The Eye Of The Leopard Read Free

of mosquitoes had not yet
taken over the town, which lay where the river made a bend on
its long journey to the sea. A crow squawked its loneliness at the
top of a crooked fir and then flapped away over the ridge where
Hedevägen wound its way to the west. The moss under his feet
was spongy. He had grown tired of the game, and on his way to
the river everything changed. For as long as he had not established
his own identity, was just somebody among all the others, he had
possessed a timeless immortality, the privilege of childhood, the
most profound manifestation of childishness. At the very moment
that the unfamiliar question of why he was who he was crept into
his head, he became a definite person and thus mortal. Now he
had defined himself; he was who he was and would never be anyone
else. He realised the futility of defending himself. Now he had a
life ahead of him, in which he would have to be who he was.
    By the river he sat down on a rock and looked at the brown
water slowly making its way towards the sea. A rowboat lay
chafing at its cable and he realised how simple it would be to
disappear. From the town, but never from himself.
    For a long time he sat by the river, becoming a human being.
Everything had acquired limits. He would play again, but never
the same way as before. Playing had become a game, nothing
more.
    Now he clambers over the rocks on the riverbank until he can
see the house where he lives. He sits down on an uprooted tree
that smells of rain and dirt and looks at the smoke curling out
of the chimney.
    Who can he tell about his great discovery? Who can be his
confidant?
    He looks at the house again. Should he knock on the draughty
door to the ground floor flat and ask to speak with Egg-Karlsson?
Ask to be admitted to the kitchen where it always smells of rancid
fat, wet wool, and cat piss? He can't talk to Egg-Karlsson, who
doesn't speak to anyone, just shuts his door as if he's closing an
eggshell of iron around himself. All Hans knows about him is
that he's a misanthrope and bull-headed. He rides his bicycle to
the farmhouses outside town and buys up eggs, which he then
delivers to various grocers. He does all his business in the early
morning, and for the rest of the day he lives behind his closed
door.
    Egg-Karlsson's silence pervades the house. It hovers like a mist
over the neglected currant bushes and the shared potato patch,
the front steps, and the stairs to the top floor where Hans lives
with his father.
    Nor does he consider confiding in old lady Westlund who
lives across from Egg-Karlsson. She would sweep him up in her
embroidery and her Free Church evangelism, never listening to
him, but proceeding at once to fling her holy words at him.
    All that remains is the little attic flat he shares with his father.
All he can do is go home and talk to his father, Erik Olofson,
who was born in Åmsele, far from this cold hole in the interior
of melancholy southern Norrland, this town that lies hidden away
in the heart of Härjedal. Hans knows how much it hurts his
father to have to live so far from the sea, to have to make do with
a sluggish river. With a child's intuition he can see that a man
who has been to sea can never thrive where the dense, frozen
grey forest conceals the open horizons. He thinks of the sea chart
that hangs on the kitchen wall, showing the waters around
Mauritius and Réunion, with a glimpse of the east coast of
Madagascar on the fading edge of the chart, and the sea floor
indicated in places, its inconceivable depth 4,000 metres. It's a
constant reminder of a sailor who wound up in the utterly wrong
place, who managed to make landfall where there wasn't any sea.
    On the shelf over the stove sits a full-rigger in a glass case,
brought home decades ago from a dim Indian shop in Mombasa,
purchased for a single English pound. In this frigid part of the
world, inhabited by ice crystals instead of jacarandas, people have
moose skulls and fox tails as wall decorations. Here it