Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

I held my breath when she relayed this. I’d grown up playing with this boy; he’d been there from the beginning and had fished the Omi-Ala with my brothers and me. It was terrible.

“How long ago was this?”

“Two years or so ago,” Mother said.

“Incorrect! — two and a half,” David interjected.

I looked up when he said this, seized by a strong feeling of déjà vu. I thought for a moment that this was 1992 or 1993 or 1994 or 1995 or 1996 and that it was Boja correcting Mother in that exact way. But this was not Boja, it was his much younger brother.

“Yes,” Mother said with half a smile, “two and a half years.” Igbafe’s death shocked me even more because I had not contemplated, at the time, the possibility that anyone I knew could have died while I was in prison, but many had. Mr Bode, the motor mechanic, was one of them. He was killed in a road accident, too. Father had written this in a letter, one in which I could almost feel his anger. The last three lines of that letter, charged and powerful, would stand strong in my memory for many years:

Young men are killed on rutted and dilapidated highway “death traps” called roads every day. Yet, these idiots at Aso Rock claim this country will survive. There lies the issue, their lies is the issue.

A pregnant woman rushed carelessly into the road and Father pulled to an abrupt halt. The woman waved in apology as she crossed. We soon entered where I reckoned was the beginning of our street. The streets from here had been cleaned up and new structures had been erected everywhere. It was as though everything had become new, as though the world itself had been born again. Familiar houses popped into sight like vistas rising from a fresh battleground. I saw the spot where Abulu’s old decrepit truck used to stand. All that was left was a few pieces of metal, like fallen trees, tangled in a garden of esan grass. A chicken and its chicks were grazing there, dipping their beaks mechanically into the soil. I was amazed at this sight, and I wondered what had happened to the truck, who had removed it. I began to think of Obembe again.

The more we drew near home, the more I thought of him and these thoughts threatened my infant joy. I began to feel that thoughts of a sun-splashed tomorrow — if Obembe did not return — would not breathe for too long. It would slump and die like a man staggering on with bullet holes. Father had told me that Mother had believed Obembe was dead. He said she buried a photo of him four years ago just after she returned from her year-long institutionalization at the Bishop Hughes Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. She said she had dreamt that Abulu killed Obembe like he killed his brother, impaled him with a spear to a wall. She’d tried pulling him off the wall, but he’d died slowly before her eyes. Convinced the dream was real, she began to mourn Obembe, wailing, refusing to be pacified. Father, who believed otherwise, felt it was best to agree with her for the sake of her healing. His friend, Henry Obialor, had advised him to let her get away with it as it was not wise to argue with her. David and Nkem had refused to allow it at first, citing that Abulu, being dead, could not have killed Obembe. But Father cautioned them, and allowed the belief to stay. He followed her to where she’d buried him beside Ikenna in a session she’d forced him to attend, threatening to take her own life if he didn’t. But what she buried was not him; it was a photo of him.

Father had changed so much that when he talked, he no longer made eye contact. I’d observed this in the prison reception hall where he’d told me about Mother. He used to be a stronger man; an impregnable man who defended fathering so many children by saying he wanted us to be many so that there could be diversity of success in the family. “My children will be great men,” he’d say. “They will be lawyers, doctors, engineers — and see, our Obembe, has become a soldier.” And for many years, he’d carried this bag of dreams. He did not know that what he bore all those days was a bag of maggoty dreams; long decayed, and which, now, had become a dead weight.

It was almost dark by the time we got home. A girl I immediately — but not without troubles — recognized to be Nkem opened the gates. She had Mother’s exact face and was much taller than a seven-year-old. She wore long braids that stretched down her back. When I saw her, I realized, at once, that she and David were egrets: the snow-white dove-like birds that appear after a storm, flying in groups. Although both of them had been born before the storm that shook our family, they did not experience it. Like a man asleep in the midst of a violent storm, they’d slept through it. And even when — during Mother’s first medical exile — they’d felt a touch of it, it had merely been a whimper, not loud enough to have awakened them.

But the egrets were also known for something else: they were often signs or harbingers of good times. They were believed to cleanse the fingernail better than the best nail files. Whenever we and the children of Akure saw them flying in the sky, we rushed out and flapped our fingers after the low-flying white flock travelling overhead, repeating the one-line saying: “Egrets, egrets, perch on me.”

The harder you flapped your fingers, the faster you sang; the harder and the faster you flapped your fingers and sang, the whiter and cleaner and brighter your nails became. I was thinking of these when my sister ran into my arms, and gave me a warm embrace, bursting into sobs while saying “Welcome home, brother, Ben” repeatedly.

Her voice sounded like music to my ears. My parents and brother, David, stood behind us, by the car, watching us. I was holding her, muttering that I was happy to be back when I heard someone toot aloud twice. I raised my head and saw, in that moment, the shadowy reflection of a person move across the fence of the compound near the well where many years ago, Boja had been pulled out. The sight startled me.

“There’s someone there,” I said, pointing towards the near darkness.

But no one moved; it was as if they had not heard me. They all stood there, watching, Father’s arms around Mother and a bright smile splayed on David’s face. It was as if they asked me, with their eyes, to find out what it was, or that they thought I was wrong. But as I looked in the direction where years ago, my brothers had fought, I saw the reflection of two legs climbing up the fence. I inched closer, the frenzied tom-toms of my heart roused to a fresh awakening.

“Who is there?” I asked aloud.

At first, there was no word, no movement, nothing. I turned back to my family behind me to ask who was there, but they were all fixed in one spot, staring at me, still unwilling to say a word. The darkness had enraptured them and they’d formed a backcloth of silhouettes. I turned again to the spot and saw the shadow rise against the wall and then stand still.

“Who is there?” I said again.

Then, the figure answered and I heard it loud and clear — as if no cause, no bars, no hands, no cuffs, no barriers, no years, no distance, no time had come between the time I last heard his voice and now; as if all the years that had passed were nothing but distance between when a cry was let out and the time it tapered off. That is: the time I realized it was him and the time I heard him say “It is me, Obe, your brother.”

For a moment, I stood still as his form began to move towards me. My heart leapt like a free bird at the thought that it was him, my veritable brother, that had now appeared as real as he once was, like an egret after my storm. As he came towards me, I remembered how in court, on the final day of my judgment, I’d seen what seemed like a vision of his return. Before I mounted the stand that day, Father had noticed that I had begun to cry again and pulled me aside to a corner of the courtroom, close to the massive aquamarine wall.