Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Obembe had given me a questioning look upon Mother’s outburst, and when I turned now from the mirror, his eyes trapped me in the netting that was the question “Can you see what I have been telling you?” It triggered an epiphany. I saw, at once, that Abulu was indeed the designer of our grief. As we drove past Argentina, the cross-wall neighbour’s rickety lorry, its exhaust pumping billows of black smoke, it struck me that it was Abulu who had wounded us. Although I had not supported my brother’s idea to punish the madman, seeing Abulu that day changed me. I was moved, too, by Mother’s reaction, her curse, and the tears that began coursing down her cheeks at the sight of him. I felt a numbing ripple through my body when Nkem, in her sing-song voice, said: “Daddy, Mama is crying.”

“Yes, I know,” Father said, looking in the overhead mirror. “Tell her to stop crying.”

When Nkem repeated “Mama, Daddy said I should tell you to stop crying,” my heart burst like a dam and the flood of the wrongs this man had done to us broke out.

1. It was he who took away our brothers.

2. It was he who deposited the poisonous venom in the hot blood of our brotherhood.

3. It was he who took away Father’s job.

4. It was he who caused Obembe and me to miss a school term.

5. It was he who almost drove Mother insane.

6. It was he who caused all of my brothers’ possessions to be burned.

7. It was he who caused Boja’s body to be burned like trash.

8. It was he who caused Ikenna to be obliterated by landfill.

9. It was he who caused Boja to be bloated like a balloon.

10. It was he who caused Boja to float around the town as a “missing person.”

The list of his evils was endless. I stopped counting, and it continued running on and on and on like a left-open tap. I was appalled by the thought that despite all he’d done to us; despite how much he’d put upon this family; despite the torture he’d inflicted upon my Mother; despite the way he’d broken us — this madman did not appear to be remotely aware of what he’d caused. His life had simply gone on, unscathed, untouched.

11. He destroyed Father’s map of dreams.

12. He birthed the spiders that invaded our house.

13. It was he, not Boja, who planted the knife in Ikenna’s belly.

By the time Father switched off the engine, the golem that this new discovery had created in me had risen to its feet, and shaken off the extra layers of earth from its creation. The verdict was now inscribed on its forehead: Abulu was our enemy.

When we got to our room, I told Obembe, while he was slipping his short trousers over his naked waist, that I wanted to kill Abulu too. He froze, and gazed at me. Then, he moved forward and threw his arms around me.

That night, in the dark, he told me a story, something he hadn’t done in a long time.

THE LEECH

Hatred is a leech:

The thing that sticks to a person’s skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one’s spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them. It clings to one’s skin, the way a leech does, burrowing deeper and deeper into the epidermis, so that to pull the parasite off the skin is to tear out that part of the flesh, and to kill it is self-flagellating. People once used fire, a hot rod, and when they burned the leech, they left the skin singed. This, too, was the case of my brother’s hatred for Abulu; it was deep under his skin. For from the night I joined him, my brother and I put our door on near perpetual lock and convened daily to plan our mission, while our parents went to their workplaces: Mother to her shop and Father to the bookshop.

“First,” my brother said one morning, “we must conquer him here in our room.” He raised the papers on which he’d sketched his plans as matchstick men fighting and killing the madman. “In our minds, then on our papers before we can conquer him in the flesh. Haven’t you heard Pastor Collins say, many times, that whatever happens in the physical already has happened in the spiritual?” It was not a question to which he expected an answer, so he went on: “So, before we leave this room in search of Abulu, we must first kill him here.”

At first, we considered the five sketches of Abulu’s moment of destruction, the possibility of achieving them. The first one he referred to as “The David and Goliath Plan”; he hauls stones at Abulu and Abulu dies.

I questioned the possibility of the design succeeding. I reasoned that since we were neither servants of God as David was, nor were we destined to be a king like David, we might not be able to hit his forehead. It was a full sun-out moment of the day when I said this, and Obembe had turned on the ceiling fan. From somewhere in the neighbourhood, I heard a man hawking rubber sandals, crying his wares: “Rubber, rubber — hereeeeeee!” My brother sat in his chair, his hand on his chin, pondering what I’d said.

“Listen, I understand your fears,” he said finally. “You may be right, but I have always thought we could kill him by stoning, but how do we stone him? Where, at what time of the day can we do it without being caught in the act? Those are the real problems with that idea, not about being a king like David.”

I nodded in agreement.

“If we stone him when people can see, we can’t tell what might happen, and what if we aim wrong and hit someone else in the process?”

“You are right,” I said, nodding.

Next he placed the one in which Abulu was stabbed to death with a knife, just the way Ikenna was killed. He’d marked it “The Okonkwo Plan,” after the story of Things Fall Apart . The image scared me.

“What if he fights or stabs you first?” I said. “He is very wicked, you know?” I asked.

This possibility troubled my brother. He took a pencil and crossed out the sketch.

Then one after the other, we propped up an idea from a sketching, sank our teeth into it, and after we found it untenable, crossed it out. After we’d torn up all of them, we began weaving a set of imagined incidents, most of which we withdrew and discarded before they were fully formed. In one, we chased Abulu down the road on a windy evening and he fell into a running car, which knocked him to the ground and spilled the content of his head on the tarred road. I wove this fictional reality, my imagination spotted with pieces of the madman’s crushed body on the asphalt like one of the various road kills — chickens, goats, dogs, rabbits — I’d seen. My brother sat for a while, his eyes closed while his mind was at work on this. The rubber-sandals hawker had returned to the neighbourhood, this time crying even louder “Rubber, rubber — heeeee! Rubberrrrr sandals hereeee!” The hawker’s voice seemed to draw closer to our compound now, and was getting so loud that I did not realize my brother had started to speak. “—Good idea,” I heard him say, “but you know those ignorant fools, kowordly people who don’t know what that madman had done to our family, would try to stop us.”

Again, as always, I agreed that he was right. He tore it up and poured the pieces angrily on the floor.

The leech that was my brother’s resolve to avenge our brothers was so deeply embedded it could not be destroyed by anything, not even fire. Over the following days, once our parents left home, we went off to find the madman. We went in late mornings, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Although the new term had begun, we were not enrolled. Father had written to the headmistress of our school to allow us a term off to recover because we were not fit to resume school just yet, since the deaths of our brothers were still fresh in our minds. So to avoid meeting classmates or kids we knew around the streets and district, we trod covert paths. Over the following days of the first week of December, we combed the district for any sign of the madman, but found none. He was not at his truck, not around the street; he was not close to the river. We could not ask anyone about him, as people in the district knew so much about us and would often put on sympathetic faces when they met us as if we bore an insignia of the tragedy of our brothers’ deaths on our foreheads.