An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  He produced the number and T.T. gazed at it in a concentrated manner. “Is this the number?”

  “Yes, it is so, my brother.”

  T.T. shook his head. “But this no be Cyprus number.” He waved the sheet. “This is not a Cyprus number at all, at all, believe me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  T.T. came closer, pointing at the figures on the paper.

  “Cyprus has Turkish number. TRNC. It is plus nine zero. This one is plus three four. Not Cyprus number at all.”

  My host stood still, like a bird transfixed in its thermal.

  “But he has called me several times,” he said.

  “On this number? It is not a Cyprus number, believe me,” T.T. said. “Did he give you any address to meet him?”

  He shook his head.

  “No address. Ah, okay. Did he give you any letter? How you take get your visa?”

  “Him send me admission letter,” my host replied. “I take am to the embassy.”

  He opened the small bag, and in haste, he presented a paper to T.T., and he and Linus peered at it.

  “Erhen, he contacted the school. I see this na genuine admission letter.” He started to speak in response, but T.T. continued, “He paid the school fees, too, since this is an unconditional admission letter. I ask because I have seen many occasions where boys just barbed people’s heads. They pretend that they are the agents of the school and take their money. But they don’t pay the fees at all. They just eat the money.”

  Ijango-ijango, my host was stunned. He tried to say something, to thaw up a piece of the thoughts that had congealed into a lump in his mind, but the lump would not thaw. In silence, he took the paper back from T.T.

  “Still, I think this Jamike guy is a yahoo boy,” T.T. said, shaking his head. “My bro, I suspect he has duped you.”

  “How?” my host said.

  “Did you contact the school directly?”

  He wanted to say he did not, but he found himself shaking his head instead. In response, a small smile appeared on T.T.’s face.

  “So you didn’t?”

  “That is so,” he said. “I have the admission letter with the school’s stamp and everything. Actually, I even saw his student ID. We browsed the school together for cyber cafe. Jamike is a student there.”

  T.T. answered with silence, and beside him Linus stood watching, his mouth slightly ajar. My host gazed at both men, almost trembling.

  “Hmm,” T.T. said.

  “He paid the school fees because the school only accepts Turkish bank checks or international money order. They don’t accept bank transfers from Nigerian bank here,” my host said. He saw the woman who had been sleeping earlier walking past them, dragging a bag behind her. “Since he was going back there, I just changed my naira and give him all the money.”

  He was continuing, but he saw that T.T.’s mouth had been opened wide in surprise, and even the other man shook his head and said, “You for no give am all that money.”

  T.T. pointed to a gate in the distance, where many of those who had been on the plane from Nigeria had started to line up, and said, “Ah, we must go board now.” T.T. took up his backpack and hung it up his back. My host watched as Linus picked up his own things. And for no apparent reason, he remembered his gosling, how—in times when it seemed it had remembered its mother and the place of its provenance—it would lift itself and dash for the window, the door, wherever it could find. How once, in a bid to escape, it had assumed the tree it had seen through the window meant it could get outside. So with violent speed it dashed against the window. Concussed, it lay as if dead.

  “Are you not coming, too?” T.T. said, and my host looked up, saw the gosling lying there, at the base of the wall, its head bent towards its neck and its wings batting against the ground.

  He blinked, closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he saw T.T. encompassed about by myriads of lights and screens.

  He nodded. “I am coming, too,” he said, and followed them.

  “Maybe you go meet Jamike at Ercan. The airport,” T.T. said. “No fear, er? No fear.”

  The other man nodded, too. “No shaking, nothing dey happen. No fear, fear go fear fear!”

  He nodded again and said, as if he believed it, “I no go fear.”

  AKWAAKWURU, the great fathers often say that a toad whose mouth is full of water cannot swallow even an ant. I have seen them apply this to the way in which the mind of a man, when it is occupied by something that threatens its peace, becomes consumed by it. This was the case with my host. For throughout the flight, his mind was hooked to the words of the two men who were now seated at the rear of the plane. He sat close to the front, surrounded by more white people than were in the previous, bigger plane. They were mostly young girls and boys who, he assumed, were students, too. Even the woman who sat by him, with hair that was brown and long, seemed to be one. And all through the flight she avoided eye contact with him, gazing in her phone or into a glossy magazine. But as he sat there, fear, having transformed itself into a mind-dwelling rat, ferreted about in his head, chewing through every detail. And when he looked out the window as he drew near the country, what he saw seemed to reinforce the grim words of the duo. For instead of the tall buildings and the long bridges over the sea he had seen as they landed in Istanbul, what he saw now were dry patches of desert land, mountains, and the sea. By the time he found himself descending the ladder from the plane into the dim light of the setting sun alongside the other travelers, the details had blossomed into genial terrors.

  The airport, to his eyes, was small. It looked, in many ways, like the one in Nigeria except that it was cleaner and more orderly. But it did not have the beauty or sophistication of the one in Istanbul. It was cheap, exuding no glow or pleasantness, conforming in every way and sense with T.T.’s description of it. Once he saw the men whose words had tormented him through the flight, he went to them. He found them with another man, who introduced himself as Jay and who was talking about his time in Germany. They stood at a place where most of the people had gathered, watching as a black hole vomited up their bags. His two bags came out with their padlocks intact, their weight as he last remembered them. Someone had mentioned how those who loaded bags into the airplanes at the airport in Nigeria sometimes broke into people’s bags and stole things during the process of transferring them into the plane. This had not happened to him. He dragged and pulled the roller bag along, carried the other by its handle, and followed the two men. They were still talking, this time about the attitude of the women in both countries—this one, which T.T. repeatedly referred to as TRNC or “this island,” and Jay’s Germany. He listened, his mind still tethered to the phone booth at the airport in Istanbul.

  When they stepped out of the airport, darkness had descended with lithe grace, and an unusual smell hung in the air. A pool of cars gathered in front of the airport greeted them. Turkish-speaking men, gesturing towards various black Mercedes-Benz or V-booths, beckoned to him.

  “They are taxi drivers,” T.T. said. He’d put on a cap and the gleeful countenance of a person who had returned home. Nothing in him betrayed the dire situation on the island he’d so painstakingly described. Still wearing that curious smile on his face, T.T. spoke with one of the men, an unusual white man, nothing like any my host had ever seen before, even on TV. This one’s face was wrinkled beyond normal, and his complexion, although white, seemed to have an unusual dark hue to it. Half the man’s head was full of black hair, but the roots at the sides of his head were gray.

  “That’s our bus there!” T.T. said, breaking off from the taxi driver to point to a big bus, brightly lit on the inside, slowly riding towards them from the other end of the park. On its body was inscribed NEAR EAST UNIVERSITY, its equivalent in Turkish beneath it.

  “We go dey go be that,” T.T. said, turning to him. “That’s our bus there.”

  My host, gazing up at the bus, nodded.

  “No worry, bro. Just wait for your friend h
ere. I am sure him go come.”

  “It is so. He will. Thank you, T.T. God bless you.”

  “No mention. Just wait here, eh. And if him no come, just take the next CIU bus wey come. Your school bus. E go come same here, probly later. Cyprus International University. Just follow am. Show dem your admission letter—where is it?”

  His mind working in distinct haste, he produced the paper from the small bag he carried, but as he did, the foolscap on which Jamike had scribbled the expenses and all it would cost him, as well as his phone number, fell.

  “Good,” T.T. was saying as he picked up the paper. “Best of luck, bro. Maybe we go come see you. Take my number.”

  My host took out his phone from his pocket to register the number, but it did not turn on when he flipped it open.

  “The battery don die,” he said.

  “No problem. We go go now. Bye.”

  Gaganaogwu, by this time, my host had begun to believe that the things he’d heard from T.T. were true. Although he started to wait, he thought it was unlikely that Jamike would come. Even though a chi can see into the interior of a host’s mind, it is sometimes still difficult to determine where an idea comes from. This was the case with this idea. It was, I think, a collection of things he had been seeing: the quality of the airport here, the behavior of the drivers, the emptiness of the land, and the problem of communication. These confirmed his worry. I pushed the thought into his mind that it was too early to lose hope. I threw his father’s motto into his mind—Forwards ever, backwards never—but it hit the door his mind had erected around his fears and ricocheted away. Instead he thought of home, of Ndali, what she must be doing at that time. He remembered the anguish of selling his chickens—how, as he dropped the cage of the brown broilers off at one of the buyers’, he had nearly choked. He looked now at the two heavy bags in his hands which bore all his remaining possessions—what he did not sell or gift to Ndali or Elochukwu, or charity, or throw away. And these things solidified his fear that something had gone wrong.

  He warded off the advances of taxi drivers time and time again. They came at him, speaking in halting language he did not comprehend, their words cadenced with a clicking accent. As night fell, the men continued to call at him, until most of the cars emptied out of the park. But there was still no Jamike. He’d waited for nearly two hours when he remembered that Jamike had told him he would be given free temporary accommodation during the first two nights at the school until he was able to choose a campus apartment. These were Jamike’s words, spoken at a time when the waters were calm, and they came to him now in this moment of great roiling waters, of the torment of fear, and of fainting hope.

  CHUKWU, the road from the airport to the town seemed as far as the journey from Umuahia to Aba, except that it was smooth, not damaged by erosion or potholes. During the ride, he gazed at the country and its strange and foreign landscape. As he registered every discernible sight, every detail of the things the men had told him worked on him like the hands of a fowler, pulling out feather after feather so that by the time the desert came into view, he’d been completely deplumed. And he, now bald and feeble, hopped about in the plains of fear. The taxi was circling a roundabout when he recalled something Jamike had said about the absence of trees, and it struck him that he had yet to see one tree so far in the journey. He saw the broad attributes of the sierras, one of which was adorned with the lighted outline of a huge flag. It occurred to him that he’d seen the flag before, although he could not recall that it was perhaps at the Turkish embassy in Abuja.

  “Okul, burda. School. School,” the man said when they arrived at a place in front of which was a short but long long brick wall bearing the name of the school.

  He saw the school—a group of unusual buildings linked together, the darkness like a still river around them. Around and about the strange smell he’d perceived at the airport lingered. The man pulled up in front of one of the buildings, a four-story one in front of which was a table with three people seated. Behind them was a board on which there was a world map—a drawing showing the White Man’s knowledge of the world. He paid the driver twenty euros. The man gave him some Turkish lira and coins in return and unloaded the bags. One of the people at the table, a man with shocks of gray hair, came to meet him. The man looked like the people from a place far from the country of the fathers, a place called India. My former host, Ezike Nkeoye, once knew such a man as a teacher. The Indian man introduced himself as Atif.

  “Chinonso,” he said, taking the man’s offer of a handshake.

  “Chi-non-so?” the man said. “Do you have an English name?”

  “Solomon, call me Solomon.”

  “Better for me,” the man said, and smiled in a way my host had never seen before, for it seemed as though the man’s eyes were completely closed. “Did you ask to be picked up from the airport?”

  “No, I was waiting for my friend, Jamike Nwaorji, your student, here, CIU, to pick me from the airport.”

  “Oh, okay. Where is he?”

  “He didn’t come.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, actually, I don’t know. Do you know where he is? Can you find him for me?”

  “Find him?” the man said, and turned to reply to something one of the others at the table, a thin white girl, had said to him in the language of the land. When he turned back, he said, “I’m sorry, Solomon. What’s your friend’s name again? I might know him if he is a student here. There are nine students from Africa in this university, and eight of them are from Nigeria.”

  “Jamike Nwaorji,” he said. “He is from Business Administration, from business department.”

  “Jamike? Does he have another name?”

  “No. You don’t know him? Jamike. J-a-m-i-k-e. His surname is Nwaorji: N-w-a-r, no, sorry, N-w-a-o-r-j-i.”

  Atif shook his head and turned back to the desk. My host had dropped his big bag on the ground, and his heart pounded as he waited for the Turkish girl to stop talking to the man again. The third person, a stout man with a large beard, snapped open a canned drink. The drink swished and dripped and foamed over his hand to the ground. The man shouted something that sounded like Olah and began to laugh. For a moment, they seemed to all forget my host.

  “His name is Jamike Nwaorji,” he said softly, making sure he said the surname as clearly as he could.

  “Okay,” the girl said now. “We are looking at the list, but not find this man, your friend.”

  “There is no such person here that I know. And now, I have looked at the business department, the only Nigerian there is Patience, Patience Otima.”

  “Nobody like Jamike Nwaorji?” my host said. He looked up at the two people on whom, it felt to him at the moment, his life may depend. But he saw in their faces, in the way they gazed at the records, that he would find no succor there. “Jamike Nwaorji, nobody like him?” he said again, and the words dragged in his mouth this time, inflected by subtle gasps whose origin seemed to be from his bowels. He placed his hands on his belly.

  “No,” the man said with something that sounded like a p at the end of it. “Can I see your admission letter?”

  Egbunu, his hands were shaking as he brought the paper out of the bag he’d been carrying for all the time he had been away from Umuahia, almost two full days. He watched as the man peered at the roughened paper, conscious of the man’s every blink, calculating every change in the man’s countenance, terrified by his every move.

  “This is real, and I can see that you paid your school fees.” He looked my host in the eye, and then scratched the side of his head. “Let me ask you a question: Did you pay for on-campus accommodation?”

  “Yes,” my host, slightly relieved now, said curtly. Then he explained that he’d sent Jamike money for accommodation for two semesters. He brought out the piece of foolscap on which Jamike had scribbled the breakdown of costs and, pointing at the different figures, said, “I paid one thousand five hundred euros for one-year accommodation. Then I paid
three thousand for one-year school fees, and two thousand euros for maintenance.”

  Something in what he’d said surprised the man, Atif. The man flipped open another file and began searching frantically for his name on a list of names. The girl, too, joined in, and even the other man with the drink. They all peered from behind Atif’s shoulders. A taxi like the one that had brought him pulled towards them slowly. As it came, Atif raised his head to tell him that even on this list there was no name similar to his. In the next file, too—which was for campus apartments, where most Africans stayed because they didn’t always like Turkish food served exclusively in dormitories—his name was not there. In the list of registered apartments subsidized by the university, his name was not there.

  When he’d looked everywhere and could not find my host’s name, Atif turned to him and said it would be fine. Egbunu, this man said this to a person who—like a fowl—had been deplumed and was now bare before the world. Atif continued to say this as he took him across the campus, up to a four-story building similar to the one in front of whose facade they had pitched their table, and up into one of the temporary accommodations, where he could stay for five days. Then Atif shook the hand of a man who had been dealt a crushing blow and said, without any shadow of doubt, that all would be well. And, as often happens everywhere among mankind, this man—deplumed, in agony, in despair—nodded and thanked the man who had said these things to him, just as I have seen men do many times. Then the man said to him, “Just relax and sleep. Good night.” And my host, reckoning that he must do as he had been told, nodded and said, “Good night, too. See you tomorrow.”

  11

  The Wayfarer in a Foreign Land

  EZECHITAOKE, the early fathers say in their peripatetic wisdom that one’s own language is never difficult. Thus, because my host arrived in a place I did not know, I must recount everything here, every bit of the next few days, every bit, for my testimony tonight to bear weight. I ask that your ears be patient in hearing me.