Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh. I thought I’d asked you.’

I shook my head.

‘Well, anyway, there’s a meeting coming up about office space on the campus. It would be good to have some figures, to give me a picture. If not an overview, then an example to better our case.’ He raised his head and looked at me directly as he said this.

‘Of course. No problem.’

‘Leave it in my pigeonhole.’

I assured him I would, and with that I made my departure.

There, on the opposite path, Attila. It is the morning of Adrian’s third visit to the asylum. He cannot help himself, he estimates the distance to the stairway to Ileana’s office and calculates that an encounter is unavoidable. He feels a faint flush, something about the man unnerves him.

Attila seems not to remember his name.

‘Of course,’ he says when Adrian has supplied it, accompanied by a small deadly smile. ‘So you’re back. How are you finding things?’

‘Fine. Thank you. Salia is being most helpful.’

Adrian doesn’t want to say more until he has had the chance to examine Agnes again, until he has a greater sense of her condition. Here Attila is all powerful, his grace everything. The Minotaur inside his labyrinth. Adrian moves aside to make way for the older man.

Agnes is an enigma, still. The clues he has to work with are few. There is no evidence of delusions, she is calm. The attendants say she is one of the better patients, meaning she is not disruptive, complaining only of a headache. She seems to be in a constant state of readiness, as if waiting for someone or something.

Twice Adrian has interviewed her, both times in Salia’s presence. On the last occasion Adrian borrowed from Ileana an orange, a sugar cube and a biscuit with a jam centre. ‘Can you tell me the name of this?’ he said, rolling the orange across the table towards her. He offered to let her keep each item she correctly identified. She’d been more responsive, and though still did not look directly at Adrian, she answered his questions. To Agnes he would likely seem a figure of some authority, an impression he decided to preserve. She could not remember how she came to be here or who brought her. Her voice was halting, he struggled to hear her and required Salia’s intervention. From time to time she rubbed a hand across her face. Other times she twisted the corner of her lappa . And though she could not answer all his questions, everything about her manner was compliant.

Though he despises cheap tricks he picked up a mirror from Ileana’s desk and turned it round to her. ‘Tell me what you see.’

One minute rolled over into two; she continued to gaze at her image. Once she rubbed her thumb over it. She leaned forward and placed the mirror upon the table.

‘What did you see?’ he repeated.

She shook her head and frowned. ‘The glass is no good.’

There’d been one other significant moment. It occurred as Agnes was leaving and passed Salia, in his customary stance, back to the window, hands folded behind him. She’d raised her chin and gazed out of the window. And then she had enquired of Salia, in an entirely conversational manner, why the harmattan had come so early this year. Were the rains over so quickly? And Salia had replied, softly and with deference, that the rains had ended several months past. That had been three days ago.

Today Salia reports he had been called to attend Agnes during the night. After the progress of the last few days she has taken a turn for the worse. A disturbance on the ward in the early hours of the morning. She’d been agitated and upset, talked of the loss of a gold chain and became frantic in her efforts to leave. He’d had no choice but to sedate her. Adrian listens to Salia, who stands silhouetted against the window, against splinters of white sunlight. Together they go to the female ward, where Agnes lies, still sleeping.

‘Should we constrain her when she wakes?’ asks Salia.

But Adrian cannot abide the idea. ‘Just keep her quiet. Let her sleep it off.’

Salia’s silent assent conveys a sense that he would do it differently, though it will be as Adrian wishes.

Afternoon. Salia and Adrian are in town. Salia steps across the choked and foul gutter in his unblemished nurse’s shoes. Tradesmen sit behind open wooden cases balanced upon stools. Salia passes between them, stops in front of a building and allows Adrian to take the lead. The stairway is unlit, the air sulphurous. At the first floor the door opens into a large hall. Inside the shapes of people move around in noise and shadows between cubicles delineated by lines of washing and makeshift cardboard screens. From outside, less than ten yards away, there is no evidence of this second city within the halls of the old department store. Adrian’s foot knocks against a bucket, water sloshes over his shoe, the noise bounces dully off the walls. A woman’s voice softly curses him. Adrian hesitates and Salia takes the lead once more. ‘Excuse me, Ma?’ to the woman as she rescues her bucket. He asks her where they might find the person they have come to find. Bent over her bucket, she raises her head and points.

They find the man, dressed in a vest and a pair of shorts, sitting upon a plinth once used to display mannequins. Yes, he says. It was he who brought the woman to the crazy hospital. He knew about Dr Attila. He hadn’t wanted to leave her on the streets.

‘You live here now?’ Adrian asks.

The man nods. To Adrian’s relief he speaks English. ‘I was doorman here,’ he adds. ‘Before.’ He says it as others do, in a way that conveys a sense of timelessness. Before. There was before. And there is now. And in between a dreamless void.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Yes. Her daughter worked here once, the ma would pass by from time to time.’

Sometimes he would go and call her daughter for her. A fine girl, the daughter. He and the woman would pass the time of day as she waited. The woman lived a way outside the city, he remembered, because when there was nothing else to say they discussed the state of the roads. That is as much as he remembers. Many years have passed. So much has changed. People say the woman has become possessed.

‘Is that what you think? That she is possessed?’

The man stands up from the plinth to address Adrian: strained, slow movements.

‘I have seen her here before. Sometimes, for some of us, they say spirits call. She is not possessed, but she is crossed, yes. And that makes some people afraid. I am not afraid, because I knew her before. But people now are not as they were, they are more fearful.’

The man accompanies them back to the stairwell. Adrian thanks him and shakes his hand. Salia leans forward and presses a few notes into his palm, and the man nods and closes his fingers around them. Silently he watches them go.

Outside they make their way back through the glare and the dust. Salia, two steps ahead of Adrian, walks like a dancer with his shoulders and chin straight, seeming almost to glide an inch above the ground. Adrian wonders how to engage him in conversation.

‘What exactly did he mean when he said she was crossed?’ he asks.

Salia turns to look at him. ‘Why do you worry about this woman?’

The question, upon the lips of a psychiatric nurse, stops Adrian short. One of the attendants had asked the same thing, chuckling secretively as she waddled down the ward sprinkling disinfectant upon the floor, her manner suggestive of something faintly improper about his interest. Why this one? Why not? he wants to answer back. But he cannot think of any other answer apart from one that is true, because apart from the patient in the hospital, the dying Elias Cole, she is all he has. He has no desire to have to justify himself. Still, Salia is Attila’s henchman.