Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘I was thinking,’ she says, before he can begin. ‘Do you want me to redecorate in here while you’re away?’

Though he can visualise the place of every book on the shelves he barely remembers the wallpaper.

‘Sure,’ he replies.

Another day Adrian talks to Kai about the man in the room. He is not Kai’s patient, though Kai volunteers what he knows of the man’s condition. In another country they would be looking for a lung donor. Impossible here, it goes without saying. Oxygen might extend his life by years, but the oxygen plant in the city has been destroyed. The hospital’s two concentrators are both in constant use. And though it is a fool’s errand, Adrian searches out the hospital administrator and asks her if anything can be done, knowing all the while that if she had an extra machine Elias Cole would still not rank in the hierarchy of the meek. It wouldn’t have surprised him had she chosen to deliver him a lecture, but instead she saves her breath, looks him straight in the eye and boldly utters the lie that she will do what she can.

A day later she puts her head around the door of his office. This is more than Adrian has seen of her since his arrival, but it is only to say that a package has arrived and is waiting for him in her office. He rises. For a moment she stands in the doorway in front of him, not moving. She has a way of regarding Adrian, as though perplexed by precisely what sort of being he is. Any minute now she will promise that talk, he thinks.

‘Yes,’ she says as though listening to his thoughts. ‘When things are a bit easier, stop by for a chat, won’t you?’ And she turns and hurries off, gunshot heels resounding in the corridor.

In the evening Adrian carries the parcel of books back to his apartment and sets them on the coffee table. He lights several candles (the generator has been playing up), opens a fresh bottle of whisky and sits down. He orders the books into a pile on the table and selects a slim volume, subtitled, A History of Mental Illness . Searching the list of chapters and then the index for the word ‘fugue’, he finds the reference he wants, turns to the page and begins to read.

1887. A time of vagabonds and gypsies, of travellers, wayfarers and tramps. A French psychiatrist working in Bordeaux treated for a number of years a patient by the name of Albert Dada. Dada was not a drifter or a tramp, he was something else — an obsessive traveller. At regular intervals he would abandon his family and his work to journey on foot as far as Constantinople and Moscow. At times he ran out of money, at others he was arrested for vagrancy, thrown into jail and made to return home. But within a few months, always, he set out again. Dada could not say why he travelled, or what he planned to do when he reached the end of his journey. At times he couldn’t even remember his own name. He knew nothing, save his destination. The psychiatrist published a paper, Les Aliens Voyageurs , which brought him a modest fame. Albert Dada became the world’s first recognised fuguer.

A spate of fugues followed the publication of Les Aliens Voyageurs , Adrian reads. Most accounts related to missing servicemen between the First and Second World Wars. The men eventually turned up hundreds of miles from home. All claimed to suffer memory loss, not to know who they were, or how they had ended up in the place in which they were found. Some were using other names and pursuing new occupations. All appeared to inhabit a state of obscured consciousness from which they eventually emerged with no memory of the weeks, months or even years they had spent away. These were not isolated incidents in the lives of these men, but a constant, a pattern of behaviour, of journey, of wanderings, of compulsive travelling. The suspicion, on the part of the psychiatrists treating the servicemen, was of malingering. The men were shot as deserters.

With no single case of fugue identified for decades a small lobby within the profession was arguing for it to be recognised for what it was — a hoax perpetrated by cowards and shirkers which ought to be removed from the official classification of mental diseases.

Three hours after he began reading, Adrian sets the book on the coffee table, stands and stretches. He heads into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich, slices open a loaf of bread to find dead ants baked into the honeycomb, shakes them out on to the kitchen surface, spreads the bread with margarine and layers on slices of bright-pink salami and processed cheese. He yearns for Caerphilly and ham sliced from the bone. From the fridge he takes a bottle of Heineken. The fridge has been on and off all day, the bottle is barely cold. He eats the sandwich standing at the worktop, in front of his reflection in the black glass of the window. What he feels is a sense of anxious euphoria, of a person who happens upon what they think might be a lost treasure in a field, brushing away the mud to see what they have found, hoping, but not daring to hope, fearful of scrutinising their find in case it turns out not to be what they had thought.

Something Salia said, the day of the visit to the old department store, the thing that had prompted Adrian to take a second look at the woman’s notes. They had returned to the mental hospital from their trip into town. Adrian had pressed Salia on the former doorman’s words. He’d said, Adrian repeated, that the woman was not possessed, rather that she was crossed.

‘He was making a distinction,’ said Adrian. ‘At least that is how it seemed to me.’

Walking ahead of him, his shoes squeaking faintly on the floor, Salia had stopped and turned to face Adrian. For a few seconds he appeared to consider whether or not to answer Adrian, or perhaps was just weighing his answer.

When he spoke he said, ‘If a spirit possess you, you become another person, it is a bad thing. Only bad spirits possess the living. I am telling you what some people believe, you understand.’

‘Yes.’

‘But sometimes a person may be able to cross back and forth between this world and the spirit world. That is to say, a living person, a real person. And when they are in between the worlds, in neither world, then we say they are crossed. This woman is travelling between worlds. It is something that happens. When I was a small boy there was a woman who became crossed, she was my aunt, in fact. There were times she would move from one village to another, alone, even as far as Guinea and Liberia. People saw her, they said she did not recognise them. Her hair grew long. People believed she had special powers.’

‘Did you ever hear of anybody else like that?’

‘There were people, yes.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Women.’

‘All of them?’

Salia inclined his head. ‘All of them.’

In his mind’s eye Adrian sees the map on the wall of Ileana’s office, the coloured pins of Agnes’s destinations superimposed on the dark window.

The European fuguers one hundred years ago were all men.

Here they are women.

Julius entered my office carrying a briefcase of whisky. His shirt was linen, short-sleeved with stitching upon the lapels, highly starched and only slightly wrinkled in the heat. Next to him I felt dull and rumpled. I was wearing a suit, one of the two I possessed, given to me by my father and shiny at the trouser seat and elbows. The other I should have collected from the cleaner’s on my way in, but had been diverted by a fracas involving a hustler, one of those men who approach you on the street, their illicit wares hidden inside their coats. This fellow had newspapers. They were no more than gossip sheets really, though they were theoretically banned. Their stock-in-trade comprised half-baked conspiracy theories, political scandals, murders served up with especially gruesome or bizarre details and often a graphic photograph, obtained from a police source for the price of a bribe. Once or twice I had found a copy of one of those papers in my office after Julius had been there. I might cast an eye over the front page before I tossed it into the bin.