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.
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."
27
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.
28
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.
There followed a few days of extre
me 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.
29
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?
30
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.
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 l
ate.
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."
I Die, But The Memory Lives On Page 4