The Memory of Love (7 page)

The middle of the night. Adrian wakes. His mouth is dry from the whisky. The water bottle on the bedside table is empty. He starts through to the kitchen, turning on lights as he goes. Too late, he remembers Kai, hastily turns the light off and is forced to stand still for a few moments while his eyes readjust to the darkness. He wonders if he has woken the other man, listens for Kai’s breathing and finds it. Slowly he gropes his way along the walls towards the kitchen.

In the kitchen he opens the fridge, takes a plastic bottle of water and raises it to his lips. He pushes back the cotton curtain. No sign of a moon. From the other room he hears sounds. A murmuring. Muttering. He lowers the bottle from his lips and listens.

Conscious of the tread of his bare feet he crosses the kitchen to the doorway. Kai is sitting on the edge of the couch.

‘Oh. I woke you,’ says Adrian. ‘Sorry.’

When there is no reply, he ventures forward, peering through the darkness. Kai is sitting on the couch, his arms squeezed to his sides, his face turned upwards, eyes open. He is speaking, though Adrian can distinguish none of the words, which come in a gabbled monotone. Faster now. And louder. Followed by a gasp, as if he had been hit in the chest. Silence. Then the murmuring begins again, softly rising.

Adrian reaches out to touch him, pushes him gently back down on to the couch. ‘You’re dreaming,’ he says in a normal voice. ‘You’re asleep and dreaming.’ He stays until the murmuring subsides, then makes his way back to his room.

In the morning Adrian wakes to a clattering. His head is buzzing. From above come loud scratching sounds of birds trying to gain purchase on the corrugated-iron roof with their claws. He rises and knocks experimentally on the door to the sitting room, pushes at the door. There are the pillow and sheets rumpled on the settee, the Ludo board and scattered coloured counters, the empty whisky bottle. He stands and surveys the scene, then turns and heads in the direction of the kitchen.

Boiling water for coffee Adrian hears the sound of the door and fetches down a second cup from the cupboard. He realises, suddenly, how empty he has felt these past weeks.

* * *

In the days and weeks that follow, the rhythms of their lives begin to intertwine. Kai takes to passing by at those times when he has a few minutes spare and sometimes to shower in Adrian’s apartment. One day Kai arrives just as Adrian is leaving. Adrian lets him in, and gives him a key to lock behind him. Suggests he may as well hold on to it.

Certain days Adrian comes home to find Kai in the apartment, settled in the front room, going through papers or writing up notes. The pattern of Kai’s breaks from the operating theatre becomes familiar to Adrian, and he will, on occasion, endeavour to stop work at the same time. He finds he looks forward to the other man’s companionship in the evenings.

So a new friendship is formed.

CHAPTER 6

A high wall surrounds the hospital, built of rough, bare blocks through which hardened floes of concrete spill. Lizards dance between shards of broken bottles planted in a bed of concrete. A ruff of razor wire encircles the building.

Outside Elias Cole’s room a kite is caught. A black kite with a bamboo frame, wings of black plastic and a tail of torn strips. It twists and turns, like a snared bird. The more it struggles to break free, the more hopelessly entangled it becomes.

In a moment of silence the old man’s eyes follow Adrian’s, and both watch the agonies of the kite.

‘Does the kite mean something to you?’ asks Adrian.

*

It reminds me of my brother. You were asking me about my family. We once built kites just like that, though in those days we made the wings from paper.

Once I was given a real kite; my father bought it for me with his clerk’s salary the week I passed my school certificate. I ran out to test it on the bank behind our house. But the season was wrong, there was not so much as a whisper of wind. Running to and fro, I became frustrated, finally I threw it down and burst into tears. My crying angered my father. He told me to bring the kite to him and in front of him he made me hand it to my brother.

Within two days an unseasonable wind blew up. Who knows from where? I watched my brother playing with the kite. He called me to join him, but I refused. I would die rather than admit how much I wanted to play with that kite.

My brother was strong-limbed and solid, hard as a rubber ball, so when he first fell ill you couldn’t notice it. I left him sleeping in the bed we shared. Afterwards he went about his chores, never complaining, only his usual boisterousness was tempered by the sickness. In a family of men doubtless nobody would have noticed. My mother had enough to do in a day, as she often said. She made all our clothes and some embroidery as well, to sell. But she had a fondness for him. Late in the morning she found him curled up in a corner of the room, complaining of the cold while outside the sun burned in the sky.

I was moved out of the bed soon afterwards, to sleep in the sitting room with an older cousin. I loved my brother, but still there were those times I would go into his room with the sole purpose of taunting him. If he asked for water, I would walk in and hold on to the mug and refuse to let him have it. There was a point in his sickness when his voice failed, and so there was nothing he could do but whimper little words and make stuttering sounds. Then I would imitate him and when I had had enough I would place the tin mug just beyond his reach and leave the room. Another time I pulled the bedclothes down and delivered bruising little pinches across his body, knowing he hadn’t the strength to fight me. None of it made any difference. Whenever I entered his room he looked at me without fear or hate, rather with something like expectation. As if waiting to see what I might do next. And there were days I sensed he felt something like pity for me, though it was he who lay there with limbs as useless as a straw doll’s.

In time he recovered though his walk maintained an uneven keel. My mother had made me fetch and carry for him during his sickness, and so it continued. Look after your brother, you’re the eldest! All the responsibility came to me, though I never asked for it. And there were times his happiness seemed designed to goad me, and I confess, occasions when left alone I vented my frustration on him.

Don’t ask me why I did it. A little childish jealousy. As an invalid he drew more of my mother’s attention. The good thing is that my brother forgave me. Even after he no longer depended on me, when I left home to pursue my studies and left him behind.

And if you asked me did I love my brother, I would have said yes. I would say yes. I had spent more nights lying in the warmth from his body than in that from any lover’s. Only during the time when he was sick did I ever sleep anywhere else.

At any rate, I digress.

A change in the season. Surreptitious at first. At night the rain tapped on the windowpanes, scores of hesitant fingers. Dawn brought bright skies, washed of the desert dust, and the hard, coppery smell of earth. For the first time in months you had a clear view of the hills from the city. As the weeks passed, the rain became emboldened, abandoned the sanctuary of the night and came by day, blindingly, accompanied by dark clouds. The blue skies that arrived with the morning by the afternoon had vanished.

One such a day, trapped indoors by the rain, I sat at my desk, trying to concentrate on the outline of a paper for the faculty journal. ‘Reflections on Changing Political Dynamics’. I was looking for an arena in which to make my name, to put recent political events into perspective. The drumming of the rain, the tapping of the typewriter keys combined to unsettle my thoughts and I struggled to maintain the logic of my argument. The light was grainy and grey; I went into a neighbouring office to fetch a small lamp and when I returned I paused for a moment to gaze out of the window. People were scurrying across the courtyard, running from one doorway to the next as though there was a sniper on the roof. I saw Julius. He was walking along the diagonal path, bareheaded and without an umbrella. With him was another person, who I took to be one of his students; they were both deeply absorbed in conversation. Julius was gesticulating with both hands. It was a habit of his, he drew sketches in the air and even traced out mathematical problems of some complexity on an invisible blackboard. At one juncture they paused, heedless of the rain, better to conduct the conversation face to face. I stayed and watched from the window. They shook hands vigorously, as though they had arrived at some agreement. Julius left his companion at the door and walked on, ambling. I saw him shake the raindrops from his head, like a dog, and watched until he disappeared into the doorway beneath me. I went back to sit at my desk. Sure enough his face, glistening wet and grinning, popped around my door moments later.

‘Borrow me twenty-five cents, Cole. I need a soft drink.’

I brought my change purse from my pocket and counted out the money. Julius had got into the habit of dropping by my office. Sometimes it was to borrow small amounts of money. At first I kept a running total of how much he owed me, until I realised he had no intention of paying it back, no intention even of expending the effort required to remember the debt. Once I came back to find three brand-new packs of cigarettes on my desk. From Julius, or at least so I assumed. Recompense for all the twenty-five-cent loans.

He had an appetite for history and frequently borrowed books. One or two he returned with phrases underscored and comments pencilled into the margin. Not for my benefit, or the benefit of any future reader, but as a record of his own thoughts.

There were other days when he sat in the spare chair, or rested his backside on the windowsill, and began to expand whatever was on his mind, something he had read in the papers, a thought, or a theory – seeing what I made of it. On days when he had use of the car he would invite me for a drive and he would continue to expound his ideas from behind the wheel. In front of my eyes he pulled down the city and rebuilt it. Drainage systems. Buildings. Bridges. Highways. Driving along, humming and singing off key.

The peninsula bridge. He told me how, when he was fifteen or so, he had watched its construction every day for months. The columns of the support towers being raised one by one. The superstructure, then the deck, one section at a time, transported and hoisted upwards on a crane and swung into place. The men who did the work knew him by name. Kru mostly, a hundred years ago they worked the ships going and coming from here, were used to the proximity of water, of heights and ropes. They seemed to understand, elementally, the nature of the construction, though none could so much as read or write. Once, at the close of the day’s work, Julius told me he crept to the edge of the new section, crawling on his belly, and peered over, exhilarated by the drop down to the water, the possibility of being blown away. The day before the official opening they lowered him, dangerously, over the side on a trapeze and he wrote all the workers’ names in the wet concrete, adding his own initials at the end.
J.K
.

For my part, I listened, which was my role. And anyway, Julius was a talker and I am not so prone to it. I am circumspect by nature. Julius was not. He was a man possessed of great ardour. The whiff of naivety, of wonderment was all about him. He had a way of seeing the world, full of glory, that served only to obscure the reality of it.

‘So, Snoopy met with Charlie Brown.’

‘What?’

He was talking, it transpired, about the moon landing, the subject of which continued to impress him. The proposed attempt was then just a few weeks away. Snoopy was one kind of craft, Charlie Brown another. Two astronauts had taken a trip outside their craft, and spacewalked close to the surface of the moon. They had made it safely back to the mother ship. From his pocket Julius drew an article cut from a news magazine. In the foreground of a black-and-white photograph was a stretch of milky land, in the distance the arc of a horizon upon which hovered a planet.

‘What is it?’ Julius demanded.

I shrugged. ‘Outer space?’

‘Yes, but what exactly? Look closely.’

I peered at the image. There was something faintly familiar about the far planet. You must remember, though such images are commonplace nowadays, at the time none of us had seen anything of its kind.

Julius tired of waiting for me. ‘It’s the earth, Elias! It’s an earthrise. Like a sunrise.’

And for a moment I was caught by his ardour. By the sight of the earth hovering above a pale lunar horizon.

‘There’s no place we can’t eventually go, and there’s nothing we can’t eventually do,’ one of the astronauts had said. Julius took it, jokingly, as his mantra, repeating it often over the next few weeks. ‘There’s nothing we can’t eventually do,’ he said, when a bottle-opener could not be found, as he expertly flipped the metal top off his beer on the edge of a table.

Yes, he was quick to friendship, in a way I was not, neither was I used to. It was a quality I might have mistrusted, but I couldn’t think what Julius might want from me. Or at least, put another way, since he never seemed to hesitate to ask for what he wanted, I could think of no ulterior motive in his befriending me. And on that basis, I suppose you could say we had become friends.

But for Saffia, we had become friends.

Saffia.

More than anything in those weeks and months, I desired time alone with Saffia, something I dreamt of constantly and how I might manage it. An evening, Julius asked for the loan of my office. It wasn’t the first time. As I say, he was in the habit of asking, when he craved a quiet place to work, or somewhere to hold a meeting with other members of his faculty. He remarked, in a teasing way, on my good fortune in acquiring a space of my own, especially in light of my relatively junior status on the campus. His own faculty was undergoing building works and the staff members crammed into every available remaining space. That day it was easy enough to agree. I was happy to be offered a way out. Work on my article had stalled, I needed to do more thinking, which I could just as easily do at home. I capped my pen, collected my papers and left the room to him.

But I didn’t go home.

There’d been a lull in the rain. In the last light of the day people were making their way home, passing me as I stood and smoked a cigarette across the road from the pink house. I threw the stub into a puddle, searched in my pocket for the packet, drew out another and lit it. When I had smoked the second cigarette, I crossed the road, stepping around the puddles and the other pedestrians. I stood before the front door, conscious I could yet turn back. At that moment I heard distinctly, on the other side of the door, the sound of her voice. My heart thudded to hear her thus, so close, unaware of my presence. I wondered who she might be talking to. Not Julius, who was in my office where I had left him. I thought I detected in her voice a note one might describe as controlled exasperation, the kind of voice a teacher might use to address a dull-witted child, or in this case a hapless servant. I raised my fist to the door and rapped. The footsteps changed direction and a moment later she stood before me.

‘Elias!’

She was surprised to see me, and the smile she gave me, though she did her best to cover it, had been preceded fleetingly by a frown. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re just rearranging a few things. Come in, come in!’ She stepped backwards into the hall.

Inside the dining-room table was covered in papers and what I took to be botanical specimens, some labelled and bagged, others pressed on to paper. On the floor were piles of books, magazines, a stack of dressmaking material and patterns. She was clearing herself a workspace, she told me, as she led the way out on to the verandah, hoping to complete her PhD thesis. She’d been putting it off since their return home from Britain.

She sat down on the edge of a chair, tucked her hands in between her knees and leaned forward with a mild air of expectancy.

‘Julius isn’t home then?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m sorry. He’s not. He’s rarely back at this time. Did you want to talk to him?’

In not replying, I avoided the need to lie. She took my silence for assent.

‘I’d offer to let you call him, except, with all the disruption at the department, he doesn’t have an office.’

‘It’s not that important. I happened to be passing.’