Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“He is a giant — Superman!” Kayode cried and the others laughed.

We’d forgotten that we had been going home, darkness was slowly covering the surface of the horizon and our mother might soon begin looking for us. I was thrilled and fascinated by this strange man. I cupped my hand around my mouth and said: “He is like a lion!”

“You compare everything to animals, Ben,” Ikenna said, shaking his head as if the comparison had annoyed him. “He is not like anything, you hear? He is just a madman — a madman.”

Lost in the moment, I watched this awesome creature with all the concentration I could gather until details of him filled my mind. He was robed from head to foot in filth. As he rose spryly to stand, some of the filth rose with him, while some was left in patches on the ground. He had a fresh scar on his face just below his chin, and his back was caked with a dripping mess from some dead mango in a state of putrefaction. His lips were dried and cracked. His hair was unkempt; it stretched like tendrils, giving him the appearance of a Rastafarian. His teeth, most of which were blackened as if singed, reminded me of fire-blowing gypsies and circus players who blew fire from their mouths and probably, I thought, burned their teeth. The man lay bare before our eyes, stark naked except for a shred of rag which hung loosely from his shoulder down to his waist; his pubic region was covered with a dense foliage of hair in the midst of which his veiny penis hung limply like trouser rope. His legs were bursting with taut varicose veins.

Kayode picked a mango and threw it in the direction of Abulu, and at once, as if expecting it, the madman caught the mango in the air. Holding out the fruit as if it was an acrid substance he could not bring close to himself, he slowly rose to his feet. With a loud, piercing cry, he hauled the mango so high it might have landed at the town centre, some twenty miles away. This swept the ground from beneath our feet.

In silence, we stood there, frozen, watching this man until Solomon moved forward and said: “You see? Do you see what I tell you? Can an ordinary human being do this?” he pointed in the direction of the projectile that was the mango. “This man is evil. Let us go home and leave him. Haven’t you heard how he killed his brother, eh? What can be worse than a man who killed his own brother?” He put his hand to hold the lobe of his ear in the manner of an older person giving instruction to a child. “We must all go home, now!”

“He is right,” Ikenna said after a moment’s thought. “We should all go home. See, it is getting late.”

We started on our way, but once we began, Abulu burst out in laughter. “Ignore him,” Solomon urged, waving us on. The rest marched on, but I couldn’t. I’d become suddenly afraid, on account of Solomon’s description of him, that this man was so dangerous he could jump on us and kill us. I turned, and when I saw that he was coming after us, my fear was inflamed.

“Let us run,” I cried, “he will kill us!”

“No, he can’t kill us,” Ikenna said and turned rapidly to face the madman. “He can see we are armed.”

“With what?” asked Boja.

“Our fishing hooks,” Ikenna replied curtly. “If he comes any closer, we will tear his flesh with the hooks, just like we kill fish, and throw his body in the river.”

As if deterred by this threat, the madman stopped and stood still, his hands masking his face, making strange sounds. We continued and had walked a fair distance away when we heard a loud cry of Ikenna’s name. We pulled to an immediate halt in shock.

“ Ikena ,” the voice called again with a Yoruba accent that lengthened the e sound of the first letter and obliterated the second n so that it sounded as Ikena .

We glanced around in bewilderment to see who’d said the name, but Abulu was the only person within sight. He now stood a few metres from us, his arms folded across his chest.

“ Ikena ,” Abulu repeated aloud, inching closer towards us.

“Let’s not listen to Abulu’s prophecies. O le wu —it is dangerous,” Solomon shouted at us, his Yoruba thickening with a twang of his Oyo dialect. “Let’s go home now, let’s go.” He pushed Ikenna forward. “It’s not good to listen to Abulu’s prophecies, Ike. Let us go!”

“Yes, Ike,” Kayode said, “he is of the devil, but we are Christians.”

For a moment, we all waited for Ikenna, whose eyes now stayed on the madman. Without turning to the rest of us, he shook his head and cried, “No!”

“What no? Don’t you know Abulu?” Solomon asked. He caught Ikenna by the shirt, but Ikenna pulled away from him, leaving a piece of his old Bahamas resort T-shirt in Solomon’s hand.

“Leave me,” Ikenna said. “I’m not going away. He is calling my name. He is calling my name. How did he know my name? How — how is he calling my name?”

“Maybe he heard it from one of us,” Solomon said, matching Ikenna’s forceful tone.

“No, he didn’t,” Ikenna shouted. “He didn’t hear it from anyone.”

He had just said that when — in a softer, subtler voice — Abulu called again, “ Ikena .” Then raising his hands, the madman burst into a song I’d heard people sing in our neighbourhood without knowing where it came from or what it meant, and the song was titled: “The Sower of Green Things.”

We all listened to his rapturous singing for a while, even Solomon. Then, shaking his head, Solomon picked up his fishing hook, tossed the piece of Ikenna’s shirt to the ground and said: “You and your brothers may stay, but I won’t stay.”

Solomon turned and Kayode followed him. Igbafe, conspicuously indeterminate, threw glances back and forth between us and the vanishing duo. Then slowly, he began walking away until, after about a hundred metres, he began to run.

Abulu had stopped singing by the time I had lost sight of those who had left us, and he had resumed calling Ikenna’s name. When it seemed he’d called it for the thousandth time, he cast his eyes above, lifted his hands and shouted: “ Ikena , you will be bound like a bird on the day you shall die,” he cried, covering his eyes with his hands to demonstrate blindness.

“ Ikena, you will be mute,” he said, and closed his ears with both hands.

“ Ikena , you will be crippled,” he said, and moved his legs apart, folding his palms together in the way of spiritual supplications. Then he knocked his knees together and fell backwards into the dirt as though the bones of his knees had suddenly been broken.

When he said: “Your tongue will stick out of your mouth like a hungry beast, and will not return back into your mouth,” he thrust out his tongue, and curled it to one side of his mouth.

“ Ikena , you shall lift your hands to grasp air, but you will not be able to. Ikena , you shall open your mouth to speak on that day”—the madman opened his mouth and made a loud gasping sound of ah, ah —“but words will freeze in your mouth.”

As he spoke, the din of an aircraft flying overhead mopped his voice into a desperate whimper at first, and then — when the plane had drawn much closer — it swallowed the rest of his words like a boa. The last statement we heard him make, “ Ikena , you will swim in a river of red but shall never rise from it again. Your life—” was barely audible. The din and the voices of children cheering at the plane from around the neighbourhood threw the evening into a cacophonous haze. Abulu cast a frenzied gaze upwards in confusion. Then, as if in a fury, he continued in a louder voice that was whipped into faint whispers by the sound of the aircraft. As the noise tapered off, we all heard him say “ Ikena , you shall die like a cock dies.”