The Eye Of The Leopard Page 15

  Mr Pihri looks sad once again.

  'The prisons in this country unfortunately suffer from neglect. Especially for Europeans who are used to quite different conditions.'

  What the hell does he want? Olofson wonders.

  'I am naturally very grateful,' he says. 'I would like to express my appreciation on behalf of Madame Fillington.'

  Again Mr Pihri smiles.

  'The boot of my car is not very big. But 500 eggs could be fitted into it with no problem.'

  'Load 500 eggs into Mr Pihri's car,' Olofson tells one of the crouching office workers.

  Mr Pihri hands him the stamped documents.

  'I regret that from time to time these stamps must be renewed. It is always good to avoid problems. This is why Madame Fillington and I meet regularly. In this way one can avoid much unpleasantness.'

  Olofson escorts Mr Pihri to his car, where the egg cartons are stacked in the boot.

  'My car is getting old,' says Mr Pihri in a worried voice. 'Perhaps it will simply stop running one day. Then it would be quite troublesome for me to visit Madame Fillington.'

  'I'll tell her that your car has begun to run poorly,' replies Olofson.

  'I would be grateful. Tell her also that just now there is an excellent used Peugeot for sale by one of my friends in Kitwe.'

  'I'll mention it to her.'

  They repeat the complicated greeting procedure.

  'It was very nice we could meet,' says Mr Pihri.

  'Naturally we are very grateful,' replies Olofson.

  'Trouble should be avoided,' says Mr Pihri as he gets behind the wheel and drives off.

  Corruption's Song of Songs, thinks Olofson as he walks back to the dark hut. Like a well-groomed beard. A polite, quiet talk ...

  When he studies the documents that Mr Pihri left, he finds to his astonishment that Judith has applied for and been granted a visa for him as a 'resident' for a period of two years.

  He is instantly agitated. I'm not going to stay here, he thinks. I have no intention of letting myself be entrapped by her plans for her own future ...

  When he returns to the house to eat lunch, Judith is awake. She is still lying in his bed. She is pale and tired, and it's a big effort for her to smile. When he starts to speak she shakes her head.

  'Later,' she says. 'Not now. I'm too tired. Luka will give me what I need.'

  When Olofson returns in the evening she has moved back to her own room. He observes how forlorn she looks in the wide double bed. The illness has diminished her, he thinks. Her skin has shrunk. Only her eyes are unchanged, just as big and restless as ever.

  'I'm feeling better,' she says. 'But I'm very tired. Every time I get malaria my powerlessness gets worse. I despise weakness, not being able to do anything.'

  'Mr Pihri came to visit,' he tells her. 'He left me some papers with a lot of stamps on them and I gave him what he wanted, 500 eggs.'

  'Smiling the whole time,' says Judith. 'He's such a crook, one of the worst. Although he is reliable; playing the corruption game with him always gives results.'

  'He wants a new car. He has picked out a used Peugeot.'

  'He'll get it when I have a sufficiently difficult matter for him to solve.'

  'Why did you apply for a two-year residence visa for me?'

  'I don't think they come any shorter than that.'

  As sick as she is, she can still lie, he thinks. When she gets well I'll have to ask her why. He listens outside her door and hears her soft snoring.

  Then he makes a pilgrimage through the house, counts the number of rooms, finds his way through deserted guest rooms, and stops outside a door he hadn't noticed before. He's at the end of a winding corridor, and the door is scarcely visible, set into the brown panelling.

  The door opens when he touches the handle, and a musty smell of camphor wafts towards him. He slides one hand over the wall to find a light switch. A bare lightbulb in the ceiling comes on. He sees a thigh bone that he surmises is from an elephant or a cape buffalo. A crocodile with the extended ribs of a reptile. Various skulls and horns, some of them broken, lie jumbled together. He imagines that the animals were once locked alive in this room and slowly rotted away, until all that remained were bones and skulls.

  Her husband's room, he thinks. A little boy's dream of what a grown man's room would be. In a dusty window niche lies a notebook. He can make out the pencil handwriting passably well and realises he is looking at poems. Quivering poetic fragments, written with a pencil that is so faint it could never have been intended that the text survive ...

  A rucksack full of ants was all that remained, he thinks. That is poetry too, the epitaph of a man who disappeared. Depressed, he leaves the room.

  Once again he listens outside Judith's door and then goes into his own room. A faint odour from her body is still between the sheets. The imprint of fever. He places her shotgun next to the bed. I don't want to take over from her, he thinks. Yet one of her weapons stands by my bed.

  All at once he is homesick, childishly so; he feels abandoned. Now I have seen Africa, he thinks. What I've seen I haven't understood, but I've still seen it. I'm no explorer; expeditions into the unknown tempt me only in my imagination.

  Once I climbed over a bridge span, as if I were riding on the axis of the earth itself. I left something behind up there on that cold iron span. It was the longest journey I ever took in my life ... It's possible that I'm still up there, with my fingers gripping the cold iron. Maybe I never really came down. I'm still up there, wrapped in my terror.

  He gets into bed and turns off the light. The sounds stream forth from the darkness, the padding dogs, the hippo sighing from the river.

  Just before he falls asleep he is wide awake for a moment. Someone is laughing out in the dark. One of the dogs barks and then all is quiet again.

  In the silence he remembers the brickworks. The ruin where he became aware of his consciousness for the first time. In the laughter that reaches him from the night he thinks he senses a continuation of that moment. The ruin of the brickworks clarified his existence. The fortified bedroom in the house by the Kafue River, surrounded by large dogs, reveals certain conditions. The laughter that penetrates the night describes the world he temporarily happens to inhabit.

  This is how it looks, he thinks. Earlier I knew without knowing. Now I see how the world has capsized, I see the poverty and misery that are the real truth. Perched high on the river bridge there were only the stars and the expansive horizon of fir trees. I wanted to get away from there and now I have done so. Being here must mean that I'm in the centre of a time that belongs to me. I have no idea who was laughing. Nor can I determine whether the laugh is a threat or a promise. And yet I know.

  Soon he must leave this place. His return ticket is his main insurance. In a place where the world is divided, where the world is fixed, he doesn't have to be involved. He stretches out his hand in the dark and runs his fingers along the cold barrel of the shotgun. The hippo sighs down by the river.

  All of a sudden he's in a hurry to get home. Judith will have to look for Duncan Jones's successor without his help. The visa that Mr Pihri extracted from his friends and was paid for with 500 eggs will never be used ...

  But he is wrong; Hans Olofson is wrong. Like so many times before, his assessments turn on their own axis and come back to the starting point as their opposites. The return ticket has already begun to decompose.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hans Olofson's dreams are almost always reminders.

  Through his dreams, his subconscious self ensures that he forgets nothing. Often there is a recurrent prelude, as if his dreams were drawing aside the old worn curtain for the very same music. The music is the winter night, the clear, starry midwinter cold.

  He is out there, Hans Olofson, still barely grown. He is standing somewhere by the church wall beneath a street lamp. He is a lonely, sad shadow against all the white of that stern winter night ...

  How could he have known? He co
uldn't peek into the veiled world of the future when he finally finished his last day of school, flung his school books under the bed and marched away to his first full-time job as the youngest man in the warehouse of the Trade Association. Back then the world was exceedingly knowable and whole. Now he was going to earn his own money, pull his own weight, learn to be a grown-up.

  What he would later recall about his time at the Trade Association was the constant hauling of goods up the hill to the train station. The cart he was given was neglected and worn-out, and with a continuous curse inside him he would drag and pull it in a perpetual circuit between the freight office and the warehouse. He quickly learned that swearing didn't make the hill any easier to overcome. Swearing was revenge and helpless rage, and as such possibly a source of strength, but it didn't flatten out the hill.

  He decides that the hellhole that is the Trade Association's warehouse can't represent the truth. The Honour of Work and the Community of Work must look different.

  And there is a difference in going to work for Under, the horse dealer who needs a helper because one of his stable boys has been badly bitten on the arm by an angry stallion.

  Hans Olofson makes his entrance into the strange world of the horse dealer one day in late September, when there is already snow in the air. Winter preparations are in full swing; stalls have to be rebuilt and expanded, the leaky roof has to be fixed, the harnesses checked, the supply of horseshoes and nails inventoried. Late autumn is the time to prepare for hibernation; horses as well as people have to sleep, and Hans stands with a sledgehammer in his hand and knocks out one of the cross-walls in the stable. Under wanders around in his galoshes in the cement dust and dispenses advice. Visselgren, a short man from the south of Sweden, who Under discovered at the Skänninge marketplace, sits in one corner mending a pile of harnesses, and winks at Hans. The immensely strong Holmström twins pull down one of the cross-walls by themselves. Horses couldn't have done it any better. Under saunters contentedly back and forth.

  In the world of Under there is a continual switching between absentminded indifference and sound opinions which he passionately defends. The very foundation of his world view is that nothing is initially a given, other than when it comes to horses. Casting modesty aside, he views himself as a member of the elite who carry the world on their shoulders. Without horse dealing, chaos would rule, and wild horses would take over the world as the new barbaric rulers. Hans swings his heavy sledgehammer and is happy to have escaped the worn-out cart. Now this is living!

  For one year he is part of this strange community. His assignments are always changing; the days differ sharply but enticingly.

  One evening he runs across the river bridge to Janine's house. On this very evening she has adorned herself with the red nose, and she is sitting at the kitchen table polishing her trombone when he stamps the snow off his feet on the steps.

  He stopped knocking long ago. Janine's house is a home, a different home from the wooden house by the river, but still his home. A little leather bag hanging above the kitchen table spreads the fragrance of cumin. Janine, who no longer has a sense of smell, still remembers cumin from the time before the botched operation.

  He confides almost everything to Janine. Not everything, that would be impossible. Thoughts and feelings that he can scarcely acknowledge to himself, those remain secret. This applies especially to Hans's increasingly agitated and vulnerable discovery of the strange desires that are boiling inside him.

  Today she has her red nose on. Usually the hole underneath her eyes is covered by a white handkerchief, stuffed into the hole so that he can see the red scars left by the scalpel, and the sight of naked flesh under her eyes becomes something forbidden, hinting at something quite different.

  He imagines her naked, with the trombone at her lips, and then he blushes with excitement. He has no idea whether she senses what he's thinking. He wishes that she would, as often as he wishes the opposite.

  She plays a new tune she has learned, 'Wolverine Blues', which she has put on her gramophone. Hans keeps the beat with a darning egg, yawns and only half listens.

  When she finishes he can't stay any longer. Nothing is calling him but he's still in a hurry. Ever since he finished school he has been running. Something is urging him on, exciting and enticing him.

  The house stands where it always has stood. Light snow covers the potato patch that nobody ever digs in. In one of the lighted windows he sees his father's shadow. Hans suddenly feels sorry for him. He tries to imagine the way his father must have stood on the afterdeck of a ship heading into a warm trade wind. Far off, against the last ribbons of the sunset, glow the faint lights from the next port of call.

  But when he walks into the kitchen there's a knot in his stomach, because his father is sitting at the table with glazed eyes and before him stands a half-empty bottle. Hans knows that his father has begun to drink himself into a stupor again.

  Why is life so damned hard? he thinks. Bare ice to slip on wherever you turn ...

  This winter even Under finally reveals himself as something other than a well-meaning horse dealer in galoshes. There is malice behind the friendly mask.

  Hans learns that the friendliness has a price. Beneath the voluminous overcoat lurks a reptile. Gradually he begins to understand that in the horse dealer's world he is nothing more than a strong pair of arms and obedient legs. When Visselgren is struck by arthritis in the middle of February, the good times are over for him. The horse dealer buys him a one-way ticket back to Skänninge and drives him to the station. Under doesn't even bother to get out of the car and thank him for all his hard work. Back at the stable he rants for a long time about Visselgren's duplicity, as if his shortness should be regarded as a character defect.

  New employees come and go, and eventually it's only the Holmström twins and Hans who remain of the old crew. Hans is starting to think the same thoughts as he had as he was pulling the cart between the warehouse and the freight office.

  Has he ended up back there again? If so, where is the Honour and Community of Work in the daily drudgery that he thought was the great Goal of life?

  A few weeks after Visselgren's departure, the horse dealer comes into the stable late one afternoon with a black box under his arm. The Holmström brothers have already left in their decrepit Saab, and Hans is alone getting the stable ready for the night.

  The horse dealer heads towards a seldom used stall where a worn-out Northern Swedish horse is crouched in a corner. He had only just purchased him for a few symbolic notes, and Hans was wondering why the horse hadn't already been sent to the slaughterhouse.

  From the black box the horse dealer takes out something that most resembles the transformer for an electric train. Then he calls Hans over and tells him to bring him an extension cord. The horse dealer is humming, pulling off his big coat, and Hans does as he is told.

  And what is he told to do?

  The old horse has to be tied with chains while steel clamps are fastened to his ears. Then the electricity passes through the cables, and the animal convulses under the shocks of the current. Under contentedly turns the little knob on the metre, as if he were directing a toy train, and Hans helplessly promises himself never to forget the horse's tormented eyes. For almost an hour the torture continues, while Under orders Hans to check that the chains are tight so the horse won't get loose.