An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  He looked at his friend, whose head was resting on his folded hands, eyes fixed on him.

  “You see? Tell the man you want to know if she has ever told him about a man in her past before.”

  “What if she has told her husband about the letter and that you are here?” Jamike, who seemed to have been rendered subservient by guilt, said.

  “Yes? But he will not know, he cannot know you are coming from me. Be vague about me, say you see destruction, that the Lord showed you mourning and weeping caused by this man.”

  He stopped now in the darkening room to replay the words he’d said in his mind, and when he had done it, the enormity of it struck him. Egbunu, please listen to these words of my host, for they are crucial to my testimony this night and a solid proof that he has not done harm to her knowingly.

  “I am not saying I will hurt her, no. I love her too much to do that, even though I am angry, very angry with her. It is a strange, uncanny mix of feelings. Deep love that is beyond compare. But no, I will kill any man, her husband even, who lays a hand on her.”

  Jamike nodded, with strains of discomfort evident in his countenance, moved in his seat, and said, “I will do it, if you say I should. I will, my brother, even though this is sinful. You cannot say the Lord has said something when he hasn’t.” Jamike shook his head. “I cannot do such a thing, my friend, by lying. I will tell him that I want to pray for him, a special prayer when I go to the mountain, and I want to know everything about his relationship with his wife so I can pray against anything in their past trying to destroy their future.”

  He did not know how to respond, so he kept silent, watching the man before him.

  “I want you to be well again, my brother Solomon. This is why I’m what I have become. I caused all this for you, and I must fix it again. If this is all that will do it, I will go. As I said, someone who works near the pharmacy says her husband works at the Afribank at Okpara Square. I will go there and ask to see him—Ogbonna Enoka.”

  My host nodded, his heart resting on the floor again.

  Later, as he drove Jamike home, his spirit calmed, and it seemed that the anticipation of her story had healed him. He slept well that night and went early to his store the following day. So many people had come looking for him, the neighbors said. He contacted some of the customers and spent a good part of the morning transporting bags of millet to them. As the sun rose after the morning’s slight shower, he returned to his store with a pickup from the major broiler feed distributor, AGBAM FEEDS AND SONS. As they offloaded the contents into his store, Jamike called. My host answered the phone with shaking hands.

  “I spoke with him, my brother. I don’t know, but I think I was able to convince him. I went there with Sister Stella, with my ministry badge clipped to the pocket of my coat.”

  “I understand.”

  “Yes, I will like to come talk to you about it, so that I can also greet you, since I will not see you until after we return from the mountain.”

  “Yes, yes, you must come.”

  “In the evening,” Jamike said.

  “Why not now?”

  “I will come, my brother. I will come in the evening.”

  OSEBURUWA, when a man has sent for a healer, if such a man is sick, and he is told that the healer is coming, he begins to count the steps of the healer’s trek towards him. I have spoken about what anticipation does to a man, and I have seen it many times. My host could not wait for Jamike to arrive that evening.

  “When I got to his office,” Jamike began, “I was afraid. I had also lied to my sister in Christ, Stella. I was sinning.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand.”

  “But it is for you, my brother Solomon. So I went in. The man is a good-looking man. He is tall and has Jheri-curled hair. Ogbonna Ephraim Enoka. Ephraim is his baptismal name. He said his grandfather was brother to Father Tansi. So with Sister Stella sitting there, we prayed for him. Then I asked if he believed in prophesies. He said yes, why not? ‘Am I not a Christian? Did the Bible not say shame on those who say they have faith but deny the power thereof?’ I corrected him: ‘It is in the book of Timothy. Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.’

  “He said, ‘Oho, that is so,’ in Igbo, then turned back to English. ‘I believe in the power of God.’

  “‘I am happy, sir. I will tell you, then. I was in the spirit praying as I passed this bank yesterday, and the Lord said, there is a man named Ogbonna here whose wife is in danger, in real danger. An enemy has appeared at their door and is knocking.’

  “‘God said the name of the man is Ogbonna?’ he asked.

  “‘Yes, yes. Father only gave me your first name.’

  “‘Okay.’

  “‘Is there another Ogbonna here?’

  “‘No, it is only me I know.’

  “‘And my spirit confirms it right now as we sit here. I can hear the Ancient of Days, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, saying this is the man. An old flame has come to your wife and can destroy your marriage.’

  “‘God forbid in Jesus’s name!’ the man said. He snapped his fingers over his head. ‘God forbid bad thing.’

  “‘Yes, brother. So can you tell me, is there any man your wife has offended? Anyone?’

  “He seemed confused by this. I could see it on his face. He thought for a moment, and then said, ‘No, nobody.’

  “‘Any man chasing her?’

  “‘No, I don’t think so. She is a married woman with a child.’

  “At this point, my brother, I worried that this man did not know anything about you,” Jamike said. Having tried to distinguish his words from the words of Ndali’s husband, his transition back to the language of the fathers was jagged.

  “I asked him again. ‘Mr. Ogbonna, is there any man whom she’d told you about?’ and he looked at me, his face changing, and said, ‘Yes, because of God, only because of God I’m saying, because it is a secret.’ ‘Don’t worry, tell it to the servant of God,’ I said. ‘She almost married a man who left her and went overseas,’ he said. ‘That man was the second person who had done this kind of thing to her.’ ‘So this man disappeared?’ I asked. ‘Yes, no one heard from him again. That is all I know.’ I wanted to speak, but Sister Stella said, ‘So she never saw him again?’ ‘That is all I know, Man of God,’ said Ogbonna.

  “My brother, at this point, I was afraid if I pressed him more, he might become suspicious. So I said let us pray; that I will go to the mountain and pray, but that he should speak to his wife to see if there was a man after her.”

  “Aye. Oh-oh, Jamike. This is insufficient,” my host said.

  “But—”

  “What if he asks her while you are away? And what if…”

  He broke off his speech because one of the neighbors drove in on his motorcycle, vrooming as he parked it. The headlights of the motorcycle sent two beams of light through the curtains and illuminated the room, splashing their shadows on the wall as though calligraphed in thick black ink. When the engine went off, and the lights with it, he continued, “What will happen if he asks her while you are away?”

  “I doubt she will tell him. I think, and see, that she doesn’t want him to know much.” Jamike slapped his leg to nip a mosquito. “I doubt he would.”

  “Yes,” he said again. “But what if she decides to tell him after a man of God has spoken to him about it?”

  Jamike considered it briefly. “Then I will find out. I will find out when I return. Isn’t what you want just the information about what she did about your going away? You will not do anything with it, except just know.”

  He agreed.

  “Then I will. Don’t worry, my brother.”

  When they went out, so that Jamike could return to church first before going home, it had become dark. They passed groups of schoolchildren trundling back home from school, crossing the street in cliques. A little boy stooped by the public gutter, vomiting into it, coughing, attended by his friends, who kept sayi
ng sorry. An adult stopped there and asked one of them to give the sick boy water. My host and his friend said sorry to the boy. Then Jamike placed his hand on the boy’s head and began speaking in tongues—an act which I have come to understand is a strange aspect of the religion of the White Man and is like an incantation, afa, in odinala. When Jamike was done with it, he switched back to the language of the White Man. “Thank You, Lord, Jehovah-jireh, the mighty healer, Jehovah-shammah, for healing this little boy.”

  OKAAOME, he returned to his apartment afterwards with the information he’d received from Ndali through Jamike. He was steeped in thought as he warmed the pot of jollof rice he’d made that morning. Insects gathered around the kerosene lantern as the pot hissed slowly to life. He was getting the pot off the stove when electricity was restored, and then, almost abruptly, it went off again. He returned to his room with the food and ate slowly, wondering why she had told her husband that he simply vanished and that she had not heard anything from him. How was it that he just vanished? How? Did Dimeji not take his message to her? He had asked that he tell her, that he contact her, just before he was sentenced. He had also asked Tobe to do so. Did she never hear what happened to him? It was, he resolved, improbable. There was a great chance she had heard and knew but was probably hiding the information from her husband. It puzzled him greatly. Why was she hiding it from him?

  In such times, a man must be careful, for in a desperate state, his mind comes up with a lot of answers. There is a part of man that can be irrational, a part which exists exclusively in order to make him comfortable. Thus, in a situation such as this, it will reach for whatever it can, the lowest branch of the tree, and pick it up. What a chi must do is to try to pick the most reasonable suggestion and allow that to dominate others. So from the multitude of possibilities that came to him that evening, I picked that it could be that Ndali simply had never received a letter from him before the one he just sent to her. But what he settled on was different—that she had told her husband he vanished to deceive him, to make her husband think she didn’t want him anymore, when in fact she still loved him.

  24

  Castaway

  AGBATTA-ALUMALU, nothing cripples a human being more than unrequited love. Although Ndali once told him that she would not have drowned anyway, his act of generosity in trying to get her off the bridge was what first won her heart. And now her heart had been taken away from him by a man who worked in a bank and knew nothing of the sacrifices he had made for her. This was beyond what my host could bear. He was defeated in the days following Jamike’s revelation. With Jamike gone in the following week, he became caught in the obsession of pursuing her. He fought hard against it at first by going to work and trying to focus on his store, but every day after closing, he would drive near the pharmacy and park on the side of the road. And from this vantage point, with his face concealed behind dark glasses, he would gaze at the pharmacy from the distance for a while.

  Sometimes, the July rain would blur his vision, and he would sit there unable to see. Then, after he’d watched and thought about her so much that his heart would feel as heavy as a thing infused with lead, he would catch sight of her either walking out of the pharmacy or driving away in her blue vehicle. Catching sight of her was always enough for him to return home with a measure of relief. She was always in her white coverall, with whatever she wore under it showing. Most days, she wore a shirt and a skirt. Sometimes an ankara print blouse or an up-and-down. On those days when he saw her, he would return home, telling himself how beautiful she was, how her hair looked, or the color of her fingernails. Once, she had painted them blue, and he could see them as she passed his car up close without noticing that the man in the car with the hat and sunglasses was my host. He stood thinking about how he’d watch her paint her nails with cortex on the bench in the yard because she did not want him to choke on the strong scent of the nail polish. Once, she’d rubbed her fingernail on one of the white chickens, and the paint had stayed on its feather, a red splotch that could not be cleaned. It’d made her laugh so hard she’d cried.

  He’d return home and long for contact with her. He’d think of all possibilities. He began to notice that the more he saw her, the more he raised the memories of their intimacy and the more his desire deepened. What would he do? She would disgrace him again if he came up to her and she would probably hate him. She had read his letter, seen all he’d suffered, but showed no remorse. At the entrance of this kind of thought, his mood would change from desire to anger, then resentment. He would clench his teeth, stamp his feet, and quiver with rage. He’d sleep in this mood and wake up the following day to the same routine: go to his store with the consolation that he’d devise a way to see her in the evening, then feel a flurry of conflicting emotions afterwards.

  On one of those days, he followed her as she drove away, curious to see what she would do, for a thought had flung into his mind that she might have a lover. She drove to a school, a private primary school, where, at the gate, her son was waiting. He looked on from the side street, in his car, parked two hundred meters away. He noticed the boy’s ears; how, by complexion, he resembled Ndali. He followed them on to their house, a duplex that stood grandly on Factory Road. It was fenced and had a gate as tall as the fence itself. He stopped by the house and surveyed its surrounding land, overgrown with bushes. On the other side of the unpaved road, a provisions store sat in front of what looked like a small clinic. A few meters from there was a shack under which a woman fried plantains, yams, and akara every evening. He returned to his apartment not knowing what to do with his new knowledge.

  At the end of that first week without Jamike, on the Friday, he could not go to work. The bitterness of the previous night had lasted into the following day, and he’d found himself weeping for the pain her rejection had caused him. Egbunu, what I was witnessing in my host was peculiar and startling. It was the known alchemy of love—it is a thing that becomes alive and thriving in a state of decay. He swore to himself that he would confront her if she stepped out of the pharmacy that day. So that day, he decided to get out of his car and sit with the woman who operated the GSM phone stall across the road. As he fumbled with one of the service phones, the woman asked if he was the man who was always sitting in a parked car and looking at the pharmacy. My host was startled.

  “Have you been seeing me?”

  The woman laughed and clapped her hands in jest. “Of course. You come every day, every day. How won’t we see you? Maybe even the people in the pharmacy have seen you.”

  He sat still. He turned to the street, to a cattle herder ferrying his cattle and slapping them with his stick.

  “You have not answered my question,” the woman said again. “Why are you always doing that?”

  My host, astonished, knew he would no longer continue this venture.

  “But I am always wearing sunglass, how did you know me?” he said.

  “Because I saw you come out of that same car just now.”

  “Okay, I was married to the pharmacist before,” he said. Then he told a lie about how her present husband took her away by casting a juju spell on her. The gullible girl felt sorry for him and, while trying to comfort him, brushed her hand against his. He’d felt nothing until then, but when her body touched his, it struck him that he was attracted to her. In a hurry to take advantage of the situation and drive my host away from his continuous, destructive obsession with Ndali, I flashed it in his mind that he could have this woman, and that she would love him always. As these thoughts floated about in his head, he observed her closely. Her features were common; she was cheaply dressed, and her skin was rough and coated with the kind of darkness that comes from privation. But on this day, she was dressed better than she usually was: in a good blouse and short skirt, her hair permed.

  He sat there while she attended to those who wanted to make calls or buy phone credits, watching this woman, aghast at the sudden transference of his wanton desire. He developed an erection.

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sp; “I think I should take you to my house today, so you can come to know my place and we can be good friends,” he said.

  The woman smiled and did not look at him. She fumbled with the cards, stacking them together with rubber bands.

  “You don’t even know me,” she said.

  “You don’t want to come, eh? Okay, what is your name?”

  “I did not say that,” she said. “My name is Chidinma.”

  “I’m Nonso. So will you come, Chidinma?”

  “Okay, after I close, then.”

  Akataka, he stayed there until the woman closed the shop, then he drove her to his home, stopping to buy two bottles of Malta Guinness on the way. I did not flee at first because I wanted to see things go through, to see where it would end. Even though I had helped engineer it, I wanted to try to understand this new phenomenon: a man is wasting away only moments before in great desire for one woman, then suddenly he is burning for another with the same intensity. This was a mystifying thing. Aside from the woman’s question about whether he would continue to look for his wife or love her instead—to which he said, “I will love you instead”—there was no resistance. He tore at her hungrily, almost ripping her clothes. He plunged his hands into her brassiere and drank her breast with mad haste. Many years had passed since he’d seen a naked woman, let alone touched one, so that when he came to the place between her legs, he was dazed.

  It was at this point, certain the unexpected would unfold, that I left his body. But so monstrous was the clamor of Benmuo this night that I was forced back into my host at once, as if chased by some deadly beast. Thus was I forced to behold the mystifying alchemy of sexual intercourse. I came back when the woman’s entreaties that he should use a condom, in the heat of the moment, became insistent. But he paid no heed. “But don’t release inside. Don’t release inside, oh,” she’d begged as he thrust violently, his bed creaking. I witnessed him throw a shout and then relieve himself on the floor.