Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

All that I remember, bright splinters, silence save for Saffia’s keening. Interrupted by a sudden commotion. Footsteps in the corridor. Johnson shouting at the desk clerk. His attempts, futile, to cover Julius’s face with the sheet. Saffia’s fury as she set herself upon Johnson, beating him with her fists. Johnson’s composure gone.

It pleased me, I admit it, to see him finally undone.

There is a quality to grief, I know. Like the first rains after the dry season. At first it fails, slides off the soil, rolling away in the dust of disbelief. But each day brings fresh rain. Saffia did what was expected of her. People came to pay respects, the women to sit with her, the men to offer gifts of money for the funeral and for the Seven and Forty Days ceremonies. I was there, assisting where I could. The Imam called. How that would have infuriated Julius! Saffia sat among the women. She wore a gown of plain black cotton, her hair wrapped in a black headdress. No make-up and not a single bangle, necklace or ring, except her gold wedding band. She was beautiful. She would reward my efforts to help with an otherworldly smile. I say otherworldly, for since the moment in that grey building when Saffia lifted the sheet from Julius’s face, she had stepped into a landscape where nobody lived but her.

The students began to return after the vacation, like birds assembling after a long migration, fluttering down in ones and twos, recognising each other from the year before.

That day, the one I am thinking of, the Dean called me into his office. I opened the door to find him at the window, from where he liked to survey his domain, or so it seemed to me. Only this time his attention seemed to be concentrated upon something of particular interest.

‘Come,’ he said, continuing to gaze from the window.

I did as I was asked.

‘What’s this?’

I looked down. The courtyard was full of students, hundreds of them. They were all dressed in white, the boys in shirts and slacks, the girls in dresses. Some had covered their hair. It was hard to see what they were doing. If it was a demonstration of some sort, then where were the placards?

‘Go down and see what’s going on,’ said the Dean.

I was due at Saffia’s house — Saffia’s house, how quickly I came to think of it as that — in a little under an hour, for it was the day of Julius’s Forty Day ceremony. I’d helped Saffia with the arrangements and I was reluctant to become involved in anything that might delay me. I allowed my gaze to drift over the heads of the gathered students. More and more of them were arriving all the time. For no reason my eye came to alight on a particular student, a boy. Perhaps because he was sitting more or less alone on the library steps. There was something familiar in his profile, even from this angle. I recognised him as the boy who had been with Julius the day I watched him from my own window, lost so deep in conversation they had stopped to continue their discourse and allowed themselves to be soaked by the rain. Shortly afterwards Julius had bounded up to my office and asked me to lend him the price of a soft drink. I remembered it as if it were yesterday. Like everybody else, the boy was dressed in white, on his feet a pair of white tennis shoes. He wore his hair high in the fashion of the times, a comb pushed into the front. What was that around his arm? I leaned forward and peered at him. It was a black armband. I switched my gaze to the student nearest him. He too wore a black armband. The girl he was talking to, she had a black scarf wrapped around her hair. Over there, the plump girl in the long skirt. A black sash. Another armband. Another. And another.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to the Dean. He was standing with his arms folded, his eyebrows drawn together, his features arranged into an expression of general and indistinct annoyance. I remembered our telephone conversation that Saturday morning, the day he asked me to fetch Saffia from her home and take her to Johnson’s offices. On the phone he had sounded irritated. As though annoyed at being woken at such an hour. And yet by then he must have known what had happened. He must have known Julius was dead.

Down in the courtyard I moved in and out of the throng of students. I saw no other faculty members. One or two of the students greeted me. A nod here, a handshake there. A boy grasped my hand and would not let it go. Instead he hung his head and began to sob.

At two o’clock the library bell sounded and there was a general movement, a shuffling as people began to shape themselves into some sort of order. I allowed myself to be carried along with them; by then I knew exactly where they were going. Despite the atmosphere of mourning, the sombre day and big-bellied clouds that floated above us, the humidity pressing in from all sides, there was something light in the air, and I felt inexplicably uplifted by it. It worried me not that the Dean might be watching, waiting for me to report back to him, all of that I would deal with later. For now I joined the march of students as we turned out of the gate and made our way along the tree-lined avenue towards the town. There was singing, as I recall, but not much. In the main we walked in silence. Forty minutes. A minute for each day that had passed. Finally we arrived.

And those who could not find room in the house filled the garden, and those who could not find room in the garden stood in the street, until the pink house on the hill was all but surrounded.

Julius died of an asthma attack. This is the sum of what we were told. By the time he was discovered it was too late; nothing could be done to save him. His medication, it seemed, had been removed from his possession along with other items of his personal effects. An error, unfortunate. In the room he was being held, in the basement of the building, nobody had heard him dying.

In the corner a woman sits at a table counting piles of battered notes. Her hair is wrapped in a deep-red cloth, wound around her head, twisted and pinned, the ends left rippling and free. The whole arrangement resembles a giant rose. The waitress has a rose pinned into her hair. There is a plastic rose in a vase on the table. At the next-door table are two men; one wears a dog tag, a bracelet and tattoos. His hair is sleek with oil, his accent curious to Adrian’s ear. A kind of strangulated American, as though he has learned to speak English from watching Taxi Driver . Adrian says this to Mamakay and it amuses her, which in turn pleases him.

‘When I was a kid we thought Liberians were so cool. They had ice-cream parlours.’

‘You didn’t have ice cream?’

She shakes her head. ‘We had ice cream. You could buy it in the supermarkets and in the department store. But ice-cream parlours . That was something else.’

By Adrian’s reckoning they are not far from the old department store where he went looking for Agnes, which now seems so long ago. Adrian must have walked past this restaurant without ever guessing it was here. On the way down the street Mamakay suddenly ducked through a flowering hedge. In that moment Adrian had lost her, before he followed her through.

Here is everything he knows about her. She is a clarinet player. Or, as she would have it said, she plays the clarinet. For it is not a job. Her job is to tutor university students by the hour. The house she shares with two of the other band members. Hers is a small suite of rooms at the back of the house with a view of a yard of moss-streaked concrete and the neighbour’s dovecote. Mamakay had sat at one end of a long wicker sofa drinking her coffee, her legs tucked beneath her, while Adrian perched against a railing. The sound of the doves reminded him of home. The woman in the red headdress who greeted Mamakay with a trio of kisses is an old friend, Mary, owner of the Mary Rose. From time to time Mamakay waitresses here to help out.