Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Obembe nodded.

“I’m not saying you should drive them in a car, no.” Father shook his head. “I mean, you just lead them.”

Obembe seconded his initial nod.

“Lead them,” Father mumbled.

“Okay, Daddy,” Obembe replied.

Father stood up and wiped his nose with his hand. The mess slid down the back of his hand, its colour like Vaseline. As I watched him, I remembered that I’d once read in the Animal Atlas that most eagles lay only two eggs. And that the eaglets, once hatched from the eggs, are often killed by the older chicks — especially during times of food shortages in what the book termed “the Cain and Abel syndrome.” Despite their might and strength, I’d read, eagles do nothing to stop these fratricides. Perhaps these killings happen when the eagles are away from the eyrie, or when they travel camel distances to get food for the household. Then when they pick the squirrel or mouse and mount the clouds in hasty flight to their eyrie, they return only to find the eaglets — perhaps two eaglets — dead: one bloodied inside the eyrie, its dark red blood leaking through the nest, and the other swollen double, bloated and floating on a nearby pool.

“You both stay here,” Father said, cutting into my thoughts. “Don’t come out of here until I tell you to. Okay?”

“Yes, Daddy,” we chorused.

He rose to leave, but turned slowly. I believe he started a sentence, perhaps a plea: “Please I beg you—” but that was it. He went out and left us there, both of us startled.

It was after Father left that it struck me that Boja was also a self-destructive fungus: one who inhabited the body of an organism and gradually effected its destruction. This was what he did to Ikenna. First, he sank Ikenna’s spirit and then he banished his soul by making a deadly perforation through which Ikenna’s blood emptied from his body and formed a red river below him. After this, like his kind, he turned against himself and killed himself.

It was Obembe who first told me that Boja killed himself. Obembe gathered from the people who’d congregated in the compound that this must have been the case, and had waited to tell me about it. And once Father left the room, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what Boja did?”

This stung me deep.

“Do you know that we drank the blood from his wound?” Obembe continued. I shook my head.

“Listen, you don’t know anything. Do you not know that there was a big hole in his head? I — saw — it! And we made tea with this well water this morning, and we all drank from it.”

I could not understand this, I could not understand how he might have been there all along. “If he was there, there all the time, there—” I began to say but stopped.

“Go on,” Obembe said.

“If he was there all this while, there — there,” I stammered.

“Go on?” he said.

“Okay, if he was there how didn’t we see him in the well when we fetched water this morning?”

“Because when something drowns, they don’t come up immediately. Listen, remember the lizard that fell into Kayode’s water drum?”

I nodded.

“And the bird that fell into the well two years ago?”

I nodded again.

“Yes, like these; it happens that way.” He gestured wearily towards the window and repeated, “Like that — it happens that way.”

He stood from the chair and lay on the bed and covered himself with the wrappa Mother had given us, the one with the portraits of a tiger etched all over it. I watched the movement of his head as the sound of suppressed sobs came from under the covering. I sat still, glued to where I was but conscious of a gradual eruption in my bowel, where something that felt like a miniature hare was gnawing inside it. The gnawing continued until, suddenly feeling a vinegary taste in my mouth, I vomited a lump of moist food in soupy pastry on the floor. The outburst was followed by bouts of coughing. I bent to the floor and coughed out more.

Obembe jumped out of his bed towards me. “What? What happened to you?”

I tried to answer, but could not; the hare had continued scratching deeper into my bones. I gasped for breath.

“Eh, water,” he said. “Let me get you some water.”

I nodded.

He brought water, and sprinkled it on my face, but it felt as if I was immersed in water, as if I were drowning. I gasped as the beads trickled down my face, and frantically wiped them off.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I nodded and mumbled: “Yes.”

“You should drink some water.”

He left and returned with water in a cup.

“Take, drink,” he said. “And don’t be afraid anymore.”

When he said that, I remembered how, once, before we began fishing, while we were coming back from the football pitch, a dog leapt out of one of the skeletal rooms of an uncompleted building, and started barking at us. This dog was a lean thing, so thin its ribs could easily be numbered. Spots and fresh wounds covered its body like freckles on a pineapple. The poor beast came towards us in intermittent steps, belligerently, as though it wanted to attack. Although I loved animals, I was scared of dogs, lions, tigers and all those in the cat family, for I had read so much about how they tore people and other animals to pieces. I screamed at the sight of the dog and clasped to Boja. To quench my fear, Boja picked a stone and aimed at the dog. The stone missed the dog, but scared it so much that the dog woofed on, jutting mechanically, wagging its thin tail as it went away, marking its footprints in the dirt. Then, turning to me, he said: “The dog is gone, Ben; don’t be afraid anymore.” And that instant, my fear was gone.

As I drank the water Obembe had brought, I became conscious of the sudden surge in the pandemonium outside. A siren was blaring at a close distance. As the peal grew louder, voices shouted orders for people to allow “them” to come in. An ambulance had apparently arrived. A tumult overwhelmed our compound as men bore Boja’s swollen body to the ambulance. Obembe rushed to watch them load Boja’s corpse into the ambulance from the window of our sitting room, making sure Father did not see him and trying to keep an eye on me at the same time. He returned to me when the sirens began blaring again, this time deafeningly. I’d drunk the water and had stopped vomiting, but my mind could not stop spinning.

I thought of what Obembe had told me on the day Ikenna pushed Boja against the metal box. He’d sat quietly in a corner of our room, hugging himself as if he’d caught a cold. Then he asked if I saw what was in the pocket of Ikenna’s shorts when he came into the room earlier.

“No, what was it?” I had asked him, but he merely gazed, dazed, his mouth hardly closing, so that his large incisors appeared bigger than they actually were. He went to the window, his face still filled with that look. He set his eyes outside where a long cavalcade of soldier ants was making a procession along the fence, which was still wet from the long days of rain. A piece of rag was stuck to it, dripping water in a long line that slowly slid down to the foot of the wall. A cumulus cloud hung in the horizon above the walls.

I had waited patiently for Obembe’s answer, but when it became a long time coming, I asked him again.

“Ikenna had a knife — in his pocket,” he answered, without turning to look at me.

I sat up and raced to him as though a beast had rammed through the wall into the room to devour me. “A knife?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I saw it, it was Mama’s cooking knife, the one with which Boja killed the cock.” He shook his head again. “I saw it,” he repeated, gazing first at the ceiling — as if something there had nodded in the affirmative to confirm that he was right. “He had a knife.” With his face contorting now and his voice falling, he said: “Perhaps, he wanted to kill Boja.”