Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

In Sweden, highly qualified and devoted care is available for as long as it is needed. About ten years ago so-called anti-retroviral drugs began to appear. It was possible to get to grips with HIV, because ARVs delay the onset of Aids. People infected could start to hope that they might be able to live a long life even so. But in a poor country in Africa, where medical care is already primitive? They have to cope with a constant lack of resources, everything from clean sheets to the most advanced medication. And in such countries, the squeeze on what care and assistance may be made available is all the time increasing. What are the prospects there?

To suffer from Aids in Sweden and to suffer from Aids in a country like Uganda are two entirely different things. The gulf between the two peoples is as between the rich and the poor. In all areas. Even when it comes to nursing. Even when it comes to pain.

If you happen to be born in a poor country, the risk of being forced to suffer unimaginable pain is infinitely greater than in a country like Sweden. In a poor country there is a devastating relative lack of resources, as also the medical capacity to alleviate pain. This is incredibly cruel. If you are doomed to die, the agony you are condemned to endure should not depend on where you happen to be born.

The day that Christine showed me the memory book she had written for Aida, Aida herself took me secretly to show me her mango plant. The two things were connected, of course, what Christine did and what Aida did. But it was not a prearranged plan. Plans often emerge of their own accord when it comes to death and the sorrow that is in store. Every time the memory book was mentioned, Aida sought consolation in her mango plant. In order to endure the prospect of death she had to make an invocation to life.

The little memory books follow a basic template. *An outline is provided on pre-printed pages. There is a simple logic in the headings printed on the various pages. But all the memory books I read in Uganda were original. No two were alike.

* A sample memory book is printed at the end of this volume.

People choose their own roads along which to travel. The most important thing is not to follow the manual but to tell about the very special things that only the writer has experienced. They don't need to be told about that. People think like that of their own accord. Everybody knows what is special about themselves, even if most people are modest enough to think they are no more than ordinary. But an ordinary person is always a person with unique and surprising experiences.

I spent a large part of one of the evenings I was in Uganda thinking about what precisely the memory of a person is. I thought about myself, of course. What do I want people to remember about me? What would I prefer to have suppressed? Do I have a number of secrets that I shall take with me to the grave? How can I shape other people's recollections of me?

It is an impossible task. I can hardly control what anyone else chooses to remember about me. I can only have a vague idea of what sort of an impression I have made. To some extent I can anticipate reactions to what I have written, what I have done in the theatre. But what about the memory of me as an individual? The child who was born in St Göran's Hospital in Stockholm at four o'clock in the morning of February 3, 1948?

I can guess that people's memories will vary. Some will remember me as a rather gloomy, possibly even melancholy person who needs to be left in peace and who can flare up if he's disturbed. Others will remember me as the opposite, a decent, cheerful person who will hardly be the last name to spring to mind when drawing up a guest list for a party.

I don't know what people will remember. Nor for how long. Memories are always finite. Memories of me will last for a number of years, but the day will come when they no longer survive. It is given to very few to live on beyond the memories of their grandchildren. After a hundred years most of us are one of the anonymous grey shadows in the blackness that surrounds us all.

But I also turn the question round: what do I remember about others?

That evening in Kampala I lay in the darkness and thought about my own parents. That was only natural. Obviously, they were important to me when I was growing up. But in quite different ways. My father was the one I lived with. Without his ability to notice me, listen, be positive, I don't know how I would have turned out. He more than made up for the fact that my mother was present only through her absence. She didn't exist except as a figure in photographs that were hidden away and kept from me. My mother was a strange shadow when I was little. I can't remember how old I was when it finally dawned on me that there was something peculiar about my mother. But I remember asking my paternal grandmother, who lived with us, why I didn't have a mother. I don't recall her answer, but it was evasive, I did notice that. That is something children learn at an early age – how to interpret the way adults answer questions. They soon learn how to tune their antennae to distinguish between the truth and a lie, what is a clear answer and what is evasive.

Then, when I was six, I started searching in secret for traces of this mother of mine who had disappeared. I found several photographs. Including one of me sitting on her knee. They were taken in a photographer's studio on my first birthday. I can still remember my heart pounding when I saw my mother's face for the first time. She had disappeared at such an early stage that I had no memory of her. Now I could see what she looked like. I was surprised that she was so unlike my father. Didn't people who had children have to look like each other? Then it struck me that in the photograph she was looking at me as if I were a child she didn't know. A changeling or something the fairies had brought.

I don't know that I thought that at the time, of course, or that it was so well formulated. But I doubtless realised that there was something funny about it. She was holding me as if I were a burden she would like to put down as swiftly as possible.

In Kampala that night I thought about her and my father, both of them now long since dead. I had difficulty in conjuring up their faces in the darkness. That was a shocking moment. I had forgotten what my parents looked like. It had been a long time since I had seen them, of course: my father died in April 1972 and my mother a couple of years later. There was a no-man's-land of thirty years between the faces I had seen and those I could no longer remember.

On the other hand I could quite distinctly recall the smell of my father's hair and his suits. My mother's face was blurred, but I could remember the sound of her voice, the way she spoke, the unmistakable traces of the Örebro dialect that she had spoken as a child.

In my mind I wrote a few memory books about my parents. And of course it was possible to do that. The memories of a smell and a voice meant that the faces came slowly out of the darkness. Now I could see my parents again. The memories behind those smells and sounds opened up many other avenues of memory. I recalled events, conversations, images, both in close-up and long shots.

It is true that neither words nor photographic images are necessary for memories. That is precisely why the examples of memory books that I saw in Uganda were so remarkable. I thumbed through the little exercise books. They contained pressed flowers, insects, one including a butterfly whose wings gleamed in an unusual shade of blue. Somebody had Sellotaped in grains of sand. There were also drawings: matchstick men, landscapes, animals, as if the pages were ancient cave paintings.