The Memory of Love (45 page)

CHAPTER 46

In her room Ileana performs her own particular tea ceremony: silvered pot, Lipton tags, canned milk. To Adrian the teapot makes her look like a Roma.

‘How far gone?’ she says.

‘Three months,’ answers Adrian. A week has passed, a week since Mamakay told him she was pregnant with his child. He feels the responding tension in his stomach. His emotions are in the wind.

Ileana crosses the room and places the tea on the desk in front of him.

‘In my professional capacity I would have to say physician, heal thyself. These things don’t just happen.’ She pats him lightly on the shoulder like a dog, the first time that Adrian can ever remember her touching him, evidence of the magnitude of her sympathy. ‘Jesus, you’ve crossed the line so many times, I don’t know which side of it you’re on any more.’

‘I know,’ says Adrian, shaking his head.

Later he walks alone in the Patients’ Garden. Ileana’s bluntness came with wisdom. Not how but why, more importantly what would happen now. He is a man with a wife, a child, a job to go back to, a home. Beneath his feet the ground is damp with recent rain, the Patients’ Garden smells of earth and moss. Rain drips from the leaves high up on to those below, musical notes. Under the heavy cloud, the garden is almost in darkness. After the months of heat and dust, Adrian still enjoys the rain, can soak it up. At night, hearing it upon the roof and during the day as he watches from his window, he marvels at its power. The rain hurls itself down with such force it seems to rage at the earth, like an angry woman throwing herself upon her lover.

He thinks of Mamakay, the equanimity with which she seems to accept the fact of her condition. From the moment they met she had appeared to expect nothing from Adrian and now it is as though what is happening to her is taking place on another plane, a higher one, from where she can see years into the future beyond the details of their liaison, towards a different horizon. She has made the greatest decision by far and by which all the others are measured, and she has made it alone. She intends to create a life. Adrian might feel grateful that she would make it so easy for him. He might, but he doesn’t. Her self-possession draws him to her; there is the desire, the compulsion almost, to breach it.

He hears rather than feels the rain begin again, striking the ground around him, hitting the upper leaves of the tree. Eventually it finds its way to him. For a few minutes longer he remains seated, letting the rain soak into his cotton shirt and touch his skin.

A cigarette stub left burning in the ashtray marks Ileana’s departure. Adrian crushes it out, and as he does so looks up to the board behind Ileana’s desk. The coloured pins and Ileana’s earring are there still, stuck into the map, tracing the journeys made by Agnes. Though Adrian regularly checks the admissions records both here and at the medical hospital, Agnes has never come back. Once Salia had gone of his own accord to the old department store to find the former doorman and obtain his promise to be informed if anything was heard or if Agnes reappeared. Since then, nothing.

Adrian takes Agnes’s file and opens it, leafing through the pages to remind himself what is written there. In the short weeks he had known her he’d used his time well. The incident with the gold chain had seemed like a blessing, empirical evidence of her dissociative state. What is he to do with all this information, now rendered useless? For he lacks the crucial element, that which would bind it all together – whatever it is that impels her journeys. The thing that makes Agnes do what she does.

Babagaleh is outside Elias Cole’s room; he tells Adrian the man inside is sleeping. At other times Babagaleh will enter and gently wake his master, but today he says Cole had passed a bad night. Babagaleh has placed himself in charge now, a sure sign Elias Cole is dying.

Leaving the old man’s room Adrian catches sight of Kai ahead of him, recognising him even in the poor light of the corridor by his habitual flip-flops, theatre greens and T-shirt, wonders in that moment whether to call out, opens his mouth, hesitates and in his hesitation the moment is lost. Kai turns the corner and disappears.

From the apartment Adrian dials his home telephone number and listens to the distant ringing. He’s about to replace the receiver when Lisa comes on the line, breathless. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, it’s me.’

‘Hello? Sorry, who is it?’

‘It’s me. Adrian.’

‘Oh, hi. Sorry, I could hardly hear you. Some of the girls are round for lunch.’

‘Do you want me to call back?’

‘No, it’s OK. They’re fine. They’ve just opened another bottle. How is it going? When are you coming back?’

They never speak without her asking the question. Today, he can hardly bear it. Instead of answering he describes for her the new sessions. In the last he achieved something, in getting the men to remember and write down or draw – for several were illiterate – their experiences. A small triumph, but significant. He remembers back to when he first arrived, how high his expectations had been, how broad his assumptions. He’d been all wrong. So much ground needed to be laid before he could even begin to build their trust. Only now does he feel he is making progress.

‘Lisa?’

A pause. ‘In the cutlery drawer, Anne. Sorry. Well, that sounds all very good. They’re certainly lucky to have you. I hope they realise it.’

‘Thanks.’

Another small silence. He can hear her draw breath. ‘Darling, I’m pleased for you, I really am. But what can you expect to achieve with these people? How many problems can one man solve in a place like that?’

He has to admire her gift for putting her finger right on top of it. He tries for flippancy and fails. ‘Someone has to do it.’ His words are followed by a burst of background laughter, the scrape of chairs, someone calling for Lisa.

‘Well, someone doesn’t have to be you,’ and then, with her customary restraint, ‘Let’s not argue. I just hope you haven’t forgotten your priorities.’

‘Of course not,’ Adrian replies.

When they have said goodbye he goes to the kitchen and, though it is early, pours himself a tumbler of whisky, carries it back to sit on the cane sofa. He thinks of Lisa and her girlfriends in London. Summer there now. They’d be in the conservatory. No husbands, of course. If Adrian was ever at home, he’d remove himself to his study or to sit at the bottom of the garden or else go out on some imaginary errand. He sips his whisky, presses the cool glass against his forehead. He is aware of something absent in his emotions and it takes him a moment to realise it. He does not miss home, at all.

Later he calls his mother. He pictures her in what he still thinks of as her new home: a triple-glazed bungalow by the sea, a model of architectural efficiency, free of any kind of charm and easy for her to manage on her own. A fortnight before his departure Adrian made a farewell visit. He’d arrived early and stood waiting for her at the gate, looking at the sculptures made out of jetsam and driftwood that decorated the lawn. In the distance he saw her coming towards him, a seventy-year-old beachcomber, in a corduroy jacket, her windswept hair a silver flame around her head. More masculine in manner and dress than before, as though she had shifted ground to fill the space left by his father. That day she’d been as happy as he’d seen her.

‘We had such a storm here last night,’ she tells him over the telephone. ‘She was furious about something, my goodness.’ To his mother the sea is always female, prone to womanly moods. ‘Thought she would sweep us all away. What a noise! But the light this morning was quite marvellous. I counted at least six dead birds. Gulls. Two avocet. Looked like they’d been washed out of the sky. Rather picturesque in their own way; I went back and fetched my camera.’

He listens to her and for the first time realises from where his love of birds most likely comes. He’d never given it much thought. Probably she used to take him for walks and talk to him about these things. It had all stopped with his father’s illness. But the memories, doubtless, had lodged in his subconscious. Suddenly he feels immensely grateful to her.

‘So how are you doing out there? How’s the work going?’

They talk for a while longer. She listens. At the end she says, ‘Well, you keep at it. We’re all very proud of you.’

And Adrian says without thinking, ‘Why don’t you come out and visit? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Come on. I think you’ll like it. At any rate, it’ll be interesting.’

‘Oh, darling, what a wonderful idea. Don’t you think I’m a bit old?’

‘No, I don’t. There are old people here, I see them every day.’

She laughs.

‘Don’t say no,’ he tells her. ‘Say you’ll think about it.’

‘All right, dear. I’ll think about it.’

He hangs up. He realises they have never spoken about his reasons for coming here. He had taken it for granted she would understand that his connection to the place came through her. He has no idea how she actually feels about it, if she feels anything at all.

How does a man like him believe in love? A man trained to analyse the component parts of emotion. Measures of neurochemicals, of serotonin, hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin. He who would name, classify and diagnose every nuance of the human soul into attachments, complexes, conditions and disorders. There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his profession. Others have identified the neurological reward pathways of the brain, the tripwires that mark the way to love. And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness.

Adrian does not know.

Above a moss-strewn yard, the night sky, so many, many stars. Next to him a woman lies sleeping, her head upon his thigh. The second when she passed from wakefulness to sleep he recorded as a momentary heaviness in her body, to which his own body responded with minute adjustments.

He didn’t come here looking for happiness. He came here to change who he was. And in her he has found his escape, this sleeping woman, for she offers him a way out of himself, away from the person he might have become. She wandered by accident through a portal into the hollow of his heart and led him out into the light.

How does a man whose task in life is to map the emotions, their origins and their end, how does such a man believe in love?

Adrian does not know. But he believes. There it is. He believes.

Again.

CHAPTER 47

‘Why do you wish to work in the United States?’

The woman at the US Embassy visa section had not looked at Kai since he entered the room, concentrating instead upon studying, at some considerable length, the letter advising him of this appointment, which he’d brought with him as instructed by the letter itself. A woman with a smoker’s tired hair and skin, she peers down at the signature at the end of the letter. The signature he assumes belongs to her, Andrea Fernandez Mount.

‘Well?’ she says. ‘What is your reason for wishing to work in the United States?’

What is the right answer?

To live the American dream.

Because it is there, like Everest. Was it Everest?

‘To advance my career,’ he says.

Andrea Fernandez Mount’s right eyebrow lifts.

‘My medical career,’ he adds. ‘I wish to gain clinical experience and to sit additional professional exams.’

So now she looks at him.

‘Are you looking for permanent residency?’

‘No.’ He shakes his head. Kai has no plans ever to return, but he does not intend to say so, it isn’t as if there is anything honest about this process. The Embassy official’s job is to make Kai jump through certain hoops, to persuade herself that this man wants to come to her country, to live in a house like the one upon which she has just taken out a mortgage, shop in the stores where she shops and send his kids to school alongside her own. He exists to validate her dreams. Doctors are given special dispensation. Because the truth, again – only if it matters – is that they want him. But Andrea is careful not to reveal any eagerness. There are only a limited number of places each year, even for medics; this gives her a little leverage, restores a little of her authority.

Kai looks at his feet. He realises he has forgotten to change his shoes and is still wearing flip-flops. There is a smear of blood on his cuff. In the street outside the Embassy a queue of men wait for the green-card lottery. Kai had been five minutes late for the interview. They’d kept him waiting nearly forty.

‘Have you brought your preliminary documentation with you?’

Kai pushes the envelope across the table. Andrea Fernandez Mount opens it and removes the contents, placing each one on the table in a row, like a detective perusing evidence. Copies of his birth certificate, passport, school certificates, medical degree, medical licence.

After a while she says, ‘Fine. Somebody here will need to interview you, but there’s a wait list of three months now. In the meantime you can take your medical exam and a language proficiency test. I can give you a list of Embassy-approved clinics.’

‘May I undergo the medical at my own hospital?’

She glances at him briefly. ‘If it’s on the list. Do you know yet which state you’re going to be working in?’

‘I’m not sure. Maryland, I think.’

‘Once you have an offer of work you’ll need a state medical licence. Your employer should help you out with that. Sometimes the application can be held up waiting for the visa to come through. We can’t give you a visa until you have the licence.’ She shrugs. ‘Catch 22, but that’s the way it goes till some person fixes it. Let them know your visa is being processed. After your formal interview I’ll be able to tell you more.’ She pushes her chair back. ‘I think we’re about done here.’ Quite unexpectedly she looks up and smiles warmly at him. ‘You can pick these up in a week.’

Kai stands up. ‘Thank you,’ he says. He’s been inside her office no more than five minutes.

‘Let me see you out.’ The meeting over, her manner seems to have changed entirely. As she walks with him to the door she says, ‘Well, who knows, I might see you around. It’s a small town, after all.’ She extends her hand. ‘Maybe you could tell me which your favourite restaurant is. It’s always good to have a local recommendation when you’re new to a place.’

Kai takes her hand, feels the slight pressure of her thumb on his. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t get to eat out much,’ he replies, smiles briefly and turns away.

Out in the street, he walks past the line of men. They look at him, with the same silent yearning as the patients waiting to be seen outside the hospital, working out who he is, whether he might be in a position to help them. He sees them notice his flip-flops and turn away. Never will any of them meet Andrea Fernandez Mount.

Kai goes to Mary’s for lunch, the second time they have seen each other in a month. It is early yet, the place is quiet. She spots him the moment he enters and advances towards him, manoeuvring her stomach between the tables. She reaches up to kiss him, her belly pressing against him. It feels warm, soft and at the same time resistant. He experiences a sudden urge to press his face against it.

‘You look good, Mary,’ he says.

‘Thank you.’ She is standing looking at him, her head on one side; the smile on her face is tinged with tenderness.

She knows, he thinks. She knows about Nenebah. And because he cannot bear the expression on her face, with all its pity, he says it first.

‘Ah, so you already know. Well, it will be good for her.’

There is firmness to her nod. She pulls a chair out, indicates for Kai to sit opposite her and claps her hands for the girl. ‘What will you have?’

‘Soda water,’ says Kai.

‘Nothing more?’

‘I’m in surgery later.’

‘Bring a soda water and a Guinness. Cold.’

They are silent while the girl opens the drinks, pours them, then places the bottles on the table and leaves.

‘Well,’ says Mary. ‘There’s no such thing as going back.’ She raises her glass to Kai, who clinks his against it.

‘No,’ says Kai. ‘Keep moving, isn’t that right?’ He takes a deep breath.

There is to be no hiding from Mary.

‘So anyway,’ she says. ‘Tell me your news. How come I’m getting to see so much of you?’

Perhaps he would not have told her if they hadn’t spoken of Nenebah, but now he feels differently. He tells her about his decision to leave, his appointment with Andrea Fernandez Mount.

When he’s finished speaking she says, ‘Well, you and Tejani never stopped talking about it. Remember me to him, won’t you? And since you’ve told me your big news, let me tell you mine.’ A pause. ‘I’m bringing my son back. I told my parents it is time. Enough. I want my two kids to live with me. Together. This one and that one.’ She pats her stomach and gives him a turned-down smile. ‘So it’s decided.’

Kai shakes his head. ‘I’m really pleased for you. How old is he now?’

‘A year the month after next. I want him back for his birthday.’

Half an hour later they say goodbye. People are beginning to arrive for lunch, Mary’s distraction grows and Kai stands up to leave. Her big belly bumps him again as she moves forward to embrace him. This time he cradles it in his hand, bends his head and presses his forehead against it, straightens and kisses Mary on the cheek. ‘You two take care of yourselves. I mean, you
three
.’ At the door he raises his hand and drops it. She has already turned away.

October 1999. So many children born in a single month. In Kai’s view Mary’s capacity to forgive seems, quite simply, immeasurable. Mary’s parents had taken her son away to raise in the village. Who knows how many children born in the same month in the same year are being raised all over the country like that? Children like Mary’s son who have one thing in common. They were all born nine months after the rebel army invaded the city.

Friday prayers and the streets are emptied of people. No
poda podas
, no taxis. A boy passes Kai pushing a load of jelly coconuts in a child’s pushchair. Kai stops him, buys one and waits while the boy hacks off the top then fashions a spoon for him out of the broken fragment. He stands scraping out pieces of coconut flesh and scooping them into his mouth, watching the people pass him on their way to the mosque. Three Fula money traders in long, pale djellebas and embroidered round hats. An elderly
haja
, white cloth wrapped around her head. A small group of office workers, heavy black shoes beneath their gowns. The boy stands watching Kai as intently as Kai watches the passers-by, as though he is watching a sideshow. The sun is beating down and Kai can feel the blood throb in the veins on his scalp.

He turns to his companion. ‘You want one?’

The boy’s eyes widen slightly, he nods sharply, neither speaking nor smiling, waiting to see what kind of joker Kai turns out to be. Kai hands him a coin. The boy takes it and serves himself one of his own coconuts, with all the care and delicacy he would a customer.

Somewhere, thinks Kai, there are towns and cities in a place called America. New York, Washington, San Francisco, Atlanta, Maryland.

He tries to imagine it, but this time he succeeds only in summoning images from films and advertisements. He cannot think how it will be, only that it is far away from all this.

In the final days of the invasion the rebels retreated from these streets. In their anger the residents discovered their courage and finally turned upon their oppressors. The doctors would sometimes leave the hospital to tour the city collecting corpses, issuing death certificates and stuffing the dead into the hospital mortuary. A vain effort at recordkeeping, imposing order on the unruliness of war. On this street Kai had seen a young girl, lying upon the road, angled in death. Fourteen, sixteen at most. Someone had tried to remove her clothing. She lay in the street in a scarlet bra and panties, doubtless at one time looted from an upmarket boutique. The people who lived there refused Kai and his team leave to touch the body. She’d been the commanding officer in charge of the attack. They would deny her the dignity of burial. The teenage commander, in stolen, silken underwear.

Kai stares at the spot where the girl had lain. Ripples of hot air rise from the tarmac. In the mirage he sees her, the brilliance of the underwear against the dark skin. He looks away. When he looks back the road is empty. The boy is watching him. Kai hands him the unfinished coconut and walks away.

The thing to remember, he tells himself, the thing to hold on to is this: that since he decided to leave he has been sleeping at night.

‘There will be a storm tonight, yes. I think so.’

Foday is the kind of patient the Western doctors complain no longer exists and for whom they yearn. He asks no questions and accepts whatever Kai tells him. Foday makes the foreign doctors nostalgic for the days before patient charters obliged them to shroud their work in secrecy and pronounce as little as possible. They like Africa. Africa is full of believers. Foday is a believer. Kai wishes Foday had a little less faith. He shifts Foday’s supper tray and leans his buttocks on the window ledge.

‘I know Mr Seligmann has already spoken to you, but I’m just reiterating what he said, so you’re clear. We’ll know more in a few weeks once the cast is off for good. You’ll have it changed in the meantime, we’ll shift the position of the foot so we can stretch that tendon. We’ll get an idea then, and of course, an even clearer picture once you begin physiotherapy. How does the foot feel now?’

‘It feels very well, thank you.’

It has something to do with gratitude, in Kai’s opinion, as though admitting to pain was somehow to demonstrate ungratefulness, and that in turn might jeopardise the doctors’ goodwill. The nurses seem equally to subscribe to the view that patients are undeserving, and are consequently reluctant to hand out as much as a single codeine tablet. Also because for years they’d had to guard precious supplies.

‘Ask the nurse for something if you feel any discomfort.’

‘I will do that, thank you.’

‘Good.’

‘Sometimes my leg itches,’ offers Foday, as though he has alighted upon a titbit to satisfy.

‘That’s normal. Try not to scratch it.’ Kai smiles. ‘How’s Zainab?’

‘Oh.’ Foday smiles in return. ‘Zainab has written to me again. My cousin brought the letter here yesterday. Now I feel sure she likes me.’

‘I’m certain she does,’ says Kai.

‘She says she’s travelling to the city, she would like to come and visit me.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Perhaps you would like to meet her? I’m sure she would like to meet you.’

‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more,’ says Kai.

‘Good. I am happy. And, Doctor?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I thank you for the radio. I’m enjoying it.’

Kai had completely forgotten about the radio.

‘Yesterday I was listening to people talking about an army of soldiers made of clay in China and buried underground. They were placed there to guard an emperor in the afterlife. This is something extraordinary. Please pass me my book.’ Foday points to the window ledge.

Kai swivels around, finds the exercise book and hands it to Foday, who opens it and begins to read. ‘For the First Emperor. Eight thousand soldiers. Five hundred horses. More than one hundred chariots. And you know what else they say?’ He looks at Kai, who shakes his head compliantly. ‘Not one of the warriors has the same face. Every one wears a different expression. This is something the craftsmen ensured, in the way they carved them and then painted them. And then these very craftsmen, after all their labours, were buried inside. I found this story very interesting.’