I did not know when I eventually slept, but I soon found myself and my brothers in our village, Amano, near Umuahia. We were playing football—two-a-side—near the bank of the river when Boja suddenly kicked the ball to a footbridge that was once used as the only crossing over the river. Biafran soldiers had hastily constructed it, after blowing up the main bridge during the Nigerian civil war, as an alternate bridge by which they could cross in the event of an invasion by Nigerian troops. It was hidden away in the forest. The footbridge was made of slats of wood held together by rusting metal loops, and thick ropes. It had no handrails one could support oneself with while crossing it. The portion of the river that flowed under the bridge was bedded underneath with rocks. Rocks and stones, reaching out of a hilly part of the forest, were visible just below the waters. Ikenna ran to the bridge without thinking, and was at the centre of it in no time. But the moment he picked up the ball, he suddenly realized he was in danger. As he gazed with trepidation at the chasm beneath him, the chasm fed his eyes with visions of his death by a fall that would end in a fatal contact with the stones. Suddenly engulfed in fear, he began crying “Help! Help!” Just as scared as he was, we began calling on him: “Ike, come, come.” In obedience to our entreaty, he spread his hands, and letting the ball fall into the gash, began walking towards us, slowly, his gait like that of someone wading through a pool of mud. As he came, tottering dangerously, the slats—made fragile with age and decay—cracked, and the bridge snapped, breaking in two. Ikenna descended at once with planks of broken wood, metals and a loud jolting cry for help. He was still falling when, abruptly waking, I heard Mother’s voice scolding Ikenna for having endangered his life by sleeping out and returning wet and ill. I once heard that the heart of an angered man will not beat with verve, it will inhale and bloat like a balloon, but eventually deflate. This was the case with my brother. For by morning, when I heard his voice, I ran out to the sitting room to see with my own eyes that he had returned drenched, helpless, an afflicted man.
With every day that passed, Ikenna became more distant from us. I hardly saw him in those days. His existence was reduced to these minimal movements around the house, the noise of his often exaggerated coughing and of the transistor radio whose volume he’d often raise so high Mother would ask him to turn it down if she was at home. Sometimes I saw him briefly leave the house, in haste mostly, not once seeing his face. I saw him again later that same week when he came out to see a football match on television. David had taken ill the previous night and vomited his dinner. Mother did not go to her store at the town bazaar that day, but sat at home to nurse David. After school, while Mother looked after David in her room, my brothers and I watched the match. Ikenna—who could not resist seeing the match, but also could not send the rest of us out of the room because Mother was there—sat aloft at the dining table as mute as a deer. It was almost at the end of the half-time when Mother came into the sitting room with a ten-naira bill in her hand and said: “I want both of you to go and get David some medicine.” Although she did not mention names, she’d apparently addressed Ikenna and Boja; they ran errands outside the house because they were older. For a moment after Mother spoke, none of them moved an inch. This staggered Mother.
“Mama, am I your only child?” Ikenna replied rubbing his chin where Obembe had told me he’d seen some beard earlier. Although I had not noticed it at the time, I did not dispute it. Ikenna had just turned fifteen, and to my eyes, he was now a full adult able to grow beards. Yet, the thought that he was old came with the strong fear that once he grew into an adult, he would disconnect from us, go to higher college or just leave home. That thought never fully formed at the time though. It hung in my mind like a television acrobat, who, having just made a prodigious leap remained—after a click of the pause button—in mid-air, unable to complete the jump.
“What?” Mother asked.
“Can’t you send someone else? Must it always be me? I’m tired and don’t want to go anywhere.”
“You and Boja will go and get it whether you like it or not. Inugo—Do you hear?”
Ikenna dropped his eyes, in a moment of wild contemplation and then, shaking his head, said: “Okay, if you insist it must be me, I will go, but I must go alone.”
He stood and made forward to take the money, but Mother retracted the bill into her fist, concealing it. This shocked Ikenna. He stepped back, aghast. “Won’t you give me the money and let me go?” he asked.
“Wait, let me ask you. What has your brother done to you? I really want to know, really.”
“Nothing!” Ikenna cried. “Nothing, Mama, I’m okay. Just give me the money and let me go.”
“I’m not talking about you but about your relationship with your brother. Look at Boja’s lip.” She pointed to Boja’s injury that was now almost fully healed. “Look at what you did to him; what you did to your blood brother—”
“Just give me the money and let me go!” Ikenna bellowed and stretched out his hand.
But Mother, unruffled, continued while he was speaking, so that they competed for the same moment, giving way to a rush of words that came out from both of them as: “Nwanne gi ye mu n hulu ego nwa anra ih nhulu ka mu ga ba—Your brother give me who suckled the money the same breasts and let me as you did go!”
“Give it to me and let me go!” Ikenna cried now, louder, as if enraged even more by every word Mother had said that’d climbed on his own words, but Mother responded with soft tsks and monotonous shaking of her head.
“Just give me the money, I want to go alone,” Ikenna said in a more restrained voice. “I beg you; please, just give me the money.”
“May thunder strike your mouth, Ikenna! Chinekem eh! My God! When did you start challenging me, eh, Ikenna?”
“What did I do to you now?” Ikenna shouted and began stamping mad on the floor in protest. “What is this? Why are you always nit-picking on me? What have I done to you, this woman? Why don’t you let me alone?”
Seated there, we all—like Mother—were shocked by Ikenna’s address of Mother, our mother, as “this woman.”
“Ikenna, is that you?” she asked in a subdued voice, pointing her forefinger at him. “Is that you, a duck that flutters its wings like a cock does? Is that you?” But as she was speaking, Ikenna made for the door. Mother watched as he opened it, then snapping her fingers, raised her voice after him, “Just wait until your father calls, I’ll tell him what you have become. Don’t worry, just let him return.”
Ikenna hissed and then—in a show of brazen defiance unprecedented in our house—stormed out of the house, forcefully slamming the door behind him. As if to enunciate what had just happened, a car honked insanely for a length of time, and when it finally stopped, it left the din to echo in my head, thickening the enormity of Ikenna’s defiance. Mother settled into one of the lounges, shock and anger tightening their grip around her heart, as she mumbled despairingly to herself, her hands clutched around her bosom.
“He has grown, Ikenna has grown horns.”
I was moved to see her in such despair. It seemed a part of her body, which she had got accustomed to touching, had suddenly sprouted thorns and every effort made to touch that part merely resulted in bleeding.
“Mama,” Obembe called to her.
“Eh, Nnam—my father,” she replied.
“Give me the money,” Obembe said. “I could go to get the medicine, and Ben could come with me. I’m not afraid.”
She looked up at him and nodded, her eyes lightening up with a smile.
“Thank you, Obe,” she said. “But it is dark, so Boja will go with you. You both should be careful.”
“I will go too,” I said, rising to get my clothes.
“No, Ben,” Mother said. “Stay here with me. Two is enough.”
In the state of mind I have come to develop after the breakdown of our lives, I often remember that phrase, “Two is enough,” as a foreboding of the things that would befall our family a few weeks after that day. I sat
down beside Mother and Obembe and pondered about how much Ikenna had changed. I’d never seen him act rude to Mother; for he loved her greatly. Of all of us, he looked the most like her. He took her colour of the tropical anthills. In this part of Africa, married women often went by the name of their first child. Hence, Mother was commonly known as Mama Ike or Adaku. Ikenna enjoyed most of the earliest cares that she ever gave her kids. It was in his cot we all laid years later. We all inherited his baskets of medicines and baby-care things. He had stood on Mother’s side against anyone in the past—even Father. Sometimes when we disobeyed Mother, he punished us before she took any action. Their partnership was what gave Father the satisfaction that we could be well reared, even in his absence. The small depression on the fourth finger of Father’s right hand was a scar from Ikenna’s bite. Years before I was born, Father hit Mother in a fit of rage. Ikenna swooped in on him and bit him on his finger, naturally ending the fight.
THE METAMORPHOSIS
Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis:
A life-changing experience that continued with each passing day. He closed himself off from the rest of us. But though he was no longer accessible, he began to leave shattering traces of himself around the house in actions that left lasting impacts on our lives. One such incident occurred at the beginning of the week following that altercation with Mother. It was a parents-teacher day, so school let out early. Ikenna remained alone in his room, while Boja, Obembe and I sat in our room playing a game of cards. It was a particularly hot day and we were all naked to the waist, seated on the carpet. Our wooden shutter was wide open, wedged with a small stone to let in air. Upon hearing the door of his room open and close, Boja said: “That is Ike going out.”
And then, after a little pause, we heard the opening and closing of the sitting room’s storm door, too. We had not seen Ikenna in two days because he’d hardly been at home, and when he was, he stayed in his room, and whenever he was there, no one, not even Boja with whom he shared the room, entered it. Boja had remained cautious of Ikenna since their last fight because Mother had asked him to stay away from Ikenna until Father returned to exorcise the evil spirits that had possessed him. So Boja mostly stayed with us, accessing the room only at times like this when he was sure Ikenna was not there. He rose to go to the room to take a few things he needed quickly while Obembe and I waited for him to return and continue the game. He’d barely gone out when Obembe and I heard him cry “Mogbe!”—a cry of lamentation in Yoruba. As we ran out, Boja began shouting “Calendar M.K.O.! Calendar M.K.O.!”
“What, what?” Obembe and I asked him as we rushed towards the room. Then we saw for ourselves.
Our prized M.K.O. calendar was charred to pieces, and meticulously destroyed. I could not believe it at first, so I glanced at the wall where it had always hung, but what I saw was a cleaner, shinier, and almost glossy, blank square surface of the wall, its edges slightly smeared with spots where it had been taped. The sight horrified me; my mind could not grasp it, for the M.K.O. calendar was a special calendar. The tale of how we obtained the calendar had been our greatest achievement. We always retold ourselves this story with great pride. It was in the middle of March 1993, in the heat of the presidential election campaigns. We’d arrived at school one morning while the assembly bell was ringing its dying chimes, and quickly merged into the group of chatting pupils, steadily forming lines and columns according to class on the assembly ground. I stood in the nursery line, Obembe in the first grade’s line, Boja in the fourth grade’s line, and Ikenna in the fifth grade’s line—just second to the last one near the fence. Once all the lines had formed, the morning assembly began. The pupils sang the morning hymns, said the Lord’s Prayer, and sang the Nigerian anthem. Afterwards, Mr Lawrence, the head teacher, stood on the podium and opened the large school attendance register. Then, with a microphone, he began calling out the names. When he called a pupil’s name and surname, we cried out “Present, sir!” and simultaneously raised our hands. In this manner, he took a roll call of all the four hundred pupils of the school. When Mr Lawrence got to the fourth grade’s line, and called the first name on the list, “Bojanonimeokpu Alfred Agwu,” the pupils burst into laughter.
“In all of your fathers’ faces!” Boja cried out, raising his two hands, his fingers spread apart, to waka at the pupils—a gesture of cursing.
That wiped out all laughter from the crowd of pupils, and still they stood, no one moving, no one saying a word except for a few murmurs that swiftly tapered off. Even the dreaded Mr Lawrence, the only person I knew who whipped sorer than Father and who was almost never seen without a whip, appeared dazed and momentarily incapacitated. Boja had been angered that morning even before we got to school. He had been embarrassed when Father asked him to take out the mattress he had wetted when he woke. What he did when Mr Lawrence called his name might have been caused by that; for it was usual for the pupils to laugh whenever Mr Lawrence, a Yoruba man, struggled to accurately pronounce Boja’s full Igbo names. Knowing Mr Lawrence’s deficiency, Boja had become used to his employment of approximate homophones, which, depending on his mood, ranged from the utterly jarring—“Bojanonokwu”—to the utterly funny—“Bojanolooku”—which Boja himself often recalled, and even sometimes boasted that he was such a menacing figure that his name could not be pronounced by just anybody—like the name of a god. Boja had often revelled in those moments and until that morning, had never complained.
The headmistress walked to the podium and Mr Lawrence, dumbfounded, stepped back. The megaphone made a prolonged shriek as it was passed from his hand to hers.
“Who said those words on the grounds of Omotayo Nursery and Primary School, a renowned Christian school built and founded on the word of God?” the headmistress said.
I was seized with the fear of an imminent severe punishment Boja would receive for this act—perhaps he would be whipped on the podium or asked to do “labour,” which entailed sweeping the entire school compound or weeding the bush in front of the school with bare hands. I tried to catch Obembe’s eyes because he was in a line two rows from me, but he would not turn away from Boja.
“I asked who?” the headmistress’s voice bellowed again.
“Me, ma,” a familiar voice replied.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice lower than it was before.
“Boja.”
There was a brief pause, after which the headmistress’s distinct voice beamed “Come here” into the megaphone. As Boja made to go out to the podium, Ikenna ran forward, stood in front of him and cried out aloud “No, ma, this is unfair! What has he done? What? If you are going to punish him, you have to punish all of these people who laughed at him, too. Why should they laugh at him and mock him?”
The silence that followed these bold words, Ikenna’s and Boja’s defiance, was for a moment spiritual. The megaphone in the headmistress’s hands shook unsteadily and then fell to the ground with a loud shriek. She picked up the microphone, dropped it on the podium, and stepped back.
“In fact,” Ikenna’s voice rose again, above the noise of a colony of birds sailing towards the hills, “this is unfair. We’d rather leave your school than be punished unjustly. My brothers and I will all leave. Now. There are better schools out there where we can get better Western education; Daddy will no longer pay the big money to you.”
I remember, in sparkling mirror memory, the unsure movements of Mr Lawrence’s legs as he reached for the long cane, and the headmistress’s gesture that stopped him. Yet, even if she had let him, he would not have been able to catch up with Ikenna and Boja who’d begun to walk through the lines that gently parted for them among the pupils, who, like the teachers, seemed to have frozen with fear. Then, our older brothers grabbing my hand and Obembe’s, we ran out of the school.
We could not go home directly because Mama had just given birth to David and was convalescing. Ikenna said we’d get her worried if we returned home less than an hour after we’d left for school. We walked about
in an end street that was mostly empty grassland, with signposts saying This land is owned by so and so, do not trespass. We stopped at the façade of a half-finished, abandoned house. Fallen bricks and crumbling pyramids of sand were scattered all over with what appeared to be dog shit. We entered the structure and sat on a slab of paved floor with a roof—something Obembe suggested would become the house’s sitting room. “You should have seen the headmistress’s daughter’s face,” Boja said. We mocked the teachers and pupils and raved about what we’d done, exaggerating the scenes to make them movie-like.
We’d sat there for about thirty minutes talking about what had happened at school when our attention was suddenly drawn to a distant rising noise. We saw a Bedford truck slowly approaching in the distance. It was covered with posters bearing the portraits of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presidential aspirant of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The truck was loaded with people on top of its open back, and was abuzz with voices singing a song that appeared on state television frequently during those days: the song that held up M.K.O. as “the man.” The people were singing, drumming, with two of them—men dressed in white T-shirts with a photograph of M.K.O.—also blowing trumpets. All around the street, onlookers reared out of houses, sheds, shops, some peeping from windows. As the group went, some of them disengaged from the truck and distributed posters. They gave Ikenna, who stepped forward to meet them while the rest of us stayed back, a small one that had M.K.O.’s smiling face, a white horse beside him, and the words Hope ’93: Farewell to Poverty cascading downwards at the right-hand corner of the poster.
The Fishermen Page 6