Henning Mankell: I Die, but the Memory Lives on

Aida's village is like all the other African villages I know. The houses are made of clay or sheets of corrugated iron or the strangest mixture of materials that happened to be at hand for the builders. But all of the lived-in houses I saw in her village had a roof.

On the other hand, there were also abandoned houses that had collapsed. When I asked why this was so, I was told that the people who had lived there had died of Aids.

African houses often have a distinctive character. Perhaps you could say it is the equivalent of the Scandinavian passion for ornate carpentry at the end of the nineteenth century. In Aida's village two doors from an old American car make up the gate in a ramshackle fence round a house where a hairdresser is plying his trade. As we pass, he is cutting a customer's hair in the shade of a tree. Shortly before we came to Aida's house – or rather her mother, Christine's, house – I notice two men, their backs running with sweat, building a wall made of rusty pieces from old petrol drums between two corner-posts.

African houses in rural areas are a hymn to the imagination, if you like. But of course they are also an expression of poverty and destitution. Around the houses are small gardens, gravel roads meandering all over the place, and apologies for fences. Nearly all of the windows have broken panes with curtains flapping behind them.

Life proceeds at a leisurely pace in these villages. Haste is a human error that has not established very deep roots in the African countryside.

But none of this is important. I do not need to describe houses and roads, as if this were some sort of travelogue from a country in Africa. I have other reasons for being here.

In this very village, Aida's village, there is something else that all the other villages in the area have in common. Many of the villagers have Aids. Many are already dead from the disease. You can already see the big gap: lots of children, quite a few old people, but not many in between. Aids generally kills people from fifteen to twenty years old to those in their early fifties. The old people have to look after their grandchildren when their parents are no longer alive. When the old people die, the children are left to look after themselves. What that means is obvious to everybody. Children who have to be one another's parents have a pretty distorted start in life. They slip up.

Even if life goes on as usual, it is as if there is an endless silence all around them. Daily events, everyday events, take place under a cold shadow. Many people, too many people, are going to die. That shadow is not black, nor is it white. It is just not visible. It is like a cold gust of wind.

In Aida's village the silence was so tangible that it did not need to be visible.

There were various sorts of waiting among the people I met in Uganda. Those who knew they were infected and spent every day looking for symptoms. Those who didn't know, those who had refused to be tested, but nevertheless looked for symptoms every day, from the moment they opened their eyes.

But there is another kind of waiting. For the people who find themselves in the same position as Aida. She is only a child, she knows that she is not infected, but she will become mother to herself and her siblings the moment that responsibility is passed on to her.

And now I see her again in a dream. It is not a very long time since we were together. The last I remember of her, she is waving vigorously. Even when she could no longer see me nor the car, no doubt she went on waving.

We all do that when we hope against hope that somebody will change their mind, decide to do something different. Come back, break off the journey, stay behind.

But in the dream she's dead. Her face appears as an unfinished wooden sculpture. That upsets me. And it's not right. It must be somebody else, somebody who looks like her. She is not the one who is dead. It is others who are dying. Not Aida. She is alive. She hasn't grown thinner, she isn't covered in sores, she hasn't lost all her strength so that all she can do is lie on a bast-mat in the shade, staring up at the sky or at the big leaves of the banana trees.

The answer is obvious, of course. I'm mixing things up. Dreams do mix things up. The first thing that strikes me when I meet Aida is how much like her mother she looked. And Christine, her mother, is ill. She may well be dead by now. The same applies to Aida's aunt. Both of them could well be dead, even though it is only a couple of weeks since I was talking to them. Aida's face is there, out in the mist. She comes very close to me.

One windy day, in the middle of this most unstable June, just before I start to write down my story about Aida, about her mango plant, and all the people around her in Uganda waiting to die of Aids, I visit one of the many medieval churches on the island of Gotland. It doesn't matter which one. The darkness of these old stone-built churches is the breath they all breathe. Darkness has no individual identity. Darkness is eternal, and has no face, no name.

A lone man is tending a grave. The gate at the churchyard entrance is black and heavy. The handle is difficult to turn.

Somebody, a friend from the old days, once told me that dark churches made him afraid of death. It is precisely the opposite for me. In the darkness of a medieval church on Gotland, time ceases to exist. Or perhaps all time, the past, the present, the future – all of them are compressed into a shared moment. Going into certain churches you feel at peace the moment the door has closed behind you. Nothing else is needed. The church creates its own universe.

I have a special reason for coming to this particular church. It feels cool within those thick stone walls. The noise of the lawn mower working away outside cannot penetrate the stone or the windows.

I contemplate the frescoes on one of the walls. The skeleton of Death is chasing a human being, smiling wryly and wielding his scythe. The man is terrified of Death, which always comes untimely. In this ancient place I am faced with pictures of the Black Death, the Plague. Time stands still, but the reality of past time is present even so.

It occurs to me that amongst all these images of Gotland peasants, I can see Aida. A black face among the medieval farmers from Tingstäde and Roma. Solidarity among men and women is as much present in horror as it is in joy.

Among the people portrayed are her mother, her brothers and her sisters. Death pursues them all down the ages. The images frozen onto the walls of the medieval church are in some ways a moving picture. The figures come running towards me, gliding through arrested time.

Then it was the Plague, now it is Aids. Then it was bacteria, now it is a virus. But death is never visible. Whence does the illness come? Where do the sores come from, what causes the emaciation?

Why should bacteria and viruses be so small that they cannot be seen? Why should they have this unfair advantage?

I sit in a pew in the dark interior and reflect. When did I first hear about this insidious and mysterious illness that seemed at first only to affect gay men on the west coast of America?

I cannot remember.

I have searched my memory and gone through newspapers from the early 1980s to see if there might be a headline I recognise, that could help me to fix a specific date. At certain times in my life I have kept detailed and seriously intended diaries, but they have not been able to help me either. I cannot find a moment that I can point to with any degree of certainty and say: this is when I realised that something momentous was happening. A new epidemic illness had put mankind under threat. Nor do I recall any conversations with friends about the illness, definitely not before 1985 or 1986.