In those days they had learned to make do. Throughout the whole of their medical training, it had been the same. One would perform a procedure, the others watch. It has become part of him, this lack of need. And there is always a fly. So they decide to proceed, as they always do. Time in the operating theatre is marked out in precious minutes.
The amputation patient is lying on the table, arms outstretched, one arm hooked up to the blood-pressure monitor, the other to a line into which the nurse is pumping ketamine. He is strapped to the table to prevent him moving should he begin to hallucinate. Kai has seen a patient try to stand up in the middle of a procedure, heard another talk to his dead mother. Tejani had written to him of nightclubs in America where people lay in darkened rooms, knocked out on ketamine. During the war commanders had given the drug to child combatants just before they sent them into battle.
In this most recent letter, Kai thinks he detects a new mood of confidence. Tejani’s letters of the first two years have been full of laments. It has been Kai’s job to reassure him. Now, for the first time, something different. Come, Tejani is saying to his old friend. Come. The word acts upon him all day, making him restless, like a grain of sand between skin and shirt.
Kai swabs the area where the first incision will be made with a mixture of water, iodine and ampicillin.
Seligmann, the Canadian surgeon whom Kai is assisting, is ready to begin.
‘Cutting now.’
Kai closes his eyes and opens them. He breathes in, lets all the sounds behind him fall away, all except the voices of the team and the sound of the instruments.
CHAPTER 11
A photograph.
‘I had Babagaleh bring this in. I hadn’t seen it myself for years. It was among the things we were packing up a few weeks ago.’
The garden, a vast sweep of foliage, seems to merge with the sky, heavy black-and-white clouds, brightened by a glint of silver, like far-off lightning. By contrast, beneath his hat the face of the man in the pale suit is shadowed. Adrian can see, though, that it is Elias Cole. Elias Cole thirty years ago.
*
I think it would be wrong to say I ever followed Saffia. In conversation the names of places she liked to visit or where she did her shopping might arise. Later, I might jot the detail down in my notebook. And if I happened to find myself there at any of those times, naturally I would look to see if she happened to be there also. Sometimes I might say hello. Other times, I thought it better not to intrude on her thoughts. I might have watched her from a distance. That was all.
In Victoria Park I saw her walking towards the library carrying a small pile of books shadowed by the shambling figure of a lunatic. I stepped up alongside her and shooed him away.
‘Oh, Elias! You frightened me.’ And then when she saw the man with his matted hair and beard, thick curling fingernails, she said, ‘Oh, there’s no harm in him.’ She reached into her handbag and found a few cents. ‘Come. Come.’
The man edged closer, keeping me in the periphery of his vision, until he was close enough to reach out and take the coin from Saffia. He smelled appallingly of piss.
‘Thank you, Ma. God bless you,’ and he bowed and retreated, somewhat as a waiter might.
‘All the same you should be careful,’ I said when he had gone.
We walked on, passing the statue of the British queen, along the pathways of cracked concrete. She lowered her chin, smiling to herself.
‘Look at this. Have you seen this before?’ She reached up, bent down a stem of bougainvillea, its head crowded with papery petals. ‘See. Three different colours. No, four. On the same shrub. There are a few like this on campus, too. Have you ever noticed? Somebody took a great deal of trouble once upon a time.’
We reached the library steps. There she stopped and half turned towards me, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
I groaned and smacked my forehead with my palm. ‘Oh, no! Excuse me, please. I hope he hasn’t let it go. A volume by Sayer. The library copy has been out for weeks. Missing, probably. You’d be amazed what you can find at the second-hand stalls down here.’
She smiled. ‘I must take a look one of these days.’ She raised her free hand. ‘Well, let me not keep you.’
At the top of the stairs she turned around and caught me watching her, lowered her head and quickly pushed through the revolving doors. I turned, walked past the second-hand bookstalls without stopping and made my way home.
The first thing to go, in matters of this kind, is judgement. I yearned for her. I lived in constant frustration. As soon as one meeting was over, I began to plan where and when the next might occur.
It is true to say no woman had ever produced such a restlessness in me. I had never been in love. Once or twice I’d whispered the words, idly, to certain women. Always in the moments before the act of love itself. But I knew, if I had not known before, that the affection I had felt for those creatures was like comparing the pleasure of a summer’s day to the terror of a storm. I was lost in the darkness amid thunder, blinding flashes, the madness of the wind. I was caught up in a tempest, I had lost all sense of direction. If Saffia found my appearance in various places unusual, she had never commented upon it. This single fact I now allowed to lend a recklessness to my warped judgement.
Friday. Four days after our meeting in Victoria Park. I stood at the side of the road and watched the people pass in groups on their way to the mosque. It had just stopped raining, the sky was pale and clear, stripped bare. The voices of the passers-by rang out, lent clarity by the purity of the air. Nobody paid me much attention. After a few minutes the door to the pink house opened and the crone stepped out and paused there for a moment, framed by the darkness of the hall. Swaddled in green cloth, her prayer beads entwined in her head covering, she tweaked the folds of her gown, tightened the grip on her purse and launched herself down the street. I watched her figure dwarf in the distance, then I crossed the street and knocked at the door.
Saffia regarded me in silence for several moments.
‘Hello, Elias,’ a note in her voice, of weariness or caution. She did not open the door, but held on to the handle.
‘I’m sorry. I woke you. You were sleeping, perhaps.’
‘No, no,’ hurriedly, for I dare say Saffia couldn’t stomach such a notion of herself as the kind of woman who slept in the afternoon.
‘Then you were on your way out.’
She wore a simple house dress and at that she glanced down at it. Quite plainly she was going nowhere. In the end she had no option but to move aside. ‘Come in, Elias.’ Her tone was less than welcoming, but I did not let that stop me, as perhaps I should have. ‘I don’t have very long. I have to go into town,’ she lied. Not a natural liar, too vague, too slow off the mark.
I sat in my customary chair on the verandah. Even dressed as she was in a loose house dress, a batik design of greys and greens, her hair in plain braids, no woman I had ever met could match her beauty. The telephone rang and she went to answer it. Her voice drifted back to me and I listened to her end of the conversation, trying to work out who she was speaking to. Whoever it was I was jealous of them, of the presumption they owned in calling her whenever they pleased.
In front of me, the sky, vast and empty. Pools of water had gathered in the garden and were beginning to hum with insect life. The rains had set the frogs off, like a chorus of drunks. Solitary drops fell from the ends of the leaves and from somewhere the sound of running water. When Saffia returned to the verandah she did not offer me coffee or a glass of water, she sat down and placed her hands in her lap. I was tempted to ask her who’d been on the telephone; instead I said something about the garden, something vaguely complimentary, about its appearance after the rain.