The Fishermen

Chapter 10: The Fungus

THE FUNGUS

Boja was a fungus:

His body was filled with fungi. His heart pumped blood filled with fungi. His tongue was infected with fungi, and, perhaps, so were most organs of his body. It was because his kidneys were filled with fungi that he could not stop bed-wetting till he was twelve. Mother became worried he was under a bed-wetting spell. After taking him for sessions of prayers, she began marking the edges of his bed with anointed oil — small-bottled olive oil on which prayers had been made — every night before he slept. Yet, Boja could not stop, even when he had to endure the shame of taking out his mattress — often spotted with urine patches of different shapes and sizes — every morning to dry in the sun, risking being seen by kids in the neighbourhood, especially Igbafe and his cousin Tobi, who could see into our compound from their storeyed building. It was because Father had mocked him for bed-wetting that he caused a stir in our school in the eventful morning of that day in 1993, in which we met M.K.O.

Just as a fungus hides in the body of an ignorant host, Boja lived on unseen in our compound for four days after Ikenna’s death, without us knowing it. He was there — silent, hidden away, refusing to speak, while the entire district and even the town desperately searched for him. He did not suggest a clue to the Nigerian police that he was within reach. He did not even try to restrain mourners who swooped on our house like bees around a keg of honey. He did not mind that his photo — printed on a poster with fading ink — was floating like an outbreak of influenza around the town — spotting bus stops, motor parks, motels and driveways, and that his name was on the lips of the people of the town.

Bojanonimeokpu “Boja” Agwu, 14, was last seen at his house at No. 21 Akure High School Road, Araromi Street on August 4, 1996. He wore a faded blue T-shirt with a portrait of Bahamas beach. The shirt was blood-stained and torn the last time he was seen. Please, if seen, kindly report to your nearest police station or call 04-8904872.

He did not cry out when his photo streamed non-stop across the screens of televisions in Akure, taking up considerable airtime on OSRC and NTA channels. Instead of making himself known, or even just his whereabouts, he decided to appear in our dreams at night-time and in figments of Mother’s troubled visions. So he sat in the big lounge in our sitting room in Obembe’s dream — the night before Ikenna was buried — laughing at Mr Bean’s tricks on television. Mother often reported sighting him in the sitting room, aproned in the dark, vanishing whenever she raised an alarm and turned on the bulb or lantern. Yet, Boja was not just a mere fungus; he embodied a wide variety of his species. He was a destructive fungus: a man of force, who forced himself into the world, and forced himself out of it. He forced himself out of Mother’s womb while she was in bed about to have a nap in 1982. A sudden labour took her unawares like a strong enema-induced bowel passage. The first nudge was a bullet of pain that overwhelmed her. The pain pulled her down and she, unable to move her body, crawled atop her bed, screaming. The landlady of the house where our parents lived at the time heard her cry and came to her aid. Seeing that there was no time to take Mother to a hospital, the woman shut the door, took a piece of cloth and wrapped it around Mother’s legs. Then, with the woman blowing on and fanning Mother’s private place with all the energy she could muster, Mother gave birth on the bed she shared with Father. She often recalled, years later, how so much blood had leaked through the mattress that it formed a huge permanent stain on the floor beneath the bed.

He destroyed our peace and set us all on edge. Father hardly sat for a minute during those days. Less than two hours after we returned from Ikenna’s burial, he announced that he was going to the police station to find out what progress had been made in the search for Boja. He said this while we were seated in the sitting room, all of us. I could not tell what it was that sent me out running after him calling “Daddy, Daddy!”

“What, Ben?” he asked, turning, his bunch of keys hanging from his index finger. I noticed that the zipper of his trousers was open, I pointed at it before replying. “What is it?” he asked again after looking at his zipper.

“I want to come with you.”

He zipped his trousers, gazing at me as if I were a suspicious object lying in his path. Perhaps he noticed that I had not shed a single tear since he’d returned. The police station was built along the old rail track that encircled a bend and veered left into a heavily pockmarked road that was filled with muddy water. The station was a large compound with a few wagons painted black — the colour of the Nigerian police — parked under a fabric awning whose pillars were cast in irons ballasted into the paved floors. A few young men, all of them naked to the waist, were arguing loudly somewhere under a torn fabric awning, while police officers listened. We walked straight to the reception: a huge wooden barricade. An officer was seated behind it on what must have been an elevated stool. Father asked him if he could see the Deputy Police Officer.

“Can you identify yourself, sir?” the constable at the desk replied with an unsmiling face, yawning as he spoke, dragging the last word, “sir,” so that it sounded like the final word of a dirge.

“I’m Mr James Agwu, a staff member of the Central Bank of Nigeria,” Father said.

Father reached into his breast pocket and showed the man a red ID card. The constable examined it. His face contorted, and then brightened. The man handed back the card with a full-faced smile, rubbing his hand around his temple.

“Oga, will you do us well?” the man said. “You know say na you be, oga.”

The man’s subtle request for a bribe irked Father, who was an ardent hater of all forms of corruption plaguing the Nigerian nation; he would often rail against it.

“I don’t have time for this,” Father said. “My child is missing.”

“Ah!” the officer cried, as though suddenly faced with a grim epiphany. “So you are the father of those boys?” he asked reflexively. Then, as if suddenly realizing what he’d said, “Sorry for that, sir. Please wait, sir.”

The officer called at someone and another officer emerged from the passageway, stamping his feet in an awkward way. He stamped to a halt, raised his hand to the side of his lean, swarthy face, held his fingers straight above his ear and dropped the hand against the side of his leg.

“Take him to Oga DPO’s office,” the first officer ordered in English.

“Yes, sir!” the junior officer cried and stamped his feet on the floor again.

The officer, who seemed oddly familiar, came forward towards us, his countenance fallen.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we will be conducting a brief search on you before you go in,” he said.

He passed his hand over Father’s body, up to his trouser pockets, frisking. He stared at me, seeming to scan me with his eyes for a while and then he asked if I had anything in my pocket. I shook my head. Convinced, he turned away from me and repeated the salute with his hand cupped above his ear again and cried “All correct, sir!” to the other officer.

The latter gave a curt nod and, gesturing that we follow him, ushered us into the hall.

The Deputy was a slender and very tall man with a striking facial structure. He had a broad forehead that seemed to spread wide like a slate over his face. His eyes were deep-set and his brows bulged as if swollen. He swiftly rose to his feet when we entered.

“Mr Agwu, right?” he said, stretching his hand to shake Father’s.

“Yes and my son, Benjamin,” Father muttered.

“Right, you’re welcome. Please, sit down.”

Father sat on the only chair in front of his desk and motioned that I sit on the other one by the side of the wall close to the door. The office was old-fashioned. All three cupboards in the room were filled with stacks of books and folders. A bright rod of daylight pierced through the aperture between the brown curtains in the absence of electricity. The air smelt of lavender — a smell that reminded me of my visits to Father’s office when he was still working in the Akure branch of the Central Bank.

Once we’d sat, the man placed his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together and said: “Erm, Mr Agwu, I regret to say that we are yet to have a word on the location of your son.” He adjusted himself in his chair, unclasped his hands and quickly put in, “But we have been making progress. We questioned someone in your neighbourhood who confirmed she saw the boy somewhere across the street that afternoon; the description she gave matched yours — the boy she saw wore blood-stained clothes.”

“Which direction did she say he went?” Father asked in a flustered hurry.

“We don’t know for now, but we are investigating thoroughly. Members of our team—” the Deputy began saying before breaking off to cough into his hand, slightly quivering as he did.

Father muttered “Sorry,” and the man thanked him.

“I mean our team has been conducting the search,” he continued after spitting into a handkerchief. “But, you know, even that will be futile if we don’t attach a ransom soon. I mean to involve the people of this town to assist us.” He opened a hardcover book before him and seemed to peruse it while he spoke. “With money on the ground, I am sure people will respond. If not, I mean, our efforts will be akin to sweeping the streets with a broom at night, I mean, by the dim squint of moonlight.”

“I understand what you are saying, DPO,” Father said after a while. “But I want to trust my instincts in this matter, and wait for your preliminary search to be completed before I go on with any personal plans of mine.”

The DPO nodded rapidly.

“Something tells me he is safe somewhere,” Father went on. “Perhaps he is merely hiding because of what he did.”

“Yes, that might be it,” the DPO said in a slightly raised voice. He seemed to be uneasy in his seat: he adjusted the chair by the hook under it, put his hands on the table and began mechanically picking sheets of paper scattered all over his table as he spoke. “You know a child and even adults — having done such a terrible thing… I mean, after killing his blood brother — would be afraid. He might be afraid of us the police, or even you his parents, of the future — of everything. There’s even a chance he may have left the town entirely.”

“Yes,” Father said in a mournful tone, shaking his head.

“That reminds me,” the policeman said with a snap of his finger. “Have you tried to reach any of your relatives in nearby places to ask—”

“Yes, but I don’t think this is likely, though. My sons have rarely visited our relatives except for when they were quite small, and never once without me or their mother. And, most of our relatives are here, none of them have seen him. They came for his brother’s funeral which we just concluded a few hours ago.”

The DPO’s eyes caught mine at that moment when I was staring at him, pondering on the heavy resemblance I thought he bore to the dark-spectacled military man in the portrait behind him — the Nigerian dictator, General Sani Abacha.

“I understand your point. We will do our best, but we hope he returns by himself — in his own time.”

“We hope, too,” Father said repeatedly in muffling tones. “Thank you for your efforts, sir.”

The man asked Father something I did not catch, for I’d gone blank again, an image of Ikenna with the knife in his belly hovering in my mind. Father and the man stood up and shook hands, and we left the office.

Boja was also a self-revealing fungus. After four torturous days in which no one had the faintest idea of what happened to him or where he was, he showed himself. He took pity on Mother, who was almost dying of grief, or perhaps he knew Father had become worn down by it all, and could not sit in the house because Mother swore at him and blamed him incessantly. When Father drove into the compound the morning after Ikenna died, she’d run up to him, opened the door of his car, and dragged him out of the car into the rain, screaming, strangling him by the collar in the rain. “Did I not tell you?” she cried. “Didn’t I tell you they were fast slipping from my grip? Didn’t I, Didn’t I? Eme, did you not know that if a wall does not open its mouth by cracking, lizards cannot enter through it. Eme, didn’t you?” She did not let go of him, even when Mrs Agbati, awakened by the noise, ran into the compound, pleading with Mother to let Father go inside. “I won’t, no,” Mother resisted, sobbing even more. “Look at us, just look, look. We opened our mouths, Eme, we opened them wide and now we have swallowed a multitude of them.”

I cannot forget how Father, pressed for breath and soaking in the rain, kept the sort of calm I’d swear he was incapable of until Mother was wrested off him. Many times in the past four days, she’d tried to attack him, and was often held back by people who had come to console us. Perhaps too, Boja might have looked upon Nkem who followed Father about, wailing incessantly because Mother could not nurse her. Obembe mostly tended to David, who also cried for no reason sometimes and got hit by Mother once when he pestered her. Perhaps, Boja saw all this and pitied her and the rest of us, too. Or, perhaps he was merely forced to reveal himself because he could no longer hide. No one will ever know.

He revealed himself not long after Father and I returned from the police station. His photo, the one in which he crouched with his hand to the photographer as if he was going to knock the man over, had just popped up on the OSRC News commercials with the heading Missing Person immediately after a clip of the Nigerian Olympic Dream Team being mobbed as they arrived in Lagos from the United States with the men’s football Olympic gold. We were eating yam and palm-oil sauce — Obembe, Father, David and me. Mother lay on the carpet in the other part of the sitting room, still dressed in all black. Nkem was in the hands of Mama Bose, the pharmacist. One of our aunties, the last of the mourners still left, but who would take the night bus back to Aba that same day, sat beside Mama Bose and Mother. Mother was talking to the two women about peace of mind, and of how people had responded to our family’s grief so far while my eyes were focused on the television, where the Dream Team’s Austin Jay-Jay Okocha was now shaking hands with General Abacha in Aso Rock when Mrs Agbati, a next-door neighbour, ran to our main door, screaming. She’d come to fetch water from our well, an eleven-foot well, believed to be one of the deepest in the district. Our neighbours, especially the Agbatis, often used it when their own wells dried or had insufficient water.

She threw herself at the threshold of our storm door, crying, “Ewooooh! Ewooooh!!”

“Bolanle, what is it?” Father asked. He’d sprung up at the woman’s shout.

“He is… in the well oooooo, Ewoooh,” Mrs Agbati managed to say between wailing and mournful wriggling on the floor.

“Who?” Father asked aloud, “what, who is in the well?”

“There, there, in the well!” the woman, whom Boja disliked and often called an ashewo because he said he once saw her going into the La Room motel, repeated.

“I said, who?” But as he asked, he’d begun to run out of the house. I followed, Obembe behind me.

The well, with its slightly torn metal lid, was filled with water to a level above eight feet. The neighbour’s plastic bucket lay at the foot of the silt around the mouth of the well. Boja’s body was floating atop the water, his clothing formed a parachute behind him, bloated like a full balloon. One of his eyes was open and could be seen beneath the surface of the clear water. The other was closed and swollen. His head was held half above the water, resting against the fading bricks of the well, while his light-skinned hands lingered on top of the water as though he was locked in an embrace with another who no one else but he could see.

This well in which he had hidden and then revealed himself had always been a part of his history, though. Two years earlier, a mother hawk — probably blind or deformed in some way — fell into the open well and drowned. The bird, like Boja, was not discovered until after many days, and so it simply lay beneath the water at first, quietly, like venom in a bloodstream. Then when its time was due, it spawned and swam upstream, but by that time, it had started to decompose. That incident happened around the time Boja was converted at the Great Gospel Crusade organized by the international German preacher, Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, in 1991. After the bird was removed from the well, persuaded that if he prayed over it, it could not harm him, Boja announced he would pray over the water and drink it. He put his faith in the scripture passage “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.” While we were waiting for the Ministry of Water Affairs officers Father had summoned to come purify the water, Boja drank a cup of it. Fearing he would die, Ikenna let the cat out of the bag, throwing our parents into a panic. Swearing he would whip Boja thoroughly afterwards, Father took him to the hospital. It was a great relief when test results showed that he was safe. So at the time, Boja conquered the well, but years later, the well conquered him. It killed him.

His form was inconceivably altered when he was pulled out. Obembe stood staring at me in horror as a mob gathered from every part of our district. In small communities in West Africa in those days, a tragic occurrence such as this travelled like a forest fire in the Harmattan. Once the woman cried out, people — both familiar and unfamiliar — started pouring into our compound until they crowded it. Unlike at the scene of Ikenna’s death, neither Obembe nor I tried to stop Boja from being taken away. Obembe did not act the same way he did when, after recovering from his enchanted intoning of “river of red, river of red, river of red,” he held Ikenna’s head and frantically tried to pump oxygen into his mouth, beckoning, “Ike wake up, please wake up, Ike” until Mr Bode pulled him off Ikenna. This time around, with our parents present, we watched from our balcony.

There were so many people that we could barely see the unfolding scene, for the people of Akure and most small towns in West Africa were pigeons: passive creatures that grazed lazily about in marketplaces or in playgrounds waddling as if waiting for a piece of rumour or news, congregating wherever a handful of grain is poured on the ground. Everyone knew you; you knew everyone. Everyone was your brother; you were everyone’s brother. It was hard to be somewhere and not see someone who knew your mother or brother. This was true of all our neighbours. Mr Agbati came wearing just a white singlet and brown shorts. Igbafe’s father and mother came in same-coloured traditional attire, having just arrived from some event and not having had the chance to change clothes. There were other people, including Mr Bode. It was he who entered the well and brought Boja out. I would gather from the commentaries of the people there that he’d first climbed in with a ladder passed down and tried to pull Boja out with one hand, but Boja’s dead weight refused to come forth. Mr Bode put his hand on the side of the well and pulled Boja up again. This time, Boja’s shirt snapped under the arm, and the ladder sank lower into the well. At the sight of that, the men at the lip of the well pulled tightly at him to prevent him from sliding in. Three men held on to the last man’s legs and waist. But when Mr Bode tried again, descending down the rungs of the ladder a bit lower, he pulled him out from the watery tomb in which he’d been dead for days. And like the scene when Lazarus was raised, the mob roared in approval.

But his appearance was not like that of a resurrected body, it was the unforgettable frightening image of a bloated dead. To prevent this image from imprinting on our minds, Father forced Obembe and me into the house.

“You both — sit here,” he said, panting, his countenance like I had never seen it before. Sudden wrinkles had appeared on his face, and his eyes were bloodshot. He knelt down when we sat, and placing his hands on both of our thighs, said: “From this moment on, both of you will be strong men. You will be men who will look into the eyes of the world and order your ways and paths through it… with… with the sort of courage your brothers had. Do you understand?”

We nodded.

“Good,” he said, nodding repeatedly and absent-mindedly.

He bowed his head and put his face between his palms. I could hear his teeth gritting in his mouth as he sustained a mechanical muttering, the only word of which we could hear being “Jesus.” When he lowered his head, I saw the middle of his scalp where his baldness, unlike Grandfather’s, had stopped its spurn as a mere arc of hairless portion hidden away in the midst of a ring of hair.

“Remember what you said some years ago, Obembe?” Father said, facing up again.

Obembe shook his head.

“You have forgotten,”—a wounded smile flashed across his face and wilted away—“what you said when your brother, Ike, drove the car to my office during the M.K.O. riots? Right there at the dining table,” he pointed to the table which had been left in a raucous state of unfinished meals on which flies were now perching, half-drained glasses of water and a jug of warm water from which, unaware of the absence of its drinkers, vapour had continued to rise. “You asked what you would do should they die.”

Obembe nodded now — like me, he’d remembered that night of June 12, 1993, when, after Father drove us home in his own car, we’d all begun in turns to tell stories of the riot at dinner. Mother told of how she and her friends ran into the nearby military barracks as the Pro-M.K.O. rioters razed the market, killing anyone they thought was a northerner. When all finished, Obembe said: “What will happen to Ben and me when Ikenna and Boja grow old and die?”

Everyone burst into laughter except the little ones, Obembe and me. Although I had not thought of the possibilities till then, I considered the question a valid inquiry.

“Obembe, you will have grown old, too, by then; they are not much older than you,” Father replied, squeaking with laughter.

“Okay.” Obembe wavered, albeit for a moment. He kept his eyes on them, questions crowding his mind like an unbearable urge. “But what if they died?”

“Will you shut up?” Mother yelled at him. “Dear God! How can you ever allow such a thought into your head? Your brothers will not die, you hear me?” She held the lobe of her ear, and Obembe — pumped with fear — nodded affirmatively.

“Good, now eat your food!” Mother thundered.

Dejected, Obembe would drop his head and continue his meal in silence.

“Yes, now that this has happened,” Father continued after our nods. “Obembe, you have to drive yourself and your younger brothers, Ben, here, and David. They will be looking up to you as their elder brother.”

Obembe nodded.

“I’m not saying you should drive them in a car, no.” Father shook his head. “I mean, you just lead them.”

Obembe seconded his initial nod.

“Lead them,” Father mumbled.

“Okay, Daddy,” Obembe replied.

Father stood up and wiped his nose with his hand. The mess slid down the back of his hand, its colour like Vaseline. As I watched him, I remembered that I’d once read in the Animal Atlas that most eagles lay only two eggs. And that the eaglets, once hatched from the eggs, are often killed by the older chicks — especially during times of food shortages in what the book termed “the Cain and Abel syndrome.” Despite their might and strength, I’d read, eagles do nothing to stop these fratricides. Perhaps these killings happen when the eagles are away from the eyrie, or when they travel camel distances to get food for the household. Then when they pick the squirrel or mouse and mount the clouds in hasty flight to their eyrie, they return only to find the eaglets — perhaps two eaglets — dead: one bloodied inside the eyrie, its dark red blood leaking through the nest, and the other swollen double, bloated and floating on a nearby pool.

“You both stay here,” Father said, cutting into my thoughts. “Don’t come out of here until I tell you to. Okay?”

“Yes, Daddy,” we chorused.

He rose to leave, but turned slowly. I believe he started a sentence, perhaps a plea: “Please I beg you—” but that was it. He went out and left us there, both of us startled.

It was after Father left that it struck me that Boja was also a self-destructive fungus: one who inhabited the body of an organism and gradually effected its destruction. This was what he did to Ikenna. First, he sank Ikenna’s spirit and then he banished his soul by making a deadly perforation through which Ikenna’s blood emptied from his body and formed a red river below him. After this, like his kind, he turned against himself and killed himself.

It was Obembe who first told me that Boja killed himself. Obembe gathered from the people who’d congregated in the compound that this must have been the case, and had waited to tell me about it. And once Father left the room, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what Boja did?”

This stung me deep.

“Do you know that we drank the blood from his wound?” Obembe continued. I shook my head.

“Listen, you don’t know anything. Do you not know that there was a big hole in his head? I — saw — it! And we made tea with this well water this morning, and we all drank from it.”

I could not understand this, I could not understand how he might have been there all along. “If he was there, there all the time, there—” I began to say but stopped.

“Go on,” Obembe said.

“If he was there all this while, there — there,” I stammered.

“Go on?” he said.

“Okay, if he was there how didn’t we see him in the well when we fetched water this morning?”

“Because when something drowns, they don’t come up immediately. Listen, remember the lizard that fell into Kayode’s water drum?”

I nodded.

“And the bird that fell into the well two years ago?”

I nodded again.

“Yes, like these; it happens that way.” He gestured wearily towards the window and repeated, “Like that — it happens that way.”

He stood from the chair and lay on the bed and covered himself with the wrappa Mother had given us, the one with the portraits of a tiger etched all over it. I watched the movement of his head as the sound of suppressed sobs came from under the covering. I sat still, glued to where I was but conscious of a gradual eruption in my bowel, where something that felt like a miniature hare was gnawing inside it. The gnawing continued until, suddenly feeling a vinegary taste in my mouth, I vomited a lump of moist food in soupy pastry on the floor. The outburst was followed by bouts of coughing. I bent to the floor and coughed out more.

Obembe jumped out of his bed towards me. “What? What happened to you?”

I tried to answer, but could not; the hare had continued scratching deeper into my bones. I gasped for breath.

“Eh, water,” he said. “Let me get you some water.”

I nodded.

He brought water, and sprinkled it on my face, but it felt as if I was immersed in water, as if I were drowning. I gasped as the beads trickled down my face, and frantically wiped them off.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I nodded and mumbled: “Yes.”

“You should drink some water.”

He left and returned with water in a cup.

“Take, drink,” he said. “And don’t be afraid anymore.”

When he said that, I remembered how, once, before we began fishing, while we were coming back from the football pitch, a dog leapt out of one of the skeletal rooms of an uncompleted building, and started barking at us. This dog was a lean thing, so thin its ribs could easily be numbered. Spots and fresh wounds covered its body like freckles on a pineapple. The poor beast came towards us in intermittent steps, belligerently, as though it wanted to attack. Although I loved animals, I was scared of dogs, lions, tigers and all those in the cat family, for I had read so much about how they tore people and other animals to pieces. I screamed at the sight of the dog and clasped to Boja. To quench my fear, Boja picked a stone and aimed at the dog. The stone missed the dog, but scared it so much that the dog woofed on, jutting mechanically, wagging its thin tail as it went away, marking its footprints in the dirt. Then, turning to me, he said: “The dog is gone, Ben; don’t be afraid anymore.” And that instant, my fear was gone.

As I drank the water Obembe had brought, I became conscious of the sudden surge in the pandemonium outside. A siren was blaring at a close distance. As the peal grew louder, voices shouted orders for people to allow “them” to come in. An ambulance had apparently arrived. A tumult overwhelmed our compound as men bore Boja’s swollen body to the ambulance. Obembe rushed to watch them load Boja’s corpse into the ambulance from the window of our sitting room, making sure Father did not see him and trying to keep an eye on me at the same time. He returned to me when the sirens began blaring again, this time deafeningly. I’d drunk the water and had stopped vomiting, but my mind could not stop spinning.

I thought of what Obembe had told me on the day Ikenna pushed Boja against the metal box. He’d sat quietly in a corner of our room, hugging himself as if he’d caught a cold. Then he asked if I saw what was in the pocket of Ikenna’s shorts when he came into the room earlier.

“No, what was it?” I had asked him, but he merely gazed, dazed, his mouth hardly closing, so that his large incisors appeared bigger than they actually were. He went to the window, his face still filled with that look. He set his eyes outside where a long cavalcade of soldier ants was making a procession along the fence, which was still wet from the long days of rain. A piece of rag was stuck to it, dripping water in a long line that slowly slid down to the foot of the wall. A cumulus cloud hung in the horizon above the walls.

I had waited patiently for Obembe’s answer, but when it became a long time coming, I asked him again.

“Ikenna had a knife — in his pocket,” he answered, without turning to look at me.

I sat up and raced to him as though a beast had rammed through the wall into the room to devour me. “A knife?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I saw it, it was Mama’s cooking knife, the one with which Boja killed the cock.” He shook his head again. “I saw it,” he repeated, gazing first at the ceiling — as if something there had nodded in the affirmative to confirm that he was right. “He had a knife.” With his face contorting now and his voice falling, he said: “Perhaps, he wanted to kill Boja.”

The ambulance’s siren began to wail again, and the noise of the mob rose to a deafening pitch. Obembe withdrew from the window and came towards me.

“They have taken him,” Obembe said presently in a husky voice. He repeated it as he took my hand and gently laid me down. My legs had, by that time, weakened from squatting to retch on the floor.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’ll clean this and come lie with you, just lie there,” he said and made towards the door but, as if on second thought, stopped and smiled, two blinking pearls stuck to the pupil of both eyes.

“Ben,” he called.

“Eh.”

“Ike and Boja are dead.” His jaw wobbled, his lower lip pouted as the two pearls slid down, marking their trails with twin liquid lines.

Because I did not know what to make of what he said, I nodded. He turned and left the room.

I closed my eyes while he packed the mess with the dustpan, my mind filled with the imagination of how Boja had died, of how — according to what they said — he’d killed himself. I imagined him standing over Ikenna’s corpse after the stabbing, wailing, having suddenly realized that by that singular action, he had plundered his own life in one single haul like a cave of ancient riches. He must have seen it, must have thought about what the future held in stock for him and dreaded it. It must have been these thoughts that birthed the heinous courage that administered the suicidal idea like morphine into his mind’s vein, starting off its slow death. With his mind dead, it must have been easy to move his legs, carry his body, fear and uncertainty sewing his mind thread-by-thread, the bulge thickening, the loom pilling until he made the plunge — head first, like a diver, the way he always dived into the river, the Omi-Ala. At once, he must have felt a rush of air flood his eyes as he dipped, quietly, without a slight moan or a word spoken. There must have been no increased throbbing and no increased pulse in his heart as he dipped; rather, he must have maintained a curious calm and tranquillity. In that state of mind, he must have glimpsed an illusory epiphany, a montage of images of his past that must have consisted of still images of a five-year-old Boja mounted on the high branch of the tangerine tree in our compound, singing Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy”; five-year-old Boja with a bowl of excreta in his pants when he was asked to stand before the entire school morning assembly and lead the school in the Lord’s Prayer; ten-year-old Boja who acted as Joseph the Carpenter, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus in our church’s Christmas play of 1992 and said: “Mary, I will not marry you because you’re an ashewo!” to the astonishment of all; Boja, who was told by M.K.O. never to fight, don’t ever!; and Boja who, earlier in the year, was a zealous Fisherman. These images may have assembled in his mind like a swarm of bees in a hive as he dipped lower until he hit the bottom of the well. The contact dashed the hive and scattered the images.

The plunge, I pictured, must have been quick. As his head sank, it must have first hit the rock that protruded from the side of the well. This contact must have then been followed in succession by the sound of bursting, of crashing skull, of breaking bones, of blood purling, then spilling and swirling in his head. His brain must have scattered into smithereens, the veins that connected it to other parts of his head uncoupling. His tongue must have thrust out of his mouth at the moment of the contact, tearing his eardrums apart like an antique veil, and pouring a tenth of his teeth into the floor of his mouth like a pack of dice. A synchrony of noiseless reactions must have followed this. For a short time, his mouth must have kept uttering something inaudible, like a pot of boiling water bubbling as his body convulsed. This must have been the peak of it all. The convulsion must have started to gradually let go of him, calm returning to his bones. Then a peace not of this world must have descended on him, calming him to deadly stillness.