The Fishermen

Chapter 14: The Leviathan

THE LEVIATHAN

But Abulu was a leviathan:

An undying whale that could not be easily killed by a band of valiant sailors. He could not die as easily as other men of flesh and blood. Although he was no different from other people of his kind — the insane vagabond who wallowed, by reason of his mental condition, in the lowest level of privation possible and was thus exposed to extreme dangers — he’d probably had closer shaves with death than any one of them. It was known too well that he mainly fed on filth — filth from dumps. Because he had no house, he fed from whatever he chanced upon — leftover meat scattered around the open-pavilioned abattoirs, crumbs of food from dumps, fruits dropped from trees. To have fed from there, for so long, one would expect him to have long contracted some infirmity. But he lived, hale and healthy, his belly bulging into a paunch. When he walked on a bed of shattered glass and bled out, people thought that was it, but he showed up again within days. Yet, these were only little stories of what should have killed the madman; there were many more.

Solomon had told us, when we convened at the Omi-Ala the day after the encounter with Abulu, that the reason he’d warned us sternly not to listen to Abulu’s prophecy was because he believed Abulu was an evil spirit manifesting in bodily form. To buttress this point, he told us of something he’d witnessed many months earlier. Abulu was walking by a roadside when he suddenly stopped. It was drizzling, and the rain was making him wet. Facing the road, the madman began calling to his mother who he believed was standing in the centre of the road, pleading with her to forgive him for all he did to her. As he pleaded, apparently conversing with her, he saw a car racing down from the other side of the road. Frightened, he began shouting to his mother to leave the road, but the apparition, who the madman was convinced was real, stood firm in the heart of the road. Abulu dashed onto the road just in the moment the car reached where he thought his mother had stood, to save her. The car swiftly pushed him to a grassy shoulder of the road, and slightly skidded off the road into the nearby bush before pulling to a halt. It was said that Abulu, thought to have immediately died, lay still for a while where the car had left him. Then he scrambled to his feet, bloodied all over, a gape on his forehead. When he stood, he began flapping his drenched clothes as though the car had merely blown a cloud of dust on him. He would limp away, frequently turning to the way the car had gone and saying: “Do you want to kill someone, eh? Can’t you stop when you see a woman on the road? Do you want to kill a person?” He limped on, asking innumerable questions as he went away, sometimes stopping to take a backward glance with his hand on the lobe of his ear to admonish the driver to drive slowly next time: “You hear, you hear?”

The day after Father announced our potential immigration to Canada, my brother shoved a sketch into my hand, and I sat gazing at it while he spoke.

“We could kill him with Ota-pia-pia. We could buy one and put it in bread or something, and give the madman, since he eats from everywhere and just about anything.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “he even feeds from gutters.”

“That’s true,” he said, and nodded. “But have you thought of why those years of feeding from these things haven’t killed him? Isn’t it from dumps and trash heaps he feeds? Why hasn’t he died?”

He expected an answer, but I said nothing.

“You remember the story Solomon told us about why he was really scared of him and wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him?”

I nodded.

“You see, then? Listen, while we must not give up, we must know that this man is strange. These stupid people”—the way he now referred to the people of Akure town because they allowed the madman to remain alive—“believe he is a kind of supernatural being who cannot be physically killed because; you know, they foolishly think his years of living outside the realm of human reasoning have altered his humanity, and hence he is no longer a mortal man.”

“Is this true?” I asked.

“If we feed him poisoned bread, people will think he died from something he ate by himself from some garbage dump.” I did not ask him how he’d found this out because he was the keeper of secret knowledge whom I unquestioningly believed. So, a while later, we went out with the front pockets of my brother’s shorts swollen with shredded pieces of bread marinated with rodenticide packed in a small sack. He’d got the bread by slicing out a piece from his breakfast the previous day. My brother had brought out the shrivelled crumbs and laced them some more with the poisoned mixture, filling the room with the piquant odour. He’d said that he wanted us to go out on “this mission” just once, and that would be it — just once. Armed with these, we went to the truck where Abulu lived, but he was not there. Although we’d heard that its door could still open and close, the truck was left almost perpetually opened. There were the rickety seats that were shrunken to their wooden bones, their flesh — the leather coverings — torn or worn off. Its rusted roof had holes through which rain entered. The seats were filled with various waste materials: a used blue curtain, which reached from the seat to the floor of the truck; the frame of an old kerosene lantern with its glass tube missing; a stick; papers; wrecked shoes; tins; and many other items picked from some trash.

“Perhaps it is not yet time,” my brother said. “Let’s return home and come back in the afternoon; perhaps we will find him then.”

We went home, and returned later that afternoon, after Mother had briefly come home to boil yams for lunch and gone back to her shop. When we got there, the madman was there all right, but nothing had prepared us for what we’d encounter. He was bent over a wok set on two big stones, and was emptying the liquid content of a water bottle. Pieces of wood — apparently intended as firewood — were piled between the stones, but they were unlit. After draining off the content of the bottle into the earthenware, the madman took up a beverage can whose content we could not easily decipher, turned it into the wok, and began painstakingly emptying its content into it. He would shake the tin, peer into it microscopically, and scratch out its content into the wok until, satisfied he’d emptied it, he placed the tin delicately on a small stool on which was a pile of assorted things. Then, dashing into his truck, he returned with what appeared to be a pack of leaves, some bones, a spherical object, a white powder that must have been salt or sugar. He poured these things into the wok and stepped back with a jolt as if he’d encountered the inflammable effect of plunging things into heated oil. It became clear, to my utter bemusement, that the madman was — or thought he was — cooking a gallimaufry of filth and waste materials. For a moment, we abandoned our quest and stood watching the scenario in disbelief until two men stopped by to join us as spectators of Abulu in his kitchen.

The men were dressed in cheap long-sleeved shirts tucked into soft-fabric trousers — one wore black trousers and the other one green. They held hardback books that we immediately knew were bibles; they had just left some church.

“Perhaps, we could pray for him,” one of the men — swarthy, with a balding that had stopped in the middle of his head — suggested.

“We have been fasting and praying for three weeks now,” the other said, “asking God for power. Isn’t it time to use it?”

The first man nodded sheepishly. And before he could respond, someone else said, “It surely isn’t.”

It was my brother; the two men turned to him.

“This man, here,” my brother continued with a countenance masked with fear, “is a fake. This is all pretence. He is a sane man. He is a well-known trickster who pretends to be like this to beg for alms, dancing on the roadsides, storefronts, or marketplaces, but he is sane. He has children.” My brother looked at me, although he was addressing the men. “He is our father.”

“What?” the balding man exclaimed.

“Yes,” my brother continued to my complete shock, “Paul, here”—he pointed at me—“and I have been sent by our mother to bring him back home, that it is enough for today, but he has refused to return home with us.”

He made a gesture of entreaty to the madman who was looking around the stool and the ground as though searching for a missing object, and did not seem to notice my brother.

“This is unbelievable,” the swarthy man said. “There’s nothing we won’t hear or see in this world — a man pretending to be insane just to earn a living? Unbelievable.”

Shaking their heads repeatedly, the men took their leave, bidding us to pray for God to touch him, and convict him of his greed. “God can do anything,” the swarthy one said, “if you ask in faith.”

My brother agreed and thanked them. When the men were gone out of earshot, I asked my brother what that was all about.

“Shh,” he said, grinning. “Listen, I was scared those men had some power. You never know: they have fasted for three weeks? Phew! What if they had power like Reinhard Bonnke, Kumuyi or Benny Hinn, and they could pray and get him healed? I don’t want that to happen. If he is well, he won’t roam about anymore, maybe he would even leave this town — who knows? You know what that means don’t you? That this man will escape, go scot-free after what he did? No, no, I won’t let that happen — over my dead bo—” My brother was forced to truncate his speech by what we now saw: a man, his wife and son about my age had stopped to watch the madman, who was chuckling. Obembe was saddened by this, as these people would again delay us till the madman left the spot. Discouraged, he concluded it was too open a place to use the poison, so we went home.

Abulu was not in his truck when we went to search for him the following day, but we found him near the small primary school with a high fence. From inside the compound, we could hear the uniform voices of children reciting poems and of their teacher breaking in, and sporadically asking them to give themselves a round of applause. The madman soon rose, and began walking majestically, his hands curved around him like the CEO of an oil company. Lying open, just a close distance from him was an umbrella with its skeletal ribs unclipped from its cleated battered tarpaulin. With his eyes fixed on a ring on one of his fingers, Abulu stamped about, chanting a string of words: “Wife,” “Now wed,” “Love,” “Marry,” “Beautiful ring,” “Now wed,” “You,” “Father,” “Marry”…

Obembe would tell me — after the madman and his gibberish had petered out of sight — that he was mimicking a Christian wedding procession. We followed him from a distance, slowly. We passed the place where Ikenna had pulled a dead man from a car in 1993. As we went, I thought of the potency of the rat poison we carried and my fear soared and again I began to feel pity for the madman, who seemed to be living just like a stray dog feeding everywhere. He often stopped, turned back, and posed like a model on a runway, stretching the hand that had the ring on it. We’d never been to this street before. Abulu made towards three women at a balcony, in front of a bungalow, plaiting the hair of one seated on a stool. Two of them gave him a chase, picking up stones and throwing them in his direction to scare him away.

Long after the women had retreated — they’d barely moved, and had only screamed at him to get his filthy self away — the madman was still running, looking back intermittently, the lascivious smile still on his face. The dirt track, as we would find out just shortly afterwards, was hardly used by cars because it ended with a wooden bridge about two hundred metres long over one part of the Omi-Ala. This made it easy for some street children to convert the track, only a few metres long, into a playground. The children lined four big rocks on both ends of the road, with spaces between them; the stones were the goal posts. They played football here, shouting and raising dust. Abulu watched them, his face filled with smiles. Then, positioning himself this and that way — with an invisible ball in his hand — he kicked wildly into the air, almost falling in the act. He shouted, thrusting his hands in the air with flourish, “Goaaaal! It. Is. A goalllll!”

When we caught up with him, we saw that Igbafe and his brother were among the boys. The moment we stepped on the bridge, I remembered the dream of the footbridge I’d seen around the time Ikenna was undergoing his metamorphosis. The familiar smell of the river, the sight of multi-coloured fish similar to the ones we used to catch, swimming at the edges of the waters, the sound of invisible croaking toads and chirping crickets and even the smell of dead river matter, all reminded me of our fishing days. I watched the fish closely because I’d not seen them swimming in a long time. I used to wish I was a fish, and that all my brothers were fish too. And that all we did, all day, every day, was swim forever and ever and ever.

As expected, Abulu began walking towards the bridge, his eyes fixed on the horizon, until he reached its foot. When he climbed, we felt his weight bear down on the wooden slab from the other end of the bridge where we were standing.

“We’ll run away, fast, once we feed it to him,” my brother said as the madman drew nigh. “He could fall into the water and die there; no one will see him die.”

Although I was afraid of this plan, I merely nodded in agreement. When Abulu climbed the bridge, he immediately went close to the railing and holding on to it, began urinating into the river. We watched until he finished, and his penis reclined like an elastic string relapsing to the centre of his waist, spitting a few last drops on the footbridge. My brother looked around to be sure no one was watching and brought out the poisoned bread and made for the madman as he went.

Now up close and certain he would soon die, I let my eyes take an inventory of the madman. He appeared like a mighty man of old when men shredded everything they grasped with bare hands. His face was fecund with a beard that stretched from the side of his face down to his jaw. His moustache stood over his mouth as though it had been applied there by fine brush strokes of charcoal paint. His hair was dirty, long, and tangled. Thick foliations of hair also covered a large part of his chest, his wrinkled and swarthy face, the centre of his pelvis, and encircled his penis. The matrixes of his fingernails were long and taut, and in the bed beneath each plate were masses of grime and dirt.

I observed that he carried on his body a variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeked of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and wastes. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, ditched underwear he sometimes wore. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sand of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. He had the smell of banana trees and guava trees, of the Harmattan dust, of trashed clothes in the large bin behind the tailor’s shop, of leftover meat at the open abattoir in the town, of leftover things devoured by vultures, of used condoms from the La Room motel, of sewage water and filth, of semen from the ejaculations he’d spilled on himself every time he’d masturbated, of vaginal fluids, of dried mucus. But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things. He smelt of death.

Obembe held out some bread for the madman, and he took it when he reached us. He seemed not to recognize us at all, as though we were not the same people he’d prophesied about.

“Food!” he said, sticking out his tongue. He then broke out into a monotonous chorus of words: “Eat, rice, beans, eat, bread, eat, that, manna, maize, eba, yam, egg, eat.” He bumped his knuckle into the palm of his other hand, and continued his rhythmic chant, which had been ignited by the word “food.”

“Food, food, ajankro ba, f-f-f-f-food! Eat this.” He bulked a space between his palms, imitating the shape of a pot. “Eat, food, eat, eat—”

“This is good food,” Obembe stuttered. “Bread, eat, eat, Abulu.”

Abulu rolled his eyes, now, with such dexterity that would have put the best eye-rollers to shame. He took a piece of the bread from Obembe, chuckled, and yawned as though it was a punctuation of some sort, and therefore part of the language he had just spoken. Once he took the bread, Obembe glared at me, drew back until, reaching a safe distance, we picked up speed. We’d run down another street before we thought to stop. In the distance, a wild motoring road undulated on a swathe of dirt road.

“Let’s not go too far away from him,” my brother said, panting, holding my shoulder for support.

“Yes,” I mumbled, trying to catch my breath.

“He will soon fall,” my brother purred, his eyes a horizon accommodating a single, radiant star of joy, but my eyes were filled with the rapid waters of ripping pity. The story Mother told of how Abulu sucked a cow’s teats had come to my mind just then, and so did the feeling that it was privation and destitution that had driven him to such desperation. In our fridge were cans of milk, Cowbell, Peak, all with pictures of cows. Perhaps, I’d thought, he could not afford any of these. He had no money, no clothes, no parents, no house. He was like the pigeons in the Sunday-school song we sang: “Look at the Pigeons, They Have No Clothes.” They have no gardens, yet God watches them. I thought that Abulu was like the pigeons, and for this I pitied the madman, as I sometimes found myself doing.

“He will soon die,” my brother said, cutting off my thoughts.

We’d stopped in front of a shed where a woman sold petty things. The shed was covered on the grille by netting under which a cashier-like space opened for interaction with customers. Hanging from the top of the grille were various sachets of beverage, powdered milk, biscuits, sweets, and other food. As we waited here, I imagined Abulu falling and dying away on the bridge. We’d seen him put the poisoned bread in his mouth, his moustached mouth shaking as he chewed. We saw him now, still holding the nylon, peering into the river. A few men passed him, one of them turning back to look at him. My heart skipped.

“He is dying,” my brother whispered, “Look, he is probably trembling now, and that is why the men are looking at him. They say when the effect begins, the body first starts to tremble.”

As if to confirm our suspicion, Abulu bent downwards to the bridge and appeared to be spitting onto it. My brother was right, I thought. We’d seen so many movies in which people coughed and foamed at the mouth after consuming poison, and then fell and died.

“We did it, we did it,” he cried. “We avenged Ike and Boja. I told you we will. I said it.”

Elated, my brother began talking about how we would now have peace, and how the madman would no longer bother people. He stopped talking when he saw Abulu starting to walk towards us, dancing and clapping as he went. This miracle came towards us dancing and singing rhapsodies of a saviour on whose palms nine-inch nails were driven and who would someday return to the earth. His psalmody whooped the darkening evening into an esoteric realm as we followed, shocked that he was still alive. We trudged along past the long road, past shops closing until Obembe, short of words, stopped, and turned back towards home. I knew that he, like me, had come to spot the difference between an unhurt thumb blood-covered from being dipped into a pool of blood, and a thumb robed in blood from a gash. He’d understood that the poison would not kill Abulu.

While the leech that infested my brother and me pasteurized our grief and kept our wound fresh, our parents healed. Mother cast away her mourning clothes towards the end of December and returned to normal life. She no longer burst out in sudden rage nor plunged into sudden declivities of grief, and it seemed the spiders had gone extinct. Because of her recovery, the valedictory service for Ikenna and Boja, which had been postponed for many weeks due to Mother’s illness, was held the following Saturday — five days after our first failed attempt on Abulu’s life. That morning, all of us in black dress, including David and Nkem, packed into Father’s car, which had had to be repaired the previous day by Mr Bode. His role in that tragedy had brought him closer to our family, and he’d visited many times, once with his betrothed, a girl whose set of protruding dentition made it hard for her to firmly close her mouth. Father had now called him “my brother.”

The service was composed of songs of valediction, a brief history of “the boys” rendered by Father, and a short sermon by Pastor Collins, who wore a gauze on his head that day. He’d had an accident a few days before on a motorcycle taxi. The auditorium was full of familiar faces from our neighbourhood, most of whom were members of other churches. In his speech, Father said Ikenna was a great man — Obembe cast a lingering stare at me when he said that — a man who would have led men if he’d lived.

“I will not say much about him, but Ikenna was a fine child,” he said. “A child who knew a lot of hardships. I mean, the devil tried to steal him, many times, but God was faithful. A scorpion stung him at age six—” Father was interrupted by a muted gasp of horror that ran through the congregation upon this revelation.

“Yes, at Yola,” he continued. “And just a few years later, one of his testicles was kicked into his body. I will spare you the rest of the details about that incident, but please know that God was with him. His brother, Boja—” and then the kind of silence I’d never experienced before in my life descended on the congregation. For, still at the podium, in front of the church, Father — our father, the man who knew all things, the brave man, the strong man, the Generalissimo, the commander of the forces of corporal discipline, the intellectual, the eagle — had begun to sob. A feeling of shame seized me at the sight of my Father openly weeping, I bent my head and fixed my eyes on my shoe while Father continued; albeit, this time, his word — like an overloaded lumber truck caught in Lagos traffic — slalomed through the pockmarked dirt of his moving speech, halting and jerking and slumping.

“He would, have been great, too. He… he was a gifted, child. He, if you knew him, he… was a good child. Thank you all for coming.”

After the long applause when Father’s hurried speech ended, the hymns began. Mother cried softly through it, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. A small knife of grief sliced slowly through my heart as I wept for my brothers.

The congregation was singing “It Is Well with My Soul,” when I noticed unusual movements. In a moment, heads began turning and eyes diverting towards the back. I did not want to turn because Father was seated beside us, next to Obembe. But just as I was wondering, Obembe tilted his head towards me, and whispered: “Abulu is here.”

I turned at once and saw Abulu, dressed in a muddied brown shirt with a large circle of sweat and grime, standing somewhere among the congregation. Father cast a glance at me, his eyes ordering me to focus. Abulu had attended the church many times before. The first time, he came in the middle of a sermon, walked past the ushers at the door, and sat down on a bench in the women’s row. Although the congregants instantly became aware that something unusual was happening, the Pastor preached on while the ushers, young men who kept watch at the doors, kept a close watch on him. But he maintained an unusual composure throughout the sermon, and when it was time for the closing prayer and hymn, he indulged in both as if he was not who everyone knew him to be. When the assembly was dismissed, he went out quietly leaving a stir in his wake. He attended a couple more times afterwards, mostly sitting in the women’s row, triggering a hot debate between those who felt his nudity was unwelcome because of the women and the children, and those who felt the house of God was meant for anyone who wished to come in, naked/clothed, poor/rich, sane/insane and to whom identity was of no importance. Finally, the church decided to stop him from attending services, and the ushers chased him with sticks whenever he came near the premises.

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.