Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

These failures did not deter my brother, not even what we heard about the madman that week, an incident that killed all the courage I had gathered when I pledged to join him in his quest. The madman had been elusive for many days — never once spotted around the district. So we began asking people we felt didn’t know us if they’d seen him. This way, we reached the end of our district to the north, near the big petrol station with the huge complex that had a motley-garbed human-shaped balloon that constantly bowed, tilted sideways, and waved its hands as the wind blew at it. There we found Nonso, Ikenna’s old classmate. He sat on a wooden stool on the side of a main road, newspapers and magazines spread on flat raffia sacks before him. He told us after shaking our hands with slaps, that he was the chief vendor of our district.

“Haven’t you heard of me?” he asked, with a voice that was cracked as though he was high on some drug, his eyes darting between our faces.

His earring glistened in the sun and his punk — a brush of equal hair in the centre of his head — was dark and polished. He’d heard of Ikenna’s death, how his “younger dude” stabbed him in the belly. He’d always hated Boja. “Anyway, may their souls rest in peace,” he said.

A man, who had been reading a copy of the Guardian, stood up, dropped the paper and gave Nonso some coins. When he put the paper on the table, I saw the slain Kudirat Abiola, wife of the 1993 presidential election winner on its front page. He gestured that we take the man’s seat on a bench just under a fabric awning. I thought of the day we encountered M.K.O.; she’d stood beside us, and had scratched my head with her ringed fingers. I remembered how her voice had carried equal measures of authority and humility when she asked the crowd to step back. In the photo on the cover of the newspaper, her eyes were shut and her face was lifeless — devoid of all hue.

“It is M.K.O.’s wife, don’t you know?” Obembe said, taking the paper from me.

I nodded. I recalled how, long after we’d met M.K.O., I’d longed to see the woman again. I’d thought, at the time, that I’d loved her. She was the first person I’d thought of as a wife. Every other woman was either a woman or someone’s mother or a girl, but she was a wife .

My brother asked Nonso if he had seen Abulu recently.

“That demon?” Nonso said. “I saw him two days ago — right here. On this main road just by the filling station, beside the corpse—”

He pointed to the dirt track by the side of the long main road that connected to a highway leading to Benin.

“What corpse?” My brother asked.

Nonso shook his head, took a small towel he habitually hung on his shoulder, and wiped ripples of sweat from his neck so that it glistened in the sun. “What, haven’t you heard?”

Abulu, he said, had found the body of a young woman killed early that morning — probably at dawn. Owing to the typical slow response of the traffic police in that part of Nigeria, the body had been allowed to remain on the spot for long, even until midday so that people who’d come that way had often stopped to see the body. When it was almost past noon, the corpse had begun to attract less attention when another mob started gathering around it, this time with an unruly cacophony. Nonso looked down the road but the mob blocked the view of what was going on at the centre.

His curiosity piqued to the extreme, he’d crossed the road to the gathering, abandoning his newspapers. When he got to the mob and negotiated his view, he saw the corpse of a woman, whose head lay on a nimbus formed by the blackened patch of her blood. Her hands were thrown sideways like he’d seen before, a ring glimmering on one of the fingers — the blood-soaked hair sticky and uneven in shape. But this time, it was naked, her breasts unclothed, and Abulu was on top of her, thrusting into her as the mob watched in horror. Some of them were arguing whether it was right to let him defile the dead while others held that the woman was already dead and that it was no harm; others claimed he should be stopped but those people were few. When he’d relieved himself, he fell asleep, clinging to the dead woman as if she was his wife until the police took her away from him.

My brother and I were so shaken by this story that we did not go out on any other reconnaissance mission that day. A shawl of dread of the madman fell over me and I could see that even Obembe, my brother, was afraid. He sat in the sitting room for long, silent until he fell asleep, his head against the top of the chair. I had started to dread the madman, to wish my brother would give it up, but could not face him to say it. I feared he would be angry or even hate me, but towards the end of that week, providence intervened — as I have now understood, now that things in the past are clearer — to save us from what was to come. Father announced that his friend, Mr Bayo, who moved to Canada when I was just three, had arrived in Lagos. It was over breakfast, and the news came like a flash of thunder. Mr Bayo, Father continued, had promised to take my brother and me with him to Canada. The news exploded over the table like a grenade, scattering shrapnel of joy all across the room. Mother shouted “Hallelujah!” and, rising from her chair, burst into singing.

I, too, was elated and my body was suddenly charged with wanton joy. But when I glanced at my brother, I saw that the expression on his face had not changed. A shade stood on his face as he ate. Had he not heard? It didn’t seem so, for he was bent over the table, eating as if he hadn’t.

“What about me?” David asked, tearfully.

“You?” Father asked, laughing. “You will go, too. How can a chief like you be left here? You will go; in fact, you will be the first on the plane.”

I was still wondering what my brother was thinking when he said: “What about our school?”

“You will get a better one in Canada,” Father replied.

My brother nodded and continued his meal; I was surprised by his lack of enthusiasm at what seemed the best news of our lives. We ate on while Father narrated the story of how Canada developed over a short period to surpass other countries, including Britain, from which it had emerged. Then he brought the talk down to Nigeria, down to the corruption that had eaten the entrails of the nation and finally, as usual, he berated Gowon, a man we had grown to hate, the man he’d repeatedly accused of bombing our village several times — the man who killed very many women during the Nigerian civil war. “That idiot,” he snapped, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat, his neck taut with sinews, “is the greatest enemy of Nigeria.”

After Father went to the bookstore and Mother left with David and Nkem, I went to my brother, who was fetching water from the well to fill the drum in the bathroom, a chore Ikenna and Boja used to do exclusively because he and I were thought to be too small to use the well. It was the first time anyone had fetched from it since August.

“If it is true that we are going to Canada soon,” he said, “then we have to kill that madman as soon as possible. We have to find him quickly.”

Before now, this would have excited me, but this time, I wanted to tell him to let us forget the madman and go and start a new life in Canada. But I could not. Instead, I found myself saying: “Yes, yes, Obe — we must.”

“We have to kill him soon.”

My brother was so worried by what should have been good news that he did not eat that night. He sat sketching and erasing and tearing, his temper burning until his pencil was reduced to a size of his finger and the table was filled with shredded paper. He’d told me at the well, shortly after our parents left for their workplaces that we must act quickly. He’d said it fiercely, pointing to the well: “Boja, our brother, decomposed here like — like a mere lizard in this place because of that madman. We must avenge or else; I’m not going to any Canada without doing that.”