An Orchestra of Minorities
Page 41
“I told you it was her,” Jamike said as the other woman turned back and began walking past the parked cars, out to the street, and Ndali returned into the pharmacy.
“It is true,” he said. “It is her.” His heart was beating now, as if to the moves of ogene music. “It is true, Jamike, it is her.”
It was indeed her, Egbunu. Ndali—the same woman whose chi had confronted me when I went to entreat it on behalf of my host. It struck me then, in a way I had not considered all these years, that it might be that her chi may have carried out its threat to cut its host away from my host forever.
“Then let us go in. I am not returning without seeing her, brother. I want you to heal, to be well, and to be filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit. You must do this. You must take courage. If you don’t, I will go alone into that pharmacy and see her. And talk to her for you.”
“Wait! My God, Jamike!”
He held Jamike again and saw in the man’s eyes something that gave him hope.
“All right, I will come,” he said. “But see, let us take it slowly. I can just look at her now. Then, maybe another time, I will talk to her?”
Jamike considered the suggestion with a slanting, informed smile that made his forehead bow against the lower side of his face.
“Okay, let us go then, Nwannem.”
He walked with trepidation, slowed by the wealth of his anxiety, until, Jamike leading, they entered the pharmacy. It was a big room with many glass windows, so the place was showered with light. Ceiling fans, loud in their swinging, supplied extra air. He sat quickly in one of the six plastic chairs facing the counter, a big wooden structure that concealed half the pharmacists. It was on this that he placed his eyes after exchanging muffled greetings with the man who sat next to him in one of the chairs, shaking his legs.
Ndali was attending to someone when they entered. Although it was the other woman who called to them, “Next customer,” he heard her voice.
Jamike did not respond immediately but stood by his chair, his eyes on the counter. My host beckoned to Jamike, and the latter bent to hear him.
“You know, you know—I just came to look at her,” he whispered into Jamike’s ear.
His friend nodded uncomfortably, gesturing at the pharmacist to wait a moment.
“Just tell her you want a drug for malaria for me.”
Jamike nodded.
He watched Ndali from where he sat, his cap pulled over his face and his eyes hidden behind the sunglasses. She seemed to him more beautiful than she had been before. How old was she now? Twenty-seven? Twenty-nine? Thirty? He could not recall exactly what year she was born. Now she looked like a woman who had entered her prime. Her hair was permed, slick, and serenaded down her shoulders. There seemed to be a change to every part of her body, down to even the very shape of her face. Her lips were fuller, this time wearing a deeper pink color than he could ever recall. He’d gazed for hours that morning at the images of her, the images that now increasingly supplied him with pleasure. Yet the face before him was slightly changed. What he could best say was that it seemed she’d been sent back to her creator for renovation and returned even better.
The other woman was starting to put the drugs in a small polythene bag when Ndali opened the small door and stepped out from behind the counter. He noticed that her breasts seemed bigger, although he could not see their full size behind her clothing. He had the chance to see her posterior, almost as he could remember it. He stared at it with all his powers of concentration until she disappeared into an office whose door, closing behind her, bore the inscription NDALI ENOKA, MSC. PHARMACY. He did not see her for the rest of the time they spent there. The nurse attended to Jamike, and they left with the malaria drugs.
AGUJIEGBE, when a man cultivates a great and ambitious expectation, and when that expectation comes to fruition, it usually confounds him. A man may have told his friends, “Look, look, my brother’s home in the far city is big. He is a rich man.” But that selfsame man soon goes to the city and discovers that his brother is nothing but a street sweeper, scraping to get by. But so great had been his expectation, so long had it been sustained, that at first he will doubt reality’s uncontestable truth, shattered though he may be. I have seen it many times. This was the case with my host. The reality of Ndali’s marriage, signified by her change of name and the ring Jamike was convinced he’d seen on her left finger, confounded him. It put out the light from his universe and left him in a world of unblemished darkness. He stood afterwards at the entrance to Jamike’s church, so deeply rattled that the sound of his heartbeat came to him as whiplash.
“I believe that she still loves me, despite all.”
“My brother, I understand thee,” Jamike said in the language of the White Man, in the way he always did when they went to church or soon after they had been to church, as if the language of the fathers was too unholy to be spoken on such grounds.
“Please speak Igbo, this is serious issue,” my host said in the language of the great fathers.
“Sorry, Nnam, sorry o. But it is what it is now. As I have been saying, just give the letter into her hand; put it on the center of her hand. That is all. Then you can go, and God will see you have done your part.”
He shook his head, not because he believed it but because Jamike did not understand it all. He wanted Jamike to go inside for his service and leave him to ponder things, so he said, “I understand. I will wait for you here.”
Jamike went in to see the two others with whom he was setting up the special gospel event that evening: a screening of a Christian movie about Jisos Kraist. My host sat on a lone block, one of the remnants of the construction of the church building, only a year ago. A soft wind was blowing, and the banner, a piece of cloth fastened to two wooden poles rigged into the ground, was flapping from the traveling wind. He gazed at the congested street, where men and their wares struggled with motor vehicles and wheelbarrows for space. As he looked, he thought about all the things he had seen and those hidden from him. Did she have children? How long ago did she marry? Was it yesterday or a year ago? Could it have been the same month—or even week—that he arrived in Nigeria a damaged man? It could even be, if things were to follow the usual pattern of life mocking him, the same day. The thought ignited: he stepping down from the plane onto the tarmac of the ramshackle airport in Abuja, she stepping up to the altar with her groom. He imagined the priest looking at her and her husband, asking them if they would be together in sickness and in health, till death. At the same moment the shell of what he once was was falling at the feet of his waiting uncle at the airport.
He considered the things he had seen: Ndali, alive, well, and a more beautiful woman. Had Jamike not appeared in his life, sent like a stone from an unseen enemy to crush him, he would have married her. They would have continued to live on his compound, alive in the midst of his birds, harvesting eggs in the mornings and waking up to the orchestral song of roosters and winged things at dawn. His joy would have been abundant. But he’d been robbed of it all. As mosquitoes buzzed around him, and the voices inside the church reached him in whispers, anger welled within him.
He stamped to his feet and began searching about for a weapon. He found a stick lying near the church’s generator and picked it up. He motioned towards the church like a madman, and he’d almost reached the door when he stopped. Egbunu, his conscience had reacted, and a stream of light had pierced the sudden darkness into which his mind had precipitously plunged. He dropped the stick and sat back on the block. He put his hands on his face, gnashing his teeth. Moments later, as he allowed himself to calm down, he felt something on his face moving around down his cheek. It was an ant that had crawled from the stick to his hand, and then from his hand to his face. He slapped it away.
“My brother, my brother. What happened?” Jamike called to him just then from the threshold.
He rose. “I will go home and be alone,” he said.
“Oh, Brother Solomon. I really want you to see
this film, Passion of the Christ. It will touch your heart. It will touch your soul.”
He wanted to speak, to tell this man that only a moment before he’d been filled with hatred towards him. But he did not, for he’d been disarmed again by Jamike’s face.
“I will watch,” he found himself saying.
“Praise God!”
He sat in the back of the church, torn into shards within, as Jamike and his church members set up the screen for the movie. He sat until the service started. The pastor mounted the stage and talked about salvation, how a man suffered to give his life for others. As the man spoke, he rose up and left the church.
Chukwu, he returned home, struggling to stop himself from falling into fresh despair. He realized, deep in the night, that his point of distress came wholly from his desire to regain that which he had lost. It was not healing and forgiveness that he wanted, not the things Jamike spoke of. Instead, he wanted his life back. He wanted to pick up the coconut that had fallen into the latrine and wash it clean. For he believed it was possible that it could be clean. He sat up, resolved that this was what he wanted, that it could be done. To do anything else was to capitulate.
This incantation of thoughts, having flourished in his mind for so long, formed into a firm decision—that he would fight for her, married or not.
I will not give up, no! he told himself. I have traveled too far to give up. Yes, I repeat it: people’s wives are taken from them; so, too, are people’s husbands. A man is robbed of his child, and a woman is robbed of her baby. A goose is robbed of its gosling. Onweghi ihe no na uwa mmadu ji na aka. Again, I repeat it: nothing in this world belongs firmly to anyone. We own whatever we have because we hold it firmly, because we refuse to let it go. In being here, in standing here, under a roof, I am holding on to my life. If I let it go, it will be taken from me.
In gesturing, his hand clung to his chest. He put on the bulb in his room and went to the mirror.
Tell me, he said, squinting at the image of the changed man who now stood pointing back at him, his face a catalog of scars. Tell me, was my own future not taken from me? Was it not wrested out of my hands by Jamike, Chuka, Mazi Obialor, Fiona, her husband, Cyprus police—and everyone?
He turned away from the mirror and pointed his finger at the wall and gestured like one confronted with something—a thing to be feared.
Did I not try to hold it, my life, but it was taken from me? What of my body? Did I give it to them? Did I? Tell me! Did I say, “Take my buttocks, put your penis in them?” He reached for the stool beside his feet and smashed it to the floor.
Tell me!
He stood now, in the wake of the dismembered furniture, panting, aware of his sudden slip into insanity and that he had shouted at midnight. It shocked him. Shaken, he switched off the bulb in haste and settled himself slowly onto the bed and lay there fearing that he may have woken the people in the other flats. He waited for someone to knock on his door, his eyes on the space below it, where he could see shadows of light. For a good while, he lay there as if bound to the bed, both arms held together to his belly, his head thrust histrionically sideways. But no one came. From somewhere, he heard what seemed to be a church service in full swing and the distant sound of drumming and music. In the serenity, it settled on him that he must return to that place where half of him never once left. It is in returning that he would regain his peace, and it would be there that he would fight his greatest battle.
23
The Ancient Tale
ECHETAOBIESIKE, I have said already that man is limited in his capabilities. I say this because, as I will now tell you, my host would have done things differently if he had more capabilities. But this is not to say that his strength is unlike every man’s—no. You have not denied him anything that you have given to others. I went with him into Afiaoke and the garden of Chiokike to pick talents and gifts which, in your generosity, you had sought to bestow on him, as you do on every human being. But still, he remained limited. Like everyone else, he is constrained by nature and time. Therefore, there are things that, once one has done them, cannot be undone. All one can do, if one cannot change a circumstance, is give up and move forward, in another direction.
Ebubedike, this wisdom came back to my host six weeks after he saw Ndali again. Because I do not want to take much more time in this luminous court, and because I must render only the details that can in some way lead to the conclusion of the matter about which I’ve come before you, I must let this man, Jamike, speak. For he’d seen that, from the day my host saw the woman he loved again, he fell into a turmoil. He was no longer himself. He was unable to move forward or backward.
“Brother, you have done what you could do. You have gone over and beyond and must now stop. I tell you because I love you with the love of Christ, Ezinwannem, that you must put all of this behind you and move forward. I am telling you, this is the best thing you can do for yourself.”
They had by this time been best friends for the past two months. They sat now in my host’s poultry-feed store. In the months since my host opened it, the store had grown to accommodate bags of feed, fertilizers, and other agricultural products. Rows of wood had been nailed to the wall, and arranged on them were cans of items related to poultry. A calendar from the Abia State Ministry of Agriculture hung on the wall, open to the page on which “the Last Pioneer,” my host, stood in front of his store squinting into the camera. It is the first picture of him that had been taken since his face was reshaped by the violence in Cyprus—the deep scars on his forehead and on his jaw, his missing teeth.
But Chukwu, I must let his friend speak:
“Let me remind you what you have done, that you have done a lot. After I found her for you, you and I went in search for her. At first, for a long time after we saw her, you went without wanting to reveal yourself to her. As a man whose heart was still filled with love, you did not want to have it destroyed by finding out that the one for whom you’d stored up this vast wealth of love no longer has an ounce of reciprocity left in her.
“Yet even though you had these fears, you did not give up. One day, five weeks ago, you took your chance. I was there with you, Nwannem Solomon. I saw every moment of it. You appeared before her undisguised, at her pharmacy. You took your chance. It was well planned. We went when we thought there was just she and one of her staff there. Of course, we did not know that two of her friends were seated in her office, whose door was opened. Perhaps, as I have said to you so many times already, it must have been because of these people that she reacted that way. When she saw you, the man she truly loved, whom she had vowed she would never leave nor forsake, she was afraid. It was not told to me in a story, nor did I dream these things. I saw it with my two eyes. With my eyes, I saw her hands tremble. The small rubber bottle she had in her hand, on the body of which she was scribbling something, fell as she gasped ‘Argh!’ then clutched at her heart.
“I saw it, Solomon my brother. It was as if she had seen a ghost in daylight. You could tell that she thought you were either dead or never coming back to Nigeria. You stood there, my brother, calling her name, saying it was you who had returned. Your hands were opened in front of the counter. But she gasped and screamed in terror, and her friends rushed out of the office to see what had happened, and her staff who was cleaning the medicine-filled shelf turned to her. I am sure it was because of nothing else but these people that she changed, turned from a mouse to a bird in the bat of an eyelid and began to shout at you, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ and without waiting for you to even answer, again began shouting, ‘I don’t know you! I don’t know this man!’ I am certain that she had recognized you that day.”
He stopped because my host was shaking his head and gnashing his teeth.
“You saw it, too. First, there was that unquestioning spark of recognition. If she didn’t recognize you, why would she gasp? Why would she tremble? Does one react that way when they suddenly meet someone they do not know? Do you gasp and tremble?”
At this, his friend put on a countenance whose expression I could not decipher.
“Maybe, Nwannem Solomon,” he said. “What you fear might indeed be true, and it may not only be because of those who were there at that time. Her actions were extreme. She was shouting, screaming louder, as you tried to explain yourself to her. At the mention of your name she screamed in English, ‘No, no, I don’t know you! Leave my office! Leave!’ Indeed, such a reaction has more to it. There was undoubtedly a snake hidden in the brush. But you should also know that she may have been afraid. This is a woman who is married. Who—” Perhaps because Jamike knew that these details oppressed his listener, and that what he was about to say would sting him even more, he paused. Then, with eyes out the store’s window, where a dazed fly droned up and down the netting behind the louvers, he said, “Has a husband.”
In truth, it stung his friend.
“It could be that she is afraid that the man she loved before would destroy her new life. She must have been afraid of you.”
He nodded in acceptance, in defeat.
“But you did not stop there. Yes, after we left the pharmacy in disgrace, hectored out by her friends, she ran out of the pharmacy in tears through a back door. And for some time it weighed you down, my friend. You were ashamed, humiliated, knocked down by this. It wasn’t told to me in a story, my brother. I was there. I saw it with my two eyes. If she was rejecting you because of your scarred face, why would she be so moved?”