The Eye of the Leopard

Chapter Thirteen

When he opens his eyes in the dark, the fever is gone. There is only a wailing and whining sound inside his head.

I’m still alive, he thinks. I’m not dead yet. The malaria has not yet conquered me. I still have time to understand why I have lived before I die...

The heavy revolver presses against one cheek. He turns his head and feels the cold barrel against his forehead. A faint smell of gunpowder, like cow manure burned out in a pasture, pricks his nose.

He is very tired. How long was he asleep? A couple of minutes or twenty-four hours? He has no idea. He listens to the darkness, but the only thing he hears is his own breathing. The heat is stifling. The sheet is incapable of absorbing all the sweat he has produced.

Now is my chance, he thinks. Before the next fever attack is upon me. Now is when I have to get hold of Luka, who has betrayed me and left me to the bandits so they can slit my throat. Now is when I can catch him and scare him into running on his silent feet through the night to bring help. They are out there in the dark, with their automatic weapons and pickaxes and knives, and they’re waiting for me to get delirious again before they come in here and kill me...

And yet he doesn’t seem to care whether the malaria kills him or the bandits. He listens to the night. The frogs are croaking. A hippopotamus sighs down by the river.

Is Luka sitting outside the door, on his haunches, waiting? His black face concentrating, turned inward, listening to his forefathers speaking inside him? And the bandits? Where are they waiting? In the dense thickets of hibiscus beyond the gazebo that blew down last year in a violent storm that came after everyone thought the rainy season was over?

One year ago, he thinks. For ten years he has lived here by the Kafue River. Or fifteen years, maybe more. He tries to tally them up but he’s too tired. And he was only supposed to stay here two weeks. What actually happened? Even time is betraying me, he thinks.

He can see himself descend from the aeroplane at Lusaka International Airport that day so inconceivably long ago. The concrete was completely white, the heat hung like a mist over the airport, and an African pushing a baggage cart laughed as he stepped on to Africa’s burning soil.

He remembers his anxiety, his instant suspicion towards Africa. Back then he left behind the adventure he had imagined ever since childhood. He had always imagined that he would step out into the unknown with a consciousness that was open and utterly free of anxiety.

But Africa crushed that idea. When he stepped out of the aeroplane and found himself surrounded by black people, foreign smells, and a language he didn’t understand, he longed to go straight back home.

The trip to Mutshatsha, the dubious pilgrimage to the final goal of Janine’s dream — he carried it out under a compulsion he had imposed on himself. He still recalls the humiliating feeling that terror was his only travelling companion; it overshadowed everything else in his mind. The money sticking to him inside his underpants, the terrified creature huddled in the hotel room.

Africa conquered the sense of adventure within him as soon as he took his first breath on the soil of this foreign continent. He began planning his return at once.

Fifteen or ten or eighteen years later, he is still there. His return ticket is somewhere in a drawer full of shoes and broken wristwatches and rusty screws. Many years ago he discovered it when he was looking for something in the drawer; insects had attacked the envelope and made the ticket illegible.

What actually happened?

He listens to the darkness. Suddenly he feels as if he’s lying in his bed in the wooden house by the river again. He can’t tell if it’s winter or summer. His father is snoring in his room and he thinks that soon, soon, the moorings of the wooden house will be cut and the house will drift away down the river, off towards the sea...

What was it that happened? Why did he stay in Africa, by this river, on this farm, where he was forced to witness the murder of his friends, where he soon felt he was surrounded only by the dead?

How has he been able to live so long with a revolver under his pillow? It isn’t normal for a person who grew up by a river in Norrland — in a town and a time where nobody ever thought of locking the door at night — to check that his revolver is loaded every night, that no one has replaced the cartridges with blanks. It isn’t normal to live a life surrounded by hate...

Once again he tries to understand. Before the malaria or the bandits have conquered him he wants to know...

He can feel that a new attack of fever is on its way. The whining in his head has stopped abruptly. Now he can hear only the frogs and the sighing hippo. He takes a grip on the sheet so he can hold on tight when the fever rolls over him like a storm surge.

I have to hang on, he thinks in despair. As long as I keep my will the fever won’t be able to vanquish me. If I put the pillow over my face they won’t hear me yell when the hallucinations torment me.

The fever drops its cage around him. He thinks he sees the leopard, which only visits him when he’s sick, lying at the foot of the bed. Its cat face is turned towards him. The cold eyes are motionless.

It doesn’t exist, he tells himself. It’s just racing around in my head. With my will I can conquer the cat as well. When the fever is gone the leopard won’t exist any more. Then I’ll have control over my thoughts and dreams. Then it won’t exist any more...

What happened? he wonders again.

The question echoes inside him. Suddenly he no longer knows who he is. The fever drives him away from his consciousness. The leopard watches by the bed, the revolver rests against his cheek.

The fever chases him out on to the endless plains...

Chapter Fourteen

One day in late September 1969.

He has promised to stay and help Judith Fillington with her farm, and when he wakes up the first morning in the room with the odd angles, he sees that some overalls with patched knees are lying on his chair.

Luka, he thinks. While I sleep he carries out her orders. Silently he places the overalls on a chair, looks at my face, disappears.

He looks out the window, out over the vast farm. An unexpected elation fills him. For a brief moment he seems to have conquered his fear. He can stay for a few weeks and help her. The trip to Mutshatsha is already a distant memory. Staying on Judith’s farm is no longer following in Janine’s footsteps...

During the hot morning hours Olofson listens to the gospel according to chickens. He and Judith sit in the shade of a tree and she instructs him.

‘Fifteen thousand eggs per day,’ she says. ‘Twenty thousand laying hens, additional colonies of at least 5,000 chicks who replace the hens that no longer lay and then go to slaughter. Every Saturday morning at dawn we sell them. The Africans wait in silent queues all night long. We sell the hens for four kwacha, and they resell the hens at the markets for six or seven kwacha...’

She looks like a bird. A restless bird who keeps expecting the shadow of a falcon or eagle to drop down over her head. He has put on the overalls that lay on the chair when he awoke. Judith is wearing a pair of faded, dirty khaki trousers, a red shirt that is far too big, and a hat with a wide brim. Her eyes are inaccessible in the shadow of the brim.

‘Why don’t you sell them at the markets yourself?’ he asks.

‘I concentrate on survival,’ she says. ‘I’m already close to cracking under the workload.’

She calls to Luka and says something that Olofson doesn’t understand. Why do all the whites act impatient, he wonders, as if every black man or woman were insubordinate or stupid?

Luka returns with a dirty map, and Olofson squats down next to Judith. With one finger she shows him on the map where her farm delivers its eggs. He tries to remember the names: Ndola, Mufulira, Solwezi, Kansanshi.

Judith’s shirt is open at the neck. When she leans forward he can see her skinny chest. The sun has burned a red triangle down towards her navel. Suddenly she straightens up, as if she were aware that he was no longer looking at the map. Her eyes remain hidden under the hat.

‘We deliver to the shops of the state cooperative,’ she says. ‘We deliver to the mining companies, always big orders. At most a thousand eggs per day go to local buyers. Every employee gets one egg a day.’

‘How many people work here?’ Olofson asks.

‘Two hundred,’ she replies. ‘I’m trying to learn all their names by paying out the wages myself. I take deductions for drunkenness and for those who miss work without having a good excuse. I give out warnings and fines, I hire and fire, and I rely on my memory to guarantee that no one who is sacked comes back under a false name to be hired again. Of the 200 who work here, twenty are night watchmen. We have two laying houses, each manned by an assistant foreman and ten workers in shifts. In addition we have butchers, carpenters, drivers, and manual labourers. Only men, no women.’

‘What will I be doing?’ asks Olofson. ‘I know what the chickens eat and where the eggs are delivered, but what will I do?’

‘Follow me like a shadow. Listen to what I say, check that it gets done. Everything we want done has to be repeated, ordered a second time, and then checked.’

‘Something must be wrong,’ Olofson says. ‘Something the whites have never understood.’

‘Love the blacks if you want,’ says Judith. ‘But take my advice. I’ve lived among them my whole life. I speak their language, I know how they think. I get doctors for their children when the medicine man fails, I pay for their funerals when they don’t have any money. I send the smartest children to school at my expense. When the food runs out I organise transport of sacks of maize to their houses. I do everything for them. But anyone who is caught stealing a single egg I turn over to the police. I fire a man who is drunk, I kick out the night watchmen who fall asleep.’

Olofson slowly begins to realise the scope of the operation. The dominion of a single woman, Africans who subordinate themselves because they have no alternative. Two different types of poverty, face to face at a common meeting point. The terror of the whites, their truncated lives as left-over colonialists in a burned-out empire. The ash heap of loneliness in a new or resurrected black colony.

The poverty of the whites is their vulnerability. Their lack of alternatives becomes apparent when they arrange to meet the Africans. Even a garden like this one, with the barely visible dream of a Victorian park embedded in the greenery, is a fortified bunker. Judith Fillington’s last bastion is her hat, which conceals her eyes.

The poverty and vulnerability of the blacks is the poverty of the continent. Broken and destroyed living patterns, their origins lost in the mists of the past, replaced by insane empire builders who changed into their dinner jackets deep in the rainforests and on the plains of elephant grass. This world of stage sets still exists. Here the Africans are trying to shape their future. Perhaps they have endless patience. Perhaps they still have doubts about how the future should look, how these stage sets can be dissolved and obliterated. But what happens when they burst?

Hans Olofson decides he must work out a contingency plan, an escape route. I’m only here for a short visit, he thinks. I’m doing a favour for a strange woman, as if I were helping her up after a fall on the street. But the whole time I remain outside the actual event. I don’t get involved, I can’t be held responsible...

Judith gets up abruptly. ‘Work is waiting,’ she says. ‘Most of your questions you can probably answer yourself. Africa belongs to each individual, it’s never shared.’

‘You know nothing about me,’ he says. ‘My background, my life, my dreams. And yet you’re prepared to grant me enormous responsibility. From my Swedish point of view it’s incomprehensible.’

‘I’m alone,’ she replies. ‘Abandoned by a man I never even had a chance to bury. Living in Africa means always being forced to take full responsibility.’

Much later he will remember his first days at Judith Fillington’s farm as an unreal journey into a world he seems to understand less and less, the more his insight grows. Surrounded by the faces of the black workers, he feels that he is in the midst of an ongoing but not yet triggered catastrophe.

During those days he discovers that feelings secrete different odours. He can sense hate in a bitter smell, like manure or vinegar, everywhere; wherever he follows Judith like a shadow the smell is always nearby. When he wakes in the night, the smell is there, a faint current through the malaria net that hangs above his bed.

Something has to happen, he thinks. An outbreak of rage at the impotence and poverty. Not having an alternative is like having nothing at all, he thinks. Not being able to see anything beyond poverty except more poverty...

He decides that he has to get away, leave Africa before it’s too late. But after a month he is still there. He lies in his room with the sloping ceiling and listens to the dogs restlessly patrolling around the house. Every evening before he goes to bed, he sees Judith check that the doors and windows are locked. He sees how she first turns out the light in each room before she goes in to draw the heavy curtains. She is always listening, stopping suddenly in the midst of a step or a movement. She takes a shotgun and a heavy elephant gun into her bedroom every night. During the day the weapons are locked inside a steel cabinet, and he sees that she always carries the keys with her.

After a month he realises that he has begun to share her fear. With the rapidly falling twilight the strange house is transformed into a bunker of silence. He asks whether she has found a successor, but she shakes her head.

‘In Africa anything important takes a long time,’ she replies.

He begins to suspect that she hasn’t written any classified ads, hasn’t made contact with the newspapers that Werner Masterton suggested. But he refrains from giving vent to his suspicion.

Judith fills him with awed respect, perhaps even devotion. Hans follows her from dawn to dusk, follows her unceasing effort, which means that 15,000 eggs leave the farm each day, despite run-down and mistreated lorries, a continual shortage of the maize waste that makes up the primary fodder, and sudden outbreaks of viral diseases which during one night can take the lives of all the hens in one of the oblong, walled-off stone buildings where they are forced into steel cages. One night she wakes him up, pulling open his door and shining a torch into his face, and tells him to get dressed at once.

Outside the house with its locked doors a frightened night watchman is shouting that hunter ants have got into one of the chicken coops, and when they reach the site Olofson sees terrified Africans using burning bundles of twigs to swat at the endless columns of ants. Without hesitation Judith takes the lead, forcing the ants to change direction, and she screams at him when he doesn’t understand what she wants him to do.

‘Who am I?’ he asks her early one morning. ‘Who am I to the blacks?’

‘A new Duncan Jones,’ she replies. ‘Two hundred Africans are searching for your weak spot right now.’

Two weeks pass before he meets the man he has come to replace. Each day they go past the house where he sits locked in with his bottles, transforming himself into a holy man. The house is on a hill right by the river, surrounded by a high wall.

A rusty car, maybe a Peugeot, is sometimes parked outside the wall. It’s always parked as though it had been abandoned in haste. The boot stands open, and the corner of a filthy blanket hangs out of one door.

He imagines a state of siege, a final battle that will be fought around this hill, between the black workers and the lone white man inside in the dark.

‘The night watchmen are afraid,’ says Judith. ‘They can hear him wailing in the night. They’re afraid, but at the same time they feel a sense of security. They think that his metamorphosis to a holy man will mean that the bandits will stay away from this farm.’

‘The bandits?’ Olofson asks.

‘They’re everywhere,’ she replies. ‘In the slums outside Kitwe and Chingola there are plenty of weapons. Gangs spring up and are destroyed, and new ones appear in their place. White farmers are attacked, cars with whites are stopped on the roads. The police are almost certainly involved, as well as workers on the farms.’

‘What if they come here?’ he asks.

‘I rely on my dogs,’ she says. ‘Africans are afraid of dogs. And I have Duncan wailing in the night. Superstition can be good if you know how to use it. Maybe the night watchmen believe he’s being transformed into a snake.’

Then one morning he meets Duncan Jones for the first time. He is standing supervising the loading of empty feed sacks into a battered lorry when the black workers stop working. Duncan Jones comes walking slowly towards him. He is dressed in dirty trousers and a ripped shirt. Olofson sees a man who has slashed his face with his straight razor. A suntanned face, skin like tanned leather. Heavy eyelids, grey hair that is tangled and filthy.

‘Don’t ever take a piss before all the sacks are loaded and the back door locked,’ says Duncan Jones, coughing. ‘If you go to take a piss before that, you have to expect that at least ten sacks will disappear. They sell the sacks for one kwacha each.’

He holds out his hand.

‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand,’ he says. ‘Why has Judith waited so long to find my successor? Everyone has to be put out to pasture eventually. The only ones spared are those who die young. But who are you?’

‘I’m a Swede,’ says Olofson. ‘I’m only here temporarily.’

Duncan Jones opens his face in a smile and Olofson looks straight into a mouth full of black stumps of teeth.

‘Why does everyone who comes to Africa have to apologise?’ he asks. ‘Even those who were born here say that they’re only here for a short visit.’

‘In my case it’s true,’ says Olofson.

Jones shrugs his shoulders. ‘Judith deserves it,’ he says. ‘She deserves all the help she can get.’

‘She put an ad in the paper,’ says Olofson.

‘Who can she get?’ says Jones. ‘Who would move here? Don’t abandon her. Never ask me for advice, I don’t have any. Maybe I had some once, advice I should have taken myself. But it’s all gone now. I’ll live for another year. Hardly longer than that...’

Suddenly he bellows at the Africans who are silently watching his meeting with Hans Olofson.

‘Work!’ he yells. ‘Work, don’t sleep!’

Instantly they grab hold of their sacks.

‘They’re afraid of me,’ says Jones. ‘I know they think I’m about to dissolve and be resurrected in the figure of a holy man. I’m about to become a kashinakashi. Or maybe a snake. How do I know?’

Then he turns and leaves. Olofson watches him stop and press one hand against the small of his back, as if a pain has suddenly struck him. That evening, as they are eating dinner, Olofson mentions the meeting.

‘Maybe he will succeed in reaching some kind of clarity,’ she says. ‘Africa has set him free from all dreams. For Duncan, life is an undertaking that has been arbitrarily assigned. He is drinking himself consciously and methodically towards the big sleep. Without fear, I think. Maybe we should envy him. Or maybe we should feel pity that he so utterly lacks hope?’

‘No wife, no children?’ asks Olofson.

‘He lies with the black women,’ she replies. ‘Maybe he has black children. I know that sometimes he mistreats the women he takes to his bed. But I don’t know why he does it.’

‘It looked as though he was in pain,’ says Olofson. ‘Maybe it’s his kidneys.’

‘He would say that Africa is taking him from inside,’ she says. ‘He would never admit to any other illness.’

Then she asks Olofson to stay a bit longer. He realises that he is listening to a liar when she says that the classified ads in the newspapers in South Africa and Botswana have not yet produced any replies.

‘All right, but not for long,’ he replies. ‘A month at most, no more.’

A week before the time has run out, Judith takes sick one night. He wakes up when she touches his arm and finds her standing in the dark by his bed. What he sees when he manages to light the bedside lamp with a drowsy hand is something he knows he’ll never forget.

A dying woman, maybe already dead. Judith is dressed in an old, stained dressing gown. Her hair is uncombed and tangled, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes wide open as if she were looking at something unbearable. In one hand she holds her shotgun.

‘I’m sick,’ she says. ‘I need your help.’

Utterly powerless she sinks down on the edge of the bed. But the mattress is soft. She slides off on to the floor and sits leaning her head against the bed.

‘It’s malaria,’ she says. ‘I must have medicine. Take the car, drive to Duncan’s place, wake him up, and ask him for medicine. If he doesn’t have any you’ll have to drive to Werner and Ruth’s. You can find your way all right.’

He helps her into the bed.

‘Take the shotgun,’ she says. ‘Lock the house behind you. If Duncan doesn’t wake up, fire the gun.’

When he turns the key in the ignition the night is filled with loud rumba music from the radio. This is crazy, he thinks as he forces the stiff gearstick into position. I’ve never been this scared in my life. Not even when I was a child and crawled across the river bridge.

He drives over the potholed sandy road, much too fast and recklessly, jamming the gears and feeling the barrel of the shotgun against his shoulder.

Outside the hen houses the night watchmen appear in the headlights. A white man in the night, he thinks. It’s not my night, it belongs to the blacks.

Outside Duncan Jones’s house he honks the horn wildly. Then he forces himself out of the car, finds a rock on the ground, and begins slamming it against the gate in the wall. He cracks the skin on his knuckles, listens for sounds from inside the house, but he hears only his own heart. He gets the gun from the car, remembers the safety catch, and then fires a shot at the distant stars. The butt slams against his shoulder and the shot booms in the night.

‘Come on!’ he yells. ‘Wake up from your drunken stupor, bring me the damned medicine!’

At last he hears a scraping sound on the other side of the gate and Olofson shouts his name. Duncan Jones stands naked before him. He has a revolver in his hand.

This is insanity, Olofson thinks again. No one would believe me if I described it; I’ll probably hardly even believe my own memories. I have to get her some medicine. Then I’ll go back home. This is no life, this is madness.

Jones is so drunk that Olofson has to tell him over and over why he came. Finally he sticks the barrel of the shotgun in his chest.

‘Malaria medicine!’ he shouts. ‘Malaria medicine...’

At last Jones understands, and he staggers back to his house. Olofson steps into an indescribable mess of dirty clothes, empty bottles, half-eaten meals, and piles of newspapers.

This is a morgue, he thinks. Here death is busy taking control. He won’t be able to find any medicine in this chaos, thinks Olofson, and he prepares to drive the long road to the Mastertons’ farm. But then Jones comes wobbling out of what Olofson assumes is his bedroom, and in his hand he has a paper bag. Olofson snatches the bag and leaves the house.

After he returns and has locked all the doors behind him, he realises that he is drenched with sweat.

He carefully shakes Judith from a feverish sleep and forces her to swallow three tablets after reading the instructions. She sinks back on to the pillows and he sits down in a chair to catch his breath. He becomes aware that he is still holding the shotgun. This isn’t normal, he thinks. I would never be able to get used to a life like this. I would never survive...

He stays awake all night, watching her fever attacks subside and then return. At daybreak he feels her forehead. Her breathing is deep and steady. He goes into the kitchen and unlocks the back door. Luka is standing there waiting.

‘Coffee,’ says Olofson. ‘No food, just coffee. Madame Judith is sick today.’

‘I know, Bwana,’ Luka replies.

Weariness suddenly gets the upper hand in Olofson’s mind. He bursts out with a furious question. All these Africans know everything in advance.

‘How can you know?’

Luka seems unperturbed by his outburst. ‘A car drives much too fast through the night, Bwana,’ he says. ‘All mzunguz drive in different ways. Bwana stops outside Bwana Duncan’s house. Fires off his shotgun, yells in the night. Luka wakes up and thinks madame must be sick. Madame is never sick unless she has malaria.’

‘Now fix my coffee,’ says Olofson. ‘It’s too early to listen to long explanations.’

Just after six o’clock he gets into the Jeep again and tries to imagine that he is Judith. He does her chores, checks off on a roll call that all the workers have arrived, ensures that the eggs are gathered and leave the farm. He makes an estimate of the feed supply and organises a tractor transport to the mill whose turn it is to deliver maize waste.

At eleven o’clock a rusty car with worn-down shock absorbers pulls up in front of the mud hut where Judith has set up her office. Olofson walks out into the sharp sunshine. A conspicuously well-dressed African comes towards him. Again Olofson finds himself involved in a complicated greeting procedure.

‘I’m looking for Madame Fillington,’ says the man.

‘She’s ill,’ replies Olofson.

The African looks at him, smiling and appraising him.

‘I’m Mr Pihri,’ he says.

‘I’m Madame Fillington’s temporary foreman,’ says Olofson.

‘I know,’ says Mr Pihri. ‘It’s precisely because you are who you are that I have come here today with some important papers. I’m the Mr Pihri who does small favours for madame now and then. Not large favours. But even small favours are necessary from time to time. To avoid problems that might become bothersome.’

Olofson senses that he has to be careful. ‘Papers?’ he says.

Mr Pihri at once looks sad.

‘Madame Fillington usually offers me tea when I come to visit,’ he says.

Olofson has seen a teapot inside the hut, and he calls to one of the Africans bent over the illegible roll call lists to fix tea. Mr Pihri’s sorrowful face is then transformed by a large smile. Olofson decides to smile too.

‘Our authorities are scrupulous about formalities,’ says Mr Pihri. ‘We learned that from the British. Perhaps our authorities today exaggerate their scrupulousness. But we must be careful with people who visit our country. All papers must be in order.’

This also applies to me, Olofson thinks. Why did this smiling man have to come today of all days, when Judith is sick?

They drink tea in the dimness of the hut and Olofson sees Mr Pihri dump eight teaspoons of sugar into his cup.

‘Madame asked me for help in facilitating the processing of your visa,’ says Mr Pihri, as he drinks his tea in slow sips. ‘Of course it is important to avoid unnecessary impediments. Madame and I usually exchange services to our mutual benefit. It makes me very sad to hear that she is ill. If she died it would be particularly disadvantageous.’

‘Perhaps I can assist you in her stead,’ says Olofson.

‘That would be excellent,’ replies Mr Pihri. From his inside pocket he takes some papers, typed and stamped.

‘I’m Mr Pihri,’ he says again. ‘Police officer and a very good friend of Madame Fillington. I hope she doesn’t die.’

‘I am of course grateful on her behalf. I would be happy to do you a service in her place.’

Mr Pihri continues to smile. ‘My friends and colleagues at the Immigration Department are quite busy at the moment. The workload is extremely heavy. They also deny many applications for temporary residency. Unfortunately they must sometimes reject people who would like to stay in our country. Naturally it is never pleasant to have to leave a country within twenty-four hours. Especially when Madame Fillington is ill. I only hope she doesn’t die. But my friends at the Immigration Department showed great understanding. I’m happy to be able to deliver these papers, signed and stamped in due order. One should always avoid trouble. The authorities take a dim view of any individuals who lack the required documents. Unfortunately, sometimes they are also forced to incarcerate people for an indefinite period.’

Mr Pihri looks sad once again.

‘The prisons in this country unfortunately suffer from neglect. Especially for Europeans who are used to quite different conditions.’

What the hell does he want? Olofson wonders.

‘I am naturally very grateful,’ he says. ‘I would like to express my appreciation on behalf of Madame Fillington.’

Again Mr Pihri smiles.

‘The boot of my car is not very big. But 500 eggs could be fitted into it with no problem.’

‘Load 500 eggs into Mr Pihri’s car,’ Olofson tells one of the crouching office workers.

Mr Pihri hands him the stamped documents.

‘I regret that from time to time these stamps must be renewed. It is always good to avoid problems. This is why Madame Fillington and I meet regularly. In this way one can avoid much unpleasantness.’

Olofson escorts Mr Pihri to his car, where the egg cartons are stacked in the boot.

‘My car is getting old,’ says Mr Pihri in a worried voice. ‘Perhaps it will simply stop running one day. Then it would be quite troublesome for me to visit Madame Fillington.’

‘I’ll tell her that your car has begun to run poorly,’ replies Olofson.

‘I would be grateful. Tell her also that just now there is an excellent used Peugeot for sale by one of my friends in Kitwe.’

‘I’ll mention it to her.’

They repeat the complicated greeting procedure.

‘It was very nice we could meet,’ says Mr Pihri.

‘Naturally we are very grateful,’ replies Olofson.

‘Trouble should be avoided,’ says Mr Pihri as he gets behind the wheel and drives off.

Corruption’s Song of Songs, thinks Olofson as he walks back to the dark hut. Like a well-groomed beard. A polite, quiet talk...

When he studies the documents that Mr Pihri left, he finds to his astonishment that Judith has applied for and been granted a visa for him as a ‘resident’ for a period of two years.

He is instantly agitated. I’m not going to stay here, he thinks. I have no intention of letting myself be entrapped by her plans for her own future...

When he returns to the house to eat lunch, Judith is awake. She is still lying in his bed. She is pale and tired, and it’s a big effort for her to smile. When he starts to speak she shakes her head.

‘Later,’ she says. ‘Not now. I’m too tired. Luka will give me what I need.’

When Olofson returns in the evening she has moved back to her own room. He observes how forlorn she looks in the wide double bed. The illness has diminished her, he thinks. Her skin has shrunk. Only her eyes are unchanged, just as big and restless as ever.

‘I’m feeling better,’ she says. ‘But I’m very tired. Every time I get malaria my powerlessness gets worse. I despise weakness, not being able to do anything.’

‘Mr Pihri came to visit,’ he tells her. ‘He left me some papers with a lot of stamps on them and I gave him what he wanted, 500 eggs.’

‘Smiling the whole time,’ says Judith. ‘He’s such a crook, one of the worst. Although he is reliable; playing the corruption game with him always gives results.’

‘He wants a new car. He has picked out a used Peugeot.’

‘He’ll get it when I have a sufficiently difficult matter for him to solve.’

‘Why did you apply for a two-year residence visa for me?’

‘I don’t think they come any shorter than that.’

As sick as she is, she can still lie, he thinks. When she gets well I’ll have to ask her why. He listens outside her door and hears her soft snoring.

Then he makes a pilgrimage through the house, counts the number of rooms, finds his way through deserted guest rooms, and stops outside a door he hadn’t noticed before. He’s at the end of a winding corridor, and the door is scarcely visible, set into the brown panelling.

The door opens when he touches the handle, and a musty smell of camphor wafts towards him. He slides one hand over the wall to find a light switch. A bare lightbulb in the ceiling comes on. He sees a thigh bone that he surmises is from an elephant or a cape buffalo. A crocodile with the extended ribs of a reptile. Various skulls and horns, some of them broken, lie jumbled together. He imagines that the animals were once locked alive in this room and slowly rotted away, until all that remained were bones and skulls.

Her husband’s room, he thinks. A little boy’s dream of what a grown man’s room would be. In a dusty window niche lies a notebook. He can make out the pencil handwriting passably well and realises he is looking at poems. Quivering poetic fragments, written with a pencil that is so faint it could never have been intended that the text survive...

A rucksack full of ants was all that remained, he thinks. That is poetry too, the epitaph of a man who disappeared. Depressed, he leaves the room.

Once again he listens outside Judith’s door and then goes into his own room. A faint odour from her body is still between the sheets. The imprint of fever. He places her shotgun next to the bed. I don’t want to take over from her, he thinks. Yet one of her weapons stands by my bed.

All at once he is homesick, childishly so; he feels abandoned. Now I have seen Africa, he thinks. What I’ve seen I haven’t understood, but I’ve still seen it. I’m no explorer; expeditions into the unknown tempt me only in my imagination.

Once I climbed over a bridge span, as if I were riding on the axis of the earth itself. I left something behind up there on that cold iron span. It was the longest journey I ever took in my life... It’s possible that I’m still up there, with my fingers gripping the cold iron. Maybe I never really came down. I’m still up there, wrapped in my terror.

He gets into bed and turns off the light. The sounds stream forth from the darkness, the padding dogs, the hippo sighing from the river.

Just before he falls asleep he is wide awake for a moment. Someone is laughing out in the dark. One of the dogs barks and then all is quiet again.

In the silence he remembers the brickworks. The ruin where he became aware of his consciousness for the first time. In the laughter that reaches him from the night he thinks he senses a continuation of that moment. The ruin of the brickworks clarified his existence. The fortified bedroom in the house by the Kafue River, surrounded by large dogs, reveals certain conditions. The laughter that penetrates the night describes the world he temporarily happens to inhabit.

This is how it looks, he thinks. Earlier I knew without knowing. Now I see how the world has capsized, I see the poverty and misery that are the real truth. Perched high on the river bridge there were only the stars and the expansive horizon of fir trees. I wanted to get away from there and now I have done so. Being here must mean that I’m in the centre of a time that belongs to me. I have no idea who was laughing. Nor can I determine whether the laugh is a threat or a promise. And yet I know.

Soon he must leave this place. His return ticket is his main insurance. In a place where the world is divided, where the world is fixed, he doesn’t have to be involved. He stretches out his hand in the dark and runs his fingers along the cold barrel of the shotgun. The hippo sighs down by the river.

All of a sudden he’s in a hurry to get home. Judith will have to look for Duncan Jones’s successor without his help. The visa that Mr Pihri extracted from his friends and was paid for with 500 eggs will never be used...

But he is wrong; Hans Olofson is wrong. Like so many times before, his assessments turn on their own axis and come back to the starting point as their opposites. The return ticket has already begun to decompose.

Chapter Fifteen

Hans Olofson’s dreams are almost always reminders.

Through his dreams, his subconscious self ensures that he forgets nothing. Often there is a recurrent prelude, as if his dreams were drawing aside the old worn curtain for the very same music. The music is the winter night, the clear, starry midwinter cold.

He is out there, Hans Olofson, still barely grown. He is standing somewhere by the church wall beneath a street lamp. He is a lonely, sad shadow against all the white of that stern winter night...

How could he have known? He couldn’t peek into the veiled world of the future when he finally finished his last day of school, flung his school books under the bed and marched away to his first full-time job as the youngest man in the warehouse of the Trade Association. Back then the world was exceedingly knowable and whole. Now he was going to earn his own money, pull his own weight, learn to be a grown-up.

What he would later recall about his time at the Trade Association was the constant hauling of goods up the hill to the train station. The cart he was given was neglected and worn-out, and with a continuous curse inside him he would drag and pull it in a perpetual circuit between the freight office and the warehouse. He quickly learned that swearing didn’t make the hill any easier to overcome. Swearing was revenge and helpless rage, and as such possibly a source of strength, but it didn’t flatten out the hill.

He decides that the hellhole that is the Trade Association’s warehouse can’t represent the truth. The Honour of Work and the Community of Work must look different.

And there is a difference in going to work for Under, the horse dealer who needs a helper because one of his stable boys has been badly bitten on the arm by an angry stallion.

Hans Olofson makes his entrance into the strange world of the horse dealer one day in late September, when there is already snow in the air. Winter preparations are in full swing; stalls have to be rebuilt and expanded, the leaky roof has to be fixed, the harnesses checked, the supply of horseshoes and nails inventoried. Late autumn is the time to prepare for hibernation; horses as well as people have to sleep, and Hans stands with a sledgehammer in his hand and knocks out one of the cross-walls in the stable. Under wanders around in his galoshes in the cement dust and dispenses advice. Visselgren, a short man from the south of Sweden, who Under discovered at the Skänninge marketplace, sits in one corner mending a pile of harnesses, and winks at Hans. The immensely strong Holmström twins pull down one of the cross-walls by themselves. Horses couldn’t have done it any better. Under saunters contentedly back and forth.

In the world of Under there is a continual switching between absentminded indifference and sound opinions which he passionately defends. The very foundation of his world view is that nothing is initially a given, other than when it comes to horses. Casting modesty aside, he views himself as a member of the elite who carry the world on their shoulders. Without horse dealing, chaos would rule, and wild horses would take over the world as the new barbaric rulers. Hans swings his heavy sledgehammer and is happy to have escaped the worn-out cart. Now this is living!

For one year he is part of this strange community. His assignments are always changing; the days differ sharply but enticingly.

One evening he runs across the river bridge to Janine’s house. On this very evening she has adorned herself with the red nose, and she is sitting at the kitchen table polishing her trombone when he stamps the snow off his feet on the steps.

He stopped knocking long ago. Janine’s house is a home, a different home from the wooden house by the river, but still his home. A little leather bag hanging above the kitchen table spreads the fragrance of cumin. Janine, who no longer has a sense of smell, still remembers cumin from the time before the botched operation.

He confides almost everything to Janine. Not everything, that would be impossible. Thoughts and feelings that he can scarcely acknowledge to himself, those remain secret. This applies especially to Hans’s increasingly agitated and vulnerable discovery of the strange desires that are boiling inside him.

Today she has her red nose on. Usually the hole underneath her eyes is covered by a white handkerchief, stuffed into the hole so that he can see the red scars left by the scalpel, and the sight of naked flesh under her eyes becomes something forbidden, hinting at something quite different.

He imagines her naked, with the trombone at her lips, and then he blushes with excitement. He has no idea whether she senses what he’s thinking. He wishes that she would, as often as he wishes the opposite.

She plays a new tune she has learned, ‘Wolverine Blues’, which she has put on her gramophone. Hans keeps the beat with a darning egg, yawns and only half listens.

When she finishes he can’t stay any longer. Nothing is calling him but he’s still in a hurry. Ever since he finished school he has been running. Something is urging him on, exciting and enticing him.

The house stands where it always has stood. Light snow covers the potato patch that nobody ever digs in. In one of the lighted windows he sees his father’s shadow. Hans suddenly feels sorry for him. He tries to imagine the way his father must have stood on the afterdeck of a ship heading into a warm trade wind. Far off, against the last ribbons of the sunset, glow the faint lights from the next port of call.

But when he walks into the kitchen there’s a knot in his stomach, because his father is sitting at the table with glazed eyes and before him stands a half-empty bottle. Hans knows that his father has begun to drink himself into a stupor again.

Why is life so damned hard? he thinks. Bare ice to slip on wherever you turn...

This winter even Under finally reveals himself as something other than a well-meaning horse dealer in galoshes. There is malice behind the friendly mask.

Hans learns that the friendliness has a price. Beneath the voluminous overcoat lurks a reptile. Gradually he begins to understand that in the horse dealer’s world he is nothing more than a strong pair of arms and obedient legs. When Visselgren is struck by arthritis in the middle of February, the good times are over for him. The horse dealer buys him a one-way ticket back to Skänninge and drives him to the station. Under doesn’t even bother to get out of the car and thank him for all his hard work. Back at the stable he rants for a long time about Visselgren’s duplicity, as if his shortness should be regarded as a character defect.

New employees come and go, and eventually it’s only the Holmström twins and Hans who remain of the old crew. Hans is starting to think the same thoughts as he had as he was pulling the cart between the warehouse and the freight office.

Has he ended up back there again? If so, where is the Honour and Community of Work in the daily drudgery that he thought was the great Goal of life?

A few weeks after Visselgren’s departure, the horse dealer comes into the stable late one afternoon with a black box under his arm. The Holmström brothers have already left in their decrepit Saab, and Hans is alone getting the stable ready for the night.

The horse dealer heads towards a seldom used stall where a worn-out Northern Swedish horse is crouched in a corner. He had only just purchased him for a few symbolic notes, and Hans was wondering why the horse hadn’t already been sent to the slaughterhouse.

From the black box the horse dealer takes out something that most resembles the transformer for an electric train. Then he calls Hans over and tells him to bring him an extension cord. The horse dealer is humming, pulling off his big coat, and Hans does as he is told.

And what is he told to do?

The old horse has to be tied with chains while steel clamps are fastened to his ears. Then the electricity passes through the cables, and the animal convulses under the shocks of the current. Under contentedly turns the little knob on the metre, as if he were directing a toy train, and Hans helplessly promises himself never to forget the horse’s tormented eyes. For almost an hour the torture continues, while Under orders Hans to check that the chains are tight so the horse won’t get loose.

He hates the damned horse dealer who is tormenting this broken-down horse. He realises that Under must have a prospective buyer in the background even for this worn-out animal. With electricity and steel clamps a trace of vitality is infused back into the horse, a strength based only on fear.

‘He’ll be practically young again,’ says Under, turning up the current a bit.

The horse foams at the mouth, his eyes are popping out of their sockets. Hans wishes he could put the steel clamps on the horse dealer’s nose and then turn up the current until he begged for mercy. But of course he doesn’t do that. He does as he’s told. Then it’s all over. The horse stands facing the wall and the horse dealer regards his work. Then he grabs Hans by the shirt as if he had set his teeth in him.

‘This is just between us,’ he says. ‘Between you and me and the horse. Get it?’

From his pocket he draws a crumpled five-krona note and presses it into Hans’s hand. Later, as he tears the note to bits outside the church wall he wonders whether the purpose of life will ever be revealed to him. Who needs him — Hans Olofson? And what is he needed for, except to drag a cart or work in a winter stable where helpless horses are tortured?

I have to get away, he thinks. Away from that damned horse dealer. But what will he do instead? Are there really any answers in life? Who can whisper the password in his ear? He walks home in the winter night in February 1959. For a dizzying second life is a breath in the mouth of eternity. Thinking you can cheat time will just drive you crazy. He stops outside the wooden house. The cold glitters in the snow.

The plough, the anchor, the moorings. To be myself and no one else, he thinks. But then what? Onward, and just keep going? He goes upstairs in the silent house, unlaces his ski boots. His father is snoring and sighing in his room. Like restless flocks of birds his thoughts gather in his mind after he gets into bed. He tries to catch them, examine them one by one, but all he sees are the terrified eyes of the horse and the horse dealer cackling like an evil troll. Life is a dizzying second, he thinks before he falls asleep.

In his dream Célestine grows out of her case and surges towards the backdrop of a world he doesn’t recognise at all, and finally he chops through her moorings.

Chapter Sixteen

Does time have a face?

How can one tell when it’s waving and saying goodbye?

One day he realises that he has been with Judith Fillington for a year. The rainy season has passed. Again the motionless heat presses down on him and the African earth.

And the questions he asked himself? They’re still there, but one puzzlement has only been exchanged for another. After a year he is no longer surprised that he is where he is, but instead by how the time could have passed so quickly. After her malaria attack Judith had been stricken by a long drawn-out fatigue that lasted half a year. A parasite, identified far too late, bored into her internal organs and made this fatigue even worse. Olofson saw no possibility of leaving. It would have meant abandoning her, the exhausted woman who lay in the bed that was much too large. He considered it mysterious that she dared to turn over the care of the farm, just like that, to his untrained hands.

One day he discovers that he is waking in the mornings with a quite new and unfamiliar happiness. For the first time in his life he feels he has an objective, even if it’s only to see the lorries full of eggs pull away in a cloud of red dust. Maybe there’s nothing more important than this, he thinks. To produce food and know that someone is always waiting for it.

After a year he also has thoughts that seem frivolous to him. I’ll stay, he thinks. As long as Judith is powerless, as long as the successor doesn’t show up. I’ll teach myself something about all this. About the eggs and the constant feed problem. About leading 200 Africans by the hand. Surely something of this will be meaningful even after I go back home.

After half a year he writes to his father and tells him that he will be staying in Africa for an indefinite period. Of his studies and his ambition to become the defender of mitigating circumstances, he writes only: I’m still young. The letter is an epistle of digression, a personal tall tale, in which he twists and distorts the facts.

It’s a belated thank you, he thinks. A thank you for all the escapades with the sea charts in the house by the river.

I’m involved in an adventure, he writes. An adventure that grew from the energy source that is possibly the true essence of adventure: coincidences that became intertwined, in which I was permitted to take part.

As a worthy cargo to lower down into Célestine’s hold, he sends a crocodile tooth.

Here the reptile’s teeth protect against danger, he writes. I’m sending you an amulet that can protect you from misplaced blows of your axe or a falling tree you otherwise wouldn’t have escaped.

One night he can’t sleep. When he goes to the kitchen to get a drink of water, he hears Judith crying in her locked room. And maybe this is when the first inkling flits past, as he stands in the warm darkness outside her door. The idea that he will stay in Africa. A door that stands ajar in his mind, a glimpse into a future that was never intended.

A year has passed. The hippo that he never sees sighs down by the river. A shiny cobra coils one morning in the wet grass before his feet. In the night he can see fires burning on the horizon, and the distant sound of drums reaches him like a language that is hard to decipher.

The elephant grass burns and the animals flee. He imagines that he is watching a distant battlefield, a war that has gone on since the mists of prehistoric time.

I, he thinks, I, Hans Olofson, am just as afraid of the unknown as I was when I stepped out of the plane into a world made utterly white by the sun. I realise that I’m surrounded by catastrophe, a temporarily postponed end of time, as two epochs collide. I know that I’m white, one of the candles that is seen much too clearly, one of those who must perish on this continent. And yet I stay.

I’ve tried to safeguard myself, to remain a nonentity in this test of strength. I stand outside, a temporary visitor, without involvement or guilt. Could it be pointless? The white man’s ultimate fancy? Yet I can see quite clearly that my fear is not the same as when I first stood in this white sun.

I no longer believe that every black is whetting his panga so he can slit my throat while I sleep. Today my fear is directed: against the murderous gangs that ravage this land, against the hit men who might also be hiding on this farm. But I don’t justify my lack of understanding by seeing a murderer in every black I meet. The workers on the farm are no longer nameless, threatening faces that all look the same.

One evening after Judith has begun to get her strength back, Ruth and Werner Masterton come to visit. It’s a lengthy dinner, and they sit for a long time behind the locked doors and empty their glasses.

Olofson gets drunk that evening. He doesn’t say much, huddling in a corner, feeling like an outsider again. Late that evening Ruth and Werner decide to spend the night. The attacks on solitary cars have increased again, and at night the white man is a hunted quarry.

On his way to bed, Hans meets Judith outside her door. He convinces himself that she is standing there waiting for him; she is tipsy too, with wandering eyes that remind him of his father.

She holds out her hand, grabs him, pulls him into her room, and they perform a love act on the cold stone floor that is equally helpless and violent. As he grasps her skinny body, he thinks of the room upstairs, the dead animals’ bone yard.

Afterwards she pulls away as if he had struck her. Not a single word, he thinks. How can one make love without saying a single word?

The next day he has a hangover and feels terrible, and he recalls her body as something harsh and repulsive. In the dawn they say goodbye to Ruth and Werner. She avoids his eye, pressing the broad-brimmed hat down on her brow.

One year has passed.

The nightly web of sound of the cicadas has become familiar. The smells of charcoal, dried fish, sweat, and stinking rubbish heaps surround him as though they had always been there. But the entirety, the black continent, becomes increasingly elusive the more he thinks he understands. He senses that Africa is not actually a unified entity; at least not something that he, with his ingrained notions, can comprehend and penetrate.

There are no simple passwords here. Wooden gods and forefathers speak as distinctly here as the living people. European truth loses its validity on the endless savannah.

He still sees himself as an apprehensive traveller, not as one of those purposeful and well-equipped pathfinders. And yet he is where he is. Beyond the ridges of fir trees, beyond the Finnish forests, on the other side of the river and the bridge.

One day in October, when he has worked for Judith for a year, she comes walking towards him in the overgrown garden. It’s Sunday, and there is only an old man busy watering the garden. Olofson is spending the day trying to fix an attachment to the pump that brings the water from the Kafue to their house.

Against the light he sees her face and is instantly worried. I don’t want to hear what she has to say, he thinks. They sit down in the shade of the big tree, and he can tell that she has prepared this conversation, for Luka shows up with coffee.

‘There is a point of no return,’ she says, ‘in every person’s life. Something one does not want, something one fears but can’t avoid. I have come to the realisation that I can’t do this any more: not the farm, not Africa, or this life. That’s why I’m making you a proposal now. Something you can think about, you don’t have to decide right away. I’ll give you three months, and what I tell you will require you to make a decision. Soon I will be leaving here. I’m still sick, the fatigue is suffocating me, and I don’t think I’ll ever regain my strength. I’m going to Europe, maybe to Italy. Beyond that I have no plans. But my offer is that you take over my farm. It makes a profit, there’s no mortgage on it, and there are no indications that it will lose its value. Forty per cent of the profits will be mine for as long as I live. That’s the price you have to pay me if you take over the farm. If you should sell the farm within ten years, seventy-five per cent of the profits will go to me. After ten years the amount is reduced to fifty per cent, and after twenty years to nothing. It would be easiest for me, of course, to sell the farm immediately. But something is preventing me: a sense of responsibility, I think, to those who work here. Maybe I can’t stand the thought of Duncan being forced off the land that will one day be his grave. For a year I’ve seen you on my farm. I know that you’ll be able to take it over...’

She falls silent and Olofson feels that he wants to sign a deed of transfer at once. An absolutely unreserved joy fills him. The voice from the brickworks which he carries inside him begins to speak. To be needed, to be somebody...

‘This is unexpected,’ is all he says.

‘I’m afraid of losing the only thing that is irreplaceable,’ she says. ‘My will to live. The simple power that makes me get out of bed when the sun comes up. Everything else can probably be replaced. But not that.’

‘It’s still unexpected,’ he says. ‘I realise you’re tired, I see it every day. But at the same time I can tell that your strength is coming back.’

‘Each day brings nothing but revulsion,’ she replies. ‘And you can’t see that. Only I can feel it. You must understand that I’ve been preparing for this moment for a long time. For years I’ve been putting money into banks in London and Rome. My lawyer in Kitwe has been informed. If you say no, I’ll sell the farm. There will be no shortage of prospective buyers.’

‘Mr Pihri will miss you,’ he says.

‘You can take over Mr Pihri,’ she says. ‘His eldest son will become a policeman too. You can also take over the young Mr Pihri.’

‘It’s a big decision,’ he says. ‘I really should have gone home long ago.’

‘I haven’t seen you leave,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen you stay. Your three months begin right now, here in the shadow of this tree.’

‘Then you’ll come back?’ he asks.

‘To sell or to pack,’ she replies. ‘Or both.’

Her preparations have been thorough. Four days after their conversation, Olofson drives her to the airport in Lusaka. He accompanies her to the check-in counter and then stands in the warm night on the roof terrace and watches the big jet plane accelerate with a roar and take off towards the stars.

Their leave-taking was simple. It should have been me, he thinks. In all fairness it should have been me who finally left this place... He stays overnight at the hotel he once hid inside. To his surprise he discovers that he has been given the same room, 212. Magic, he thinks. I forget that I’m in Africa.

A restless anxiety sends him down to the bar, and he looks for the black woman who offered herself to him last time. When he isn’t noticed quickly enough, he shouts sharply at one of the waiters who is standing idle by the bar.

‘What have you got today?’ he asks.

‘There isn’t any whisky,’ replies the waiter.

‘So there’s gin? But is there any tonic?’

‘We have tonic today.’

‘So you have gin and tonic?’

‘There is gin and tonic today.’

He gets drunk and renames the property in his mind: Olofson Farm.

Soon a black woman is standing next to his table. In the dim light he has a hard time making out her face.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I would like company. Room 212. But not now, not yet.’

He sees her hesitate, wondering if she should wait at his table or not.

‘No,’ he says. ‘When you see me go up the stairs, wait for another hour. Then come.’

After he has eaten, he starts up the stairs, but doesn’t see her. She sees me though, he thinks.

When she knocks on the door he discovers that she is very young, hardly more than seventeen. But she is experienced. She walks into the room and demands an immediate agreement.

‘Not the whole night,’ he says. ‘I want you to go.’

‘A hundred kwacha,’ she says. ‘Or ten dollars.’

He nods and asks her name.

‘Whatever name you want,’ she says.

‘Maggie,’ he suggests.

‘My name is Maggie,’ she says. ‘Tonight my name is Maggie.’

He has sex with her, and feels the meaninglessness. Beyond the arousal there is nothing, a room that has been empty for far too long. He breathes in the scents from her body, the cheap soap, the perfume that reminds him of something sour. She smells like an apple, he thinks. Her body is like a musty flat I remember from my childhood.

It is over quickly; he gives her the money and she gets dressed in the bathroom.

‘I’ll be here another time,’ she says.

‘I like the name Janine,’ he says.

‘Then my name will be Janine,’ she replies.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Never again. Now go.’

When he goes into the bathroom he discovers she has taken the toilet paper and his soap. They steal, he thinks. They would cut out our hearts if only they could.

By twilight of the next day he is back on the farm. He eats the dinner Luka has prepared for him. I’m going to run this farm differently, he thinks. Through my example the constant arguments about the necessity of the whites will disappear. The man I appoint to be my overseer must be black. I will build my own school for the workers’ children, I won’t offer them help only when they’re to be buried.

The truth about this farm today, or Ruth and Werner’s farm, is the underpaid labour, the worn-out workers. Judith’s money in the European banks is the wages that were never paid.

I’m going to transform this farm, and I’ll dedicate the school I’m going to build to Janine. When I leave the farm it will be in commemoration of the moment when the ideas of the white farmers were finally refuted.

But he also realises that even as he starts out he is prosperous. The farm represents a fortune. Even if he doubles the workers’ wages the hens will keep laying directly into his own pockets.

Impatiently he waits for daybreak. He walks through the silent rooms and stops in front of the mirrors and looks at his face. He utters a moan that echoes through the empty house.

At dawn he opens the door. Faint bands of mist are drifting over the river. Luka is waiting outside, as well as the gardeners and the woman who washes his clothes. When he sees their silent faces he shudders. Their thoughts are clear enough...

Eighteen years later he remembers that morning. As if the memory and the present have merged. He can recall the mist that drifted over the Kafue, Luka’s inscrutable face, the shudder that went through his body.

When almost everything is already past, he returns to that moment, October 1970. He remembers wandering through the silent house and the plans he made for the future. In the reflection of that night he looks back on the many years, a lifetime of eighteen years in Africa.

Judith Fillington never came back. In December 1970 he has a visit from her lawyer, to his surprise an African and not a white man, who delivers a letter from Naples, asking for his decision. He gives it to Mr Dobson, who promises to telegraph it to her and return as soon as possible with the papers to be signed. At the New Year, signatures are exchanged between Naples and Kalulushi. At the same time Mr Pihri comes to visit with his son.

‘Everything will be the same as always,’ says Hans Olofson.

‘Trouble should be avoided,’ replies Mr Pihri with a smile. ‘My son, young Mr Pihri, saw a used motorcycle for sale in Chingola a few days ago.’

‘My visa will have to be renewed soon,’ says Olofson. ‘Of course young Mr Pihri needs a motorcycle.’

In mid-January a long letter arrives from Judith, postmarked Rome. I have understood something, she writes. Something I never dared realise before. During my whole life in Africa, from my earliest childhood, I grew up in a world that depended on the differences between blacks and whites. My parents took pity on the blacks, on their poverty. They saw the necessary development, they taught me to understand that the whites’ situation would only prevail for a limited time. Maybe two or three generations. Then an upheaval would take place; the blacks would take over the whites’ functions, and the whites would see their imagined importance reduced. Maybe they would even dwindle to an oppressed minority. I learned that the blacks were poor, their lives restricted. But I also learned that they have something we don’t have. A dignity that will someday turn out to be the deciding factor. I realise now that I have denied this insight, perhaps especially after my husband disappeared without a trace. I blamed the blacks for his disappearance; I hated them for something they didn’t do. Now that Africa is so far away, now that I have decided to live the rest of my life here, I can dare once more to acknowledge the insight I previously denied. I have seen the brute in the African, but not in myself. A point will always come in everyone’s life when the most important thing must be turned over to someone else.

She asks him to write and let her know when Duncan Jones dies, and gives him the address of a bank on the island of Jersey.

Mr Dobson comes with men who pack up Judith’s belongings in huge wooden crates. He checks them off meticulously on a list.

‘Whatever is left is yours,’ he tells Olofson.

They go into the room that is filled with bones.

‘She doesn’t mention anything about this,’ says Mr Dobson. ‘So it’s yours.’

‘What am I going to do with it?’ asks Olofson.

‘That’s hardly a matter for a lawyer,’ replies Mr Dobson amiably. ‘But I suppose there are two choices. Either you leave it be, or you get rid of it. The crocodile can easily be taken back to the river.’

Together with Luka he carries the remains down to the river and watches as they sink to the bottom. The femur of an elephant glints through the water.

‘We Africans will avoid this spot, Bwana,’ says Luka. ‘We see dead animals who still live on the bottom. The crocodile’s skeleton may be more dangerous than the living crocodile.’

‘What are you thinking?’ asks Olofson.

‘I think what I think, Bwana,’ replies Luka.

Olofson stretches taut his eighteen-year arc of time, filled with transforming his farm into a political model.

Early one Saturday morning he gathers all the workers outside the mud hut that is his office, climbs up on a petrol tank, and tells them that now he is the one, not Judith Fillington, who owns the farm. He sees their guarded faces but he is determined to carry out what he has decided to do.

During the years that follow, years of ceaseless work, he tries to implement what he has taken on as his great task. He singles out the most industrious workers as foremen and gives them all more responsible assignments. He introduces drastic wage increases, builds new housing, and overseas the construction of a school for the workers’ children. From the start he is met by opposition from the other white farmers.

‘You’re undermining your own position,’ Werner Masterton tells him when they visit one evening.

‘You don’t have a clue,’ says Ruth. ‘I hope it isn’t too late when you come to your senses.’

‘Too late for what?’ Olofson asks.

‘For everything,’ Ruth replies.

Sometimes Duncan Jones stands like a phantom and watches him. Olofson sees how the blacks fear him. One night when he is again awakened by the night watchmen to fight a fierce battle against invading hunter ants, he hears Duncan Jones wailing from his fortified house.

Two years later he is dead. During the rainy season the house begins to smell, and when they break in they find Jones’s half-decayed body on the floor among bottles and half-eaten meals. The house is full of insects, and yellow moths swarm over the dead body. In the night he hears the drums pounding. The spirit of the holy man is already hovering over the farm.

Duncan Jones is buried on a little hill by the river. A Catholic priest comes from Kitwe. Other than Olofson there is no white man at the coffin, only the black workers.

He writes a letter care of the bank in Jersey, announcing that Duncan Jones is dead. He never hears a word from Judith.

The house stands empty for a long time before Olofson decides to tear down the wall and set up a health centre for the workers and their families.

With infinite slowness he seems to sense a change. Metre by metre he attempts to eradicate the boundary between himself and the 200 workers.

The first hint that everything has gone totally wrong, that all his good intentions have backfired, comes after a trip he takes to Dar-es-Salaam. The production figures begin to fall inexplicably. Complaints come in about broken eggs or eggs that are never delivered. Spare parts start disappearing, chicken feed and tools vanish unaccountably. He discovers that the foremen are falsifying roll call lists, and during a night check he finds half of the watchmen asleep, some dead drunk. He calls in the foremen and demands an explanation, but all he gets are peculiar excuses.

He had made the trip to Dar-es-Salaam to buy spare parts for the farm’s tractor. Then the day after the tractor is repaired, it’s gone. He calls the police and fires all the night watchmen, but the tractor remains missing.

This is when he makes a serious mistake. He sends for Mr Pihri and they drink tea in the mud hut.

‘My tractor is gone,’ says Olofson. ‘I made the long journey to Dar-es-Salaam to buy spare parts that are unavailable in this country. I made this long trip so that my tractor would function again. Now it’s gone.’

‘That is naturally very troublesome,’ replies Mr Pihri.

‘I don’t see why your colleagues can’t track down the tractor. In this country there aren’t that many tractors. A tractor is hard to hide. It must also be difficult to drive it over the border to Zaire to sell it in Lubumbashi. I don’t understand why your colleagues can’t find it.’

Mr Pihri all at once becomes very serious. In the dim light Olofson thinks he sees a dangerous glint in his eyes. The silence lasts a long time.

‘The reason my colleagues can’t find the tractor is because it is no longer a tractor,’ replies Mr Pihri at last. ‘Perhaps it’s already been taken apart? How can one distinguish one screw from another? A gear shift has no face. My colleagues would be very upset if they found out that you are displeased with their work. Very, very upset. It would mean trouble that even I could do nothing about.’

‘But I want my tractor back!’

Mr Pihri serves himself more tea before he answers.

‘Not everyone is in agreement,’ he says.

‘In agreement about what?’

‘That whites should still own most of the best land without even being citizens of our country. They don’t want to exchange their passports, but still they own our best land.’

‘I don’t understand what that has to do with my tractor.’

‘Trouble should be avoided. If my colleagues can’t find your tractor, it means that there is no longer a tractor to be found. Naturally it would be quite unfortunate if you were also to upset my colleagues. We have much patience. But it can come to an end.’

He follows Mr Pihri out into the sun. His farewell is unusually brief, and Olofson realises that he has stepped over an invisible boundary. I have to be careful, he thinks. I should never have mentioned the tractor.

In the night he wakes abruptly, and as he lies in the dark listening to the dogs’ restless patrolling of his house, he feels that he is ready to give up. Sell the farm, transfer the profits to Judith, and take off. But there is always something that needs to be done first. The drop in production halts after he takes all decisions into his own hands for a while.

He writes to his father, asking him to visit. Only once does he get an answer, and the inarticulate letter tells him that Erik Olofson is drinking more heavily and more often. Maybe someday I’ll understand it, he thinks. Maybe when I understand why I’m staying here. He looks at his suntanned face in the mirror. He has changed his appearance, let his beard grow.

One morning he realises that he no longer recognises himself. The face in the mirror belongs to someone else. He gives a start. Luka is standing behind him, and as usual he hasn’t heard his bare feet on the stone floor.

‘A man has come to visit, Bwana,’ he says.

‘Who?’

‘Peter Motombwane, Bwana.’

‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’

‘He has still come, Bwana.’

‘Who is he and what does he want?’

‘Only he knows, Bwana.’

Olofson turns around and looks at Luka.

‘Ask him to have a seat and wait, Luka. I’ll be right there.’

Luka leaves. Something is making Olofson nervous. Not until many years later will he understand why.

Chapter Seventeen

Who whispers the password in his ear? Who reveals what his Goal will be? How does he find a direction in life that is not merely a point of the compass? This year too, 1959, springtime finally breaks through the obstinate barriers of cold, and Hans Olofson has decided that one more leave-taking is necessary. His decision is vague and hesitant, but he knows that he can’t escape the admonition that he has given himself.

One Saturday evening in May, when Under comes roaring up in his Buick in a cloud of dust, Hans screws up his courage and goes out to meet him. At first the horse dealer doesn’t understand what the boy is muttering about. He tries to brush him off, but Hans is stubborn and doesn’t back down before he has delivered his message. When Under grasps that the boy is standing there stammering out his resignation, he flies into a rage. He raises his hand to deal a box on the ear, but the boy is quick to scamper away. The only thing left for Under is to dispense a symbolic humiliation, and he pulls out a wad of money and peels off one of the lowest value, a fiver, and tosses it in the gravel.

‘You’re being paid according to your services. But it’s a damned shame that the authorities don’t print notes worth even less. You’re being overpaid...’

Hans picks up the note and goes into the stable to say goodbye to the horses and the Holmström twins.

‘What will you do now?’ ask the brothers, who are washing themselves under the cold tap in preparation for Saturday night.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘Something will turn up.’

‘We’re going to move on next winter too,’ the brothers tell him as they change their mucking-out boots for black dancing shoes.

They offer him aquavit.

‘That damned horse dealer,’ they say, passing around the bottle. ‘If you see a Saab, it’s us! Don’t forget it.’ He runs across the river bridge in the spring night to tell Janine of his decision. Because she hasn’t yet returned from one of Hurrapelle’s Joyous Spring Fellowships, he strolls about in her garden and thinks about the time he and Sture splashed varnish all over her currant bushes. He shudders at the memory, wishing he hadn’t been reminded of that thoughtless act.

Is there anything that can be understood? Isn’t life, which is so difficult to manage, nothing but a series of incomprehensible events lurking behind the corners as one passes? Who can ever deal with the dark impulses hidden inside? Secret rooms and wild horses, he thinks. That’s what you have to carry around.

He sits down on the steps and wonders about Sture. He’s out there somewhere. But is he in a distant hospital or on one of the furthest stars in the universe? Many times he thought of asking Nyman the courthouse caretaker, but it never came to anything. There are many reasons not to find out. He doesn’t want to know for sure. He can see the horrifying images far too clearly in his mind. An iron pipe, thick as the pipe on a coffee pot, rammed down his throat. And the iron lung? What can that be? He sees a big black beetle opening up its body and enclosing Sture under its shiny wings.

But not to be able to move? Day after day? For his whole life? He tries to imagine it by sitting on Janine’s porch, completely still, but it doesn’t work. He can’t comprehend it. That’s why it’s good that he doesn’t know for sure. Then a little door still remains to be pushed open. A little door to the idea that Sture may have recovered, or that the iron bridge and the river and the red jacket were all a dream.

There’s a crunching on the gravel, and Janine appears. He has been so deep in thought that he didn’t hear her open the gate. Now he jumps up as if he has been caught in the act of doing something forbidden.

Janine stands there in her white coat and light-blue dress. In the dusk the light falls so that her white nose handkerchief under her eyes takes on the same colour as her skin.

Something passes by, a shiver. Something that is more important than all the world’s evil horse dealers. How long ago was it? Two months already. One morning, Under had flung a terrified stable girl in among the horses, a girl he had found on a lonely horse farm deep in the forests of Hälsingland. A girl who wanted to get away, who knew about horses, and who he’d stuffed in the back seat of his Buick.

Hans Olofson had loved her boundlessly. For the month she was at the stable he had circled round her like an attentive butterfly, and every evening he had stayed behind just to be alone with her. But one day she was gone. Under had taken her back, cursing her parents for pestering him with calls about how she was doing.

Hans had loved her, and in the twilight when he can’t see the nose handkerchief he loves Janine too. But he’s afraid of her ability to read his thoughts. So he gets up quickly, spits in the gravel, and asks where the hell she has been.

‘We had a spring fellowship,’ she says.

She sits down next to him on the steps and they watch a sparrow hopping about in a footprint in the gravel. Her thigh touches his leg. The stable girl, he thinks. Marie, or Rimma as they called her. One time he stayed behind, hiding behind the hay, and watched her take off her clothes and wash naked by the water pump. He was just about to rush forward, force himself on her, and let himself be swallowed up by the inconceivable mystery.

The sparrow crouches in the footprint. Janine hums and touches her leg to his. Doesn’t she understand what she’s doing? The wild horses are tugging and twitching where they are chained in his secret stalls. What will happen if they break loose? What can he do then?

Suddenly she gets up, as if she understood his thoughts.

‘I’m cold,’ she says. ‘The church is draughty, and today he talked for so long.’

‘Hurrapelle?’

She laughs at him. ‘He’s probably the only one who doesn’t know his nickname,’ she says. ‘He would certainly be upset if he did.’

In the kitchen he tells her about quitting his job with the horse dealer. But what is really the truth? How did it all happen? He hears himself describe how he was excited and shouting, while the horse dealer was puny as a trembling dwarf. But wasn’t he the one who squeaked and mumbled, hardly able to make himself understood? Is he the one who’s too little, or is it that the world is too big?

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asks.

‘I’ll probably have to go to high school and think a little,’ he replies.

And that is precisely what he decides to do. He knows his marks are good enough: Headmaster Gottfried told him that, although it might be hard to convince Erik Olofson of the usefulness of going back to a worn-out school bench.

‘Do it,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you’ll do well.’

But he’s still feeling defensive. ‘If it doesn’t work out then I’ll leave town,’ he says. ‘There’s always the sea. I’ll never go back to the horse dealer. He can get somebody else to torture his horses.’

On the way home from Janine’s house he goes down to his boulder. The spring flood is roaring and a huge log has lodged on the point at People’s Park. Life is hard, he thinks.

Tonight is as good as any other to tell his father about his decision. He’ll sit there until the tram rattles across the river bridge and disappears into the woods. The springtime river dances.

Erik Olofson is sitting polishing his little pearl-handled revolver when Hans comes home. He bought the revolver from a Chinese man he met in Newport; it cost him nine dollars cash and a jacket. Hans sits down across the kitchen table from his father and watches him carefully rub the gleaming handle.

‘Will it fire?’ he asks.

‘Of course it’ll fire,’ replies his father. ‘Do you think I’d buy a weapon I couldn’t use?’

‘How should I know?’

‘No, how would you know?’

‘Exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. But I quit that damned horse dealer.’

‘You never should have started working for him. What did I tell you?’

‘You didn’t tell me anything, did you?’

‘I told you to stay at the Trade Association!’

‘What does that have to do with it?’

‘You’re not listening to what I’m saying.’

‘Well, what does it have to do with anything?’

‘Here you come home and say I never tell you anything.’

‘I never should have started at that warehouse. And now I’m finished with that damned horse dealer.’

‘What did I tell you?’

‘You didn’t say a thing.’

‘Didn’t I tell you to stay at the warehouse?’

‘You should have told me never to start!’

‘Why would I say that?’

‘I already told you! Aren’t you going to ask what I plan to do instead?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then ask me!’

‘I shouldn’t have to ask. If you’ve got something to say, then say it. This handle will never get clean.’

‘I can see it shining.’

‘What do you know about mother-of-pearl revolver handles? Do you know what mother-of-pearl is?’

‘Not really.’

‘See what I mean?’

‘I’m going to start at secondary school. I’ve already applied. And my grades are good enough.’

‘All right.’

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Do you think it’s a good idea?’

‘I’m not the one going there.’

‘God damn it...’

‘Don’t swear.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re too young.’

‘How old do you have to be to swear?’

‘Well...’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I think you should have stayed at the warehouse. That’s what I’ve always said...’

The spring, the summer, are so short, so fleeting, and now it’s time for the rowan berries, when Hans Olofson will be walking through the gates of the secondary school. What sort of ambition does he have? Not to be the best, but not the worst either. To be somewhere in the middle of the stream, always far from the deep current. He doesn’t intend to take the lead and swim on ahead.

Hans will be a pupil that teachers forget. He sometimes seems slow, almost sluggish. A pupil who can usually answer, and be right most of the time. But why doesn’t he ever raise his hand, even when he knows the answer? In geography he possesses knowledge about the oddest places. He can talk about Pamplemousse as though he has been there. And Lourenço Marques, wherever that is.

Hans never drowns in the flood of knowledge through which he swims for four long years. He makes himself inaccessible and as invisible as possible in the middle ranks of the class. There he stakes out his territory and arranges his hiding place. It serves as a protective cover against a strange hesitant feeling.

What does he actually hope to get out of these four years? It’s not as though he had any plans for the future. The dreams he harbours are so different. With quiet obsession he hopes that each lesson will reveal the Goal to him. He dreams of the decisive moment, when he can close his books, get up and leave, never to return. Attentively he watches the teachers, searching for his signpost.

But life being what it is, many other fires are also burning inside him during those last years he lives by the river. He is entering that age when every person is his own pyromaniac, equipped with a piece of flint in an otherwise incomprehensible world. It’s the passions that flare up and die down, that again gather speed to devour him, yet always let him climb out of the ashes alive.

The passions release powers that leave him bewildered. This is the time when he seems to burst the final membranes that bind him to his childhood, to the time that perhaps both began and ended in the ruins of the brickworks, when he discovered that he was precisely himself and no one else, a specific ‘I’ and no other.

And these passions flame to the insipid music of Kringström’s band. They have a bass and drums, clarinet, guitar and accordion. With a sigh they strike up ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, weary unto death, after a thousand years of incessant playing in the draughty dance rotunda of the People’s Hall. Kringström, who barely remembers his own first name, suffers from chronic bronchitis caused by a lifetime standing in the heat of the smoky stoves and the cross-draught of doors eternally opened and closed. Once, in his lost youth, he had intended to be a composer. Not a heavy-hipped man of gravity who wrote down notes for posterity, but the creator of light and popular tunes — he would be a master of pop songs. But what did he become? What remains of life’s wan smile? The melodies were utterly lost, they never appeared on his accordion, no matter how much he prayed for inspiration, how much he practised his fingering. Everything had already been written, and so he put together his band in order to survive. People are now stomping on the boards of the dance rotunda, where they will play until the moment that eternity shoves them off the last precipice. The music that once was a dream has become an affliction.

Kringström coughs and envisions a horrendous death from lung cancer. But he plays on, and when the last note dies out he receives his listless applause. Below the bandstand, as usual, hooting and drunken youngsters hang around, not knowing any dance steps, but all the more willing to hurl jeers if the music isn’t to their liking. Long ago Kringström’s band stopped throwing pearls before swine; his music falls from the instruments like granite. With ear plugs he mutes the sound as best he can, hearing only enough so he doesn’t lose the beat. They take a break as often as they can, and drag it out as long as they dare. In a dreary back room where a single lightbulb dangles from the ceiling and a torn poster depicting a snake charmer is peeling from the wall, they drink coffee laced with schnapps, sitting in silence, and take turns peeking out the door and keeping an eye on the instruments. If any of the drunken youths were to get the idea of staggering up on to the bandstand and sinking their teeth into a clarinet...

After ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ comes ‘Diana’, and then they have to speed it up so the audience won’t start snarling. And Kringström’s band thumps away at something that’s supposed to be ‘Alligator Rock’, and he feels as though an evil being is standing behind him pounding him on the head with a sledgehammer. On the dance floor the young people are jumping and bounding like mad, and Kringström feels that he is spending his life in an insane asylum. After this musical outburst come two slow numbers, and sometimes Kringström takes his revenge on the demanding youth by playing a waltz. Then the dance floor thins out, and the noisy mob crowds through the swinging doors that lead to the café, where it’s easy to mix aquavit from hip flasks into lukewarm Loranga soda.

Hans Olofson also enters this world. Most often he comes with the Holmström twins. They still haven’t found their chosen crafts and left the horse dealer to his fate. Their patrimony, the future planned out for them, will have to wait another year, and when the autumn evenings start to turn cold they head for the Saturday dances at the People’s Hall. They park their Saab and bump into Hans Olofson, loitering against a wall, unsure as to whether he dares go inside. They take him under their wing, drag him along behind the beauty parlour and offer him some schnapps. The fact that he stood up to the horse dealer and told him that he was quitting has made a deep impression. Most who leave Under’s stable are simply kicked out. But Hans Olofson took a stand, and for that he has earned a snort and their protection.

Hans can feel the schnapps warming his blood, and he follows the twins into the crowd. Superintendent Gullberg stands by the ticket cage and watches the hullabaloo with suspicious eyes. He ejects those who are too obviously drunk, which usually results only in lame protests. But he knows that one litre after another of brandy and schnapps is being carried past him in handbags and roomy overcoats. They slip through the eye of the needle, step into the smoky heat, the world of malfunctioning lightbulbs. The Holmström twins are no great dancers, but with sufficient schnapps in their bellies they can offer a fairly well-executed fox trot. At once they run into some ladies they know from some faraway summer lodgings, and Hans finds himself abandoned.

He knows how to dance — Janine taught him that. But she never taught him to dare ask a girl to dance. He has to go through this trial by fire alone, and he steps on his own toes in fury over not being able to ask one of the female flock waiting in desire and dread along the wall of the dance rotunda, which is never called anything but ‘the mountain wall’. On the dance floor the Enviable Ones are already gliding past, the Beauties and the Willing, those who are always asked to dance and hardly ever manage to return to ‘the mountain wall’ before they’re swept off again. They dance with the men of sure steps, the men who own cars and have the right looks. Hans sees last year’s ‘Lucia’ glide past in the arms of Julin the driver, who operates one of the Highway Department’s big road graders. The sweat stinks, the bodies are steaming, and Hans rages at standing there like an oaf.

Next time, he thinks. Next time I’ll cross the water.

But once he has decided on the daughter of the district nurse, taken his bearings and set his feet in the right direction, it’s already too late. Like angels to the rescue the Holmström brothers come clamouring, flushed and hot after intense efforts on the dance floor. In the men’s room they refresh themselves with some lukewarm schnapps and dirty stories. From one of the locked toilet stalls they hear the loud song of someone throwing up.

Then they head out again, and now Hans is in a hurry. Now it’s sink or swim, now he has to conquer the ‘mountain wall’ to avoid going under from self-loathing. On unsteady legs he pushes across the dance floor just as Kringström starts off an infinitely slow version of ‘All of Me’. He stops in front of one of the bridesmaids from the year before. She follows him out into the fray, where they shove their way on to the overcrowded dance floor.

Many years later, in his house on the banks of the Kafue, with a loaded pistol under his pillow, he recalls ‘All of Me’, the smoking heat of the stove, and the bridesmaid he pushed along the dance floor. When he wakes in the African night, drenched with sweat, afraid of something he dreamed or perhaps something he heard outside in the dark, he returns there. He can see everything, exactly the way it was.

Now Kringström is starting up a new dance. ‘La Paloma’ or ‘Twilight Time’, he can’t remember which. He has danced with the bridesmaid, had a few more snorts from the Holmström brothers’ flask, and now he’s going to dance again. But when he stops in front of her on his unsteady legs she shakes her head and turns away. He reaches out his hand to grab hold of her arm, but she pulls away. She grimaces and says something, but the drums are banging and when he leans forward to hear what she’s saying, he loses his balance. Without knowing how it happened, he finds himself all at once with his face among feet and shoes. When he tries to get back up, he feels a strong hand on his collar lifting him up. It’s Superintendent Gullberg, who vigilantly spotted the intoxicated youth crawling about on the floor and decided that he should be put out in the street at once.

In the African night he can recall the humiliation, and it’s just as awful as when it happened.

He staggers away from the People’s Hall through the autumn night, knowing that the only person he can turn to in his misery is Janine. She wakes up when he pounds on her door, roughly torn out of a dream in which she was a child again. She opens the door groggily and there’s Hans, standing wide-eyed.

She slowly thaws him out, as always waiting patiently. She can see that he’s drunk and miserable, but she waits, leaving him alone with his silence. As he sits in her kitchen and the image of his defeat becomes clearer, it assumes grotesque proportions. No one could have been subjected to greater disgrace, whether it was madmen who tried to set fire to themselves or who stood in the winter night determined to tear down the church with a frozen crowbar. There he had lain among the feet and shoes. Tossed out like a cat by the scruff of his neck.

She spreads out a sheet and a blanket in the room with the gramophone and tells him to lie down. Without a word he staggers in and falls on the sofa, out cold. She closes the door and then lies in her own bed, unable to sleep. She tosses restlessly, waiting for something that never happens.

When Hans wakes up in the morning, with temples pounding and mouth parched, he is thinking about a dream: the door opened, Janine came into his room and stood naked looking at him. The dream is like a polished prism, as clear as an image from reality. It penetrates the fog of contrition. It must have happened, he thinks. She must have come in here last night, with no clothes on.

He gets up from the sofa and goes into the kitchen for a drink of water. The door to her room is closed, and when he listens he can hear her snoring softly. The clock on the wall says quarter to five, and he crawls back on to the sofa to fall asleep and dream or forget that he exists.

When he wakes up a few hours later it’s already dawn and Janine is sitting in her robe at the kitchen table, knitting. When he sees her he wants to take the knitting out of her hands, untie her robe, and bury himself in her body. The door to this house on the south side of the river will be closed for good; he will never leave this house again.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asks.

She knows, he thinks. It won’t do any good to lie. Nothing will do any good; the difficulties of life are looming before him like enormous icebergs. What is he actually imagining — that he can find a password that will make it possible to control this damned life?

‘You’re thinking about something,’ she says. ‘I can tell by your face. Your lips are moving as if you’re talking to someone. But I can’t hear what you’re saying.’

‘I’m not thinking,’ he says. ‘What would I be thinking about? Maybe I’m incapable of thinking!’

‘You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,’ she says.

Again he thinks that he’s going to go over to her and undo the sash of her robe. Instead, he borrows a jumper from her and vanishes into the frosty landscape of autumn.

At the People’s Hall, Superintendent Gullberg’s wife is busy cleaning up. She peevishly opens the back door when he knocks. His coat is still hanging on its hook like an abandoned skin. He hands her his cloakroom number.

‘How can anyone forget his coat?’ she asks.

‘It’s possible,’ replies Hans Olofson and leaves. He realises that there is a kind of forgetfulness that is quite vast.

The seasons change, the river freezes over and then one day floods its banks. No matter how much his father chops at them, the fir forests remain motionless on the horizon. The tram clatters across the bridge, and season after season Hans trudges to Janine’s house. The river of knowledge on which he floats, year after year, reveals no Goal to him. But he keeps waiting.

He stands outside Janine’s house. The notes from her slide trombone trickle out through a half-open window. Every day he stands there and every day he decides to untie the sash of her robe. More and more often he chooses to visit her when he can expect her not to be dressed. Early on Sunday mornings he knocks on her door; other times he stands on her steps long past midnight. The sash tied around her robe glows like fire.

But when it finally happens, when he grabs with fumbling fingers for her sash, there is nothing that reminds him of what he had imagined.

It’s a Sunday morning in May, two years after he left the horse dealer. The evening before, he was pushed and shoved on the dance floor. But this time he left early, long before Superintendent Gullberg angrily began flashing the lights and Kringström’s band started to pack up their instruments. Suddenly he decided he’d had enough, and so he left. For a long time he roamed around in the light spring night before slipping past Egg-Karlsson’s door and crawling into bed.

He wakes early and drinks coffee with his father in the kitchen. Then he goes over to Janine’s house. She lets him in and he follows her into the kitchen and loosens her sash. Softly they sink to the floor, like two bodies falling through the sea on their way to a distant bottom. Roughly they unite around each other’s desire. This desire had never been completely extinguished for Janine on Hurrapelle’s penitential bench. For a long time she feared that it would dry up one day, but her hope never ran out.

At last Hans steps out of himself, out of his introverted powerlessness. For the first time he feels that he holds life in his hands; from behind his forehead Sture lies motionless in his bed and watches what’s happening with a smile.

But neither of them has any idea that passion is a faithless master when they fling their limbs around each other on the kitchen floor. Now there is only great relief. Afterwards they drink coffee. Hans steals a glance at her and wishes she would say something.

Is she smiling? And her thoughts? The hands on the wall clock wander their mute circuit. A moment not to forget, he thinks. Possibly life is more than just trouble and suffering after all. Possibly there is also something else. A moment not to forget...

Chapter Eighteen

In a black-and-white photograph he is standing next to Peter Motombwane.

Behind them is the white wall of the house, and the picture has been taken in bright sunlight. A lizard sits motionless on the wall beside Peter Motombwane’s head. It will wind up being part of their shared portrait.

Both of them are laughing in the picture, at Luka holding Peter’s camera. But why did he want to have the picture? Why did Peter suggest that they take the photograph? He can’t remember.

One day Hans Olofson invites his foremen to dinner in his house. Mutely they sit at his table, devouring the food as if they hadn’t eaten in a very long time, drinking themselves quickly into a stupor. Olofson asks questions and gets one-syllable replies.

Afterwards he asks Luka to explain. Why this reluctance? This sulky silence?

‘You are a mzungu, Bwana,’ says Luka.

‘That’s no answer,’ says Olofson.

‘It is an answer, Bwana,’ says Luka.

One of the workers who cleans the feed supply and hunts rats falls from the stacked-up sacks and lands so badly that he breaks his neck. The dead man leaves behind a wife and four daughters in a wretched mud hut that Judith once had ordered built. Her name is Joyce Lufuma, and Olofson begins going to her house quite often. He gives her a sack of maize, a chitenge, or something else she needs.

Sometimes, when he is very tired, he sits down outside her house and watches the four daughters playing in the red dirt. Maybe this is my lasting contribution, he thinks. Aside from all my great plans, to help these five women.

But usually he keeps his weariness under control, and one day he gathers his foremen and tells them that he will give them cement, bricks, and roofing metal so that they can repair their houses, maybe even build new ones. In return he requires that they dig pits for their refuse and build covered toilet pits.

For a short time he seems to see an improvement. Then everything is the same as it was before. Rubbish whirls across the red earth. The old roofing metal suddenly reappears. But where are the new materials he bought? He asks but receives no answer.

He discusses this with Peter Motombwane as they sit on his veranda in the evenings, and he tries to understand. He realises that Peter Motombwane is his first black friend. It has taken four years.

Why Motombwane first came to visit him on the farm he has no idea. He stood in the doorway and said he was a journalist, that he wanted to write about the egg farm. But Olofson never read anything about it in the Times of Zambia.

Motombwane returns and never asks Olofson for anything, not even a tray of eggs. Olofson tells him about his grand plan. Motombwane listens with his serious eyes fixed on some point above Olofson’s head.

‘What sort of answer do you think you’ll get?’ he asks, when Olofson is finished.

‘I don’t know. But what I do has to be right.’

‘You’ll hardly get the answers you’re hoping for,’ says Motombwane. ‘You’re in Africa now. And the white man has never understood Africa. Instead of being surprised you’re going to be disappointed.’

Their conversations are never concluded, because Peter Motombwane always breaks off unexpectedly. One moment he is sitting in one of the deep soft chairs on the terrace, and the next he has stood up to say goodbye. He has an old car, and only one rear door will open. To get behind the wheel he has to crawl over the seats.

‘Why don’t you fix the doors?’ Olofson asks.

‘Other things are more important.’

‘Does the one have to exclude the other?’

‘Sometimes, yes.’

After Motombwane has visited him he feels restive. Without being able to explain what it is, he feels that he has been reminded of something important, something he always forgets.

But other people come to visit too. He gets to know an Indian merchant from Kitwe named Patel.

On an irregular basis and without any apparent logic, various necessities suddenly vanish in the country. One day there’s no salt, another day no newspapers can be printed because there’s no paper. He remembers what he thought when he first arrived in Africa: on the black continent everything is in the process of running out.

But through Patel he can get hold of whatever he needs. From hidden storerooms Patel fetches whatever the white colony requires. Along unknown transport routes the scarce goods are brought into the country, and the white colony can get what it needs for a reasonable additional fee. In order not to provoke the wrath of the blacks and risk seeing his shop plundered and burned down, Patel makes personal visits to the various farms to hear whether anything is needed.

He never comes alone. He always has one of his cousins with him, or a friend from Lusaka or Chipata who happens to be visiting. They’re all named Patel. If I shouted that name I’d be surrounded by a thousand Indians, thinks Olofson. And they would all ask whether there was anything I needed.

I can understand their caution and fear. They are hated more than the whites, since the difference between them and the Africans is so striking. In the shops they have everything that the blacks so seldom can afford to buy. And everyone knows about the secret storerooms, everyone knows that their great fortunes are smuggled out of the country to distant bank accounts in Bombay or London. I can understand their fear. Just as clearly as I can understand the blacks’ hatred.

One day Patel stands outside his door. He’s wearing a turban and smells of sweet coffee. At first Hans Olofson doesn’t believe in accepting the dubious privilege that Patel offers him. Mr Pihri is enough, he thinks.

But after a year he gives in. He’s been without coffee for a long time. He decides to make an exception, and Patel returns to his farm the next day with ten kilos of Brazilian coffee.

‘Where do you get hold of it?’ Olofson asks. Patel throws out his hands and gives him a sorrowful look.

‘So much is in short supply in this country,’ he says. ‘I’m only trying to relieve the worst of the shortages.’

‘But how?’

‘Sometimes I don’t even know myself how I do it, Mr Olofson.’

Then the government introduces harsh currency restrictions. The value of the kwacha drops dramatically when the price of copper falls, and Olofson realises that he will no longer be able to send money to Judith Fillington as required in their contract.

Once again Patel comes to his rescue.

‘There’s always a way out,’ he says. ‘Let me handle this. I ask only twenty per cent for the risks I’m taking.’

How Patel arranges it Olofson never knows, but each month he gives him money and a receipt comes regularly from the bank in London, confirming that the money has been transferred.

During this period Olofson also opens his own account in the London bank, and Patel withdraws two thousand Swedish kronor monthly as his fee.

Olofson notices an increasing unrest in the country, and this is confirmed when Mr Pihri and his son begin to pay more frequent visits.

‘What’s going on?’ Olofson asks. ‘Indian shops are being burned down or plundered. Now there’s talk of the danger of rioting, because there isn’t any maize to be had and the blacks have no food. But how can the maize suddenly run out?’

‘Unfortunately there are many who smuggle maize to the neighbouring nations,’ says Mr Pihri. ‘The prices are better there.’

‘But aren’t we talking about thousands of tonnes?’

‘The ones who are smuggling have influential contacts,’ replies Mr Pihri.

‘Customs officials and politicians?’

They are sitting in the cramped mud hut talking. Mr Pihri lowers his voice.

‘It may not be wise to make such statements,’ he says. ‘The authorities in this country can be quite sensitive. Recently there was a white farmer outside Lusaka who mentioned a politician by name in an unfortunate context. He was deported from the country within twenty-four hours. The farm has now been taken over by a state cooperative.’

‘I just want to be left in peace,’ says Olofson. ‘I’m thinking of those who work here.’

‘That’s quite as it should be,’ says Mr Pihri. ‘One should avoid trouble for as long as possible.’

More and more frequently there are forms that have to be filled out and approved, and Mr Pihri seems to be having a harder and harder time fulfilling his self-imposed obligations. Olofson pays him more and more, and he sometimes wonders whether it’s really true, what Mr Pihri tells him. But how can he check?

One day Mr Pihri comes to the farm accompanied by his son. He is very solemn.

‘Perhaps there is trouble coming,’ he says.

‘There’s always trouble,’ says Olofson.

‘The politicians keep taking new decisions,’ says Mr Pihri. ‘Wise decisions, necessary decisions. But unfortunately they can be troublesome.’

‘What’s happened now?’

‘Nothing, Mr Olofson. Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing really, not yet, Mr Olofson.’

‘But something is going to happen?’

‘It’s not at all certain, Mr Olofson.’

‘Only a possibility?’

‘One might put it that way, Mr Olofson.’

‘What?’

‘The authorities are unfortunately not very pleased with the whites who live in our country, Mr Olofson. The authorities believe that they are sending money out of the country illegally. Of course this also applies to our Indian friends who live here. It is suspected that taxes are not being paid as they should be. The authorities are therefore planning a secret raid.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Many police officers will visit all the white farms at the same time, Mr Olofson. In all secrecy, of course.’

‘Do the farmers know about this?’

‘Of course, Mr Olofson. That’s why I’m here, to inform you that there will be a secret raid.’

‘When?’

‘Thursday evening next week, Mr Olofson.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘Nothing, Mr Olofson. Just don’t have any papers from foreign banks lying about. And especially no foreign currency. Then it could be quite troublesome. I wouldn’t be able to do anything.’

‘What would happen?’

‘Our prisons are unfortunately still in very poor condition, Mr Olofson.’

‘I’m very grateful for the information, Mr Pihri.’

‘It’s a pleasure to be able to help, Mr Olofson. My wife has been mentioning for a long time that her old sewing machine is causing her a great deal of trouble.’

‘That’s not good, of course,’ says Olofson. ‘Isn’t it true that there are sewing machines in Chingola at the moment?’

‘I’ve heard it mentioned,’ replies Mr Pihri.

‘Then she ought to buy one before they’re gone,’ Olofson says.

‘My view precisely,’ replies Mr Pihri.

Olofson shoves a number of notes across the table.

‘Is the motorcycle all right?’ he asks young Mr Pihri, who has been sitting quietly during the conversation.

‘An excellent motorcycle,’ he replies. ‘But next year there’s supposed to be a new model coming out.’

His father has taught him well, Olofson thinks. Soon the son will be able to take over my worries. But part of what I will be paying him in future will always fall to the father. They ply me well, their source of income.

Mr Pihri’s information is correct. The following Thursday two broken-down Jeeps full of police officers come driving up to the farm just before sundown. Olofson meets them with feigned surprise. An officer with many stars on his epaulettes comes up on to the terrace where Olofson is waiting. He sees that the policeman is very young.

‘Mr Fillington,’ says the policeman.

‘No,’ Olofson replies.

Serious confusion results when it turns out that the search warrant is made out in the name of Fillington. At first the young officer refuses to believe what Olofson says, and in an aggressive tone he insists that Hans Olofson’s name is Fillington. Olofson shows him the deed of transfer and title registration, and at last the police officer realises that the warrant he is holding in his hand is made out to the wrong person.

‘But you are welcome to search the house anyway,’ Olofson adds quickly. ‘It’s easy to make a mistake. I don’t want to cause any difficulties.’

The officer looks relieved, and Olofson decides that now he has made another friend, perhaps someone he may find useful in future.

‘My name is Kaulu,’ says the police officer.

‘Please come in,’ says Olofson.

After barely half an hour the officer comes out of the house leading his men.

‘Might one ask what you are looking for?’ asks Olofson.

‘Activities inimical to the state are always under way,’ says the officer gravely. ‘The value of the kwacha is continually being undermined by illegal foreign exchange transactions.’

‘I understand that you have to intervene,’ says Olofson.

‘I shall tell my supervisor of your accommodation,’ replies the police officer and gives him a salute.

‘Please do,’ says Olofson. ‘You’re welcome to visit anytime.’

‘I’m quite fond of eggs,’ shouts the officer as Olofson watches the dilapidated vehicles drive off in a cloud of dust.

Suddenly he understands something about Africa, an insight into the young Africa, the anguish of the independent states. I ought to laugh at this inadequate search of the premises, he thinks. At the young police officer who surely comprehends nothing. But then I would be making a mistake, because this inadequacy is dangerous. In this country people are hung, young policemen torture people, kill people with whips and truncheons. Laughing at this helplessness would be the same as putting my life at risk.

The arc of time grows, and Hans Olofson continues to live in Africa.

When he has been in Kalulushi for nine years, a letter arrives to inform him that his father has died in a fire. One cold night in January of 1978 the house by the river burned down.

The cause was never clarified. You were sought for the funeral, but your whereabouts was not discovered until now. One other person died in the fire, an elderly widow named Westlund. It is also believed that the fire started in her flat. But of course, this will never be known. Nothing was left; the building burned to the ground. What will happen with the inventory of your father’s estate, I am not at liberty to say.

The letter is signed with a name that vaguely reminds him of one of his father’s foremen at the lumber company.

Slowly he lets the grief seep in. He sees himself in the kitchen, sitting across the table from his father. The heavy odour of wet wool. Célestine stands in her case, but now she is a smoking wreck burned black. There is also the charred sea chart of the approaches to the Strait of Malacca.

He glimpses his father under a sheet on a stretcher. Now I’m alone, he thinks. If I choose not to return, my mother will remain an enigma, in the same way as the fire.

His father’s death becomes a burden of guilt, a feeling of betrayal, of having given up. Now I’m alone, he thinks again. I’ll have to bear this loneliness as long as I live.

Without really knowing why, he gets in his car and drives to Joyce Lufuma’s mud hut. She is standing there pounding corn, and she laughs and waves when she sees him coming.

‘My father is dead,’ he says.

At once she senses his grief and begins to moan, casting herself to the ground, wailing out the pain that is actually his.

Other women come over, hear that the white man’s father is dead in a distant land, and instantly join the lamenting chorus. Olofson sits down beneath a tree and forces himself to listen to the women’s appalling lamentations. His own pain is wordless, an anxiety that digs its nails into his body.

He returns to his car, hears the women shrieking behind him, and thinks that Africa is giving Erik Olofson his tribute. A sailor who drowned in the sea of the Norrland forests.

As if on a pilgrimage he sets off on a journey to the sources of the Zambezi River in the northwest corner of the country. He travels to Mwinilunga and Ikkelenge, sleeps overnight in his car outside the mission infirmary at Kalenje Hill, and then continues along the almost impassable sand track that leads to the long valley where the Zambezi has its source. He walks for a long time through the dense, desolate bush until he reaches it.

A simple stone cairn marks the spot. He squats down and sees how individual drops of water fall from broken blocks of stone. A rivulet no wider than his hand winds through the stones and bush grass. He cups his hand in the rivulet and thus stops the flow of the Zambezi River.

He doesn’t leave until late in the afternoon, knowing he must reach his car before it grows dark. By then he has decided to stay in Africa. There is nothing left to return to in Sweden. From his grief he also gathers the strength to be realistic. He will never be able to transform his farm into the political model of his dreams. Even though he once firmly vowed never to lose himself in idealistic labyrinths, he ended up doing just that.

A white man can never help Africans develop their country from a superior position, he thinks. From below, from inside, one can surely contribute to expertise and new working patterns. But never as a bwana. Never as someone who holds all power in his hands. Africans see through words and actions — they see the white man as owner, and they gratefully accept the wage increases he gives them, or the school he builds, or the sacks of cement he is willing to forgo. His thoughts of influence and responsibility they regard as irrelevant whims, random gestures which increase the possibility for the individual foreman to make off with some extra eggs or spare parts that he can later sell.

The long colonial history has freed the Africans from all illusions. They know the capriciousness of the whites, their constant exchange of one idea for another, while demanding that the black man be enthusiastic. A white man never asks about traditions, even less about the opinions of their ancestors. The white man works quickly and hard, and haste and impatience are viewed by the black man as a sign of low intelligence. Thinking long and precisely is the black man’s wisdom.

At the source of the Zambezi he seeks the way to a new starting point, free of suppositions. I have run my capitalistic farm under the guise of a socialist dream, he thinks. I have occupied myself with an impossibility, incapable of realising even the most fundamental contradictions that exist. The starting point was always mine: my ideas, never the Africans’ thoughts, never Africa.

From the profit that the blacks produce, I pass on a share to those workers that is more than Judith Fillington or the other farmers ever did. The school I built, the school uniforms I pay for, are their own achievements, not mine. My most important function is to keep the farm operating and not permit too much pilfering or absenteeism. Nothing more. The only thing I can do is someday turn over the farm to a workers’ collective, transferring ownership itself. But this too is an illusion. The time is not ripe for it. The farm would fall into disrepair, some people would get rich, and others would be shoved out into even greater poverty. What I can do is to continue to run the farm as I do today, but without disrupting the great tranquillity with whims and ideas that will never amount to anything for the Africans. Their future is their own creation. I contribute to the production of food, and that is always time well spent. I know nothing about what the Africans think of me. I’ll have to ask Peter Motombwane, maybe also ask him to investigate it by talking to my workers. I wonder what Joyce Lufuma and her daughters think.

He returns to Kalulushi with a feeling of calm. He realises that he will never understand the underlying currents of life. Sometimes it’s necessary to stop asking certain questions, he thinks. There are some answers that simply don’t exist.

As he turns in the gates to the farm, he thinks of Egg-Karlsson, who evidently survived the fire. In my childhood I lived next door to an egg dealer, he thinks. If anyone had told me back then that one day I would be an egg dealer in Africa, I wouldn’t have believed it. That would have been unreasonable to believe.

I’m still the same person today. My income is large, my farm is solid. But my life is a quagmire.

One day perhaps Mr Pihri and his son will come and tell me that they can no longer handle my papers. The authorities will declare me an undesirable. I live here with no actual rights; I’m not a citizen with roots legally planted in Africa. I could be deported without notice, the farm confiscated.

A few days after his return from the Zambezi he looks up Patel in Kitwe and arranges increased transfers of foreign currency to the bank in London.

‘It’s becoming harder and harder to handle,’ says Patel. ‘The risks of discovery are increasing all the time.’

‘Ten per cent harder?’ asks Olofson. ‘Or twenty per cent harder?’

‘I would say twenty-five per cent harder,’ replies Patel in a worried voice.

Olofson nods and leaves the dark back room with its odours of curry and perfume. I’m putting my trust in an increasingly complex tangle of bribes, illegal financial transactions and corruption, he thinks. I scarcely have any choice. It’s hard to imagine that the corruption in this country is more widespread than it is in Sweden. The difference lies in the candour of it. Here everything is so obvious. In Sweden the methods are more evolved, a more refined and well-concealed pattern. But that is probably the only difference.

The arc of time is expanding. Hans Olofson loses a tooth, and just afterwards one more.

He turns forty and invites his many white and few black friends to a party. Peter Motombwane declines and never gives an explanation. Olofson gets very drunk during this party. He listens to incomprehensible speeches from people he scarcely knows. Speeches that praise him, pouring out a foundation of veneration for his African farm. They’re thanking me because I’ve started running my farm without extravagant thoughts about its function as a future model, he thinks. Not a true word is being spoken here.

On wobbly legs he stands up at midnight to thank his guests because so many of them came. Suddenly he realises that he has begun speaking in Swedish. He hears his old language, and he hears himself make a raging attack on the racist arrogance that characterises the whites who still live in this African land. He raves on in Swedish with a friendly smile.

‘A pack of scoundrels and whores is what you are,’ he says, raising his glass.

‘How nice,’ an elderly woman tells him later. ‘Mixing the two languages like that. But of course we’re wondering what you said.’

‘I hardly recall,’ Olofson replies, and steps outside in the dark alone.

Something whimpers at his feet and he discovers the German shepherd puppy he got as a present from Ruth and Werner Masterton.

‘Sture,’ he says. ‘Your name is Sture from now on.’

The puppy whimpers and Olofson calls Luka.

‘Take care of the puppy,’ he says.

‘Yes, Bwana,’ says Luka.

The party degenerates into a Walpurgis Night. Drunken people lie sprawled in the various rooms, an ill-matched couple has taken over Olofson’s own bed, and in the garden someone is shooting a pistol at bottles that a terrified black servant is lining up on a garden table.

Olofson suddenly feels aroused, and he begins to hover about a woman from one of the farms that lies furthest from his own. The woman is fat and swollen, her skirt is hitched up above her knees, and her husband is asleep under a table in the room that was once Judith Fillington’s library.

‘I’d like to show you something,’ says Olofson.

The woman gives a start from her half-doze and follows him up to the second floor of the house, to the room where skeletons once filled all the walls. He lights a lamp and closes the door behind him.

‘This is what you wanted to show me?’ she says with a laugh. ‘An empty room?’

Without replying he presses her against the wall, pulls up her skirt, and forces himself inside her.

‘An empty room,’ she says again and laughs.

‘Imagine that I’m black,’ Olofson says.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Imagine that I’m black,’ he says again.

When it’s over she clings to him and he smells the sweat from her unwashed body.

‘One more time,’ she says.

‘Never,’ says Olofson. ‘It’s my party, and I decide.’ He goes quickly, leaving her alone.

Pistol shots echo from the garden and he suddenly can’t stay there any longer. He staggers out into the darkness, deciding that the only person he wants to be near is Joyce Lufuma.

He gets in his car and leaves his house and his party with a screech of tyres. Twice he drives off the road, but manages to avoid flipping over, and finally pulls in front of her house.

The yard is silent and dark. He sees the disrepair in the headlights of his car, and he turns off the motor and sits in the dark. The night is warm and he feels his way to his usual spot under the tree.

We all have a lonesome, abandoned dog sitting and barking inside us, he thinks. Its paws are different colours, its tail may be cut off. But we all have that dog inside us.

He wakes up at dawn when one of Joyce’s daughters stands looking at him. He knows she is twelve years old; he can remember when she was born.

I love this child, he thinks. In her I can recognise something of myself, the child’s magnanimity, an ever-present readiness to show consideration for others.

Gravely she watches him, and he forces himself to smile.

‘I’m not sick,’ he says. ‘I’m just sitting here resting.’

When he smiles she smiles back at him. I can’t abandon this child, he thinks. Joyce and her daughters are my responsibility, no one else’s.

He has a headache and feels bad; the hangover is pounding in his chest and he shudders when he recalls the hopeless fornication in the empty room. I might just as well have mounted one of the skeletons, he says to himself. The humiliation I subject myself to seems to have no limits.

He drives back to his house and sees Luka picking up shards of glass in the garden, and he realises he also feels ashamed in front of Luka. Most of the guests have disappeared, only Ruth and Werner Masterton are left. They’re sitting on the terrace drinking coffee. The German shepherd puppy he named Sture is playing at their feet.

‘You survived,’ says Werner with a smile. ‘The parties seem to be getting more and more intense, as if a day of judgement were imminent.’

‘Who knows?’ Olofson says.

Luka walks past below the terrace. He’s carrying a pail full of broken bottles. They follow him with their gaze, watch him vanish towards the pit in the ground where he dumps the rubbish.

‘Drop by and say hello sometime,’ says Ruth as she and Werner get up to return to their farm.

‘I will,’ Olofson says.

A few weeks after the party he comes down with a severe attack of malaria, worse than any he has had before. The fever dreams hound him.

He imagines that he is being lynched by his workers. They rip off his clothes, pound him bloody with sticks and clubs, and drive him before them towards Joyce Lufuma’s house. There he senses his salvation, but she meets him with a rope in her hand, and he awakes just as he realises that she and her daughters are coming to hoist him up in the tree, with the rope fastened in a noose around his neck.

When he recovers and pays his first visit to Joyce, he suddenly remembers the dream. Maybe it’s a sign after all, he thinks. They accept my assistance, they are dependent on it. They have every reason to hate me, I forget that far too often. I forget the simplest antagonisms and truths.

The arc of time extends further over his life, the personal river he carries inside him. Often he returns in his thoughts to a frozen winter night, to the remote site he has never visited. He imagines his father’s grave. Now that he has been in Africa for eighteen years he ought to start looking for a spot for his own grave.

He walks over to the hill where Duncan Jones has already rested for many years, and he lets his gaze wander. It’s late afternoon and the sun is coloured red by the invisible soil that whirls over the African continent. He sees his long white hen houses against the light, workers on their way home from the day’s work. It’s October, just before the long rain begins to fall. The ground is scorched and dry, only scattered cactuses glow like green patches in the desiccated landscape. The Kafue is almost empty of water. The riverbed is laid dry, except for a narrow trickle in the middle of its furrow. The hippopotamuses have sought out distant water holes, and the crocodiles will not come back until the rain has returned.

He clears the weeds from Duncan Jones’s grave and squints towards the sun, seeking his own future gravesite. But he won’t make a decision; that would be tempting Death to come to him too soon. But what is the past? Who can make sense of his allotted time?

No one remains unaffected for almost twenty years, surrounded by African superstition, he thinks. An African would never search for his gravesite, not to mention select it. That would be like sending a resounding summons to Death.

I’m really standing on this hill because the view from here is beautiful. Here is the treeless landscape, the endless horizons that my father always looked for. Maybe I think it’s so beautiful because I know that it’s mine.

Here is the beginning and perhaps the end too, a chance journey and even more chance meetings led me here. He decides to pay another visit to Mutshatsha.

In all haste he sets out. It’s the middle of the rainy season and the roads are like liquid mud. Yet he drives fast, as if he were fighting to escape from something. A despair breaks through the barriers. Janine’s trombone echoes in his mind.

He never makes it to Mutshatsha. All at once the road is gone. With his front wheels balanced over a precipice, he looks straight down into a ravine that has opened up. The road has collapsed, and there is no longer a road to Mutshatsha. When he tries to turn the car around, it gets stuck in the mud. He breaks branches from bushes and lays them under the wheels, but the tyres can’t get a firm purchase. In the brief twilight the rain arrives with a roar, and he sits in his car and waits. Maybe no one will come by, he thinks. While I sleep the car might be invaded by wandering ants and when the rainy season is over only my skeleton, picked clean, will be left, polished like a piece of ivory.

In the morning the rain stops and he gets help with the car from some people in a nearby village. Late in the afternoon he arrives back at the farm.

The arc of time expands but suddenly begins to bend towards the earth again.

In the shadows people are grouping around him, and he doesn’t notice what’s happening. It is January 1987. He has now been in Africa for eighteen years.

The rainy season this year is intense and drawn out. The Kafue floods over its banks, the torrential rains threaten to drown his hen houses. Transport lorries get stuck in the mud; power poles topple and cause long power cuts. This is a rainy season like none he has ever experienced before.

At the same time there is more unrest in the country. Throngs of people are on the move; hunger riots strike the cities in the copper belt and Lusaka. One of his egg vans is stopped on its way to Mufulira by an excited mob who empties its cargo. Shots are fired in the night and the farmers refrain from leaving their homes.

Early one morning when Olofson goes to his little office, he finds that someone has flung a large rock through a window of the mud hut. He questions the night watchmen but no one has heard or seen anything.

One older worker stands at a distance and watches as Olofson carries out the questioning. Something in the old African’s face makes him break off abruptly and send the night watchmen home without any sort of punishment. He senses something menacing but can’t say what it is. The work is being done, but a heavy mood rests over the farm.

One morning Luka is gone. When Olofson opens the door to the kitchen at dawn as usual, Luka isn’t there. This has never happened before. Mists roll over the farm after the night’s rain. He calls for Luka but no one comes. He asks questions, but nobody knows, nobody has seen Luka. When he drives to his house, he finds it open with the door flapping in the wind.

In the evening he cleans the firearms he once took over from Judith Fillington, and the revolver he bought ten years earlier from Werner Masterton, the revolver he always keeps under his pillow. During the night he sleeps restlessly, the dreams are hounding him, and suddenly he wakes up with a start. He thinks he hears footsteps in the house, footsteps upstairs, above his head. In the dark he grabs the revolver and listens. But it’s only the wind slithering through the house.

He lies awake, the revolver resting on his chest. In the dark, just before dawn, he hears a car drive up in front of the house and then loud pounding on the front door. With the revolver in his hand he calls through the door and recognises the voice of Robert, Ruth and Werner Masterton’s foreman. He opens the door and realises once again that even a black man can look pale.

‘Something has happened, Bwana,’ says Robert, and Olofson sees that he is terrified.

‘What happened?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know, Bwana,’ replies Robert. ‘Something. I think it would be good if Bwana could come.’

He has lived in Africa long enough to be able to distinguish gravity in an African’s enigmatic way of expressing himself.

He dresses quickly, stuffs his revolver in his pocket, and grabs his shotgun. He locks the house carefully, wonders again where Luka is, and then gets into his car and follows Robert. Black rain clouds are scudding across the sky when the two cars turn up towards the Mastertons’ house.

I came here once, he thinks, in another time, as a different person. He recognises Louis among the Africans standing outside the house.

‘Why are they standing here?’ he asks.

‘That’s just it, Bwana,’ says Robert. ‘The doors are locked. They were locked yesterday too.’

‘Maybe they went on a trip,’ says Olofson. ‘Where’s their car?’

‘It’s gone, Bwana,’ Robert replies. ‘But we don’t think that they left.’

He looks at the house, its immovable façade. He walks around the house, calls out to their bedroom. The Africans follow him at a distance, expectantly. All at once he is afraid without knowing why. Something has happened.

He feels a vague fear of what he is about to see, but he asks Robert to fetch a crowbar from the car. When he breaks open the front door the alarm sirens don’t go off. As the front door yields he discovers that the telephone line to the house has been cut next to the outer wall.

‘I’m going in alone,’ he says, taking the safety off his gun and pushing the door aside.

What he finds is worse than he could have imagined. As if in a macabre film, he steps into a slaughterhouse, where human bodies lie hacked up all over the floor.

He never will understand why he didn’t pass out at the sight of what he saw.

Chapter Nineteen

And afterwards?

What is left?

The last year before Hans Olofson leaves the heavy fir ridges behind, leaves his father Erik Olofson behind in his mute dream of a distant sea that calls inside him. The last year that Janine is alive.

On an early Saturday morning in March 1962, she takes up position on the corner between the hardware shop and the People’s Hall. It’s the very heart of town, the one corner that no one can avoid. In the early morning she raises a placard above her head. On it is a text in black letters that she wrote the night before.

Something unheard of is about to happen. A rumour is growing and threatening to boil over. There are a few people who dare acknowledge that Janine and her lonely placard express a sensible opinion that has been lacking for too long. But their voices disappear in the icy March wind.

The right-thinking ones mobilise. A person who doesn’t even have a nose? Everyone has assumed that she was resting securely in the embrace of Hurrapelle. But now here she stands, the woman who ought to be living unnoticed and hiding her ugly face. Janine knows what thoughts are spreading like wildfire.

And she has also learned something from Hurrapelle’s monotonous exhortations. She knows how to resist when the wind changes and entrenched beliefs fumble for a foothold. She is driving a stake into the slumbering anthill on this early morning. People hurry along the streets, coats flapping, and they read what she has written. Then they hurry on to grab their neighbour by the collar and ask what that crazy woman can possibly mean. Is a noseless shrew going to tell us what to think? Who asked her to raise this unseemly barricade?

The old men come staggering out from the beer tavern to witness the spectacle with their own eyes. They don’t care about the fate of the world, but nevertheless they become her mute supporters. Their need for revenge is boundless. Whoever drives a stake into the heart of the anthill deserves all the support imaginable. Blinking at the light they stumble out of the pilsner’s dark room. With glee they note that nothing looks the same this morning. They understand at once that Janine needs all the support she can get, and one daring fellow staggers across the street and offers her a beer, which she amiably declines.

At that moment Hurrapelle comes skidding to a stop in his new car, alerted by an agitated member of the congregation who woke him with the shrill ring of his telephone. And he does what he can to stop her. He entreats her, entreats as much as he can. But she only shakes her head; she’s going to stay there. When he realises that her decision is unshakeable, he goes to his church to take counsel with his God about this difficult matter.

At the police station they are consulting the legal texts. Somewhere there must be a paragraph that permits an intervention. But it can hardly be called ‘reckless endangerment’, can it? It’s not ‘incitement to riot’ or ‘assault with a deadly weapon’ either. The policemen sigh over the gaps in the law books, leafing feverishly through the thick text, while Janine stands at her post on the corner.

Suddenly something reminds them of Rudin, who several years before had set fire to himself. That’s where the solution lies! Taking into custody a person who is incapable of taking care of herself. Sweaty fingers leaf further, and finally they are ready to intervene.

But when the police officers come marching and the crowd eagerly waits to see what’s going to happen, Janine calmly takes down her placard and walks away. The police gape, disconcerted, the crowd of people grumbles, and the old men from the tavern applaud with satisfaction.

When calm has been restored it is possible to argue about what she had written on her shameless placard: ‘No to the atom bomb. Only one Earth.’ But who wants a bomb on their head? And what did she mean by ‘Only one Earth.’? Are there supposed to be more? If the truth is to be preached, people refuse to have it served up by just anyone who claims to have been warned, and least of all by some woman with no nose.

Janine walks with her head held high even though she usually looks down at the ground. She is thinking of standing on her corner again next Saturday, and no one will be able to stop her. Far from the arenas where the world plays out in earnest, she will make her small contribution in accordance with her abilities. She walks across the river bridge, tosses her hair, and hums ‘A Night in Tunisia’. Under her feet dance the first ice floes of the spring thaw. She has proven herself in her own eyes and she has dared to act. She has someone who desires her. If everything is transitory after all, at least she has experienced this outpouring of life, when the pain was completely suppressed.

There is a movement in their life, this last year that Hans Olofson lives in the house by the river. Like a slow displacement of the Earth’s axis, a movement so slight that it’s not noticeable at first. But even to this isolated town in the sticks, a swell comes rolling in to tell them about a world outside which will no longer tolerate being relegated to endless darkness. The perspective has begun to shift, the quaking from distant wars of liberation and uprisings penetrates through the walls of the fir ridges.

Together they sit in Janine’s kitchen and learn the names of the new nations. And they notice the movement, the vibration from distant continents where people are rising up. With amazement, and a certain amount of alarm, they see how the world is changing. An old world in dissolution, where rotten floors are collapsing to reveal indescribable misery, injustice, atrocity. Hans begins to understand that the world he soon intends to enter will be a different one to his father’s. Everything will have to be discovered anew, the sea charts revised, the changed names replacing the old ones.

He tries to talk with his father about what he’s witnessing. Tries to encourage him to whack his axe into a stump and go back to sea. Usually the conversation ends before it has really begun. Erik Olofson is defensive and doesn’t want to be reminded. But then something unexpected happens.

‘I’m going to Stockholm,’ Erik Olofson says as they’re eating dinner.

‘Why?’ Hans asks.

‘I have a matter to take care of in the capital.’

‘You don’t know anybody in Stockholm, do you?’

‘I got an answer to my letter.’

‘What letter?’

‘The letter I wrote.’

‘You don’t write letters, do you?’

‘If you don’t believe me, we won’t talk about this any more.’

‘What letter?’

‘From the Vaxholm Company.’

‘The Vaxholm Company?’

‘Yes. The Vaxholm Company.’

‘What’s that?

‘A shipping company. They handle transport throughout the Stockholm archipelago.’

‘What do they want with you?’

‘I saw an advert somewhere. They need seamen. I thought it might be something for me. Domestic harbours and coastal traffic in the inland waters.’

‘Did you apply for a job?’

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘So what did they say?’

‘They want me to come to Stockholm and present myself.’

‘How can they tell by looking at you that you’re a good sailor?’

‘They can’t. But they can ask questions.’

‘About what?’

‘Why I haven’t been to sea in so many years, for instance.’

‘What are you going to say?’

‘That the children are grown and can take care of themselves.’

‘The children?’

‘I thought it would sound better if I said I had more than one. Seamen are supposed to have a lot of children, that’s always been the case.’

‘And what are the names of these children?’

‘I’ll think of something. I just have to come up with some names. Maybe I can borrow a photo from somebody.’

‘So you’re going to borrow a picture of someone else’s children?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘It makes a hell of a lot of difference!’

‘I probably won’t even have to prove they’re mine. But I know how ship owners are. It’s best to be prepared. There was a ship owner in Göteborg one time who demanded that anyone who wanted to go out on his boats had to be able to walk on his hands. The Seamen’s Association protested, of course, but he had it his way.’

‘Can you walk on your hands?’

‘No.’

‘What are you telling me, anyway?’

‘That I have an appointment in Stockholm.’

‘When are you leaving?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe I’ll say the hell with it.’

‘Of course you have to go! You can’t keep wandering around in the woods.’

‘I don’t wander around in the woods.’

‘You know what I mean. When I finish school we’ll leave this place.’

‘And go where?’

‘Maybe we can ship out on the same vessel.’

‘On a Vaxholm boat?’

‘What the hell do I know? But I want to go further. I’m going out in the world.’

‘Then I’ll wait till you’ve finished school.’

‘Don’t wait! You have to go now.’

‘That won’t work.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s already too late.’

‘Too late?’

‘Time ran out.’

‘When?’

‘About six months ago.’

‘Six months ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re only telling me now? Why didn’t you go?’

‘I thought I’d talk to you first.’

‘Good Lord...’

‘What is it?’

‘We have to get out of here. We can’t live here. We have to get out and discover the world again!’

‘I’m starting to get too old, I think.’

‘You’re getting old by stomping around in the woods.’

‘I’m not stomping around in the woods! I’m working.’

‘I know. But still.’

Maybe there’s still time, Hans thinks. Maybe he’ll take off again. He carries the sea inside him, I know that now. Hans hurries over to Janine’s to tell her. I’ll never have to see him crawling around scrubbing the kitchen at night, with water up to his neck.

He stops on the river bridge and looks down in the water where the ice floes rock their way towards the sea. Far off in the distance is the world, the new world that’s waiting for the conqueror of the new era. The world which he will discover with Janine.

But somewhere along the way they turn off in different directions. For Hans the change takes the form of a period of waiting for something. His pilgrimage, with or without his father Erik Olofson, will take place in a world that others are putting in order for him.

Janine’s thoughts are different. She makes the crucial discovery that incredible poverty is neither a whim of nature nor a law decreed by fate. She sees people who consciously choose a barbaric evil as the tool for their own gain. So they part ways at the centre of the world.

Hans emerges from his period of waiting. Janine discovers that her conscience requires action, more than just the intercessions for sufferers in which she takes part under Hurrapelle’s leadership. The question deepens, and never leaves her in her dreams. And she begins to search for a means of expression. A personal crusade, she thinks. A solitary crusade, in order to tell of the world that exists beyond the fir ridges.

Slowly a decision matures, and without saying anything to Hans she decides to take up her post on the street corner. She knows that she must carry out her plan alone. Until she has stood there for the first time she won’t share her crusade with anyone.

On that particular Saturday morning in March, Hans spends his time in the forestry officer’s garage. Along with one of the officer’s sons he has worked in vain to try to revive an old motorcycle. Not until late in the afternoon, when he stops at Pettersson’s kiosk, does he hear about what happened. His heart tightens when he hears what Janine has done. He feels that he has been exposed. Surely everyone knows that he sneaks up to her door, even though he tries to avoid being seen when he walks through her gate. He begins at once to hate her, as if her real intention had been to pull him into her own humiliation. He knows that he has to distance himself from her at once, to separate from her.

‘No one should care about a woman without a nose,’ he says.

They had agreed that he would visit her that evening. But now he spends the evening at the People’s Hall instead. He dances with every girl he meets, spitting out the most disparaging remarks about Janine that he can think of when he is crowded and jostled in the men’s toilet. When Kringström’s band finishes up with ‘Twilight Time’ he feels that he has presented a sufficient defence. Now nobody will think that he has a secret life with the placardcarrying lunatic. He goes out to the street, wipes the sweat off his brow, and stands in the shadows watching the couples leave. The night is full of shouts and giggles. He rocks back and forth on his feet, dizzy from all the lukewarm aquavit. That damn bitch, he thinks. She would have yelled at me and asked me to help hold her sign if I happened to pass by.

Suddenly he decides to visit her one last time and tell her what he’s thinking. So as not to be discovered he sneaks like a criminal across the bridge and waits for a long time outside her gate before he slips into the shadows.

She welcomes him without reproach. He was supposed to come but didn’t. No more than that.

‘Did you wait for me?’ he asks.

‘I’m used to waiting,’ she replies. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

He hates her and he desires her. But at the same time he knows that tonight he brings with him the opinion of the town, and he tells her that he will never come back if she stands on the street corner again.

A cold wind blows through her heart. She had thought he would encourage her, agree that what she was doing was right. That’s how she had interpreted their conversation about the way the world was cracking under the winds of change. Sorrow sinks like a lead weight on to her head. Now she knows that she will be left alone again. But not yet, because his desire takes over, and once again they are entwined with each other.

Their last time together becomes a long drawn-out agony. Hans returns to the starting point, the chopped-off crow’s head that he and Sture put in her letterbox. Now it’s her head he’s swinging at. He spits and swears at her, breaks arrangements, and paints her black for anyone who will listen.

In the midst of this chaos he passes his secondary school examination. With an intense outburst of concentrated energy he succeeds in getting unexpectedly high marks. Rector Bohlin has seen to it that an application is sent to the college in the county seat. When he puts on the grey graduation cap, he decides to keep studying. Now he doesn’t have to wait for his father to fling away the axe of indecision, now he’s in charge of his own future. With one single motion he can set himself free.

On the evening after the exam he stands outside Janine’s door. She’s waiting with flowers for him, but he doesn’t want her damned flowers. He’s going to leave this place and now he’s here for the last time. He hangs his grey cap over the picture of the Virgin Mary sitting in her window. But to the last day, all summer long, he visits her. And yet the secret that will be her last he never will know.

The final break-up, the end, is irresolute and forlorn. One evening in the middle of August he visits her and now it is really for the last time. They meet briefly in her kitchen, with few words, as if it were their first time, when he stood there with his hedge clippers in his hand. He says he’ll write, but she tells him it would be better if he didn’t. It’s best to let everything dissolve, blow away with the wind.

He leaves her house. Behind him he hears the notes of ‘Some of These Days’.

The next day his father accompanies him to the train station. Hans looks at his father, grey and indecisive.

‘I’ll come home sometime,’ he says. ‘And you can always come to visit.’

Erik Olofson nods. He’ll certainly come to visit. ‘The sea...’ he says and falls silent.

But Hans doesn’t hear him. He’s waiting patiently for the tram to take him away.

For a long time his father stays at the station, and he tells himself that the sea still does exist, after all. If only he... Always that ‘if only’. Then he goes home to the house by the river, and lets the sea roar out of his radio.

The month of the rowan berries. A Sunday morning in September. A bank of fog lies heavy over the town as it slowly begins to awake. There’s a chill in the air and the gravel crunches as a lone man turns off the main road and takes a short cut down the slope to the river. The People’s Park on its promontory shines forlornly like a half-razed ruin in the grey morning light. In the horse dealer’s pastures the horses are grazing in the fog. Noiselessly they move like ships waiting for the wind.

The man unties a rowboat at the river bank and sits down at the oars. He rows out into the sound between the point of the People’s Park and the south bank of the river. There he throws out an anchor that grips the rocks on the river bed. He tosses out a line and waits.

After an hour he decides to try further down towards the point. He lets the anchor drift under the keel of the boat as he rows. But abruptly it catches, and when he finally pulls it loose he sees that an almost rotten piece of cloth has been pierced by his hook. A bit of a woman’s blouse, he can see. Pensively he rows back to shore.

The bit of cloth lies on a table at the police station, with Hurrapelle standing looking at it. He nods.

The hastily assembled river-dragging crew doesn’t have to search long. On the second pass the two rowboats make through the sound, one of their hooks catches on something at the bottom. From the shore Hurrapelle watches Janine return.

The doctor examines the body one last time before he finishes the autopsy. When he has washed his hands, he stands by the window and looks out over the fir ridges coloured red by the setting sun. He wonders whether he is the only one who knows Janine’s secret. Without knowing why, he decides not to include it in the autopsy report. Even though this is not proper procedure, he doesn’t think it will change anything. He knows that she drowned. Around her waist there was a thick steel wire and in her clothing were irons and heavy pieces of drainpipe. No crime was committed. So he doesn’t need to report that Janine was carrying a child when she died.

In the house by the river Erik Olofson sits poring over a sea chart. He adjusts his glasses and pilots his vessel with his index finger through the Strait of Malacca. He smells the sea, sees the glimmering lanterns from distant vessels on an approaching course. In the background the carrier waves from the shortwave radio hiss through the ether. Maybe it’s still possible, he thinks. A little ship that takes goods along the coast? Maybe it’s still possible.

And what about Hans? He doesn’t remember who told him. But someone heard about it, and Hans learns that Janine is dead. The woman who stood every Saturday with her placard on the corner between the People’s Hall and the hardware shop. In the night he leaves the room in his boarding house, which he already detests, and wanders restlessly through the dark town. He tries to convince himself that no one is to blame. Not him, nor anybody else. But still, he knows. Mutshatsha, he thinks. You wanted to go there, Janine, that was your dream. But you never went and now you’re dead.

I once lay behind a broken-down kiln in the old brickworks and realised that I was myself and no one else. But since then? Now? He asks himself how he can stand four years in this distant college. Inside him an incessant struggle is going on between belief in the future and resignation. He tries to cheer himself up. Living must be like continually preparing for new expeditions, he thinks. It’s either that or I’ll become like my father.

All at once he decides. Someday he will go to Mutshatsha. Someday he will make the journey that Janine never made. That thought becomes instantly holy for him. The most fragile of all Goals has revealed itself to him. The dream of another which he is taking over.

Cautiously he tiptoes up the stairs to his room. He recognises the smell of old lady Westlund’s flat. Apples, sour drops. On the table the books lie waiting for him. But he is thinking of Janine. Maybe growing up means realising one’s loneliness, he thinks. He sits motionless for a long time.

He feels as if he were again sitting on the huge span of the iron bridge. High overhead, the stars.

Below him Janine...