Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Then, as if someone had signalled him, the Pastor cleared his throat again, and attempted to move forward but dangled delicately over the edge of the grave, inadvertently pushing sand into it as he struggled to hold himself from falling. A man helped him regain balance and then he moved back a little more.

“It is now time to read briefly from the word of God,” the Pastor began when he’d steadied himself. He spoke in spurts as if his words were tropical grasshoppers that flew out of his mouth and paused, the way a grasshopper perches and hops off, again and again and again until he completed his speech. And as he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his throat. “Let us read from the book of Hebrews; Paul’s letter to the Hebrews. Let’s read from the first verse of chapter eleven.” He raised his head, and held the entire group of mourners in one stern stare. Then bowing slightly, he began to read: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…”

While the Pastor read, I felt an incredible urge to watch Obembe, to gauge his feelings at the time. When I looked at him, memories of my lost brothers filled me, for it seemed the past suddenly exploded and fragments of the past began floating freely in his eyes like confetti in an air-filled balloon. First, I saw Ikenna, face funnelled, dim-eyed and angry, standing over Obembe and me who were kneeling on the ground. This was near the esan bush, on our way to Omi-Ala just after Obembe had mocked the white garment church, when he’d ordered us to kneel in punishment for “disrespecting other people’s faith.” Next, I saw Ikenna and myself sitting in the crook of the tangerine tree in our compound, both of us theatrical Commando and Rambo, lying in wait for Obembe and Boja. They were Hulk Hogan and Chuck Norris respectively and were hiding at the veranda of our bungalow. They emerged every now and then, pointing their toy guns at us, making gun-battle sounds— dririririri or ti-ti-ti-ti-ti. When they jumped or screamed, we responded with the din of a bomb blast— gbum!

I saw Ikenna, dressed in his red vest, standing across the white chalk line drawn on the dirt pitch of the sports ground of our primary school. It is 1991 and I’d just finished the kindergarten race in the colours of the blue team and had emerged as the second from the rear — after I’d managed to edge out the runner for the White House. I’m now in Mother’s arms, standing with Obembe and Boja behind the long rope fastened to poles at both ends, which cordoned off the spectators from the track field. We are cheering for Ikenna from this side line, Boja and Obembe clapping intermittently. A whistle goes off at some point and Ikenna — who is on the same par as four others in colours: green, blue, white and yellow — bends one knee to the ground as the voice of Mr Lawrence, the jack-of-all-trades teacher who also happened to be the sports master, cries: “On your mark!” He pauses as all the runners raise one leg with their fingers pointing to the ground like kangaroos. “Set!” Mr Lawrence cries next. When he cries “Go!” it seems that although the athletes had apparently begun running, the boys are still on the same line — standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Then, one after the other, they disengage. The colours of their shirts appears like a momentary vision, and then disappears only for others to take their various places. Then, the Green House runner trips, and falls, fanning dust into the air. The boys seemed to be engulfed in smoke, but then Boja sees Ikenna raise his arm in celebration at the other end of the finish line; then I see it too. In a breath of a moment, he is surrounded by a flock of Red Vest wearers shouting: “Up Red House! Up Red House!” Mother leaps for joy with me in her hands and then suddenly stops. I see why: Boja, having crawled under the barricading rope, is racing towards the finish line crying “Ike, winner! Ike, winner!” Behind him, in hot pursuit and with a long cane, is the teacher guarding the barricade.

When my attention returned to the funeral, the Pastor had reached the thirty-fifth verse, his voice louder, incantatory, so that every verse he read hung on the mind’s fish hook, pulsing like captured fish. The Pastor closed the dog-eared Bible and put it under his armpit. With an already damp handkerchief he wiped his brow.

“Let us now share the grace,” he said.

In response, everyone at the funeral massed into a forceful fellowship of noisy throats. I recited as loud as I could with my eyes firmly closed: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us now and forever. Amen.”

The amen died off slowly, carried along the rows of the massive graveyard whose language was silence. The Pastor signalled the grave-diggers. They immediately returned from where they had sat talking and laughing during the funeral. These curious men began pulling the heap back in haste, quickening Ikenna’s obliteration, as if they were oblivious of the fact that once they covered him, no one would ever see him again. As chunks of earth fell on him, a fresh outbreak of grief erupted and nearly everyone at the funeral cracked open like small pod-producing ifoka nuts. Although I did not cry there, I felt strongly the real palpable reach of loss. With a bewildering air of apathy, the diggers dug on, quicker, one of them briefly stopping to remove a flattened earth-covered water bottle half-buried in the mound of sand that now partly concealed Ikenna’s body. As I watched the men throw more earth into the grave, I dug into the cold soil of my own mind, and it became suddenly clear — the way things always become clearer only after they have happened — that Ikenna was a fragile delicate bird; he was a sparrow.

Little things could unbridle his soul. Wistful thoughts often combed his melancholic spirit in search of craters to be filled with sorrow. As a younger boy, he often sat in the backyard, brooding and contemplative, his arms clasped over his knees. He was highly critical of things, a part of him that greatly resembled Father. He nailed small things to big crosses and would ponder for long on a wrong word he said to someone; he greatly dreaded the reprove of others. He had no place for ironies or satires; they troubled him.

Like sparrows — which we believed had no homes — Ikenna’s heart had no home, no fixed allegiances. He loved the far and the near, the small and the big, the strange and the familiar. But it was the little things that drew and consumed his compassion, the most memorable of which was a small bird he owned for a few days in 1992. He was sitting out in the corridor of the house alone one Christmas Eve while the others were inside dancing and singing carols, eating, and drinking, when a bird fell to the dirt in front of him. Ikenna bent low and inched towards it in the dark and then wrapped his hands around its feathery body. It was a badly deplumed sparrow that had been caught by someone and had escaped, a strand of twine still wound around its leg. Ikenna’s soul cleaved to the sparrow, and he guarded it jealously for three days, feeding it with whatever he could find. Mother asked him to let it go, but he refused. Then, one morning, he lifted the bird’s lifeless body in his hand and dug a hole in the backyard; his heart was broken. He and Boja covered the sparrow with sand until the bird was buried under the earth. This was exactly how Ikenna vanished, too. First, the earth poured by the mourners and the undertakers covered his white-shrouded trunk, then his legs, arms, face and everything, until he was obliterated forever from our eyes.

THE FUNGUS