Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

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.

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.