Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Father was an unusual man. When everyone was taking up the gospel of birth control, he — an only child who had grown up with his mother longing for siblings — had a dream of a house full of children, a clan from his body. This dream fetched him much ridicule in the biting economy of 1990s Nigeria, but he swatted off the insults as if they were mere mosquitoes. He sketched a pattern for our future — a map of dreams. Ikenna was to be a doctor, although later, after Ikenna showed much fascination with planes at an early age, and encouraged by the fact that there were aviation schools in Enugu, Makurdi and Onitsha where Ikenna could learn to fly, Father changed it to pilot. Boja was to be a lawyer, and Obembe the family’s medical doctor. Although I had opted to be a veterinarian, to work in a forest or to tend animals at a zoo, anything that involved animals, Father decided I would be a professor. David, our younger brother, who was barely three in the year Father moved to Yola, was to be an engineer. A career was not readily chosen for Nkem, our one-year-old sister. Father said there was no need to decide such things for women.

Although we knew from the very beginning that fishing was nowhere on Father’s list, we did not think of it at the time. It became a concern from that night when Mother threatened to tell Father about our fishing, thereby kindling the fire of fear of Father’s wrath in us. She believed that we’d been pushed into doing it by bad spirits that must be exorcised by strokes of the whip. She knew we would rather wish the sun fell down and burned the earth with us on it than receive Father’s wracking Guerdon on the flesh of our buttocks. She said we’d forgotten that our Father was not the kind of man who would dip his foot in another shoe because his own was damp; he would rather trek the earth on bare feet.

When she went to the store with David and Nkem the following day, a Saturday, we attempted to destroy every evidence of our trade. Boja hurriedly concealed his hooked fishing lines and the extra one we had under rusting roofing sheets — leftovers from when the house was built in 1974—piled against the fence at our mother’s backyard tomato garden. Ikenna destroyed his fishing lines, and threw the broken pieces into the dump behind our fence.

Father visited that Saturday, precisely five days after we were caught fishing the river. Obembe and I made an exigent prayer on the eve of his visit, after I’d suggested that God could touch Father’s heart and make him refrain from whipping us. Together we knelt on the floor and prayed: “Lord Jesus, if you say you love us — Ikenna, Boja, Ben and me,” he began. “Don’t allow Father to visit again. Let him stay in Yola, please Jesus. Please listen to me: you know how hard he would whip us? Don’t you even know? Listen, he has cowhides, kobokos he bought from the meat-roasting mallam — that one is very painful! Listen, Jesus, if you let him come back and he whips us, we won’t go to Sunday school again, and we won’t sing and clap in church ever again! Amen.”

“Amen,” I repeated after him.

When Father arrived that afternoon the way he’d often done, honking at the gate, driving into the compound amidst joyful acclaim, my brothers and I did not go out to greet him. Ikenna had suggested we remain in the room and feign sleep because we could annoy Father the more if we went out to welcome him “just like that, as if we’d done nothing wrong.” So we gathered in Ikenna’s room, listening attentively to Father’s movements, waiting for the moment Mother would begin her report, for Mother was a patient storyteller. Each time Father returned, she would sit by him on the big lounge in the sitting room and detail how the house had fared in his absence — a breakdown of home needs and how they were met, whom she had borrowed from; of our school reports; of the church. She would particularly bring to his notice acts of disobedience she found intolerable or believed were deserving of his punishment.

I remember how she once fed him, over two nights, with news of our church member who gave birth to a baby that weighed soand-so pounds. She told about the deacon who accidentally farted while on the church podium the previous Sunday, describing how the microphones had amplified the embarrassing sound. I particularly liked how she recounted an incident about a robber who was lynched in our district, how the mob knocked down the fleeing thief with a hail of stones, and how they got a car tyre and placed it around his neck. She’d emphasized the mystery behind how the mob got petrol within that fleeting moment, and how, within coughing minutes, the thief had been set ablaze. I as well as Father had listened intently as she described how the fire had engulfed the thief, the blaze prospering at the hairiest parts of the thief’s body — especially his pubic area — as it slowly consumed him. Mother described the kaleidoscope of the fire as it enveloped the thief in an aureole of flame and his jolting cry with so much vivid detail that the image of a man on fire stayed in my memory. Ikenna used to say that if Mother had been schooled, she would have made a great historian. He was right; for Mother hardly ever missed a detail of anything that happened in Father’s absence. She told him every single story.

So, they first talked about tangential matters: Father’s job; his view about the depletion of the naira under the “rotten polity that is this current administration.” Although my brothers and I had always wished we knew the kind of vocabulary Father knew, there were times when we resented it and other times when it just felt necessary, like when he discussed politics, which could not be discussed in Igbo because the words for it would be lacking. “Aministation,” as I believed it was called at the time, was one of those words. The Central Bank was heading for doom, and the subject he most dwelt on that day was the possible demise of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first president, whom Father loved and saw as a mentor. Zik, as he was called, was at a hospital in Enugu. Father was bitter. He bemoaned the poor health facilities in the country. He swore at Abacha, the dictator, and railed on about the marginalization of Igbos in Nigeria. Then he complained about the monster the British had created by forming Nigeria as a whole, until his food was ready. When he began to eat, Mother took the baton. Did he know that all of the teachers at the kindergarten where Nkem had been enrolled loved her? When he said, “ Ezi okwu —Is it true?” she chronicled little Nkem’s journey so far. What about the Oba, the King of Akure? Father wanted to know, so she filled him in on the Oba’s fight with the Military Governor of the state whose capital Akure was. Mother went on and on until, just when we were not expecting it, she said: “Dim, there is something I want to tell you.”

“I’m all ears,” Father replied.

“Dim, your sons Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin, have done the worst, the very, unimaginable worst.”

“What have they done?” Father asked as the sound of his silverware on his plate rose sharply.

“ Heh , okay, Dim. Do you know Mama Iyabo, Yusuf’s wife, the one who sells groundnuts—”

“Yes, yes I know her, go straight to what they did, my friend ,” he shouted. Father often referred to anyone as “my friend” if that person annoyed him.

“ Ehen , that woman was selling groundnuts to that old priest of the Celestial Church close to the Omi-Ala when the boys emerged from the path leading to the river. She recognized them at once. She called to them but they ignored her. When she told the priest she knew them, he told her the boys had been fishing the river for a long time, and that he had tried to warn them several times, but they wouldn’t listen. And what is more tragic?”—Mother clapped her hands to prepare his mind for the grim answer to the question—“Mama Iyabo recognized the boys were your sons: Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Benjamin.”