An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  Ijango-ijango, at times like these my host’s mind always failed to provide an adequate answer to the questions. Should he argue with this man? Certainly not: he would get his head split open. Run? Certainly not. He possibly could not run faster than this individual. Even so, if he ran he faced the possibility of going back to the party to face more humiliation. The best thing to do was yield to the orders of this strange person who, without warning, had assumed lordship over him. So in submission, he took off his gown and new plain trousers and put on the regalia of the gateman.

  Satisfied, the brawny man said, “Follow me.” But what he meant was “Walk in front of me.” The horsewhip the man took with him as they walked—what was it for? Could it come down on his back anytime? The fear of the possibility of this was overwhelming. The man and he walked all the way back the way he and the cameraman had taken earlier, only now he was dressed differently—stripped of the regalia of the dignified, clothed in the garments of the lowly, and reduced to his true status. The phrase where you belong came into his head with such force that he was convinced someone had whispered it into his ear right then. As they passed, he saw that the food was being dished into plastic bags and that the van was driving away. He heard Ndali’s father’s voice, unmistakable over the speakers, as they passed behind the awnings, hidden behind the backs of people who stood on the edge of the pavilions, until they reached the gate.

  “Join the gatemen,” the brawny man with the whip said, pointing to the gate. “This is your job.”

  AGUJIEGBE, it was here that Ndali would find him later, drenched in sweat, directing the surfeit of cars that poured in and out of the compound, finding parking spaces, settling disputes, and helping unload and take into the house some of the gifts some of the guests had brought (a bag of rice, tubers of yams, cases of expensive wines, a television in a box… ), and once, when the ribbons fastened around the statue of the lion snapped, he and one of his colleagues adorned the statue with new ribbons.

  When she saw him, he had no words for her—for such is the kind of thing that gouges words from within a man, and leaves him empty. Thus he could not even answer the questions, “Who did this to you? Where is your dress? Where—what?” He had merely said, in a voice that seemed as if it had grown old in the time he’d served at the gate, “Please take me home, abeg you in the name of the almighty God.” The party was still in full swing and Oliver De Coque was making unintelligible sounds akin to those made by termites crawling on dead wood and the crowd was braying like senseless lambs. All of it, all of them were blown away as his van lurched out of the gate. Memories completely random, moments past—as if fanned by some orchestrated wind—blew into his mind and replaced them. He paid no heed to Ndali who wept all the way as he drove slowly through the noisy streets of Umuahia. But even in his tombed silence, he was well aware, as I could see, that she, like him, had been gravely wounded.

  CHUKWU, what had been done to him was so painful that he could not shake a single detail of it out of his mind. Memories of the events persisted, like insects around a glob of sugarcane, crawling into every crevice of his mind, filling him with their black fragrance. And Ndali had cried much of the night until he made love to her and she slouched into slumber. Now the night had deepened, and he lay on the bed beside her. By the dim light of the kerosene lantern, he gazed into her face and saw that even in sleep, he could see signs of anger and sympathy—things that were often difficult to find on her face. His father had once told him that a person’s true countenance at a given moment is that which remains on their face while in an unconscious state.

  Earlier, while he worked at the gate during the party, he’d thought of how to repay her brother for what he had done to him. But he realized he could not have. What could he have done? Hit him? How can one hit the brother of the woman one loves so much? It occurred to him, again, that things could only go one way anytime he met Chuka. He can only be hit; he cannot hit back. Like craven blacksmiths, Ndali’s family had forged a weapon out of his desire, from his heart, and against this weapon he could not contend.

  Yet, Egbunu, he knew that the only possible solution—that he should leave her and end it all—lay in the center of the room of his thoughts, gazing at him with its dim face and cruel eyes. But he kept looking past it as if it were not there. And it persisted. He began to ponder instead the itinerant fear that now returned to him—the fear that in the end, Ndali would be frustrated and leave him. Ndali herself had raised this question earlier, just before she fell asleep.

  “Nonso, I’m afraid,” she’d said suddenly.

  “Why, Mommy?”

  “I’m afraid that they will succeed in the end and make you leave me. You will, Nonso?”

  “No,” he’d said, much louder than he intended to, vehemently. “I will not leave you. Never.”

  “I just hope you will not leave me because of them, because I will not let anyone choose who to marry for me. I’m not a child.”

  He had said nothing else but instead recalled the moment when, while directing traffic at the gate, the man who’d sat beside him under the party tents had seen him on the way out and been bewildered. The man wound down the tinted glass of his Mercedes-Benz and cocked his head towards the front seat. “No be you sidon there with me before?” He found no words. “You are—what? A gateman?” He shook his head, but the man laughed and said something he could not make out, then wound up his window again and drove out.

  “Are you sure, Nonso?” Ndali said, her voice tense.

  “That is so, Mommy. They won’t. They cannot,” he said, and his heart palpitated at the violence with which he’d spoken. He did not know, Egbunu, that fate was a strange language which the life of a man and his chi are never able to learn. He raised his eyes to her again and saw a tear sliding down her face. “Nobody can make me leave you,” he said again. “Nobody.”

  8

  The Helper

  OSEBURUWA, I stand here testifying to you, knowing full well that you understand the ways of mankind, your creation, more than they can know themselves. You know, then, that the character of human shame is chameleonic. It appears at first, disguised, as if a benevolent spirit, by allowing reprieve whenever the humiliated is taken away from the presence of those to whom or by whom he has been disgraced—those from whom he must hide his face. The disgraced can forget his shame until he comes across those privy to it. Only then does shame strip itself of its dubious benevolence like a bodice and present itself in all its truthful colors: as malevolent. Yes, my host could hide from everyone else, from all of the people of Umuahia, and even from the whole world, and in doing so, all that had happened to him could amount to nothing. A pauper can disguise himself as a king in a place where his true identity is not known, and he would be received as such. Thus my host’s peculiar dilemma was that Ndali had witnessed his humiliation. She’d seen him in the cloth of the night watchman, drenched in sweat, directing traffic. This was the blow from whose impact he could not recover. A man such as he, who knows his limitations, who is aware of his own capabilities—such a man is easily broken. For pride erects a wall around a man’s inner self while shame pierces that wall and strikes the inner self in the heart.

  Still, I have lived with mankind long enough to know that when a man begins to break, he tries to do something to salvage his situation as quickly as possible. It is why ndiichie, in their ancient wisdom, say that it is best to search for the black goat in daylight, before night falls and it becomes difficult to find it. So even before he vowed to Ndali that he would never leave her, he’d already begun to think of a solution. But he could not come up with anything he thought worthwhile, and for days he thrashed about like an injured worm in the mud of despair. On the fourth day of the following week, he called his uncle for advice, but the line was so bad my host could barely hear him. It was with much effort that he understood—in between the older man’s stammering and the fragile connection—that it was best he leave Ndali. “You sti-still a boy,” his uncle had sa
id again and again. “You still a bo-oy. J-j-jus twenty-six, er. Jo-jus-t forget about this wo-wo-wo-man n-ow. Th-ere are many many out there. Ma-ny many. Yo-yo-u see me? You ca-ca-n’t convince them to a-cce-pt you.”

  Ijango-ijango, I was happy that his uncle had given him this advice. I had thought of the same thing after his treatment at Ndali’s family house. The wise fathers often say that when one is insulted, it extends to his chi. I, too, had been humiliated by Ndali’s family. Yet I knew it was not of her making and hoped that she would find a way to resolve the crisis. So I did not reiterate his uncle’s position. Also, it occurred to me that my host was one of those on earth with the gift of luck, one who would always get whatever he wanted. Before he was born, while he was yet in Beigwe in the form of his onyeuwa and we were traveling together to begin the fusion of flesh and spirit to form his human component (an account which I will render in detail in the course of my testimony), we made the customary journey to the great garden of Chiokike. We walked the gleaming paths between the luminous trees across from which plumes of emerald clouds hung in exquisite arrangement. Between them flew the yellow birds of Benmuo, emerging from the open tunnel of Ezinmuo, as big as full-grown men moving through the serrated tracks. A lump of herbage crowned the sides of the road leading up to the gate out into uwa. There was the great garden where the onyeuwas often go to find a gift which had returned there from unfortunate people who had either died at childbirth or infancy or had been miscarried. Even though we arrived to find the garden crowded, with hundreds of chis and their potential hosts combing through the plants and tangled copse, my host found a small bone. Some of the spirits immediately gathered and revealed that it was from some beast that dwells primarily in the great forest of Benmuo, where Amandioha himself lived in the form of a white ram. They told us that the finding of the bone meant that my host would always get whatever he wanted out of life if he persevered. This they said was because the beast whose bone he’d found, an animal exclusive to Beigwe, is never lacking in food as long as it lives in the forest.

  Gaganaogwu, I can name numerous instantiations of this gift of luck at work in my host’s life, but I do not want to stray too much from the testimony. At the time, I had confidence that the white bone would bring him some help. I was thus delighted when he decided it was best he try to win the support of her family. Worried that her continued stay away from her family on account of him was only going to escalate the crisis, he begged her to return.

  “You don’t get it, Nonso, you don’t. You think they just don’t like you? Eh? Okay, can you tell me why? Can you give me one reason why they don’t like you? Can you tell me why they treated you like this last Sunday? Or have you forgotten what they did to you? It was only six days ago. Have you forgotten, Nonso?”

  He did not speak.

  “No answer? Can you tell me why?”

  “Because I am poor,” he said.

  “Yes, but not that only. Daddy can give you money. They can open a big business for you, or even help expand the poultry business. No, not only that.”

  He had not thought about these possibilities, Egbunu. So, riveted by her words, he looked up at her as she spoke.

  “It is not that you are poor. No. It is because you don’t have a big degree. You see, Nonso, you see? They don’t think in those their big heads that sometimes people are orphaned. And Nigeria is hard! How many people who don’t have any parents can go to university? Even—the public schools? Where will you find money to bribe even if your JAMB score is three hundred? Er, tell me, how will you pay school fees, even?”

  He gazed at her, his tongue numb.

  “Yet they say it, all the time: ‘Ndali, you are marrying an illiterate’; ‘Ndali, you are embarrassing us’; ‘Ndali, please, I hope you are not thinking of marrying that riffraff.’ It is, just, very bad. This thing they are doing, it is very bad.”

  Afterwards, when she had retreated into his old room to study, he sat, folded into himself like a wet cocoyam leaf, worried that she had said a lot of things he hadn’t thought about before. Why hadn’t he considered that it might be possible to return to school, and that that could be the solution? He beat himself, Chukwu, for what he hadn’t thought of. He did not realize that he had grown up in adversity and had become resigned to it. It had made him live a life unlike that of most of his age-mates, a reclusive, provincial life, which developed in its adherents a natural proclivity to be patient in adversity, unhurrying, and measured. If he was not stirred, he would not act. His achievements, if there were any, were given to a slow and sluggish emanation, and his dreams were long-limbed. This was why his uncle had to arouse in him the desire for a woman and now Ndali had inspired him to return to school. And he began to see this sluggishness as a weakness. Later, after she had gone to sleep, he sat alone in the living room, deep in thought. He could register at ABSU and get a degree. Or perhaps he could do a part-time study. Now that his discovery of his love for birds had swallowed the initial dream to go to university, he could even study agriculture.

  These ideas came to him with so much power that joy welled within him. They meant that there was genuine hope—that there was a path to him getting married to Ndali. He walked into the kitchen and fetched water from a blue keg, and his thoughts were suspended by the recollection that they were running out of drinking water. The keg was the only one of the three he had with drinking water still left in it. The family who owned two big tanks and sold water in the street had been gone for two weeks, and many of the people in the street either drove to get water from elsewhere or drank rainwater, which they collected in bowls or basins or drums while it rained. The water he scooped into his mouth had a bad taste, but he drank one more cup of it.

  As he sat down in the living room, the thought of leaving Ndali reminded him of his grandmother, Nne Agbaso, how she would sit on the old chair that used to be just at the end of the living room—where now, piled up against the wall, were video and audiocassettes, gathering dust—and tell him stories. He imagined he could see her now, swallowing and batting her eyelids as she spoke, as if words were bitter pills she ingested when she talked. It was a habit she’d developed in old age, the only time he ever knew her. After she fell and broke her hip and could no longer continue to farm or even walk without a stick, she came from the village to live with them. During that period, she told him the same story again and again, and yet whenever he sat by her, she’d say, “Have I told you about your great ancestors Omenkara and Nkpotu?” he would say either a yes or a no. But even when he said yes, she’d merely sigh, then blink and tell him how Omenkara had refused a white man’s attempt to take his wife and was hanged in the village square by the district commissioner. (Chukwu, I bore witness to this cruel event and how it impacted the people at the time.)

  He reckoned now that the story may have been his grandmother telling him again and again that he should not capitulate in the face of any situation. He thought now that he could choose to cower in the face of mere oppression and lose Ndali. No, he said aloud, struck by the thought of another man’s mouth on her breasts. He trembled from the mere approach of such an idea towards the corridor of his mind. He’d dropped out after failing his first secondary school certificate exams, passing only three inessential subjects—history, Christian religious knowledge, and agriculture. No mathematics, no English. His university matriculation exams had been worse. He took them around the time when his father’s condition was deteriorating, leaving him to tend to the increasing demands of the poultry business alone. Agujiegbe, you know that all I’ve described here is the education of the White Man’s civilization. Like most people of his generation, he knew nothing of the education of his people, the Igbo and of the civilization of the erudite fathers.

  So after those strings of failures, he told his father he would not try anymore. He could sustain himself and future family through the poultry business and small farm and, if possible, expand it or branch out into a retail business. But his father had insisted he return to sc
hool. “Nigeria is becoming tougher and tougher by the day,” his father would say, scrunching his mouth, as he’d begun doing in the early beginning of his last days. “Soon, someone who has a bachelor’s degree would be useless, because everyone would have it. So what would you do without even a bachelor’s? Farmers, shoemakers, fishermen, carpenters—everybody, I tell you, will need it. That is what Nigeria is becoming, I tell you.”

  It was talks like this, as well as my frequent accentuation by flashes of thoughts that he should listen to his father—which I often buttressed with the proverb: what an old man sees squatting a child cannot see even from a treetop—that pushed him to take the external GCE. He studied and attended extra lessons at the building on Cameroon Street, where four young university students taught exam-preparatory sessions. And in the weeks of the exam, the extra-lesson center turned into a miracle center. One after the other, a few days before the subject exams, the teachers began to come to the class with leaked question papers. When the exams ended and the results came months later, he passed six of the eight subjects, even getting an A in biology, the one he’d been least prepared for. One of the papers, economics, was canceled for most of the centers in Abia because of what the examination body said was “widespread malpractice.” It was true. A copy of the exam paper had been in his hand for nearly three weeks before the actual exam day, and if the results had been released, he would have got an A in it, too. He would have returned to school at this time if they did not wake one morning that same month to find that his sister had vanished, plunging his father into a debilitating depression. All the peace that had returned after his father finished mourning his wife for many years vanished at once. Grief returned like an army of old ants crawling into familiar holes in the soft earth of his father’s life, and months later, he was dead. With his father’s body, every thought of school was buried.