Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘So now his answer is to keep the man chained.’

She regards him for a moment in silence, dips her chin and looks at the floor.

‘Looks like you dropped something,’ she says, pointing.

His eye travels to the floor. There is nothing he can see.

‘Where?’

‘Right there.’ She points.

Adrian sees nothing but a patch of lino, curled and broken. He frowns. ‘What is it?’

‘Oh, about two million dollars, I think.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What it would cost to put in a proper security system: infrastructure, staff, training.’

They are on the other side of the door. Ileana reaches into her pocket for her cigarettes and lighter. She turns away, trailing smoke.

‘I’m sorry. I just want to know about the treatment methods.’

‘We have a method,’ she says. ‘We call it cold turkey.’

Ileana walks and smokes. Adrian, unsure of his response, walks alongside her, waiting for her to say something more, realising she does not intend to.

‘So why did Dr Attila say …?’

‘Exactly,’ she says, laughs briefly and gives him a humourless smile. ‘Now you get it. You should have been here at the start. But of course you weren’t. Nobody was. You all turn up when it’s over. Shit!’ And throws her butt into a flowerbed.

At her office Ileana unlocks the door with a key she draws from her smock pocket, crosses the room and plugs a kettle into the wall.

‘Back in the 1980s the country was being run into the ground. Attila was already working here by then. On his own. He trained abroad and came back after his studies were over. I think there was a Brit in charge up until that point, but gradually they were leaving and being replaced by Africans. He must have been pretty young to take on such a responsibility. At that time the population he was treating was pretty much the same as anywhere else: schizophrenics, psychotics, depressives. The usual breakdown of nutcases. Then, at some point, that began to change.’

Ileana makes tea in a small silvered pot. Lipton Yellow Label, it takes an age to brew and even then the tea achieves no more than a pale gold.

‘In the early 1980s there was an influx of new admissions; Attila saw it first. He was the one admitting them. They were mostly young men, late teens and early twenties. They came from the city but also from the provinces, either without family or thrown out by their families. All with drug-related disorders. Within a few years, the make-up of his population had inverted. Those who’d once made up no more than a tenth were now the overwhelming majority.’

She pauses to stir and then to pour the tea, hands Adrian a cup. There is no air conditioning in the room, no fridge either. The windows are all closed. What he’d in fact really like is a glass of cold water, but he accepts the tea without complaint. He wants to get over the bad start he seems to have made with Ileana.

‘He wrote to the government, the newspapers. Something was coming. Of course no one took him seriously. The government ministers laughed and said he was as batty as his patients. But he went on, to the World Health Organisation. The government began to get irritated with him. Fuckers. He was trying to warn them. And then in the 1990s. Whoosh!’ She throws both hands dramatically up in the air. ‘Hundreds, thousands of young men, high on drugs and very, very angry. No jobs. No families. No futures. Nothing to lose. The thing that was coming had arrived.’

In the silence Adrian drinks his tea. Ileana fetches a tin from the top of a filing cabinet and offers him a biscuit from a selection. He takes one with jam in the middle, like the ones he used to enjoy as a child, licking out the sticky, synthetic centre. He hasn’t had one in years. Ileana opens a window and a faint trickle of breeze reaches him. On the wall behind her desk a sign reads: Some days it’s just not worth chewing through the straps . The conversation picks up and strays on to other subjects. He asks her where she trained, as a way of trying to locate where in Eastern Europe she is from.

‘Tel Aviv.’

‘Ah.’

She smiles for the first time, knowing she has confounded him. ‘My initial training was in Bucharest.’

On the way back to the front gate they pass a building, smaller than the rest, and set slightly apart. Outside it is a washing line upon which are strung several lappas , lengths of printed cloth, limp with age and wear. At the back a woman is bent over a cooking fire. The women’s quarters.

‘Can we take a look?’ asks Adrian.

‘Don’t see why not,’ Ileana shrugs, tosses her half-smoked cigarette on to the ground and leads the way, introducing Adrian to the female attendant at the door.

Inside the room the beds are fewer and therefore more widely spaced than inside the men’s ward. The rank odour is less present, possibly because the windows are open. None of the patients is restrained. Some are sitting or lying on their beds, at the far end a woman is folding clothes, nearest the door another sits cross-legged on her bed. She looks up at Adrian and smiles suddenly and warmly; one eye is cloudy, her hand plucks at the bedclothes as she babbles nonsense. They are, Ileana explains, mostly schizophrenics, some personality disorders. Few are violent, though they have to keep an eye on them.

‘With women the families will try to keep them at home, seek treatment through local healers or religious leaders. So there are relatively few of them here.’

‘Do they help? The local methods?’ he asks.

‘It’s just care in the community under another name,’ she replies.

The attendant, who has been shadowing them ever since they entered the room, says something to Ileana, who stops, holds up her hand, signalling for Adrian to wait. She moves forward, stopping a few paces in front of a woman who is standing facing them from the other side of a bed, sullen and motionless, a hairbrush in her hand. Ileana speaks to her for a moment. She turns to Adrian.

‘This one’s not good with men. They had a bit of trouble with her the other day, apparently. I hadn’t heard about it. If you’ve seen enough we may as well go.’

‘Sure.’

Ileana gives instructions regarding the patient’s medication to the attendant. Adrian waits, looking around him. There is a woman lying in one of the beds, curled upon her side, hands under her chin, her eyes open, staring into the middle distance. He takes a step forward and peers at her, but moves no nearer, less concerned with his own safety than subverting Ileana’s authority.

When Ileana joins him again he asks, ‘What do you know about this woman?’ It is her, he is sure of it, the woman who came to see him in the hospital and who approached him later on the street. She had fled then and never returned.

Ileana tilts her head on one side and peers at the woman’s face. ‘I’ve never seen her before, I don’t think. Mostly it’s Attila who deals with the women’s ward.’ She turns to the attendant, speaking the local dialect.

‘She was admitted two days ago.’ She interprets haltingly, her attention given to listening to the attendant. ‘Somebody brought her. She’s not sure who, but it wasn’t a family member. Somebody off the street. She’s confused, apparently.’ A pause. ‘That’s it.’ She is about to continue walking when the attendant speaks again, saying something which causes Ileana to raise her eyebrows and grunt with faint surprise. ‘Every few months or so. She reappears every few months. It’s a regular occurrence, apparently.’

Through the open office door Adrian can see Attila bent over his desk. Thankfully he is alone. Adrian knocks softly on the door. He is suddenly nervous, the memory of the man’s earlier manner and also now the possibility of being refused. There is no reason, after all, for the man to say yes except as a professional courtesy. Adrian’s sliver of hope rests on Attila seeing it that way. At the second knock Attila waves him in without looking up and points at an empty chair. Adrian obeys. Attila signs off on the document in front of him and rises, paper in hand.