The Eye Of The Leopard Read Free Page A

should
smell of sour rubber boots and lingonberries, not the distant
odour of the salty monsoon sea and burned-out charcoal fires.
But the full-rigger sits there on the stove shelf, with its dreamy
name Célestine . Long ago Hans decided that he would never marry
a woman who wasn't named Célestine. It would be a form of
betrayal; to his father, to the ship, to himself.
    He also senses a murky connection between the full-rigger in
its dusty case and the recurring nights when his father scrubs out
his fury. A sailor finds himself driven ashore in a primeval Norrland
forest, where no bearings can be taken, no ocean depths sounded.
    The boy senses that the sailor lives with a stifled cry of lamentation
inside. And it's when the longing grows too strong that the
bottles end up on the table, the sea charts are taken out of the
chest in the hall, the seven seas are sailed once more, and the sailor
metamorphoses into a wreck who is forced to scrub away his
longing, transformed into hallucinations dissolved in alcohol.
    The answers are always found in the past.
    His mother disappeared, was simply gone one day. Hans was
so little then that he has no memory either of her or of her
departure. The photographs that lie behind the radio in father's
unfinished logbook, and her name, Mary, are all he knows.
    The two photographs instil in him a sense of dawn and cold.
A round face with brown hair, her head tilted a little, maybe a
hint of a smile. On the back of the photographs it says Atelier Strandmark, Sundsvall .
    Sometimes he imagines her as a figurehead on a ship that was
wrecked in a heavy storm in the southern seas and has since lain
on the bottom in a watery grave 4,000 metres down. He imagines
that her invisible mausoleum lies somewhere on the sea
chart that hangs on the kitchen wall. Maybe outside Port Louis,
or in the vicinity of the reef off the east coast of Madagascar.
    She didn't want to leave. That's the explanation he gets. On
the rare occasions that his father talks about her departure, he
always uses the same words.
    Someone who doesn't want to leave. Quickly, unexpectedly
she disappeared, that much he understands. One day she's gone,
with a suitcase. Someone saw her get on the train, towards Orsa
and Mora. The vastness of Finnmark closed in around her disappearance.
    For this disappearance he can manage only a wordless despair.
And he assumes that they share the guilt, he and his father. They
didn't die. They were left behind, never to receive a sign of life.
    He's not sure whether he misses her, either. His mother is two
photographs, not a person of flesh and blood who laughs, washes
clothes, and tucks the covers under his chin when the winter cold
penetrates the walls of the building. The feeling he bears is a kind
of fear. And the shame of having been found unworthy.
    He decides early on to share the contempt that the decent
town has hung like shackles around his runaway mother. He goes
along with the decent people, the grown-ups. Enclosed in an iron
grip of constancy they pass their life together in the building
where the beams scream out their distress during the long drawnout
winters. Sometimes Hans imagines that their house is a ship
that has dropped anchor and is waiting for the wind to come up.
The chains of the elkhounds out by the woodshed are actually
anchor chains, the river a bay of the open sea. The attic flat is
the captain's cabin, while the lower flat belongs to the crew. Waiting
for the wind takes a long time, but occasionally the anchors are
hauled up from the deep. And then the house sets off under full
sail to race down the river, saluting one last time where the river
bends at the People's Park, before the wind carries them away.
Towards an Away that doesn't entail a return.
    In an attempt to understand, he creates for himself the only
rational explanation for why his father remains in this parched
town, every day grabbing his tools and heading out into the forest
that prevents him from seeing the