Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

In the months and years that followed he left behind the lives of birds and immersed himself in the world of humans, qualifying one decade later as a psychologist. Several years afterwards, in a street in Norwich, he had bumped into one of his companions from the camping trip, now a father of three running a dry-cleaning business. The other man had been unable to recall any of the trip. Pressed by Adrian, he shook his head and shrugged. Adrian had spoken of the bittern’s cry. Not me, said the fellow. I’ve lived here all my life and never heard a bittern. And Adrian remembered that nobody had heard the bird but him, and so he had no way of knowing whether it had ever truly occurred. There were days, some, when he imagined the night was nothing but a dream.

Now, standing in the corridor, in the sickly shadows of the fluorescent light, he returns to that place. The night of the bittern, the place of solitude and mortality. He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.

A nurse comes to him and asks him his blood group. Adrian doesn’t know. She pricks his finger, swabs the blood on to a glass slide and departs. Adrian sucks hard at his finger, forcing out the drops, is reminded momentarily of standing outside his mother’s house on the half-finished deck with a splinter in his finger. It feels more like a dream than a memory.

People pass him, going in and out of the operating theatre. At some point he is asked to move, by whom he cannot remember, told he is standing in what is strictly speaking a sterile area. He is shown into a small room, given a cup of coffee. He has made few friends at the hospital, did not think his relationship with Mamakay was well known. He is considerably older than most of them. And yet here they are, showing him kindness. At some point in those hours Mrs Mara comes by and tries to coax him to wait in her office. Adrian shakes his head. He can barely focus on her words. His body is numb, his brain a vortex of half-formed thoughts. At moments he paces the room unable to sit, at others he slumps, suddenly inert, as though the bones have been sucked out of his body. Everybody around him seems to walk with speed and purpose. There is no one to talk to, no one to ask what is happening. He wants to catch one of them by the arm, but he is afraid of becoming a distraction, aware of how irrelevant he is to all of this, how purposeless his presence.

It is so quiet. None of the whisper and murmur of other hospitals he has been inside: the cushioned floors and draped curtains, the breathing of air conditioning and electronic heartbeat of monitors. Only the slap of rubber shoes on cement, the banging of doors. Hard, comfortless sounds. Even the light is hard, shines so bright it hurts the eyes and yet barely illuminates.

Another time he steps out of the waiting room. He realises he has no idea how much time has passed. An hour? A minute? He thinks it must be past midnight. He sees the nurse who swabbed blood from his finger. ‘What about the blood?’ he asks. ‘Shouldn’t I go somewhere to give blood?’ But she shakes her head and tells him he is not a match, not the right blood group. She smiles at him, and he tries to read her smile for whatever information it might contain. He returns to the room and sits down on the bench upon which has been placed a thin mattress, leans his back against the wall, feels the palpitations of his heart.

Sounds in the hallway. A commotion. Adrian stands and then sits back down, stands again and opens the door. The corridor is empty, the hard light reflecting on the painted floor. Suddenly sound and movement burst upon the emptiness. A gurney appears wheeled by a pair of orderlies. A man, awake and moaning in pain, lies upon it. The man’s leg is exposed, his trousers have been cut away. There is a bloodstained dressing. Nurses appear. The door to the operating theatre opens, to the theatre where Mamakay is. A surgeon comes out — what’s his name, Seligmann? Yes, Seligmann. Now he is looking at the man on the gurney, giving a rapid series of instructions to a nurse as he inspects the man’s wounds. The nurse is fitting a strap to the man’s arm. Adrian feels the tension rising in his chest. He has stopped breathing. Who is the man upon the gurney? He wishes the man away, wishes he would vanish or die, he just wants Seligmann to go back inside the theatre. This man, this new patient, is an unwanted diversion.

He made a mistake in staying here, in letting her stay here. He sees it now. Too wrapped in love, seduced by the beauty of this broken country, this was his failure. This is not a place to live one’s life. It is his fault, not Mamakay’s, for she knows no other life. He should have known better, he let things go to his head, let the place seep through his pores and into his soul. When this is over he will take her away. They will go together to Britain. He will take care of her. She will be fine with the idea, because it is for the best. There will be none of this. There will be order. There will be quiet. There will be people to explain. There will be understanding. Everything will be clear. She has waved away suggestions of leaving, but she will see it now. Here there is nothing, they are both at the mercy of this place, like everybody else. At home, his home, it will be different. She will be happy, for what is there not to be happy about living beyond the shadow of disaster. Her anger will be calmed, her restlessness stilled, once she is far from the events of her past.

Please God, let it not be too late.

It could be that simple. It is that simple.

It is never that simple.

He knows what he is doing. He’s already bartering with God, making offerings. It is for just such times humankind invented gods, while hope still exists. When hope disappears, men don’t call for God, they call for their mothers.

Adrian sits down on the bench, his elbows on his knees, his face covered by his hands, feels his breath hot in his cupped hands. He is aware of a scent of her upon his fingers. He inhales deeply and holds his breath for as long as he can. The longer they are in there, the more serious it becomes. He stares into the darkness he has created. He prays.

Once, twice, he hears the sound of footsteps, the sound of the OR doors swinging back upon themselves. Each time he rises and goes to the door, but by the time he looks out whoever it was has passed by and disappeared.

He wishes he could sleep simply in order to wake up and find all this had never happened. The moment of his arrival home, the bloodstains on Mamakay’s skirts, watching her face collapse in pain, her fear for the child, the drive to the hospital, the hideous traffic.

He tries to smell her again upon his fingers, but the scent eludes him. Perhaps he imagined it.

Two o’clock. A moth is banging itself against the ceiling and the bare, bright bulb. Silvery, dark smudges upon the white paint. Adrian’s body aches, the sweat in his armpits has dried and grown damp several times over. He needs air. He rises and exits the room and then the building. He stands in the courtyard. People are sitting huddled on a mat spread in the corridor — the family of the man they brought in, presumably, one of them a woman nursing a baby. Adrian turns away from them, stands and stares at the sky. He feels tears well and subside. He takes a deep breath of the warm air. He closes his eyes. A sound rises in his throat, a long low sigh, of which he is entirely unaware. He is desolate.

After a few moments he turns and walks back into the building, down towards the room where he has waited out half the night. As he approaches the last of the doors, he sees, through the square pane of glass, that the doors of the operating theatre are open. They are coming out. He starts to run, sees the first person appear. It is Kai. Kai!