All evening, they had been hearing loud, excessive caws, but now it grew too distracting for him. He went to the kitchen, drew his catapult and a stone from the window frame, and ran out. All his chickens were in their coops, and just as he got close to one of them, a reddish cock leapt to the bars noisily, squawking in distress. It was fighting with one of the newest roosters, the one with a serrated comb and an abundance of wattles. The rooster had shown unusual belligerence even from the day he bought it. He unbarred the coop’s net door and tried to catch it. But it hopped against the wall and tried to find something to hang on, but couldn’t. He tripped and landed with his hands on the floor as the roosters leapt up and ran out of the coop with two others from the group of six cocks and cockerels. He pursued it, and it jumped onto the bench under the guava tree, and when he tried to catch it, it mounted the water drum, crowing aggressively. He was furious. He circled the well and then, moving as fast as he could, grabbed the rooster.
He was binding the bird to the tree with hempen twine when Ndali stepped into the yard. The low evening sun cast a shadow of her against the wall, a shadow so large that only half of it could be seen.
“Nonso,” she said, startling him.
“Yes, Mommy.”
“What have you done?”
“Nothing,” he said.
He turned and held her, his chest still pounding, but pressed against her chest, he felt that her pounding was far worse.
AGBATTA-ALUMALU, sometimes a man cannot fully understand what he has done until he has told another person about it. Then his own action becomes clearer even to himself. I have seen it many times. Although my host had spent the past hour explaining his rationale for selling the compound, and poultry, when he was done, he began to see the flaws in the decisions he had made. Again, Chukwu, you have established that the main roles of the guardian spirit are to watch over our hosts and make sure that preventable calamities do not befall them, so they can more easily fulfill their destinies, the reason for which you created them. We must never try to compel our hosts against their will. So even though I had worried that he was selling most of what he had, I had let him do this without interference. I did this also because I believed that the man who had come to him to help him had been a product of his gift of good luck, the bone from the garden of Chiokike.
But now, when he heard the gasps and saw the fright on Ndali’s face, he became afraid that he had made hasty decisions. A coldness came upon his heart which, for the weeks past, had been warm with the joy birthed by hope. After he’d finished revealing everything he had done in secret, Ndali said, “I have not words, Nonso. I am speechless.”
She went into his old room and closed the door while he sat in the sitting room, staring at the documents. He reread the agreement about the sale of the compound again, and fear welled up in his mind. When his father bought the house, he was barely ten, and his mother was pregnant. His father had said they needed a bigger house as more children came. He thought he’d forgotten this bit of memory, but now he found it as fresh as yesterday. His mother holding him, he’d stopped in the empty room while his father and the seller went around the place. Then he’d broken free from his mother and ran to the backyard and stood under the guava tree, greatly fascinated by it. He tried to climb it, but his mother, although heavy with child, came running and calling him down. He heard her voice with startling clarity, as if she were behind him in the room. “No, Bobo, no. Don’t, I don’t like people who climb trees.” “Why?” he’d asked, turning his back to his mother, as he did when he wanted to disobey her. “Nothing,” she said, and he heard her sigh, as she had begun doing as her belly bulged. Then, with the kind of resignation that he’d come to understand as a marker of finality, she said, “If you do, I won’t like you.”
He was thinking this when Ndali emerged from the room and said, “Nonso, let us go to Tantalizers, I’m hungry.” At first, he could not distinguish between the voices of the two women, but Ndali stepped farther into the sitting room and stamped her feet on the floor. “Nonso, I’m talking to you!”
“Er, Mommy, yes, yes, let us go.”
They walked slowly, a quietness between them, as if some authority beyond the will of man had ordered that words not be spoken. They went through the narrow street, between graying and molding fences and street gutters clogged with waste. On the other side, separated by a potholed road, birds sat in chambers of an unfinished multistory building fettered by wooden scaffolding. He was gazing at the birds when, in a voice a little above a whisper, Ndali said that if she knew it would come to this, she would have left him.
“Why do you say that, Mommy?”
“Because I am not worth this sacrifice. All this—it is too much.”
He did not speak until they entered the restaurant, for he was disturbed by what she had said. The restaurant was alive with the chatter of people—a group of men in plain shirts, some office workers, and two women, and a song was playing at a low tune on the speaker. He wanted to contest what she’d said vehemently and insist that she was worth it. But he didn’t. For even though he now mostly regretted it and agreed that he had acted in haste, he knew, too, that he’d gone too far to turn back now. He had sold his compound, which he inherited from his father. Two semesters of school fees had been paid, along with the fees for a year’s accommodation. And Jamike, who had now returned to Cyprus, had two thousand more euros which he had given Jamike to keep in an account for him for “maintenance,” so he wouldn’t have to carry much money while traveling. In the bag was another six hundred euros, the last of the hard currency. Only the forty-two thousand naira he had in the bank was to remain, in addition to however much they would get from selling all the fowls.
When they sat down in a corner of the restaurant, she repeated her words again.
“Why do you say this?” he said.
“Because, Nonso, you have destroyed yourself because of me!” she said with what my host thought was anger. After she said this, she turned about to look around the place, for it seemed as though she realized that she’d spoken in a burst of emotion, and her words had been loud, so she whispered, “You have destroyed yourself, Nonso.”
Chukwu, the effect of this unexpected proclamation on my host was severe. It felt as though something had riven through the landscape of his soul and split it in two. It was in an effort to hold himself together that he said, “I didn’t destroy myself anything, I didn’t destroy myself.”
“You have,” she said. “I gbu o le onwe gi.”
Surprised by her switch to Igbo, he did not speak.
“How can you sell everything, Nonso?”
“I did it because I don’t want them to separate us.”
“Yes, but you sold everything you have, Nonso,” she said again and turned to him, and he saw that she had again begun to cry. “For me, for me, why, Nonso?”
He swallowed hard, for he saw now that the reality of what he had done, when expressed in words, bore a grave, crushing enormity.
“No, I will recover it all—” he said, but saw that she was shaking her head, her eyes diluted with tears. He stopped. He looked about, afraid that people around them would see her crying. “I sold it to go to school, and to go overseas where I can make it. I will get it all back ten times. I will get a job there…”
The food arrived: jollof rice for him and fried rice for her, with meat pie on the side. And in the lull, I flashed in his mind to assure her in stronger words. I reminded him of all the things he’d considered to arrive at the decision. I reminded him of the man who sold his land to send his son to school. I reminded him, Ezeuwa, that he had reckoned that if he got the degree, and returned and married her, he could get a job by her father’s influence and could buy a new poultry and build a new coop. And the house? What was it even worth? He had not considered that it may be big but that Amauzunku was one of the worst places in Umuahia. So he could not wait for the waiter to go, and once the waiter was gone, he said, “I will be paying for my life a
lso, and for the woman I love. If I get the degree and I get a good job, I can buy a house ten times better, Mommy. Look at this dirty street. Maybe we can even go to another place, or even, in fact, even maybe Enugu. It is better, Mommy. Actually, it is better. It is better than me allow them to separate us.”
But Ndali simply shook her head in a way that he would remember for a very long time. She said nothing more. She ate little and wiped the steady tears that ran down her cheeks. Her sorrow troubled him, for he had not expected that she would react this strongly to his decision. He held her hand as they walked home, but as they drew near the house, she removed her hand. “Your hand is sweating again,” she said. He wiped his palms on his trousers and spat into the gutter on the side of the road.
She began to walk alone, a distance from him. He was watching her walk, the swinging of her buttocks with every lithe step visible through the fabric of her tight skirt, when a man on a motorcycle raced past and called at her, “Asa-nwa, how are you?” She hissed at the man and, laughing, the man took off, his vehicle whining. My host, his heart now cleaved, hastened to her. She turned and looked at him, but without a word. He glanced at the disappearing man, at the empty street behind him, as if the world had itself suddenly become empty. For it occurred to him that this might be what she most feared: if he left, other men would come to her. And he wished, then, that this had happened a few days before, when he had not yet sold his house.
As he began to reach for her clothes after they got home later that night, she thrust the camera into his hand, stripped bare, and asked him to take photos of her. His hand shook as he snapped the first photo, which instantly emerged printed from the top of the camera. It was a full image of her erect body, with her supple breasts staring at the camera, and the nipples taut and hard. The pictures were for him, she said. “So that anytime you feel like you want to do it, you can look at the pictures.” After he lay down by her side, he wondered if she had done it because of the man who had called to her. And a strange fear came upon him, one that possessed him through the night.
CHUKWU, the old fathers say that the god who created the itch also gave man the finger to scratch it. Although his joy had sprung leaks in response to Ndali’s sorrow, once they returned home that evening and she asked him to make love to her, he felt better. She told him she was sad mostly because she would miss him, and he assured her that he would return frequently until she could join him. He said, the degree will be quick, and then he will be done. And he said these things so fervently because he was now afraid of leaving her alone in the interim, exposed to the prying eyes of other men. By the time he was to travel to Abuja the following week, his words had worked and she was no longer steeped in sorrow. She drove him to the bus station and returned to her parents.
It rained heavily the night before his trip to Abuja for his visa, and by morning the storm had caused the main road to close. A great pothole that formed in the center of the road would have drowned every vehicle the size of the Abia Line luxurious bus. The route the driver took was longer, and by the time he got to Abuja, it was almost nightfall. He took a taxi to the cheap hotel where Jamike had suggested he stay, near Kubwa. They knew Jamike, too. They called him Turkey Man. “He is a good man, nice guy,” the cashier, whose mouth smelt of something like vomit, told him. So taken by the man’s words was he that as he took his traveling bag into the room, it occurred to him that he had not yet given Jamike anything in appreciation for his goodness. He’d only bought him beer during the four times they ran around to cyber cafes, the immigration office, the high court to swear an affidavit in lieu of a birth certificate, and to find a buyer for his house.
He became worried by this. He cursed himself inwardly for such an oversight, which may have been interpreted as ingratitude, and decided to call Jamike immediately. He scratched a Globacom phone card he’d bought from the vendor’s tent outside the hotel and loaded the phone. After he dialed Jamike did not pick up, and then a foreign voice came on, followed by an English translation. He laughed at the words and the way they had been said. Then he tried again, and this time, Jamike picked up.
“Na who be the fool wey dey call me at this time of the night?”
He was struck as if with a rod to his back. He thought to remain silent so Jamike would not find out it was he who was foolish enough not to have remembered they were in different time zones, but he was too embarrassed to control himself in the way he wanted.
“I say who be that?”
“Am sorry, my brother,” he said. “It is me.”
“Ah, ah, Bobo Solo!”
“Yes, me. I am sorry—”
“No, no, no, mehn. Na me suppose dey sorry. I just came in today. I was in—”
Jamike’s voice disappeared behind a wall of indecipherable sounds, then emerged again with a discordant echo of “ebi,” then “ommm,” and then it went blank again. “Jami, are you there? Are you there?” he said.
“Yes, Bobo Solo, you dey hear me?”
The talk was interrupted by a warning that the call would soon be disconnected. When it cleared, Jamike was saying, “That’s why I neva call you yet. But Solo, you don get the visa?”
“I am in Abuja now. Just today.”
“Oh boy! Bobo Solo, the main man!”
“That is—”
The ping went off again, and the call died. He put the phone on the only table in the room—on which sat the TV, a Bible, a laminated card listing the channels on the TV and, on the back, a menu from the hotel restaurant. At one corner of the room, near the closed curtain, a small cockroach clung to the wall, its antennae curved backwards. As he disrobed, the phone rang. When he looked in the screen, it was Ndali.
“I just wanted to see if you had a safe journey,” she said.
“Yes, Obim. But the road was very bad. Too bad.”
“Blame Orji Kalu, your governor.”
“He is a madman.”
She laughed, and as she did, he heard the voice of a rooster from some distance in the background.
“Where are you?”
“At your house.”
He hesitated. “Why, Mommy? What are you doing there? I said you should go home after feeding them.”
“Nonso, I can’t leave them here alone because you traveled. What am I, Oyibo or egg?”
Her words cut to his heart.
“I love you, Mommy,” he said. Words pooled together in his head, but he hesitated, overcome by the surprise of what she had done. “You are feeding them yourself alone?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I picked the eggs.”
“How many?”
“Seven.”
“Mommy,” he said, and when she said, “Eh?,” he fell silent. For he could not tell why suddenly he’d become moved to tears. “If you don’t want me to actually leave home, I will come back tomorrow. I will return the money for the house and not sell it again. I will ask Jamike to send me back my school fees. Everything, Mommy. After all, actually I have not started school, you see?”
The words had come out with such rapidity that it surprised him to think he uttered them. For even as he spoke, a strange silence formed an integral part of his speech. He knew, once he’d said all that, that he had simply spoken for her sake. He waited for her to respond, his mind light as the feather of a pipit.
“I don’t know what to say, Obim,” she said after a while. “You are a good man, a very good man. I love you, too. I support your decision—because God has given me a good man.” He heard her deep sigh. “Go.”
“I should go, Mommy? If you say no, I swear to God who made me, I won’t go.”
“Yes. Go.”
“Okay, Mommy.”
“Do you know that the breeder laid pink egg again?” she said.
“Ah, Obiageli?”
“Yes. I fried the egg. Very sweet.”
They laughed, and later, long after the call, he wished he had not made the decision to leave. For the rest of that day, the joy that had filled my host’s heart was s
ealed off from him by the partial veil of regret. I, his chi, felt he had made a good decision, and I was convinced that this sacrifice would further solidify Ndali’s love for him rather than destroy it. Chukwu, if only I, too, could see the future; if only I could see that which was to come, I would not have thought this foolish thing!
By dusk the following day, when he got to the embassy, the joy returned again and filled his heart so much that, in the taxi back to the hotel, he wept as he looked at the visa in his passport and the Turkish Airlines ticket he’d bought from the place Jamike had suggested. As he returned to the hotel, it seemed to him that something divine had happened to him. Before he died, his father had once said he was sure that his wife, the mother of my host, was watching over her children. He remembered now that his father had said this after my host escaped what would have been a ghastly accident. It was four years ago when he’d boarded a bus to Aba to visit his uncle but had removed himself at the last minute. Just as the bus was about to set off, a passenger arrived carrying bush meat in a jute sack. My host had complained that he could not endure the smell for the duration of the journey. He left the bus and went to another. He would see the bus on the evening news later that day, damaged beyond recognition. Only two people, of all the nine occupants, had survived the crash. Something he did not know, and which even I could not discern, had brought the meat-carrying man and forced my host to leave the bus and escape an untimely death. He resolved now that the same thing may have brought Jamike to him—the hand of some benevolent god, to help him in this time of need. As I have mentioned before, I, his chi, thought it was a result of the good-luck gift he obtained at the garden of Chiokike.
The journey back to the hotel was long, clogged with traffic in various places. He closed his eyes and imagined the future. There were Ndali and he, together in a beautiful house overseas. With much effort, he imagined them with a child, a boy, carrying a big soccer ball. Inchoate and indistinct as these imaginations were, they soothed his spirit. For a long time he had been a lost man riffling through the crammed quarters of life, but now he had found fertile hope, in which anything could grow. At the hotel, he rang Ndali, but she did not answer. While he lay waiting for her to return the call, he dozed off.
An Orchestra of Minorities Page 17