The Memory of Love (30 page)

‘Photograph,’ explains Salamatu. She slides a needle into his arm. Reaches up to the IV line and injects a fluid into it.

‘Passport photo,’ says Kai. ‘For your honeymoon.’

Foday rolls his head in Kai’s direction and grins at him. He seems about to respond, when his eyes lose focus, the lids flutter closed.

‘Good,’ says Seligmann, putting down the camera. He peers at Foday.

They are ready to begin. The nurse tightens the tourniquet around Foday’s thigh.

‘Over or under?’ asks Seligmann. ‘Under or over?’

They assess the point of entry, agree to go in under the muscle. Seligmann makes the first incision. Blood oozes from the wound. ‘Tourniquet,’ he says. The nurse tightens the tourniquet further. Kai meanwhile stands by with the diathermy wand. He glances down. The tip of the wand is waving. He takes a quick, deep breath, tries to steady his arm and his hand to stop the involuntary movement of the wand. He looks up to check whether anybody else has noticed. The nurse is finishing off the tourniquet. Seligmann waits to continue the incision. Salamatu is sitting next to Foday’s head. None of them are looking in his direction. Kai flexes his arm, at the same time lowering the wand below the level of the table. He counts and breathes. One, two, three. It’s worked before. He concentrates all his energy into stilling his hand and arm. The waving is arrested sure enough, but the tip of the wand continues to shiver. He can do nothing to control it. Any moment now, Seligmann will ask him to begin cauterising the ends of blood vessels left by his incision. The nurse has tied off the tourniquet and now resumes her place next to Seligmann. Seligmann bends his head, adjusts his grip on the scalpel and prepares to begin again.

‘Sorry,’ says Kai. ‘Can you excuse me a moment?’

‘What?’ Seligmann, bent over Foday’s leg, looks up at him, incredulous. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘Yes. I mean, no. Sorry.’ He indicates to the nurse to come and take the diathermy wand from him. ‘I have to go.’

‘Something up?’

Kai rolls his eyes. ‘Ate at the Beach Bar last night.’

Seligmann emits a snort of muffled laughter into his mask. ‘So even the locals aren’t immune. Bad luck. Go! Go! For Christ’s sake!’ He waves the scalpel in the direction of the door. ‘I can manage here for a while.’ Chuckles as he returns to work.

‘Thanks.’ Kai makes his way to the door, stripping off his gloves as he goes, conscious of the nurse’s eyes upon him above her mask.

Ten minutes elapse before he returns to the OR; the most delicate part of the procedure is over. Kai had spent the time sitting alone in the changing room, trying to locate the presence of mind required to continue, aware he couldn’t stay away too long. He must see this through. Thoughts of Foday. Of the altered technique he and Seligmann were pioneering. In time he rose, changed his robe, scrubbed back in and re-entered the theatre. The nurse helped him with his gloves. He catches a trace of a question in her eyes, wonders how much she noticed.

‘Just in time.’ Seligmann is wielding a steel hammer and chisel. ‘Come and mark off the bone for me, would you?’

At that moment Foday’s arm rises from the table of its own accord.

‘Anaesthesia, we are moving,’ calls Seligmann.

Salamatu pumps more ketamine into Foday’s system. Slowly, as if buoyed on invisible currents, Foday’s arm drifts back down. Kai marks a groove in the exposed bone. A moment later Seligmann positions the chisel, draws back his arm and with a blow of the hammer drives the chisel through the bone. Behind him the display light box on the wall flickers faintly.

On the operating table Foday sleeps with the angels, while his shin bone is methodically smashed.

* * *

Seven o’clock and he is on his way home. Almost twelve hours since he arrived at the hospital. He has barely rested or eaten. He and Seligmann had sewn up Foday’s wound together, the older man talking and telling jokes, full of good spirits on that day. Kai was grateful for it, grateful Seligmann was distracting himself, allowing Kai to concentrate on each suture as though it were the first he had ever performed.

Afterwards Seligmann had accepted Kai’s offer to write up the notes and exited the theatre swinging his arms and whistling. Opposites on the surface, the same beneath the skin, both men thrive only in the theatre, a scalpel in their hand, a human body on the table. Seligmann had faced his retirement without equanimity, with the belligerence of a bull. Within six months his marriage had fallen apart. His wife made it a condition of their eventual reunion that he find a way to go back to work. Now here he is, in a country far from home, operating where he is still needed. His wife stays in the house, occupied with their grandchildren, lunches and life-drawing classes. Seligmann calls her every day, never returns home for more than two weeks at a time. In this way they have found contentment.

Exhausted. Still, Kai hadn’t wanted to go home where the church meeting would be under way. He’d passed by Adrian’s apartment, found the place empty, showered and changed back into his day clothes, rummaged through the fridge. Nothing. Too much effort to send someone out and begin to cook, and in no mood for the canteen, he’d decided at last to go home.

The traffic is slow, the
poda poda
in which he travels inches its way around another of its kind, broken down in the middle of the road. Traffic passes either side like a sluggish river around a rock.

Some time after eight Kai slips through the gate and makes it to the back of the house unobserved. There he takes a beer from the fridge and carries it out to the yard, where he sits in the half-darkness. From the front verandah come the booming words of the preacher, florid and false. He can see the preacher in his mind’s eye: the peanut head, myopic gaze, striped suit, leather-soled shoes. His cousin’s folly. He takes a gulp of beer. It is warm and gassy. He scratches his scalp, which has now begun to itch, and slaps at a mosquito. He drains the first bottle of beer and goes in search of another one. Within a couple of minutes the second bottle is half empty. From his room he fetches a tape recorder, sits with it under the banana tree buzzing the tape back and then forward, trying and failing to locate a song to suit his mood.

Abass appears before him, dressed in his pyjama bottoms.

‘Guess what I saw today,’ says the boy.

‘Not now, Abass.’ He swallows from the bottle. Hunger has been replaced by thirst.

Abass presses on. ‘I saw the fifty orange monkeys, they came to my school.’

‘I said not now!’ The words come fast and harder than Kai intended. He sees the boy blench. Abass freezes, his mouth hangs open, the remainder of a smile upon his lips, eyes liquid bright. He is uncertain whether his uncle is joking. Kai continues to sit, staring at the top of his beer bottle and breathing hard to control a sudden inexpressible anger. ‘Go to bed. Go on,’ he says in a low voice.

By the time he recovers himself it is too late. The boy has fled. He is into his third bottle of beer when he remembers the man with the spinal injury. The family must have been waiting to speak to him and he had forgotten.

By his fifth bottle of beer he is drunk, and still not ready for sleep.

CHAPTER 29

‘Last night I dreamt of Julius,’ says Elias Cole. ‘We were in some great airy space, like a railway station or a lecture theatre. It was one of those ever-changing spaces that occur in dreams. There among the gathering of people, I was sure it was him. Julius. Yet what was he doing here? I tried to elbow my way towards him, but the more I did so, the more the crowd seemed to thicken. I made to call his name, but my voice emerged as a faint and ludicrous squeak. Suddenly I was in a different place. I was walking down a road. It was dusk, but I had an awareness of space, of something like open fields on either side. Ahead of me I saw Julius. That distinctive walk of his, the way his thighs brushed together. I called, “Julius!” I wanted to ask him what he was doing there. But he continued to walk away, ambling slowly and yet at the same time he seemed to be covering a great distance in a very short time. I ran, but he left me behind.’

‘And then what happened?’ asks Adrian.

‘Then I woke up. Or dreamt I woke up. Later when I woke up my arm was numb. Then I knew I was really awake.’

The old man turns from Adrian to face the window. Outside a second kite is caught on the razor wire. There is no breeze to speak of and yet its wings of black plastic beat like the wings of a bird.

‘This urge to order memories arrives with the age. A final sifting and sorting and cataloguing. To leave things in order before we go.’ A pause. ‘Back then, we were creatures of the air. Julius more than any of us.’

*

2
August
1969
The Dean telephoned me on the Saturday. He asked me to collect Saffia and take her to the place where Johnson worked. I asked no questions but did as I was told. We arrived full of the hope Julius was being released, though Saffia carried a small valise of his clean clothes, insurance against overoptimism. Precisely how long we waited I can’t recall exactly. No sign of Johnson, whom I both expected to see and dreaded seeing. We waited on the third floor where the desk clerk refused to accept the valise, which served to graft another layer upon our thin hopes. So we sat, staring at the grey, scuffed walls. The clerk at the desk placed a package wrapped in brown paper upon the desk and called Saffia to sign for it. She wrote her name down. Strange what details you retain from such times. I remember her signature, or rather her lack of one. I’d never seen her handwriting before. Clear, legible, almost schoolgirlish, devoid of flourishes.

Saffia opened the package. It contained Julius’s watch. His handkerchief. His wallet. A pair of bolts, a washer and a heavy metal screw: Julius’s worry beads. His asthma medication, too. He was supposed to carry it everywhere with him, but often forgot. Too little a thing to fit in the scale of his imagination.

By some blunder we were led into the basement of the building. Three flights of stairs and then another, along a corridor, a grey-walled tunnel. There it was cool, a dampness hung in the air. The clerk opened the door to a room.

With what innocence we entered. Such innocence. We thought it was a waiting room, you see. I was talking, what was I saying? I think I was asking the clerk whether Johnson would be coming down. I stopped when Saffia dropped the package and a screw skittered across the floor. I bent to retrieve it, chasing it with my fingers. When I straightened, Saffia was on the other side of the room. I looked across and saw what she had seen. I walked towards her.

‘Don’t!’ For some reason that was the only thing I could think of to say. ‘Don’t.’ As though we could somehow walk out, close the door of that narrow room and turn our backs on what was inside. And in so doing prevent it from ever becoming real.

She never heard me.

She reached out her hand and pulled back the sheet.

People, when they describe such life-changing moments, often say every action seems suddenly slowed. How true it is. The workings of the brain, I expect, struggling to embrace the enormity of the moment. Afterwards you are left with fragments. The form lying on the trolley. Saffia’s hand over her mouth. Julius’s face, his eyes half open, the pupils not dull but lucent, so that he appeared to be looking past us at the door, as if waiting for someone else to enter. Saffia’s hand on his cheek.

No sound save the banging of my own heart.

What a terrible stillness there is, once the heat and the light have left a body. The death mask, a look of sheer indifference to you, the living. Saffia placed her hand on Julius’s cheek, withdrew it and reeled backwards, colliding with me. I tried and failed to hold her. Within the same motion she fell suddenly forward, tore the sheet away from her husband’s body and pressed her forehead against his chest. She began to kiss his face. She begged him to wake up. With growing insistence she kissed him and shook him by the shoulders. She straightened, her tears left upon Julius’s face. She started to search his body, I could only imagine for some sign of what or who had done this to him.

What the clerk was doing all this time, I have no idea. Did he say anything? Did he try to interfere? I think not. I imagine by then he had realised the scale of his error. At no time did I register him. I wonder, now, if I could even recall his face. Instead I noticed that Julius was wearing the same clothes he had worn the night of the moon landing. And that now Saffia was unbuttoning his shirt, pressing her face into his still-powerful chest, murmuring, ‘Don’t go there, please, my darling. It’s too dark. Too dark. Stay with me.’ She ran her fingertips over his naked stomach and chest, his collarbones and down his arms. She held his hands in hers, felt his fingers and held them against her face. She bent over him and searched his sides. But there was nothing, no wound, or bruise, fracture or burn.

All that I remember, bright splinters, silence save for Saffia’s keening. Interrupted by a sudden commotion. Footsteps in the corridor. Johnson shouting at the desk clerk. His attempts, futile, to cover Julius’s face with the sheet. Saffia’s fury as she set herself upon Johnson, beating him with her fists. Johnson’s composure gone.

It pleased me, I admit it, to see him finally undone.

There is a quality to grief, I know. Like the first rains after the dry season. At first it fails, slides off the soil, rolling away in the dust of disbelief. But each day brings fresh rain. Saffia did what was expected of her. People came to pay respects, the women to sit with her, the men to offer gifts of money for the funeral and for the Seven and Forty Days ceremonies. I was there, assisting where I could. The Imam called. How that would have infuriated Julius! Saffia sat among the women. She wore a gown of plain black cotton, her hair wrapped in a black headdress. No make-up and not a single bangle, necklace or ring, except her gold wedding band. She was beautiful. She would reward my efforts to help with an otherworldly smile. I say otherworldly, for since the moment in that grey building when Saffia lifted the sheet from Julius’s face, she had stepped into a landscape where nobody lived but her.

The students began to return after the vacation, like birds assembling after a long migration, fluttering down in ones and twos, recognising each other from the year before.

That day, the one I am thinking of, the Dean called me into his office. I opened the door to find him at the window, from where he liked to survey his domain, or so it seemed to me. Only this time his attention seemed to be concentrated upon something of particular interest.

‘Come,’ he said, continuing to gaze from the window.

I did as I was asked.

‘What’s this?’

I looked down. The courtyard was full of students, hundreds of them. They were all dressed in white, the boys in shirts and slacks, the girls in dresses. Some had covered their hair. It was hard to see what they were doing. If it was a demonstration of some sort, then where were the placards?

‘Go down and see what’s going on,’ said the Dean.

I was due at Saffia’s house – Saffia’s house, how quickly I came to think of it as that – in a little under an hour, for it was the day of Julius’s Forty Day ceremony. I’d helped Saffia with the arrangements and I was reluctant to become involved in anything that might delay me. I allowed my gaze to drift over the heads of the gathered students. More and more of them were arriving all the time. For no reason my eye came to alight on a particular student, a boy. Perhaps because he was sitting more or less alone on the library steps. There was something familiar in his profile, even from this angle. I recognised him as the boy who had been with Julius the day I watched him from my own window, lost so deep in conversation they had stopped to continue their discourse and allowed themselves to be soaked by the rain. Shortly afterwards Julius had bounded up to my office and asked me to lend him the price of a soft drink. I remembered it as if it were yesterday. Like everybody else, the boy was dressed in white, on his feet a pair of white tennis shoes. He wore his hair high in the fashion of the times, a comb pushed into the front. What was that around his arm? I leaned forward and peered at him. It was a black armband. I switched my gaze to the student nearest him. He too wore a black armband. The girl he was talking to, she had a black scarf wrapped around her hair. Over there, the plump girl in the long skirt. A black sash. Another armband. Another. And another.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to the Dean. He was standing with his arms folded, his eyebrows drawn together, his features arranged into an expression of general and indistinct annoyance. I remembered our telephone conversation that Saturday morning, the day he asked me to fetch Saffia from her home and take her to Johnson’s offices. On the phone he had sounded irritated. As though annoyed at being woken at such an hour. And yet by then he must have known what had happened. He must have known Julius was dead.

Down in the courtyard I moved in and out of the throng of students. I saw no other faculty members. One or two of the students greeted me. A nod here, a handshake there. A boy grasped my hand and would not let it go. Instead he hung his head and began to sob.

At two o’clock the library bell sounded and there was a general movement, a shuffling as people began to shape themselves into some sort of order. I allowed myself to be carried along with them; by then I knew exactly where they were going. Despite the atmosphere of mourning, the sombre day and big-bellied clouds that floated above us, the humidity pressing in from all sides, there was something light in the air, and I felt inexplicably uplifted by it. It worried me not that the Dean might be watching, waiting for me to report back to him, all of that I would deal with later. For now I joined the march of students as we turned out of the gate and made our way along the tree-lined avenue towards the town. There was singing, as I recall, but not much. In the main we walked in silence. Forty minutes. A minute for each day that had passed. Finally we arrived.

And those who could not find room in the house filled the garden, and those who could not find room in the garden stood in the street, until the pink house on the hill was all but surrounded.

Julius died of an asthma attack. This is the sum of what we were told. By the time he was discovered it was too late; nothing could be done to save him. His medication, it seemed, had been removed from his possession along with other items of his personal effects. An error, unfortunate. In the room he was being held, in the basement of the building, nobody had heard him dying.