An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  Chukwu, at this point, Jamike shook his head gravely. I have cycled the habitation of man for so long like a falcon, but I have never seen anything like this before: a man stripped naked of all dignity and forced to gaze at his unpleasant self in the dark mirror of his own past malevolence.

  Turkish people don’t hear English. They don’t hear at all. If you speak even “come” they don’t hear. Only few of them hear. So the taxi man who took me did not hear English. When we got to the school I was very afraid. I prayed to God, let it not be true, let it not be true. So but they cannot see my name. I find out only one semester school fees is what Jamike paid for me, even though I gave him equivalent of almost 5,000 euros for both two semester school fees and accommodation. The money I gave him to open a bank account for me also. He ran away with. So out of 7,100 euro, he use only 1,500 for me. He ran away with all the rest. Everything mommy. All of the money they paid me for the house and the fowls.

  “Read, I say, read or I will cut your throat!” my host said, brandishing the knife.

  “Can I stop, please, my brother?”

  “If you don’t read on now I will smash your head!” He threw the knife away across the room and with all his might struck Jamike on the cheek. The man fell off the stool to the ground with a scream, his hands on his mouth.

  He’d struck Jamike with so much force that his knuckles hurt. Now he held that hand in the other and began to blow at it to ease the pain. He could tell that his hand had broken something in Jamike’s face, and even though he did not know what it was, it gave him relief.

  “I swear to God who made me,” he said between deep pants, his chest heaving. “I will kill you if you don’t finish reading this thing. I swear to God who made me. You must know everything that happened.”

  Indeed, Agujiegbe, the murderous rage had returned, and my host—in one flash—had become unrecognizable even to me, his faithful chi. He paced from one end of the room to the other while the man on the floor lay still, his eyes closed, blood running down the side of his mouth. The sun had dropped and sunk away from the habitation of living men. Light from its retreating shadow held everything in a dim receptacle.

  He stopped before the single wall mirror in the room and saw himself in it. He saw how far fury could take him. He saw, as if portrayed in the mirror, the potential of a wounded man to do damage if he did not bring himself under control. It was this that calmed him so that he returned to the chair.

  EBUBEDIKE, it is not for nothing that the world is as old as it is. Perhaps every day, in every nation, amongst every people, through time, people are coming face-to-face with their tormentors. What a man carves with his hands, that shall he bear on his head. Again, as the great fathers say, the head that stirs the wasp’s nest bears its sting. Guardian spirits of mankind, we must all take this to heart. Children of men must listen to us, to this, to this story, to the stories of their neighbors, and take notice: there is a comeuppance for everything, every action, every careless word, every unfair transaction, every injustice. For every wrong, there will be reckoning.

  Man, do you take your neighbor’s property and say, “Oh, he does not know?” Well, beware! Some day he might catch you in the act and demand justice. Man, do you eat that which you did not plant? Beware! Someday it might purge you. Every person must hear this. Tell it in the village squares, in the town halls, along the corridors of the big cities. Tell it in the schools, at the gatherings of the elders. Tell it to the daughters of the great mothers, so they may tell it to their children. Tell, O world, tell! Tell them this: in the end, there will be reckoning. They must recite it like an anthem. They must tell it from the tops of the trees, on the tops of the mountains, on the pinnacle of the hills, along the river shores, at the marketplaces, in the town squares. They must say it again and again: in the end, it does not matter how long it takes. There. Will. Be. Reckoning.

  Guardian spirits of mankind, all you who stand in the court of Bechukwu to testify, tell! And if they doubt you, then tell them to look at my host: he had cried for justice so much, so loudly, all these years, that it had now been given to him. And now, his enemy was on the floor, and he was on the chair. The evening bore an uncanny resemblance to the day in Cyprus when the scars on his jaw and face were inflicted on him. But this time, the equation had been reversed. The contention was now between my host, a man with a weapon and an impregnable will, and Jamike, a man who, if he had any power at all, seemed determined not to claim it. This man had no weapon and did nothing against his foe. The man, after a long period of praying, began waving one hand in the air, the other placed on his bloodied mouth, chanting, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Amen. Amen. Amen.”

  Jamike sat up, and blood spattered on his neck and shirt. My host gave him a rag to clean himself, but Jamike would not take it. It seemed, Egbunu, that Jamike had come to understand that reckoning had come. It must have been this awareness that caused him to open his mouth to speak. He closed it again without speaking, shook his head, and snapped his fingers.

  “Brother Chinonso-Solomon, I am sorry for everything,” he said. “The Lord has forgiven me. Would you forgive me, too?”

  “I want you to read this all first,” my host said. “You have to know what happened to me, what you caused me, for you to ask for forgiveness and for me to consider it. You must read, first. You must read. You must finish it.”

  “Okay,” the man said.

  My host took up the letter and pointed to a part of it, on the second page, and said, “Continue from here.” Jamike nodded and held the paper with the hand not stained with blood, put it close to his face, and began to read.

  The nurse was very sorry for me when I told her all that happened. She even cried for me. Her eyes were very read. She took me to a restaurant and buy me food, and assorted things like biscuit and coke. Then she said tomorrow she will come and take me to another city in cypros there, The name of the city is Grine. So we can go and look for job. In fact, very long time. She can speak Turkish also, this woman. In fact very well also. This woman gave me hope very much hope. That was why I called you that day if you still remember. I didn’t call you for long because I was afraid of what to say to you. but I finally called you because of this. I told you everything will be alright because of the woman. I also tell you about the island, that all the trees in it have been removed. Mommy the following day she come. OK, this was after my friend and me go get a place to stay in the town, Lefkoshia. The nurse took me to the city girine where she intronduce me to the manager of the casino. The man say he will employ me. Actually he said I can start the following day also. But the nurse say since it is the weekend, I should rest and start Monday. I was very glad mommy. In fact I was so glad I was thanking and thanking this woman. I really believed she was godsent. Really, god sent.

  At this point my host saw that darkness had arrived and that the man before him, who was now almost entirely turned into a silhouette, was struggling to see. There was a power outage. So he motioned for Jamike to stop and went out of the house to an open area where there was a kitchen—a half-covered place with old cupboards, almost black with soot. One of the people in the other flats who shared the kitchen with him was bent over a stove at a corner of the room, peering into a bubbling pot with a torchlight. He did not speak to the man, who had previously sparred with him over the cleanliness of the shared kitchen two days before when he’d rushed back from his store hungry. Then, he went to the store near the house, he bought Indomie and eggs, cooked the noodles and fried the eggs. In haste, he’d left the eggshells near the stove. The neighbor would find flies congregating in the shells, the air thick with odor from what remained of the eggs. Enraged, the man would knock on his door and admonish him, threatening to report him to the landlord.

  He swept past the man presently, took a box of matches, and hastened back to his apartment. For it came into his thought just then that Jamike could leave before he returned. He found Jamike still seated, hugging himself in the near darkness, only t
he sound of his breathing and the rumble of his intestines audible. He was touched by Jamike’s demeanor, the way in which he’d submitted himself to my host’s wrath. The voice of his head told him to consider this as the ultimate act of remorse. But he could not bring himself to stop. He was determined, Chukwu, that Jamike would have to hear everything that’d happened to him—from beginning to end. He raised the lever of the kerosene lantern on the table and lit it.

  Ezeuwa, later he would regret forcing Jamike to continue reading the letter. For Jamike began reading from the parts my host often refrained from going. Whenever his mind tried to drag him close to these places—dark beyond all things—he would fight, like a mortally wounded beast, with defiant violence to be spared the torture of such recollections. But now, he’d plunged himself into its pit by asking that it be read to him. A supreme act of self-flagellation. For as Jamike read to him about the incidents in the house of the nurse, he began to weep. And as Jamike read on, he saw the inadequacy of his own words to express what he had experienced. When Jamike read about how he’d passed the days in prison, portions of which had been too heavy for him to write down (… about some of these things, please don’t ask me to tell you, Mommy. And please don’t ask also…), my host became possessed with a desperate urge to correct the insufficiency in the narration. He wanted to add, for instance, that there had been times when he did not just see “visions” but had completely lost his mind.

  For how might he explain the times when, while drifting to sleep at midday, he’d be roused by the sound of an imagined rifle? Or how might one explain times when, half asleep, he’d feel a hand on his back trying to pull up his clothes and he’d scream? One could call these things hallucinations, but they felt real to him. What about those times when, in the veranda between sleep and wakening, the man he could have been would appear in the vision of his mind? The uncreated man would conjure up peace and sublunary bliss. And, by turns, he’d see himself helping what would appear to be their kids—a fine-looking boy and a beautiful girl with long braided hair—with their schoolwork. He’d see Ndali and him marching together at what was a vision of their wedding, often leaving him with a crushing envy for a version of himself that never was. This and many more were the things that he had not been able to express in the narrative because of the inadequacy of his words.

  When Jamike was almost done, when he’d read the part about his hopelessness in prison, his incarceration for a crime he did not commit, the horde of unwanted memories rushed into his head. At once the violent rage came upon him again. In terror, he seized the man and began to hit him. But the memory did not abate at all. It was as if the images held his two hands and forced him to see what he did not want to see, and hear what he did not want to hear. The same way the men, now alive again and clear in his mind as daylight, had held him down, one pressing his neck to the wall that stank of rank sweat while the other slid his penis into his anus.

  He struck at Jamike, everywhere he could find, but the images in his head remained, for the mind, Egbunu, is like blood. It cannot be easily stanched when a wound is deep. It will bleed at its own pace, at its own will. Only something powerful can stanch it. I have seen it many times. But now, no such thing was near. So he felt the man’s palm becoming sweaty on his back and buttocks. He felt the forbidden thrusts. His onyeuwa felt it. His chi felt it. What was happening in that moment was transformative, life-altering. The moaning man’s words—“You rape Turkish woman! You, ibne, orospu-cocugu, you rape Turkish woman! We rape you too”—was not the voice of a human being but of something unfamiliar to any man. It sounded like something beyond time, beyond man: perhaps the voice of a prehistoric beast whose name no one alive or in living memory knew. And the man’s smell, which he could recall now in striking vividness, was the odor of ancient animals.

  He knelt on the floor beside his enemy, weeping. But, Ijango-ijango, this particular memory, when it begins, often bleeds till the body is emptied and the bloodless body falls and expires. So he would recall how the man’s semen splashed around his buttocks and streamed down the back of his thigh. So although completely undesirous of it, he remembered even how he’d felt in the aftermath, after the world had scourged him with this severest of flagella. How he’d lain there for days that did not seem to cease, everything else alive but him.

  Beside him, Jamike, having been beaten into a human pulp, lay still again, curved into the shape of a fetus. A slow, drawn-out moan of pain emitted from him, and his bloodstained hands trembled. It seemed that a revulsion of feeling seized him and he began to stitch words together, his teeth clattering, blood dripping from his mouth until, at last, words burst out of him in a voice slightly above a whisper:

  “Heal him, Lord.”

  21

  Man of God

  GAGANAOGWU, the magnanimous fathers often say that if one keeps a record of all the wrongs done to him by his kinsmen, he will have none left. This is because they know that you did not create the human heart to be capable of accommodating hatred. To harbor hatred in the heart is to keep an unfed tiger in a house filled with children and the feeble, for it cannot afford communion with a human being, nor can it be tamed. No sooner has it rested enough and woken up in need of food again than it falls upon the man who has nurtured it and devours him. Indeed, hatred is a vandalism of the human heart. A man seeking justice with his own hands must dispense it as quickly as possible, or he risks being destroyed by his own dark desire. I have seen it many times.

  As is common with men, they often realize this truth long after the hatred has driven them into retributive acts. That night, my host realized these things. He helped the man up and took him to the clinic down the street. There was healing in this realization. But he’d been moved even more by Jamike’s reaction. Jamike had thanked him after the nurses attended to his wounds and cleaned them up and refused to tell the nurses what happened to him. The nurses had gazed at my host as if to demand the truth from him. “He was attacked by armed robbers,” he said. One of the nurses nodded and sighed. He stood there, expecting Jamike to deny it. But Jamike said nothing, merely keeping his eyes firmly closed. Later, on their way out of the clinic, with his head bandaged and a plaster on the bridge of his nose, he said, in the language of the White Man, “Brother Chinonso-Solomon, please do not tell lies anymore. God says, Thou shalt not lie. Revelations twenty-one verse eight says that all liars shall inherit the kingdom of hell. I don’t want you to go there.”

  Jamike, who walked with a limp in his gait, put a hand on my host’s shoulder as he spoke. My host said nothing. He could not understand it at all. He could not understand how, despite all he’d done to this man, all that seemed to matter was that he’d lied. When they came to the place where he’d parked his motorcycle, Jamike asked if he had forgiven him.

  “You can cut off my hand if you want, or my leg. But all I want is that you forgive me. I have six thousand euro at home. Your money. The money I took from you. I have kept it for more than two years waiting to find you.”

  “Is this true?” he said.

  “Yes. Now the value has increased. When you change it now, it must be as much as your seven thousand.”

  “Ah, Jamike, how is it possible? Why didn’t you tell me you had this money before—before all I did to you?”

  Jamike looked away and shook his head. “I wanted you to forgive me from your heart, not because I repaid you.”

  Oseburuwa, it is difficult to fully describe how this gesture made my host feel. It brought him the first touch of healing. It was a resurrection, a revival of something long dead. He was so shaken by it that when he got home that night, he could not sleep. He thought at first that Jamike was faking it all—the transformation, the docility he now exuded, must be false, the mask of a wicked man seeking to evade justice. He would have attacked Jamike that very first day if they had been in private. But now, that gesture of restitution convinced him that Jamike was indeed a transformed man. That night, in between struggling to breathe through a s
tuffed nose, he wrestled with the thought of forgiveness. If indeed the Jamike who damaged his life was dead, why punish the new one for the sins of the other? He considered: was it not what Jamike did to him that had caused him to change? If this was indeed so, then was it not a good thing? Was it not a thing to celebrate?

  Chukwu, these were questions that I would have asked him, but the voice in his head asked them instead. And I flashed thoughts in his mind, accentuating them. The following day, early in the morning, while he brushed his teeth, Jamike arrived with an old envelope containing the money. Not once in all these years had he imagined even remotely that he would get his money back. And now, not only had the German woman paid him, so, too, had Jamike. It offered him renewed hope that he could regain all the things he once owned. This thought opened up slowly like a frontier in his mind. As he counted the money in disbelief, Jamike sank to his knees again.

  “I want you to forgive me all the wrongs I have done, so that I may be forgiven by my father in heaven.”

  He looked upon the man whose death he once sought with an all-consuming zeal. As he made to speak, his phone rang. The screen showed the name of Unoka, a trader who had been lately trying to persuade him to add turkey feed to his stock. But he ignored the call. And when it had rung out, he said in a shattered, speckled voice, “I forgive you from now on, Jamike. My friend.”

  Ebubedike, that was the beginning of his clemency—when the soul of the afflicted embraces the soul of the afflicter, with his paralyzed limbs, both of them become forever marked by that embrace.