The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

  The message had been there for a month. It was from Naasu, searching for her father, her mother and sisters.

  Naasu travelled to the halfway point of their journey home to meet them. Agnes, Isatta and Hassan had walked the distance. Now there were vehicles on the roads and with Naasu’s money they were able to obtain transport the rest of the way.

  In the back of the poda poda Naasu told her story. She had stayed in the city for almost a year, sheltering in the house of a workmate. After the arrival of the foreign troops she waited until she heard it was safe to return to her home town, fourteen months after the Friday when she had sat with her father and eaten doughnuts on the John Deere tractor. Agnes embraced Naasu and said her father and sisters were dead and in her choice of words let Naasu believe they had all died in the camps together. Naasu wept. Isatta stared at Naasu. So beautiful and healthy: there was flesh on her arms, her hair was black where theirs had turned dry and red. Such elegant clothes. Naasu explained that she had met a man who offered to take care of her and she had married him. She begged her mother’s forgiveness for marrying without her permission and Agnes gave it easily, for a good man was what she had prayed Naasu might find. That at least was God’s true work.

  Then Naasu reached across, took her mother’s hand and placed it on her belly. Agnes felt the roundness of her daughter’s stomach and for the first time Isatta saw her friend cry.

  In this way they made the journey home.

  The marketplace was empty, they saw nobody. Many houses were abandoned, others destroyed. They reached Agnes’s home first and what she saw silenced Isatta. The house was neat and the plaster was new. Chairs stood on the verandah much as they had two years before. It was all her husband’s doing, Naasu told them as she ran up the stairs. It was nearly dark and she invited Isatta and her son to eat with them and to stay the night. Since the food they had brought with them was finished, Isatta accepted. The three waited while Naasu went to find her husband. Isatta thought of her own house and wondered what she would find the next morning. She was happy for Agnes and envied her, too. Soon Naasu returned, her new husband following behind. Naasu was smiling, a sheen of excitement upon her skin as she brought him forward to greet her mother. The man stepped out from under the eaves of the house and into what remained of the light.

  The old woman stops speaking. She is no longer looking at Kai, but down at her own lap. He can hear her breathing. There is silence. Somebody in the room urges her to continue. It is Ishmail’s aunt. The old woman looks to her and then back down at her hands.

  ‘What did you see?’ asks Kai, speaking for the first time.

  She swallows and her voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘I saw JaJa.’

  They are driving through the dark. Abass wide awake in the passenger seat, buckled in by his seat belt. Kai drives at some speed, propelled by what lies behind him, slowing for the bright lights that come at him out of the darkness.

  Ishmail had accompanied him as they made their way slowly down darkened streets back to Old Faithful. Kai unlocked the car and Abass climbed inside. He turned to Ishmail and put out his hand. Automatically, they clasped hands and clicked thumbs and fingers. Kai thanked him. Ishmail inclined his head. They stood awhile in silence until, as though in completion of some shared observation, Ishmail sighed and said, ‘So now you see us here. This is God’s wish.’

  ‘Is that what you believe?’

  ‘You ask me one day, I would answer no, I don’t believe it. You ask me the next day, after these things have occurred, I would not know how to answer you. Such things happened everywhere, for what reason I cannot tell you.’

  ‘No.’ Kai sighed and shook his head. ‘Nobody can.’

  ‘So what is there to do but pray?’

  Kai hadn’t answered. Instead he embraced his cousin, slipped behind the wheel of the vehicle and drove out of the town.

  He remembers now that they’ve eaten nothing since the chicken they bought in the marketplace. He pulls over at the next junction and buys four ears of roast corn. They drive on.

  ‘Better?’ he says to Abass.

  The boy nods. He has been silent since they left the town. Instead he has been sitting, watchful and still, gazing at the darkness ahead of them, unblinking even in the face of the oncoming headlights.

  ‘So the man killed the lady’s husband and then he married her daughter,’ Abass says.

  Kai doesn’t spare the child, but replies, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now she has to live with him and keep quiet because her daughter doesn’t know what he did.’

  He had been listening to every word spoken in the house.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Kai.

  ‘And everybody else keeps quiet, too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about us?’

  Kai turns briefly to look at Abass, who does not return his look but stares straight ahead. The darkness seems to hurtle at them, breaking apart on the windscreen and closing up again in their wake. Abass says, ‘Do we have to keep quiet?’

  ‘No,’ says Kai. ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘What if we lived in that town? Would we have to be quiet then?’

  In the silence all Kai can hear is the rush of air. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  The hospital is in darkness, save for the glow of security lights. Kai and Abass pass the wards. A door stands ajar; through the gap he can see a nurse at her station. Hushed footsteps, whispers, the slow squeak of wheels and of rubber on lino.

  Kai unlocks the door of Adrian’s apartment and switches on the main lights. There are the books, the pair of mugs on the table undisturbed since morning. He turns and leaves.

  CHAPTER 38

  Adrian reaches Elias Cole’s room at a quarter past four. Fifteen minutes late. A downpour and an overflowed gutter halted traffic in the streets. He’d stopped by his apartment for a change of clothing. On the door of the old man’s room hangs a laminated sign: No Visitors. He stops short with his hand upon the doorknob, hesitates and withdraws it. Then he turns and walks away.

  CHAPTER 39

  The young man shifts in his chair and surveys his feet. His voice is almost inaudible. The others seated in the circle of chairs watch him, as if from a distance.

  ‘Here.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘They put it inside your head. Afterwards you are powerful. You do battle.’ On the cheekbone below his temple is a series of short, thick keloid scars. His name is Soulay.

  Ileana had given Adrian Soulay’s records before the start of the session. A government soldier turned rebel, he’d then been recruited back into the army as part of a new deal. It hadn’t worked. In a second shake-up, Soulay had been discharged. He’d worked as a security guard, but failed to hold on to any of his jobs. Soulay had a prolonged history of violence and erratic behaviour and also suffered agonising headaches, which he claimed were due to the drugs he’d been given. Adrian doubted the two were connected, though that fact made the migraines no less real.

  ‘What was the last dream you had?’

  The young man shakes his head. It is slow going. A shuffling and a snorted laugh from somebody in the room. Adecali.

  ‘Yes?’ says Adrian, turning to look at Adecali.

  He is becoming used to the laughter now. Strange and surreal, it permeates so many moments, not just in the hospital but outside. A memory of Mamakay comes to him, as one seems to every few minutes, of her translating for him a phrase he’d heard and not understood. ‘It means, “I fall down, I get up again.” When somebody asks how you are, perhaps you can’t honestly answer that you are fine. That’s what it is saying.’ Grim humour. Adrian pulls himself back to the present.

  ‘What is it, Adecali? What do you want to say?’

  ‘He hollers for his mama. He jumps out of his bed.’ Adecali suffers nightmares, too. Also incontinence. He has a terror of fire, of the wicks of oil lamps, matches, lighters. Nobody knew precisely from where this stemmed and Adrian wonders what memories fire brings back to Adecali,
who also suffers from a complex combination of twitches and a stammer. ‘M-m-m-mama’. Of the four patients in the room, he appears the most outwardly deranged.

  ‘Would you like to talk about any of your dreams?’ Adrian finds the sessions demanding. By the end he is exhausted. He is also exhilarated. It is what he has longed for.

  Adecali drops his gaze and shuts his mouth.

  ‘We are here to listen and to help each other.’

  They are nothing if not compliant. Boys, still. Their commanders had taken the place of their parents and now they look to Adrian. None had questioned the purpose of the sessions, or considered their right to attend or not. They did as they were told, as they always had. Now the effort of attempting to obey causes Adecali to knead his brow.

  ‘I dream. It is such that I am afraid to sleep. But it m-m-m-makes no sense. Sometimes in the day they come, sometimes by night.’ His fingers work upon his forehead. ‘Sometimes I smell something that is not there.’

  ‘Take your time.’ Adrian urges Adecali on, careful not to push the pace too much. ‘What is it you smell?’

  ‘I smell roast meats. I hear screaming and banging. And then I smell roasted meat.’

  In the afternoon Adrian has a meeting with Attila. He makes his way to the man’s office, forces himself to drop his shoulders, to take deep breaths of the sea-dampened air and walks on past the ornamental palms, the edges of whose great leaves move in the wind, creating a rattling sound which reminds him, as it did the first time, of the spinnakers of yachts at the quay in Norwich. High in the sky a pair of vultures wheel on the rising currents.

  Five minutes later he is in the seat opposite Attila. Attila leans far back into his chair, elbows on the table, fingers laced, considering Adrian from beneath hooded lids. He loves a game of cat and mouse, thinks Adrian. Still, it was true to say that though the chief psychiatrist had more or less ignored Adrian he’d also given him the free run of the hospital, had not hampered his efforts. Adrian clears his throat and begins to speak, describing the sessions, their nature, the patients he selected to attend and the reasons for those choices. His choice was heavily determined by whether or not they spoke English, something he does not mention now. Attila listens in silence.

  When Adrian has finished he waits for Attila’s response, noticing for the first time the glossy darkness beneath the other man’s eyes. Despite the robustness of his physique, he looks exhausted. Attila leans across and moves a pen a few inches across his desk, shifts a paper or two. It is all an act, thinks Adrian, this ponderousness. Attila is sly and quick and clever. He is dedicated to what he does. Nobody else would do this job.

  Adrian likes him, he wishes he could tell him so.

  ‘What do you aim to achieve with these sessions?’

  The cat pawing the mouse.

  ‘To return the men to normality, to some degree of normality. So they can live their lives. Achieve everything anyone else could expect to achieve.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What is it they can expect to achieve?’

  ‘To hold down a job. To enjoy a relationship. To marry and have children.’

  Atilla nods his head briskly. Suddenly he places his palms flat on the table and pushes himself up. ‘I have to attend a meeting at the Health Ministry. Why don’t you ride along with me?’

  Adrian, who has things he could do, though nothing that could in any way be called urgent, senses this is a moment to comply. It is in the interests of his relationship with this awkward, heavy man.

  ‘Of course.’

  Adrian follows Attila out, waits while he selects a key from a large bunch and locks his office door, then follows him to the front entrance of the hospital. Attila eases his bulk behind the wheel of his car, Adrian slides into the passenger seat. They pass through the centre of town, past the turning to the old department store. It is hot and Attila’s car does not have air conditioning. Adrian feels the sweat on his shirt and the back of his thighs.

  Now they are away from the grid of roads, the traffic moves more freely here; a light breeze enters the vehicle. Adrian might have been relieved, except the breeze carries with it a foul odour of rotted fish and the high, sweet smell of sewage. The road leads sharply downhill. Tin huts reach out in either direction, an endless landscape of rusted tin. On the right is the sea. Not the green-blue sea visible from the campus, but water the colour of shit. Attila slows the car. Neither of them had spoken during the drive. Now Attila says in a conversational tone, ‘A few years back a medical team came here. They were here to survey the population.’

  He pulls over, applies the handbrake and looks out of Adrian’s window, like a tourist pausing to appreciate the view. Ahead of them two shirtless men labour to push a cart loaded with scrap metal up the hill. Their bodies are lean and muscled, glowing with sweat and sun. A filthy dog, with perhaps the worst case of mange Adrian has ever seen, trots across the road. There are people moving in, out and around the huts. The rush of air as a car passes brings a fresh gust of the terrible smell.

  ‘Do you know what they concluded?’

  Adrian shakes his head. Attila has said neither who the researchers were nor indicated the purpose of the study.

  ‘They were here for six weeks. They sent me a copy of the paper. The conclusion they reached was that ninety-nine per cent of the population was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’ He laughs cheerlessly. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder! What do you think of that?’

  Adrian, who is entirely unsure what is expected of him, answers, ‘The figure seems high but strikes me as entirely possible. From everything I’ve heard.’

  ‘When I ask you what you expect to achieve for these men, you say you want to return them to normality. So then I must ask you, whose normality? Yours? Mine? So they can put on a suit and sit in an air-conditioned office? You think that will ever happen?’

  ‘No,’ says Adrian, feeling under attack. ‘But therapy can help them to cope with their experiences of war.’

  ‘This is their reality. And who is going to come and give the people who live here therapy to cope with this?’ asks Attila and waves a hand at the view. ‘You call it a disorder, my friend. We call it life.’ He shifts the car into first gear and begins to move forward. ‘And do you know what these visitors recommended at the end of their report? Another one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to engage in even more research.’ He utters the same bitter chuckle. ‘What do you need to know that you cannot tell just by looking, eh? But you know, these hotels are really quite expensive. Western rates. Television. Minibar.’ He looks across at Adrian. ‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘you carry on with your work. Just remember what it is you are returning them to.’

  It is as close as he has ever come to praise.

  Attila drops Adrian off outside the government building and walks away, leaving Adrian standing in the car park. As he makes his way to the main road to hail a taxi he considers Attila’s words. He recalls the conversation with Kai, two months ago now, after the attack by Agnes’s son-in-law. This is our country. He was rejecting Adrian’s offer of help. It was this that had stung so much, the idea he was neither wanted nor needed. It had simply never occurred to him.

  Attila. The man is right, of course. People here don’t need therapy so much as hope. But the hope has to be real – Attila’s warning to Adrian. I fall down, I get up. Westerners Adrian has met despise the fatalism. But perhaps it is the way people have found to survive.

  Saturday. The air is so still the woodsmoke from cooking fires lifts vertically into the air. The clouds are unmoving in the sky. Everything is quiet. No traffic on the roads. Even the birds are silent. Adrian is sipping coffee on the verandah of Mamakay’s upstairs neighbour.

  ‘I should be going,’ he says, meaning the opposite. He wants to know whether she is available for the rest of the day.

  ‘You can’t.’

  He smiles. ‘Can’t I?’ he asks teasingly. ‘Why not?’<
br />
  And she answers, ‘No, I mean you really can’t go. It’s Cleaning Saturday.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means you have to stay in until midday, to clean your yard. Nobody is allowed on the streets except to clean them.’

  He has never heard of it before. Mamakay explains. One of the juntas introduced the cleaning days. Their first act in power. By making everyone clean their neighbourhood on the last Saturday of the month they transformed the city. The optimism was short-lived. In the years that followed the capital was sacked twice. Still, Cleaning Saturdays survived and that was something.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I was out this morning. Before you woke up.’

  The quiet, the absence of traffic on the roads is explained. Now that they are trapped here for two hours Adrian fetches his sketchbook and pencils; he plans to sketch a view of the dovecote, but instead he begins to sketch Mamakay’s profile as she sits with her back to the morning light. He hasn’t attempted a human figure since his days at school. But Mamakay is unselfconscious, does not stiffen or attempt to arrange herself into a more formal or flattering pose, indeed she is not bothered to pose at all and moves as she pleases. Adrian draws freely: a series of small, rough sketches, attempting to capture the curve of her spine, the swell of muscle at the back of her thigh, the line of a heel.

  ‘Babagaleh tells me you spend time with my father.’ She is sitting on the armrest of the sofa, watching him.

  Adrian draws the line from Mamakay’s chin to her collarbone. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘To talk.’

  She nods, rests her chin upon her arm and switches her gaze out over the balcony.

  There had always been uncertainty in Adrian’s mind about the exact nature of his relationship with Elias Cole. Elias had never identified a specific problem or asked for help. He certainly didn’t seem to suffer any neuroses. A long time ago, almost from the start, Adrian had given up treating Elias as a case or even a possible case. He kept clinical notes because he felt it was the least that was required of him. Elias seemed to him to be a lonely man in search of a peaceful death. Adrian might have been priest, imam, counsellor or layman.