Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

Some are already commenting on this in their memory books. There are people who are about to die, but who do nevertheless try to see into the future. They can comprehend the consequences of their own death, magnified and on a global scale. If there is one thing that is certain when it comes to Aids in Africa, it is that you will not die alone. Also it is true that your death will have very far-reaching consequences.

I read about this in several of the memory books. The fear of impoverishment, the fear that children will be left to their own devices, the fear that all knowledge will be forgotten, rot away like the dead body of a human being.

Aids has to do with many kinds of death. Hence also with many kinds of life. Obviously, life can be assessed and interpreted in the number of books that are written and the books that are read.

In 1343, Petrarch found a voluminous manuscript in Verona containing Cicero 's letters to his son Atticus: for many years the boy was an idle and unenthusiastic student in Athens. Those letters had been lost since Cicero 's time, since the beginning of our chronology. After thirteen hundred years they suddenly reappeared.

Is this what will happen to all the memory books that are being written today? It seems hardly credible that in our day and age it would be possible to bury the written word in archives, even as we bury nuclear waste in caverns deep inside mountains. But you never know.

There was once a great library in Alexandria. It contained all of human knowledge until it burnt down. Now it has been rebuilt.

Perhaps that library ought to be a centre for all the memory books that are being written today. Perhaps at least copies ought to be kept there, for the future.

In the diary I kept during my visit to Uganda there is a stray sentence scribbled down on the inside back cover.

The pain can be seen in their smiles.

Strangely enough, I have to admit that I can't remember when I wrote that. Who had I met? Whose smiles was I referring to? It seems to me odd that I can't remember. I would hardly have made a note like that without good reason.

I scour my memory, but I cannot find the occasion or the cause.

How can I remember a smile without remembering the face?

It wasn't until my last visit to Gladys that I realised that there was a link between her and Christine which I had not known about. Gladys told me when I first visited her that when she heard she had tested HIV-positive, she sat down and stayed sitting down for several years, doing nothing, only waiting to die. On that occasion, I overlooked the obvious question: what shook you out of that apathy?

It was Christine who persuaded her to abandon her apathetic wait for death.

Gladys and Christine knew each other only slightly, but Christine had heard that Gladys was sitting in her dark room as if paralysed. She never went out, hardly spoke to her children. She just sat there motionless, waiting for the cold breeze on the back of her neck.

One day Christine went to see her. She knocked on the open door and went in. Gladys' house has three rooms. In the first one, which was used as the best room, there were two armchairs with white embroidered throws over their backs. It was in one of those chairs that Gladys was waiting for death to call. She had been sitting there for more than three years. Every morning was a long wait for the evening. A wait for death. Christine entered the room and sat down in the other chair. She began by telling Gladys that she too was HIV-positive, but that she was unwilling to sit down and wait to die. Gladys didn't say much, so Christine talked all the more. She spoke about all Gladys' children, and her own children. Christine said that between them, they had a responsibility for seventeen children. They simply had to live for as long as possible, and never forget that despite everything, there could always be room for a smile on their faces. They had no right to sit down and wait for death. He would call when the time came, in any case.

Christine kept going back, day after day. I don't know how long she spent trying to persuade Gladys, but the fact is that one day, Gladys left her chair and abandoned her unending wait for night to fall. Christine had succeeded. I asked Gladys what would have happened if Christine hadn't knocked on her door.

"I'd have still been sitting there, waiting to die."

And Christine?

"I knew that Gladys had many children. I heard that she was just sitting there in the darkness. I couldn't bear the thought of that. I thought that I might be able to talk her into making an effort to live longer."

Gladys also said: "I feel infinitely grateful to Christine. But for her, I'd have withered away. When she first came, I didn't want to listen to her. But she wouldn't give up. I thank her for that every morning when I wake up."

And Christine?

"I don't think I did anything out of the ordinary. It was just that I couldn't bear to walk past her house knowing that she was there, inside in the darkness, doing nothing, with no will to live. That was all. Nothing else."

In all I read some thirty memory books while I was in Uganda. Not all of them were complete, some had been interrupted by the death of the author and would never be more than fragments of stories. Some were written by people no longer with us, others had authors who were still alive.

Some were brief, laconic. That could be due to the style or the contents. There were some authors who knew practically nothing about their own ancestors, about the earlier generations of their families. They had left the "my family" pages blank. Other authors seemed to be overwhelmed by the feeling that they had "nothing to say". They thought they led humdrum lives. It had never occurred to them that they would leave any impression behind them apart from the houses they had built, the land they had cultivated, the children they had had. But even if some of the documents were thin, all of them were full of life, and often extremely expressive. Everything in them, whether written, drawn, pressed in the form of flowers or butterflies – everything was about life and death. Literally.

Most moving, of course, were the memory books written by sick parents of children who were still very small, in many cases infants. They would inherit these slim little books without having any memories whatsoever of the parent who had written this last will and testament bequeathing no money, no property. Nothing but a memory.

There were also memory books written by two parents together. They might not be married, but they have children together. Infidelity is a vague concept in cultures where polygamy has to do with traditions rather than a matter of morality. The infected parents sit together and write these memory books.

These suffering couples. It was as if they were sitting side by side, asking: Who are you? Who am I? Who are we? And so their memory books were created.

Needless to say, I also saw unwritten memory books. The pages remained blank. Not because the people concerned had no memories. Not because they had no desire, no intention of writing. They were blank memory books that bore witness to the overwhelming angst that induces paralysis in the face of disease, pain and death.

These empty memory books were almost always symptomatic of people who didn't dare start to write, as that was tantamount to accepting that death really was close at hand.

It is with Aids as it is with all other chronic diseases. Many of those infected will refuse to accept that they are ill until the bitter end. It starts much earlier, of course. When many people refuse to undergo tests. Some fall ill and will die with every symptom you can think of. But they insist that they are suffering from something else.