Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Day Eighteen. 24 January 1999. Every nurse and doctor who could be located had reported for work. The wards were in ceaseless turmoil. All non-emergency patients had been discharged to make way for the new intake, even the paediatric ward had been emptied. It was as though plague had struck, a plague which tore open men’s chests, blew off limbs, ripped through muscle and bone, unleashed arrowheads of shrapnel into soft flesh. Nights on end Kai did not sleep, or slept standing up, for he had no memory of sleeping and could not later imagine where such an event might have taken place, there was not a spare bed, chair, or inch of floor space. He made his way down the corridor, the first time he’d left the theatre in many hours. Last time he walked down this corridor it had been daylight, and now it was day again.

A smell of coffee. In the staff room he found the new nurse making mugs of weak coffee, heaped teaspoons of sugar and powdered milk. The new nurse was very young and very pretty; he found it hard not to be aware of her evident attraction to him. What was her name? Balia. Balia offered him a cup of coffee, blinked and smiled with embarrassment. He smiled back at her, said thank you and used her name as he did so, left the room bearing the mug, sipped the coffee and felt the heat hit his stomach and moments later the sugar enter his bloodstream. The arrival of the injured showed no signs of slowing. Apart from coffee Kai had fed on nothing but adrenalin for days. All things considered, the hospital was about the safest place to be. Evidence of the fight that was taking place out in the streets of the city was strewn all over their floor.

Kai picked his way through the dying and injured, looking for his next patient, someone likely to survive. The medical staff had to ration their resources, their skills, their energy. Kai’s eyes travelled the lines of slumped, bleeding men, assessing injuries, life chances, rejecting those who looked too far gone. A soldier whose jaw had been blown away wore the uniform of the foreign fighting forces. Kai’s eyes passed over him and returned, drawn by the nature of the injury. The man was sitting up with his back to the wall, nodding and gesturing, making the effort towards speech with the local reporter who stood above him. As Kai watched he reached into his pocket and withdrew a document, an ID card or a photo, and handed it over. Astonishingly, absurdly, above the hole that had been his face — and this you could tell from his eyes — the man appeared to be smiling.

Kai was there, coffee in hand, making his way down the corridor, momentarily arrested by the sight of the injured man, when he heard the sound of gunfire close at hand. He was too exhausted, too focused on the task at hand to feel anything approaching fear. He turned to see the intruders enter the building. The reporter, who had, a moment before, been standing just a yard away from Kai, was suddenly gone. For the first time in days, there was silence, a brief moment of silence.

Then, a single word.

‘You!’

The man holding the gun pointed it at Kai’s chest. Balia, coming out of the staff room, straight upon the scene, was seized by one of the gunmen. Kai was still carrying his coffee as they walked towards the car. He didn’t feel afraid. But someone kept pushing him from behind, making him angry. He turned and shoved the barrel of the gun away, slopping coffee down his front. He glanced at Balia, her face stiff with fear, walking with small, reluctant steps.

Nobody bothered to blindfold them. Nobody wore a mask. That meant something, surely, Kai thought, as they drove through the stillness of the city. He wondered if he should feel afraid.

They arrived at an old, partly burned government building. The patients were all fighters. Young, adolescent, their arms, legs and guts full of metal. The rebels spoke to each other in many different languages of which Kai recognised some and not others. The commander, to whom Kai was taken, was perhaps seventeen. Kai heard those around call him Amos. Kai told Amos he could be of no help without supplies. While Amos consulted his aides, Kai waited and looked around him. There was little furniture left in the room, the President’s portrait bore the scars of a bayonet, someone had drawn hopscotch squares on the carpet. Kai was put into the back of the same car and driven through the town to a pharmacy, where his captors looted the shelves of morphine, sterile dressings, rubber gloves, saline solution and IV equipment under his instruction.

A heavy wooden door served as the operating table. For hours Kai worked with Balia at his side. They worked well together, efficiently, though Balia’s hands never stopped shaking. Amazingly, Kai succeeded in losing himself in his work, in forgetting his surroundings and the circumstances, seeing only wounds, what could be debrided, sutured, what was a viable limb and what was not. All of the injuries were fresh. A young combatant, having lost the affections of a girlfriend and unable to endure the teasing of his colleagues, had torn the pin from a grenade and tossed it into the back of the lorry that contained his tormentors.

At the end of eight hours there was insufficient light to continue working. Kai called for Captain Amos and asked for his permission to leave. The young commander looked at him with eyes that were darkly opaque and seemed to absorb the remaining light. He told Kai he might yet be needed, they were both to stay. In the morning they would be released.

They lay on the floor by the wall. Kai stayed awake, to guard over Balia. He listened to the sounds from outside, far away and close at hand, terrifying comings and goings. He tried to reassure Balia, but his words rang hollow in the darkness. The scent of ganja. Laughter, hard and humourless. Shouts. Music. Swearing and singing. Screams. Swells of cheering. More than once he thought he heard a helicopter. There were other, unexplained sounds. Then footsteps. Somebody passing by rapped upon the door, causing Balia to whimper and huddle closer to him. Kai listened carefully, trying to make sense of what was happening.

Several hours into the night, the door opened. Somebody held a kerosene lamp close to Kai’s face. There were seven of them, Kai counted carefully. It seemed they had come to stare, as though they had known there was something unexpected to be found in the room. There were some changes of places, people entered and left, called others. Kai felt his heart contract. He got to his feet to be on the same level as the newcomers.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘You’re the doctor?’ From his voice he was young. Kai had the sense they were all young, all smaller than him at any rate. He could hear a bottle being passed in the darkness behind.

‘Yes,’ said Kai, hoping perhaps he was needed.

‘Who is this? Is this your girlfriend?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s a nurse.’

‘She’s your girlfriend. Look how fine she is. Why don’t you share your girlfriend with us? You tink say because you na big doctor, you deserve better than we.’

Kai asked for Captain Amos, but got no reply. It was hard to make out who he was speaking to: he could smell better than see them.

Somebody reached around him, seized Balia’s arm and pulled her away from him.

‘We want to fuck your girlfriend, Mister Doctor.’ The speaker raised his eyebrows and smiled broadly, confidently. Kai could see the gleam of his teeth as he waited for Kai’s reaction. Kai didn’t speak. His brain worked cold and fast. Whatever came next was critical. Then from Balia a sob. She began to plead, a low, wavering, ululating sound. Laughter. Balia twisted and strained.

‘She is a nurse,’ said Kai. ‘Please let her go.’

Somebody sucked his teeth.

Somebody else said, ‘These two came from the hospital. I saw them there. Let us leave them.’