Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

He was startled.

“No, Obe, let’s not do it. Look, we are going to Canada, we are going to live there.” I continued, taking advantage of his silence, tasting the sap of my own courage. “Let us not do it. Let us go, we could grow up and become like Chuck Norris or Commando and come here and shoot him, even—”

I stopped abruptly because he’d begun to shake his head. Then, just then, I saw the fury in his tearful eyes.

“What, what is it?” I stammered.

“You are a fool!” he shouted. “You don’t know what you are saying. You want us to run away, run away to Canada? Where is Ikenna? Where, I ask you, is Boja?”

The beautiful streets of Canada were blurring out of my mind now as he spoke.

“You don’t know,” he said. “But I know. I know, too, where they are now. You may leave; I don’t need your help. I will do it all by myself.”

At once, the images of children riding on bicycles faded from my mind and a sudden desperation to please him seized me. “No, no, Obe,” I said, “I will go with you.”

“You won’t!” he cried, and then stormed out.

I sat still for a while, then, too afraid to remain in the room and fearing my dead brothers may have heard I did not want to avenge them as my brother had said they could, I went to the balcony and sat there.

My brother was away for a long time, gone to a place I would never know. After I’d stayed on the balcony for a while, I went to the backyard where one of Mother’s multi-coloured wrappas hung on the ropes on which we dried our laundry. Using a low branch, I climbed up the tangerine tree and sat there thinking of everything.

When Obembe came back later, he headed straight to our room. I climbed down from the tree and followed him in, got on my knees and began pleading that I wanted to join him.

“Don’t you want to go to Canada anymore?” he asked.

“Not without you,” I replied.

For a moment he stood still, then, walking to the other side of the room, said: “Stand up.”

I did.

“Listen, I want to go to Canada, too. That’s exactly why I want us to do this quickly and pack our things. Don’t you know that Father has gone to get the visas?”

I nodded.

“Listen, we will be unhappy if we leave Nigeria without doing it. Listen, let me tell you,” he said, drawing nearer. “I am older than you and I know much more than you do.”

I agreed with a nod.

“So, I am telling you, now listen, if we go to Canada without doing this, we will hate it there. We will not be happy. Do you want to be unhappy?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” he said.

“Let us go,” I said, sufficiently convinced. “I want to do it.”

But he hesitated. “Is that the truth?”

“The truth.”

He searched my face with his eyes. “The truth?”

“Yes, the truth,” I said, nodding again and again.

“Okay, let us go then.”

It was late in the afternoon, and shadows had appeared like dark frescoes everywhere. My brother had put the weapons outside behind the shutters, covered with an old wrappa . That way, Mother would not see them. I waited for him to go behind our window and bring the fishing lines. He handed me a torchlight he’d also brought.

“In case we have to wait till it gets dark,” he mumbled as I took it. “It is the best time now, we will surely find him there.”

We went out into the evening like the fishermen we once were, carrying hooked fishing lines concealed in old wrappas . The appearance of the horizon evoked a strong feeling of déjà vu in me. Its face was rouged, the sun a hanging orb of red. As we went towards Abulu’s truck, I noticed that the wooden pole of the street had been knocked down, the craning lamp smashed into bits, and the cables that held the bulbs in the lamp head unfurled so that the fluorescent core had snapped and now sagged low. We avoided places where we might be seen by the street people, who already knew our stories and who would gaze at us with sympathy or even with suspicion as we went by. We’d planned to lie in wait for the madman at the path between the esan bushes leading to the river.

As we waited, my brother told me how he’d found some men at the Omi-Ala before in a strange posture, as if worshipping some deity, and hoped they wouldn’t be there this time. He was still speaking when we heard Abulu’s voice approaching the river, singing happily. The madman stopped in front of a bungalow where two men, naked to the waist, sat across from each other on a wooden bench, playing Ludo. There was a glass rectangular slate with the photo of a white woman model on it. Following a marked track, the men rolled the dice around the board until they reached the prize lines. Abulu knelt across from them, vigorously babbling and shaking his head. This was dusk, the time of the day when he usually transformed into Abulu the extraordinary, and his eyes became that of a spirit and not of a man. His prayers were deep, a sort of groaning in front of the men who kept on playing their games as though they were oblivious that he was praying for them, as though one of them was not Mr Kingsley and the other, a Yoruba name ending with ke . I grasped the end of the prophecy: “… when this child of yours, Mr Kingsley, said he was ready to sacrifice his own daughter for money ritual. He will be shot to death by armed robbers, and his blood will be splashed on the window of his car. Lord of hosts, The Sower of Green Things, says he will be—”

He was still speaking when the man Abulu had called “Mr Kingsley,” jumped to his feet and dashed into the bungalow in fury. He emerged brandishing a machete, spitting murderous curses as he chased Abulu down to where a path carved itself out between the esan and stopped. The man returned to his house, warning that he would kill Abulu if he came near his house again.

We edged away from there and made towards the river after Abulu. I followed my brother like a child who was being dragged to the scaffold of corporal punishment, dreading the whip but unable to turn away. At first we walked slowly, Obembe holding the wrapped lines, and I the torch, so as not to arouse suspicion from people around, but once we entered the area where the Celestial Church blocked the street from sight, we picked up speed. A small goat lay on its belly across from their door, a map of yellow urine beside it. An old piece of newspaper, apparently ferried by wind, stuck halfway to the door of the house like a poster, while the rest of it lay open on the dirt.

“Let us wait here,” my brother said, trying to catch his breath.

We were almost at the end of the path leading to the bank. I could see that he, too, was afraid, and that, like me, the udder of courage from which we’d drunk our fill had been drained, and was now shrunken like a crone’s breast. He spat and wiped it into the earth with his canvas shoe. I saw that we were close enough now, for we could hear Abulu singing and clapping from the direction of the river.

“He is there, let us attack him now,” I said, my heartbeat quickening again.

“No,” he whispered wagging his head, “we have to wait a bit to make sure no one is coming. Then we will go and kill him.”

“But it is getting dark?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. He looked around, craning his head into the distance. “Let’s just be sure the men are not here when we do it — the two men.”

I noticed his voice was now cracked, like one who’d been crying. I imagined us turning into the ferocious matchstick men he’d drawn — those fearless ones who were capable of killing the madman, but I feared that I was not poised to be as brave as the fictitious boys who’d finished the madman with stones, knives and hooked fishing lines. I was absorbed in these thoughts when my brother unwrapped the weapons and gave me one. The sticks were very long, taller than both of us when we held them to the ground like spears of warriors of old. Then as we waited, hearing a spontaneous splash of water and the singing and clapping, my brother threw a glance at me and I heard an unsaid Ready ? And every time I heard it, my heartbeat would pause, and then pick up again as I waited anxiously for my brother’s order.