Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Ah, ah, Ike,” she called out at us as we passed, calm as prisoners. “What have you come to do here?”

“Nothing!” Ikenna answered, quickening his pace.

She’d risen to her feet, a tiger of a woman, arms raised as if about to pounce on us.

“And the thing in your hand? Ikenna, Ikenna! I’m talking to you.”

In defiance, Ikenna hurried down the path, and we followed suit. We took the short turn behind a compound where the branch of a banana tree, snapped in a storm, bowed like the blunt snout of a porpoise. Once there, Ikenna faced us and said: “Have you all seen it? Have you seen what your folly has caused? Didn’t I say we should stop going to this stupid river, but none of you listened?” He piled both hands on his head: “You will see that she will certainly blow the whistle to Mama. You want to bet it? ” He slapped his forehead. “You want to?”

No one replied. “You see?” he said. “Your eyes have now opened, right? You will see.”

These words throbbed in my ears as we went, driving home the fear that she would definitely report us to Mother. The woman was Mother’s friend, a widow whose husband had died in Sierra Leone while fighting for the African Union forces. He left her with only a gratuity that was sawn in half by her husband’s family members, two malnourished sons Ikenna’s age, and a sea of endless wants that prompted Mother to step in to help from time to time. Mama Iyabo would definitely sound the alarm to Mother as payback that she’d found us playing at the dangerous river. We were very afraid.

We did not go to the river after school the following day. We sat in our rooms instead, waiting for Mother to return. Solomon and the others had gone there hoping we’d come, but after waiting a while and suspecting we were not coming, they came to check on us. Ikenna advised them, especially Solomon, that it was best they stopped fishing, too. But when Solomon rejected his advice, Ikenna offered him his hooked fishing line. Solomon laughed at him and left with the air of one immune to all the dangers Ikenna had enumerated as lurking like shadows around Omi-Ala. Ikenna watched as they went, shaking his head with pity for these boys who seemed determined to continue down this doomed path.

When Mother came home that afternoon, much earlier than her usual closing time, we saw at once that the neighbour had reported us. Mother was deeply shaken by the weight of her ignorance despite living with us in the same house. True, we’d concealed our trade for so long, hiding the fish and tadpoles under the bunk bed in Ikenna and Boja’s shared room because we knew about the mysteries that surrounded Omi-Ala. We’d covered up the smell of the bracken water, even the nauseating smell of the fish when they died, for the fish we caught were usually insignificant, weak, and barely ever survived beyond the day of their catch. Even though we kept them in the water we fetched from the river, they soon died in the beverage cans. We’d return from school every day to find Ikenna and Boja’s room filled with the smell of dead fish and tadpoles. We’d throw them with the tin into the dump behind our compound’s fence, sad because empty tins were hard to get.

We’d kept the many wounds and injuries we sustained during those trips secret, too. Ikenna and Boja had ensured Mother did not find out. She once accosted Ikenna for beating Obembe after he heard him singing the fishermen’s song in the bathroom, and Obembe swiftly covered for him by saying that Ikenna had hit him because he’d called Ikenna a pig-head, therefore deserving Ikenna’s wrath. But Ikenna had hit him because he thought it foolish for Obembe to be singing that song at home when Mother was in the house, at the risk of blowing our cover. Then Ikenna had warned that if he ever made that same mistake, Obembe would never see the river again. It was this threat, and not the slight blow, that had caused Obembe to weep. Even when, in the second week of our adventure, Boja popped his toe into the blade of a crab’s claw near the bank of the river and his sandal became awash in his own blood, we lied to Mother that he was injured in a football match. But in truth, Solomon had had to pull the crab’s claw out of his flesh while every one of us, except Ikenna, was asked to look away. And Ikenna, enraged at the sight of Boja’s profuse bleeding and the fear that he might bleed to death despite Solomon’s solid assurances that he would not, had smashed the crab to pieces, cursing it a thousand times for causing such grievous harm to Boja. It pained Mother that we had succeeded in keeping it secret for such a long time — over six weeks, although we lied that it was only three — within which she did not even suspect that we were fishermen.

Mother paced about that night with heavy footsteps, wounded. She did not give us dinner.

“You don’t deserve to eat anything in this house,” she said as she moved around, from the kitchen to her room and back, her hands unsteady, her spirit broken. “Go and eat the fish you caught from that dangerous river and be stuffed by it.”

She shut the kitchen door and padlocked it to prevent us from getting in to find food after she’d gone to bed, but she was so troubled she kept up her characteristic monologue when aggrieved long into the night. And every word that fell from her mouth that night, every sound she made, penetrated our minds like poison to the bone.

“I will tell Eme what you have done. I’m certain that if he hears it, he’ll leave everything else and return here. I know him, I know Eme. You. Will. See.” She snapped her fingers, and afterwards, we heard the sound of her blowing her nose into the edge of her wrappa . “You think I would have ceased to exist if something bad had happened to you or if one of you had drowned in that river? I will not cease to live because you chose to harm yourselves. No. “ Anya nke na’ akwa nna ya emo, nke neleda ina nne ya nti, ugulu-oma nke ndagwurugwu ga’ghuputa ya, umu-ugo ga’eri kwa ya— The eye that mocks a father, that scorns an aged mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures.”

Mother ended the night with this passage from Proverbs — the most frightening I knew of in the entire Bible. Looking back, I realize it must have been the way she quoted it, in Igbo — imbuing the words with venoms — that made it so damning. Aside from this, Mother said all else in English instead of Igbo, the language with which our parents communicated with us; while between us, we spoke Yoruba, the language in Akure. English, although the official language of Nigeria, was a formal language with which strangers and non-relatives addressed you. It had the potency of digging craters between you and your friends or relatives if one of you switched to using it. So, our parents hardly spoke English, except in moments like this, when the words were intended to pull the ground from beneath our feet. Our parents were adept at this, and so Mother succeeded. For, the words “drowned,” “everything,” “exist,” “dangerous” came out heavy, measured, charged and indicting, and lingered and tormented us long into the night.

THE EAGLE

Father was an eagle:

The mighty bird that planted his nest high above the rest of his peers, hovering and watching over his young eagles, the way a king guards his throne. Our home — the three-bedroom bungalow he bought the year Ikenna was born — was his cupped eyrie; a place he ruled with a clenched fist. This is why everyone has come to believe that had he not left Akure, our home would not have become vulnerable in the first place, and that the kind of adversity that befell us would not have happened.