Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

One afternoon, when Hans is wandering aimlessly down by the river, he sees a boy he doesn’t know sitting on one of his special boulders, a look-out over the steel bridge and the south bank of the river. He hides behind a bush and watches the interloper, who seems to be busy fishing.

The boy is the son of the new judge. Pleased, he summons up all the contempt he can muster. Only an idiot or a stranger from another parish would think it possible to catch fish in the river at this time of year.

Von Croona. That’s the family’s name. A noble name, he has heard. A family, a name. Not ordinary, like Olofson. The new judge has ancestors reaching back into the mists of historical battlefields.

Hans decides that because of this the judge’s son must be a really unpleasant devil. He steps out of the bushes and shows himself.

The boy on the rock regards him with curiosity.

‘Are there any fish here?’ he asks.

Hans shakes his head and decides he ought to hit him. Chase him away from his private rock. But he stops short, because the nobleman is looking him straight in the eye, with absolutely no sign of embarrassment. He reels in his fishing line, pulls the piece of worm off the hook, and stands up.

‘Are you the one who lives in the wooden house?’ he asks, and Hans nods.

And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they fall in together along the path. Hans leads the way, and the nobleman follows a few steps behind. Hans directs and points out things; he knows the paths, the ditches, the rocks. Finally they reach the pontoon bridge that leads over to the People’s Park and then take a short cut across the common until they come to Kyrkogatan. Outside Leander Nilsson’s bakery they stop to watch two dogs mating. At the water tower Hans shows him the spot where Rudin the madman set fire to himself a few years earlier, in protest at Head Physician Torstenson’s refusal to admit him to the hospital for his stomach troubles.

With undisguised pride Hans tries to recount the most hairraising events that he knows in the town’s history. Rudin wasn’t the only madman.

He directs their steps towards the church and points out the hollow space in the masonry of the south wall. As recently as the previous year one of the trusted deacons, in a fit of acute crisis of faith, tried to demolish the church one late January evening. With a pick and sledgehammer he resolutely set to work on the thick wall. The commotion naturally prompted the police to be called in, and Constable Bergstrand was forced to button up his winter coat and venture out into the snowstorm to arrest the man.

Hans tells the story and the nobleman listens.

From that day on a friendship grows between this ill-matched pair, the nobleman and the son of a woodcutter. Together they surmount the vast differences between them. Not all of them, of course; there is always a no-man’s-land they can never enter together, but they grow as close to each other as possible.

Sture has his own room up in the attic of the courthouse. A large, bright room, with an abundance of curious equipment, maps, Meccano constructions, and chemicals. There are no toys, only two model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.

Sture points to a picture hanging on the wall. Hans sees a bearded man who reminds him of one of the portraits of the old pastors that hang in the church. But Sture explains that this is Leonardo, and he wants to be just like him someday. Inventing new things, creating what people never even imagined they needed...

Hans listens without fully understanding. But he senses the passion in what he hears, and thinks he recognises in it his own obsessive dream of getting the miserable wooden house to cut its moorings and float away down the river towards the sea he has never yet seen.

In this attic room they act out their mysterious games. Sture seldom visits Hans at home. The stuffy smell of elkhounds and wet woollens bothers him. He says nothing of this to Hans. Sture has been brought up not to offend anyone unnecessarily; he knows where he belongs and he’s glad he doesn’t have to live in Hans’s world.

Early that first summer they begin to go on nightly excursions. A ladder raised towards the attic window enables Sture to escape without anyone hearing him, and Hans bribes the elkhounds with bones he has saved and sneaks out the door. In the summer night they stroll through the sleeping town, investing all their pride in never being discovered. Cautious shadows in the beginning, they develop a less and less restrained audacity. They slip through hedges and broken fences, listen at open windows, climb up on each other’s shoulders and press their faces against the windows where the few night-time lamps in the town are still burning. They see drunken men in filthy underwear sleeping in musty flats; on one golden but sadly never repeated occasion they witness a railway worker cavorting with Oscaria the shoe salesgirl in her bed.

They rule the deserted streets and courtyards.

One night in July they commit a ritual break-in. They enter the bicycle shop near the chemist’s, the Monarch Specialist, and move some bicycles around in the display window. Then they hastily leave the shop without taking anything. It’s the break-in itself that tempts them, pulling off a bewildering mystery. Wiberg the bicycle dealer will never figure out what happened.

But they steal things too, of course. One night, from an unlocked car outside the Tourist Hotel, they snatch an unopened bottle of booze and ramble through their first bout of drunkenness, sitting on the boulder down by the river.

They follow each other, first one leading, then the other. They never fight, but they don’t share all their secrets. For Hans it’s a constant source of humiliation that Sture has so much money. When the feeling of subordination grows too strong, Hans decides that his own father is a good-for-nothing who never had enough sense to secure himself a real income.

For Sture the secret is the reverse. In Hans he sees a capable warrior, but he’s also thankful that he doesn’t have to be him.

Perhaps they both have an inkling that their friendship is an impossibility. How long can the camaraderie be stretched before it snaps? The abyss is there, they both sense how close it is, but neither wants to confront the catastrophe.

A streak of malice develops in their friendship. Where it comes from neither of them knows; suddenly it’s just there. And it’s towards the Noseless One in Ulvkälla that they direct their dark weapons.

In her youth the Noseless One was struck by a thyroid fever which necessitated an operation on her nose. But the accident and emergency surgeon at the time, Dr Stierna, was having a bad day. The woman’s nose disappeared completely under his knife and fumbling fingers, and she had to return home with a hole between her eyes. She was seventeen at the time and twice tried to drown herself, but both times she floated to shore. She lived alone with her mother, a seamstress, who died less than a year after the disastrous operation.

If Pastor Harry Persson of the Free Church, nicknamed Hurrapelle, hadn’t taken pity on her, she would certainly have succeeded in taking her own life. But Hurrapelle brought her to the wooden pews in the Baptist church, which lay between the town’s two dominant dens of iniquity, the beer café and the People’s Hall. At the church she was surrounded by a community she hadn’t known existed. In the congregation there were two elderly nurses who weren’t scared off by the Noseless One and her hole between the eyes, into which she stuck a handkerchief. They had served as missionaries in Africa for many years, mostly in the basin of the Belgian Congo, and there they experienced horrors far worse than a missing nose. They bore with them the memories of bodies rotted with leprosy and the grotesquely swollen scrotums of elephantiasis. For them the Noseless One was a grateful reminder that Christian mercy could work wonders even in such a godless land as Sweden.