Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Kai began to run. Suddenly the man was behind him, following him, gaining on him in great bounds. In a moment he would catch him. Kai needed to reach Nenebah’s house. But he did not want to lead the freakish man there, so he switched direction. Running was becoming hard work: to make his legs move required every fibre of his being. Despite himself he was slowing. He felt the man gaining on him. And there ahead of them both, the bridge road, long and empty. The man had overtaken him and was running straight for it. Stop! Kai wanted to shout. The man kept on going, Kai behind him. They were on the bridge now. Kai could not see to the end, only the soldier ahead of him. The bridge began to break up, he couldn’t keep his footing. He felt himself falling. He opened his mouth to scream, but the force of the wind knocked the air out of his lungs .

He wakes with a start. He is sitting on a chair in the staff room. Around the coffee table three doctors and a nurse are talking between themselves. At the computer Seligmann works and whistles ‘Love me Tender’. Kai sits still. His breathing is heavy, his armpits damp. Sweat trickles down his neck. He looks to see if he has been observed, but his other colleagues continue talking between themselves. He waits another minute, then goes to the bathroom and splashes water on his face. Cupping his hand under the tap he drinks. He looks at his face in the mirror and thinks of Nenebah.

Throughout the second invasion he had acted as a lifeline to the household. As a doctor he was given transport and protection. He used his influence to acquire small amounts of food. The city was split into two, one side under rebel control, the other side under the control of the government troops and task force. A bridge divided the city, though not the one from his dream. This one spanned the east of the city to the west. The besieged residents of the west were trapped by the rebel army on one side, the sea and mountains on the other side.

Kai leaves the staff room and crosses the quad towards Adrian’s apartment. A light rain is falling, dampening the heat. He has set aside this afternoon to advance his application to work in the US. Despite Tejani’s assurances the quantity of paperwork is daunting. References, certified copies of his degree and other medical qualifications, his birth certificate. The records offices in town had been looted and burned, adding to the challenge. He is also required to undergo a full medical. This should be easy enough to arrange, except that Kai hasn’t yet told anyone at the hospital of his plans. The same goes for references. Who should he ask? Seligmann? To do so would seem like a betrayal.

He ponders matters as he walks down the corridor towards the flat.

At home two evenings ago, Kai had been sitting studying some of the forms. Abass had come in, tired from playing, and lain, legs and arms draped across the back of the sofa, his chin resting on Kai’s shoulder. From there he’d read the paper in Kai’s hand and asked in a loud, enquiring voice, ‘What’s the Department of Immigration?’

Kai felt his cousin’s quick glance as she looked up from her book.

‘Do you know how rude it is to read over another person’s shoulder?’ he said to Abass. Placing the papers face down on the coffee table, he hauled the child off the back of the sofa and began to tickle him, felt his cousin’s covert gaze upon them both.

Inside the empty apartment Kai sits on the cane sofa and places the envelope of papers before him. He fetches himself a glass of water from the kitchen, sorts the papers into a single pile and begins to read through them. For ten minutes he works in this way, before getting up to turn on the fan. The rain, as it does so often, has brought only temporary relief, clearing the clouds away only for the sun’s rays to shine through more strongly. Kai hasn’t seen Adrian in weeks now. Work at the mental hospital must be keeping him busy. Kai hasn’t even managed to tell him of his return trip to Agnes’s home town. He must do so.

In the days following the visit Kai had thought a lot about the woman’s story. He didn’t dwell on the more gruesome facts, for atrocities such as these were the facts of war. He’d administered to the consequences of them often enough. In Agnes’s case it was the unbearable aftermath, the knowledge, and nothing to be done but to endure it. For a while Kai had dreamt even more than was usual. And though they were his dreams, his own experiences, to him they were in some way connected to Agnes.

On the table, a reference book belonging to Adrian. Kai picks it up and it falls open in the place where the spine is broken. Idly, he turns the book over to read the title. A History of Mental Illness . Kai returns to the text and reads, guided by Adrian’s markings and annotations, at first casually and then with greater intensity:

Fugue. Characterised by sudden, unexpected travel away from home. Irresistible wandering, often coupled with subsequent amnesia. A rarely diagnosed dissociative condition in which the mind creates an alternative state. This state may be considered a place of safety, a refuge .

During his life as a surgeon Kai has seen people arrive at the hospital with terrible injuries, wounds that would seem to defy their ability to retain consciousness, let alone walk or talk.

Once during the war, he and the other hospital staff had been called outside to attend the passengers of a truck that had arrived from the provinces. The first person Kai helped down from the tailgate was a woman, both of whose hands were almost entirely severed, they flapped from her wrists like broken wings. He’d seen a man, hopping, clutching his own amputated foot in both hands. There were dozens of them, men, women, children. Some had survived for days in the bush. In the theatre Kai worked harder, faster and more furiously than he had ever done in his life.

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state .

Kai thinks of the conversation with Adrian here in the kitchen the evening after Adrian had been attacked by JaJa. Kai had presumed JaJa to be a common hoodlum, a drug smuggler. He’d understood little about Agnes’s sickness, except what Adrian had told him. Adrian said Agnes’s journeys, the kind of journeys described in the book, were made because she was looking for something.

But Agnes isn’t searching for anything.

She is fleeing something. She is running away from intolerable circumstances. Escaping the house, her daughter, most of all escaping JaJa. The difference between Agnes and the injured people who arrive at the hospital is that for Agnes there is no possibility of sanctuary.

Kai replaces the book on the table. He must talk to Adrian. Adrian deserves to know. Whatever comes next, if anything, is for the future. He will wait here for Adrian.

He looks at his watch. Two-thirty. Suddenly he is exhausted. He stretches out on the sofa and within minutes is asleep. Images pass in front of his eyelids, a waste of burned buildings, of flailing limbs, sometimes Foday walking and smiling, other times people — those from the truck, without hands and feet. Balia the young nurse smiling shyly at him. In his ears the chatter of the man with his jaw missing.

There is no coherence, nothing that amounts to a nightmare. Just a record of images that float before him.

Thus he sleeps.

Adrian makes his way to Elias Cole’s room direct from his meeting with Mrs Mara. The meeting had not gone especially well. The new oxygen concentrators were held up in customs.