The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

With the forceps he pulls at the end of a tendon. The forefinger of the woman unconscious upon the table moves as though beckoning to him.

  ‘Hold this,’ he says to the anaesthetist.

  He wonders if Tejani has ever attempted such an operation. He goes to the door and looks through the glass panel. The lower half of a human leg sits in a bucket on the floor. Mrs Goma is bent over, stitching a flap of folded skin over the remaining stump, neat as a hospital corner, watched by Jestina, the theatre nurse brought in to replace Mary. Kai knocks on the door and pokes his head inside.

  ‘Mrs Goma, may I borrow Jestina?’

  Two hours later and Kai has done his best. The woman will never play the piano, but she might wash and dress herself. Kai leaves the theatre through the swing doors. Up in emergency all is quiet. He passes Mrs Mara’s office. He should speak to her, tell her his plans, put things in motion. Outside the door he hesitates. He can hear her speaking on the telephone, calling for her assistant. A moment later Mrs Mara opens the door. How much older she looks, he thinks. She smiles. Kai is one of her favourites, he knows.

  ‘Hello. What are you doing there? Did you want to speak to me?’

  ‘No worries. It can wait.’

  ‘No, come on in.’

  ‘It might take a bit of time. I’ll come back later.’

  Mrs Mara smiles again. ‘OK. By the way, if you see Alex, tell him I’m looking for him.’

  ‘Will do.’ He smiles back at her, feeling like a hypocrite.

  After lunch in the staff room a game of boules is under way. As Kai opens the door a silver ball rolls across the black-and-white tiles towards him. Kai steps backwards. The ball comes to a full stop. One of the medics, a short man with a bald head, darts forward and measures the distance between two balls using his thumb and forefinger, and whoops. Kai never joins in these games, played mostly between the overseas staff. Today he thinks how pleasant it might be. He feels energised by the morning’s work. For a few minutes he sits, watches the silver balls rolling across the floor, gently knocking each other. There are things he could be doing: notes, correspondence. But Kai is in no mood for paperwork. He decides to take a turn around the hospital. Check in with emergency to see if there’s anything new. Maybe he’ll call in on Foday, purely for a social visit.

  Outside the sun shines between silvered black clouds. The air is hot, vibrating with the electricity of distant storms. Beneath the corrugated-iron shelter that passes as a waiting area, a dozen pairs of eyes follow his approach. Kai can sense the anticipation grow with his every pace, the collective deflation as he moves beyond them without calling a name or pointing at a patient to follow him. He heads up the ramp to the building when a man runs up behind him.

  ‘Yes, sir, Doctor!’

  Kai turns.

  ‘You are Dr Mansaray, yes?’

  Kai nods. ‘How can I help you?’

  The man, a slim, well-spoken Fula, says, ‘They told me you attended to my wife this morning. She had injured her hand.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Kai. ‘She’ll be on the ward now. It went well. In fact’ – he looks briefly at his watch, then at the doors to the emergency department – ‘we can go along now and see how she’s doing. Come with me.’

  Together they make their way along the covered walkways. Kai explains how the operation went, the best that could be expected. Possessed of no expectations of his own, the husband nods and thanks him again. Remembering the note on the woman’s history, Kai asks, ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was my fault, Doctor. My wife was very angry with her niece. She wanted to slap her. But I held on to her. Then my wife’s niece took this opportunity to say some bad things. My wife tried to break free from me and I let her go. This was my mistake. She went forward too fast and her hand broke the window.’

  It figures. An injury on such a scale would be hard to self-inflict. And Kai has never once treated a would-be suicide. War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly. Perhaps the Swedish doctor imagines himself trying to end it all if he lived here. No need therefore to refer her to Adrian, which in some ways is a shame.

  But Kai still needs to talk to Adrian. As soon as he’s finished with the woman and her husband, he’ll go to the apartment and, if Adrian isn’t there, this time he’ll leave a note. A drop of rain touches his arm. He quickens his pace.

  Several hours pass before Kai reaches Adrian’s apartment. The sky is reflected in discs of water across the courtyard. The waiting patients have gone home, to return another day. The building is quiet, even the children’s ward, where it is time for the afternoon nap. Kai passes it, deep in thought. He could take the opportunity to go and see Mrs Mara, though it can wait until another day. If Adrian is there perhaps Kai will suggest a beer someplace. It’s a long time since he relaxed. He’d like to talk to someone about his plans and there’s no one else to talk to. Not Seligmann or Mrs Mara. Not his cousin. He is about to take a step that will change his life, something he has never done before. Though in the past years his life had indeed changed immeasurably, none of it had been of his own doing. He’d imagined his life differently, both of them had, he and Tejani. War had frustrated all his hopes, shut out the light. Everything had ceased. The foreigners fled, the embassies shut down, no flights landed or took off from the airport for years. The country was a plague ship set adrift.

  Once, standing in an open space, he’d seen a commercial airliner pass overhead, on its way from one country to another, the sun golden upon its wings. It seemed incredible to him that there were people inside, drinking wine and eating from plastic trays, pressing a button for the hostess. Did they have any idea what was going on directly below them, a nation devouring itself? He felt like a drowning man watching a ship sail by.

  And afterwards, when it was finally over, he and Tejani caught up on three years of missed movies, watched Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 4, Keanu Reeves become freed from a virtual world only to return, people discover a lost island where the dinosaurs still roamed.

  How desperate they’d been to get out, they could hardly articulate it. It was never so much a feeling as a frenzy. As each one of his friends, family and classmates made it over the fence, Kai had felt pleased and bereft in equal measure. He had stayed. Nenebah had stayed. The difference between the two of them was that Nenebah, alone among their friends, family and acquaintances, never experienced the desire to leave. The more people left, the more fiercely she clung. She loved the country the way a parent loves the child who wounds them most. What happens if everyone leaves? She demanded he answer her question. She’d made him feel guilty.

  So now his turn has arrived and he has never felt more conflicted. For here in this building where he barely has a moment to himself, he has never been so sure of who he is. He can walk the corridors, courtyards and wards blindfolded. Out on the streets he is recognised by his patients and he in turn recognises them. The change had occurred outside of his awareness. In this place of terrifying dreams and long nights, he knows who he is.

  His rubber flip-flops suck at the wet concrete. A momentary breeze sends a shower of heavy raindrops from the branches of a tree down upon him. Kai lifts his head to the sky and feels the wind trail across his face. In his pocket he finds a mint, unwraps it and places it in his mouth.

  For a moment he is as he once was, before the war, during his university years. He is back there and whole again. The hospital buildings shrink, spread and grow into different buildings with different dimensions. The trees transform into flamboyant trees, like those on the campus, with white-painted trunks. The quadrangle becomes a lawn.

  He looks up, and sees her. There is Nenebah, she is walking towards him. For a moment he holds her in his gaze, her long-tailed scarf, books held to her chest. Then the present reasserts itself, the buildings resume their former shape, the concrete hardens. The woman who looks like Nenebah is still there.

  The woman does not look like Neneb
ah. It is Nenebah.

  He opens his mouth to call her name, but his voice fails him. For in the next instant he sees that the door of Adrian’s apartment is open and there is Adrian, coming out after her. He sees Adrian’s hand at her back, and the answer of her slight smile, he sees that they are together. He does not know how, but he knows this beyond doubt. He stands in the courtyard while the rain falls lightly on his shoulders. And he is drowning.

  CHAPTER 44

  ‘Yes please. Mr Adrian?’

  Adrian turns his gaze towards Salia, suddenly aware he hasn’t heard a word the man has been saying. ‘Sorry. Can you repeat that?’

  Salia regards Adrian for a moment, then repeats, with no hint of hurry or exasperation, what he has just said. From his other side Adrian is aware of Ileana watching him. He closes his eyes and takes a breath. With an effort of will he focuses upon the sound of Salia’s voice.

  An hour later the morning meeting is over. Adrian collects his papers for the group therapy session from the desk he keeps in Ileana’s office. Ileana follows him, stands in the middle of the room watching him.

  ‘Carry on ignoring me and I might throw something.’

  He turns to her. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit distracted.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean you to actually tell me about it. What I said was tell me about it. I can see you’re distracted. You OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ nods Adrian. He bends his head back to his desk, hears Ileana grunt and move away. He looks up. ‘Are you free for an early lunch?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I need to go and see my landlord about renewing the lease. Another time?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Minutes later Adrian makes his way over to the meeting room. He unlocks the door and leaves it standing ajar, moves around opening windows, lifting chairs from the stacks at the end of the room and arranging them into a circle. In his mind he returns to the events of the night a week before. Mamakay’s silence in the car. His own effort not to let himself be disturbed by it, though he was for some reason, and profoundly.

  In the end he’d said, ‘He called you Nenebah.’ The only way he could think of to get inside.

  ‘Yes,’ she’d replied, her face turned away from him.

  ‘Is that your name then?’ He sounded irritable, he knew, already the jealous lover. An image of Kai, of his bare arm and shoulder as he shrugged on a shirt.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t understand.’ The emotion moved so fast. He felt ridiculous. He strove for a normal tone. ‘I thought your name was Mamakay.’

  ‘Mamakay is my house name. I told you I was named after my aunt. Nenebah is my real name.’ She shrugged. He hated the gesture, the indifference it projected.

  ‘I see.’ And he’d thought he knew so much about her.

  It turned out he didn’t even know her name.

  A sound makes Adrian look up. Adecali has entered the room, wordlessly, and is helping with the chairs. Adecali is making progress, though he continues to be haunted by smells, most notably of cooked meat. Two weeks ago a trader set up outside the front gate of the hospital selling skewers of beef roasted over a charcoal fire. Ileana and Adrian had bought some for lunch, so had a few of the men who were not confined to their wards. One of them carried his portion back to a bed near Adecali. Ten minutes later Adrian was called to the ward, to find Adecali straining at his chains, blowing snot and saliva. Since that day Adrian has held several private sessions with Adecali, trying to encourage him to talk, which sometimes the young man did at an insistent babble and sometimes not at all. He was punctilious, though. Never missed a session. Small steps, steps in the sand. But in the right direction.

  ‘Thank you, Adecali,’ says Adrian.

  The other patients are beginning to appear, shuffling in to take their seats one by one. Whatever scepticism there had been among the staff at the hospital about his sessions – and Adrian had overheard one or two remarks from among the attendants – the men seemed to want them. Adrian found it had soon become unnecessary to go round the wards, for like Adecali they came of their own accord. Once, held up by the traffic, he arrived late to find them all waiting for him in silence outside the locked door.

  ‘OK,’ says Adrian, when they are all seated. ‘Who is going to begin today? Anyone?’

  The night before Adrian had slept fitfully and woken with the sun on his face. Mamakay was already up, preparing breakfast. They sat and ate in the yard. Adrian wished it was a Saturday so he didn’t have to go anywhere. He wanted to talk to her. There had been no lovemaking the night before and now they ate in silence. Adrian put down his plate.

  ‘You were close then?’ he asked her. They both knew exactly what he was talking about.

  ‘Yes, we were together when I was at university. I haven’t seen him for a long time. He wanted to go abroad. It’s what he always talked about.’

  ‘He’s a surgeon.’ Then when she didn’t say anything more, he asked, ‘He was the one you told me about. The one you said you loved.’

  And she’d chosen not to spare him at all, looked away and simply nodded.

  Five o’clock. Something is burning outside the walls of the hospital. A smell of woodsmoke, scented like cedar, the smell that woke Adrian a night soon after his arrival, the night he’d met Kai. He’d looked out into the corridor and seen a woman give birth to a dead baby. Kai was the first person Adrian had talked to properly since his arrival; they’d become friends. That was six months ago. How much has he learned since then? Sometimes it feels like a great deal, other times not much at all. Adrian lifts his eyes to the sky for a brief moment, enters the darkened corridor and makes his way to Elias Cole’s room.

  In his work Adrian has met many kinds of liar: pathological liars, compulsive liars, patients with different kinds of personality disorders. Broadly speaking though, when it comes down to it, there are just two types of liar: the fantasist and the purist. The fantasists are the embroiderers. Simplest to spot because they have a tendency to contradict. A liar should have a good memory, said Quintilian. The trouble with the fantasists is that, in their eagerness to impress, they become careless about the details. The purists, as Adrian thinks of them, are of distinctly cooler temperament. Intellectually-minded, they understand the fallibility of memory, prefer to lie by omission. The silent lie that can neither be proved nor disproved. The fantasists and the purists have one thing in common, and this they share with all liars – the pathological, the compulsive, the delusional, the ones who suppress and repress unbearable memories. They all lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth. And one thing Adrian’s two decades of study and practice have taught him is to discover the purpose served by the lie.

  Adrian raises his fist and knocks on the door of Elias Cole’s room. He cannot decide if he is in the mood for this or not. As he steps over the threshold the scent of woodsmoke disappears, to be replaced by another smell: clinical, like powdered aspirin. There is a new sound, too, a whirring. The oxygen concentrator.

  ‘So it came at last,’ he says.

  Elias Cole removes the mask from his face. ‘I take it as a sign of how bad things must be. People like to leave it to the end before they salve their consciences.’

  How true, thinks Adrian. He sits down, crosses his legs and laces his fingers, copybook pose of the clinical psychologist. ‘What did you want to talk about today? Was there anything in particular?’

  The last time they had been talking about Mamakay, but Adrian would rather speak of anything now than her. To his relief Elias Cole shakes his head slowly.

  ‘I’ve told you what there is to tell. Now all I want is to die in peace.’

  For the first time Adrian feels a faint, cold gust of hostility towards Elias Cole. He says, ‘Something that interests me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why did Johnson agree to release you? After your arrest?’r />
  Adrian sees Elias Cole shift slightly, and turn to look at him. His surprise is small but evident. ‘The Dean knew Johnson. He had some way to him. That was how he was able to come and see me when I was in custody. But for him I would probably still be there to this day.’ He laughs softly, abruptly.

  Adrian doesn’t laugh. He continues, ‘The Dean asked you to cooperate …’

  The old man interrupts. ‘I told Johnson what I knew, which anyway was nothing of consequence.’

  ‘But you said you’d already told him everything. You held nothing back.’

  ‘I had tried. Johnson was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t believe me until the Dean’s intervention.’

  Adrian continues, gently insistent. He has never spoken to Elias Cole this way, has taken him at his word. ‘When we spoke about those events, or rather when you told me what had happened, you used a very specific word. You used the word “arrangement”. The Dean said all you needed to do was come to an arrangement with Johnson.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Repeating what you had already told Johnson doesn’t quite fit the description, somehow. Surely he would have wanted something more. As you say he was a proud man. Some sign of victory would have been important.’

  Elias Cole is silent. He purses his lips, turns his head away from Adrian. He lifts the plastic mask, places it over his mouth and nose and inhales. Finally he speaks. ‘The Dean asked me to give Johnson my notebooks. I used to write down much of what happened. That’s something I told you. They were not diaries as such, more notes to myself, aides memoires. There were times, dates, places, people’s names. I kept a note of Julius’s movements and Saffia’s. It was something I did. There was a note of the first time I had seen him, addressing the students – although, of course, on that occasion I was sent along by the Dean. Also of the first dinner I attended at their house. The conversation when Julius proposed a toast to the first black man on the moon. The same phrase that appeared in the newspaper editorial. I think I even made a note of the music that was played. It was all there. Johnson pounced on it, of course.’