Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Two nights after Mother returned from hospital, we were seated on the bed in our room, our backs against the wall, drifting off to sleep. Suddenly, my brother said: “Ben, I know why our brothers died.” He snapped his fingers and rose up, clutching his head. “Listen, I just — I just discovered.”

He sat down again and began telling me a long story he once read in a book whose title he could not recall, but which, he was sure, had been written by an Igbo. I listened as my brother’s voice soared above the rattling ceiling fan. When he finished, he fell silent, while I tried to process the story of the strong man, Okonkwo, who was reduced to committing suicide by the wiles of the white man.

“You see, Ben,” he said, “the people of Umuofia were conquered because they were not united.”

“It’s true,” I said.

“The white men were a common enemy that would have been easily conquered if the tribe had fought as one. Do you know why our brothers died?”

I shook my head.

“The same way — because there was a division between them.”

“Yes,” I muttered.

“But do you know why Ike and Boja were divided?” He suspected I didn’t have an answer, so he did not wait long; he went on. “Abulu’s prophecy; they died because of Abulu’s prophecy.”

He put his fingers on the back of his left hand and scratched absent-mindedly, not seeing the white lines that had formed on his dry skin. We sat in silence for a while afterwards, my mind drifting backwards as though I were skating a sharp steep slope.

“Abulu killed our brothers. He is our enemy.”

His voice seemed to have cracked and his words came forth like a whisper from the end of a cave. Although I knew Ikenna was transformed by Abulu’s curse, I had not thought he was directly involved the way my brother now phrased it. I have never thought the madman could be blamed directly even when I could see signs that it was he who planted the fear in my brother. But when my brother now said it, it occurred to me that it was true. As I pondered this, Obembe lifted his legs to his chest to hug them, dragging off the bed sheet so that a part of the mattress became exposed. Then, turning to me and planting one hand on the bed so that it sank down to the springboard, he slugged his fist into the air and said: “I will kill Abulu.”

“Why would you do that?” I gasped.

He let his eyes, which were fast clouding with tears, navigate my face for a little and said: “I will do it for them because he killed our brothers. I will do it for them.”

Dumbfounded, I watched him go to lock the door first, then to the window. He dipped his hand in his short pocket. Then came flashes of two attempts to light a match. The third time, it clicked and a small light sparked and disappeared. I was shocked. In its wake, the silhouetted form of him put a cigarette in his mouth, smoke wafting upwards and out into the dark night. I nearly jumped out of bed. I had not known, could not have imagined, could not tell how or what had happened. “A cigare—” I quavered.

“Yes, but shut up, it is nothing to you.”

In a flip, his silhouette had become a force that massed before me by the bed, the smoke from his cigarette rising steadily over his head.

“If you tell them,” he said, his eyes filled with so much darkness, “you will only increase their pain.”

He blew the smoke out of the window as I watched in horror at the sight of my brother, only two years older than me, smoking and sobbing like a child.

The things my brother read shaped him; they became his visions. He believed in them. I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible. This was the case with my brother. After he broke his plan to me, he detached from me and developed his ideas every day, smoking at night. He read more, sometimes up in the tangerine tree in the backyard. He rejected my inability to be brave for my brothers, and complained that I was not willing to learn from Things Fall Apart and fight against our common enemy: Abulu the madman.

Even though our Father tried to restore us back to the days before he moved out of Akure — the egg-white days of our lives — my brother remained unmoved. He was not endeared by the new movies Father brought home — new Chuck Norris movies, a new James Bond movie, one titled Waterworld , and even a movie played by Nigerians, Living in Bondage .

Because he read somewhere that if someone drew a sketch of any problem and visualized its complete make-up, they could solve that problem, he spent most of the day drawing matchstick men portraits of his plans to avenge our brothers, while I sat and read. I stumbled on them one day, about a week after our altercation, and was frightened. In the first, drawn with sharpened pencil, Obembe hauls stones at Abulu, who then falls and dies.

In another, set in the area outside the escarpment where Abulu’s truck sat, Obembe brandishes a knife, his matchstick legs captioned in the motion of walking with me following him. There are distant trees and pigs brooding nearby. Then in the truck, through the transparent capture of the goings-on inside it, his own matchstick man portrait decapitates Abulu— like Okonkwo killed the court messenger .

The sketches terrified me. I held the paper and examined it, my hands trembling, when he came in from the toilet after having been gone for about ten minutes.

“Why are you looking at that?” he cried in fury. He pushed me and I fell into the bed with the paper still in my hand.

“Give that to me,” he raged.

I threw the paper at him and he took it from the floor.

“Don’t ever touch anything on this table again,” he roared. “Do you hear me, you blockhead?”

I lay in the bed, shielding my face with my hand from fear that he might hit me, but he merely put the papers in his closet and covered them with his clothes. Then he went to the window and stood there. Outside, in the next house hidden by a high fence, the voices of children playing reached our ears. We knew most of the children. Igbafe, one of the boys who fished the river with us, was one of them. His voice intermittently rose above those of the others: “Yes, yes, give me the ball, shoot! Shoot!! Shoot!!! Ah, what did you do?” Then laughter, the sound of children running and panting. I sat up in bed.

“Obe,” I called to my brother as calmly as I could.

He did not answer, he was humming a tune.

“Obe,” I called out again, almost with a cry. “But why must you try to kill the madman?” I asked.

“It is simple, Ben,” he said with such a collected calm that I was thrown off my nerves. “I want to kill him because he killed my brothers, and so does not deserve to live.”

The first time he’d said it, after he told me the story of Things Fall Apart , I’d thought he was merely broken and had said he would do it because of anger; but now, hearing the way he said it with grave determination and seeing these drawings, I began to fear he meant what he’d said.

“Why, why do you — you want to kill a person?”

“You see?” he said, diminishing the alarm that had leaked into my words and had caused me to shout the word “kill” rather than plainly say it. “You don’t even know why because you have forgotten our brothers so soon.”

“I haven’t,” I protested.

“You have, if not, you would not sit here, and watch Abulu continuing to live when he killed our brothers.”