An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  So with this great fear my host needed help. He must at least try to know; he must try to find a way. A way? This was what he’d been trying to tell Jamike. And now, exhausted, he fell on his knee and held his friend who had returned to him from the mountain of prayers, filled with the spirit of the great deity worshipped in distant lands and also worshipped by the children of the pious fathers.

  “Jamike,” he said. “I know you are a man of God. I know God has changed your life, but I want you to do this one thing for me. I am sad, a very sad man still. I am still in a sloam. I will be saved only when I have my wife back.”

  Even though he knew at this point that she had been lost, even though he could tell that he was now on the brink of insanity, he was worried by the consternation he saw on Jamike’s face.

  “Yes,” he said vehemently, gnashing his teeth and gripping Jamike’s thin trousered leg even more firmly. “She is my wife, Jamike. She is mine. We were going to get married. I suffered for her.”

  His friend visibly seemed not to know what to say. He gazed on at my host, who loosened his grip. My host continued, “About a week ago, I met her at the front of her house, Jamike. I saw her, so close, and her son. Do you know what his name, the name of her son is? It is Chinonso.”

  “Your name?” Jamike said, and my most rational host became animated, for it seemed he’d struck something in the man with whom he sought help.

  “That is so, that’s the boy’s name.”

  “I can’t believe it, my brother.”

  “I think,” he said, but a deep chest-heaving inhalation silenced him, so that he began again: “I think there is a reason why and I want to know. Did she think I was dead? Is that why she gave the boy my name? Or is it because of something else?” He coughed and spat into a handkerchief. “The boy, I have seen him with my two wide-open eyes and my spirit tells me that he is my son.”

  “It does?”

  “That is so,” he said and snapped his fingers. “In fact, can you see the boy? He looks like he is at least five or six. When did she marry this man? You said not long ago?”

  “Ha, that is true. B-but when could that be?”

  “I do not know. I do not know. I do not know, oh. Only God knows. But, my brother, my heart is broken. A dead person is better than me right now. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I don’t know why my life is like this. But I want to know why her son has my name.”

  “What you say is true, my brother Solomon. Ndiichie say that a toad in full daylight does not run for nothing. Either something is chasing it, or it is chasing something.”

  True, Gaganaogwu: that was the wisdom of the erudite fathers!

  “I understand, Nwannem Solomon,” Jamike continued. “Ask me anything and I will do it. I want to help you.”

  At this my host looked up and in that moment saw that he was kneeling on the ground and gripping the thin legs of his friend, his poor friend who had been without food for forty days and forty nights. The thinness of his friend’s frame shocked him, and he withdrew his hands in a hurry and sat on the bed across from his friend. It was the word help, Egbunu, the promise of reprieve, hope, that did this to him. He sat up now, and shaking his head, said, “I want you to go back to her husband, and say to him, ‘God has sent me to you, Mr. Ogbonna, to warn you that they may be in danger.’”

  He waited for Jamike to speak, but his friend held his hand to his mouth, wiping the corners that opened into an O shape.

  “It will not be a sin,” he said. “All you are doing is trying to know if she is—whether she is safe or not. God will not forbid this. And, also, you are a pastor. So it is not a lie.”

  Jamike shook his head. Although it seemed that it took a great resolve for him to finally speak, he did not say, “But the Lord has not sent me to him. That is a lie,” as my host had feared he would say. Rather, in a voice that seemed to cleave through the air like a sickle, Jamike said that he would do it. Then, as if he thought my host had not heard him, he repeated it again with the blunt force of a persuasion.

  My host became calm. Then, lifted by a hand he could not see, he rose up.

  CHUKWU, the great fathers often say that it was to the hunter’s advantage that the antelope developed a bloated scrotum. For now the hunter with his poisoned arrow—even if he is an old man with a body full of old, weak bones—would be able to catch the antelope. Mr. Ogbonna, my host’s lover’s husband, the evil man who has taken advantage of his absence and stolen his bride, the man who had ruined him, the man for whose sake he now suffered, the man who may be claiming his child, had already developed a swollen scrotum. He had given himself to a masked priest, a spy working for the damaged kingdom of my host. And now, on the evening of the following day, when the horizon itself wore a painted mask of thin gray and the bled-out red of a desert ant, my host and his friend drove to the bank where Ndali’s husband worked.

  He waited near a mechanic’s workshop while Jamike went into the bank. The workshop was located under an old ugba tree, a tree that I immediately recognized. It had been there for many years. More than two hundred years before, as the heartless men of Arochukwu dragged my host, Yagazie, and other captured slaves along, their extremities bound with chains, a woman fell under the tree and fainted. The captors were forced to halt the march. Without a word, one of them, a stout man, signaled to the rest and said that the woman may be ill and might not make it to the seashore. So what to do? He cut her loose. But the woman did not move. They left her there, as if asleep, in a clearing with this single old tree.

  My host came out from his car and stood under the tree with the men from the workshop, his eyes drawn to the Biafran flag, which was bound to a piece of wood inside the building. The flag was almost blackened with soot, with a hole at one corner of it. The men offered him a seat on a dirty bench by a big tire, perhaps from a semi, with filing tools piled on it. But he stood by as the men worked, his arms folded over his chest, watching the street.

  He had just bought a cold Pure Water from a hawker and was drinking it when Jamike returned. Jamike came with a certain muteness, as if something had silenced him. “Let us go somewhere and talk,” he said to my host with haste in his voice, motioning towards the car.

  They drove to his apartment, and it was not until they had sat down, he on the bed and Jamike on his chair, that the conversation began.

  “My brother, when I went in there, it was like he was waiting for me. He jumped up and said, ‘Pastor, Pastor, I’m in trouble.’ I asked what was the matter and he said, ‘Pastor, my wife, my wife.’ He was in anguish. He said Ndali had seen the man whom she almost married, and that the man had found out that the boy is his son.”

  My host stood to his feet.

  “Yes, it is your son, my brother,” Jamike said, looking up at him.

  “How did that happen? How?”

  “The man said she was pregnant before you left Nigeria. After you left, and she did not hear from you, she tried to find you. She called CIU.”

  Ijango-ijango, you must wonder what this did to my host.

  “Say again. Isi gi ni?” was all he could say.

  “She called the university, she called Dehan, my brother Solomon.”

  He sat silent. I flashed in his mind two of the occasions when she had held on to him and asked him to ejaculate inside her. Then I flashed in his thought another one, that evening now long past, when he’d been so carried away by it all that he’d let himself ejaculate in her and pulled himself out only after much had gone into her. And he hadn’t told her, fearing she would scold him. Then she asked him to put on the light so she could clean herself with tissues. And he’d put it on, relieved that she had not asked him if he’d pulled out effectively. He put the light on and found, floating in the air, a white feather. Ndali had been mesmerized by it. She’d asked where it was from and how it had come to float in the air. And he said he did not know. That was simply one of the many instances I reminded him of. But on his own, my host recalled how, when he reached her on the ph
one just after he’d received the promise of hope from the nurse, she had said there was something she wanted to say but she would tell him at a later time. I heard her voice still as she said it to him on that phone many years ago: “It is big, big news, even me, I am surprised. But I’m very happy!”

  “She could no longer hear from you, she was worried, my brother. Child of God, she was with your child, and suddenly, for many days no word. Then for weeks, she waited, no word. She had the photocopy of your admission letter which you had given to her. She called the school and was told of what you had done.”

  He was starting to speak, but Jamike went on.

  “They told her you raped a white woman, and were going to spend twenty-six years in prison. In fact, they told her that the people were more lenient because in most Muslim countries, the penalty for rape was death.”

  “Who told her that?”

  “He did not tell me, but I think it was Dehan. He did not know the whole story; I don’t think he did. But she tried. She looked for you, she tried to help you. He said she did not believe you did it, and had reported to the Nigerian embassy in Turkey, but no one did anything. I remember this, my brother, when I called my friends whose house you went to in Girne, they told me the Nigeria embassy in Turkey called the university. So I believe she tried, my brother. I caused this, but she tried to do something.”

  “What else, what else happened?” my host asked, for the old rage had started to come upon him again.

  “Her family,” said his friend, who had begun to weep. “They were furious at it all. She was pregnant out of wedlock, then she was making international moves to rescue a man held as a criminal in another country. This was why they asked her to go to Lagos first. Ogbonna did not say this, my brother, but I believe she tried. Then she gave up.”

  Ijango-ijango, something moved in my host’s bowel, and he felt a warmth inside, as if something hot had penetrated it with slow ferality. She gave up. What does it mean? Akataka, it means that a person has tried something and then stopped. It may be that person has been trying to lift something, and then it occurs to such a one that they would never be able to lift it, so they resign and give up.

  My host sat there, stunned, as if the world in which he’d been born, lived, made love, slept, suffered, healed, and suffered again had been all along an illusion, the kind of sudden vision seen by the eyes of a blind old man: one moment radiant and aglow, and the next, a mirage that dissolves once it is seen.

  26

  Spiders in the House of Men

  CHUKWU, your ears have been patient. You have listened. You have heard me recount all these things before the divine council here. You have listened while every tree in Beigwe wore the enchanting tunes like shiny garments. Even as I speak the music is pouring out of everywhere in the luminous halls like sweat from the pores of the skin. And all around are guardian spirits who must step in and render their respective accounts. But now I must hasten to fill the chasm that has opened in my story. And it will not be long, Gaganaogwu, till I am done with it.

  To hasten, I must remind you of what the great fathers, wise in ways of war and battle, often say: that which must kill a man does not have to know his name. This was true of my host. For what he became, in the days and weeks after Jamike’s discoveries, is painful to describe. But I must tell you the consequences of this change, because the cause for which I plead requires it. Egbunu, my host became a djinn, a man-spirit, a vagabond, a descaled wanderer, a thing creeping in the bush, a self-exiled outcast, shorn from the world. He refused to listen to the counsel of his friend, who begged him not to get in the fight. He vowed that he would, in fact, fight. He vowed, vehemently, that he would get his son back. He insisted that it was the only thing he had left in the world worth fighting for. And nobody, not even I, his guardian spirit, could persuade him against his will.

  So he began again to lurk in the bush around her house, and when she drove home, he tried to accost her. She would not get out of her car but skirted around him and drove away. When this failed, he went to her pharmacy, shouting that he wanted his child. But she locked herself in the room and called on her neighbors from her locked window. Three men ran up into the pharmacy and dragged him out, punching him until his lips were swollen and the upper side of his left eye was split open.

  But it did not stop him, Egbunu. He went next to the school the boy attended and tried to take him by force. And it was here that I think the seed of that which brought me here in this most troubling of human nights was sown. For I have seen it many times, Oseburuwa. I have come to know that a man who returns to that place where his soul was once shattered will not lightly forgive those who had dragged him there. And where am I talking about? It is that place where a man’s existence stops, where he lives a still life like that statue of a man with a drum there at the center of the street or the figure of a child with the gaping mouth near the police station.

  Although the treatment by the guards this time was different, merely insults and slaps, he was tormented by the memory it unleashed in him. He wept in the cell. He cursed himself. He cursed the world. He cursed his misery. Then, Chukwu, he cursed her. And when he slept that night, a time in the past appeared, and he heard her voice say, “Nonso, you have destroyed yourself because of me!” and from the bare floor of the dungeon, he sat up frantically, as if those words had taken years to reach him and he’d just heard them now for the first time, four years after she’d said them.

  EZEUWA, Jamike came to bail him out the morning of the third day. “I have told you, let her alone,” Jamike said after they had left the police station. “You cannot force her to return to you. Get the past behind you and move on. Move to Aba, or Lagos. Start again. You will find a good woman. Look at me, all the years I spent in Cyprus, did I find anybody? I found Stella here. And now, she will become my wife.”

  Jamike spoke to him, a man who seemed to be without a mouth, until they arrived at his house, and all Jamike’s counsel came together with a combination of all the things he had seen and done. When the taxi pulled up in front of his apartment, he thanked his friend and asked to be alone.

  “No problem,” Jamike said. “I will come and see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  OBASIDINELU, the great fathers in their diplomatic sagacity say that whichever tune the flutist plays is what the dancer will dance to. It is madness to dance to one tune while listening to another. My host had been taught by life itself these hard truths. But I had counseled him, too, and so had Jamike, his friend, on whom he now relied. And it was with these words in his heart that he unlocked the gate and made his way to his apartment. He was greeted by his neighbor’s wife, who was picking beans on a tray, and he mumbled a response under his heavy breath. He unlocked the padlock and opened the door to his room. Once inside, he was hit by a claustrophobic odor. Looking in the direction from which the loud droning of flies came, he saw what it was: the moi-moi he’d bought and half eaten the day he was taken away. Worms had filled the polythene wrap, and a milky substance ran down from the rotten food onto the table.

  He took off his shirt and put the food in it, sending the flies into a frenzy. He wiped the putrefied substance off the table and took the shirt to the trash. Then he lay on his bed, his eyes closed, his hands on his chest, as he tried to think of nothing. But this, Egbunu, is almost impossible—for the mind of a man is a field in a wild forest on which something, no matter how small, must graze. What came he could not reject: his mother. He saw her, seated on the bench in the yard, pounding pepper or yam in the mortar, and he beside her, listening to her stories. He saw her, her head covered in a calico scarf.

  He dwelt in this place, this veranda between consciousness and unconsciousness, until night fell. Then he sat up and let the idea flower that he should leave Umuahia and everything in it behind. He had thought about this in the jail, even before Jamike said it again. And I had ensured that it persisted in his thoughts. The idea had come and gone out of his mind l
ike a restless visitor those three days he spent there. Now something in the vision of his mother settled it, even if he did not know what it was. Was it that after she died he himself told his father many times that he should forget her? He had several times fought the man, told him it was only a child who hung on to what had been lost. Especially that night when his father, drunk, had walked into his room. Earlier they had cut up a chicken to supply to a woman whose daughter was about his sister’s age and who was getting married. It may have been this that bothered the man. His father had staggered into my host’s room in the dead of the night, in tears, saying, “Okparam, I am a failure. A big failure. When your mother was in the labor room, I failed to protect her. I could not bring her back. Now your sister, I failed to protect her. What is my life now? Is it just a record of losses? Is my life now defined by what I have lost? Who have I wronged? Kedu ihe nmere?”

  In the past iterations of this remembering, he had thought of his father as weak, as someone who could not withstand hardship, who did not know how to turn his back. Now it struck him that he himself was clinging to what had been lost, what he could never again possess.

  He would leave. He would return to Aba, to his uncle, and leave it all behind. He could not change that which has remolded itself to resist change. His world—nay, his old world—had remolded itself and could not change. Only forward momentum was possible. Jamike had left the province of his shame, made peace with my host, and moved forward. And so, too, had Ndali. She had wiped clean the board of the inscriptions he’d made on her soul and inscribed new things. There was no longer a remembrance of things past.