The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

Twice Adrian has interviewed her, both times in Salia’s presence. On the last occasion Adrian borrowed from Ileana an orange, a sugar cube and a biscuit with a jam centre. ‘Can you tell me the name of this?’ he said, rolling the orange across the table towards her. He offered to let her keep each item she correctly identified. She’d been more responsive, and though still did not look directly at Adrian, she answered his questions. To Agnes he would likely seem a figure of some authority, an impression he decided to preserve. She could not remember how she came to be here or who brought her. Her voice was halting, he struggled to hear her and required Salia’s intervention. From time to time she rubbed a hand across her face. Other times she twisted the corner of her lappa. And though she could not answer all his questions, everything about her manner was compliant.

  Though he despises cheap tricks he picked up a mirror from Ileana’s desk and turned it round to her. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  One minute rolled over into two; she continued to gaze at her image. Once she rubbed her thumb over it. She leaned forward and placed the mirror upon the table.

  ‘What did you see?’ he repeated.

  She shook her head and frowned. ‘The glass is no good.’

  There’d been one other significant moment. It occurred as Agnes was leaving and passed Salia, in his customary stance, back to the window, hands folded behind him. She’d raised her chin and gazed out of the window. And then she had enquired of Salia, in an entirely conversational manner, why the harmattan had come so early this year. Were the rains over so quickly? And Salia had replied, softly and with deference, that the rains had ended several months past. That had been three days ago.

  Today Salia reports he had been called to attend Agnes during the night. After the progress of the last few days she has taken a turn for the worse. A disturbance on the ward in the early hours of the morning. She’d been agitated and upset, talked of the loss of a gold chain and became frantic in her efforts to leave. He’d had no choice but to sedate her. Adrian listens to Salia, who stands silhouetted against the window, against splinters of white sunlight. Together they go to the female ward, where Agnes lies, still sleeping.

  ‘Should we constrain her when she wakes?’ asks Salia.

  But Adrian cannot abide the idea. ‘Just keep her quiet. Let her sleep it off.’

  Salia’s silent assent conveys a sense that he would do it differently, though it will be as Adrian wishes.

  Afternoon. Salia and Adrian are in town. Salia steps across the choked and foul gutter in his unblemished nurse’s shoes. Tradesmen sit behind open wooden cases balanced upon stools. Salia passes between them, stops in front of a building and allows Adrian to take the lead. The stairway is unlit, the air sulphurous. At the first floor the door opens into a large hall. Inside the shapes of people move around in noise and shadows between cubicles delineated by lines of washing and makeshift cardboard screens. From outside, less than ten yards away, there is no evidence of this second city within the halls of the old department store. Adrian’s foot knocks against a bucket, water sloshes over his shoe, the noise bounces dully off the walls. A woman’s voice softly curses him. Adrian hesitates and Salia takes the lead once more. ‘Excuse me, Ma?’ to the woman as she rescues her bucket. He asks her where they might find the person they have come to find. Bent over her bucket, she raises her head and points.

  They find the man, dressed in a vest and a pair of shorts, sitting upon a plinth once used to display mannequins. Yes, he says. It was he who brought the woman to the crazy hospital. He knew about Dr Attila. He hadn’t wanted to leave her on the streets.

  ‘You live here now?’ Adrian asks.

  The man nods. To Adrian’s relief he speaks English. ‘I was doorman here,’ he adds. ‘Before.’ He says it as others do, in a way that conveys a sense of timelessness. Before. There was before. And there is now. And in between a dreamless void.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes. Her daughter worked here once, the ma would pass by from time to time.’

  Sometimes he would go and call her daughter for her. A fine girl, the daughter. He and the woman would pass the time of day as she waited. The woman lived a way outside the city, he remembered, because when there was nothing else to say they discussed the state of the roads. That is as much as he remembers. Many years have passed. So much has changed. People say the woman has become possessed.

  ‘Is that what you think? That she is possessed?’

  The man stands up from the plinth to address Adrian: strained, slow movements.

  ‘I have seen her here before. Sometimes, for some of us, they say spirits call. She is not possessed, but she is crossed, yes. And that makes some people afraid. I am not afraid, because I knew her before. But people now are not as they were, they are more fearful.’

  The man accompanies them back to the stairwell. Adrian thanks him and shakes his hand. Salia leans forward and presses a few notes into his palm, and the man nods and closes his fingers around them. Silently he watches them go.

  Outside they make their way back through the glare and the dust. Salia, two steps ahead of Adrian, walks like a dancer with his shoulders and chin straight, seeming almost to glide an inch above the ground. Adrian wonders how to engage him in conversation.

  ‘What exactly did he mean when he said she was crossed?’ he asks.

  Salia turns to look at him. ‘Why do you worry about this woman?’

  The question, upon the lips of a psychiatric nurse, stops Adrian short. One of the attendants had asked the same thing, chuckling secretively as she waddled down the ward sprinkling disinfectant upon the floor, her manner suggestive of something faintly improper about his interest. Why this one? Why not? he wants to answer back. But he cannot think of any other answer apart from one that is true, because apart from the patient in the hospital, the dying Elias Cole, she is all he has. He has no desire to have to justify himself. Still, Salia is Attila’s henchman.

  ‘Shall we get something cold?’ Adrian points to a seller with an ice box sitting upon his haunches under a tree. He needs to be in the shade, out of this unrelenting heat. Salia nods and orders crushed ice, choosing a topping in a lurid shade of yellow. Adrian asks for a Coke and searches in his pocket for the change. While Salia spoons crushed ice into his mouth, Adrian repeats his question.

  ‘It is to say,’ answers Salia. ‘When a spirit enters a person sometimes it makes them act a certain way, what people call crazy. So he is trying to tell you the woman was acting crazy when he found her. That is all.’

  Later, in Ileana’s office, Adrian carefully rereads Agnes’s notes. On the wall he stares at a map of the country. Holding on to the patterns, the order of vowels and consonants of the unfamiliar place names mentioned in her notes, he locates them one by one. In an ashtray on Ileana’s desk he finds a small number of coloured drawing pins, also three earrings and a safety pin with a ribbon tied to it; he uses them all, pressing them through the paper. In this way he marks each separate location, including the place where he saw Agnes in the street his first week in the country. He is standing back, reviewing his work, when Ileana enters and stands next to him smelling of smoke and perfume.

  ‘Art therapy?’

  Adrian smiles. ‘Guess.’

  ‘Something to do with your patient, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She gazes at the map, then shakes her head. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They’re all the places she was found before she was brought here.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ says Ileana.

  Side by side they stand and stare at Agnes’s journeys mapped in colours and jewels.

  Agnes sleeps. Both her hands are tucked under her chin, her body curled into a question mark. She is completely still, no fluttering of eyelids, a dreamless sleep. Adrian stands at the foot of her bed. He can barely discern her breathing. In the corner of the room a woman smiles and sings to herself.

  Afterwards he walks through the gardens, past the lawns to a small cl
uster of trees in a hidden corner. The Patients’ Garden, as it once was, has gone wild. Crazy paving. Anywhere else he might have imagined it as somebody’s idea of a joke. The paths are overgrown, the air carries an odour of dead flowers mingled with the freshness of the sea. The ground is covered with long, curved pods, some of which have opened and spilt their seeds. An orchid, dark and dense, crouches on a branch above him. He ponders Agnes and her journeys. Fugue, they call it in his profession, a condition in which the body and the disturbed spirit are joined in shadowy wanderings.

  Agnes is searching for something. Something she goes out looking for and fails to find. Time after time.

  CHAPTER 15

  The man on the table has dreams, he dreams of marrying. The most Kai usually knows about a patient is a name and a medical history, sometimes not even that much. But this patient is Kai’s elective. His dream is to walk straight and find a bride, or perhaps it would be truer to say to become a groom. There are few who would give their daughter to a cripple, especially a poor one. His name is Foday. This will be his first operation.

  Kai works the pedal of the diathermy with his foot, cauterising the blood vessels at the point of incision. In contrast to his youthful face, Foday’s body is muscular and bears old scars, one on the heel of his right hand, another on the back of the leg upon which they are operating, upon his right buttock two small disc-shaped scars.

  ‘Looks like he’s been through the wars, this one,’ says Seligmann. And then, ‘Sorry,’ as he catches the anaesthetist’s glance. She is, Kai knows, merely confused by Seligmann’s use of idiom. But he says nothing.

  Foday lies on the table, asleep and naked. He has placed his dreams in the hands of the surgeons and his balls in the hand of a nurse, who holds them aloft, out of danger of the scorching end of the diathermy wand. He expects miracles, Kai knows.

  An hour and a half later Kai, alone in the theatre, works on, soaking the plaster of Paris bandages in water and wrapping them around Foday’s leg. The leg is straight now. Kai’s hands work dextrously, smoothing the slippery plaster. Foday’s other leg slides off the table. Kai moves around and replaces it carefully, leaving plaster of Paris handprints on the upper thigh. He is as intimate with Foday’s body as with a lover. He takes a damp cloth and dabs at the chalky prints on Foday’s thighs. There are splashes of wet plaster on his genitals and Kai wipes them too. If he has time, when he has seen how things are going in emergency, maybe he will stop by the ward, try and get there soon after Foday wakes up.

  A hillside. How many years ago? Five, six. Kai, Tejani and Nenebah. Two of them revising for a test: textbooks and lecture notes, a picnic of peppered chicken and Vimto. They hadn’t gone far, just the hills above the campus. There they had a view of the city, of the sprawling docks. The smell of dried grass. Tejani and he rehearsing mnemonics upon Nenebah’s person. C5, 6, 7,’ said Kai. ‘Raise your wings up to heaven.’ His fingers walked up Nenebah’s back between her shoulder blades, using her vertebrae as stepping stones, feeling the muscles quicken at his touch before she let her arms float upwards like a bird in flight. ‘Injury causes inability to raise arms past ninety degrees,’ replied Tejani, lying on his back with his hands across his eyes. Kai laid the flat of his hand against Nenebah’s back. And results in, Tejani spoke each word slowly, pushing against the effort of remembering. ‘Winging of the scapula.’ He lifted his hands from his eyes. Nenebah clapped.

  ‘Don’t Exercise in Quicksand,’ said Kai. ‘Diaphragm, External Intercostals, Internal Intercostals, Quadratus,’ Tejani responded. Kai’s fingers traced maps across Nenebah’s ribs.

  ‘I Long for Spinach.’ Kai bent to Nenebah’s ear and whispered, ‘I Love Sex.’ Her soft snort and giggle as she elbowed him in the ribs. ‘Iliocostalis, Longissimus, Spinals,’ Tejani recited. ‘And I heard that, by the way, you two.’

  Kai sitting facing Nenebah and Tejani. The sky behind them. Watching his face drift into hers, and back again, until he can no longer tell one from the other. A cloud passes in front of the sun, the shadows spread across their faces obliterating their features.

  Another time. Before or after, he cannot be sure. The two of them alone, he lying on his back with his head in her lap, savouring the warmth and scent of her and of their recent lovemaking, gazing at an upward-tilted nipple. ‘Nenebah,’ he says. And she leans back on her hands, puts her head on one side, the better to peruse him and asks, ‘Why do you call me that? Nobody else does.’ And he replies, ‘Because it is your name. Nenebah. That is your name, isn’t it? Or am I getting you confused with somebody else?’ And she grabs a T-shirt and hits him with it. And when he opens his mouth, the better to laugh at his own joke, she stuffs the shirt inside. It tastes of her.

  He gives the finished plaster an experimental knock, pulls the cord for the porters. Afterwards, in the surgeons’ rest room, he writes up notes of the operation. There is nothing for him yet in emergency. Mid-morning and the staff room is crowded. A year or so ago somebody had brought a miniature croquet game and the medics sometimes passed their breaks knocking balls across the lino. Now the miniature croquet has been superseded by miniature boules, though the balls are prone to skid and bounce. He is in no mood either for boules or for conversation. He passes by the window on his way to Adrian’s apartment and lets himself in. Nobody is home. In the kitchen he switches on the kettle, and waits for it to come to the boil. A sunbird is perched on the feeder outside, hanging upside down, angling its head to reach the pipette. From the fridge Kai takes a plastic jar of coffee creamer and the box of sugar cubes, stirs one and then the other into his cup and carries it to the sitting room. He rarely eats until surgery is over for the day.

  And today, another letter from Tejani, the second in just a few days. He has yet to reply to the last, though he has composed several different versions in his head. The timing of the letters’ arrival is down to the vagaries of the post, the actual dates are two weeks apart. He spreads them both out on the coffee table in front of him, helps himself to a pen and paper from Adrian’s store and sits down to write. In his first letter Tejani writes of awaiting the results of his first-stage professional surgical exams, of which he is tentatively hopeful. The second letter is much shorter:

  Well, I did it, bro! I did it! Christ, though, I wish you’d been here. I had to put in a couple of all-nighters there at the end. Remember that time we did three in one week, until we ran out of candles? We sneaked into Mo’s room and took his battery light and got it back in the cupboard in the morning. Man couldn’t figure why the thing had run out of juice. And the palaver in front of the Vice Chancellor’s office, when we went to hand in the petition. Those were the days, I was telling Helena about it. She can relate, being from Belarus. But I tell you, you should be here. You’ve got the qualifications and they’re crying out for people like you and me, man. I can give you any help you need, but the agency handles it all anyway. Don’t worry about where to stay. This place has a couch with your name on it. But seriously, if I get this job, I (we) am going to buy us a place and then you’ll be welcome any time. Don’t leave it too late. Kai man, I miss you.

  If you go down to Mary’s have a beer for me. Tell her ‘how do’ and that I’m doing good. Tell her I miss her food. Tell her I miss her big, beautiful tumbu.

  Your brother,

  Tejani.

  At the bottom of the page, a postscript had been added using the same pen, but in a different hand.

  PS. This is Helena, TJ’s friend. TJ tells me about you all the time. This is true. I very much look forward to one day when we meet.

  Kai starts to write and stops. It has been two years now and still he feels Tejani’s absence, feels it in his soul, a yearning, cold and hollow. When Tejani left for America, they’d punched fists at the ferry port, making believe Tejani was going away for a few weeks. ‘When you get there send something small for me,’ Kai joked. They had turned away from each other. Kai thought of nothing but the next hour, the next day. He did not let himself think, wa
s incapable of thinking, further than that. Tejani could, though. He had gone.

  They’d always planned to leave together.

  In the end he pens a paragraph congratulating Tejani on his exam pass, on being one step closer to membership of the elite professional body, which is his ambition.

  He lays down the pen and sips his coffee, not knowing how to finish the letter. He should just take up Tejani’s offer, send over his résumé. The coffee is tepid. He drinks it hastily, a half-hour has passed. From the table he picks up and pockets all three letters and lets himself out.

  Minutes later he enters the ward. A nurse passes carrying a kidney bowl of swabs and a pair of forceps. She nods at him.

  ‘He just opened his eyes. I was on my way to get him something to drink. Over there.’

  ‘Hello, Dr Mansaray.’ Foday’s voice is husky.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, Doctor.’ A small grin. Kai can see how hard Foday is struggling to keep his eyes open.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you everything went well. So fingers crossed, hey?’

  ‘I will pray for that.’

  ‘We’ll take a look at that leg in a day or two, just to make sure everything’s all right. May I?’ Kai pulls the sheet down to uncover Foday’s leg. The young man pulls himself up using his powerful arms and shoulders. From there he looks down at his legs, reaches to touch the cast. ‘And we’ll get you a wheelchair for the time being.’ With those arms Kai doesn’t doubt Foday will be able to wheel himself anywhere he wants to go.

  ‘Yes, Doctor. May God bless you.’

  Above the bed a photograph is tacked to the wall, one Kai has seen before. A Polaroid, taken around the time Foday was admitted to the hospital. It shows his legs from the waist down before the two operations. The weak calves, angulated from the knee, the feet below turned in upon themselves. Not one but two congenital abnormalities of the lower limbs. Blount’s disease and talipes in both legs, plus a dislocated kneecap, which had floated around the side of his left leg. By contrast, above the knee, the thighs had the muscularity of a sprinter. His chest and his arms were massive. Unbelievably, Foday walked.