An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  OBASIDINELU, as days passed and Ndali continued to defy her parents, refusing to even talk with them, my host’s fear grew. But, afraid he would bother her if he spoke up, he kept silent, shielding her from the turmoil in his head. But because fear does not leave until it is cast out, it curled around the trembling branches of his heart like an old serpent. It was there when he took her to the bus station the morning she was to go to Lagos for a conference. As the bus was about to leave, he embraced her, and putting his forehead against hers, he said, “I hope I don’t disappear before you return, Mommy.”

  “What is that, Obim?”

  “Your people, hope they don’t kidnap me before you return.”

  “Come-on, why will you think like that? How can you even think they will do such a thing, eh? O gini di? They are not devils.”

  Her anger at this suggestion flung him down. It made him look inward and question if he had been overestimating the situation, wonder if the long night of fear had been nothing but a skeletal dance of worry across the corridor of serenity. “I was actually joking,” he said. “Actually.”

  “Okay, but I don’t like that kind of joke, eh. They not devils. Nobody will do anything to you, oh?”

  “That is so, Mommy.”

  He tried not to think of the things that made him fear. Instead, he weeded the small farm and cleaned his room. Then he treated one of the roosters who had injured its foot. He’d found it the previous evening on the other side of the road. It had jumped the high fence of the yard, fallen into the bush behind, and stepped on what he believed may have been a broken bottle. It had reminded him of the gosling, how he’d once left it loose and it had made its way out of the house and sat on the fence. He ran out after it and found it on the fence gazing about with its head turning in agitation. With his heart pounding, fearing that it would fly away and never return, he beseeched it tearfully. It was morning, and his father was brushing his teeth (not with a chewing stick, as the old fathers did, but with a brush) when he heard his son’s panicked shout. The man rushed out with the white froth dripping down his beard and his creamed brush in his hand to find his son anxious. He gazed up to the fence and the boy and shook his head. “Nothing you can do, son,” he said. “It is afraid. If you go close, it will run.” I, watching as well, had the same fears as his father, and I put the thought in his head, too. So he stopped crying, and in a voice as soft as a whisper, he began calling to the gosling, “Please, please, don’t ever leave me, don’t ever leave me, I rescued you, I’m your falconer.” And, miraculously—or perhaps because the bird had seen something else across the fence, perhaps the neighbor’s dog—the bird bristled and crouched into a spread of wings. Then it returned through a rushed updraft back to the yard, back to him.

  He had hardly set the injured cock back into the coop when Elochukwu arrived. He’d texted Elochukwu early that morning, and Elochukwu had responded that getting an education was the best idea. “If you go back and finish your studies, then they will surely accept you,” Elochukwu had said. Elochukwu dismounted from his motorcycle and stood with my host on the front porch overlooking the farm. My host gave Elochukwu an account of the party and how he’d been humiliated by Ndali’s family. And when he was done, Elochukwu shook his head and said, “It is well, my brother.” And my host, looking up at his friend, nodded in acceptance. Egbunu, this expression, very common amongst the children of the great fathers and spoken mostly in the language of the White Man, has often baffled me. A man in a situation in which his livelihood is threatened has just rendered an account of his travails, and his friend—one he sees as a comforter—responds simply, “It is well.” That expression instantly yields silence between them. For it is a peculiar phrase, all-encompassing in scope. A mother whose child has just died, when asked how she is doing, replies simply, “It is well.” It-is-well emerges from the intercourse between fear and curiosity. It designates a transient state in which, although the unfortunate knows he is experiencing something unpleasant, he hopes it will soon be mended. Most people in the country of the children of the fathers are always in this state. Are you hoping to recover from an illness? It is well. Has something been stolen from you? It is well! And when a man steps out of this condition of it-is-well onto a new path towards a more satisfying state, he immediately finds himself in another situation of it-is-well.

  Elochukwu shook his head again, repeated the phrase, tapped my host on the shoulder, gave him a bag of books, and said, “I am in a hurry, we are going to a rally at GRA.” Before Elochukwu left, my host complained that he would not be able to get a degree for at least five years, and that was if there were no strikes, which could delay it and cause him to not have a degree for probably even seven years. “Start ti go du first,” Elochukwu said, mounting his motorcycle. “Once e start tiri, ha ga hun na idi serious.” Elochukwu, who had himself nearly completed a degree in chemistry and was not one to dwell on words, finished the topic with, “And if it doesn’t work, just forget the girl. There is nothing the eye sees that can cause it to shed blood in place of tears.”

  Not long after his friend left, rain began. It rained through that morning into the evening. As it poured down on Umuahia, unremitting in volume and unpredictable in temperament, he lay in the sitting room, studying one of the university matriculation exam preparatory books he’d received from Elochukwu.

  Now, he read for a long time by the dim light from the cloud-washed sky that came through the parted curtains until his eyes began to close. He was almost asleep, anchored like a wind-borne leaf in the threshold between sleep and awakening, when he heard a knock on his front door. At first, he’d mistaken the knock as the rain pattering on the door, but then he heard a familiar voice say in the most forceful of tones:

  “Will you open this door, now?”

  Then the banging began again. He jumped up, and through the windows, he saw Chuka and two men, dressed in raincoats, standing on his porch.

  Gaganaogwu, the effect of the sight of these men on him could only be described as hypnotic. In all the years I had been with him, I had never seen anything close to this happen to him. It seemed strange that only some time ago he had made a joke about something, a wild, far-fetched joke. And in daylight, his joke had materialized, and here was her brother at his doorstep with a gang of men? He let them in, steeped in terror, a pounding in his chest.

  “Chuka—” he started to say as the men came in.

  “Shut up!” shouted one of the men, the brawny one who’d led him to serve at the gate during the party. Even now, the man had come prepared—with that same whip.

  “I can’t shut up. No.” He stepped back as the men advanced and moved behind the biggest sofa. “I can’t shut up because this is my house.”

  The man with the whip lunged forward, but Chuka raised his hand and said, “No! I have said this before, no touching anybody.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the man said, stepping back behind Chuka, who now walked into the center of the room.

  He watched Chuka unhood his raincoat, shaking his head as he did. Then Chuka swirled around to inspect the room, then sat down with his raincoat on the couch, still dripping water. The men stood beside the couch, gazing at my host with a frown.

  “I have come to ask you to send my sister back,” Chuka said in the same calm voice he’d spoken in before, and in the language of the White Man. “We are not interested in making trouble with you. Not at all. My parents, her parents, are worried.” Chuka dropped his head to the floor as if in contemplation, and in the brief silence that ensued, my host heard the soft patter of rain dripping from Chuka’s raincoat to the carpet.

  “Once she is back from Lagos, we ask you to make sure she is back within two days,” Chuka said with his eyes to the floor. “Within two days. Two days.”

  They left the way they had come, slamming the door behind them. Although it was still daylight, the rain clouds had dimmed the horizon so much that they’d driven with their headlights on. He watched their car retreat from his f
arm path in reverse gear, like two disks of yellow light receding into the distance. When they were gone, he sank to his knees, and without any reason to which his mind could cling, he broke into a prolonged sob.

  EGBUNU, if an arrow is pointed at the chest of a defenseless man, that man must do as he is told. To do any different in the face of indefensible danger is folly. The valiant fathers say that it is from the house of a coward that we point to the ruins of the house of a brave man. Thus the defenseless man must speak, with a soft tongue, effectual words to the one who bears the arrows: “Do you want me to go yonder?” And if the man who endangers him answers that he should, he must do as he is told until he is cleared from the present danger. After Ndali’s brother left, my host resolved to do all he had been told to do. He would persuade her to return home, and while she was gone, he would find a solution to his inadequacy, the main source of all the problems. He would go back to school and get an education and a job that would make him suitable for her. Chukwu, I have come to understand that, when a man is disgraced, his actions might be shaped by shame and his will by desperation. What once means much to such a man might begin to mean little. He could, for instance, stand in his yard and regard his poultry, this thing he had built for himself, these eight coops of nearly seventy birds, and see how lowly a business it was. The sight of feathers, which he’d normally sniff and twist in admiration, now may look like litter to him. What is he doing now, one may ask? Well, he is responding, Chukwu. His mind is preparing itself for change. It has weighed everything on a scale and determined that a return to loneliness, especially by losing Ndali, would be worse than anything else. She was the glittering, priceless article in a store full of precious artifacts. The poultry, the birds, these weighed less. They could be gotten rid of if need be in order to get her. After all, he’d seen a man sell his land to send his child to school abroad. What has such a man done? He has decided that it would be better in the future to have a child who can be a doctor than to keep the land. Such a man has reasoned, perhaps, that with a rich son, the land can be recovered, or such a son can even buy him a bigger piece of land.

  So by the time he’d finished these unbroken ruminations, by morning two days after Chuka came to his house, he rose and, even without feeding his flock and harvesting fresh eggs, went out and bought forms for the university matriculation exam from the Union Bank branch down the street. He waited in a long line in the old and crowded bank, a line that stretched to the entrance, and he had to plead for those in the line to make room so he could squeeze into the building. He left the bank tired and soaked in sweat.

  Ijango-ijango, it is imperative that I tell you, in detail, about this walk back home, for it was during this walk that the black seeds of his undoing came to root in his life. When he got back on the road home, he walked for a while by a school bus, which had slowed down in the clotted traffic. He gazed at the uniformed children inside it, who were poised in different shades of slumber. A few had their heads resting against the seats, some had their heads tilted sideways against the headrests, some had bowed their heads into their hands, and others were resting their heads against the windows. One or two of them seemed awake: an albino girl with sand-colored hair and a sore on her purplish lower lip, gazing blankly at him, and a boy with a clean-shaven head. He lumbered on, carrying the file containing the forms under his armpit, past sheds and tables from which articles were sold, the sellers calling to him to buy their wares. One of them, a woman who sold used clothes piled on a jute sack, called to him, “Fine man, come buy fine shirt, fine jeans. Come see ya size.” He had just passed the woman’s shed when he felt something palpitating in his trouser pocket. He reached for his phone and saw that Elochukwu was calling.

  “Er, Elo, Elo—”

  “Kai, Nwanne, I’ve been calling you!” Elochukwu said, partly in the language of the great fathers and partly in the White Man’s language.

  “What, I was at the bank, so I silence my phone.”

  “Okay, no problem. Where are you now, where are you? We are at your house, oh. Me and Jamike, Jamike Nwaorji.”

  “Er, Chukwu! E si gini? Jamike? No wonder you are speaking English.”

  He heard a voice in the background and Elochukwu ask the person in the broken language of the White Man if he wanted to talk to him.

  “Bobo Solo!” the voice said into the phone.

  “Jisos! Ja-mi-ke!”

  “Please, come, come, we are waiting for you oh. Come come.”

  “I am almost there,” he said. “I am coming, oh.”

  He put the phone back in his pocket and began walking fast towards his house, his mind racing. He had not seen or heard anything about this man in a long time. And now Jamike, his old classmate from Ibeku High School, was at his house. He crossed the street and passed between the poor houses of the lower street, where a gulley had carved up the earth and dug up the yellow soil and swallowed the loam in many broken places. He ran, the file in his hand, until he reached his compound. At the entrance, he raised his head and saw Elochukwu and their old classmate standing on the porch. By the porch, leaning against its kickstand, was Elochukwu’s Yamaha motorcycle. He walked towards them on the graveled path flanked on both sides by the fields of the small farm. As he drew closer to the men, he stifled the urge to shout. At first, he did not recognize this person with a broad, mustachioed face. But then he found himself suddenly absolutely beyond repose, shouting, “Jamike Nwaorji!” The man, in a red cap with a white bull’s head embossed on it, and a white shirt and jeans, drew close and rammed his hand into his raised hand.

  “I can’t believe it, mehn!” the man said.

  He recognized at once a tincture of a foreign accent in the man’s voice, the way people who’d lived outside the world of the Black Man spoke, the way his lover and members of her family sounded.

  “Elo here tell me that you are living in overseas,” he said in the language of the White Man, as they did in their school days, when it was a punishable offense to speak an “African language.” So with the exception of Elochukwu, the language of the White Man was how he communicated with friends from school, even though nearly every one of them spoke the tongue of the august fathers.

  “Na so, oh, my brother,” this man, Jamike, said. “I have been living abroad for many, many years, mehn.”

  “Er, let me go now, Nonso.” It was Elochukwu who had spoken. He tipped his black hat, which he’d begun wearing since he joined MASSOB, as he shook my host’s hand. “I was just waiting for you to come because when I saw him, I remembered your problem. Jamike can help you.”

  “Er, you are going?”

  “Yes, I gat do something for my Popsy.”

  He watched Jamike, who had a smell that must have been from an expensive perfume, hug Elochukwu, who then hopped on his motorcycle, pumped the pedals twice, and a plume of smoke gushed up into the air. “I go call una,” he said, and rode away.

  “Bye-bye,” he called after Elochukwu, then turned to the man before him.

  “Na wa oh, Jamike himself!”

  “Yes, oh, Bobo Solo!” Jamike said.

  They shook hands again.

  “Let us go inside naw. Come, come.”

  My host led the visitor inside the house. As they entered, he had a flash of how, two days before, Chuka had sat on the sofa where Jamike now sat, his raincoat giving him the appearance of a movie villain and his presence bearing as much threat to my host as this sudden recollection of it.

  “Mehn, you get very big compound, oh. Only you live here?” Jamike said.

  My host smiled. He sat down to face the visitor after parting the curtains to let in light to the room.

  “Yes, my parents passed away, and you know that my sister, the small one that time?”

  “Er, er—”

  “Nkiru, she marry. So only me I am here now. And my girlfriend also. Ehen, where are you living now?”

  Jamike smiled. “Cyprus—you know the place?”

  “No,” he said.


  “I know that you won’t. It is an island in Europe. A very small country. Very small, but very beautiful; very beautiful, mehn.”

  He nodded, “That is so, my brother.”

  “Oh-ho. You remember our classmate Jonathan Obiora? He used to live here,” Jamike said, pointing at an old house in the distance. He removed his cap and tapped it on his lap. “Bobo, do you want us to go drink beer and talk small?”

  “Yes, yes, my brother,” he said.

  Egbunu, when two people meet at a place such as this, and both of them have crawled out of each other’s past, they often suspend the present as they try to drag all that has happened in the intervening period into the moment. This is because they are bound somewhat by where they had both been in that time long ago or by the same uniform they wore. It would occur to both of them that it is sometimes hard to tell how much time has passed until something or someone from that point in the past reappears, bearing the wear and tear of long travel. For my host, Jamike noted that he was much taller but still lanky. My host on the other hand was astonished at how Jamike’s once small body and clean-shaven head had now given way to a towering figure only half an inch shorter than himself and a beard that cascaded down both sides of his head. After they have noted these differences, they will proceed to talk about where they have gone since the last time they met, what road they have taken, and how they have gotten to the point at which they find each other now. And sometimes these two may build new relationships and become friends. I have seen it many times.

  So they left his compound and walked to the Pepper Soup place on the adjacent street and sat on one of the rows of benches on the earthen floor. The sun had increased in intensity and they were sweating when they entered the restaurant. They sat under one of the ceiling fans, beside a stereo from which a low tune slowly rose. He could barely wait to sit down, for during the short walk, Jamike had painted a portrait of the place where he lived, Cyprus, as a place where everything was in order. Electricity was constant; food was cheap; hospitals were plentiful and free, if you were a student; and jobs, “like water.” A student could own a Jeep or an E-class Mercedes-Benz. In fact, Jamike said that he’d returned to Nigeria with a sports car which he had now given to his parents. On their way to the restaurant, he’d observed that Jamike walked with a certain ceremonial gait, employing the full weight of his body as he went along, as if his movement were a performance whose audience was everything within the ambit—the parked truck, the old pub, the cashew tree, the mechanic’s workshop, the mechanic working beneath a pickup truck on the other side of the road, even the vacant sky. Jamike spoke with the same cadence, with a light swagger in his voice, so that every word he said struck deep into my host.