The Eye Of The Leopard Page 16

  He hates the damned horse dealer who is tormenting this broken-down horse. He realises that Under must have a prospective buyer in the background even for this worn-out animal. With electricity and steel clamps a trace of vitality is infused back into the horse, a strength based only on fear.

  'He'll be practically young again,' says Under, turning up the current a bit.

  The horse foams at the mouth, his eyes are popping out of their sockets. Hans wishes he could put the steel clamps on the horse dealer's nose and then turn up the current until he begged for mercy. But of course he doesn't do that. He does as he's told. Then it's all over. The horse stands facing the wall and the horse dealer regards his work. Then he grabs Hans by the shirt as if he had set his teeth in him.

  'This is just between us,' he says. 'Between you and me and the horse. Get it?'

  From his pocket he draws a crumpled five-krona note and presses it into Hans's hand. Later, as he tears the note to bits outside the church wall he wonders whether the purpose of life will ever be revealed to him. Who needs him – Hans Olofson? And what is he needed for, except to drag a cart or work in a winter stable where helpless horses are tortured?

  I have to get away, he thinks. Away from that damned horse dealer. But what will he do instead? Are there really any answers in life? Who can whisper the password in his ear? He walks home in the winter night in February 1959. For a dizzying second life is a breath in the mouth of eternity. Thinking you can cheat time will just drive you crazy. He stops outside the wooden house. The cold glitters in the snow.

  The plough, the anchor, the moorings. To be myself and no one else, he thinks. But then what? Onward, and just keep going? He goes upstairs in the silent house, unlaces his ski boots. His father is snoring and sighing in his room. Like restless flocks of birds his thoughts gather in his mind after he gets into bed. He tries to catch them, examine them one by one, but all he sees are the terrified eyes of the horse and the horse dealer cackling like an evil troll. Life is a dizzying second, he thinks before he falls asleep.

  In his dream Célestine grows out of her case and surges towards the backdrop of a world he doesn't recognise at all, and finally he chops through her moorings.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Does time have a face?

  How can one tell when it's waving and saying goodbye?

  One day he realises that he has been with Judith Fillington for a year. The rainy season has passed. Again the motionless heat presses down on him and the African earth.

  And the questions he asked himself? They're still there, but one puzzlement has only been exchanged for another. After a year he is no longer surprised that he is where he is, but instead by how the time could have passed so quickly. After her malaria attack Judith had been stricken by a long drawn-out fatigue that lasted half a year. A parasite, identified far too late, bored into her internal organs and made this fatigue even worse. Olofson saw no possibility of leaving. It would have meant abandoning her, the exhausted woman who lay in the bed that was much too large. He considered it mysterious that she dared to turn over the care of the farm, just like that, to his untrained hands.

  One day he discovers that he is waking in the mornings with a quite new and unfamiliar happiness. For the first time in his life he feels he has an objective, even if it's only to see the lorries full of eggs pull away in a cloud of red dust. Maybe there's nothing more important than this, he thinks. To produce food and know that someone is always waiting for it.

  After a year he also has thoughts that seem frivolous to him. I'll stay, he thinks. As long as Judith is powerless, as long as the successor doesn't show up. I'll teach myself something about all this. About the eggs and the constant feed problem. About leading 200 Africans by the hand. Surely something of this will be meaningful even after I go back home.

  After half a year he writes to his father and tells him that he will be staying in Africa for an indefinite period. Of his studies and his ambition to become the defender of mitigating circumstances, he writes only: I'm still young. The letter is an epistle of digression, a personal tall tale, in which he twists and distorts the facts.

  It's a belated thank you, he thinks. A thank you for all the escapades with the sea charts in the house by the river.

  I'm involved in an adventure, he writes. An adventure that grew from the energy source that is possibly the true essence of adventure: coincidences that became intertwined, in which I was permitted to take part.

  As a worthy cargo to lower down into Célestine's hold, he sends a crocodile tooth.

  Here the reptile's teeth protect against danger, he writes. I'm sending you an amulet that can protect you from misplaced blows of your axe or a falling tree you otherwise wouldn't have escaped.

  One night he can't sleep. When he goes to the kitchen to get a drink of water, he hears Judith crying in her locked room. And maybe this is when the first inkling flits past, as he stands in the warm darkness outside her door. The idea that he will stay in Africa. A door that stands ajar in his mind, a glimpse into a future that was never intended.

  A year has passed. The hippo that he never sees sighs down by the river. A shiny cobra coils one morning in the wet grass before his feet. In the night he can see fires burning on the horizon, and the distant sound of drums reaches him like a language that is hard to decipher.

  The elephant grass burns and the animals flee. He imagines that he is watching a distant battlefield, a war that has gone on since the mists of prehistoric time.

  I, he thinks, I, Hans Olofson, am just as afraid of the unknown as I was when I stepped out of the plane into a world made utterly white by the sun. I realise that I'm surrounded by catastrophe, a temporarily postponed end of time, as two epochs collide. I know that I'm white, one of the candles that is seen much too clearly, one of those who must perish on this continent. And yet I stay.

  I've tried to safeguard myself, to remain a nonentity in this test of strength. I stand outside, a temporary visitor, without involvement or guilt. Could it be pointless? The white man's ultimate fancy? Yet I can see quite clearly that my fear is not the same as when I first stood in this white sun.

  I no longer believe that every black is whetting his panga so he can slit my throat while I sleep. Today my fear is directed: against the murderous gangs that ravage this land, against the hit men who might also be hiding on this farm. But I don't justify my lack of understanding by seeing a murderer in every black I meet. The workers on the farm are no longer nameless, threatening faces that all look the same.

  One evening after Judith has begun to get her strength back, Ruth and Werner Masterton come to visit. It's a lengthy dinner, and they sit for a long time behind the locked doors and empty their glasses.

  Olofson gets drunk that evening. He doesn't say much, huddling in a corner, feeling like an outsider again. Late that evening Ruth and Werner decide to spend the night. The attacks on solitary cars have increased again, and at night the white man is a hunted quarry.

  On his way to bed, Hans meets Judith outside her door. He convinces himself that she is standing there waiting for him; she is tipsy too, with wandering eyes that remind him of his father.

  She holds out her hand, grabs him, pulls him into her room, and they perform a love act on the cold stone floor that is equally helpless and violent. As he grasps her skinny body, he thinks of the room upstairs, the dead animals' bone yard.

  Afterwards she pulls away as if he had struck her. Not a single word, he thinks. How can one make love without saying a single word?

  The next day he has a hangover and feels terrible, and he recalls her body as something harsh and repulsive. In the dawn they say goodbye to Ruth and Werner. She avoids his eye, pressing the broad-brimmed hat down on her brow.

  One year has passed.

  The nightly web of sound of the cicadas has become familiar. The smells of charcoal, dried fish, sweat, and stinking rubbish heaps surround him as though they had always been there. But the entirety, the black contin
ent, becomes increasingly elusive the more he thinks he understands. He senses that Africa is not actually a unified entity; at least not something that he, with his ingrained notions, can comprehend and penetrate.

  There are no simple passwords here. Wooden gods and forefathers speak as distinctly here as the living people. European truth loses its validity on the endless savannah.

  He still sees himself as an apprehensive traveller, not as one of those purposeful and well-equipped pathfinders. And yet he is where he is. Beyond the ridges of fir trees, beyond the Finnish forests, on the other side of the river and the bridge.

  One day in October, when he has worked for Judith for a year, she comes walking towards him in the overgrown garden. It's Sunday, and there is only an old man busy watering the garden. Olofson is spending the day trying to fix an attachment to the pump that brings the water from the Kafue to their house.

  Against the light he sees her face and is instantly worried. I don't want to hear what she has to say, he thinks. They sit down in the shade of the big tree, and he can tell that she has prepared this conversation, for Luka shows up with coffee.

  'There is a point of no return,' she says, 'in every person's life. Something one does not want, something one fears but can't avoid. I have come to the realisation that I can't do this any more: not the farm, not Africa, or this life. That's why I'm making you a proposal now. Something you can think about, you don't have to decide right away. I'll give you three months, and what I tell you will require you to make a decision. Soon I will be leaving here. I'm still sick, the fatigue is suffocating me, and I don't think I'll ever regain my strength. I'm going to Europe, maybe to Italy. Beyond that I have no plans. But my offer is that you take over my farm. It makes a profit, there's no mortgage on it, and there are no indications that it will lose its value. Forty per cent of the profits will be mine for as long as I live. That's the price you have to pay me if you take over the farm. If you should sell the farm within ten years, seventy-five per cent of the profits will go to me. After ten years the amount is reduced to fifty per cent, and after twenty years to nothing. It would be easiest for me, of course, to sell the farm immediately. But something is preventing me: a sense of responsibility, I think, to those who work here. Maybe I can't stand the thought of Duncan being forced off the land that will one day be his grave. For a year I've seen you on my farm. I know that you'll be able to take it over ...'

  She falls silent and Olofson feels that he wants to sign a deed of transfer at once. An absolutely unreserved joy fills him. The voice from the brickworks which he carries inside him begins to speak. To be needed, to be somebody ...

  'This is unexpected,' is all he says.

  'I'm afraid of losing the only thing that is irreplaceable,' she says. 'My will to live. The simple power that makes me get out of bed when the sun comes up. Everything else can probably be replaced. But not that.'

  'It's still unexpected,' he says. 'I realise you're tired, I see it every day. But at the same time I can tell that your strength is coming back.'

  'Each day brings nothing but revulsion,' she replies. 'And you can't see that. Only I can feel it. You must understand that I've been preparing for this moment for a long time. For years I've been putting money into banks in London and Rome. My lawyer in Kitwe has been informed. If you say no, I'll sell the farm. There will be no shortage of prospective buyers.'

  'Mr Pihri will miss you,' he says.

  'You can take over Mr Pihri,' she says. 'His eldest son will become a policeman too. You can also take over the young Mr Pihri.'

  'It's a big decision,' he says. 'I really should have gone home long ago.'

  'I haven't seen you leave,' she says. 'I've seen you stay. Your three months begin right now, here in the shadow of this tree.'

  'Then you'll come back?' he asks.

  'To sell or to pack,' she replies. 'Or both.'

  Her preparations have been thorough. Four days after their conversation, Olofson drives her to the airport in Lusaka. He accompanies her to the check-in counter and then stands in the warm night on the roof terrace and watches the big jet plane accelerate with a roar and take off towards the stars.

  Their leave-taking was simple. It should have been me, he thinks. In all fairness it should have been me who finally left this place ... He stays overnight at the hotel he once hid inside. To his surprise he discovers that he has been given the same room, 212. Magic, he thinks. I forget that I'm in Africa.

  A restless anxiety sends him down to the bar, and he looks for the black woman who offered herself to him last time. When he isn't noticed quickly enough, he shouts sharply at one of the waiters who is standing idle by the bar.

  'What have you got today?' he asks.

  'There isn't any whisky,' replies the waiter.

  'So there's gin? But is there any tonic?'

  'We have tonic today.'

  'So you have gin and tonic?'

  'There is gin and tonic today.'

  He gets drunk and renames the property in his mind: Olofson Farm.

  Soon a black woman is standing next to his table. In the dim light he has a hard time making out her face.

  'Yes,' he says. 'I would like company. Room 212. But not now, not yet.'

  He sees her hesitate, wondering if she should wait at his table or not.

  'No,' he says. 'When you see me go up the stairs, wait for another hour. Then come.'

  After he has eaten, he starts up the stairs, but doesn't see her. She sees me though, he thinks.

  When she knocks on the door he discovers that she is very young, hardly more than seventeen. But she is experienced. She walks into the room and demands an immediate agreement.

  'Not the whole night,' he says. 'I want you to go.'

  'A hundred kwacha,' she says. 'Or ten dollars.'

  He nods and asks her name.

  'Whatever name you want,' she says.

  'Maggie,' he suggests.

  'My name is Maggie,' she says. 'Tonight my name is Maggie.'

  He has sex with her, and feels the meaninglessness. Beyond the arousal there is nothing, a room that has been empty for far too long. He breathes in the scents from her body, the cheap soap, the perfume that reminds him of something sour. She smells like an apple, he thinks. Her body is like a musty flat I remember from my childhood.

  It is over quickly; he gives her the money and she gets dressed in the bathroom.

  'I'll be here another time,' she says.

  'I like the name Janine,' he says.

  'Then my name will be Janine,' she replies.

  'No,' he says. 'Never again. Now go.'

  When he goes into the bathroom he discovers she has taken the toilet paper and his soap. They steal, he thinks. They would cut out our hearts if only they could.

  By twilight of the next day he is back on the farm. He eats the dinner Luka has prepared for him. I'm going to run this farm differently, he thinks. Through my example the constant arguments about the necessity of the whites will disappear. The man I appoint to be my overseer must be black. I will build my own school for the workers' children, I won't offer them help only when they're to be buried.

  The truth about this farm today, or Ruth and Werner's farm, is the underpaid labour, the worn-out workers. Judith's money in the European banks is the wages that were never paid.

  I'm going to transform this farm, and I'll dedicate the school I'm going to build to Janine. When I leave the farm it will be in commemoration of the moment when the ideas of the white farmers were finally refuted.

  But he also realises that even as he starts out he is prosperous. The farm represents a fortune. Even if he doubles the workers' wages the hens will keep laying directly into his own pockets.