Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“This night,” my brother said after a while, his eyes on mine, the rest of his face, silhouetted. “I have the knife ready. Once we are sure Daddy and Mama are asleep, we will leave through the window.”

Then, as if he’d projected the words through the rising indistinct body of smoke, said, “Will I be going alone?”

“No, I will come with you,” I stammered.

“Good,” he said.

Although I badly wanted my brother’s love and did not want to disappoint him again, I could not bring myself to go hunt the madman at midnight. Akure was dangerous at night; even adults were careful where they went after dark. Just towards the end of the school term, before Ikenna and Boja died, it was reported at the morning assembly that Irebami Ojo, one of my classmates who lived on our street, had lost his father to armed robbers. I wondered why my brother, who was only a child, was not afraid of the night. Did he not know, had he not heard these things? And the madman, the demon, perhaps he knew we would come and would lie in wait. I pictured Abulu grabbing the knife and stabbing us. This filled me with terror.

I rose from the bed and said I wanted to go drink some water. I went to the sitting room where Father was still seated, his hands folded across his chest, watching the television. I fetched water in a cup from the cask in the kitchen and drank. Then, I sat in the lounge close to Father, who barely acknowledged my presence with a nod, and asked if his eye was okay. “Yes,” he said and turned back to the television. Two men dressed in suits were debating and in the background was a poster that said Economic Matters . I’d thought of an idea, a way to escape going out with my brother. So, I took one of the newspapers from Father’s side and began reading. Father loved this; he enjoyed every effort made to acquire knowledge. As I scanned through the paper, I asked Father questions to which he merely provided short answers, but I wanted him to talk for long. So I asked him about the day he said his uncle went to fight in the war. Father nodded and began, but he was sleepy, yawning again and again, so he made it short.

Yet his story was the same as he’d recollected it: his uncle hiding in trees along the highway to lay ambush for a convoy of Nigerian soldiers. His uncle and the men opening a barrel of fire on the soldiers who, not knowing the direction from which the bullets were coming, shot frantically into the empty forest until they were all killed. “All of them,” Father would enunciate. “Not one of them escaped.”

I planted my eyes back on the newspaper and began reading and praying Father would not leave anytime soon. We’d been talking for an hour and it was almost ten. I wondered what my brother was doing, if he would come for me. Then Father began to sleep. I switched off the light and curved into the lounge.

It must have been less than an hour later that I heard a door open and a movement in the sitting room. I felt the movement reach behind my chair, then, I felt his hand shake me, first slowly, then forcefully, but I did not even stir. I tried to make faint noises with my throat, but as I was starting, Father moved and there was a sharp movement behind my chair — perhaps my brother ducking. Then I felt him crawl slowly back to our room. I waited a while, and then opened my eyes. Father’s posture struck me. He was asleep, his head tilted sideways against the chair, and his arms hanging loosely by his sides. A steady stream of light from the bright yellow bulb from our neighbour’s house, which often shone into our house from above our fence, rested on a fraction of his face through the parted curtain, giving him the appearance of someone wearing a double-sided mask — one black, one white. I watched Father’s face for a while until, convinced my brother had gone, I tried to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, I told my brother I’d gone to drink water and Father had started talking to me, that I did not know when I fell asleep. My brother did not say a word in reply. He sat where he was, looking at the cover of a book that had a ship at sea and mountains, his head leaning on his hand.

“Did you kill him?” I asked after a long silence.

“The idiot wasn’t there,” he said, to my surprise. I’d not expected it, but it seemed my brother had believed me, that my trick had worked. I’d never thought I could play a trick on him — ever. But he told me now, of how he’d gone out alone after I failed to come with him, armed with the knife. He’d slowly walked — there was no one, no one at all on the streets at that time of the night — to the madman’s truck, but the madman was not in his truck! My brother was outraged.

I lay in bed, my mind wandering across a vast territory of the past. I remembered the day we caught so many fish, so many that Ikenna complained his back ached, when we sat by the river and sang the fishermen’s song as if it was some freedom song, so much that our voices cracked. All we did for the rest of that evening was sing, the dying sun pitched in a corner of the sky as faint as a nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away.

My brother was wrapped in his own skin for many days afterwards, broken by our successive failures. On Christmas Day, he stared out of the window at lunch, while Father talked about the money he’d sent to his friend for our journey. The word “Toronto” danced around the table like a fairy, often filling Mother with profound joy. It seemed that Father — with one eye that closed halfway — mentioned it frequently for her sake. On New Year’s Eve, while the claps of firecrackers boomed around the town despite the ban placed on them by the military governor, Captain Anthony Onyearugbulem, my brother and I stayed in our room, silent and brooding. In the past, we and our elder brothers blasted firecrackers across the street, sometimes joining the street kids in mock warfare using the crackers. But not that New Year.

It was tradition to pass into the New Year in a church service, so we all packed into Father’s car and joined the church, which was filled with people that night, so full that people stood at the threshold; everyone went to church on the eves, even atheists. That night was rife with superstition, with fears of the vicious, malicious spirit of the “ber” months that fought tooth-and-nail to prevent people from passing into the New Year. It was generally believed that more deaths were recorded in those months — Septem ber , Octo ber , Novem ber and Decem ber —than in all the other months of the year combined, and afraid of the grim-reaping spirit prowling across the land for last-minute harvests, the church was thrown into a claustrophobic cacophony at twelve midnight when the Pastor announced that we were now officially in 1997, shouts of “Happy New Year, hallelujah! Happy New Year, hallelujah!” renting the air as people jumped and threw themselves into each other’s arms, unknown people, shaking, whistling, cooing, singing and shouting. Outside the church, fireworks — harmless rockets of strobe lights and man-made lightning — tore into the sky from the palace of the monarch of Akure, the Oba. This was the way things have always been, the way of the world that had continued on in spite of the things that had happened.

In the spirit of Yuletide, no sorrow was allowed to stay in the minds of the people. But like a curtain merely swiped to a corner for light to illuminate a room during the day, it would stand, patiently waiting for the time when night would descend, and the curtain would be swiped back to its place. It was always this way. We would return home from church, have pepper soup and sponge cakes and soft drinks and just as in past years, Father would play a video of Ras Kimono for the New Year dance.