The Eye Of The Leopard (7 page)

In Kitwe a laughing African comes running to meet them.

Hans Olofson sees that he has trainers on his feet, with
no holes, and the heels have not been cut off.

'This is Robert,' says Ruth. 'Our chauffeur. The only one on
the farm we can count on.'

'How many employees do you have?' asks Olofson.

'Two hundred and eighty,' replies Ruth.

Olofson crawls into the back seat of a Jeep that seems much
the worse for wear.

'You have your passport, don't you?' asks Werner. 'We'll be
going through several checkpoints.'

'What are they looking for?' Olofson asks.

'Smuggled goods headed for Zaire,' says Ruth,'or South African
spies. Weapons. But actually they just want to beg for food and
cigarettes.'

They reach the first roadblock just north of Kitwe. Crossed
logs, covered with barbed wire, cut off the lanes of the road. A
dilapidated bus stops just before they arrive, and Olofson sees a
young soldier with an automatic rifle chase the passengers out
of it. There seems to be no end to the Africans who come pouring
out, and he wonders how many can actually fit inside. While the
passengers are forced to line up, a soldier climbs up on the roof
of the bus and starts tearing apart the shapeless pile of bundles
and mattresses. A goat that was tied up suddenly kicks its way
loose, jumps down from the roof of the bus, and disappears
bleating into the bush by the side of the road. An old woman
begins to shriek and wail and a tremendous commotion breaks
out. The soldier on the roof yells and raises his rifle. The old
woman wants to chase her goat but is restrained by other soldiers
who suddenly appear from a grass hut beside the road.

'Coming right after a bus is a nightmare,' says Ruth. 'Why
didn't you overtake it?'

'I didn't see it, madame,' replies Robert.

'The next time you'll see the bus,' says Ruth, annoyed. 'Or you
can look for a new job.'

'Yes, madame,' Robert answers.

The soldiers seem tired after searching the bus and wave the
Jeep through without inspecting it. Olofson sees a moonscape
spreading before them, high hills of slag alternating with deep
mine pits and blasted crevices. He realises that now he is in the
midst of the huge copper belt that stretches like a wedge into
Katanga province in Zaire. At the same time he wonders what
he would have done if he hadn't met the Mastertons. Would he
have got off the train in Kitwe? Or would he have stayed in the
compartment and returned with the train to Lusaka?

They pass through more roadblocks. Police and drunken
soldiers compare his face to his passport photo, and he can feel
terror rising inside him.

They hate the whites, he thinks. Just as much as the whites
obviously hate the blacks ...

They turn off the main road and suddenly the earth is quite
red. A vast, undulating fenced landscape opens before the Jeep.

Two Africans open a wooden gate and offer hesitant salutes.
The Jeep pulls up to a white two-storey villa with colonnades
and flowering bougainvillea. Olofson climbs out, thinking that
the white palace reminds him of the courthouse in his distant
home town.

'Tonight you'll be our guest,' says Werner. 'In the morning I'll
drive you to Kalulushi.'

Ruth shows him to his room. They walk down cool corridors;
tiled floors with deep rugs. An elderly man appears before them.
Olofson sees that he is barefoot.

'Louis will take care of you while you're here,' says Ruth. 'When
you leave you can give him a coin. But not too much. Don't upset
him.'

Olofson is troubled by the man's ragged clothes. His trousers
have two gaping holes in the knees, as if he has spent his life
crawling on them. His faded shirt is frayed and patched.

Olofson looks out a window at a large park extending into the
distance. White wicker chairs, a hammock in a giant tree.
Somewhere outside he hears Ruth's excited voice, a door slamming.
From the bathroom he hears water running.

'Your bath is ready,
Bwana
,' says Louis behind him. 'The towels
are on the bed.'

Olofson is suddenly agitated. I have to say something, he thinks.
So he understands that I'm not one of them, merely a temporary
visitor, who is not used to being assigned a personal servant.

'Have you been here long?' he asks.

'Since I was born,
Bwana
,' Louis replies.

Then he vanishes from the room, and Olofson regrets his
question. A master's question to a servant, he thinks. Even though
I mean well I make myself look insincere and common.

He sinks down in the bathtub and asks himself what escape
routes are still left to him. He feels like a conman who has grown
tired of not being unmasked.

They're helping me carry out a meaningless assignment, he
thinks. They're ready to drive me to Kalulushi and then help me
find the last transport out to the mission station in the bush.
They're going to a lot of trouble for something that's just an egocentric
impulse, a tourist trip with an artificial dream as its motive.

The dream of Mutshatsha died with Janine. I'm plundering
her corpse with this excursion to a world where I don't belong at
all. How can I be jealous of a dead person? Of her will, of her
stubborn dream, which she clung to despite the fact that she could
never realise it? How can an atheistic, unbelieving person take over
the dream of being a missionary, helping downtrodden and poverty-stricken
people with a religious motive as the foremost incentive?

In the bathtub he decides to return, ask to be driven back to
Kitwe. Come up with a credible explanation for why he has to
change his plans.

He dresses and goes out into the large park. Under a tall tree
that spreads a mighty shadow there is a bench that is carved out
of a single block of stone. He scarcely manages to sit down before
a servant brings him a cup of tea. All at once Werner Masterton
stands before him, dressed in worn overalls.

'Would you like to see our farm?' he asks.

They climb into the Jeep, which has been newly washed.
Werner puts his big hands on the wheel after pulling a worn
sunhat down over his eyes. They drive past long rows of hen
houses and fields. Now and then he brakes to a stop and black
workers instantly come running. He barks out orders in a mixture
of English and a language that is unknown to Olofson.

The whole time Olofson has a feeling that Werner is balancing
on an ice floe beneath which an outbreak of rage might erupt at
any moment.

'It's a big farm,' he says as they drive on.

'Not that big,' says Werner. 'If it were a different time I would
probably have expanded the acreage. Nowadays you never know
what's going to happen next. Maybe they'll confiscate all the farms
from the whites. Out of jealousy, or displeasure at the fact that
we're so infinitely more skilled than the black farmers who started
after independence. They hate us for our skill, our ability to
organise, our ability to make things work. They hate us because
we make money, because our health is better and we live longer.
Envy is an African inheritance. But the reason they hate us most
is that magic doesn't work on us.'

They drive by a peacock ruffling its gaudy feathers.

'Magic?' Olofson asks.

'An African who is successful always risks being the target of
magic,' says Werner. 'The witchcraft that is practised here can be
extremely effective. If there's one thing that the Africans can do,
it's mixing up deadly poisons. Salves that are spread on a body,
herbs that are camouflaged as common vegetables. An African
spends more time cultivating his envy than cultivating his fields.'

'There's a lot I don't know,' says Olofson.

'In Africa knowledge does not increase,' says Werner. 'It
decreases, the more you think you understand.'

Werner breaks off and furiously slams on the brakes.

A piece of fence has broken off, and when an African comes
running, Olofson sees to his astonishment that Werner grabs
him by the ear. This is a grown man, maybe fifty years old, but
his ear is caught in Werner's rough hand.

'Why isn't this fixed?' he yells. 'How long has it been broken?
Who broke it? Was it Nkuba? Is he drunk again? Who's responsible
for this? It has to be fixed within the hour. And Nkuba
must be here in an hour.'

Werner shoves the man aside and returns to the Jeep.

'I can be away for two weeks,' he says. 'More than two weeks,
and the whole farm would fall apart, not just a bit of fence.'

They stop by a small rise in the midst of a vast grazing pasture,
where Brahma cattle move in slow herds. On top of the small
hill is a grave.

JOHN MCGREGOR, KILLED BY BANDITS 1967, Olofson reads on
a flat gravestone.

Werner squats down and lights his pipe. 'The first thing a man
thinks about when settling on a farm is to choose his gravesite,'
he says. 'If I'm not chased out of the country I'll lie here one day
too, along with Ruth. John McGregor was a young Irishman who
worked for me. He was twenty-four years old. Outside Kitwe they
had set up a fake roadblock. When he realised he had been stopped
by bandits and not police, he tried to drive off. They shot him
down with a submachine gun. If he had stopped they would only
have taken the car and his clothes. He must have forgotten he
was in Africa; you don't defend your car here.'

'Bandits?' Olofson asks.

Werner shrugs. 'The police came and said they had shot some
suspects during an escape attempt. Who knows if they were the
same people? The important thing for the police was that they
could record somebody as the guilty party.'

A lizard stands motionless on the gravestone. From a distance
Olofson sees a black woman moving with infinite slowness along
a gravel road. She seems to be on her way directly into the sun.

'In Africa death is always close by,' says Werner. 'I don't know
why that is. The heat, everything rotting, the African with his
rage just beneath the skin. It doesn't take much to stir up a crowd
of people. Then they'll kill anyone with a club or a stone.'

'And yet you live here,' says Olofson.

'Perhaps we'll move to Southern Rhodesia,' Werner replies.
'But I'm sixty-four years old. I'm tired, I have difficulty pissing
and sleeping, but maybe we'll move on.'

'Who will buy the farm?'

'Maybe I'll burn it down.'

They return to the white house and out of nowhere a parrot
flies and perches on Olofson's shoulder. Instead of announcing
that his journey to Mutshatsha is no longer necessary, he looks
at the parrot nipping at his shirt. Sometimes timidity is my main
psychological asset, he thinks in resignation. I don't even dare
speak the truth to people who don't know me.

The tropical night falls like a black cloth. Twilight is an
ephemeral, hastily passing shadow. With the darkness he feels as
though he is also taken back in time.

On the big terrace that stretches along the front of the house,
he drinks whisky with Ruth and Werner. They have just sat down
with their glasses when headlights begin to play over the grazing
meadows, and he hears Ruth and Werner exchange guesses about
who it might be.

A car comes to a stop before the terrace and a man of indeterminate
age steps out. In the light from shaded kerosene
lamps hanging from the ceiling, Olofson sees that the man has
red burn marks on his face. His head is completely bald and he
is dressed in a baggy suit. He introduces himself as Elvin
Richardson, a farmer like the Mastertons.

Who am I? Olofson thinks. An accidental travelling companion
on the night train from Lusaka?

'Cattle rustlers,' says Richardson, sitting down heavily with a
glass in his hand.

Olofson listens as if he were a child engrossed in a story.

'Last night they cut the fence down near Ndongo,' says
Richardson. 'They stole three calves from Ruben White. The
animals were clubbed and slaughtered on the spot. The night
watchmen didn't hear a thing, of course. If this goes on, we'll
have to organise patrols. Shoot a couple of them so they know
we mean business.'

Black servants appear in the shadows on the terrace. What are
the blacks talking about? Olofson wonders. How does Louis
describe me when he sits by the fire with his friends? Does he
see my uncertainty? Is he whetting a knife intended expressly for
me? There doesn't seem to be any dialogue between the blacks
and the whites in this country. The world is split in two, with
no mutual trust. Orders are shouted across the chasm, that's all.

He listens to the conversation, observing that Ruth is more
aggressive than Werner. While Werner thinks that maybe they
should wait and see, Ruth says they should take up arms at once.

He gives a start when one of the black servants bends over him
and fills his glass. All at once he realises that he is afraid. The
terrace, the rapidly falling darkness, the restless conversation; all of
it fills him with insecurity, that same helplessness he felt as a child
when the beams of the house by the river creaked in the cold.

There are preparations for war going on here, he thinks. What
scares me is that Ruth and Werner and the stranger don't seem
to notice it ...

At the dinner table the conversation suddenly shifts character,
and Olofson feels more at ease sitting in a room where lamps
ward off the shadows, creating a light in which the black servants
cannot hide. The conversation at the dinner table turns to the
old days, to people who are no longer here.

'We are who we are,' says Richardson. 'Those of us who choose
to stay on our farms are surely insane. After us comes nothing.
We are the last.'

'No,' says Ruth. 'You're wrong. One day the blacks will be
begging at our doors and asking us to stay. The new generation
can see where everything is headed. Independence was a gaudy
rag that was hung on a pole, a solemn proclamation of empty
promises. Now the young people see that the only things that
work in this country are still in our hands.'