The Eye Of The Leopard (4 page)

As usual, I'm ill-equipped, he thinks. My preparation was
cursory, just throwing a few things into a suitcase. Only when
it's too late do I try to make a plan.

I wanted to see the mission station that Janine didn't have a
chance to visit before she died. I took over her dream instead of
creating my own ...

Hans Olofson falls asleep, sleeps restlessly, and rises at dawn.
Out of the hotel window he sees the sun rise like a huge ball of
fire over the horizon. Black shadows appear on the street below
him. The fragrance of the jacaranda trees blends with the stifling
smoke of the charcoal fires. Women with bulging bundles on
their heads and children tied on to their backs walk towards goals
he cannot fathom.

Without consciously making a decision, he vows to continue,
towards Mutshatsha, towards the goal that Janine never
reached ...

When Hans Olofson awakes in the cold winter
morning, and his father lies collapsed over the
kitchen table, asleep after a long night's struggle with
his invisible demons, he knows that he is not completely alone
in the world. He has a confidant, a warrior with whose help he
torments the life out of the Noseless One who lives in Ulvkälla,
a cluster of shacks on the south bank of the river. The two of
them go searching for the adventure that must exist even in this
frozen community.

The wooden house where Hans's accomplice lives has a mighty
fir tree. Fenced in by stone posts and well-polished steel wire
stands the district court and courthouse, a white building with
a columned portico and wide double doors. The ground floor is
the courtroom, and the judge lives upstairs. For over a year the
building stood empty, after old Judge Turesson died. Then one
day a fully packed Chevrolet drove into the courtyard of the
courthouse, and the town peeked expectantly through its curtains.
From the gleaming car poured the family of the new district
judge. One of the children running around in the yard was named
Sture. He became Hans Olofson's friend.

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.

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.