The Eye of the Leopard by Henning Mankell

Hans is serious, and he wants to yell to him to come down. But at the same time he feels the forbidden desire to wait and see. Maybe he will witness how somebody fails in attempting the impossible.
    Hans closes his eyes and climbs further. The wind sings in his ears, the blood pounds in his temples, and he is utterly alone. The bridge span is cold against his body, the heads of the rivets scrape against his knees, and his arms and fingers have already gone completely numb. He forces himself not to think, just to keep climbing, as if it were one of his usual dreams. And yet he seems to be climbing up over the axis of the earth itself …
    He feels the bridge span under him begin to flatten out, but this doesn’t calm him, it only increases his terror. Now he sees in his mind’s eye how high up he is, how far away in his great loneliness. If he falls now, nothing can save him.
    Desperately he keeps crawling forward, clinging to the span, floundering his way metre by metre back towards the ground. His fingers grip the steel like claws, and for a dizzying second hethinks that he has been turned into a cat. He feels something warm but doesn’t know what it is.
    When he reaches the bridge abutment on the other side of the river and cautiously opens his eyes and realises that it’s true, that he has survived, he hugs the bridge span as if it were his saviour. He lies there before jumping down to the ground.
    He looks at the bridge and knows he has conquered it. Not as some external enemy, but as an enemy within himself. He wipes off his face, flexes his fingers to get the feeling back, and sees Sture come walking across the bridge with his jacket in his hand.
    ‘You forgot to piss,’ says Sture.
    Did he? No, he didn’t! Now he knows where the sudden warmth came from up on the cold steel span. It was his body giving way. He points at the dark patch on his trousers.
    ‘I didn’t forget,’ he says. ‘Look here! Or do you want to smell it?’
    Then comes his revenge.
    ‘It’s your turn now,’ he says, sitting down on his jacket.
    But Sture has already prepared his escape. When he realised that Hans would make it down from the bridge span without falling into the river, he searched feverishly for a way to get out of it.
    ‘I will,’ he replies. ‘But not now. I didn’t say when.’
    ‘When will you do it?’ asks Hans.
    ‘I’ll let you know.’
    They head home in the spring evening. Hans has forgotten all about the flowers. There are plenty of flowers, but only one bridge span …
    The silence grows between them. Hans wants to say something, but Sture is lost in his own thoughts and impossible to reach. They part quickly outside the courthouse gate …
    The last day of school comes with a light, hovering fog thatrapidly thins and vanishes in the sunrise. The schoolrooms smell newly scrubbed, and Headmaster Gottfried has been sitting in his room since five in the morning preparing his commencement address for the pupils he will now be sending out into the world. He is cautious with the vermouth this morning, so filled is he with melancholy and reflection. The last day of the school year is a reminder of his own mortality in the midst of all the effervescent anticipation that his pupils feel …
    At seven-thirty he walks out on the steps. He sincerely hopes he won’t see a pupil arrive without a relative. Nothing makes him so upset as to see a child arrive alone on the last day of school.
    At eight o’clock the school bell rings and the classrooms are brimming with expectant silence. Headmaster Gottfried walks down the corridor to visit all the classes. Schoolmaster Törnkvist appears before him and announces that a pupil is missing from the commencement class. Sture von Croona, the son of the district judge. Headmaster Gottfried looks at his watch and decides to ring the district judge.
    But not until it’s time to march over to the church does he hurry into his office and ring the district court. His hands are