The Eye of the Leopard

Chapter One

He wakes in the African night, convinced that his body has split in two. Cracked open, as if his guts had exploded, with the blood running down his face and chest.

In the darkness he fumbles in terror for the light switch, but when he flips it there is no light, and he thinks the electricity must be out again. His hand searches under the bed for a torch, but the batteries are dead and so he lies there in the dark.

It’s not blood, he tells himself. It’s malaria. I’ve got the fever, the sweat is being squeezed out of my body. I’m having nightmares, fever dreams. Time and space are dissolving, I don’t know where I am, I don’t even know if I’m still alive...

Insects are crawling across his face, enticed by the moisture that is oozing from his pores. He thinks he ought to get out of bed and find a towel. But he knows he wouldn’t be able to stand upright, he would have to crawl, and maybe he wouldn’t even be able to make it back to bed. If I die now at least I’ll be in my own bed, he thinks, as he feels the next attack of fever coming on.

I don’t want to die on the floor. Naked, with cockroaches crawling across my face.

His fingers clutch at the wet sheet as he prepares himself for an attack that will be more violent than the ones before. Feebly, in a voice that is hardly audible, he cries out in the darkness for Luka, but there is only silence and the chirping cicadas of the African night.

Maybe he’s sitting right outside the door, he thinks in desperation. Maybe he’s sitting there waiting for me to die.

The fever comes rolling through his body in waves, like sudden storm swells. His head burns as if thousands of insects were stinging and boring into his forehead and temples. Slowly he is dragged away from consciousness, sucked down into the underground corridors of the fever attack, where he glimpses the distorted faces of nightmares among the shadows.

I can’t die now, he thinks, gripping the sheet to keep himself alive.

But the suction draught of the malaria attack is stronger than his will. Reality is chopped up, sawed into pieces that fit nowhere. He believes he is sitting in the back seat of an old Saab that is racing through the endless forests of Norrland in Sweden. He can’t see who is sitting in front of him: only a black back, no neck, no head.

It’s the fever, he thinks again. I have to hold on, keep thinking that it’s only the fever, nothing more.

He notices that it has started to snow in the room. White flakes are falling on his face and instantly it’s cold all around him.

Now it’s snowing in Africa, he thinks. That’s odd, it really shouldn’t be doing that. I have to get hold of a spade. I have to get up and start shovelling, otherwise I’ll be buried in here.

Again he calls for Luka, but no one answers, no one comes. He decides to fire Luka, that’s the first thing he’ll do if he survives this fever.

Bandits, he thinks in confusion. Of course, that’s who cut the electrical line.

He listens and seems to hear the patter of their feet outside the walls of the house. With one hand he grips the revolver under his pillow, forces himself up to a sitting position, and points the gun at the front door. He has to use both hands just to lift it, and in desperation he fears he doesn’t have enough strength in his finger to pull the trigger.

I’m going to give Luka the sack, he thinks in a rage. He’s the one who cut the electrical line, he’s the one who lured the bandits here. I have to remember to fire him in the morning.

He tries to catch some snowflakes in the barrel of the revolver, but they melt before his eyes.

I have to put on my shoes, he thinks. Otherwise I’ll freeze to death.

With all his might he leans over the edge of the bed and searches with one hand, but finds only the dead torch.

The bandits, he thinks groggily. They’ve stolen my shoes. They’ve already been inside while I was asleep. Maybe they’re still here...

He fires the pistol out into the room. The shot roars in the dark and he falls back against the pillows with the recoil, feeling calm, almost content.

Luka is behind it all, naturally. It was he who plotted with the bandits, he who cut the electrical line. But now he’s been unmasked, so he has no more power. He will be sacked, chased off the farm.

They won’t get me, he thinks. I’m stronger than all of them.

The insects continue boring into his forehead and he is very tired. He wonders whether dawn is far off, and he thinks that he must sleep. The malaria comes and goes, that’s what is giving him the nightmares. He has to force himself to distinguish what he’s imagining from what’s real.

It can’t snow here, he thinks. And I’m not sitting in the back seat of an old Saab racing through the bright summer forests of Norrland. I’m in Africa, not in Härjedal. I’ve been here for eighteen years. I have to keep my mind together. The fever is compelling me to stir up old memories, bring them to the surface, and to fool myself that they’re real.

Memories are dead things, albums and archives that have to be kept cold and under lock and key. Reality requires my consciousness. To have a fever is to lose one’s internal directions. I mustn’t forget that. I’m in Africa and I’ve been here for eighteen years. It was never my intention, but that’s how it turned out.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had malaria. Sometimes the attacks are violent, like now; other times milder, a shadow of fever that quickly passes across my face. The fever is seductive, it wants to lure me away, creating snow even though it’s over thirty degrees Celsius. But I’m still here in Africa, I’ve always been here, ever since I landed and stepped off the plane in Lusaka. I was going to stay a few weeks, but I’ve been here a long time, and that is the truth. It is not snowing.

His breathing is heavy and he feels the fever dancing inside him. Dancing him back to the beginning, to that early morning eighteen years ago when for the first time he felt the African sun on his face.

From the mists of the fever an instant of great clarity emerges, a landscape in which the contours are sharp and washed clean. He brushes off a large cockroach that is feeling his nostril with its antennae and sees himself standing in the doorway of the big jet at the top of the mobile staircase they have brought out.

He recalls that his first impression of Africa was how the sunshine turned the concrete of the airport completely white. Then a smell, something bitter, like an unknown spice or a charcoal fire.

That’s how it was, he thinks. I will be able to reproduce that moment exactly, for as long as I live. It was eighteen years ago. Much of what happened later I’ve forgotten. For me Africa became a habit. A realisation that I can never feel completely calm when faced with this wounded and lacerated continent... I, Hans Olofson, have grrown used to the fact that it’s impossible for me to comprehend anything but fractions of this continent. But despite this perpetual disadvantage I have persevered, I have stayed on, learned one of the many languages that exist here, become the employer of over 200 Africans.

I’ve learned to endure this peculiar life, that involves being both loved and hated at the same time. Each day I stand face to face with 200 black human beings who would gladly murder me, slit my throat, offer up my genitals in sacrifice, eat my heart.

Every morning when I awake I am still, after eighteen years, surprised to be alive. Every evening I check my revolver, rotate the magazine with my fingers, make sure that no one has replaced the cartridges with empty ones.

I, Hans Olofson, have taught myself to endure the greatest loneliness. Never before had I been surrounded by so many people who demand my attention, my decisions, but who at the same time watch over me in the dark; invisible eyes that follow me expectantly, waiting.

But my most vivid memory is still that moment when I descended from the plane at Lusaka International Airport eighteen years ago. I keep returning to that moment, to gather courage, the power to survive; back to a time when I still knew my own intentions...

Today my life is a journey through days coloured by unreality. I live a life that belongs neither to me nor to anyone else. I am neither successful nor unsuccessful in what I set out to accomplish.

What possesses me is a constant amazement at what actually did happen. What was it that really brought me here, made me take that long journey from the remote interior of Norrland, still covered in snow, to an Africa that had not summoned me? What is it in my life that I have never understood?

The most curious thing is that I’ve been here for so long. I was twenty-five when I left Sweden, and now I’m forty-three. My hair began turning grey long ago; my beard, which I never manage to shave off, is already completely white. I’ve lost three teeth, two in the lower jaw and one in the top left. The tip of my ring finger on my right hand is severed at the first knuckle, and sometimes I suffer from pain in my kidneys. I regularly dig out white worms that have bored underneath the skin on the soles of my feet. In the first few years I could scarcely bring myself to carry out these operations using sterilised tweezers and nail scissors. Now I grab a rusty nail or a knife that’s lying about and carve out the parasites living in my heels.

Sometimes I try to view all these years in Africa as a wrinkle in my life, one which will some day turn out to never have happened. Maybe it’s an insane dream that will be smashed apart when I finally manage to extricate myself from the life I’m living here. Someday this wrinkle in my life will have to be smoothed out...

In his attacks of fever, Olofson is flung against invisible reefs that tear his body apart. For brief moments the storm subsides, and he rocks on the waves and feels himself quickly turning into a block of ice. But just when he thinks the cold has reached his heart and frozen his last heartbeat to stillness, the storm returns and the fever slings him once more against the burning reefs.

In the restless, shredded dreams that rage like demons in his mind he keeps returning to the day he came to Africa. The white sun, the long journey that brought him to Kalulushi, and to this night, eighteen years later.

Like a malevolent figure, with no head or neck, the fever attack stands before him. With one hand he clutches his revolver, as if it were his last salvation.

The malaria attacks come and go.

Hans Olofson, once raised in a grim wooden house on the banks of the Ljusna River, shakes and shivers under his wet sheet.

From his dreams the past emerges, a reflection of the story he has still not given up hope of someday understanding...

Chapter Two

Through the swirling snow he returns to his childhood.

It is midwinter 1956. It’s four in the morning and the cold whines and prises at the beams of the old wooden house. That’s not the sound that wakes him, but rather a stubborn scraping and muttering from the kitchen. He wakes as abruptly as only a child can, and he knows at once that his father has started scrubbing again. Dressed in his blue-trimmed pyjamas with their permanent snuff stains, with thick rag socks on his feet that are already soaked through from all the hot water he is madly sloshing across the floor, his father chases his demons through the winter night. He has chained up the two grey elkhounds out by the woodshed, hauling on the frozen chains as he stands half-naked in the freezing cold, while the water slowly comes to a boil on the stove.

And now he scrubs, a raging assault on the dirt that is visible to no one but himself. He throws the boiling water on cobwebs that suddenly flare up on the walls, then dumps a whole bucket over the hood of the stove because he’s convinced that a knot of filthy snakes is hiding there.

All this the son lies in bed and watches, a twelve-year-old with the woollen blanket pulled up over his chin. He doesn’t need to get up and tiptoe across the cold planks of the floor to watch it happen. He knows all about it. And through the door he hears his father’s muttering and nervous laughter and desperate outbursts of rage.

It always occurs at night.

The first time he woke up and padded out to the kitchen he was five or six years old. In the pale light from the kitchen lamp with its misty shade he saw his father squelching around in the water, with his brown hair in wild disarray. And he understood, without putting it into words, that he was invisible. It was another kind of vision that occupied his father as he raced about with his scrubbing brush. His father was looking at something that only he could see. It terrified the boy, more so than if his father had suddenly raised an axe over his head.

Now, as he lies in bed listening, he knows that the coming days will be calm. His father will lie motionless in his bed before he finally gets up, pulls on his rough work clothes, and heads out into the forest again, where he cuts trees for Iggesund or Marma Långrör.

Neither father nor son will utter a word about the night-time scrubbing. For the boy in the bed it will fade like a malevolent apparition, until he again awakes in the night to the sound of his father scrubbing away his demons.

But now it is February 1956. Hans Olofson is twelve years old, and in a few hours he will get dressed, munch a few slices of rye bread, take his knapsack and head out into the cold on his way to school.

The darkness of night is a split personality, both friend and foe. From the blackness he can haul up nightmares and inconceivable horrors. The spasms of the roof beams in the hard frost are transformed into fingers that reach out for him. But the darkness can also be a friend, a time in which to weave thoughts about what will come, what people call the future.

He imagines how he will leave this lonely wooden house by the river for the last time, how he will run across the bridge, disappear past the arches of the bridge, out into the world, almost all the way to Orsa Finnmark.

Why am I who I am? he thinks. Why me and not somebody else?

He knows precisely the first time that he had this crucial thought. It was a bright summer evening, and he was playing in the abandoned brickworks behind the hospital. They had divided themselves into friends and enemies, hadn’t defined the game any more than that, and they alternately attacked and defended the windowless, half-razed factory building. They often played there, not just because it was forbidden, but because the building provided endlessly adaptable stage sets for their games. Its identity was forgotten, and with their games they lent constantly changing faces to the ruin. The dilapidated brickworks was defenceless; the shadows of the people who had once worked there were no longer present to protect it. Those who played there ruled. Only seldom did a bellowing father come and drag his child away from the wild game. There were shafts to plunge into, rotten steps to fall through, rusty kiln doors that could slam shut on hands and feet. But the boys playing there knew the dangers, avoided them, and had explored the safe paths through the endless building.

And it was there on that bright summer evening, as he was lying hidden behind a rusty, collapsed brick kiln, waiting to be discovered and captured, that he had asked himself for the first time why he was who he was and not someone else. The thought had made him both excited and upset. It was as if an unknown being had crept into his head and whispered to him the password to the future. After that, all his thoughts, the very process of thinking, seemed to come from a voice that was external, that had crept into his head, left its message, and then disappeared.

On that occasion he left the game, sneaked away from the others, vanished among the fir trees surrounding the dead brickworks, and went down to the river.

The forest was quiet; the swarms of mosquitoes had not yet taken over the town, which lay where the river made a bend on its long journey to the sea. A crow squawked its loneliness at the top of a crooked fir and then flapped away over the ridge where Hedevägen wound its way to the west. The moss under his feet was spongy. He had grown tired of the game, and on his way to the river everything changed. For as long as he had not established his own identity, was just somebody among all the others, he had possessed a timeless immortality, the privilege of childhood, the most profound manifestation of childishness. At the very moment that the unfamiliar question of why he was who he was crept into his head, he became a definite person and thus mortal. Now he had defined himself; he was who he was and would never be anyone else. He realised the futility of defending himself. Now he had a life ahead of him, in which he would have to be who he was.

By the river he sat down on a rock and looked at the brown water slowly making its way towards the sea. A rowboat lay chafing at its cable and he realised how simple it would be to disappear. From the town, but never from himself.

For a long time he sat by the river, becoming a human being. Everything had acquired limits. He would play again, but never the same way as before. Playing had become a game, nothing more.

Now he clambers over the rocks on the riverbank until he can see the house where he lives. He sits down on an uprooted tree that smells of rain and dirt and looks at the smoke curling out of the chimney.

Who can he tell about his great discovery? Who can be his confidant?

He looks at the house again. Should he knock on the draughty door to the ground floor flat and ask to speak with Egg-Karlsson? Ask to be admitted to the kitchen where it always smells of rancid fat, wet wool, and cat piss? He can’t talk to Egg-Karlsson, who doesn’t speak to anyone, just shuts his door as if he’s closing an eggshell of iron around himself. All Hans knows about him is that he’s a misanthrope and bull-headed. He rides his bicycle to the farmhouses outside town and buys up eggs, which he then delivers to various grocers. He does all his business in the early morning, and for the rest of the day he lives behind his closed door.

Egg-Karlsson’s silence pervades the house. It hovers like a mist over the neglected currant bushes and the shared potato patch, the front steps, and the stairs to the top floor where Hans lives with his father.

Nor does he consider confiding in old lady Westlund who lives across from Egg-Karlsson. She would sweep him up in her embroidery and her Free Church evangelism, never listening to him, but proceeding at once to fling her holy words at him.

All that remains is the little attic flat he shares with his father. All he can do is go home and talk to his father, Erik Olofson, who was born in Åmsele, far from this cold hole in the interior of melancholy southern Norrland, this town that lies hidden away in the heart of Härjedal. Hans knows how much it hurts his father to have to live so far from the sea, to have to make do with a sluggish river. With a child’s intuition he can see that a man who has been to sea can never thrive where the dense, frozen grey forest conceals the open horizons. He thinks of the sea chart that hangs on the kitchen wall, showing the waters around Mauritius and Réunion, with a glimpse of the east coast of Madagascar on the fading edge of the chart, and the sea floor indicated in places, its inconceivable depth 4,000 metres. It’s a constant reminder of a sailor who wound up in the utterly wrong place, who managed to make landfall where there wasn’t any sea.

On the shelf over the stove sits a full-rigger in a glass case, brought home decades ago from a dim Indian shop in Mombasa, purchased for a single English pound. In this frigid part of the world, inhabited by ice crystals instead of jacarandas, people have moose skulls and fox tails as wall decorations. Here it should smell of sour rubber boots and lingonberries, not the distant odour of the salty monsoon sea and burned-out charcoal fires. But the full-rigger sits there on the stove shelf, with its dreamy name Célestine. Long ago Hans decided that he would never marry a woman who wasn’t named Célestine. It would be a form of betrayal; to his father, to the ship, to himself.

He also senses a murky connection between the full-rigger in its dusty case and the recurring nights when his father scrubs out his fury. A sailor finds himself driven ashore in a primeval Norrland forest, where no bearings can be taken, no ocean depths sounded.

The boy senses that the sailor lives with a stifled cry of lamentation inside. And it’s when the longing grows too strong that the bottles end up on the table, the sea charts are taken out of the chest in the hall, the seven seas are sailed once more, and the sailor metamorphoses into a wreck who is forced to scrub away his longing, transformed into hallucinations dissolved in alcohol.

The answers are always found in the past.

His mother disappeared, was simply gone one day. Hans was so little then that he has no memory either of her or of her departure. The photographs that lie behind the radio in father’s unfinished logbook, and her name, Mary, are all he knows.

The two photographs instil in him a sense of dawn and cold. A round face with brown hair, her head tilted a little, maybe a hint of a smile. On the back of the photographs it says Atelier Strandmark, Sundsvall.

Sometimes he imagines her as a figurehead on a ship that was wrecked in a heavy storm in the southern seas and has since lain on the bottom in a watery grave 4,000 metres down. He imagines that her invisible mausoleum lies somewhere on the sea chart that hangs on the kitchen wall. Maybe outside Port Louis, or in the vicinity of the reef off the east coast of Madagascar.

She didn’t want to leave. That’s the explanation he gets. On the rare occasions that his father talks about her departure, he always uses the same words.

Someone who doesn’t want to leave. Quickly, unexpectedly she disappeared, that much he understands. One day she’s gone, with a suitcase. Someone saw her get on the train, towards Orsa and Mora. The vastness of Finnmark closed in around her disappearance.

For this disappearance he can manage only a wordless despair. And he assumes that they share the guilt, he and his father. They didn’t die. They were left behind, never to receive a sign of life.

He’s not sure whether he misses her, either. His mother is two photographs, not a person of flesh and blood who laughs, washes clothes, and tucks the covers under his chin when the winter cold penetrates the walls of the building. The feeling he bears is a kind of fear. And the shame of having been found unworthy.

He decides early on to share the contempt that the decent town has hung like shackles around his runaway mother. He goes along with the decent people, the grown-ups. Enclosed in an iron grip of constancy they pass their life together in the building where the beams scream out their distress during the long drawnout winters. Sometimes Hans imagines that their house is a ship that has dropped anchor and is waiting for the wind to come up. The chains of the elkhounds out by the woodshed are actually anchor chains, the river a bay of the open sea. The attic flat is the captain’s cabin, while the lower flat belongs to the crew. Waiting for the wind takes a long time, but occasionally the anchors are hauled up from the deep. And then the house sets off under full sail to race down the river, saluting one last time where the river bends at the People’s Park, before the wind carries them away. Towards an Away that doesn’t entail a return.

In an attempt to understand, he creates for himself the only rational explanation for why his father remains in this parched town, every day grabbing his tools and heading out into the forest that prevents him from seeing the ocean, or taking a bearing, or gazing at distant horizons.

Out there, he chops down the forest. Plodding through the heavy snow, chopping down tree after tree, stripping the bark from the trunks and slowly opening the landscape to the endless horizon. The sailor driven ashore has set himself a task — to clear a path back to a distant shoreline.

But Hans Olofson’s life is more than just melancholy motherlessness and a woodcutter’s bouts of alcoholism. Together they study his father’s detailed world maps and sea charts, go ashore in ports his father has visited, and explore in their imagination places that still await their arrival. The sea charts are taken down from the wall, rolled out, and weighted down with ashtrays and chipped cups. The evenings can be long, because Erik Olofson is a good storyteller. By the age of twelve Hans possesses an exhaustive knowledge of places as distant as Pamplemousse and Bogamaio; he has glimpsed the innermost secrets of seafaring, mysterious ships that vanished in their own enigma, pirate captains and sailors of the utmost benevolence. The secret world and the construct of regulations, so difficult to grasp, with which trading companies and private shippers have to live and comply, he has stratified in his mind without fully understanding them; yet it is as though he has touched on a great and decisive source of wisdom. He knows the smell of soot in Bristol, the indescribable sludge in the Hudson River, the Indian Ocean’s variable monsoons, the threatening beauty of icebergs, and the rattle of palm fronds.

‘Here the wind murmurs in the trees,’ says Erik Olofson. ‘But in the tropics there is no murmuring. The palm leaves rattle.’

He tries to imagine the difference, striking his fork against a glass, but the palms simply refuse to clatter or rattle. They still murmur in his ears, like the firs he is surrounded by.

But when he tells his teacher that palms clatter and that there are water lilies as big as the centre circle on the ice-hockey rink outside the elementary school, he is ridiculed and called a liar. Red in the face, Headmaster Gottfried comes storming out of the musty office where he quells his distaste for teaching by imbibing vermouth assiduously. He grabs Hans by the hair and threatens him with what happens to anyone who is on an excursion to the land of lies.

Afterwards, alone in the schoolyard in the spotlight of derision, he decides never again to share any of his exotic knowledge. In this hellhole of filthy snow and wooden houses, no one understands a thing about the truths that must be sought at sea.

His eyes red and swollen, he comes home, boils potatoes, and waits for his father. Maybe this is when he makes his decision. That his life will be an unbroken journey. Standing over the pot of potatoes, the holy spirit of his journey takes possession of him. His father’s smelly rag socks hang on the stove.

Sails, he thinks. Patched, mended sails...

That night, as he lies in bed, he asks his father to tell him one more time about the water lilies on Mauritius. And he falls asleep, assured that Headmaster Gottfried will burn in hell for not believing a sailor’s report.

Later that evening, Erik Olofson drinks his coffee, sunk in the rickety chair next to the radio. He lets the waves of the ether hiss softly, as if he doesn’t really want to listen. As if the hissing is message enough. The breathing of the sea, far away. The photographs burn in the logbook. All alone, he must guide his son. And no matter how much he reveals to the boy, the forest still seems to tighten around him. Sometimes he thinks that this is the true great defeat of his life, that despite everything he endures.

But for how long? When will he splinter, like a glass that has been heated for too long?

The ether waves hiss and he thinks again about why she left him, left their son. Why did she act like a man? he wonders. Fathers are the ones who leave and disappear. Not mothers. Least of all after conceiving a precise and premeditated plan of escape. How much about another person can you ever understand? Especially someone who lives close to you, in the inner circle of your own life.

In the pale light of the radio Erik Olofson tries to comprehend.

But the questions return, and the next evening are still hanging on their hooks. Erik Olofson tries to force his way into the core of a lie. Tries to understand, tries to endure.

Finally both of them are asleep, the sailor from Åmsele and his twelve-year-old son. The beams writhe in the midwinter darkness. A lone dog runs along the river in the moonlight. The two elkhounds lie curled up next to the stove in the kitchen, shaggy, with ears that prick up and fall again as the beams scrape and complain.

The house by the river sleeps. The dawn is far off on this night in Sweden in 1956.

Chapter Three

He can recall his departure for Africa like a dim shadow play.

He imagines the memories he bears to be a forest which was once open and clean, but which has become more and more overgrown. He has no tools for clearing the brush and scrub in this landscape. The growth of his memories is constant, the landscape harder and harder to take in.

Still, something does remain of that early morning in September 1969 when he left all his horizons behind and flew out into the world.

The Swedish sky was heavy that morning. An endless carpet of rain clouds hung over his head as he boarded an aeroplane for the first time. As he walked across the tarmac the damp seeped through his shoes.

I’m leaving Sweden with wet socks, he thought. If I ever make it to Africa I might bring along an autumn greeting in the form of a cold.

On the way to the plane he had turned around, as if someone might be there after all, waving goodbye to him. But the shadowy grey figures on the roof terrace of Arlanda didn’t belong to him. His departure was noticed by no one.

As he checked in he suddenly felt an urge to snatch the ticket back, yell that it was all a mistake, and leave the airport. But he said thank you when they handed the ticket back to him, along with his boarding card and the wish for a pleasant trip.

His first stop on the way to foreign horizons was London. Then Cairo, Nairobi, and finally Lusaka.

He imagined that he might just as well be on his way to a distant constellation, the Lyre or one of the faintly glowing fixed stars in Orion’s Belt.

All he knew about Lusaka was that the city was named after an African elephant hunter.

My objective is as unreasonable as it is ridiculous, he thought. Who in the world but me is on his way to a strange mission station deep in the bush of northwest Zambia, far beyond the roads to Kinshasa and Chingola? Who travels to Africa with a fleeting impulse as his only carry-on luggage? I have no detailed itinerary, nobody accompanied me to the airport, nobody will be meeting me. This journey I am about to begin is merely an escape...

He remembers that this is what he thought, and then there are only the vague shadows of memory. The way he sat in the plane holding on to himself with a cramplike grip. The vibrating fuselage, the whine of the jet engines, the machine gathering speed.

With a slight bow Hans Olofson made the climb into the air.

Twenty-seven hours later, precisely according to the schedule, he landed at Lusaka International Airport.

Naturally there was no one there to meet him.

Chapter Four

There is nothing remarkable about Hans Olofson’s first encounter with the African continent, nothing unusual. He is the European visitor, the white man with his pride and his fear, who defends himself against what is foreign by instantly condemning it.

At the airport, disorder and chaos reign: incredibly complicated entry documents to fill out, badly spelled instructions, African immigration officers who seem unfazed by anything as mundane as time or organisation. Hans Olofson stands in a queue for a long time, only to be brusquely shunted to another queue when he finally reaches the brown counter on which black ants are hauling invisible particles of food. He realises that he has joined the queue intended for returning residents, those with Zambian passports or residence permits. Sweat pours out, strange foreign smells fill his nose, and the stamp he finally obtains in his passport is upside down, and he sees that the date of his arrival is wrong. He is handed a new form by an unbelievably beautiful African woman, brushes her hand quickly, and then truthfully fills in the amount of foreign cash he is bringing in.

At customs there is seemingly insurmountable chaos; suitcases are tossed off noisy carts pushed along by excited Africans. Among the pile of cardboard boxes he finally finds his suitcase, half squashed, and when he bends down to pull it out someone bumps into him and sends him sprawling. When he turns around there is no one apologising, no one seems to have noticed that he fell, only a billowing mass of people pushing towards the customs agents who are angrily ordering everyone to open their bags. He is sucked into this human surge, shoved back and forth like a pawn in some game, and then suddenly all the customs agents vanish and no one asks him to open his battered suitcase. A soldier with a submachine gun and a frayed uniform scratches his forehead with the muzzle of his weapon, and Olofson sees that he is hardly more than seventeen. A creaky swinging door opens and he steps out on to African soil in earnest. But there is no time for reflection; porters grab at his suitcase and his arms, taxi drivers yell out offers of their services. He is dragged off to an indescribably dilapidated car on which someone has painted the word TAXI on one of the doors in sloppy, garish letters. His bag is stuffed into a baggage compartment which already contains two hens with their feet tied together, and the boot lid is held in place by an ingeniously bound steel wire. He tumbles into a back seat with no springs at all, so that it feels as if he is sitting right on the floor. A leaky plastic container of petrol is leaning against one knee, and when the taxi driver climbs into the driver’s seat with a burning cigarette in his mouth, Olofson for the first time begins to hate Africa.

This car will never start, he thinks in desperation. Before we even get out of the airport it will explode... He watches the driver, who can’t be more than fifteen years old, join two loose wires next to the steering wheel; the engine responds reluctantly, and the driver turns to him with a smile and asks where he wants to go.

Home, he wants to answer. Or at least away, away from this continent that makes him feel totally helpless, that has ripped from him all the survival tools he had acquired during his previous life...

His thoughts are interrupted by a hand groping at his face, stuck in through the window which has no glass in it. He gives a start, turns around, and looks straight into two dead eyes, a blind woman who is feeling his face with her hand and wants money.

The driver shouts something in a language that Olofson doesn’t understand, the woman replies by starting to screech and wail, and Olofson sits on the floor of the car unable to do a thing. With a screech of tyres the driver leaves the begging woman behind, and Olofson hears himself yelling that he wants to be taken to a hotel in the city.

‘But not too expensive!’ he shouts.

He never hears the driver’s reply. A bus with stinking exhaust and a violently racing engine squeezes past and drowns out the driver’s voice.

His shirt is sticky with sweat, his back already aches from the uncomfortable sitting position, and he thinks he should have settled on the price before he let himself be forced into the car.

The incredibly hot air, filled with mysterious smells, blows into his face. A landscape drenched with sun as if it were an overexposed photograph rushes past his eyes.

I’ll never survive this, he thinks. I’m going to be killed in a car crash before I’ve even understood that I’m really in Africa. As if he had unconsciously made a prophecy, the car loses one of its front wheels at that instant and careens off the road into a ditch. Olofson strikes his head against the steel edge of the front seat and then heaves himself out of the car, afraid that it’s going to explode.

The driver gives him a surprised look and then squats down in front of the car and looks at the axle, which is bereft and gaping. From the roof of the car he then takes a spare tyre, patched and completely bald. Olofson leans over the red dirt and watches the driver put on the spare tyre as if in slow motion. Ants are crawling on his legs and the sun is so sharp that the world turns white before his eyes.

In order to hold on, regain an inner balance, he searches for something he can recognise. Something that reminds him of Sweden and the life he is used to. But he finds nothing. Only when he closes his eyes are the foreign African odours mixed with vague memories.

The spare tyre is put on and the journey continues. With wobbly movements of the steering wheel the driver pilots the car towards Lusaka, which will be the next stage in the nightmare that Olofson’s first meeting with African soil has become. The city is a clamorous chaos of broken-down cars, swerving cyclists, and peddlers who seem to have laid out their wares in the middle of the street. There’s a stench of oil and exhaust, and at a traffic light Olofson’s taxi stops next to a lorry piled high with flayed animal carcasses. Black and green flies instantly swarm into the taxi, and Olofson wonders if he will ever find a hotel room, a door to close behind him.

But finally there is a hotel. The taxi comes to a stop under blooming jacaranda trees; an African in an outgrown, frayed uniform succeeds in prising open the door and helping Olofson to his feet. He pays the driver what he asks, even though he realises the amount is preposterous. Inside he has to wait for a long time at the front desk before they can work out whether there are any vacant rooms. He fills out an endless registration form and thinks that he’d better learn his passport number by heart, since this is already the fourth time he has had to repeat it. He keeps his suitcase between his legs, certain that thieves are lurking everywhere. Then he waits for half an hour in a queue to exchange money, and fills out another form with the feeling that he has seen it before.

A rickety lift transports him upwards and a porter in worn-out shoes carries his suitcase. Room 212 at the Ridgeway Hotel at last becomes his first breathing space on this new continent, and in impotent rebellion he strips off his clothes and crawls naked between the sheets.

The world traveller, he thinks. Nothing but a scared rabbit.

There’s a knock at the door and he jumps up as if he had committed a crime by getting into bed. He wraps the bedspread around him and opens the door.

An old, shrunken African woman in a cleaning smock asks if he has any laundry to be done. He shakes his head, replies with exaggerated politeness, and suddenly realises he has no idea how he is expected to behave towards an African.

He lies down in bed again after drawing the curtains. An air-conditioning unit rattles and all of a sudden he begins to sneeze.

My wet socks in Sweden, he thinks. The wetness I brought with me. I’m nothing but an endless string of weaknesses. Anxiety is hereditary in my life. From the snowstorm a figure has emerged, someone who is continually threatened by his lack of inner direction.

In order to shake off his dejection he takes action, picking up the phone to call Room Service. An incomprehensible voice answers just as he’s about to give up. He orders tea and chicken sandwiches. The mumbled voice repeats his order and says it will be brought to his room at once.

After an almost two-hour wait, a waiter appears at his door with a tray. During these two hours he was incapable of doing anything but waiting — with a crushing sense of being someone who does not exist, not even to the person who takes the Room Service orders.

Hans Olofson sees that the waiter has a pair of shoes that are almost falling apart. One heel is missing, and the sole of the other is gaping like a fish gill. Unsure how much to tip, he gives far too much, and the waiter gives him a quizzical look before vanishing silently from the room.

After the meal he takes a nap, and when he awakes it is already evening. He opens the window and looks out into the darkness, surprised that the heat is just as intense as it was that morning, although the white sun is no longer visible.

A few street lamps cast a faint light. Black shadows flit past, a laugh comes from an invisible throat in a car park just below his window.

He looks at the clothes in his suitcase, uncertain what would be proper for the dining room of an African hotel. Without actually choosing, he gets dressed and then hides half of his money in a hole in the cement behind the toilet bowl.

In the bar he sees to his surprise that almost all the guests are white, surrounded by black waiters, all wearing bad shoes. He sits down at a solitary table, sinks down into a chair that reminds him of the seat in the taxi, and is at once surrounded by dark waiters waiting for his order.

‘Gin and tonic,’ he says politely.

One of the waiters replies in a worried voice that there isn’t any tonic.

‘Is there anything else you can mix it with?’ asks Olofson.

‘We have orange juice,’ says the waiter.

‘That will be fine,’ says Olofson.

‘Unfortunately there is no gin,’ says the waiter.

Olofson can feel himself starting to sweat. ‘What do you have then?’ he asks patiently.

‘They don’t have anything,’ a voice replies from a nearby table, and Olofson turns to see a bloated man with a red face, dressed in a worn khaki suit.

‘The beer ran out a week ago,’ the man continues. ‘Today there is cognac and sherry. For a couple of hours yet. Then that’ll be gone too. Rumour has it that there may be whisky tomorrow. Who knows?’

The man finishes his speech by giving the waiter a dirty look and then leaning back in his chair.

Olofson orders cognac. He has the feeling that Africa is a place where everything is just about to run out.

By his third glass of cognac an African woman suddenly sits down in the chair next to him and gives him an inviting smile.

‘Company?’ she asks.

He is flattered, although he realises that the woman is a prostitute. But she arrived too early, he thinks. I’m not ready yet. He shakes his head.

‘No thanks. Not tonight.’

Unfazed and still smiling, she gazes at him.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Perhaps,’ he says. ‘But I may be leaving tomorrow.’

The woman gets up and disappears in the darkness by the bar.

‘Whores,’ says the man at the next table, who seems to be watching over Olofson like a guardian angel. ‘They’re cheap here. But they’re better at the other hotels.’

‘I see,’ replies Olofson politely.

‘Here they’re either too old or too young,’ the man goes on. ‘There was a better arrangement before.’

Olofson never finds out what the prior arrangement consisted of, since the man again breaks off the conversation, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes.

In the restaurant he is surrounded by new waiters, and he sees that they too all have worn-out shoes. One waiter who sets a carafe of water on his table has no shoes at all, and Olofson stares at his bare feet.

After much hesitation he orders beef. Just as the food is set on the table he feels an attack of severe diarrhoea coming on. One of the waiters notices that he has put down his fork.

‘It doesn’t taste good?’ he asks anxiously.

‘I’m sure it tastes excellent,’ says Olofson. ‘It’s just that my stomach is acting up.’

Helplessly he sees the waiters flocking around his table.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the food,’ he says. ‘It’s just my stomach.’ Then he can’t hold out any longer. Astonished guests watch his hasty flight from the table, and he fears he won’t make it to his room in time.

Outside the lift he sees to his surprise that the woman who had previously offered him her company is leaving the hotel with the bloated man in the khaki suit who claimed that the prostitutes weren’t any good at this hotel.

In the lift he shits his pants. A terrible stench begins to spread and the shit runs down his legs. With infinite slowness the lift takes him to his floor. As he stumbles down the corridor he hears a man laughing behind a closed door.

In the bathroom he studies his wretchedness. Then he lies down in his bed and thinks that the assignment he has given himself is either impossible or meaningless. What was he thinking?

In his wallet he has the smudged address of a mission station on the upper reaches of the Kafue. How he’s going to get there he has no idea. He checked that there was a train to Copperbelt before he left. But from there, another 270 kilometres straight out into a pathless, desiccated landscape?

At the library back in his home town he had read about the country where he now found himself. Large parts of it are inaccessible during the rainy season. But when is the rainy season?

As usual, I’m ill-equipped, he thinks. My preparation was cursory, just throwing a few things into a suitcase. Only when it’s too late do I try to make a plan.

I wanted to see the mission station that Janine didn’t have a chance to visit before she died. I took over her dream instead of creating my own...

Hans Olofson falls asleep, sleeps restlessly, and rises at dawn. Out of the hotel window he sees the sun rise like a huge ball of fire over the horizon. Black shadows appear on the street below him. The fragrance of the jacaranda trees blends with the stifling smoke of the charcoal fires. Women with bulging bundles on their heads and children tied on to their backs walk towards goals he cannot fathom.

Without consciously making a decision, he vows to continue, towards Mutshatsha, towards the goal that Janine never reached...

Chapter Five

When Hans Olofson awakes in the cold winter morning, and his father lies collapsed over the kitchen table, asleep after a long night’s struggle with his invisible demons, he knows that he is not completely alone in the world. He has a confidant, a warrior with whose help he torments the life out of the Noseless One who lives in Ulvkälla, a cluster of shacks on the south bank of the river. The two of them go searching for the adventure that must exist even in this frozen community.

The wooden house where Hans’s accomplice lives has a mighty fir tree. Fenced in by stone posts and well-polished steel wire stands the district court and courthouse, a white building with a columned portico and wide double doors. The ground floor is the courtroom, and the judge lives upstairs. For over a year the building stood empty, after old Judge Turesson died. Then one day a fully packed Chevrolet drove into the courtyard of the courthouse, and the town peeked expectantly through its curtains. From the gleaming car poured the family of the new district judge. One of the children running around in the yard was named Sture. He became Hans Olofson’s friend.

One afternoon, when Hans is wandering aimlessly down by the river, he sees a boy he doesn’t know sitting on one of his special boulders, a look-out over the steel bridge and the south bank of the river. He hides behind a bush and watches the interloper, who seems to be busy fishing.

The boy is the son of the new judge. Pleased, he summons up all the contempt he can muster. Only an idiot or a stranger from another parish would think it possible to catch fish in the river at this time of year.

Von Croona. That’s the family’s name. A noble name, he has heard. A family, a name. Not ordinary, like Olofson. The new judge has ancestors reaching back into the mists of historical battlefields.

Hans decides that because of this the judge’s son must be a really unpleasant devil. He steps out of the bushes and shows himself.

The boy on the rock regards him with curiosity.

‘Are there any fish here?’ he asks.

Hans shakes his head and decides he ought to hit him. Chase him away from his private rock. But he stops short, because the nobleman is looking him straight in the eye, with absolutely no sign of embarrassment. He reels in his fishing line, pulls the piece of worm off the hook, and stands up.

‘Are you the one who lives in the wooden house?’ he asks, and Hans nods.

And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they fall in together along the path. Hans leads the way, and the nobleman follows a few steps behind. Hans directs and points out things; he knows the paths, the ditches, the rocks. Finally they reach the pontoon bridge that leads over to the People’s Park and then take a short cut across the common until they come to Kyrkogatan. Outside Leander Nilsson’s bakery they stop to watch two dogs mating. At the water tower Hans shows him the spot where Rudin the madman set fire to himself a few years earlier, in protest at Head Physician Torstenson’s refusal to admit him to the hospital for his stomach troubles.

With undisguised pride Hans tries to recount the most hairraising events that he knows in the town’s history. Rudin wasn’t the only madman.

He directs their steps towards the church and points out the hollow space in the masonry of the south wall. As recently as the previous year one of the trusted deacons, in a fit of acute crisis of faith, tried to demolish the church one late January evening. With a pick and sledgehammer he resolutely set to work on the thick wall. The commotion naturally prompted the police to be called in, and Constable Bergstrand was forced to button up his winter coat and venture out into the snowstorm to arrest the man.

Hans tells the story and the nobleman listens.

From that day on a friendship grows between this ill-matched pair, the nobleman and the son of a woodcutter. Together they surmount the vast differences between them. Not all of them, of course; there is always a no-man’s-land they can never enter together, but they grow as close to each other as possible.

Sture has his own room up in the attic of the courthouse. A large, bright room, with an abundance of curious equipment, maps, Meccano constructions, and chemicals. There are no toys, only two model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.

Sture points to a picture hanging on the wall. Hans sees a bearded man who reminds him of one of the portraits of the old pastors that hang in the church. But Sture explains that this is Leonardo, and he wants to be just like him someday. Inventing new things, creating what people never even imagined they needed...

Hans listens without fully understanding. But he senses the passion in what he hears, and thinks he recognises in it his own obsessive dream of getting the miserable wooden house to cut its moorings and float away down the river towards the sea he has never yet seen.

In this attic room they act out their mysterious games. Sture seldom visits Hans at home. The stuffy smell of elkhounds and wet woollens bothers him. He says nothing of this to Hans. Sture has been brought up not to offend anyone unnecessarily; he knows where he belongs and he’s glad he doesn’t have to live in Hans’s world.

Early that first summer they begin to go on nightly excursions. A ladder raised towards the attic window enables Sture to escape without anyone hearing him, and Hans bribes the elkhounds with bones he has saved and sneaks out the door. In the summer night they stroll through the sleeping town, investing all their pride in never being discovered. Cautious shadows in the beginning, they develop a less and less restrained audacity. They slip through hedges and broken fences, listen at open windows, climb up on each other’s shoulders and press their faces against the windows where the few night-time lamps in the town are still burning. They see drunken men in filthy underwear sleeping in musty flats; on one golden but sadly never repeated occasion they witness a railway worker cavorting with Oscaria the shoe salesgirl in her bed.

They rule the deserted streets and courtyards.

One night in July they commit a ritual break-in. They enter the bicycle shop near the chemist’s, the Monarch Specialist, and move some bicycles around in the display window. Then they hastily leave the shop without taking anything. It’s the break-in itself that tempts them, pulling off a bewildering mystery. Wiberg the bicycle dealer will never figure out what happened.

But they steal things too, of course. One night, from an unlocked car outside the Tourist Hotel, they snatch an unopened bottle of booze and ramble through their first bout of drunkenness, sitting on the boulder down by the river.

They follow each other, first one leading, then the other. They never fight, but they don’t share all their secrets. For Hans it’s a constant source of humiliation that Sture has so much money. When the feeling of subordination grows too strong, Hans decides that his own father is a good-for-nothing who never had enough sense to secure himself a real income.

For Sture the secret is the reverse. In Hans he sees a capable warrior, but he’s also thankful that he doesn’t have to be him.

Perhaps they both have an inkling that their friendship is an impossibility. How long can the camaraderie be stretched before it snaps? The abyss is there, they both sense how close it is, but neither wants to confront the catastrophe.

A streak of malice develops in their friendship. Where it comes from neither of them knows; suddenly it’s just there. And it’s towards the Noseless One in Ulvkälla that they direct their dark weapons.

In her youth the Noseless One was struck by a thyroid fever which necessitated an operation on her nose. But the accident and emergency surgeon at the time, Dr Stierna, was having a bad day. The woman’s nose disappeared completely under his knife and fumbling fingers, and she had to return home with a hole between her eyes. She was seventeen at the time and twice tried to drown herself, but both times she floated to shore. She lived alone with her mother, a seamstress, who died less than a year after the disastrous operation.

If Pastor Harry Persson of the Free Church, nicknamed Hurrapelle, hadn’t taken pity on her, she would certainly have succeeded in taking her own life. But Hurrapelle brought her to the wooden pews in the Baptist church, which lay between the town’s two dominant dens of iniquity, the beer café and the People’s Hall. At the church she was surrounded by a community she hadn’t known existed. In the congregation there were two elderly nurses who weren’t scared off by the Noseless One and her hole between the eyes, into which she stuck a handkerchief. They had served as missionaries in Africa for many years, mostly in the basin of the Belgian Congo, and there they experienced horrors far worse than a missing nose. They bore with them the memories of bodies rotted with leprosy and the grotesquely swollen scrotums of elephantiasis. For them the Noseless One was a grateful reminder that Christian mercy could work wonders even in such a godless land as Sweden.

Hurrapelle sent the Noseless One out on endless door-to-door rounds with the congregation’s magazines in her hand, and no one refused to buy what she had to sell. Soon she had become a goldmine for Hurrapelle, and within six months he could even afford to trade in his rusty old Vauxhall on a brand-new Ford.

The Noseless One lived in a secluded house in Ulvkälla. One night Sture and Hans stood outside her darkened window. They listened in silence before they went home across the river bridge.

The next night they returned and nailed a dead rat to her front door. Her deformity led them to torment her for a few intense weeks that summer.

One night they threw an anthill they had dug up through her open kitchen window. Another night they splashed varnish all over her currant bushes and finished by putting a crow with its head cut off in her letterbox, along with some pages torn out of a well-thumbed and sticky issue of Cocktail that they had found in a dustbin. Two nights later they came back, this time equipped with a pair of Nyman, the courthouse caretaker’s, hedge clippers. Their plan was to butcher her flowers.

While Hans stood watch by the corner of the house, Sture attacked one of the well-tended flower beds. Then the front door opened and the Noseless One stood there in a light-coloured bathrobe and asked them, quite calmly, without being sad or angry, why they were doing these things.

They had an escape route planned. But instead of disappearing like two hares in a hunt they just stood there as though struck by a sight they couldn’t escape.

An angel, thinks Hans Olofson much later, many years after vanishing into the tropical night of Africa. He remembers her like an angel descended from heaven, now that she is dead and he has set out on the journey to fulfil her dream that he has taken as his own.

In the summer night the Noseless One stands in the doorway, her white bathrobe gleaming in the early grey light of dawn. She waits for their answer, which never comes.

Then she moves aside and asks them to come in. Her gesture is not to be refused. With bowed heads they pad past her, into her freshly scrubbed kitchen. Hans recognises at once the odour of soap, from his father’s furious scrubbing, and he has a fleeting thought that maybe the Noseless One also scrubs her way through sleepless, haunted nights.

Her kindness makes them weak, defenceless. If fire and fuming sulphur had spewed out of the hole where her nose used to be, they could have dealt with the situation more easily. A dragon can be more easily conquered than an angel.

The smell of soap is mixed with the scent of bird cherry trees from outside her open kitchen window. A clock ticks softly on the wall. The marauders crouch down with their gaze fixed firmly on the linoleum. There in the kitchen, it is as quiet as if a prayer service were in progress. And perhaps the Noseless One is silently appealing to Hurrapelle’s God to counsel her on how she can make the two shipwrecked vandals explain why one morning she came out to a kitchen crawling with angry ants.

In the minds of the two warrior brothers there is a great emptiness. Their thoughts are locked like frozen gears. What is there to explain? Their impetuous desire to torment her has no tangible cause. The roots of evil grow in the dark subterranean soil that can scarcely be viewed, let alone explained.

They crouch in the kitchen of the Noseless One, and after they sit in silence long enough, she lets them go. To the end she holds them there with her kindness, and she asks them to come back when they think they can explain their actions.

The meeting with the Noseless One becomes a turning point. They return to her kitchen often, and slowly a great intimacy develops among the three. That year Hans turns thirteen and Sture fifteen. They are always welcome at her house. As if by silent agreement, they don’t talk about the crow with its throat cut or the crawling ants. A wordless apology is given, forgiveness is received, and life turns the other cheek.

Their first discovery is that the Noseless One has a name. It isn’t just any old name, either; it’s Janine, a name that emanates a foreign, mysterious fragrance.

She has a name, a voice, a body. She hasn’t yet turned thirty. She is still young. They begin to sense the vague shimmer of beauty when they succeed in looking past and beyond the gaping hole below her eyes. They sense a heartbeat and lively thoughts, desires and dreams. And as if it were the most natural thing in the world she pilots them through her life story, lets them accompany her to the appalling moment when she realises that the surgeon has carved off her entire nose, follow her twice into the black water of the river and feel the ropes from the weights snap just at the instant her lungs are about to burst. They follow her like invisible shadows to Hurrapelle’s penitent bench, listen to the mysterious embrace of salvation, and finally stand next to her when she discovers the ants crawling across the kitchen floor.

That year a strange love blooms among those three. A wildflower in the house just south of the river...

Chapter Six

On a dirty map Hans Olofson puts his finger on the name Mutshatsha.

‘How do I get there?’ he asks.

It is his second morning in Africa, his stomach is unsettled, and the sweat is running down inside his shirt.

He is standing at the front desk of the Ridgeway Hotel. Behind the desk is an elderly African with white hair and tired eyes. His shirt collar is frayed and his uniform unwashed. Olofson can’t resist the temptation of leaning over the counter to see what the man has on his feet.

On the way down in the lift he’d thought, if the condition of the African continent is the same as the shoes of its inhabitants, the future is already over and all is irretrievably lost. He senses a vague unrest growing inside him from all the worn-out shoes he has seen.

The old man is barefoot. ‘Maybe there’s a bus,’ he says. ‘Maybe a lorry. Sooner or later a car will come by, I’m sure.’

‘How do I find the bus?’ asks Olofson.

‘You stand by the side of the road.’

‘At a bus stop?’

‘If there is a bus stop. Sometimes there is. But usually not.’

Olofson realises that the vague answer is the most detailed one he will get. He senses something tentative, ephemeral in the lives of the blacks, so distant and foreign from the world he comes from.

I’m afraid, he thinks. Africa scares me, with its heat, its odours, its people with bad shoes. I’m much too visible here. My skin colour shines as if I were a burning candle in the dark. If I leave the hotel I’ll be swallowed up, vanish without leaving a trace...

The train to Kitwe is supposed to depart in the evening. Olofson spends the day in his room. He stands at the window for long stretches. He sees a man in ragged clothes cutting grass around a big wooden cross with a long, broad-bladed knife. People pass by with shapeless bundles on their heads.

At seven in the evening he leaves his room and has to pay for the night he won’t be spending in it. When he emerges from the hotel screaming taxi drivers fall upon him.

Why do they make such a damned racket? he thinks, and the first wave of contempt washes over him.

He walks towards the car that seems the least dilapidated and puts his suitcase in the back seat with him. He has hidden his money in his shoes and underwear. When he sits down in the back seat he immediately regrets his choice of hiding places. The banknotes are sticky and cling to his body.

At the railway station there is, if possible, even greater chaos than at the airport. The taxi lets him off in the midst of a surging sea of humanity, bundles of clothes, chickens and goats, water sellers, fires, and rusted cars. The station is almost completely dark. What few lightbulbs there are have burned out or have been stolen.

He barely manages to pay the taxi driver before he is surrounded by filthy children offering their services as porters or begging for money. Without knowing what direction he should take, he hurries off, his feet already hurting from the wads of notes. He discovers a gaping hole in a wall above which a rickety sign says Ticket Counter. The waiting room is packed with people, it 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 everdiminishing 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, freedom meant that nobody had to work any more. No one gave orders, no one considered they might have to do something that wasn’t demanded of them. Now the country survives on its income from copper mining. But what happens when prices drop on the world market? No investment has been made in any alternatives. This is an agricultural country. It could be one of the world’s best, since the soil is fertile and there is water available. But no efforts are being made. The Africans have grasped nothing, learned nothing. When the British flag was struck and they raised their own, it was the beginning of a funeral procession that is still going on.’

‘I know almost nothing about Africa,’ says Olofson. ‘What little I do know I’ve already begun to doubt. And I’ve only been here two days.’

They give him an inquisitive look and he suddenly wishes he could have offered a different reply.

‘I’m supposed to visit a mission station in Mutshatsha,’ he says. ‘But I don’t really know how to get there.’

To his surprise, the Mastertons immediately take up the question of how he can complete his expedition. He quickly surmises that perhaps he has presented a problem that can be solved, in contrast to the one Werner Masterton has just laid out. Perhaps black problems have to be solved by the blacks, and the whites’ problems by the whites?

‘We have some friends in Kalulushi,’ says Werner. ‘I’ll take you there in my car. They can help you to continue from there.’

‘That’s too much to ask,’ replies Olofson.

‘That’s the way it is,’ says Ruth. ‘If the mzunguz don’t help each other, no one will. Do you think that any of the blacks climbing on the roof of this train car would help you? If they could, they’d steal your trousers right off you.’

Ruth lays out a meal from her baggage and invites Hans to join them.

‘Didn’t you even bring water with you?’ she asks. ‘The train could be a day late. There’s always something that breaks down, something missing, something they forgot.’

‘I thought there would be water on the train.’

‘It’s so filthy that not even a munto will drink it,’ says Werner, spitting into the darkness. ‘This would be a good country to live in if it weren’t for the blacks.’

Olofson decides that all whites in Africa probably espouse racist views just to survive. But is that true of missionaries too?

‘Isn’t there any conductor coming?’ he asks, to avoid responding to this last remark.

‘There may not be one,’ replies Ruth. ‘He may have missed his train. Or else some distant relative died and he went to the funeral without letting anyone know. The Africans spend a great deal of their lives going to and from funerals. But maybe he will come. Nothing is impossible.’

These people are the remnants of something utterly lost, thinks Olofson. Colonialism is completely buried today, with the exception of South Africa and the Portuguese colonies. But the people remain. A historical epoch always leaves behind a handful of people for the following period. They keep looking backwards, dreaming, aggrieved. They look at their empty hands and wonder where the instruments of power have gone. Then they discover these instruments in the hands of the people they previously only spoke to when giving out orders and reprimands. They live in the Epoch of Mortification, in the twilight land of ruin. The whites in Africa are a wandering remnant of a people that no one wants to think about. They have lost their foundation, what they thought was permanent for all eternity...

One question remains obvious. ‘So things were better before?’

‘What answer can we give to that?’ says Ruth, looking at her husband.

‘Answer with the truth,’ says Werner.

A weak, flickering lamp casts the compartment in darkness. Hans sees a lampshade covered with dead insects. Werner follows his gaze.

‘For a lampshade like that a cleaning woman would have been given the 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 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 person snoring. He traces the sound to the roof of the train car.

In a sudden flare-up of rage, he gives himself two alternatives: either continue his law studies or return to the frozen landscape of his childhood.

The journey to Africa, to the mission station in Mutshatsha, will fade away. In every person’s life there are ill-considered actions, trips that never needed to be taken. In two weeks he will return to Sweden and leave the Southern Cross behind. The parentheses will then be closed.

Suddenly Werner Masterton is standing by his side and looking out into the darkness.

‘They’re selling diesel fuel,’ he says. ‘I just hope they don’t miscalculate, so we wind up stuck here. Within a year the wandering hunter ants will have transformed this train into a deformed steel skeleton...’

After an hour the train jolts to a start.

Later they stop for an inexplicably long time at Kapiri Mposhi. In the dawn light Olofson falls asleep in his corner. The conductor never appears. Just as the morning’s heat breaks through, the train screeches into Kitwe.

‘Come with us,’ says Ruth. ‘Then we’ll drive you to Kalulushi.’

Chapter Seven

One day Janine teaches them to dance.

The rest of the town expects her to whine and complain, but she chooses to go in a completely different direction. In music she sees her salvation. She decides that the affliction so deeply incised in her body will be transformed into music. In Hamrin’s music shop she purchases a slide trombone and begins to practise daily. Hurrapelle tries for the longest time to persuade her to choose a more pleasing instrument, like the guitar, mandolin, or possibly a small bass drum. But she persists, forgoing the possible joy of joining in the concerts of the Free Church, and practises by herself in her house by the river. She buys a Dux gramophone and searches often and eagerly through the record selection at the music shop. She is entranced by jazz, in which the trombone often has a prominent role. She listens, plays along, and she learns. On dark winter evenings, when the door-knocking with her magazines is over for the day, and the congregation doesn’t have a prayer meeting or other fellowship, she loses herself in her music. ‘Some of These Days’, ‘Creole Love Call’, and not least ‘A Night in Tunisia’ flow from her trombone.

She plays for Sture and Hans. Astonished, they watch her the first time, barefoot on the kitchen floor, with the gramophone spinning in the background and the brass instrument pressed to her lips. Sometimes she deviates from the melody, but usually the notes are woven together with the orchestra that is pressed into the grooves of the record.

Janine with her trombone...

Janine with her noseless face and her incredible gesture of inviting them into her house instead of calling the police, transforms that year, 1957, into a fairy tale they doubt they will ever experience again.

For Sture the move from the cathedral and residence in a city in Småland to this market town had seemed a nightmare. In a desolate and snowed-in Norrland he would go under, he was convinced of that. But he found a warrior and together they found Janine...

Hans creates a huge dream for himself which he can crawl inside like a voluminous overcoat. He realises at once that he loves her; in his dreams he furnishes her with a nose and transforms her into his vicarious mother.

Even though Janine is their common property, separate walls close tightly around their experiences. One cannot share everything; secrets must be carefully kept to oneself. A piece of crucial wisdom on life’s arduous path is to learn which dreams can be shared and which must be kept inside one’s own secret rooms.

Janine watches, listens and senses. She sees Sture’s tendency towards arrogance and bullying, she senses Hans’s longing for his absent mother. She sees the chasms that exist there, the huge differences. But one evening she teaches them to dance.

Kringström’s orchestra, which had played at every Saturday night dance since 1943, has testily accepted the challenge emanating from the increasingly discontented youth and has reluctantly begun to alter its repertoire. One Saturday in early spring they surprise everyone, not least themselves, by striking up a tune that might be related to the new music pouring in from the USA.

On this very evening Sture and Hans are hanging around outside the People’s Hall. Impatiently they are waiting until they’re big enough to buy their own tickets and step on to the crowded dance floor. The music comes through the walls, and Sture decides it’s time they learned how to dance.

Later that evening, when they are frozen and stiff, they wander down by the river bridge, race each other and yell underneath the iron span, and they don’t stop until they are standing outside Janine’s door. Music is coming through the walls. She’s playing tonight...

When she realises that they want to learn to dance, she is ready at once to teach them. Before the surgeon deformed her face, she had danced quite often. But she has not moved across a dance floor since. With a firm grip around the waist and simple repeated steps to the left and right, she leads them into the rhythmic stamping of the waltz and foxtrot. She keeps pressing them to her, one after the other, and sweeps around on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Whoever is not dancing runs the gramophone, and soon the windows are fogged up from their efforts to follow and keep track of the steps.

From a kitchen cabinet she pulls out a bottle of homemade booze. When they ask where she got hold of it she just laughs. She offers each of them only a little glass, but keeps on drinking until she gets drunk. She lights a cigar and blows smoke out her nose hole, while claiming to be the world’s only female locomotive. She tells them that sometimes she imagines how she will leave Hurrapelle’s penitent bench and vanish into the world of carnival sideshows. She will never be a prima donna on the slack wire, but perhaps a freak who can elicit horror from the crowd. Exhibiting deformed people for money is a tradition that has been lost in the mists of time. She tells them about the Laughing Kid, who had the corners of his mouth sliced open to his ears and was then sold to a carnival troupe and made his owners rich.

From a kitchen drawer she takes out a red clown nose which she fastens with an elastic string around her head, and dumbstruck they watch this woman who radiates so many contradictory powers. What is hardest to understand but also most disturbing is how Janine can live this double life: the barefoot dance on the kitchen floor, the booze in the cupboard; the hard pews in Hurrapelle’s church.

But her salvation is no fabrication. She has her God securely placed in her heart. Without the fellowship that the congregation once extended to her she would no longer be alive. This is not to say that she is attracted to or professes all the beliefs of the congregation. Raising money to send missionaries to distant Bantu tribes in Africa she considers not only meaningless but a serious violation of the decree that all faith must be voluntary. When the women of the congregation meet in sewing circles for the production of table runners to sell at fairs, she stays home and sews her own clothes. She is a restless element in the congregation’s world, but as long as she can single-handedly collect the majority of its annual income by knocking on doors, she does not hesitate to indulge her freedoms. Hurrapelle makes regular attempts to coax her into the sewing circle, but she refuses. Since he’s afraid she might begin to waver in her faith, or even worse, move her God to a competing congregation, he doesn’t press the issue. When the members of the congregation complain about her self-indulgent behaviour, he deals sternly with the criticism.

‘The least of my children,’ he says. ‘Think of her suffering. Think how much good she is doing for our congregation...’

The evenings with Janine during that year become an unbroken series of peculiar encounters. Against a background of ‘Some of These Days’ she holds her hand over the two vandals who in the malevolence of ignorance once decided to torment the life out of her.

Both of them, each in his own way, find in her something of the mystery they had previously sought in vain in the town. The house by the south bank of the river becomes a journey out into the world...

On the evening she starts teaching them to dance, they experience for the first time the exciting sensation of being close to a warm, sweaty female body.

And the thought occurs to her — maybe not just at that moment, but later — that she would like to take off her clothes and stand stark naked before them, to be seen just once, even if it’s only by two skinny, half-grown boys.

At night come the dark powers that are never permitted to surface and burn. To cry out her distress and follow Hurrapelle’s admonition always to surrender to God, who keeps His ear in constant readiness; that would be impossible. There the religious thread breaks, and then she has no one but herself to cling to. The greatest of all the sorrows she has to bear is that she has never had the chance to sink into an embrace, even in the dirty back seat of a car parked on a remote logging road.

But she refuses to complain. She has her trombone. In the dawn of winter mornings she stands in her kitchen and plays ‘Creole Love Call’.

And the boys who brought the sack of ants — she always lets them in. When she teaches them to dance she feels happy that she could overcome their childish shyness...

During the late winter and early spring of 1957, Sture and Hans spend many evenings at her house. They often don’t go home until the winter night has driven its frozen ship towards midnight.

Spring arrives again. One day the unassuming but eagerly awaited yellow crowns of the coltsfoot begin to glow in a dirty ditch. Hurrapelle stands one morning in the back room of the Baptist church and searches in a cardboard box for handbills announcing the Spring Meeting. Soon it will be time for even the sermon placards to change their skin.

But spring is deceptive, because its beauty barely conceals the fact that death is hiding in the eye of the coltsfoot blossom.

For Sture and Hans, death is an invisible insect that eats away at life and every event. Long evenings they sit on the boulder by the river or in Janine’s kitchen and ponder how death actually ought to be understood and described. Sture suggests that death ought to be like Jönsson, the restaurant owner, who stands on the doorstep of the Grand Hotel and welcomes his guests in a black, greasy tuxedo. How easily he could then drip poison into the black soup or the sauce on the roast beef. He would lurk by the swinging doors to the kitchen and the tablecloths would be transformed into stained shrouds...

For Hans Olofson, death is much too complicated to be compared to a restaurant owner. Thinking of death as a person of flesh and blood, with a hat and coat and sniffling nose, is too simple. If death had a face, clothes and shoes, it wouldn’t be any harder to conquer than one of the scarecrows that Under the horse dealer uses to protect his berry bushes. Death is more vague, a cool breeze that suddenly wafts across the river without rippling the water. He won’t come any closer than that to death this spring, until the great catastrophe occurs and death blows its shrillest trumpet.

And yet it’s something he will always remember. Much later, when the African night closes in on him, and his childhood is just as distant as the land he now inhabits, he remembers what they talked about, on the boulder by the river or in Janine’s kitchen. As if in a fleeting dream, he remembers the year when Janine taught them to dance and they stood in the darkness outside her house and heard her playing ‘A Night in Tunisia’...

Chapter Eight

In Kitwe a laughing African comes running to meet them.

Hans Olofson sees that he has trainers on his feet, with no holes, and the heels have not been cut off.

‘This is Robert,’ says Ruth. ‘Our chauffeur. The only one on the farm we can count on.’

‘How many employees do you have?’ asks Olofson.

‘Two hundred and eighty,’ replies Ruth.

Olofson crawls into the back seat of a Jeep that seems much the worse for wear.

‘You have your passport, don’t you?’ asks Werner. ‘We’ll be going through several checkpoints.’

‘What are they looking for?’ Olofson asks.

‘Smuggled goods headed for Zaire,’ says Ruth, ‘or South African spies. Weapons. But actually they just want to beg for food and cigarettes.’

They reach the first roadblock just north of Kitwe. Crossed logs, covered with barbed wire, cut off the lanes of the road. A dilapidated bus stops just before they arrive, and Olofson sees a young soldier with an automatic rifle chase the passengers out of it. There seems to be no end to the Africans who come pouring out, and he wonders how many can actually fit inside. While the passengers are forced to line up, a soldier climbs up on the roof of the bus and starts tearing apart the shapeless pile of bundles and mattresses. A goat that was tied up suddenly kicks its way loose, jumps down from the roof of the bus, and disappears bleating into the bush by the side of the road. An old woman begins to shriek and wail and a tremendous commotion breaks out. The soldier on the roof yells and raises his rifle. The old woman wants to chase her goat but is restrained by other soldiers who suddenly appear from a grass hut beside the road.

‘Coming right after a bus is a nightmare,’ says Ruth. ‘Why didn’t you overtake it?’

‘I didn’t see it, madame,’ replies Robert.

‘The next time you’ll see the bus,’ says Ruth, annoyed. ‘Or you can look for a new job.’

‘Yes, madame,’ Robert answers.

The soldiers seem tired after searching the bus and wave the Jeep through without inspecting it. Olofson sees a moonscape spreading before them, high hills of slag alternating with deep mine pits and blasted crevices. He realises that now he is in the midst of the huge copper belt that stretches like a wedge into Katanga province in Zaire. At the same time he wonders what he would have done if he hadn’t met the Mastertons. Would he have got off the train in Kitwe? Or would he have stayed in the compartment and returned with the train to Lusaka?

They pass through more roadblocks. Police and drunken soldiers compare his face to his passport photo, and he can feel terror rising inside him.

They hate the whites, he thinks. Just as much as the whites obviously hate the blacks...

They turn off the main road and suddenly the earth is quite red. A vast, undulating fenced landscape opens before the Jeep.

Two Africans open a wooden gate and offer hesitant salutes. The Jeep pulls up to a white two-storey villa with colonnades and flowering bougainvillea. Olofson climbs out, thinking that the white palace reminds him of the courthouse in his distant home town.

‘Tonight you’ll be our guest,’ says Werner. ‘In the morning I’ll drive you to Kalulushi.’

Ruth shows him to his room. They walk down cool corridors; tiled floors with deep rugs. An elderly man appears before them. Olofson sees that he is barefoot.

‘Louis will take care of you while you’re here,’ says Ruth. ‘When you leave you can give him a coin. But not too much. Don’t upset him.’

Olofson is troubled by the man’s ragged clothes. His trousers have two gaping holes in the knees, as if he has spent his life crawling on them. His faded shirt is frayed and patched.

Olofson looks out a window at a large park extending into the distance. White wicker chairs, a hammock in a giant tree. Somewhere outside he hears Ruth’s excited voice, a door slamming. From the bathroom he hears water running.

‘Your bath is ready, Bwana,’ says Louis behind him. ‘The towels are on the bed.’

Olofson is suddenly agitated. I have to say something, he thinks. So he understands that I’m not one of them, merely a temporary visitor, who is not used to being assigned a personal servant.

‘Have you been here long?’ he asks.

‘Since I was born, Bwana,’ Louis replies.

Then he vanishes from the room, and Olofson regrets his question. A master’s question to a servant, he thinks. Even though I mean well I make myself look insincere and common.

He sinks down in the bathtub and asks himself what escape routes are still left to him. He feels like a conman who has grown tired of not being unmasked.

They’re helping me carry out a meaningless assignment, he thinks. They’re ready to drive me to Kalulushi and then help me find the last transport out to the mission station in the bush. They’re going to a lot of trouble for something that’s just an egocentric impulse, a tourist trip with an artificial dream as its motive.

The dream of Mutshatsha died with Janine. I’m plundering her corpse with this excursion to a world where I don’t belong at all. How can I be jealous of a dead person? Of her will, of her stubborn dream, which she clung to despite the fact that she could never realise it? How can an atheistic, unbelieving person take over the dream of being a missionary, helping downtrodden and poverty-stricken people with a religious motive as the foremost incentive?

In the bathtub he decides to return, ask to be driven back to Kitwe. Come up with a credible explanation for why he has to change his plans.

He dresses and goes out into the large park. Under a tall tree that spreads a mighty shadow there is a bench that is carved out of a single block of stone. He scarcely manages to sit down before a servant brings him a cup of tea. All at once Werner Masterton stands before him, dressed in worn overalls.

‘Would you like to see our farm?’ he asks.

They climb into the Jeep, which has been newly washed. Werner puts his big hands on the wheel after pulling a worn sunhat down over his eyes. They drive past long rows of hen houses and fields. Now and then he brakes to a stop and black workers instantly come running. He barks out orders in a mixture of English and a language that is unknown to Olofson.

The whole time Olofson has a feeling that Werner is balancing on an ice floe beneath which an outbreak of rage might erupt at any moment.

‘It’s a big farm,’ he says as they drive on.

‘Not that big,’ says Werner. ‘If it were a different time I would probably have expanded the acreage. Nowadays you never know what’s going to happen next. Maybe they’ll confiscate all the farms from the whites. Out of jealousy, or displeasure at the fact that we’re so infinitely more skilled than the black farmers who started after independence. They hate us for our skill, our ability to organise, our ability to make things work. They hate us because we make money, because our health is better and we live longer. Envy is an African inheritance. But the reason they hate us most is that magic doesn’t work on us.’

They drive by a peacock ruffling its gaudy feathers.

‘Magic?’ Olofson asks.

‘An African who is successful always risks being the target of magic,’ says Werner. ‘The witchcraft that is practised here can be extremely effective. If there’s one thing that the Africans can do, it’s mixing up deadly poisons. Salves that are spread on a body, herbs that are camouflaged as common vegetables. An African spends more time cultivating his envy than cultivating his fields.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t know,’ says Olofson.

‘In Africa knowledge does not increase,’ says Werner. ‘It decreases, the more you think you understand.’

Werner breaks off and furiously slams on the brakes.

A piece of fence has broken off, and when an African comes running, Olofson sees to his astonishment that Werner grabs him by the ear. This is a grown man, maybe fifty years old, but his ear is caught in Werner’s rough hand.

‘Why isn’t this fixed?’ he yells. ‘How long has it been broken? Who broke it? Was it Nkuba? Is he drunk again? Who’s responsible for this? It has to be fixed within the hour. And Nkuba must be here in an hour.’

Werner shoves the man aside and returns to the Jeep.

‘I can be away for two weeks,’ he says. ‘More than two weeks, and the whole farm would fall apart, not just a bit of fence.’

They stop by a small rise in the midst of a vast grazing pasture, where Brahma cattle move in slow herds. On top of the small hill is a grave.

JOHN MCGREGOR, KILLED BY BANDITS 1967, Olofson reads on a flat gravestone.

Werner squats down and lights his pipe. ‘The first thing a man thinks about when settling on a farm is to choose his gravesite,’ he says. ‘If I’m not chased out of the country I’ll lie here one day too, along with Ruth. John McGregor was a young Irishman who worked for me. He was twenty-four years old. Outside Kitwe they had set up a fake roadblock. When he realised he had been stopped by bandits and not police, he tried to drive off. They shot him down with a submachine gun. If he had stopped they would only have taken the car and his clothes. He must have forgotten he was in Africa; you don’t defend your car here.’

‘Bandits?’ Olofson asks.

Werner shrugs. ‘The police came and said they had shot some suspects during an escape attempt. Who knows if they were the same people? The important thing for the police was that they could record somebody as the guilty party.’

A lizard stands motionless on the gravestone. From a distance Olofson sees a black woman moving with infinite slowness along a gravel road. She seems to be on her way directly into the sun.

‘In Africa death is always close by,’ says Werner. ‘I don’t know why that is. The heat, everything rotting, the African with his rage just beneath the skin. It doesn’t take much to stir up a crowd of people. Then they’ll kill anyone with a club or a stone.’

‘And yet you live here,’ says Olofson.

‘Perhaps we’ll move to Southern Rhodesia,’ Werner replies. ‘But I’m sixty-four years old. I’m tired, I have difficulty pissing and sleeping, but maybe we’ll move on.’

‘Who will buy the farm?’

‘Maybe I’ll burn it down.’

They return to the white house and out of nowhere a parrot flies and perches on Olofson’s shoulder. Instead of announcing that his journey to Mutshatsha is no longer necessary, he looks at the parrot nipping at his shirt. Sometimes timidity is my main psychological asset, he thinks in resignation. I don’t even dare speak the truth to people who don’t know me.

The tropical night falls like a black cloth. Twilight is an ephemeral, hastily passing shadow. With the darkness he feels as though he is also taken back in time.

On the big terrace that stretches along the front of the house, he drinks whisky with Ruth and Werner. They have just sat down with their glasses when headlights begin to play over the grazing meadows, and he hears Ruth and Werner exchange guesses about who it might be.

A car comes to a stop before the terrace and a man of indeterminate age steps out. In the light from shaded kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling, Olofson sees that the man has red burn marks on his face. His head is completely bald and he is dressed in a baggy suit. He introduces himself as Elvin Richardson, a farmer like the Mastertons.

Who am I? Olofson thinks. An accidental travelling companion on the night train from Lusaka?

‘Cattle rustlers,’ says Richardson, sitting down heavily with a glass in his hand.

Olofson listens as if he were a child engrossed in a story.

‘Last night they cut the fence down near Ndongo,’ says Richardson. ‘They stole three calves from Ruben White. The animals were clubbed and slaughtered on the spot. The night watchmen didn’t hear a thing, of course. If this goes on, we’ll have to organise patrols. Shoot a couple of them so they know we mean business.’

Black servants appear in the shadows on the terrace. What are the blacks talking about? Olofson wonders. How does Louis describe me when he sits by the fire with his friends? Does he see my uncertainty? Is he whetting a knife intended expressly for me? There doesn’t seem to be any dialogue between the blacks and the whites in this country. The world is split in two, with no mutual trust. Orders are shouted across the chasm, that’s all.

He listens to the conversation, observing that Ruth is more aggressive than Werner. While Werner thinks that maybe they should wait and see, Ruth says they should take up arms at once.

He gives a start when one of the black servants bends over him and fills his glass. All at once he realises that he is afraid. The terrace, the rapidly falling darkness, the restless conversation; all of it fills him with insecurity, that same helplessness he felt as a child when the beams of the house by the river creaked in the cold.

There are preparations for war going on here, he thinks. What scares me is that Ruth and Werner and the stranger don’t seem to notice it...

At the dinner table the conversation suddenly shifts character, and Olofson feels more at ease sitting in a room where lamps ward off the shadows, creating a light in which the black servants cannot hide. The conversation at the dinner table turns to the old days, to people who are no longer here.

‘We are who we are,’ says Richardson. ‘Those of us who choose to stay on our farms are surely insane. After us comes nothing. We are the last.’

‘No,’ says Ruth. ‘You’re wrong. One day the blacks will be begging at our doors and asking us to stay. The new generation can see where everything is headed. Independence was a gaudy rag that was hung on a pole, a solemn proclamation of empty promises. Now the young people see that the only things that work in this country are still in our hands.’

The alcohol makes Olofson feel able to speak.

‘Is everyone this hospitable?’ he asks. ‘I might be a hunted criminal. Anyone at all, with the darkest of pasts.’

‘You’re white,’ says Werner. ‘In this country that’s enough of a guarantee.’

Elvin Richardson leaves when the meal is over, and Olofson realises that Ruth and Werner retire early. Doors with wroughtiron gates are carefully barred shut, German shepherds bark outside in the darkness, and Olofson is instructed how to turn off the alarm if he goes into the kitchen at night. By ten o’clock he is in bed.

I’m surrounded by a barrier, he thinks. A white prison in a black country. The padlock of fear around the whites’ property. What do the blacks think, when they compare our shoes and their own rags? What do they think about the freedom they have gained?

He drifts off into a restless slumber.

He jumps awake when a sound pierces his consciousness. In the dark, he doesn’t know for a moment where he is.

Africa, he thinks. I still know nothing about you. Perhaps this is exactly how Africa looked in Janine’s dreams. I no longer recall what we talked about at her kitchen table. But I have a feeling that my normal judgements and thoughts are insufficient or perhaps not even valid out here. Another kind of seeing is required...

He listens to the darkness. He wonders whether it is the silence or the sound that is imagined. Again he is afraid.

There is a catastrophe enclosed within Ruth and Werner Masterton’s friendliness, he thinks. This entire farm, this white house, is enclosed by an anxiety, an anger that has been dammed up for much too long.

He lies awake in the dark and imagines that Africa is a wounded beast of prey that still does not have the strength to get up. The breathing of the earth and the animals coincides, the bush where they hide is impenetrable. Wasn’t that the way Janine imagined this wounded and mangled continent? Like a buffalo forced to its knees, but with just enough power left to keep the hunters at bay.

Maybe she with her empathy could probe more deeply into reality than I can, tramping about on the soil of this continent. Maybe she made a journey in her dreams that was just as real as my meaningless flight to the mission station in Mutshatsha.

There may be another truth as well. Is it true that I hope I’ll meet another Janine at this mission station? A woman who can replace the one who is dead?

He lies awake until dawn suddenly breaks through the dark. Out the window he sees the sun rise like a red ball of fire over the horizon. Suddenly he notices Louis standing by a tree, watching him. Even though the morning is already quite warm, he shivers. What am I afraid of? he thinks. Myself or Africa? What is Africa telling me that I don’t want to know?

At a quarter past seven he bids farewell to Ruth and takes his place next to Werner in the front seat of the Jeep.

‘Come back again,’ says Ruth. ‘You’re always welcome.’

As they drive out through the farm’s big gate where the two Africans helplessly salute, Olofson notices an old man standing in the tall elephant grass next to the road, laughing. Half hidden, he flashes past. Many years later this image will resurface in his consciousness.

A man, half hidden, laughing soundlessly in the early morning...

Chapter Nine

Would the great Leonardo have wasted his time picking flowers?

They’re sitting in the attic room of the courthouse, and suddenly the great silence is there between them. It’s late spring in 1957 and school is almost over for the year.

For Sture, elementary school is at an end, and middle school awaits. Hans Olofson has another year before he has to make up his mind. He has toyed with the idea of continuing his studies. But why? No child wants to stay a child; they all want to be grown-ups as soon as possible. Yet what does the future actually have to offer him?

For Sture, the path already seems laid out. The great Leonardo hangs on his wall, urging him on. Ashamed, Hans crouches over his own hopeless dream, to see the wooden house cast off its moorings and drift away down the river. When Sture plies him with questions, he has no idea how to answer. Will he go out in the forest and chop his way to the horizon like his father? Hang up his wet rag socks to dry eternally over the stove? He doesn’t know, and he feels envy and unrest as he sits with Sture in the attic room, and the late spring blows in through the open window. Hans has come to suggest that they pick flowers for the last day of school.

Sture sits leaning over an astronomical chart. He makes notes, and Hans knows that he has decided to discover an unknown star.

When Hans suggests flowers, the silence spreads. Leonardo didn’t waste his time going out in the fields hunting for table decorations.

Hans wonders with suppressed fury how Sture can be so damned certain. But he doesn’t say a word. He waits. Waiting for Sture to finish one of the important tasks he has set himself has become more and more common this spring.

Hans senses that the distance between them is growing. Soon the only thing left of their old familiar friendship will be the visits to Janine. He has a feeling that Sture is about to leave. Not the town, but their old friendship. It bothers him. Mostly because he doesn’t understand why, what has happened.

Once he asks Sture straight out.

‘What the hell is supposed to have happened?’ Sture replies.

After that he doesn’t ask again.

But Sture is also changeable. Now, he suddenly flings aside the astronomical chart impatiently and gets up.

‘Shall we go then?’ he says.

They slide down the riverbank and sit under the wide expanse of the river bridge’s iron beams and stone caissons. The spring flood surges past their feet; the usual soft gurgle has been replaced by the roar of the river’s whirlpools. Sture heaves a rotten tree stump into the river, and it floats away like a half-drowned troll.

Without knowing where it comes from, Hans is attacked by a sudden fury. The blood pounds in his temples and he feels that he has to make himself visible to the world.

He has often fantasised about completing a test of manhood, climbing across the river on one of the curved bridge spans that are only a couple of decimetres thick. Climbing up to a giddy height, knowing full well that a fall would mean his death.

Undiscovered stars, he thinks furiously. I’ll climb closer to the stars than Sture ever will.

‘I was thinking I’d climb across the bridge span,’ he says.

Sture looks at the gigantic iron arches.

‘It can’t be done,’ he says.

‘The hell it can’t,’ says Hans. ‘You just have to do it.’

Sture looks at the bridge span again.

‘Only a child would be that stupid,’ he says.

Hans’s heart turns a somersault in his chest. Does he mean him? That climbing across bridge spans is for little children?

‘You don’t dare,’ he says. ‘God damn it, you don’t dare.’

Sture looks at him in astonishment. Usually Hans’s voice is almost soft. But now he’s loud and talking in a harsh, brusque way, as if his tongue had been replaced by a piece of pine bark. And then the challenge, that he doesn’t dare...

No, he wouldn’t dare. To climb up on one of the bridge arches would be to risk his life for nothing. He wouldn’t get dizzy; he can climb a tree like a monkey. But this is too high; there’s no safety net if he should slip.

Of course he doesn’t say this to Hans. Instead he starts to laugh and spits contemptuously into the river.

When Hans sees the gob of spit he decides. Sture’s derisive accusation of childishness can only be countered on the iron beams.

‘I’m going to climb it,’ he says in a quavering voice. ‘And damned if I won’t stand up on the span and piss on your head.’

The words rattle around in his mouth, as if he were already in the utmost distress.

Sture looks at him incredulously. Is he serious? Even if the trembling Hans, on the verge of tears, looks nothing like a grown-up, an intrepid climber prepared to scale an impossible mountain face, there is something in his shaking obsession that makes Sture hesitate.

‘Go ahead and do it,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll do it after you.’

Now, of course, there’s no turning back. Quitting now would expose Hans to boundless humiliation.

As though on his way to his execution, Hans scrambles up the riverbank until he reaches the bridge abutment. He takes off his jacket and climbs up on one of the iron spans. When he raises his eyes he sees the gigantic iron arch vanish into the distance, merging with the grey cloud cover. The distance is endless, as if he were on his way up to heaven. He tries to persuade himself to be calm, but it only makes him more agitated.

Desperately, he starts slithering upwards, and deep down in his gut he realises that he has no idea why he needs to climb across this damned bridge span. But now it’s too late, and like a helpless frog he crawls up the iron arch.

It has finally dawned on Sture that Hans is serious, and he wants to yell to him to come down. But at the same time he feels the forbidden desire to wait and see. Maybe he will witness how somebody fails in attempting the impossible.

Hans closes his eyes and climbs further. The wind sings in his ears, the blood pounds in his temples, and he is utterly alone. The bridge span is cold against his body, the heads of the rivets scrape against his knees, and his arms and fingers have already gone completely numb. He forces himself not to think, just to keep climbing, as if it were one of his usual dreams. And yet he seems to be climbing up over the axis of the earth itself...

He feels the bridge span under him begin to flatten out, but this doesn’t calm him, it only increases his terror. Now he sees in his mind’s eye how high up he is, how far away in his great loneliness. If he falls now, nothing can save him.

Desperately he keeps crawling forward, clinging to the span, floundering his way metre by metre back towards the ground. His fingers grip the steel like claws, and for a dizzying second he thinks that he has been turned into a cat. He feels something warm but doesn’t know what it is.

When he reaches the bridge abutment on the other side of the river and cautiously opens his eyes and realises that it’s true, that he has survived, he hugs the bridge span as if it were his saviour. He lies there before jumping down to the ground.

He looks at the bridge and knows he has conquered it. Not as some external enemy, but as an enemy within himself. He wipes off his face, flexes his fingers to get the feeling back, and sees Sture come walking across the bridge with his jacket in his hand.

‘You forgot to piss,’ says Sture.

Did he? No, he didn’t! Now he knows where the sudden warmth came from up on the cold steel span. It was his body giving way. He points at the dark patch on his trousers.

‘I didn’t forget,’ he says. ‘Look here! Or do you want to smell it?’

Then comes his revenge.

‘It’s your turn now,’ he says, sitting down on his jacket.

But Sture has already prepared his escape. When he realised that Hans would make it down from the bridge span without falling into the river, he searched feverishly for a way to get out of it.

‘I will,’ he replies. ‘But not now. I didn’t say when.’

‘When will you do it?’ asks Hans.

‘I’ll let you know.’

They head home in the spring evening. Hans has forgotten all about the flowers. There are plenty of flowers, but only one bridge span...

The silence grows between them. Hans wants to say something, but Sture is lost in his own thoughts and impossible to reach. They part quickly outside the courthouse gate...

The last day of school comes with a light, hovering fog that rapidly thins and vanishes in the sunrise. The schoolrooms smell newly scrubbed, and Headmaster Gottfried has been sitting in his room since five in the morning preparing his commencement address for the pupils he will now be sending out into the world. He is cautious with the vermouth this morning, so filled is he with melancholy and reflection. The last day of the school year is a reminder of his own mortality in the midst of all the effervescent anticipation that his pupils feel...

At seven-thirty he walks out on the steps. He sincerely hopes he won’t see a pupil arrive without a relative. Nothing makes him so upset as to see a child arrive alone on the last day of school.

At eight o’clock the school bell rings and the classrooms are brimming with expectant silence. Headmaster Gottfried walks down the corridor to visit all the classes. Schoolmaster Törnkvist appears before him and announces that a pupil is missing from the commencement class. Sture von Croona, the son of the district judge. Headmaster Gottfried looks at his watch and decides to ring the district judge.

But not until it’s time to march over to the church does he hurry into his office and ring the district court. His hands are sweaty and no matter how he tries to tell himself that there will be an explanation, he feels very uneasy...

Sture left in plenty of time that morning. Unfortunately his mother couldn’t go with him because she was struck by a bad migraine. Of course Sture went to school, says the judge over the telephone.

Headmaster Gottfried hurries to the church. The last children are already on their way into the vestibule with their parents and he stumbles and practically runs as he tries to understand what could have happened to Sture von Croona.

But it isn’t until he is holding in his hand the prize book that is intended for Sture that he seriously begins to fear that something might have happened.

At the same moment he sees the doors to the vestibule cautiously being opened. Sture, he thinks, until he sees that the father is standing there, District Judge von Croona.

Headmaster Gottfried speaks about a deserved rest, the mustering of strength and preparation for the coming year of study; he calls on them to consider all of life’s shifting situations, and then there is no more. In a few minutes the church is empty.

The district judge looks at him, but Headmaster Gottfried can only shake his head. Sture did not show up for graduation.

‘Sture doesn’t just disappear,’ says the district judge. ‘I’ll contact the police.’

Headmaster Gottfried nods hesitantly and feels the torment increasing.

‘Perhaps he still...’

He gets no further. The district judge is already leaving the church with determined steps.

But no search needs to be organised. Only an hour after the end of school, Hans Olofson finds his missing friend.

His father, who had attended the graduation, has already changed into his work clothes again and headed out to his logging. Hans is enjoying the great freedom that lies before him, and he strolls down to the river.

It occurs to him that he hasn’t seen Sture today. Maybe he just played truant on the last day and devoted himself to coaxing an unknown star from the heavens.

He sits down on his usual boulder by the river and decides that he’s pleased to be alone. The coming summer requires a good deal of reflection. Ever since he conquered the huge span of the iron bridge he feels that it’s easier to be by himself.

His gaze is caught by something shining red underneath the bridge. He squints, thinking that it’s a scrap of paper caught on the branches along the bank.

But when he goes over to investigate what the shining red thing is, he finds Sture. It’s his red summer jacket, and he is lying there at the edge of the river. He has fallen from one of the bridge spans and broken his back. Helpless, he has lain there since the early morning hours when he awoke and decided to conquer the bridge span in secret. He had wanted to explore any hidden difficulties in solitude, and once it was done he planned to accompany Hans to the bridge and show him that he too could conquer the iron beams.

He hurried down to the bridge in the damp dawn. For a long time he regarded the huge spans before he started to climb.

Somewhere along the way he was gripped by pride. Much too rashly he raised his upper body. A gust of wind came out of nowhere and he swayed, lost his grip, and plunged from the bridge. He hit the water hard, and one of the stones in the riverbed cracked his spine. Unconscious, he was carried by an eddy towards the shore, where his head lolled above the water surface. The cold water of the river gave him hypothermia, and when Hans found him he was almost dead.

Hans pulls him out of the water, calls to him without getting an answer, and then runs screeching up to the streets of town. As he runs along the riverbank, summer dies. The great adventure vanishes in a gigantic cloud passing before the sun. Howling, he reaches the town. Frightened people draw back as if he were a mad dog.

But Rönning the junk dealer, who was a volunteer in the Winter War in Finland and has experienced much worse situations than a wildly gesticulating young man, grabs hold of him and bellows at him to tell him what has happened. Then the townsfolk rush to the river.

The taxi that is also used as an ambulance comes skidding through the gravel down towards the iron bridge. The district judge and his wife are informed about what has happened, and at the hospital the lone and always weary doctor begins to examine Sture.

He’s alive, he’s breathing. The concussion will pass. But his spine is broken; he is paralysed from the neck down. The doctor stands for a moment at the window and looks across the ridges of the forest before he goes out to the waiting parents.

At the same time Hans Olofson is vomiting into the toilet of the police station. A policeman holds him by the shoulders, and when it’s over, a cautious interview begins.

‘The red jacket,’ he keeps repeating over and over. ‘I saw the jacket lying in the river.’

At long last his father comes hurrying from the forest. Rönning the junk dealer drives them home and Hans crawls into bed. Erik Olofson sits on the edge of his bed until long after midnight, when his son finally falls asleep.

All night long the lights are burning in the spacious upper floor of the courthouse.

A few days after the accident, Sture disappears from town.

Early one morning Sture is carried out on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance which quickly drives off to the south. The vehicle sprays gravel when it passes through Ulvkälla. But the hour is early, Janine is asleep, and the car disappears towards the endless forests of Orsa Finnmark.

Hans Olofson never gets a chance to visit his fallen brother in arms. At dusk on the day before Sture is driven away, he wanders restlessly around the hospital, trying to figure out which room Sture is lying in. But everything is secret, concealed, as if the broken spine were contagious.

He leaves the hospital and wanders down towards the river, drawn inexorably to the bridge, and inside he feels a great burden of guilt. The accident was his creation...

When he discovers that Sture has been driven out of town early one morning, to a hospital far away, he writes a letter that he stuffs into a bottle and flings into the river. He watches it float down towards the point at People’s Park and then he runs across the river to the house where Janine lives.

There is A Joyous Spring Fellowship at her church that evening, but now that Hans is standing like a white shadow in her doorway, of course she stays home. He sits down on his usual chair in the kitchen. Janine sits down across from him and looks at him.

‘Don’t sit on that chair,’ he says. ‘That’s Sture’s.’

A God that fills the earth with meaningless suffering, she thinks. Breaking the back of a young boy just as summertime is bursting forth?

‘Play something,’ he says without raising his head to look at her.

She takes out her trombone and plays ‘Creole Love Call’ as beautifully as she can.

When she finishes and blows the saliva out of the instrument, Hans gets up, takes his jacket, and leaves.

Far too small a person in a far too large and incomprehensible world, she thinks. In a sudden flare-up of wrath she puts the mouthpiece to her lips and plays her lament, ‘Siam Blues’. The notes bellow like tortured animals and she doesn’t notice Hurrapelle step through the doorway and gaze at her in dismay as she rocks on her bare feet in time with her music. When she discovers him she stops playing and pounces on him with furious questions. He is forced to listen to her doubts in the God of reconciliation, and he has a sudden sense that the hole below her eyes is threatening to swallow him up.

He squats there in silence and lets her talk herself out. Then he carefully chooses his words and coaxes her back to the true path once again. Even though she doesn’t put up any resistance, he’s still not sure whether he has succeeded in infusing the powers of faith into her again. He decides at once to keep her under close observation for a while, and then asks her whether she isn’t going to take part in the evening’s Joyous Fellowship. But she is mute, just shakes her head and opens the door for him to go. He nods and vanishes out into the summertime.

Janine is far away in her own thoughts and it will be a long time before she comes back...

Hans plods homeward through the dandelions and moist grass. When he stands underneath the beams of the river bridge he clenches his fists.

‘Why didn’t you wait?’ he yells.

The message in the bottle rocks towards the sea...

Chapter Ten

After a journey of two hours on his way to the mission station in Mutshatsha, the distributor of the car Hans is riding in becomes clogged with silt.

They have stopped in a forlorn and desiccated landscape. Olofson climbs out of the car, wipes his filthy, sweaty face, and lets his gaze wander along the endless horizon.

He senses something of the great loneliness that it is possible to experience on the dark continent. Harry Johanson must have seen this, he thinks. He came from the other direction, from the west, but the landscape must have been the same. Four years his journey took. By the time he arrived his entire family had perished. Death defined the distance in time and space. Four years, four dead...

In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in gigantic catapults across the world. The time allotted to us is no more than that of our forefathers, but we have augmented it with our technology. We live in an era when the mind is less and less often allowed to be amazed by distance and time... And yet that’s not true, he laments. In spite of everything, it has been ten years since I heard Janine for the first time tell the story of Harry Johanson and his wife Emma, and their trek towards the mission station of Mutshatsha.

Now I’m almost there and Janine is dead. It was her dream, not mine. I’m a pilgrim in disguise, following someone else’s tracks. Friendly people are helping me with lodging and transportation, as if my task were important.

Like this David Fischer, bent over the distributor of his car. Early that morning Werner Masterton had turned into David’s courtyard. A couple of hours later they were on their way to Mutshatsha. David Fischer is about his own age, thin and balding. He reminds Olofson of a restless bird. He keeps looking around, as if he thinks he’s being followed. But of course he will help Hans Olofson make it to Mutshatsha.

‘To the missionaries at Mujimbeji,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been there, but I know the way.’

Why doesn’t anybody ask me? Olofson wonders. Why does no one want to know what I’m going to do in Mutshatsha?

They travel through the bush in David Fischer’s rusty military Jeep. The top has been put up, but the dust seeps in through the cracks. The Jeep pitches and skids in the deep sand.

‘The distributor will probably silt up again,’ yells Fischer over the roar of the engine.

The bush surrounds Hans Olofson. Now and then he glimpses people in the tall grass. Or maybe it’s only shadows, he thinks. Maybe they’re not really there.

Then the distributor silts up, and Olofson stands in the oppressive heat and listens to the African silence. Like a winter night in my home town, he thinks. Just as still and deserted. There it was the cold, here it’s the heat. And yet they are so similar. I could live there, could have endured. So I can probably live here too. Having grown up in Norrland, in the interior of Sweden, seems to be an excellent background for living in Africa...

Fischer slams down the bonnet, casts a glance over his shoulder, and sets about taking a piss.

‘What do Swedes know about Africa?’ he asks out of the blue.

‘Not a thing,’ Olofson replies.

‘Even those of us who live here don’t understand it,’ says Fischer. ‘Europe’s newly awakened interest in Africa, after you’ve already abandoned us once. Now you’re coming back, with a guilty conscience, the saviours of the new age.’

All at once Olofson feels personally responsible. ‘My visit is utterly futile,’ he replies. ‘I’m not here to save anyone.’

‘Which country in Africa receives the most support from Europe?’ asks Fischer. ‘It’s a riddle. If you guess right you’ll be the first.’

‘Tanzania,’ Olofson suggests.

‘Wrong,’ says Fischer. ‘It’s Switzerland. Anonymous numbered accounts are filled with contributions that make only a quick round trip to Africa. And Switzerland is not an African country...’

The road plunges steeply down towards a river and a ramshackle wooden bridge. Groups of children are swimming in the green water, and women are kneeling and washing clothes.

‘Ninety per cent of these children will die of bilharzia,’ Fischer yells.

‘What can be done?’ Olofson asks.

‘Who wants to see a child die for no reason?’ Fischer shouts. ‘You have to understand that this is why we’re so bitter. If we had been allowed to continue the way we were going, we probably would have got the better of the intestinal parasites as well. But now it’s too late. When you abandoned us, you also abandoned the possibility for this continent to create a bearable future.’

Fischer has to slam on the brakes for an African who jumps on to the road and waves his arms, trying to get a ride. Fischer honks the horn angrily and yells something to the man as they pass.

‘Three hours, then we’ll be there,’ Fischer shouts. ‘I hope you’ll at least think about what I said. Of course I’m a racist. But I’m not a stupid racist. I want the best for this country. I was born here and I hope to be allowed to die here.’

Olofson tries to do as Fischer asks, but his thoughts slip away, lose their hold. It’s as if I’m travelling in my own recollections, he thinks. Already this journey seems remote, as if it were a distant memory...

Afternoon arrives. The sun shines straight into the car’s front windscreen. Fischer comes to a stop and shuts off the engine.

‘Is it the distributor again?’ asks Olofson.

‘We’re here,’ says Fischer. ‘This must be Mutshatsha. The river we just crossed was the Mujimbeji.’

When the dust settles, a cluster of low, grey buildings appears, grouped round an open square with a well. So this is where Harry Johanson ended up, he thinks. This is where Janine headed in her lonely dream... From a distance he sees an old white man approaching with slow steps. Children flock round the car, naked or wearing only rags.

The man walking towards him has a pale, sunken face. Olofson senses at once that he is not at all welcome. I’m breaking into a closed world. A matter for the blacks and the missionaries... He quickly decides to reveal at least part of the truth.

‘I’m following in Harry Johanson’s footsteps,’ he says. ‘I come from his homeland and I’m searching for his memory.’

The pale man looks at him for a long time. Then he nods for Olofson to follow him.

‘I’ll stay until you tell me to leave,’ says Fischer. ‘I can’t get back before dark anyway.’

Olofson is shown into a room containing a bed with a crucifix hanging above it, and a cracked washbasin. A lizard scurries into a hole in the wall. A sharp smell that he can’t identify pricks his nose.

‘Father LeMarque is on a trip,’ says the pale man with the reticent voice. ‘We expect him back tomorrow. I’ll send someone over with sheets and to show you where to get some food.’

‘My name is Hans Olofson,’ he says.

The man nods without introducing himself.

‘Welcome to Mutshatsha,’ he says in a sombre voice before he leaves.

Silent children stand in the doorway, watching him attentively. Outside a church bell rings. Olofson listens. He feels a creeping fear inside. The smell that he can’t identify stings his nose. I’ll just leave, he thinks agitatedly. If I take off right now, I never will have been here. At the same moment David Fischer comes in carrying his suitcase.

‘I understand you’ll be staying,’ he says. ‘Good luck with whatever it is you’re doing. If you want to come back, the missionaries have cars. And you know where I live.’

‘How can I thank you?’ Olofson says.

‘Why do people always have to thank each other?’ says Fischer, and leaves.

Olofson watches the car go down the road. The children stand motionless and stare at him.

Suddenly he feels dizzy from the intense heat. He goes inside the cell assigned to him, stretches out on the hard bed and closes his eyes.

The church bells fall silent and everything is still. When he opens his eyes the children are still standing in the doorway watching him. He stretches out his hand and motions to them. In an instant they are gone.

He has to go to the toilet. He walks out through the door and the heat strikes him hard in the face. The big sandy area is deserted, and even the children are gone. He walks around the building in his search for a toilet. At the rear he finds a door. When he pushes the handle the door opens. He steps inside and in the darkness he is blind. The sharp smell makes him feel sick. When he gets used to the dark he realises that he’s in a morgue.

In the dark he can distinguish two dead Africans lying stretched out on wooden benches. Their naked bodies are scarcely covered by dirty sheets. He recoils and slams the door behind him. The dizziness returns at once.

On the steps outside his door sits an African, looking at him.

‘I am Joseph, Bwana,’ he says. ‘I will guard your door.’

‘Who told you to sit here?’

‘The missionaries, Bwana.’

‘Why?’

‘In case something happens, Bwana.’

‘What would that be?’

‘In the dark many things can happen, Bwana.’

‘Like what?’

‘You’ll know it when it happens, Bwana.’

‘Has anything happened before?’

‘There’s always a lot happening, Bwana.’

‘How long are you supposed to sit here?’

‘As long as Bwana stays here, Bwana.’

‘When do you sleep?’

‘When there is time, Bwana.’

‘There is only night and day.’

‘Now and then other times arise, Bwana.’

‘What do you do while you’re sitting here?’

‘I wait for something to happen, Bwana.’

‘What?’

‘You’ll know when it happens, Bwana.’

Joseph shows him where there is a toilet and where he can take a shower under an old petrol tank with a dripping hose. After he has changed his clothes, Joseph accompanies him to the mission station’s mess hall. An African with one leg shorter than the other walks around the empty tables wiping them with a dirty rag.

‘Am I the only one here?’ he asks Joseph.

‘The missionaries are on a trip, Bwana. But tomorrow they may return.’

Joseph waits outside the door. Olofson sits down at a table. The lame African brings a bowl of soup. Olofson eats, swatting at flies that buzz around his mouth. An insect stings him on the back of the neck and when he starts, he spills the soup on the table. The lame man comes at once with his rag.

Something is wrong on this continent, he thinks. When someone cleans up, the dirt is just spread even more.

The brief twilight is almost over as he leaves the mess hall. Joseph is waiting for him outside the door. In the distance fires are gleaming. He notices that Joseph is standing rocking on his feet, that he can hardly keep his balance.

‘You’re drunk, Joseph,’ he says.

‘I’m not drunk, Bwana.’

‘I can see that you’re drunk!’

‘I’m not drunk, Bwana. At least not much. I only drink water, Bwana.’

‘You can’t get drunk on water. What have you been drinking?’

‘African whisky, Bwana. But it’s not allowed. I won’t be permitted to stand watch here if any of the mzunguz find out about it.’

‘What would happen if someone saw that you were drunk?’

‘Sometimes in the morning we have to line up and breathe at a wakakwitau, Bwana. If anyone smells of anything but water he is punished.’

‘Punished how?’

‘In the worst case he would have to leave Mutshatsha with his family, Bwana.’

‘I won’t say a thing, Joseph. I’m no missionary. I’m only here on a visit. I’d like to buy a little of your African whisky.’

He watches Joseph trying to assess the situation and make a decision.

‘I’ll pay you well for your whisky,’ he says.

He follows Joseph’s wobbly figure creeping through the dark, close to the building walls, over towards an area with grass huts. Faces he cannot see laugh in the darkness. A woman scolds an invisible man, children’s eyes shine near a fire.

Joseph stops outside one of the grass huts and calls something in a low voice. Two men and three women emerge from the hut, all drunk. Olofson has a hard time distinguishing them in the dark. Joseph makes a sign to him to enter the hut. An ingrained stench of urine and sweat meets him in the darkness within.

I ought to be afraid, he thinks briefly. Yet I feel quite safe in Joseph’s company...

At the same moment he stumbles over something on the floor, and when he feels with his hand he finds that it’s a sleeping child. Shadows dance across the walls, and Joseph motions him to sit down. He sinks down on to a raffia mat and a woman hands him a mug. What he drinks tastes like burnt bread and it’s very strong.

‘What am I drinking?’ he asks Joseph.

‘African whisky, Bwana.’

‘It tastes bad.’

‘We’re used to it, Bwana. We distil lituku from maize waste, roots, and sugar water. Then we drink it. When it’s gone we make more. Sometimes we drink honey beer too.’

Olofson can feel himself becoming intoxicated.

‘Why did the others leave?’ he asks.

‘They’re not used to a mzungu coming here, Bwana. No mzungu has ever been inside this hut before.’

‘Tell them to come back. I’m no missionary.’

‘But you’re white, Bwana. A mzungu.’

‘Tell them anyway.’

Joseph calls out into the darkness, and the three women and two men return and squat down. They are young.

‘My sisters and my brothers, Bwana. Magdalena, Sara, and Salomo. Abraham and Kennedy.’

‘Salomo is a man’s name.’

‘My sister’s name is Salomo, Bwana. So it’s a woman’s name too.’

‘I don’t want to bother you. Tell them that. Tell them I don’t want to bother you.’

Joseph translates and the woman named Sara says something, casting glances at Olofson.

‘What does she want?’ he asks.

‘She wonders why a wakakwitau is visiting an African hut, Bwana. She wonders why you drink, since all the whites here say it is forbidden.’

‘Not for me. Explain to her that I’m not a missionary.’

Joseph translates and an intense discussion breaks out. Olofson watches the women, their dark bodies in relief under their chitengen. Maybe Janine will come back to me in a black guise, he thinks...

He gets drunk on the drink that tastes like burnt bread and listens to a discussion he doesn’t understand.

‘Why are you so excited?’ he asks Joseph.

‘Why don’t all the mzunguz drink, Bwana? Especially the ones who preach about their God? Why don’t they understand that the revelation would be much stronger with African whisky? We Africans have understood this since the days of our first forefathers.’

‘Tell them I agree. Ask them what they really think about the missionaries.’

When Joseph has translated, there is an embarrassed silence.

‘They don’t know what to say, Bwana. They aren’t used to a mzungu asking such a question. They’re afraid of giving the wrong answer.’

‘What would happen?’

‘Living at a mission station means food and clothing, Bwana. They don’t want to lose that by giving the wrong answer.’

What would happen then?’

‘The missionaries might be displeased, Bwana. Maybe we would all be chased off.’

‘Does that happen? That anyone who doesn’t obey is chased off?’

‘Missionaries are like other whites, Bwana. They demand the same submission.’

‘Can’t you be more clear? What would happen?’

‘Mzunguz always think that we blacks are unclear, Bwana.’

‘You speak in riddles, Joseph.’

‘Life is mysterious, Bwana.’

‘I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying, Joseph. You won’t be chased away by the missionaries!’

‘Of course you don’t believe me, Bwana. I’m just telling you the truth.’

‘You’re not saying anything.’

Olofson takes a drink.

‘The women,’ he says. ‘They’re your sisters?’

‘That’s right, Bwana.’

‘Are they married?’

‘They would like to marry you, Bwana.’

‘Why is that?’

‘A white man is not black, unfortunately, Bwana. But a bwana has money.’

‘But they’ve never seen me before.’

‘They saw you when you arrived, Bwana.’

‘They don’t know me.’

‘If they were married to you they would get to know you, Bwana.’

‘Why don’t they marry the missionaries?’

‘Missionaries don’t marry blacks, Bwana. Missionaries don’t like black people.’

‘What the hell are you saying?’

‘I’m just saying the truth, Bwana.’

‘Stop calling me Bwana.’

‘Yes, Bwana.’

‘Of course the missionaries like you! It’s for your sake they’re here, isn’t it?’

‘We blacks believe that the missionaries are here as a penance, Bwana. For the man that they nailed to a cross.’

‘Why do you stay here then?’

‘It’s a good life, Bwana. We will gladly believe in a foreign god if we get food and clothing.’

‘Is that the only reason?’

‘Of course, Bwana. We have our own real gods, after all. They probably don’t like it that we fold our hands several times each day. When we speak to them we beat our drums and dance.’

‘Surely you can’t do that here.’

‘Sometimes we go far out in the bush, Bwana. Our gods wait there for us.’

‘Don’t the missionaries know about this?’

‘Of course not, Bwana. If they did they would be very upset. That wouldn’t be good. Especially not now, when I might get a bicycle.’

Olofson stands up on his unsteady legs. I’m drunk, he thinks. Tomorrow the missionaries will return. I have to sleep.

‘Follow me back, Joseph.’

‘Yes, Bwana.’

‘And stop calling me Bwana!’

‘Yes, Bwana. I’ll stop calling you Bwana after you leave.’

Olofson gives Joseph some money. ‘Your sisters are beautiful.’

‘They would like to marry you, Bwana.’

Olofson crawls into his hard bed. Before he falls asleep he hears Joseph already snoring outside the door.

He wakes up with a start. The pale man is standing over him.

‘Father LeMarque has returned,’ he says in a toneless voice. ‘He would like to meet you.’

Olofson dresses hastily. He feels bad, his head is pounding from the African whisky. In the early dawn he follows the pale man across the red dirt. So the missionaries travel by night, he thinks. What is he going to tell me about why he came here?

He enters one of the grey buildings. At a simple wooden table sits a young man with a bushy beard. He is dressed in a torn undershirt and dirty shorts.

‘Our guest,’ he says with a smile. ‘Welcome.’

Patrice LeMarque comes from Canada, he tells Hans Olofson. The lame man has brought two cups of coffee and they sit at the back of the building in the shade of a tree. At the Mutshatsha mission station there are missionaries and health care personnel from many countries.

‘But none from Sweden?’ Olofson asks.

‘Not at the moment,’ replies LeMarque. ‘The last one was here about ten years ago. A Swedish nurse who came from a city I think was called Kalmar.’

‘The first one came from Röstånga. Harry Johanson.’

‘Have you really come all this way to see his grave?’

‘I stumbled upon his story when I was quite young. I won’t be finished with him until I have seen his grave.’

‘Harry Johanson sat in the shade of this very tree,’ LeMarque says. ‘When he wanted to be alone and meditate, he used to come here, and no one was allowed to bother him. I’ve also seen a photograph of him sitting in this spot. He was short but he was physically very strong. He also had a keen sense of humour. Some of the older Africans still remember him. When he was angry he could lift a baby elephant over his head. That’s not true, of course, but as an illustration of his strength the image is good.’

He sets down his coffee cup. ‘I’ll show you his grave. Then I must go back to my work. Our pumping station has broken down.’

They walk along a winding path that leads up a hill. Through the dense thickets they glimpse the reflection of the river.

‘Don’t go there without Joseph,’ says LeMarque. ‘There are many crocodiles in the river.’

The terrain levels out and forms a mesa on top of the high hill. Olofson finds himself facing a simple wooden cross.

‘Harry Johanson’s grave,’ says LeMarque. ‘Every four years we have to put up a new cross because the termites eat them. But he wanted to have a wooden cross on his grave. We comply with his wish.’

‘What did he dream about?’ asks Olofson.

‘I don’t think he had much time for dreaming. A mission station in Africa requires constant practical work. One has to be a mechanic, carpenter, farmer, businessman. Harry Johanson was good at all those things.’

‘What about religion?’

‘Our message is planted in the maize fields. The gospel is an impossibility if it is not involved in daily life. Conversion is a matter of bread and health.’

‘But in spite of everything, conversion is the crucial thing? Conversion from what?’

‘Superstition, poverty, and sorcery.’

‘Superstition I can understand. But how can one convert someone from poverty?’

‘The message instils confidence. Wisdom requires the courage to face life.’

Hans Olofson thinks of Janine. ‘Was Harry Johanson happy?’ he asks.

‘Who knows the innermost thoughts of another human being?’ says LeMarque.

They head back the way they came.

‘I never met Harry Johanson, after all,’ says LeMarque. ‘But he must have been a colourful and wilful person. The older he got, the less he felt he understood. He accepted that Africa remained a foreign world.’

‘Can a person live long in a foreign world without trying to recreate it so that it resembles the world he left behind?’

‘We had a young priest from Holland here once. Courageous and strong, self-sacrificing. But one day, with no warning, he got up from the dinner table and walked straight out into the bush. Purposefully, as if he knew where he was going.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was never seen again. His goal must have been to be swallowed up, never to return. Something in him snapped.’

Olofson thinks of Joseph and his sisters and brothers. ‘What do the blacks really think?’ he asks.

‘They get to know us through the God we give them.’

‘Don’t they have their own gods? What do you do with them?’

‘Let them disappear on their own.’

Wrong, Olofson thinks. But maybe a missionary has to ignore certain things in order to endure.

‘I’ll find someone who can show you around,’ says LeMarque. ‘Unfortunately almost everyone who works here is out in the bush right now. They’re visiting the remote villages. I’ll ask Amanda to show you around.’

Not until evening is Olofson shown the infirmary. The pale man, whose name is Dieter, informs him that Amanda Reinhardt, who LeMarque thought would show him around, is busy and asks his forgiveness.

When he returns from Johanson’s grave Joseph is sitting by his door. He notices at once that Joseph is frightened.

‘I won’t say anything,’ he says.

‘Bwana is a good bwana,’ says Joseph.

‘Stop calling me Bwana!’ ‘Yes, Bwana.’

They walk down to the river and search for crocodiles without seeing any. Joseph shows him Mutshatsha’s extensive maize cultivation. Everywhere he sees women with hoes in their hands, bent over the earth.

‘Where are all the men?’ he asks.

‘The men are making important decisions, Bwana. Maybe they are also busy preparing the African whisky.’

‘Important decisions?’

‘Important decisions, Bwana.’

After eating the food served to him by the lame man, he sits down in the shade of Harry Johanson’s tree. He doesn’t understand the emptiness that pervades the mission station. He tries to imagine that through him Janine really has accomplished her long journey. The inactivity makes him restless. I have to return home, he thinks. Return to what I’m supposed to do, whatever that might be...

In the twilight, Amanda Reinhardt suddenly appears in his doorway. He had been lying on top of his bed and dozed off. She has a kerosene lamp in her hand, and he sees that she is short and chubby. From her broken English he gathers that she is German.

‘I am sorry you are left alone,’ she says. ‘But we are so few here just now. There is so much to do.’

‘I’ve been lying here thinking of Harry Johanson’s tree,’ Olofson says.

‘Who?’ she asks.

At that moment an excited African appears from the shadows. He exchanges a few sentences with the German woman in the language Olofson doesn’t understand.

‘A child is about to die,’ she says. ‘I must go.’

In the doorway she stops short and turns around. ‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘Come with me to Africa.’

He gets up from the bed and they hurry towards the infirmary, which lies at the foot of Johanson’s hill. Olofson shrinks back as he steps into a room full of iron beds. A few kerosene lamps cast a dim light over the room. Olofson sees that there are sick people lying everywhere. On the beds, between the beds, under the beds. In several beds lie mothers intertwined with their sick children. Cooking vessels and bundles of clothing make the room almost impassable, and the intense smell of sweat and urine and excrement is stupefying. In a bed made of bent iron pipes tied together with steel wire lies a child of three or four years old. Around the bed women are squatting.

Olofson sees that even a black face can radiate pallor.

Amanda Reinhardt bends over the child, touches his forehead, talking all the while with the women.

The anteroom of death, he thinks. The kerosene lamps are the flames of life...

Suddenly a shriek breaks out from all the women squatting around the bed. One of the women, hardly more than eighteen years old, throws herself over the child in the bed, and her wail is so penetrating and shrill that Olofson feels the need to flee. The lamentation, the roars of pain that fill the room, strike him with a paralysing effect. With a giant leap he wants to leave Africa behind.

‘So does death look,’ says Amanda Reinhardt in his ear. ‘The child has died.’

‘From what?’ asks Olofson.

‘Measles,’ she replies.

The women’s shrieking rises and falls. Never before has he experienced the voice of grief as in this dirty room with its unearthly light. Someone is pounding on his eardrums with sledgehammers.

‘They will scream all night,’ says Amanda Reinhardt. ‘In this heat the burial must take place tomorrow. Then the women will lament for some more days. Maybe they faint from exhaustion, but they continue.’

‘I never thought such a wailing existed,’ says Olofson. ‘This must be the ancient sound of pain.’

‘Measles,’ says Amanda Reinhardt. ‘You have surely had this disease. But here children die of it. They came from a distant village. The mother walked five days and carried her child. Had she come earlier we could have maybe saved him, but she went first to the witch doctor in the village. When it was too late she came here. Actually it is not measles that kills. But the children are malnourished, their resistance is poor. When the child dies it is the end of a long chain of causes.’

Olofson leaves the infirmary alone. He has borrowed her kerosene lamp and tells her he will find his own way. He is followed by the screams of the wailing women. Outside his door sits Joseph by his fire.

This man I will remember, Olofson thinks. This man and his beautiful sisters...

The next day he drinks coffee again with Patrice LeMarque.

‘What do you think of Harry Johanson now?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know,’ says Olofson. ‘Mostly I’m thinking about the child who died yesterday.’

‘I’ve already buried him,’ replies LeMarque. ‘And I’ve got the pumping station going too.’

‘How do I get out of here?’ Olofson asks.

‘Tomorrow Moses is driving to Kitwe in one of our cars. You can ride along with him.’

‘How long will you stay here?’ Olofson asks.

‘As long as I live,’ says LeMarque. ‘But I probably won’t live as long as Harry Johanson. He must have been very special.’

At dawn Olofson is awakened by Joseph.

‘Now I’m travelling home,’ he tells him. ‘To another part of the world.’

‘I will wait at the white men’s doors, Bwana,’ replies Joseph.

‘Say hello to your sisters!’

‘I already have, Bwana. They are sad that you’re leaving.’

‘Why don’t they come and say goodbye then?’

‘They are, Bwana. They’re saying goodbye, but you don’t see them.’

‘One last question, Joseph. When will you chase the whites out of your country?’

‘When the time is ripe, Bwana.’

‘And when is that?’

‘When we decide that it is, Bwana. But we won’t chase all the mzunguz out of the country. Those who want to live with us can stay. We aren’t racists like the whites.’

A Jeep drives up to the building. Olofson puts his suitcase in it. The driver, Moses, nods to him.

‘Moses is a good driver, Bwana,’ says Joseph. ‘He just drives off the road once in a while.’

Olofson gets into the front seat and they turn on to the road. Now it’s over, he thinks. Janine’s dream and Harry Johanson’s grave...

After a few hours they stop to rest. Olofson discovers that the two dead bodies he’d seen in the morgue are packed in the boot of the Jeep. At once he feels sick.

‘They’re going to the police in Kitwe,’ says Moses, noticing his distress. ‘All murder victims must be examined by the police.’

‘What happened?’

‘They are brothers. They were poisoned. Their maize field was probably too big. Their neighbours were jealous. Then they died.’

‘How?’

‘They ate something. Then they swelled up and their stomachs burst open. It smelled terrible. The evil spirits killed them.’

‘Do you really believe in evil spirits?’

‘Of course,’ says Moses with a laugh. ‘We Africans believe in sorcery and evil spirits.’

The journey continues.

Olofson tries to convince himself that he is going to go back to his legal studies. He clings once more to his decision to become the defender of extenuating circumstance. But I’ve never clarified what it would mean to spend my life in courtrooms, he thinks. Where I’d have to try to distinguish what is a lie from what is truth. Maybe I should do as my father did. Maybe I should go and chop down horizons in a forest of paragraphs. I’m still searching for a way out of the confusion that marks my beginning...

The long trip from Mutshatsha is coming to an end. I must decide before I land at Arlanda again, he thinks. That’s all the time I have left.

He shows Moses the way to Ruth and Werner’s farm.

‘First I drive you, then I drive the corpses,’ says Moses.

Olofson is glad that he doesn’t call him Bwana.

‘Say hello to Joseph when you return.’

‘Joseph is my brother. I’ll say hello to him.’

Just before two o’clock in the afternoon they arrive...

Chapter Eleven

The sea. A bluish-green wave that moves towards infinity.

A frozen wind blows from the Kvarken Straits. A sailboat with an uncertain helmsman is becalmed on the swells with sails flapping. Seaweed and mud blow their musty odour in Hans Olofson’s face, and even though the sea isn’t as he had imagined it, the reality is overwhelming.

They beat into a stiff wind along a spit of land outside Gävle, Hans and his father. In order to divert his son from the pain of constantly thinking of Sture, Erik Olofson has asked for a week off to take Hans to the sea. One day in the middle of June they depart with the country bus from town, change in Ljusdal, and reach Gävle late in the evening.

Hans finds a worn-out toy boat made of bark that someone has thrown away and stuffs it inside his jacket. His father dreams about the banana boats he once sailed on. The face of a sailor emerges from the woodcutter’s, and he realises once again that the sea is his world.

To Hans, the sea is constantly changing its face. It’s never possible to completely capture the surface of the water with his gaze. Somewhere there is always an unexpected movement, the interplay of the sun and clouds glitters and changes continuously and tirelessly. He can’t get his fill of looking at the sea rolling and grunting, tossing wave-tops back and forth, flattening during a calm, and once again foaming and singing and moaning.

The thought of Sture is there, but it’s as if the sea has flooded over it, slowly covering up the last of the pain and the most gnawing grief. The muddled feeling of guilt, of having acted as the invisible hands that heaved Sture off the bridge span, sinks away, leaving only a churning unrest, like a pain that can’t decide whether to strike or not.

Already Sture has begun to change from a living person to a memory. With each passing day the contours of his face grow dimmer, and although Hans can’t express it, he realises that life, the life that goes on all around him, will always be the most important thing. He senses that he is on his way into something unknown, where new and disquieting powers are beginning to emerge.

I’m waiting for something, he thinks. And while he waits he searches assiduously for flotsam along the beaches. Erik Olofson walks a little to one side, as if he doesn’t want to bother him. Erik is tormented by the fact that his own waiting never seems to end. The sea reminds him of his own ruin...

They stay at a cheap hotel next to the railway station. When his father has fallen asleep, Hans creeps out of bed and sits on the wide window seat. From there he has a view over the little square in front of the station.

He tries to picture the room in the distant hospital where Sture is lying. An iron lung, he heard. A thick black hose in his throat, an artificial throat that breathes for Sture. His spine is broken, snapped in two, like a perch killed by a fisherman.

He tries to imagine what it would be like not to be able to move, but of course he can’t, and suddenly he can’t stand the anxiety, but casts it aside.

I don’t like it, he thinks. I crawled across the arch of the bridge and I didn’t fall off. What the hell was he doing there, all alone, in the morning fog? He should have waited for me...

The days by the sea pass quickly. After a week they have to go home. In the rattling bus he suddenly calls to his father.

‘What about Mamma?’ he shouts. ‘Why don’t you know where she is?’

‘There are lots of things a person can never know,’ Erik says defensively, surprised at the unexpected question.

‘Pappas disappear,’ shouts Hans. ‘Not mammas.’

‘Now you’ve seen the sea,’ says Erik. ‘And this is not a good place to talk. The bus is rattling so damned loudly.’

The next day Erik Olofson goes back to clearing the horizon. Impatiently he hacks with his axe at a single branch that refuses to be separated from the trunk. He puts all his bodily strength behind the blow, hacking furiously at the branch.

I’m hacking at myself, he thinks. Chopping off these damned roots that are binding me here. The boy is almost fourteen. In a few years he can take care of himself. Then I can go back to sea, to the ships, to the cargoes.

He chops with his axe, and with each blow it’s as though he’s striking his fist against his brow and saying: I must...

Hans is running through the bright summer evening of Norrland. Walking takes too long, he’s in a hurry now. The soft, waterlogged earth is burning...

In a grove in the woods past the abandoned brickworks he builds an altar to Sture. He can’t imagine him either alive or dead, he’s just gone, but he builds an altar out of pieces of board and moss. He has no idea what he’s going to do with it. He thinks of asking Janine, initiating her into his secret, but he refrains. Visiting the altar once each day and seeing that no one has been there will suffice. Even though Sture doesn’t know it, they’re sharing one more secret.

He dreams that the house where he lives is cast off its moorings and floats down the river, never again to return...

He bolts through the summer, runs along the river until he is out of breath and sweaty. When nothing else is left there is always Janine.

One evening when he comes running, she isn’t home. For a brief moment he worries that she too is gone. How could he lose another person who supports his world? But he knows that she’s at one of the Joyous Fellowships at the church, and so he sits down on her front steps to wait.

When she arrives she’s wearing a white coat over a light-blue dress. A breeze passes through his body, a sudden apprehension.

‘Why are you blushing?’ she asks.

‘I’m not blushing,’ he replies. ‘I never do.’

He feels caught red-handed. Shove it in your nose, he thinks furiously. Shove it in the hole.

That evening Janine starts talking about the trip.

‘Where would someone like me go?’ says Hans. ‘I’ve been to Gävle. I probably won’t go any further. But I could try to stow away on the train to Orsa. Or go to the tailor and ask him to sew on a pair of wings.’

‘I’m serious,’ says Janine.

‘I am too,’ says Hans.

‘I want to go to Africa,’ says Janine.

‘Africa?’

For Hans that is an unfathomable dream.

‘Africa,’ she says again. ‘I would go to the countries by the big rivers.’

She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance. She tells him about the dark moments. About the anguish that makes her long to go to Africa. There she wouldn’t attract attention everywhere she went with her missing nose. There she wouldn’t always be surrounded by male loathing and revulsion.

‘Leprosy,’ she says. ‘Bodies that rot away, souls that atrophy in despair. There I would be able to work.’

Hans tries to imagine the Realm of the Noseless, tries to see Janine among the deformed human bodies.

‘Are you going to be a missionary?’ he asks.

‘No, not a missionary. Maybe I would be called one. But I would work to alleviate suffering,’ she says. ‘It’s possible to travel without actually travelling. A departure always begins inside yourself. It was probably the same for Harry Johanson and his wife Emma. For fifteen years they prepared for a journey that they probably never thought would happen.’

‘Who is Harry Johanson?’ Hans asks.

‘He was born in a poor cottage outside Röstånga,’ says Janine. ‘He was the next-youngest of nine children. When he was ten years old he decided to be a missionary. That was in the late 1870s. But not until twenty years later, in 1898, after he had married and he and Emma had had four children, were they able to set off. Harry had turned thirty and Emma was a few years younger, and they left on a ship from Göteborg. In Sweden there were followers of the Scottish missionary Fred Arnot who tried to build up a network of mission stations along the routes that Livingstone had travelled in Africa. From Glasgow they sailed with an English ship and arrived in Benguella in January of 1899. One of their children died of cholera during the passage, and Emma was so sick that she had to be carried ashore when they reached Africa.

‘After a month of waiting, they set off together with three other missionaries and over 100 black bearers on a 1200-mile journey, straight through uncharted country. It took them four years to reach Mutshatsha, where Fred Arnot had determined that the new mission station should be located. They had to wait for a whole year by the Lunga River before the local chieftain gave them permission to pass through his lands.

‘The whole time they were plagued with illness, lack of food, impure water. After four years, when Harry finally reached Mutshatsha, he was alone. Emma had died of malaria, and the children had perished from various intestinal diseases. The three other missionaries had also died. Harry himself was dazed by malaria when he arrived along with those of the bearers who hadn’t left years before. His loneliness must have been indescribable. And how did he manage to hold on to his faith in God when his entire family had been obliterated on the way to spread God’s message?

‘Harry lived for almost fifty years in Mutshatsha. By the time he died, an entire community had grown up around the little hut which was the beginning of the mission station. There was an infirmary, an orphanage, a building for older women who had been driven out of their villages because of accusations of witchcraft. When Harry Johanson died he was called Ndotolu, the wise man. He was buried on the hill to which he had retired during his last years and built a modest little hut. When he died there were English doctors and another Swedish missionary family in Mutshatsha. Harry Johanson died in 1947.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Hans asks.

‘An old woman who once visited Harry in Mutshatsha told me,’ Janine replies. ‘She went there as a young woman to work at the mission station, but she got sick and Harry forced her to go back to Sweden. She visited our congregation last year and I had a long talk with her about Harry Johanson.’

‘Say it once more,’ says Hans. ‘The name.’

‘Mutshatsha.’

‘What was he doing there, anyway?’

‘He arrived as a missionary. But he became the wise man. The doctor, the carpenter, the judge.’

‘Say it one more time.’

‘Mutshatsha.’

‘Why don’t you go there?’

‘I probably don’t have what Harry Johanson had. And Emma, although she never made it there.’

What was it that Harry Johanson had? Hans wonders as he walks home in the bright summer evening. He pictures himself dressed in Harry Johanson’s clothes; behind him is a long line of bearers. Before the safari crosses the river he sends out scouts to check whether crocodiles are lurking on the sandbanks. When he reaches the house where he lives, four years have passed and the safari has reached Mutshatsha. He’s all alone; there are no bearers left, they have all deserted him. As he walks up the steps he decides that the altar he built for Sture in the grove behind the brickworks will be called Mutshatsha...

He opens the door and the dream of Harry Johanson and Mutshatsha retreats and leaves him, because in the kitchen sits Erik Olofson, drinking with four of the town’s most notorious drunks. Célestine has been taken from her case, and one of the drunks is sitting there picking at the meticulously constructed rigging with fumbling fingers. A man who hasn’t even taken off his dirty rubber boots is asleep on top of Hans’s bed.

The drunks stare at him curiously, and Erik Olofson gets up, wobbling, and says something that is drowned in the crash of a bottle hitting the floor. Usually Hans feels sad and ashamed when his father starts drinking and goes into one of his spells, but now he feels only fury. The sight of the full-rigger on the table, as if it had run aground among glasses and bottles and ashtrays, makes him so outraged with sorrowful anger that he is perfectly calm. He walks over to the table, picks up the ship, and stares into the glazed eyes of the drunk who was picking at it.

‘You keep your filthy mitts off her,’ he says.

Without waiting for a reply he puts the ship back in its case. Then he goes into his room and kicks at the snoring man lying on his bed.

‘Get up! Up, God damn it!’ he says, and he doesn’t stop until the man wakes up.

His father is holding on to the door frame, with his trousers half falling off, and when he sees his flickering eyes he starts to hate him. Hans chases the dazed drunk into the kitchen and slams the door behind him, right in front of his father. He tears off the bedspread and sits down, and feels his heart pounding in his chest.

Mutshatsha, he thinks.

In the kitchen the chairs scrape, the outer door is opened, voices mutter and then there is silence. At first he thinks that his father has left with the drunks for town. But then he hears a shuffling and a thud from the kitchen. When he opens the door he sees his father crawling around with a rag in his hand, trying to wipe the dirt off the floor. He looks like an animal. His trousers have slipped down so his bottom is bare. A blind animal crawling around and around...

‘Pull up your trousers,’ he says. ‘Stop crawling around. I’ll clean the damned floor.’

He helps his father up, and when Erik Olofson loses his balance they wind up on the kitchen sofa in an involuntary embrace. When Hans tries to pull himself loose his father holds on to him. At first he thinks his father wants to fight, but then he hears him snuffling and whimpering and hiccuping, and realises he is sobbing violently. He has never seen him do this before.

Sorrow and glistening eyes, a quavering voice that has turned thick, that much he knows. But never this open surrender to tears. What the hell is he going to do now? Hans wonders, with his father’s sweaty and unshaven face against his neck.

The elkhounds are skulking restlessly underneath the kitchen table. They have been kicked and stepped on and haven’t had any food all day. The kitchen stinks of closed-in sweat, fuming pipes, and spilled beer.

‘We have to clean up,’ says Hans, tearing himself loose. ‘You go and lie down and I’ll clean up the mess.’

Erik Olofson slumps down in the corner of the sofa and Hans starts washing the floor.

‘Take the dogs out,’ mumbles Erik.

‘Take them out yourself,’ says Hans.

The fact that Shady, the most contemptuous and feared drunk in town, had been allowed to stretch out in the kitchen makes him feel sick. They can stay in their hovels, he thinks, with their old hags and brats and beer bottles...

His father is asleep on the sofa. Hans places a quilt over him and takes out the dogs and chains them up near the woodpile. Then he goes to his altar in the woods.

It’s already night, the light summer night of Norrland. Outside the People’s Hall some youths are talking loudly around a shiny Chevrolet. Hans returns to his safari, counts his bearers, and gives the order to march.

Missionary or not, a certain authority is required so that the bearers won’t succumb to idleness and maybe even start stealing supplies. They should be encouraged with glass beads and other trinkets at regular intervals, but also forced to witness punishments for neglect when necessary. He knows that during the many months, perhaps years, that the safari will be under way, he can never permit himself to sleep with more than one eye closed at a time.

As they pass the hospital the bearers begin to shout that they have to rest, but he keeps driving them. Not until they reach the altar in the woods does he let them put down the large bundles they are carrying on their heads...

‘Mutshatsha,’ he says to the altar. ‘Together we will travel to Mutshatsha one day, when your spine has healed and you can get up again...’

He sends the bearers on ahead so he can have peace and quiet to meditate. Travelling might mean deciding to conquer something, he thinks vaguely. Conquer the doubters who didn’t believe he would get away, never even as far as Orsa Finnmark. Or conquer the ones who had travelled even further, vanished even deeper into the wilderness. And conquer his own indolence, cowardice, fear.

I conquered the river bridge, he thinks. I was stronger than my own fear...

He strolls homeward through the summer night. There are so many more questions than answers. Erik Olofson, his incomprehensible father. Why is he starting to drink again? After they went to the sea together and saw that it was still there? In the middle of summer, when the snow and cold is gone? Why does he let the drunks in the house, let them get their hands on Célestine?

And why did Mamma leave, anyway? Outside the People’s Hall he stops and looks at the remnants of the poster for the last movie programme of the spring.

Run for Your Life, he reads. That’s it, run for your life. And he runs on silent feet through the warm summer night. Mutshatsha, he thinks. Mutshatsha is my password...

Chapter Twelve

Hans Olofson says goodbye to Moses and watches the car bearing the dead men vanish in a cloud of dust.

‘You stay as long as you like,’ says Ruth, who has come out on to the porch. ‘I won’t ask why you’re back so soon. All I’m saying is that you can stay.’

When he enters his old room, Louis is already busy filling the bathtub. Tomorrow, he thinks, tomorrow I will re-examine myself, decide what I’m going back to.

Werner Masterton has gone to Lubumbashi to buy bulls, Ruth tells him as they sit with their whisky glasses on the veranda.

‘Such hospitality,’ says Olofson.

‘Here it’s necessary,’ says Ruth. ‘We can’t survive without one another. Forsaking a white person is the only mortal sin we recognise. But no one commits it. It’s especially important that the blacks understand this.’

‘Perhaps I’m wrong,’ says Olofson, ‘but I feel there is a state of war here. It isn’t visible, but it’s here.’

‘Not a war,’ says Ruth, ‘but a difference that is essential to maintain, using force if necessary. Actually it’s the whites that are left in this country who are the ultimate guarantee of the new black rulers. They use their newly won power to shape their lives like ours. The district governor borrowed from Werner the plans for this house. Now he’s building a copy, with one difference: his house will be bigger.’

‘At the mission station in Mutshatsha an African talked about a hunt that was ripening,’ says Olofson. ‘The hunt for the whites.’

‘There’s always someone who shouts louder than others,’ replies Ruth. ‘But the blacks are cowardly. Their method is assassination, never open warfare. The ones who shout aren’t the ones you have to worry about. It’s the ones who are silent that you have to keep a watchful eye on.’

‘You say that the blacks are cowardly,’ says Olofson, feeling the beginnings of intoxication. ‘To my ears that sounds as if you think it’s a racial defect. But I refuse to believe it.’

‘Maybe I said too much,’ says Ruth. ‘But see for yourself. Live in Africa, then return to your own country and tell them what you experienced.’

They eat dinner, alone at the big table. Silent servants bring platters of food. Ruth directs them with glances and specific hand gestures. One of the servants spills gravy on the tablecloth. Ruth tells him to go.

‘What will happen to him?’ asks Olofson.

‘Werner needs workers in the pig sties,’ replies Ruth.

I ought to get up and leave, Olofson thinks. But I won’t do anything, and then I’ll acquit myself by saying that I don’t belong, that I’m only a casual passing guest...

He has planned to stay for several days with Ruth and Werner. His plane ticket permits him to return no sooner than a week after arriving. But without his noticing, people gather around him, taking up the initial positions for the drama that will keep him in Africa for almost twenty years. He will ask himself many times what actually happened, what powers lured him, wove him into a dependent position, and in the end made it impossible for him to stand up and go.

The curtain goes up three days before Werner is supposed to drive him to Lusaka. By that time he has decided to resume his legal studies, make another try at it.

One evening the leopard shows itself for the first time in Hans Olofson’s life. A Brahma calf is found mauled. An old African who works as the tractor foreman is summoned to look at the dead animal, and he instantly identifies the barely visible marks as being from the paws of a leopard.

‘A big leopard,’ he says. ‘A lone male. Bold, probably cunning too.’

‘Where is it now?’ asks Werner.

‘Nearby,’ says the old man. ‘Maybe it’s watching us right now.’

Olofson notices the man’s terror. The leopard is feared; its cunning is superior to that of men...

A trap is set. The slaughtered calf is hoisted up and lashed to a tree. Fifty metres away, a grass blind is built with an opening for a rifle.

‘Maybe it will come back,’ says Werner. ‘If it does, it will be just before daybreak.’

When they return to the white house, Ruth is sitting with another woman on the veranda.

‘One of my good friends,’ says Ruth. ‘Judith Fillington.’

Olofson says hello to a thin woman with frightened eyes and a pale, harried face. He can’t tell her age, but he thinks she must be forty years old. From their conversation he understands that she has a farm that produces only eggs. A farm located north of Kalulushi, towards the copper fields, with the Kafue River as one of its boundaries.

Olofson keeps to the shadows. Fragments of a tragedy slowly emerge. Judith Fillington has come to announce that she has finally succeeded in having her husband declared dead. A bureaucratic obstacle has finally been overcome. A man struck to the ground by his melancholia, Olofson gathers. A man who vanished into the bush. Mental derangement, perhaps an unexpected suicide, perhaps a predator’s victim. No body was ever found. Now there is a paper that confirms he is legally dead. Without that seal he has been wandering around like a phantom, Olofson thinks. For the second time I hear about a man who disappeared in the bush...

‘I’m tired,’ Judith says to Ruth. ‘Duncan Jones has turned into a drunk. He can’t handle the farm any more. If I’m gone for more than a day everything falls apart. The eggs don’t get delivered, the lorry breaks down, the chicken feed runs out.’

‘You’ll never find another Duncan Jones in this country,’ says Werner. ‘You’ll have to advertise in Salisbury or Johannesburg. Maybe in Gaborone too.’

‘Who can I get?’ asks Judith. ‘Who would move here? Some new alcoholic?’

She quickly drains her whisky glass and holds it out for a refill. But when the servant brings the bottle she pulls back her empty glass.

Olofson sits in the shadows and listens. I always choose the chair where it’s darkest, he thinks. In the midst of a gathering I look for a hiding place.

At the dinner table they talk about the leopard.

‘There’s a legend about the leopards that the older workers often tell,’ says Werner. ‘On Judgement Day, when the humans are already gone, the final test of power will be between a leopard and a crocodile, two animals who have survived to the end thanks to their cunning. The legend has no ending. It stops just at the moment when the two animals attack each other. The Africans imagine that the leopard and the crocodile engage in single combat for eternity, into the final darkness or a rebirth.’

‘The mind boggles,’ says Judith. ‘The absolute final battle on earth, with no witnesses. Only an empty planet and two animals sinking their teeth and claws into each other.’

‘Come with us tonight,’ says Werner. ‘Maybe the leopard will return.’

‘I can’t sleep anyway,’ says Judith. ‘Why not? I’ve never seen a leopard, although I was born here.’

‘Few Africans have seen a leopard,’ says Werner. ‘At daybreak the tracks of its paws are there, right next to the huts and the people. But no one sees a thing.’

‘Is there room for one more?’ asks Hans. ‘I’m good at making myself quiet and invisible.’

‘The chieftains often wear leopard skins as a sign of honour and invulnerability,’ says Werner. ‘The magic essence of the leopard unites various tribes and clans. A Kaunde, a Bemba, a Luvale; all of them respect the leopard’s wisdom.’

‘Is there room?’ Olofson asks again, but without receiving an answer.

Just after nine the group breaks up.

‘Who are you taking with you?’ asks Ruth.

‘Old Musukutwane,’ replies Werner. ‘He’s probably the only one here on the farm who has seen a leopard more than once in his life.’

They park the Jeep a little way off from the leopard trap. Musukutwane, an old African in ragged clothes, bent and thin, steps soundlessly out of the shadows. Silently he guides them through the dark.

‘Choose your sitting position carefully,’ whispers Werner when they enter the grass blind. ‘We’ll be here for at least eight hours.’

Olofson sits in a corner, and all he hears is their breathing and the interplay of night-time sounds.

‘No cigarettes,’ whispers Werner. ‘Nothing. Speak softly if you do speak, mouth against ear. But when Musukutwane decides, all of us must be silent.’

‘Where is the leopard now?’ asks Olofson.

‘Only the leopard knows where the leopard is,’ replies Musukutwane.

The sweat runs down Olofson’s face. He feels someone touch his arm.

‘Why are they doing this, anyway?’ asks Judith. ‘Waiting all night for the leopard, when it probably won’t show up?’

‘Maybe I’ll figure out an answer myself before dawn,’ says Olofson.

‘Wake me up if I fall asleep,’ she says.

‘What is required of a foreman on your farm?’ he asks.

‘Everything,’ she replies. ‘Fifteen thousand eggs have to be gathered, packed, and delivered each day, including Sundays. Feed has to be found; 200Africans must be taken by the ear. Every day involves preventing a number of crises from developing into catastrophes.’

‘Why not a black foreman?’ he asks.

‘If only it were that easy. But it isn’t.’

‘Without Musukutwane there will be no leopard. To me it’s inconceivable that an African cannot be promoted to foreman in this country. They have a black president, a black government.’

‘Come and work for me,’ she says. ‘All Swedes are farmers, aren’t they?’

‘Not exactly,’ he replies. ‘Maybe in the old days, but not any longer. And I don’t know anything about chickens. I don’t even know what 15,000 hens eat. Tons of breadcrumbs?’

‘Waste from the corn mills,’ she says.

‘I don’t think I have the temperament to take someone by the ear,’ he says.

‘I must find someone to help me.’

‘In two days I’ll be leaving on a plane. I can’t imagine I’ll be coming back.’

Olofson swats at a mosquito singing in front of his face. I could do it, he thinks hastily. At least I could try until she finds someone suitable. Ruth and Werner have opened their house to me and given me a breathing space. Maybe I could do the same for her. What tempts him is the possibility of escaping his sense of emptiness. But at the same time he mistrusts the temptation; it could just be another hiding place.

‘Is there a lot of paperwork?’ he asks. ‘Residence permit, work permit?’

‘An unbelievable amount of paperwork is required,’ she says. ‘But I know a colonel in the Immigration Department in Lusaka. Five hundred eggs delivered to his door will procure the required stamps.’

‘But I don’t know anything about chickens,’ he says again.

‘You already know what they eat,’ she replies.

A grass blind and a hiring office, he thinks, and he feels as though he has become involved in something very unusual...

Cautiously he shifts his position. His legs are aching and a rock is pressing against the small of his back. A night bird screeches a sudden complaint in the dark. The frogs fall silent and he listens to the different people breathing around him. The only one he can’t hear is Musukutwane. Werner moves his hand, a faint metallic sound comes from the rifle. Like in the trenches, he thinks. Waiting for the invisible foe...

Just before dawn Musukutwane suddenly emits a faint throaty sound.

‘Starting now,’ whispers Werner. ‘Not a sound, not a movement.’

Olofson turns his head cautiously and pokes a little hole in the grass wall. Judith is breathing close to one ear. A faint sound tells them that Werner has taken the safety off his gun. The light of dawn comes softly, like a vague reflection of a distant fire. The cicadas fall silent, the screeching night bird is gone. The night is suddenly soundless.

The leopard, he thinks. When it approaches it is preceded by silence. Through the hole in the wall he tries to make out the tree to which the cadaver is tied.

They wait, but nothing happens. Suddenly it is full daylight; the countryside is revealed. Werner locks the safety on his rifle.

‘Now we can go home,’ he says. ‘No leopard tonight.’

‘It has been here,’ says Musukutwane. ‘It came just before dawn. But it sensed something and disappeared again.’

‘Did you see it?’ asks Werner suspiciously.

‘It was dark,’ says Musukutwane. ‘But I know he was here. I saw him in my head. But he was suspicious and never climbed up in the tree.’

‘If the leopard was here there must be some tracks,’ says Werner.

‘There are tracks,’ says Musukutwane.

They crawl out of the grass blind and walk over to the tree. Flies are buzzing around the dead calf. Musukutwane points at the ground. The leopard’s tracks.

He came from a dense thicket just behind the tree, made a circuit to observe the calf from different directions, before he approached the tree. Then he turned and quickly vanished back into the thicket. Musukutwane reads the tracks as if they were written words.

‘What scared it off?’ asks Judith.

Musukutwane shakes his head and touches the track carefully with his palm.

‘He didn’t hear anything. But he still knew it was dangerous. It’s an old, experienced male. He has lived long because he is smart.’

‘Will he come back tonight?’ asks Olofson.

‘Only the leopard knows that,’ replies Musukutwane.

Ruth is waiting for them with breakfast.

‘No shots last night,’ she says. ‘No leopard?’

‘No leopard,’ says Judith. ‘But I may have found myself a foreman.’

‘Really?’ says Ruth, looking at Hans. ‘Are you thinking of staying?’

‘A short time,’ he replies. ‘While she looks for the right person.’

After breakfast he packs his bag and Louis carries it out to the waiting Land Rover.

In surprise he realises that he has no regrets at all. I’m not making any commitment, he tells himself. I’m just allowing myself an adventure.

‘Maybe the leopard will come tonight,’ he says to Werner when they say goodbye.

‘Musukutwane thinks so,’ says Werner. ‘If the leopard has any weakness it’s the same as that of a human being: an unwillingness to lose prey that is already caught.’

Werner promises to cancel Olofson’s return trip for him.

‘Come back soon,’ says Ruth.

Judith pulls a dirty cap over her brown hair and with great difficulty jams the car into first gear.

‘We never had children, my husband and I,’ she blurts out as they drive through the gates of the farm.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing,’ says Olofson. ‘What actually happened?’

‘Stewart, my husband, came out to Africa when he was fourteen,’ Judith says. ‘His parents left England during the Depression in 1932, and their savings were just enough for a one-way trip to Capetown. Stewart’s father was a butcher, and he did well. But his mother suddenly began going out in the middle of the night and preaching to the black workers in the shanty towns. She went insane and committed suicide only a few years after they arrived in Capetown. Stewart was always afraid that he would wind up like his mother. Every morning when he woke up he searched for signs that he was starting to lose his mind. He would often ask me if I thought he was doing or saying anything odd. I never thought he had inherited anything from his mother; I think he fell ill from his own fear. After independence here, with all the changes, and the blacks who could now make their own decisions, he lost heart. Still, I was unprepared when he disappeared. He left no message, nothing...’

After a little over an hour they arrive. ‘Fillington Farm’ Olofson reads on a cracked wooden sign nailed to a tree. They turn in through a gate opened by an African in ragged clothes, pass by rows of low incubation buildings, and stop at last outside a house of dark-red brick. A house that was never completed, Olofson can see.

‘Stewart was always fixing up the house,’ she says. ‘He would tear things down and add things on. I don’t think he ever liked the house; he probably would rather have pulled it down and started again.’

‘A castle out in the African bush,’ says Olofson. ‘A strange house. I didn’t think there were any like this.’

‘Welcome,’ she says. ‘Call me Judith and I’ll call you Hans.’

She shows him to a large, bright room with odd angles and a sloping ceiling. Through the window he looks out over a partially overgrown yard with dilapidated garden furniture. German shepherds run restlessly back and forth in a fenced dog run.

‘Bwana,’ says someone behind him.

A Masai, he thinks as he turns around. I’ve always imagined them like this. Kenyatta’s men. This is how they looked, the Mau-Mau warriors, the ones who drove the English out of Kenya.

The African who stands before him is very tall, his face noble.

‘My name is Luka, Bwana.’

Can one have a servant who is nobler than oneself? Olofson wonders. An African warrior who runs one’s bath?

He notices Judith standing in the doorway. ‘Luka will take care of us,’ she says. ‘He reminds me of what I forget.’

Later, when they are sitting in the dilapidated wooden furniture drinking coffee, she tells him about Luka.

‘I don’t trust him,’ she says. ‘There’s something wily about him, even though I’ve never caught him stealing or lying. But he does both, naturally.’

‘How should I treat him?’ asks Olofson.

‘Firmly,’ says Judith. ‘The Africans are always looking for your weak point, those moments when you can be talked into something. Give him nothing; find something to complain about the first time he washes your clothes. Even if there’s nothing; then he’ll know that you make demands...’

Two large tortoises are asleep at Olofson’s feet. The heat gives him a churning headache, and when he sets down his coffee cup, he sees that his table is a stuffed elephant foot.

I could live here the rest of my life, he thinks. The impulse is immediate, it overwhelms his consciousness and he can’t formulate a single objection. I could put twenty-five years of my life behind me. Never again have to be reminded of what came before. But which of my roots would die if I tried to transplant them here, to this red earth? Why leave the meadowlands of Norrland for the sandy red soil they have here? Why would I want to live on a continent where an inexorable process of eviction is under way? Africa wants the whites out, I’ve understood that much. But they persevere, build their forts to defend themselves using racism and contempt as their tools. The whites’ prisons are comfortable, but they are still prisons, bunkers with bowing servants...

His thoughts are interrupted. Judith looks at the coffee cup in her hand.

‘The porcelain is a reminder,’ she says. ‘When Cecil Rhodes received his concessions over what today is called Zambia, he sent his employees into the wilderness to conclude agreements with the local chieftains. Perhaps also to obtain their help in finding unknown ore deposits. But these employees, who sometimes had to travel for years through the bush, were also supposed to be the vanguard of civilisation. Each expedition was like sending out an English manor house with bearers and ox carts. Every evening when they made camp, the porcelain service was unpacked. A table was set up with a white tablecloth, while Cecil Rhodes bathed in his tent and changed into his evening clothes. This service once belonged to one of the men who cleared the way for Cecil Rhodes’s dream of an unbroken British territory from the Cape to Cairo.’

‘Everyone is occasionally seized by impossible dreams,’ says Olofson. ‘Only the craziest try to realise them.’

‘Not the madmen,’ replies Judith. ‘There you are mistaken. Not the madmen, but the intelligent and far-sighted ones. Cecil Rhodes’s dream was not an impossibility; his problem was that he was all alone, at the mercy of impotent and capricious British politicians.’

‘An empire that rests upon the most precarious of all foundations,’ says Olofson. ‘Oppression, alienation in one’s own country. Such an edifice must collapse before it’s even completed. There is one truth that’s impossible to avoid.’

‘And what’s that?’ asks Judith.

‘The blacks were here first,’ says Olofson. ‘The world is full of various judicial systems, and in Europe it’s based on Roman law. In Asia there are other legal forms, in Africa, everywhere. But natural law is always followed, even if the laws are given a political interpretation. The Indians of North America were almost totally wiped out in a couple of hundred years. And yet their natural law was written into the American law...’

Judith bursts into laughter. ‘My second philosopher,’ she says. ‘Duncan Jones is also steeped in ephemeral philosophical reflections. I’ve never understood a word of it, even though I tried to in the beginning. Now he has drunk his brain into mush, his body shakes, and he chews his lips to shreds. Maybe he’ll live a few more years before I have to bury him. Once he was a man with dignity and resolve. Now he lives in an eternal twilight zone of alcohol and decay. The Africans think he is being transformed into a holy man. They’re afraid of him. He’s the best watchdog I could have. And now you arrive, my next philosopher. Maybe Africa tempts some people to start ruminating.’

‘Where does Duncan Jones live?’ Olofson asks.

‘I’ll show you tomorrow,’ says Judith.

Olofson lies awake for a long time in his irregular room with its sloping roof. A scent that reminds him of winter apples pervades it. Before he puts out the light he gazes at a big spider web, motionless on one of the walls. Somewhere a roof beam is complaining and he feels transported back to the house by the river. He listens to the German shepherds that Luka has let outside. They run restlessly around the house, making one circuit after another.

A short time, he thinks. A temporary visit to lend a helping hand to people with whom he has nothing in common, but who have taken care of him during his journey to Africa. They have abandoned Africa, but not each other, he thinks. That will also turn out to be their ruin...

In his dreams the leopard appears, the one he waited for last night in a grass blind. Now it races into the space inside him, searching for a quarry that Olofson left behind. The leopard searches through his internal landscape, and he suddenly sees Sture before him. They are sitting on the boulder by the river and watching a crocodile that has crawled up on a sand bank, right by the huge stone caissons of the river bridge.

Janine is balancing on one of the iron beams with her trombone. He tries to hear what she’s playing, but the night wind carries away the tune.

Finally there is only the leopard’s watchful eye, observing him from the dream chamber. The dream falls away, and when he awakens in the African dawn he will not remember it.

It is a day in late September of 1969. Hans Olofson will remain in Africa for eighteen years...