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I don't know what people will remember. Nor for how long. Memories are always finite. Memories of me will last for a number of years, but the day will come when they no longer survive. It is given to very few to live on beyond the memories of their grandchildren. After a hundred years most of us are one of the anonymous grey shadows in the blackness that surrounds us all.
But I also turn the question round: what do I remember about others?
26
That evening in Kampala I lay in the darkness and thought about my own parents. That was only natural. Obviously, they were important to me when I was growing up. But in quite different ways. My father was the one I lived with. Without his ability to notice me, listen, be positive, I don't know how I would have turned out. He more than made up for the fact that my mother was present only through her absence. She didn't exist except as a figure in photographs that were hidden away and kept from me. My mother was a strange shadow when I was little. I can't remember how old I was when it finally dawned on me that there was something peculiar about my mother. But I remember asking my paternal grandmother, who lived with us, why I didn't have a mother. I don't recall her answer, but it was evasive, I did notice that. That is something children learn at an early age – how to interpret the way adults answer questions. They soon learn how to tune their ante
Then, when I was six, I started searching in secret for traces of this mother of mine who had disappeared. I found several photographs. Including one of me sitting on her knee. They were taken in a photographer's studio on my first birthday. I can still remember my heart pounding when I saw my mother's face for the first time. She had disappeared at such an early stage that I had no memory of her. Now I could see what she looked like. I was surprised that she was so unlike my father. Didn't people who had children have to look like each other? Then it struck me that in the photograph she was looking at me as if I were a child she didn't know. A changeling or something the fairies had brought.
I don't know that I thought that at the time, of course, or that it was so well formulated. But I doubtless realised that there was something fu
In Kampala that night I thought about her and my father, both of them now long since dead. I had difficulty in conjuring up their faces in the darkness. That was a shocking moment. I had forgotten what my parents looked like. It had been a long time since I had seen them, of course: my father died in April 1972 and my mother a couple of years later. There was a no-man's-land of thirty years between the faces I had seen and those I could no longer remember.
On the other hand I could quite distinctly recall the smell of my father's hair and his suits. My mother's face was blurred, but I could remember the sound of her voice, the way she spoke, the unmistakable traces of the Örebro dialect that she had spoken as a child.
In my mind I wrote a few memory books about my parents. And of course it was possible to do that. The memories of a smell and a voice meant that the faces came slowly out of the darkness. Now I could see my parents again. The memories behind those smells and sounds opened up many other avenues of memory. I recalled events, conversations, images, both in close-up and long shots.
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 ca
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.