An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  That was it, all they had time for. He never saw Dimeji again. No one whom he’d known prior to the events that led him to trial in a foreign country appeared within sight in the ensuing four years. The only one, the German woman, was his prime accuser. The other, her husband, who had been unconscious in the hospital bed for sixteen days, was his second accuser, corroborating his wife’s testimony. This man had maintained that he’d found the black man on top of his wife, struggling. So on that day, the judge had turned to Fiona’s husband and spoken to him in English.

  “So, Mr. Aydinoglu, did you know before that your wife would be seeing this man?”

  “Yes, sir. She is a nurse. Good woman who likes to help people. So she wanted to help this poor rapist from Africa. Walahi yaa!”

  “May we ask you to watch your language before this court, Mr. Aydinoglu?”

  “Am sorry, Your Lordship.”

  “Comport yourself. Now, so you let her bring him into your home?”

  “No, she always help people. It is normal for her, yani. When I came to my house, he was tryingk to rape her.”

  “Can you tell this court what you saw?”

  “My wife, yani, was on the floor, near to the dining table, and this man was on top of her, and his hand was holdingk her on the neck, one hand. Pardon—the other hand. One, he was tryingk to force himself into her. It was very disgustingk, my lord. Very disgustingk.”

  “Go on—”

  “I immediately threw myself for him and we began to fight, before I ask my wife to call the police. I had a bottle, so I injured him with it, then went to check my wife, who was still lying on the floor, weeping, breathing very loud. Then, this man came very low behind my back and hit me on the center of my head here—on this spot, my Lord—with a stool. I fell, sir. That is all I remember.”

  Agbatta-Alumalu, the fathers say that the switch that broke the head of a dog must be called something else. There was no more my host could do in his defense. After that second court session, judgment was passed. It was already late by then, five weeks late. The judgment passed by the words of a man’s mouth, couched in words—first in the language of the land, then in the language of the White Man—meant nothing because a greater judgment, one passed by actions so powerful they’d imprinted themselves forever on his mind, had happened to him. So the pronouncement that he was to be sentenced to a combined twenty-six years in prison for attempted rape and attempted murder meant nothing. By that time, already, his life as he once knew it had separated from him like an ill-fated shadow hewn from its bearer and thrown over the cliff into a bottomless pit of oblivion, and even through all these years, he could still hear its dark voice screaming as it continued its fall.

  19

  Seedlings

  GAGANAOGWU, I must here argue that to prove my host’s motive in the action I am claiming he is innocent of, you should consider that he has suffered because of his love for this woman. The early fathers say that it was in the hunt for a worthy cause that Orjinta, the mighty hunter of yore, was torn to pieces. Although even amongst the old fathers this was told as a proverbial tale, you know that it happened at a time when Alaigbo was at its prime, when everything was almost as you had intended it to be. Even I had not been created then. The people constructed rectangular houses made from mud bricks, kept their shrines in their obis, consulted their ancestors and fed them constantly, and no one trampled on the personal liberty of his neighbor because he believed in the primal law of coexistence. (Let the eagle perch, let the hawk perch, and if either says the other should not perch, may his wings be broken.) Orjinta, a young man who had made a habit of calling his betrothed before she grew the age of a clear moon, would crouch behind her father’s compound at night and whistle until she would come out, jump out through the window, and follow him into the brush. Orjinta knew it was forbidden to whistle at night, as it bothered the spirits of the living dead in the Ogbuti forest. But a man in love would crawl into a viper’s hole to find his lover. He ignored the creatures of the night, who are terrified of human cries and whistles. As he whistled one night, an angered spirit possessed a leopard and drove the beast through the forest, howling, trampling young saplings underfoot, scratching up rows of yams, driven by a hellish fury that was not beholden to even the most basic statute of civilization. Orjinta whistled on as his woman listened for her parents, for any sound in the house, waiting for the best time to jump out unseen for the night’s rendezvous. The beast continued its journey towards him, its track mapped by a devilish magnetic pull towards its prey and its violent strides echoing in the dark terrain of the night, until it found the exact spot at the very moment when Orjinta, raising his head, saw his lover coming. The beast fell on him, and with an anger originating from a time beyond history, before the inception of love and romance, and of flesh and blood, tore him to pieces and dragged his corpse away into the forest.

  Egbunu, what are stories like this for? They are meant to warn us about the dangers of such actions as Orjinta took. This was why, starting from my host’s second year in prison and after my second encounter with Ndali’s chi, I had begun to try to make him forget her. But I have come to understand that such efforts often are futile. Love is a thing that cannot be lightly destroyed in a heart in which it has found habitation. I have seen it many times. And there is an extent to which a chi can make suggestions and it becomes coercion. A chi cannot coerce its host, even in the face of the most violent dangers. Insanity is the result of an irreconcilable difference between a man and his chi. Even among the fathers, consensus was the mode in which they operated. They began every discourse with the bellowing of “Kwenu”—an invitation to agree, for if a man in a group refuses to respond “Yaa” and says, “Ekwe ro mu,” then the discussion cannot continue until the dissenters have given consent.

  How, then, can a chi disagree with his host? How can it say to him, “Leave this pursuit, for it may lead you to dark places,” when his host is determined to continue on this path? Had I not seen that all these years, in the midst of anguish and torment, in the midst of prayers that the nurse would tell the truth and he would be free, the one thing he longed for most of all was to return to her? As unbelievable as it may sound, almost daily, he wept for her. He longed for her. He begged for pen and paper and wrote the letter, but where would he send it? He did not know the address of her house. And even if he could guess, how to send the letter? For the first two years, he lived in terror of the guards. They seemed to have a certain contempt for him, and this was early on, even long before the great evil that happened to him while in the prison. The guards called him arap or zengin and would often comment on his rape of a Turkish woman. To these men he asked for help in sending his letter, but none paid any heed to him. In his second year, a certain Mahmut, in love with a football player from the country of my host, Jay-Jay Okocha, would agree to post his letter. But only if it was within Cyprus. “Nijerya, cok para,” the man would often say. “Parhali, cok, cok, big, big, Mr. Ginoso.” “Sorry, my friend.” What about the money he had in the pocket of the clothes he wore on the day he was arrested? “Sorry, Mr. Ginoso, we cannot take. The court lock money. Nobody take money. Sorry. Understand me, Mr. Ginoso?” After this man, too, declined, he gave up. He did not know that even I, his chi, had tried to reach her.

  So Agujiegbe, I let him lie in bed after he returned from searching for Ndali that night, and he continued to ponder the possibility of reconciliation with her. But then, as the night deepened, he allowed himself—with a certain back-to-the-wall bravery—to consider that which he’d refused to consider: that he may never have her again. Into the fragile ear of his mind was delivered the thought that enough time had passed. She could have married and had kids by now. She could have forgotten about him, or she could have died. Whom did she know to contact to find out anything about him? There was nobody. He thought with bitter regret that he should have given her his uncle’s phone number. Or even Elochukwu’s. He resolved that he should not think it was possible that
she could still be waiting for him all these years. Enough years have passed, the voice in his head repeated with finality. She is gone forever.

  The impact of this realization struck him with despair. Chukwu, it has always perplexed me how a man’s mind sometimes becomes the source of his own confrontation and inner defeat. So floored did he become that night that he considered himself foolish for all those years he’d wasted thinking of her, clinging to pieces of the memory of their time together. Perhaps she was in the arms of another man all those nights when, sleepless, he’d restage a moment of sexual experience with her as vividly as he could, so much that he’d touch himself with the lather of his saliva.

  He rose with a sudden cry and smacked the kerosene lamp across the room. Its bulb broke and threw the room into instant darkness, and the sound of glass shattering was trapped in his head. He stood fuming in the dark, his chest heaving, the air filled with the smell of kerosene. But none of this could stop him from wallowing in the fitful thought that a man he does not know has been sucking Ndali’s breasts.

  He slept very little that night, and over the following days he attended to life with a feeling of having failed in everything. It threatened his existence. Even I, his chi, feared for him. For so lost was he in the new meaninglessness of all things that he veered into oncoming traffic. Twice, he had close brushes with death in accidents that could have killed him. Once, after a car had knocked him and his bike into a ditch, the driver of the car said, “How come you survived this?” The man and the onlookers who had immediately gathered were astounded. “Your chi is truly awake!” one said. A third person insisted he must have been saved by an angel, a messenger of the White Man’s alusi.

  Many times, when tormenting thoughts of his loss of Ndali came to his mind, I would push a counterthought in. Think of the girl at the mash store who was kind to you and called you a good man, I would suggest. Think of your uncle. Think of your sister. The football match. Think of the good future you can have. Sometimes, when all these failed, I’d try to go with him in the direction he had chosen. I’d try to give him hope that he could still find her. Think of it this way: love never dies. You see, in that film you saw, The Odyssey, in which the man returned after ten years to find his wife still waiting for him, the wife knew that her husband loved her and was just being kept away from her because of the circumstances of life. So she remained faithful through the years, refusing, no matter how much she was pressured, to betray him. Is this not the same situation with you? Is it not, simply, only four years? Only four years.

  It was during one of these moments, on the very day when I reminded him of that movie, that I stumbled by serendipity onto something neither he nor I had given any serious thought to in all those years. I acknowledge that once or twice he’d replayed the experience in his mind, but in none of those times did he consider its possible outcome. They had started making love in the yard in full view of the fowls when, suddenly, she pulled away from him and said it was not good for the birds to witness it. He then carried her into the house, her legs wrapped around his body, her arms clasped around his neck. They’d made love with such intensity that when he started to pull out, she grabbed him so tightly he squirmed.

  “Do you love me, Solomon?”

  Although all of it—the grip, her apparent unconcern as to whether or not he was about to ejaculate, and the fact that she’d called him by his Christian name, Solomon, which she rarely did—shocked him, he answered, “Yes—”

  “Do you love me?” she asked again, more fiercely, as if she had not heard him.

  “That is so, Mommy. I love you. I am about to release.”

  “I don’t care. Just answer my question! Do you love me?”

  “Yes, I love you.”

  He’d started to let himself loose, trembling through his speech, and when he’d emptied himself, he collapsed against her.

  “Do you know we are now one flesh, Nonso?”

  “That is so, Mommy,” he said breathlessly. “I—I know.”

  “No, look at me,” she said, reaching for his face. “Look at me.”

  He swerved to her side and turned to face her.

  “Do you know we are now one flesh?”

  “Yes, Mommy.”

  “Do you know we are now one? No more you or me anymore?” She paused, her voice rising, tears running from her eyes. Thinking she’d finished, he started to speak. She said, “Do you know we are just one now? Us?”

  “Yes, Mommy. It is so.”

  She opened her eyes, and through the glob of tears, she smiled.

  My host sat with this piece of tranquilizing memory as if it were a sudden, strange gift from a divine messenger come to help him. It was one of the cherished events of his life, and what she had done was monumental. She had allowed him to ejaculate into her. Yet she’d done it so offhandedly, as if it were a trivial thing. That time, he’d been too shocked to comment on it. But when they made love again later that night, and she held him stiff, forcing him to ejaculate into her as before, he asked why she was doing it. She said she did it to show him she loved him and was ready to marry him at all costs. But what if she got pregnant, then? he’d wondered. In response, she inclined her head, thought about it, perhaps considered how her parents would have taken it, and said, “So what? Are they my god? You want me to take Postinor?”

  “What is that?” he’d said.

  “God! Village boy!” she’d said with a laugh. “So you don’t know? It’s after morning. A drug women take so they don’t get pregnant after sex.”

  “Ah, Mommy,” he’d said. “I did not know.”

  As these vivid events revisited him, his slumped hopes opened their weak eyes. Through the days that followed, ideas came to him, possibilities. If she still believed what she’d told him that day—that they were one and the same—she indeed must be waiting for him. She could not have given up after only four years. He began to devise his next moves. Daily, in between measuring out cups of feed, millet, brown seeds, and clumps of loam, he would leap into the hole of ideas and rummage within its crevices. It was on the fourth day after the hope-bringing remembrance that he finally dug up something convincing enough for him to consider: whether or not he should return to her house and try to speak with the gateman again. Perhaps the man was poorly paid and he could bribe him to give him some information. Perhaps he could give him the letter he’d written to her in his first weeks in prison. Yes, even that would be enough. The letter contained everything, everything he wanted her to know about his disappearance and his failure to keep his own side of the promise never to leave her.

  OBASIDINELU, the great fathers, in their esoteric wisdom, say that whatever a man desires to see in the universe, that he will see. How true, Egbunu! A man who hates another will see evil in whatever that individual does, no matter how well-intentioned. The fathers also say that if a man wants something, if he does not desist from pursuing it, he will eventually find it. I have seen it many times.

  It did not cross my host’s mind that the universe was about to grant him that which he’d been seeking for many years that day—it was simply the resolve to go to the gateman that formed strongly in his mind and caused him to stop the task he was doing—grinding melon seeds on the manual grinder clamped to the other end of a small bench. He removed his apron, locked his store, and set off for Ndali’s family house. As he removed the stone wedge holding the door open, thoughts of what he would miss if he did not commit to his business that day trickled into his mind. In one hour, the agriculture professor who was coming to buy a bag of broiler feed for her poultry would arrive. He would miss the opportunity to sell in one transaction what he sold in a week. But even this did not deter him.

  He mounted his motorcycle and raced onto the road towards a roundabout. On the side of the road was a construction site a few square meters long, cordoned off with a zinc roofing sheet held in place by bricks. A man carrying a slab of wood crossed the road dangerously, forcing the traffic to pause until he was on t
he side of the road, where everywhere sheds were erected. A house with a sun-scorched roof towered above, painted in dim red, with 0802 inscribed on it in white letters. From here he entered Danfodio Road, meandering between a water tanker and a white car whose boot was open, pressed down by the weight of the overload of grain sacks held in place only by strong, tight ropes. On the shoulder of the road, beneath a high billboard, stood a man speaking into a megaphone, surrounded in a half circle by others who carried Bibles, guitars, and flyers.

  He’d halted because a semi turning in front had temporarily paused traffic. He would have driven on, but that pause—just a few hundred meters from the billboard—allowed him to hear the distinct voice blare from the megaphone. Despite the many years that had passed, he recognized the voice right away. He pulled onto the shoulder of the road, and once he came within view of the man, it became clear to him and me that something extraordinary had happened in the universe. I felt indeed that some great argument had been settled in the realm of the spirits, one which not even I, his chi, had participated in. And now, after my host had given up all hope, after he’d resolved to simply swallow whatever life like an unhinged mother had put in his infant mouth, the universe had heard his pleas and come to his aid.

  He’d spent nights pleading with whosoever could hear him to give him only one chance, just one, so that he might find the bearer of this voice again. That he may make the fellow pay for what he’d done to him. He’d made these requests to deities big and small, sometimes to “God,” sometimes to “Jesus,” even once to “Ala,” and once—unexpectedly—to me, his chi. When the prayers went unanswered, or when he thought that was the case, he would recline into himself and spend the time conjuring up images of a confrontation with this man, some more violent than others. One very prominent one was that he would be eating at the restaurant where the man and he had eaten the day he first met him in 2007, and the man—now wealthy from the money he’d stolen from him and others—would walk in with a good-looking woman. The man would walk in with majesty, booming with grace and attended by a chorus of praise from those seated in the restaurant. He would order them all drinks and settle the tab, happy with himself that he was impressing the woman he brought with him. The man must have come on short visits to Nigeria, perhaps thinking his victim might still be in jail. And was thus completely at ease. He would not realize that fate had planted his comeuppance in the form of my host, a vandalized man waiting for him to arrive.