Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Less than fifteen minutes have elapsed since he entered the examination room.

So now he is free until midday. He’s about to leave the building, when he changes his mind and ascends the stairs to the library. The whole place has been remodelled since he was here last, though the smell of clean air and paper remains. As a child he passed hours in here looking at the medical books, not to thumb through to explicit images like the other kids, but to stare at the diagrams, repeat to himself the Latin names of bones, muscle, tissue, organs.

To the librarian he mouths, ‘History,’ and is pointed to the back of the room. Africa. Europe. Oceania. India. China. He finds what he is looking for among the outsize books: The Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang . The book is more than fifteen years old, does not contain the most recent findings; still, the images are various and in colour.

At the front desk Kai waits while the librarian searches among the index cards for his old membership number, hunts and pecks the letters of his name on the computer keyboard. He moves away to browse the periodicals.

There, standing in the narrow aisle, he sees her. She is working at one of the desks facing the wall, her back to him, head bent over a book. Several other volumes sit upon the floor by her foot, two more next to her elbow. Her chin is cradled in the palm of her hand. With her free hand she flicks the end of her scarf over her shoulder, with a gesture so utterly familiar it nearly winds him.

For a year nothing, now twice in a matter of weeks.

For all of those months he had lived inside the cold, bright tunnel of medicine. Once he’d passed her standing at the roadside, her arms full of books. He did not wave or call to the driver to stop. Instead he sped past, away to a future without her.

Now Kai stands and watches Nenebah. It would be so easy to speak to her. He should tell her, perhaps, that he is leaving. After all those arguments. Now none of it matters. And yet what of consequence can he tell her in just a few minutes, here in a public library? What can he say that would make any difference? He should tell her about that night on the bridge, the days before and after. At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go; by then months had passed. She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back.

As with all the most traumatic injuries, the pain followed later. He’d tried to find her, to go back to her. By then she’d left her father’s house and was moving around the city. He went to find Mary, but Mary had gone too. In the scale of what had happened in the city, the echoes of which were still ringing through the streets, Kai had felt shamed. He went back to work. And had never stopped working since.

Now he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

But what of Adrian? Kai might have told himself the relationship with Adrian was meaningless, had he not known that with Nenebah nothing was meaningless. She brought an intensity to everything she did. Whereas for Kai, only one thing really mattered and that was medicine. And Nenebah. Two things mattered, nothing else.

She shifts in her chair and the movement brings him back to himself. He is about to go to her, but still he hesitates and remains standing in the aisle, holding on aware in some distant, unconscious way, of balancing upon an axial moment in his life. With the first step he will put into motion a sequence of events that will play out into the future. The ramifications are enormous. He made a mistake in letting her go. Now he wants to go back. It is not too late.

Somebody comes down the aisle, and Kai steps aside to let them pass. As he does, his view of Nenebah alters. For the first time he can see the pages of the book open on the desk in front of her. The person who passed him has stopped further down the aisle. Kai waits for them to move on. He angles his head so he can see what Nenebah is reading. From this distance he can just about make out a diagram, the figure of a woman, a pregnant woman. Kai looks down to the books on the floor. The volume on the top of the pile shows a picture of a child held in its mother’s arms. Something for Mary, perhaps? Mary was probably too busy to visit the library, she might have asked Nenebah to look something up for her. Even as Kai tells himself this, he knows it isn’t true. In front of him Nenebah stretches and flexes her spine, before relaxing back into position. More telling than the visible swell of her stomach is the way she touches it with her right hand, a slow, circular caress, before she turns another leaf of the book.

The library, the shelves, the strip lighting have all disappeared. Kai cannot hear, he is in a deafening tunnel of wind. He reaches out and holds on to a shelf. Inside his mind he is rushing backwards, away from the place in his mind he was only moments before, the place from where he had seen the possibility of a future with Nenebah. The man in the aisle is looking at him. Kai concentrates on closing the thoughts off, one by one. Realigning his whole being. His command of himself is almost total; it is an effort of will.

And when control has been resumed he turns and walks back to the front desk, where he picks up the book for Foday.

For an hour Kai walked the streets, carrying with him the great book on the model armies of China. Now he understands the reason for Mary’s look. It wasn’t the fact of Nenebah having another man, for in Mary’s mind such matters were always reversible. But a child, a child was something different.

He hails an empty taxi. He is in no mood now to return to the hospital. He directs the driver out towards the west of the city, to the bars along the beach, promises him sufficient fare not to take other passengers.

Sitting at a bar, one he has never been to before, Kai orders a beer and sits with the book upon his lap, staring at the horizon. After a few sallies the barman has abandoned his attempts at banter. Now the man sits on the opposite side of the bar, staring as moodily as Kai at some unknown point.

A white woman is walking up the beach, dressed in tight black shorts and trainers, a ponytail pushed through the back of her baseball cap, arms bent like a jogger, her chin pointed forward and her backside pushed out behind her. Kai watches as she heads up the beach, the ponytail swinging from side to side like a metronome. About a hundred yards further on he sees her turn back on herself. He is still watching her as she heads up the beach towards the bar. She sits on a stool and orders from the barman. She is not, Kai thinks, especially pretty, though she behaves otherwise, flicking her blonde ponytail and wriggling on the bar stool. Any minute now she will start to talk to him, begin to ask him questions and demand that he reveal himself to her. Before such a thing can happen he places the book on the bar, swings himself off his stool and heads out across the sand towards the water. At first his intention is to do no more than walk along the line of the surf. But the sand is hot underfoot. He feels constrained by his shirt and undoes a few buttons at his throat and then a few more, before he removes it altogether. Trousers and flip-flops follow. In his shorts he walks down to the water and through the crashing surf. A wave breaks against his thighs, forcing him to brace. When the wave recedes he continues his assault upon the ocean for several more paces, before he puts his arms above his head and dives into the next wave.

Silence.

Water warm as blood; he feels himself being pulled out to sea by the strength of the undertow, stretches out his arms and allows himself to drift. He opens his eyes. The water is hazy. Angled reflections of sun upon the sand. A piece of seaweed hovers horizontally in the water in front of him, like a curious passer-by. Muted sounds of pounding surf upon sand. Above him the glassy surface of the sea, through which he sees, as if through a stained-glass window, a wavering, distant sun. He crashes through the surface, and turns on his back, sucking air into his lungs, and kicks out.