An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  My host would bend his head towards the table to conceal his face so the man could settle into his chosen seat, then he would rise quickly, break the bottle of beer he’d been served, and launch his attack. In attacking, he would be a person he never imagined he could ever be. He would have grown the heart of an executioner—merciless, quick, collateral, brutal. Within the span of a few eye blinks, he’d break the bottle and sink it deep into the belly of his enemy. But that would not be all. He would pull it out and stab it again into the man’s chest. He would not be deterred by the inflorescence of blood or its affluent spattering all across the room. He would keep stabbing—at the man’s neck, hands, chest, until people would wrest him off the body. But by then, it would all have been done. There would have been a reckoning, as has been known amongst men for thousands of years. He who had come the hard way would have fallen hard. Egbunu, this is the image which, for a long time, had stood in his mind as the truest portrait of the day that he has stumbled into by serendipity.

  My host pulled his motorcycle up towards the gathering and had barely dismounted when the man of guilt recognized him, too. The man halted his speech and in haste handed the megaphone to another who stood by his side, dressed, like him, in the way of the White Man: a shirt, a tie, and plain trousers. Then the man ran forward, crying “Chinonso-Solomon!”

  Ijango-ijango, this is one of the instances when I often wish that we, guardian spirits, are able to see what other humans, not our hosts, are thinking. Yes, clearly he looked afraid, but was he truly afraid? Was he as afraid as he should have been? I do not know. All I could see then was that although he hastened towards my host, there was caution in his expression. For he stopped a few steps away from my host. As his enemy drew near, my host realized that things would not be as he’d imagined. For where he had found the man was an open place where he could do nothing. Now stopped in the presence of my host, this man broke down in tears. “Solomon,” the man said, and inched forward, turned his eyes back to the gathering, and then stretched his hand towards my host, who stepped back slightly. The man’s hand came down slowly, trembling as it did. “Solomon,” the man said again, and turned to face the crowd. “Brethren, it is him. It is Solomon. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” He threw his hands into the air and jumped.

  Then, without warning, this man for whose death my host had prayed for so long jumped forward and embraced him. In the moment when he should have gripped the man by the neck and started strangling him, the man turned back to the crowd, took the megaphone, and said with genial vehemence, “God, the God of heaven has answered my prayers! He has heard me! Praise the Lord!” And the crowd cried in response, “Hallelujah!”

  “You don’t know, you don’t know, brothers and sisters, what the Lord has just done for me,” the man said, and stamped his feet so hard that dust swelled around them.

  “You don’t know!”

  The man brought out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, for indeed, Egbunu, he was crying. My host looked about now and saw that the crowd was growing. A man and his wife had parked a lorry on the corner and moved closer to witness the evolving scene. An elderly woman had come out of a house on the other side of the street and now leaned on the balcony, watching. Round and about, faces, eyes, encircled him as if with an invisible chain that completely becalmed him.

  “This man here is the reason I’m saved. I was a thief. I stole from him and others. But the Lord used him to touch me. The Lord used him to save me. Praise the Lord!”

  The people responded, “Hallelujah!”

  Now, was there anything my host could have done with these people surrounding him? No, Chukwu. They were the weapons of finality that neutralized all his vivid conjurations and elaborate plans. What was happening was incomprehensible to him, for now, this creator of all his sorrows, took his hand. What could he do but let the man have it? Then he watched, amazed, as the man knelt before him and held his hand.

  “Brother Chinonso-Solomon, I kneel here before you, in the name of God who made you and, I and the whole world and… forgiveness, forgiveness. Please forgive me in Jesus’s name.”

  Although some of the words were lost in the eruption of static from the megaphone, nearly everyone there seemed to understand. A murmur rose amongst the crowd. A young man in a red shirt and brown tie on which there was an image of a church and cross began to pray, shaking a tambourine—a small circular instrument with small metal clippings which, when knocked against the palm of his hand, released a jingling sound similar to that produced by iron staffs carried by priests and dibias. Even though my host could not hear him, he could sense what this individual was saying. But I, his chi, heard every word of it: “Lord help him. Lord help him. Let him forgive. Touch his heart. For you made it possible for such a time as this. Lord help him! Lord help him!”

  IJANGO-IJANGO, my host stood there, helpless, transfixed, surprised at how his hand trembled as his enemy, who had stood up again, thrust the megaphone into his hands. Once he held it, the crowd erupted. His enemy wept even more vocally, like one mourning a parent. The tambourine attended with a ringing acclamation, and the crowd cheered even louder. My host knew they were waiting for him to speak.

  “I… I,” he said, and brought the megaphone down.

  “Help him, Lord! Help him!” the man of guilt said, his words attended by the ritual jiggle of a tambourine.

  “Yes! Yes!” the crowd chorused.

  “I… I for—” my host said, and his hands began to shake. For he remembered now, as if an apparition had appeared before his face, the white men gathering as he walked towards his cell. He saw the one with the ugly scar on his face, and another, coming at him with their fists, saying, “You rape Turkish woman, you rape Turkish woman,” with a flurry of Turkish words he could not understand. He saw himself trying to open the cell and run into it, catching the eye of a black man watching from the distance, while the men kicked him on the back. He saw himself falling against the bars of the cell and gripping them as the men tried to wrest him off.

  “Touch him, Lord! Jesus, touch him!” the man in the tie and suit said again, and the strange instrument that produced the jiggling attended.

  “Yes! Forgive! Amen!”

  “I will forgive,” my host let out.

  The eruption of the crowd this time was wild. In the heat of it, reality insulted him even more. Without warning, he whom he should have killed lifted my host’s hand like a referee who raises the arm of a victorious wrestler to the cheers of onlookers. My host had, however, just been defeated. For this man was Jamike: the man he’d sought for so long, one of the things that had kept him alive all along. And now, after all those years, he had found Jamike, and what did he do? He’d simply announced that he would forgive.

  “Some people say there is no God!” Jamike shouted presently, and the crowd responded with an acclamation. “They say it is not true what we say we believe. I say shame on them!”

  “Shame!” the crowd yelled.

  “Who else could save me so? Who else?”

  “Onwero!”

  Agbatta-Alumalu, his anger grew as Jamike—now slim, bespectacled, possessing an innocent gaze, and exuding an unexpected warmth—gave a brief testimony of how he stole everything from “Brother Chinonso-Solomon” four years ago and how “Brother Chinonso-Solomon” came to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus but he, the thief, fled south to the Republic of Cyprus. How, two years later, after he had been involved in an accident, he started to rethink his life. So he reached out to people in North Cyprus and was told about the fate of the three people he had duped—one lady at Near East University had become a prostitute and “Brother Chinonso- Solomon here, who was sent to prison, and brother, brother Jay.”

  Jamike struggled with the last name, and when he finally uttered it, he fell into a caesura of despondency, during which he wiped his eyes with the hem of his shirt.

  “Do you know what happened to him because of me?”

  “No,” the people replied.

&n
bsp; “I heard he committed suicide! He jumped from the top of a building and killed himself.”

  The crowd gasped. My host, fearing that he would not be able to restrain himself, detached his hand softly from the man’s and put it to his chest as if stifling a cough.

  “When I heard that and another story of what I had done, I gave my life to Christ. My brothers and sisters, I began to pray that God would let me see him again to ask for forgiveness. Glory to God!”

  “Amen!” the people cried.

  “I say glory to God!” Jamike said now, in the language of the White Man, as if the language of the fathers were no longer sufficient.

  “Amen!” they repeated.

  “Otito di ri Jesu!”

  “Na ndu ebebe!” the crowd shouted.

  Jamike turned back to him with eyes that were filled with tears and a face that bore the visible stigmata of his own suffering. My host had not expected this: before him was Jamike, in tears, with a weather-beaten face, cracked lips—a face that bore the insignia of shame. It was not the face of one who has conquered another but of one who has been subdued. The face disarmed him.

  Chukwu, the things he was feeling at that moment were in fact strangely common. I have seen it many times. The face is, beyond all else, naked—a thing of great poverty. It does not conceal itself from anyone, not even strangers. It is that which bears no secret. That which communicates continually, unrestrainedly with the world. Warriors of old amongst the great fathers often told of how, in wars, when confronted with the face of the enemy, they found their resolve to violence weakened. Almost instantly, their drive to kill for the sake of killing became a drive to kill simply in order not to be killed. It becomes as if the warrior, in the presence of his enemy’s revealed face, strips himself of all enmity. Egbunu, it is a thing that is hard to understand. Even the wise fathers grappled with it, their tongue wove many proverbs to explain this phenomenon, but nowhere was it more pronounced than in their articulation of what that powerful emotion is which a man develops for a woman or a mother for her child. They referred to it as Ihu-na-anya. For truly, they understood that only when a man is without malice towards the other can he look him in the eye. So when a person says, I can look you in the eye, he has expressed affection. And in reverse, a man who is masked, or who is distant—that man can be easily harmed.

  I am certain that it was for this reason that my host allowed Jamike to embrace him again and to weep on his shoulder while the gathered crowd shouted “Hallelujah” and clapped for them. It must have been why—although my host did not know this—he gave this man who had caused him irreparable damage his phone number and nodded in response to his adversary’s request to meet the following day at Mr. Biggs, down the street.

  “At five o’clock?”

  “Yes, at five o’clock,” he said.

  “I shall be there, Brother Chinonso-Solomon.”

  I am certain that it was the confrontation with Jamike’s face that made him turn afterwards and make his way through the cheerful crowd that had gathered there. It was why he mounted his motorcycle and raced away from the scene without so much as looking back—not onwards to the place where he had been heading initially, but back to his apartment.

  20

  Reckoning

  IKUKUAMANAONYA, anticipation is one of the most curious habits of the human mind. It is a drop of vicious blood in the vein of time. It controls all that is within it and renders a person incapable of doing anything but beg for time to pass. An action delayed by the natural agency of time or human intervention comes to perpetually dominate an individual’s thoughts. It bears down against the present until a view of the present is lost. It is why the old fathers say that when a child’s food is cooking, the child’s eyes are unblinkingly fastened to the top of the hearth. When a person is anxious, he attempts to peek into the unformed time, to try to gain knowledge of an event that has not yet happened. He may see himself already in a country he has not yet traveled to. He may find himself dancing with the people of the place, eating their local cuisine, and walking along the country’s scenic parts. This is the alchemy of anxiety, for it is hinged on the promise of something, an event, a meeting, for which a participant cannot wait. I have seen it many times.

  In the meantime, though, the man may dwell in much thinking and agony, as my host did after the encounter with Jamike. He returned full of spite and lunged about his room, kicking at the shelf, the bed, a rubber cup, cursing, raging. He blamed the heavens, the conspiratorial entities, for what had happened to him. He blamed his god. Why, he said, did he have to meet Jamike after all these years in such a public place? And why, of all things, was Jamike preaching, a situation that had fettered him? It would have been nearly impossible to assault one who was preaching the gospel. People in Alaigbo and in the world of the Black Man in general revered the kind of man Jamike had become so much that he would not have been able to do anything. He blamed himself for not contacting Elochukwu since he returned. He should not have blamed Elochukwu for the many failures while he was in Cyprus—like failure to help get back his house and get Jamike’s location from Jamike’s sister. Had my host made contact upon returning, Elochukwu would have told him that Jamike was in Umuahia. He would have simply invited Jamike somewhere secluded and exacted his revenge.

  Agujiegbe, I had never before seen my host like he became that night. So angry was he that he cursed, punched the wall, took a knife, and threatened himself. In a moment of great uncertainty, when I could not tell if truly this was my host or an agwu who had possessed him, he stood before the mirror, brandishing a knife and saying, “I will cut myself, kill myself!” He brought the knife close to his chest, and with his hand trembling, his eyes closed, he wagged it so that it touched his flesh. I rushed thoughts into his mind, reminding him first of his uncle, then of the possibility of reunion with Ndali. And I must say, humbly—Chukwu—that I may have helped save my host’s life! For my words—What if she still loves you like Odysseus’s wife?—filled him with sudden hope. He unclenched his fist and the knife fell into the sink, did a mild dance, and settled there. Then he burst into tears. So hard was his pain and so great his grief that I feared he might not recover from it. I put it in his thoughts that it was only the first time he’d met this man since the events had happened. And that they would be meeting the following day, this time in private. His enemy would come to him as he had always wished, and he could do with him what he willed, even show the man the letter he’d written for Ndali, chronicling what had happened to him, so the man could know the gravity of what he had done. He should not think that the wasted opportunity was all he would have. No.

  Again, he listened to my voice. I had affirmed a thing, and he’d followed. He washed his face and drained his nose into the sink and wiped his face on the towel that hung by a nail on the wall. He returned to the living room and removed the letter containing the story of his life, which he’d now decided he would show to Jamike the following day. He examined it carefully, trying to make sure the changes he’d made to it two days earlier had not altered its message. In fact, it struck him now that fate, or whatever it was that initiated events, had foreseen this meeting with Jamike. For only two days earlier, he’d woken from sleep in the middle of the night and could not fall back. This had become part of his life since he returned from prison. He had formed the habit of turning on the radio and then listening to it to help him sleep. He’d started to fade out when the voice of a preacher came on. And what was the man talking about? Hell. The same topic he had sometimes thought so deeply about during his years in prison. A place from which no one can escape. From everything the preacher described, as he listened, he realized that if he asked any questions about hell, the speaker’s speech would contain all the answers: in hell, there is no redemption. It is a place of perpetual suffering where man is held up like a prisoner and where, the preacher emphasized again and again, “the worm never dies.”

  He turned off the radio and sat to ponder what he’d he
ard, menaced by his own mind. Then he rose and read the letter he’d written for Ndali. He’d not read it since he returned to the land of the great fathers because he’d felt that all he’d needed to tell her was there. He took a pen now and crossed out the title and wrote under it a new one:

  My Story: How I Suffered in Cypros

  My Story: How I Went to Hell in Cypros

  When he finished reading through the letter, he was satisfied that nothing had been fundamentally altered. Tomorrow, he would give the letter to the man who had helped him construct it. And he could not wait for that to happen.

  CHUKWU, the brave fathers say that a man who has been bitten by a snake becomes afraid of earthworms. For years, time and space had hidden this enemy from him, but that day, he would be alone with the man. He woke the following morning, from a night in which he’d slept little, with a kind of peace. He sat in the bed and let his plans play out till the imagined end, in which Jamike would lie on the floor in a pool of his own blood. He did not yet know of the importunity of hatred, how, even when one resists it and tries to push it away, it merely hoards itself for a moment like a tide, then comes flooding through until the mind is again drowned in it.