The Fishermen

Chapter 9: The Sparrow

THE SPARROW

Ikenna was a sparrow:

A thing with wings, able to fly out of sight in the blink of an eye. His life had already gone by the time Obembe and I returned to our compound with Mr Bode, and what we found on the floor in a pool of blood was his empty, bloodied and mangled body. Then, not long after we found it, it disappeared in an ambulance from the General Hospital, returning to our compound in a wooden coffin on the back of a pickup four days later. Obembe and I still did not see him then; our ears merely picked up allusions to “his body in the coffin.” We swallowed the many words people said to us to comfort us like bitter pills with the power to heal us: “E jo, ema se sukun mo, oma ma’a da—do not weep, it will be well.” They did not mention that Ikenna had become a traveller overnight, a curious traveller that journeys out of his own body, leaving the rest of himself lying empty like the twin husks of a groundnut capped together after its content had been extracted. Although I knew he had died, it felt improbable to me at that time. And although he was in the ambulance outside the house, it was hard to imagine he would never again stand up and walk into the house.

Father knew too, for he returned two days after Ikenna died. It was drizzling, wet and slightly cold. I saw his car drive into the compound through the arc formed from wiping the sheet of fog off the louvres in the sitting room where I’d passed the night. It was his first visit since the morning he had called us his fishermen. He returned with all his things, with no intention of leaving again. He’d tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to get permission to leave the three-month training course in Ghana for a few days to visit Akure when Mother began telling him about Ikenna’s changing behaviour. Then, when Mother made the distress call hours after Ikenna was found dead — a call in which the only words she’d said were: “Eme, Ikenna anaaaa!” before throwing herself back to the floor — Father scribbled his resignation letter and submitted it to a colleague at the training-course centre in Ghana. Once he arrived back in Nigeria, he took a night bus to Yola, packed his things into his car and drove back to Akure.

Ikenna was buried four days after Father returned — with Boja’s whereabouts still unknown. Although the news of the tragedy had spread across the district and neighbours were thronging our house to offer what they’d heard or seen, no one knew where he was. A neighbour, a pregnant woman who lived in a house across the road from ours, said she’d heard a loud cry at about the time Ikenna died. It had woken her from sleep. Another, a university doctorate student, whom everyone called “Prof,” an elusive figure who was almost never in his home — the small one-bedroom bungalow beside Igbafe’s house — had, while studying, heard the bang of a metal object around that time. But it was Igbafe’s mother who — having brought the message from her father, Igbafe’s grandfather — gave details close to what might have happened. One of them (Boja, apparently) had staggered up from the ground and rather than continue the fight, had gone towards the kitchen in blind fury and agony, the other trailing. At that point, the man, horrified and thinking the fight had ended, had left his seat and entered the house. He could not tell where Boja had gone.

Like a miracle, a host of people, almost all of whom were relatives, Nde Iku na’ ibe, some of whom I’d seen before and others whose faces merely peopled the many daguerreotypes and fading photographs tucked away in our family albums, arrived at the house within two days. They had all come from the village, Amano, a place I barely knew. We’d visited it only once, during the burial ceremony of Yee Keneolisa, an old immobile man, who was Father’s uncle. We’d travelled through a seemingly interminable road sewn between two vast stretches of thick forests until we reached a place where the great jungle shrunk into a few trees and cultivated heaps and a distributed army of scarecrows. Soon, as Father’s Peugeot negotiated the sand-filled tracks, jerking furiously, we began to meet people who knew him. These people greeted our parents and us with a boisterous effulgence of geniality. Later, dressed in black clothes with a host of others, we’d marched down in a procession to the funeral, no one speaking, but merely crying as if we had been transformed from creatures capable of making speech to ones that could only wail; this had amazed me beyond words.

These people arrived now exactly the way I last saw them: wearing black clothes. Ikenna was, in fact, the only one dressed differently at his funeral. The sparkling white shirt and trousers he wore gave him the appearance of an angel who — caught unawares during a physical manifestation on earth — had his bones broken to prevent him from returning back to heaven. Everyone else was dressed in black and cloaked in different shades of grief at the ceremony except for Obembe and me: we alone did not cry. Through the days that had collected like bad blood in a boil since Ikenna died, Obembe and I had refused to cry except for initial tears we’d shed in the kitchen when we saw his lifeless body. Even Father had wept a few times: once, while pasting Ikenna’s obituary poster on the wall of our house, and again while talking with Pastor Collins during the latter’s first condolence visit. Although I cannot rationalize my decision not to shed a tear, I’d held it so strongly — and it seemed Obembe held it, too — that rather than weep, I fixed my eyes instead on Ikenna’s face, which I feared would soon be lost. His face had been washed and oiled with olive oil so that it gleamed with unearthly radiance. Although the tear on his lip and the scar across his eyebrows were still visible, his face wore an uncanny peace as if he were not real, as if I and the rest of the mourners had simply dreamt him up. It was as he lay there that I first saw what Obembe had long seen and known — that Ikenna had grown a beard. It seemed to have sprouted overnight and now lined beneath his jaw like a delicately inscribed sketch.

In the coffin, Ikenna’s body — his head facing up, cotton wool plugs blocking his nostrils and ears, hands clinging to his sides, legs tagged together — had the shape of a prolate spheroid; an ovoid, the shape of a bird. This was because he was, in fact, a sparrow; a fragile thing who did not design his own fate. It was designed for him. His chi, the personal god the Igbos believe everyone had, was weak. His was the efulefu kind: the irresponsible sentinel that sometimes abandoned its subject and went on far journeys or errands, leaving them unprotected. This was the reason why, by the time he became a teenager, he’d already had his fill of sinister events and personal tragedies, for he was a mere sparrow who lived in a world of black storms.

When he was six, a boy kicked him in the crotch while they were playing football, sending one of his testes out of his scrotal sac into his body. He was rushed to a hospital where doctors scrambled to carry out a testicular transplant; while in a room in the same hospital they struggled to revive Mother, who had fainted upon hearing of Ikenna’s injury. By the morning of the following day, both of them were alive — Mother with relief in place of the grief of the past day when she’d greatly feared he would die, and Ikenna with a small pebble in his scrotum in place of his lost testes. He did not play football for three years. Even when he began playing again, he often grabbed his crotch with his hand to protect it whenever the ball was kicked in his direction. Two years after that, at age eight, he was stung by a scorpion while sitting under a tree in his school. Again, he survived the sting; but his right leg became permanently impaired, shrunken to a smaller size than the other one.

The funeral was held at St. Andrew’s Cemetery, a walled field full of gravestones and a few trees. It was filled with posters that were made for the burial. Some of the obituary posters printed on white A4 papers were pasted on the buses that conveyed members of our church and other guests to the funeral, and some on the windshield and rear window of Father’s car. One was on the exterior part of the wall of our house, just by the postal number, which was written in a circle with charcoal chalk by census workers during the 1991 national census. One was pasted on the rounded electric pole outside the gate of our compound and another on the notice boards of the church. They pasted one on the gate of my school — where Ikenna was once a pupil — and Aquinas College, Akure, the junior secondary school he and Boja attended. Father had decided they should only be pasted where necessary, “just to let our family and friends know what has happened.” The posters were headlined with the word “obituary” printed in ink that spilled at the head of the b, and at the tails of the a and r. In almost all of them, the whiteness of the paper seemed to blur out Ikenna’s photo and make him look like one who existed in the nineteenth century. Under the photo was the inscription Although you left us too early, we love you dearly. We hope we will meet again when the time comes. And this below:

IKENNA A. AGWU (1981–1996),

survived by his parents,

Mr and Mrs Agwu and his siblings,

Boja, Obembe, Benjamin, David and Nkem Agwu.

At the funeral, before Ikenna was obliterated by sand-fill, Pastor Collins requested that members of our family gather round him while the others stepped back. “Step back a bit, please,” he said in English cadenced with a thick Igbo accent. “Oh, thank you, thank you. The Lord bless you. A little bit more please. The Lord bless you.”

My close family and our relatives surrounded the grave. There were faces I hadn’t seen since I was born. After nearly all had surrounded the grave, the Pastor asked that eyes be closed for prayers, but Mother burst into a piercing cry of anguish, sending a terrible wave of sorrow down the line. Pastor Collins ignored her and prayed on, his voice shimmying. Although his words—that you forgive and receive his soul in your kingdom… we know that in the same way you gave, you have taken… the fortitude to bear the loss… thank you Lord Jesus for we know you have heard us—seemed to me to have little meaning, all the people hummed a high-sounding “amen” at the end of them. Then one after the other, they scooped earth with a single shovel, threw it into the grave, and passed the shovel on to the next person in the ring. While waiting my turn, I looked up and noticed the horizon had become filled with wool-shaped clouds, so thickly ashen that I thought even white egrets would have been mocked into greyness were they to fly past at that very hour. I was lost in this observation when I heard my name. I dropped my eyes and saw Obembe tearfully muttering something inaudible as he held the shovel towards me with trembling hands. The shovel was big and heavy in my hands, weightier because of the patch of earth that clung to the back of it like a hunch. It was cold, too. My feet sank into the heap of sand when I dug the shovel into the earth and lifted some of it. I then threw it into the grave, and passed the shovel to Father. He took it, dug up a mighty heap of sand and threw it into the grave. Because he was the last person, he dropped the shovel and put his hand on my shoulder.

Then, as if someone had signalled him, the Pastor cleared his throat again, and attempted to move forward but dangled delicately over the edge of the grave, inadvertently pushing sand into it as he struggled to hold himself from falling. A man helped him regain balance and then he moved back a little more.

“It is now time to read briefly from the word of God,” the Pastor began when he’d steadied himself. He spoke in spurts as if his words were tropical grasshoppers that flew out of his mouth and paused, the way a grasshopper perches and hops off, again and again and again until he completed his speech. And as he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his throat. “Let us read from the book of Hebrews; Paul’s letter to the Hebrews. Let’s read from the first verse of chapter eleven.” He raised his head, and held the entire group of mourners in one stern stare. Then bowing slightly, he began to read: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…”

While the Pastor read, I felt an incredible urge to watch Obembe, to gauge his feelings at the time. When I looked at him, memories of my lost brothers filled me, for it seemed the past suddenly exploded and fragments of the past began floating freely in his eyes like confetti in an air-filled balloon. First, I saw Ikenna, face funnelled, dim-eyed and angry, standing over Obembe and me who were kneeling on the ground. This was near the esan bush, on our way to Omi-Ala just after Obembe had mocked the white garment church, when he’d ordered us to kneel in punishment for “disrespecting other people’s faith.” Next, I saw Ikenna and myself sitting in the crook of the tangerine tree in our compound, both of us theatrical Commando and Rambo, lying in wait for Obembe and Boja. They were Hulk Hogan and Chuck Norris respectively and were hiding at the veranda of our bungalow. They emerged every now and then, pointing their toy guns at us, making gun-battle sounds—dririririri or ti-ti-ti-ti-ti. When they jumped or screamed, we responded with the din of a bomb blast—gbum!

I saw Ikenna, dressed in his red vest, standing across the white chalk line drawn on the dirt pitch of the sports ground of our primary school. It is 1991 and I’d just finished the kindergarten race in the colours of the blue team and had emerged as the second from the rear — after I’d managed to edge out the runner for the White House. I’m now in Mother’s arms, standing with Obembe and Boja behind the long rope fastened to poles at both ends, which cordoned off the spectators from the track field. We are cheering for Ikenna from this side line, Boja and Obembe clapping intermittently. A whistle goes off at some point and Ikenna — who is on the same par as four others in colours: green, blue, white and yellow — bends one knee to the ground as the voice of Mr Lawrence, the jack-of-all-trades teacher who also happened to be the sports master, cries: “On your mark!” He pauses as all the runners raise one leg with their fingers pointing to the ground like kangaroos. “Set!” Mr Lawrence cries next. When he cries “Go!” it seems that although the athletes had apparently begun running, the boys are still on the same line — standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Then, one after the other, they disengage. The colours of their shirts appears like a momentary vision, and then disappears only for others to take their various places. Then, the Green House runner trips, and falls, fanning dust into the air. The boys seemed to be engulfed in smoke, but then Boja sees Ikenna raise his arm in celebration at the other end of the finish line; then I see it too. In a breath of a moment, he is surrounded by a flock of Red Vest wearers shouting: “Up Red House! Up Red House!” Mother leaps for joy with me in her hands and then suddenly stops. I see why: Boja, having crawled under the barricading rope, is racing towards the finish line crying “Ike, winner! Ike, winner!” Behind him, in hot pursuit and with a long cane, is the teacher guarding the barricade.

When my attention returned to the funeral, the Pastor had reached the thirty-fifth verse, his voice louder, incantatory, so that every verse he read hung on the mind’s fish hook, pulsing like captured fish. The Pastor closed the dog-eared Bible and put it under his armpit. With an already damp handkerchief he wiped his brow.

“Let us now share the grace,” he said.

In response, everyone at the funeral massed into a forceful fellowship of noisy throats. I recited as loud as I could with my eyes firmly closed: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us now and forever. Amen.”

The amen died off slowly, carried along the rows of the massive graveyard whose language was silence. The Pastor signalled the grave-diggers. They immediately returned from where they had sat talking and laughing during the funeral. These curious men began pulling the heap back in haste, quickening Ikenna’s obliteration, as if they were oblivious of the fact that once they covered him, no one would ever see him again. As chunks of earth fell on him, a fresh outbreak of grief erupted and nearly everyone at the funeral cracked open like small pod-producing ifoka nuts. Although I did not cry there, I felt strongly the real palpable reach of loss. With a bewildering air of apathy, the diggers dug on, quicker, one of them briefly stopping to remove a flattened earth-covered water bottle half-buried in the mound of sand that now partly concealed Ikenna’s body. As I watched the men throw more earth into the grave, I dug into the cold soil of my own mind, and it became suddenly clear — the way things always become clearer only after they have happened — that Ikenna was a fragile delicate bird; he was a sparrow.

Little things could unbridle his soul. Wistful thoughts often combed his melancholic spirit in search of craters to be filled with sorrow. As a younger boy, he often sat in the backyard, brooding and contemplative, his arms clasped over his knees. He was highly critical of things, a part of him that greatly resembled Father. He nailed small things to big crosses and would ponder for long on a wrong word he said to someone; he greatly dreaded the reprove of others. He had no place for ironies or satires; they troubled him.

Like sparrows — which we believed had no homes — Ikenna’s heart had no home, no fixed allegiances. He loved the far and the near, the small and the big, the strange and the familiar. But it was the little things that drew and consumed his compassion, the most memorable of which was a small bird he owned for a few days in 1992. He was sitting out in the corridor of the house alone one Christmas Eve while the others were inside dancing and singing carols, eating, and drinking, when a bird fell to the dirt in front of him. Ikenna bent low and inched towards it in the dark and then wrapped his hands around its feathery body. It was a badly deplumed sparrow that had been caught by someone and had escaped, a strand of twine still wound around its leg. Ikenna’s soul cleaved to the sparrow, and he guarded it jealously for three days, feeding it with whatever he could find. Mother asked him to let it go, but he refused. Then, one morning, he lifted the bird’s lifeless body in his hand and dug a hole in the backyard; his heart was broken. He and Boja covered the sparrow with sand until the bird was buried under the earth. This was exactly how Ikenna vanished, too. First, the earth poured by the mourners and the undertakers covered his white-shrouded trunk, then his legs, arms, face and everything, until he was obliterated forever from our eyes.