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

sack,’ he says. ‘Not the next day, not after a warning, but instantly, kicked out on the spot. A train as filthy as this one would have been an impossibility. In a few hours we’ll be in Kabwe. Before, it was called Broken Hill. Even the old name was better. The truth, if you want to know, is that nothing has been maintained or become better. We’re forced to live in the midst of a process of decay.’
    ‘But–’ says Olofson, before he is interrupted.
    ‘Your “but” is premature,’ says Ruth. ‘I have a feeling that you want to ask whether the blacks’ lives are better. Not even that is true. Who could take over from all the Europeans who left the country in 1964? There was no preparation, only a boundless arrogance. A bewitched cry for independence, their own flag, maybe soon their own currency.’
    ‘Taking responsibility requires knowledge,’ Werner continues. ‘In 1964 there were six blacks with university degrees in this country.’
    ‘A new era is created out of the preceding one,’ Olofson counters. ‘The education system must have been poor.’
    ‘You’re starting from the wrong assumptions,’ says Ruth. ‘No one was thinking about anything as dramatic as what you call a new era. Development would continue, everyone would be better off, not least the blacks. But without chaos taking over.’
    ‘A new era doesn’t create itself,’ Olofson insists. ‘What did actually happen?’
    ‘Treachery,’ says Ruth. ‘The mother countries deceived us. All too late we realised we had been abandoned. In Southern Rhodesia they understood, and there everything has not gone to hell as it has here.’
    ‘We’ve just been in Salisbury,’ says Werner. ‘There we could breathe. Maybe we’ll move there. The trains ran on time, the lampshades weren’t full of insects. The Africans did what they do best: follow orders.’
    ‘Freedom,’ says Olofson, and then has no idea what to say next.
    ‘If freedom is starving to death, then the Africans are on the right track in this country,’ says Ruth.
    ‘It’s hard to understand,’ says Olofson. ‘Hard to comprehend.’
    ‘You’ll see for yourself,’ Ruth goes on, smiling at him. ‘There’s no reason for us not to tell you how things stand, because the truth will be revealed to you anyway.’
    The train screeches to a stop, and then everything is quiet. Cicadas can be heard in the warm night and Olofson leans out into the darkness. The starry sky is close and he finds the brightly glowing constellation of the Southern Cross.
    What was it he had thought when he left Sweden? That he was on his way to a distant, faintly gleaming star?
    Ruth Masterton is engrossed in a book with the help of her shaded pocket torch, and Werner is sucking on his extinguished pipe. Olofson feels called upon to take stock of his situation.
    Janine, he thinks. Janine is dead. My father drank himself into a wreck that will never again go to sea. My mother consists in her entirety of two photographs from Atelier Strandmark in Sundsvall. Two pictures that instil fear in me, a woman’s face against a backdrop of merciless morning light. I live with an inheritance of the smell of elkhound, of winter nights and an unwavering sense of not being needed. The moment I chose not to conform to my heritage, to become a woodcutter like my father and marry one of the girls I danced with to Kringström’s orchestra in the draughty People’s Hall, I also rejected the only background I had. I passed the lower-school examination as a pupil none of the teachers would ever remember, I endured four terrible years in the county capital and passed a meaningless student examination so that I wouldn’t be a failure. I did my military service in a tank regiment in Skövde, again as a person no one ever noticed. I nourished the hope of becoming a lawyer, the sworn defender of extenuating circumstances. I lived for over a year as a lodger in a dark flat in Uppsala, where a fool sat across from me