She removed the coat and revealed a green shirt and jean trousers that gave her the appearance of a teenager.
“I am just coming from the lab,” she said. “Please off the TV, we need to talk about coming to my family house tomorrow.”
“The TV?” he said.
“Yes, off it!”
“Oh? No vex, Mommy.”
He rose slowly to turn it off, but stopped at the intensification of a peculiar sound. He stood watching again.
“In fact let us go to the backyard, it is stuffy here,” she said.
He followed her to the yard, the air thick with the smell of the poultry. They sat on the bench, and she was about to begin speaking when she saw a long black bit of plumage stuck to the wall as if glued to it. “Look, Nonso!” she said, and he saw it, too. He picked the feather off the wall and sniffed it.
“It is from that stupid hawk,” he said, shaking his head.
“Ah, how did it hang there like that?”
“I don’t know.” He crumpled it and flung it over the fence, his anger erupting at the memory of the previous day.
She drew a deep breath, and, pushing herself forward, she spoke as if she’d been thinking about every word, and every one of them had been measured and planned for so long.
“Chinonso Solomon Olisa, you have been a great person, a godsend to me. Look at me, I have been through hell. You met me in the worst place. You met me, I was on the bridge. I was on that bridge because—because what?—because I was tired of the bad treatment. Because I was tired of being cheated and lied to. But God! He sent you into my life at the very appointed time. Look at me now.” She splayed her hands open for him to see. “Look at me, look at how I have been transformed. If anyone told me or even my mum that her daughter would be working in a poultry, touching agric fowl, who would believe it? Nobody. Nonso, you don’t even know who I am or where I am from.”
She seemed to smile, but he could tell that it wasn’t a smile. It was something her face had done to help her conceal the difficult emotion that was welling within her.
“So what am I saying? Why am I talking like this? I am saying that my family—my mother and father, and even my brother—may not accept you. I know it is hard to understand, Nonso, but look, my dad is a chief. Onye Nze. They will say I am not suited for a farmer. It is just that, they will say that…”
Egbunu, my host listened as she said the same thing over and over again to try to neutralize its effect. He was shaken by the things she’d said, for he’d been afraid of these things. He’d seen the signs. He saw it on the day at the watch store on Finbarr’s Street, when she’d told him that she was born overseas, “in the UK.” Her parents and her older brother had been schooled there, and it was she alone who had chosen to do her schooling in Nigeria. “But,” she had added, “I will do my master’s abroad.” He remembered another time. They were driving past the old part of the city, tearing through the storm wind that massed against it, when she asked if he had gone to university. He’d been struck by it, and his heart had begun to beat rapidly. “No,” he’d said, as if with a dead tongue. But Ndali had simply said, “Oh, I see.” He remembered how, afterwards, she’d pointed past a group of multistory buildings lined shoulder to shoulder on the side of the road around Aguiyi Ironsi Layout, a tall new solar-powered streetlight sticking up above one of them, and said, “We live somewhere among those buildings.”
“I am not trying to make you afraid,” she said presently. “Nobody can decide who I want to marry. I decide for myself. And I am no longer a child.”
He nodded.
“Obim, igho ta go?” she said, her head tilted sideways, her face anchored in the valley between smiling and crying.
“I understand, Mommy,” he said in the language of the White Man, surprised by her switch to the language of the old fathers. Although he’d heard her speak it on the phone with her parents, she hardly spoke it with him. She’d said she did not like to speak it except with her parents because, having lived abroad for a few years, she did not think she was fluent in it.
“Da’alu,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. She rose and went into the kitchen.
Later, while they ate, she said, “Nonso, you truly love me?” He was starting to answer when she said, “That must be why you would want to marry me?” He murmured something that dissolved away in an instant because she quickly added, “It must be because you love me.”
He waited for a moment before saying, “It is.” He expected her to say more, but she went to the kitchen to wash the plates, carrying the single kerosene lamp in the house. It crossed his mind to put on the rechargeable lantern, but he remained seated instead, contemplating all she had said when she came back into the sitting room.
“Nonso, I ask again, do you love me?”
In the near darkness, although he wasn’t looking at her, he could tell that she’d closed her eyes as she waited for his answer. She often closed her eyes whenever she expected a response to a question, as if afraid that what he might say might hurt her. Then, after he had spoken, she would try to slowly take in what had been said.
“You say yes, Nonso, but is it true?”
“It is so, Mommy.”
She returned to the room with the lantern, set it on a stool beside her, and turned it low so that their shadows sketched by the incipient darkness swelled.
“So you truly love me?”
“It is so, Mommy.”
“Chinonso, you always say you love me. But do you know that you need to really love someone before you marry the person? Do you know the meaning of love?” He was starting to speak. “No, just tell me, first, do you know what love is?”
“I do, Mommy.”
“Is that truth? Really, is that the truth?”
“It is so, Mommy.”
“Then, Nonso, what is love?”
“I know. I can feel it,” he said. He opened his mouth to proceed, but he said, “Eck,” and then fell silent again. For he feared that he could not answer her correctly.
“Nonso? Do you hear?”
“Yes, I feel love, but I cannot lie that I know everything concerning it, every single thing.”
“No, no, Nonso. You said you love me, so you must know what love is. You must know what.” She sighed and let out a tsk. “You must know, Nonso.”
Gaganaogwu, my host was troubled by this. Although I, like every good chi, often allow my host to make use of the talent I have chosen for him from the hall of talents by interfering minimally in his decision makings, I wanted to interfere here. But I was stopped by what he resorted to: the effective tool of silence. For I have come to know that when the peace of the human mind is threatened, it often answers with benign silence at first, as if stunned by a withering blow whose impact it must allow to dissipate. And when this dissipation had been completed, he mumbled, “Okay.”
He leaned back into the chair and recalled what she had told him about one of her friends who laughed at a man who told her friend he loved her after just meeting her for the first time. He’d wondered at the time why she and Lydia, the friend, had thought it completely ludicrous and that it deserved mockery. This reminded him of when Miss J laughed at him when he said he loved her. At the time, he had been surprised, as he was now. He looked up at her silhouette, and it struck him for the first time that he’d not properly weighed what it would entail to be married. She would have to move in with him into the compound. She would ride with him in his van to deliver eggs to the bakery on Finbarr’s Street and meat to the restaurants where he delivered live chickens every now and then. All that had come to belong to him would now also belong to her—everything. Did he hear himself say it correctly? Everything! And if, in time, he plants his seed in her, the child that will be born—even that child will belong to both of them! Her possessions, her car—he would benefit from her studies in the university, her family, her heart, and all that was her, hers, and all that would be hers would all be his, too. This was what marriage comprised.
/> In light of this new understanding, he said, “Actually, I don’t, I can say—”
She must have said the “Okay” after she opened her eyes. “But you…,” she started to say, but fell silent.
“What? What?” he said in a frantic effort to prevent her from holding back that which she had prepared for release, for she often did this: pause on the verge of saying something, then draw back and seal it up again in the jar of thought, to be released later, and sometimes never.
“Don’t worry,” she said almost in a whisper. “You will come to my house next Sunday, then. And you will meet my family.”
Oseburuwa, you know that a chi is a font of memory—a moving accretion of the many cycles of existences. Each event, every detail stands like a tree staked into the bright darkness of its eternity. Yet it does not remember every event, only those which impact its host in memorable ways. I must tell you that my host’s decision that night is one I will always remember. At first he’d waited for her to say these words he dreaded, that “it will not be good.” But she did not speak. So, in a faltering tone, he said, “That is so, Mommy. I will meet your family next week Sunday.”
6
“August Visitor”
OBASIDINELU, you have sent me to live on the earth with humans in many cycles of existence, and I have seen many things, and I’m wise in the ways of humanity. Yet I do not fully understand the human heart. Every person lives as if oscillating between two realms, unable to anchor his foot in either. This is a strange thing. Let us consider, for instance, the intercourse between fear and anxiety. Fear exists because of the presence of anxiety and anxiety because humans cannot see the future. For if only a man could see the future, he would be more at peace. For one who plans to travel in a coming day may say to his companion, “If we go to Aba tomorrow, we will encounter robbers on the highway and we will be robbed of this car and all our possessions.” To which the other may say, “Surely we will not go to Aba tomorrow.”
Or suppose there is a young woman about to be married. If she could see the future, she could say to her father on the eve of the wedding, “My father, I don’t mean to disappoint our entire clan and soil our name. But I have come to find that if I marry this man, he will beat me every day and will treat me worse than a dog.” Can you imagine what fear this would create in her beloved father if he believes what she has seen is true? The father would snap his fingers over his head and cry, “Tufia! Ya buru ogwu ye ere kwa la! Anyone who has prepared such a spell, may it come to naught! You must leave the man at once, my daughter. Where is the bride price he has paid? Where is the young goat? Where are the three tubers of yam? Where is the bottle of schnapps and the crate of mineral? Return them all at once! God forbid that my daughter should marry such a man!” But Chukwu, they will not do such a thing because none of them can see the future. So without knowing it, the men of trade will embark on their journey on the planned day and get robbed and killed. The young woman will marry the man who will treat her worse than a slave.
I have seen it many times.
It is in this same way that my host drove his van to Ndali’s house that Sunday not knowing what was in store. Unable to induce the day to arrive earlier and unable to stop it from coming, he’d waited anxiously for it. Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay. The day will come, as it has done since the beginning, and all that man can do is wait. Waiting in such a state of anxiety is tasking. Although one might feel a sense of peace while waiting, that peace is deceptive—the kind that could cause a man to think of roiling waters as calm.
He had not seen her in two days before that day, and he longed for her. He entered her street, trying to imagine what her family was like, what the house looked like. The electrical poles around the street were lower than they were in most other parts of Umuahia, and they seemed lined up close to each other, like laundry ropes. Small sparrows sat on a thick one that reared from the transmitter on the other side of the road, as if they were all in some agreement to stay on the cable. Shepherd, he thought suddenly. Is that nobler? Shepherd of birds? Is that what he would call himself at the meeting? Would that make things good and make things go well?
He arrived to find their house looming over the road in grandeur and prominence. He accessed this secluded part of the street called “Layout” by serendipity. The road was well paved, and there was a sidewalk, beyond both sides of which were residential buildings. The house he was looking for, number 71, sat at the end of the layout, creating a dead end. Its walls were yellow, not quite as high as some of the others but rimmed around on the top with fine hoops of barbed wire. As if to demonstrate what might happen to a robber confident enough to attempt a break-in, a black polythene bag had been caught on the spike of one of the hooped wires. The morning wind pushed persistently at the bag, forcing it to cling to the wire by one of its handles, and its tumefied body to continue to wheeze at the pressure of the wind.
Oseburuwa, he did not know why he watched the bag for as long as he did—an object caught in something from which it could not get away no matter how much it tried. This intrigued him. He pulled up in front of the giant gate and turned off his engine. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He’d successfully cut his hair the previous afternoon. By the mirror, he fixed his tie, which was the color of the shirt he wore. He’d pressed it with the iron Ndali had bought him, a strange technique in which the surface of a hot object is pressed against a cloth. He sniffed the suit and questioned whether he should have worn it. He had washed it the day before and hung it on the laundry rope. He’d hoped to take it in shortly afterwards but had fallen asleep. Once I heard the rain, I rushed out of the yard, but there was nothing I could do. A chi cannot influence a host who is not in a conscious state. So I had watched, helpless, as rain poured down on his laundry until the drumming on the asbestos roof woke him. Instantly, I flashed the thought of the suit jacket into his mind, and he ran out but found the suit already soaked. He brought it into the house and hung it on a chair in the living room. Although it was dry by the time he put it on, it had acquired a rank smell. He removed the suit jacket and held it in his hand in case Ndali became concerned with why he did not wear it.
Before he turned on the engine again, he looked at the metallic structure attached to the gate. It was of Jisos Kraist bearing a piece of wood with two outstretched arms. He was gazing at this when the small gate attached to the big one opened. A man stepped out of it wearing a uniform of faded blue and a black beret. The man’s trousers were hiked unevenly—one to the knees and the other below the knee.
“Oga, what do you want?” the man said.
“I am a guest of Ndali.”
“A guest, er,” the man said, a weak frown on his face. The man ran his eyes over the van, ignoring his affirmative answer. “From where you know Madam from, Oga?” the man said in the language of the White Man.
“What?”
“I asked how you take know my Madam?” The man had come to the van, planted his two hands on top of it, and bent his head to peer in at its only occupant.
“I am her boyfriend. My name is Chinonso.”
“Okay, sir,” the man said. He detached from the van. “You be the man they are expecting?”
“Yes, na me.”
“Ah, welcome, sir. Welcome.”
The man hurried through the small opening in the gate, and he heard a rattling of metals and rods. One of the two big gates squeaked and swung open. Although he knew that Ndali’s father was a titled chief and therefore rich, he did not expect that their wealth would be of this magnitude. He didn’t at all expect to see the life-size sculpture of a menacing lion, one foot suspended in midair, the other ballasted into the floor of the fountain. From its wide-open eyes and mouth flowed a steady stream of water into a bowl of concrete. It took him a moment to recall that she’d said something about a figure whose photo her dad had taken during a trip to France and vowed to replicate in their mansion in Umuahia. He searched
his mind carefully to see if he had been told about a basketball hoop. Had she mentioned the number of cars they had, or that their cars sat under a structure roofed with zinc? He could not remember. He counted: the black Jeep—1, the white Jeep—2, a car whose make he did not know—3, Ndali’s Audi sedans—4, 5, 6. Oh, there’s another shielded from view by the big wheels—7! Yet another, a Mercedes-Benz, beside which he’d parked his own vehicle—8. Looking carefully, he could see that was all. Eight cars.
He’d stepped out before he noticed that the gate man had been following him and had been standing beside his car waiting for him to come out.
“I can help you carry anything you bring inside, Oga.”
He noticed then that he’d forgotten the gift he had brought. He stopped, turned and rushed back to the car. Even though the image of him dropping the bag with the wine on the bench in the yard stood like a banner in his mind, he searched the van, the backseats, the front like a madman.
Egbunu, I must say here that this was one of the occasions in which I had wanted to remind him that he was forgetting the gifts. But I didn’t because of your counsel: Let man be man. The role of the chi is to attend to higher matters, things which, by virtue of their magnitude, can affect the host in major or significant ways. It must also attend to supernatural matters which man, in his limitation, cannot handle. But this omission, as I look back now on the things that would result from that visit, strikes me with pangs of regret, and I begin to wish that I had reminded him.
“Oga, Oga, hope no problem?” the gate man said repeatedly.
“No, no problem,” he said with a slight trembling in his voice.
He thought for a moment if he should rush back home, but he recalled she’d begged him not to arrive late. The word flashed in his mind like fire: punctuality. He remembered her saying it: “My dad likes punctuality.” I was relieved, Chukwu, as he hurried towards the house.
An Orchestra of Minorities Page 10