At first, we considered the five sketches of Abulu’s moment of destruction, the possibility of achieving them. The first one he referred to as “The David and Goliath Plan”; he hauls stones at Abulu and Abulu dies.
I questioned the possibility of the design succeeding. I reasoned that since we were neither servants of God as David was, nor were we destined to be a king like David, we might not be able to hit his forehead. It was a full sun-out moment of the day when I said this, and Obembe had turned on the ceiling fan. From somewhere in the neighbourhood, I heard a man hawking rubber sandals, crying his wares: “Rubber, rubber—hereeeeeee!” My brother sat in his chair, his hand on his chin, pondering what I’d said.
“Listen, I understand your fears,” he said finally. “You may be right, but I have always thought we could kill him by stoning, but how do we stone him? Where, at what time of the day can we do it without being caught in the act? Those are the real problems with that idea, not about being a king like David.”
I nodded in agreement.
“If we stone him when people can see, we can’t tell what might happen, and what if we aim wrong and hit someone else in the process?”
“You are right,” I said, nodding.
Next he placed the one in which Abulu was stabbed to death with a knife, just the way Ikenna was killed. He’d marked it “The Okonkwo Plan,” after the story of Things Fall Apart. The image scared me.
“What if he fights or stabs you first?” I said. “He is very wicked, you know?” I asked.
This possibility troubled my brother. He took a pencil and crossed out the sketch.
Then one after the other, we propped up an idea from a sketching, sank our teeth into it, and after we found it untenable, crossed it out. After we’d torn up all of them, we began weaving a set of imagined incidents, most of which we withdrew and discarded before they were fully formed. In one, we chased Abulu down the road on a windy evening and he fell into a running car, which knocked him to the ground and spilled the content of his head on the tarred road. I wove this fictional reality, my imagination spotted with pieces of the madman’s crushed body on the asphalt like one of the various road kills—chickens, goats, dogs, rabbits—I’d seen. My brother sat for a while, his eyes closed while his mind was at work on this. The rubber-sandals hawker had returned to the neighbourhood, this time crying even louder “Rubber, rubber—heeeee! Rubberrrrr sandals hereeee!” The hawker’s voice seemed to draw closer to our compound now, and was getting so loud that I did not realize my brother had started to speak. “—Good idea,” I heard him say, “but you know those ignorant fools, kowordly people who don’t know what that madman had done to our family, would try to stop us.”
Again, as always, I agreed that he was right. He tore it up and poured the pieces angrily on the floor.
The leech that was my brother’s resolve to avenge our brothers was so deeply embedded it could not be destroyed by anything, not even fire. Over the following days, once our parents left home, we went off to find the madman. We went in late mornings, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Although the new term had begun, we were not enrolled. Father had written to the headmistress of our school to allow us a term off to recover because we were not fit to resume school just yet, since the deaths of our brothers were still fresh in our minds. So to avoid meeting classmates or kids we knew around the streets and district, we trod covert paths. Over the following days of the first week of December, we combed the district for any sign of the madman, but found none. He was not at his truck, not around the street; he was not close to the river. We could not ask anyone about him, as people in the district knew so much about us and would often put on sympathetic faces when they met us as if we bore an insignia of the tragedy of our brothers’ deaths on our foreheads.
These failures did not deter my brother, not even what we heard about the madman that week, an incident that killed all the courage I had gathered when I pledged to join him in his quest. The madman had been elusive for many days—never once spotted around the district. So we began asking people we felt didn’t know us if they’d seen him. This way, we reached the end of our district to the north, near the big petrol station with the huge complex that had a motley-garbed human-shaped balloon that constantly bowed, tilted sideways, and waved its hands as the wind blew at it. There we found Nonso, Ikenna’s old classmate. He sat on a wooden stool on the side of a main road, newspapers and magazines spread on flat raffia sacks before him. He told us after shaking our hands with slaps, that he was the chief vendor of our district.
“Haven’t you heard of me?” he asked, with a voice that was cracked as though he was high on some drug, his eyes darting between our faces.
His earring glistened in the sun and his punk—a brush of equal hair in the centre of his head—was dark and polished. He’d heard of Ikenna’s death, how his “younger dude” stabbed him in the belly. He’d always hated Boja. “Anyway, may their souls rest in peace,” he said.
A man, who had been reading a copy of the Guardian, stood up, dropped the paper and gave Nonso some coins. When he put the paper on the table, I saw the slain Kudirat Abiola, wife of the 1993 presidential election winner on its front page. He gestured that we take the man’s seat on a bench just under a fabric awning. I thought of the day we encountered M.K.O.; she’d stood beside us, and had scratched my head with her ringed fingers. I remembered how her voice had carried equal measures of authority and humility when she asked the crowd to step back. In the photo on the cover of the newspaper, her eyes were shut and her face was lifeless—devoid of all hue.
“It is M.K.O.’s wife, don’t you know?” Obembe said, taking the paper from me.
I nodded. I recalled how, long after we’d met M.K.O., I’d longed to see the woman again. I’d thought, at the time, that I’d loved her. She was the first person I’d thought of as a wife. Every other woman was either a woman or someone’s mother or a girl, but she was a wife.
My brother asked Nonso if he had seen Abulu recently.
“That demon?” Nonso said. “I saw him two days ago—right here. On this main road just by the filling station, beside the corpse—”
He pointed to the dirt track by the side of the long main road that connected to a highway leading to Benin.
“What corpse?” My brother asked.
Nonso shook his head, took a small towel he habitually hung on his shoulder, and wiped ripples of sweat from his neck so that it glistened in the sun. “What, haven’t you heard?”
Abulu, he said, had found the body of a young woman killed early that morning—probably at dawn. Owing to the typical slow response of the traffic police in that part of Nigeria, the body had been allowed to remain on the spot for long, even until midday so that people who’d come that way had often stopped to see the body. When it was almost past noon, the corpse had begun to attract less attention when another mob started gathering around it, this time with an unruly cacophony. Nonso looked down the road but the mob blocked the view of what was going on at the centre.
His curiosity piqued to the extreme, he’d crossed the road to the gathering, abandoning his newspapers. When he got to the mob and negotiated his view, he saw the corpse of a woman, whose head lay on a nimbus formed by the blackened patch of her blood. Her hands were thrown sideways like he’d seen before, a ring glimmering on one of the fingers—the blood-soaked hair sticky and uneven in shape. But this time, it was naked, her breasts unclothed, and Abulu was on top of her, thrusting into her as the mob watched in horror. Some of them were arguing whether it was right to let him defile the dead while others held that the woman was already dead and that it was no harm; others claimed he should be stopped but those people were few. When he’d relieved himself, he fell asleep, clinging to the dead woman as if she was his wife until the police took her away from him.
My brother and I were so shaken by this story that we did not go out on any other reconnaissance mission that day. A shawl of dread of the madman fell over me
and I could see that even Obembe, my brother, was afraid. He sat in the sitting room for long, silent until he fell asleep, his head against the top of the chair. I had started to dread the madman, to wish my brother would give it up, but could not face him to say it. I feared he would be angry or even hate me, but towards the end of that week, providence intervened—as I have now understood, now that things in the past are clearer—to save us from what was to come. Father announced that his friend, Mr Bayo, who moved to Canada when I was just three, had arrived in Lagos. It was over breakfast, and the news came like a flash of thunder. Mr Bayo, Father continued, had promised to take my brother and me with him to Canada. The news exploded over the table like a grenade, scattering shrapnel of joy all across the room. Mother shouted “Hallelujah!” and, rising from her chair, burst into singing.
I, too, was elated and my body was suddenly charged with wanton joy. But when I glanced at my brother, I saw that the expression on his face had not changed. A shade stood on his face as he ate. Had he not heard? It didn’t seem so, for he was bent over the table, eating as if he hadn’t.
“What about me?” David asked, tearfully.
“You?” Father asked, laughing. “You will go, too. How can a chief like you be left here? You will go; in fact, you will be the first on the plane.”
I was still wondering what my brother was thinking when he said: “What about our school?”
“You will get a better one in Canada,” Father replied.
My brother nodded and continued his meal; I was surprised by his lack of enthusiasm at what seemed the best news of our lives. We ate on while Father narrated the story of how Canada developed over a short period to surpass other countries, including Britain, from which it had emerged. Then he brought the talk down to Nigeria, down to the corruption that had eaten the entrails of the nation and finally, as usual, he berated Gowon, a man we had grown to hate, the man he’d repeatedly accused of bombing our village several times—the man who killed very many women during the Nigerian civil war. “That idiot,” he snapped, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat, his neck taut with sinews, “is the greatest enemy of Nigeria.”
After Father went to the bookstore and Mother left with David and Nkem, I went to my brother, who was fetching water from the well to fill the drum in the bathroom, a chore Ikenna and Boja used to do exclusively because he and I were thought to be too small to use the well. It was the first time anyone had fetched from it since August.
“If it is true that we are going to Canada soon,” he said, “then we have to kill that madman as soon as possible. We have to find him quickly.”
Before now, this would have excited me, but this time, I wanted to tell him to let us forget the madman and go and start a new life in Canada. But I could not. Instead, I found myself saying: “Yes, yes, Obe—we must.”
“We have to kill him soon.”
My brother was so worried by what should have been good news that he did not eat that night. He sat sketching and erasing and tearing, his temper burning until his pencil was reduced to a size of his finger and the table was filled with shredded paper. He’d told me at the well, shortly after our parents left for their workplaces that we must act quickly. He’d said it fiercely, pointing to the well: “Boja, our brother, decomposed here like—like a mere lizard in this place because of that madman. We must avenge or else; I’m not going to any Canada without doing that.”
He’d licked his thumb to accentuate his vow, to make me see that it was a vow. He was determined. He’d lifted the buckets of water he’d fetched and gone into the house, leaving me standing there, beginning to wonder—as he always left me to do—if I missed my brothers, Ikenna and Boja, just as he did. Then I would comfort myself by the conviction that I did, but was merely scared of the madman. I could not kill, either. It is evil, and how might I, only a child, do it? But my brother had said he would carry out the plan with all the powers of persuasion, determined that he would succeed, for his desire had become an indestructible leech.
THE LEVIATHAN
But Abulu was a leviathan:
An undying whale that could not be easily killed by a band of valiant sailors. He could not die as easily as other men of flesh and blood. Although he was no different from other people of his kind—the insane vagabond who wallowed, by reason of his mental condition, in the lowest level of privation possible and was thus exposed to extreme dangers—he’d probably had closer shaves with death than any one of them. It was known too well that he mainly fed on filth—filth from dumps. Because he had no house, he fed from whatever he chanced upon—leftover meat scattered around the open-pavilioned abattoirs, crumbs of food from dumps, fruits dropped from trees. To have fed from there, for so long, one would expect him to have long contracted some infirmity. But he lived, hale and healthy, his belly bulging into a paunch. When he walked on a bed of shattered glass and bled out, people thought that was it, but he showed up again within days. Yet, these were only little stories of what should have killed the madman; there were many more.
Solomon had told us, when we convened at the Omi-Ala the day after the encounter with Abulu, that the reason he’d warned us sternly not to listen to Abulu’s prophecy was because he believed Abulu was an evil spirit manifesting in bodily form. To buttress this point, he told us of something he’d witnessed many months earlier. Abulu was walking by a roadside when he suddenly stopped. It was drizzling, and the rain was making him wet. Facing the road, the madman began calling to his mother who he believed was standing in the centre of the road, pleading with her to forgive him for all he did to her. As he pleaded, apparently conversing with her, he saw a car racing down from the other side of the road. Frightened, he began shouting to his mother to leave the road, but the apparition, who the madman was convinced was real, stood firm in the heart of the road. Abulu dashed onto the road just in the moment the car reached where he thought his mother had stood, to save her. The car swiftly pushed him to a grassy shoulder of the road, and slightly skidded off the road into the nearby bush before pulling to a halt. It was said that Abulu, thought to have immediately died, lay still for a while where the car had left him. Then he scrambled to his feet, bloodied all over, a gape on his forehead. When he stood, he began flapping his drenched clothes as though the car had merely blown a cloud of dust on him. He would limp away, frequently turning to the way the car had gone and saying: “Do you want to kill someone, eh? Can’t you stop when you see a woman on the road? Do you want to kill a person?” He limped on, asking innumerable questions as he went away, sometimes stopping to take a backward glance with his hand on the lobe of his ear to admonish the driver to drive slowly next time: “You hear, you hear?”
The day after Father announced our potential immigration to Canada, my brother shoved a sketch into my hand, and I sat gazing at it while he spoke.
“We could kill him with Ota-pia-pia. We could buy one and put it in bread or something, and give the madman, since he eats from everywhere and just about anything.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “he even feeds from gutters.”
“That’s true,” he said, and nodded. “But have you thought of why those years of feeding from these things haven’t killed him? Isn’t it from dumps and trash heaps he feeds? Why hasn’t he died?”
He expected an answer, but I said nothing.
“You remember the story Solomon told us about why he was really scared of him and wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him?”
I nodded.
“You see, then? Listen, while we must not give up, we must know that this man is strange. These stupid people”—the way he now referred to the people of Akure town because they allowed the madman to remain alive—“believe he is a kind of supernatural being who cannot be physically killed because; you know, they foolishly think his years of living outside the realm of human reasoning have altered his humanity, and hence he is no longer a mortal man.”
“Is this true?” I asked.
“If we feed
him poisoned bread, people will think he died from something he ate by himself from some garbage dump.” I did not ask him how he’d found this out because he was the keeper of secret knowledge whom I unquestioningly believed. So, a while later, we went out with the front pockets of my brother’s shorts swollen with shredded pieces of bread marinated with rodenticide packed in a small sack. He’d got the bread by slicing out a piece from his breakfast the previous day. My brother had brought out the shrivelled crumbs and laced them some more with the poisoned mixture, filling the room with the piquant odour. He’d said that he wanted us to go out on “this mission” just once, and that would be it—just once. Armed with these, we went to the truck where Abulu lived, but he was not there. Although we’d heard that its door could still open and close, the truck was left almost perpetually opened. There were the rickety seats that were shrunken to their wooden bones, their flesh—the leather coverings—torn or worn off. Its rusted roof had holes through which rain entered. The seats were filled with various waste materials: a used blue curtain, which reached from the seat to the floor of the truck; the frame of an old kerosene lantern with its glass tube missing; a stick; papers; wrecked shoes; tins; and many other items picked from some trash.
“Perhaps it is not yet time,” my brother said. “Let’s return home and come back in the afternoon; perhaps we will find him then.”
We went home, and returned later that afternoon, after Mother had briefly come home to boil yams for lunch and gone back to her shop. When we got there, the madman was there all right, but nothing had prepared us for what we’d encounter. He was bent over a wok set on two big stones, and was emptying the liquid content of a water bottle. Pieces of wood—apparently intended as firewood—were piled between the stones, but they were unlit. After draining off the content of the bottle into the earthenware, the madman took up a beverage can whose content we could not easily decipher, turned it into the wok, and began painstakingly emptying its content into it. He would shake the tin, peer into it microscopically, and scratch out its content into the wok until, satisfied he’d emptied it, he placed the tin delicately on a small stool on which was a pile of assorted things. Then, dashing into his truck, he returned with what appeared to be a pack of leaves, some bones, a spherical object, a white powder that must have been salt or sugar. He poured these things into the wok and stepped back with a jolt as if he’d encountered the inflammable effect of plunging things into heated oil. It became clear, to my utter bemusement, that the madman was—or thought he was—cooking a gallimaufry of filth and waste materials. For a moment, we abandoned our quest and stood watching the scenario in disbelief until two men stopped by to join us as spectators of Abulu in his kitchen.
The Fishermen Page 20