Free The Eye Of The Leopard by Henning Mankell

whetting a knife intended expressly for
me? There doesn't seem to be any dialogue between the blacks
and the whites in this country. The world is split in two, with
no mutual trust. Orders are shouted across the chasm, that's all.
    He listens to the conversation, observing that Ruth is more
aggressive than Werner. While Werner thinks that maybe they
should wait and see, Ruth says they should take up arms at once.
    He gives a start when one of the black servants bends over him
and fills his glass. All at once he realises that he is afraid. The
terrace, the rapidly falling darkness, the restless conversation; all of
it fills him with insecurity, that same helplessness he felt as a child
when the beams of the house by the river creaked in the cold.
    There are preparations for war going on here, he thinks. What
scares me is that Ruth and Werner and the stranger don't seem
to notice it ...
    At the dinner table the conversation suddenly shifts character,
and Olofson feels more at ease sitting in a room where lamps
ward off the shadows, creating a light in which the black servants
cannot hide. The conversation at the dinner table turns to the
old days, to people who are no longer here.
    'We are who we are,' says Richardson. 'Those of us who choose
to stay on our farms are surely insane. After us comes nothing.
We are the last.'
    'No,' says Ruth. 'You're wrong. One day the blacks will be
begging at our doors and asking us to stay. The new generation
can see where everything is headed. Independence was a gaudy
rag that was hung on a pole, a solemn proclamation of empty
promises. Now the young people see that the only things that
work in this country are still in our hands.'
    The alcohol makes Olofson feel able to speak.
    'Is everyone this hospitable?' he asks. 'I might be a hunted criminal.
Anyone at all, with the darkest of pasts.'
    'You're white,' says Werner. 'In this country that's enough of a
guarantee.'
    Elvin Richardson leaves when the meal is over, and Olofson
realises that Ruth and Werner retire early. Doors with wroughtiron
gates are carefully barred shut, German shepherds bark
outside in the darkness, and Olofson is instructed how to turn
off the alarm if he goes into the kitchen at night. By ten o'clock
he is in bed.
    I'm surrounded by a barrier, he thinks. A white prison in a
black country. The padlock of fear around the whites' property.
What do the blacks think, when they compare our shoes and their
own rags? What do they think about the freedom they have gained?
    He drifts off into a restless slumber.
    He jumps awake when a sound pierces his consciousness. In
the dark, he doesn't know for a moment where he is.
    Africa, he thinks. I still know nothing about you. Perhaps this
is exactly how Africa looked in Janine's dreams. I no longer recall
what we talked about at her kitchen table. But I have a feeling that
my normal judgements and thoughts are insufficient or perhaps
not even valid out here. Another kind of seeing is required ...
    He listens to the darkness. He wonders whether it is the silence
or the sound that is imagined. Again he is afraid.
    There is a catastrophe enclosed within Ruth and Werner
Masterton's friendliness, he thinks. This entire farm, this white
house, is enclosed by an anxiety, an anger that has been dammed
up for much too long.
    He lies awake in the dark and imagines that Africa is a wounded
beast of prey that still does not have the strength to get up. The
breathing of the earth and the animals coincides, the bush where
they hide is impenetrable. Wasn't that the way Janine imagined
this wounded and mangled continent? Like a buffalo forced to its
knees, but with just enough power left to keep the hunters at bay.
    Maybe she with her empathy could probe more deeply into
reality than I can, tramping about on the soil of this continent.
Maybe she made a journey in her dreams that was just as real
as my meaningless flight to the mission station in Mutshatsha.
    There may be another truth as well. Is it