An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  This vision had come to him with such vividness that he shuddered into a jerk. The bottle tumbled out of his hand and spilled onto the rug. A strong sudden wish for Jamike to not bleed to death seized him. He stretched his hands and pleaded with the suffering man, as if he were there, to stop bleeding. “Look, I don’t actually want to injure you like this, er,” he said, shading his eyes from the ghastly image of the bloodied man before him. “My one point five million naira, please, Jamike, please. Just give it to me back and I will go back home, I swear to God who made me. Just give to me back!”

  He looked up again at his hearer, and as if in response, the shimmering figure trembled even more. He looked down in horror and saw blood gathering into a puddle between the feet of the wounded man. He sat up and pulled himself away from the sight, which, although in his vision, he assumed was in the room.

  “Look, I don’t want you to die,” he said. “I don’t—”

  “Are you all right, Solomon?” This was Tobe, in the real world of objects and flesh and time, rapping on the door.

  “Yes, Tobe,” my host said, astonished that he’d been loud enough for Tobe to hear.

  “Are you on the phone?’

  “Yes, yes, on the phone.”

  “Okay. I heard your voice, so I wondered. Please make sure you try to sleep to rest your mind.”

  “Thank you, my brother.”

  When Tobe had gone, he said aloud, “Yes, I will call you again tomorrow.” He paused, to feign listening, and then said, “Yes, you, too. Good night.”

  He gazed about now, and there was no Jamike. He wiped his eyes, in which tears had gathered, while he’d begged the phantom. Ijango-ijango, in a memorable moment of life which I cannot forget, my host searched about him, looking up on the bed, behind the red curtain, on the ceiling, tapping the floor, whispering and looking for the conflicting shadow of Jamike. Where was the man who had been bleeding? Where was the man on whom he’d struck the death blow? But he did not find him.

  The image of the mad black man came to him now and, in fear, he climbed into the bed. But he could not sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he leapt at once like an enraged cat into the wastelands of this burnt-out day, in which all he’d achieved was to gather more convincing evidence that he’d indeed become undone. He rummaged through the rich dirt of the wasteland, prancing in the choke of trash, digging, scrounging up detail after detail—about the bank, the girls who had touched his hair, the inquiry at the police station, the meeting with Dehan, the unearthed memory of what he did to Jamike many years before, which he believed may have caused this great hatred, this genuine malice to be sustained through the ages. He would pounce, dig, and scrounge on until he had brought up everything, until the surface of his mind had become strewn with the debris. Only then would he fall asleep. But not for long. For he would soon wake again, and the cycle would repeat itself without mercy, time and time again.

  AKATAKA, so disturbed was I with the state of my host, and so afraid for the future, that for the short time he was asleep, close to midnight, I shot out of his body. I waited, and seeing no spirit in the room, I made my way into the ether and flew into the plains of Ezinmuo, through the concourse of spirits. In time, I was in the Ngodo cave, in the dwelling of many thousand guardian spirits. The moment my feet touched the luminous ground, I saw a guardian spirit I knew from many years ago. It had been a chi to the father of a former host. I asked it if it knew the chi of a living person by the name of Jamike Nwaorji, but it did not. I left the spirit, who sat alone, playing with a silver jar by the side of the waterfall. I asked a cluster of guardian spirits, one of whom had not had a host in twenty human years, and it told me it would be difficult to find a chi who might know the current location of a living host or the host’s chi. Indeed, I looked around at the multitude of guardian spirits, who were simply a tiny fraction of the innumerable guardian spirits on the earth, and I realized the futility of my mission. I knew that I would not be able to find Jamike or his chi if I did not know where they were. Sad, defeated, I ascended with preternatural force towards the skies and soon found myself in that single esoteric path of descent known only to you, Chukwu, and me. For it is the single route by which I can return to my living host, as if drawn by a magnetic force, from anywhere in the universe.

  13

  Metamorphosis

  OBASIDINELU, the great fathers in their naturalist wisdom say that a mouse cannot knowingly enter into a trap set for it. A dog cannot know for certain that there is a deep miry pool at the end of the path and knowingly plunge into it to drown. No one sees fire and throws himself in it. But such a man may walk into a pit of fire if he did not see that it is there. Why? Because a human being is limited in sight; he cannot see beyond the boundaries of what his eyes can reach. For if one comes to a man in his house sharing a meal with his household, he may say, “Dianyi, I just came back from the big north, Ugwu-hausa, with two cows and they are worth so much money.” He may garnish it by saying, “I have come to you because my cattle are special breeds, rich in good milk, their flesh as edible as that of nchi caught from Ogbuti forest.” The man of the house might be convinced. He may thus think of the seller as one of goodwill and believe all the man says, even though he did not himself witness it. But he does not know that the cows are poorly fed and afflicted or that they are inferior breeds. And because he does not know, he buys the cows for so much. I have seen it many times.

  Chukwu, why does a thing like this happen? Because man cannot see what is not revealed to him, nor can he see that which is concealed. A word spoken stands as truth, firm, unless it is revealed to be a lie. Truth is a fixed, unchangeable state. It is that which resists any touching, any fiddling. It cannot be adorned, nor can it be garnished. It cannot be bent, or rearranged, or moved about. One may not say: “May we make this account clearer by adding such-and-such detail, perhaps the listener will understand better.” No! To do so would be to corrupt the truth. One may not say, “My friend, if they ask me at the court if my father committed the crime, because I do not want my father to go to prison, do I say he did not commit the crime?” No, foolish man! That would be a lie. Speak only what you know. If a fact is thin, do not feed it to make it fat. If a fact is rich, do not take from it to make it lowly. If a fact is short, do not stretch it to make it long. Truth resists the hand that creates it, so that it is not bound by that hand. It must exist in the state in which it was first created. This is why, when a man comes to another with a lie, he has cloaked the fact. He may be offering a rattlesnake in a calabash of food. He may dress destruction in the garments of compassion until he who is targeted is trapped, until such a one is deceived, until such a one is stripped of his possessions, until such a one is destroyed! I have seen it many times.

  Oseburuwa, I say this not just because of what had happened to my host but also because when he woke in the deep throat of night, soon after I returned from the cave of guardian spirits, the first thing that occurred to him was that he had not yet called Ndali as he’d said he would. She had made him promise her that he would never lie to her. It was a few days before he was to leave for Lagos, and they were seated in the backyard, watching one of the broilers who’d just had chicks preening and making perfunctory stabs into the plumage around its neck. Turning to him as if she had suddenly remembered something, she said, “Nonso, you promise?”

  “Yes,” he’d said. “I promise.”

  “You know, lying is one evil thing. How can I know what I don’t know if it is not told me, if something else is said instead of it?”

  “It is so, Mommy.”

  “Obim, then, that means you will never ever lie to me?”

  “Ye—”

  “Never ever. I mean, no matter what? Ever?”

  “I will not, Mommy.”

  “Promise?”

  “With all my heart.” She then opened her eyes, but when she saw his, she snapped them closed again. “No, no, Nonso. Really, listen.” He waited for her to speak, but she would not s
peak for a long time. Even now, he could not tell what it was that had stopped her. A thought, perhaps, so large that it had distracted her for that long? Or was it fear big enough to cause her to weigh her words with a caution similar to that of a person about to identify whether the mangled body about to be uncovered is that of a loved one?

  “You will never lie to me, Nonso?” she said, finally.

  “I will never lie to you, Mommy.”

  ONYEKERUUWA, my host rose that morning as if awoken by a shout from an unseen person. When he opened his eyes, he heard the sound of a distant vehicle, something like a crane or a heavy truck screeching. For a while he listened to this vehicle to keep afloat the fear that settled on the surface of his mind like a drop of oil. He sustained it with thoughts of things he could do by himself to find Jamike. Garbed in the light that fell through the curtains, he sat up and tried to locate Jamike in the tangled thickets of his thoughts. Once the rest of the night was broomed away, he would rise and walk into the new country. He would go wherever he could to find anyone who might know where Jamike had gone or how to contact him. Somewhere there must be a friend who might have information about Jamike’s whereabouts. No longer would he let Tobe carry his cross; he must now bear it alone.

  He washed himself, picked up the bag containing the documents, and stepped out before he could hear Tobe’s movement. He walked into the school as the sun rose, past the places where Tobe and he had walked. He sat at a bench beside a pool where the sculpture of a frog stood overlooking the ringed pond, brackish with a dredge-black underbelly. At the tip of the bench sat a light-skinned couple speaking in Turkish. The two rose as soon as he settled into the bench, glancing back again and again as they walked away in a manner that convinced him they were speaking about him.

  He sat there until the time on his charged phone said it was 8:14. He rose, and behind him, the 8:15 bus had pulled up. In the space between him and the bus, someone had created a fountain in the ground—certain unfamiliar materials rigged into the ground like strange plants—from which water sprayed about. My host paused before the sprinklers to determine the water’s direction, then, when it turned away from him, he made a safe passage and rushed up to catch the bus.

  As he made to climb into the bus, the driver said something to him.

  “No Turkish,” he said.

  “No Turkish,” the driver said.

  “Yes, English but no Turkish.”

  “You, Nijerya?”

  “Yes. I am from Nigeria.”

  He said the last words distractedly before sitting down. The bus passed between two sidewalks, on one of which two Nigerians were carrying nylon bags from Lemar, the supermarket where Tobe and he had bought telephone SIM cards. He did not know why he lifted himself from his seat at the sight of one of them, then caught himself and sat back. Something he could not explain had made him think for one sharp moment that the man was Jamike. He sat, aware of the startled gaze of the people on the bus, perhaps wondering if he had gone mad.

  When he saw that the bus was approaching the stop where he was to disembark, he stepped forward, out of the spot on which he’d stood and out of the untamed thickets of his thoughts. Swaggering, he walked to the front and held on to one of the support poles. The driver caught sight of him in the mirror that hung in front of him and grinned. “Nijerya, very goodt, futball. Very very goodt. Jay-Jay Okocha, Amokachi, Kanu—very goodt, Nijerya, wallahi!”

  Once out of the bus, he fell back into the memory of that evening in the yard as if knocked back in there by an invisible club. And Ndali had sat back on the bench and the hen had crouched on its belly, gazing at them in silence.

  “Mommy,” she said, then laughed. “You are one unusual man, Nonso. Will you always call me this thing?”

  “It is so, Mommy.”

  She laughed again.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yes, but it is strange. I have never heard any person call their girlfriend Mommy before. They say ‘baby’ or ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart.’ You know. But ‘Mommy’? It is different.”

  “I under—”

  “Ehen, I remember, I remember, Nonso! Today, during our service in the church, we sang a song that reminded me very much of you, Nonso. I don’t know why, I don’t know why, but no, I think I know why. It is the wordings of the song, about coming to me. And you come to me. It so reminds me of you, of how, suddenly, out of nowhere, you came to me.”

  “You should sing it, Mommy.”

  “Oh God! Nonso, I should?” She gave him a sight blow on the arm.

  “Ah! Ah! You will kill me, oh.”

  She laughed. “I know my blows feel like feathers to you. But you say it is heavy? Ah, this is a lie. But, see, it’s a song to God. So I don’t want to use it for you as if it is love song.”

  “I am sorry, Mommy. I know. I just want you to sing it. I want to hear you sing and also to know why it remember you of me.”

  She opened her eyes now after he’d stopped speaking.

  “‘Remind,’ not ‘remember.’ ‘Remind you of me.’”

  “Oh, Mommy, that is true. Sorry.”

  “Well, okay, but I am shy. Ama’im ka e si a gu egwu.”

  “Good Igbo,” he said, and laughed.

  “Stupid!” She hit him again. He squirmed and wrinkled his face into a tuft of pain. She stuck out her tongue, pulled down the flesh beneath her eyelids so that the full balls of her eyes were exposed down to the constellation of veins coated in red flesh. “That’s what you deserve for laughing at me.”

  “Will you sing now?”

  “Okay, Obim.”

  He watched her raise her eyes to the ceiling, fold her fingers into each other, and begin singing the song. Her voice moved and swayed, softly, tenderly, as the words came out. Egbunu, the power of music on the consciousness of man cannot be lightly observed. The old fathers knew this. It was why they often said that the voice of a great singer could be heard by the ears of the deaf, and even of the dead. How true, Oseburuwa! For a man may be in a state of profound sadness—that uterine, entombed state. For days he may be still, in tears, perhaps not even eating. Neighbors have come and gone; relatives have streamed in and out of his house, saying, “Take heart! It is well, my brother.” Yet, after all has been said, he has returned into the dark place again. Then let him hear good music, whether sung by a gifted voice or on the radio. You’ll see his soul rise, slowly, from the dark place past the threshold into light. I have seen it many times.

  My host, whose fear of losing Ndali had been growing in those days, was gripped by the strong hands of the last lines:

  You are my king

  You are my king

  And you come to me

  Jesus, you come to me

  And you come to me

  And you come to me

  When she finished, he grabbed her hand and kissed so fervently that, later, they’d made love, and she asked him if it was the song that’d made it so good.

  The song was material in his head as he alighted from the bus onto the paved terrace that branched towards a long road leading to Near East University. It remained with him even afterwards, like a persistent din caught in the ear of the universe. And you come to me. Before and around him, everywhere his eyes could see, he found evidence of the things the man he’d met at the airport, T.T., had said to him about the country, how it was mostly deserts and mountains and seas where nothing consumable grew. The only thing in sight was a large stretch of empty land. Sometimes, a big rolled-up bunch of dry tares, which looked like what the people across the great ocean called hay, lay in the land. And by the shoulder of the road, big billboards stood. Just before the bus stop, he saw a field of wrecked automobiles and all kinds of scrap metal. A lorry that had been stripped to its frame sat on the brush, staring with empty sockets where its headlamps had been. Beside this was a white sports car, upturned and held in place by the burned-out remains of what must have been a truck. Beside this sat a reticulated lorry, twisted into a ring, one of
its cabs crushed beyond repair.

  He thought to call T.T., since he was going to his school, the same one Tobe had written in his note as Jamike’s school. He’d begun to search his phone when I put the thought into his head that he’d not taken T.T.’s number. His phone had been dead when they met at the airport. He gazed at the phone in anger, rubbing his hand over its edges. It crossed his mind to throw it somewhere and never see it again. But he found himself slipping it into his pocket. He had by now reached a place that looked something like a racetrack. In front of its gate was a group of people waiting, a black girl among them. Her ankara dress reminded him of a dress his sister used to wear. The woman’s ears were plugged, he saw, and she was bobbing her head every now and then to the music that was being received through the device plugged to her ears, which my host rendered to his mind as “earphone.” He went to her.

  “Please, my sister, is this Near East?”

  “No. Near East is still far,” the lady said.

  “Err, oh far?”

  “Yes, but this bus coming will take us there. Oh, here it is. We take it and it will drop you where on campus you are going.”

  “Thank you, my sister.”

  The bus was neater and newer and fuller than the one from his own school, with many Turkish youth speaking their language. The black girl recessed into the back, where, finding no seat, she stood and held on to a rubber handle that extended from an overhead pole. Its interior was covered with posters of every kind. Not one of them was in a language he could understand. In one of the posters, a black male student stood beside a white male student, both pointing at a building as tall as some of the ones he’d seen near the city center the previous day. He thought now about how much things were different in this country. Back in the land of the great fathers, beggars and people who sold different products mobbed buses, hawking their wares and trying to command the attention of the passengers. He recalled the congestion at the bus park in Lagos, how he’d tried to haggle about a cheap bottle of perfume with a seller who had persistently bothered him. It occurred to him that had he come in a good situation, he probably would have loved it here—at least for its orderliness.