An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

“That is so, Fiona.”

  “Okay, take it for now. We can increase later. Genau?”

  He nodded. He walked by her side now as they arrived at the entrance to the manager’s office. But the desire remained, even against his will. He wondered how old she must be. Her body looked young, like that of a woman in her thirties, but her neck showed skin gradations that suggested otherwise. And he’d seen traces of wrinkles on her legs too. But still he could not determine such things about white people, about whom he knew little.

  Through a glass door they came into a room where a man sat across a desk, his face intent on a computer screen. The computer, Chukwu—an instrument that is able to do so much. It can gather information, serve as a device for communicating with those afar, and much more! When it becomes common among the children of the precious fathers, it will further alienate them from their ancestors. Fathers of the hills and lands, dwellers of Alandiichie, do you weep that the alters of the ikenga have been abandoned? What you have seen is nothing. Do you worry that your children do not observe omenala? This thing, this box of light into which this white man is staring, will cause you greater grief in the fullness of time.

  The man rose once my host and his companion entered the room. He shook the man’s hand but understood little of what the man said. He thought the man spoke the language of the White Man well but seemed to prefer the language of the country. What he noticed more was how the man hugged Fiona and touched her shoulder and patted her on the arm. For a while they spoke the language, and he gazed at colorful images on the four walls of the room—images of the great sea, the swimming turtle, and of some of the ruins he’d seen on the tour, all the while praying that the man would give him the job. So folded away was he that he gave a start when the man stretched his hand towards him and said, “So you can start from tomorrow, Tuesday, if you want.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” he said, shaking the man’s hand and bowing slightly.

  “Don’t mention. Okay, see you, my friend. Congratulations.”

  The man walked back into the hallway and made to leave but turned hurriedly and took Fiona’s hand again, and they embraced. The man seemed to kiss her cheeks, the way Ndali would sometimes ask him to do to her. It was a strange thing, Chukwu. A man kissing another woman who was not his wife in plain sight? The man lit a cigarette and began speaking to Fiona again in the language of the country.

  When they came out of the building, Fiona said she had baked a cake for my host. She would bring it from the oven, wrap it up for him, and they would go to a restaurant. And while at her house, she would show him her garden, for she, too, was a farmer, like him. He agreed and thanked her even more. By the time they got on the road again, his lust had fizzled out, suppressed by an infant rage which stood in the midst of his joy like a stranger among a crowd of friends. An Igbo man like him, one he could call a brother, an old classmate, had cheated him and almost destroyed him. But here, among a people he did not know, people of a different country and race, a woman had come to save him. This woman and her friend had even gone further than Tobe, who for a long time had borne his cross with him. They’d taken his cross and set it on fire, Fiona and this man. And by the time she arrived at her house, his cross—all that it was, and all that was within it—had burned to ashes.

  EGBUNU, I have spoken about the primal weakness of man and his chi: their inability to see the future. Should they have possessed this ability, a great many disasters would have been easily prevented! Many, many. But I know that you require me to testify in the sequence that things happened, to give a full account of my host’s actions, and thus I must not stray from the path of my story. I must thus proceed by saying that my host followed this woman to her house.

  The house was big. Outside it, a garden, water hoses, and flowers arranged in neat beddings. She said her mother, who sometimes visited from Germany, was a farmer. A dry pool filled with leaves lay near the low wall on one side beside a shovel and a wheelbarrow. She did not plant anything that could be eaten, except for tomatoes. But she hadn’t planted in a long time. The garden, he realized, was a storage area for things she wanted to keep possessing. She said that the old paraffin lamp that hung on the branch of a low, lean tree from which a fine laundry rope stretched out to the house was her cat’s. Miguel. He did not know that people could keep cats as pets, let alone that they could be named.

  This thing that looked like the engine of a car seated on the ground was from the truck in which her husband’s father had died. She paused at the sight of this one and dropped both hands to her sides. Then, without looking at him, she said, “It was the beginning of the trouble. From then, he always says: ‘Why did I let him drive? If he didn’t drive at seventy-two, he’d still be here today.’ That’s why he drinks himself to stupor and turns his back to the world.” Then an unexpected thing happened. For when she turned to him, this woman whom all the while had been full of life was now almost in tears. “He turned his back to the world,” she said again. “The whole world.”

  Thinking of the job, of the casino, of the charge he’d given to Elochukwu, how it would turn out, he barely heard the things she was saying. That long walk he had thought of as the most unbearable time of his life, he reckoned, had in the end become the thing that had brought him great hope. He followed her into the house, curious to see what white people’s houses looked like. They went through the back door into a kitchen that was nothing like what my host had seen before. It was marbled (although he did not know the word, Egbunu) and covered with paintings.

  “They are my drawings,” Fiona said to him as he gazed at one which was different from the rest. It was not the image of a cat, or dog, or flowers, but a bird.

  “They are very nice,” he said.

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  He walked with her into the sitting room, and he was struck by the enormity of Ndali’s father’s wealth. Their house was lusher than that of a white family. He gazed about at the piano by the yellow wall, a big television, and a speaker. There was only one couch, long and black, made of some kind of leather. The walls, from beginning to end, were covered with paintings and photographs. Near the television and a shelf of books stood what looked like the dry white sculpture of a human skeleton. The sculpture wore a necklace with the evil eye image on it.

  “So I will change. It’s hot. I’ll put on some pants and shirt, and we will have the cake and go. Genau?”

  He nodded. He watched her climb the stairs, the thighs under her frock visible. Desire erupted in him again. To shove off this urge, he looked up to the image on the wall above the piano in which sat the man he believed might be her husband. His eyes in the picture were happy. Yet there was a sternness to them that gave him the appearance of a man of tough temperament, something close to what Fiona described as “turning his back to the world.” Beside that lone portrait was one of the man and Fiona, years younger, with fuller hair that was fixed into the shape of a hanging tail behind her back. They were seated, Fiona in front of him, he behind her, half of him concealed so that only his chest was revealed. The picture was taken, it seemed, at a function, for there were people in the background, some prominent, others faded out by distance. The trunk of a green car—rear pointing downward—stretched into the picture, its other half lost to visual oblivion.

  Egbunu, at this point, I can tell you that there was nothing in his mind about this man other than that he was curious about what grief had done to him. He was searching the picture of the man to see if he could find any sign of the darkness Fiona had described. He’d also noticed a kind of quiet fear in Fiona since they arrived at the house, as if she was afraid of something which she was unwilling to confront. Chukwu, I know that it is quite possible that our recollections are not always accurate because hindsight can influence them. But I am giving you the unfiltered account when I say that my host gazed at this man’s photo closely and introspectively, as if he were aware, even vaguely, of what would come next. He turned from it to the small reces
s in the wall containing woods and dry ash—what he thought of as firewood inside a sitting room but which I knew from the days of Yagazie as a fireplace, where white people sunned themselves when it was cold. There was such a place in every house where my host went in Virginia, in the country of the brutal White Man. Without it, the cold—something unthinkable in the land of the great fathers—would kill them. He was examining this when Fiona began descending down the stairs. She had changed into short pants and a shirt with the image of a half-sliced apple on it.

  “Okay, let me get the cake, and let us go.”

  “Okay, Fiona.”

  He watched her open the oven and bring out something wrapped in a white paperlike material; neither I nor my host knew what it was. She put the thing in a polythene bag.

  “What kind of food do you like?” she said.

  He had begun to speak when she cut off his speech with a wave of her hand. He turned in the direction where her eyes were looking and saw the reason why. The main door was opening, and an older, much more worn-looking version of the man in the portrait stepped into the house. His shirt was unbuttoned, a wrinkled blue shirt whose sleeves had been rolled up, revealing a white skin so hirsute it appeared as if his hands were black. He walked a few paces into the living room and stopped where he was, gazing at them.

  “Ahmed, wow, welcome,” Fiona said in a voice that betrayed restlessness, fear. “Where are you coming from?”

  The man did not speak. He stood with eyes roving from my host to his wife and back again with an intensity that was familiar to me. It was a gaze whose import may be understood more in effect than in contemplation, like the understanding of the full enormity of life in the moment before death. The man’s mouth was poised for speech, but instead, he laid down the bag he carried on the floor gently. Fiona moved towards him, calling his name, but the man stepped towards the bookshelf.

  “Ahmed,” she said again, and spoke in the foreign language.

  The man responded with a countenance that frightened my host. As the man spoke, saliva splashed from his mouth. He pointed to Fiona, clenched his fist, and pounded it into his palm. Fiona, gasping, her hand over her mouth, spoke in rapid gusts in what seemed like protests, to which the man paid no heed. He spoke even louder, in a high-pitched tone. He snapped his fingers, thumped his chest, and stamped his feet. Fiona fidgeted as the man spoke and stepped backwards in increments, turning back and forth from her husband to my host and back again, her eyes filling with tears. She was talking when the man faced him.

  “Who are you?” the man said. “Do you hear me? Who in hell are you?”

  “Ahmed, Ahmed, lutfen,” Fiona said, and tried to grab him. But the man wrenched himself away with a cruel force and struck her across the face. She fell down with a scream. Her husband followed her to the floor, beating her with his fists.

  Gaganaogwu, my host was terrified by what was unfolding before him, and I, his chi, was too. He stood where he was and said in a quivering voice, “Sorry, sir, sorry, sir!” He glanced at the door, whose path he could reach without much trouble if he hastened, but he stood still. Go! I cried into the ears of his mind, but he merely stepped forward an inch. Then he turned again to Fiona. He lunged forward and punched the man on the back and pushed him away. The man rose, picked up the bag, and rushed at him with it. The man slung the bag at my host’s face with a brutal force that sent him across the room. The bag bounced off his face to the floor, and from the sound it made, and from the frothing liquid that poured across the floor, I knew at once that it contained a bottle.

  My host lay where he had fallen now, dazed, his body in a state of frugal peace. When he opened his eyes, a fast-moving figure rushed into his field of vision, and before he could tell what it was, his eyes had closed again. Slowly and continuously, he felt cold liquid run down his shoulder, chest, and arms. Ebubedike, although I was greatly shaken by this, I was mightily relieved that my host was alive. If this man had killed him, what would his ancestors have said of me? Would they have said that I, his chi, was asleep? Or that I was an ajoo-chi or an efulefu? This is how, sometimes, the life of a person ends—suddenly. I have seen it many times. One moment they are singing; the next, they are gone. One moment they are saying to a friend or a relative, I will go to that store across the road, buy bread, and come back. I will be back in five minutes. But they never return alive. A woman and her husband may be talking. She is in the kitchen, he is in the sitting room. He asks a question, and while she is answering—while she is answering, Egbunu!—he is gone. When she does not hear from him for a while, she calls out, “My husband, have you been listening? Are you there?” And when he does not respond, she steps in and finds him slumped, one hand clutching his chest. This, too, I have witnessed.

  My host lay, alive but in sublime pain, his face and mouth covered in blood. He wanted to keep his eyes closed, but Fiona’s screaming and pleading prevented him. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the man and, in the man’s hand, what had hit him: a big white bottle whose bottom half had broken off, leaving it in the shape of half-formed fingers, its edges red with blood that slowly dripped to the floor. The man was standing with the object over Fiona. Then he saw the man bend over her, shouting and moving the bottle about so that drops of blood and wine spattered on her face. From the dim vision of his closing eyes, he saw the man throw the bottle away and sink down and begin to reach for her throat again, unmoved by her screaming and pleading. Slowly, he crawled towards them, stopping to gather strength as Fiona’s screaming grew louder with each step, for the man had now succeeded in reaching her throat. In this memorable moment of life, Egbunu, my host, bleeding profusely, reached up, lifted a stool, and tried to keep his eyes open to prevent the blood from clouding his vision.

  The stool in his hand felt heavy. He had been weakened by the blood he had lost, not just now but a few days before, at the hospital. Yet Fiona’s screaming propelled him forward. He rose up and lifted one foot, then the other, until he reached the place where they were. With every bit of strength he could summon, he hauled himself forward like a sack of grain and brought the stool down on the man’s head.

  The man fell over backwards against him and lay still. From his head, an aureole of blood formed. My host staggered, wiped his face, and batted his eyelids. Then he fell back to the wet floor and lay down on the black veranda between consciousness and unconsciousness. In the meaningless space that the world suddenly became, he saw Fiona turn into a strange creature, at once a bird and at once a white woman dressed in white. From the margins of his anguished vision, he saw her stretch and rise slowly like a snake unfurling from a rigid coil and then begin to scream and shout. He saw her perch on the corner of the room beside her husband, her plumage rich and almost immaculately white. Then she materialized again into a human, trying to waken her slumped husband, who did not stir. He heard her say, “He is not breathing! He is not breathing! My God! My God!” Then her wings spread, and she flew out of the range of his vision.

  He lay there with a still vision in his mind of Ndali seated on the bench under the tree in his compound, looking straight ahead. He could not see what she was looking at. Whether this was from memory or from his imagination, he could not tell, nor could I, his chi. But it continued as he watched Fiona, wings still splayed, return to the place with a majestic stride. He saw her enlarged sternum, with the sparkling necklace around it, and a beak that seemed to carry something indistinct clamped in it. Then she moved again, now with her human feet, and he heard the sound of her feet on the floor. He heard the sound of her dim cries.

  He heard the white woman speaking on the phone, her voice frantic, helpless. He opened his eyes to see her, but he was blinking so rapidly that the muscle below his eyes had begun to ache. In the all-encompassing darkness into which his body was thrown, a sudden chill came upon him and he became aware of a presence. Chukwu, he became still: for he could tell that yet again, it had come. From the backstage of life, it had come. That creature which has a red mot
her and whose complexion is the color of blood. Again, it had come. It had come again—to steal everything that had been given to him and to destroy the joy he had found. What is this thing? He wondered. Is it a man or a beast? A spirit or a god? Ijango-ijango, he did not know. And I, his chi, did not know, either. The great fathers often say that one cannot, by looking at the shape of the belly of a goat, tell what kind of grass it has eaten.

  He heard Fiona crying, but he did not open his eyes. She said something to him which at first he did not hear, then to her husband, who lay still, like a plank. It was then that he heard what she had said, loud and clear: “You’ve killed him. You’ve killed him.” She broke down into a loud sound. She had barely begun to cry when, in the distance, a siren began to wail. But he lay still there, his mind fixed on the curious vision of Ndali staring into the unknown, as if in a mysterious way she had broken the barrier of thousands of kilometers and was looking at him.

  17

  Alandiichie

  EBUBEDIKE, the old fathers in their cautionary wisdom say that the same place one visits and returns to is often the place where one goes and becomes trapped. My host had found succor in the white woman, but this same place where he’d found succor is where he now lay, wounded and bleeding, blinded by his own blood. Frantic, unable to do anything, and wary as to how I would explain this tragic end to you, Chukwu, and to his ancestors, I left his body to see if help might be found in the spirit realm. Once out, I saw that spirits of all kinds had gathered in the room like dark auxiliaries marching upon the entire army of mankind itself. They hung everywhere, near the arch of the ceiling, suspended over the body of my host and the other man, some hanging like curtains made of shadows. Among them was an unsightly creature who gazed at me with an ugly frown on its face. I noticed that it was an incorporeal replica of the man on the floor. It pointed its finger at me and spoke in the strange language of the country. It was speaking when the door opened and police officers stormed in with people in white frocks like the one Ndali wore, and the white woman, too. She was crying and speaking to them, pointing at her husband and then at my host, who lay there, slowly slipping into unconsciousness from loss of blood.