Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Na that madman, Abulu cause am. Im tell Biyi say na the thing wey im treasure most go kill am. Now im wife don kill am.”

Mother was stung. She glanced around at our faces — Boja, Obembe, and I — and took in our stares with her eyes. Someone stood up from a chair somewhere, not in the sitting room, and gently opened a door and appeared in the room. Although I did not look back to see him there, I knew. And it was clear that Mother, and everyone in the room knew, too, that it was Ikenna.

“No, no,” Mother said loudly. “Iya Iyabo, I don’t want you saying this nonsense, this thing here.”

“Ah, what—”

“I said no!” Mother shouted. “How can you believe a mere madman could see the future? Just how?”

“But Mama Ike,” the woman murmured, “Na so they say im be —”

“No,” Mother said. “Where is Aderonke now?”

“Police station.”

Mother shook her head.

“Them arrest her,” Iya Iyabo said.

“Come make we go talk outside,” Mother said.

The woman rose, and together, with Nkem following, they went out. After they left, Ikenna stood there, his eyes lifeless like those of a doll. Then, suddenly clutching his belly, he raced to the bathroom, making choking sounds as he retched into the sink. It was here that his illness began, when the fear robbed him of his health, for it seemed that the account of the man’s death had established in him the unquestionable inescapability of Abulu’s prescient powers, causing smoke to rise from things yet unburned.

A few days after that, a Saturday morning, we were all having breakfast at the dining table, fried yams and corn pap, when Ikenna, who had just taken his food and gone into his room, suddenly rushed out, a hand on his belly, grunting. Before we could make sense of what was going on, a cupful of disgorged food landed on the paved floor behind the blue lounge we’d named “Father’s throne.” Ikenna had been heading for the bathroom, but now, inhibited by the force he could only try to contain, he dropped to one knee on the floor, as he retched, partly disappearing behind the chair.

Calling, “Ikenna, Ikenna,” Mother ran to him from the kitchen and tried to lift him, but he protested that he was fine, when in fact he looked pale and sickly.

“What is it, Ikenna? When did this begin?” Mother asked after he stopped, but he did not answer.

“Ikenna, why, why not even answer, why? Eh, why?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Let me go wash now, please.”

Mother let go of his hand, and as he walked to the bathroom, Boja said, “Sorry, Ike.” I said the same. So did Obembe. David did, too. Although Ikenna did not respond to any of these sympathies, he did not bang the door this time. He closed it and bolted it gently.

Once Ikenna was out of sight, Boja ran into the kitchen and returned with a broom — a stack of needle-thin sticks of raffia bound together with a tight cord — and a dustpan. It was the quickness with which Boja had run to clean up the mess that had moved Mother.

“Ikenna, you live in fear that one of your brothers will kill you,” she said aloud so Ikenna could hear her voice over the water, “but come and see—”

“No, no, no, Nne, no; don’t say, please—” Boja pleaded effusively.

“Leave me, let me tell him,” Mother said. “Ikenna come and see them, just come and—” Boja protested that Ikenna will not like to hear he was cleaning the vomit, but Mother was undeterred.

“See those same brothers of yours weeping for you,” she continued. “See them cleaning up your vomit. Come out and see ‘your enemies’ caring for you, even against your wish.”

Perhaps because of this, it took long for Ikenna to come out of the bath that day, but he did, eventually, swaddled in a towel. By that time, Boja had swept clean the spots and even mopped the floor and parts of the wall and the back of the lounge on which his vomit had caked. And Mother had sprinkled Dettol antiseptic everywhere. She would force Ikenna to go with her to the hospital afterwards by threatening that if he refused, she would phone Father. Ikenna knew Father took matters of health very seriously, so he caved.

To my consternation, Mother returned home alone hours later. Ikenna had typhoid and had been admitted at the hospital, receiving intravenous injections. When Obembe and I, gripped by fear, broke down, Mother comforted us saying assuredly he would be discharged the following day and that he would be fine.

But I had begun to fear that something bad was going to happen to Ikenna. I spoke little at school and fought when anyone provoked me until I was whipped by one of the disciplinary teachers. This too was rare; for I was an obedient child not only to my parents, but to my teachers as well. I dreaded corporal punishment and would do anything to prevent it. But the sadness I felt for my brother’s deteriorating situation had inflamed a bitter resentment towards everything, especially school and all it contained. The hope that my brother would be redeemed had been destroyed; I was afraid for him.

After his health and well-being, the venom next robbed Ikenna of his faith. He’d missed church for three consecutive Sundays, giving illness as an excuse — plus the one he could not attend because of the two nights he spent at the hospital. But on the morning of the next one, perhaps emboldened by the news that Father — who had travelled to Ghana on a three-month training course — would not be visiting Akure again until his return, Ikenna declared that he just didn’t want to go to church.

“Did I hear you well, Ikenna?” Mother said.

“Yes, you did,” Ikenna replied forcefully. “Listen, Mama, I’m a scientist, I no longer believe there’s a God.”

“What?” Mother cried, stepping backwards as if she’d stepped on a sharp thorn. “Ikenna, what did you say?”

He hesitated, a deep scowl on his face.

“I asked you: ‘What did you say,’ Ikenna?”

“I said I’m a scientist,” he answered, with the word “scientist,” which he had to say in English because there was no Igbo word for it, resonating with alarming defiance.

“And?” The silence she met would prompt her to say “Complete it Ikenna; complete this abominable thing you have said.” Then, with her finger pointing to his face, charged, she said: “Ikenna, look here: one thing Eme and I cannot take, and will never accept, is an atheist of a child. Never!”

She tsked and snapped two fingers over her head to superstitiously stave off the possibility of that phenomenon. “So, Ikenna, if you still want to be a part of this family or eat any food in it, stand up from that bed of yours now, or else you and I will fit into the same trousers.”

Ikenna was cowed by the threat; for Mother used that expression “fit into the same trousers” only when her anger had reached its peak. She went into her room and returned with one of Father’s old leather belts wound halfway around her wrist, fully ready to flog him, something she almost never did. At the sight of it, Ikenna dragged himself to the bathroom to bathe and get ready for church.

On our way home after the service, Ikenna walked ahead of us, so Mother wouldn’t pick issues with him in public and because Mother usually gave him the key so he could unlock the gate and the main door for us. She almost never went home directly after church; she always waited with the little ones for post-service women’s meetings, or attended one visitation or the other. Once we were out of Mother’s sight, Ikenna began quickening his steps. I and the rest followed him in silence. Ikenna, for some reason, took a longer route home through Ijoka Street, a street that was populated by the poor who lived in low-cost houses — mostly unvarnished — and in wooden shacks. Little children were playing in almost every corner of this dirty area. There were little girls jumping around within a big square of columns. A boy, not more than three, stooped over what appeared to be tawny ropes of excreta trailing down from him to form viscous pyramids. As this pyramid formed and polluted the air, the boy played on, marking the dirt with a stick, undisturbed by the league of flies that hovered around his fundament. My brothers and I spat into the dirt, and then by unquestioned instinct, immediately erased the spittle with the soles of our sandals as we passed, Boja cursing the little boy and the people of the neighbourhood—“pigs, pigs.” Obembe, trying to cleanly erase his spittle, trailed behind momentarily. By spitting and erasing it, we were observing the superstition that if a pregnant woman stepped on saliva, the person who had spit — if male — would be rendered permanently impotent, which I understood at the time to mean that one’s organ would magically disappear.