An Orchestra of Minorities Read online

  “I will leave you alone now,” he said, lifting his hands up again. “I go leave you alone. I swear to God who made me.”

  He turned towards his van, but because of the gravity of the sorrow he’d seen in her, even the momentary shuffling of his feet away from her seemed like a grievous act of unkindness. He stopped, conscious of the rushed sinking in the pit of his stomach and the audible anxiety of his heart. He faced her again.

  “But Mommy,” he said. “Don’t jump it, you hear?”

  In haste, he unlocked the back of the van and then unlatched one of the cages, and with his eyes looking through the window, whispering to himself that she should not go, he took two chickens by their wings, one in each hand, and hurried down.

  He found the woman standing where he’d left her, looking in the direction of his vehicle, seemingly transfixed. Although a guardian spirit cannot see the future and thus cannot fully know what its hosts will do—Chukwu, you alone and the great deities possess the spirit of foresight and may bequeath certain dibias this gift—I could sense it. But because you caution us, guardian spirits, not to interfere in every affair of our hosts, to allow man to execute his will and be man, I sought not to stop him. Instead, I simply put the thought in his mind that he was a lover of birds, one whose life has been transformed by his relationship with winged things. I flashed a stirring image of the gosling he once owned into his mind that instant. But it was of little effect, for in moments like this, when a man becomes overcome by emotion, he becomes Egbenchi, the stubborn kite which does not listen or even understand whatever is spoken to it. It moves on to wherever it wishes and does whatever it desires.

  “Nothing, nothing should make someone fall inside the river and die. Nothing.” He raised the chickens above his head. “This is what will happen if somebody fall inside there. The person will die, and no one can see them again.”

  He lunged towards the rails, his hands heavy with the birds, which cackled in high-pitched tones and stirred with agitation in his grip. “Even these fowls,” he said again, and flung them over the bridge into the gloom.

  For a moment, he watched the birds struggle against the thermal, whipping their wings violently against the wind as they battled desperately for their lives but failed. A feather landed on the skin of his hand, but he beat it off with such haste and violence that he felt a quick pain. Then he heard the sucking sound of the chickens’ contact with the waters, followed by vain plonks and splashes of sound. It seemed the woman listened, too, and in listening, he felt an indescribable bond—as if they had both become lone witnesses to some inestimable secret crime. He stood there until he heard the woman’s gasps. He looked up at her, then back at the waters hidden from his sight by the darkness, and back at her again.

  “You see,” he said, pointing at the river as the wind groaned on like a cough caught in the dry throat of the night. “That is what will happen if somebody fall inside there.”

  The first car to approach the bridge since his own arrived with cautious speed. It stopped a few paces from them and honked, then the driver said something he could not hear but which had been spoken in the White Man’s language and which I, his chi, had heard: “I hope you are not hoodlums oh!” Then the car drove away, gathering speed.

  “You see,” he repeated.

  Once the words had left his mouth, he resolved into a calm, as it often happens at such times when a man, having done something out of the ordinary, retreats into himself. All he could think of was to leave the place, and this thought came upon him with an overwhelming passion. And I, his chi, flashed the thought in his mind that he’d done enough, and that it was best he left. So he rushed back to his van and started it amidst the mutiny of voices from the back. In the side mirror, the vision of the woman on the bridge flashed like an invoked spirit into the field of light, but he did not stop, and he did not look back.

  2

  Desolation

  AGUJIEGBE, the great fathers say that to get to the top of a hill, one must begin from its foot. I have come to understand that the life of a man is a race from one end to the other. That which came before is a corollary to that which follows it. This is the reason people ask the question “Why?” when something that confounds them happens. Most of the time, even the deepest secrets and motives of the hearts of men can be uncovered if one probes deeper. Thus, Chukwu, to intercede on behalf of my host, I must suggest that we trace the beginning of everything to the harsh years preceding that night on the bridge.

  His father had died only nine months earlier, leaving him with a pain that was exquisite beyond anything he’d ever felt. It may have been a little different had he been with others, as he was when he lost his mother and when he lost his gosling and when his sister left home. But upon his father’s passing, there was no one. His sister, Nkiru, having eloped with an older man and feeling her conscience seared by their father’s death, distanced herself even more. Perhaps she’d done this for fear my host might blame her for their father’s death. The days that followed the demise were of utmost darkness. The agwu of pain afflicted him night and day and made of him an empty house in which traumatic memories of his family lurked like rodents. In the mornings on most days, he’d wake up smelling his mother’s cooking. And sometimes during the day, his sister would reveal herself in vivid pictures, as if she’d been merely hidden all along by a drawn curtain. At night, he’d feel the presence of his father so intensely he’d sometimes become convinced that his father was there. “Papa! Papa!” he’d call into the darkness, turning about in frantic steps. But all he’d get back would be silence, a silence so strong it would often restore his confidence in reality.

  He walked through the world vertiginously, as if on a tightrope. His vision became one from which he could see nothing. Nothing gave him comfort, not even the music of Oliver De Coque, which he’d play on his big cassette player most evenings or while working at the yard. Even his fowls were not spared his grief. He tended to them with less care, mostly feeding them once a day and sometimes forgetting to give them food altogether. Their riotous squawking in protest was what often stirred him in those times, forcing him to feed them. His watch over his flock was distracted, and many times hawks and kites preyed on them.

  How did he eat in those days? He simply fed off the small farm, a plot of land that stretched from the front of the house to the place where the motor road began, harvesting tomatoes, okro, and peppers. The corn his father had planted he let wilt and die, and he allowed a collection of insects to foment the resultant decay as long as they did not also trample on the other crops. When what was left of the farm could not meet his needs, he shopped at the market near the big roundabout, using as few words as necessary. And in time he became a man of silence who went days without speaking—not even to his flock, whom he often addressed as comrades. He bought onions and milk from the provisions shed nearby and sometimes ate at the canteen across the street, Madam Comfort’s restaurant. He hardly spoke there, either, but merely observed the people around him with a strained mercurial awe, as if in their seeming peacefulness they were all renegade spirits come into his world through a back door.

  Soon, Oseburuwa, as is often the case, he became one with sorrow so much that he resisted all help. Not even Elochukwu, the only friend he kept after he left school, could comfort him. He stayed away from Elochukwu, and once Elochukwu rode his motorcycle up to the front of the compound, knocked on the door, and shouted my host’s name to see if he was in. But he pretended he was not in the house. Elochukwu, perhaps suspicious that his friend was in, rang my host’s phone. My host let it ring on until Elochukwu, maybe concluding that he was indeed away, left. He refused all pleas from his uncle, his father’s only surviving sibling, to come and stay in Aba. And when the older man persisted, he turned off his phone and did not turn it on for two months, until he woke up one day to the sound of his uncle driving onto his compound.

  His uncle had come angry, but when he found his nephew so broken, so lean, so emasculat
ed, he was moved. The old man wept in the presence of my host. The sight of this man whom he had not seen in years weeping for him changed something in my host that day. He discovered that a hole had been bored into his life. And that evening, as his uncle snored, stretched out on one of the sofas in the sitting room, it struck him that the hole became evident after his mother died. It was true, Gaganaogwu. I, his chi, was there when he saw his mother being taken out of the hospital, dead shortly after delivering his sister. This was twenty-two years ago, in the year the White Man refers to as 1991. He was only nine at the time, too young to accept what the universe had given him. The world he’d known up till that night suddenly became reticulated and could not be straightened again. His father’s devotion, trips to Lagos, excursions to the zoo in Ibadan and the amusement parks in Port Harcourt, even playing with the video-game consoles—none worked. Nothing his father did repaired the chink in his soul.

  Towards the end of that year, around when the cosmic spider of Eluigwe spins its lush web over the moon the thirteenth time, increasingly desperate to restore his son’s well-being, his father took him to his village. He’d remembered that my host had been enticed by stories of how he’d hunted wild geese in the Ogbuti forest as a little boy during the war. So he took my host to hunt geese in the forest, an account of which I will give you in due course, Chukwu. It was here that he caught the gosling, the bird that would change his life.

  His uncle, seeing the state my host was in, stayed with him for four days instead of one, as he’d planned. The older man cleaned the house, tended the poultry, and drove him to Enugu to buy feed and supplies. During those days, Uncle Bonny, despite stammering, filled my host’s mind with words. Most of what he said pivoted around the perils of loneliness and the need for a woman. And his words were true, for I had lived among mankind long enough to know that loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief. I have seen it many times.

  “Nonso, ih if y ou don’t ge get y-y your self a-a wife s-su su soon,” Uncle Bonny said the morning he would leave, “your aunt a-ah-ah me wi-will h-ave to get y-y-ou one our ourself.” His uncle shook his head. “Be-be-be-because because you can’t live like this.”

  So strong were his uncle’s words that, after he left, my host began to think of new things. As if the eggs of his healing had hatched in secret places, he found himself craving something he had not had in a long time: the warmth of a woman. This desire drew his attention away from thoughts of his loss. He began to go out more, to lurk around near the Federal Government Girls College. At first, he watched the girls from the roadside canteens with fitful curiosity. He paid attention to their plaited hair, their breasts, and their outward features. As he developed interest, he reached out to one, but she rebuffed him. My host, who’d been molded by circumstances into a man of little confidence, decided he would not try a second time. I flashed in his thought that it was hardly possible to get a woman at the first try. But he paid no heed to my voice. A few days after he was turned down, he inquired at a brothel.

  Chukwu, the woman into whose bed he was admitted was twice his age. She wore loose hair, the kind of which was known among the great mothers. Her face was painted with a powdery substance that gave it delicacy which a man might find inviting. She looked by the shape of her face like Uloma Nezeanya, a woman who, two hundred forty-six years ago, was betrothed to an old host (Arinze Iheme) but disappeared before the wine-carrying ceremony, taken away by Aro slave raiders.

  Before his eyes, the woman stripped and bared a body that was buxom and attractive. But when she asked him to climb her, he could not. It was, Egbunu, an extraordinary experience, the like of which I had never seen before. For suddenly, the great erection he’d sustained for days was gone the very moment it could be satiated. He was seized by a sudden acute self-awareness of himself as a novice, unskilled in the art of sex. With this came a flurry of images—of his mother in the hospital bed, of the gosling perched precariously on a fence, and of his father in the hard grip of rigor mortis. He trembled, pulled himself slowly from the bed, and begged to leave.

  “What? You wan just waste your money like that?” the woman said.

  He said yes. He stood up and reached for his clothes.

  “I no understand, look how your prick still dey stand.”

  “Biko, ka’m laa,” he said.

  “You no sabi speak English? Speak pidgin, I no be Ibo,” the woman said.

  “Okay, I say I wan go.”

  “Eh, na wa oh. Me I neva see this kain thing before, oh. But I no want your money make e waste.”

  The woman climbed off the bed and switched on the lightbulb. He stepped back at the full glare of her female immensity. “No fear, no fear, just relax, eh?”

  He stood still. His hands yielded like one afraid as the woman took his clothes and put them back on the chair. She knelt on the floor and held his penis with one hand and clutched his buttocks with the other. He squirmed and trembled from the sensation. The woman laughed.

  “Wetin be your age?”

  “Thirty, ah-gh thirty.”

  “Abeg talk true, wetin be your age?” She squeezed the tip of his penis. He gasped as he made to speak, but she clamped her mouth over it and swallowed it halfway. My host mumbled the word twenty-four in feverish haste. He tried to get out, but the woman curved her other arm around his waist and held him still. She sucked with plopping sounds, forcefully, while he screamed, gnashed his teeth, and uttered meaningless words. He saw iridescent light tempered with darkness and felt a coldness within. The complex equation continued to erupt in his body until he let out a shout: “I dey release, I dey release!” The woman turned away, and the semen barely escaped her face. He fell back into the chair, fearing that he might pass out. He would leave that brothel, shocked and exhausted, bearing the weight of the experience with him like a sack of corn. It was four days later that he encountered the woman on the bridge.

  EZEUWA, he left the bridge that night, uncertain about what he had done, only knowing that it was something out of the ordinary. He drove home with a sense of fulfillment, the kind he had not experienced in a long time. In peace, he unloaded the new chickens, ten instead of twelve, and took the cages into the yard using the torchlight at the head of his phone. He unpacked the silo bag of millet and other things he’d bought in Enugu. Once he set everything down, he was hit with a sudden realization. “Chukwu!” he said, and rushed into the sitting room. He lifted his rechargeable lamp, pressed up the switch by its side, and a weak white light glowed from the three fluorescent bulbs. He turned the switch up even more, but the lighting did not improve. He moved forward and gazed down at it to see that one of the bulbs had died, its top end coated with a blob of soot. He ran to the yard with the lamp nonetheless, and once the half-light illuminated the cage, he screamed again, “Chukwu, oh! Chukwu!” For he’d found that one of the chickens he’d thrown over the bridge was the wool-white rooster.

  Akataka, it is a common phenomenon among mankind to attempt to flip precedence: to try to bring that which has gone forward back. But it always, always fails. I have seen it many times. Like others of his kind, my host ran out of his house back to his van, on which a black cat had climbed and sat gazing about like a watchman. He shooed the cat away. It gave a loud feline whine and dashed into the adjoining bush. He entered the van and drove back out into the night. The traffic was light, and only once did a big semi block the way while it was trying to pull into a filling station. When he got to the bridge, the woman he’d seen only a while before was gone—her car, too. He reckoned that she had not fallen into the river, for if she had, then her car would still be there. But the woman was not, at this point, what he cared about. He rushed down the shore, the nocturnal noise filling his ears, his torchlight swallowing the darkness like a boa. He felt the sensation of insects resolve into a concentric fold in the air and net his face as he approached the shore. He waved frantically to swat them away. The torchlight followed the movement of his han
d and wavered upon the waters in a straight rod a few times, and then flashed across the riverbank for meters on end. His gaze traced the path of the light, but all he saw was empty banks and rags and dirt strewn about. He walked directly under the bridge, turning when he heard a sound, his heart palpitating. As he came near, the light revealed a basket. The main raffia plaiting had loosened into long, twisted fibers. He rushed towards it, expectation bearing down on him.

  When he found nothing in the basket, he cast the light on the water under the bridge, down the distant reaches of the river as far as his torchlight could illuminate, but there was no trace of either chicken. He recalled the moment he threw them, how they’d fluttered their wings, how’d they tried in agonizing desperation to cling to the bars of the bridge, and how they must have been unable to do it. He’d learned early on when he first began keeping poultry that domestic fowls were the weakest animals among all creatures. They had little ability to defend or save themselves from dangers large or small. And it was this weakness that further endeared them to him. At first he’d loved all birds because of the gosling, but he began to love only the weak domestic fowls after he witnessed the violence of a hawk attack on a hen.

  After he had combed through the thick hide of night, as one would search for lice on the skin of a densely furred animal, he returned home in anguish. His action seemed to him all the more like something his hand had done out of concert with his mind. It was this, above all, that caused him pain. Sudden darkness often descends upon the heart of a person who discovers that he has unknowingly committed harm. Upon the discovery of the harm it has done, the man’s soul kneels in complete defeat, submits to the alusi of remorse and shame, and in its submission wounds itself. Once wounded, a man seeks healing through acts of restitution. If he has soiled another’s cloth, he may go to that person with a new cloth and say, there, my brother, take this new cloth in exchange for the one I ruined. If he has broken something, he may seek to mend or replace it. But if he has done that which cannot be undone, or broken that which cannot be mended, then there is nothing he can do but submit to the tranquilizing spell of remorse. This is a mystifying thing!