“No Turkish,” he said, surprised at how husky his voice sounded even though he’d not been speaking much. With his eyes, he directed them to Tobe, who turned presently.
“You speak Turkish?” the girl said.
“Little Turkish.”
The girl laughed. She said something of which Tobe understood not a word.
“Okay, no Turkish. English? Ingilizce?” Tobe said.
“Oh, sorry, only my friend, English,” she said, turning to the other, who was hiding behind her.
“Can we, emm, sac neder mek ya?”
“Hair,” the other said.
“Evet!” the first girl said. “Can we hair?”
“Touch?” Tobe said.
“Evet! Yes, yes, touch. Heh. Can we touch your hair? It is very interesting for we.”
“You want to touch our hair?”
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
Tobe turned to him. It was clear that Tobe was willing to have these girls feel his hair. He was a dark-skinned man with hair that mimicked the scant vegetation of the desert, which the girls wanted to touch. It didn’t matter to Tobe, and my host thought it should not matter to him, either. It should not even matter that he still could not account for the one point five million naira which was what his house and the rest of the money for which he’d sold his poultry had become. It did not matter, either, that while trying to solve a problem, he’d pushed himself into an even greater quandary, one even bigger than what had come before. Now these two women, strangers, white-skinned, speaking in a language he could not understand and in a mangled, tattered version of the language of the White Man, wanted to touch his hair because they found it interesting. Agujiegbe, as Tobe bent his head so that the girls grazed their hands over his frizzy, uncombed hair, my host placed his, too, under their hands. And the white hands, thin fingers with painted nails of various colors, ran over the heads of the two children of the old fathers. Giggling, their eyes alight, they asked questions as they touched, and Tobe answered swiftly.
“Yes, the hair can be longer than this. If we don’t cut.”
“Why is it curly?”
“It is curly because we comb it, and we cream it, too,” Tobe said.
“Like Bob Marley?”
“Yes, our hair can become like Bob Marley. Dada. Rasta. If we don’t cut it,” Tobe said.
Now they turned to Hannah, the girl from the country of the fathers.
“The girl there, is that her hair?”
“No, it is an attachment. Brazilian hair,” Tobe said, and turned to Hannah.
“These Turka people sef, dem no sabi anything oh. Tell am say na so the hair be jare,” Hannah said.
“Is the hair of the black woman, eh, eh long?”
Tobe laughed. “Yes. It is long.”
“So why you put another hair?”
“Just cosmetic. Because they don’t want to plait their hair in African braids.”
“Okay, thank you. It is very interesting for we.”
ONWANAETIRIOHA, I was dwelling in a host who did not live beyond the age of thirteen when the first white men came to Ihembosi. The fathers laughed at them and would go about for days on end mocking the stupidity of the White Man. Ijango-ijango, I recall vividly—for my memory isn’t like that of man—that one of the reasons the fathers laughed and thought of these people as mad was because of the idea of “banking.” They had wondered how a man in his right senses could take his money and sometimes all his livelihood and deposit it with others. This was beyond folly, the wise fathers thought. But now the children of the fathers willingly do this. And in ways that still defy my understanding, when they go, they receive their money back and even sometimes more than they had put in!
This place where my host and his friend arrived was such a place—a bank. Just before they entered, he remembered his gosling; one day he returned from school and found it in its cage, its eyes closed, almost as if swollen. His father was traveling, and he was alone. At first he’d become very afraid, for rarely did he find the bird asleep like this, at least not before feeding on the bag of termites and grains he bought it. But just before he even tapped the cage, the bird rose, raised its head, and made a loud call. At the time, he’d kicked himself for becoming afraid too quickly.
So in serenity, he sat in this bank, which looked like the ones in Nigeria—lush and exquisitely decorated. He told himself to wait and see what they would find, to not be afraid too quickly. He waited with Tobe near an aquarium in which gold and yellow and pink fishes swam up and down over the imported pebbles and artificial reefs. When it was their turn, Tobe went up and spoke to the man at the counter. And in words my host would not have been able to find, Tobe explained the situation.
“So if I hear you clearly, you want to know if your friend has an account with us?” The man spoke fluently and in an accent similar to the one Ndali and her brother affected.
“Yes, sir. Also, we want you to check for Jamike Nwaorji, whom my friend gave the money to. See this receipt here? Jamike Nwaorji paid the school fees for him.”
“Sorry, man, but we can only check your friend’s account, not another person’s account. Can I have his passport?”
Tobe handed him my host’s passport. The man keyed in a few details, pausing once to talk and laugh with a woman who peered into his cubicle. Gaganaogwu, this woman looked exactly like Mary Buckless, the woman in the country of the brutal White Man who had desired my host, Yagazie, to lie with her two hundred and thirty-three years before. Mary Buckless’s family lived on a plot of land by the farm where Yagazie lived as slave to a master who owned other slaves. Her father had been killed a few years earlier, and she became curiously drawn to my host, Yagazie. She tried to lure him to bed for a long time, entreating him with gifts. But he feared going to bed with her, for death hung over his head if he did, in that land of the brutal White Man. Then one night, she came over the tired mountains, which during the day teemed with the strange, ghastly birds they called ravens. With the other four male captives pretending to be asleep, this strange white woman, unfazed by the crude smell of the lowly slave quarters and driven by a kind of lust I had never seen before, insisted she would kill herself if she did not have him. That night, the young man, birthed by the great fathers and ever dreaming of his homeland, slept with her and basked in the occult richness of her lust.
Now, many years later, it seemed I was seeing her two gray eyes staring at her colleague and biting into the apple, which afterwards bore the shape of her teeth.
“Sir, there is no such account with TC Ziraat,” the man said.
He handed back the passport and turned to the Mary Buckless look-alike to say something.
“But excuse me, can you check the other man?” Tobe said.
“No, sorry. We are a bank, not the police,” the man said with a growl. He tapped his head as the woman, biting into the apple again, vanished from sight. “Understand me? Here is a bank not a police station.”
As Tobe made to speak, the man turned away and followed after the woman.
My host and his friend walked out of the bank in silence and into the city center like men who had been served a grim notice about the new country they had come into. Like a desperate maiden, the new country threw itself up at him, flaunting its hollow enchantments. He watched her with the eyes of a noctambulist so that the tall buildings, the old trees, the pigeons that swarmed the streets, the sparkling glass structures all came to him like mirages, blurry images seen through wheezy rain. The people of the country watched them go by: the children pointing, the old men seated on chairs smoking, the women seeming indifferent. His companion, Tobe, was taken by the pigeons, which hopped about the squares. They walked past stores, banks, phone shops, pharmacies, ancient ruins, and old colonial buildings bearing flags similar to the ones in the buildings of the white people who came to the land of the great fathers. My host felt as if part of him had been pricked with a nail and he was bleeding, marking his trail as they went. In front
of almost every building, someone stood with a cigarette clasped between their fingers, whipping smoke in the air. They stopped somewhere, and Tobe ordered them food, wrapped in what he said was bread, and Coca-Colas. They were drenched in sweat, and he was hungry. He did not speak. Egbunu, silence is often a fortress into which a broken man retreats, for it is here that he communes with his mind, and his soul, and his chi.
Yet inwardly, he prayed; the voice in his head prayed that Jamike be found. He shifted his thoughts to Ndali. He should not have left her. Tobe and he had, by this time, arrived at a place where shoes were displayed on platters and tabletops, and his eyes caught the inscription on the glass door beside the store: INDIRIM. The thought of the man who now owned his compound crept into his mind again. He imagined the man and his family moving in, unloading their truck, dragging bags and furniture into the now empty place that was his house. He had gazed at his father’s room just before he’d left the house: empty, with a wall scarred about with marks and small chinks. The sun had stayed on the wall to the east, where the head of the bed had been, and looking through the louvers, he faced towards the well in the yard. That room where, once, he’d peeped at his parents making love when they forgot to lock the door was now so thoroughly empty that looking at it had given him an eerie sense similar to what he’d felt every time a parent died.
Gaganaogwu, the food came while he was still thinking about the last time he made love to Ndali, how, after he released her, the semen had seeped down both their legs and she’d begun to sob, saying how cruel he was to want to leave now—“now that you have become a part of me.” His mind switched to the food, but Chukwu, I describe what had happened afterwards, after that sexual encounter. I had not recollected it because I had not thought it important until now. You know that if we were to collect everything our hosts do in one testimony, it would never end. Hence a testifier must be selective and must render to you that which is relevant, that which must add flesh and bone and blood to the creature he is creating: the story of his host’s life. But now, at this point, I think I must recall it. That evening in the empty room his bedroom had become, he’d leaned his head against the wall, her tears running down his shoulder to his chest, and said it was for the best. “Mommy, believe in me. Believe, it will be good. I don’t want to lose you.” “But you don’t have to, Nonso. You don’t have to. What can they do to me? Proud people?” He’d held her, his heart beating, planted his mouth on hers and sucked at it as if it were a flute until she, shuddering, said nothing more.
Agujiegbe, the food he was now eating—which Tobe had called “kebab”—had been served by a slim, tall white man who, as he dropped the food on small trays, green peppers sticking out, said something that had “Okocha” in it. Tobe enthusiastically said he knew about Jay-Jay Okocha, the Nigerian footballer. My host, although silent, worried that this response would draw more men, all of whom looked like this man. They were white but appeared as if they’d been darkened by the raging sun, for it was hot here, hotter than he could ever remember in Umuahia. He avoided their gazes and ate the food, which, although it tasted good, was strange to him. For he thought that the people of this country did not cook most of their foods. It seemed, my host thought with a sense of mockery, that the people placed a premium on the need for things to be eaten in their raw states, once they had been washed. Onions? Yes, simply cut them up and add them to your food. Tomatoes? Certainly, just get them from your garden, dust off the earth around them, wash them in water, cut them up, and put them on the served plate of food. Salt? Same—even condiments and pepper. Cooking is a time-wasting experience, and time must be conserved for something else—smoking, sipping tea from minuscule cups, and watching football.
Although the men spoke with Tobe, my host merely gazed out the window at the traffic. Cars moved slowly, deliberately stopping for people to cross the road. No one honked. People walked fast, and almost every woman who passed seemed accompanied by a man who held her hand. His mind returned to Ndali. He had not called her since he left Lagos. And it was now two full days and half the third. He had, he reckoned painfully, broken the promise he made at the dawn of his temptation. He imagined where she must be now, what she may be doing, and saw her in the book room where he’d sat before his humiliation at the party. Then it struck him that here, Cyprus, overseas, was a new, sudden dream, the kind of ambition that a child would have—impulsive, instinctive, temporal, with little consideration. A child might, while walking with a parent, see a magician entertaining a crowd on a side street. He might see a man standing on a platform, striking his fist into the air, shouting bogus promises into a megaphone, and being cheered by an enthusiastic, banner-bearing crowd.
—Papa, who is that?
—He is a politician.
—What does he do?
—He is an ordinary man who wants to become the governor of Abia State.
—Papa, I want to be a politician in the future!
It occurred to him that what was happening to him was a mere temptation, that which must come to a man while in the pursuit of any good thing. And it has come to him, with the sole purpose of drawing him back. But he resolved that it would not succeed. He declared this to himself with such vehemence that it had an instant physical effect on him. Clumps of meat from the food he was eating spilled onto the table. “What time is it in Nigeria now?” he said to deflect attention from the embarrassment.
“Three fifteen here now,” Tobe said, his eyes on the wall clock behind the back of my host. “Then it must be five fifteen in Nigeria now. They are two hours ahead.”
Even Tobe must have been surprised, he thought. That’s all? The time in Nigeria? Tobe did not know that words had become painful now that he was trying to digest what indeed may have happened to him. It was still hard to believe Jamike had planned it all out. How possible was it? Had he not just been on his own when Elochukwu told him that he could find help in the hands of this man to whom he’d given all he had? How did Jamike devise everything so fast? How did Jamike know that he would sell his house and poultry? Why did he expect these things when he’d not wronged Jamike in any way—at least in no way that he could remember?
He’d hardly let this sink in when the voice in his head propped up an example of a wrong he’d done to Jamike. There he was, in 1992, in the classroom standing before desks and chairs, the unvarnished walls covered with old calendars. He was only ten, seated with Romulus and Chinwuba. They were discussing the football match of their street against another, when suddenly, Chinwuba stamped his feet, and clapped his hands and pointed out the window at the boy walking towards the building, holding something like a folded shirt, his bag hung on his back. “Nwaagbo, oh, Nwaagbo is coming!” He and the others joined in, calling the boy outside the window a girl while observing with scrutinous gaze the effeminate features of the fellow: the plump flesh at his hips, the big buttocks, his gapped teeth, his bloated chest like small breasts, and his fat body. The boy walked in moments later, and in unison, the three of them shouted, “Welcome, Nwaagbo!” He remembered now, the way the bespectacled boy had been stunned by their assault and walked with a lumbering gait and a pant in his breath to his seat, one of his hands on his face, over his spectacles, as if to hide his weak tears.
He gazed closely now at the image of young Jamike, weeping from being bullied by him, and he wondered if what Jamike had now done to him was a revenge for this time in the past. Was this a stone thrown from his past to crush him in the present?
“Solomon,” Tobe said suddenly.
“Er?”
“Did you say that a friend brought Jamike Nwaorji to you?”
Agbatta-Alumalu, for a reason that was not immediately evident, my host’s heart pounded because of this question. He bent over the table and said, “That is so, what happened?”
“Nothing, nothing, I just had an idea,” Tobe said. “Have you called your friend? Do you know if Jamike is in Nigeria? Does he know Jamike’s father’s house? Does…”
My
host was hit with this idea as if by lightning. He rushed his phone out of his pocket while Tobe was still speaking and began fumbling at it in a frenzy. Tobe paused, but seeing the effect of his wisdom, continued. “Yes, let’s call him, let’s find out if this Jamike is here. You are my brother, and I don’t know you, but we are not home. We are in foreign land. I can’t allow my brother to be stranded. Let us call him.”
“Thank you, Tobe. May almighty God bless you for me,” he said. “What did you say I need to do to call Nigeria number again?”
“Add zero zero and then plus, then two, three, four, remove the zero, and put the rest of the number.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Oh, sorry, sorry, add only plus. Zero zero is another you can try.”
“Okay.”
Chukwu, he called Elochukwu, and the latter was shocked to hear everything. Elochukwu was near a building running a generator, so my host could barely hear him. But from the little he could hear, Elochukwu assured him that, indeed, Jamike had returned overseas. He knew Jamike’s sister’s shop, where she sold schoolbags and sandals. He would go there and find out where Jamike was.
He dropped the phone afterwards, relieved somewhat but also surprised that it had not crossed his mind to call Elochukwu until Tobe mentioned it. He did not know in fullness how the mind of a man in despair works. He did not know that it was sometimes better for such a man not to think. For the mind of a man in despair could produce a fruit which, although it may appear shiny on the surface, is filled to bursting with worms. This is because such a mind, wounded beyond reckoning, often begins to dwell mostly in the aftermath.
Egbunu, the aftermath—it is a place of little comfort. In the aftermath there is little movement, but much rumination. The event, having been done and ended, is now lacking in ability and agency. What the mind of such a man strikes leaves no dent on the skin of time. It is in this place that the mind of the man in despair dwells for much of the time, unable to move forward.
An Orchestra of Minorities Page 22
