Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘One moment,’ he says to Adrian. ‘Salia!’

A moment later the nurse glides into view and Attila hands him the document, issuing instructions as he does so. He returns and sits down behind the desk, regarding Adrian with no particular sign of warmth.

‘How may I help you?’

Suddenly Adrian is in two minds whether to ask about the woman at all, but now he is expected to say something.

‘Thanks for letting me look around.’

‘My pleasure,’ replies Attila, and inclines his head without smiling, as though he means nothing of the sort. He leans back with his hands spread out on the desk in front of him and waits for Adrian.

‘There’s a patient on the women’s ward.’ Adrian plunges straight in. ‘She was admitted a few days ago. I’m told not for the first time.’ He describes the woman he has just seen. Attila nods once, yes, he is aware of the patient. Adrian continues, telling Attila how the same woman had been to see him at the hospital. In the moment he decides to omit any mention of the encounter in the street. The psychiatrist listens expressionlessly and without comment until Adrian finishes.

‘So what is it you think I can help you with?’

Adrian takes a breath. ‘I’d like your permission to examine her, if I may.’

‘By all means.’

It had been that easy. Adrian realises he has been holding his breath and exhales, wondering why he’d allowed himself to become so tense.

‘Come back when it suits you. I will inform Salia. Her notes will be made available to you.’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

‘We are,’ says Attila, turning upon Adrian a fathomless look, ‘at your service.’

It is enough for Adrian, who rises to go. By the time he reaches the door, Attila’s attention has shifted back to the paperwork on his desk.

For the second time in the same day and with Ileana’s help, Adrian succeeds in securing a taxi to himself. Despite the heat and the speakers relaying rap music directly behind his head, he luxuriates across the plastic-covered back seat.

For the first time since his arrival he feels a small sense of triumph.

At a T-junction next to a garage a traffic policeman is waving his arms in the air, rotating them like windmills. It seems to be a fashion among the new recruits to develop an individual style, a kind of a semaphoric signature. On three sides the traffic stops and starts in confusion. Inevitably, there is a collision, minor, but chaos ensues as the two drivers get out of their vehicles and a crowd, including the traffic policeman, gathers.

Adrian’s driver exhales huffily, turns up the music and pulls out around the fracas, skirting the cars and people, turning right down a road Adrian has never been before. Suddenly the way ahead of them is clear. Adrian winds down the window and lets in the air, salt and marshy. In between the speed bumps, the driver accelerates. The houses come to an end. There is an expanse of scrub, a view of the sea and a bridge, stretching out ahead of them. As they cross it Adrian sees, to the left, an inlet leading to swampy, open land. To the right, the horizon, a straight blue-grey line. His thoughts are brought back from the mental hospital.

The bridge; he sits up and looks around properly. Over there, the peninsula. And this bridge is the one Elias Cole described. Exactly as he described, Adrian is certain of it.

Julius’s bridge.

It is something Kai enjoys. Keeps his fingers dextrous, like a piano player practising scales. And it entertains children. He holds up the single piece of orange peel, the entire skin of the fruit, so it falls into a natural helix, and hands it to the girl pressed up next to him on the bench. He places a segment of the fruit in his mouth, gives the next one to one of the children, sharing the segments out until the orange is finished. The last piece he hands to the girl next to him. When he stands, she stands alongside him. When he walks, she shadows him, one step behind. Bump, scrape, pushing her bamboo walking frame ahead of her. He turns and squats, pushes a forefinger experimentally into the space between her leg and the plaster.

‘Good?’

A nod.

He moves away. She watches him go, leaning across her frame, like an old woman at the garden gate.

He passes through the children’s ward, still decorated with the remnants of Christmas, tinsel and twists of coloured paper. There’d been presents this time, donated by a Western charity, who sent a photographer along to capture the occasion. The children sat unsmiling, clutching the presents on their knees. The photographer, a middle-aged German, had tried to press them into unwrapping their gifts. The children weepily resisted his encouragements. Finally he had removed — wrenched — the gift from the arms of a five-year-old, and begun to tear the paper away. The child’s distress reached a new pitch, to cease suddenly when the man drew from the box a small wooden house. In moments the room was filled with the sound of tearing paper, scrabbling fingers. The photographer, happy now, clicked away for minutes. Kai stood smiling in a white coat and stethoscope he rarely wore, clapping along with the other staff members.

One parcel contained a plastic gun. A scuffle broke out between two of the boys. One of them, in fact the smaller of the two, wrestled the gun successfully from the other, forced his companion to his knees, hands behind his head, and shot him in the back of the skull. The rhythm of the clapping grew ragged. Mrs Mara stepped forward and removed the weapon, gave the child another toy and resumed her place in the line, the gun held behind her back.

Outside the swing doors of the outpatient department a boy, long-limbed and languid, is sitting in a wheelbarrow. His right knee and lower leg, massively distorted, is bandaged and propped out in front of him. Next to the boy his uncle fans flies away from the leg. Even at this distance the odour reaches Kai, sweet and high like rotted flowers. The amputation would take place in the evening. He pauses in front of the pair, asks the uncle who is to give blood for the operation. The man taps himself on the chest. The boy, feverishly beautiful with cheekbones cut across his face and huge, heavy-lidded eyes, stares into the middle distance, dreamy and preoccupied. He looks otherworldly. It strikes Kai how death, so often ugly, can sometimes arrive in the guise of such beauty.

Diagnosis: Sarcoma. Advanced. Proposed Treatment . Kai had written on the admission form, Surgery. Amputation of left leg. ATK. Grounds: Compassionate .

In the antechamber to the operating theatre he changes his clothes, tossing the used greens into the bin, kicking off his flip-flops and slipping his feet into one of the pairs of rubber clogs. Some of the visiting foreign surgeons have their own pairs, initialled in black marker pen upon the toe. Kai is content with one of the general pairs; they are a luxury, still.

He takes a cap from the shelf and sits down on the bench, flexes his fingers. Sometimes he remains in the changing room for minutes at a time, opening himself for the state to arrive. He read something once, on artists, performers, and their relationship with their work, and recognised himself in the description. One of the writers had commented that it was not so much a matter of waiting for the muse to descend, as opening oneself to receive it. Kai knows that when the sounds around him begin to recede, when the edges of his mind draw in and the horizon comes closer, he is ready to begin. In that state he had learned to work under almost any conditions. As he had for months under flickering lights, a generator roaring in the corner of the room, pausing motionless with his instruments held in the air, like a conductor at the start of an overture, each time the machine broke down and somebody was sent to coax it back into life. As he had when there were no anaesthetists available, when the patients were tied to the table and told to clamp down on a twisted sheet. Kai lost himself amid their screaming, failed to notice when and if they finally fainted. All the time making do with whatever instruments were available, even kitchen utensils.