Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Father dashed for the well in delirious haste, but when he looked, he saw pieces of the passport floating on the surface of the water, damaged beyond repair. Father piled his hands on his head, shaking. Then, as if suddenly possessed of a spirit, he reached for the tangerine tree, broke off a stick, and ran back towards the house. He was about to descend on Boja when Ikenna intervened. He’d arranged for Boja to throw the passport in the well because he did not want to leave without him; they would go together when they were older. Although I’d come to understand later (and even our parents did so) that this was a lie, Father was overcome at the time by what Ikenna had deemed an act of love, which now, in this moment of his metamorphosis, had become to him an act of ultimate hatred.

When Mother and he returned from the clinic that afternoon, Boja appeared many miles from himself. Blood-stained gauze, with cotton wool underneath, covered the gash at the back of his head. My heart sank when I saw it and I wondered how much blood he’d lost and shuddered at the pain he must have endured. I tried to understand what had happened, what was going on but I could not; the reckoning of these things was not cheap.

Throughout the rest of that day, Mother was a mined road that exploded when anyone stepped within an inch of her. Later, while preparing eba for dinner, she began to soliloquize. She complained that she’d asked Father to request a transfer back to Akure or move us down with him, but that he hadn’t. And now, she lamented, his children were splitting each other’s heads. Ikenna, she continued, had turned into a stranger to her. Her mouth was still moving when she set dinner on the table, while each one of us pulled out the wooden dining chairs and sat on them. When she put out the last thing for dinner, the hand-washing bowl, she began to sob.

Silence and fear engulfed the house that night. Obembe and I retreated to our room early, and David, scared of being around Mother in her harsh mood, followed us. For long before I slept, I listened for any sign of Ikenna but heard none. Yet even as I waited, I secretly wished he would not come home until the next morning. One reason was my fear of Mother’s fury, what she might do to him if he returned in this climate. The second was my fear of how, after they returned from the clinic, Boja had declared that enough was enough. “I promise,” he’d said, licking the tip of his index finger in a gesture of oath-taking, “I will no longer be kept out of my room.” And, to make good his threat, he’d retired to sleep there. I was afraid of the potential danger of Ikenna returning and finding him there and this filled me with the immense premonition that Boja would, someday, retaliate, for he’d been deeply wronged. And as my body yielded to the forceful closure of that day, I began to ponder how far the venom in Ikenna had travelled and feared where it would end.

THE LOCUSTS

Locusts were forerunners:

They swarmed Akure and most parts of Southern Nigeria at the beginning of rainy seasons. The winged insects, as small as the brown brush flies, would leap out of porous holes in the earth in a sudden invasion and converge wherever they saw light — it drew them magnetically. The people of Akure often rejoiced at the arrival of the locusts. For, rain healed the land after the dry seasons during which the inclement sun, aided by the Harmattan wind, tormented the land. The children would switch on bulbs or lanterns and hold bowls of water close so they could knock the insects into them or cause them to shed their wings and drown in the water. The people would gather and feast on the roasted remains of the locusts, rejoicing at the oncoming rain. But the rain would come down — usually on the day after the locust invasion — with a violent storm, plucking out roofs, destroying houses, drowning many and turning whole cities into strange rivers. It would transform the locusts from harbingers of good things into the heralds of evil. Such was the fate the week that followed Boja’s head injury brought to the people of Akure, to all Nigerians, and to our family.

It was the week in August when Nigeria’s Olympic “Dream Team” got to the final of the men’s football. In the weeks before that, marketplaces, schools, offices had lit up with the name Chioma Ajunwa, who had won gold for the ramshackle country. And now, the men’s team, having beaten Brazil in the semi-final, was now in the final with Argentina. The country was mad with joy. As people waved the Nigerian flags in the summer heat in faraway Atlanta, Akure slowly drowned. Thick rain, armed with a fierce wind, which had left the town in a blackout, poured through the eve of the night of the final match between Nigeria’s Dream Team and Argentina. The rain dragged into the morning of the match, the morning of August 3rd, and pummelled zinc and asbestos roofs until sunset when it weakened and ceased. No one went out of the house that day, including Ikenna, who spent most of the day confined to his room, silent except for times when his voice rose as he sang along to a tune on the portable radio cassette player that had become his main companion. His isolation had, by that week, become fully formed.

Mother had confronted him for the injury he’d inflicted on Boja, and he’d argued that he was right because Boja had threatened him first. “I could not have kept quiet and watched a little boy like him threaten me,” he’d insisted, standing at the threshold of his room even though Mother had begged him to sit down in the sitting room and talk. Then, after he’d said that, he burst into tears. Perhaps ashamed of this outburst, he ran into his room and shut the door. Mother would say that day that she was now certain that Ikenna was obviously out of his mind, and that everyone should avoid him until Father returned to bring him back to his senses. But my fear of what Ikenna had become was already growing stronger by the day. Even Boja, despite his initial threat that he would no longer be cheated, complied with Mother’s directions and stayed clear of Ikenna’s way. He’d now fully recovered from his wound and the plaster had been taken off, revealing a curved dent where the stitch had been made.

The rain stopped in the evening, close to the time when the match was to begin. Once it drew near, Ikenna disappeared. We’d all waited for electricity to be restored in time to see the crucial match, but at eight in the evening, there was still a blackout. All day, Obembe and I sat in the sitting room, reading by the dim light of the grey sky. I was reading a paperback edition of a curious book, in which animals spoke and had human names and all of them were domesticated — dogs, pigs, hens, goats, etcetera. The book did not have the wild ones I liked in it, but I read on, drawn by the way the animals spoke and thought like humans. I was deep into the book when Boja, who had been sitting quietly all along, told Mother that he wanted to go see the match at La Room. Mother was seated in the sitting room playing with David and Nkem.

“Isn’t it too late now — must you see the match?” Mother said.

“No, I will go; it is not too late—”

She seemed to ponder it a little while after which she looked up at us and said, “Okay, but be careful.”

We took the torchlight from Mother’s room and went out into the darkening street. All around there were pockets of buildings powered by generators that buzzed noisily, filling the neighbourhood with a confluence of white noises. People generally believed that in Akure, the rich bribed the National Electric Power Authority branch to interrupt power during big matches like this one so they could make money by setting up makeshift viewing centres. La Room was the most modern hotel in our district: a four-storeyed building, walled around with a high barbed-wire fence. At night, even in the absence of electricity, the bright fluorescent lamps stretching from within its walls cast a still pool of light over a stretch of the surroundings. La Room had that night, as on most nights when this power interruption occurred, turned its reception hall into a makeshift viewing centre. A big signboard outside the hotel attracted people with a coloured poster with the logo of the Olympic Games and the inscription: Atlanta 1996 . And indeed, the hall was full when we got there. There were people in every corner of the hall, in different positions, trying to glean a view from the two fourteen-inch television sets placed opposite each other on two high tables. The viewers who had arrived the earliest had occupied the plastic seats closer to the television sets and a growing crowd now massed up behind them, watching.