Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

I have come to believe that it was here that the first mark of the line between Ikenna and Boja — where not even a dot had ever been drawn before — first appeared. It altered the shape of our lives and ushered in a transition of time when craniums raged and voids exploded. They stopped speaking. Boja came descending like a fallen angel, and landed where Obembe and I had long been confined.

In those early days of Ikenna’s metamorphosis, we all hoped the hand that held his heart, having clenched into a fist, would unclench in no time. But days rolled past and Ikenna moved farther and farther from us. He hit Boja after a heated argument a week or so later. Obembe and I were in our room when this happened because we’d started to avoid the living room whenever Ikenna was there, but Boja often stayed put. It must have been Ikenna’s anger at his persistence that caused the argument. All I heard was blows and their voices as they argued and swore at each other. It was on a Saturday and Mother, who no longer went to work on Saturdays, was at home taking a nap. But when she heard the noise, she ran out to the living room, swaddled from bosom to knee because she’d breastfed Nkem who had been crying earlier. Mother first tried to break up the fight by calling on them to stop, but they paid no heed. She plunged in and pulled them apart until she was stretched between them, but Boja held on to Ikenna’s T-shirt in defiance. When Ikenna tried to wrest himself free, he did it with such a ferocious jerk of Boja’s arm that he mistakenly pulled off the wrappa Mother was swaddled in, stripping her to her underpants.

“ Ewooh! ” Mother cried. “Do you want to bring a curse on yourselves? Look what you have done; you have stripped me naked. Do you know what it means — to see my nakedness? Do you know it is a sacrilege— alu ?” She fastened the wrappa around her bosom again. “I will tell Eme everything you have done from A to Z, don’t you worry.”

She snapped her fingers at both of them, now standing apart, still trying to catch their breath.

“Now tell me, Ikenna, what did he do to you? Why were you fighting?”

Ikenna threw off his shirt and hissed in reply. I was stupefied. Hissing at an older person in Igbo culture was considered an insufferable act of insubordination.

“What, Ikenna?”

“ Eh , Mama,” Ikenna said.

“Did you hiss at me?” Mother said in English first, then placing her hands on her bosom, she said, “ Obu mu ka ighi na’a ma lu osu? ”

Ikenna did not answer. He moved back to the lounge where he’d sat before the fight, picked up his shirt and walked to his room. He slammed the door so hard that the louvres in the sitting room rattled. Mother, astounded at the brazen insult in his act of walking out on her, stood with mouth agape, her eyes fixed on the door, and her wrath piqued. She was about to head to the door to discipline Ikenna when she noticed Boja’s broken lip. He was dabbing the shirt now covered with crimson stains against his bloodied lips.

“He did that to you?” Mother asked.

Boja nodded. His eyes were red, full of bottled tears that were held back from pouring out only because it would have meant he’d been beaten. My brothers and I hardly ever cried when we fought, even if we’d suffered severe blows or had been hit in the most sensitive places. We always tried to stifle tears until we went out of everyone’s sight. Only then did we let it out, and sometimes, in spades.

“Answer me,” Mother shouted. “Have you turned deaf?”

“Yes, Mama, he did it.”

“ Onye —Who? Ike- nna did this?”

Boja nodded in reply, his eyes on the stained shirt in his hands. Mother walked closer to him and tried to touch the wounded lip, but Boja squirmed in pain. She stepped back, still gazing at the wound.

“Did you say Ikenna did it?” she asked again as if Boja had not replied before.

“Yes, Mama,” Boja said.

She fastened her wrappa again, this time tighter. Then she walked briskly to Ikenna’s door and began banging on it, calling on Ikenna to open it. When there was no response, she began threatening aloud, punctuating her words with tsks to give them resolve. “Ikenna, if you don’t open that door now, I will show you that I’m your mother, and that you came out from between my legs.”

Now that she threatened with tsks, she did not wait too long before the door opened. She pounced on him and an exchange of blows and tantrums followed. Ikenna was unusually defiant. He received every slap with protests and even threatened to hit back, further aggravating her. Mother struck more blows. He cried freely and complained aloud that she hated him because she did not reprimand Boja for the provocation that led to the fight in the first place. In the end, he pushed her to the floor and ran out. Mother chased after him, her wrappa falling again as she did. But by the time she got to the sitting room, he was gone. She raised her wrappa to cover her bosom as before. “Heaven and earth hear me,” she swore, touching her tongue with the tip of her index finger. “Ikenna, you will not eat anything in this house again until your father comes back. I don’t care how you do it, but not in this house.” Her words clogged with tears. “Not in this house, not until Eme returns from wherever he is. You will not eat here.”

She was speaking to those of us now gathered in the sitting room and to others, perhaps our neighbours who were probably listening from the other side of the lizard-infested fence. For Ikenna had vanished. He’d probably crossed the road to the other side of the street, walked northwards to Sabo, along the dirt road that led further into the part of the city where old hills rose above three schools, a cinema in a crumbling building and a big mosque, from where the muezzin called for prayers through mighty loudspeakers at dawn every day. He did not return that day. He slept somewhere he never disclosed.

Mother paced the house all that night, anxiously waiting for Ikenna to knock on the storm door. When, at midnight, she was compelled to lock up the gate for safety — armed robbery occurred frequently in Akure in those days — she sat with the keys near the main door, waiting. She’d driven the rest of us to our rooms to sleep and only Boja remained in the sitting room because he could not enter his room for fear of Ikenna. Obembe and I did not sleep, either; we listened to Mother from our beds. She went out many times that night, thinking she’d heard a knock at the gate, but returned all those times alone. She barely sat down. When a deluge began later, she telephoned Father, but the repeated rings went unanswered. As the pon-pon, pon-pon sound of the phone repeated itself again and again I tried to imagine Father seated in the new house in the dangerous city, his spectacles on, reading the Guardian or the Tribune . That image of him was torpedoed by the static on the line, which made Mother hang up.

I did not know when I eventually slept, but I soon found myself and my brothers in our village, Amano, near Umuahia. We were playing football — two-a-side — near the bank of the river when Boja suddenly kicked the ball to a footbridge that was once used as the only crossing over the river. Biafran soldiers had hastily constructed it, after blowing up the main bridge during the Nigerian civil war, as an alternate bridge by which they could cross in the event of an invasion by Nigerian troops. It was hidden away in the forest. The footbridge was made of slats of wood held together by rusting metal loops, and thick ropes. It had no handrails one could support oneself with while crossing it. The portion of the river that flowed under the bridge was bedded underneath with rocks. Rocks and stones, reaching out of a hilly part of the forest, were visible just below the waters. Ikenna ran to the bridge without thinking, and was at the centre of it in no time. But the moment he picked up the ball, he suddenly realized he was in danger. As he gazed with trepidation at the chasm beneath him, the chasm fed his eyes with visions of his death by a fall that would end in a fatal contact with the stones. Suddenly engulfed in fear, he began crying “Help! Help!” Just as scared as he was, we began calling on him: “Ike, come, come.” In obedience to our entreaty, he spread his hands, and letting the ball fall into the gash, began walking towards us, slowly, his gait like that of someone wading through a pool of mud. As he came, tottering dangerously, the slats — made fragile with age and decay — cracked, and the bridge snapped, breaking in two. Ikenna descended at once with planks of broken wood, metals and a loud jolting cry for help. He was still falling when, abruptly waking, I heard Mother’s voice scolding Ikenna for having endangered his life by sleeping out and returning wet and ill. I once heard that the heart of an angered man will not beat with verve, it will inhale and bloat like a balloon, but eventually deflate. This was the case with my brother. For by morning, when I heard his voice, I ran out to the sitting room to see with my own eyes that he had returned drenched, helpless, an afflicted man.