Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

The ambulance’s siren began to wail again, and the noise of the mob rose to a deafening pitch. Obembe withdrew from the window and came towards me.

“They have taken him,” Obembe said presently in a husky voice. He repeated it as he took my hand and gently laid me down. My legs had, by that time, weakened from squatting to retch on the floor.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’ll clean this and come lie with you, just lie there,” he said and made towards the door but, as if on second thought, stopped and smiled, two blinking pearls stuck to the pupil of both eyes.

“Ben,” he called.

“Eh.”

“Ike and Boja are dead.” His jaw wobbled, his lower lip pouted as the two pearls slid down, marking their trails with twin liquid lines.

Because I did not know what to make of what he said, I nodded. He turned and left the room.

I closed my eyes while he packed the mess with the dustpan, my mind filled with the imagination of how Boja had died, of how — according to what they said — he’d killed himself. I imagined him standing over Ikenna’s corpse after the stabbing, wailing, having suddenly realized that by that singular action, he had plundered his own life in one single haul like a cave of ancient riches. He must have seen it, must have thought about what the future held in stock for him and dreaded it. It must have been these thoughts that birthed the heinous courage that administered the suicidal idea like morphine into his mind’s vein, starting off its slow death. With his mind dead, it must have been easy to move his legs, carry his body, fear and uncertainty sewing his mind thread-by-thread, the bulge thickening, the loom pilling until he made the plunge — head first, like a diver, the way he always dived into the river, the Omi-Ala. At once, he must have felt a rush of air flood his eyes as he dipped, quietly, without a slight moan or a word spoken. There must have been no increased throbbing and no increased pulse in his heart as he dipped; rather, he must have maintained a curious calm and tranquillity. In that state of mind, he must have glimpsed an illusory epiphany, a montage of images of his past that must have consisted of still images of a five-year-old Boja mounted on the high branch of the tangerine tree in our compound, singing Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy”; five-year-old Boja with a bowl of excreta in his pants when he was asked to stand before the entire school morning assembly and lead the school in the Lord’s Prayer; ten-year-old Boja who acted as Joseph the Carpenter, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus in our church’s Christmas play of 1992 and said: “Mary, I will not marry you because you’re an ashewo !” to the astonishment of all; Boja, who was told by M.K.O. never to fight, don’t ever! ; and Boja who, earlier in the year, was a zealous Fisherman. These images may have assembled in his mind like a swarm of bees in a hive as he dipped lower until he hit the bottom of the well. The contact dashed the hive and scattered the images.

The plunge, I pictured, must have been quick. As his head sank, it must have first hit the rock that protruded from the side of the well. This contact must have then been followed in succession by the sound of bursting, of crashing skull, of breaking bones, of blood purling, then spilling and swirling in his head. His brain must have scattered into smithereens, the veins that connected it to other parts of his head uncoupling. His tongue must have thrust out of his mouth at the moment of the contact, tearing his eardrums apart like an antique veil, and pouring a tenth of his teeth into the floor of his mouth like a pack of dice. A synchrony of noiseless reactions must have followed this. For a short time, his mouth must have kept uttering something inaudible, like a pot of boiling water bubbling as his body convulsed. This must have been the peak of it all. The convulsion must have started to gradually let go of him, calm returning to his bones. Then a peace not of this world must have descended on him, calming him to deadly stillness.

THE SPIDERS

When a mother is hungry, she says:

“Roast something for my children that they may eat.”

ASHANTI PROVERB

Spiders were beasts of grief:

Creatures whom the Igbo believes nest in the houses of the aggrieved, spinning more webs and weaving noiselessly, achingly, until their yarns bulged and covered vast spaces. They appeared as one of the many things that changed in this world after my brothers died. In the first week after their deaths, I went about with the feeling that a fabric awning or an umbrella under which we’d sheltered all along was torn apart, leaving me exposed. I began to remember my brothers, to think of minute details of their lives, as if through the telescope of hindsight that magnified every detail, every little act, every event. But it was not my world alone that was changed after the incidents. We all — Father, Mother, Obembe, me, David and even Nkem — suffered differently, but in the first few weeks after their deaths, Mother emerged as the greatest sufferer.

Spiders built temporary shelters and nested in our home as the Igbo people believe they do when people mourn, but they took their invasion a step further and invaded our mother’s mind. Mother was the first to notice the spiders and the bulging orbs clipped by thread-like fangs to the roof; but that was not all. She began seeing Ikenna spying on us from the carapace of the spiders hanging in the orbs, or saw his eyes looking through the spirals. She complained about them: Ndi ajo ife —These beastly, scaly, terrifying creatures. They scared her. They made her weep, pointing at the spiders, until Father — in a bid to soothe her, and having been mightily pressed by Mama Bose, a pharmacist, and Iya Iyabo to harken to the voice of a grieving woman no matter how absurd he might consider her request — dislodged every webbed abode in the house and smashed several spiders dead against the walls. Then, he also drove out wall geckos, and drew battle lines against cockroaches, whose proliferation was fast becoming a menace. Only then was peace restored; but it was a peace with swollen feet and a limp in its gait.

For soon after the spiders left, Mother began to hear voices from the edge. She suddenly became conscious of the perpetual manoeuvres of an army of biting termites that she perceived had infested her brain and had begun gnawing at the grey matter. She told people who came to comfort her that Boja had forewarned her in a dream that he would die. She frequently recounted the strange dream she had the morning Ikenna and Boja died to the neighbours and church members who swarmed like bees to our home in the days succeeding the deaths, pegging the dreams to the tragedy because the people of that area, and even all of Africa, very strongly believed that when the fruit of a woman’s womb — her child — dies, or is about to, she somehow obtains prescient knowledge of it.

The first day I heard Mother recount this experience — on the eve of Ikenna’s funeral — the reaction that followed it had moved me. Mama Bose, the pharmacist, threw herself on the floor in a loud wail. “Ohhh, that must have been God warning you,” she moaned as she rolled from one end of the floor to the other. “It must have been God warning you it was going to happen, ooooo, eeeyyyy .” Her ejaculation of pain and sorrow was uttered in wordless groans that consisted of jarred vowels stretched to precipitous levels — sometimes totally meaningless, but the nuance of which everyone there perfectly understood. What gripped those who were there even more was what Mother did after telling the story. She stood near the Central Bank calendar that hung on the wall still open to the eagle’s page — to May — because no one had remembered to change it during the terrible weeks of Ikenna’s metamorphosis. Raising both hands up, Mother cried: “ Elu n’ala —Heaven-and-earth, look at my hands and see that they are clean. Look, look at the scar of their birth, it has not yet healed and now they are dead.” When she said this, she raised her blouse and pointed below her navel. “Look at the breasts they sucked; they are still full, but they are no more.” She pulled up her blouse — apparently to show her breasts — but one of the women rushed forward spryly to pull it back down. Too late, for almost everyone in the room had already seen it: the two vein-strewn breasts with prominent nipples — in broad daylight.