Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

We watched as Father sprinkled kerosene on the heap from the red can, every drop we had left in the house. Then, with a few glances at Mother, he struck the match. The heap lighted and a burst of smoke exploded into the air. As the fire gnawed the belongings of Ikenna and Boja and the things they had touched while on earth, the sense of their end filled my body with a thousand tacks. Vividly do I recall how one of Boja’s favourite garments, a kaftan, struggled with the fire. It first spread out from its compressed state when the fire caught it as if it were a living thing struggling for life, then it slowly began to tilt backwards, wilting, as it dissolved into black ash. I heard Mother’s sobs, and looked back. I saw she had come out of the room and was now sitting on the ground a few metres from the heap with Nkem squatted beside her. Father stood for long beside the heap, the empty can of kerosene in his hand, wiping his rheumy eyes and his dirtied face. Obembe and I stood beside him. When he noticed Mother, he dropped the can and went to her.

“Nwuyem,” he said, “I told you this grief will pass — eh. We cannot continue to grieve forever. I’ve told you that we cannot flip precedence. We cannot bring forward what is behind, nor can we bring what is forward back. It is enough, Adaku, I beg you. I’m here now, we will get through this together.”

A flock of birds, barely visible in the approaching darkness, had begun to circle the skyward smoke. The sky above us had now become the colour of bright fire, and the trees, now turned into mere silhouettes, appeared like uncanny witnesses of the burning as the ashes of Ikenna’s briefcase, Boja’s bags, their clothes, their shoes, Ikenna’s bad guitar, their M.K.O. writing books, their photographs, notebooks with sketches of Yoyodon, tadpoles, the Omi-Ala River, their fishing clothes, one of the tins we’d hoped to store fish in but never used, their toy guns, their alarm clock, their drawing books, their matchboxes, their underpants, their shirts, their trousers — all the things they once had or touched — rose in a cloud of smoke, and vanished into the sky.

THE SEARCHDOG

Obembe was a searchdog:

The one who first discovered things, who knew things and who, after discovering them, examined them. He was perpetually pregnant with ideas, and in the fullness of time, delivered them as creatures equipped with wings — able to fly.

It was he who first found that there was a loaded pistol behind the sitting-room shelf two years after we moved into our house in Akure. He’d found the gun while chasing a small housefly around our room. The fly had droned over him, and escaped two frantic blows with the Simple Algebra textbook Obembe swiftly employed for the purpose of killing it. The fly leapt up after the last miss and glided into the space on the shelf where the television, VHS and radio were set in their various columns. When he chased the fly there, he let out a scream, dropping the book. We had just moved into the house and no one had looked behind the shelf to see the barrel of the pistol slightly sticking out from under it. Father would pick the pistol up and take it to the police station, petrified as all of us were, but thankful that it was not found by one of the younger children, David or Nkem.

Obembe’s eyes were a searchdog’s.

Eyes that noticed little things, negligible details others overlooked. I have come to believe he had an inkling that Boja was in the well long before Mrs Agbati found him there. For the morning she found Boja, Obembe had discovered that the water from the well was greasy, and had a foul odour. He’d fetched it to bathe and had noticed a slick on the surface of the water in the bucket. He called me to see it and when I scooped the water in my hand, I spat and threw away the water. I’d perceived the smell, too — the smell of rot, or of dead matter — but had not been able to tell what it was.

It was he who unravelled the mystery about what happened to Boja’s corpse, since we did not attend his burial. There were no posters, no visits, not a single sign of his funeral. I’d wondered and asked my brother when it would be done, but he did not know and did not want to question our parents, the two ventricles of our home. Although he did not raise any alarm at the time or push further, were it not for him, I would never have known what became of Boja’s body after his death. On the first Saturday of November, a week after Mother returned from the psychiatric hospital, he found something I had not noticed before although it had been on the top shelf in the sitting room, behind a framed portrait of our parents on their wedding day in 1979, all along. Obembe showed me a small transparent jar that sat on that shelf. In it was a polythene bag containing something ash-coloured and grey like loamy sand dug from under dead logs of wood and dried in the sun to fine grains the size of salt. I noticed, just as I reached for it, that it was tagged: Boja Agwu (1982–1996).

When we confronted Father a few days afterwards, Obembe saying he knew the strange substance was Boja’s ashes in the jar, Father, staggered, gave up. He and Mother, he revealed, had been warned strictly by clansmen and relatives that Boja should not be buried. It was a sacrilege to Ani, goddess of the earth, for a person who committed suicide or fratricide to be interred in the earth. Although Christianity had almost cleanly swept through Igbo land, crumbs and pieces of the African traditional religion had eluded the broom. Stories came from time to time from our village and from clansmen in diasporas, about mysterious mishaps — even deaths, owing to punishments from the gods of the clan. Father, who did not believe a goddess would punish him or that such a contraption “by illiterate minds” existed, decided not to bury him just for Mother’s sake, and because he’d already had a dose of tragedies. They did not say a word to my brother and me, and we did not know about this, until Obembe, the searchdog, found out.

Obembe’s mind was a searchdog’s: a restless mind that was always engaged in the search for knowledge. He was a question-asking person — an inquirer, who read widely to feed his mind. The lantern, the tool with which he read, was his greatest companion. Before my brothers died, we had three kerosene lanterns in the house. A sprocket-controlled wick dipped into their small fuel tanks to absorb the kerosene. Because there was a perennially erratic power supply in Akure in those days, Obembe read with one of the three lanterns every night. After the death of our brothers, he began to read as if his life depended on it. Like an omnivorous animal, he stored the information he garnered from these books in his mind. Then, after he had processed and pruned it down to the essentials, he passed it on to me in the form of stories he told me every night before we slept.

Before our brothers died, he told me the story of a princess who followed a perfect gentleman of great beauty to the heart of a forest insisting she’d marry him only to discover the man was merely a skull who’d borrowed the flesh and body parts of others. That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me. During the days Ikenna was a python, Obembe told me of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, from the simplified copy of the Odyssey of Homer, forever inscribing in my mind images of the Poseidon seas and the deathless gods. He mostly told me the stories at night-time, in the near darkness of the room, and I gradually burrowed into the world his words created.