Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Abulu fell silent and his face lit up with relief. Then he moved one of his hands in the air as if scribbling something on an invisible hanging paper or book with a pen no one else but he could see. When it seemed he was done, he started to go, singing and clapping along.

We watched the forward-and-backwards swing of his backbone as he sang and danced, the song’s charged lyrics falling back on us like wind-borne dust.

A fe f ko le fe ko

ma kan igi oko As the wind cannot blow

without touching the trees Osupa ko le hon ki

enikan fi aso di As no one can block the light of the moon with a sheet

of the moon with a sheet Oh, Olu Orun,

eni ti mo je Ojise fun Oh, father of the host for

whom I’m an oracle E fa orun ya,

e je ki ojo ro I implore you to tear the

firmaments and give rain Ki oro ti mo to

gbin ba le gbo That the green things

I have sown will live E ba igba orun je,

ki oro mi bale mi Mutilate the seasons so my

words can breathe, Ki won ba le gbo. That they yield fruit.

The madman sang on as he went away from us until his voice petered out, along with all of his corporeal convoy — his presence, his smell, his shadow that clung to the tree and the ground, his body. And once he was out of sight, I noticed that the night had descended heavily around us, covering the roof of the world with a crepuscular awning, and — in what seemed like the blink of an eye — had turned the birds nesting in the mango tree and the sprawling esan bush around it into black objects that were imperceptible to the eyes as they flew past us. Even the Nigerian flag that hovered over the police station two hundred metres away had darkened and the distant hills had merged with the dark sky as if there was no partition between the sky and the earth.

My brothers and I went home afterwards, bruised as if we’d been beaten in an easy fight, while the world around us continued to run with the machinery of things unaltered, with nothing suggesting that something of portentous significance had happened to us. For the street was alive, bustling with the night-time cacophony of roadside sellers with lanterns and candles on tables and people walking around whose shadows were scattered on the ground, walls, against trees, on buildings like life-sized murals. A Hausa man in northern garment stood behind a wooden shed covered with tarpaulins, turning a pile of skewered meat on a charcoal hearth set in a metal bowl from which thick black smoke was rising. Separated from this man by a running sewer were two women who sat on a bench, bent over an actual hearth, roasting corn.

We were only a stone’s throw from our house when Ikenna stopped walking, forcing the rest of us to a halt, so that he stood in front of the three of us, now a mere silhouette. “Did any of you hear what he said when the plane was flying past?” he said in a voice that was unsteady yet measured. “Abulu kept speaking, but I did not hear.”

I had not heard the madman; the plane had caught my attention so much that, for the time it was visible, I had watched it closely, my hand shaded over my eyes to try to catch a glimpse of its most likely foreign passengers heading, perhaps, somewhere in the Western world. But it seemed neither Boja nor Obembe had heard him, for neither said a word. Ikenna had turned and was about to start walking when Obembe said: “I did.”

“What then are you waiting for?” Ikenna thundered loudly. All three of us stepped back a few metres.

Obembe steeled himself, afraid that Ikenna would hit him.

“Were you deaf?” Ikenna shouted.

The rage in Ikenna’s voice frightened me. I dropped my head to avoid looking straight at him and focused, instead, on his shadow that was sprawled on the dirt. As I watched the actions of his actual body by the movement of his shadow on the dirt, I saw it throw what it held in its hand to the ground. Then his shadow flowed towards Obembe, its head elongating at first and then retracting back into shape. When it steadied, its arms flailed briefly and then I heard the sound of Obembe’s tin fall and felt a splash of its content on my leg. Two small fish — one of which Ikenna had argued was a Symphysodon — shot out of the tin, and began writhing and thrashing about in the dirt, muddied by the spilled water as the tin swung from side to side, spurting out more water and tadpoles until it stilled. For a moment, the shadows did not move. Then a hand that elongated and stretched across the other side of the street was followed by a cry from Ikenna’s voice: “Tell me!”

“Didn’t you hear him?” Boja asked menacingly even though Obembe — frozen in a posture of his hand shielding himself from an expected assault from Ikenna — had begun to speak.

“He said,” Obembe stammered, but stopped when Boja spoke. Now he began afresh again: “He said — he said that a fisherman will kill you, Ike.”

“What, a fisherman?” Boja said aloud.

“A fisherman?” Ikenna repeated.

“Yes, a fisher—” Obembe did not complete this, he was trembling.

“Are you sure?” Boja said. When Obembe nodded, Boja said: “How did he say it?”

“He said ‘ Ikena , you shall—’ ” He stopped, his lips shaking as he gazed from face to face and then to the ground. It was with his eyes cast down to the ground that he continued: “He said Ikenna, you shall die by the hands of a fisherman.”

It is hard to forget the black cloud that covered Ikenna’s face after Obembe said those words. He glanced up as if in search of something, then he turned in the direction where the madman had gone, but there was nothing to be seen but a sky turned to orange.

We were almost at our gate when Ikenna faced us, but with his eyes cast on no one in particular. “He saw a vision that one of you will kill me,” he said.

More words dangled feverishly on his lips, but didn’t spill out. They seemed to retract inside as if they were fastened to a rope that was pulled back from within him by an unseen hand. Then, as if unsure of what to say or do, and without waiting for any of us to speak — for Boja was starting to say something now — he turned and walked on into our gate, and we followed him.

THE MADMAN

Those the gods have chosen to destroy, they inflict with madness.

IGBO PROVERB

Abulu was a madman:

His brain, Obembe said, dissolved into blood after the near-fatal accident that left him insane. Obembe, through whom I came to the understanding of most things, knew Abulu’s history from God-knows-where and he told it to me one night. He said Abulu, like us, had a brother. His name was Abana. Some people in our street remember him as one of the two brothers who attended Aquinas College, the premier boys’ high school in the town, with a white plain shirt and white khaki shorts that were always spotlessly clean. Obembe said Abulu loved his brother; that they were inseparable.

Abulu and his brother grew up without their father. When they were kids, their father went on a Christian pilgrimage to Israel and never returned. Most people believed he was killed by a bomb in Jerusalem, while one of his friends who’d gone on the same pilgrimage said he had made his way to Austria with an Austrian woman and settled there. So Abulu and Abana lived with their mother and their elder sister who, by the time she was fifteen, took up whoring and moved to Lagos to practise her trade.

Their mother operated a small restaurant. Constructed with wood and zinc materials, it was popular in our street in the eighties. Obembe said even Father ate there a couple of times when Mother was pregnant and became too heavy to make food. Abulu and his brother used to serve at the restaurant after school, washing the plates and cleaning the rickety tables after every meal, supplying toothpicks, sweeping the floor that became darker with soot and grime each year until it looked like a mechanic’s workshop, and keeping the flies out in the rainy seasons, waving raffia-plaited hand fans. Yet, despite all they did, the restaurant brought little return, and they still could not afford proper education.