Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Order. Isatta never lost her belief in it. After a few days she urged Agnes on through a rigid routine of her own devising. Every morning after bathing they went to the Red Cross tent to check the list of new arrivals. In nearly two years Agnes had had no news of Naasu. But they’d both heard of the sacking of the city where they thought Naasu must be living — living without a father, a mother or a husband.

The Red Cross tent was where people exchanged news of home. New arrivals were especially sought after, for the information they might bring with them. In this way they learned of the turn in events, the troops who had come from overseas, the regaining, mile by mile, of rebel-held territory. Now, after eighteen months of fighting, the government had almost reached the border and the camps. More and more of the new arrivals were people travelling from one refugee camp to another searching for loved ones. One day a Red Cross worker approached Agnes and asked her name. ‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘We are holding a message for you.’

The message had been there for a month. It was from Naasu, searching for her father, her mother and sisters.

Naasu travelled to the halfway point of their journey home to meet them. Agnes, Isatta and Hassan had walked the distance. Now there were vehicles on the roads and with Naasu’s money they were able to obtain transport the rest of the way.

In the back of the poda poda Naasu told her story. She had stayed in the city for almost a year, sheltering in the house of a workmate. After the arrival of the foreign troops she waited until she heard it was safe to return to her home town, fourteen months after the Friday when she had sat with her father and eaten doughnuts on the John Deere tractor. Agnes embraced Naasu and said her father and sisters were dead and in her choice of words let Naasu believe they had all died in the camps together. Naasu wept. Isatta stared at Naasu. So beautiful and healthy: there was flesh on her arms, her hair was black where theirs had turned dry and red. Such elegant clothes. Naasu explained that she had met a man who offered to take care of her and she had married him. She begged her mother’s forgiveness for marrying without her permission and Agnes gave it easily, for a good man was what she had prayed Naasu might find. That at least was God’s true work.

Then Naasu reached across, took her mother’s hand and placed it on her belly. Agnes felt the roundness of her daughter’s stomach and for the first time Isatta saw her friend cry.

In this way they made the journey home.

The marketplace was empty, they saw nobody. Many houses were abandoned, others destroyed. They reached Agnes’s home first and what she saw silenced Isatta. The house was neat and the plaster was new. Chairs stood on the verandah much as they had two years before. It was all her husband’s doing, Naasu told them as she ran up the stairs. It was nearly dark and she invited Isatta and her son to eat with them and to stay the night. Since the food they had brought with them was finished, Isatta accepted. The three waited while Naasu went to find her husband. Isatta thought of her own house and wondered what she would find the next morning. She was happy for Agnes and envied her, too. Soon Naasu returned, her new husband following behind. Naasu was smiling, a sheen of excitement upon her skin as she brought him forward to greet her mother. The man stepped out from under the eaves of the house and into what remained of the light.

The old woman stops speaking. She is no longer looking at Kai, but down at her own lap. He can hear her breathing. There is silence. Somebody in the room urges her to continue. It is Ishmail’s aunt. The old woman looks to her and then back down at her hands.

‘What did you see?’ asks Kai, speaking for the first time.

She swallows and her voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘I saw JaJa.’

They are driving through the dark. Abass wide awake in the passenger seat, buckled in by his seat belt. Kai drives at some speed, propelled by what lies behind him, slowing for the bright lights that come at him out of the darkness.

Ishmail had accompanied him as they made their way slowly down darkened streets back to Old Faithful. Kai unlocked the car and Abass climbed inside. He turned to Ishmail and put out his hand. Automatically, they clasped hands and clicked thumbs and fingers. Kai thanked him. Ishmail inclined his head. They stood awhile in silence until, as though in completion of some shared observation, Ishmail sighed and said, ‘So now you see us here. This is God’s wish.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘You ask me one day, I would answer no, I don’t believe it. You ask me the next day, after these things have occurred, I would not know how to answer you. Such things happened everywhere, for what reason I cannot tell you.’

‘No.’ Kai sighed and shook his head. ‘Nobody can.’

‘So what is there to do but pray?’

Kai hadn’t answered. Instead he embraced his cousin, slipped behind the wheel of the vehicle and drove out of the town.

He remembers now that they’ve eaten nothing since the chicken they bought in the marketplace. He pulls over at the next junction and buys four ears of roast corn. They drive on.

‘Better?’ he says to Abass.

The boy nods. He has been silent since they left the town. Instead he has been sitting, watchful and still, gazing at the darkness ahead of them, unblinking even in the face of the oncoming headlights.

‘So the man killed the lady’s husband and then he married her daughter,’ Abass says.

Kai doesn’t spare the child, but replies, ‘Yes.’

‘And now she has to live with him and keep quiet because her daughter doesn’t know what he did.’

He had been listening to every word spoken in the house.

‘That’s right,’ says Kai.

‘And everybody else keeps quiet, too.’

‘Yes.’

‘What about us?’

Kai turns briefly to look at Abass, who does not return his look but stares straight ahead. The darkness seems to hurtle at them, breaking apart on the windscreen and closing up again in their wake. Abass says, ‘Do we have to keep quiet?’

‘No,’ says Kai. ‘No, we don’t.’

‘What if we lived in that town? Would we have to be quiet then?’

In the silence all Kai can hear is the rush of air. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

The hospital is in darkness, save for the glow of security lights. Kai and Abass pass the wards. A door stands ajar; through the gap he can see a nurse at her station. Hushed footsteps, whispers, the slow squeak of wheels and of rubber on lino.

Kai unlocks the door of Adrian’s apartment and switches on the main lights. There are the books, the pair of mugs on the table undisturbed since morning. He turns and leaves.

Adrian reaches Elias Cole’s room at a quarter past four. Fifteen minutes late. A downpour and an overflowed gutter halted traffic in the streets. He’d stopped by his apartment for a change of clothing. On the door of the old man’s room hangs a laminated sign: No Visitors . He stops short with his hand upon the doorknob, hesitates and withdraws it. Then he turns and walks away.

The young man shifts in his chair and surveys his feet. His voice is almost inaudible. The others seated in the circle of chairs watch him, as if from a distance.

‘Here.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘They put it inside your head. Afterwards you are powerful. You do battle.’ On the cheekbone below his temple is a series of short, thick keloid scars. His name is Soulay.

Ileana had given Adrian Soulay’s records before the start of the session. A government soldier turned rebel, he’d then been recruited back into the army as part of a new deal. It hadn’t worked. In a second shake-up, Soulay had been discharged. He’d worked as a security guard, but failed to hold on to any of his jobs. Soulay had a prolonged history of violence and erratic behaviour and also suffered agonising headaches, which he claimed were due to the drugs he’d been given. Adrian doubted the two were connected, though that fact made the migraines no less real.