The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

  ‘Long time, my friend,’ says Ishmail. ‘What brings you here?’

  Kai tells him he is looking for Dr Bangura, the Lassa fever specialist. His cousin nods first, then shakes his head and tuts. The doctor is gone. Not the war, a pinprick to his finger. He was infected by the disease he’d been researching.

  Kai is quiet, remembering the doctor working diligently over his samples late into the night, the household rubber gloves, the snorkel and mask in place of proper safety equipment. He would have died in agony.

  Through the streets of the town, a slow, late-afternoon stroll. From time to time Ishmail raises a hand to people sitting on the steps of houses, shakes another’s hand, introduces Kai as his brother. Once they pass a house upon whose balcony six or so young men lounge. Unlike outside the other houses here there are no women, no children. Ishmail nods. One or two nod in return. There are no smiles and Ishmail does not introduce Kai as he has before. Down a road enclosed by houses on both sides, Abass, ahead of them, turns and, with a child’s expert memory, declares, ‘This is where we found Uncle Adrian after the bicycle hit him.’

  Ishmail laughs. ‘Who is this that was hit by a bicycle?’

  ‘Uncle Adrian. We found him here and took him home.’

  Ishmail turns questioningly to Kai.

  Kai lets Abass get ahead once more, before he tells Ishmail. Afterwards they continue in silence until they reach a motel, partly rebuilt and painted, bristling with bamboo scaffolding. In the courtyard a nanny goat and her kid are tethered. The goat is bleating, a melancholy, repetitive sound. Abass is given a Fanta, which he carries outside to sit and watch the goat. Two men are following the football at the bar, dressed in the typical attire of government utility workers. Ishmail leads Kai to a table in the back of the room.

  ‘I heard something about this man,’ he says presently, ‘the one you say was hit by a bicycle. I heard a stranger was hurt.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Ishmail shrugs. ‘People talk.’ He is sitting hunched over the table, facing Kai, one arm curled around his beer. He speaks in a low voice. ‘Some bad business.’

  ‘He was attacked,’ says Kai. He tells Ishmail all he knows about Agnes, Adrian’s imprudent visit to her house. The son-in-law.

  Ishmail nods as if somehow it all makes sense to him.

  ‘Do you know what it was about?’ asks Kai.

  Ishmail shakes his head. ‘There are some bad people here. You were not here during the fighting, you didn’t see. I was not here much of the time, but I was here before. I came back after and saw how things were different. Now they say it’s over, but it is not over. You see those men we passed?’

  ‘Who?’ Kai looks at the men at the bar.

  ‘No, not these ones. Them that we passed in that house. They arrived at that time and they are still here. People want them to go, but they don’t go. The government told the fighters to return to their own homes, but many stayed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe because they found a better life. Maybe because they have nowhere else to go.’ Ishmail shakes his head, positions his beer bottle on the damp cardboard mat, turns the label carefully round to face him and studies it. ‘So they stay. Why not?’

  ‘Was it one of them who attacked my friend?’

  This time Ishmail shakes his head emphatically. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He takes a drink of his beer. On the television a player misses a penalty. One of the men slams his bottle down on the table and exclaims. Ishmail picks at the label on his beer bottle and says no more. Kai decides to confide in Ishmail about his plans to go to America. His cousin grins and congratulates him, raises his beer bottle. They both drink.

  ‘When you get there send something small for me.’

  They finish drinking and Ishmail stands. ‘Let’s go,’ he says. Outside they collect Abass, who has collected some grass and leaves and laid them in front of the goat, though his offerings have gone untouched.

  ‘Maybe she’s thirsty,’ suggests Kai. As Abass goes to ask the kitchen for a bowl of water, Ishmail says, ‘This is a good friend of yours, this man who was beaten?’

  ‘Yes,’ answers Kai. ‘A good friend. Though he’s a visitor here, we have become close through the hospital. I stay at his place often. He wants to help.’

  Ishmail nods. ‘We should all have friends. Look at Abass. He can create friends across the species.’

  The goat is down on her front knees drinking from the bowl. Abass stands by happily, arms dangling at his sides. They walk out into the darkening streets, back the way they came, until at one point Ishmail turns away from their route saying, ‘Let us use this road. Perhaps I know somebody you can talk to.’ Kai follows, saying nothing. Presently they reach a house. A curtain hangs in front of the open door, glimmers of light behind. Ishmail knocks on the door frame, pushing the curtain gently aside. Kai waits. He hears Ishmail speaking to somebody. He is beckoned inside. A woman is sitting on a stool shelling groundnuts. She wipes her hands on her dress.

  ‘I have told her what it is you want to know,’ says Ishmail. ‘She is my wife’s aunt. She agrees to help you.’

  The woman offers him the back of her wrist. Kai touches it with the back of his own.

  ‘Agnes was not always this way,’ she says. ‘Before she was like you and me. And then she became crossed.’ She removes the stool from beneath her, brushes the seat and sets it down. ‘Please.’

  Kai sits.

  She offers him some of the groundnuts and leaves the room with Ishmail. Kai prepares to wait.

  How many hours he sat there he would not later recall. At some point the boy, sleepy and tired of waiting outside, crept in to be with him and Kai allowed him to stay, sheltered beneath the wing of his arm. People were sent for. A neighbour. A young woman without a smile. An older woman with a creased face and white hair. Kai waited and listened without interrupting or speaking except to greet each new arrival, watch while they took a seat and were told what was required of them. He didn’t speak even when they faltered; he offered no solace but left it to others. Each person told a part of the same story. And in telling another’s story, they told their own. Kai took what they had given him and placed it together with what he already knew and those things Adrian had told him.

  This was Agnes’s story, the story of Agnes and Naasu. In hushed voices, told behind a curtain in a quiet room and in the eye of the night, from the lips of many. By the time the last speaker had finished the moon was well past its zenith and Kai understood the storytellers’ courage.

  Mohammed remembered Naasu. How every Monday she walked the same route to the bus stop wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and a suit made of shiny fabric. Every Friday the bus carried her back, and this time she wore a simple cotton dress. On Monday when she walked to the bus stop, Mohammed and the other young motorbike-taxi riders would watch her pass from their place by the roundabout. Mohammed would sometimes offer her a lift and sometimes, too, she accepted. She would sit with her legs to one side and be carried down to the bus stop. A lot of young men had an idea they might put cola for Naasu, who was one of the finest girls in the town and from a good family. You could see it in the way she held herself. She had the job in the city department store. Some of the young men teased her. When are you coming to take me to the big city with you, Naasu? And she smiled and teased them back. She was bold, but in such a way as you understood there was nothing in it. For they had all known each other for a long time, they were her classmates. Everybody knew Naasu. Sometimes she stopped by her father at the nursery with fried doughnuts for his sweet tooth. They would sit on the frame of an old tractor. If Naasu was sitting with her father outside the nursery that meant it was a Friday, the day she returned from the city. During the curfew months she used to arrive home a little earlier, when the buses became cautious about travelling the roads at night. Naasu’s father and she ate sugared doughnuts sitting on the rusting frame of the old John Deere tractor the last Friday Naasu was home.

&nb
sp; Naasu was away in the city the day the thin men came to the town.

  This is what Mohammed remembers about Naasu.

  On market day, at six o’clock in the morning, Binta rose and dressed, washing from the bucket in the corner of the yard. By six-thirty she was ready to walk the half-mile to the town with her small basket of cucumbers and tomatoes. This was the part of the day she liked the best, the moments of quiet on the walk to the town past the sugar-cane fields. Within the hour the sun would be strong enough to dry the dew, drawing spirals of mist from the earth. As Binta passed the avenues of sugar cane she saw shadows moving between the rows. Somebody’s goats must have broken free.

  On the outskirts of the town she passed Agnes working in her vegetable garden. They called to one another. ‘Ng’ dirai?’ Agnes’s husband was there in the background; the rising sun lent a dark edge to the shape of his body. He was too far away for Binta to greet him, so she walked swiftly on, hoping to beat Agnes, whose tomatoes were always so plump and shiny, to the first of the customers.

  By eight o’clock Binta had set up her stall and the first buyers had already appeared. Agnes was there, two stalls away from Binta. A customer dropped a tomato and Binta bent to retrieve it, annoyed to see it had bruised and the skin was split. While she had her head below the level of the stall, she heard the sound of gunfire. She had heard it before, only never so close. All around her people started at the sound and began to move, some in one direction and some in another, like a herd of sheep on a road, uncertain in which direction safety lay. In the end they stood still.

  A group of men entered the square; one was talking into a megaphone, calling people to gather in the marketplace. This man was wearing fatigues and looked like a soldier. But the men with him were not like soldiers. Soldiers were given more rice than anybody else in the country and they carried the weight of it upon their bodies. These men were narrow and angular, curiously dressed. Jewellery and amulets around their necks, rows of bullets like necklaces, dark sunglasses. Others went barefoot and dressed in rags. Strange, thin men. They reminded Binta of the puppets from the shows she was taken to as a child. They had frightened her even then. The thin men ran around the houses, beating upon the doors and ordering the people outside. There were more sounds of gunfire, of splintering wood, the smell of smoke.

  The man with the megaphone ordered everybody to sit down. As new people arrived in the square they were pushed down to the ground. By the end only the man with the megaphone and his men remained standing. He announced his name: Colonel JaJa, and began to speak. Binta listened. At first the talk sounded to her like a political speech, with words like ‘government’ and ‘elections’. He told them the government had betrayed the people, and he spoke a name that before she had only read in the newspapers.

  And she realised who these people were and guessed everybody else did too.

  Binta’s mouth went dry.

  Colonel JaJa shouted an instruction and four of his men came forward bearing a pair of bamboo cages strung between poles. In these boxes were men, tightly huddled into the small space. One of the boxes was opened and the man brought out, an army soldier, Binta guessed, by what remained of his uniform. He struggled to stand and held his side where his uniform was darkly stained. A rope around his waist led to one of JaJa’s men, who pulled at it. The man on the end of the rope offered no resistance and only stumbled after him, his head lowered like a child playing bull. The commander lowered the megaphone from his lips and his words were lost to Binta. She couldn’t take her eyes off the soldier. She missed the motion of the hand to the belt, the drawing of the weapon, the way JaJa took lazy aim before he shot the army soldier in the head. She heard the sound of cheers and claps from JaJa’s men. Somebody near by said, ‘O Kuru.’ My God. The body lay in the dust; the legs thrashed and were still.

  A second cage was opened, another man brought forward. He held his bound hands up and Binta could tell he was begging for his life. Seconds later he too crumpled to the ground. Fear surged through the crowd, people began to panic. The commander spoke into the megaphone and warned them to remain still. Men were brought forward and ordered to move the bodies. Binta recognised them as the workers from the nursery, Agnes’s husband among them. She heard Agnes’s gasp.

  The report of the gun. JaJa’s voice. Agnes’s gasp. Other than these sounds it seemed to Binta everything she was watching happened in silence. Dark smoke drifted beyond the roofs of the houses and the dusty smell of burning brick reached the square, carrying with it the magnitude of what was happening that day.

  In the middle of the square Agnes’s husband, the eldest of the men, was struggling under the weight of one of the corpses. He was recently out of hospital, where he’d had a hernia operation. Agnes had talked to Binta about it. He stumbled, was hit by one of the thin men, and fell to the ground. The other nursery workers stood still. Binta saw them turn open-handed to JaJa, remonstrating, the way people do when they are afraid. From where she stood she could sense the anger in JaJa, for Binta had known men like him in her life. Men who yearned to inspire fear in others, and yet were angered when they saw it for it reminded them of themselves. The nursery men, though, seemed not to understand and kept coming, their palms turned upwards. Agnes’s husband clambered to his knees, holding his stomach, and reached out his free hand to touch JaJa. No, thought Binta. Don’t touch him. The old man’s fingers grasped at the Colonel’s clothing. The young commander stepped out of reach, then turned and walked away. For several seconds he stood motionless with his back to them all. Binta stopped breathing. Suddenly JaJa swung around and returned to the old man with a swift, unbroken stride, raised his weapon and shot him in the chest. There were screams. The sound of more shots, this time into the air. Somebody held on to Agnes, but there was nobody to hold her younger daughter Yalie, who ran to her father where he lay. The thin men gathered around laughing until one of them pulled her away. JaJa snatched a mattock from one of his men. Binta saw again the certainty in his movements. The thin men stood back while he hacked at the nursery worker’s neck with the blade, picked up the head and tossed it to Yalie, who instinctively reached out to catch it. The thin men cheered again.

  Agnes’s husband’s death was the first of many. Afterwards the thin men were unleashed upon the town. This was the advance party. Now the war is over she knows their name. G5. She has heard it broadcast on the radio. Responsible for ‘coordinating relations between the civilian population and the rebel movement’, according to the spokesman for the rebels. Some called it the Sensitisation Unit.

  There Binta stops speaking. Her hands have remained in her lap, still and quiet, her palms flat on her thighs, long, tapered fingers.

  The nursery was on the way into town, somebody explains to Kai. They took the men from there as they entered the town over the bridge.

  Yes, Kai nods.

  Eleven o’clock. In the chair is a woman in her fifties, cropped grey hair and a thin scar enfolded by the soft flesh of her cheeks. Isatta was in the refugee camps in Guinea with Agnes and with her two years later when they made the long journey by foot back to the town.

  In the camp it seemed they faced more dangers than on the outward journey. In the forest the dangers were from snakes, buffalo and rebel soldiers. In the camps there was hunger, typhoid and cold. But the greatest threat of all came from their own kind, gangs of men who searched the weak out from among the rest: those without family, women without menfolk. The first day they arrived Isatta and Agnes saw a row of girls lying at the edge of the camp, blood leaking from between their open legs. And on many mornings to come the bodies of young women were found dumped behind the tents, their lappas bunched around their waists. During the day families came to collect the bodies of their daughters. Those girls without family remained where they lay. Agnes and her two daughters were alone without men. So Isatta invited Agnes, Yalie and Marian to share a tent with her and her son. Just fifteen, Hassan had run out of time to become a man.

  They su
rvived by clinging to order: queuing for food, washing their clothes in the river, fetching water, hunting for firewood and edible plants in pairs. Scrubbing down the sides of the tent became a daily routine. In the evenings they slept together and Isatta’s son lay across the entrance. Outside lean shadows stalked between the tents. They prayed nobody would notice they were four women, protected only by a young boy. The refugees lived in fear of rebel raids, but those never came. Instead two cholera epidemics arrived within the first year. The third took Yalie. Marian died six months later, poisoned by a cut on her foot.

  The day after Marian’s death Agnes disappeared. Isatta and her son searched the camp until dusk drove them to their tent. All night Isatta lay awake, fearing for Agnes. For if age was a woman’s protection at home, it was no protection here. The next day she found Agnes sitting on the other side of the stream, unharmed. She guided her back to the tent. For days Agnes neither spoke, nor moved, nor ate. Isatta was not disturbed by Agnes, for many were the women who mourned in such a way.

  Order. Isatta never lost her belief in it. After a few days she urged Agnes on through a rigid routine of her own devising. Every morning after bathing they went to the Red Cross tent to check the list of new arrivals. In nearly two years Agnes had had no news of Naasu. But they’d both heard of the sacking of the city where they thought Naasu must be living – living without a father, a mother or a husband.

  The Red Cross tent was where people exchanged news of home. New arrivals were especially sought after, for the information they might bring with them. In this way they learned of the turn in events, the troops who had come from overseas, the regaining, mile by mile, of rebel-held territory. Now, after eighteen months of fighting, the government had almost reached the border and the camps. More and more of the new arrivals were people travelling from one refugee camp to another searching for loved ones. One day a Red Cross worker approached Agnes and asked her name. ‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘We are holding a message for you.’