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

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 every day at the breakfast table. The present
confusion, indolence and fear within the Swedish working classes
have found in me a perfect representative.
    Still, I haven't given up. The failed law studies were only a
temporary humiliation – I can survive that. But the fact that I
have no dream? That I travel to Africa with someone else's dream,
someone who is dead? Instead of grieving I set off on a journey
of penance, as if I were actually to blame for Janine's death.
    One winter night I crept across the cold iron spans of the river
bridge. The moon hung like a cold wolf 's eye in the sky, and I
was utterly alone. I was fourteen years old and I didn't fall. But
afterwards, when Sture was supposed to follow me ...
    His thoughts burst. From somewhere he hears a