Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Obembe held out some bread for the madman, and he took it when he reached us. He seemed not to recognize us at all, as though we were not the same people he’d prophesied about.

“Food!” he said, sticking out his tongue. He then broke out into a monotonous chorus of words: “Eat, rice, beans, eat, bread, eat, that, manna, maize, eba, yam, egg, eat.” He bumped his knuckle into the palm of his other hand, and continued his rhythmic chant, which had been ignited by the word “food.”

“Food, food, ajankro ba , f-f-f-f-food! Eat this.” He bulked a space between his palms, imitating the shape of a pot. “Eat, food, eat, eat—”

“This is good food,” Obembe stuttered. “Bread, eat, eat, Abulu.”

Abulu rolled his eyes, now, with such dexterity that would have put the best eye-rollers to shame. He took a piece of the bread from Obembe, chuckled, and yawned as though it was a punctuation of some sort, and therefore part of the language he had just spoken. Once he took the bread, Obembe glared at me, drew back until, reaching a safe distance, we picked up speed. We’d run down another street before we thought to stop. In the distance, a wild motoring road undulated on a swathe of dirt road.

“Let’s not go too far away from him,” my brother said, panting, holding my shoulder for support.

“Yes,” I mumbled, trying to catch my breath.

“He will soon fall,” my brother purred, his eyes a horizon accommodating a single, radiant star of joy, but my eyes were filled with the rapid waters of ripping pity. The story Mother told of how Abulu sucked a cow’s teats had come to my mind just then, and so did the feeling that it was privation and destitution that had driven him to such desperation. In our fridge were cans of milk, Cowbell, Peak, all with pictures of cows. Perhaps, I’d thought, he could not afford any of these. He had no money, no clothes, no parents, no house. He was like the pigeons in the Sunday-school song we sang: “Look at the Pigeons, They Have No Clothes.” They have no gardens, yet God watches them. I thought that Abulu was like the pigeons, and for this I pitied the madman, as I sometimes found myself doing.

“He will soon die,” my brother said, cutting off my thoughts.

We’d stopped in front of a shed where a woman sold petty things. The shed was covered on the grille by netting under which a cashier-like space opened for interaction with customers. Hanging from the top of the grille were various sachets of beverage, powdered milk, biscuits, sweets, and other food. As we waited here, I imagined Abulu falling and dying away on the bridge. We’d seen him put the poisoned bread in his mouth, his moustached mouth shaking as he chewed. We saw him now, still holding the nylon, peering into the river. A few men passed him, one of them turning back to look at him. My heart skipped.

“He is dying,” my brother whispered, “Look, he is probably trembling now, and that is why the men are looking at him. They say when the effect begins, the body first starts to tremble.”

As if to confirm our suspicion, Abulu bent downwards to the bridge and appeared to be spitting onto it. My brother was right, I thought. We’d seen so many movies in which people coughed and foamed at the mouth after consuming poison, and then fell and died.

“We did it, we did it,” he cried. “We avenged Ike and Boja. I told you we will. I said it.”

Elated, my brother began talking about how we would now have peace, and how the madman would no longer bother people. He stopped talking when he saw Abulu starting to walk towards us, dancing and clapping as he went. This miracle came towards us dancing and singing rhapsodies of a saviour on whose palms nine-inch nails were driven and who would someday return to the earth. His psalmody whooped the darkening evening into an esoteric realm as we followed, shocked that he was still alive. We trudged along past the long road, past shops closing until Obembe, short of words, stopped, and turned back towards home. I knew that he, like me, had come to spot the difference between an unhurt thumb blood-covered from being dipped into a pool of blood, and a thumb robed in blood from a gash. He’d understood that the poison would not kill Abulu.

While the leech that infested my brother and me pasteurized our grief and kept our wound fresh, our parents healed. Mother cast away her mourning clothes towards the end of December and returned to normal life. She no longer burst out in sudden rage nor plunged into sudden declivities of grief, and it seemed the spiders had gone extinct. Because of her recovery, the valedictory service for Ikenna and Boja, which had been postponed for many weeks due to Mother’s illness, was held the following Saturday — five days after our first failed attempt on Abulu’s life. That morning, all of us in black dress, including David and Nkem, packed into Father’s car, which had had to be repaired the previous day by Mr Bode. His role in that tragedy had brought him closer to our family, and he’d visited many times, once with his betrothed, a girl whose set of protruding dentition made it hard for her to firmly close her mouth. Father had now called him “my brother.”

The service was composed of songs of valediction, a brief history of “the boys” rendered by Father, and a short sermon by Pastor Collins, who wore a gauze on his head that day. He’d had an accident a few days before on a motorcycle taxi. The auditorium was full of familiar faces from our neighbourhood, most of whom were members of other churches. In his speech, Father said Ikenna was a great man — Obembe cast a lingering stare at me when he said that — a man who would have led men if he’d lived.

“I will not say much about him, but Ikenna was a fine child,” he said. “A child who knew a lot of hardships. I mean, the devil tried to steal him, many times, but God was faithful. A scorpion stung him at age six—” Father was interrupted by a muted gasp of horror that ran through the congregation upon this revelation.

“Yes, at Yola,” he continued. “And just a few years later, one of his testicles was kicked into his body. I will spare you the rest of the details about that incident, but please know that God was with him. His brother, Boja—” and then the kind of silence I’d never experienced before in my life descended on the congregation. For, still at the podium, in front of the church, Father — our father, the man who knew all things, the brave man, the strong man, the Generalissimo, the commander of the forces of corporal discipline, the intellectual, the eagle — had begun to sob. A feeling of shame seized me at the sight of my Father openly weeping, I bent my head and fixed my eyes on my shoe while Father continued; albeit, this time, his word — like an overloaded lumber truck caught in Lagos traffic — slalomed through the pockmarked dirt of his moving speech, halting and jerking and slumping.

“He would, have been great, too. He… he was a gifted, child. He, if you knew him, he… was a good child. Thank you all for coming.”

After the long applause when Father’s hurried speech ended, the hymns began. Mother cried softly through it, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. A small knife of grief sliced slowly through my heart as I wept for my brothers.

The congregation was singing “It Is Well with My Soul,” when I noticed unusual movements. In a moment, heads began turning and eyes diverting towards the back. I did not want to turn because Father was seated beside us, next to Obembe. But just as I was wondering, Obembe tilted his head towards me, and whispered: “Abulu is here.”

I turned at once and saw Abulu, dressed in a muddied brown shirt with a large circle of sweat and grime, standing somewhere among the congregation. Father cast a glance at me, his eyes ordering me to focus. Abulu had attended the church many times before. The first time, he came in the middle of a sermon, walked past the ushers at the door, and sat down on a bench in the women’s row. Although the congregants instantly became aware that something unusual was happening, the Pastor preached on while the ushers, young men who kept watch at the doors, kept a close watch on him. But he maintained an unusual composure throughout the sermon, and when it was time for the closing prayer and hymn, he indulged in both as if he was not who everyone knew him to be. When the assembly was dismissed, he went out quietly leaving a stir in his wake. He attended a couple more times afterwards, mostly sitting in the women’s row, triggering a hot debate between those who felt his nudity was unwelcome because of the women and the children, and those who felt the house of God was meant for anyone who wished to come in, naked/clothed, poor/rich, sane/insane and to whom identity was of no importance. Finally, the church decided to stop him from attending services, and the ushers chased him with sticks whenever he came near the premises.