Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

This was indeed a dirty street, the street in which Kayode, our friend, lived with his parents in an unfinished two-storeyed building whose floor alone had been paved. The house was in such a raw shape that masts of unshaped concrete and iron stretched from the attic, thrusting skeletal beams upwards. Unvarnished piles of blocks greening with moss were scattered around the entire compound. In the holes in the bricks and in its entire frame nested multitudes of lizards and skinks that scurried everywhere. Kayode once told us of how his mother found a lizard in the drum in their kitchen where they stored drinking water. The dead lizard lay atop the water for days unnoticed until the water acquired a sour taste. When his mother emptied the drum and the dead lizard slid to the ground in the pool of water, its head had swollen double, and like all things that drown , had started to decompose. At nearly every corner of the neighbourhood, heaps of trash ate into slabs and thrust into roadways. Some of the dirt piled in open sewers, brooding and choky like tumours, curved around pedestrian bridges like boas, nestled like bird nests between roadside kiosks, festered in small land cavities and peopled clearings. And all over the place, stale air hung, linking the buildings together with its invisible stench.

The sun was fierce in the sky, forcing trees to create dark awnings under their canopies. At one side of the road, a woman was frying fish in a pan on a hearth under a wooden shack. The billows of smoke rose steadily from both sides of the hearth, pooling towards us. We crossed to the other side between a parked truck and the balcony of a house whose interior I glimpsed briefly: two men seated on a brown couch, gesticulating while a roving standing fan slowly turned its head. A goat and her kids were squirrelled under a table in front of the balcony, surrounded by black pods of their own waste.

When we got to our compound, waiting for Ikenna to open the gate, Boja said: “I saw Abulu try to enter the church during the service today, but he was not allowed in because he was naked.” Boja had joined a team of boys who played drums for our local church. The boys played by rotation and he’d played that day, and had thus sat at the front of the church near the altar — hence the reason why he’d been able to see Abulu come through the rear door of the church. Ikenna was fumbling in his pocket for the key, and had to turn the pocket inside out because the key had become tangled in a twine of the linen and unfurled fibres, wrapping itself out of his reach. The pocket was dirty: it was stained with ink, and small pieces of groundnut husks showered to the ground like dust when he thrust it out. When he tried to untangle the key without success, he tore it out with force, causing the pocket to spring a leak. He was starting to turn the key in the hole when Boja said, “Ike, I know you believe the prophecy, but you know we are children of God—”

“He is a prophet,” Ikenna replied curtly.

He opened the door and as he extracted the key from the keyhole, Boja said, “Yes, but he is not of God.”

“How did you know?” Ikenna snapped, turning to face Boja now. “I’m asking you; how did you know?”

“He isn’t, Ike, I’m sure.”

“What is your proof? Eh, what is your proof?”

Boja said nothing. Ikenna’s eyes were raised upwards above our heads and we all followed, and saw the object of his view: a kite made of different polythene materials gliding aloft in the distance.

“But what he said cannot happen,” Boja said. “Listen, he mentioned a red river. He said you will swim in a red river. How can a river be red?” He made a gesture that vocalized impossibility by spreading his hands, gazing at us as if asking for assurance that what he’d said was right. Obembe nodded in reply. “He is mad, Ike; he does not know what he says.”

Boja drew closer to Ikenna and in an unexpected show of courage, put his hand on Ikenna’s shoulder. “You have to believe me, Ike, you have to believe,” he said, shaking Ikenna’s shoulder as if he was attempting to demolish the mountain of fear deep within his brother.

Ikenna stood there, his eyes fixed on the floor — apparently moved by Boja’s words. It was a moment of hope, one in which it seemed that we could restore him who was lost to us. Like Boja, I, too, wanted to tell Ikenna that I could not kill him, but it was Obembe who spoke next.

“He. Is. Right,” Obembe stammered. “None of us will kill you. We are not — Ike — we are not even real fishermen. He said a fisherman will kill you, Ike, but we are not real fishermen.”

Ikenna looked up at Obembe and his face wore the expression of one confounded by what he’d heard. Tears stood in his eyes. It was now my turn.

“We cannot kill you, Ike, you are strong, and bigger than us all,” I said in a voice that was as collected as I could manage, having been nudged by the feeling that I, too, had something to say. But I did not know what gave me the audacity to take his hand and say: “Brother Ike, you said we hate you, but it is not true. We like you very much more than everyone.”

Although at that point my throat became warm, I said with all the calm I could muster: “We like you even more than Daddy and Mama.”

I stepped back from him and my eyes fell on Boja, who was nodding. For a moment, Ikenna seemed lost. Our words, it seemed, had had an impact on him, and for the first time in many weeks, my eyes and those of the others met his. His eyes were bloodshot and his face pale, but there was an expression on it that was so indescribable, so beyond recognition — as my memory at the time could afford — that it became the face that I now mostly remember of him.

A moment of great expectation followed, all of us waiting for what he would do next. As if nudged by a pat from a spirit, he turned and hurried into his room. Then from within it, he yelled: “I don’t want anyone disturbing me from now on. All of you mind your business and leave me alone. I warn you, leave me alone!”

The fear, after destroying Ikenna’s well-being, health and faith, destroyed his relationships, the closest of which was with us, his brothers. It seemed that he had fought the internal battle for too long, and now wanted to get it over with. As if to dare the prophecy to come true Ikenna began to do all he could to harm us. Two days after our attempt to persuade him, we woke to discover that Ikenna had destroyed our prized possession: a copy of the Akure Herald of June 15th, 1993. The newspaper had our photos on it; it had Ikenna’s on the front page with the caption Young Hero drives his younger brothers to safety . The photos of Boja, Obembe and me were placed in a small rectangular box just over Ikenna’s full image, under the title Akure Herald . The newspaper was priceless, our medal of honour even stronger than the M.K.O. calendar. At one time, Ikenna would have killed for it. The newspaper told the story of how he led us to safety during the internecine political riots, a seminal moment that changed everything in the life of Akure.

On that historic day, barely two months after we met M.K.O., we were in school when cars began honking interminably. I was in my class of mostly six-year-olds, unaware of the boiling unrest in Akure and around Nigeria. I’d heard of a war that had happened long before — a war Father often mentioned in passing. When he said the phrase “before the war,” a sentence unconnected to the events of the war would often follow, and then sometimes end with “but all these were cut short by the war.” There were times when, while chiding us for an act that smacked of laziness or weakness, he’d tell the story of his escapade as a ten-year-old boy during the war when he was left to cater for, hunt for, feed and protect his mother and younger sisters after they all took to the big Ogbuti forest to escape the invasion of our village by the Nigerian army. This was the only time he ever actually said anything that happened “during the war.” Alternatively, the phrase would be “after the war.” Then, a fresh sentence would take form, without any link to the war mentioned.