Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Just the beginning. The second time inside the day somebody had said those words. Ten minutes later I watched her wind her orange scarf around her head and walk away from me. She declined my offer to accompany her home. She wasn’t sure yet where she was going, whether back to Johnson or to the lawyer’s office. She had a few errands to run in the meantime.

‘Call me if you hear anything.’

‘Of course, Elias.’

As it turned out events outpaced the lawyer’s intervention. The writ of habeas corpus was drawn up on Thursday. Before it could be delivered, Yansaneh was released. In the light of this new development the lawyer suggested they hold off to see what happened next. Julius’s release might be imminent. Later in the same day Saffia and I went to Yansaneh’s place. He seemed, how can I describe it to you? Somehow slowed, even more so than before. His short brow furrowed beneath the straight hairline. There was an air of bewilderment about him. I held back and watched Saffia embrace him, couldn’t help but measure the embrace for warmth and tenderness. But Yansaneh just stood, his arms by his sides. Afterwards he turned and walked to the settee, where he sat down heavily and shook his head. For some minutes the three of us remained bound together in silence. Yansaneh asked if there was news of Julius. No, Saffia replied. Shoulders bowed, eyes cast downwards, he seemed smaller. Somehow I expected Yansaneh, the good-natured pedant, to be more stoical.

You will imagine we questioned him about his experiences, that we dug around for facts to piece together, that we examined the thing this way and that to find answers. It wasn’t like that. We listened as he recounted in a low voice those relevant parts of his ordeal. He spoke at his own pace, the sentences punctuated by long silences. He had been questioned, as I had been. The questions pursued more or less the same line. They seemed to be looking for agitators on the campus. Julius. His views, his movements, the company he kept. Yansaneh mentioned meetings in my room, though in the flow of his account they did not emerge as especially significant. None of what he said added much to what we already knew.

We left Yansaneh’s place and drove back through the town. It was early evening. Saffia’s fingers played upon the steering wheel. She said, ‘One never expects to find oneself in this kind of situation. It’s the sort of thing you read about, that happens to other people in other countries.’

I made no reply. A few years ago we’d had a coup, our first, followed by two years of military rule. Not what you hope for, but still. It had all seemed to take place at a different level, well above the lives of ordinary people. We’d woken up one morning to a new government. And in many ways the military were not the worst you could imagine. Though few people publicly supported them, quite a few did so privately. Now we had a civilian government again.

‘In a building in this city, in a room or a cell, is my husband. I can’t see him. I can’t find my way to him. Yet I know he is there. And so do the people who put him there. Whatever the outcome, even if Julius is released tomorrow, things will never be the same again. This is something more. Don’t you see?’

I shook my head. ‘Let’s not blow things out of proportion. You don’t know Johnson like I do. I was with the man for the best part of two days. He’s the one who’s behind this. There’s no great conspiracy. Johnson’s got ahead of himself, that’s all. Nothing more to it than that. But he’s not all powerful. To take things further he’ll have to consult someone higher up and they’ll put a stop to it.’

She looked at me. I could see the hope in her eyes.

‘Do you think so, Elias?’ She wanted to believe.

‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘I do.’

Early morning, a month after his illness. Adrian is driving himself for once. He sees the young woman standing at the roadside, a pair of plastic containers at her feet. It is her, he is certain, the woman he saw talking to Babagaleh and whose face he saw again on the poster at the Ocean Club. He is peering through the windscreen, wanting to assure himself of the fact, when she steps out in front of the vehicle and waves. Adrian’s first response is to wave back, until he realises she is flagging him down. He stops and she hoists the two containers into the back, opens the door and climbs up into the front seat.

‘Thanks,’ she says, as though she has been waiting for him all this time. ‘Water.’

‘Water?’ he repeats.

‘There isn’t any water where I live. They haven’t turned the pumps on for weeks.’

Adrian blinks. ‘So what do people do?’

She jerks her head backwards in the direction of the containers.

Now he understands. He’s seen the queues of people, or sometimes a line of differently shaped and coloured containers, marking places, waiting for the water to come when some government official deemed it. Next to him the young woman sits in silence, except to give occasional directions. Fifteen minutes later she asks him to stop. Before Adrian manages to open his door, she has already stepped out and lifted the two containers from the back. Drops of perspiration bead her forehead and she wipes them with the back of her arm.

‘Thanks,’ she says through the open passenger window.

For the first time he is able to look directly into her face.

‘Is that you? On the poster at the Ocean Club?’

‘Yes. It is.’

He doesn’t want to let her go. ‘You’re a singer?’

She smiles. ‘Oh no. There’s a few of us. It isn’t a living. More like something to do.’

He pauses to leave an opening, hoping for an invitation, but instead she bends down to pick up the containers. And so he says, ‘Perhaps I could come and listen one evening.’

She smiles at him, properly this time. And though he feels faintly exposed, he also feels rewarded.

‘I’m not sure when we’re next playing at the Ocean Club,’ she says.

‘Oh.’

She continues, ‘But if you’re looking for something to do, we’re at the Ruby Rooms. You know it?’

He nods. The name is familiar, though he’s not sure exactly why. She walks away from him, not up the steps of a house, as he imagined, but down the street, labouring under the weight of her containers. He watches her for a few moments more, notices she doesn’t turn once.

Later in the day Adrian gave an account of Agnes’s case to Attila. He stuck to the clinical details, omitting mention of the visit to Port Loko and Agnes’s house. Instead he concluded with her departure from the hospital. Attila’s response had been to shrug and regard Adrian from his great height, those hawkish features atop the bulk of his body. They were standing in the hospital’s courtyard, Attila for once without his retinue.

‘Change takes time, my friend,’ he’d said as he made to move on, a ship preparing to sail. ‘And some of us here have more time than others.’ The implication being, Adrian tells Ileana later, that Adrian was some sort of fly-by-night. The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands. Everything matters more.

Ileana exhales and at the same time sighs. ‘Yeah, well.’ Her voice is gritty with smoke. ‘Shit happens.’ She does not raise her head, or meet his eye, but smokes and shuffles papers.

Adrian is astonished. ‘Ileana?’

She looks up, takes another pull at her cigarette, pinching the filter tight between her thumb and forefinger. Tiny tributaries of lipstick run down the lines around her mouth. Her eyes, inside the dark ring of mascara, are red-rimmed.