He turned back at once and saw me still gazing at the man.
“All of you close your eyes now!” he barked. He watched to ensure we’d all complied and then said, “Benjamin, lead us in prayer.”
“Yes, Daddy,” I replied, clearing my throat, and began praying in English, the only language in which I knew how to pray. “In Jesus’ name, Lord God, I ask that you help us… bless us, oh God, please heal Mama, you who healed the sick, Lazarus and all, let her stop talking like a madwoman in Jesus’ name we have prayed.”
The rest chorused “Amen!”
By the time we opened our eyes, the group had reached the entrance of the hospital, but still visible was the dust-caked fundament of the deranged man as he was being forced into the hospital. Father came to the back-seat door and opened it from where I sat, Nkem sandwiched between David and me.
“Listen, my friends,” he began, his bloodshot eyes peering down into our faces. “Number one: your mother is not a madwoman. Listen, all of you, when you enter there, do not look left or right; just face straight ahead of you. Whatever you see within these halls will remain in your mind. I will give anyone who misbehaves a Guerdon once we get home.”
We all nodded in agreement. Then, one after the other, we alighted with Obembe leading, Father beside him, I at the back. We walked through the long line of flowers to the entrance of the big building whose floors were fully tiled and smelt of lavender. We entered a large hall full of people chattering. I tried not to look, so as not to get whipped, but I could not resist. So when I thought Father was not looking, I diverged to the left, my eyes falling on a pale girl with a thin long neck that moved mechanically as though she were a robot. Her tongue stuck halfway almost interminably out of her mouth and her hair was so thin and pale her scalp could be glimpsed. I was horrified. When I turned back to Father, he was taking a blue tag from the white-uniformed woman across the counter and saying: “Yes, they are all her children, they shall come with me.”
When he said this, the woman behind the glass counter rose to her feet and looked at us.
“Her children,” Father mumbled.
“Are you sure they can see her in this condition?” the woman asked.
She was light-complexioned, clothed in a white pinafore. Her nursing cap sat solidly on her beautifully oiled hair and the clipped tag on the top of her breast read: Nkechi Daniel.
“I believe it will be okay,” Father mumbled. “I have carefully weighed the consequences and believe I can manage it.”
Not satisfied, the woman shook her head.
“We have regulations here, sir,” she said. “But please give me one minute, let me ask my boss.”
“All right,” Father agreed.
While we waited there, clustered around Father, I could not let go of the feeling that the eyes of the pale girl were set on me. In turn, I tried to focus on a calendar on the wooden wall of the small room behind the counter, and on the many photos of medicine and medical instructions. One of them was the silhouetted portrait of a pregnant woman with a child on her back and two toddlers on both sides of her. A little distance in front of her was a man who was apparently her husband. He had a child sitting on his shoulder and one about my height was before them carrying a raffia basket. I could not see the writing below it, but I could guess what it was—one of the numerous ads in the aggressive government campaign for birth control.
The nurse returned and said, “Okay, you may all go in, Mr Agwu; ward thirty-two. Chukwu che be unu.”
“Da-alu—Thank you, nurse,” Father said in reply to her Igbo, bowing slightly.
The Mother we saw in ward thirty-two was vacant-eyed, and sat in an emaciated body that was packed into a black blouse she had been wearing since the day Ikenna died. She’d become so frail and pale that I almost cried out in shock. I wondered, at the sight of her, if this horrible place sucked out the flesh of human beings and deflated large buttocks. That her hair was messy and dirty, her lips flaking and dried, and that she looked so changed, greatly horrified me. Father went to her, as Nkem cried out, “Mama, Mama.”
“Adaku,” he said, putting his arms around her, but Mother did not even turn. She kept staring at the naked ceiling, at the unmoving ceiling fan in the centre of it, and at the corners of the walls. As she stared, she whispered in silent, cautious, knowing tones “Umu ugeredide, umu ugeredide—the spiders, the spiders.”
“Nwuyem, which spiders again, have they not all been removed?” He looked around at the edges of the ceiling. “Where did you find them now?”
She continued her whispering, her hands clasped to her chest as though she did not hear him.
“Why are you doing this to us—your children and me?” Father said as Nkem’s wailing soared. Obembe lifted her but she struggled with him, kicking wildly at his knees until he dropped her.
Father made to sit beside Mother on the bed, but she pulled away, crying “Leave me! Go away! Leave me alone!”
“I should leave you, eh?” Father asked, rising to his feet. His face had turned colourless and the veins at the side of his head had become deeply pronounced. “Look at you, look at the way you’re pining away before the eyes of the rest of your children. Ada, do you not know that there is nothing the eye can see that can make it shed the tears of blood? Do you not know that there is no loss we cannot overcome?” He gestured at her with a splayed-out palm rising from her head to her feet.
“Pine away, go on and pine away.”
I noticed then that David was standing there beside me, his hand on my shirt. When I looked, I saw that he was about to cry. I felt a sudden need to hold him to stop his tears. I pulled him closer and held him. I sniffed the olive oil with which I’d oiled his head that morning and thought of how Ikenna used to bathe me when I was a little boy and hold me by the hand on the way to our primary school. I was a shy child, who was very scared of the teachers because of their canes, and would not raise my hand when pressed to say: “Excuse me, ma, I want to go and pupu.” I would rather raise my voice instead and cry as loud as I could in Igbo so that Boja, whose classroom was partitioned from mine by just a wooden wall, could hear me say: “Brother Boja, achoro mi iyun insi.” Boja would rush out of his class, and take me to the latrine while his classmates and mine were thrown into a fit of laughter. He would wait for me to finish, clean me up and return me to the class, where most of those times, I would be asked to stretch my palms out in front of everyone and the teacher would whip me on them for disrupting the class. This happened many times, and in all of those times, Boja did not once complain.
Father did not let Obembe and me return to the hospital. He sometimes took Nkem and David along with him to see Mother only after they’d disturbed him beyond what he could bear. She was tucked away for three more weeks. Those days were cold and unnatural, even the wind that blew every night seemed to croon like a dying animal. Then, in late October, the Harmattan—a season when the dry dusty wind from the Sahara desert of northern Nigeria travelled south and covered most of sub-Saharan Africa—seemed to have appeared overnight, leaving a thick, heavy fog to hang suspended in patches of cumulus awnings over Akure like a spectral presence even into sunrise. Father drove into the compound with Mother at his side in the car. She’d been away for five weeks, and had doubly shrunk. Her fair colour had darkened as though she had tanned without ceasing for innumerable days. Her hands had become spotted with scars from intravenous punctures, and on one of her thumbs was a plaster stuffed with much cotton wool. While it was obvious that she would not be the same again, it was hard to comprehend the enormity of what had happened to her.
Father guarded her like the egg of a rare bird and would often shoo us—David mostly—away from her as if we were gnats. Only Nkem was allowed to hover around her. He relayed messages from her to us and hurried her off to their room when people came to visit. He’d kept her condition secret from people except his closest friends, and lied to neighbours most of the time that she had travelled to our village near Umuahia t
o stay with her family to regain strength from the loss of her children. He’d warned us in the strictest terms, and with his hands pulling at the lobes of his ears, not to mention Mother’s illness to anyone. “Even the mosquito singing beside your ear must not hear it,” he’d warned. He continued to cook all the meals afterwards, serving her first and then us. He ran the home alone.
Then, almost one week after her return, we caught phrases from what seemed to have been an intense argument carried out in whispers and behind closed doors. Obembe and I had gone to the cinema near the post office earlier, and when we returned, we found Father carrying out cartons in which Ikenna had stored many of his books and drawings. At the place where we played football, most of our brothers’ belongings were already stacked in a growing heap. When Obembe asked him why he wanted to burn them, Father replied that Mother had insisted that their things be burned. She did not want the curse on them—Abulu’s curse—to be transferred to the rest of us via contact with their possessions. He did not turn to look at us while he explained, and when he finished, he shook his head and went back to the house to take more things until the room was emptied. Ikenna’s study table had been pushed against the purple wall that was covered with pencil sketches and watercolour paintings. His bent chair was placed on the top of it. Father went out with the last of Boja’s bags, and poured out their contents into the heap. He kicked in Ikenna’s old guitar, which had been given to him by a Rastafarian musician who used to entertain people on the street when Ikenna was a child. That man, with dreadlocks that stretched to his chest, would often render Lucky Dube and Bob Marley, drawing a large audience from neighbourhood kids and adults. He often sang under the coconut tree in front of our gate and Ikenna would—against our parents’ warning—dance to entertain the audience. He would become known as “Rasta Boy,” a designation that Father exorcised by the power of a smarting Guerdon.
We watched as Father sprinkled kerosene on the heap from the red can, every drop we had left in the house. Then, with a few glances at Mother, he struck the match. The heap lighted and a burst of smoke exploded into the air. As the fire gnawed the belongings of Ikenna and Boja and the things they had touched while on earth, the sense of their end filled my body with a thousand tacks. Vividly do I recall how one of Boja’s favourite garments, a kaftan, struggled with the fire. It first spread out from its compressed state when the fire caught it as if it were a living thing struggling for life, then it slowly began to tilt backwards, wilting, as it dissolved into black ash. I heard Mother’s sobs, and looked back. I saw she had come out of the room and was now sitting on the ground a few metres from the heap with Nkem squatted beside her. Father stood for long beside the heap, the empty can of kerosene in his hand, wiping his rheumy eyes and his dirtied face. Obembe and I stood beside him. When he noticed Mother, he dropped the can and went to her.
“Nwuyem,” he said, “I told you this grief will pass—eh. We cannot continue to grieve forever. I’ve told you that we cannot flip precedence. We cannot bring forward what is behind, nor can we bring what is forward back. It is enough, Adaku, I beg you. I’m here now, we will get through this together.”
A flock of birds, barely visible in the approaching darkness, had begun to circle the skyward smoke. The sky above us had now become the colour of bright fire, and the trees, now turned into mere silhouettes, appeared like uncanny witnesses of the burning as the ashes of Ikenna’s briefcase, Boja’s bags, their clothes, their shoes, Ikenna’s bad guitar, their M.K.O. writing books, their photographs, notebooks with sketches of Yoyodon, tadpoles, the Omi-Ala River, their fishing clothes, one of the tins we’d hoped to store fish in but never used, their toy guns, their alarm clock, their drawing books, their matchboxes, their underpants, their shirts, their trousers—all the things they once had or touched—rose in a cloud of smoke, and vanished into the sky.
THE SEARCHDOG
Obembe was a searchdog:
The one who first discovered things, who knew things and who, after discovering them, examined them. He was perpetually pregnant with ideas, and in the fullness of time, delivered them as creatures equipped with wings—able to fly.
It was he who first found that there was a loaded pistol behind the sitting-room shelf two years after we moved into our house in Akure. He’d found the gun while chasing a small housefly around our room. The fly had droned over him, and escaped two frantic blows with the Simple Algebra textbook Obembe swiftly employed for the purpose of killing it. The fly leapt up after the last miss and glided into the space on the shelf where the television, VHS and radio were set in their various columns. When he chased the fly there, he let out a scream, dropping the book. We had just moved into the house and no one had looked behind the shelf to see the barrel of the pistol slightly sticking out from under it. Father would pick the pistol up and take it to the police station, petrified as all of us were, but thankful that it was not found by one of the younger children, David or Nkem.
Obembe’s eyes were a searchdog’s.
Eyes that noticed little things, negligible details others overlooked. I have come to believe he had an inkling that Boja was in the well long before Mrs Agbati found him there. For the morning she found Boja, Obembe had discovered that the water from the well was greasy, and had a foul odour. He’d fetched it to bathe and had noticed a slick on the surface of the water in the bucket. He called me to see it and when I scooped the water in my hand, I spat and threw away the water. I’d perceived the smell, too—the smell of rot, or of dead matter—but had not been able to tell what it was.
It was he who unravelled the mystery about what happened to Boja’s corpse, since we did not attend his burial. There were no posters, no visits, not a single sign of his funeral. I’d wondered and asked my brother when it would be done, but he did not know and did not want to question our parents, the two ventricles of our home. Although he did not raise any alarm at the time or push further, were it not for him, I would never have known what became of Boja’s body after his death. On the first Saturday of November, a week after Mother returned from the psychiatric hospital, he found something I had not noticed before although it had been on the top shelf in the sitting room, behind a framed portrait of our parents on their wedding day in 1979, all along. Obembe showed me a small transparent jar that sat on that shelf. In it was a polythene bag containing something ash-coloured and grey like loamy sand dug from under dead logs of wood and dried in the sun to fine grains the size of salt. I noticed, just as I reached for it, that it was tagged: Boja Agwu (1982—1996).
When we confronted Father a few days afterwards, Obembe saying he knew the strange substance was Boja’s ashes in the jar, Father, staggered, gave up. He and Mother, he revealed, had been warned strictly by clansmen and relatives that Boja should not be buried. It was a sacrilege to Ani, goddess of the earth, for a person who committed suicide or fratricide to be interred in the earth. Although Christianity had almost cleanly swept through Igbo land, crumbs and pieces of the African traditional religion had eluded the broom. Stories came from time to time from our village and from clansmen in diasporas, about mysterious mishaps—even deaths, owing to punishments from the gods of the clan. Father, who did not believe a goddess would punish him or that such a contraption “by illiterate minds” existed, decided not to bury him just for Mother’s sake, and because he’d already had a dose of tragedies. They did not say a word to my brother and me, and we did not know about this, until Obembe, the searchdog, found out.
Obembe’s mind was a searchdog’s: a restless mind that was always engaged in the search for knowledge. He was a question-asking person—an inquirer, who read widely to feed his mind. The lantern, the tool with which he read, was his greatest companion. Before my brothers died, we had three kerosene lanterns in the house. A sprocket-controlled wick dipped into their small fuel tanks to absorb the kerosene. Because there was a perennially erratic power supply in Akure in those days, Obembe read with one of the three lanterns every night. After the death of our br
others, he began to read as if his life depended on it. Like an omnivorous animal, he stored the information he garnered from these books in his mind. Then, after he had processed and pruned it down to the essentials, he passed it on to me in the form of stories he told me every night before we slept.
Before our brothers died, he told me the story of a princess who followed a perfect gentleman of great beauty to the heart of a forest insisting she’d marry him only to discover the man was merely a skull who’d borrowed the flesh and body parts of others. That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me. During the days Ikenna was a python, Obembe told me of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, from the simplified copy of the Odyssey of Homer, forever inscribing in my mind images of the Poseidon seas and the deathless gods. He mostly told me the stories at night-time, in the near darkness of the room, and I gradually burrowed into the world his words created.
Two nights after Mother returned from hospital, we were seated on the bed in our room, our backs against the wall, drifting off to sleep. Suddenly, my brother said: “Ben, I know why our brothers died.” He snapped his fingers and rose up, clutching his head. “Listen, I just—I just discovered.”
He sat down again and began telling me a long story he once read in a book whose title he could not recall, but which, he was sure, had been written by an Igbo. I listened as my brother’s voice soared above the rattling ceiling fan. When he finished, he fell silent, while I tried to process the story of the strong man, Okonkwo, who was reduced to committing suicide by the wiles of the white man.
The Fishermen Page 18