through hostile terrain without surrendering to confusion. Maybe the fact that I didn’t remain in the place of my birth could be regarded as a mitigating circumstance. But why didn’t I stay there? Why didn’t I grab a pickaxe and bury the roots, marry one of the bridesmaids?

My inheritance is a dusty full-rigger in a glass case, the smell of wet woollen socks drying over the stove. A mother who couldn’t stand it any longer and vanished on a train heading south; a haggard seaman who managed to drift ashore where there wasn’t any sea.

As the defender of mitigating circumstance perhaps I can remain unnoticed. I, Hans Olofson, possess an incontrovertible talent. The art of finding the best hiding places.

The summer after his examination he returns to the house by the river. There is no one to meet him at the station, and when he enters the kitchen it smells newly scrubbed, and his father is sitting at the table regarding him with glazed eyes.

He sees that he is beginning to resemble his father more and more. The face, the tangled hair, the stooping spine. But do I also resemble him inside? If so, where will I drift ashore?

In a surge of responsibility he tries to take care of his father, who is obviously drinking more often and more than before. He sits down across from him at the kitchen table and asks if he isn’t going to take off soon. What happened to the boat that sailed along the coast?