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.
CHAPTER 41
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.
‘He could die,’ said Adrian.
‘He’s dying anyway,’ she’d replied. ‘We’re talking extra weeks or months.’
Perhaps he shouldn’t have pressed it but he did. Suddenly Mrs Mara stopped talking, sat down heavily and rubbed her eyelids. Adrian felt like a bully.
Now memories of his last conversation with Mamakay reverberate as he crosses the courtyard. Here in the land of the mute, Elias Cole has elected to talk. It has never occurred to Adrian to ask why, just as he never questions the presence of a patient in his office, only asks how he might be able to help them. The difference between Elias Cole and the men at the mental hospital, as well as those early patients Adrian saw, is that Cole is educated. The more education a person has received, the more capable of articulating their experiences they are. Also of intellectualising them, of course. Those with less education tend to express their conflicts physically through violence or psychosomatically: deafness, blindness, muteness, paralysis, hallucinations — visual and olfactory. Adecali’s roasting meat.
It isn’t considered acceptable to talk about these differences outside psychiatric circles, but this is the fact of the matter. In Adrian’s opinion the second category of patients are much more straightforward to treat; the first hold the interesting challenges. He steps into Elias Cole’s room.
‘How are you?’
‘I am exactly as you see me,’ says Elias Cole. ‘Surviving.’ He coughs and spits into a handkerchief. ‘I apologise about last week. The doctors feel I have been straining myself. They tell me I should try not to talk.’ He gives a colourless laugh. ‘I sent Babagaleh with a message, but he was unable to find you.’ He looks at Adrian, who feels a spasm of guilt. He wonders what Elias Cole knows, whether there is anything contained in his look.