The Fishermen

Chapter 13: The Leech

THE LEECH

Hatred is a leech:

The thing that sticks to a person’s skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one’s spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them. It clings to one’s skin, the way a leech does, burrowing deeper and deeper into the epidermis, so that to pull the parasite off the skin is to tear out that part of the flesh, and to kill it is self-flagellating. People once used fire, a hot rod, and when they burned the leech, they left the skin singed. This, too, was the case of my brother’s hatred for Abulu; it was deep under his skin. For from the night I joined him, my brother and I put our door on near perpetual lock and convened daily to plan our mission, while our parents went to their workplaces: Mother to her shop and Father to the bookshop.

“First,” my brother said one morning, “we must conquer him here in our room.” He raised the papers on which he’d sketched his plans as matchstick men fighting and killing the madman. “In our minds, then on our papers before we can conquer him in the flesh. Haven’t you heard Pastor Collins say, many times, that whatever happens in the physical already has happened in the spiritual?” It was not a question to which he expected an answer, so he went on: “So, before we leave this room in search of Abulu, we must first kill him here.”

At first, we considered the five sketches of Abulu’s moment of destruction, the possibility of achieving them. The first one he referred to as “The David and Goliath Plan”; he hauls stones at Abulu and Abulu dies.

I questioned the possibility of the design succeeding. I reasoned that since we were neither servants of God as David was, nor were we destined to be a king like David, we might not be able to hit his forehead. It was a full sun-out moment of the day when I said this, and Obembe had turned on the ceiling fan. From somewhere in the neighbourhood, I heard a man hawking rubber sandals, crying his wares: “Rubber, rubber — hereeeeeee!” My brother sat in his chair, his hand on his chin, pondering what I’d said.

“Listen, I understand your fears,” he said finally. “You may be right, but I have always thought we could kill him by stoning, but how do we stone him? Where, at what time of the day can we do it without being caught in the act? Those are the real problems with that idea, not about being a king like David.”

I nodded in agreement.

“If we stone him when people can see, we can’t tell what might happen, and what if we aim wrong and hit someone else in the process?”

“You are right,” I said, nodding.

Next he placed the one in which Abulu was stabbed to death with a knife, just the way Ikenna was killed. He’d marked it “The Okonkwo Plan,” after the story of Things Fall Apart. The image scared me.

“What if he fights or stabs you first?” I said. “He is very wicked, you know?” I asked.

This possibility troubled my brother. He took a pencil and crossed out the sketch.

Then one after the other, we propped up an idea from a sketching, sank our teeth into it, and after we found it untenable, crossed it out. After we’d torn up all of them, we began weaving a set of imagined incidents, most of which we withdrew and discarded before they were fully formed. In one, we chased Abulu down the road on a windy evening and he fell into a running car, which knocked him to the ground and spilled the content of his head on the tarred road. I wove this fictional reality, my imagination spotted with pieces of the madman’s crushed body on the asphalt like one of the various road kills — chickens, goats, dogs, rabbits — I’d seen. My brother sat for a while, his eyes closed while his mind was at work on this. The rubber-sandals hawker had returned to the neighbourhood, this time crying even louder “Rubber, rubber — heeeee! Rubberrrrr sandals hereeee!” The hawker’s voice seemed to draw closer to our compound now, and was getting so loud that I did not realize my brother had started to speak. “—Good idea,” I heard him say, “but you know those ignorant fools, kowordly people who don’t know what that madman had done to our family, would try to stop us.”

Again, as always, I agreed that he was right. He tore it up and poured the pieces angrily on the floor.

The leech that was my brother’s resolve to avenge our brothers was so deeply embedded it could not be destroyed by anything, not even fire. Over the following days, once our parents left home, we went off to find the madman. We went in late mornings, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Although the new term had begun, we were not enrolled. Father had written to the headmistress of our school to allow us a term off to recover because we were not fit to resume school just yet, since the deaths of our brothers were still fresh in our minds. So to avoid meeting classmates or kids we knew around the streets and district, we trod covert paths. Over the following days of the first week of December, we combed the district for any sign of the madman, but found none. He was not at his truck, not around the street; he was not close to the river. We could not ask anyone about him, as people in the district knew so much about us and would often put on sympathetic faces when they met us as if we bore an insignia of the tragedy of our brothers’ deaths on our foreheads.

These failures did not deter my brother, not even what we heard about the madman that week, an incident that killed all the courage I had gathered when I pledged to join him in his quest. The madman had been elusive for many days — never once spotted around the district. So we began asking people we felt didn’t know us if they’d seen him. This way, we reached the end of our district to the north, near the big petrol station with the huge complex that had a motley-garbed human-shaped balloon that constantly bowed, tilted sideways, and waved its hands as the wind blew at it. There we found Nonso, Ikenna’s old classmate. He sat on a wooden stool on the side of a main road, newspapers and magazines spread on flat raffia sacks before him. He told us after shaking our hands with slaps, that he was the chief vendor of our district.

“Haven’t you heard of me?” he asked, with a voice that was cracked as though he was high on some drug, his eyes darting between our faces.

His earring glistened in the sun and his punk — a brush of equal hair in the centre of his head — was dark and polished. He’d heard of Ikenna’s death, how his “younger dude” stabbed him in the belly. He’d always hated Boja. “Anyway, may their souls rest in peace,” he said.

A man, who had been reading a copy of the Guardian, stood up, dropped the paper and gave Nonso some coins. When he put the paper on the table, I saw the slain Kudirat Abiola, wife of the 1993 presidential election winner on its front page. He gestured that we take the man’s seat on a bench just under a fabric awning. I thought of the day we encountered M.K.O.; she’d stood beside us, and had scratched my head with her ringed fingers. I remembered how her voice had carried equal measures of authority and humility when she asked the crowd to step back. In the photo on the cover of the newspaper, her eyes were shut and her face was lifeless — devoid of all hue.

“It is M.K.O.’s wife, don’t you know?” Obembe said, taking the paper from me.

I nodded. I recalled how, long after we’d met M.K.O., I’d longed to see the woman again. I’d thought, at the time, that I’d loved her. She was the first person I’d thought of as a wife. Every other woman was either a woman or someone’s mother or a girl, but she was a wife.

My brother asked Nonso if he had seen Abulu recently.

“That demon?” Nonso said. “I saw him two days ago — right here. On this main road just by the filling station, beside the corpse—”

He pointed to the dirt track by the side of the long main road that connected to a highway leading to Benin.

“What corpse?” My brother asked.

Nonso shook his head, took a small towel he habitually hung on his shoulder, and wiped ripples of sweat from his neck so that it glistened in the sun. “What, haven’t you heard?”

Abulu, he said, had found the body of a young woman killed early that morning — probably at dawn. Owing to the typical slow response of the traffic police in that part of Nigeria, the body had been allowed to remain on the spot for long, even until midday so that people who’d come that way had often stopped to see the body. When it was almost past noon, the corpse had begun to attract less attention when another mob started gathering around it, this time with an unruly cacophony. Nonso looked down the road but the mob blocked the view of what was going on at the centre.

His curiosity piqued to the extreme, he’d crossed the road to the gathering, abandoning his newspapers. When he got to the mob and negotiated his view, he saw the corpse of a woman, whose head lay on a nimbus formed by the blackened patch of her blood. Her hands were thrown sideways like he’d seen before, a ring glimmering on one of the fingers — the blood-soaked hair sticky and uneven in shape. But this time, it was naked, her breasts unclothed, and Abulu was on top of her, thrusting into her as the mob watched in horror. Some of them were arguing whether it was right to let him defile the dead while others held that the woman was already dead and that it was no harm; others claimed he should be stopped but those people were few. When he’d relieved himself, he fell asleep, clinging to the dead woman as if she was his wife until the police took her away from him.

My brother and I were so shaken by this story that we did not go out on any other reconnaissance mission that day. A shawl of dread of the madman fell over me and I could see that even Obembe, my brother, was afraid. He sat in the sitting room for long, silent until he fell asleep, his head against the top of the chair. I had started to dread the madman, to wish my brother would give it up, but could not face him to say it. I feared he would be angry or even hate me, but towards the end of that week, providence intervened — as I have now understood, now that things in the past are clearer — to save us from what was to come. Father announced that his friend, Mr Bayo, who moved to Canada when I was just three, had arrived in Lagos. It was over breakfast, and the news came like a flash of thunder. Mr Bayo, Father continued, had promised to take my brother and me with him to Canada. The news exploded over the table like a grenade, scattering shrapnel of joy all across the room. Mother shouted “Hallelujah!” and, rising from her chair, burst into singing.

I, too, was elated and my body was suddenly charged with wanton joy. But when I glanced at my brother, I saw that the expression on his face had not changed. A shade stood on his face as he ate. Had he not heard? It didn’t seem so, for he was bent over the table, eating as if he hadn’t.

“What about me?” David asked, tearfully.

“You?” Father asked, laughing. “You will go, too. How can a chief like you be left here? You will go; in fact, you will be the first on the plane.”

I was still wondering what my brother was thinking when he said: “What about our school?”

“You will get a better one in Canada,” Father replied.

My brother nodded and continued his meal; I was surprised by his lack of enthusiasm at what seemed the best news of our lives. We ate on while Father narrated the story of how Canada developed over a short period to surpass other countries, including Britain, from which it had emerged. Then he brought the talk down to Nigeria, down to the corruption that had eaten the entrails of the nation and finally, as usual, he berated Gowon, a man we had grown to hate, the man he’d repeatedly accused of bombing our village several times — the man who killed very many women during the Nigerian civil war. “That idiot,” he snapped, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat, his neck taut with sinews, “is the greatest enemy of Nigeria.”

After Father went to the bookstore and Mother left with David and Nkem, I went to my brother, who was fetching water from the well to fill the drum in the bathroom, a chore Ikenna and Boja used to do exclusively because he and I were thought to be too small to use the well. It was the first time anyone had fetched from it since August.

“If it is true that we are going to Canada soon,” he said, “then we have to kill that madman as soon as possible. We have to find him quickly.”

Before now, this would have excited me, but this time, I wanted to tell him to let us forget the madman and go and start a new life in Canada. But I could not. Instead, I found myself saying: “Yes, yes, Obe — we must.”

“We have to kill him soon.”

My brother was so worried by what should have been good news that he did not eat that night. He sat sketching and erasing and tearing, his temper burning until his pencil was reduced to a size of his finger and the table was filled with shredded paper. He’d told me at the well, shortly after our parents left for their workplaces that we must act quickly. He’d said it fiercely, pointing to the well: “Boja, our brother, decomposed here like — like a mere lizard in this place because of that madman. We must avenge or else; I’m not going to any Canada without doing that.”

He’d licked his thumb to accentuate his vow, to make me see that it was a vow. He was determined. He’d lifted the buckets of water he’d fetched and gone into the house, leaving me standing there, beginning to wonder — as he always left me to do — if I missed my brothers, Ikenna and Boja, just as he did. Then I would comfort myself by the conviction that I did, but was merely scared of the madman. I could not kill, either. It is evil, and how might I, only a child, do it? But my brother had said he would carry out the plan with all the powers of persuasion, determined that he would succeed, for his desire had become an indestructible leech.