The Eye Of The Leopard Page 21

  He walks over to the hill where Duncan Jones has already rested for many years, and he lets his gaze wander. It's late afternoon and the sun is coloured red by the invisible soil that whirls over the African continent. He sees his long white hen houses against the light, workers on their way home from the day's work. It's October, just before the long rain begins to fall. The ground is scorched and dry, only scattered cactuses glow like green patches in the desiccated landscape. The Kafue is almost empty of water. The riverbed is laid dry, except for a narrow trickle in the middle of its furrow. The hippopotamuses have sought out distant water holes, and the crocodiles will not come back until the rain has returned.

  He clears the weeds from Duncan Jones's grave and squints towards the sun, seeking his own future gravesite. But he won't make a decision; that would be tempting Death to come to him too soon. But what is the past? Who can make sense of his allotted time?

  No one remains unaffected for almost twenty years, surrounded by African superstition, he thinks. An African would never search for his gravesite, not to mention select it. That would be like sending a resounding summons to Death.

  I'm really standing on this hill because the view from here is beautiful. Here is the treeless landscape, the endless horizons that my father always looked for. Maybe I think it's so beautiful because I know that it's mine.

  Here is the beginning and perhaps the end too, a chance journey and even more chance meetings led me here. He decides to pay another visit to Mutshatsha.

  In all haste he sets out. It's the middle of the rainy season and the roads are like liquid mud. Yet he drives fast, as if he were fighting to escape from something. A despair breaks through the barriers. Janine's trombone echoes in his mind.

  He never makes it to Mutshatsha. All at once the road is gone. With his front wheels balanced over a precipice, he looks straight down into a ravine that has opened up. The road has collapsed, and there is no longer a road to Mutshatsha. When he tries to turn the car around, it gets stuck in the mud. He breaks branches from bushes and lays them under the wheels, but the tyres can't get a firm purchase. In the brief twilight the rain arrives with a roar, and he sits in his car and waits. Maybe no one will come by, he thinks. While I sleep the car might be invaded by wandering ants and when the rainy season is over only my skeleton, picked clean, will be left, polished like a piece of ivory.

  In the morning the rain stops and he gets help with the car from some people in a nearby village. Late in the afternoon he arrives back at the farm.

  The arc of time expands but suddenly begins to bend towards the earth again.

  In the shadows people are grouping around him, and he doesn't notice what's happening. It is January 1987. He has now been in Africa for eighteen years.

  The rainy season this year is intense and drawn out. The Kafue floods over its banks, the torrential rains threaten to drown his hen houses. Transport lorries get stuck in the mud; power poles topple and cause long power cuts. This is a rainy season like none he has ever experienced before.

  At the same time there is more unrest in the country. Throngs of people are on the move; hunger riots strike the cities in the copper belt and Lusaka. One of his egg vans is stopped on its way to Mufulira by an excited mob who empties its cargo. Shots are fired in the night and the farmers refrain from leaving their homes.

  Early one morning when Olofson goes to his little office, he finds that someone has flung a large rock through a window of the mud hut. He questions the night watchmen but no one has heard or seen anything.

  One older worker stands at a distance and watches as Olofson carries out the questioning. Something in the old African's face makes him break off abruptly and send the night watchmen home without any sort of punishment. He senses something menacing but can't say what it is. The work is being done, but a heavy mood rests over the farm.

  One morning Luka is gone. When Olofson opens the door to the kitchen at dawn as usual, Luka isn't there. This has never happened before. Mists roll over the farm after the night's rain. He calls for Luka but no one comes. He asks questions, but nobody knows, nobody has seen Luka. When he drives to his house, he finds it open with the door flapping in the wind.

  In the evening he cleans the firearms he once took over from Judith Fillington, and the revolver he bought ten years earlier from Werner Masterton, the revolver he always keeps under his pillow. During the night he sleeps restlessly, the dreams are hounding him, and suddenly he wakes up with a start. He thinks he hears footsteps in the house, footsteps upstairs, above his head. In the dark he grabs the revolver and listens. But it's only the wind slithering through the house.

  He lies awake, the revolver resting on his chest. In the dark, just before dawn, he hears a car drive up in front of the house and then loud pounding on the front door. With the revolver in his hand he calls through the door and recognises the voice of Robert, Ruth and Werner Masterton's foreman. He opens the door and realises once again that even a black man can look pale.

  'Something has happened, Bwana,' says Robert, and Olofson sees that he is terrified.

  'What happened?' he asks.

  'I don't know, Bwana,' replies Robert. 'Something. I think it would be good if Bwana could come.'

  He has lived in Africa long enough to be able to distinguish gravity in an African's enigmatic way of expressing himself.

  He dresses quickly, stuffs his revolver in his pocket, and grabs his shotgun. He locks the house carefully, wonders again where Luka is, and then gets into his car and follows Robert. Black rain clouds are scudding across the sky when the two cars turn up towards the Mastertons' house.

  I came here once, he thinks, in another time, as a different person. He recognises Louis among the Africans standing outside the house.

  'Why are they standing here?' he asks.

  'That's just it, Bwana,' says Robert. 'The doors are locked. They were locked yesterday too.'

  'Maybe they went on a trip,' says Olofson. 'Where's their car?'

  'It's gone, Bwana,' Robert replies. 'But we don't think that they left.'

  He looks at the house, its immovable façade. He walks around the house, calls out to their bedroom. The Africans follow him at a distance, expectantly. All at once he is afraid without knowing why. Something has happened.

  He feels a vague fear of what he is about to see, but he asks Robert to fetch a crowbar from the car. When he breaks open the front door the alarm sirens don't go off. As the front door yields he discovers that the telephone line to the house has been cut next to the outer wall.

  'I'm going in alone,' he says, taking the safety off his gun and pushing the door aside.

  What he finds is worse than he could have imagined. As if in a macabre film, he steps into a slaughterhouse, where human bodies lie hacked up all over the floor.

  He never will understand why he didn't pass out at the sight of what he saw.

  Chapter Nineteen

  And afterwards?

  What is left?

  The last year before Hans Olofson leaves the heavy fir ridges behind, leaves his father Erik Olofson behind in his mute dream of a distant sea that calls inside him. The last year that Janine is alive.

  On an early Saturday morning in March 1962, she takes up position on the corner between the hardware shop and the People's Hall. It's the very heart of town, the one corner that no one can avoid. In the early morning she raises a placard above her head. On it is a text in black letters that she wrote the night before.

  Something unheard of is about to happen. A rumour is growing and threatening to boil over. There are a few people who dare acknowledge that Janine and her lonely placard express a sensible opinion that has been lacking for too long. But their voices disappear in the icy March wind.

  The right-thinking ones mobilise. A person who doesn't even have a nose? Everyone has assumed that she was resting securely in the embrace of Hurrapelle. But now here she stands, the woman who ought to be living unnoticed and hiding her ugly face. Janine kn
ows what thoughts are spreading like wildfire.

  And she has also learned something from Hurrapelle's monotonous exhortations. She knows how to resist when the wind changes and entrenched beliefs fumble for a foothold. She is driving a stake into the slumbering anthill on this early morning. People hurry along the streets, coats flapping, and they read what she has written. Then they hurry on to grab their neighbour by the collar and ask what that crazy woman can possibly mean. Is a noseless shrew going to tell us what to think? Who asked her to raise this unseemly barricade?

  The old men come staggering out from the beer tavern to witness the spectacle with their own eyes. They don't care about the fate of the world, but nevertheless they become her mute supporters. Their need for revenge is boundless. Whoever drives a stake into the heart of the anthill deserves all the support imaginable. Blinking at the light they stumble out of the pilsner's dark room. With glee they note that nothing looks the same this morning. They understand at once that Janine needs all the support she can get, and one daring fellow staggers across the street and offers her a beer, which she amiably declines.

  At that moment Hurrapelle comes skidding to a stop in his new car, alerted by an agitated member of the congregation who woke him with the shrill ring of his telephone. And he does what he can to stop her. He entreats her, entreats as much as he can. But she only shakes her head; she's going to stay there. When he realises that her decision is unshakeable, he goes to his church to take counsel with his God about this difficult matter.

  At the police station they are consulting the legal texts. Somewhere there must be a paragraph that permits an intervention. But it can hardly be called 'reckless endangerment', can it? It's not 'incitement to riot' or 'assault with a deadly weapon' either. The policemen sigh over the gaps in the law books, leafing feverishly through the thick text, while Janine stands at her post on the corner.

  Suddenly something reminds them of Rudin, who several years before had set fire to himself. That's where the solution lies! Taking into custody a person who is incapable of taking care of herself. Sweaty fingers leaf further, and finally they are ready to intervene.

  But when the police officers come marching and the crowd eagerly waits to see what's going to happen, Janine calmly takes down her placard and walks away. The police gape, disconcerted, the crowd of people grumbles, and the old men from the tavern applaud with satisfaction.

  When calm has been restored it is possible to argue about what she had written on her shameless placard: 'No to the atom bomb. Only one Earth.' But who wants a bomb on their head? And what did she mean by 'Only one Earth.'? Are there supposed to be more? If the truth is to be preached, people refuse to have it served up by just anyone who claims to have been warned, and least of all by some woman with no nose.

  Janine walks with her head held high even though she usually looks down at the ground. She is thinking of standing on her corner again next Saturday, and no one will be able to stop her. Far from the arenas where the world plays out in earnest, she will make her small contribution in accordance with her abilities. She walks across the river bridge, tosses her hair, and hums 'A Night in Tunisia'. Under her feet dance the first ice floes of the spring thaw. She has proven herself in her own eyes and she has dared to act. She has someone who desires her. If everything is transitory after all, at least she has experienced this outpouring of life, when the pain was completely suppressed.

  There is a movement in their life, this last year that Hans Olofson lives in the house by the river. Like a slow displacement of the Earth's axis, a movement so slight that it's not noticeable at first. But even to this isolated town in the sticks, a swell comes rolling in to tell them about a world outside which will no longer tolerate being relegated to endless darkness. The perspective has begun to shift, the quaking from distant wars of liberation and uprisings penetrates through the walls of the fir ridges.

  Together they sit in Janine's kitchen and learn the names of the new nations. And they notice the movement, the vibration from distant continents where people are rising up. With amazement, and a certain amount of alarm, they see how the world is changing. An old world in dissolution, where rotten floors are collapsing to reveal indescribable misery, injustice, atrocity. Hans begins to understand that the world he soon intends to enter will be a different one to his father's. Everything will have to be discovered anew, the sea charts revised, the changed names replacing the old ones.

  He tries to talk with his father about what he's witnessing. Tries to encourage him to whack his axe into a stump and go back to sea. Usually the conversation ends before it has really begun. Erik Olofson is defensive and doesn't want to be reminded. But then something unexpected happens.

  'I'm going to Stockholm,' Erik Olofson says as they're eating dinner.

  'Why?' Hans asks.

  'I have a matter to take care of in the capital.'

  'You don't know anybody in Stockholm, do you?'

  'I got an answer to my letter.'

  'What letter?'

  'The letter I wrote.'

  'You don't write letters, do you?'

  'If you don't believe me, we won't talk about this any more.'

  'What letter?'

  'From the Vaxholm Company.'

  'The Vaxholm Company?'

  'Yes. The Vaxholm Company.'

  'What's that?

  'A shipping company. They handle transport throughout the Stockholm archipelago.'

  'What do they want with you?'

  'I saw an advert somewhere. They need seamen. I thought it might be something for me. Domestic harbours and coastal traffic in the inland waters.'

  'Did you apply for a job?'

  'Are you listening to me?'

  'So what did they say?'

  'They want me to come to Stockholm and present myself.'

  'How can they tell by looking at you that you're a good sailor?'

  'They can't. But they can ask questions.'

  'About what?'

  'Why I haven't been to sea in so many years, for instance.'

  'What are you going to say?'

  'That the children are grown and can take care of themselves.'

  'The children?'

  'I thought it would sound better if I said I had more than one. Seamen are supposed to have a lot of children, that's always been the case.'

  'And what are the names of these children?'

  'I'll think of something. I just have to come up with some names. Maybe I can borrow a photo from somebody.'

  'So you're going to borrow a picture of someone else's children?'

  'What's the difference?'

  'It makes a hell of a lot of difference!'

  'I probably won't even have to prove they're mine. But I know how ship owners are. It's best to be prepared. There was a ship owner in Göteborg one time who demanded that anyone who wanted to go out on his boats had to be able to walk on his hands. The Seamen's Association protested, of course, but he had it his way.'

  'Can you walk on your hands?'

  'No.'

  'What are you telling me, anyway?'

  'That I have an appointment in Stockholm.'

  'When are you leaving?'

  'I haven't decided yet.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Maybe I'll say the hell with it.'

  'Of course you have to go! You can't keep wandering around in the woods.'