The Eye of the Leopard by Henning Mankell Page B

must be voluntary. When the women of the congregation meet in sewing circles for the production of table runners to sell at fairs, she stays home and sews her own clothes. She is a restless element in the congregation’s world, but as long as she can single-handedly collect the majority of its annual income by knocking on doors, she does not hesitate to indulge her freedoms. Hurrapelle makes regular attempts to coax her into the sewing circle, but she refuses. Since he’s afraid she might begin to waver in her faith, or even worse, move her God to a competing congregation, he doesn’t press the issue. When the members of the congregation complain about her self-indulgent behaviour, he deals sternly with the criticism.
    ‘The least of my children,’ he says. ‘Think of her suffering. Think how much good she is doing for our congregation …’
    The evenings with Janine during that year become an unbroken series of peculiar encounters. Against a background of ‘Some of These Days’ she holds her hand over the two vandals who in the malevolence of ignorance once decided to torment the life out of her.
    Both of them, each in his own way, find in her something of the mystery they had previously sought in vain in the town. The house by the south bank of the river becomes a journey out into the world …
    On the evening she starts teaching them to dance, they experience for the first time the exciting sensation of being close to a warm, sweaty female body.
    And the thought occurs to her – maybe not just at that moment, but later – that she would like to take off her clothes and stand stark naked before them, to be seen just once, even if it’s only by two skinny, half-grown boys.
    At night come the dark powers that are never permitted to surface and burn. To cry out her distress and follow Hurrapelle’s admonition always to surrender to God, who keeps His ear in constant readiness; that would be impossible. There the religious thread breaks, and then she has no one but herself to cling to. The greatest of all the sorrows she has to bear is that she has never had the chance to sink into an embrace, even in the dirty back seat of a car parked on a remote logging road.
    But she refuses to complain. She has her trombone. In the dawn of winter mornings she stands in her kitchen and plays ‘Creole Love Call’.
    And the boys who brought the sack of ants – she always lets them in. When she teaches them to dance she feels happy that she could overcome their childish shyness …
    During the late winter and early spring of 1957, Sture and Hans spend many evenings at her house. They often don’t go home until the winter night has driven its frozen ship towards midnight.
    Spring arrives again. One day the unassuming but eagerly awaited yellow crowns of the coltsfoot begin to glow in a dirty ditch. Hurrapelle stands one morning in the back room of the Baptist church and searches in a cardboard box for handbillsannouncing the Spring Meeting. Soon it will be time for even the sermon placards to change their skin.
    But spring is deceptive, because its beauty barely conceals the fact that death is hiding in the eye of the coltsfoot blossom.
    For Sture and Hans, death is an invisible insect that eats away at life and every event. Long evenings they sit on the boulder by the river or in Janine’s kitchen and ponder how death actually ought to be understood and described. Sture suggests that death ought to be like Jönsson, the restaurant owner, who stands on the doorstep of the Grand Hotel and welcomes his guests in a black, greasy tuxedo. How easily he could then drip poison into the black soup or the sauce on the roast beef. He would lurk by the swinging doors to the kitchen and the tablecloths would be transformed into stained shrouds …
    For Hans Olofson, death is much too complicated to be compared to a restaurant owner. Thinking of death as
a person
of flesh and blood, with a hat and coat and sniffling nose, is too simple. If