The Fishermen Read online

  Boja set the petrified cock down on the chosen spot, and took the knife that Obembe had brought from our kitchen. Ikenna joined him and together they held the chicken in place, unshaken by its loud squawks. Then we all watched as the knife moved in Boja’s hand with unaccustomed ease, a downward slit through the rooster’s wrinkled neck as if he’d handled the knife several times before, and as if he were destined to handle it yet again. The cock twitched and made aggravating movements that were restrained by all our hands holding it firmly. I looked over our fence to the top floor of the two-storeyed building overlooking our compound and saw Igbafe’s grandfather, a small man who had stopped speaking after an accident a few years earlier, seated on the large veranda in front of the door of the house. He had the habit of sitting there all day and he used to be the butt of our jokes.

  Boja severed the cock’s head, leaving a jolting outpouring of blood in its wake. I turned away and returned my eyes to the old mute man. He appeared like a moment’s vision of a faraway warning angel whose warnings we could not hear owing to the distance. I did not see the rooster’s head fall into the small hole Ikenna had dug in the dirt, but I watched as its trunk palpitated violently, spurting blood about, its wings raising dust. My brothers held it down even more firmly until it gradually quieted. Then we set off with the headless corpse in Boja’s grip, the blood marking our trail, unshaken by the few people who looked on in awe. Boja flung the dead rooster over the fence, blood spitting around as it careered in the air. Once it was out of sight, we felt satisfied we had had our revenge.

  Ikenna’s frightening metamorphosis did not, however, begin then; it began long before Father’s Guerdon, and even before the neighbour caught us fishing at the river. It first showed itself in an attempt to make us hate fishing, but this was fruitless, for the love of fishing had been wired into the arteries of our hearts at the time. In his frail effort, he dug up everything he deemed bad about the river, things we had never before observed. He complained, just a few days before the neighbour caught us, that the bush around the river was filled with excreta. Although we had never seen anyone do this, nor even perceived the odour he so painstakingly described to us, Boja, Obembe and I did not argue with him. He said at one point that Omi-Ala’s fish were polluted, and stopped us from bringing the fish into his room. Hence, we began keeping them in the room I shared with Obembe. He even complained he had seen a human skeleton floating underneath the waters of the Omi-Ala while fishing, and that Solomon was a bad influence. He said these things as if they were undeniable truths newly discovered, but the passion we’d developed for fishing had become like liquid frozen in a bottle and could not be easily thawed. It was not that we did not have reservations about the enterprise; we all did. Boja hated that the river was small and only contained “useless” fish; Obembe had troubles with what the fish did at night since there’s no light under the water, in the river. How, he frequently wondered, did the fish move about—since they did not have electricity or lanterns—in the pitch black darkness that covered the river like a sheet at night; and I detested the weakness of the smelts and tadpoles, how they died so easily even when you stored them in the river’s water! This frailty sometimes made me want to cry. When Solomon came knocking the following day, the day the neighbour caught us, Ikenna had insisted at first that he would not go to the river with him. But when he saw that we, his brothers, were leaving without him, he joined in, taking his fishing line from Boja. Solomon and the rest of us cheered him, hailing him a most valiant “Fisherman.”

  The thing that was consuming Ikenna was like a tireless enemy, hiding inside him, biding its time while we plotted and carried out our revenge on Iya Iyabo. It began to control him from the day Ikenna severed ties with Obembe and me, keeping only Boja with him. They barred Obembe and me from their room, and excluded us from joining in at the new football place they discovered a week after the whipping. Obembe and I longed for their companionship, and waited in vain for their return every evening, yearning for our kinship that seemed to be slipping away. But as days went by, it began to seem as if Ikenna had got rid of an infection in his throat by finally coughing us out, like a man who’d simply cleared his stuffed passages.

  At around the same time, Ikenna and Boja hassled one of Mr Agbati’s children, our cross-wall neighbours who owned a rickety lorry that was known as “Argentina” because of the legend “Born and raised in Argentina” inscribed around its frescoed body. Owing to its feebleness, the lorry made deafening noises when starting, often rattling the neighbourhood and waking people from sleep in the early hours of the day. This engendered several complaints and quarrels. In one of the fights, Mr Agbati came off with a perpetual swelling on his head after a female neighbour hit him with the heel of her shoe. From then on, Mr Agbati began sending one of his children to inform the neighbours whenever he wanted to start the lorry. The children would knock on every neighbour’s door or gate a couple of times, announcing that “Papa wan start Argentina, oh.” Then they would run off to the next house. That morning, Ikenna—who had begun to grow more belligerent and irascible—fought the oldest of the children after accusing the boy of being a nuzance, a word Father often used to describe someone who made unnecessary noise.

  Later that same day, after we had returned from school and eaten, he and Boja went to play football at the pitch while Obembe and I stayed home, sad that we could not go with them. We were watching television, and were still on the same programme, one about a man who settled family disputes, when they returned. They had only been gone for half an hour. As they hurried into their room, I saw that Ikenna’s face was covered with dirt, his upper lip was swollen into a pulp and there were bloodstains on his jersey which had the sobriquet “Okocha” and the figure 10 inscribed on its back. Once they shut their door, Obembe and I ran to our room and stood beside the wall to eavesdrop on their conversation to find out what had happened. At first, we only heard the closet doors opening and closing, and the sound their feet made as they walked on the worn carpet. It was long before we caught the words “If I hadn’t thought Nathan and Segun would come in if I did and outnumber us, I would have joined in the fight.” This was Boja’s voice and he was not finished yet. “If only I had known they wouldn’t join, if only I had known.”

  The sound of feet rapping on the carpet followed this declaration, after which Boja continued: “But he did not even really beat you, that frog; he was only lucky to have,” he paused as if searching for the right words, “to have… done this.”

  “You didn’t fight for me,” Ikenna burst out suddenly. “No! You stood by and watched. Don’t even try to deny it.”

  “I could have—” Boja began to say after a brief pause, breaking the silence.

  “No you didn’t!” Ikenna cried. “You stood by!”

  This was loud enough for Mother to hear from her room; she had not gone to work that day because Nkem was having diarrhoea. She scrambled to her feet, slapped the floor a few times with her flip-flops and started knocking on their door.

  “What is going on there, why are you shouting?”

  “Mama, we want to sleep,” said Boja.

  “Is that why you won’t answer the door?” she asked, and when no one answered back, she said: “What was the shouting in that room about?”

  “Nothing,” Ikenna replied sharply.

  “It better be nothing,” said Mother. “It better be.”

  Her flip-flops slapped the floor again in rhythm as she returned to her room.

  Ikenna and Boja did not go out to play after school the following day; they stayed in their room. Wanting to take advantage of the situation to communicate with them again, Obembe seized on the opportunity of a television show Ikenna particularly liked to bring them to the sitting room. Both of them had not watched television since the neighbour caught us at the Omi-Ala, and Obembe continually ached for the days when we all saw our favourite programmes together with riotous glee—Agbala Owe, the Yoruba soap opera, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, a
n Australian drama. Obembe always wanted to reach out to them whenever any of the programmes was on, but the fear that he might annoy them often stopped him. On this day, however, having grown desperate and because Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was Ikenna’s favourite, first he craned his neck to look through the keyhole of their room’s door so he could see our brothers through it. Then making the sign of the cross, his lips moving inaudibly with the rhythm of the words “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he started pacing about the room singing the theme song of the show:

  Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo

  Skippy, Skippy, Skippy our friend ever true.

  Obembe had told me many times over those dark days of separation from our brothers that he wanted to put an end to the rift, but I’d always warned he’d incur their wrath. I’d managed to dissuade him every single time. So when he began to sing that song, I began to fear for him again. “Don’t, Obe, they’ll beat you,” I said, gesturing that he stop.

  The effect of my entreaty was like a sudden pinch on the skin that attracted only a minute response. He’d stopped and cast a lingering stare at me as though unsure of what he had heard. Then shaking his head, continued, “Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo—”

  He stopped singing when the handle of the door of my brothers’ room twitched. Ikenna appeared, walked to the lounge beside me, and sat in it. Obembe froze like a statue and remained by the wall, under a framed photo of Nnene, Father’s mother, holding the newly born Ikenna in 1981. He would maintain this posture for very long as if pinned to the wall. Boja came out after Ikenna and sat down.

  Skippy, the kangaroo, had just fought with a rattlesnake, making prodigious leaps every time the serpent lunged to sting him with its venomous tongue, and the kangaroo was now licking its paws.

  “Oh, I hate when this stupid Skippy does this annoying paw-licking!” Ikenna fumed.

  “He just fought with a snake,” Obembe said. “You should have seen—”

  “Who asked you?” Ikenna snarled, jumping to his feet. “I said who asked you?”

  In anger, he kicked Nkem’s mobile plastic chair so that it plunged into the big shelf which held the television, VHS player and telephone. A glass-covered framed photo of Father as a young clerk of the Central Bank of Nigeria crashed behind the cupboard, shattering into pieces.

  “Who asked you?” Ikenna, ignoring the fate of Father’s treasured portrait, repeated for the third time. He pressed the red button on the television and it went dead.

  “Oya, all of you to your rooms!” he cried.

  Obembe and I ran there, panting. Then, from our room, I heard Ikenna say “Boja, why are you still waiting there? I said, all of you.”

  “What, Ike, me, too?” Boja asked in astonishment.

  “Yes, I said all—all!”

  The silence was broken by the sound of Boja’s feet as he walked to his room, and then the sound of their door slamming. After we’d all gone, Ikenna turned on the television and settled to watch—alone.

  I have come to believe that it was here that the first mark of the line between Ikenna and Boja—where not even a dot had ever been drawn before—first appeared. It altered the shape of our lives and ushered in a transition of time when craniums raged and voids exploded. They stopped speaking. Boja came descending like a fallen angel, and landed where Obembe and I had long been confined.

  In those early days of Ikenna’s metamorphosis, we all hoped the hand that held his heart, having clenched into a fist, would unclench in no time. But days rolled past and Ikenna moved farther and farther from us. He hit Boja after a heated argument a week or so later. Obembe and I were in our room when this happened because we’d started to avoid the living room whenever Ikenna was there, but Boja often stayed put. It must have been Ikenna’s anger at his persistence that caused the argument. All I heard was blows and their voices as they argued and swore at each other. It was on a Saturday and Mother, who no longer went to work on Saturdays, was at home taking a nap. But when she heard the noise, she ran out to the living room, swaddled from bosom to knee because she’d breastfed Nkem who had been crying earlier. Mother first tried to break up the fight by calling on them to stop, but they paid no heed. She plunged in and pulled them apart until she was stretched between them, but Boja held on to Ikenna’s T-shirt in defiance. When Ikenna tried to wrest himself free, he did it with such a ferocious jerk of Boja’s arm that he mistakenly pulled off the wrappa Mother was swaddled in, stripping her to her underpants.

  “Ewooh!” Mother cried. “Do you want to bring a curse on yourselves? Look what you have done; you have stripped me naked. Do you know what it means—to see my nakedness? Do you know it is a sacrilege—alu?” She fastened the wrappa around her bosom again. “I will tell Eme everything you have done from A to Z, don’t you worry.”

  She snapped her fingers at both of them, now standing apart, still trying to catch their breath.

  “Now tell me, Ikenna, what did he do to you? Why were you fighting?”

  Ikenna threw off his shirt and hissed in reply. I was stupefied. Hissing at an older person in Igbo culture was considered an insufferable act of insubordination.

  “What, Ikenna?”

  “Eh, Mama,” Ikenna said.

  “Did you hiss at me?” Mother said in English first, then placing her hands on her bosom, she said, “Obu mu ka ighi na’a ma lu osu?”

  Ikenna did not answer. He moved back to the lounge where he’d sat before the fight, picked up his shirt and walked to his room. He slammed the door so hard that the louvres in the sitting room rattled. Mother, astounded at the brazen insult in his act of walking out on her, stood with mouth agape, her eyes fixed on the door, and her wrath piqued. She was about to head to the door to discipline Ikenna when she noticed Boja’s broken lip. He was dabbing the shirt now covered with crimson stains against his bloodied lips.

  “He did that to you?” Mother asked.

  Boja nodded. His eyes were red, full of bottled tears that were held back from pouring out only because it would have meant he’d been beaten. My brothers and I hardly ever cried when we fought, even if we’d suffered severe blows or had been hit in the most sensitive places. We always tried to stifle tears until we went out of everyone’s sight. Only then did we let it out, and sometimes, in spades.

  “Answer me,” Mother shouted. “Have you turned deaf?”

  “Yes, Mama, he did it.”

  “Onye—Who? Ike-nna did this?”

  Boja nodded in reply, his eyes on the stained shirt in his hands. Mother walked closer to him and tried to touch the wounded lip, but Boja squirmed in pain. She stepped back, still gazing at the wound.

  “Did you say Ikenna did it?” she asked again as if Boja had not replied before.

  “Yes, Mama,” Boja said.

  She fastened her wrappa again, this time tighter. Then she walked briskly to Ikenna’s door and began banging on it, calling on Ikenna to open it. When there was no response, she began threatening aloud, punctuating her words with tsks to give them resolve. “Ikenna, if you don’t open that door now, I will show you that I’m your mother, and that you came out from between my legs.”

  Now that she threatened with tsks, she did not wait too long before the door opened. She pounced on him and an exchange of blows and tantrums followed. Ikenna was unusually defiant. He received every slap with protests and even threatened to hit back, further aggravating her. Mother struck more blows. He cried freely and complained aloud that she hated him because she did not reprimand Boja for the provocation that led to the fight in the first place. In the end, he pushed her to the floor and ran out. Mother chased after him, her wrappa falling again as she did. But by the time she got to the sitting room, he was gone. She raised her wrappa to cover her bosom as before. “Heaven and earth hear me,” she swore, touching her tongue with the tip of her index finger. “Ikenna, you will not eat anything in this house again until your father comes back. I don’t care how you do it, but not in this house.” Her wor
ds clogged with tears. “Not in this house, not until Eme returns from wherever he is. You will not eat here.”

  She was speaking to those of us now gathered in the sitting room and to others, perhaps our neighbours who were probably listening from the other side of the lizard-infested fence. For Ikenna had vanished. He’d probably crossed the road to the other side of the street, walked northwards to Sabo, along the dirt road that led further into the part of the city where old hills rose above three schools, a cinema in a crumbling building and a big mosque, from where the muezzin called for prayers through mighty loudspeakers at dawn every day. He did not return that day. He slept somewhere he never disclosed.

  Mother paced the house all that night, anxiously waiting for Ikenna to knock on the storm door. When, at midnight, she was compelled to lock up the gate for safety—armed robbery occurred frequently in Akure in those days—she sat with the keys near the main door, waiting. She’d driven the rest of us to our rooms to sleep and only Boja remained in the sitting room because he could not enter his room for fear of Ikenna. Obembe and I did not sleep, either; we listened to Mother from our beds. She went out many times that night, thinking she’d heard a knock at the gate, but returned all those times alone. She barely sat down. When a deluge began later, she telephoned Father, but the repeated rings went unanswered. As the pon-pon, pon-pon sound of the phone repeated itself again and again I tried to imagine Father seated in the new house in the dangerous city, his spectacles on, reading the Guardian or the Tribune. That image of him was torpedoed by the static on the line, which made Mother hang up.