Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Okay, let’s go,” Mr Bode said.

He darted back towards the house as if going for something, but stopped short and gesturing forward, said: “Let’s go.” Once on the way, my brother and I began to run but stopped so Mr Bode could catch up.

“We have to be quick, sir,” I begged.

At this, Mr Bode began running, too, barefooted. Close to home, two women blocked the edge of the sidewalk. They were dressed in cheap grime-tainted gowns, and each bore a sack laden with corn on her head. Obembe brushed past one of them and two small cobs fell from a hole in the sack. The woman swore as we raced away.

The first thing we saw when we got to our compound was the pregnant goat with a bloated belly and sagging udders, owned by our neighbours. It crouched near the gate, bleating with its tongue unfurled from its mouth like adhesive tape unrolled from its spool. All around its dark, heavy and reeking body were small black pods of its faeces, some squashed into brown pus-like paste and others coagulated in twos, threes and multiples. The only sound I could hear from the compound was the huee, huee sound of the goat’s heavy breathing. We ran to the backyard, but all we saw were pieces of rags from what had been their clothes, bloodstains streaked into the dirt, and a palimpsest of rich dirt defaced with their footprints. It was impossible to have imagined they could have ended the fight without mediation. Where had they gone? Who’d intervened?

“Where did you say they were fighting?” Mr Bode asked, bemused.

“Here, on this spot,” Obembe replied, pointing to the dirt, tears welling in his eyes.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir,” Obembe said, “here, right here is where we left them. Here.” Mr Bode looked at me and I said, “Here, they were fighting here. See the blood.” I pointed to the spot where blood had mixed with earth and formed into a lump, and another spot where there was a wet, rounded, dark patch the shape of a half-closed eye.

Mr Bode gazed on in confusion and said: “Then where might they be?” He began looking about him again and as he did, I wiped my eyes and blew my nose into the dirt. A low-flying bird, a pigeon, perched on the fence by my right hand, fluttering its wings rapidly. As though threatened, the bird leapt off, and glided over the well to the fence. I looked up to see if Igbafe’s grandfather was still where I’d seen him seated during the fight. But he, too, was no longer there. A plastic cup was on the chair where he’d sat only a while ago.

“Okay, let us go look inside the house,” I heard Mr Bode say. “It is well, let’s go. Maybe they stopped fighting and went back inside.”

Obembe nodded and led the way while I remained in the backyard. The goat came doddering towards me, bleating. I made a move to deter it, but it merely halted, raised its horned head and bleated like a speechless creature that, having witnessed something terrible, was mustering all its strength to force out a sensible speech to report it. But even in its best effort, the best it could only come up with was a deafening bleat of mbreeeeeeeeeeeh! — a bleat which, looking back now, I recognize must have been a plea in hircine-speak.

I left the goat and headed for the garden. Obembe and Mr Bode went inside the house, calling my brothers’ names. I was negotiating my way through the heads of corn that had started thriving in the soft rain of August and had almost reached the end of it — where the old asbestos sheets lay piled against the wall — when I heard a sharp cry from the direction of our kitchen. At once, I made a mad rush towards there. I found the kitchen in disarray.

The top shelves were opened and inside them was an empty bottle of Horlicks, a can of yellow custard and old coffee tins that sat atop each other. Lying by the door, broken at the arm, and pointing its soot-black feet upwards, was Mother’s plastic kitchen chair. A pool of reddish palm oil mapped across the top of the board beside the sink filled with unwashed plates, dripping down its edge to the floor. The blue cask in which the oil had been stored now lay on the ground on its side, blackened at the dregs, the last of the oil still in it. A fork lay like a dead fish, still, in the pool of red oil.

Obembe was not alone in the kitchen. Mr Bode stood beside him, his hands on his head, gnashing his teeth. Yet, there was a third person, who, however, had become a lesser creature than the fish and tadpoles we caught at Omi-Ala. This person lay facing the refrigerator, his wide-opened eyes still and fixed in one place. It was obvious these eyes could not glimpse a thing. His tongue was stuck out of his mouth from which a pool of white foam had trailed down to the floor, and his hands were splayed wide apart as though nailed to an invisible cross. Half-buried in his belly was the wooden end of Mother’s kitchen knife, its sharp blade deep in his flesh. The floor was drenched in his blood: a living, moving blood that slowly journeyed under the refrigerator, and, uncannily — like the rivers Niger and Benue whose confluence at Lokoja birthed a broken and mucky nation — joined with the palm oil, forming an unearthly pool of bleached red, like puddles that form in small cavities on dirt roads. The sight of this pool caused Obembe, as if possessed of a prating demon, to continue to utter with quivering lips the refrain “River of red, river of red, river of red.”

It was all he could do, for the hawk had taken flight, soaring on an unapproachable thermal. All that there was to do was scream and wail, scream and wail. I, like Obembe, stung to stillness by the sight, cried out the name, but my tongue became lost to Abulu’s so that the name came out corrupted, slashed, wounded, subtracted from within, dead and vanishing: Ikena .

THE SPARROW

Ikenna was a sparrow:

A thing with wings, able to fly out of sight in the blink of an eye. His life had already gone by the time Obembe and I returned to our compound with Mr Bode, and what we found on the floor in a pool of blood was his empty, bloodied and mangled body. Then, not long after we found it, it disappeared in an ambulance from the General Hospital, returning to our compound in a wooden coffin on the back of a pickup four days later. Obembe and I still did not see him then; our ears merely picked up allusions to “his body in the coffin.” We swallowed the many words people said to us to comfort us like bitter pills with the power to heal us: “ E jo, ema se sukun mo, oma ma’a da —do not weep, it will be well.” They did not mention that Ikenna had become a traveller overnight, a curious traveller that journeys out of his own body, leaving the rest of himself lying empty like the twin husks of a groundnut capped together after its content had been extracted. Although I knew he had died, it felt improbable to me at that time. And although he was in the ambulance outside the house, it was hard to imagine he would never again stand up and walk into the house.

Father knew too, for he returned two days after Ikenna died. It was drizzling, wet and slightly cold. I saw his car drive into the compound through the arc formed from wiping the sheet of fog off the louvres in the sitting room where I’d passed the night. It was his first visit since the morning he had called us his fishermen. He returned with all his things, with no intention of leaving again. He’d tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to get permission to leave the three-month training course in Ghana for a few days to visit Akure when Mother began telling him about Ikenna’s changing behaviour. Then, when Mother made the distress call hours after Ikenna was found dead — a call in which the only words she’d said were: “Eme, Ikenna anaaaa! ” before throwing herself back to the floor — Father scribbled his resignation letter and submitted it to a colleague at the training-course centre in Ghana. Once he arrived back in Nigeria, he took a night bus to Yola, packed his things into his car and drove back to Akure.