Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Ben!” he cried when I ran a distance from him.

I’d begun to sob freely, too. He gazed at me, his mouth open. He could now see that I was determined to go back, for my brother knew things.

“If you won’t come with me, then tell them,” he said in a shaky voice. “Tell Daddy and Mama that I… ran away.”

He could barely speak, his heart was now bursting with grief.

“Tell them that we — you, me — did it for them.”

In a flash, I was back to him — clasped to his body. He held me closer and put his hand behind my head, to the oblong side of my scalp. For a long time Obembe sobbed against my shoulder, then he disentangled from me, and moved backwards without turning away from me. He raced a distance away. There he stopped, and cried: “I will write to you!”

Then, the darkness swallowed him. I lunged forward and cried: “No, don’t go Obe, don’t go, don’t leave me.” But there was nothing; no trace of him in the darkness. “Obe!” I called aloud, making a frantic dash forward. But he did not stop, did not seem to hear. I tripped, fell and struggled up. “Obe!” I called even louder, more desperately into the night as I entered the road. To my left, to my right, forward, backwards — no trace of him. No sound, no one about. He was gone.

I sank to the ground and began to wail anew.

THE MOTH

I, Benjamin, was a moth:

The fragile thing with wings, who basks in light, but who soon loses its wings and falls to the ground. When my brothers, Ikenna and Boja, died, I felt like a fabric awning that had always sheltered me was torn off from over my head, but when Obembe ran away, I fell from space, like a moth whose wings were plucked off its body while in flight, and became a being that could no longer fly but crawl.

I had never lived without my brothers. I’d grown up watching them while I merely followed their lead, living a version of their early lives. I’d never done anything without them — especially without Obembe who, having absorbed much wisdom from the older two and distilled broader knowledge through books, had left me totally dependent. I had lived with them, relied on them so much that no concrete thought ever took shape in my mind without first floating through their heads. And even after Ikenna and Boja died, I’d lived on as if unaffected because Obembe had closed in on their absence, proffering answers to my questions. But he, too, was now gone, leaving me at the threshold of a door I shuddered to enter. Not that I feared to think or live for myself, I did not know how, had not prepared for it.

When I returned, our room was dead, empty and dark. I lay on the floor weeping as my brother ran, his rucksack on his back, his small Ghana-must-go bag in his hand. As the darkness gradually lifted over Akure, he ran on, panting, sweating. He must have run — perhaps spurred by the story of Clemens Forell — as Far As His Feet Would Carry Him. He must have trod along the silent, dark street and reached its end. He may have stopped there a while to look up at the swathe of plain tracks, unable to decide, for a moment, which way to go. But like Forell, he must have been subdued by the fear of capture, and the fear must have powered his mind like a turbine, spinning out ideas. He must have stumbled many times as he ran or fell into potholes, or was tripped by tangled foliage. He must have got tired along the way and become thirsty, needing water. He must have been drenched in sweat, becoming dirty. He must have raced on, carrying the black banner of fear in his heart, perhaps the fear of what would become of me, his brother, with whom he had attempted to put out the fire that had engulfed our household. And that fire had, in return, threatened to consume us.

My brother was probably still running when the horizon cleared and our street woke with the tremor of voices, loud cries and gunshots as if under an invasion by an enemy army. Voices barked orders and howled, arms banged on doors, feet stamped the ground with feral intensity and hands brandished guns and cowhides. They collected into a whole — half a dozen soldiers — and began banging on our gate. Then, once Father opened, they shoved him away, barking like wounded dogs: “Where are they? Where are those juvenile delinquents?”

“Murderers!” another spat.

As the tumult erupted, Nkem cried out as Mother rushed to the door of my room and banged repeatedly, calling, “Obembe, Benjamin, wake! Wake!” But while she spoke, the boots stamped in and the voices closed in on hers. There was an outcry, a shriek and the sound of one falling to the ground.

“Please, please officers, they are innocent, they are innocent.”

“Shut up! Where are those boys?”

Then the ferocious knocking and booting on the door began.

“Will you boys open now or I will blast your heads.”

I unlatched the door.

The next time I came home was three weeks after they took me away, long after my entrance into the new and frightening world devoid of my brothers. I had returned to have a bath. On Mr Bayo’s persistence, our lawyer, Barrister Biodun, had persuaded the judge to allow me to be brought here to have a bath at least. Not a bail, they’d maintained, but a reprieve. Father told me Mother had worried I had not had a bath in three weeks. At the time, whenever he told me something she’d said, I imagined as hard as I could, how she’d said it because, for all those three weeks, I’d hardly seen her speak. She’d relapsed into what she became after my brothers died — afflicted by invisible spiders of grief. But although she wasn’t speaking, her every gaze, every movement of her hand seemed to contain a thousand words. I avoided her, wounded by her grief. I’d once heard someone say — when Ikenna and Boja died — that a mother who loses a child loses a part of herself. When she put a bottle of Fanta in my mouth just before the second court session, I wanted to reach to her and tell her something, but I could not. Twice during the trial she lost control and screamed or cried out. One such time was after the prosecutors, led by a very dark man whose appearance in black apparel gave him the look of a movie demon, argued that Obembe and I were guilty of manslaughter.

On the day before my first trial when he’d visited me, Barrister Biodun had counselled me to just focus on something else, the window, the railing — anything. The wardens, men in brown khaki uniforms, had brought me out to meet him, my lawyer and Father’s old friend. He’d always come with smiles and a certain confidence that sometimes annoyed me. He and my father had come into the small room where I received visitors while a junior warden started a stopwatch. The place had a pungent smell that often reminded me of my school latrine — the smell of stale shit. Barrister Biodun had told me not to worry, that we would win the case. He’d said, too, that justice was going to be manipulated because we’d injured one of the soldiers. He was always confident. But Barrister Biodun, on this last day of my expedited trial, was not full of smiles. He was sullen and sober. The map of emotion splayed over his face was grainy and unintelligible. When he came to where Father and I stood at a corner of the courtroom, where he’d revealed the mystery about his eye to me, he’d said: “We will do our best and leave the rest in God’s hands.”

We returned home in Pastor Collins’s van. He’d come to pick me up with Father and Mr Bayo, who’d almost totally abandoned his own family in Ibadan, returning to Akure every now and then with the hope that they would secure my release and he would take me with him to Canada, where he lived with his children. I almost could not recognize him. He was now much different than the man I last saw when I was four or so. He was much lighter in complexion and tints of grey hair creased the sides of his head. He seemed to pause between speeches in the way a driver would pull the brake, slow down and ramp up again.