Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

“Bayo got both of you Canadian visas. If this hadn’t happened, you both would have been on your way there by now.”

I began to grieve again, and returned to the sitting room after my bath in tears. Mr Bayo was seated across from Father, his hands resting on both knees, his eyes completely focused on Father’s face.

“Take your seat,” Mr Bayo said. “Benny, when you go there today, don’t be afraid. Don’t be at all. You’re a child and the man you killed was not just a madman, but one that had wronged you. It will be wrong to jail you for this. Go there, say what you did and they will free you.” He paused. “Oh no, stop crying.”

“Azikiwe, I have told you not to do this,” Father said.

“No, Eme, don’t; he is but a child,” Mr Bayo said. “They will free you and I will take you to Canada the next day. It is why I’m still here — waiting for you. You hear?”

I nodded.

“Then, please wipe your eyes.”

His mention of Canada skewered my heart again. The thought that I had been close enough to going to the places in the photos he sent us or living in a house made of wood, the leafless trees under which his daughters, Kemi and Shayo, posed atop bicycles. I thought of “Western education,” this phenomenon that I’d craved so badly, the only thing I’d grown up thinking could ever make Father happy, slipping beyond my grasp. This feeling of lost opportunity so strongly overwhelmed me that, without a thought, I sank to my knees, clasped his legs and began saying, “Please Mr Bayo, take me now, why not take me now?”

For a moment he and Father exchanged glances, short of words.

“Daddy, please tell him to take me now,” I pleaded, rubbing my palms together. “Tell him to take me now, please, Daddy.”

In reply, Father sank his head down to his palms, weeping. It dawned on me for the first time that Father, our Father, the strong man, could not help me; he’d become a tamed eagle with broken claws and a crooked beak.

“Ben, listen,” Mr Bayo began but I was not listening. I was thinking of flying in an actual plane, soaring like a bird in the sky. It would be long after he’d spoken that I would recall he’d said: “I cannot take you now because, you know, they will arrest your father. We need to face them first. Don’t worry, they will free you. They have no other choice.”

He reached for my hand and slipped a handkerchief in it, saying: “Wipe your tears, please.”

I buried my head in the handkerchief so that I could recline away — even if for a moment — from a world that had now become a pool of fire threatening to obliterate me, a mere little moth.

THE EGRETS

David and Nkem were egrets:

The wool-white birds that appear in flocks after a storm, their wings unspotted, their lives unscathed. Although they became egrets in the midst of the storm, they emerged, wings afloat in the air, at the end of it, when everything as I knew it had changed.

The first was Father: the next time I saw him he had grown a grey beard. It was on the day of my release and I had not seen him and the rest of my family in six years. When they finally came, I noticed they had all changed beyond recognition. I was saddened by what Father had become — a gaunt, wiry man whom life, like a blacksmith, had beaten into the shape of a sickle. Even his voice had accrued a certain rancour as though the detritus of words long left unsaid inside the cave of his mouth had become rusty and scattered in tiny bits on the top of his tongue whenever he opened his mouth to speak. Although I could tell he had undergone many medical procedures over the past years, the changes were difficult to fully describe.

Mother had got much older, too. Like Father, a certain weight had gathered like a lump behind her voice, making her words come forth as if bogged down, the way obesity affects a person’s gait, causing them to lumber. While we sat on a wooden bench inside the prison house awaiting the final signature of the head warden, Father had told me about how the spiders returned to her vision after Obembe and I left home, but that she soon recovered. As he spoke, I looked at the opposite wall that was littered with different portraits of hateful men in uniforms and obituaries printed on cheap posters. The blue paint was weak, faded and mildewed from humidity. I let my eyes focus on the clock on the wall because I hadn’t seen one in a long while. The time was forty-two minutes after five and the little hand was moving towards the six.

But of all of them, it was the change that I noticed in David that surprised me the most. When I saw him, it struck me how he’d taken up Boja’s exact body. There was almost no difference in him except that, while Boja was characteristically spirited, David came across as shy and somewhat restrained. The first time he said anything after the initial pleasantries we shared at the prison compound was when we drove close to the heart of the town. He was ten. This was the same child, I recalled, for whom, in the memorable months leading to his birth (and Nkem’s), Mother would often break into a song she believed gave the unborn child joy, and we all believed this back then. My brothers and I would gather when she began singing and dancing, for her voice was enthralling. Ikenna would become a drummer, and would drum with spoons on the table. Boja would become a flautist, and he would make flute sounds with his mouth. Obembe would become a whistler, and he would blow whistles to the tune. I would become a cheerer, clapping to the beats while Mother repeated the refrain:

Iyoghogho Iyogho Iyoghogho, Ka’nyi je na nke Bishopu

na five akwola Let us go to the Bishop’s,

it is five o’clock Ihe ne ewe m’iwe bun

a efe’m akorako I’m only sad because

my laundry is still wet Nwa’m bun a-afo

na’ewe ahuli But I’m relieved to know that

the child in my womb is happy

A strong urge to draw David to myself and embrace him had seized me, when Father suddenly said: “Demolitions,” as if I had asked him. “Everywhere.”

He’d seen a crane somewhere in the distance pulling down a house, people gathered around it. I had seen a similar scene somewhere earlier, near an abandoned public toilet.

“Why?” I asked.

“They want to make this place a city,” David said without looking at me. “The new Governor has asked that most of those houses be brought down.”

A preacher, the only person allowed to see me, had told me about the change in government. Because of my age at the time, the judge had deemed me unworthy of a life imprisonment or capital punishment. And, also, I was not worthy of juvenile prison because I’d committed murder. Hence, they decided that I serve an eight-year incarceration without visits or contact with my family. That session, all of it, had been stored in a sealed bottle, and many nights in the cell, while mosquitoes buzzed around my ears, I’d catch sudden glimpses of the courthouse, green curtain waving, and the judge seated across on the elevated podium, his voice deep and guttural:

… you will be there till society deems you an adult, able to conduct yourself in a civilized way acceptable to the society and mankind. In light of this, and by the powers conferred in me by the Federal Justice System of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and by the recommendations of the jury that justice be tempered with mercy — for the sake of your parents, Mr and Mrs Agwu, I hereby sentence you, Benjamin Azikiwe Agwu, to eight years’ confinement without familial contacts — until you, now ten, shall reach societal-proved maturity age of eighteen. The court is hereby dismissed.