Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Ikenna was buried four days after Father returned — with Boja’s whereabouts still unknown. Although the news of the tragedy had spread across the district and neighbours were thronging our house to offer what they’d heard or seen, no one knew where he was. A neighbour, a pregnant woman who lived in a house across the road from ours, said she’d heard a loud cry at about the time Ikenna died. It had woken her from sleep. Another, a university doctorate student, whom everyone called “Prof,” an elusive figure who was almost never in his home — the small one-bedroom bungalow beside Igbafe’s house — had, while studying, heard the bang of a metal object around that time. But it was Igbafe’s mother who — having brought the message from her father, Igbafe’s grandfather — gave details close to what might have happened. One of them (Boja, apparently) had staggered up from the ground and rather than continue the fight, had gone towards the kitchen in blind fury and agony, the other trailing. At that point, the man, horrified and thinking the fight had ended, had left his seat and entered the house. He could not tell where Boja had gone.

Like a miracle, a host of people, almost all of whom were relatives, Nde Iku na’ ibe , some of whom I’d seen before and others whose faces merely peopled the many daguerreotypes and fading photographs tucked away in our family albums, arrived at the house within two days. They had all come from the village, Amano, a place I barely knew. We’d visited it only once, during the burial ceremony of Yee Keneolisa, an old immobile man, who was Father’s uncle. We’d travelled through a seemingly interminable road sewn between two vast stretches of thick forests until we reached a place where the great jungle shrunk into a few trees and cultivated heaps and a distributed army of scarecrows. Soon, as Father’s Peugeot negotiated the sand-filled tracks, jerking furiously, we began to meet people who knew him. These people greeted our parents and us with a boisterous effulgence of geniality. Later, dressed in black clothes with a host of others, we’d marched down in a procession to the funeral, no one speaking, but merely crying as if we had been transformed from creatures capable of making speech to ones that could only wail; this had amazed me beyond words.

These people arrived now exactly the way I last saw them: wearing black clothes. Ikenna was, in fact, the only one dressed differently at his funeral. The sparkling white shirt and trousers he wore gave him the appearance of an angel who — caught unawares during a physical manifestation on earth — had his bones broken to prevent him from returning back to heaven. Everyone else was dressed in black and cloaked in different shades of grief at the ceremony except for Obembe and me: we alone did not cry. Through the days that had collected like bad blood in a boil since Ikenna died, Obembe and I had refused to cry except for initial tears we’d shed in the kitchen when we saw his lifeless body. Even Father had wept a few times: once, while pasting Ikenna’s obituary poster on the wall of our house, and again while talking with Pastor Collins during the latter’s first condolence visit. Although I cannot rationalize my decision not to shed a tear, I’d held it so strongly — and it seemed Obembe held it, too — that rather than weep, I fixed my eyes instead on Ikenna’s face, which I feared would soon be lost. His face had been washed and oiled with olive oil so that it gleamed with unearthly radiance. Although the tear on his lip and the scar across his eyebrows were still visible, his face wore an uncanny peace as if he were not real, as if I and the rest of the mourners had simply dreamt him up. It was as he lay there that I first saw what Obembe had long seen and known — that Ikenna had grown a beard. It seemed to have sprouted overnight and now lined beneath his jaw like a delicately inscribed sketch.

In the coffin, Ikenna’s body — his head facing up, cotton wool plugs blocking his nostrils and ears, hands clinging to his sides, legs tagged together — had the shape of a prolate spheroid; an ovoid, the shape of a bird. This was because he was, in fact, a sparrow; a fragile thing who did not design his own fate. It was designed for him. His chi , the personal god the Igbos believe everyone had, was weak. His was the efulefu kind: the irresponsible sentinel that sometimes abandoned its subject and went on far journeys or errands, leaving them unprotected. This was the reason why, by the time he became a teenager, he’d already had his fill of sinister events and personal tragedies, for he was a mere sparrow who lived in a world of black storms.

When he was six, a boy kicked him in the crotch while they were playing football, sending one of his testes out of his scrotal sac into his body. He was rushed to a hospital where doctors scrambled to carry out a testicular transplant; while in a room in the same hospital they struggled to revive Mother, who had fainted upon hearing of Ikenna’s injury. By the morning of the following day, both of them were alive — Mother with relief in place of the grief of the past day when she’d greatly feared he would die, and Ikenna with a small pebble in his scrotum in place of his lost testes. He did not play football for three years. Even when he began playing again, he often grabbed his crotch with his hand to protect it whenever the ball was kicked in his direction. Two years after that, at age eight, he was stung by a scorpion while sitting under a tree in his school. Again, he survived the sting; but his right leg became permanently impaired, shrunken to a smaller size than the other one.

The funeral was held at St. Andrew’s Cemetery, a walled field full of gravestones and a few trees. It was filled with posters that were made for the burial. Some of the obituary posters printed on white A4 papers were pasted on the buses that conveyed members of our church and other guests to the funeral, and some on the windshield and rear window of Father’s car. One was on the exterior part of the wall of our house, just by the postal number, which was written in a circle with charcoal chalk by census workers during the 1991 national census. One was pasted on the rounded electric pole outside the gate of our compound and another on the notice boards of the church. They pasted one on the gate of my school — where Ikenna was once a pupil — and Aquinas College, Akure, the junior secondary school he and Boja attended. Father had decided they should only be pasted where necessary, “just to let our family and friends know what has happened.” The posters were headlined with the word “obituary” printed in ink that spilled at the head of the b , and at the tails of the a and r . In almost all of them, the whiteness of the paper seemed to blur out Ikenna’s photo and make him look like one who existed in the nineteenth century. Under the photo was the inscription Although you left us too early, we love you dearly. We hope we will meet again when the time comes. And this below:

IKENNA A. AGWU (1981–1996),

survived by his parents,

Mr and Mrs Agwu and his siblings,

Boja, Obembe, Benjamin, David and Nkem Agwu.

At the funeral, before Ikenna was obliterated by sand-fill, Pastor Collins requested that members of our family gather round him while the others stepped back. “Step back a bit , please,” he said in English cadenced with a thick Igbo accent. “Oh, thank you, thank you. The Lord bless you. A little bit more please. The Lord bless you.”

My close family and our relatives surrounded the grave. There were faces I hadn’t seen since I was born. After nearly all had surrounded the grave, the Pastor asked that eyes be closed for prayers, but Mother burst into a piercing cry of anguish, sending a terrible wave of sorrow down the line. Pastor Collins ignored her and prayed on, his voice shimmying. Although his words— that you forgive and receive his soul in your kingdom … we know that in the same way you gave, you have taken… the fortitude to bear the loss… thank you Lord Jesus for we know you have heard us —seemed to me to have little meaning, all the people hummed a high-sounding “amen” at the end of them. Then one after the other, they scooped earth with a single shovel, threw it into the grave, and passed the shovel on to the next person in the ring. While waiting my turn, I looked up and noticed the horizon had become filled with wool-shaped clouds, so thickly ashen that I thought even white egrets would have been mocked into greyness were they to fly past at that very hour. I was lost in this observation when I heard my name. I dropped my eyes and saw Obembe tearfully muttering something inaudible as he held the shovel towards me with trembling hands. The shovel was big and heavy in my hands, weightier because of the patch of earth that clung to the back of it like a hunch. It was cold, too. My feet sank into the heap of sand when I dug the shovel into the earth and lifted some of it. I then threw it into the grave, and passed the shovel to Father. He took it, dug up a mighty heap of sand and threw it into the grave. Because he was the last person, he dropped the shovel and put his hand on my shoulder.