An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  AGUJIEGBE, I have spoken already about the poverty of anticipation and the emptiness of hope for the future. Now I would like to ask: what is a person’s tomorrow? Is it not to be likened to an endangered animal who, having escaped from a pursuer, arrives at the mouth of a cave whose depth or length it does not know and within which it can see nothing? It does not know whether the ground is filled with thorns. It doesn’t know, cannot see, if a more venomous beast is in the cave. Yet it must enter into it; it has no choice. For to not enter is to cease to exist, and for a man to not enter through the door of tomorrow is death. The possible result of entering into the unknown of tomorrow? Numerous possibilities, Chukwu, too numerous to count! A certain man may wake up joyful because he has been told the day before that he will be promoted at work that morning. He embraces his wife and leaves for work. He gets in his car and does not see the schoolboy run into the road in fear. In a second, in the batting of an eyelid, the man has killed a promising child! The world heaps a great burden on him at once. And this burden is not an ordinary one, for it is something he cannot unburden himself of. It will remain with him for the rest of his life. I have seen it many times. But is not this, too, the tomorrow the man has entered?

  My host woke up in the new country the next morning after he arrived, knowing only that things were different here, unaware of what awaited him in this new day. He knew that there had been uninterrupted electricity, and he’d plugged in his phone so it could charge all night. And throughout the night, he did not hear a cock crow, even though he’d been awake for most of it. It seemed that in the country from which he’d come, there was noise, constant grinding of some machines, constant shouts of children playing, weeping, the honking of cars and motorcycles, acclamations, church drums and singing, muezzins calling from mosques’ megaphones, loud music from some party in full swing—and the source of the constant animated sound is boundless, innumerable. It seemed as if the world of the country abhorred calm. But here, there was calm. Even silence. It was as though everywhere, in every house, at every moment, funerals were going on, the kind in which one could only utter a muffled gasp. Despite this quiet, he slept very little, so little that even now, at daybreak, he still felt a need for sleep. During the night, his mind had become a carnival fair in which wanted and unwanted thoughts danced. And as the carnival went on, he could not close his eyes.

  When he walked out of the room, the day offered him a black man, naked to the waist, who stood washing his hands in the kitchen sink.

  “My name is Tobe. I am from Enugu. Computer Engineering—doctorate,” the man said, and moved away from the glare of the sun that was shining through the naked windows.

  “Chinonso Solomon Olisa. Business Administration,” he said.

  He shook hands with the man.

  “I saw when Atif was bringing you in last night but I didn’t want to disturb you. I was at the other apartment with some of the old students. Apartment five.” The man pointed to a building through the window. It had yellow-colored walls with red brick columns on the sides and wide balconies in front of the four stories. On the red iron balcony of the one he pointed to, a black man with enormous hair and a big comb tucked into it stood leaning against the wall, smoking. “There are three Nigerians there, and all of them came last semester. They are the old students.”

  My host, stirring, looked in the direction of the place, for a glimmer of hope had sparked within him.

  “Do you know their names, all their names?” he said.

  “Yes, what happened?”

  “Can you—”

  “One is—that one is Benji. Benjamin. The other is Dimeji: Dee. He came here before many of them. The third one is John. He is Igbo, too.”

  “No one called Jamike. Jamike Nwaorji?”

  “Ah, no, no Jamike,” the man said. “What kind of name is that, sef?”

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly, beaten back from the door of the apartment where, in that brief moment, his heart had traveled. Yet he kept his eyes on the place and saw that the man, Benji, had gone back in and another man and a black woman were exiting the door.

  “Can you come introduce me to them? I want to see if any of them know Jamike.”

  “What happened? What do you need? You can tell me.”

  He gazed at this shirtless hirsute man whose eyes lay deep in his head behind his large-rimmed glasses trying to decide whether or not to be discreet. But the voice in his head, even before I could stir, nudged him to tell his story; perhaps this man could help him. And with so much care, he told the man the story up to that point. At first he spoke in the language of the White Man, but midway through the story, he asked the man if he spoke Igbo, which the latter affirmed, as if annoyed by the question. Now, given a softer bed to sit on, he spoke in excruciating detail, and by the time he was done, the man told him he was certain he’d been duped. “I am certain,” Tobe said, and then began describing many scams he’d heard about, comparing the similarities.

  “Wait, and when you called him, er, you discovered the number was fake?” Tobe said presently.

  “That is so.”

  “And he did not come to the airport, I am sure?”

  “It is so, my brother.”

  “So you see what I tell you? That he must be fake? But look, let’s go first, let’s try to find him. It is possible he is not what we think. Maybe he drank and forgot to come to the airport—people party a lot on this island! You know this can happen. Let us go buy a phone card so you can call him until he picks up. Let us go.”

  The new country presented itself to him outside the apartment with a jolt. The ground was paved with what looked like bricks flattened into the earth. There were flowers in vases, and a host of flowers was placed outside, on the balconies of the houses. The buildings appeared different from the ones in Nigeria, even in Abuja. There seemed to be some finesse to their crafting that he’d never seen before. A building made almost entirely of glass, long and rectangular, caught his attention in the distance. “The English building,” Tobe said. “That is where all of us will take our Turkish Language lessons.” While he was still speaking, two white boys, dragging bags, one of them smoking, called at them.

  “My friend! Arkadas.”

  “Arkadas. How are you?” Tobe said, then drew near and shook hands with the men.

  “No, only English,” the white man said. “No Turkish.”

  “Okay, English, English—English,” Tobe said in an affected accent, his voice altered to mimic the language of these people. As my host watched them, he wondered if this was how one lived here. Did one put on a new voice every time one spoke with one of these people? When Tobe rejoined him, I thought he would ask Tobe questions, to try to find answers to the questions now crowding his mind but he did not. Agujiegbe, this was a strange trait in this host of mine, something I had seen in few others in my many cycles on the earth.

  On the way to the place where they would buy phone cards, Tobe said school was to begin on Monday, and some students were starting to arrive. He said that the campus would be filled by Sunday night, in four days.

  They arrived at a building with two glass doors and an assortment of things inside, what he thought was some kind of expanded supermarket. As they entered it, Tobe turned to him. “This is Lemar, where we will buy the SIM card. You will use it to call Jamike again.”

  Ijango-ijango, Tobe spoke with so much authority over my host, as though he were a child who had been handed over to Tobe for guidance. I saw this man as the hand of providence sent to help my host in this time of distress. For this was the way of universe: when a man has reached the edge of his peace, the universe lends a hand, usually in the form of another person. This is why the enlightened fathers often say that a person can become a chi to another. Tobe, now his human chi, took him where the telephone cards were, and Tobe himself tore open the wrapping of the SIM pack and gazed keenly at it, as if to ensure he had picked out the good apple from a basket before handing it back to the toddler in
his care with the words, “Okay, it is good, it is good. Now scratch the Turksim like MTN or Glo scratch card.”

  My host scratched the card outside the supermarket, near an open patch of land covered with wild, clay-colored earth that had caused Tobe to repeat the word desert. He keyed in Jamike’s phone number. As it connected, he closed his eyes until the line trailed into the fast-clicking language, after which came the wounding end statement: The number you have called does not exist. Please check the number and try again. When he brought the phone down from his ear, he glanced up at Tobe, who’d leaned close and picked up the strange voice in his own ear. Now my host nodded.

  He let Tobe decide the next steps, and Tobe said they should head to the “international office.”

  —What is there?

  —A woman they call Dehan.

  —What would she do?

  —She might help us find Jamike.

  —How would she do it? His number does not exist?

  —Perhaps she knows him. She is the international officer in charge of all the foreign students. If he was a student here, she must know him.

  —Okay, let us go, then.

  CHUKWU, with my host growing in desperation and myself increasingly convinced that what he feared had happened to him, he followed Tobe to the office. They went between long trails of beautifully cultivated flowers, and the vegetation of the strange new land opened to his eyes while his heart wept secretly. Here and there young white people swept by, many of them female, but he did not so much as look at them. In the state into which he’d been thrown, Ndali hovered like an unusual shadow, one that shone in the horizons of his darkened mind like something made of steel. At the office, which was located on the ground floor of a three-story structure with the words ADMINISTRATIVE BUILDING etched on it, Dehan, the international officer, received them with a disarming smile. Her voice sounded like that of a singer whose name he could not immediately recall. In her presence, Tobe looked flustered as he returned to the forced accent. They sat down on the chairs across from her. Dehan swung in her chair while he spoke and then began picking among the papers on her desk. When she found the one she was looking for, she said that indeed my host’s admission had been procured by someone on the island. But she had only corresponded with this person by e-mail. She wrote down the e-mail, the same one my host had: Jamike200@yahoo.com. Dehan brought out a file containing his documents and set them on the table. Tobe, seeming certain that he would see things, began looking through the papers and counted the new revelations as he found them:

  The school fees he thought had been paid had been only partly paid. Only one semester, not two. One thousand, five hundred euros, not three thousand. In regard to the accommodation he thought he had paid, as Atif rightly observed, nothing was paid. Nothing. “Maintenance”—which Jamike had said the school required you to deposit in a verified bank account to ensure that you have enough to live on while at school, so you do not need to work illegally—that, too, was nonexistent.

  It seemed that this woman, Dehan, was puzzled by the term maintenance. “I’ve never heard it before,” she said, gazing with perplexity at them. “Not in this school. He lied to you, Solomon. Really. He lied to you. I’m very sorry for this.”

  Egbunu, he took the news that after all the school did not have any money in an account for him with a kind of relief, a mysterious kind. They left the office afterwards carrying Dehan’s comforting words, “Don’t worry,” like a banner of peace. Such words, said to a man in dire need, often soothe him—even if for a moment. Such a person would thank the person who had given him the assurance, as my host and his friend did, and then they would leave with a countenance that communicates to the person that they have been comforted by their words. So my host carried with him the file containing the original copy of his admission letter and unconditional admission letters as well as the receipt for his school fees, which was the only document that bore Jamike’s name and the date: 6 August 2007.

  As they stood resting under the pavilion of a building Tobe pointed out to him as housing his department, the Ceviz Uraz Business Admin Building, he remembered the day before that day—the fifth of August. He could not tell why he remembered this, as he did not always think in dates as the White Man had framed them but in days and periods, as the old fathers did. Yet somehow, that date had been burned into his mind as if by a blacksmith’s rod. It was the day he received the full payment for his compound: one million, two hundred thousand naira. The man to whom he sold it had brought it in a black nylon bag. He and Elochukwu, wide-eyed, had counted it, his hands shaking, his voice cracking from the enormity of what he had just done. He remembered, too, that it was just after Elochukwu and the man left that Jamike called to tell him he had paid his school fees and that he should send the money and the accommodation fees as soon as possible.

  Oseburuwa, as his guardian spirit, one who watches over him without cease, I’m at once thicketed in regrets whenever I think about his dealings with this man and all that it caused him. I am even more disturbed that I did not suspect anything in the least. In fact, if there had been a shadow of misgiving about Jamike, it was immediately dissolved by his enormous generous act. He—and I, too—thought Jamike was not serious when he promised to pay the school fees with his own money so my host didn’t have to rush the sale of the house and poultry and could wait until he found a good bargain. So it was with this unbelief that he drove to the cyber cafe on Jos Street and found the document Jamike had said he needed for the visa, the “unconditional admission letter,” sent to him through this medium that could best be described as an arrangement of calligraphed words on a screen. The letter, he saw, had come from the same woman they had just met, Dehan.

  He recalled now, as they walked past a group of white female students playing on a field and a group of white men smoking, how, after the cafe attendant printed the letter for him, he’d gone straight to the bank with the money and requested that the bank send the equivalent of six thousand euros to Jamike Nwaorji—Jamike Nwaorji in Cyprus. He’d waited, and when the deal was completed, he returned home with the receipt showing that the bank had converted his naira into euros at the rate of 127 naira each. He’d gazed at the figure the bank woman had underlined as the total in her slanting handwriting: 901,700, and what was left of the sum for which he’d sold the compound, 198,300. He recalled how, at the time, as he drove home from the bank, his mind had been split between gratitude to Jamike on the one hand, anxiety about parting from Ndali on the other hand, and the disquiet that came from the feeling that he may have betrayed his parents.

  Although deep within, my host was now cautious and suspicious of the motives of others, he saw in Tobe a genuine desire to help him. So again, Chukwu, he sought to reward this man by letting him lead the way. A man like Tobe is often paid for his pains by the gratification that comes from being in charge, leading his one-man—grievously wounded, disarmed, dispirited—infantry on. I have seen it many times.

  Now, Tobe said they should go to TC Ziraat Bankasi, and he knew where it was—at the city center of Lefkosa, beside the old mosque.

  “What will we do there?” my host said.

  “We will ask about the money.”

  “Which money?”

  “The maintenance money Jamike, that stupid thief, was supposed to deposit in an account in your name.”

  “Okay, then we should go. Thank you, my brother.”

  So they got on the bus that was to take them to the city center, a bus like the one that had come to the airport the previous day to pick up students while he waited for Jamike. Seated there were several Turkish or Turkish-Cypriot people, as he came to believe most of the people here were. A woman sat with a pink plastic bag on her thighs beside another, a yellow-haired girl in sunglasses to whom, on a different day, he would have given a sustained gaze. Two men in short pants, T-shirts, and bathroom slippers stood behind the driver’s seat, chatting with him. A black man and woman sat behind Tobe and him. Tobe knew them; the
y had come on the same plane as he did. The man, who was named Bode, and the woman, Hannah, argued that Lagos was ten times better than Lefkosa. Tobe, a loud talker, engaged them. Tobe disagreed, contending that if nothing else North Cyprus had constant electricity and good roads. Even their currency was better.

  “How much is a dollar to their money? One point two TL to a dollar. Our own? One twenty! Can you imagine? One hundred and twenty-something naira! Common dollar, oh. And euro nko, it is one seventy! And you say it is better?”

  “But you say that their money be the same as ours?” the other man said. “They just devalue am ni. If you look well, sef, you go see say if you change hundred naira, or wetin you go buy here for one tele in Naija, na hundred naira. Our money just get more zeros. Na why Turka people still dey call one thousand one million.”

  “Yes, it is the same. I agree. Ghana did the same—”

  “Ehen!”

  “They canceled zeros and rewrote their currency,” Tobe continued.

  Chukwu, my host listened with half his mind, determined to say nothing. He reckoned that only those for whom all was well could engage in such trivial chatter. For him, he was far removed. He now inhabited a new world into which he’d reclined, gaunt and constricted, like an insect in a wet log. So he let his eyes roam the bus, perching like a weak fly on everything from the images on the sides of the bus to its roof to the foreign writings along its door. It was thus he who first noticed the two Turkish girls who’d boarded the bus at the last stop, outside what looked like a car-selling park identified by the bold inscription LEVANT OTTO. He’d noticed, too, that the girls were no doubt talking about his compatriots and him because they were looking in their direction, along with others in the bus who knew their language. Then one of them waved at him, and the other pushed herself towards him. My host cursed inwardly, for he did not want to speak to anyone; he did not want to be stirred out of the wet log. But he knew it was too late. The women had assumed he would speak with them, and had come towards him, and stood in the aisle between the empty seats. One of them, waving her painted fingers, said something to him in Turkish.