Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“But must we try to kill the demon-man? Is there no other way, Obe?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen, Ben, if you and I were not too scared to interfere when they were fighting until they killed each other, we must not be afraid to avenge them now. We must kill Abulu or else we cannot have peace; I cannot have peace; Daddy and Mama cannot have peace. Mama was driven crazy because of that madman. There’s a wound he has inflicted on us that would never ever heal. If we do not kill this madman, nothing will ever be the same.”

I sat there, frozen under the power of his words, unable to say anything. I could see that an indestructible plan had been formed within him, and night after night, he sat on the pane of the shutters and smoked, naked to the waist most times — because he did not want to trap the cigarette smell in his shirt. He would smoke and cough and spit, slapping himself on the skin frequently to swat mosquitoes. When Nkem toddled to the door and began banging on it, babbling that dinner was ready, he opened the door, and just as light flashed in, he closed it and darkness returned.

When weeks passed and he was still not able to convince me to join in his mission, he moved away, determined to carry out his task alone.

Towards the middle of November, when the dry Harmattan breeze turned people’s skin ashen white, our family emerged like a mouse — the first sign of life from the rubble of a burnt-out world. Father opened a bookshop. With the savings he had, and generous support from his friends — most especially Mr Bayo in Canada, who had announced that he would be visiting Nigeria to see us and whose visit we were eagerly awaiting — he rented a one-room shop just about two kilometres from the Akure monarch’s palace. A local carpenter constructed a large wooden signboard with the words Ikeboja Bookshop engraved in red paint on its white background. The signboard was then nailed to the lintel of the bookshop. Father took us all to see it the day he opened it. He’d arranged most of the books on the wooden shelves — all of them smelling of wood-spray. He told us he’d got four thousand books for a start and that it would take days to load them onto the shelves. Sacks and cartons of books were packed in an unlit room he said would serve as the store. A rat darted out of the door of the store the moment he opened it, and Mother laughed a long throaty laugh — her first since our brothers died.

“His first customers,” she said, as Father chased the rat that was ten times swifter than he, until it was out the door, while we laughed. Father, gasping for breath, then told us about the strange case of one of his colleagues in Yola, whose house was invaded by rats. The man had endured the presence of the legion for very long, fighting only with mousetraps because he did not want them to die in a place he couldn’t easily locate so they wouldn’t begin to decay before their corpses were discovered. Every other measure had been futile in the past. But when two rats appeared in broad daylight while he was entertaining two of his colleagues, embarrassing him, he decided to end the ordeal. He evacuated all the members of his family to a hotel for one week, and then lined every nook and cranny of the house with Ota-pia-pia . By the time they returned, there was a dead rat in almost every corner of the house, even in shoes.

Father’s office table and chair were placed at the centre of the bookshop, facing the doorway. There was a flower vase on the top of the table and a glass atlas David would have knocked over had Father not made quickly to save it. When we stepped outside the shop, we saw a tumult just across the road from the bookshop. Two men were fighting, and a mob had gathered there. Father, ignoring them, pointed at the big signboard by the side of the road that read Ikeboja Bookshop . It was David alone who had to be told that the name was a combination of our brothers’ names. Father drove us from there down to the big Tesco supermarket to buy cakes, and while returning, he took the route through the street at the haunch of our district, through the small road from which we could see the stretch of esan bush that hid the Omi-Ala River. On the way we passed a group of dancers playing music from a truck loaded with boomboxes. The street was filled with wooden testers and fabric awnings under which women sold petty items. Others lined tubers of yam stacked on thread sacks, rice in basins, even baskets, and many other wares on the roadside. Motorcycles laden with passengers thrust dangerously in-between cars — for it would be only a matter of time before some of their heads would be crushed on the road. The statue of Samuel Okwaraji, the erstwhile Nigerian football player who died on the field of play in 1989, loomed over the buildings from where it stood in the stadium with a ball hanging interminably still on his foot and his finger pointing perpetually towards an unseen teammate. His dreadlocks were caked with dust, and threads of metals, which had loosened from the sculpture, were hanging awkwardly from his buttocks. Across the road from the stadium, people were gathered under tarpaulins, dressed in traditional clothes. They were seated on plastic chairs, a few tables filled with wine and other drinks in front of them. Two men, bowed over, were beating a tune on hourglass-shaped talking drums, while a man wearing an agbada and long trousers of the same fabric, danced acrobatically about, flapping his flowing robe.

We had barely reached the detour from which a leftward track led straight to our house when we saw Abulu. It was the first time since our brothers died. Before now, he’d disappeared like he never existed; as if he entered into our house, kindled a small fire and vanished. He was rarely mentioned at all by our parents after Mother returned except for when she brought a piece of news about him. He’d gone away, bereft of any burden hanging around his neck, the way the people of Akure had always allowed it to be.

Abulu was standing by the roadside looking in the distance when he saw our car slowly slaloming towards him because of the speed breakers. He dashed forward towards the car, waving and smiling. There was a gap in his upper dentition where it seemed one of the upper teeth had fallen out. Under his raised arm was a long fresh scar, still red and bloody. He was swaddled in a wrappa , one that had flowery designs all over it. I saw him cross onto the sidewalk, swaggering and gesticulating as if he had a companion. Then, as we closed in, to allow a Bedford truck filled with building materials to drive past on the narrow road, he stopped, and began examining something on the ground with keen interest. Father continued driving as though he did not see him, but Mother uttered a prolonged hiss and murmured “Evil man” under her breath, snapping her fingers over her head. “You will die a cruel death,” Mother continued in English as if the madman could hear her, “you surely will. Ka eme sia .”

A van towing a damaged car trudged noisily down the road, honking erratically. In the side mirror where I’d fixed my eyes to keep Abulu in sight, the madman receded like a fighter jet. After he vanished from view, I kept my gaze on the mirror, on the inscription: Caution: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear . I thought then of how Abulu had been close to our car and I imagined he had touched it. This set off an avalanche chain of thoughts in my mind. First, I pondered Mother’s reaction to the sight of the madman: the possibility of his death, and concluded it would not be possible. Who, I wondered, could kill him? Who could go close and put a knife in his stomach? Would the madman not see it coming and even kill the person first? Would most of the people of this town not have killed off this man if they could? Had they not chosen instead to swivel in concentric circles and to run dazed in pulsating rings? Had they not always turned into pillars of salt at the gate of reckoning as though Abulu was beyond harm?