An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  He stared in the direction where, indeed, even though the distance limited his vision, he could see tall buildings like the ones in American movies. The people he had visited in that city called Girne the previous day had told him that that was the real Europe, where Jamike was. He wished that by some extraordinary means he could find himself in that place, among those giant buildings, crossing the street to see Jamike. He wished he’d catch Jamike in his house and take back his money and then bring him to the police here to be imprisoned. He thought of the German lady and the promise of his deliverance. As it often happened, when something is only a promise, a thing of hope, its anticipation is shadowed by fear. And as he thought of it now, he wished that he would get the job. I intervened and put it in his thoughts that the kind woman had been moved by him. Perhaps she has never seen a man become so broken that he was willing to give his blood twice. She will do everything within her means to help you.

  Chukwu, I achieved success again. For my host heard me, and my words brought him succor. His thoughts shifted at once to the resolve that he would not tell Ndali any of the things that had happened to him until he was fine again. He would shield her from them, but after he’d gotten the job and recovered his money and things were going well at school, he would tell her everything, about how he was almost destroyed by this move. He was thinking about how much she’d cried and how he wanted, badly, to be with her again when they entered a city. “Gazimagusa,” Dehan announced. “Bigger, much much bigger than Lefkosa. But we are going to the old ancient part, surrounded by walls. I live here.” She stuck out her tongue, and the students laughed. She said something to the driver, and the man trailed off in a rushed, high-pitched response, and the students answered ecstatically.

  From that moment onwards, the views changed. Giant walls rose high, and, carved into a fortress of high stone and concrete, bricks which he’d never seen before. It seemed like they had not been made with cement and water—a material with which the children of the old fathers now built—but with something solid yet earthen-looking, resembling the color of clay. Even though I have lived through many cycles, have followed and acquired knowledge from numerous hosts across times, I had never seen anything like these before. The stones had beams that were big and deeply cast, as if baked by the hands of the minions of Amandioha.

  The bus drove under an arch formed with these bricks which had small dents and holes, as if a thousand men had stood below them pelting them with small stones for a hundred years. Egbunu, I could dwell on this endlessly, for I was greatly fascinated by these structures. But I’m here to testify about my host and his acts and to make the case that what he has done—if it is in fact true that what I fear has happened—was done in error.

  The bus stopped just after this, and Dehan signaled that they alight. The other bus had arrived ahead of them, the guide with them. And when the people in my host’s bus had all alighted, the man raised his voice and proclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the walled city of Gazimagusa, as we say in Turkish, or Famagusta, as we say in English. What you see around you now, here, is the Venetian walls. They were built in the fifteenth century.”

  Like the others, my host turned around and saw the gradations of the massive structure, and again, these were so mighty and immense that I had the urge to leave his body and wander amongst these massive stones. Even though I had done so once, I feared that spirits in lands outside of Alaigbo, where the people have a reverence for the great goddess, are often violent and aggressive. I had heard that in these places roam a great many akaliogolis, agwus of all kinds, spirits of the hemisphere, creatures long extinct, and demons. I’d heard stories from sentinel spirits at the caves at Ogbunike and Ngodo about how violent spirits even forced a chi out of the body of its host and possessed him, something unheard-of even amongst the weakest of guardian spirits! So I stayed back. I sought instead to see everything through the eyes of the man with whom you, Chukwu, had made me one.

  While most of the people seemed to dwell on the structures, my host observed the trees scattered among buildings. He thought they were trees similar to palms, as in the land of the fathers, but without fruits. Other kinds existed, too—one whose leaves covered it like tangled hair on the head of an unkempt person. At every step, the guide spoke of history, trailed by the crowd of students, who fed their eyes while listening to him. They stopped again at the center of a skeletal structure with five-columned spaces between its crumbled white walls. A great mass of stones that must have once stood as part of the building was now scattered about the space, some sinking into the rich earth of its ancient floor.

  “Church of Saint George,” the man said, his eyes raised towards the top of the immense ruins. “It was constructed during the early time of the church, maybe only a hundred years after the death of Christ.”

  Chukwu, as they walked on, he recalled suddenly how, once, he’d slept during the day and woke to find the gosling standing at the threshold of the sitting room’s door. Outside, the day had aged—its subdued light cast the gosling as a silhouette. He’d almost never remembered that, for it didn’t mean much until the days before he left for Lagos: he’d slept by Ndali, only to wake and find her standing in the same spot as the gosling, made into a silhouette by the dusk light.

  He was deep in thoughts when he felt his phone buzzing in his trouser pocket. He took it out and saw that it was the nurse. He broke off from the group, but fearing that if he picked up, he’d call attention to himself and disrupt the guide’s speech, he let it die. He’d barely rejoined them when it buzzed again. He saw that it was a message, so he opened it in a hurry.

  My friend, hope all is going well? I am hoping you will fill your day with the good sun. nice man. Don’t worry, my friend says we can come on Monday. Don’t worry. Fiona.

  EZEUWA, he followed the tour conscientiously, as if he were not the same man as the day before. He stood breathless as he and the other students lingered near the shores of the great Mediterranean Sea, where I struggled to contain the urge to get out of him and observe this curious place the guide had referred to as “the ghost city of Varosha.” He listened, as if to lifesaving instructions, while the man talked. “Hollywood stars, presidents of many many countries, many many people, have come here.” He marveled at the damaged structures—multistory buildings pocked with holes, their bricks fallen out, some riddled with bullet holes, images that reminded me of the towns and villages in the land of the fathers at the heat of the Biafran War. He gazed intently at one which must have been a great hotel, with massive corridors, but which now stood empty and abandoned. Beside it was a gray-colored building, its paint worn out and fallen away like pieces of soot. He tried to decipher the name of the hotel, but only part of it was still standing, and most of the cursive lettering had become detached from the wall. Holes adorned this building and gave it a peculiar look. He fell behind the group as he looked intently at the houses in the inner parts of the town, barricaded away by barbed wire and thin fences, buildings whose doors had fallen out. In one, the door knelt as if in plea at the threshold and leaned against the balcony with the rest of its body. Down below this building, sturdy plants threaded themselves through the streets in patches and stretched, as if through soft clothing, through the old faces of the walls.

  The town opened a window in his mind which, throughout the rest of the trip, he could not shut. He was moved at The Blue House, which the former Greek leader with the strange name—who the guide had said was the one who caused the war between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots—had built for his children. But he kept thinking about the other abandoned places the guide said existed—an airport with planes, restaurants, schools, all vacant now. The place where they came to now the guide called the war museum. He was reminded at once of the Biafran War museum in Umuahia, which he had visited when he was a child with his father. Of that incident, I could not bear much witness, Egbunu. This is because no sooner had he and his father entered the place than they saw a tank which had been dr
iven by one of my past hosts, Ejinkeonye, who had fought in the Biafran War and driven that selfsame tank. I was immediately overcome by the kind of crippling nostalgia that sometimes comes upon a guardian spirit who encounters the memorial of a past host or his grave. So I had left my young new host and gone into the tank, which I had been in many times in 1968, when Ejinkeonye drove it. The past is a strange thing to us guardian spirits, for we are not humans. Once I sat in the tank, I reenacted many of the bloody scenes of battle—how once the tank had raced into a forest to escape air bombs and had felled trees and trampled over the bodies of people as it went, my host weeping within it. It had been a sobering moment, and I had stayed in it while my current host and the other visitors inspected it, looking in it but not seeing a creature seated on its shriveled seat, a creature which, even these many decades later, still recognized the dried-blood smell of its interior.

  From the war museum in this new country, they went to the “green-line zone,” back in Lefkosa, and he saw the other Cyprus, a different country, separated merely by barbed wire. He marveled. It reminded him of the stories his father had told him about Biafra. He was moved by the sight of the Museum of Barbarism, of which the guide said, “Don’t come in with us if you don’t like horror movies.” Then they had gone in with him, almost everyone. In the crowded doorway, he’d see the bathtub in which a woman and her children had been shot dead, their blood left smeared on the wall and the bathtub, just as it had been in the year the White Man calls 1963. “The blood on that wall is older than all of us here,” the man said as they looked at the gruesome sight.

  This he remembered, and those last words remained with him long after the tour had ended and he and Tobe had returned to the campus. But none of these touched him like the ghost town. It troubled him so much that later that evening, when he fell asleep on the couch in the living room, he dreamt of Varosha. He saw himself chasing his gosling as it leapt and raced into the abandoned houses. He chased it past the Turkish soldiers mounted on top of the buildings, watching. The bird ran, enfeebled by the twine on its left leg. It entered one of the buildings, the one whose door leaned against its balcony. He followed the bird, his heart palpitating. The house smelt of rust and decay, and dirt and dust had festered on the floor. Colloids of wall paint had massed about, as if waiting for something that would never come. Past this, he saw the gosling mount the stairs, its color turning dark as it came in contact with the dirt and dust in the house. The railings had cracked and, beneath them, clasped to the feet of the wall as by talons, were beds of moss. A shirt hung on a broken door, and he peeped in to see chairs and waste and upturned furniture, all bound with a monstrous network of impenetrable cobwebs. He was sweating and panting, and the gosling, rattling, kept ascending, mostly flying in leaps, turning in the gyre of stairs, as if its path had been mapped for it and its travel was deliberate. At last he found himself on the top of the building. He did not know why, but he cried to the gosling to stop, to not go, and it turned to him. But the bird leapt into the air and descended towards the shore. In panic, he followed it headlong, forgetting in the heat of the moment where he was. He was falling and screaming, headed for certain destruction, when he woke up.

  The sun had almost gone down, and its vast endless shadows had dimmed. He opened his eyes and saw Tobe standing in the room, looking at his wristwatch. He would have been thinking on about that ghastly dream, but Tobe said, “I didn’t want to wake you. But we better go move into our house before Atif brings the new students here.”

  He nodded and picked up his phone. There had been three missed calls from Ndali, none of which he had heard because the phone was still set to the mode that rendered even the longest ring silent. He found that there was a text, and he opened it at once: Obim, are you OK? Pls dnt forget 2 call me, OK? He wanted to ask Tobe how one sent text messages to Nigeria. One needed to add symbols and additional numbers in order to call, but what of messaging? Instead, he hurried to his room to prepare. While he packed, it occurred to him that he had not yet read her letter. He decided that once they got to the new place, he would read it.

  AGUJIEGBE, after they arrived at the new apartment and moved their belongings into their rooms, he reached into his bag and searched until he found her letter, hidden in one of the pen pockets, folded many times. He wondered when she had written it. Was it the last night, when she had cried for most of the time and insisted they sit on the bench under the tree in the yard? They had sat there, a soft wind blowing, listening to the sound of the streets.

  His hands shook as he unfolded the piece of paper, taken from one of her lined jotters, some of which he’d once flipped through. He put it down, lay flat on his back, and took it up again to read as she’d told him was best—reading aloud to himself:

  When you read, especially the Bible, say it to yourself. Speak it, because Nonso I tell you words are living things. I don’t know how to explain it but I know it. That everything we say, everything, lives. I just am sure.

  He looked up and then about at his bags before reading the next line, which stood alone.

  Obim, I am sad. I am very sad.

  Egbunu, he put it down, for his heart raced. He heard the sound of music starting up, perhaps from Tobe’s laptop. He felt something—a thought—flash in his mind, but he could not tell what it was. He was certain that he had not merely forgotten it, for it had not fully materialized in his mind but rather flashed in and fled.

  I have come to confess that many times I have wanted to leave. While in Lagos I planned to text you and say that I am not doing again. In fact, I typed everything out but my heart did not allow me. It is because I love you. Sometimes I feel I want to leave because of my family but it is like something stopped me. It is like you captured me, like our chickens. It is like I cannot get out. I cannot leave at all, Nonso. Even 1

  Ijango-ijango, as the heart of a troubled man often leads him on tangents at such a moment as this (many instances of which I have seen), his eyes pored over a dab of ink that spread across the paper from the last word so that it seemed as if the last letter, 1, was an upturned number 7.

  night they asked me why I love you. For a longtime I did not know it myself Nonso. Yes, I wanted to find the good man who helped me at the bridge that night, but I cannot explain why I became intimate with you after we saw again. I liked you but I didn’t know why I did it. But the day you pursue the hawk, I knew that day that you can do anything to protect somebody you love. I knew that if I give my heart to this man, he will never disappoint me. When I see the love you show to ordinary animals, I knew you will show me greater love, greater care, greater help, greater everything. This is why I love you Nonso. See it now? Is it not true? Who can do this? How many men in Nigeria or even all over the world can sell everything they have for the sake of a woman? AM I CORRECT NOW OR NOT?

  She had written the last question in capital letters, and the perceived tone, the force of how she may have felt while conceiving it, caused him to drop the paper, for his heart was beating faster now. He could not tell exactly why at first, but out of the emptiness of his mind, he saw his father and his mother and him during an environmental sanitation day in the year the White Man calls 1988. They were cleaning the front of their compound. His parents were both watching him and clapping for him because his mother had mocked his father for not being able to sweep thoroughly. And his father had complained that the broom was too lean. As he swept, many of its bamboo sticks had fallen off. His mother, having taken the broom from him, had given the broom to my host and said to his father, “You will see that he would sweep it better than you.” And taking the broom, he, a mere six-year-old, swept as his parents cheered him on.

  It struck him now that it was that same compound that he had sold. He reread the passage about how he was the only man in the world who could have done it. An idea came to him. What if he called the man who had bought the compound and told him to hold off, that he would send the money for the place with interest? He could pay every month, ev
ery month, until all was paid plus 10 percent. He nearly jumped up at this thought. He would call Elochukwu the following day, and then Ndali, so they could go to the man at once and ask him to hold off ownership of the house.

  Ijango-ijango, I, too, was overjoyed at this idea. It was not in the custom of the old fathers to sell a land. For lands were sacred. It was given to them by Ala herself and was not the possession of the man who came to own it but that of his lineage. Although Ala never punishes one who sells his land out of his own will, it angers her. With the enormous relief he felt at this decision, he picked up the letter again, its edges now wet from the sweat on his palms, and finished reading it.

  I know myself. From the first day, I knew you were genuine. I knew you were the man God has prepared for me. And I want you to know that I love you and will wait for you. So please be happy.