Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Wake up, wake up,” she called, tapping us.

I screamed upon her touch. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was two distinct eyes blinking in the stark darkness.

“It is me ,” Mother said, “do you hear? It is me.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

“Shhhhhhh… don’t shout; you will wake Nkem.”

I nodded, and although Obembe had not shouted as I did, he nodded, too.

“I want to ask both of you something,” Mother whispered. “Are you awake?”

She tapped my leg again. In a jolt, I let out a loud “Yes!” and Obembe followed.

“ Ehen ,” Mother muttered. It appeared as if she’d had a long session of praying or crying or, just as likely, both. Not long before that day — when Ikenna refused to go to the pharmacy with Boja to be precise — I’d asked Obembe why Mother cried so often when she was not a child, and thus past the age of frequent crying. Obembe had replied that he did not know either, but that he thought women were prone to crying.

“Listen,” Mother, now seated on the bed with us, said. “I want both of you to tell me what caused the rift between Ikenna and Boja. I’m sure you both know, so, tell me — quickly, quickly.”

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said.

“No, you know,” she countered. “There must be something that happened — a fight or quarrel I do not know of; just something. Think.”

I nodded and started to think, to try to understand what she wanted.

“Obembe,” Mother called after only a wall of silence greeted her query.

“Mama.”

“Tell me, your mother, what caused the rift between your brothers,” she said, this time, in English. She knotted her wrappa around her chest as if it had come loose, something she often did when agitated. “Did they have a fight?”

“No,” Obembe replied.

“Is it true, Ben?”

“Yes, it is, Mama.”

“ Fa lu ru ogu? — Did they quarrel?” she asked, returning to Igbo.

We both replied “No,” Obembe’s coming much later after mine.

“So, what happened?” she asked after a short pause. “Tell me, eh , my princes, Obembe Igwe, Azikiwe, gwa nu mu ife me lu nu, biko my husbands,” she pleaded, employing the heart-melting endearments she bestowed on us in times like this when she wanted to obtain some information from us. She’d bestow royalty on Obembe, ascribing him the title of an igwe , a traditional king. She’d confer the name of Nigeria’s first indigenous president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, on me. Once she called us these names, Obembe began staring at me — an indication that there was something he did not want to say, but which — nudged by Mother’s entreaties — he was now wholly ready to say. Hence, Mother only needed to repeat the endearments just once more before Obembe spilled it, for she had already won. Both she and Father were good at digging into our minds. They knew how to burrow so deep into our psyche when they wanted to find things out that it was sometimes difficult to think they didn’t already know what they were asking about, but were merely seeking to confirm it.

“Mama, it began the day we met Abulu at Omi-Ala,” Obembe said once Mother repeated the endearment.

“Eh? Abulu the madman?” Mother cried, springing to her feet in terror.

Obembe, it seemed, had not expected this reaction. Perhaps frightened, Obembe cast his eyes on the bare mattress spread out in front of him and said nothing. For this was a metal-lidded secret, one that Boja had warned us never to reveal to anyone after Ikenna first started drawing a line between us and him. “You have both seen what it has done to Ikenna,” he’d said, “so keep your mouths shut.” We had agreed, and promised to wipe it out of our memory by committing a lobotomy on our minds.

“I asked you a question,” Mother said. “Which Abulu did they meet? The madman?”

“Yes,” Obembe affirmed in a whisper, and quickly glanced at the wall that partitioned our room from our elder brothers’ room, suspecting that they might have heard he’d revealed the secret.

“ Chi-neke! ” Mother cried. Then she sat back on the bed slowly, her hands on her head. She remained in that strange silence for a moment, grinding her teeth and tsking. “Now,” she said suddenly, “tell me at once, what happened when you met him? Did you hear me, Obembe? I said, and I’m saying for the last time, tell me what happened at that river.”

Obembe hesitated for a while longer, too afraid to begin the story he’d partly told in that one revealing sentence. But it was too late, for Mother had already started to wait anxiously, her feet suddenly set on the hill as if she’d seen a raptor advancing towards her fold, and she, the falconer, was ready for a confrontation. Hence, it was now impossible for Obembe, even if he’d wanted to, to resist her.

A little more than a week before the neighbour caught us, my brothers and I were returning from the Omi-Ala River with the other boys when we met Abulu along the sandy pathway. We had just completed a fishing session at the river and were walking home, discussing the two big tilapias we’d caught that day (one of which Ikenna had fiercely argued was a Symphysodon) when, upon reaching the clearing where the mango tree and the Celestial Church were located, Kayode cried: “Look, there’s a dead man under the tree! A dead man! A dead man!”

We all turned at once to the spot and saw a man lying on a mat of fallen leaves at the foot of the mango tree, his head pillowed on a small broken branch still foliated with leaves. Mangoes of different sizes, colours — yellow, green, red — and ones in different stages of decomposition lay about everywhere. Some were squashed, some rotten from bird bites. The soles of the man’s feet, which laid plain before our eyes, were so ugly that it seemed that athlete’s foot had carved sinewy lines all over them, giving them the resemblance of a complex map, coloured with dead leaves that clung to every line.

“That’s not a dead man; he is the one humming this tune,” Ikenna said calmly. “He must be a madman; this is how mad people behave.”

Although I’d not heard the tune before, I did now that Ikenna called our attention to it.

“Ikenna is right,” Solomon said. “This is Abulu, the vision-seeing madman.” Then snapping his fingers, he said, “I detest this man.”

“Ah!” Ikenna cried. “Is it him?”

“It is him — Abulu,” Solomon said.

“I didn’t even recognize him,” said Ikenna.

I looked at the madman, whom Ikenna and Solomon had revealed they knew, but I could not remember having ever seen him before. A great number of mad people, derelicts and beggars roamed the streets of Akure, and there was nothing noteworthy or distinct about any of them. It was thus strange to me that this one not only had a distinct identity, but also a name — a name people seemed to know. As we looked on, the madman raised his hands and held them strangely in the air, still, with a sublimity that struck me with awe.

“Look at that!” Boja said.

Abulu sat up now, as if glued to the spot, peering straight into the distance.

“Let’s leave him alone and go on our way,” Solomon said at that point. “Let’s not talk to him, let’s just go; leave him alone—”

“No, no, we should rattle him a bit,” Boja, who’d moved towards the man, suggested. “We shouldn’t just leave like that, this could be fun. Listen, we could frighten him, and—”

“No!” Solomon said forcefully. “Are you mad? Don’t you know this man is evil? Don’t you know him?”

While Solomon was still speaking, the madman burst into a sudden roar of laughter. In fear, Boja swiftly skipped backwards and re-joined the rest of us. Just then, Abulu sprang acrobatically to his feet with one prodigious leap. He put both hands together to his side, clasped his legs, and without a part of his body moving, fell back into his former position. Thrilled by this callisthenic display, we clapped and cheered in admiration.