The Eye Of The Leopard (29 page)

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.

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.

Mutshatsha, he thinks. What remains other than you?

The Swedish sky is heavy on that early morning in September
1969 when he leaves all his former horizons behind him and flies
out into the world. He has spent his savings and bought the
ticket that will fling him out into the upper layers of the air, his
dubious pilgrimage to the Mutshatsha of Janine's dreams.

A motionless sky, an endless wall of clouds hangs over his
head, as for the first time in his life he boards an aeroplane. When
he walks across the tarmac the dampness soaks into his shoes.
He turns around as if someone were there after all to wave
goodbye to him.

He observes his fellow passengers. None is on his way to
Mutshatsha, he thinks. Right now that is the one thing I know
for sure. With a slight bow Hans Olofson makes the ascent up
into the air. Twenty-seven hours later, precisely according to the
timetable, he lands in Lusaka. Africa receives him with intense
heat. No one is there to meet him.