The Memory of Love

‘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.