The Eye of the Leopard - By Henning Mankell Page 0,1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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