I Die, But The Memory Lives On

by Henning Mankell

  41

  It is like one of those awful, cruel fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen or the brothers Grimm. It deals with one of the most frequently recurring themes in literature. The possible variations are limitless. Two people, brother and sister, brother and brother, twins, or two people not known to each other at all, are born at the same time. If they are twins, they might become separated only to meet again later without knowing who the other is. As I say, there are endless variations.

  Here is one: in November 1989 a good friend of mine, a stage designer, was told that he was HIV-positive. When his male partner underwent tests and was found also to be infected, they were soon able to work out what had happened. They were frank with each other and with their friends. The stage designer's partner had visited New York in the spring of 1988. He had been careless one night and invited a man he'd met in a bar to his hotel room. There was no other possible source of infection. A one-night stand, death the outcome. Despite the fact that one of them was clearly guilty of making them both carriers of the disease, they never – as far as I know – uttered a single angry word to each other. They both knew the risks. One of them had taken a chance. At that time, in the late 1980s, there were no ARVs. There was no hope at all, in fact. Death would ensue. Soon.

  They began to make preparations. Or rather: they decided to live life to the full, to do everything they had planned to do, to cut out everything that was unnecessary. They moved from the town where they lived, settled in the country, and lived a quiet but intense life. I don't know much about their nights and their dawns: they must have been suffused with fear. Then they died, one of them in 1996, the other a year later.

  A few years earlier, a woman friend of mine in Mozambique told me that she had Aids. Well, she didn't actually tell me at first, but I had started to suspect as much when she suddenly started losing weight, acquired a nasty cough, and lost a lot of her good humour. We knew each other well enough for me to ask her outright: had she tested positive? She confirmed my suspicions. When we went on to talk about it, she admitted that she had started living on borrowed time. She learned for certain that she had the disease in the spring of 1988.

  She didn't last long after she told me that she was ill. Although I was able to help her financially, the resources available in Mozambique were inadequate to ease her suffering. Her death was dreadful. Unlike the friends I had in Sweden who were able to die without needless pain, one of them in an ordinary hospital, the other in a hospice.

  All three died on the wrong side of the border, as it were. Before this happened, there were virtually no ARVs: afterwards, the new medication could give hope to the sufferers. The researchers and doctors had almost reached the first of the finishing lines. Only a year or so later it began to be possible, in the West, to slow down the progress of the disease. Nowadays, people with Aids live comparatively normal lives. A lot manage to die of other illnesses, or simply of old age.

  But this development would have made a difference only to my two Swedish friends who died. The ARVs would not have been available to my friend in Mozambique. At least, not unless I had paid for them.

  That makes me angry. A desire to overturn the injustice must survive the death of its victims.

  42

  In the early 1990s, at the theatre where I work in Maputo, we staged a production of We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay!, a play by Dario Fo that has been performed successfully all over the world. In it, a coffin is used to smuggle sacks of flour past a number of watchful police officers. The old carpenter, Mestre Afonse, made the coffin we used from thin plywood. Heaven alone knows where he managed to find this relatively rare but very useful material in Maputo. Anyway, we performed the play many times and then put the production in mothballs as we intended to include it in the repertoire at some future date.

  And that is precisely what we did. Two years after the premiere our theatre manager, Manuela Soeiro, decided that it was time to give the Fo play another run of about a month. He spoke to me and we arranged times for rehearsals and reallocated one of the parts, since one of the actresses was much too pregnant to manage her part.

  The day before we were due to rehearse the scene which involved the coffin I was approached by Alfredo, the stage manager, who asked for a word in private. He was very worried, and stared at his feet. I had great difficulty making out what he was muttering. In the end, the penny dropped.

  "Are you saying that the coffin has disappeared?"

  "Disappeared."

  "How is that possible? It was agreed from the word go that this production would have a second run."

  Alfredo stammered and mumbled away. I started getting impatient.

  "For Christ's sake, that coffin can't simply have disappeared, can it?"

  "It has been used."

  "Used? What do you mean, used? What for?"

  "For a funeral."

  I stared at Alfredo for quite a while. Then we sat down in the front row of the stalls. I asked him to tell me the full story. A girl who used occasionally to hang around outside the theatre had died. She was seventeen or so and used to beg for food. She had died of Aids, Alfredo knew that for sure. He also assured me that although the girl probably worked as a prostitute, none of the theatre workers had been with her in that capacity.

  But it was all to do with the burial. The girl did not have any relatives. She had run the risk of being tipped into one of the paupers' graves in the city. They were filled once a week with dead bodies. Then the stage technicians at the theatre had remembered the coffin that had been used in the Dario Fo play. It might only be a stage prop, a cheap plywood box, but it was better than nothing. So the coffin had been retrieved from the stores and the girl had been buried in a dignified way, though her coffin was only a prop from a play written by an Italian master of farce.

  When Alfredo had finished his story, we sat there for ages, neither of us saying a word. I felt sick. It was as if reality had placed its heavy, gnarled hand over the theatre.

  But the queasiness passed. I told Alfredo that I thought they had done the right thing. No doubt it would be possible to build another coffin.

  "Mestre Afonse says he has no more plywood."

  "Then he'll have to use something else."

  "He has only solid wooden planks."

  "Then he'll have to use those."

  "They are thick planks. The coffin will be very heavy."

  "Then the actors who carry the coffin will have to get used to that."

  About a year later, Alfredo and I were both present at a burial service in the big cemetery outside Maputo, by the side of the road leading to Xai-Xai. Afterwards, as we were walking towards the gate, Alfredo pointed towards a corner of the cemetery. There were several mounds with no crosses.

  I understood without him needing to say anything.

  That was where she was buried, in a stage coffin made of plywood which had been used in a theatre production.

  I've often thought that I ought to write to Dario Fo and tell him this story. I'm sure he would have liked it. I'm certain he would have been moved.

  43

  It is impossible of course not to feel angry about the Aids epidemic that is ravaging our world. The number of unrecorded cases is astronomical and terrifying. For the majority of those affected, death is inevitable. Only a limited number of those with the disease have access to effective ARVs and the full resources that can more or less control the virus.

  The virus can infect anybody at all who is careless, unaware or irresponsible. But depending on where you were born or who your parents were, the implications are different. The virus will also infect those who, through poverty, are forced into situations where they are exposed to it. This in itself is enough to arouse and justify anger. This is what our world is like, a twilight zone for poor people in the so-called developing countries. At the same time it is an illusory paradise for those who live in the rich ghettos surrounded by palisades that are growing higher and higher. Death has become an economi
c question. Solidarity with our fellow men and women is being made more and more difficult.

  A growing number of people are forced to accept that their lives are going to be unexpectedly short. They will not be able to watch their children grow up, grow to be in a position to look after themselves. That is why they write their memory books, so that they do not completely disappear from the memories of their children.

  In the midst of all this I see Aida and her mango plant. I never saw any trace of her anger, but I am convinced that it exists. Why should her mother have to die when she herself is still so young? Why should Aida have to shoulder responsibilities that are much too great for her to bear? She finds herself in a situation in which she has no choice. The only thing she can do is to protest, and she does that by tending her mango plant, watching it live even as she herself is surrounded by death and more death.

  This is the point of what I am writing. We must hope that Aida will not need to write a memory book about her own life for her own children. She is aware that the disease exists, she knows how she can avoid catching it, and she will make demands of the man she meets one day.

  Memory Books are important for Aida's sake.

  It will be best if her own is never written.

  44

  What did Aida say when she took me to see the mango plant that she had hidden among the banana trees? As she was very shy, she didn't say much at all.

  I think she felt an affinity with that plant. It was young, as she was. I think she wanted to show that she was able to nurture a piece of life, to make something grow and survive; that she had drawn up her own line of defence, there in among the banana trees. Surrounded by death and fear she had planted her little tree as a protection for the living, for things that grow.

  But I do remember one thing we spoke about. What mangoes taste like. We were in complete agreement: if you eat one mango, you want to eat another one. Mangoes always make you want more. I asked her how long it would be before her plant was big enough to bear fruit. She didn't know, but she promised to write and tell me.

  Now, several months after I met her, as I am writing this, I can't help but think about her name. Aida. One letter makes it different from the name of the disease. Just as one hair's breadth separates life and death.

  45

  I shall end as I began. One night in June, in 2003, I dream about dead people in a coniferous forest. Everything in the dream is very clear. The smell of moss, the steam rising after autumn rain. Fungi around the roots of the trees, unseen birds taking off from branches that are still shaking. The faces of the dead are inlaid in the tree trunks. It is like wandering through a gallery with an exhibition of unfinished wooden sculptures. Or a studio that has been hurriedly abandoned by the artist.

  The faces are contorted. No cries come from their half-open mouths, only silence.

  In many ways the dream fills me with unanswered questions. But I know the important thing is that death has a name: Aids.

  If I look carefully enough, at the periphery of the dream, I can see a young and still very fragile mango plant, hidden under layers of twigs that protect it.

  And close by, a half-rotted plywood coffin that once was used on a theatre stage, but then was spirited out into dark and horrific reality.

  We are the ones who decide, nobody else. About what will happen in the trial of strength between the mango plant and the coffin of rotting, black-painted plywood.

  Nothing is inevitable.

  Nor is anything too late.

  Afterword

  The people I have written about here exist in the real world. But their words are not only theirs, the words are also mine. What I have written is a record of what I heard them say and to an equal extent my interpretation of what they didn't say out loud.

  In conversations overshadowed all the time by death, silences are often long and full of meaning. I have interpreted what I heard and tried to understand what was not said. I have named some people by name, but the text also contains other people and other stories.

  I am full of respect for all the dignity, all the strength I found.

  My worry is that we do not all of us in our part of the world understand that these people need – and have a right to – our solidarity.

  H.M.

  Sweden

  AUGUST 2003

  Twenty Years of Denial

  Abridged afterword to the original Swedish edition of this book

  It will soon be 20 years since the HIV/Aids epidemic first cropped up as a very real problem in our societies. We know now that some individuals had died of Aids before then, but it was not until the mid-1980s that HIV could be identified clearly and unambiguously. It started as an inexplicable epidemic among gay men in the San Francisco area. After a while we started to hear more and more reports from Africa about a new type of immunodeficiency illness that was affecting many of the countries south of the Sahara.

  There was immediately a flood of publicity surrounding this new epidemic. Once the virus had been identified and the ways in which it could be passed on clarified, barely a day passed without enormous headlines in the press and the rest of the media. HIV was portrayed as a horrific plague, in the same league as the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Newspaper reports came from African villages where hundreds of people were ill or dead, from American sauna clubs and drug districts in Zurich and Barcelona. American and European experts competed with each other to describe worst-case scenarios of the future spread of the disease.

  Even so, it seemed that the epidemic was not really being taken seriously. One explanation for that might be that the pattern of infection seemed to vary in different parts of the world. In the USA the infection was spread most quickly among homosexual men, and close behind them came drug addicts who injected. Other groups were hardly affected at all in the early days. It was more or less the same in Europe. In Africa, however, a much wider cross-section of society was under threat, with the majority of those infected being women.

  Many people in our part of the world drew the somewhat too hasty conclusion that HIV was first and foremost a problem among certain minority groups, notably gay men and drug addicts. That meant that the majority of the population could wash their hands of the problem. This pattern did not apply to the rapid spread of the infection in certain developing countries, it is true: it was maintained that in such areas the problem was due to widespread poverty and poor levels of general health and health care among the population at large.

  Nevertheless, governments in Europe and the USA reacted quickly and resolutely to the new virus. Large-scale propaganda campaigns were organised, explaining clearly how the disease was being passed on. Every individual who had indulged in unprotected sex with a stranger was urged to undergo tests. The campaigns were successful, and the spread of the virus was curtailed. Indeed, the campaigns were so successful that most people in the industrialised world no longer consider HIV a potential threat. This is true not least of the younger generation. As a result, the number of those infected has again risen, most of all in the USA.

  The HIV epidemic is a catastrophe for Africa

  While the situation is largely under control in the OECD countries, the picture is much more gloomy in the rest of the world. It is most serious in Africa. There, the disease has spread like wildfire. UNAIDS, the UN organisation devoted to Aids, calculates that there are at least 30 million people testing HIV-positive in Africa. Almost 10 per cent of the adult population of sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be infected. The situation is even more serious in certain countries. In Botswana, for instance, 39 per cent of adults are infected, and in neighbouring Zimbabwe the figure is 33 per cent.

  Most of those who test positive for HIV develop the immunodeficiency disease Aids and die within a few years. Nowadays, of course, there are antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) on the market. In the correct dosage, they have been able to prolong the life of many hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive patients in the USA and Europe. But they are expensive and,
moreover, it is difficult to administer them in poor villages where there are not usually any health-care facilities. The combination of these circumstances means that only a tiny fraction of those afflicted in Africa have access to the new medication.