Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Then I would see how, in the immediate fear that seized me, I shot a glance at my father and saw a smile hop to his forehead like a praying mantis as Mother, with an outcry, and hands that helicoptered over her head, pleaded with God who lived there that He couldn’t afford to be silent when all this was happening to her, not this time . Then when the wardens handcuffed me, and began pushing me towards the back exit, my understanding of things suddenly shrunk to that of an unformed child — a foetus, as if everyone there were visitors who’d come to see me in my own world and were now about to leave — as if it wasn’t me, but them that were being taken away.

The prison, by policy, allowed a preacher to visit the inmates. One of them, Evangelist Ajayi, came every fortnight or so, and it was through him I kept abreast of the happenings in the outside world. He’d said, a week before I was told that I was to be released, that in the spirit of the first ever transition from military to civilian rule in Nigeria, Olusegun Agagu, the governor of the state of Ondo whose capital was Akure, had decided to free some prisoners. Father said my name had topped the list. And that sweltering day of May 21st, 2003 was fixed as the day of our release. But not all prisoners had been lucky. A year after I got into prison, in 1998, Evangelist Ajayi brought news that General Abacha, the dictator, died frothing at the mouth, and news floated that a poisoned apple had killed him. Then, exactly one month later, as he was about to be released, Abacha’s prime prisoner and arch enemy, M.K.O. died much the same way — after drinking a cup of tea.

M.K.O.’s afflictions had begun a few months after we met, when the 1993 election he was believed to have won was annulled, setting off a chain of events that put Nigeria’s politics on an unprecedented slide for the mud. One day in the following year, while gathered in the sitting room to watch the NTA national network news, we saw M.K.O. rounded up in his house in Lagos by a convoy of about two hundred heavily armed soldiers in armoured tanks and military vehicles, and then led off in a Black Maria; he’d been accused of treason and his long incarceration had begun. But although I had been aware of M.K.O.’s troubles, the news of his death came to me with the force of a blow from a weighted fist. I recall how I hardly slept that night, how I lay on the mattress, covered in the wrappa Mother gave me, and thought of how much that man had meant to my brothers and me.

We crossed a portion of the Omi-Ala, the largest in the town and I caught sight of men paddling the mud-coloured water, a fisherman casting a fishnet into the waters. A long line of street-lamp poles ballasted into the concrete lane divider tracked along the road. As we drove towards home, forgotten details of Akure began to open their dead eyes. I noticed that the road had changed a great deal, and that a lot had changed in six years in this city where I was born, in whose soil my feet had been planted. The roads had widened so that the sellers got pushed back many metres from the jumbled roadways, which often filled with cars and trucks. An overhead bridge had been constructed over the road on two sides. Everywhere, the cacophony of vendors crying their wares roused the silent creatures that had crept into my soul. A man dressed in a faded Manchester United jersey ran along as we stopped in the middle of the clogged traffic, banging on the car, as he attempted to shove a loaf of bread through the window near Mother’s side. She wound up the glass. In the distance beyond the nearly thousand cars that were honking and raving with impatience was a mighty semi making a slow U-turn under the overhead pedestrian bridge. It was this vehicular dinosaur that had brought the entire traffic to a halt.

Everything that moved around me now was in strong contrast to the years in prison — when all I did was read, gaze, pray, cry, soliloquize, hope, sleep, eat and think.

“Many things have changed,” I said.

“Yes,” Mother said. She smiled now and I remembered, in flashes, how spiders had tormented her.

I returned my eyes to the streets. As we drew near home, I heard my own voice say “Daddy, do you mean Obembe has not returned at all, all these years?”

“No, not even once,” Father answered sharply, shaking his head.

I wanted to catch Mother’s eyes when he said this, but she was staring out of the window and instead, my Father’s eyes met mine from the overhead mirror. I felt like telling them Obembe wrote to me a few times from Benin, that he said he was now living with a woman who loved him, and adopted him as a son. He’d entered a bus from Akure and travelled to the city of Benin the morning after he left home. He said he’d simply thought of Benin because of the story of the great Oba Ovonramwen of Benin who defied the British imperial rule and decided to go there. When he arrived at the city, he saw a woman coming out of a car and walked up bravely to her and told her he had nowhere to sleep. She took pity on him and took him to her house where she lived alone. He wrote that there were things that would sadden me if he told me and some things he thought I was too young to hear and may not understand, but he promised he would tell them later. The few things he said I should know, for now, were these: the woman was a widow who lived alone, and that he had become a man. He said, in that same letter, that he’d calculated the exact date of my release — February 10th, 2005—and that he would return to Akure that same day. He said Igbafe would keep him abreast of developments, and that way, he would know what happens to me.

Igbafe delivered his letters to me. My brother first met Igbafe when, once — after the first six months in exile — he tried to return home. He’d made the journey, but had been too afraid to enter our compound. He’d sought out Igbafe instead who told him everything and promised to deliver letters to me. He wrote almost every month over the next two years, through Igbafe, who would then give the letters to a junior warden to pass to me — usually with a bribe to persuade them. I often replied to the letters while Igbafe waited outside. But after the first three years, Igbafe suddenly stopped coming, and I never found out why or what became of Obembe. I waited for days and months and then years but nothing. Then all I got was the occasional letter from Father and once, from David. I began to read and reread the letters, about sixteen of them, that Obembe had sent me until the entire content of the last one he dated November 14th, 2000—it became stored in my head like water in a coconut:

Listen, Ben,

I can’t face our parents now and alone. I can’t. I’m to blame for everything that happened, everything. It was I who told Ike what Abulu said when the plane flew past — I’m to be blamed. I was so stupid, so stupid. Listen, Ben, even you have suffered because of me. I want to go to them, but, I can’t face them alone. I will come the day they release you so we can meet them together and beg them forgiveness for all we’ve done. I need you to be there when I come.

Obembe

As I thought of the letter, it struck me to ask about Igbafe. I thought I could perhaps find out from him why my brother had stopped writing. When I asked if Igbafe was still living in Akure, Mother gazed at me with a startling measure of surprise.

“The neighbour?” she said.

“Yes, the neighbour.”

She shook her head.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“What?” I gasped.

She nodded. Igbafe had become a truck driver like his father, ferrying timber from forests to Ibadan for two years. He died in an accident when his truck skidded off the road into a deathly crater carved by devastating erosion.