Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

He barely manages to pay the taxi driver before he is surrounded by filthy children offering their services as porters or begging for money. Without knowing what direction he should take, he hurries off, his feet already hurting from the wads of notes. He discovers a gaping hole in a wall above which a rickety sign says Ticket Counter. The waiting room is packed with people, it smells of urine and manure, and he gets into something that appears to be a queue. A man with no legs comes sliding along on a board and tries to sell him a dirty ticket to Livingstone, but Olofson shakes his head, turns away, and retreats within himself.

I hate this chaos, he thinks. It’s impossible to get an overview. Here I am at the mercy of chance and people sliding along on boards.

He buys a ticket to Kitwe and walks out on the platform. A train with a diesel locomotive is waiting, and he looks despondently at what awaits him: run-down carriages, already overfilled, like bursting cardboard boxes with toy figures in them, and broken windowpanes.

He notices two white people climbing into the carriage behind the locomotive. As if all white people were his friends in this black world, he hurries after them and almost falls on his face when he trips over a man lying stretched out on the platform asleep.

He hopes he has bought a ticket that gives him access to this carriage. He makes his way forward to the compartment where the white people he has been following are busy stowing their bags on the baggage racks.

Entering a compartment on a train in Sweden can often feel like intruding in someone’s private living room, but in this compartment he is met by friendly smiles and nods. He imagines that with his presence he is reinforcing a disintegrating and everdiminishing white army.

Before him are an older man and a young woman. Father and daughter, he guesses. He stows his suitcase and sits down, drenched in sweat. The young woman gives him an encouraging look as she takes out a book and a pocket torch.

‘I come from Sweden,’ he says, with a sudden urge to talk to someone. ‘I assume that this is the train for Kitwe?’

‘Sweden,’ says the woman. ‘How nice.’

The man has lit his pipe and leans back in his corner.

‘Masterton,’ he says. ‘My name is Werner, and this is my wife Ruth.’

Olofson introduces himself and feels a boundless gratitude at finding himself together with people who have decent shoes on their feet.

The train starts up with a jolt and the uproar in the station increases in a violent crescendo. A pair of legs is visible outside the window as a man climbs up on to the roof. After him come a basket of chickens and a sack of dried fish which rips open and spreads a smell of decay and salt.

Werner Masterton looks at his watch.

‘Ten minutes too early,’ he says. ‘Either the driver is drunk or he’s in a hurry to get home.’

Diesel fumes waft by, fires are burning along the tracks, and the lights of Lusaka slowly fall behind.

‘We never take the train,’ says Masterton from the depths of his corner. ‘About once every ten years. But in a few years there will hardly be any trains left in this country. Since independence everything has fallen apart. In five years almost everything has been destroyed. Everything is stolen. If this train suddenly stops tonight, which it most certainly will do, it means that the driver is trying to sell fuel from the locomotive. The Africans come with their oil cans. The green glass in the traffic lights has disappeared. Children steal them and try to palm them off on tourists as emeralds. But soon there won’t be any tourists left either. The wild animals have been shot, wiped out. I haven’t heard of anyone seeing a leopard in more than two years.’ He gestures out into the darkness.

‘There were lions here,’ he says. ‘Elephants wandered free in huge herds. Today there is nothing left.’

The Mastertons have a large farm outside Chingola, Olofson learns during the long night’s journey to Kitwe. Werner Masterton’s parents came from South Africa in the early 1950s. Ruth was the daughter of a teacher who moved back to England in 1964. They met while visiting friends in Ndola and married despite the great age difference.

‘Independence was a catastrophe,’ says Masterton, offering whisky from his pocket flask. ‘For the Africans, freedom meant that nobody had to work any more. No one gave orders, no one considered they might have to do something that wasn’t demanded of them. Now the country survives on its income from copper mining. But what happens when prices drop on the world market? No investment has been made in any alternatives. This is an agricultural country. It could be one of the world’s best, since the soil is fertile and there is water available. But no efforts are being made. The Africans have grasped nothing, learned nothing. When the British flag was struck and they raised their own, it was the beginning of a funeral procession that is still going on.’

‘I know almost nothing about Africa,’ says Olofson. ‘What little I do know I’ve already begun to doubt. And I’ve only been here two days.’

They give him an inquisitive look and he suddenly wishes he could have offered a different reply.

‘I’m supposed to visit a mission station in Mutshatsha,’ he says. ‘But I don’t really know how to get there.’

To his surprise, the Mastertons immediately take up the question of how he can complete his expedition. He quickly surmises that perhaps he has presented a problem that can be solved, in contrast to the one Werner Masterton has just laid out. Perhaps black problems have to be solved by the blacks, and the whites’ problems by the whites?

‘We have some friends in Kalulushi,’ says Werner. ‘I’ll take you there in my car. They can help you to continue from there.’

‘That’s too much to ask,’ replies Olofson.

‘That’s the way it is,’ says Ruth. ‘If the mzunguz don’t help each other, no one will. Do you think that any of the blacks climbing on the roof of this train car would help you? If they could, they’d steal your trousers right off you.’

Ruth lays out a meal from her baggage and invites Hans to join them.

‘Didn’t you even bring water with you?’ she asks. ‘The train could be a day late. There’s always something that breaks down, something missing, something they forgot.’

‘I thought there would be water on the train.’

‘It’s so filthy that not even a munto will drink it,’ says Werner, spitting into the darkness. ‘This would be a good country to live in if it weren’t for the blacks.’

Olofson decides that all whites in Africa probably espouse racist views just to survive. But is that true of missionaries too?

‘Isn’t there any conductor coming?’ he asks, to avoid responding to this last remark.

‘There may not be one,’ replies Ruth. ‘He may have missed his train. Or else some distant relative died and he went to the funeral without letting anyone know. The Africans spend a great deal of their lives going to and from funerals. But maybe he will come. Nothing is impossible.’

These people are the remnants of something utterly lost, thinks Olofson. Colonialism is completely buried today, with the exception of South Africa and the Portuguese colonies. But the people remain. A historical epoch always leaves behind a handful of people for the following period. They keep looking backwards, dreaming, aggrieved. They look at their empty hands and wonder where the instruments of power have gone. Then they discover these instruments in the hands of the people they previously only spoke to when giving out orders and reprimands. They live in the Epoch of Mortification, in the twilight land of ruin. The whites in Africa are a wandering remnant of a people that no one wants to think about. They have lost their foundation, what they thought was permanent for all eternity...