Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Ben, are you afraid?” he asked me after he gave me the hooked fishing line and tossed the wrappa into the thickets. “Tell me, are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why then are you afraid? We are about to avenge our brothers, Ikenna and Boja.” He wiped his brow, dropped his line into the bed of grass and placed his hand on my shoulder.

He moved closer, and raising his hooked fishing line so that the wrappa fell off, embraced me.

“Listen, do not be afraid,” he whispered into my ear. “We are doing the right thing and God knows. We will be free.”

Too scared to tell him what I really wanted to say — that he should return and let us go back home; that I was afraid he could get hurt — I muttered the verbal smokescreen: “Let’s do it quickly.”

He looked at me, and his face lit slowly like a lantern’s light coming on. And I could tell, in that memorable moment, that the tender hands turning up the light were those of my dead brothers.

“We will!” my brother cried into the darkness.

He waited, then he rushed forward in the direction of the river, and I followed.

Later, after we got to the riverbank, I could not tell exactly why we had cried loudly as we lunged at Abulu. Perhaps it was because my heart stopped beating the moment I sprang to my feet and I wanted to stir it back to life, or perhaps it was because my brother had begun to sob as we made forward like soldiers of old or because my spirit had rolled before me like a ball across a pitch of muck. Abulu was lying on his back, facing the sky, singing aloud when we reached the shore. The river stretched out behind, its waters covered in a quilt of darkness. The madman’s eyes were closed and even though we’d lunged forward with a frantic cry spilling from the deep of our souls, he did not notice we were upon him. The djinn that seemed to suddenly possess us that moment leapt to the fore of my mind and tore every bit of my senses to shreds. We jabbed the hook of our lines blindly at his chest, his face, his hand, his head, his neck and everywhere we could, crying and weeping. The madman was frantic, mad, dazed. He flung his arms aloft to shield himself, running backwards, shouting and screaming. The blows perforated his flesh, boring bleeding holes and ripping out chunks of his flesh every time we pulled out the hooks. Although my eyes were mainly closed, when I opened them in flashes, I saw pieces of flesh unbuckling from his body, blood dripping from everywhere. His helpless cries shook the core of my being. But persistently, like caged birds, we flung our anger wild at him, leaping from bar to bar of the cage, from the roof to the floor. The madman jabbered about, his voice deafening, his body in flustered panic. We kept hitting, pulling, striking, screaming, crying, and sobbing until weakened, covered in blood, and wailing like a child, Abulu fell backwards into the water in a wild splash. I’d once been told that if a man wanted something he did not have, no matter how elusive that thing was, if his feet do not restrain him from chasing it, he would eventually grab it. This was our case.

As we watched his body being ferried away spouting blood on the darkening waters, like a wounded leviathan, we heard voices behind us, speaking aloud in Hausa. We turned in frenzy and saw the silhouettes of two men running towards us, torches flashing. Before we could lift our legs, one of them was upon me, holding my trousers from behind. The smell of alcohol was heavy around him and domineering. He wrestled me to the ground, speaking a rushed, smattering language I could not understand. I saw my brother running along the trees, calling my name aloud as the other man, drunk, too, stumbled after him. The man held my left arm in a vice-like grip, and it seemed that if I pulled harder, my arm would rip out. As I struggled to wrestle myself free, I grabbed the hooked fishing line and hit the man with the hooked end with all the courage I could muster. He cried out and stamped about in searing pain. His torch fell down and showered a momentary flash on his boot. I knew at once that he was one of the soldiers we’d seen at the river the other day.

A dust devil of fear swallowed me. In frenzy, I ran away as fast as I could, between houses, bush paths, until I was close to Abulu’s decrepit truck. Then I stopped, dropped my hands to my knees and gasped for life, for air, for peace — all at once. As I stooped there on the ground, I saw the soldier, who had chased my brother, now running back towards the river. I crouched down behind Abulu’s truck to duck, my heart racing, afraid the man might have seen me while walking past. I waited, still, imagining the man would come up and drag me from behind the truck, but as I waited, I became reassured by the thought that he could not have seen me since there were no street lights around the truck, and the closest one in the distance had been broken, bent from its ballast, flies nestling around it like vultures congregating on carrion. Then, I crawled for a distance through the small patch of foliage between the truck and the escarpment behind our compound and ran home.

Because I knew Mother must have closed up and returned home, I took the backyard route, through the pig mire. A distant moon illuminated the night so the trees looked scary — like still monsters with dark, indecipherable heads. A bat flew past as I neared our compound’s fence, and I followed it with my eyes as it glided towards Igbafe’s house. I remembered his grandfather, the only person who may have seen Boja fall into the well. He’d died at a hospital outside the city in September. He was eighty-four. I was climbing the fence when I heard a whispering. There was Obembe, standing inside the compound, beside the well, waiting for me.

“Ben!” he whispered aloud, rising swiftly from the neck of the well.

“Obe,” I called out as I climbed.

“Where’s your line?” he asked, trying hard to catch his breath.

“I… left it there,” I stammered.

“Why?!”

“It stuck in the man’s hand.”

“It did?”

I nodded. “He almost caught me, the soldier. So I hit him with it.”

My brother did not seem to have understood, so as he led me to the tomato garden at the back of the compound, I told him how it had happened. We then removed our blood-stained shirts and flung them over the fence like kites into the bush behind our compound. My brother took up his hooked fishing line to hide it behind the garden. But when he flashed the torchlight, I saw a patina of Abulu’s bloodied flesh impaled to the hook. While he knocked the hook against the wall to remove it, I crouched beside the wall and retched into the dirt.

“Don’t worry,” he said, the chirping of the night crickets punctuating his speech. “It is finished.”

“It is finished,” a voice repeated in my ears. I nodded and my brother, dropping the line, inched forward and embraced me.

THE ROOSTERS

My brother and I were roosters:

The creatures that crow to wake people, announcing the end of nights like natural alarm clocks, but who, in return for their services, must be slain for man’s consumption. We became roosters after we killed Abulu. But the process that transformed us into roosters really began moments after we left the garden and entered the house to find the pastor of our church, Pastor Collins, who seemed to appear almost every time something happened, concluding a visit to our home. He was still wearing a plaster over the wound on his head. He was seated in the lounge chair in the sitting room by the window, his legs sprawled out so that Nkem sat between them, playing and chattering away. He hollered at us in his deep, sonorous voice when we came in. Mother, who had grown apprehensive of our whereabouts and would have pummelled us with questions if the Pastor were not there, threw a curious glance and a sigh at us when we entered.