'So who?'
'If you really want to know, I've met Nyman's wife from time to time. But you keep your mouth shut about it. Nyman's a nice bloke.'
Hans can't believe his ears. 'Are those my sisters and brothers?'
'Who?'
'Nyman's children. Are they my sisters and brothers?'
'Those are Nyman's children.'
'How can you be sure?'
'We only saw each other when she was pregnant,' Erik says simply. 'You learn these things. There can never be shared paternity.'
'And you expect me to believe this?'
'I don't expect anything. I'm just telling you the truth.'
Hans stays in the café while his father visits the ship owner. My father, he thinks. I evidently never knew a thing about him.
After half an hour Erik comes back.
'How'd it go?'
'Good. But I didn't get a job.'
'So it didn't go so well then.'
'They said they'd let me know.'
'When?'
'When they need seamen.'
'I thought they needed to hire people now?'
'They must have hired someone else.'
'Are you satisfied with that?'
'I've been waiting for years,' says Erik with sudden sharpness. 'I've waited and wished and almost given up. But now at least I've tried.'
'What are we going to do now?'
'I'm going home tonight. But now I want to have a pilsner.'
'What are we going to do for the rest of the day?'
'I thought you were studying at the university.'
'I am. But now you're here in town and we haven't seen each other for a long time.'
'How are your studies?'
'All right.'
I see.'
'You didn't answer my question.'
'What question?'
'What do you want to do today?'
'I already told you. I want a pilsner. Then I'll go home.'
They spend the day in the hotel room. A pale autumn sun shines through the curtains.
'If I find her,' says Hans, 'what should I say?'
'Nothing from me,' Erik says firmly.
'What was her name before you married?'
'Karlsson.'
'Mary Karlsson or Mary Olofson from Askersund? Anything else?'
'She had a dog named Buffalo when she was a child. I remember she told me that.'
'That dog must have been dead for fifty years by now.'
'Its name was Buffalo anyway.'
'Is that all you know?'
'Yep.'
'A goddamn dog named Buffalo?'
'That's what it was called, I remember that clearly.'
Hans accompanies him to the train. I'm going to look for her, he thinks. I can't have a mother who's a riddle. Either he's lying, hiding something, or else my mother is a strange woman.
'When are you coming home?' his father asks.
'In the summer. Not before. Maybe you'll be a seaman again before that, what do you think?'
'Could be. Could be.'
Hans takes the train with him as far as Uppsala. He has the moose steak under his arm.
'So who's poaching?' he asks.
'Nobody you know,' says Erik.
Hans goes back to the house of the clocks. I can't give up, he thinks. Nothing can really prevent me from becoming the defender of mitigating circumstance. I'll build barricades inside of me.
I can't give up.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He sees the dead snake.
What is it saying? What message does it bring? Sorcerers interpret their ancestors' voices, and the black masses huddle in terrified submission. He knows he should get going, leave the farm, leave Africa.
Suddenly it's incomprehensible to him. Almost twenty years in Africa. An unreal, unbelievable life. What was it I thought I could achieve? Superstition is real, that's what I always forget. I keep deceiving myself with the white point of view. I've never been able to grasp the way the blacks think. I have lived here for almost twenty years without realising on what ground I'm actually standing. Ruth and Werner Masterton died because they refused to understand.
With a feeling that he is no longer able to cope, he gets into his car and drives to Kitwe. So he can get some sleep he checks into the Hotel Edinburgh, pulls the curtains and lies naked on top of the sheet. A violent thunderstorm passes through and the lightning flashes flicker across his face. The torrent pounds like the surf against the window.
Suddenly he longs for home, a melancholy hunger for the clear water of the river, the motionless ridges of firs. Maybe that was what the white snake wanted to tell him. Or was it giving him his last warning?
I ran away from my own life, he thinks. In the beginning there was possibility; growing up with the smell of elkhounds, that may have been meagre but that was still my very own heritage. I could have worked towards realising an ambition, watching over the mitigating circumstance. Chance events that were stronger than I was created my confusion. I accepted Judith Fillington's offer without understanding what it really involved. Now that I've already taken off my shoes in the vestibule of middle age, I'm afraid that my life is shipwrecked. There is always something else I want. Right now to go back, to start over from the beginning if it were possible.
Restlessly he gets dressed and goes down to the hotel bar. He nods to some familiar faces and discovers Peter Motombwane in a corner, bent over a newspaper. He sits down at his table without telling him about the events at the farm.
'What's going on?' he asks. 'New riots? New plundering raids? When I came to Kitwe everything seemed calm.'
'The authorities have released an emergency store of maize,' Motombwane says. 'Sugar is on the way from Zimbabwe, Canadian wheat is in Dar-es-Salaam. The politicians have decided not to have any more riots. Many people have been put in jail, and the president is hiding in the State House. Everything will calm down again, unfortunately. A mountain of sacks of corn meal is enough to delay an African riot for quite a while. The politicians can sleep securely with their fortunes, and you can take down your barricades from the doors and sleep soundly again.'
'How do you know that I build barricades?' Olofson asks.
'Even with no imagination I would guess that,' replies Motombwane.
'But Werner and Ruth Masterton will not get their lives back,' Olofson says.
'At least that's something,' replies Motombwane.
Olofson starts. He feels the rage coming. 'What do you mean?' he asks.
'I was thinking of driving out to see you someday,' Motombwane says unperturbed. 'I'm a journalist, and I've investigated the twilight land that Rustlewood Farm has become. Truths are coming to light, and no one is afraid that the dead will come back to haunt them since their heads were cut off their bodies. The black workers are talking, an unknown world is emerging. I thought I'd drive out to see you someday and tell you about it.'
'Why not now?' Olofson asks.
'I like it on your farm,' replies Motombwane. 'I would have liked to live there. On your terrace one can talk about everything.'
Olofson realises that there is a subtext to Peter Motombwane's words. I don't know him, he thinks. Beyond our conversations, evenings spent in each other's company, the fundamental fact keeps returning that he's black and I'm a white European. The differences between the continents are never so great or blatant as when they are represented by two individuals.
'Two dead, dismembered bodies,' says Motombwane. 'Two Europeans who lived here for many, many years, murdered and cut to bits by unknown blacks. I decided to work backwards, to search for light among the shadows. Perhaps because I might have been wrong, it mightn't have been pure chance that it was the Mastertons who were killed. I start my investigations and an underlying world begins to surface. A farm is always a closed system; the white owners put up both visible and invisible fences around themselves and their workers. I talk with the blacks, put together fleeting rumours into something that su
ddenly starts to be readable and clear. I stand before an assumption that is slowly confirmed. Werner and Ruth Masterton were hardly murdered by chance. I can never be sure; coincidences and conscious decisions can also be woven together with invisible threads.'
'Tell me,' says Olofson. 'Tell me the story of the shadows.'
'A picture began to emerge,' says Motombwane. 'Two people with an unreasoning hatred of black people. A terror regime with constant threats and punishments. In earlier times we were beaten with whips made from hippopotamus skins. Today that would be an impossibility. The whips are invisible; they leave their marks only in the sensitive skin of the mind and the heart. The blacks who worked at Rustlewood Farm endured a constant barrage of humiliations and threats of dismissal, degrading transfers, fines, and lockouts. A South African territory reveals itself right here, in this country, an utterly unbounded racism. Ruth and Werner Masterton's primary nourishment was the contempt they cultivated.'
'I don't believe it,' says Olofson. 'I knew them. You can't see through the lies you're dragging up out of the shadow world you've been visiting.'
'I'm not asking you to believe me,' says Motombwane. 'What I'm giving you is the black truth.'
'A lie will never be true, no matter how many times you repeat it,' Olofson replies. 'Truths don't follow race; at least they shouldn't do so in a friendly conversation.'
'The various accounts coincided,' Motombwane says. 'Individual details were confirmed. According to what I now know, I have to shrug my shoulders at their fate. I believe it was justified.'
'That conclusion makes our friendship impossible,' says Olofson, getting to his feet.
'Has it ever really been possible?' asks Motombwane, unmoved.
'I thought so,' Olofson says. 'At least it was my sincere hope.'
'I'm not the one who's making something impossible,' says Motombwane. 'You're the one who prefers to deny a truth about dead people when it's right in front of you, instead of choosing a friendship with a living person. What you're doing now is taking a racist position. Actually, it surprises me.'
Olofson feels an urge to hit Motombwane. But he controls himself.
'What would you do without us?' he asks. 'Without the whites this country would fall apart. Those aren't my words, they're yours.'
'And I agree with them. But the collapse wouldn't be as great as you imagine. It would be extensive enough that a necessary transformation would have to be pushed through. A revolt that has been suppressed for far too long might break out. In the best case, we would succeed in ripping away all the European influences that continue to oppress us even though we ourselves are not aware of them. Then perhaps we could finally achieve our African independence.'
'Or else you'll chop each other's heads off,' says Olofson. 'Tribe against tribe, Bemba against Luvale, Kaonde against Luzi.'
'Anyway, that's our own problem,' says Motombwane. 'A problem that wasn't imposed on us by you.'
'Africa is sinking,' Olofson says excitedly. 'The future of this continent is already over. The only thing that remains is a deeper and deeper decay.'
'If you live long enough you'll realise that you're wrong,' replies Motombwane.
'According to all available calculations my life span is superior to yours,' says Olofson. 'No one will shorten it by raising a panga over my head, either.'
Theirs is a ragged and weary parting of ways. Olofson merely walks away, leaving Motombwane huddled in the shadows. When he returns to his room and has slammed the door behind him, he feels sad and forlorn. The lonely dog barks inside him, and he suddenly sees his father's impotent scrubbing. Ending a friendship, he thinks. It's like breaking your own fingers. With Peter Motombwane I lose my most important link to Africa. I will miss our conversations, his clarification of why the black man's thoughts look the way they do. He lies down on the bed to think. Motombwane could be absolutely right, of course. What do I really know about Ruth and Werner? Almost twenty years ago we shared a compartment on the night train between Lusaka and Kitwe; they helped me along, took care of me when I came back from Mutshatsha. They never made a secret of their opposition to the transformation that Africa is undergoing; they always referred to the colonial times as the era that could have led Africa forward. They felt both betrayed and disappointed. But what about the brutality that Motombwane thought he had traced to their daily life?
Maybe he's right, Olofson thinks. Maybe there is a truth that I'm pushing away. He hurries back to the bar to try and reconcile with Peter Motombwane.
But the table is empty; one of the waiters says that he got up and left. Exhausted and sad, Olofson sleeps in his hotel bed.
When he eats breakfast in the morning, he is again reminded of Ruth and Werner. One of their neighbours, an Irishman named Behan, comes into the dining room and stops by his table. A will has been found in the blood-drenched house; a steel safe survived the fire. A law firm in Lusaka is authorised to sell the farm and transfer the remaining profit to the British retirement home in Livingstone.
Behan tells him that the auction of the farm will be held in a fortnight. Many whites are prospective bidders; the farm will not be allowed to fall into black hands.
There's a war going on, Olofson thinks. A war that only occasionally becomes visible. But everywhere the racial hatred is alive – whites against the blacks and blacks against whites.
He returns to his farm. A violent downpour makes visibility through the windscreen nonexistent and forces him to stop on the verge just before the farm. A black woman with two small children crosses the road in front of the car, covered with mud and water. He recognises her as the wife of one of the workers on the farm. She doesn't ask for a ride, he thinks. Nor do I offer her one. Nothing unites us, not even a fierce downpour, when only one of us has an umbrella. People's barbaric behaviour always has a human face, he thinks vaguely to himself. That's what makes the barbarity so inhumane.
The rain drums on the roof of the car; he waits alone for it to ease. I could decide here and now, he thinks. Decide to leave. Sell the farm, go back to Sweden. Exactly how much money Patel has weaseled out of me I have no idea, but I'm not penniless. This egg farm has given me a few years' breathing space. Something about Africa scares me just as much now as the day I stepped out of the plane at Lusaka International Airport. Twenty years' experience of this continent hasn't changed a thing, since I never questioned white assumptions. What would I actually say if someone asked me to explain what is happening on this continent? I have my memories – adventurous, gruesome, exotic. But I don't have any real knowledge.
The rain stops abruptly, a wall of clouds rises and the landscape starts to dry out again. Before he starts the engine he decides to spend an hour each day planning his future.
A perfect calm rests over the farm; nothing seems to have happened. By chance he encounters Eisenhower Mudenda, bowing to the ground. A white man in Africa is someone who takes part in a play he knows nothing about, he thinks. Only the blacks know the next line. Every evening he builds his barricades, checks his weapons, and chooses a different bedroom. Daybreak is always a relief, and he wonders how long he'll be able to endure. I don't even know my own breaking point, he thinks. But it must exist.