Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

He barely receives an answer. His father’s head hangs as if his neck were already broken.

One single time Hans crosses the bridge to Janine’s house. It’s late at night, the bright Norrland night, and he thinks he hears her trombone for a brief dreadful moment. The neglected currant bushes glow. He leaves the place and never returns. He avoids her grave in the churchyard.

One day he bumps into Nyman the courthouse caretaker. On an impulse he asks about Sture. Nyman knows. After ten years Sture is still lying motionless in bed in a hospital for the incurable outside Västervik.

Restlessly he wanders along the river. He walks with his tornup roots in his hand, searching for a suitable plot of ground to set them down in. But in Uppsala it’s all pavement, isn’t it? How can he plant them there?

At the beginning of August he can finally take off, and he does so with a great sense of relief. Again circumstances lead him further away. If he hadn’t had Ture Wickberg as a classmate he wouldn’t have been given the chance to finance his studies by working in Ture’s uncle’s gun shop in Stockholm.

His father accompanies him to the station, and stands on the platform carefully watching his son’s two suitcases. Suddenly Hans feels a great fury. Who would steal his luggage?

The train lurches forward and Erik Olofson raises his hand awkwardly to wave goodbye. Hans sees him moving his mouth but he can’t hear what he’s saying. As the train rattles across the iron bridge, Hans is standing at the window. The iron beams whirl past, the water of the river runs towards the sea. Then he closes the window, as if he were lowering an iron curtain. He is alone in the gloom of the compartment. He has a fleeting sensation that he is in a hiding place where no one will ever find him.

But the conductors of Swedish Railways do not place philosophical importance on closed, dark compartments. The door flies open and Hans feels caught out in the depths of a great secret, and he hands over his ticket as if begging for mercy. The conductor punches it and tells him how to change trains in the early dawn.

In a wounded and lacerated world there is no room for the scared rabbits of anxiety, he thinks. The feeling refuses to let him go, even when he has commuted back and forth between Uppsala and Stockholm for almost ten months.

Hans finds a place to live with a man who has a passionate love of fungi and works as a lecturer in biology. A lovely attic room in an old wooden building becomes his new hiding place. The building lies in an overgrown garden, and he decides that the lecturer has planted his own private jungle.

Time reigns supreme in the house. Clocks hang on all the walls. Hans imagines the clockwork menagerie, a ticking, rattling, sighing orchestra that calibrates time and the noble insignificance of life. In window niches the sand runs through hourglasses that are constantly turned over. An elderly mother wanders about in the ticking rooms, taking care of the clocks.

The clocks were inherited, he is told. The lecturer’s father, an eccentric inventor who in his youth made a fortune on combine harvesters, spent his life passionately collecting timepieces.

The first months of that autumn he will remember as a long drawn-out agony when he seemed to understand nothing. The law seems an unknown cuneiform script for which he completely lacks a personal code. Each day he is prepared to give up, but he mobilises his maximum endurance and finally succeeds, in early November, in cracking the shell and penetrating into the darkness behind the words.

At about the same time he decides to change his appearance. He grows a beard and clips his hair to a downy fringe all over his skull. In photo booths he turns the stool into position, feeds in one-krona coins, and then studies his features. But behind his new look he can still see the face of Erik Olofson.

He imagines dejectedly how his coat of arms might look. A snowdrift, a chained elkhound, against a background of infinite forests. He will never escape it.

One time when he is alone in the ticking house he decides to investigate the secrets of the fungus-loving lecturer and his timekeeping mother. Perhaps I could raise this to a lifelong mission, he thinks. Peeping. I will take on the form of a field mouse and break out of my ingenious system of secret passages. But he finds nothing in the chiffoniers and chests of drawers.

He sits down among the ticking clocks and with an utter seriousness attempts to understand himself. He has wound up here, from the brickworks, via the span of the iron bridge. But after that? Onward, to become a lawyer, the defender of mitigating circumstance, simply because he wouldn’t be any good as a woodcutter. I possess neither meekness nor impatience, he thinks. I was born into a time when everything is splitting apart. I have to make a decision. I must make up my mind to continue with what I decided to do. Maybe I will find my mother. My indecision is in itself a hiding place, and there’s a risk that I’ll never find my way out.

On precisely this day in April when Stone from Tibro has told Hans about his internal parasites and the black lions in the Kalahari, a telegram lies waiting for him when he returns to the house of the clocks. It’s from his father, telling him that he’s coming to Stockholm on the morning train.

His rage is instant. Why is he coming here? He’d thought that his father was securely chained up beyond the fir ridges. Why is he on his way here? The telegram gives no reason.

Early in the morning he hurries to Stockholm and is waiting on the platform when the Norrland train pulls in. He sees his father cautiously peering out from one of the last cars. In his hand he holds the bag that Hans himself used when he travelled to the county seat. Under his arm he has a package wrapped in brown paper.

‘Well now, there you are,’ says Erik Olofson when he spies his son. ‘I didn’t know if the telegram had arrived.’

‘What would you have done then? And what are you doing here?’

‘It’s those Vaxholm boats again. They need seamen now.’

Hans leads him to a cafeteria in the station.

‘Do they serve pilsner here?’ his father asks.

‘No, no pilsner. You’ll have coffee. Now tell me!’

‘There isn’t much to tell. I wrote and got an answer. I have to be at their office at nine o’clock.’

‘Where are you going to live?’

‘I thought there might be some sort of boarding house.’

‘What have you got in the package? It’s leaking!’

‘A moose steak.’

‘A moose steak?’

‘Yep.’

‘It’s not hunting season now, is it?’

‘Well, it’s a moose steak anyway. I brought it for you.’

‘There’s blood dripping out of the package. People will think you murdered somebody.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Good Lord.’

They find a room at the Central Hotel. Hans watches his father unpack his clothes. He recognises them all, has seen them all before.

‘Make sure you give yourself a good shave before you go there. And no pilsners!’

His father hands him a letter and Hans sees that the Vaxholm boats have an office on Strandvägen.

After Erik has shaved they set off.

‘I borrowed a picture of Nyman’s children. It’s so fuzzy you can’t really see anything. So it’ll do fine.’

‘Do you still think you can show pictures of other people’s children?’

‘Sailors are supposed to have a lot of children. It’s expected.’

‘Why didn’t you tell my mother that?’

‘I thought I’d ask around about her. You haven’t seen her, by any chance, have you?’

Hans stops dead in his tracks. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Just wondering.’

‘Why would I have seen her? Where would I have seen her?’