The Eye of the Leopard by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online

smells of urine and manure, and he gets into something that appears to be a queue. A man with no legs comes sliding along on a board and tries to sell him a dirty ticket to Livingstone, but Olofson shakes his head, turns away, and retreats within himself.
    I hate this chaos, he thinks. It’s impossible to get an overview. Here I am at the mercy of chance and people sliding along on boards.
    He buys a ticket to Kitwe and walks out on the platform. A train with a diesel locomotive is waiting, and he looks despondently at what awaits him: run-down carriages, already overfilled, like bursting cardboard boxes with toy figures in them, and broken windowpanes.
    He notices two white people climbing into the carriage behind the locomotive. As if all white people were his friends in this black world, he hurries after them and almost falls on his face when he trips over a man lying stretched out on the platform asleep.
    He hopes he has bought a ticket that gives him access to this carriage. He makes his way forward to the compartment where the white people he has been following are busy stowing their bags on the baggage racks.
    Entering a compartment on a train in Sweden can often feel like intruding in someone’s private living room, but in this compartment he is met by friendly smiles and nods. He imagines that with his presence he is reinforcing a disintegrating and ever-diminishing white army.
    Before him are an older man and a young woman. Father and daughter, he guesses. He stows his suitcase and sits down, drenched in sweat. The young woman gives him an encouraging look as she takes out a book and a pocket torch.
    ‘I come from Sweden,’ he says, with a sudden urge to talk to someone. ‘I assume that this is the train for Kitwe?’
    ‘Sweden,’ says the woman. ‘How nice.’
    The man has lit his pipe and leans back in his corner.
    ‘Masterton,’ he says. ‘My name is Werner, and this is my wife Ruth.’
    Olofson introduces himself and feels a boundless gratitude at finding himself together with people who have decent shoes on their feet.
    The train starts up with a jolt and the uproar in the station increases in a violent crescendo. A pair of legs is visible outside the window as a man climbs up on to the roof. After him come a basket of chickens and a sack of dried fish which rips open and spreads a smell of decay and salt.
    Werner Masterton looks at his watch.
    ‘Ten minutes too early,’ he says. ‘Either the driver is drunk or he’s in a hurry to get home.’
    Diesel fumes waft by, fires are burning along the tracks, and the lights of Lusaka slowly fall behind.
    ‘We never take the train,’ says Masterton from the depths of his corner. ‘About once every ten years. But in a few years there will hardly be any trains left in this country. Since independence everything has fallen apart. In five years almost everything has been destroyed. Everything is stolen. If this train suddenly stops tonight, which it most certainly will do, it means that the driver is trying to sell fuel from the locomotive. The Africans come with their oil cans. The green glass in the traffic lights has disappeared. Children steal them and try to palm them off on tourists as emeralds. But soon there won’t be any tourists left either. The wild animals have been shot, wiped out. I haven’t heard of anyone seeing a leopard in more than two years.’ He gestures out into the darkness.
    ‘There were lions here,’ he says. ‘Elephants wandered free in huge herds. Today there is nothing left.’
    The Mastertons have a large farm outside Chingola, Olofson learns during the long night’s journey to Kitwe. Werner Masterton’s parents came from South Africa in the early 1950s. Ruth was the daughter of a teacher who moved back to England in 1964. They met while visiting friends in Ndola and married despite the great age difference.
    ‘Independence was a catastrophe,’ says Masterton, offering whisky from his pocket flask. ‘For the Africans,