The Memory of Love (14 page)

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, was 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.

Four operations, then. Two to straighten the calves. Two to correct the ankles. And then the months of physiotherapy. Kai has no doubt Foday will see it through. He is a fighter.

A surgeon, recently arrived from Geneva, had passed by as Kai was examining the X-rays, stopped to look. He had been both shocked and excited.

‘Do you know how often we see this in Switzerland?’

‘How often?’ Kai obliged.

‘Never. Not once in my career. Tell me when you’re operating. I’d like the opportunity to observe. If I may?’ And he had bowed slightly, as though Kai was the senior of the two.

The war was medieval neither in concept nor in tactics, whatever the view from elsewhere, only in the hardware. From the outset the patients came in two classes. There were the soldiers and foreign peacekeepers, victims mostly of gunshot wounds, sometimes grenade and mortar wounds. In the second class were the peasants, the ones who somehow made it from their villages and were admitted with a
C
scrawled heavily on their charts. Unarmed and poor, the waste of a bullet wasn’t so much resented as simply unnecessary. They were the victims of attacks using machetes and cutlasses.
C
. The doctor’s own shorthand adapted to the circumstances.
C. Cleaved
. Kai gained hundreds of hours of experience in repairs, stitching layers of muscle, sewing skin, patching holes with pieces from elsewhere. Surgical housekeeping. Late in the war, the rebels advanced upon the capital and in advance of them came the first of the amputees. Mostly the team of surgeons concerned themselves with saving lives, cutting away necrotised flesh, repairing the ‘hatchet jobs’, the way they once, in peacetime, referred to the work of lesser surgeons. Though there were occasions, a few, when the attackers had been either merciful or inept, when it had been possible to reattach a tendon and restore a walk. Later a team of surgeons including Kai practised the Krukenberg intervention, unused since the First World War, fashioning out of the muscles and two bones of the wrist a pair of blunted pincers: a hand. Ugly, it was true. But Kai had seen a man once again able to hold his own penis when he pissed, a mother place a nipple into her child’s mouth. In those months of turmoil, Kai had discovered a new and enduring love, of orthopaedic surgery. Still a junior surgeon, he had seen and dealt with more than some consultants of thirty years.

Six o’clock now. Kai heads for the men’s changing room, where he exchanges his scrubs for day clothes. Now he is hungry. On the way home he stops at the roadside and buys okra, onions, peppers and smoked fish from the women traders. No meat, too late for the butchers. He hails a taxi, a shared one, and checks the route. The driver is going via the peninsula bridge. Kai lets him go, waves the next taxi down.

On his way up the road towards the house he sees Abass hanging over the verandah railings. Kai raises a hand. The boy turns to rush down the stairs. As Kai opens the door in the metal gate, the child hurtles towards him throwing his full weight against his stomach, arms around his waist. Kai braces; all the same the impact very nearly winds him.

‘Hey, my man. You’re almost too big for that. How goes it?’

The child doesn’t reply, but pulls Kai’s arm around him and buries his face in his side. Together they walk up to the house.

‘Is your mother home?’

‘Yes. But she’s gone out again. She told me to tell you. To Yeama,’ Abass answers in his deep, little man’s voice.

Yeama is a neighbour whose sister-in-law died in childbirth. Yeama has been left with the infant. The father, serving with the army on the northern border, has no idea yet of either the arrival of his daughter or the death of his new wife. Abass’s mother, Kai’s cousin, makes visits bearing baby clothes and tins of formula to Yeama’s tiny house. The child was born prematurely: Kai doesn’t imagine she’ll live too long.