Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

His rubber flip-flops suck at the wet concrete. A momentary breeze sends a shower of heavy raindrops from the branches of a tree down upon him. Kai lifts his head to the sky and feels the wind trail across his face. In his pocket he finds a mint, unwraps it and places it in his mouth.

For a moment he is as he once was, before the war, during his university years. He is back there and whole again. The hospital buildings shrink, spread and grow into different buildings with different dimensions. The trees transform into flamboyant trees, like those on the campus, with white-painted trunks. The quadrangle becomes a lawn.

He looks up, and sees her. There is Nenebah, she is walking towards him. For a moment he holds her in his gaze, her long-tailed scarf, books held to her chest. Then the present reasserts itself, the buildings resume their former shape, the concrete hardens. The woman who looks like Nenebah is still there.

The woman does not look like Nenebah. It is Nenebah.

He opens his mouth to call her name, but his voice fails him. For in the next instant he sees that the door of Adrian’s apartment is open and there is Adrian, coming out after her. He sees Adrian’s hand at her back, and the answer of her slight smile, he sees that they are together. He does not know how, but he knows this beyond doubt. He stands in the courtyard while the rain falls lightly on his shoulders. And he is drowning.

‘Yes please. Mr Adrian?’

Adrian turns his gaze towards Salia, suddenly aware he hasn’t heard a word the man has been saying. ‘Sorry. Can you repeat that?’

Salia regards Adrian for a moment, then repeats, with no hint of hurry or exasperation, what he has just said. From his other side Adrian is aware of Ileana watching him. He closes his eyes and takes a breath. With an effort of will he focuses upon the sound of Salia’s voice.

An hour later the morning meeting is over. Adrian collects his papers for the group therapy session from the desk he keeps in Ileana’s office. Ileana follows him, stands in the middle of the room watching him.

‘Carry on ignoring me and I might throw something.’

He turns to her. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit distracted.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean you to actually tell me about it. What I said was tell me about it. I can see you’re distracted. You OK?’

‘Yes,’ nods Adrian. He bends his head back to his desk, hears Ileana grunt and move away. He looks up. ‘Are you free for an early lunch?’

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I need to go and see my landlord about renewing the lease. Another time?’

‘Sure.’

Minutes later Adrian makes his way over to the meeting room. He unlocks the door and leaves it standing ajar, moves around opening windows, lifting chairs from the stacks at the end of the room and arranging them into a circle. In his mind he returns to the events of the night a week before. Mamakay’s silence in the car. His own effort not to let himself be disturbed by it, though he was for some reason, and profoundly.

In the end he’d said, ‘He called you Nenebah.’ The only way he could think of to get inside.

‘Yes,’ she’d replied, her face turned away from him.

‘Is that your name then?’ He sounded irritable, he knew, already the jealous lover. An image of Kai, of his bare arm and shoulder as he shrugged on a shirt.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Sorry, but I don’t understand.’ The emotion moved so fast. He felt ridiculous. He strove for a normal tone. ‘I thought your name was Mamakay.’

‘Mamakay is my house name. I told you I was named after my aunt. Nenebah is my real name.’ She shrugged. He hated the gesture, the indifference it projected.

‘I see.’ And he’d thought he knew so much about her.

It turned out he didn’t even know her name.

A sound makes Adrian look up. Adecali has entered the room, wordlessly, and is helping with the chairs. Adecali is making progress, though he continues to be haunted by smells, most notably of cooked meat. Two weeks ago a trader set up outside the front gate of the hospital selling skewers of beef roasted over a charcoal fire. Ileana and Adrian had bought some for lunch, so had a few of the men who were not confined to their wards. One of them carried his portion back to a bed near Adecali. Ten minutes later Adrian was called to the ward, to find Adecali straining at his chains, blowing snot and saliva. Since that day Adrian has held several private sessions with Adecali, trying to encourage him to talk, which sometimes the young man did at an insistent babble and sometimes not at all. He was punctilious, though. Never missed a session. Small steps, steps in the sand. But in the right direction.

‘Thank you, Adecali,’ says Adrian.

The other patients are beginning to appear, shuffling in to take their seats one by one. Whatever scepticism there had been among the staff at the hospital about his sessions — and Adrian had overheard one or two remarks from among the attendants — the men seemed to want them. Adrian found it had soon become unnecessary to go round the wards, for like Adecali they came of their own accord. Once, held up by the traffic, he arrived late to find them all waiting for him in silence outside the locked door.

‘OK,’ says Adrian, when they are all seated. ‘Who is going to begin today? Anyone?’

The night before Adrian had slept fitfully and woken with the sun on his face. Mamakay was already up, preparing breakfast. They sat and ate in the yard. Adrian wished it was a Saturday so he didn’t have to go anywhere. He wanted to talk to her. There had been no lovemaking the night before and now they ate in silence. Adrian put down his plate.

‘You were close then?’ he asked her. They both knew exactly what he was talking about.

‘Yes, we were together when I was at university. I haven’t seen him for a long time. He wanted to go abroad. It’s what he always talked about.’

‘He’s a surgeon.’ Then when she didn’t say anything more, he asked, ‘He was the one you told me about. The one you said you loved.’

And she’d chosen not to spare him at all, looked away and simply nodded.

Five o’clock. Something is burning outside the walls of the hospital. A smell of woodsmoke, scented like cedar, the smell that woke Adrian a night soon after his arrival, the night he’d met Kai. He’d looked out into the corridor and seen a woman give birth to a dead baby. Kai was the first person Adrian had talked to properly since his arrival; they’d become friends. That was six months ago. How much has he learned since then? Sometimes it feels like a great deal, other times not much at all. Adrian lifts his eyes to the sky for a brief moment, enters the darkened corridor and makes his way to Elias Cole’s room.

In his work Adrian has met many kinds of liar: pathological liars, compulsive liars, patients with different kinds of personality disorders. Broadly speaking though, when it comes down to it, there are just two types of liar: the fantasist and the purist. The fantasists are the embroiderers. Simplest to spot because they have a tendency to contradict. A liar should have a good memory, said Quintilian. The trouble with the fantasists is that, in their eagerness to impress, they become careless about the details. The purists, as Adrian thinks of them, are of distinctly cooler temperament. Intellectually-minded, they understand the fallibility of memory, prefer to lie by omission. The silent lie that can neither be proved nor disproved. The fantasists and the purists have one thing in common, and this they share with all liars — the pathological, the compulsive, the delusional, the ones who suppress and repress unbearable memories. They all lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth. And one thing Adrian’s two decades of study and practice have taught him is to discover the purpose served by the lie.