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Henning Mankell: Illustration by Andrea Ventura for Review
Henning Mankell: Illustration by Andrea Ventura for Review
Henning Mankell: Illustration by Andrea Ventura for Review

Henning Mankell’s final farewell

This article is more than 8 years old

In 2014 the internationally acclaimed Swedish crime writer and creator of Wallander was diagnosed with cancer. In a series of previously unpublished pieces he looks back on his life and reflects on mortality, moments of intense fear, hope and happiness. He died last autumn

The car accident

Early in the morning of 16 December 2013 Eva drove me to the Statoil depot in Kungsbacka, where I collected the car I had hired. I was going to drive to Vallåkra, just outside Landskrona, and back. The car was due to be returned that same evening. The following day I would be busy signing copies of my latest novel in bookshops in Gothenburg and Kungsbacka as part of the pre-Christmas publicity programme. The wintry morning was freezing cold, but there was no rain or snow. The drive would t ake me three hours if I stopped for breakfast on the outskirts of Varberg, as was my wont.

The head of my theatre in Maputo – Manuela Soeiro, with whom I had now been working for 30 years – was visiting Sweden. This was to be the first real meeting concerning the production we were planning to stage the following autumn. Manuela was staying with the director who was going to work on the version of Hamlet I had been thinking about virtually all the years I had been working at the Teatro Avenida.

As I drove through Halland I found myself looking forward to the coming day. I was filled with great expectations.

The roads further south were dry, although it was very cloudy and overcast. I wasn’t driving all that fast, unusually for me – I had given them an arrival time and I didn’t want to get there too early.

Then suddenly it all happens very quickly. Just north of Laholm I pull out into the outside lane in order to overtake a slow-moving lorry. Somewhere on the road surface is a patch of something, possibly oil: I start skidding and lose control, the car crashes head-on into the central barrier and the airbags inflate. I black out for a second or two.

When I come to, I sit there in silence for a while. What has happened? I feel around to make sure I am still in one piece. I’m not injured, I’m not bleeding. Then I get out. Cars have stopped and people are running towards me. I tell them I’m OK, I’m not hurt.

I stand on the verge and telephone Eva. When she answers I make a point of trying to sound calm.

“You can hear that it’s me,” I say. “And that I’m all right.”

“What’s happened?” she asks immediately.

I tell her about the accident. I play down the crash, and insist that all is well. I don’t really know what’s going to happen next, but I’m fine. I don’t know if she believes me.

Then I telephone Vallåkra.

“I’m afraid I shan’t be coming,” I say. “I’ve crashed into the central barrier on the road just outside Laholm. I’m not injured. But the car’s a total write-off.”

The police drive me to the railway station in Laholm: half an hour later I’m on a train back to Gothenburg. I still haven’t been to Vallåkra, and I never did the book signings there.

Without really knowing why, I date my cancer to that very day: 16 December 2013. There is no logic in doing so, of course. My tumours and metastases must have been growing for some considerable time. Nor did I have any symptoms or other indications on that particular day.

It was more of a warning. Something was happening.

A week later, just before Christmas, Eva and I went to our little flat in Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast. On the morning of Christmas Eve I was woken up by pains in my neck and a general feeling of stiffness. I thought I must have been stupid enough to lie in an awkward position and given myself a twisted neck – what the doctors call torticollis.

But the pain didn’t go away. Instead, it spread quickly down my right arm. I lost all feeling in the thumb of my right hand. And it hurt. In the end I rang an orthopaedic specialist in Stockholm I was lucky enough to get hold of even though almost everybody was on holiday for Christmas. I went back to Sweden and he examined me on 28 December. He thought it could well be early signs of a slipped disc at the top of my spine, but of course it was not possible to say without a scan, which we agreed I should have as soon as the Christmas holidays were over.

The eighth of January dawned. It was a cold morning, and snowing lightly. I thought it was high time to get the slipped disc diagnosis confirmed. I was still suffering severe neck pains. Strong painkillers helped, but that was only a stop-gap measure. The slipped disc needed proper treatment.

Early in the morning I had two scans. Two hours later the torticollis and slipped disc theory had changed into a cancer diagnosis. I was shown a computer image of a cancerous tumour, 3cm in diameter, in my left lung. And there was a metastasis in my neck. That was the cause of my pain.

The diagnosis was very clear: it was serious, possibly incurable. I asked hesitantly if that meant I should go home and wait for the end.

“Not long ago that would have been our advice,” said the doctor. “But now we have treatment options.”

Eva was with me at the Sophiahem when I was informed of the situation. Afterwards, as we stood outside in the cold winter weather waiting for a taxi, we didn’t have much to say. We probably didn’t say anything at all, in fact.

But I saw a little girl jumping up and down in a snowdrift, full of joy and energy.

I saw myself, as a child, jumping around in the snow. Now I was 65 years old and had been diagnosed with cancer. I was not jumping around.

It was as if Eva had read my thoughts. She took a firm grip of my arm.

As we drove away in the taxi the little girl was still jumping up and down in her snowdrift.

Quicksand

It suddenly seemed as if my life had shrunk. That January morning when I received my cancer diagnosis, I had the feeling that my life was dwindling away. Very few thoughts came into my head; my mind seemed to be a sort of desert-like landscape.

Perhaps I didn’t dare to think about the future – it was so uncertain, a veritable minefield. Instead, I kept returning again and again to my childhood.

When I was eight or nine years old I passed through a period in which I kept thinking about what kind of death frightened me most of all. That is nothing remarkable – people have such thoughts at that age. Life and death begin to be serious topics that one needs to come to terms with. Children are extremely serious creatures. Not least when they reach the age when they slowly take the step that changes them into conscious human beings – conscious of the fact that they have an identity that cannot be changed. Over the years what one looks like in a mirror changes, but behind that mirror image is always the real you.

Your identity is formed when you decide your attitude towards serious questions. That is something known to everybody who has not forgotten all about their childhood.

What frightened me more than anything else was falling through the ice on a lake or a river and being sucked underneath the ice sheet, unable to break through to the surface. To drown just underneath the ice through which you could see the sun shining. Suffocating in the cold water. Being overcome by panic from which no one could rescue you. Screaming without being heard. Screams that froze and turned into ice.

That kind of fear was not so strange: I grew up in the province of Härjedalen where the winters were long and severe.

Around that time, a girl about my age actually did fall through the all-too-thin ice on the Sandtjärn lake. I was there when they recovered her body. The word had spread very fast through Sveg. Everybody came running up. It was a Sunday. Her parents were standing next to the lake where the black water in the hole stood out among all the whiteness of the ice and snow. When the volunteer firemen had dragged out the girl with their grappling irons, her parents didn’t react as they would have done in a film or a book. They didn’t burst into tears. They were completely silent. It was others who wept. Her teacher, I recall. The vicar and the girl’s closest friends.

Henning lived in Gothenburg with his wife, Eva. Photograph: Imagebank Sweden

Somebody vomited into the snow. It was very quiet. The white clouds of breath coming out of everybody’s mouths were like incomprehensible smoke signals.

The drowned girl had not been in the water all that long. But she was completely stiff. Her woollen clothes crackled and creaked as they laid her down in the snow. Her face was absolutely white, as if it had been made up in that colour. Her blond hair stuck out from under her red cap like yellow icicles.

But there was another kind of death that terrified me. I had read about it somewhere. It was about quicksand. About how a man in a khaki uniform, with a rifle over his shoulder, dressed for an expedition, happens to tread on the treacherous sand and is immediately stuck fast. He is sucked inexorably further and further down, totally unable to break free until the sand begins to cover his mouth and his nose. The man is doomed. He suffocates and eventually the last glimpse of his hair-covered scalp disappears under the sand. The quicksand was alive. The grains transmuted into ghastly tentacles that devoured a human being. A flesh-eating sand hole.

I was able to avoid treacherous ice floes, and there was not much in the way of sandy beaches by the lakes or the River Ljusnan. But many years later, when I was wandering around in the sand dunes at Skagen, or later still on African beaches, the memory of that quicksand cropped up inside my head.

When I was told I had cancer, that same feeling of terror burst out inside me again.

What I felt was precisely that fear of quicksand. I fought against being sucked down and swallowed up by it. By the totally paralysing realisation that I had been stricken by a serious, incurable disease. It took me 10 days and nights, with very few hours of sleep, to keep myself afloat and not be incapacitated by the fear that threatened to overcome all my powers of resistance.

I can’t remember being afflicted by desperation so great that I burst into tears. Nor that I screamed out loud in despair. It was a silent battle to overcome the quicksand.

And I wasn’t sucked down totally. In the end I was able to crawl back out of the sand and begin to come to terms with what had happened. I no longer thought in terms of lying down and waiting for death to come. I would accept the treatment that was now available today. Even if I would never be completely cured, there was a possibility that I could live for quite a long while yet.

Being stricken by cancer is an extreme catastrophe. It is only after some time that you know if you are going to be able to handle it, to resist it. I am still not clear about what I thought and experienced during those 10 days after I had received that catastrophic diagnosis. Perhaps I never shall be? Those 10 days in the beginning of 2014, after twelfth night, are shadowy, as dark as the Swedish midwinter. I was occasionally subjected to attacks of the shivers – reminiscent of the occasions when I was stricken with malaria. I spent most of the time lying in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin.

The only thing I am quite clear about is being convinced that time had stood still. As if in a concentrated and condensed universe, everything had become a point in which there was no past or future: nothing but now. I was a human being clinging fast to the edge of a patch of death-bringing quicksand.

When I had finally conquered the urge to give up, to allow myself to be swallowed up into the abyss, I read some books about what quicksand actually is. And I discovered that the story of sand that can suck down and swallow up a human being is in fact a myth. All the stories describing it are inventions. Among other authorities, a university in Holland has conducted practical experiments to prove the point.

Nevertheless, the comparison with quicksand is still the one I acknowledge today. That is what the 10 days that completely changed the circumstances of my life were like.

Henning Mankell. Photograph: Sara Appelgren

The courage to be afraid

At about the same time as I left the quicksand behind me and slowly came to terms with my illness, I received a letter from one of my oldest friends. I had got to know him in 1964, after I left grammar school one January day at the age of 16 and decided to go to Paris. I had never met him before, but he was a jazz musician in the French capital, and his parents had a little bakery in Borås. I went to their home and got his address.

Now, 50 years later, I received a letter from Göran. He had read about my illness.

“What on earth can you write to somebody who’s got cancer?” he wondered.

He was right, of course. What can one say? And what does the sufferer say to himself?

One of the first things that happened after I had shaken myself out of the quicksand was that I started formulating questions about courage and fear. Is it possible to be courageous without acknowledging one’s fear? I don’t think it is. In this context, fear is much more than the primitive and fundamental dread of dying. The predator sees you, but you don’t see the predator. Death always sees you as fair game: but being afraid in this sense is just as much a matter of being frightened of a pain that cannot be suppressed, or of no longer being able to experience what is going to happen the next day, and the day after that. The fear of dying is a mixture of rational reasons and the opposite: imagination and biological necessity. The foundation of life.

Fear is natural and based on the simple truth that what distinguishes us humans from other species is that we know we are going to die. The cats I have owned during my life have never been aware of their own death. They haven’t even been aware that they were alive. They have simply been there, day after day – hunting, lying around, miaowing. Acknowledging one’s fear of the unknown is realising what it means to be a person. Our existence is basically a tragedy. Throughout our lives we strive to increase our knowledge, our abilities, our experiences. But the bottom line is that all of that will be lost in oblivion.

I respect those who believe in a life after this one. But I don’t understand them. It seems to me that religion is no more than an excuse for not accepting the conditions of life. The here and now, nothing more than that. That is also the unique aspect of our life, the wonderful part of being alive.

In the first book I wrote, back in 1973, is a sentence to the effect that a human being can spit into the sea, and by doing so can conquer all the eternity one needs. I still believe that, over 40 years later.

I left behind the quicksand and began to accumulate courage, which in turn was based on the knowledge that I would never completely rid myself of my fear. But I was forced to be the strongest: I have to control my fear and never allow it to take control over me.

Of course I don’t mention any of that when I eventually get round to answering Göran’s letter. Instead, I remind him how beautifully he used to play Duke Ellington’s “Solitude”.

Courage and fear are always intertwined. It requires courage to live and courage to die.

But I have no intention of dying, I write at the end of my letter. Not yet, at least. I have far too much still to do.

I continue to prepare myself for the chemotherapy that is in store.

The way out

Just as everything in my life has changed, every new morning brings with it a fresh challenge. I have to think about something other than my illness. Every morning I spend a certain amount of time asking myself how I feel, if I have any new side effects, or if it looks like being a good day. But if I am unable to thrust aside such thoughts with a real ice-hockey tackle of an effort, the battle is lost before it has even begun. Then there is a risk that resignation, suffering and fear will gain the upper hand. What course is open to me in that case? To lie down and turn my face to the wall?

Henning Mankell in June 2015. Photograph: Nora Lorek/AFP/Getty Images

At difficult times whenever I have needed to give myself relief or consolation, or perhaps a breathing space, my instinct has been to pick up a book and immerse myself in its text. I have turned to books when love affairs have come to an end. When a theatre production went wrong, or I failed to meet a deadline, my books have always been there. As a sort of liniment. But even more as a means of diverting my thoughts in a different direction, in order to gather strength.

And that was the case now as well. On my desk are all the books I haven’t yet read – but on this occasion something happened that was new for me. I found myself unable to devote myself to new, unread books, even if they were by authors I always used to approach with great interest. I was unable to deal with the new, the unknown. Reading a new book is to journey into the text as if one were on an expedition, but I found that I was going round in circles. I read a page, but was unable properly to grasp what it said. The words were like shut and bolted doors, and I didn’t have a key.

For a brief moment that made me afraid. Were books beginning to let me down, just when I needed them more than at any other time in my life so far?

But that was not the case. When I picked up a book that I had read many times before, the words opened themselves up again. What I was unable to cope with was the new and the unknown; but what I had read before, perhaps on several occasions, had the same effect as ever. I read and was able to stop thinking about my illness.

The first book I opened was one of the many versions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe I have collected over the years. I know of no better novel than Robinson Crusoe. It reveals the secret behind the difference between a good and a bad story. Robinson Crusoe is about a shipwrecked sailor who spends many years alone on a desert island with only a few wild goats as company. But in fact Robinson is never alone. The reader is always with him, invisible but by his side. That is what makes the story so magical. If the reader keeps his distance and only peers into the text, the intimate relationship between the reader and the story that all novels aim to create never occurs. But in Robinson Crusoe the reader is invited to take part. He lies there in the sand, just as much a castaway as Robinson.

In my second-year class at primary school in Sveg, Miss Manda Olsson handed out small grey notebooks. We were to invent stories that we should then write down in the book. After a week, we were expected to hand in a written story – long or short, it didn’t matter. I went home, locked myself into the lavatory and wrote a version of Robinson Crusoe on one page. I handed the book in proudly the very next day. By then I had filled it with stories and adventures to the very last page. Miss Olsson said afterwards that she couldn’t make out anything of what I had written because it had all been done so quickly and carelessly. I had been in too much of a hurry. But I was given a new notebook, and urged in friendly terms to rewrite everything in a way that could be read and understood.

Now, in my study, I shifted to one side all the unread books and made a pile of the ones I wanted to reread. I would be threatened by no surprises. I would be wandering around in familiar territory.

Everything went well until I began my first cycle of chemotherapy. It transpired that one of the side effects was that the mucous membranes of my eyes became irritated, and produced constant tears. If I read too much there was a sort of mist between my eyes and the text. I couldn’t see the words clearly. If I rested for an hour, it went away. But it soon came back again.

And so I began to alternate reading with looking at images of works of art. Again I chose ones that I was already familiar with. Never more than one picture a day. I began with the artists who have meant – and still mean – most to me: Caravaggio and Daumier. No matter how strange the world they create is, I always feel at home in it. I sometimes think about the fact that although Caravaggio painted such a variety of motifs, he never painted the sea. As for Daumier, a lot of people are familiar with his political caricatures, but not so many know that he was also a painter and sculptor of significance.

Allegory of Music by Caravaggio, one of Mankell’s favourite artists. Illustration: Courtesy of Geoffrey Clements/Corbis

Every picture that means something special to me also has a story to tell, even if they open different doors to the ones opened by written texts.

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More Homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others’ stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

My third way of thinking about something other than my illness was of course music. If you ask people suffering from severe pains or devastating sorrow what gives them the greatest relief, most of them say music. I started going through my record collection, switching between jazz, classical, and everything from African folk music to electronic music.

Most of all I listened to Miles Davis and Beethoven. Occasionally also Arvo Pärt and blues from the southern states delta.

I succeeded in diverting my attention from my illness by never breaking my routine. Books, pictures, music. With these it was possible to counter the almost intolerable pressure to devote all my attention to the disease, the treatment, and constantly looking for signs of new symptoms. That also gave me more strength to cope with the times when I had no alternative but to consider what I was stricken with. I was not simply a person who had been diagnosed with a serious illness: I was also the same person as I had been before, myself and no other. It was possible to live in two worlds at the same time.

But on certain days not even the stories, pictures and music helped. Days when I barely had the strength to get out of bed as a result of the exhaustion brought about by the effects of the chemotherapy as it attacked the tumours and metastases. Some days I hovered in a weightless state in an empty and cold universe, without meaning and without purpose. At such times I could understand that some seriously ill people can choose to put an end to their own lives.

I could understand it, but at the same time it was something I couldn’t want for myself, and could never do. I wouldn’t want to subject my nearest and dearest to the agony of always wondering if there was more they could have done, despite everything.

After about two months, when I had reached the middle of the first basic cycle of chemotherapy, I had the feeling one morning that a new sort of normality had entered my life. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been before I received the diagnosis, but nevertheless it was as if life was now taking on a form that in my darkest moments I would never have thought possible.

The days were getting lighter. Not a lot, but mid-winter was past. One morning, all too early, a blackbird started singing from its perch on the television aerial. It occurred to me that this was something I could record on my gravestone.

I have heard the blackbird. I have lived.

But I thought less and less often about death. It was there all the time anyway, without my needing to lure it out from the shadows. Now I read my books, looked at pictures and listened to music – all things that had to do with life.

One day when I had finished a book I’d read before – Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – I went to look at the pile of unread books I had put to one side almost two months earlier.

I was unable to pick any of them up. But only a few days later I started reading books from that pile as well.

Light had been travelling for a long way, but at last it had arrived. Just then, at least.

Room number one

I always had my chemotherapy treatment in the same room in the oncology department of the Sahlgrenska hospital in Gothenburg. It was a somewhat shabby room, but always immaculately clean. The visitor’s chair was tucked away in a corner – the room was small and space was at a premium – and had a light blue cover; the wooden arms were scraped and worn. The only window in the room was high up. When I lay on the bed and looked through the window I could see a patch of sky, which was usually grey these winter months.

It started with one of the nurses sticking a needle into one of my arms or hands. As I have deep-lying veins that are reluctant to yield any blood, and are keen to prevent needles sticking into them, it could take half an hour to fix the cannula through which the infusions would pass. It sometimes happened that one of the nurses would give up and ask a colleague to try instead. The veins would occasionally become cramped or split, but in the end the nurses always managed to fit the cannula.

I would get to room number one shortly before half past nine, and the process would be finished about five hours later, by which time the contents of the bags had been absorbed into my bloodstream. Most of the time I was alone in the room – nobody needed to check that the infusions were flowing as they should.

During my third cycle of chemotherapy I had an unexpected visitor in room number one. I was lying on top of the bed and had fallen asleep. One of the nurses had just connected up the third bag. I heard the door opening.

But it wasn’t one of the nurses. Standing in the doorway was a girl who couldn’t be more than 20 years old. I hadn’t seen her before and wondered if she was one of the healthcare assistants I hadn’t yet met. But she wasn’t dressed as if she was working at the hospital.

I realised she was in fact a patient, just like myself. She stood there looking at me. Her eyes were glazed, her movements slow, as if every step, every gesture, required an almost impossible effort. She was very thin, her face pale, and around her eyes were deep hollows making it look as if her tiredness had been applied like mascara.

Then I noticed that she was wearing a black wig. It was not her own hair.

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are always associated with hair loss. I had been spared this inconvenience, but I had noticed that people I met often glanced at my hair.

This led to me also glancing surreptitiously at fellow patients’ heads when I attended the clinic. There were some who wore wigs, and others who didn’t bother about their baldness. I imagined it must be worst for women. But that was my prejudice; in fact more men than women hid their baldness under wigs.

The girl stood there looking at me, like somebody who had just been woken up out of a dream.

She didn’t look Swedish – whatever that means. But of course she could have been born in Sweden even so: our country is based on immigration and emigration. My own ancestry can be traced back to France and Germany.

‘I have heard the blackbird. I have lived.’ Photograph: Richard Packwood/Getty Images

I nodded to her, smiled, and asked if she was looking for someone. She didn’t seem to understand what I said. She swayed from side to side slightly, and sat down – or rather, collapsed on to the visitor’s chair with its worn armrests. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

It dawned on me that she was very ill. The earth was already pulling her down, despite the fact that she was so young. Her tiredness was pure exhaustion: she was already half-gone, leaving life behind.

Then the door opened again. A woman in her 50s came in. She merely glanced at me before gently taking hold of the girl on the chair. She was speaking Arabic. I couldn’t understand what she said, but she was obviously the girl’s mother.

Then her father appeared – a short, timid-looking man with a furrowed face. He took no notice of me either as I lay there with the infusion dripping into my arm. All the pair of them cared about was their daughter. With extreme tenderness they helped her up and supported her as they left the room.

I didn’t exist. All that mattered was their sick daughter.

The door closed. It echoed in a way reminiscent of a heavy church door. Death has paid a visit, I thought to myself, and didn’t try to overlook the fact that the encounter with the girl and her parents had scared me. Why had the girl opened the door to room number one in the first place? What was the message she had brought with her? Was death in the habit of sending out couriers?

When one of the nurses came to connect the next bag of cytotoxins, I couldn’t resist telling her about the unexpected visit I had had. I said I had the impression that the girl was very ill. She nodded as she changed the bag and checked that the new infusion was flowing through the plastic tubing as it should.

Then the nurse confirmed that the girl was indeed very ill. She said it in such a way that I understood death was just around the corner. But I didn’t ask exactly what cancer she was suffering from. Nobody speaks about other patients. Everybody has their integrity.

But I couldn’t help asking one question that wasn’t directly connected with her illness.

“Why did she come to room number one?”

I assumed there would be no answer, but there was.

“She was moved here when there was a leak in the room she usually uses. There are no spare beds in the intensive care wards. She was in here for a week before she was able to move back to her usual place.”

And then came something I shouldn’t really have been told.

“Her brain has been affected by her illness. She disappears sometimes. Her parents look for her until they find her. They are always here. She is their only child. Their other children have all died in some war they came here to get away from.”

I was told no more. I don’t know if she had a brain tumour or if her mental confusion was due to something else. But in any case, it doesn’t matter. When she came into my room she was on her way to somewhere but didn’t know where.

As far as she was concerned, even though I was lying there on the bed, the room was completely empty.

I never saw her or her parents again. I don’t even know her name. Nor do I know if she is still alive.

But every time I return to room number one for chemotherapy or a blood transfusion, when my blood counts have become so poor that I can’t stand up without losing my balance, I think I can see her there, sitting in the visitor’s chair with its worn-out armrests. There was something she wanted to tell me, this courier sent to me by death. But I still don’t know what that message was.

Never being robbed of one’s happiness

On 9 May 2014 it is drizzling south of Gothenburg where Eva and I live. A change is on the way – I can see that the shallow waters in the Stallviken inlet have started to ebb away, which indicates warmer and sunnier weather. The occasional salmon trout fisherman is standing a long way out from land: they often stand there for hours on end, whether or not the fish are biting, and many of them throw the fish back into the water if and when they do catch one. I envy them their unalloyed joy as they seem to stand there, waiting for everything and nothing.

It is five months since I received my cancer diagnosis, and a couple of days ago I had my fourth and last infusions in this series of chemotherapy treatment. I shall meet Dr Bergman tomorrow, and hear how things have progressed so far.

I got up early this morning – as so often I slept only fitfully. I feel as if I am waiting for a court’s verdict, and it’s impossible to know whether I am going to be declared innocent or guilty. All I can do at the moment is prepare for the worst but hope for the best.

But as dawn is beginning to break I start thinking about something completely different, just as the blackbird starts singing its reveille from our chimney stack and giving the go-ahead for all the other birds to join in. Instead of preparing for whatever is in store for me tomorrow, I start wondering exactly when I experienced the greatest happiness with which I have been blessed in this life. Is there such a moment? Or is it impossible to choose? The birth of a child, the relief when a severe pain goes away, an assault that didn’t result in my death, the feeling that something I have written turned out better than I had expected? I soon decide that it is impossible to choose. Moments can hardly be compared or placed in order. One kind of happiness is different from another.

Nevertheless, I eventually find myself remembering a moment that I think exceeded all other feelings of happiness.

Maputo in Mozambique, where Mankell spent a lot of his time. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

I am transported back to 4 October 1992. Twenty-two years ago. I was aged 44 and experiencing what were probably the most intense years of my life. I was spending nearly all the time in Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique. I directed at least two plays every year, as well as being mainly responsible for practical aspects of running the theatre.

There had been civil war in Mozambique for more than 10 years, and many people had been killed. As always in connection with civil wars, there had been extremely brutal attacks on the civilian population – ears and noses cut off, children crushed by being smashed against trees. The previous year I had proposed that we should perform Aristophanes’ ancient comedy Lysistrata. Needless to say, it would have to be Africanised in order to make it comprehensible toa modern and mainly young African audience, many of whom would be illiterate. The first things to be omitted were every reference to Greek temples and priestesses: instead we would adapt Aristophanes’ basic theme about women going on erotic strike in order to force their menfolk to stop going to war. One day I was shopping in the central market in Maputo, and when I saw all the women working on the various stalls I realised that this was the answer. Our Lysistrata, who we renamed Julietta, was a stallholder selling fish in the market. Throughout the time we were producing our play negotiations were taking place in Rome between the legal government of Mozambique and the gangs of bandits – lackeys of the apartheid state in South Africa – creating violent chaos all over the country.

In the morning of the last performance a friend of mine, a journalist, hammered excitedly on my front door. The unexpected had happened! A peace treaty had been signed.

As I was walking down the hills to Teatro Avenida I made up my mind what we should do. I sat in the as yet empty theatre with Lucrecia Paco, who was playing the leading role of Julietta, and suggested what she should say after the final applause had died down. The end came at last. The applause was long and loud. After being called out on stage for the third time, Lucrecia raised her arms and the applause died down.

I remember her words, exactly as she had chosen them herself: “As we all know, a peace treaty was signed in Rome today. We can only hope that this terrible war, with all its murders and mutilation, is now over. We must believe that this peace treaty will be honoured. But I promise you that if it becomes necessary we shall repeat our performance of this play again. Like you, we shall never give up.”

It was followed by total silence. There was no more applause. But the audience rose to its feet. In utter silence, they gazed at the actors and actresses who had performed this 2,000-year-old play about a number of women’s desperate and courageous struggle against barbaric warfare.

I find it hard to recall any incident in my life that was more significant and more filled with joy than that moment in the theatre. Things cannot be compared or placed in order. But that morning in 2014, as I prepared myself for what might be good or bad news the following day, I was overcome by the memory of that all-consuming happiness.

The drizzle continued. I gazed out over the sea and thought that despite everything I had been lucky enough to be present at a moment of boundless joy. Many moments, in fact.

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