But on that day of my brothers’ valediction service, he took everyone by surprise. He’d slipped in when no one was watching, and was already inside when they noticed him. And because of the sensitive nature of the service, the officials let him stay. Later, after the church had closed and he’d left, the woman beside whom he’d sat recalled how he cried during the service. She said he asked her if she knew the boy, and went on to say he knew him. The woman, with a shake of her head in the manner of one who had seen a ghost in broad daylight, said Abulu had repeatedly mentioned Ikenna’s name.
I did not know what my parents made of Abulu’s attendance at the valediction service of their sons, whose deaths he caused, but I could tell, from the grave silence that enshrouded us all the way home, that they’d been shaken by it. No one said a word except for David who, enthralled by one of the songs we’d sung in the service, hummed or tried to sing it. It was about midday and most churches in this predominantly Christian town now closed, vehicles filled the roads. As we motored through the clogging traffic, David’s soulful song—a miraculous creation rendered in palatal babble and mispronunciations, half-slit words, upturned connotations, and strangled meanings—filled the car with a sedating atmosphere, so that the silence became palpable, as if two more persons—who could not be seen by mere eyes—were seated there with us, and were, like all of us, sedated.
Whe pis lak’ a rifa ateent ma so
Whe so ow lak sea billows roooooo
What eefa my Lord, if at cos me to say
It is weh, (it is weh) with ma so
It is weh, (it is weh) with ma so, (with ma so)
It is weh, (it is weh) with ma so.
Shortly after we got home, Father went out and did not return for the rest of the day. As time slipped past midnight, Mother’s fear was piqued to curious levels. She darted like a frenzied cat about the house, then to the neighbours, raising alarm that she did not know the whereabouts of her husband. Her anxiety was such that a sizeable number of our neighbours gathered at our house, counselling her to be patient, to wait a bit more—till the next day at least—before going to the police. Although Mother took counsel, she was in a delirious state of anxiety when Father returned. The rest of the children, even Obembe, had slept at that time except me. He did not answer Mother’s pleas to give an account of where he’d been and why he had a bandage on one of his eyes. He merely dragged his feet into his room. When Obembe asked him the next morning, he merely said: “I had a cataract operation. No more questions.”
I swallowed saliva that had formed a lump in my throat as I tried to restrain more questions from pouring out.
“You couldn’t see?” I asked, after a while.
“I said. No. More. Questions!” he barked.
But I could tell, from the mere fact that neither he nor Mother had gone to work that something was truly wrong with him. Father, who’d been greatly changed by the tragedies and his job, was never the same again. Even after the bandage was removed—the lid of that one eye could no longer close completely like the other.
Obembe and I did not go out to hunt Abulu that entire week, because Father stayed home throughout, listening to the radio, watching television or reading. My brother repeatedly cursed the sickness, the “cataract” that caused Father to stay at home. Once, when Father was watching television, his eyes fixed on the prime-time news being read by Cyril Stober, Obembe asked him when we were to go to Canada. “Early next year,” Father replied phlegmatically. On the screen before him was a scene of fire, frantic pandemonium, and then blackened bodies in different shades of cremation, lying about in a scorched field from where black smoke was rising. Obembe was about to say something else, but Father raised his five splayed fingers to stop him as the TV said: “Due to this unfortunate sabotage, the nation’s daily output has now been cut by fifteen thousand barrels a day. Hence, the government of General Sani Abacha urges the citizenry to express caution even as the queues at the petrol stations return, knowing that it will be temporary. However, the government will duly punish any miscreants.”
We waited patiently, so as not to distract him until a man brushing his teeth from up-to-down came on the screen.
“In January?” My brother quickly said once the man came on the screen.
“I said ‘early next year,’ ” Father mumbled, lowering his eyes, the affected one half-closed. I wondered what truly was wrong with Father’s eyes. I’d overheard him arguing with Mother who’d accused him of lying, that he had no “katacat.” Perhaps, I thought some insect had got into his eyes. It pained me that I could come up with nothing, and I came down with the feeling that were Ikenna and Boja still alive they could—by virtue of their superior wisdom—have provided an answer.
“Early next year,” Obembe mumbled when we returned to our room. Then, his voice lowering like a camel reclining, repeated it: “Early. Next. Year.”
“It must be in January?” I suggested, inwardly delighted.
“Yes, January, but that means we don’t have much time—in fact, we don’t have time at all. We don’t have much time.” He shook his head. “I won’t be happy in Canada, or wherever, if that madman still walks about freely.”
Although I was very wary of inflaming my brother’s ire, I could not help but say: “But, we have tried, he just isn’t dying. You said it; he is like the whale—”
“Lie!” he cried, a single tear rolling down his reddened eye. “He is a human being; he too can die. We’ve only made one attempt, just one attempt for Ike and Boja. But I swear, I will avenge my brothers.”
Father called out at that time and asked us to go clean his car.
“I will do it,” my brother whispered again.
He wiped his eyes with a cloth until they were dry. Later, after he’d cleaned the car with a towel he soaked in a bucket of water, he told me we should try “The Knife Plan”. This was how it should go: we should steal out of the room in the dead of the night and find the madman in his truck, then stab him to death and run away. What he described frightened me, but my brother, this small man of sorrow, having locked the door, lit a cigarette for the first time in a long time. Even though there was electricity he’d turned off the light so our parents could think we were asleep. And although the night was a little cold, he left the window open as he blew out the smoke. Then when he was done, he turned to me, and whispered: “It shall be this night.”
My heart skipped. I heard a familiar Christmas carol playing from somewhere in the neighbourhood. It dawned on me, suddenly, that that night was December 23rd, and the next day would be Christmas Eve. I was struck by how different that Christmas season had been: bleak and uneventful compared to the others. It came as always with befogged mornings that when cleared, left sagging clouds of dust in the air. People filled their houses with decorations, with the radio and television stations rolling out carols after carols. Sometimes, the statue of the Madonna at the gate of the big cathedral, the new one they erected after Abulu desecrated the first, shone with colourful decorations, attracting many as the highlight of the Yuletide celebrations in our district. People’s faces would beam with smiles even as prices of commodities—predominantly of live cocks, turkey, rice, and all the fancy Christmas recipes—soared beyond the reach of the common man. None of these things had happened—at least not in our house. No decorations. No preparations. Whatever we had in the natural way of living, it seemed, had been mauled by the monstrous termite of grief that had attacked us. And our family had become a shadow of what we once were.
“This night,” my brother said after a while, his eyes on mine, the rest of his face, silhouetted. “I have the knife ready. Once we are sure Daddy and Mama are asleep, we will leave through the window.”
Then, as if he’d projected the words through the rising indistinct body of smoke, said, “Will I be going alone?”
“No, I will come with you,” I stammered.
“Good,” he said.
Although I badly wanted my brother’s love and did not
want to disappoint him again, I could not bring myself to go hunt the madman at midnight. Akure was dangerous at night; even adults were careful where they went after dark. Just towards the end of the school term, before Ikenna and Boja died, it was reported at the morning assembly that Irebami Ojo, one of my classmates who lived on our street, had lost his father to armed robbers. I wondered why my brother, who was only a child, was not afraid of the night. Did he not know, had he not heard these things? And the madman, the demon, perhaps he knew we would come and would lie in wait. I pictured Abulu grabbing the knife and stabbing us. This filled me with terror.
I rose from the bed and said I wanted to go drink some water. I went to the sitting room where Father was still seated, his hands folded across his chest, watching the television. I fetched water in a cup from the cask in the kitchen and drank. Then, I sat in the lounge close to Father, who barely acknowledged my presence with a nod, and asked if his eye was okay. “Yes,” he said and turned back to the television. Two men dressed in suits were debating and in the background was a poster that said Economic Matters. I’d thought of an idea, a way to escape going out with my brother. So, I took one of the newspapers from Father’s side and began reading. Father loved this; he enjoyed every effort made to acquire knowledge. As I scanned through the paper, I asked Father questions to which he merely provided short answers, but I wanted him to talk for long. So I asked him about the day he said his uncle went to fight in the war. Father nodded and began, but he was sleepy, yawning again and again, so he made it short.
Yet his story was the same as he’d recollected it: his uncle hiding in trees along the highway to lay ambush for a convoy of Nigerian soldiers. His uncle and the men opening a barrel of fire on the soldiers who, not knowing the direction from which the bullets were coming, shot frantically into the empty forest until they were all killed. “All of them,” Father would enunciate. “Not one of them escaped.”
I planted my eyes back on the newspaper and began reading and praying Father would not leave anytime soon. We’d been talking for an hour and it was almost ten. I wondered what my brother was doing, if he would come for me. Then Father began to sleep. I switched off the light and curved into the lounge.
It must have been less than an hour later that I heard a door open and a movement in the sitting room. I felt the movement reach behind my chair, then, I felt his hand shake me, first slowly, then forcefully, but I did not even stir. I tried to make faint noises with my throat, but as I was starting, Father moved and there was a sharp movement behind my chair—perhaps my brother ducking. Then I felt him crawl slowly back to our room. I waited a while, and then opened my eyes. Father’s posture struck me. He was asleep, his head tilted sideways against the chair, and his arms hanging loosely by his sides. A steady stream of light from the bright yellow bulb from our neighbour’s house, which often shone into our house from above our fence, rested on a fraction of his face through the parted curtain, giving him the appearance of someone wearing a double-sided mask—one black, one white. I watched Father’s face for a while until, convinced my brother had gone, I tried to sleep.
When I woke the next morning, I told my brother I’d gone to drink water and Father had started talking to me, that I did not know when I fell asleep. My brother did not say a word in reply. He sat where he was, looking at the cover of a book that had a ship at sea and mountains, his head leaning on his hand.
“Did you kill him?” I asked after a long silence.
“The idiot wasn’t there,” he said, to my surprise. I’d not expected it, but it seemed my brother had believed me, that my trick had worked. I’d never thought I could play a trick on him—ever. But he told me now, of how he’d gone out alone after I failed to come with him, armed with the knife. He’d slowly walked—there was no one, no one at all on the streets at that time of the night—to the madman’s truck, but the madman was not in his truck! My brother was outraged.
I lay in bed, my mind wandering across a vast territory of the past. I remembered the day we caught so many fish, so many that Ikenna complained his back ached, when we sat by the river and sang the fishermen’s song as if it was some freedom song, so much that our voices cracked. All we did for the rest of that evening was sing, the dying sun pitched in a corner of the sky as faint as a nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away.
My brother was wrapped in his own skin for many days afterwards, broken by our successive failures. On Christmas Day, he stared out of the window at lunch, while Father talked about the money he’d sent to his friend for our journey. The word “Toronto” danced around the table like a fairy, often filling Mother with profound joy. It seemed that Father—with one eye that closed halfway—mentioned it frequently for her sake. On New Year’s Eve, while the claps of firecrackers boomed around the town despite the ban placed on them by the military governor, Captain Anthony Onyearugbulem, my brother and I stayed in our room, silent and brooding. In the past, we and our elder brothers blasted firecrackers across the street, sometimes joining the street kids in mock warfare using the crackers. But not that New Year.
It was tradition to pass into the New Year in a church service, so we all packed into Father’s car and joined the church, which was filled with people that night, so full that people stood at the threshold; everyone went to church on the eves, even atheists. That night was rife with superstition, with fears of the vicious, malicious spirit of the “ber” months that fought tooth-and-nail to prevent people from passing into the New Year. It was generally believed that more deaths were recorded in those months—September, October, November and December—than in all the other months of the year combined, and afraid of the grim-reaping spirit prowling across the land for last-minute harvests, the church was thrown into a claustrophobic cacophony at twelve midnight when the Pastor announced that we were now officially in 1997, shouts of “Happy New Year, hallelujah! Happy New Year, hallelujah!” renting the air as people jumped and threw themselves into each other’s arms, unknown people, shaking, whistling, cooing, singing and shouting. Outside the church, fireworks—harmless rockets of strobe lights and man-made lightning—tore into the sky from the palace of the monarch of Akure, the Oba. This was the way things have always been, the way of the world that had continued on in spite of the things that had happened.
In the spirit of Yuletide, no sorrow was allowed to stay in the minds of the people. But like a curtain merely swiped to a corner for light to illuminate a room during the day, it would stand, patiently waiting for the time when night would descend, and the curtain would be swiped back to its place. It was always this way. We would return home from church, have pepper soup and sponge cakes and soft drinks and just as in past years, Father would play a video of Ras Kimono for the New Year dance.
David, Nkem and I would take to the floor with my brother, who, having forgotten our failures and even the mission, stamped his feet in rhythm at the staccato beat of Ras Kimono’s reggae. Mother cheered and shouted “Onye no chie, Onye no chie” as Obembe, my veritable brother, danced in the light. Like most people, on that day, he sought transitory relief so much that his sorrow may have sunk into the ground, allowing him in this circus of bliss. And by dawn, when the town had reclined to sleep and calm had returned to the streets and the sky was quiet and the church was empty and deserted and the fish in the river had slept and a mumbling wind riffled through the furred night and Father was asleep in the big lounge and Mother in her room with the kids, my brother stepped back out beyond the gate, and the curtain returned to its position, closing behind him. Then dawn, like an infernal broom, swept the detritus of the festival—the peace that had come with it, the relief and even the unfeigned love—like confetti scattered on a floor after the end of a party.
THE TADPOLE
Hope was a tadpole:
The thing you caught and brought home with you in a can, but which, despite being kept in the right water, soon died. Father’s hope that we would grow up into many great people, his map of dreams,
soon died despite how much he guarded it. My hope that my brothers would always be there, that we’d all give birth to children and have a clan, even though we nurtured it in the most primal of waters, also died. So did the hope of our immigration to Canada, just as it was close to being fulfilled.
That hope came with the New Year, bringing in a new spirit, and a peace that belied the sadness of the past year. It seemed that sadness would not return to our home. Father repainted his car a shiny navy blue and talked often, even incessantly, of Mr Bayo’s coming and of our potential immigration to Canada. He started to call us pet names again: Mother, Omalicha, the beautiful; David, Onye-Eze, the king; Nkem, Nnem, his mother. He prefixed Obembe’s name and mine with “fisherman.” Mother, too, recovered her weight. My brother was, however, untouched by this change. Nothing appealed to him. No news, no matter how small, pleased him. He was not moved by the idea of flying in an airplane or living in a city where we could ride through the streets on bicycles and skateboards like Mr Bayo’s children. When Father first announced the possibility of this, the news had come to me as big, the animal equivalent of a cow or an elephant, but to my brother, a mere ant. And when he and I went into our room later, he pinched the ant-sized promise of a better future between his fingers and threw it out of the window, and said, “I must avenge our brothers.”
But Father was determined. He woke us in the morning of January 5th—the same way he’d come into our room exactly a year before, to announce that he was moving to Yola—to announce that he was travelling to Lagos, filling me with a déjà vu. I’d heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance—even if faint—to their beginnings. This was true of us.
“I’m leaving for Lagos right now,” he announced. He wore his usual spectacles, his eyes hidden behind them, and was dressed in an old short-sleeved shirt on whose front pocket was a badge of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
The Fishermen Page 22