Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

He is struck by repeated bouts of malaria and hallucinates again that he is being attacked by bandits. One night he thinks he’s going to die. When he wakes up the electricity is off; the fever makes him lose all his internal bearings. He shoots his revolver straight out into the darkness.

When he wakes again the malaria has passed, and Luka waits as usual outside his door in the dawn. New German shepherds are running around his house; his neighbours have brought them as the obvious gifts of the white community.

He attends to the daily work on the farm as usual. Egg lorries are no longer being plundered; quiet has settled over the land. He wonders how he will endure. I could not have avoided killing Peter Motombwane, he thinks. He never would have allowed it. If he could he would have sliced off my head. His despair must have been so strong that he could no longer live with the idea of waiting for the time to be ripe, for the revolt slowly to emerge. He must have thought that this ripening process had to be hastened along, and he took to the only weapon he had. Maybe he was also aware that he would fail.

He compares himself to Motombwane, wandering through his entire life in a long sorrowful procession. My life is built of bad cement, he thinks. The cracks run deep, and someday it will all come crashing down. My ambitions have always been superficial and flawed. My moral gestures are sentimental or impatient. I have almost never made real demands on myself.

I studied to find a way out, a way to get by. I came to Africa because I carried another person’s dream. A farm was placed in my hands. When Judith Fillington left here the work was already done. All that was left was to repeat routines that were already in practice. Finally I was assigned the shocking role of killing one or maybe two people, people who were prepared to do what I would never have dared do. I can hardly be blamed for defending my own life. And yet I blame myself.

More and more often he gets drunk in the evenings and staggers around the empty rooms. I have to get away, he thinks. I’ll sell the farm, burn it down, take off.

He can think of only one more task he has left to do. Joyce Lufuma’s daughters. I can’t abandon them, he thinks. Even if Lars Håkansson is there, I have to stay until I’m sure that they’re safe enough to complete their education.

After a month he decides to drive to Lusaka and visit them. He doesn’t call ahead; he gets into his car and drives off towards Lusaka. He arrives there late one Sunday evening.

As he drives into the city he realises that for the first time in a very long time he feels happy. I should have had children of my own, he thinks. In this respect too, my life is unnatural. But maybe it’s not too late.

The night watchman opens the gates for him and he turns into the gravel courtyard in front of the house.

At the moment of defeat Hans Olofson wishes that he could at least play a flute carved for him of birchwood.

But he cannot. He has no flute, he has only his pulledup roots in his hands.

It is Hans Fredström, son of a pastry chef from Danderyd, who hands down the verdict on Hans Olofson. The students are sitting in a beer café in Stockholm in early September 1969. He doesn’t know who came up with the idea that they take the train to Stockholm that Wednesday evening to drink beer, but he follows along anyway; there are five of them, and they met several years before in the introductory law course.

In the spring Hans Olofson had gone home with the embittered feeling that he would never finish his studies. By then he had lived in the house of the clocks and suffered through his lectures and homework long enough to know that he didn’t fit in anywhere. The ambition he’d had, to be the defender of mitigating circumstance, had dissolved and vanished like a fleeting mirage. With a growing sense of unreality the clocks went on ticking around him, and finally he realised that the university was just an excuse for the afternoons he spent in Wickberg’s gun shop.

The salvation of the summer was the Holmström twins, who had not yet found their wives-to-be, but were still racing around through the bright summer woods in their old Saab. Hans squeezed into their back seat, shared their schnapps, and watched the forests and lakes glide by. On a distant dance floor he found a bridesmaid and fell immediately and fiercely in love. Her name was Agnes, nicknamed Agge, and she was studying to be a hairdresser at a salon called ‘The Wave’, which stood between the bookshop and Karl-Otto’s used motorcycle shop. Her father was one of the men he had worked with at the Trade Association warehouse. She lived with an older sister in a small flat above the Handelsbank, and after her sister took off with a man and his house trailer to Höga Kusten, they had the flat to themselves. The Holmström brothers showed up there in their Saab, plans were made for the evening, and it was to there that they all returned.

By then he had decided to stay, to get a job and not go back south when automn arrived. But love was illusory too, just another hiding place, and finally he went back south just to escape. In her eyes he could read his betrayal. But maybe he also went back because he couldn’t stand to watch his father fighting with his demons more and more often; now even water couldn’t vanquish them. Now he simply boozed, a single-minded genuflection before his inability to return to the sea.

That summer Erik Olofson finally became a woodcutter. He was no longer the seaman who toiled among bark and brushwood to open the horizon and take his bearings. One day Célestine fell to the floor, as if she had been shipwrecked in a mighty hurricane. Hans found her while his father was sleeping it off on the sofa. He recalls that moment as a raging helplessness, two opposing forces wrestling with each other.

He returned to Uppsala and now he’s sitting in a beer café in Stockholm, and Hans Fredström is dribbling beer on his hand. Fredström possesses something enviable: he has a calling. He wants to become a prosecutor.

‘Hooligans have to be taken by the ears and punished,’ he says. ‘Being a prosecutor means pursuing purity. The body of society is purged.’

Once Olofson had revealed to him what he planned to be: a spokesman for the weak, thereby instantly winding up in Fredström’s disfavour. He mobilises a hostility that Olofson cannot deflect. His conversation is so fiery and prejudiced that it makes Olofson sick. Their discussions always finish just on the verge of a fistfight. Olofson tries to avoid him. If he fights with him he always loses. When Fredström dribbles beer on his hand he pulls it away.

I have to stand up to him, he thinks. The two of us will be defending law and order together for our generation. The thought suddenly seems impossible to him. He ought to be able to do it, he ought to force himself to resist, otherwise Hans Fredström will have free reign to ravage through the courtrooms like a predator, crushing with an elephant foot the mitigating circumstance that may still be there. But he can’t do it. He is too alone, too poorly equipped.

Instead he stands up and leaves. Behind him he hears Fredström sniggering. He wanders restlessly through the city, heading down streets at random. His mind is empty, like deserted halls in an abandoned palace. First he thinks there isn’t anything at all, only the peeling wallpaper and the echo of his footsteps.

But in one of the rooms lies Sture in his bed, with a rough blackened tube sticking out of his throat. The iron lung folds its shiny wings around him and he hears a wheezing sound, like a locomotive letting off steam. In another room echoes a word, Mutshatsha, Mutshatsha, and perhaps he also hears the faint tones of ‘Some of These Days’. He decides to visit Sture, to see him again, dead or alive.