Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

He had written about fifteen memory books, one for each of his children and some for the older ones among his grandchildren. He didn't tell me how he had caught the virus; but his two wives were dead, no doubt he had infected them, and they had both died before him. I thought several times that I ought to ask him. But I never managed to overcome my hesitation. And now it's too late.

I asked him about the memory books.

"Somebody told me about them. Beatrice. At first I thought they weren't for me, but I couldn't get them out of my mind. One day I went to that centre where people who have the disease can go for help and advice. I spoke to another man who was also ill. He showed me a memory book he had written for one of his daughters. That made me think I ought to do the same. Even if I'm not very good at writing. I thought I could tell the tale, and one of my grandchildren could write it down. All of them can read and write. So that's what I did."

We leafed through one of the memory books he'd written. All the text was in rounded, childish letters. Everything except his signature and an admonition to "always live honourably and work hard".

He noticed that I could see the text had been written by various hands.

"I thought that even handwriting is a memory of a person. My handwriting is poor, the letters jump all over the place, but it's my handwriting. When I'm gone, my grandchildren can remember that this is how their grandfather used to write."

Then he started talking about how the fatal disease that had taken possession of his body had crept up on him.

"It came in the night. Illness never strikes when the sun is shining. Diseases, especially those that are serious and kill or blind or deform people, always creep up on you during the night."

I asked him what he meant by that.

"The mosquitoes start whining at night. They only suck your blood from sundown until the sun starts rising again. Mosquitoes carry death, malaria. Snakes and predators also roam in the hours of darkness, even if we haven't had any lions or leopards in these parts for the last ten or even fifteen years. We are convinced that disease strikes you during the night."

"A bite in the neck from a leopard can hardly be called a disease!"

"Everything that kills, be it visible or invisible, is a disease as far as I'm concerned. I know that you Europeans talk about something you call 'death from natural causes'. For us Africans that is a very peculiar way of looking at what happens in the dark."

But then he suddenly seemed to have lost interest in discussing his view that the night is the realm of death and illness. Instead he started talking about when he first realised that there was a new disease that was dangerous and invisible.

He had just started talking when the heavens opened. We took cover and sat in a part of the large house that he had to himself. One of his daughters, Laurentina, was very fat but moved gracefully and quickly despite her huge body. When we came in, she disappeared behind a curtain made from cut-up, old skirts. It was dim inside the room. Moses sat down in a sagging armchair from which he could keep an eye on what was happening outside while he spoke.

He said: "I was still very young. It was 1974, the year before Amin came to power and ruined our country. My father used to go often to Kampala to buy cheap clothes with factory faults that he put right and then cycled round the villages and sold them. One day he came home and told us about one of the young men he used to do business with in the city: he was now ill. My father said he had grown very thin in a very short space of time. He had lost his appetite, the glands under his arms had swollen up and were very tender, and now he was getting sores all over his body. He had been to the doctor, who had been unable to tell him what he was suffering from, nor could he give him any effective medicine. My father was quite sure about what he was saying. He had a keen eye, a good memory, and he often was quite certain about things before anybody else realised that something had happened. That was exactly what he said: 'Something has happened'. His business contact, Lukas was his name, was suffering from a disease that my father was convinced was something quite new. 'It has crept up in the night,' my father said. Lukas died, and his two wives also fell ill and had the same mysterious sores and one after the other they too died. Every time my father came back from Kampala, he told us about other people who had died from this same disease. Soon, so many had fallen victim to the disease that everybody was talking about why people all of a sudden became very tired and very thin and then died. But nobody knew what it was. I think that was the situation until the 1980s – in any case Amin was no longer around when the disease was finally given a name and it was understood how the infection could be spread. I was no longer so young by then. My father lived to be very old, and of course he was not surprised to find that he had eventually been proved right. What his friend Lukas had died of was a new disease that had crept up on us during the night. He had noticed it before anybody else."

Moses fell silent. Then he shouted something to his daughter. She came in with a bottle of water and two glasses. Moses poured, and assured me that the water had been boiled.

"It is a terrible plague," he said after a while. "In the night, in the darkness, when men and women come together, the disease wanders from person to person. There have been other diseases in the past that have infected people in the same way. But nothing as dangerous as this, nothing as painful. I have seen how people suffer before they die. I have listened to people in houses a long way away from here, screaming in agony before everything goes quiet, and they fade away into the other darkness, the one that never quite dissipates when the sun rises again. The land of death is a land without sun, that is the nature of it and we are all frightened of being forced to go there before we have lived for so long that we don't really care any more. Now I have the disease myself, and every day I look for signs to show that I am on the way to being overcome by this thing inside me, and every time I think about that day my father came home and was worried as he told us about his friend Lukas."

Moses stared at his hands.

"I didn't want to write these memory books. Not for a very long time. It was as if the moment I picked up my pen or started telling my story for my grandchildren to write it down, I was giving up all hope of not having to die as a result of this disease. Obviously, I don't have any hope. Everybody who catches this disease dies of it. But deep down there is another kind of hope, something you have no control over. It's as if there is an unknown being inside my body that is hoping on my behalf. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. But once I'd started to write those books, it was as if I'd accepted the fact that I was going to die. I dreamt about my father the night before I started preparing to write the memory books. He was coming back from the city on foot, just as I remembered it as a child. He always walked quickly, carrying a bale of clothes on his head. Now he was old and didn't have anything on his head. The worst thing was that he didn't stop. He didn't turn off the road and come back here. He just kept on walking until I could no longer see him. When I woke up the next morning and remembered the dream, it seemed as if he had instructed me to accept my fate. That was the day I started preparing the books."

Moses had finished his tale, abruptly, as if he'd told me too big a secret. Then he said with a smile that he was tired, and needed to rest.

We said our goodbyes, and I left. I didn't know if I would ever meet him again.