The Memory of Love Read Online Free PDF

echoing in the corridors. The time he spent rearranging the shabby furnishings of his office. Each activity had its own purpose, pitch and resonance, like the notes from a tuning fork. But as the days passed the resonance had faded.
    Breakfast in the canteen and he watched his colleagues come and go, each with a nod of the head. He knew their names, faces, their occupations. Some he had shared a beer with after work in a nearby bar, invariably marked by a late arrival or a drink left unfinished as someone hurried back to deal with another emergency. At mealtimes he sat over a cup of instant coffee, watching the tendrils of steam grow thin and fade, as around him others went about their business.
    At other times he walked the long wards. Saw the occupants of a crowded minibus driven by a young man high on marijuana at the end of a sixteen-hour shift, encountered the unseeing gaze of a man beneath whom bamboo scaffolding had collapsed, watched listless mothers fanning inert babies.
    Three weeks following his arrival, Adrian saw his first patients. This after he had obtained the consent of the hospital administrator for a system of referrals. The people his colleagues sent to him were outpatients mostly, the ones with whom the doctors could find nothing wrong. They sat with rounded shoulders and lowered eyes, hands curled in their laps like docile pets. What brings you here? The doctors sent me to you. Urged on by Adrian’s gentle encouragement they described headaches, pains in their arms, legs, abdomens. Here, here, here. Touching body parts. When did the pains begin? Sometime after the trouble. Yes, I was healthy before then.
    At Adrian’s insistence they described in dampened voices what they had endured, as though the events described belonged to somebody else. Adrian had read the press accounts, the post-conflict reports. He knew how the war had begun – the barely remarked border crossing of a small contingent of foreign-trained rebel soldiers, who soon declared their presence by taking over a series of towns and vowed to march on the capital and overturn the bloated autocracy, which had ruled for twenty years. And he knew how it ended – how the civilians had borne the brunt of the rebels’ fury from the outset and endured their agonies for a decade until the war was brought to a halt by the army of a nearby state with an ambitious despot of its own.
    Adrian’s empathy sounded slight, unconvincing in his own ears. So he nudged his patients along with questions, aware of the energy it cost him to obtain a sliver of trust. Later, in his apartment, he splashed water on his face. Once he filled the basin and plunged his face into the water, held his breath until his lungs ached. Alone he waited for his thoughts to be restored, for his jarred soul to settle.
    And afterwards each of his new patients made the same request for medicines, to which Adrian explained he was not that sort of doctor. A nod, of acceptance rather than understanding. They thanked him and left. None of them ever returned.
    Late afternoon on a Saturday Adrian was walking past a row of stalls on the streets behind the hospital. A woman called out to him – he turned, recognising her by the yellow-and-black print of her wrap. Automatically Adrian smiled and raised his hand to wave. The woman was walking towards him with an unsteady puppet gait. A damp stain ran down the front of her blouse, the top few buttons of which were undone, partially revealing an arc of dark nipple.
    ‘Doctor!’ she’d called, grasping him by the arm. Her breath was hot. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, wished he could remember her name. She lost her grip on his arm momentarily, stumbled and fell against him. A passer-by, a man in his fifties, intervened on Adrian’s behalf and grasped the woman by the arm. The woman shrieked and in trying to pull herself free fell backwards, landing heavily on the ground before scuttling away through the legs of the onlookers.