But in the dream she's dead. Her face appears as an unfinished wooden sculpture. That upsets me. And it's not right. It must be somebody else, somebody who looks like her. She is not the one who is dead. It is others who are dying. Not Aida. She is alive. She hasn't grown thinner, she isn't covered in sores, she hasn't lost all her strength so that all she can do is lie on a bast-mat in the shade, staring up at the sky or at the big leaves of the banana trees.

The answer is obvious, of course. I'm mixing things up. Dreams do mix things up. The first thing that strikes me when I meet Aida is how much like her mother she looked. And Christine, her mother, is ill. She may well be dead by now. The same applies to Aida's aunt. Both of them could well be dead, even though it is only a couple of weeks since I was talking to them. Aida's face is there, out in the mist. She comes very close to me.

One windy day, in the middle of this most unstable June, just before I start to write down my story about Aida, about her mango plant, and all the people around her in Uganda waiting to die of Aids, I visit one of the many medieval churches on the island of Gotland. It doesn't matter which one. The darkness of these old stone-built churches is the breath they all breathe. Darkness has no individual identity. Darkness is eternal, and has no face, no name.

A lone man is tending a grave. The gate at the churchyard entrance is black and heavy. The handle is difficult to turn.

Somebody, a friend from the old days, once told me that dark churches made him afraid of death. It is precisely the opposite for me. In the darkness of a medieval church on Gotland, time ceases to exist. Or perhaps all time, the past, the present, the future – all of them are compressed into a shared moment. Going into certain churches you feel at peace the moment the door has closed behind you. Nothing else is needed. The church creates its own universe.