Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

There followed a few days of extreme panic. I lay in my sickroom, sometimes listening to the sound of gunfire in the unsettled Johannesburg night; the fear came and went in waves. I don't recall ever starting to cry, though. I stopped short of that. It would be a defeat already if I went to pieces. In that case the illness would be let loose and finish me off immediately. I tried to imagine the number of days in which I would be able to lead a normal life in spite of everything. I tried to convince myself that the cancer had been discovered very early and hence I would have a considerable way to go before my last journey.

I lay awake at night, hoping the whole thing might be a mistake. A technical fault in the X-ray machine, a piece of dust on the plate.

One morning the obese doctor with the skull-cap came back. I gripped the bed frame tightly and prepared to listen to my death sentence. But he informed me that it was an accumulation of fluid in one of my lungs. Nothing dangerous, not cancer, nothing to worry about. Then he was gone.

I wonder what he knew about people's fear. Perhaps it was beneath his dignity to worry about such lowly human emotional reactions? I thought afterwards and I still feel that I hate that man for his inability to recognise my fear. But what about me? Do I see the fear of others when it ought to be obvious?

Both my other two moments of well-founded terror are associated with incidents in Africa. Late one night in Lusaka I was attacked as I parked the car outside the house where I lived. I was dragged out of the car by a man with blood-shot, drug-crazed eyes. He held a pistol to my head. I still don't know how long it was there. I have tried to reconstruct how long it would have taken the bandits to pull me from the car. Thirty seconds? More? Less? I don't know. But I was quite certain that I was about to die. Most often in Zambia in the 1980s the car hijackers did shoot. They had nothing to lose. If anyone used a gun in the course of a robbery, it was a hanging offence. And hanged they were. Absurdly enough, the hangman in Zambia was called White, as I recall it. Anyway, it was usual practice for the hijackers to shoot. I remember the cold terror, as if somebody was slowly filling my veins with liquid ice. I was sure that I was about to die, and that I didn't want to die in this stupid, barbaric way. Then the revolver was taken away, I was kicked to the ground, and as the car drove off with a racing start it came to me that I was still alive.

The third moment was the worst. It might seem exotic, almost comical, but it was the most dangerous thing to have happened to me in my life. (Nobody knows, of course, how close one might have been to a plane crash or a road accident.)

It was on one of the little tributaries of the River Kabompo in Zambia, still in the 1980s. There were several of us on a fishing trip. We cruised up the river, switched off the engine and started fishing as we drifted. We knew that there was a colony of hippos just past a point where the river split into two branches, some way downstream in the direction we were drifting towards. In good time before we reached there, we would start the engine again and turn off along the other branch. Hippos are extremely dangerous if they think their calves are under threat. And these hippos had young. Some distance before we reached the colony, one of us pulled at the cord to start the outboard motor. Nothing happened. At first there was no panic. The man in the stern kept pulling, adjusted the choke, tried again. No ignition. By now we could see the heads of the hippos. We didn't need to say anything, but we all knew that if the engine didn't start, we wouldn't stand a chance. The hippos would attack the boat, overturn it and then hack us to pieces with their enormous jaws. There would be no point in diving into the river and swimming for it. Not one of us would reach the bank – the river was teeming with crocodiles.

At the last possible moment the engine gave a cough and started. There must have been an angel in the carburettor.

What I remember now, so many years later, is the relief I felt as the boat moved away. We never referred to the incident afterwards. If I remember aright, we carried on fishing.

But there was also the time I took an HIV test. It was in the mid-1980s, when everybody still felt insecure. Despite all the assurances about how the virus was passed on, was there a possibility that it could infect people in some other way? Nobody could be certain, and opinions were divided on whether kisses could be infectious or not. In other words, there was a grey area around the assertion that HIV was a weak virus, could survive only for about twenty minutes at room temperature, and therefore that it was not so easy to become infected, one could avoid it by simple precautionary measures.

I took a test at the hospital in Ystad. The doctor asked me why I was doing this and I said I had no reason to believe that I had been infected, but that I was doing it "for safety's sake". He had no objection. I suspected that he had probably undergone tests himself, just "for safety's sake".

Afterwards, when I had had my blood sample taken and registered, when I was on my way home in the car, I suddenly felt scared. I was so shaken that I had to pull up. It was a wet day in the autumn. I got out of the car and felt quite certain that the result of the test would be positive. Nobody, least of all me, would ever be able to explain how it had happened. Perhaps I would be the first one to demonstrate that there really was a very large grey area blurring the convictions of medical science regarding how the disease was passed on.

The three days that followed were pure nightmare. Common sense told me that I had nothing to worry about. But I gave a start every time the telephone rang. I woke up each night and stared into the darkness.

The nurse duly phoned on the third day. A shiver ran down my spine when she said who she was. But, predictably, I was not summoned back to the hospital. She simply told me, with no appearance of feeling, that the test result was negative. I thanked her for informing me, perfectly calmly, with no trace of stress, and replaced the receiver.

Then I went out into the rain and fell to my knees in the mud. I stayed like that for a long time before going back indoors. My relief had been manically exaggerated. Not joy, just relief. I can still remember the mud sticking to my trouser legs.

I had been afraid for no reason. What must it be like for those who take the test and know that there really is a risk that he or she has been infected?

Moses was the only man with whom I had real conversations during my stay in Uganda. Beatrice, who worked with people with HIV, told me that men seldom write memory books. Nor were they so willing to talk about their fate, whereas women were always prepared to talk openly about their lives. But there were exceptions, and Moses was only one of many, even though for various reasons he was the only one I ended up talking to.

The last time I spoke to him somebody took a couple of photographs with a polaroid camera that I had with me. Moses and I are sitting on a couple of wooden stools in the shade of a tree. He kept one of the pictures, I kept the other. Whenever I look at it I wonder how he is, if he's still alive, if he's in pain. And I think that the picture shows him exactly as I remember him. A face radiating great dignity. A man who has accepted that life can suddenly change course, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Moses lived not far from Christine. He had a large family, several of his children had families of their own and some lived in the same house as he did. He sat in the shade, pointing out all his grandchildren and telling me their names, their ages; and he characterised their "lust for life" in various ways. One of them, a girl, delighted in kicking a home-made football around their yard. A boy, aged about ten, could climb any tree that stood in his path. He could climb as high as you like, as quick as a flash. That was the way he liked to characterise his grandchildren, and he would keep laughing out loud. But much of the time he was melancholy.