Aminatta Forna The Memory of Love (epub)

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.Within a few yards of the receiving line, I saw him move away.Not her husband.Relief, a cold breath down my spine.Then I saw her reach out her hand and touch him lightly on the sleeve.And with that light touch, made with just the ends of her fingers, she may as well have had the strength of ten men, so quickly did he yield and alter his course back towards the long line of people.I saw how he submitted his will to hers.I saw her smile, an upward curving of her lips, faint and sweet.A smile he returned, gracious in defeat.Seconds had passed since I first laid eyes on her and I’d already lost her twice over.I excused myself, placed my glass on the tray of a passing waiter, moved across the lawn and stood at the end of the receiving line next to the last man, a fellow I recognised vaguely from the faculty hierarchy.I nodded and he nodded back, barely registering me, having lapsed long before into the sort of stupor such social obligations are inclined to induce.I shook one or two hands, muttered greetings.Nobody knew or cared, their minds were already turned to thoughts of alcohol and food.And then there she was, standing before me, her hand held out, smiling.I took her hand.I spoke my name.Saw her smile, a poor man’s version of the smile she had given to her husband.She moved on and hovered a few yards away while I shook her husband’s hand.Together they walked across the lawn, his hand once more at her elbow.My eyes followed them.I realised I had no idea of her name, for it had been obliterated in the moment of our meeting, by the drumming in my ears.The tea had cooled by the time I got around to drinking it.I have a dislike of lukewarm liquids.I carried the cup across the room and set it down on a low table while I heaved open the glass door to the verandah.Outside I poured the liquid over the railing into the flowerbed and watched with satisfaction as it bored a hole in the dry earth.The garden had suffered during the drought; bare patches of rough earth had appeared in the lawn, the beds looked more like neglected graves.By the time I returned to the chair, the effort had brought me out in a sweat.I poured myself a fresh cup of tea, and drank it carefully.I cracked one of the eggs on the side of the tray, and picked at the shell with my fingernails.Then I poured a little salt on to the plate and dipped the egg into it.Babagaleh never had subscribed to the view that an egg could be overcooked.It was as much as I could do to swallow.I returned the rest to the tray.Still no appetite.It is a mockery.It should be liberating, the absence of a desire.Instead you feel another kind of longing, for the desire that is lost.I yearned to want food again, to feel hunger and then to indulge the pleasure of sating it.I felt a sudden, whimsical urge for a cigarette.What could be more pleasurable than casually inhaling toxins, deep into the lungs?In time I levered myself back to my feet and went to sit behind the desk, swivelled the chair around to face the bookshelves.I selected a volume and brought it down.Banton’s West African City, published under the auspices of the International African Institute.The book was cloth-bound with stitched seams, the paper yellow and grainy beneath my fingertips.I searched the front pages for the publication date.1957.I began to read where the book fell open, about the growth of this city: The third stratum comprised the tribal immigrants, who were regarded by the Creoles as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and who were for a time content with their station.I turned back a page: They called them ‘unto whom’, quoting from Psalm 95: ‘Unto whom I sware in my wrath: that they should not enter into my rest.’In the margin were scribbled some words.Had I not been as familiar as I was with the hand, I would have struggled to decipher the words: Give me a full belly and a hammock and I shall enter my own rest.Julius.It had been a habit of his, typical of the man, to enter marginalia into a borrowed book.I closed the page, took a few minutes to bring control to my breathing.I leaned over the desk and let the book drop into the cardboard box by the side of the desk.The next volume I picked up was Lethbridge Banbury’s book on these parts.Now this one was actually worth something.A handsome deep-red volume.On the cover a gold-engraved image of an elephant and a palm tree.Hand-cut leaves [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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