The Memory of Love (38 page)

CHAPTER 37

Given the extra shifts he’d worked Kai was owed any number of days off. He let Seligmann know he’d be away for a day, preferring to avoid Mrs Mara. Abass was on holiday, bored at home, so Kai had invited him to come along. They left the city by way of the hospital, where Kai checked briefly on Foday. A doctor was a farmer, he told Abass; patients were crops that had to be watered or cows that needed milking. Together they passed by Adrian’s flat and found it empty. Kai noted the reordering of items, the books taken down from their shelves, the pair of coffee mugs.

They encounter little traffic and no accidents and thus make good time. There are vehicle tracks on the road to the falls. A couple of British military observers, a woman and a man picnicking on the rocks, provide theatre for a group of children. Kai raises a hand in greeting, but the couple do not return it and their gaze travels through him. And so, though Kai could free them from the bondage of the children’s stares, he chooses not to do so.

Abass goes to fish in the crevices between the rocks. Kai strips down to his shorts and dives into the cool water. The swim does little, though, to ease his restlessness. Like the British couple, he would have preferred to be alone. Once, on a trip here with Nenebah, they’d been invaded by a group of foreign engineers on a sightseeing trip from the dam. Tejani had driven away to explore the town, the two of them been on the point of making love interrupted by the arrival of the delegation in khaki shorts and open sandals. By the time Tejani came back, the men were gone. He’d thought they were fooling.

Did Nenebah ever come back here?

He climbs out and lies upon the rocks. Abass’s shadow looms over him, holding a sand skipper in his cupped hands. The Europeans get up and leave. One more swim, Kai tells Abass, and then it is time to go.

Past the petrol station and the queue of vehicles, they enter the town. In the square Kai parks the old Mercedes by a row of stalls and climbs down. Abass is hungry now and hovers in front of the food stalls. They buy chicken and wait while the stallholder griddles it over hot coals. Kai buys some bread from a neighbouring stall and they eat leaning against the car. Afterwards he gets behind the wheel and they move forward at a crawl, driving the route he walked just once, in the middle of a night six years ago.

‘Where are we going?’ asks Abass.

‘I’m looking for somebody I met here a long time ago.’

‘Will they still be here?’

‘I don’t know,’ answers Kai.

Abass winds down his window and hums. Kai is trying to feel the route, pacing his driving against the distantly remembered conversation of that night, the lefts and rights. The layout of the streets could have changed. Back then they’d been accompanied by soldiers, who’d led them, to their surprise, straight to the door. He swings the car around to the right, descends a steep section of track. Outside a low, bunker-shaped building he halts, orders Abass to wait, pulls his shirt over his mouth and nose and pushes at the door. Inside are the old refectory tables, broken glass and a burned mattress. Otherwise no sign of the laboratory that once stood there.

Somewhere in this town Kai has a cousin. In the marketplace he stops again at the food sellers to ask where he might find the street where the family live. Minutes later they arrive at the house. Somebody is sent to fetch Ishmail and he arrives smiling and buttoning his shirt, punches fists with Kai and then with Abass. They settle with their backs against the wall. Last time they met was some years before the war, before the city where Kai lived became an island within the rest of the country.

‘Long time, my friend,’ says Ishmail. ‘What brings you here?’

Kai tells him he is looking for Dr Bangura, the Lassa fever specialist. His cousin nods first, then shakes his head and tuts. The doctor is gone. Not the war, a pinprick to his finger. He was infected by the disease he’d been researching.

Kai is quiet, remembering the doctor working diligently over his samples late into the night, the household rubber gloves, the snorkel and mask in place of proper safety equipment. He would have died in agony.

Through the streets of the town, a slow, late-afternoon stroll. From time to time Ishmail raises a hand to people sitting on the steps of houses, shakes another’s hand, introduces Kai as his brother. Once they pass a house upon whose balcony six or so young men lounge. Unlike outside the other houses here there are no women, no children. Ishmail nods. One or two nod in return. There are no smiles and Ishmail does not introduce Kai as he has before. Down a road enclosed by houses on both sides, Abass, ahead of them, turns and, with a child’s expert memory, declares, ‘This is where we found Uncle Adrian after the bicycle hit him.’

Ishmail laughs. ‘Who is this that was hit by a bicycle?’

‘Uncle Adrian. We found him here and took him home.’

Ishmail turns questioningly to Kai.

Kai lets Abass get ahead once more, before he tells Ishmail. Afterwards they continue in silence until they reach a motel, partly rebuilt and painted, bristling with bamboo scaffolding. In the courtyard a nanny goat and her kid are tethered. The goat is bleating, a melancholy, repetitive sound. Abass is given a Fanta, which he carries outside to sit and watch the goat. Two men are following the football at the bar, dressed in the typical attire of government utility workers. Ishmail leads Kai to a table in the back of the room.

‘I heard something about this man,’ he says presently, ‘the one you say was hit by a bicycle. I heard a stranger was hurt.’

‘Who told you that?’

Ishmail shrugs. ‘People talk.’ He is sitting hunched over the table, facing Kai, one arm curled around his beer. He speaks in a low voice. ‘Some bad business.’

‘He was attacked,’ says Kai. He tells Ishmail all he knows about Agnes, Adrian’s imprudent visit to her house. The son-in-law.

Ishmail nods as if somehow it all makes sense to him.

‘Do you know what it was about?’ asks Kai.

Ishmail shakes his head. ‘There are some bad people here. You were not here during the fighting, you didn’t see. I was not here much of the time, but I was here before. I came back after and saw how things were different. Now they say it’s over, but it is not over. You see those men we passed?’

‘Who?’ Kai looks at the men at the bar.

‘No, not these ones. Them that we passed in that house. They arrived at that time and they are still here. People want them to go, but they don’t go. The government told the fighters to return to their own homes, but many stayed.’

‘Why?’

‘Maybe because they found a better life. Maybe because they have nowhere else to go.’ Ishmail shakes his head, positions his beer bottle on the damp cardboard mat, turns the label carefully round to face him and studies it. ‘So they stay. Why not?’

‘Was it one of them who attacked my friend?’

This time Ishmail shakes his head emphatically. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He takes a drink of his beer. On the television a player misses a penalty. One of the men slams his bottle down on the table and exclaims. Ishmail picks at the label on his beer bottle and says no more. Kai decides to confide in Ishmail about his plans to go to America. His cousin grins and congratulates him, raises his beer bottle. They both drink.

‘When you get there send something small for me.’

They finish drinking and Ishmail stands. ‘Let’s go,’ he says. Outside they collect Abass, who has collected some grass and leaves and laid them in front of the goat, though his offerings have gone untouched.

‘Maybe she’s thirsty,’ suggests Kai. As Abass goes to ask the kitchen for a bowl of water, Ishmail says, ‘This is a good friend of yours, this man who was beaten?’

‘Yes,’ answers Kai. ‘A good friend. Though he’s a visitor here, we have become close through the hospital. I stay at his place often. He wants to help.’

Ishmail nods. ‘We should all have friends. Look at Abass. He can create friends across the species.’

The goat is down on her front knees drinking from the bowl. Abass stands by happily, arms dangling at his sides. They walk out into the darkening streets, back the way they came, until at one point Ishmail turns away from their route saying, ‘Let us use this road. Perhaps I know somebody you can talk to.’ Kai follows, saying nothing. Presently they reach a house. A curtain hangs in front of the open door, glimmers of light behind. Ishmail knocks on the door frame, pushing the curtain gently aside. Kai waits. He hears Ishmail speaking to somebody. He is beckoned inside. A woman is sitting on a stool shelling groundnuts. She wipes her hands on her dress.

‘I have told her what it is you want to know,’ says Ishmail. ‘She is my wife’s aunt. She agrees to help you.’

The woman offers him the back of her wrist. Kai touches it with the back of his own.

‘Agnes was not always this way,’ she says. ‘Before she was like you and me. And then she became crossed.’ She removes the stool from beneath her, brushes the seat and sets it down. ‘Please.’

Kai sits.

She offers him some of the groundnuts and leaves the room with Ishmail. Kai prepares to wait.

How many hours he sat there he would not later recall. At some point the boy, sleepy and tired of waiting outside, crept in to be with him and Kai allowed him to stay, sheltered beneath the wing of his arm. People were sent for. A neighbour. A young woman without a smile. An older woman with a creased face and white hair. Kai waited and listened without interrupting or speaking except to greet each new arrival, watch while they took a seat and were told what was required of them. He didn’t speak even when they faltered; he offered no solace but left it to others. Each person told a part of the same story. And in telling another’s story, they told their own. Kai took what they had given him and placed it together with what he already knew and those things Adrian had told him.

This was Agnes’s story, the story of Agnes and Naasu. In hushed voices, told behind a curtain in a quiet room and in the eye of the night, from the lips of many. By the time the last speaker had finished the moon was well past its zenith and Kai understood the storytellers’ courage.

Mohammed remembered Naasu. How every Monday she walked the same route to the bus stop wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and a suit made of shiny fabric. Every Friday the bus carried her back, and this time she wore a simple cotton dress. On Monday when she walked to the bus stop, Mohammed and the other young motorbike-taxi riders would watch her pass from their place by the roundabout. Mohammed would sometimes offer her a lift and sometimes, too, she accepted. She would sit with her legs to one side and be carried down to the bus stop. A lot of young men had an idea they might put cola for Naasu, who was one of the finest girls in the town and from a good family. You could see it in the way she held herself. She had the job in the city department store. Some of the young men teased her. When are you coming to take me to the big city with you, Naasu? And she smiled and teased them back. She was bold, but in such a way as you understood there was nothing in it. For they had all known each other for a long time, they were her classmates. Everybody knew Naasu. Sometimes she stopped by her father at the nursery with fried doughnuts for his sweet tooth. They would sit on the frame of an old tractor. If Naasu was sitting with her father outside the nursery that meant it was a Friday, the day she returned from the city. During the curfew months she used to arrive home a little earlier, when the buses became cautious about travelling the roads at night. Naasu’s father and she ate sugared doughnuts sitting on the rusting frame of the old John Deere tractor the last Friday Naasu was home.

Naasu was away in the city the day the thin men came to the town.

This is what Mohammed remembers about Naasu.

On market day, at six o’clock in the morning, Binta rose and dressed, washing from the bucket in the corner of the yard. By six-thirty she was ready to walk the half-mile to the town with her small basket of cucumbers and tomatoes. This was the part of the day she liked the best, the moments of quiet on the walk to the town past the sugar-cane fields. Within the hour the sun would be strong enough to dry the dew, drawing spirals of mist from the earth. As Binta passed the avenues of sugar cane she saw shadows moving between the rows. Somebody’s goats must have broken free.

On the outskirts of the town she passed Agnes working in her vegetable garden. They called to one another. ‘
Ng’ dirai?
’ Agnes’s husband was there in the background; the rising sun lent a dark edge to the shape of his body. He was too far away for Binta to greet him, so she walked swiftly on, hoping to beat Agnes, whose tomatoes were always so plump and shiny, to the first of the customers.

By eight o’clock Binta had set up her stall and the first buyers had already appeared. Agnes was there, two stalls away from Binta. A customer dropped a tomato and Binta bent to retrieve it, annoyed to see it had bruised and the skin was split. While she had her head below the level of the stall, she heard the sound of gunfire. She had heard it before, only never so close. All around her people started at the sound and began to move, some in one direction and some in another, like a herd of sheep on a road, uncertain in which direction safety lay. In the end they stood still.

A group of men entered the square; one was talking into a megaphone, calling people to gather in the marketplace. This man was wearing fatigues and looked like a soldier. But the men with him were not like soldiers. Soldiers were given more rice than anybody else in the country and they carried the weight of it upon their bodies. These men were narrow and angular, curiously dressed. Jewellery and amulets around their necks, rows of bullets like necklaces, dark sunglasses. Others went barefoot and dressed in rags. Strange, thin men. They reminded Binta of the puppets from the shows she was taken to as a child. They had frightened her even then. The thin men ran around the houses, beating upon the doors and ordering the people outside. There were more sounds of gunfire, of splintering wood, the smell of smoke.