Ebubedike, his friend had spoken with the frankness of the old fathers and left my host confounded by what he’d heard. He gazed out the window, and his eyes fell on a peddler hawking CDs on a wheelbarrow. The peddler had been stopped by a woman who was running her eyes over a record.
“But one must add, too, that it may also be because she is angry with you,” Jamike said suddenly, and again gave his friend that warning look that says, Steel yourself. “She may have hated you then because she does not yet know your story. She is ignorant.”
This, said not in the language of the fathers, was meant to stand out, to punch everything else into the listening ear whose bearer again nodded desperately.
“She does not know what you went through, how you spent one week in hell on arrival in Cyprus because of what I did to you. She didn’t know of your anguish. She did not yet know how lost you were because you gave up everything for the sake of love.”
He listened to these heavy words that bit at his heart with sharp teeth, nodding sporadically.
“She did not know, as yet, how you paid for it dearly. She did not know how you were humiliated, stripped bare, robbed of everything you ever owned. She did not yet know the pain of such self-sacrifice. Then after, as if all that was not enough, they threw you in prison.” Again, Egbunu, he gave my host the searing gaze. “I will not say more, Nwannem, for there are no words one might use to describe what you went through there that will not scald one’s tongue. None. But this is what I mean: she had not yet any knowledge of these things. She had not yet read the letter.”
His eyes were fixed on Jamike, who pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his plain trousers. He tucked the pocket, which had turned itself out along with the kerchief, back inside and wiped his forehead.
“Yes, she did not know these things before, but then after you gave her the letter and it was only a few days after you made yourself known to her. I remember that day. We had come up with a plan. So we found a man to act as a courier who delivered the letter, with unmarked stamps, to her address with her full name. It was successful. Tokunbo said he went out of the pharmacy after handing her the letter, and then through the window, he saw her open the letter and begin reading it. You and I had rejoiced. For me, that was enough. You got her to understand you were not the kind of man she assumed you were, to realize that you fought hard to have her back. You did not merely go abroad and vanish. You did not even merely give in to oppression but were valiant in the face of it. You proved there that you loved her, and that not once in all those years—despite all that you faced—did you forget her. You woke every morning and imagined her in the same room as you, and said to her, often, ‘I will return to you. I will return to you.’ These were the words that gave you life in those painful years. You said there what you said every day to that conjured-up presence of hers you felt in your cell. For. Four. Good. Years. Four good years, blessed Brother Solomon.”
My host was nodding, his eyes vacant, as if the other were speaking words strong enough to overpower all his senses.
“In your letter, which you had delivered to her, you described how this happened to you, how you survived those years. You said it was like a battle—”
The word battle hung on his friend’s tongue like a fish on a hook, because two men dressed in blue aprons entered the store at that moment. On their clothes was the inscription MICHAEL OKPARA UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE, UMUDIKE.
He knew them.
“Oga Falconer abi na fowler,” one of the men said, removing his cap.
“Ah, university people, una don come?” he said.
“Yes, oh, Na professor send us come.”
He shook hands with them. They shook hands with his friend.
“Wetin him want?” he said.
“Layers,” one of the men said. “Half bag. Also, him say make you add one bowl of boiler.”
“La-yers, ah layers,” he said, a finger on his lips as he glanced around the store. “E be like say we no get am again. Wait.”
He pushed open a door to the other room, a small storage area that stank from the silos and bags of poultry feed stored in it. He looked amongst the silos, which were full of corn and placed on wooden slabs, their mouths opened to let in air, and the jute bags of millet, which were stacked one on the other.
“We no get am. E don finish,” he said when he returned back into the store, his hands white from turning over sacks and bags.
“Ah!” one of the men said.
“But broilers dey yan-fun yan-fun. Him no wan millet?”
“No, we over get am,” the man said. “Okay, just bring the boilers.” And upon consulting in whispers with his colleague, said, “Two mudus.”
“Okay, sir,” he shouted from inside the storage room.
He came back into the store with a metal bowl and a black polythene bag which he unfurled to open widely so that its inside swelled in expectation. Counting, one, he scooped a handful of the gray-colored mash into the bag. He found something that looked like a raffia broom in it and, removing it, threw it out the door. He scooped another bowlful and poured it into the bag. Then, looking up at the men, he scooped a handful with his hand and threw it into the bag.
“Na jara be that,” he said.
“You do well,” the men said.
He shook their hands and thanked them.
GAGANAOGWU, after the men had paid and left the store, my host sat down with Jamike and asked him to continue what he was saying. The other, who had started to gaze into his big Bible while my host served the feed buyers, closed the book and put it on the upturned megaphone on the floor. Then Jamike bent over so that his elbows rested on his thighs and continued.
“I was saying that if she has indeed read your letter she must have seen all this by now.”
Although Jamike had spoken without the oratory of the fathers, his words carried the hypnotic power of their tongue. For my host had received his words the way an ancient story slowly crowds the mind, like embers from dying coals. Afterwards, while Jamike left to do some evangelism, carrying his Bible and megaphone, he sat digesting the things Jamike had said, trying to let them soothe his spirit. He regained all the confidence he had lost. He went to Mr. Biggs, the restaurant she had introduced him to, and had a meal. He sat in the far corner of the restaurant, where he had sat with her, only now on a new chair and table. Then he went to an electronics store down the street and bought a used television set while Jamike went to his church. He was prepared for the time when they eventually would begin to meet again, so she would not mock him for not owning a television.
Although my host sought it, from that day onwards, Jamike did not talk about Ndali. He was convinced that she would either call the number scribbled at the end of the letter or post a letter to the address on the envelope. My host, too, believed this. It consumed him. He went about his life unbalanced, thinking perpetually about what she would do or what she would not do. He would sometimes seek desperately to be free for a moment, to think about the stampede at the Ascension Crusade rally or the impending activities of MASSOB which Elochukwu—with whom he was no longer close—had told him about and which could flare into a riot in the city. He would thrust out all these and imagine, instead, that Ndali had read his letter and wanted to meet him or that she read it and did not believe a word of it. Perhaps she simply thought it was impossible that all that could have happened; perhaps he was making it all up. Or maybe she read a bit of it and tore it up, never seeing the rest. Or perhaps she may not have read it at all. Maybe she tore it up and the courier saw her reading something else and mistook it for his letter. Let us even say she read it. Really, let us assume beyond reason that she read it and thought it was all true, but that it was now too late. She was now married, inseparable from that man. They had become one, nothing can put them asunder. Nothing. The man has slept with her for years, every day, far more than he ever had. It was too late, too late, too late.
These uncertainties, these fears strained his mind so mu
ch that he became sick from pondering what she may have done with the letter. On the night of the fourth day after Jamike’s long speech, he became so sick and weak that he did not rise from his bed. The rain did not help, either; it had rained so hard, rapping continuously against the roof of his apartment, that it kept him awake far into the morning. Thunder clapped a few times and I rushed out to see it. It was the young kind, the kind Amandioha used as a weapon. In its aftermath, lightning struck the face of the horizon, shaped like thin branches of phosphorescent trees. The rumbling in the bowel of the sky was so loud that it morphed from sound into invisible object: a spark of teeth-white light. By morning, the volume of rain had become so enormous that it seemed there was some kind of movement in the land, as if the world had become reduced to an ark in which everything—man, beast, birds, trees, buildings—was crammed and was floating towards some shore.
He did not leave the house for most of the day but lay in bed tormented by the thought of the loss of Ndali. Between thinking and imagining, vivid things emerged in his head. He would rise and walk about his room. He would gaze at himself, his face, his mouth, in the mirror. He would nurse a certain memory of Ndali, now blurred, dulled by time, of them making love. Then he would think of the new man in the same position. And it would kill him. An image of wishful violence would jump out into his field of vision like a beast and howl into his rankled head.
Oseburuwa, I did not know what to say to him in this time. In the years before he saw her again, I always told him to have faith like the white man of ancient times, Odysseus, in the tale he loved as a kid. In that tale, the man had been stopped from returning to his wife by an angry god. I would have kept mentioning this story to him, if the man did not eventually reunite with his wife. I could not remind him because his woman had yielded to another man. I feared that to remind him now would instead fill him with a sense of failure. I did not know how, at all, to help him. I knew it was futile to try to discourage him from loving her, and I could only give suggestions. His will was sealed. There was more to what he now felt. It was not only love, it was not only that he wanted her back, it was also that her rejection of him made him feel his suffering had been futile. He wanted her to acknowledge, to make a concession towards him, a man who has been damaged for her sake.
The hands of the small wall clock without a glass covering on the wall of his room was pointing at 4:00 p.m. when he rose, brushed his teeth, and spat into the gutter that flowed out of the compound. One of his neighbors was in the shared bathroom, the sound of splashing water reaching him, and suds washing up and down the drain. He chewed what was left of the bread he’d bought the previous day, finishing it in two bites. He dressed and walked out of the house.
He saw that the rain had created a fjord outside the compound. Egbunu, although since his prison days I have cut down very drastically on the frequency with which I left the body of my host, I went out that night to see the rain as I had done of the thunder, to wash in it while he was fast asleep. I had spent much of the night there, with a thousand other spirits of all kinds, taking in the empyreal smell of Benmuo. I was confident that because of the storm, no spirit would be going around looking for bodies to inhabit or harm. And now that my host had left his apartment, I had the chance to see the impact of the rain for myself. The clay earth had been softened, so that as he walked his shoes made small ruts on the earth. A house across from the block of flats in which he lived, made of unvarnished adobe bricks, now stood precariously on a shelf of earth.
With the cuffs of his trousers stained with mud water, he arrived near the pharmacy, his face concealed behind his sunglasses. Across the road from the big shoe store, he saw Elochukwu and a group of men dressed mostly in black vests carrying Biafran flags as they walked towards the other side. The MASSOB. They were not protesting, simply walking, some of them with sticks, redirecting traffic. He saw Elochukwu among them, consumed with this agitation. My host shook his head and walked on to the pharmacy.
When he reached a short distance away, he saw that the car he’d identified as Ndali’s—the same one she used to drive to his house—was there. As he looked at the car, at the small poster on the back window, he lost all confidence again and began to wonder why he had come. He did not know what to do next. I put in his mind caution—Jamike’s words that he should no longer try to meet her on his own. “Don’t do it, cha-cha, please, I beg you in the name of Jesus, the son of God. If she is married and says she doesn’t want you, then once you have sought forgiveness from her, let her go.”
But he could not. Even when he tried to let himself do it, to give it all up, something drew him back. One time, a crushing desire to be reunited with her. And next time, a desire to have his suffering, his sacrifice acknowledged.
He walked on towards the other side of the street, past a group of small fruit hawkers lined up with their wares balanced on rickety tables. Two boys in school uniforms, talking about a pig, walked by him. The bag of one of them was open, dangling from his back. My host stopped at the GSM table a few meters away and sat with the lady on one of the plastic chairs.
“I wan make call,” he said.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Glo, MTN, Airtel?”
“Emm, Glo.”
He dialed Jamike’s number with the woman’s phone, whose keypads had been cleaned off. Jamike answered in a husky voice. “My brother, we have just finished counseling. Have you closed for the day?”
“Yes,” he said. “Can you come? There is something I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay, I will come in the evening.”
He walked back all the way, stopping to buy a cup of garri and a bag of peeled oranges. While he waited for Jamike to arrive, he rehearsed the idea that had come to him while standing across from Ndali’s car. Chukwu, I will let you in on this later. He put it through various iterations until he was confident of its final form, so that when Jamike arrived, he did not mince words.
“You leave in two days for this long prayer, and I will not see you for—how long?”
“Forty days and forty nights. That is the number of days our Lord Jesus Christ fasted and prayed—”
“Okay, forty days,” he said bitterly. He glanced around his one room, looking to find traces of the torment he’d been in the past two days. He’d wanted to tell Jamike about it but decided not to.
“Tell me whatever you want, my brother Solomon, and I will do it. You know you have a friend in me.”
“Da’alu,” he said, and adjusted himself on the bed, on which he sat to face Jamike, who sat on the lone wooden chair in the room. “I want us to urinate together so we can generate more foam than when one of us does it alone.”
“Okay, my brother,” his friend said.
Indeed, Ijango-ijango, it was not very common for the children of the old fathers, now sold in the ways of the White Man, to speak with the oratory of the wise great fathers. But it came often in the speech of my host when what he was about to say had come from deep introspection.
“I know you have changed completely, and are a good man because you are born again, Onye-ezi-omume. You believe that I should leave Ndali alone after I have suffered for her, because she is married.”
The other nodded to every word he said.
“I have heard all of that. I will not bother her even though, Nwannem, I have not lost a drop of love for her. My heart is still full, so full it cannot even be lidded. What I am going through, knowing she is alive and rejects me, is worse than anything I have gone through before.”
He paused because he’d seen a cockroach appear over the wall mirror. He watched it as it flared its wings, then flew down behind the chair.
“This is worse, my brother, I really mean it. It is an imprisonment not of myself, but my heart. It is held and locked up by her.” He moved to the edge of the bed and leaned against the wall. “M.O.G., I don’t want to love her. Not anymore. She has spat on a man who sold everything he had to be able to marry her. I cannot forgive. No, I cannot.”
Even as he spoke, he knew that although he was bitter, what he wanted most of all was to have Ndali back—to spend those nights with her again, and to make love to her. He watched Jamike shake his head.
“At least, Jamike, I want to know what happened to her. I want to know at what time she decided to leave and get married. Do you see? I sold everything, I left for her sake, I want to know what she did for me, too. I want to know why, what sent out the wild mouse running into the street in broad daylight.”
“Yes, very wise, very wise,” Jamike muttered with the same intensity as my host’s.
“I want to know what happened to her,” he said again, almost offhandedly, as if those words had been painful to utter. “I wanted to write to her, but I could not find anyone who could help me post the letter in the prison.”
Chukwu, this was true. And it was this frustration that led me to try to get in touch with Ndali myself by performing the extraordinary act of nnukwu-ekili in which I attempted to appear in her dream to give her the information my host wanted her to have. Indeed, Egbunu, as I have already told you, her chi prevented this from happening. And, as I have already told you, many of the guards would not even respond to my host’s request for help in sending a letter. And one, who spoke English, told him that if it was a letter to Cyprus, then he could help him, but for Nigeria, he couldn’t because it would be expensive.
He looked upon his friend with terror in his eyes.
“I want to know what effort she made for me during those times.”
Jamike motioned to speak, but he continued.
“I want you to help me. And you must do this. See what you have caused me, see?” The other nodded with shame on his face. “So you must help me, Jamike. You should go to her husband as a preacher, and tell him you have seen a vision for him. Tell him as if you know much about his life. Say, for example, that you know his wife. Tell him you have seen in a vision that someone in her past, a man is after her, and will destroy the family if he does not pray.”
An Orchestra of Minorities Page 42