An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  Egbunu, I have seen it many times, what men have done from hearts filled with hatred. I cannot describe it all, for time would fail me. But not wanting to stir up further emotion in my host, I watched in silence as his mind ran its bloody errand until, tired, he fell asleep.

  It rained for most of that morning. Since he returned to Alaigbo, he felt the most at home when it poured. This was because most of the earliest memories he formed in Umuahia were shadowed by the presence of storms. The clouds were a constant image in his mind as a child. Claps of thunder, the shrapnel of lightning, these gave this world a beating heart and a memory as vivid as that of war. In some nations, like Ugwu-hausa, other elements might dominate, but rain reigned supreme here. Amongst the Igbo people, the sun was considered a weakling.

  He did not go to the store that day, for the rain continued till almost the time when, having run its course, it yielded to sunlight. For the rain is the master of all other elements. The previous day, when he’d encountered Jamike, the sun had emerged early, effulgent against the morning sky. Then slowly, clouds swarmed up and contested its right to stay.

  A weak sun was rolling slowly through the pool of wet clouds like a ball through sloam when he stepped out of the house. He peeled the tarpaulin from over his motorcycle and mounted the bike. For the first time since he returned, he carried the bag Ndali had given him. The white print on its leather face was still apparent: CONFERENCE OF AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN POLITICAL SCHOLARS, APRIL 2002. All its contents were still intact, except for the two photographs of Ndali and her letter. He recalled then how, after he was released from the hospital and taken to the police station, one of the officers brought out the photos while searching the bag. He’d have tried to grab them, but he was handcuffed. The men had passed the photos between them, laughing and saying something, making gestures—the hand slapped against the palm—which, he would later come to understand, meant sex. One of them had spoken to him in halting English: “You, you like pussy many-many. Black pussy, good? Yes? Good?” It was a moment he would never forget—one in which his punishment had been extended to the most innocent of people: Ndali. At the time, many thousands of miles from the land of the fathers, he was witnessing her being violated by the eyes of strangers. Later, one of the men, visibly angry at the actions of the others, would take the photos, put them in the bag, and say to my host, “I am sorry, my friend.” Then the man would leave with the bag. He would not see the bag until his release. When it was handed back to him, the first thing he looked for were the photos. Her letter had been removed from his bloodied trousers after he arrived at the hospital, badly damaged.

  Now he carried a knife in the bag, hidden between the pages of a book. He’d planned it all out. He would get to the restaurant and sit down calmly at a table by the door for easy exit once the deed had been done. He would place the book on the table and eat quickly, for once Jamike came, he would be too angry to eat. He would try to disarm his enemy by making him feel at ease, even believing that he’d been forgiven. Then he would invite Jamike to his apartment. He would not use the knife in a public space. But if the man refuses out of suspicion, he would have no choice but to use the knife right there at the restaurant. He would stab the man dead and run away to the bus station and take a bus to Lagos. He would try to locate his sister or go to his father’s village and stay in his father’s empty house there.

  Chukwu, I was afraid that this plan, if fulfilled, would bring him even greater troubles. So I flashed the thought in his head that if he did all these things he had planned to do he would lose Ndali forever. And, I added—although with great hesitation—that such an act would return him to prison and deprive him of ever finding her again. He considered this for a while with fear. He even took out the knife from the bag and placed it on the table. But then a monstrous rage gripped him again, and he slipped it back into the bag. I will do it, I will kill Jamike and find her, the voice in his head said. I will kill Jamike, I don’t care!

  Egbunu, often a man, even while knowing that he cannot see the future, plans nevertheless. You see people like that every day, couples dressed up visiting families, telling them their wedding is five months from now. Along the road near the end of the street, there are numerous projects. A man has bought a house, laid the foundation, and hopes to build on it in the future. Even though he can die one minute after laying the foundation, it matters little. In fact, human life revolves around preparations for the future, of which he has little control! This was why, despite all his planning, when my host entered the restaurant, he heard, “Brother Chinonso-Solomon.” He was startled, as if thrown off horseback. The man he’d seen the previous day stood now, almost alone with him. Across from them was a counter from which a woman watched. Behind her braided head were posted items for sale with their prices.

  “My brother, my brother,” Jamike said, coming towards him.

  “I want us to just sit down,” he said quickly, in the language of the fathers, although when with this man he primarily spoke the White Man’s language.

  Jamike, his hands still afloat in the air, stopped. “Okay, brother,” Jamike said.

  My host pointed to the chair near the door and began walking towards it. Jamike followed with a weak smile on his face.

  As he sat, he realized that something had happened yet again and had caused him to calm in the presence of this much-hated man. But he could not tell what it was. Suddenly his great, maddening anger was gone, and he sat down slowly in the chair, surprised at himself. Jamike stretched out his hand, and he shook it.

  “Madam! Madam!” Jamike cried.

  The woman at the counter reappeared from the kitchen, where she’d gone.

  “Please bring us two bottles of soft drinks. Cokes.”

  “Okay, sir,” the woman said.

  He could see, now, that part of what disarmed him was the change he’d seen in Jamike. The man had slimmed down so much that instead of a big, fleshy head, he now had a lean face with protruding cheekbones. His eyes had retreated inwards so that the eyelids hung like small awnings. His thinness was pronounced in the long-sleeved shirt he wore, which was much larger than his diminutive frame. His lips were cracked, with a spit of blood on the ridge between them. His whole constitution was that of an emaciated, suffering man, malarial and gaunt. And in his eyes, there were signs of tears. On the side of the table, he’d set the big Bible he’d brought with him, and now he placed his hand on it and said, “Brother, I have been looking for you. I have been waiting for you. Many years, my brother. I did not know you had returned. I even asked Elochukwu, but he did not know.”

  Egbunu, my host wanted to speak, but it seemed as if the words had been bound with chains within him, and they could not get out.

  “Ever—oh God—ever since I heard about your prison. I have been looking for you, Solo. I have been looking for you everywhere.” Jamike shook his head. “I have been in a very bad state. I have been very very sorry. I have not been myself. I have not—how do I say it?—been alive. God help me. Help your son!”

  Then Jamike began to cry. The woman arrived with the drinks and set them down, her eyes on the weeping man. Then, with an opener, she uncapped both drinks.

  “Do you want to order?” she said.

  “The drinks are enough,” my host said. “Thank you.”

  “Ah, only drinks?” she said. “Oga sorry, er.”

  “That is so,” he said, without looking at Jamike.

  “Thank you, madam,” Jamike said.

  When the woman was gone, he said, “Jamike, can we go to the house? I need to tell you my story.”

  He’d spoken quickly because his hatred had returned, and he was afraid it would go back into wherever it had come from. He wanted it to stay, to be ever present with him while he was with this man. Without it, he feared that he would never be well again.

  “Oh, you don’t want to eat?” Jamike said. “I am buying the food.”

  “No, we can eat after.”

  Jamike paid the woman
for the drinks and they walked out of the restaurant, my host carrying his bag, and his heart beating loudly for fear he may have betrayed his intentions through his tone. Although he listened for the sound of someone following him, he did not look back.

  “It is not far. We can ride on my motorcycle to the place,” he said aloud.

  “I want to come,” Jamike said.

  He turned and looked, for the first time that day, at Jamike’s face. “Let us take my machine,” he said.

  He realized he had not fully considered his request until Jamike mounted behind him and their bodies touched. It sent a shiver through him, as if he had been poked with a sharp rod. He lost his grip on his keys, and the bunch fell on the ground. Jamike rushed to pick them up.

  “Brother Solo, are you fine?” he said.

  He did not speak. He merely pointed to the street ahead and started the motorcycle.

  GAGANAOGWU, revenge is a debris field. It is a situation in which a man who was once defeated in a fight drags his enemy back to a cleared field after the battle has been won and lost, hoping to revive a dead fight. He returns to pick up the rusty weapons, to scrape clean the blood-encrusted swords, and to light again the violent fire of hatred against his foe. For him, the fight was never over. But for his foe, so much time may have passed that the enemy, if he had felt himself the victor, may have forgotten about the old battle. Thus he may be astonished when he who was smeared in the mud, whose bones were broken, who was vanquished, seizes him again by the throat and begins to drag him back to the battleground.

  The broken man may himself be surprised by the force with which he has now seized his enemy. But this may be the beginning of his surprises. What if he seizes his enemy by the throat, wrestles him to the ground, and begins to strangle him without any resistance? What if his enemy simply lies there, closes his eyes, and simply says, “Please, brother, go ahead”? What if the other’s face, red and bursting with veins, continues to entreat him? “I am in Christ. Praise the Lord. To die in him, I am willing to do… Argh… I love you, Chinonso-Solomon. I love you, my brother.”

  What would the broken man do? What would he say when the man he was about to kill speaks of love for him? What would he say when his heart had been further broken by all the misreckonings of life, by all the false calculus of time and the dubious permutations of fate? What would he do when he had done no wrong to warrant the trouble that came to him? He had fallen in love with a woman, just like any other man. He’d tried to marry that woman, the way every good man should. Indeed, her parents had tried to obstruct it, but he tried to scale the obstacle, the way people do when wanting to achieve a goal. Now, certainly that had led him into even greater trouble, but what did he do? He plotted his revenge and sought it as if his life depended on it. It had taken him a long time to find his enemy, but he’d finally found him. And now, he is strangling the man, trying to kill him and discard his body in the Imo River, as people would do to someone who had destroyed their lives. So you see, Egbunu, he has done nothing out of the ordinary. Yet nothing he has done has yielded a common result!

  If he headed north just as every other traveler did, he found himself in the south. If he put his hand into a bowl of water, it burned him as if it were fire. If he trod on land, he drowned as if he’d stepped in water. If he looked, he did not see. If he prayed, what is heard was a curse. And now, when he engaged a wicked man in a fight he’d rehearsed for many years, what he finds instead is a saint who prays for him; instead of protestations, he finds a singing man.

  So he resigned. He unclasped his hands from the throat of his enemy, who had begun to cough frantically, trying to gather air into his lungs. He sank to his knees and began weeping, while the man whom he had tried to kill whispered prayers through his aching throat: God forgive him, please. Put all his sins on my head. You know what I have done. Please, Lord, help him. Heal him, heal him, Lord.

  On his knees, my host wept aloud, for everything. He wept for that which had been lost and would not again be found. He wept for the time which would not replenish itself. He wept for the sickness which ate out the interiors of his world and left it as a cracked shell of its old self. He wept for the dreams washed down the pit of life. He wept for all that would come, all that he could not yet see or know. He wept, even more, for the man he had become. And his weeping was attended by the words dripping like poisoned rain from the mouth of his enemy who lay beside him: Yes, Lord, you are merciful. Merciful father. King of kings. Heal him. Heal my brother. Heal him, Lord.

  CHUKWU, they stayed this way for some time—he kneeling and sobbing, the man praying quietly while lying on his back on the floor. Into their ears came the world from the outside. A neighbor was chopping firewood at the back of the house, a dog was barking somewhere not too far away, and on the long road that led to the big market, cars were honking and streaming about interminably. The sun outside had started to set, and the last light of the day lay outside the window as if too afraid to enter the room. In his mind, the great anguish had subsided like a receding storm. Now he sat empty, watching the shadow on the wall forged from him and his enemy by the subdued light of the evening sun.

  In the small serenity of his mind, a vision of the gosling materialized. It was one of those times when it seemed to have suddenly forgotten that it was on the leash, for it sometimes forgot about it, and was enraged by it and wanted out. It would rouse itself and make a rustling, held back by the leash, bound to the leg of a chair or a table. When it had tired, the bird would smear down, its wings spread out as if in surrender. Then it would orient its head downward and peer at him, its yellow eyes on the sides of its small face bulging as if they would pop out of their sockets. But then the thin sheets of skin that formed its lids would cover them and open again, revealing pupils now dilated. It would sit that way for a while, and then a sudden epiphany would strike it and it would leap up again, seeking the familiar pool of the Ogbuti forest—its true home.

  My host rose afterwards and sat on the lone chair in the room. Then he pulled one of the two stools forward so that it faced him, and called to Jamike to rise.

  “Come and sit here,” he said, tapping the stool in front of him.

  Jamike stood and moved towards the stool, planted himself on it, and folded his hands across his chest. My host examined him, as if to assure himself that this was truly the man who had dominated his thoughts for four years. He was again surprised by what he saw. The man before him was nothing like the one he’d stored in his head for all those years and who sometimes visited him in vivid dreams. What sat before him now was a shadowy creature from an inchoate dream, one who, in some indefinable way, seemed to have suffered a fate similar to his.

  He took up the bag Ndali had given him and brought out the letter.

  “I want you to read this,” he said. “It contains my story. I want you to read it loud to me. I want to hear it, together with you. I want us both to read my testimony. So go ahead, read!”

  The man passed his eyes around the four pages stapled together and folded into columns. Then, raising his head to look at my host, he said, “Everything?”

  “Yes, everything.”

  “Okay.”

  My Story: How I Went to Hell in Cypros

  Dear Mommy,

  I am writing you from my second year in prison in cypros. You will not believe my story but everything I am saying here will be truth. Just belif me in the name of Almighty God I beg you. Please Obim. you know I love you. Do you remember?

  Jamike raised his head to look at him.

  “Read on!” he said. “I want you to read what I went through because of you.”

  After you saw me to the bus garage, I said to myself, I will see you again soon. I said I will return to you and I will marry you. my mommy. I was happy. I beliefed that what I was doing was—

  “What is this?”

  He bent forward to see the titled page. “For you, I believed that what I was doing was for you.”

  “Okay.”


  For you I beliefed that what I was doing was for you. I fly to Istanbul thinking of you. not even a single time did you leave my mind. Actually I even dreamt of you, many dreams, both of the future, and past time. Then, in the plane, I began to listen to tow Nigerians. They were talking of this country I was going. They were talking how bad cypros was. They said it was like Nigeria, that agents who ask people to come there lie to them. It is false what they say. All telling serious lies. cypros is not like europe. They said if you go there, it is like a pit. You can come back to Nigeria or you can stay there. And if you stay you will not get a better job. You will always work bad job. So I become afraid. I ask the men when we got to Istanbul if there were true, and they said yes, yes. It is so. So I become afraid again. I said to them, but my old classmate Jamike Nwaorji say it is a good place. He lied to me.

  “Look, I said you should not stop. Read on! Gu ba!”

  My host, becoming desperate, did not want to harm this man but rather to threaten him so he would read the letter in its entirety. He brought out the knife from the bag and held it. Ijango-ijango, I must emphasize that my host was merely desperate to make Jamike read the letter in its entirety and was not intent on doing harm. I, his chi, who would not want him to shed blood and incur your wrath and Ala’s, would have attempted to stop him. But I could see that he would not use it, so I did not interfere. Brandishing the knife, he said, “I will kill you here, and nobody will know, if you don’t read on now.”

  It worked. For Jamike, slightly shaken, continued.

  I tried to call him. The phone never go. I was very surprised because I called the number many times before. So I ask the men and they say it was not cypros number. I try many times. So when we reached cypros naw, the man was no where to be found. Actually no where at all. I can’t by then reach his number also. Please God, help me I was praying. I was very afraid. But my spirit told me, if you are afraid that is not good. It means this man will win. You must be strong. So I went to the airport in cypros. I wait, wait, wait. He didn’t come at all. His number did not go through still. Even in cypros. What can I do now, I ask myself then. This is everything I have. So I decided to wait. For three hours, he did not come to the airport, after all of his promises. So I took a taxi…