Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

A few days later he is in Västervik. Late in the afternoon he gets off the bus he boarded in Norrköping, which will now continue on to Kalmar. At once he smells the sea, and like an insect driven by its sense of smell he finds his way to Slottsholmen.

An autumn wind blows in off the sea as he walks along the wharves and looks at the boats. A lone yacht runs before the wind into the harbour, and the sail flaps as a woman takes it in.

He can’t find a boarding house, and in a fit of recklessness he checks in at the City Hotel. Through the wall of his room he can hear someone talking excitedly and at length. He thinks it might be a man practising for a play. At the front desk a friendly man with a glass eye helps him find the hospital where Sture is presumed to be.

‘Fir Ridge,’ says the man with the glass eye. ‘That’s probably it. That’s where they take people who weren’t lucky enough to die instantly. Traffic accidents, motorcycles, broken backs. That must be it.’

‘Fir Ridge’ is a deeply misleading name, Olofson realises as he arrives in a taxi the next morning. The forest opens up, he sees a manor house surrounded by a well-tended garden and a glimpse of the sea shining behind one wing of the manor house. Outside the main entrance a man with no legs sits in a wheelchair. He is wrapped in a blanket, sleeping with his mouth open.

Olofson walks in through the tall door; the hospital reminds him of the courthouse where Sture once lived. He is shown to a small office. A lamp glows green and he enters to find a man who introduces himself as Herr Abramovitch. He speaks in a muted, scarcely audible voice, and Olofson imagines that his primary task in life is to preserve the silence.

‘Sture von Croona,’ whispers Herr Abramovitch. ‘He has been with us for ten years or more. But I don’t remember you. I assume you’re a relative?’

Olofson nods. ‘A half-brother.’

‘Some people who come to visit for the first time may be a little distressed,’ whispers Herr Abramovitch. ‘He is pale, naturally, and a little swollen up from constantly lying down. A certain hospital odour is also unavoidable.’

‘I would like to visit him,’ says Olofson. ‘I’ve come a long way to see him.’

‘I’ll ask him,’ says Herr Abramovitch, getting to his feet. ‘What was the name again? Hans Olofson? A half-brother?’

When he returns everything is arranged. Olofson follows him down a long corridor and they stop before a door, on which Herr Abramovitch knocks. A gurgling sound comes in reply.

Nothing is as he imagined in the room he enters. The walls are covered with books, and in the middle of the room, surrounded by pot plants, Sture lies in a blue-painted bed. But there is no tube sticking out of his throat and no giant insect folding its wings around the blue bed.

The door closes silently and they are alone.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ asks Sture, in a voice that is hoarse but still reveals that he is angry.

Hans’s assumptions crumble. He had imagined that a person with a broken spine would be taciturn and softly spoken, not angry like this.

‘Have a seat,’ says Sture, as if to help him through his embarrassment.

Hans lifts a stack of books from a chair and sits down.

‘Ten years you make me wait,’ Sture goes on. ‘Ten years! First I was disappointed, of course. A couple of years, maybe. Since then I’ve mostly been damned angry with you.’

‘I have no explanation,’ says Hans. ‘You know how it is.’

‘How the hell should I know how it is when I’m lying here?’

Then his face breaks out in a smile. ‘Well, you finally came,’ he says. ‘To this place where things are the way they are. If I want a view they set up a mirror so I can see the garden. The room has been painted twice since I came here. At first they would roll me out to the park. But then I said no. I like it better in here. I’ve been taking it easy. Nothing to prevent someone like me from surrendering to laziness.’

Hans listens dumbstruck to the will power emanating from Sture as he lies in the bed. He realises that Sture, despite his terrible disadvantage, has developed a power and sense of purpose that he doesn’t have.

‘Of course, bitterness is my constant companion,’ Sture says. ‘Every morning when I awake from my dreams, every time I shit myself and it starts to smell, every time I realise that I can’t do anything — that’s probably the worst thing, not being able to offer any resistance. It’s my spine that’s severed, that’s true. But something was also broken inside my head. It took me many years to realise that. But then I made a plan for my life based on my opportunities, not the lack of them. I decided to live until I turned thirty, about five more years. By then I’ll have my philosophy worked out, I’ll have clarified my relationship with death. My only problem is that I can’t end my own life because I can’t move. But I have another five years to figure out a solution.’

‘What happened?’ asks Hans.

‘I don’t remember. The memory is completely erased. I can remember things long before and I remember when I woke up here. That’s all.’

A stench suddenly spreads in the room and Sture presses his nose to a call button.

‘Go out for a while. I have to be cleaned up.’

When he comes back, Sture is lying there drinking beer through a straw.

‘I drink schnapps sometimes,’ he says. ‘But they don’t like that. If I start throwing up there’s trouble. And I can get foul-mouthed. My way of getting back at the nurses for everything I can’t do.’

‘Janine,’ says Hans. ‘She died.’

Sture lies quiet a long while. ‘What happened?’

‘She drowned herself in the end.’

‘You know what I dreamed of? Undressing her, making love to her. I still kick myself because I never did it. Did you ever think of that?’

Hans shakes his head. He quickly grabs a book to avoid the topic.

‘With my upbringing I never would have wound up studying radical philosophy,’ says Sture. ‘I dreamed of becoming the Leonardo of my time. I was my own constellation in a private cosmos. But now I know that reason is the only thing that gives me consolation. And reason means understanding that one dies alone, irreparably alone — everyone, even you. I try to think about it when I write. I talk on to tape, and someone else types it up.’

‘What do you write about?’

‘About a broken spine that ventures out into the world. Abramovitch doesn’t look too amused when he reads what the girls type up. He doesn’t understand what I mean, and it makes him nervous. But in five years he’ll be rid of me.’

When Sture asks Hans to tell him about his own life, he doesn’t seem to have anything to say.

‘Do you remember the horse dealer? He died last summer. He was eaten up by bone cancer.’

‘I never met him,’ says Sture. ‘Did I ever meet anyone other than you and Janine?’

‘It’s so long ago.’

‘Five more years,’ says Sture. ‘If I haven’t found the solution to my final problem, would you help me?’

‘If I can.’

‘You can’t break a promise to someone who’s broken his back. If you did I would haunt you until you dropped dead.’

Late in the afternoon they say goodbye. Herr Abramovitch cautiously opens the door a crack and says he can offer Hans a ride into town.

‘Come back once a year,’ says Sture. ‘No more. I don’t have time.’

‘I can write,’ says Hans.

‘No, no letters. I just get upset by letters. Letters are too much for me to stand. Go now.’

Hans leaves the town with a feeling of being king of the unworthy. In Sture he saw his own mirror image. He can’t escape it. Late in the evening he reaches Uppsala. The clocks tick in the impenetrable jungle of time in which he lives.