Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

We drove in the van, the one with the name of the church, Assemblies of God Church, Araromi, Akure Branch and its motto, Come as you are, but leave as new , boldly inscribed on it. They spoke little to me because I’d barely answered questions, only nodding. Since the day I was first taken to the prison, I’d begun avoiding talking to my parents and Mr Bayo. I could not bear to face them. The salvation I had thrashed — the prospect of a new life in Canada — had hit Father so hard that I often wondered how he still kept on a calm veneer as if unfazed. I confided mostly in the lawyer, a man whose voice was thin like a woman’s and who often assured me, beyond every other person, that I would soon be released, with the refrain “in a short time.”

But as we drove home, unable to hold back the question that had been throbbing in my brain, I said: “Has Obembe returned?”

“No,” Mr Bayo said, “but he will soon return.” Father was about to say something, but Mr Bayo put it off by adding: “We have sent for him. He will come.”

I wanted to ask where they found him, but Father said: “Yes, true.” I waited, and then I asked Father where his car was.

“Bode has taken it for repairs,” was his curt riposte. He turned back and met my eyes, but I quickly looked away. “It’s got a ‘plug’ problem,” Father said. “Bad plug.”

He’d said this in English because Mr Bayo, a Yoruba, did not know Igbo. I nodded. We’d set into a road that was so beat-up and potholed that Pastor Collins, like other commuters, had to veer to the shoulder to escape the gaping maws. As he negotiated the boundary of a stretch of bush, a school of copse — mostly elephant grasses — rapped against the body of the van.

“Are they treating you well?” Mr Bayo asked.

He was sitting with me in the back seat, the space between us filled with tracts, Christian books and church advert bills, most of which featured the same images of Pastor Collins, holding a microphone.

“Yes,” I said.

Although I’d not been beaten or bullied, I felt I’d lied. For there had been threats and verbal slurs. The first day in the prison, amidst the inconsolable tears and frantic beating of my heart, one of the wardens had called me a “little murderer.” But the man had disappeared soon after they kept me in the empty, windowless cell with bars through which I could see nothing but other cells with men in them, sitting like caged animals. Some of the rooms were empty, except for the prisoners. Mine had a worn-out mat, a bucket with a lid into which I defecated and a water cask that was refilled once a week. The cell that faced mine was occupied by a fair-skinned man, whose face and body were covered with wounds, scars and dirt, giving him a horrible appearance. He sat at one corner of his cage, staring blankly at the wall, his expression vacant — catatonic. This man would later become my friend.

“Ben, do you mean you have not been beaten or hit at all?” Pastor Collins asked after I said yes to the first question from Mr Bayo.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Ben, tell us the truth,” Father said. He glanced back. “Please, tell the truth.”

I met his eyes again, and this time, I could not look away. Instead of speaking, I began to cry.

Mr Bayo reached for my hand, and began squeezing, saying: “Sorry, sorry. Ma su ku mo —stop crying.” He revelled in speaking Yoruba to my brothers and me. The last time he visited Nigeria, in 1991, he’d often joked about how my brothers and I, mere children, had learned Yoruba, the language of Akure, better than our parents.

“Ben,” Pastor Collins called in his tender voice as the van neared our district.

“Sir,” I answered.

“You are and will be a great man.” He raised one hand from the wheel. “Even if they end up putting you there — I hope not, and that won’t be the case in Jesus’s name—”

“Yes, amen,” Father interrupted.

“But should that happen, know that there will be nothing greater, nothing grander than that you will be suffering for your brothers. No! There will be nothing greater. Our Lord Jesus says: ‘For there’s no greater love than for a man to suffer for his friends.’ ”

“Yes! Very true,” Father yodelled, nodding fiercely.

“Should they put you there, you will not be suffering for mere friends, but for your brothers.” This one was answered by a clash between Father’s booming “Yes” and Mr Bayo’s foreign-accented vociferation of “Absolutely, absolutely, Pastor.”

“Nothing,” the Pastor repeated.

Father’s yodelling of “yes” took a turn for the worse at this, it even silenced the Pastor. When Father finished, he thanked the Pastor, heartily, gravely. Then, for the rest of the journey, we drove in silence. Although my fear of incarceration was now increased, the thought that whatever I faced, I would be facing it for my brothers, comforted me. It was a strange feeling.

I was broken earthenware filled with dust by the time we got home. David lingered around me, watching me from a distance but avoiding my eyes and darting backwards whenever I inched closer to take his hand. I moved around the house like a wretched stranger who’d suddenly found himself in the court of a monarch. I trod the ground with caution and did not enter my room. Every step I took brought the past to me with gripping palpability. I was little bothered by the days I’d spent on the unpaved floor of the cage-like room where I’d been confined for many days, with only a book to keep me company. I was bothered by the effect of the confinement on my parents, especially on Mother, and by the whereabouts of my brother. I thought, as I bathed, about what Father had revealed to me in the court the previous week, when, before a session, he’d drawn me to a corner of the court and said: “There’s something I must let you know” in a grave voice. I noticed he was crying. When we’d gone out of earshot of anyone else, he nodded and suppressed a grin in an attempt to conceal his grief. He raised his head again to look at me and moved his finger to the end of his eyes to wipe the tears. He removed his spectacles and stared at me with his bad eye. He hardly removed the spectacles since that day he returned home with a plaster around his eye, a scar on the left side of his face. He tilted his head forwards, held my hand and whispered.

“ Ge nti , Azikiwe,” he said in a subtle Igbo. “What you have done is great. Ge nti, eh . Do not regret it, but your mother must never hear a word of what I tell you here now.”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said in English, his voice diminishing. “She must never. See, this thing in my eye is not a cataract, it was—” He stopped, gazing fixedly at me. “The madman you killed did it to me.”

“Eh!” I cried out, drawing attention from the surroundings. Even Mother looked up from where she was beside David, her hands encamped around her frail body.

“I told you not to shout,” Father said like a scared child, his eyes in Mother’s direction. “You see, after that madman came to your brothers’ service of songs, I was very hurt. I felt ashamed and I felt he’d smitten us enough. I wanted to kill him with my own hands, since neither these people nor this government would do it for me. I went with a knife but just as I advanced on him, he threw the content of a bowl in my face. That man you killed almost blinded me.”

He folded his hands together as I tried to make sense of what he’d told me, the image of the day he returned as poignant in my mind as the present. He rose and walked across the hall, while I found myself thinking of how fish in the Omi-Ala swam and how they were suspended and held up against the currents.

When I finished my bath, I wiped my body with Father’s towel and then wrapped it around me; I replayed what Father had told me earlier, before we came home.