Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Two weeks later Olofson drives the two daughters to Lusaka. Marjorie, the eldest, sits next to him in the front seat, Peggy behind him. Their beauty is blinding, their joy in life brings a lump to his throat. Still, I’m doing something, he thinks, I’m seeing to it that these two young people are not forced to have their lives thwarted for no reason, subjected to far too many childbirths in far too few years, to poverty and privation, to lives that end too soon.

Their reception at Håkansson’s house is reassuring. The cottage he puts at the disposal of the two girls is freshly painted and well equipped. Marjorie stands looking at the light switch as if in a dream; for the first time in her life she will have electricity.

Olofson decides that the vague unease he felt means nothing. He is projecting his own anxiety on to other people. He spends the evening at Håkansson’s house. Through his bedroom window he can see Marjorie and Peggy, shadows glimpsed behind thin curtains. He remembers arriving in the county seat from his hometown, his first time away, possibly the most crucial journey of all.

The next day he signs a deed of conveyance for his hill, and leaves his English bank account number. Before he leaves Lusaka he stops on a whim outside the Zambia Airways office on Cairo Road and picks up a timetable of the airline’s European flights.

The long trip back to Kalulushi is interrupted by thunderstorms that erase all visibility. Not until late that night does he turn in through the gates of his farm. The night watchman comes towards him in the glare of the headlights. He doesn’t recognise the man, and has a fleeting thought that it’s a bandit dressed in the night watchman’s uniform. My guns, he thinks desperately. But the night watchman is the person he says he is, and at close range Olofson knows him.

‘Welcome home, Bwana ,’ he says.

I’ll never know if he really means it, Olofson thinks. His words could just as well mean that he’s welcoming me so that he’ll have a chance to cut my heart right out of my body.

‘Everything quiet?’ he asks.

‘Nothing has happened, Bwana .’

Luka is waiting for him, and dinner is waiting. He sends Luka home and sits down at the table. The meal might be poisoned — the thought comes out of nowhere. I’ll be found dead, a sloppy autopsy will be done, and no poison will ever be detected.

He shoves the tray away, turns out the light, and sits in the dark. From the attic he can hear the scraping of bat wings. A spider hurries across his hand. He suddenly knows that his breaking point is near. Like an attack of dizziness, an approaching whirlwind of unresolved feelings and thoughts.

He sits for a long time in the dark before he grasps that he is about to have an attack of malaria. His joints start to ache, his head is pounding, and the fever shoots up in his body. Quickly he builds his barricades, pulls cupboards in front of the front door, checks the windows, and picks a bedroom where he lies down with his pistol. He takes a quinine pill and slowly drifts off to sleep.

A leopard is chasing him in his dreams. He sees that it is Luka, dressed in a bloody leopard skin. The malaria attack chases him into a chasm. When he wakes in the morning, he realises that the attack was mild. He gets out of bed, dresses quickly, and goes to open the door for Luka. He pushes away a cupboard and realises that he still has his pistol in his hand. He has slept with his finger on the trigger all night. I’m starting to lose control, he thinks. Everywhere I sense threatening shadows, invisible pangas constantly at my throat. My Swedish background leaves me unable to handle the fear I keep repressing. My terror is an enslaved emotion that is about to break free once and for all. The day that happens, I will have reached my breaking point. Then Africa will have conquered me, finally, irrevocably.

He forces himself to eat breakfast and then drive to the mud hut. The black clerks, who are hunched over delivery reports and orders, stand up and say good morning to him.

That day Olofson realises that the most simple actions are causing him great difficulty. Each decision causes him abrupt attacks of doubt. He tells himself that he’s tired, that he ought to turn over responsibility to one of his trusted foremen and take a trip, give himself some time off.

In the next moment he begins to suspect that Eisenhower Mudenda is slowly poisoning him. The dust on his desk becomes a powder that gives off noxious vapours. Quickly he decides to put an extra padlock on the door of the mud hut at night. An empty egg carton falling from the top of a stack provokes a meaningless outburst of rage. The black workers watch him with inquisitive eyes. A butterfly that lands on his shoulder makes him jump, as if someone had put a hand on him in the dark.

That night he lies awake. Emptiness spreads out its desolate landscape inside him. He starts to cry, and soon he is shouting out loud into the darkness. I’m losing control, he thinks when the weeping has passed. These feelings come out of nowhere, attacking me and distorting my judgement. He looks at his watch and sees it’s just past midnight. He gets up, sits in a chair, and begins to read a book taken at random from the collection Judith Fillington left behind. The German shepherds pace back and forth outside the house; he can hear their growling, the cicadas, lone birds calling from the river. He reads page after page without understanding a word, looks at his watch often, and waits for daybreak.

Just before three he falls asleep in the chair, the revolver resting on his chest. He wakes up abruptly and listens into the darkness. The African night is still. A dream, he thinks. Something I dreamed yanked me up to the surface. Nothing happened, everything is quiet. The silence, he thinks. That’s what woke me up. Something has happened, the silence is unnatural. He feels the fear coming, his heart is pounding, and he grabs his pistol and listens into the darkness.

The cicadas are chirruping but the German shepherds are quiet. Suddenly he is sure that something is happening outside his house in the dark. He runs through the silence to get his shotgun. With shaking hands he shoves shells into the two barrels and takes off the safety. The whole time he is listening, but the dogs remain quiet. Their growling is gone, the sound of their paws has stopped. There are people outside in the dark, he thinks in desperation. Now they’re coming after me. Again he runs through the empty rooms and lifts the telephone receiver. The line is dead. Then he knows, and he’s so scared that he almost loses control of his breathing. He runs up the stairs to the top floor, grabs a pile of ammunition lying on a chair in the hallway, and continues into the skeleton room. The single window has no curtains. He peers cautiously into the darkness. The lamps on the terrace cast a pale light across the courtyard. He can’t see the dogs anywhere.

The lamps suddenly go out and he hears a faint clinking from one of the glass covers. He stares out into the darkness. For a few brief seconds he’s sure he hears footsteps. He forces himself to think. They’ll try to get in downstairs, he tells himself. When they realise that I’m up here they’ll smoke me out. Again he runs down the hall, down the stairs, and listens at the two outer doors that are blockaded by cabinets.

The dogs, he thinks in despair. What have they done to the dogs? He keeps moving between the doors, imagining that the attack could come from two directions at once. Suddenly it occurs to him that the bathroom window has no steel bars on it. It’s a small window, but a thin man could probably squeeze through. Carefully he pushes open the bathroom door; the shotgun is shaking in his hands. I can’t hesitate, he tells himself. If I see someone I have to aim and shoot. The bathroom window is untouched and he goes back to the doors.