Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Right, you’re welcome. Please, sit down.”

Father sat on the only chair in front of his desk and motioned that I sit on the other one by the side of the wall close to the door. The office was old-fashioned. All three cupboards in the room were filled with stacks of books and folders. A bright rod of daylight pierced through the aperture between the brown curtains in the absence of electricity. The air smelt of lavender — a smell that reminded me of my visits to Father’s office when he was still working in the Akure branch of the Central Bank.

Once we’d sat, the man placed his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together and said: “Erm, Mr Agwu, I regret to say that we are yet to have a word on the location of your son.” He adjusted himself in his chair, unclasped his hands and quickly put in, “But we have been making progress. We questioned someone in your neighbourhood who confirmed she saw the boy somewhere across the street that afternoon; the description she gave matched yours — the boy she saw wore blood-stained clothes.”

“Which direction did she say he went?” Father asked in a flustered hurry.

“We don’t know for now, but we are investigating thoroughly. Members of our team—” the Deputy began saying before breaking off to cough into his hand, slightly quivering as he did.

Father muttered “Sorry,” and the man thanked him.

“I mean our team has been conducting the search,” he continued after spitting into a handkerchief. “But, you know, even that will be futile if we don’t attach a ransom soon. I mean to involve the people of this town to assist us.” He opened a hardcover book before him and seemed to peruse it while he spoke. “With money on the ground, I am sure people will respond. If not, I mean, our efforts will be akin to sweeping the streets with a broom at night, I mean, by the dim squint of moonlight.”

“I understand what you are saying, DPO,” Father said after a while. “But I want to trust my instincts in this matter, and wait for your preliminary search to be completed before I go on with any personal plans of mine.”

The DPO nodded rapidly.

“Something tells me he is safe somewhere,” Father went on. “Perhaps he is merely hiding because of what he did.”

“Yes, that might be it,” the DPO said in a slightly raised voice. He seemed to be uneasy in his seat: he adjusted the chair by the hook under it, put his hands on the table and began mechanically picking sheets of paper scattered all over his table as he spoke. “You know a child and even adults — having done such a terrible thing… I mean, after killing his blood brother — would be afraid. He might be afraid of us the police, or even you his parents, of the future — of everything. There’s even a chance he may have left the town entirely.”

“Yes,” Father said in a mournful tone, shaking his head.

“That reminds me,” the policeman said with a snap of his finger. “Have you tried to reach any of your relatives in nearby places to ask—”

“Yes, but I don’t think this is likely, though. My sons have rarely visited our relatives except for when they were quite small, and never once without me or their mother. And, most of our relatives are here, none of them have seen him. They came for his brother’s funeral which we just concluded a few hours ago.”

The DPO’s eyes caught mine at that moment when I was staring at him, pondering on the heavy resemblance I thought he bore to the dark-spectacled military man in the portrait behind him — the Nigerian dictator, General Sani Abacha.

“I understand your point. We will do our best, but we hope he returns by himself — in his own time.”

“We hope, too,” Father said repeatedly in muffling tones. “Thank you for your efforts, sir.”

The man asked Father something I did not catch, for I’d gone blank again, an image of Ikenna with the knife in his belly hovering in my mind. Father and the man stood up and shook hands, and we left the office.

Boja was also a self-revealing fungus. After four torturous days in which no one had the faintest idea of what happened to him or where he was, he showed himself. He took pity on Mother, who was almost dying of grief, or perhaps he knew Father had become worn down by it all, and could not sit in the house because Mother swore at him and blamed him incessantly. When Father drove into the compound the morning after Ikenna died, she’d run up to him, opened the door of his car, and dragged him out of the car into the rain, screaming, strangling him by the collar in the rain. “Did I not tell you?” she cried. “Didn’t I tell you they were fast slipping from my grip? Didn’t I, Didn’t I? Eme, did you not know that if a wall does not open its mouth by cracking, lizards cannot enter through it. Eme, didn’t you?” She did not let go of him, even when Mrs Agbati, awakened by the noise, ran into the compound, pleading with Mother to let Father go inside. “I won’t, no,” Mother resisted, sobbing even more. “Look at us, just look, look. We opened our mouths, Eme, we opened them wide and now we have swallowed a multitude of them.”

I cannot forget how Father, pressed for breath and soaking in the rain, kept the sort of calm I’d swear he was incapable of until Mother was wrested off him. Many times in the past four days, she’d tried to attack him, and was often held back by people who had come to console us. Perhaps too, Boja might have looked upon Nkem who followed Father about, wailing incessantly because Mother could not nurse her. Obembe mostly tended to David, who also cried for no reason sometimes and got hit by Mother once when he pestered her. Perhaps, Boja saw all this and pitied her and the rest of us, too. Or, perhaps he was merely forced to reveal himself because he could no longer hide. No one will ever know.

He revealed himself not long after Father and I returned from the police station. His photo, the one in which he crouched with his hand to the photographer as if he was going to knock the man over, had just popped up on the OSRC News commercials with the heading Missing Person immediately after a clip of the Nigerian Olympic Dream Team being mobbed as they arrived in Lagos from the United States with the men’s football Olympic gold. We were eating yam and palm-oil sauce — Obembe, Father, David and me. Mother lay on the carpet in the other part of the sitting room, still dressed in all black. Nkem was in the hands of Mama Bose, the pharmacist. One of our aunties, the last of the mourners still left, but who would take the night bus back to Aba that same day, sat beside Mama Bose and Mother. Mother was talking to the two women about peace of mind, and of how people had responded to our family’s grief so far while my eyes were focused on the television, where the Dream Team’s Austin Jay-Jay Okocha was now shaking hands with General Abacha in Aso Rock when Mrs Agbati, a next-door neighbour, ran to our main door, screaming. She’d come to fetch water from our well, an eleven-foot well, believed to be one of the deepest in the district. Our neighbours, especially the Agbatis, often used it when their own wells dried or had insufficient water.

She threw herself at the threshold of our storm door, crying, “Ewooooh! Ewooooh!! ”

“Bolanle, what is it?” Father asked. He’d sprung up at the woman’s shout.

“He is… in the well oooooo, Ewoooh ,” Mrs Agbati managed to say between wailing and mournful wriggling on the floor.

“Who?” Father asked aloud, “what, who is in the well?”

“There, there, in the well!” the woman, whom Boja disliked and often called an ashewo because he said he once saw her going into the La Room motel, repeated.

“I said, who?” But as he asked, he’d begun to run out of the house. I followed, Obembe behind me.