The Memory of Love (52 page)

One or two of the men nod to Adrian as he passes by. They do not smile or speak, but he knows that now he is held high in their regard. Salia is there and raises a hand. The fragmentation of the conscience. Adecali, tortured by those acts he had committed. Elias Cole unperturbed by the many he had not. Adecali was made to feel shame, was held culpable. Cole was venerated. Yet where does the greater evil lie, if evil is what you call it? Somewhere in the place he calls a soul, Elias Cole knows. Adrian has been his last attempt at absolution, his last attempt to convince himself of his own cleanliness.

Adrian drives slowly home. Though the roads are heavy with cars and minibuses, the traffic keeps moving. At a junction he stops and watches a man with matted dreadlocks feed crumbs of cake to a skinny dog lying curled against him. Both dog and man look entirely content. He crosses each of three bridges. The first, which divides the west of the city from the east. He reaches the junction where the traffic policeman with the wheeling arms stands. There he turns right over the peninsula bridge, where Julius as a boy was once lowered over the side by the men who built it, in order that he might write all their initials in the wet cement on the side. The boy had watched them every day for months as they built the bridge. Julius’s bridge. The final and smallest bridge is the one over the river next to his new home. Adrian turns down the track.

He is early. He knows Mamakay likes to sleep in the heat of the afternoon those days she is able, for the baby keeps her awake at night. There are times he has returned home to find her asleep on the cane sofa on the verandah. For some reason it embarrasses her to be caught sleeping. The thought makes him smile. He will surprise her. There she is. His footsteps must sound in her dreams for she begins to stir as he mounts the last few steps. He walks towards her, she opens her eyes.

He smiles.

She blinks, looks up at him, her eyes wide, frowning slightly.

‘What is it?’ he says.

She half rises. Her hand is feeling among her skirts, patting the cushions of the old sofa as though searching for a lost ring. Adrian follows the movements of her hand, until he sees the wide, dark stain spread out upon her skirt and the covers of the chair.

CHAPTER 53

In front of Kai, Zainab behaved demurely, just as she appeared to be in her photograph, a girl possessed of the manners of the village. She regarded his footwear when she spoke to him, giggled behind her hand and smiled with her lips held together. In Kai’s opinion she nevertheless succeeded in giving the impression of being in possession of some impertinent secret, some item of unwholesome knowledge about him. Foday gazed at her with open admiration. And Kai too had taken a liking to Zainab, despite scarcely succeeding in pressing a word out of her. It was in the clarity of her gaze that Kai saw a young woman who knew exactly who she was in this world.

Later, passing by the window next to Foday’s bed, Kai hears Zainab’s giggle transformed into laughter: full-throated and rebellious.

Kai retires to update Foday’s records. The main consequence of the infection is to delay what comes next: removal of the cast, physiotherapy, the final operation on the right foot. He closes his eyes, leans back in the chair and immediately is drawn towards sleep, sliding backwards only to be jerked forward. There are times the desire for sleep became so urgent it is the very thing that keeps him awake. Somewhere a door slams. Kai opens his eyes and sits up straight, shakes his head and opens his eyes wide. The light in the room seems to fracture and fragment, particles of bright light appear and disappear. He rubs his eyelids. The long nights of sleeplessness always return in the end. As a child he’d been afraid of the creatures that lived under his bed, though somehow the fear never prevented him sleeping. Well, now he’d take back the monsters any time.

Yesterday he had gone into town to an Internet café and sent an email to Tejani, then sat and waited for the email to go. Everything was done, he told Tejani, the process complete. Andrea Fernandez Mount had called with the news herself. Kai’s application had been accepted. His visa had come through. Afterwards he’d walked the whole way home, moving through the heat, traffic, dust and crowds as though contained inside his own invisible tunnel.

He rises and makes a tour of the hospital: emergency, the wards, intensive care, the labs.

Eight o’clock. He is in the laboratory checking on the results of a blood sample when he sees Seligmann pass by, propelled forwards by the speed of his gait, a half-doughnut in one hand. Kai hands the slide he is holding back to the lab assistant and follows Seligmann to the operating theatre. By the first door he sees Adrian, wonders briefly at his presence there. Kai does not nod or call or wave. It is dark. Most likely Adrian, who is standing under the light, cannot see Kai crossing the quadrangle, for he does not wave or call either. It is months since they last spoke. Adrian is not looking his way, but talking to Mrs Mara. Kai is in a hurry. He walks past them, hears Mrs Mara call his name. He doesn’t want to stop now. Because of Adrian, because of Seligmann. He’ll deal with whatever she wants later. He looks around for Seligmann.

Afterwards he will remember the faces. Not Seligmann’s, for Seligmann was the only one who didn’t realise what was happening, but the faces of the others. The eyes. Some following him. Others downcast. The silence. None of the banter of the OR. At the time he had thought nothing of it. He was tired, relieved not to be forced into a jocularity he didn’t feel. A memory of Mrs Mara reaching out for him as he went by, as if to touch him on the shoulder. He had walked quickly past them all. All except Seligmann, whom he went to assist.

At first he does not recognise her. Seligmann is talking to him. Kai is listening to the older man. But Kai is the kind of doctor who looks into the faces of his patients and surely, soon enough, he looks.

She is conscious, still. She smiles to see him. There is no sign of fear in her eyes. She tells him she is glad he is here, because she had asked for him. Before she can say any more the pain comes. He can see the power in it as it builds, a mighty surge. It is awesome. Her fingernails press into his forearm. He feels the pressure in his arm turn to pain, wishes he could transfer all that she is feeling from her body to his own. He watches the pain take her, like a dam bursting.

‘Go on,’ he tells her. For God’s sake, go on. Shout. Scream. It doesn’t matter to me. But she does not hear him and no longer sees him. The breath leaves her in a long shuddering groan.

‘Somebody you know?’ asks Seligmann.

Kai nods.

Seligmann’s eyes are upon Kai’s face. For once the older man is not whistling. ‘We have to get the child out of there. She may have ruptured. Are you up for this? I can bring someone else in.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Then let’s get going.’

Kai doesn’t want her awake for this. He doesn’t want her asleep either. He wants her conscious, so he can talk to her, comfort her. Now that he has her again, he does not want to let her go. He goes to her and takes her hand.

‘I’m here. I love you,’ he whispers. He wants to reach her.

She smiles. ‘I know. Didn’t you say you’d deliver all my babies? Or did you refuse? I can’t remember.’ She opens her mouth: ‘Alph …’

Then she is in pain again.

Kai nods to the anaesthetist, who depresses the syringe, releasing the fluid into the plastic line. He holds Nenebah’s hand and watches her face. Feels her fingers tighten in his, and then relax. Sees his reflection in her eyes, the theatre lights above him, watches the light shimmer and still, the eyelids close.

On a hillside. When? Five, six, a thousand years ago, before a war came along and blew them all in different directions. They were students sitting in their favourite place in the hills above the university. He proposed to her and she accepted him in return for a ring of plaited grass. See here. She shows her finger off to Tejani. Kai sets about weaving her a necklace and a crown of grass, entwined with flowers. Ants, drunk on nectar, crawl from the blossoms. An ant crawls across her bare stomach, merging briefly with the two moles below her navel. Kai blows the ant away. Hey. She slaps him softly. That was our firstborn. You blew away our son. He buries his face in her stomach, bites the flesh. There’ll be more. Millions more, you’ll see. She hits him with her crown of flowers, showering him with ants and petals.

For a month they made up names for the ant babies, until they had a list of twenty names memorised by heart. Then, because it was altogether more practical, they decided to use those twenty names in alphabetical order for the millions of ant babies to come. Alpha, Brima, Chernor …

For some reason they were all boys.

* * *

Kai watches the blade of Seligmann’s scalpel slip between the two moles.

Behind him, through the double doors, a nurse enters with a message. Adrian is outside in the corridor wanting to speak to him. But Kai cannot speak to Adrian now.

‘Tell me what I should say?’ asks the young nurse.

‘Tell him to stand by to give blood.’ He glances at her, notices how her eyes do not meet his.

CHAPTER 54

As a boy, Adrian loved many things. He loved the freedom of cycling the roads around his house. He loved the water, swimming, the icy pull of the North Sea. He loved to lie on the lawn and feel the sun upon his eyelids. He loved birds in all their varieties. For days one summer he watched as a wren built her nest in the vines which grew against his bedroom window, watched her as if on a screen, warming her eggs and feeding her young, unaware of Adrian on the other side of the glass. Another summer, spent by the sea, he had sat up all night listening out for the bittern’s echoing call. When it came his companions were all asleep and Adrian hadn’t woken them, but instead stayed awake alone through the long night waiting to hear it again. During those hours, as he sat hugging his knees in the cold clear night, surrounded by sleeping bodies, the flat land and immense bowl of the sky, the dark water slipping through the reeds, listening for the call of a bird so rare as to be all but extinct, he had for the first time in his life become deeply aware of his own mortality. It was, he thought later, the first time he had seen himself as a finite being, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Up until then he’d never imagined death could touch him. He had no idea why it should happen on that night, whether it was connected to the disappearing bittern, or prompted by some change in the circumstances of his life, his father’s illness, perhaps, or whether he had simply come to an age when he could remember there being a past, and when the future seemed for the first time visible instead of hazy, consisting of more than just the afternoon or the day ahead. He was sixteen.

In the months and years that followed he left behind the lives of birds and immersed himself in the world of humans, qualifying one decade later as a psychologist. Several years afterwards, in a street in Norwich, he had bumped into one of his companions from the camping trip, now a father of three running a dry-cleaning business. The other man had been unable to recall any of the trip. Pressed by Adrian, he shook his head and shrugged. Adrian had spoken of the bittern’s cry. Not me, said the fellow. I’ve lived here all my life and never heard a bittern. And Adrian remembered that nobody had heard the bird but him, and so he had no way of knowing whether it had ever truly occurred. There were days, some, when he imagined the night was nothing but a dream.

Now, standing in the corridor, in the sickly shadows of the fluorescent light, he returns to that place. The night of the bittern, the place of solitude and mortality. He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.

A nurse comes to him and asks him his blood group. Adrian doesn’t know. She pricks his finger, swabs the blood on to a glass slide and departs. Adrian sucks hard at his finger, forcing out the drops, is reminded momentarily of standing outside his mother’s house on the half-finished deck with a splinter in his finger. It feels more like a dream than a memory.

People pass him, going in and out of the operating theatre. At some point he is asked to move, by whom he cannot remember, told he is standing in what is strictly speaking a sterile area. He is shown into a small room, given a cup of coffee. He has made few friends at the hospital, did not think his relationship with Mamakay was well known. He is considerably older than most of them. And yet here they are, showing him kindness. At some point in those hours Mrs Mara comes by and tries to coax him to wait in her office. Adrian shakes his head. He can barely focus on her words. His body is numb, his brain a vortex of half-formed thoughts. At moments he paces the room unable to sit, at others he slumps, suddenly inert, as though the bones have been sucked out of his body. Everybody around him seems to walk with speed and purpose. There is no one to talk to, no one to ask what is happening. He wants to catch one of them by the arm, but he is afraid of becoming a distraction, aware of how irrelevant he is to all of this, how purposeless his presence.

It is so quiet. None of the whisper and murmur of other hospitals he has been inside: the cushioned floors and draped curtains, the breathing of air conditioning and electronic heartbeat of monitors. Only the slap of rubber shoes on cement, the banging of doors. Hard, comfortless sounds. Even the light is hard, shines so bright it hurts the eyes and yet barely illuminates.

Another time he steps out of the waiting room. He realises he has no idea how much time has passed. An hour? A minute? He thinks it must be past midnight. He sees the nurse who swabbed blood from his finger. ‘What about the blood?’ he asks. ‘Shouldn’t I go somewhere to give blood?’ But she shakes her head and tells him he is not a match, not the right blood group. She smiles at him, and he tries to read her smile for whatever information it might contain. He returns to the room and sits down on the bench upon which has been placed a thin mattress, leans his back against the wall, feels the palpitations of his heart.

Sounds in the hallway. A commotion. Adrian stands and then sits back down, stands again and opens the door. The corridor is empty, the hard light reflecting on the painted floor. Suddenly sound and movement burst upon the emptiness. A gurney appears wheeled by a pair of orderlies. A man, awake and moaning in pain, lies upon it. The man’s leg is exposed, his trousers have been cut away. There is a bloodstained dressing. Nurses appear. The door to the operating theatre opens, to the theatre where Mamakay is. A surgeon comes out – what’s his name, Seligmann? Yes, Seligmann. Now he is looking at the man on the gurney, giving a rapid series of instructions to a nurse as he inspects the man’s wounds. The nurse is fitting a strap to the man’s arm. Adrian feels the tension rising in his chest. He has stopped breathing. Who is the man upon the gurney? He wishes the man away, wishes he would vanish or die, he just wants Seligmann to go back inside the theatre. This man, this new patient, is an unwanted diversion.

He made a mistake in staying here, in letting her stay here. He sees it now. Too wrapped in love, seduced by the beauty of this broken country, this was his failure. This is not a place to live one’s life. It is his fault, not Mamakay’s, for she knows no other life. He should have known better, he let things go to his head, let the place seep through his pores and into his soul. When this is over he will take her away. They will go together to Britain. He will take care of her. She will be fine with the idea, because it is for the best. There will be none of this. There will be order. There will be quiet. There will be people to explain. There will be understanding. Everything will be clear. She has waved away suggestions of leaving, but she will see it now. Here there is nothing, they are both at the mercy of this place, like everybody else. At home, his home, it will be different. She will be happy, for what is there not to be happy about living beyond the shadow of disaster. Her anger will be calmed, her restlessness stilled, once she is far from the events of her past.

Please God, let it not be too late.

It could be that simple. It is that simple.

It is never that simple.

He knows what he is doing. He’s already bartering with God, making offerings. It is for just such times humankind invented gods, while hope still exists. When hope disappears, men don’t call for God, they call for their mothers.

Adrian sits down on the bench, his elbows on his knees, his face covered by his hands, feels his breath hot in his cupped hands. He is aware of a scent of her upon his fingers. He inhales deeply and holds his breath for as long as he can. The longer they are in there, the more serious it becomes. He stares into the darkness he has created. He prays.

Once, twice, he hears the sound of footsteps, the sound of the OR doors swinging back upon themselves. Each time he rises and goes to the door, but by the time he looks out whoever it was has passed by and disappeared.

He wishes he could sleep simply in order to wake up and find all this had never happened. The moment of his arrival home, the bloodstains on Mamakay’s skirts, watching her face collapse in pain, her fear for the child, the drive to the hospital, the hideous traffic.

He tries to smell her again upon his fingers, but the scent eludes him. Perhaps he imagined it.

Two o’clock. A moth is banging itself against the ceiling and the bare, bright bulb. Silvery, dark smudges upon the white paint. Adrian’s body aches, the sweat in his armpits has dried and grown damp several times over. He needs air. He rises and exits the room and then the building. He stands in the courtyard. People are sitting huddled on a mat spread in the corridor – the family of the man they brought in, presumably, one of them a woman nursing a baby. Adrian turns away from them, stands and stares at the sky. He feels tears well and subside. He takes a deep breath of the warm air. He closes his eyes. A sound rises in his throat, a long low sigh, of which he is entirely unaware. He is desolate.

After a few moments he turns and walks back into the building, down towards the room where he has waited out half the night. As he approaches the last of the doors, he sees, through the square pane of glass, that the doors of the operating theatre are open. They are coming out. He starts to run, sees the first person appear. It is Kai. Kai!

But Kai doesn’t hear him, doesn’t turn or look up, is pulling his mask from his face, and as he walks his feet barely clear the floor. He does not hear Adrian because the sound of Adrian’s call, before it began, died in his throat. Something in the set of Kai’s shoulders. Why is he walking like that? It is all wrong. Adrian pushes through the door, begins to run down the corridor.

‘Kai!’

At the sound of him Kai lifts his head. Suddenly he no longer looks defeated but very alert. He turns square to Adrian, begins to move towards him down the corridor. He walks fast, very fast indeed. It crosses Adrian’s mind how strange it is: Kai walking towards him, his head lowered, arms by his sides, fists clenched, at such a pace. Now he is lifting his arms. Adrian stops and waits, puzzled, unmoving. Standing thus, he takes the full force of the push, feels the heels of Kai’s hands hard against his chest. Out of his mouth is expelled all the air in his lungs. Winded, he doubles over, sees Seligmann hurrying towards them. A nurse, eyes round above her mask. Kai’s face above his, Kai’s voice ringing in the empty corridor, calling Adrian a bastard. Now Seligmann is there. A hand on each man, on Kai’s arm and Adrian’s shoulder. Seligmann is pushing Adrian back against the wall, peering into Adrian’s face.

Adrian wants to speak, to ask Seligmann about Mamakay, for Seligmann surely knows and will tell him. He tries to take a breath, to form the words, but he cannot.

Four o’clock. Adrian places the glass back on the table. He watches the movement of his hand, listens to the knock of the glass against the table surface. Opposite him sits Kai. They are in the old apartment, now returned to its former use as a place for on-duty staff to rest. Salt has dried on Adrian’s cheek, his skin is dry and tight. He feels the contractions in his empty stomach, but they come without the accompanying desire for food and he mutes the pangs with shots of whisky. They sit in silence. Seligmann is long gone, knowing he was neither needed nor wanted. The whisky is courtesy of him. They are, neither of them, drunk. Though Adrian longs to be.

A sigh from Kai, who sits with his fist clenched, shakes his head as he stares at the floor. For the last three hours his mood has swung the short distance between grief and rage. Adrian has wept, but so far Kai has remained dry-eyed. ‘Sometimes I kid myself into believing it might be over, finally,’ he says.

‘That what might be over?’

‘The dying, the killing. That perhaps the bloodthirsty bastard up there might have had enough for the day. Or might pick on someone else for a change.’

Adrian is silent.

‘Why? Why the fuck?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Adrian.

‘She survived everything else, survived the war. She was never afraid, you know. I never saw her afraid in all that time. There were times I was afraid, Jesus, yes – but not her. Even when they brought her here tonight. Fear equals defeat in her vocabulary. Fear of what, it doesn’t matter. The trick is – you didn’t give in.’ He changes tense as he speaks of Mamakay, from present to past, to present. ‘Like death was a big dog or something. You should never show it you are afraid. I told her that once. She liked it. Death the dog. Or perhaps it was fate. Yes, fate – you must never show fate you’re afraid.’

‘I believe that,’ says Adrian.

‘What?’

‘That she treated fate like a big dog.’

Kai laughs, as if remembering something else. A moment later the smile drops off his face and he clenches his fist again. They sit in silence for several minutes more.

‘I wish I knew what to do,’ says Adrian.

‘Go home.’

Adrian blinks and looks up at Kai.

‘Go home,’ repeats Kai. ‘What in the hell did you ever come here for, anyway?’ He speaks tiredly and does not raise his voice.

Adrian looks down.

‘Well?’ Louder this time.

Still Adrian doesn’t answer.

Kai continues, ‘I’m serious. It’s a genuine question. Why did you come here and have you found whatever it was you were looking for?’ He is slipping back towards anger of which Adrian has seen plenty that night.

To Adrian a memory of their first meeting, here in this room. Kai had called Adrian a tourist, had always questioned his right to be here, even once they’d become friends. ‘What makes you think I was looking for something?’