The Fishermen

Chapter 13: The LeechChapter 12: The Searchdog

THE SEARCHDOG

Obembe was a searchdog:

The one who first discovered things, who knew things and who, after discovering them, examined them. He was perpetually pregnant with ideas, and in the fullness of time, delivered them as creatures equipped with wings — able to fly.

It was he who first found that there was a loaded pistol behind the sitting-room shelf two years after we moved into our house in Akure. He’d found the gun while chasing a small housefly around our room. The fly had droned over him, and escaped two frantic blows with the Simple Algebra textbook Obembe swiftly employed for the purpose of killing it. The fly leapt up after the last miss and glided into the space on the shelf where the television, VHS and radio were set in their various columns. When he chased the fly there, he let out a scream, dropping the book. We had just moved into the house and no one had looked behind the shelf to see the barrel of the pistol slightly sticking out from under it. Father would pick the pistol up and take it to the police station, petrified as all of us were, but thankful that it was not found by one of the younger children, David or Nkem.

Obembe’s eyes were a searchdog’s.

Eyes that noticed little things, negligible details others overlooked. I have come to believe he had an inkling that Boja was in the well long before Mrs Agbati found him there. For the morning she found Boja, Obembe had discovered that the water from the well was greasy, and had a foul odour. He’d fetched it to bathe and had noticed a slick on the surface of the water in the bucket. He called me to see it and when I scooped the water in my hand, I spat and threw away the water. I’d perceived the smell, too — the smell of rot, or of dead matter — but had not been able to tell what it was.

It was he who unravelled the mystery about what happened to Boja’s corpse, since we did not attend his burial. There were no posters, no visits, not a single sign of his funeral. I’d wondered and asked my brother when it would be done, but he did not know and did not want to question our parents, the two ventricles of our home. Although he did not raise any alarm at the time or push further, were it not for him, I would never have known what became of Boja’s body after his death. On the first Saturday of November, a week after Mother returned from the psychiatric hospital, he found something I had not noticed before although it had been on the top shelf in the sitting room, behind a framed portrait of our parents on their wedding day in 1979, all along. Obembe showed me a small transparent jar that sat on that shelf. In it was a polythene bag containing something ash-coloured and grey like loamy sand dug from under dead logs of wood and dried in the sun to fine grains the size of salt. I noticed, just as I reached for it, that it was tagged: Boja Agwu (1982–1996).

When we confronted Father a few days afterwards, Obembe saying he knew the strange substance was Boja’s ashes in the jar, Father, staggered, gave up. He and Mother, he revealed, had been warned strictly by clansmen and relatives that Boja should not be buried. It was a sacrilege to Ani, goddess of the earth, for a person who committed suicide or fratricide to be interred in the earth. Although Christianity had almost cleanly swept through Igbo land, crumbs and pieces of the African traditional religion had eluded the broom. Stories came from time to time from our village and from clansmen in diasporas, about mysterious mishaps — even deaths, owing to punishments from the gods of the clan. Father, who did not believe a goddess would punish him or that such a contraption “by illiterate minds” existed, decided not to bury him just for Mother’s sake, and because he’d already had a dose of tragedies. They did not say a word to my brother and me, and we did not know about this, until Obembe, the searchdog, found out.

Obembe’s mind was a searchdog’s: a restless mind that was always engaged in the search for knowledge. He was a question-asking person — an inquirer, who read widely to feed his mind. The lantern, the tool with which he read, was his greatest companion. Before my brothers died, we had three kerosene lanterns in the house. A sprocket-controlled wick dipped into their small fuel tanks to absorb the kerosene. Because there was a perennially erratic power supply in Akure in those days, Obembe read with one of the three lanterns every night. After the death of our brothers, he began to read as if his life depended on it. Like an omnivorous animal, he stored the information he garnered from these books in his mind. Then, after he had processed and pruned it down to the essentials, he passed it on to me in the form of stories he told me every night before we slept.

Before our brothers died, he told me the story of a princess who followed a perfect gentleman of great beauty to the heart of a forest insisting she’d marry him only to discover the man was merely a skull who’d borrowed the flesh and body parts of others. That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me. During the days Ikenna was a python, Obembe told me of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, from the simplified copy of the Odyssey of Homer, forever inscribing in my mind images of the Poseidon seas and the deathless gods. He mostly told me the stories at night-time, in the near darkness of the room, and I gradually burrowed into the world his words created.

Two nights after Mother returned from hospital, we were seated on the bed in our room, our backs against the wall, drifting off to sleep. Suddenly, my brother said: “Ben, I know why our brothers died.” He snapped his fingers and rose up, clutching his head. “Listen, I just — I just discovered.”

He sat down again and began telling me a long story he once read in a book whose title he could not recall, but which, he was sure, had been written by an Igbo. I listened as my brother’s voice soared above the rattling ceiling fan. When he finished, he fell silent, while I tried to process the story of the strong man, Okonkwo, who was reduced to committing suicide by the wiles of the white man.

“You see, Ben,” he said, “the people of Umuofia were conquered because they were not united.”

“It’s true,” I said.

“The white men were a common enemy that would have been easily conquered if the tribe had fought as one. Do you know why our brothers died?”

I shook my head.

“The same way — because there was a division between them.”

“Yes,” I muttered.

“But do you know why Ike and Boja were divided?” He suspected I didn’t have an answer, so he did not wait long; he went on. “Abulu’s prophecy; they died because of Abulu’s prophecy.”

He put his fingers on the back of his left hand and scratched absent-mindedly, not seeing the white lines that had formed on his dry skin. We sat in silence for a while afterwards, my mind drifting backwards as though I were skating a sharp steep slope.

“Abulu killed our brothers. He is our enemy.”

His voice seemed to have cracked and his words came forth like a whisper from the end of a cave. Although I knew Ikenna was transformed by Abulu’s curse, I had not thought he was directly involved the way my brother now phrased it. I have never thought the madman could be blamed directly even when I could see signs that it was he who planted the fear in my brother. But when my brother now said it, it occurred to me that it was true. As I pondered this, Obembe lifted his legs to his chest to hug them, dragging off the bed sheet so that a part of the mattress became exposed. Then, turning to me and planting one hand on the bed so that it sank down to the springboard, he slugged his fist into the air and said: “I will kill Abulu.”

“Why would you do that?” I gasped.

He let his eyes, which were fast clouding with tears, navigate my face for a little and said: “I will do it for them because he killed our brothers. I will do it for them.”

Dumbfounded, I watched him go to lock the door first, then to the window. He dipped his hand in his short pocket. Then came flashes of two attempts to light a match. The third time, it clicked and a small light sparked and disappeared. I was shocked. In its wake, the silhouetted form of him put a cigarette in his mouth, smoke wafting upwards and out into the dark night. I nearly jumped out of bed. I had not known, could not have imagined, could not tell how or what had happened. “A cigare—” I quavered.

“Yes, but shut up, it is nothing to you.”

In a flip, his silhouette had become a force that massed before me by the bed, the smoke from his cigarette rising steadily over his head.

“If you tell them,” he said, his eyes filled with so much darkness, “you will only increase their pain.”

He blew the smoke out of the window as I watched in horror at the sight of my brother, only two years older than me, smoking and sobbing like a child.

The things my brother read shaped him; they became his visions. He believed in them. I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible. This was the case with my brother. After he broke his plan to me, he detached from me and developed his ideas every day, smoking at night. He read more, sometimes up in the tangerine tree in the backyard. He rejected my inability to be brave for my brothers, and complained that I was not willing to learn from Things Fall Apart and fight against our common enemy: Abulu the madman.

Even though our Father tried to restore us back to the days before he moved out of Akure — the egg-white days of our lives — my brother remained unmoved. He was not endeared by the new movies Father brought home — new Chuck Norris movies, a new James Bond movie, one titled Waterworld, and even a movie played by Nigerians, Living in Bondage.

Because he read somewhere that if someone drew a sketch of any problem and visualized its complete make-up, they could solve that problem, he spent most of the day drawing matchstick men portraits of his plans to avenge our brothers, while I sat and read. I stumbled on them one day, about a week after our altercation, and was frightened. In the first, drawn with sharpened pencil, Obembe hauls stones at Abulu, who then falls and dies.

In another, set in the area outside the escarpment where Abulu’s truck sat, Obembe brandishes a knife, his matchstick legs captioned in the motion of walking with me following him. There are distant trees and pigs brooding nearby. Then in the truck, through the transparent capture of the goings-on inside it, his own matchstick man portrait decapitates Abulu—like Okonkwo killed the court messenger.

The sketches terrified me. I held the paper and examined it, my hands trembling, when he came in from the toilet after having been gone for about ten minutes.

“Why are you looking at that?” he cried in fury. He pushed me and I fell into the bed with the paper still in my hand.

“Give that to me,” he raged.

I threw the paper at him and he took it from the floor.

“Don’t ever touch anything on this table again,” he roared. “Do you hear me, you blockhead?”

I lay in the bed, shielding my face with my hand from fear that he might hit me, but he merely put the papers in his closet and covered them with his clothes. Then he went to the window and stood there. Outside, in the next house hidden by a high fence, the voices of children playing reached our ears. We knew most of the children. Igbafe, one of the boys who fished the river with us, was one of them. His voice intermittently rose above those of the others: “Yes, yes, give me the ball, shoot! Shoot!! Shoot!!! Ah, what did you do?” Then laughter, the sound of children running and panting. I sat up in bed.

“Obe,” I called to my brother as calmly as I could.

He did not answer, he was humming a tune.

“Obe,” I called out again, almost with a cry. “But why must you try to kill the madman?” I asked.

“It is simple, Ben,” he said with such a collected calm that I was thrown off my nerves. “I want to kill him because he killed my brothers, and so does not deserve to live.”

The first time he’d said it, after he told me the story of Things Fall Apart, I’d thought he was merely broken and had said he would do it because of anger; but now, hearing the way he said it with grave determination and seeing these drawings, I began to fear he meant what he’d said.

“Why, why do you — you want to kill a person?”

“You see?” he said, diminishing the alarm that had leaked into my words and had caused me to shout the word “kill” rather than plainly say it. “You don’t even know why because you have forgotten our brothers so soon.”

“I haven’t,” I protested.

“You have, if not, you would not sit here, and watch Abulu continuing to live when he killed our brothers.”

“But must we try to kill the demon-man? Is there no other way, Obe?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen, Ben, if you and I were not too scared to interfere when they were fighting until they killed each other, we must not be afraid to avenge them now. We must kill Abulu or else we cannot have peace; I cannot have peace; Daddy and Mama cannot have peace. Mama was driven crazy because of that madman. There’s a wound he has inflicted on us that would never ever heal. If we do not kill this madman, nothing will ever be the same.”

I sat there, frozen under the power of his words, unable to say anything. I could see that an indestructible plan had been formed within him, and night after night, he sat on the pane of the shutters and smoked, naked to the waist most times — because he did not want to trap the cigarette smell in his shirt. He would smoke and cough and spit, slapping himself on the skin frequently to swat mosquitoes. When Nkem toddled to the door and began banging on it, babbling that dinner was ready, he opened the door, and just as light flashed in, he closed it and darkness returned.

When weeks passed and he was still not able to convince me to join in his mission, he moved away, determined to carry out his task alone.

Towards the middle of November, when the dry Harmattan breeze turned people’s skin ashen white, our family emerged like a mouse — the first sign of life from the rubble of a burnt-out world. Father opened a bookshop. With the savings he had, and generous support from his friends — most especially Mr Bayo in Canada, who had announced that he would be visiting Nigeria to see us and whose visit we were eagerly awaiting — he rented a one-room shop just about two kilometres from the Akure monarch’s palace. A local carpenter constructed a large wooden signboard with the words Ikeboja Bookshop engraved in red paint on its white background. The signboard was then nailed to the lintel of the bookshop. Father took us all to see it the day he opened it. He’d arranged most of the books on the wooden shelves — all of them smelling of wood-spray. He told us he’d got four thousand books for a start and that it would take days to load them onto the shelves. Sacks and cartons of books were packed in an unlit room he said would serve as the store. A rat darted out of the door of the store the moment he opened it, and Mother laughed a long throaty laugh — her first since our brothers died.

“His first customers,” she said, as Father chased the rat that was ten times swifter than he, until it was out the door, while we laughed. Father, gasping for breath, then told us about the strange case of one of his colleagues in Yola, whose house was invaded by rats. The man had endured the presence of the legion for very long, fighting only with mousetraps because he did not want them to die in a place he couldn’t easily locate so they wouldn’t begin to decay before their corpses were discovered. Every other measure had been futile in the past. But when two rats appeared in broad daylight while he was entertaining two of his colleagues, embarrassing him, he decided to end the ordeal. He evacuated all the members of his family to a hotel for one week, and then lined every nook and cranny of the house with Ota-pia-pia. By the time they returned, there was a dead rat in almost every corner of the house, even in shoes.

Father’s office table and chair were placed at the centre of the bookshop, facing the doorway. There was a flower vase on the top of the table and a glass atlas David would have knocked over had Father not made quickly to save it. When we stepped outside the shop, we saw a tumult just across the road from the bookshop. Two men were fighting, and a mob had gathered there. Father, ignoring them, pointed at the big signboard by the side of the road that read Ikeboja Bookshop. It was David alone who had to be told that the name was a combination of our brothers’ names. Father drove us from there down to the big Tesco supermarket to buy cakes, and while returning, he took the route through the street at the haunch of our district, through the small road from which we could see the stretch of esan bush that hid the Omi-Ala River. On the way we passed a group of dancers playing music from a truck loaded with boomboxes. The street was filled with wooden testers and fabric awnings under which women sold petty items. Others lined tubers of yam stacked on thread sacks, rice in basins, even baskets, and many other wares on the roadside. Motorcycles laden with passengers thrust dangerously in-between cars — for it would be only a matter of time before some of their heads would be crushed on the road. The statue of Samuel Okwaraji, the erstwhile Nigerian football player who died on the field of play in 1989, loomed over the buildings from where it stood in the stadium with a ball hanging interminably still on his foot and his finger pointing perpetually towards an unseen teammate. His dreadlocks were caked with dust, and threads of metals, which had loosened from the sculpture, were hanging awkwardly from his buttocks. Across the road from the stadium, people were gathered under tarpaulins, dressed in traditional clothes. They were seated on plastic chairs, a few tables filled with wine and other drinks in front of them. Two men, bowed over, were beating a tune on hourglass-shaped talking drums, while a man wearing an agbada and long trousers of the same fabric, danced acrobatically about, flapping his flowing robe.

We had barely reached the detour from which a leftward track led straight to our house when we saw Abulu. It was the first time since our brothers died. Before now, he’d disappeared like he never existed; as if he entered into our house, kindled a small fire and vanished. He was rarely mentioned at all by our parents after Mother returned except for when she brought a piece of news about him. He’d gone away, bereft of any burden hanging around his neck, the way the people of Akure had always allowed it to be.

Abulu was standing by the roadside looking in the distance when he saw our car slowly slaloming towards him because of the speed breakers. He dashed forward towards the car, waving and smiling. There was a gap in his upper dentition where it seemed one of the upper teeth had fallen out. Under his raised arm was a long fresh scar, still red and bloody. He was swaddled in a wrappa, one that had flowery designs all over it. I saw him cross onto the sidewalk, swaggering and gesticulating as if he had a companion. Then, as we closed in, to allow a Bedford truck filled with building materials to drive past on the narrow road, he stopped, and began examining something on the ground with keen interest. Father continued driving as though he did not see him, but Mother uttered a prolonged hiss and murmured “Evil man” under her breath, snapping her fingers over her head. “You will die a cruel death,” Mother continued in English as if the madman could hear her, “you surely will. Ka eme sia.”

A van towing a damaged car trudged noisily down the road, honking erratically. In the side mirror where I’d fixed my eyes to keep Abulu in sight, the madman receded like a fighter jet. After he vanished from view, I kept my gaze on the mirror, on the inscription: Caution: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. I thought then of how Abulu had been close to our car and I imagined he had touched it. This set off an avalanche chain of thoughts in my mind. First, I pondered Mother’s reaction to the sight of the madman: the possibility of his death, and concluded it would not be possible. Who, I wondered, could kill him? Who could go close and put a knife in his stomach? Would the madman not see it coming and even kill the person first? Would most of the people of this town not have killed off this man if they could? Had they not chosen instead to swivel in concentric circles and to run dazed in pulsating rings? Had they not always turned into pillars of salt at the gate of reckoning as though Abulu was beyond harm?

Obembe had given me a questioning look upon Mother’s outburst, and when I turned now from the mirror, his eyes trapped me in the netting that was the question “Can you see what I have been telling you?” It triggered an epiphany. I saw, at once, that Abulu was indeed the designer of our grief. As we drove past Argentina, the cross-wall neighbour’s rickety lorry, its exhaust pumping billows of black smoke, it struck me that it was Abulu who had wounded us. Although I had not supported my brother’s idea to punish the madman, seeing Abulu that day changed me. I was moved, too, by Mother’s reaction, her curse, and the tears that began coursing down her cheeks at the sight of him. I felt a numbing ripple through my body when Nkem, in her sing-song voice, said: “Daddy, Mama is crying.”

“Yes, I know,” Father said, looking in the overhead mirror. “Tell her to stop crying.”

When Nkem repeated “Mama, Daddy said I should tell you to stop crying,” my heart burst like a dam and the flood of the wrongs this man had done to us broke out.

1. It was he who took away our brothers.

2. It was he who deposited the poisonous venom in the hot blood of our brotherhood.

3. It was he who took away Father’s job.

4. It was he who caused Obembe and me to miss a school term.

5. It was he who almost drove Mother insane.

6. It was he who caused all of my brothers’ possessions to be burned.

7. It was he who caused Boja’s body to be burned like trash.

8. It was he who caused Ikenna to be obliterated by landfill.

9. It was he who caused Boja to be bloated like a balloon.

10. It was he who caused Boja to float around the town as a “missing person.”

The list of his evils was endless. I stopped counting, and it continued running on and on and on like a left-open tap. I was appalled by the thought that despite all he’d done to us; despite how much he’d put upon this family; despite the torture he’d inflicted upon my Mother; despite the way he’d broken us — this madman did not appear to be remotely aware of what he’d caused. His life had simply gone on, unscathed, untouched.

11. He destroyed Father’s map of dreams.

12. He birthed the spiders that invaded our house.

13. It was he, not Boja, who planted the knife in Ikenna’s belly.

By the time Father switched off the engine, the golem that this new discovery had created in me had risen to its feet, and shaken off the extra layers of earth from its creation. The verdict was now inscribed on its forehead: Abulu was our enemy.

When we got to our room, I told Obembe, while he was slipping his short trousers over his naked waist, that I wanted to kill Abulu too. He froze, and gazed at me. Then, he moved forward and threw his arms around me.

That night, in the dark, he told me a story, something he hadn’t done in a long time.