The Eye Of The Leopard Page 30

  By then he had decided to stay, to get a job and not go back south when automn arrived. But love was illusory too, just another hiding place, and finally he went back south just to escape. In her eyes he could read his betrayal. But maybe he also went back because he couldn't stand to watch his father fighting with his demons more and more often; now even water couldn't vanquish them. Now he simply boozed, a single-minded genuflection before his inability to return to the sea.

  That summer Erik Olofson finally became a woodcutter. He was no longer the seaman who toiled among bark and brushwood to open the horizon and take his bearings. One day Célestine fell to the floor, as if she had been shipwrecked in a mighty hurricane. Hans found her while his father was sleeping it off on the sofa. He recalls that moment as a raging helplessness, two opposing forces wrestling with each other.

  He returned to Uppsala and now he's sitting in a beer café in Stockholm, and Hans Fredström is dribbling beer on his hand. Fredström possesses something enviable: he has a calling. He wants to become a prosecutor.

  'Hooligans have to be taken by the ears and punished,' he says. 'Being a prosecutor means pursuing purity. The body of society is purged.'

  Once Olofson had revealed to him what he planned to be: a spokesman for the weak, thereby instantly winding up in Fredström's disfavour. He mobilises a hostility that Olofson cannot deflect. His conversation is so fiery and prejudiced that it makes Olofson sick. Their discussions always finish just on the verge of a fistfight. Olofson tries to avoid him. If he fights with him he always loses. When Fredström dribbles beer on his hand he pulls it away.

  I have to stand up to him, he thinks. The two of us will be defending law and order together for our generation. The thought suddenly seems impossible to him. He ought to be able to do it, he ought to force himself to resist, otherwise Hans Fredström will have free reign to ravage through the courtrooms like a predator, crushing with an elephant foot the mitigating circumstance that may still be there. But he can't do it. He is too alone, too poorly equipped.

  Instead he stands up and leaves. Behind him he hears Fredström sniggering. He wanders restlessly through the city, heading down streets at random. His mind is empty, like deserted halls in an abandoned palace. First he thinks there isn't anything at all, only the peeling wallpaper and the echo of his footsteps.

  But in one of the rooms lies Sture in his bed, with a rough blackened tube sticking out of his throat. The iron lung folds its shiny wings around him and he hears a wheezing sound, like a locomotive letting off steam. In another room echoes a word, Mutshatsha, Mutshatsha, and perhaps he also hears the faint tones of 'Some of These Days'. He decides to visit Sture, to see him again, dead or alive.

  A few days later he is in Västervik. Late in the afternoon he gets off the bus he boarded in Norrköping, which will now continue on to Kalmar. At once he smells the sea, and like an insect driven by its sense of smell he finds his way to Slottsholmen.

  An autumn wind blows in off the sea as he walks along the wharves and looks at the boats. A lone yacht runs before the wind into the harbour, and the sail flaps as a woman takes it in.

  He can't find a boarding house, and in a fit of recklessness he checks in at the City Hotel. Through the wall of his room he can hear someone talking excitedly and at length. He thinks it might be a man practising for a play. At the front desk a friendly man with a glass eye helps him find the hospital where Sture is presumed to be.

  'Fir Ridge,' says the man with the glass eye. 'That's probably it. That's where they take people who weren't lucky enough to die instantly. Traffic accidents, motorcycles, broken backs. That must be it.'

  'Fir Ridge' is a deeply misleading name, Olofson realises as he arrives in a taxi the next morning. The forest opens up, he sees a manor house surrounded by a well-tended garden and a glimpse of the sea shining behind one wing of the manor house. Outside the main entrance a man with no legs sits in a wheelchair. He is wrapped in a blanket, sleeping with his mouth open.

  Olofson walks in through the tall door; the hospital reminds him of the courthouse where Sture once lived. He is shown to a small office. A lamp glows green and he enters to find a man who introduces himself as Herr Abramovitch. He speaks in a muted, scarcely audible voice, and Olofson imagines that his primary task in life is to preserve the silence.

  'Sture von Croona,' whispers Herr Abramovitch. 'He has been with us for ten years or more. But I don't remember you. I assume you're a relative?'

  Olofson nods. 'A half-brother.'

  'Some people who come to visit for the first time may be a little distressed,' whispers Herr Abramovitch. 'He is pale, naturally, and a little swollen up from constantly lying down. A certain hospital odour is also unavoidable.'

  'I would like to visit him,' says Olofson. 'I've come a long way to see him.'

  'I'll ask him,' says Herr Abramovitch, getting to his feet. 'What was the name again? Hans Olofson? A half-brother?'

  When he returns everything is arranged. Olofson follows him down a long corridor and they stop before a door, on which Herr Abramovitch knocks. A gurgling sound comes in reply.

  Nothing is as he imagined in the room he enters. The walls are covered with books, and in the middle of the room, surrounded by pot plants, Sture lies in a blue-painted bed. But there is no tube sticking out of his throat and no giant insect folding its wings around the blue bed.

  The door closes silently and they are alone.

  'Where the hell have you been?' asks Sture, in a voice that is hoarse but still reveals that he is angry.

  Hans's assumptions crumble. He had imagined that a person with a broken spine would be taciturn and softly spoken, not angry like this.

  'Have a seat,' says Sture, as if to help him through his embarrassment.

  Hans lifts a stack of books from a chair and sits down.

  'Ten years you make me wait,' Sture goes on. 'Ten years! First I was disappointed, of course. A couple of years, maybe. Since then I've mostly been damned angry with you.'

  'I have no explanation,' says Hans. 'You know how it is.'

  'How the hell should I know how it is when I'm lying here?'

  Then his face breaks out in a smile. 'Well, you finally came,' he says. 'To this place where things are the way they are. If I want a view they set up a mirror so I can see the garden. The room has been painted twice since I came here. At first they would roll me out to the park. But then I said no. I like it better in here. I've been taking it easy. Nothing to prevent someone like me from surrendering to laziness.'

  Hans listens dumbstruck to the will power emanating from Sture as he lies in the bed. He realises that Sture, despite his terrible disadvantage, has developed a power and sense of purpose that he doesn't have.

  'Of course, bitterness is my constant companion,' Sture says. 'Every morning when I awake from my dreams, every time I shit myself and it starts to smell, every time I realise that I can't do anything – that's probably the worst thing, not being able to offer any resistance. It's my spine that's severed, that's true. But something was also broken inside my head. It took me many years to realise that. But then I made a plan for my life based on my opportunities, not the lack of them. I decided to live until I turned thirty, about five more years. By then I'll have my philosophy worked out, I'll have clarified my relationship with death. My only problem is that I can't end my own life because I can't move. But I have another five years to figure out a solution.'

  'What happened?' asks Hans.

  'I don't remember. The memory is completely erased. I can remember things long before and I remember when I woke up here. That's all.'

  A stench suddenly spreads in the room and Sture presses his nose to a call button.

  'Go out for a while. I have to be cleaned up.'

  When he comes back, Sture is lying there drinking beer through a straw.

  'I drink schnapps sometimes,' he says. 'But they don't like that. If I start throwing up there's trouble. And I can get foul-mouthed. My way of getting
back at the nurses for everything I can't do.'

  'Janine,' says Hans. 'She died.'

  Sture lies quiet a long while. 'What happened?'

  'She drowned herself in the end.'

  'You know what I dreamed of? Undressing her, making love to her. I still kick myself because I never did it. Did you ever think of that?'

  Hans shakes his head. He quickly grabs a book to avoid the topic.

  'With my upbringing I never would have wound up studying radical philosophy,' says Sture. 'I dreamed of becoming the Leonardo of my time. I was my own constellation in a private cosmos. But now I know that reason is the only thing that gives me consolation. And reason means understanding that one dies alone, irreparably alone – everyone, even you. I try to think about it when I write. I talk on to tape, and someone else types it up.'

  'What do you write about?'

  'About a broken spine that ventures out into the world. Abramovitch doesn't look too amused when he reads what the girls type up. He doesn't understand what I mean, and it makes him nervous. But in five years he'll be rid of me.'

  When Sture asks Hans to tell him about his own life, he doesn't seem to have anything to say.

  'Do you remember the horse dealer? He died last summer. He was eaten up by bone cancer.'

  'I never met him,' says Sture. 'Did I ever meet anyone other than you and Janine?'

  'It's so long ago.'

  'Five more years,' says Sture. 'If I haven't found the solution to my final problem, would you help me?'

  'If I can.'

  'You can't break a promise to someone who's broken his back. If you did I would haunt you until you dropped dead.'

  Late in the afternoon they say goodbye. Herr Abramovitch cautiously opens the door a crack and says he can offer Hans a ride into town.

  'Come back once a year,' says Sture. 'No more. I don't have time.'

  'I can write,' says Hans.

  'No, no letters. I just get upset by letters. Letters are too much for me to stand. Go now.'

  Hans leaves the town with a feeling of being king of the unworthy. In Sture he saw his own mirror image. He can't escape it. Late in the evening he reaches Uppsala. The clocks tick in the impenetrable jungle of time in which he lives.

  Mutshatsha, he thinks. What remains other than you?

  The Swedish sky is heavy on that early morning in September 1969 when he leaves all his former horizons behind him and flies out into the world. He has spent his savings and bought the ticket that will fling him out into the upper layers of the air, his dubious pilgrimage to the Mutshatsha of Janine's dreams.

  A motionless sky, an endless wall of clouds hangs over his head, as for the first time in his life he boards an aeroplane. When he walks across the tarmac the dampness soaks into his shoes. He turns around as if someone were there after all to wave goodbye to him.

  He observes his fellow passengers. None is on his way to Mutshatsha, he thinks. Right now that is the one thing I know for sure. With a slight bow Hans Olofson makes the ascent up into the air. Twenty-seven hours later, precisely according to the timetable, he lands in Lusaka. Africa receives him with intense heat. No one is there to meet him.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Anight watchman comes towards him with a cudgel in his hand. Olofson can see that he is very afraid. Two big German shepherds are running restlessly back and forth across the poorly lit courtyard.

  Suddenly he feels a raging disgust at being always surrounded by nervous watchdogs and high walls with crushed glass cemented on top. I travel from one white bunker to the next, he thinks. Everywhere this terror.

  He knocks on the door of the servants' quarters and Peggy answers. She lets him in, and behind her is Marjorie, and they laugh with joy that he has come. And yet he notices at once that something is wrong. He sits down on a chair and listens to their voices in the tiny kitchen where they are fixing tea for him.

  I forget that I'm a mzungu even to them, he thinks. Only with Peter Motombwane did I succeed in experiencing a completely natural relationship with an African. He drinks tea and asks how they're getting along in Lusaka.

  'It's going well,' replies Marjorie. 'Bwana Lars is taking care of us.'

  He doesn't tell them about the attack in the night, but asks instead whether they are homesick. When they reply that they aren't, he again senses that something is wrong. There's an uncertainty behind their usual happiness. Something is troubling them. He decides to wait until Håkansson comes back.

  'Tomorrow I'll be in town all day,' he says. 'We can take the car and drive in to Cairo Road and go shopping.'

  As he leaves he can hear them locking the door. In an African village there are no locks, he thinks. It's the first thing we teach them. Locking a door gives a false sense of security.

  The night watchman comes towards him again, his cudgel in hand.

  'Where is Bwana Lars?' Olofson asks.

  'In Kabwe, Bwana.'

  'When is he coming back?'

  'Maybe tomorrow, Bwana.'

  'I'll stay here tonight. Open the door for me.'

  The night watchman vanishes in the darkness to fetch the keys. I'm sure he's buried them, Olofson thinks. He strikes one of the German shepherds who sniffs at his leg. Whimpering, it retreats. In this country there are innumerable dogs trained to attack people with black skin, he thinks. How does one train a dog to exhibit racist behaviour?

  The night watchman unlocks the house. Olofson takes the keys and locks the door from the inside. First the wrought-iron gate with two padlocks and a crossbar with another lock. Then the outer door with three locks and three deadbolts.

  Eight locks, he thinks. Eight locks for my nightly slumber. What was it that was bothering them? A homesickness they're afraid to admit? Or something else? He turns on the lights in Lars Håkansson's big house, walks through the tastefully furnished rooms. Everywhere there is shiny stereo equipment, and he lets the music flow from hidden loudspeakers.

  He selects a guest room with a bed made up with clean sheets. I feel more secure here than on my own farm, he thinks. At least I think I do, because no one knows where I am.

  He takes a bath in a shiny bathroom, turns off the music, and climbs into bed. Just as he is about to slip off into sleep, he is suddenly wide awake. He thinks again about Marjorie and Peggy, and his feeling that something is not quite right. He tries to convince himself that Africa has made him far too sensitive in his judgement, that after all these years he thinks he sees terror in everyone's face.

  He gets up and goes through the house, opening doors, studying the titles in the bookshelves and a drawing of a link station hanging on a wall in Håkansson's office. Everything is in perfect order. Lars Håkansson has established himself in Africa without a speck of dust, with everything in its place. He pulls out drawers and sees underwear in meticulously arranged piles. One room has been converted to a photography studio; behind another door he finds an exercise bicycle and a table tennis table.

  He returns to the big living room. He hasn't found anything that gives a picture of Håkansson's past. Nowhere does he see pictures of children or an ex-wife. He imagines that Håkansson makes use of the fact that Africa is a long way from Sweden. The past is the past; nothing needs to remind him unless he wants it to.