Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Around the bend of the hill the road narrows suddenly, encroached upon by a marketplace. Kai pulls over and lowers the window. ‘Ssssss!’ He raises a hand and clicks his fingers. A woman approaches and lowers a tray from her head. She counts out six fish, golden and blackened, a dozen rounds of flat bread, separates the fish and bread into portions and ladles a deep-red sauce over each. Kai passes a portion to Adrian, to Abass another. Adrian eats with his fingers. The fish is smoky and dry, the cassava bread plain and unsalted — reminding him of unleavened bread. By contrast the sauce is rich, greasy and savoury. Kai starts the car and drives away, eating from his lap with one hand and steering with the other. The sauce stains the tips of Adrian’s fingers saffron.

Up through the hills, trees closing in on either side of the road. The traffic is gone, the road is silent. The landscape flattens out. Rice fields, vegetable plots and tree plantations are gradually replaced by an unvarying wall of elephant grass. There is the occasional broken-down lorry but little else. The interval between settlements widens, children seemingly frozen in a single moment in time watch the passage of the vehicle. Once they pass what looks like a disused quarry. Abass lowers the window and sticks his head out, opens and closes his mouth to make popping sounds and occasionally shouts his name into the wind. Kai presses a cassette into the tape player, the speakers hiss, a drum beat and then another.

Well they tell me of a pie up in the sky ,

Waiting for me when I die .

But between the day you’re born and when you die ,

They never seem to even hear your cry .

Abass draws his head back inside the car, stands up between the seats, steadying himself between the headrests, and sings at the top of his voice, The harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all !

Kai taps the steering wheel. Adrian remembers Kai playing the same tape in the evenings in the apartment during his illness. Another song follows. Abass seems to know the words to each one. Kai leans across and flips open the glove compartment. ‘Choose something.’

Adrian rummages through the space: Biros, latex gloves, matchsticks, cassettes. Next to him Kai takes a corner, swerves suddenly and comes to a halt. Out of the rear window Adrian sees a minibus on its roof in the ditch. A knot of people are gathered in the road. In front of them, a row of cloth-covered shapes.

Kai has the door open. ‘Hold on here a moment.’ He doesn’t pause for an answer but steps out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

‘Wait for me!’ Abass scrabbles at the door handle. ‘I’m coming, too.’ But Kai is already twenty yards away.

‘You know, I think we should wait here,’ says Adrian. ‘Like we were asked to.’

Abass’s head snaps round, he is still tugging at the door. ‘Why?’

‘Well, I think they might need a doctor. They don’t need us, either of us. You stay with me.’

Abass peruses Adrian’s face for a moment, considering his response. Adrian smiles. Abass relaxes and lets go of the door. ‘OK, then,’ he says. Behind the boy’s head Adrian can see Kai pause and squat at each of the covered shapes. There follows a brief conversation with the people by the roadside, Kai walks back to the car and swings himself into his seat, turning down the volume of the music before they drive away.

‘What happened to the poda poda ? Did it crash?’ asks Abass.

‘Yes,’ says Kai.

‘What happened to the people?’

‘Some of them are dead. The ones who were injured have been taken away. The accident was a little while ago. They’re waiting for someone to collect the bodies.’

‘I want to see the dead people!’ shouts Abass.

‘Well, they didn’t want to see you,’ replies Kai equably.

Abass squirms around on the back seat and stares at the wreck out of the back window as it recedes into the distance. They drive in silence for a while. After a few minutes Kai turns the music up. He has moved on. It is their day out. Abass, too, is soon humming along and pointing out of the window. Adrian tries to erase from his mind the image of the survivors standing waiting, the bulky lozenges beside them, like an orchestra of double-bass players.

A half-hour on Kai turns off the highway on to a dirt road. They traverse a metal bridge high over a slow, wide river and pass through a town. From there they continue east down a long, straight dirt track. Here the landscape is different again, even less cultivated. There are scatterings of black boulders that seem to absorb the sunlight, so starkly black in the dazzling day that Adrian finds it hard to focus upon them. A short series of hills juts out of the flat landscape to cast a shadow over the surrounding earth.

They stop to stretch their legs, the men set off in opposite directions to urinate — Abbas follows Kai. The air is sweet and heavy. Adrian’s clothes and skin are covered in a layer of dust. He shakes his head and dust falls from his cropped hair. The ground at his feet is cracked, and when he relieves his bladder the liquid sends up a small spurt of dust and a white butterfly. From the ice box in the boot Kai fetches cold drinks and the three drink them standing by the car. A man steps out of nowhere and exchanges greetings with Kai. His eyes flick over Adrian with interest, though it is to Kai he addresses his words. From what Adrian can guess, from the nods, the gestures, he is asking where they are going. Kai offers him the empty drink bottle and the man reaches out to accept it gravely. Again and again his eyes slip back towards Adrian. In time he moves on. To where? From where? Adrian cannot imagine. For on either side of them the road reaches out for miles.

It is one o’clock when they turn off the road down a descending and increasingly narrow and uneven track. The track is so overgrown that light is scarce. After ten minutes Kai pulls over and applies the handbrake. ‘We’ll walk from here.’ So they gather their things and set off, Kai in the lead, the cooler from the boot on his shoulder.

‘Have I been here before?’ asks Abass.

‘No, we used to come here before you were born.’

‘How come you never brought me?’

‘It was never possible,’ says Kai, shifting the weight of the cooler, waving off Adrian’s offer of help. ‘There was a lot of fighting around here.’ He turns to Adrian and points somewhere up into the trees ahead of them. ‘There’s a dam up there, a big hydroelectric project.’

‘Are we going to see the dam?’ Abass asks.

‘Not this time.’

Abass runs up behind Kai and butts the small of Kai’s back with his head. Kai catches hold of Abass and swings him around with his free arm. They walk, play-fighting as they go, Abass, head lowered like a small ram. Kai, catching him, swinging him, never breaking his stride.

The call of birds, footsteps on dry leaves, an occasional insect, nothing else. Sweat trickles down Adrian’s back. How hot it is even in the shade! As he walks on Adrian hears a rushing in the air, a white noise. Ahead of them he can see light, muted by the leaves, transforming in the distance into pure, pale, shimmering brilliance. They are by a river. He can see the reflection of the sun upon water. Beneath his feet the way turns to rocks, and he picks his route over and between them. They follow the curve of the river. The noise fills Adrian’s head. Kai turns and calls to him; Adrian can see Kai’s mouth open and close, but hears nothing. He cups his ears. Kai points and Adrian stumbles towards him, his gaze following Kai’s finger.

It is the height of a three-storey building. To Adrian the breadth is as impressive as the depth, for it is some fifty yards wide. Powerful, determined, inexorable, the water is like a great herd of animals, plunging from a cliff of rock into the silent pool.