An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  He gazed up at her. “That is so.”

  “Then you will meet my family. If you say you want to marry me.”

  Egbunu, she said this as if it was a painful thing to say. And one could see then, without needing a diviner’s eye, that there lurked in her heart something heavy which, concealed in the veiled compartment of her mind, she would not reveal. My host saw this, too, and this was why he drew her to sit by him on the big sofa and asked why she did not want him to meet her people. To this question she pulled herself from him and turned her face away. Then he saw that she was afraid. He saw it even though she had turned away from him, and all he could see were the big earrings that drooped down almost to her shoulders, forming a ring big enough for two of his fingers to slide through. For fear is one of the emotions that clothes the primal nudity of a person’s face, and wherever it presents itself, every percipient eye can recognize it, no matter how adorned the face.

  “Why is it making you sad, Mommy?”

  “It is not making me sad,” she said almost before he finished speaking.

  “Why, then you fear?”

  “Because it will not be good.”

  “Why? Why can’t I even know my girlfriend’s family?”

  She looked at him, her eyes firm against his own, unblinking. Then she turned away again. “You will meet them. I promise you that. But I know my parents. And my brother. I know them.” She shook her head again. “They are proud people. It will not be good. But you will meet them.”

  Confounded by what he heard, he did not speak. He wished to know more, but he was not one who asked too many questions.

  “When I go home, I will tell them about you.” She tapped her feet in an undecipherable act of discomfort. “This night, I will tell them this very night. Then we see when I can take you home.”

  Once she said this, as if she had relieved herself of a great burden, she leaned back into the couch towards him and drew a deep breath. But her words remained in his head. For words as strong as the ones she’d spoken—“It will not be good”; “So you want to marry me?”; “You will meet them. I promise you that”; “Then we see when I can take you home”—are not easily dispelled from the mind. They have to be broken down slowly, over time. He was digesting them when he heard a distinct sound from the backyard that startled him.

  He leapt to his feet and was in the kitchen in the blink of an eye. He grabbed his catapult from the windowsill and opened the net door. But it was too late. The hawk had mounted its thermal by the time he got to the yard, flapping its wings violently against the updraft, with one of the yellow-white chicks clasped in its talons. Its wings hit the laundry rope as it lifted, rattling the rope so that two of the pieces of clothing he’d hung on it fell to the ground. He slung a stone at it, but it fell far away from the bird. He’d put another stone in the catapult when he saw that it was no use. The hawk had glided into an unreachable thermal and had started to gain momentum, its eyes no longer glancing downward but ahead, into the colorless immensity of the sky.

  Chukwu, the hawk—he is a dangerous bird, as lethal as the leopard. He craves nothing but flesh and he spends his life chasing it. He is an unspoken mystery amongst the birds of the sky. He is a soaring deity, borne on violent wings and merciless talons. The great fathers studied it and the kite, its close sibling, and made proverbs to explain its nature, one of which captures what had just happened to my host’s chickens: Before every attack the hawk says to the hen, “Keep your chicks close to your bosoms, for my talons are soaked in blood.”

  My host was gazing at the fleeing hawk, full of rage, when Ndali opened the net door and entered the backyard.

  “What happened? Why did you run out so fast?”

  “A hawk,” he said without looking back. He pointed in the distance, but the sun forced his eyes into a squint. He held up his hand to shade them as he stared in the direction the bird had gone. But the image of the attack was still so clear in his mind, still so vivid, that he struggled to believe it had concluded. There was nothing he could do now to save one of his flock from being torn apart and eaten up. The chickens he reared with his own hands and sweat—one had been taken away from him, again, without a fight.

  He turned about and saw that the rest of his flock—with the exception of the one whose chick had been stolen—was cowered in the safety of the coop. The bereft hen pranced about with a stutter in its gait, cawing with what he knew was the avian language of anguish. He did not speak but pointed in the direction of the empty sky.

  “I can’t see anything.” She cupped her eyes and turned to him again. “It stole a chicken?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, my God!”

  He turned his gaze to the evidence of the attack: the ground stained with blood and strewn with feathers.

  “How many did it take? How did it—”

  “Ofu,” he said, then, reminding himself that he was talking with someone who preferred not to speak Igbo, he added, “Only one.”

  He set the catapult on the bench and followed the wailing hen around the yard. It eluded him at the first attempt to catch it. But he dashed forward with his two hands in front of him and clasped it by the wing closest to its left shoulder, then trapped it against the wall of the fence. Then he lifted it by its leg, gently feeling its spur. The hen went quiet, its tail upraised.

  “How did it happen?” Ndali said as she picked up the fallen clothes.

  “It just came—” He paused to stroke the hen’s earlobe. “It just land on them and catch the small one of this mother hen, Ada. One of her new chicks.”

  He set Ada, the hen, back into the coop and closed the door slowly.

  “Very sorry, Obim.”

  He dusted his hands by slapping them against each other and went into the house.

  “Does it happen all the time?” she said when he returned to the sitting room from washing his hands in the bathroom.

  “No, no oh, not all the time.”

  He wanted to leave his answer there, but Chukwu, I nudged him to unload what he bore in his mind. I knew him. I knew that one of the things that can heal the heart of a defeated man is the story of his past victory. It soothes the wound caused by the defeat and fills him with the possibility of a future victory. So I flashed the thought in his mind that hawks did not usually come here. I suggested he tell her it didn’t always happen. And in a rare instance of compliance, he listened to me.

  “No, it doesn’t happen every time,” he said. “It cannot always happen. Mba nu!”

  “Er,” she said.

  “I don’t allow it. Not so long ago, in fact, one tried to attack my fowls,” he said, surprised by his sudden slide into the corrupted form of the White Man’s language. But it was in this language that he told her the story of his recent victory, and she listened, transfixed. Not too long ago, he began, he’d let out the flock, almost all the poultry except the occupants of one of the cages of broilers, and had started to peel yams into the sink in his kitchen, looking out every now and then, when he noticed a hawk hovering in the air above the flock. He opened his louvers, grabbed the catapult, and pulled a stone from the windowsill. He blew the stone with his mouth to clear off the red ants on it. Then he unhooked one of the louvers to allow his hand enough space and wound the handles so that the louvers stood in straight horizontal layers over each other. Then he waited for the bird to strike.

  The hawk, he informed her, might be the most watchful of birds and can hover for hours on end, priming its target, making an effort to strike as precisely as possible—so one strike might be enough. So he, knowing this, waited for it, too. He did not take his eyes away from where it hovered for a second. It was why he caught it in that very moment when it made the daring plunge into the yard, picked up a small rooster, and attempted to mount the updraft. The missile knocked the raptor against the wall of the fence, making it drop the chick. The hawk slid down to the foot of the wall with a thud. It hoisted itself up, its head momentarily lost in its spread-out wings. It
had been concussed.

  He hastened out into the yard as the hawk tried to stand erect, then pinned it to the wall, unfazed by the violence of its beating wings and its riotous squawks. He dragged the bird by its wings to the cashew tree at the end of the compound, beside the refuse bin. He could not, he emphasized, describe the anger he’d felt. It was with this great anger that he bound the hawk by its wings, its head blood soaking the strong fibers of the twine. As he tied the bird to the tree, he spoke to it and all of its kind—all who stole what people like him reared with their sweat, time, and money. He walked into the house and returned with a few nails, sweat bleeding down his back and neck. As he stepped back into the yard, the hawk called with a strange fury, its voice piercing and ugly. He picked up a big stone from behind the tree and held up the bird’s neck against the tree. Then he struck the nail into its throat with the stone until the nail burst out on the other end, spitting splinters and unbuckling a coat of old bark from the tree. He spread one wing, his hand and the stone now covered in the hawk’s blood, and drove it, too, deep into the flesh of the tree. Although he saw that he’d done something extremely violent and unusual, so overwhelmed with rage was he that he was determined to complete what his mind had conjured up as the deserving punishment for the bird: a crucifixion. Thus he put together the feathery legs of the dead bird and nailed them to the tree. And it was finished.

  He sat back into the chair now that he’d finished the story, entranced in his own vision. Although he’d been looking at her all the while, it seemed that he had just seen her for the first time since he began the tale. He became conscious of the weight of what he had told her. And he feared, now, that she must think of him as a violent man. In haste, he looked up at her, but he could not tell what she was thinking.

  “I am amazed, Nonso,” she said suddenly.

  “By what?” he said, his heart quickening.

  “The story.”

  Is that it? he wondered. Is that the way she would view him from now on? An irredeemably violent man who crucifies birds? “Why?” he said instead.

  “I don’t know. But—in fact—I don’t know. Maybe the way you tell it to me. But—I just see you, just a man who loves his fowls so much. So very much.”

  Ebubedike, my host’s thoughts swirled at this. Love, he thought. How could love be what she thinks about at this given moment after he’d just exposed himself as capable of such senseless brutality?

  “You love them,” she said again, now with her eyes closed. “If you didn’t love them, you would not have acted this way in the story you just told me. And today also. You really love them, Nonso.”

  He nodded without knowing why.

  “I think you are really a good shepherd.”

  He looked up at her and said, “What?”

  “I called you a shepherd.”

  “What is that?”

  “It is one who keeps sheep. Do you remember from the Bible?”

  He was somewhat perplexed by what she’d said, for he had not given it much thought, just as men do not often give deep thoughts to the things they do every day, things that are routine to them. He hadn’t considered that he had been broken by the world. The birds were the hearth on which his heart had been burned, and—at the same time—they were the ashes that gathered after the wood was burnt. He loved them, even if they were varied while he was one and simple. Yet, like everyone who loves, he wished that it be requited. And because he could not tell even if his singular gosling once loved him or not, in time his love became a deformed thing—a thing neither he nor I, his chi, could understand.

  “But I keep fowls, not sheep,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter, so far you keep birds.”

  He shook his head.

  “It is very true,” she said, drawing close to him now. “You are a shepherd of birds, and you love your flock. You care for them the way Jesus cares for his sheep with so much love.”

  Although what she said had puzzled him, he said, “That is so, Mommy.”

  Agbatta-Alumalu, my host was so confounded by the things Ndali said that day that even long after they’d finished making love, eaten rice and stew, and made love again, he sat in the bed listening to the sound of crickets in the farm and barnyard while Ndali drifted off to sleep. His mind lay solidly on the cryptic things she had said about her family as if caught there, like a bird on birdlime. He was peering directly at the wall across from him, gazing at nothing in particular, when he was startled by her voice.

  “Why are you not sleeping, Nonso?”

  He faced her and slid downward into the bed.

  “I will, Mommy. Why did you wake?”

  She shifted, and he saw the silhouettes of her breasts in the darkness.

  “I don’t know oh, I just wake like that. I did not sleep deep before oh,” she said, with the same weak voice. “Er-he, Nonso, I have been wondering all day: what is the sound that the chickens were making after the hawk took the small one? It was like they all gathered—er, together.” She coughed, and he heard the sound of phlegm within her throat. “It was like they were all saying the same thing, the same sound.” He started to speak, but she spoke on. “It was strange. Did you notice it, Obim?”

  “Yes, Mommy,” he said.

  “Tell me, what is it? Is it crying? Are they crying?”

  He inhaled. It was hard for him to talk about this phenomenon because it often moved him. For it was one of the things that he cherished about the domestic birds—their fragility, how they relied chiefly on him for their protection, sustenance, and everything. In this they were unlike the wild birds.

  “It is true, Mommy, it is cry,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “That is so, Mommy.”

  “Oh, God, Nonso! No wonder! Because of the small one—”

  “That is so.”

  “That the hawk took?”

  “That is so, Mommy.”

  “That is very sad, Nonso,” she said after a moment’s quiet. “But how did you know they were crying?”

  “My father told me. He was always saying it is like a burial song for the one that has gone. He called it Egwu umu-obere-ihe. You understand? I don’t know umu-obere-ihe in English.”

  “Little things,” she said. “No, minorities.”

  “Yes, yes, that is so. That is the translation my father said. That’s how he said it in English: minorities. He was always saying it is like their ‘okestra.’”

  “Orchestra,” she said. “O-r-c-h-e-s-t-r-a.”

  “That is so, that is how he pronounced it, Mommy. He was always saying the chickens know that is all they can do: crying and making the sound ukuuukuu! Ukuuukuu!”

  Later, after she drifted back to sleep, he lay back beside her, thinking about the hawk attack and her observation about the fowls. Then, as the night prospered and his thoughts returned to the things she’d said about her family, the fear slithered in again, this time wearing the facial mask of a sinister spirit.

  IJANGO-IJANGO, the ndiichie say that if a wall does not bear a hole in it, lizards cannot enter a house. Even if a man is troubled, if he does not become broken, he can sustain himself. Although my host’s peace had been meddled with, he went about his business with serenity. He delivered twenty-nine eggs to the restaurant down the street and drove to Enugu to sell seven of the chicks and to buy a few more brown hens and six bags of feed. He had only bought a bag of mash when he came by a man playing uja, the flute of the spirits. The flutist trailed behind another man whose torso was painted with nzu and uli and camwood, and who clenched a strand of young palm leaf between his teeth. Behind the two men was a masquerade. A group of people were gathered as the iru-nmuo, wearing an antlered mask that bore the scarification of a slit-eyed ichie, danced to the sound of ancient flute music attended by a rattling twin gong. As you know, Egbunu, when one encounters an ancestral spirit—the corporeal manifestation of one or more of the great fathers—one cannot resist. Gaganaogwu, I could not hold back! For I had lived in the day
s of the great fathers when masquerades were a frequent sight. I could not hold back the temptation to listen to the mystical tune of the uja, the flute crafted by the best among the people who live on the earth. I shot out of my host into a frantic crowd of spirits of all kinds and climes which were gathered around this area, making deafening noises, their feet ticking on the soft grounds of Ezinmuo. But what surprised me even more was what I saw above the other part of the bustling market. A group of small human-shaped spirits—of children killed at childbirth or conception or of twins killed long ago—stood playing at an elevation of about four hundred meters, the distance at which ekili, the mystical transport system of astral projection and bird flight, are rendered possible. This group of spirits was held above the human crowd by a force beyond the knowledge of man (except dibias and the initiated), so that it seemed as though they were on the ground. They were stamping their feet, leaping, and snapping their fingers as they played the ancient game of okwe-ala. Their laughter was loud and cheerful, ringed with the hollow thread of the ancient language long lost among men. Chukwu, although I have witnessed things like this before, I was again mystified by the fact that, despite the dozen or so childish spirits playing, a market went on undisrupted below them. The market continued to teem with women haggling, people driving in cars, a masquerade swinging through the place to the music of an uja and the sound of an ekwe. None of them was aware of what was above them, and those above paid no heed to those below, either.

  I had been so carried away by the frolicking spirits that the masquerade and its entourage were gone by the time I returned to my host. Because of the fluidity of time in the spirit realm, what may seem like a long time to man is in fact the snap of a finger. This was why, by the time I was back into him, he was already in his van driving back to Umuahia. Because of this distraction, I was unable to bear witness to everything my host did at the market, and for this I plead your forgiveness, Obasidinelu.

  A short distance from Umuahia, my host received a message from Ndali that she would come that night briefly because she was preparing for a test the following day. When she came that night, wearing her lab coat, he was watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a TV show she loved and had introduced him to.