A waitress brought Nescafé in stainless-steel pots, a small jug of evaporated milk, a bowl of sugar cubes and set them down without ceremony upon the chequered plastic cloth.
‘So what’s next?’ I said.
She had been back to see Johnson each day. While he refused to officially verify Julius was in his custody, everything in his manner confirmed it to her. He had told her to go home and wait.
‘Perhaps you should. You look exhausted.’
She looked up at me, her eyes flashed. ‘What are you saying, Elias?’
‘Only that some things are best left. If you rile them, you might end up making things worse for Julius.’
She looked at me steadily. ‘I know you’re just trying to help.’ She drew a deep breath: ‘I’ve been to see a lawyer,’ she announced. ‘The lawyer says to give Johnson two more days and then to issue a writ of habeas corpus. One for Julius. One for Ade.’
I listened, I said, ‘I want Julius out of there as much as you do, believe me. Only if you do as you suggest you risk bringing the whole thing out into the open.’
‘That’s the point.’
‘The trouble is,’ I said gently, ‘you’d end up putting Johnson on the defensive. He might have to justify himself by charging Julius. And that would be a worse outcome.’
‘What would you suggest?’ she asked.
‘That we continue as we are. Do as Johnson says and wait. He can’t keep Julius in there for ever, he just wants to show he’s a big man. Perhaps I can speak to my pastor, see if he can bring any pressure to bear.’
She sipped her coffee. Thoughts shadowed her face. Finally, she said, ‘It’s not just that I can’t sit and do nothing, it’s that I won’t. This isn’t just about Julius, don’t you see, Elias? This is about all of us. To tolerate this kind of thing, well, it would be just the beginning.’
Just the beginning. The second time inside the day somebody had said those words. Ten minutes later I watched her wind her orange scarf around her head and walk away from me. She declined my offer to accompany her home. She wasn’t sure yet where she was going, whether back to Johnson or to the lawyer’s office. She had a few errands to run in the meantime.
‘Call me if you hear anything.’
‘Of course, Elias.’
As it turned out events outpaced the lawyer’s intervention. The writ of habeas corpus was drawn up on Thursday. Before it could be delivered, Yansaneh was released. In the light of this new development the lawyer suggested they hold off to see what happened next. Julius’s release might be imminent. Later in the same day Saffia and I went to Yansaneh’s place. He seemed, how can I describe it to you? Somehow slowed, even more so than before. His short brow furrowed beneath the straight hairline. There was an air of bewilderment about him. I held back and watched Saffia embrace him, couldn’t help but measure the embrace for warmth and tenderness. But Yansaneh just stood, his arms by his sides. Afterwards he turned and walked to the settee, where he sat down heavily and shook his head. For some minutes the three of us remained bound together in silence. Yansaneh asked if there was news of Julius. No, Saffia replied. Shoulders bowed, eyes cast downwards, he seemed smaller. Somehow I expected Yansaneh, the good-natured pedant, to be more stoical.
You will imagine we questioned him about his experiences, that we dug around for facts to piece together, that we examined the thing this way and that to find answers. It wasn’t like that. We listened as he recounted in a low voice those relevant parts of his ordeal. He spoke at his own pace, the sentences punctuated by long silences. He had been questioned, as I had been. The questions pursued more or less the same line. They seemed to be looking for agitators on the campus. Julius. His views, his movements, the company he kept. Yansaneh mentioned meetings in my room, though in the flow of his account they did not emerge as especially significant. None of what he said added much to what we already knew.
We left Yansaneh’s place and drove back through the town. It was early evening. Saffia’s fingers played upon the steering wheel. She said, ‘One never expects to find oneself in this kind of situation. It’s the sort of thing you read about, that happens to other people in other countries.’
I made no reply. A few years ago we’d had a coup, our first, followed by two years of military rule. Not what you hope for, but still. It had all seemed to take place at a different level, well above the lives of ordinary people. We’d woken up one morning to a new government. And in many ways the military were not the worst you could imagine. Though few people publicly supported them, quite a few did so privately. Now we had a civilian government again.
‘In a building in this city, in a room or a cell, is my husband. I can’t see him. I can’t find my way to him. Yet I know he is there. And so do the people who put him there. Whatever the outcome, even if Julius is released tomorrow, things will never be the same again. This is something more. Don’t you see?’
I shook my head. ‘Let’s not blow things out of proportion. You don’t know Johnson like I do. I was with the man for the best part of two days. He’s the one who’s behind this. There’s no great conspiracy. Johnson’s got ahead of himself, that’s all. Nothing more to it than that. But he’s not all powerful. To take things further he’ll have to consult someone higher up and they’ll put a stop to it.’
She looked at me. I could see the hope in her eyes.
‘Do you think so, Elias?’ She wanted to believe.
‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘I do.’
CHAPTER 27
Early morning, a month after his illness. Adrian is driving himself for once. He sees the young woman standing at the roadside, a pair of plastic containers at her feet. It is her, he is certain, the woman he saw talking to Babagaleh and whose face he saw again on the poster at the Ocean Club. He is peering through the windscreen, wanting to assure himself of the fact, when she steps out in front of the vehicle and waves. Adrian’s first response is to wave back, until he realises she is flagging him down. He stops and she hoists the two containers into the back, opens the door and climbs up into the front seat.
‘Thanks,’ she says, as though she has been waiting for him all this time. ‘Water.’
‘Water?’ he repeats.
‘There isn’t any water where I live. They haven’t turned the pumps on for weeks.’
Adrian blinks. ‘So what do people do?’
She jerks her head backwards in the direction of the containers.
Now he understands. He’s seen the queues of people, or sometimes a line of differently shaped and coloured containers, marking places, waiting for the water to come when some government official deemed it. Next to him the young woman sits in silence, except to give occasional directions. Fifteen minutes later she asks him to stop. Before Adrian manages to open his door, she has already stepped out and lifted the two containers from the back. Drops of perspiration bead her forehead and she wipes them with the back of her arm.
‘Thanks,’ she says through the open passenger window.
For the first time he is able to look directly into her face.
‘Is that you? On the poster at the Ocean Club?’
‘Yes. It is.’
He doesn’t want to let her go. ‘You’re a singer?’
She smiles. ‘Oh no. There’s a few of us. It isn’t a living. More like something to do.’
He pauses to leave an opening, hoping for an invitation, but instead she bends down to pick up the containers. And so he says, ‘Perhaps I could come and listen one evening.’
She smiles at him, properly this time. And though he feels faintly exposed, he also feels rewarded.
‘I’m not sure when we’re next playing at the Ocean Club,’ she says.
‘Oh.’
She continues, ‘But if you’re looking for something to do, we’re at the Ruby Rooms. You know it?’
He nods. The name is familiar, though he’s not sure exactly why. She walks away from him, not up the steps of a house, as he imagined, but down the street, labouring
under the weight of her containers. He watches her for a few moments more, notices she doesn’t turn once.
Later in the day Adrian gave an account of Agnes’s case to Attila. He stuck to the clinical details, omitting mention of the visit to Port Loko and Agnes’s house. Instead he concluded with her departure from the hospital. Attila’s response had been to shrug and regard Adrian from his great height, those hawkish features atop the bulk of his body. They were standing in the hospital’s courtyard, Attila for once without his retinue.
‘Change takes time, my friend,’ he’d said as he made to move on, a ship preparing to sail. ‘And some of us here have more time than others.’ The implication being, Adrian tells Ileana later, that Adrian was some sort of fly-by-night. The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands. Everything matters more.
Ileana exhales and at the same time sighs. ‘Yeah, well.’ Her voice is gritty with smoke. ‘Shit happens.’ She does not raise her head, or meet his eye, but smokes and shuffles papers.
Adrian is astonished. ‘Ileana?’
She looks up, takes another pull at her cigarette, pinching the filter tight between her thumb and forefinger. Tiny tributaries of lipstick run down the lines around her mouth. Her eyes, inside the dark ring of mascara, are red-rimmed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. And shakes her head.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Nina. She was hit by a car. The bastard didn’t even stop. She managed to crawl almost all the way home. She died outside the house.’
‘Oh, Ileana. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve never told anyone else this, but when I worked at the mental hospital in Bucharest a patient was admitted one evening straight from the medical hospital. At the staff meeting the next day she was allocated to me. Apparently everybody else had a full caseload. I was delighted. I still only saw patients under supervision. I was desperate for a real case.
‘She was young. Maybe a couple of years younger than me. She was on suicide watch. I mean, this was a long way off teaching inmates to make string bags and tea towels. I took it as a sign my supervisor had faith in me.’ Ileana sets a pot of tea down on the desk along with the two flowered bone china cups and a box of sugar cubes. ‘They had her on the full dose of drugs. Early on I fought to have her regime reduced. After that she started making progress. She was smart, educated. In another place she could have been my friend. Sugar?’
Adrian shakes his head.
‘When I came back she wasn’t there. She’d been transferred. Without any reference to me. Gone. They’d already given her bed to somebody else.’
‘Christ!’ said Adrian. ‘What was that about?’
‘I’d been set up. She was a political detainee. From us she was transferred to a high-security psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed paranoiac. Everyone in the country knew what was happening but pretended everything was perfectly normal. The ones who couldn’t keep up the pretence we locked away.’ She laughs and Adrian smiles. Ileana raises her tea cup. ‘To Nina. Snappy little bitch, soul of a stray. Bit me more than once. I found her on the beach, did I ever tell you that? Seduced her with tinned salmon.’ She sighs. ‘I loved her.’
‘To Nina,’ Adrian concurs. The tea burns the roof of his mouth. He asks, ‘Is that why you left Bucharest?’
‘More or less. The fact is, soon after I didn’t have a job. None of us did.’
‘How?’
‘Ceauescu decided we were collaborators with Western spy agencies. He sent a lot of people to prison. Banned the entire profession from practising.’
‘But not you?’
‘I was too junior. I didn’t matter.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I went to work as a cleaner until my family could emigrate. We dug up a Jewish grandmother, actually a dead step-grandmother. We used her to emigrate to Israel.’ She raises her cup again. ‘A toast to her, too. Whoever she was.’
‘Have you been back since? To Bucharest?’
‘Once. That was enough.’
He is quiet. She lights another cigarette and disappears briefly behind the smokescreen. ‘My family, the ones who still lived there, they didn’t want to talk about the past. All they wanted were watches, TVs, video recorders. Not one of them raised a finger to help after I lost my job. Fuck this! Come on!’ She grinds out the stub of her cigarette into a saucer and slides the handle of her handbag off the back of the chair. ‘Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a drink. In fact, I’ll do better. I’ll buy you tomorrow’s hangover.’
Somehow, not before they have been to a couple of the bars along the way, they wind up at the Ruby Rooms. As soon as he enters, Adrian realises why the name seemed so familiar. The booths, the wine-coloured carpet and compact dance floor, the terrace overlooking the hills, the place is just as Elias Cole described it in their conversations, from a time when it was called the Talk of the Town.
Ileana is at the bar ordering drinks. Shouting Romanian-accented Creole at the barman above the din. He cannot imagine Lisa acting like that, or even agreeing to come to a place like this. The bass beat pounds through Adrian’s guts. There are people on the dance floor, dark shapes, their edges illuminated by the strobe light. A DJ, trapped like a bird in a tiny booth above the dancers, announces each new song. Smells of sweat, beer and dry ice. He catches Ileana’s eye, mouths to her at the same time as pointing to the door. She nods back. Outside on the terrace he finds a table, wet with beer, a couple of plastic chairs. Up this high there is a breeze. The music has settled to a more bearable level. He watches Ileana as she comes towards him carrying the drinks. In her high-necked floral blouse, white socks and sandals, she could scarcely look more incongruous.
As Adrian watches a tall, good-looking man in baggy jeans and an oversize T-shirt peels away from a wall and intercepts her, keeping pace with her as she walks. From what Adrian can make out he appears to be saying something to her under his breath. Ileana responds without breaking her stride. The young man stops dead in his tracks and stares at her with his mouth open. Then he draws back his chin, sucks his teeth so loudly even Adrian can hear it, turns on his heel and rejoins his companions. Adrian rises to help Ileana with the drinks.
‘What was that about?’
‘He offered to pleasure me. Apparently his cock is enormous. Can you believe it?’
Adrian can’t quite, in fact. The young man can’t be much past his twenties, if that. ‘What was it you said to him?’
‘I told him no thanks. But to come back when he could lick his eyebrows. Noroc!’ She raises her glass of Jack Daniels.
Adrian, who has already taken a sip of his drink, nearly chokes.
Inside the music has quieted. People are leaving the verandah, moving back inside, in ones and twos.
‘They must be starting,’ he says. He feels nervous with anticipation.
They leave the table and follow the other guests inside. For the first time Adrian notices a small stage at the back of the room. Musical instruments. Drums. A guitar leaning on a chair. A clarinet. The DJ is speaking into the microphone. Adrian can’t make out what he is saying, only the drama in the man’s voice. Around Adrian people begin to clap. Three men and a woman come on to the stage. It is her. Adrian closes his lips, misses a breath, and inhales deeply with the next. A dress, of the same print as the men’s shirts, is wrapped around her body. Her shoulders are bare, her hair pulled back from her face. She doesn’t go to the microphone stand, as he expects, but crosses the stage and picks up the clarinet. One of the group steps forward to the microphone and begins to hum ascending notes. The sound is immense, reverberating through the density of bodies. Minutes, it seems, pass. The sound grows louder. Then enters the clarinet. Finally the guitar and the keyboard. But it is the clarinet, so close in sound to the human voice, that rises above the other
s. The man in the lead shifts his footing to lean closer in to the microphone and begins to sing. Afterwards Adrian would struggle to describe to himself the sort of music it was, whether jazz or soul, only the mood of it. It slows his heartbeat, his spirit is lifted and carried along on it, only to be set down and lifted again. Nobody dances, just listens. As each song finishes the sound of the last chord hangs in the air above the heads of the audience, is dispelled only by the sound of clapping. The band moves from one song to the next. Three songs in all. He watches her throughout, the sharp point of her elbow, the movement of her wrists and fingers, the way she rests the mouthpiece on her lower lip. Her playing is unostentatious, devoid of showmanship, she does not close her eyes or sway. Just the heel of a foot counting beats upon the wooden floor. From time to time she lifts her eyes and casts an appraising look over the crowd. Once she sees him, he thinks, and seems to smile. The singer leans into the microphone again, murmurs several thank yous, introduces the band one by one. There is clapping and whistling at each name. She holds her clarinet across her body. When her cue comes she raises the mouthpiece to her lips and plays a few notes of a solo. Three songs more. And then it is over. People drift back outside. The band leave. The instruments remain on the stage.
Ten minutes. Adrian watched the door to the club virtually the entire time. Finally the band come out on to the terrace, to be surrounded immediately by well-wishers. She is not among them. When she does appear she wends her way through the groups of people. A nod here, a handshake. She does not stop, clearly on her way somewhere else. Disappointed, he turns away. When next he looks up, she is standing by the table.
‘Hello,’ he says, rising quickly.
‘So you came along,’ she says. ‘How did you like the music?’
‘It was,’ he opens his hands, ‘really beautiful. Thank you.’
The Memory of Love Page 27
