Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

I saw stories without words, without pictures. There was joy and clarity in these stories. But, inevitably, mainly despair and worry: what will happen to my children when I have gone? All those I spoke to, all the people who had overcome their uncertainties and produced memory books for their children were pleased they had done so. I talked to men and women, all of whom had made nine or ten stories, one for each of their children, told in different ways because the children were of different ages.

Stories are bridges. Nobody regrets the building of a bridge.

Needless to say, that was the most moving and at the same time the most poignant aspect of these slim little memory books. They were farewells, inexorable farewell letters. All the stories ended up in an infinite emptiness, they were about lives that would end far too soon.

Christine said as much very clearly in reply to one of my questions: "When does death come too soon?"

She thought for a long time before answering.

"When does a person die too soon? There are lots of different answers to that. One answer that is always true is: when a parent, usually a mother, is forced to leave her children when they are too small to take care of themselves. And when she cannot be sure that someone else can be counted upon to take care of her children when she has gone."

Suddenly she realised that some of her children were listening. She fell silent immediately.

"Do you think they can hear what we're talking about?"

"I don't know."

Then she burst out laughing.

"It doesn't matter. Why should I try to fool myself or my children or my friends? Everybody knows my time is limited."

Later, our last day together, she returned to the question:

"Death always makes a mess of things, no matter when it comes."

I've experienced this before.

People who are shortly going to die want to know that they are still alive. Often with a desperate and at times ferocious intensity.

Once I had a friend who had bone cancer. He suppressed to the very end the fact that he was in great pain and had only months to live. He wouldn't even reach forty. We had known each other for a long time. The sad thing was, he had always imagined that when he retired, he would sail round the world. One day when I went to see him he insisted on examining his face in a mirror and then asked me if I thought his face had grown more mature-looking in recent years. I agreed with him, naturally. Now, many years after he died, I can't remember talking about anything else on that occasion, just that his face had grown more mature and signalled a man on his way to his prime. That's how it was too with the people with Aids that I met in the villages north of Kampala. They showed me things all the time. Photographs, a newly painted room, a knitted sweater. Everything was significant because they thought it confirmed their existence, was a sign that they were still alive. They were somehow protected by these objects. Despite the fact that many of them were already so acutely ill that they would very soon die, the objects gave them the illusion of being a safe distance away from cold death.

During my visit to Uganda I spoke to a lot of sick people, but I spoke most to three: Christine, Gladys and Moses. And there was also Aida, the girl who wasn't ill, the girl who wasn't going to die but instead would have to take on huge responsibilities.

The girl who was nurturing a mango plant.

I have already written about Christine. A few miles from her house lived Moses. I had made a few notes on the overnight flight from London, but when I looked at them later, the questions I had written seemed idiotic. The most idiotic of all was: "When did you start being afraid?"

It was the most obvious question, of course. Fear, open or concealed, affects everybody suffering from a fatal disease. You keep waiting for test results that can turn out to be a death sentence.

A young man who tested positive for HIV in Gothenburg at the end of the 1980s told me how the doctor who had to inform him of the positive result burst into tears. He was nineteen when he discovered that he was infected. Instead of trying to cope with his own fear, he found himself having to console the weeping doctor.

When did you start being afraid?

When had I been afraid?

During the night I spent on the flight from London to Entebbe, I thought a lot about the occasions in my life when I had been paralysed with fear. I could recall three situations in particular, one of them was when I was waiting for news from a doctor.

I was in Mozambique, it was autumn, the days were hot. I was working on the production of a play, but started to feel unwell. I suspected it was influenza, possibly malaria, or it could simply be exhaustion. As usual, I had been working far too long hours. The tiredness wouldn't go away. I dragged myself as far as my Renault 4 in the mornings and sat there, having long, silent conversations with myself before making up my mind to try to work one more day.

But then one morning, when I reached the theatre and had parked the car, I stayed behind the wheel. It was obvious that there was something badly wrong with me. I was seriously ill, something nasty had found its way into my body and was threatening my life. I drove home again, but stopped on the way to buy some food. As I went up the steps I bumped into Christer, a Swedish dentist and aid worker.

"You're completely yellow," he said.

I went to my doctor, who sent me to a clinic for tests, and I returned with liver readings that were nothing short of catastrophic. I was sent at once to South Africa. I remember nothing of the journey. But it was an aggressive form of jaundice. (I suspect it was caused by a dirty salad at a restaurant in Pemba in northern Mozambique.)

But it wasn't only jaundice. One morning a doctor came to see me. He was obese and was wearing a Jewish skull-cap. I remember my messengers over the years very clearly, all the people who have passed on to me vital information.

I did not know his name, but I remember there was sweat on his forehead as he told me, without beating about the bush, that they had found a patch in one of my lungs. It could be ominous. It would take several days for all the test results to come through. Then he went away. I don't think he had looked me in the eye once during the brief time he was in my room.

I remember the feeling of paralysis that gripped me. Panic was a sharp hook stabbing into my consciousness and immediately sending signals to all parts of my body. Fear makes itself felt in the stomach as well as in the brain. It was like a frantic telegram being rattled out by a machine inside me.

Lung cancer. I hadn't avoided it.

I smoked my first cigarette at Spencer's cafe in Borås, in Allégatan. It must have been one of the last days in August, 1963. I had just started secondary school. One of my classmates, a girl called Hedelin I think it was, offered me a cigarette. A Prince. I had never smoked before, apart from a couple of furtive puffs on stumps of cigars in Sveg. But now I felt obliged to accept the cigarette. From then on I was a smoker. Although I had long since stopped smoking by the time that Jewish doctor came into my room, all those packets of cigarettes had caught up with me. Followed me all the way down to southern Africa. I had stopped smoking too late. Lung cancer was going to kill me. I could envisage my lungs covered in lumps of tar. In desperation, trying as far as possible to keep the panic under control, I tried to convince myself that I might be able to live for a few more years. Not more than a few, probably, but long enough to have a chance of completing some of the things I had planned. Not ten books, but maybe two. And a play, if I really worked hard.