An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  He exited at the first bus stop at the school. Two male students, carrying books, had also gotten off. The bus coasted on with a loud whine as it slid between two fields of what seemed to me to be artificial grass, not like anything in the land of the great fathers. A building lay beside a massive roadway, across from a small hill. He had not thought it deeply through, where to go. I could not do anything to help him, as nothing here was like I have known, not even like when my enslaved host was taken to a place across the mighty ocean, your powerful vast waters that cover much of the surface of the earth. In that place, Virginia, my former host, Yagazie, found himself living among others captured from the nations of black people, many of whom did not speak the language of the great fathers. That place was very sparsely populated. There were mighty buildings, two of which he participated in building, around where his captors lived. The rest were fields and mountains, fields as thick as the forests of Ogbuti-ukwu. There was none of the magnificence he saw now, no bright lights on the streets at night, no equipment that made various sounds. So I was silent as he thought of what to do. Egbunu, at this moment when my host’s mind could not come up with a problem-solving thought, and I, his guardian spirit, could not help him, either, the universe lent him a hand. For as he started walking again towards the nearest building, his phone rang. He opened it in a rush and picked up the call.

  Tobe’s voice on the other side of the phone was sullen, bearing seedlings of concern. My host replied, “I am at Near East, my brother. I didn’t want to continue to bother you with my problems.”

  “I understand. Have you found him?”

  “No. I just arrived at the school. I don’t even know what I should do.”

  “Have you gone to their international office, like the one of Dehan here in CIU?”

  “Jesus Christ! That is so, my brother. That must be where I should go.”

  “Yes, yes,” Tobe said. “Go there first.”

  “Chai, da’alu nu,” he said, almost breaking into tears, for he wondered again how this potent idea had escaped his thoughts.

  “Will you come back so we can go to the house agent? Dee gave me an address. Today is my fifth day in this apartment, two more days.”

  “It is so, Nwannem. I will come back soon. Once I finish.”

  Up till now he’d walked with warm courage, propelled by his own determination that he should bear his cross alone. But now his courage left him, whether it was because he had heard Tobe’s voice or because he’d arrived at a place in this country where he was certain Jamike had been and did not know how to proceed I do not know. What became clear was that something changed in him after the call ended. He began walking with the gait of a cricket forced out of its hole until he found a man whose face was round—the kind his people referred to as “Chinese.” “Ah!” the man gasped in response to my host’s inquiry, and said he had just left the international office himself. This man took him close to the building, which had a facade like nothing he’d ever seen before. Beside it, flags hung from innumerable poles, amongst which he spotted the green-white-green flag of the nation from which he’d come.

  Egbunu, before he entered through the door, my host, in fear, sought spiritual help. In this he acted like the faithful fathers. But where the fathers would have offered prayers to their ikenga, or their chi, or their agwu, or even another deity, my host prayed to the White Man’s alusi for help in finding Jamike here—his first time praying in many years. For here, he feared, might be his last source of hope.

  “God Jesus, have mercy on me. Forgive me all my sins as I forgive all those who have trespassed against me. If you help me get all my money back, if you don’t allow this to happen to me, I will serve you for the rest of my life. In Jesus’s name I pray. Amen. Amen.”

  AKATAKA, you must forgive me. You designed us in such a way that we are one with our hosts. So that in time we begin to suffer their pains. What ails them ails us. It is thus why I am loath to describe his experience at that office but would rather give you an account of its effect on him, of the aftermath. For I do not want to stand here much longer, seeing these many guardian spirits who are seeking your audience, too. I will therefore say what he found here about the man he sought was that, as the policeman had said, Jamike was indeed a student there and was well-known among the foreign students. He found, too, that Jamike had been a student for only one semester, even though he had been in the country for two years. He stopped attending classes after three weeks. One of the workers at the school’s international office who gave his name as Aiyetoro and who was from the same country as my host drew him aside into an empty hall after he’d finished with the chief international officer.

  “Omo, you may be in serious trouble, oh,” the man said.

  “I know,” said my host.

  “You do? Wait, did you know Jami before, in Nigeria?”

  My host nodded. “We went to primary school together, my brother.”

  “What, Umuahia?”

  “That is so.”

  “So, after, did you know him? Did you know that he is an original yahoo boy?”

  My host shook his head. “No.”

  “Ah. He is a serious scammer, oh—professional yahoo boy. How much did he take from you?”

  My host gazed at this man, and for a moment, he thought of his gosling, the bird he loved very much, the first thing to which his heart had clung. The image in his mind was a still one, but Egbunu, it was much bigger than that. It was an event. It was after he had read books about falconers and begun calling himself a falconer and thought of flying his bird around the town. He had decided to buy a very long twine, sturdy but long. And he had had his father buy him jesses, something that he tied around the bird like an anklet when he released it into the air. At first, the gosling refused to lift itself. It would rather call and mourn. But one day, it flew so high, so far beyond the guava tree, to the limit the twine could go, even with my host raising his hand high and only twisting the twine around his wrist in one fold. At the time, the joy of the gosling flying had been so overwhelming he’d cried.

  “You no want tell me?” the man asked. “I want to know so I know how I can help you, er?”

  “Very much, my brother. Around seven thousand euros.”

  “Ye paripa! Jisos! Okay, you know what? No shaking, eh? Just relax. I go help you. That guy has duped plenty of people. I haven’t seen him since last year, but I know some guys he shares apartment with who has seen him.”

  Gaganaogwu, what this man had given my host was hope. A man in need will hang on to whatever he can get to survive. I have seen it many times. A drowning man will not request a rope when a rod is presented to him or the branch of a tree instead of a raft. That which comes within reach is that which he clings to. And so, at the outskirts of the school, right back where he’d questioned the dark-skinned girl earlier, Aiyetoro flagged a taxi for him and gave the driver an address in a place he called Girne. My host thanked Aiyetoro, shook his hand with sweating palms, and the man said, “It is well, bro.”

  My host then left for Girne a broken man. For a long time, the drive took him through empty desert plains flanked by mountains. He got a closer view of the painted flag on the sierra, which he’d seen in lights on his first night. He gazed at its patterns: the crimson crescent and a star placed on a sea of white. It was, he reckoned, much like the Turkish flag: a white crescent moon on a sea of crimson. In the peace that the car provided him, Ndali returned to his mind through the song he’d remembered earlier. It brought him to the verge of tears. He knew that if she had this new telephone number, she would have tried to call or send him a message. In a jolt he keyed in her number after a plus sign and dialed it, but he could not bring himself to go through with it. Yet he feared that she must be very worried, wondering what had happened to him. He dialed it again and waited, his heart pounding, until she picked on the third ring. Egbunu, I find it difficult to describe the emotion he felt when he heard her voice. He shifted, rubbed his hand against the seat,
as she said, “Hello, hello—who is this? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello, can you hear me?” He suspended his breath, making sure no identifiable sound escaped him. He heard her sigh. “Maybe it is network,” she said, and sighed again. “Maybe it is even Nonso, er.” Then she ended the call.

  He gazed at the phone, her voice still in his head as if trapped in it. “I should…,” he began saying, but stopped to look at the phone again.

  “I should not have come here,” he said in the language of the fathers. “I should not have come. I should not have come.”

  “Pardon?” the driver said.

  My host, astonished, realized that he hadn’t thought this but spoken it aloud.

  “Sorry, not you,” he said.

  The man waved his hand. “Not problem. Not problem for me, arkadas.”

  Again, my fear was inflamed, for one of the first signs of a man in despair is that he is no longer able to distinguish between reality and imagination. Throughout the rest of the journey, he carried himself delicately, like a liquid-holding glass bottle cracked in many places, which was nevertheless held together by what seemed like a miracle. As the journey progressed, and in a brief period of reprieve, he became drawn to the natural beauty of the island. For once they came close to Girne, the landscape became like one he’d never seen before—very different from the land of the opulent fathers. Castles and houses, some bearing Turkish flags, sat on top of mountains and granitic outcroppings. It shocked him that people could build houses on mountains and hills. The last section of the highway lifted off, out of something that looked like a valley—a long, solid rock on one side and a sparsely shrubbed field, tenanted with pieces of rocks and stones—on the other side. And slowly, they seemed to be approaching the ascending road from where the entire city spread out before his eyes: houses big and small, some towering and others with spires. And in the distance beyond them all, he saw a bowl of the Mediterranean Sea’s blue water, visible between the dense streets. As they drew closer, the sea seemed to expand, so that by the time they arrived at the great bridge at the entrance to Girne, it seemed the entire city was held back by some invisible fence which, if removed, would plunge it into the sea.

  Later, in front of a three-story building, the driver pointed and said, “There, arkadas.” My host dipped into his pocket and gave the man thirty-two lira. Then he walked through the metal door, struggling to retain in his head the name of the man who had sent him there—Aiyeoto, Aiyetoo.

  He knocked on the first apartment, marked with the inscription APT 1. A poster hung on the door with an inscription in Turkish, below which was the translated version: WELCOME. A Turkish woman appeared, and behind her a young girl, holding a wild-haired doll.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Not a problem. Looking for the Nigerians?” the woman said in clear English that surprised him.

  “Yes, the Nigerians. Where are they?”

  “Apartment five.” The woman pointed upwards.

  “Thank you.”

  With thoughts flourishing in his mind, he hurried up, his heart pounding, a single bud of hope rooted in his mind like the mushroom he’d once seen growing on the seat of an old abandoned car. Perhaps he would find Jamike here, hiding, perhaps secretly returned through the porous borders from South Cyprus to evade the police. Perhaps this was why the state record showed that he had left the country. This hope, wild as it was and growing without soil or water on the gnarled and ramshackle fixtures of that car, remained alive as he reached a level from which he began to perceive the aroma of Nigerian food and hear loud male voices arguing in the language of the White Man and its broken version. He waited at the door, his hand on his chest, as it seemed that he could hear Jamike’s distinct voice among them, shouting in his swaggering tone with the prominent echo of “mehn.” Then he knocked.

  AKWAAKWURU, the job of a guardian spirit is often made more difficult when the spirit of our host, his ageless onyeuwa, which exists in the host’s body only as an expression of his mind, is broken. When it is broken, the host slips into despair. And despair is the death of the soul. It is therefore very difficult to hold up one’s host against this, to keep him, as long as one can, from falling. This was why, when he left the house of the people who knew Jamike’s whereabouts, I threw thoughts into his mind to amuse him. I reminded him of that day when he’d eaten the ugba and shitted endlessly. He saw himself spattering shit into the creepers. This should have made him laugh, but it didn’t. I made him remember one of the things that used to fascinate him the most: the way the gosling yawned. How it opened its mouth and its gray tongue shivered with a nacrelike substance that bloomed into a globule under its tongue. Its mouth, wider by double than any human’s, dragged a good portion of the sheet of its skin into a strained exertion that wrinkled its face. In an ordinary time, he would have laughed. But now he didn’t; he couldn’t. Why? Because all the world becomes dead to a man like him in such a time as this, and therefore all the pleasant memories, all the images that would have brought him pleasure, mean nothing in this moment. Even if they had been gathered in his mind in their multitudes, they would merely accumulate in abysmal futility, like a stack of gold in the mouth of a dead man.

  So he stepped back out into the city, carrying, like a gift on a platter, the conviction his talk with the men had birthed in him: that it was all over; that that which has been done has been done. They had told him in clear words that the plan had been elaborate. Jamike had let his friends in on the intricacies of it all. He’d told them that he was on to a major big deal, after which he would cross into the south.

  What did they mean by that? My host, with a trembling voice, had asked them.

  Simple, they answered. North Cyprus and South Cyprus were once one country, until they fought a war and Turkey split the island in 1974. This Turkish part is a rogue state, and the Greek part is the real Cyprus. The two countries are separated by barbed wire. If you go to Girne Kapisi, the city center in Lefkosa, inside it you will see the border and Europeans coming into this part of the island from the other side. They are in the EU. Many Nigerians pay to be smuggled there, and some try to cross into the territory themselves by jumping the wire and claiming asylum. Jamike, too, had paid to cross.

  “Is he never coming back?” he asked next, and although he’d spoken with the kind of menacing panic that would have drawn even the sympathy of an executioner, one of them said, “He isn’t. Him don go be that.”

  Egbunu, my host accepted this revelation with a grim firmness, like a man who’d run into an enclosed space sealed behind him, out of which there was no escape. If he turned to the left, he met an impenetrable stone wall. If he turned to the right, he met a granitic door against which the strength of a hundred stout men would be fruitless. Forward? Same. Backwards? Sealed, too.

  So he asked the men, what might he do?

  “I don’t know, bros,” the man who had identified himself as Jamike’s “best friend” said. “We tell people for Nigeria may them shine their eyes, make you no dull yourself, because people—er, broda—are bad. But some of you just no dey listen. Look at how that boy don gbaab you.”

  “Try and stay, mehn,” another said. “You are a man. Endure it. What have happen have happened. Many people are here like you. And they survive. Even me, someone lied to me, an agent, that this is America. I pay, pay, pay to come here and then what did I discover? Africa in Europe.”

  They all laughed.

  “No rope, no E-u,” the first man said. “Na so! What did I do? Did I kill myself? I found a menial job. I do construction.” He showed my host his palms. They were firm, as hard as concrete, the insides rough like the surface of sawed timber. “I don work with Turka people tire, but see me, I am still in school. In fact, to worsen the matter, their women no like us. Kanji don kill boys finish!”

  The men laughed loudly at this, in the presence of a man on fire who watched them with empty eyes. “Or just go back home,” one of those who’d spoken before said to my host now. �
�Some have done that. It can even be better for you. Just buy ticket with wetin remain, and go back home.”

  Chukwu, were I not his chi, one who has been with him even before he came into the world, before he was conceived, I would not have believed it was he who left that place that evening and walked into the sun. For he’d metamorphosed, turned in the blink of an eye from a solid thing into a mass of weak clay and was now unrecognizable. I have seen much: I have seen a host enslaved, bound in chains, starved, flogged. I have seen hosts die violently, suddenly. I have seen hosts suffer diseases: Nnadi Ochereome, many, many years ago, who—whenever he went to stool—passed blood and had a swelling from his anus that was so excruciatingly painful he could not walk sometimes. But none of these times can I recall witnessing this great shattering of a man’s soul. And I know him well. As you know, Egbunu, that in truth, every man is a mystery to the world. Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known. He cannot be fully seen by those who look at him, nor can he be fully touched by those who embrace him. The true being of a man is hidden behind the wall of flesh and blood from the eyes of everyone else, including his own. Only his onyeuwa and his chi—if a good chi and not an efulefu—can truly know him.

  Gaganaogwu, this man he had become in the batting of an eyelid left the apartment, walked across the road, and entered a store he had seen similar to the one from which he’d bought the last strong drink. He picked the same bottle from the fridge and paid the quiet man with rheumy eyes who watched him curiously, as if he were some alien emerged from a craven hole in the earth, drenched in soil and mud. The world around him, this strange land, this frightful awakening, felt sharp and alive, like tempered steel. For over across the road was a white man who was walking with his child. On the other side was a woman pushing a thing with wheels packed full of supplies and a pigeon that dabbled at sidewalk dirt. He thought of himself, and that he was hungry. It was almost noon, and he had not eaten a thing. It surprised him that he had not considered it, had not thought how quickly things could change.