Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

The men were dressed in cheap long-sleeved shirts tucked into soft-fabric trousers — one wore black trousers and the other one green. They held hardback books that we immediately knew were bibles; they had just left some church.

“Perhaps, we could pray for him,” one of the men — swarthy, with a balding that had stopped in the middle of his head — suggested.

“We have been fasting and praying for three weeks now,” the other said, “asking God for power. Isn’t it time to use it?”

The first man nodded sheepishly. And before he could respond, someone else said, “It surely isn’t.”

It was my brother; the two men turned to him.

“This man, here,” my brother continued with a countenance masked with fear, “is a fake. This is all pretence. He is a sane man. He is a well-known trickster who pretends to be like this to beg for alms, dancing on the roadsides, storefronts, or marketplaces, but he is sane. He has children.” My brother looked at me, although he was addressing the men. “He is our father.”

“What?” the balding man exclaimed.

“Yes,” my brother continued to my complete shock, “Paul, here”—he pointed at me—“and I have been sent by our mother to bring him back home, that it is enough for today, but he has refused to return home with us.”

He made a gesture of entreaty to the madman who was looking around the stool and the ground as though searching for a missing object, and did not seem to notice my brother.

“This is unbelievable,” the swarthy man said. “There’s nothing we won’t hear or see in this world — a man pretending to be insane just to earn a living? Unbelievable.”

Shaking their heads repeatedly, the men took their leave, bidding us to pray for God to touch him, and convict him of his greed. “God can do anything,” the swarthy one said, “if you ask in faith.”

My brother agreed and thanked them. When the men were gone out of earshot, I asked my brother what that was all about.

“Shh,” he said, grinning. “Listen, I was scared those men had some power. You never know: they have fasted for three weeks? Phew! What if they had power like Reinhard Bonnke, Kumuyi or Benny Hinn, and they could pray and get him healed? I don’t want that to happen. If he is well, he won’t roam about anymore, maybe he would even leave this town — who knows? You know what that means don’t you? That this man will escape, go scot-free after what he did? No, no, I won’t let that happen — over my dead bo—” My brother was forced to truncate his speech by what we now saw: a man, his wife and son about my age had stopped to watch the madman, who was chuckling. Obembe was saddened by this, as these people would again delay us till the madman left the spot. Discouraged, he concluded it was too open a place to use the poison, so we went home.

Abulu was not in his truck when we went to search for him the following day, but we found him near the small primary school with a high fence. From inside the compound, we could hear the uniform voices of children reciting poems and of their teacher breaking in, and sporadically asking them to give themselves a round of applause. The madman soon rose, and began walking majestically, his hands curved around him like the CEO of an oil company. Lying open, just a close distance from him was an umbrella with its skeletal ribs unclipped from its cleated battered tarpaulin. With his eyes fixed on a ring on one of his fingers, Abulu stamped about, chanting a string of words: “Wife,” “Now wed,” “Love,” “Marry,” “Beautiful ring,” “Now wed,” “You,” “Father,” “Marry”…

Obembe would tell me — after the madman and his gibberish had petered out of sight — that he was mimicking a Christian wedding procession. We followed him from a distance, slowly. We passed the place where Ikenna had pulled a dead man from a car in 1993. As we went, I thought of the potency of the rat poison we carried and my fear soared and again I began to feel pity for the madman, who seemed to be living just like a stray dog feeding everywhere. He often stopped, turned back, and posed like a model on a runway, stretching the hand that had the ring on it. We’d never been to this street before. Abulu made towards three women at a balcony, in front of a bungalow, plaiting the hair of one seated on a stool. Two of them gave him a chase, picking up stones and throwing them in his direction to scare him away.

Long after the women had retreated — they’d barely moved, and had only screamed at him to get his filthy self away — the madman was still running, looking back intermittently, the lascivious smile still on his face. The dirt track, as we would find out just shortly afterwards, was hardly used by cars because it ended with a wooden bridge about two hundred metres long over one part of the Omi-Ala. This made it easy for some street children to convert the track, only a few metres long, into a playground. The children lined four big rocks on both ends of the road, with spaces between them; the stones were the goal posts. They played football here, shouting and raising dust. Abulu watched them, his face filled with smiles. Then, positioning himself this and that way — with an invisible ball in his hand — he kicked wildly into the air, almost falling in the act. He shouted, thrusting his hands in the air with flourish, “Goaaaal! It. Is. A goalllll!”

When we caught up with him, we saw that Igbafe and his brother were among the boys. The moment we stepped on the bridge, I remembered the dream of the footbridge I’d seen around the time Ikenna was undergoing his metamorphosis. The familiar smell of the river, the sight of multi-coloured fish similar to the ones we used to catch, swimming at the edges of the waters, the sound of invisible croaking toads and chirping crickets and even the smell of dead river matter, all reminded me of our fishing days. I watched the fish closely because I’d not seen them swimming in a long time. I used to wish I was a fish, and that all my brothers were fish too. And that all we did, all day, every day, was swim forever and ever and ever.

As expected, Abulu began walking towards the bridge, his eyes fixed on the horizon, until he reached its foot. When he climbed, we felt his weight bear down on the wooden slab from the other end of the bridge where we were standing.

“We’ll run away, fast, once we feed it to him,” my brother said as the madman drew nigh. “He could fall into the water and die there; no one will see him die.”

Although I was afraid of this plan, I merely nodded in agreement. When Abulu climbed the bridge, he immediately went close to the railing and holding on to it, began urinating into the river. We watched until he finished, and his penis reclined like an elastic string relapsing to the centre of his waist, spitting a few last drops on the footbridge. My brother looked around to be sure no one was watching and brought out the poisoned bread and made for the madman as he went.

Now up close and certain he would soon die, I let my eyes take an inventory of the madman. He appeared like a mighty man of old when men shredded everything they grasped with bare hands. His face was fecund with a beard that stretched from the side of his face down to his jaw. His moustache stood over his mouth as though it had been applied there by fine brush strokes of charcoal paint. His hair was dirty, long, and tangled. Thick foliations of hair also covered a large part of his chest, his wrinkled and swarthy face, the centre of his pelvis, and encircled his penis. The matrixes of his fingernails were long and taut, and in the bed beneath each plate were masses of grime and dirt.

I observed that he carried on his body a variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeked of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and wastes. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, ditched underwear he sometimes wore. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sand of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. He had the smell of banana trees and guava trees, of the Harmattan dust, of trashed clothes in the large bin behind the tailor’s shop, of leftover meat at the open abattoir in the town, of leftover things devoured by vultures, of used condoms from the La Room motel, of sewage water and filth, of semen from the ejaculations he’d spilled on himself every time he’d masturbated, of vaginal fluids, of dried mucus. But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things. He smelt of death.