Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Hurrapelle sent the Noseless One out on endless door-to-door rounds with the congregation’s magazines in her hand, and no one refused to buy what she had to sell. Soon she had become a goldmine for Hurrapelle, and within six months he could even afford to trade in his rusty old Vauxhall on a brand-new Ford.

The Noseless One lived in a secluded house in Ulvkälla. One night Sture and Hans stood outside her darkened window. They listened in silence before they went home across the river bridge.

The next night they returned and nailed a dead rat to her front door. Her deformity led them to torment her for a few intense weeks that summer.

One night they threw an anthill they had dug up through her open kitchen window. Another night they splashed varnish all over her currant bushes and finished by putting a crow with its head cut off in her letterbox, along with some pages torn out of a well-thumbed and sticky issue of Cocktail that they had found in a dustbin. Two nights later they came back, this time equipped with a pair of Nyman, the courthouse caretaker’s, hedge clippers. Their plan was to butcher her flowers.

While Hans stood watch by the corner of the house, Sture attacked one of the well-tended flower beds. Then the front door opened and the Noseless One stood there in a light-coloured bathrobe and asked them, quite calmly, without being sad or angry, why they were doing these things.

They had an escape route planned. But instead of disappearing like two hares in a hunt they just stood there as though struck by a sight they couldn’t escape.

An angel, thinks Hans Olofson much later, many years after vanishing into the tropical night of Africa. He remembers her like an angel descended from heaven, now that she is dead and he has set out on the journey to fulfil her dream that he has taken as his own.

In the summer night the Noseless One stands in the doorway, her white bathrobe gleaming in the early grey light of dawn. She waits for their answer, which never comes.

Then she moves aside and asks them to come in. Her gesture is not to be refused. With bowed heads they pad past her, into her freshly scrubbed kitchen. Hans recognises at once the odour of soap, from his father’s furious scrubbing, and he has a fleeting thought that maybe the Noseless One also scrubs her way through sleepless, haunted nights.

Her kindness makes them weak, defenceless. If fire and fuming sulphur had spewed out of the hole where her nose used to be, they could have dealt with the situation more easily. A dragon can be more easily conquered than an angel.

The smell of soap is mixed with the scent of bird cherry trees from outside her open kitchen window. A clock ticks softly on the wall. The marauders crouch down with their gaze fixed firmly on the linoleum. There in the kitchen, it is as quiet as if a prayer service were in progress. And perhaps the Noseless One is silently appealing to Hurrapelle’s God to counsel her on how she can make the two shipwrecked vandals explain why one morning she came out to a kitchen crawling with angry ants.

In the minds of the two warrior brothers there is a great emptiness. Their thoughts are locked like frozen gears. What is there to explain? Their impetuous desire to torment her has no tangible cause. The roots of evil grow in the dark subterranean soil that can scarcely be viewed, let alone explained.

They crouch in the kitchen of the Noseless One, and after they sit in silence long enough, she lets them go. To the end she holds them there with her kindness, and she asks them to come back when they think they can explain their actions.

The meeting with the Noseless One becomes a turning point. They return to her kitchen often, and slowly a great intimacy develops among the three. That year Hans turns thirteen and Sture fifteen. They are always welcome at her house. As if by silent agreement, they don’t talk about the crow with its throat cut or the crawling ants. A wordless apology is given, forgiveness is received, and life turns the other cheek.

Their first discovery is that the Noseless One has a name. It isn’t just any old name, either; it’s Janine, a name that emanates a foreign, mysterious fragrance.

She has a name, a voice, a body. She hasn’t yet turned thirty. She is still young. They begin to sense the vague shimmer of beauty when they succeed in looking past and beyond the gaping hole below her eyes. They sense a heartbeat and lively thoughts, desires and dreams. And as if it were the most natural thing in the world she pilots them through her life story, lets them accompany her to the appalling moment when she realises that the surgeon has carved off her entire nose, follow her twice into the black water of the river and feel the ropes from the weights snap just at the instant her lungs are about to burst. They follow her like invisible shadows to Hurrapelle’s penitent bench, listen to the mysterious embrace of salvation, and finally stand next to her when she discovers the ants crawling across the kitchen floor.

That year a strange love blooms among those three. A wildflower in the house just south of the river...

On a dirty map Hans Olofson puts his finger on the name Mutshatsha.

‘How do I get there?’ he asks.

It is his second morning in Africa, his stomach is unsettled, and the sweat is running down inside his shirt.

He is standing at the front desk of the Ridgeway Hotel. Behind the desk is an elderly African with white hair and tired eyes. His shirt collar is frayed and his uniform unwashed. Olofson can’t resist the temptation of leaning over the counter to see what the man has on his feet.

On the way down in the lift he’d thought, if the condition of the African continent is the same as the shoes of its inhabitants, the future is already over and all is irretrievably lost. He senses a vague unrest growing inside him from all the worn-out shoes he has seen.

The old man is barefoot. ‘Maybe there’s a bus,’ he says. ‘Maybe a lorry. Sooner or later a car will come by, I’m sure.’

‘How do I find the bus?’ asks Olofson.

‘You stand by the side of the road.’

‘At a bus stop?’

‘If there is a bus stop. Sometimes there is. But usually not.’

Olofson realises that the vague answer is the most detailed one he will get. He senses something tentative, ephemeral in the lives of the blacks, so distant and foreign from the world he comes from.

I’m afraid, he thinks. Africa scares me, with its heat, its odours, its people with bad shoes. I’m much too visible here. My skin colour shines as if I were a burning candle in the dark. If I leave the hotel I’ll be swallowed up, vanish without leaving a trace...

The train to Kitwe is supposed to depart in the evening. Olofson spends the day in his room. He stands at the window for long stretches. He sees a man in ragged clothes cutting grass around a big wooden cross with a long, broad-bladed knife. People pass by with shapeless bundles on their heads.

At seven in the evening he leaves his room and has to pay for the night he won’t be spending in it. When he emerges from the hotel screaming taxi drivers fall upon him.

Why do they make such a damned racket? he thinks, and the first wave of contempt washes over him.

He walks towards the car that seems the least dilapidated and puts his suitcase in the back seat with him. He has hidden his money in his shoes and underwear. When he sits down in the back seat he immediately regrets his choice of hiding places. The banknotes are sticky and cling to his body.

At the railway station there is, if possible, even greater chaos than at the airport. The taxi lets him off in the midst of a surging sea of humanity, bundles of clothes, chickens and goats, water sellers, fires, and rusted cars. The station is almost completely dark. What few lightbulbs there are have burned out or have been stolen.