Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘Detainees are not permitted to make telephone calls, other than to their legal representatives.’

Was I now a detainee? Was he trying to intimidate me? I hesitated to pursue it, for fear of having it confirmed, made solid. Then there would be no going back. I said, ‘It must be possible.’

‘I assure you, I know the rules, Mr Cole.’ He went on to quote the act and even the clause relating to communications with detainees.

I said, ‘Those laws were passed during the state of emergency.’ And by the previous regime. Reference to them was contained in my paper.

‘That may be.’ He flattened his palm on my file in front of him. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand your point.’

The guard returned and escorted me back to my room. My room, as I had already begun to think of it. I sat on the chair. Once, twice I heard sounds of other people, steps in the corridor. I waited through the afternoon and evening. Again I reviewed my conversations with Johnson. I pondered the existence of a file on me. At times the fact of it seemed momentous, at other times insignificant. Quite likely it contained nothing more than my employment and social security records, all of which he could have acquired without difficulty. The title of the paper — how had Johnson come to have knowledge of that? Who had supplied it? I checked myself. I was beginning to think like Johnson. The paper had been unremarkable — an all too unremarkable work of academia. Possibly mention of it was contained in my employment records. And yet it was an unpublished paper. How could it have acquired such status?

I thought, too, of Johnson, the practised obtuseness, the implacability of his regard and strange old man’s hands. Tiny, black and wrinkled, those searching fingertips. Monkey’s hands. Nit-picking hands. What was it he wanted? I didn’t know. If I had, I might have given it to him.

I wanted a smoke. The comforting task of lighting and inhaling. I was frightened. Nobody had hurt me so far, but one heard of things happening — to people who were activists, troublemakers. And wasn’t that precisely what Johnson seemed insistent on trying to pin on me?

How quickly in such situations one searches out comfort where one will. A small rectangle of sun from the tiny window appeared on the wall. I moved the chair, took off my jacket and sat in it. I have always had a sharp sense of mortality. I had no wife, no children. I had no regrets, I was not being maudlin. I say simply that I had a sharp sense of my own mortality. I had never possessed the kind of fearlessness one finds so often in the very young — in my brother, before his illness. In Julius. Julius . What had he got me involved in?

That moment, during the night before, when I’d seen myself from the outside, not myself — the vacant space I occupied — I knew my limitations. I knew I was no hero.

I must have fallen asleep. I awoke on the hard floor, grit pressed into my face. My body ached, the points of my hip and shoulder felt bruised. For a moment I forgot where I was.

Who hasn’t had one of those terrible dreams in which some unremembered crime has come to light, some dreadful act for which you know yourself to be responsible, because all the evidence is there in your own heart, and yet you can recall nothing of it? You wake up in your own bed awash with relief. That dawn, when I woke curled upon the floor of the cell, in the moment or two it took me to remember where I was, I waited in vain for the release that would tell me it had been a bad dream. I sat up. Somewhere out there people were going about their business, my colleagues, my landlady, Saffia. I’d barely thought about Saffia. I wondered what she was doing, whether she had understood the reason for my absence.

A guard came for me, just as one had the day before. I was shown into Johnson’s office. He was standing with his back to me studying the noticeboard behind his desk. I had tried to steel myself for another bout of his questions, but the truth is I was lost. When he turned to me and I saw it was not Johnson but the Dean, I almost collapsed with relief. I believe I would have cried, were it not for the briskness of the Dean’s manner. He made no remark on my appearance, though his gaze lingered over me. No doubt because of his own particularity regarding matters of personal hygiene, he looked faintly repelled. He sat down in Johnson’s chair; the table in front of him had been cleared of papers. My knees buckled slightly and I sat down heavily in the chair opposite.

‘I have spoken to Mr Johnson. He has explained some of the matter to me. I’ve told him that you are one of the most reliable members of the faculty. As a result he has been kind enough to allow the use of his office for us to have this conversation.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I see no reason why this should take very long at all.’ His manner was devoid of the fractious energy and absent-mindedness he displayed at other times. I was pleased. He was taking it seriously. At last somebody to make sense of it all, to lead me out of this place.

‘I have no idea what this is about,’ I said. ‘I can assure you.’

‘Mr Johnson tells me the police are clamping down on illegal publications,’ said the Dean. ‘It seems you may have been swept up in somebody else’s business.’

He pushed a newspaper across the desk towards me, one of those street sheets, with names like Scope and Searchlight . I thought of the vendor whose arrest I’d witnessed. The paper on the desk bore a date a month old; in terms of quality it was marginally better produced than most.

The Dean continued, ‘It’s simply a matter of cooperating with these people.’

I didn’t have the strength to argue with the Dean, to tell him what kind of person Johnson was, how you could not believe anything he said. I waited.

The Dean pushed the paper an inch further towards me. ‘He asks me to show you this.’

‘What does this have to do with me?’

‘Take a look.’

I opened the paper, and began to turn the leaves one by one. I could feel the Dean watching me. On the third page, on the right-hand side, a headline caused me to pause. I felt the same small electrical jolt to my heart as when Johnson had mentioned my essay. This article was entitled, ‘A Black Man on the Moon’.

‘Read it.’

I had paused too long. I should have continued turning the pages, maintained a pretence. Too late. So I did as the Dean had asked me and read the article. Put plainly, it consisted of a sustained attack upon the government, on the regime’s failure to observe basic human rights during their time in power. Progress in the country was in danger of stalling because the elite had more interest in lining their pockets. The relevance of the headline was to indicate to the reader how distant we were as a nation from such an achievement. There was no byline, and I noticed none of the other articles had bylines either. I scanned the article quickly; one phrase came to the fore that still sticks: At the present rate of development it will take a century to achieve what many nations manage in a decade . An inversion of the words Julius had used, the very first evening we spent together. A century of work in a single decade. He’d been talking about the moon landing.

The Dean watched me, leaning back in Johnson’s chair, balanced between the chair’s two back legs and his toes. Before I had finished reading he interrupted. ‘Not the kind of thing we want associated with the university, I think you’ll agree.’

I nodded, I was scarcely in a position to do otherwise.

He let the chair drop forward and leaned his elbows on the desk. He was silent, tapping his pursed lips with his forefinger. Then he put his fingertips together, and looked at me over their steepled arch. ‘Really, it’s a matter of coming to some arrangement with these people. No more than that.’