The Memory of Love (41 page)

All except Elias Cole. The thought strikes him for the first time. On the paper the line of pencil lead loses its way and tapers off. All except Elias Cole. Adrian frowns, his head still bent to the paper.

Mamakay is speaking. He looks up. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘I asked how your drawings are.’

‘Oh fine. I think. Yes, I’m quite pleased. You’re easy to draw. Does that sound foolish? Perhaps it does.’

‘No,’ says Mamakay. ‘It doesn’t. Though I can’t draw. My mother could draw. Plants. She was a botanist.’

‘What was your home life like?’

‘My parents weren’t especially close, I was the go-between. I remember outings with my mother and outings with my father. I don’t remember any outings with my mother
and
my father. My mother kept to herself a lot, though she would sometimes take me to collect specimens. I used to dry my own flowers, I had a little press and everything. But I didn’t like the way the pressed flowers looked, the colour and life all gone from them. My father, he took me to Sunday school and told me stories, he talked to me about history.’

‘Is that why you chose history?’

‘Yes. When I was older I was allowed to help with his research, fetching books from the library and marking the relevant pages. It made me feel very important. He took me to the archives at the university. We would discuss subjects, whatever he was writing about. I guess I wanted to please him. As little girls do.’

‘But you never finished your degree.’

‘No.’

Adrian waits for Mamakay to continue, but she does not. For the second time Adrian has a sense of something unspoken. Mamakay breaks her pose and stands up to lean over the balcony. It occurs to him that he has barely ever seen her at the hospital. Only that once, talking with Babagaleh. He’s never seen her visit her father, though imagines she must do. She turns to face him, her back to the light. He cannot read her expression.

‘It’s midday,’ she says. ‘We’re free.’

CHAPTER 40

In the sack carried over his shoulder he had a loaf of stale bread, some onions, a piece of meat wrapped in paper. A man stopped and asked him for food, Kai shook his head, but the man persisted, and reached out to touch Kai. The touch made Kai angry. He knocked the man’s hand away. But the man would not be deterred and touched him again. Kai turned around to confront him and saw it was the soldier from the hospital, unmistakable from the nature of his injury. Part of the man’s face was missing, most of the lower jaw had been blasted away, leaving the roof of his mouth and teeth exposed. He was in the country serving with the foreign task force. Kai had found him sitting on the floor of the hospital corridor, next to a three-hour-old corpse and a pool of oily, blackened blood, lucid still and in remarkably good spirits, believing himself saved. Kai knew he was going to die
.

But something was wrong. What was he doing here? Kai could see the huge tongue flapping obscenely as the man tried to talk to him. Kai understood he was hungry and asking for food. Kai didn’t want to give him any, but the ruined face loomed in front of him. He swung the sack from his shoulder and bent to open it, but when he looked up the man was sauntering away down the road, whistling an Elvis song
.

Kai began to run. Suddenly the man was behind him, following him, gaining on him in great bounds. In a moment he would catch him. Kai needed to reach Nenebah’s house. But he did not want to lead the freakish man there, so he switched direction. Running was becoming hard work: to make his legs move required every fibre of his being. Despite himself he was slowing. He felt the man gaining on him. And there ahead of them both, the bridge road, long and empty. The man had overtaken him and was running straight for it. Stop! Kai wanted to shout. The man kept on going, Kai behind him. They were on the bridge now. Kai could not see to the end, only the soldier ahead of him. The bridge began to break up, he couldn’t keep his footing. He felt himself falling. He opened his mouth to scream, but the force of the wind knocked the air out of his lungs
.

He wakes with a start. He is sitting on a chair in the staff room. Around the coffee table three doctors and a nurse are talking between themselves. At the computer Seligmann works and whistles ‘Love me Tender’. Kai sits still. His breathing is heavy, his armpits damp. Sweat trickles down his neck. He looks to see if he has been observed, but his other colleagues continue talking between themselves. He waits another minute, then goes to the bathroom and splashes water on his face. Cupping his hand under the tap he drinks. He looks at his face in the mirror and thinks of Nenebah.

Throughout the second invasion he had acted as a lifeline to the household. As a doctor he was given transport and protection. He used his influence to acquire small amounts of food. The city was split into two, one side under rebel control, the other side under the control of the government troops and task force. A bridge divided the city, though not the one from his dream. This one spanned the east of the city to the west. The besieged residents of the west were trapped by the rebel army on one side, the sea and mountains on the other side.

Kai leaves the staff room and crosses the quad towards Adrian’s apartment. A light rain is falling, dampening the heat. He has set aside this afternoon to advance his application to work in the US. Despite Tejani’s assurances the quantity of paperwork is daunting. References, certified copies of his degree and other medical qualifications, his birth certificate. The records offices in town had been looted and burned, adding to the challenge. He is also required to undergo a full medical. This should be easy enough to arrange, except that Kai hasn’t yet told anyone at the hospital of his plans. The same goes for references. Who should he ask? Seligmann? To do so would seem like a betrayal.

He ponders matters as he walks down the corridor towards the flat.

At home two evenings ago, Kai had been sitting studying some of the forms. Abass had come in, tired from playing, and lain, legs and arms draped across the back of the sofa, his chin resting on Kai’s shoulder. From there he’d read the paper in Kai’s hand and asked in a loud, enquiring voice, ‘What’s the Department of Immigration?’

Kai felt his cousin’s quick glance as she looked up from her book.

‘Do you know how rude it is to read over another person’s shoulder?’ he said to Abass. Placing the papers face down on the coffee table, he hauled the child off the back of the sofa and began to tickle him, felt his cousin’s covert gaze upon them both.

Inside the empty apartment Kai sits on the cane sofa and places the envelope of papers before him. He fetches himself a glass of water from the kitchen, sorts the papers into a single pile and begins to read through them. For ten minutes he works in this way, before getting up to turn on the fan. The rain, as it does so often, has brought only temporary relief, clearing the clouds away only for the sun’s rays to shine through more strongly. Kai hasn’t seen Adrian in weeks now. Work at the mental hospital must be keeping him busy. Kai hasn’t even managed to tell him of his return trip to Agnes’s home town. He must do so.

In the days following the visit Kai had thought a lot about the woman’s story. He didn’t dwell on the more gruesome facts, for atrocities such as these were the facts of war. He’d administered to the consequences of them often enough. In Agnes’s case it was the unbearable aftermath, the knowledge, and nothing to be done but to endure it. For a while Kai had dreamt even more than was usual. And though they were
his
dreams,
his
own experiences, to him they were in some way connected to Agnes.

On the table, a reference book belonging to Adrian. Kai picks it up and it falls open in the place where the spine is broken. Idly, he turns the book over to read the title.
A History of Mental Illness
. Kai returns to the text and reads, guided by Adrian’s markings and annotations, at first casually and then with greater intensity:

Fugue. Characterised by sudden, unexpected travel away from home. Irresistible wandering, often coupled with subsequent amnesia. A rarely diagnosed dissociative condition in which the mind creates an alternative state. This state may be considered a place of safety, a refuge
.

During his life as a surgeon Kai has seen people arrive at the hospital with terrible injuries, wounds that would seem to defy their ability to retain consciousness, let alone walk or talk.

Once during the war, he and the other hospital staff had been called outside to attend the passengers of a truck that had arrived from the provinces. The first person Kai helped down from the tailgate was a woman, both of whose hands were almost entirely severed, they flapped from her wrists like broken wings. He’d seen a man, hopping, clutching his own amputated foot in both hands. There were dozens of them, men, women, children. Some had survived for days in the bush. In the theatre Kai worked harder, faster and more furiously than he had ever done in his life.

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance.
The mind creates an alternative state
.

Kai thinks of the conversation with Adrian here in the kitchen the evening after Adrian had been attacked by JaJa. Kai had presumed JaJa to be a common hoodlum, a drug smuggler. He’d understood little about Agnes’s sickness, except what Adrian had told him. Adrian said Agnes’s journeys, the kind of journeys described in the book, were made because she was looking for something.

But Agnes isn’t searching for anything.

She is fleeing something. She is running away from intolerable circumstances. Escaping the house, her daughter, most of all escaping JaJa. The difference between Agnes and the injured people who arrive at the hospital is that for Agnes there is no possibility of sanctuary.

Kai replaces the book on the table. He must talk to Adrian. Adrian deserves to know. Whatever comes next, if anything, is for the future. He will wait here for Adrian.

He looks at his watch. Two-thirty. Suddenly he is exhausted. He stretches out on the sofa and within minutes is asleep. Images pass in front of his eyelids, a waste of burned buildings, of flailing limbs, sometimes Foday walking and smiling, other times people – those from the truck, without hands and feet. Balia the young nurse smiling shyly at him. In his ears the chatter of the man with his jaw missing.

There is no coherence, nothing that amounts to a nightmare. Just a record of images that float before him.

Thus he sleeps.

CHAPTER 41

Adrian makes his way to Elias Cole’s room direct from his meeting with Mrs Mara. The meeting had not gone especially well. The new oxygen concentrators were held up in customs.

‘He could die,’ said Adrian.

‘He’s dying anyway,’ she’d replied. ‘We’re talking extra weeks or months.’

Perhaps he shouldn’t have pressed it but he did. Suddenly Mrs Mara stopped talking, sat down heavily and rubbed her eyelids. Adrian felt like a bully.

Now memories of his last conversation with Mamakay reverberate as he crosses the courtyard. Here in the land of the mute, Elias Cole has elected to talk. It has never occurred to Adrian to ask why, just as he never questions the presence of a patient in his office, only asks how he might be able to help them. The difference between Elias Cole and the men at the mental hospital, as well as those early patients Adrian saw, is that Cole is educated. The more education a person has received, the more capable of articulating their experiences they are. Also of intellectualising them, of course. Those with less education tend to express their conflicts physically through violence or psychosomatically: deafness, blindness, muteness, paralysis, hallucinations – visual and olfactory. Adecali’s roasting meat.

It isn’t considered acceptable to talk about these differences outside psychiatric circles, but this is the fact of the matter. In Adrian’s opinion the second category of patients are much more straightforward to treat; the first hold the interesting challenges. He steps into Elias Cole’s room.

‘How are you?’

‘I am exactly as you see me,’ says Elias Cole. ‘Surviving.’ He coughs and spits into a handkerchief. ‘I apologise about last week. The doctors feel I have been straining myself. They tell me I should try not to talk.’ He gives a colourless laugh. ‘I sent Babagaleh with a message, but he was unable to find you.’ He looks at Adrian, who feels a spasm of guilt. He wonders what Elias Cole knows, whether there is anything contained in his look.

‘I’m sorry,’ he replies. ‘When I’m not here I’m generally at the mental hospital.’

‘Ah! And how are the inmates? I hope you are bringing them peace.’

‘It’s interesting you should say that. Is peace what you’d like for yourself?’

That look again. What does it hold, exactly? Mamakay has inherited it, though in her it appears more amused, less calculated. Adrian doesn’t entirely expect Cole to answer, but then the old man says, ‘I told you once there were two endings to this story: we are but waiting for the third.’

*

My promotion to the position of Dean coincided with our move away from the campus. There was no doubt things had changed. The campus was not the place it had once been. There were troublemakers among the student fraternity. As it happened I had done well enough over the years to build a house, an ambition I had nurtured for some time.

The new house was in the west of the city. I had the good fortune to be able to buy several town lots together and the house boasted a sizeable garden. After years on campus where the grounds were taken care of by a team of workers, Saffia had her own garden again. She set to work terracing the land, planting an orchard towards the rear, lawns and formal beds at the front.

As for me, my work at the university kept me occupied. The Dean had been promoted to the position of Vice Chancellor. There were shortages and frequent power cuts. There were strikes and petitions – the young by then so different from my day. They seemed to think we could magic light out of the darkness and were convinced they must find somebody to blame.

We had been married for twenty-one years and lived in our new house for four.

It doesn’t make me proud to tell you I was elsewhere that day. So it happened that Babagaleh was first to hear the news.

This is your first rainy season, so you see now how the rains behave in this part of the world. And what you see now is only the beginning. They drive across the Atlantic, and here on the edge of the continent we catch the full force of them.

Saffia had maintained her business delivering flowers to weddings and suchlike. Not many people marry during the rains, most people prefer the end of Ramadan, depending on when it falls, or Christmas. Sometimes, though, it happens. A couple may have their own reasons.

Even now I can see Saffia standing in the driveway in the mornings while Babagaleh loaded pots into the back of the car. She had never sold the Variant, which she retained for her own use. That day she had a delivery, a wedding party up in Hill Station. I can’t remember whether I knew this or not. It is as likely I didn’t.

The road from our house up to Hill Station is one most new visitors generally find unnerving to drive. A railway line was cut into the hillside once. It had a narrow gauge with a single carriage hauled up the steep track by the engine. When the road to replace the railway was laid the dimensions were retained, though the traffic now moved in two directions. Nobody ever thought to put a guard rail in place. During the rains the water pours off the hillside, carrying mud and rocks on to the road.

She had delivered the flowers successfully, as far as I later understood, and was on her way home, driving a twenty-year-old car. No other vehicle was involved, according to the police. Nobody else was hurt. The sole witness, the driver of the car following, said she had edged over to make way for an army truck coming in the other direction. It seems she misjudged the depth of the curve. Doubtless the rain reduced visibility, made the road all the harder to navigate, for Saffia was an excellent driver. The car rolled thirty yards down the hill. No seat belt, I don’t believe the Variant was even fitted with them. She suffered little in the way of injuries; her neck, though, was snapped.

The police would not come out during the rains. One of the occupants of the huts nearby recognised the car. He sent his son to our house and found Babagaleh. She was gone already by then. Impossible to move the body during the downpour. Babagaleh hurried up to the campus. I was not there. Instead he happened upon my daughter. She knew, just by his appearance on campus, something dreadful must have occurred.

Later Babagaleh brought the news to me. Somehow he knew where to find me. I have no idea how.

* * *

He stops speaking, turns his head on the pillow.

‘Pass me that, please.’ He stretches out a hand.

Adrian rises and picks up a framed photograph. He is about to hand it to Elias Cole.

‘No, I meant for you.’

Adrian looks at the photograph expecting to see a picture of Saffia. Instead he finds himself looking at a photograph of Mamakay, taken when she must have been about sixteen. She is looking at the camera slightly askance; behind the look of youthful defiance in her eyes, the same look of detached appraisal she still wears on occasion. She leans into the back of her chair, her body is turned away from the photographer, though her gaze is directed towards him. Her elbow rests on the edge of the seat, the stiff cloth of her gown rises unevenly at one shoulder and slips from the other. A narrow necklace follows the contours of her collarbone and disappears behind the neckline of her dress. Her hair is caught in a heavy and elaborately knotted headdress in a print that matches her dress. She doesn’t smile and evident between her eyebrows is the faint smudge of a frown. Yet Adrian sees nothing stern in her expression. Rather she seems to be assessing the situation, contemplating the camera, and through its lens those who might observe her in the future. Her expression suggests compliance more than participation with the act of being photographed. Seeing her thus, so unexpectedly, leaves Adrian momentarily disorientated. He pulls himself up short and replaces the photograph.

‘She had wanted to be a historian. After that day she lost faith in me. At first I thought she was mourning her mother, but a distance opened up between us and was never again bridged. She was of that age, no longer a child, yet still a child. Somehow she found out. People gossip, impossible to stop them.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Impossible. I had my enemies, they must have delighted in it.’

Outside the sun has almost set. The rains have cleared and the colours of the earth have suffused the sky with a deep red. The skeletons of the two kites flutter on the razor wire. Outside somebody is walking down the corridor; the sound of their footsteps mounts and then recedes down the hall.

Adrian says, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

The old man sighs. ‘Babagaleh knew where to find me. Don’t you see? I expect he must have known all along. Perhaps Saffia knew too, who knows?’

‘Where were you?’

‘I was with my mistress.’

Adrian covers his surprise.

‘Yes, my mistress. From the fourth year of my marriage to Saffia I had kept a mistress. Always the same one, in that respect I was loyal. You must understand … no, I would
like
you to understand, she gave me something Saffia never did. With her I did not feel wanting, second-best. All very banal, I’m sure. Believe me, I was aware of it at the time. It made no difference.’

‘And you were at her home at the time of Saffia’s car accident?’

‘With Vanessa, yes.’