The Fishermen

Chapter 17: The Moth

THE MOTH

I, Benjamin, was a moth:

The fragile thing with wings, who basks in light, but who soon loses its wings and falls to the ground. When my brothers, Ikenna and Boja, died, I felt like a fabric awning that had always sheltered me was torn off from over my head, but when Obembe ran away, I fell from space, like a moth whose wings were plucked off its body while in flight, and became a being that could no longer fly but crawl.

I had never lived without my brothers. I’d grown up watching them while I merely followed their lead, living a version of their early lives. I’d never done anything without them — especially without Obembe who, having absorbed much wisdom from the older two and distilled broader knowledge through books, had left me totally dependent. I had lived with them, relied on them so much that no concrete thought ever took shape in my mind without first floating through their heads. And even after Ikenna and Boja died, I’d lived on as if unaffected because Obembe had closed in on their absence, proffering answers to my questions. But he, too, was now gone, leaving me at the threshold of a door I shuddered to enter. Not that I feared to think or live for myself, I did not know how, had not prepared for it.

When I returned, our room was dead, empty and dark. I lay on the floor weeping as my brother ran, his rucksack on his back, his small Ghana-must-go bag in his hand. As the darkness gradually lifted over Akure, he ran on, panting, sweating. He must have run — perhaps spurred by the story of Clemens Forell — as Far As His Feet Would Carry Him. He must have trod along the silent, dark street and reached its end. He may have stopped there a while to look up at the swathe of plain tracks, unable to decide, for a moment, which way to go. But like Forell, he must have been subdued by the fear of capture, and the fear must have powered his mind like a turbine, spinning out ideas. He must have stumbled many times as he ran or fell into potholes, or was tripped by tangled foliage. He must have got tired along the way and become thirsty, needing water. He must have been drenched in sweat, becoming dirty. He must have raced on, carrying the black banner of fear in his heart, perhaps the fear of what would become of me, his brother, with whom he had attempted to put out the fire that had engulfed our household. And that fire had, in return, threatened to consume us.

My brother was probably still running when the horizon cleared and our street woke with the tremor of voices, loud cries and gunshots as if under an invasion by an enemy army. Voices barked orders and howled, arms banged on doors, feet stamped the ground with feral intensity and hands brandished guns and cowhides. They collected into a whole — half a dozen soldiers — and began banging on our gate. Then, once Father opened, they shoved him away, barking like wounded dogs: “Where are they? Where are those juvenile delinquents?”

“Murderers!” another spat.

As the tumult erupted, Nkem cried out as Mother rushed to the door of my room and banged repeatedly, calling, “Obembe, Benjamin, wake! Wake!” But while she spoke, the boots stamped in and the voices closed in on hers. There was an outcry, a shriek and the sound of one falling to the ground.

“Please, please officers, they are innocent, they are innocent.”

“Shut up! Where are those boys?”

Then the ferocious knocking and booting on the door began.

“Will you boys open now or I will blast your heads.”

I unlatched the door.

The next time I came home was three weeks after they took me away, long after my entrance into the new and frightening world devoid of my brothers. I had returned to have a bath. On Mr Bayo’s persistence, our lawyer, Barrister Biodun, had persuaded the judge to allow me to be brought here to have a bath at least. Not a bail, they’d maintained, but a reprieve. Father told me Mother had worried I had not had a bath in three weeks. At the time, whenever he told me something she’d said, I imagined as hard as I could, how she’d said it because, for all those three weeks, I’d hardly seen her speak. She’d relapsed into what she became after my brothers died — afflicted by invisible spiders of grief. But although she wasn’t speaking, her every gaze, every movement of her hand seemed to contain a thousand words. I avoided her, wounded by her grief. I’d once heard someone say — when Ikenna and Boja died — that a mother who loses a child loses a part of herself. When she put a bottle of Fanta in my mouth just before the second court session, I wanted to reach to her and tell her something, but I could not. Twice during the trial she lost control and screamed or cried out. One such time was after the prosecutors, led by a very dark man whose appearance in black apparel gave him the look of a movie demon, argued that Obembe and I were guilty of manslaughter.

On the day before my first trial when he’d visited me, Barrister Biodun had counselled me to just focus on something else, the window, the railing — anything. The wardens, men in brown khaki uniforms, had brought me out to meet him, my lawyer and Father’s old friend. He’d always come with smiles and a certain confidence that sometimes annoyed me. He and my father had come into the small room where I received visitors while a junior warden started a stopwatch. The place had a pungent smell that often reminded me of my school latrine — the smell of stale shit. Barrister Biodun had told me not to worry, that we would win the case. He’d said, too, that justice was going to be manipulated because we’d injured one of the soldiers. He was always confident. But Barrister Biodun, on this last day of my expedited trial, was not full of smiles. He was sullen and sober. The map of emotion splayed over his face was grainy and unintelligible. When he came to where Father and I stood at a corner of the courtroom, where he’d revealed the mystery about his eye to me, he’d said: “We will do our best and leave the rest in God’s hands.”

We returned home in Pastor Collins’s van. He’d come to pick me up with Father and Mr Bayo, who’d almost totally abandoned his own family in Ibadan, returning to Akure every now and then with the hope that they would secure my release and he would take me with him to Canada, where he lived with his children. I almost could not recognize him. He was now much different than the man I last saw when I was four or so. He was much lighter in complexion and tints of grey hair creased the sides of his head. He seemed to pause between speeches in the way a driver would pull the brake, slow down and ramp up again.

We drove in the van, the one with the name of the church, Assemblies of God Church, Araromi, Akure Branch and its motto, Come as you are, but leave as new, boldly inscribed on it. They spoke little to me because I’d barely answered questions, only nodding. Since the day I was first taken to the prison, I’d begun avoiding talking to my parents and Mr Bayo. I could not bear to face them. The salvation I had thrashed — the prospect of a new life in Canada — had hit Father so hard that I often wondered how he still kept on a calm veneer as if unfazed. I confided mostly in the lawyer, a man whose voice was thin like a woman’s and who often assured me, beyond every other person, that I would soon be released, with the refrain “in a short time.”

But as we drove home, unable to hold back the question that had been throbbing in my brain, I said: “Has Obembe returned?”

“No,” Mr Bayo said, “but he will soon return.” Father was about to say something, but Mr Bayo put it off by adding: “We have sent for him. He will come.”

I wanted to ask where they found him, but Father said: “Yes, true.” I waited, and then I asked Father where his car was.

“Bode has taken it for repairs,” was his curt riposte. He turned back and met my eyes, but I quickly looked away. “It’s got a ‘plug’ problem,” Father said. “Bad plug.”

He’d said this in English because Mr Bayo, a Yoruba, did not know Igbo. I nodded. We’d set into a road that was so beat-up and potholed that Pastor Collins, like other commuters, had to veer to the shoulder to escape the gaping maws. As he negotiated the boundary of a stretch of bush, a school of copse — mostly elephant grasses — rapped against the body of the van.

“Are they treating you well?” Mr Bayo asked.

He was sitting with me in the back seat, the space between us filled with tracts, Christian books and church advert bills, most of which featured the same images of Pastor Collins, holding a microphone.

“Yes,” I said.

Although I’d not been beaten or bullied, I felt I’d lied. For there had been threats and verbal slurs. The first day in the prison, amidst the inconsolable tears and frantic beating of my heart, one of the wardens had called me a “little murderer.” But the man had disappeared soon after they kept me in the empty, windowless cell with bars through which I could see nothing but other cells with men in them, sitting like caged animals. Some of the rooms were empty, except for the prisoners. Mine had a worn-out mat, a bucket with a lid into which I defecated and a water cask that was refilled once a week. The cell that faced mine was occupied by a fair-skinned man, whose face and body were covered with wounds, scars and dirt, giving him a horrible appearance. He sat at one corner of his cage, staring blankly at the wall, his expression vacant — catatonic. This man would later become my friend.

“Ben, do you mean you have not been beaten or hit at all?” Pastor Collins asked after I said yes to the first question from Mr Bayo.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Ben, tell us the truth,” Father said. He glanced back. “Please, tell the truth.”

I met his eyes again, and this time, I could not look away. Instead of speaking, I began to cry.

Mr Bayo reached for my hand, and began squeezing, saying: “Sorry, sorry. Ma su ku mo—stop crying.” He revelled in speaking Yoruba to my brothers and me. The last time he visited Nigeria, in 1991, he’d often joked about how my brothers and I, mere children, had learned Yoruba, the language of Akure, better than our parents.

“Ben,” Pastor Collins called in his tender voice as the van neared our district.

“Sir,” I answered.

“You are and will be a great man.” He raised one hand from the wheel. “Even if they end up putting you there — I hope not, and that won’t be the case in Jesus’s name—”

“Yes, amen,” Father interrupted.

“But should that happen, know that there will be nothing greater, nothing grander than that you will be suffering for your brothers. No! There will be nothing greater. Our Lord Jesus says: ‘For there’s no greater love than for a man to suffer for his friends.’ ”

“Yes! Very true,” Father yodelled, nodding fiercely.

“Should they put you there, you will not be suffering for mere friends, but for your brothers.” This one was answered by a clash between Father’s booming “Yes” and Mr Bayo’s foreign-accented vociferation of “Absolutely, absolutely, Pastor.”

“Nothing,” the Pastor repeated.

Father’s yodelling of “yes” took a turn for the worse at this, it even silenced the Pastor. When Father finished, he thanked the Pastor, heartily, gravely. Then, for the rest of the journey, we drove in silence. Although my fear of incarceration was now increased, the thought that whatever I faced, I would be facing it for my brothers, comforted me. It was a strange feeling.

I was broken earthenware filled with dust by the time we got home. David lingered around me, watching me from a distance but avoiding my eyes and darting backwards whenever I inched closer to take his hand. I moved around the house like a wretched stranger who’d suddenly found himself in the court of a monarch. I trod the ground with caution and did not enter my room. Every step I took brought the past to me with gripping palpability. I was little bothered by the days I’d spent on the unpaved floor of the cage-like room where I’d been confined for many days, with only a book to keep me company. I was bothered by the effect of the confinement on my parents, especially on Mother, and by the whereabouts of my brother. I thought, as I bathed, about what Father had revealed to me in the court the previous week, when, before a session, he’d drawn me to a corner of the court and said: “There’s something I must let you know” in a grave voice. I noticed he was crying. When we’d gone out of earshot of anyone else, he nodded and suppressed a grin in an attempt to conceal his grief. He raised his head again to look at me and moved his finger to the end of his eyes to wipe the tears. He removed his spectacles and stared at me with his bad eye. He hardly removed the spectacles since that day he returned home with a plaster around his eye, a scar on the left side of his face. He tilted his head forwards, held my hand and whispered.

“Ge nti, Azikiwe,” he said in a subtle Igbo. “What you have done is great. Ge nti, eh. Do not regret it, but your mother must never hear a word of what I tell you here now.”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said in English, his voice diminishing. “She must never. See, this thing in my eye is not a cataract, it was—” He stopped, gazing fixedly at me. “The madman you killed did it to me.”

“Eh!” I cried out, drawing attention from the surroundings. Even Mother looked up from where she was beside David, her hands encamped around her frail body.

“I told you not to shout,” Father said like a scared child, his eyes in Mother’s direction. “You see, after that madman came to your brothers’ service of songs, I was very hurt. I felt ashamed and I felt he’d smitten us enough. I wanted to kill him with my own hands, since neither these people nor this government would do it for me. I went with a knife but just as I advanced on him, he threw the content of a bowl in my face. That man you killed almost blinded me.”

He folded his hands together as I tried to make sense of what he’d told me, the image of the day he returned as poignant in my mind as the present. He rose and walked across the hall, while I found myself thinking of how fish in the Omi-Ala swam and how they were suspended and held up against the currents.

When I finished my bath, I wiped my body with Father’s towel and then wrapped it around me; I replayed what Father had told me earlier, before we came home.

“Bayo got both of you Canadian visas. If this hadn’t happened, you both would have been on your way there by now.”

I began to grieve again, and returned to the sitting room after my bath in tears. Mr Bayo was seated across from Father, his hands resting on both knees, his eyes completely focused on Father’s face.

“Take your seat,” Mr Bayo said. “Benny, when you go there today, don’t be afraid. Don’t be at all. You’re a child and the man you killed was not just a madman, but one that had wronged you. It will be wrong to jail you for this. Go there, say what you did and they will free you.” He paused. “Oh no, stop crying.”

“Azikiwe, I have told you not to do this,” Father said.

“No, Eme, don’t; he is but a child,” Mr Bayo said. “They will free you and I will take you to Canada the next day. It is why I’m still here — waiting for you. You hear?”

I nodded.

“Then, please wipe your eyes.”

His mention of Canada skewered my heart again. The thought that I had been close enough to going to the places in the photos he sent us or living in a house made of wood, the leafless trees under which his daughters, Kemi and Shayo, posed atop bicycles. I thought of “Western education,” this phenomenon that I’d craved so badly, the only thing I’d grown up thinking could ever make Father happy, slipping beyond my grasp. This feeling of lost opportunity so strongly overwhelmed me that, without a thought, I sank to my knees, clasped his legs and began saying, “Please Mr Bayo, take me now, why not take me now?”

For a moment he and Father exchanged glances, short of words.

“Daddy, please tell him to take me now,” I pleaded, rubbing my palms together. “Tell him to take me now, please, Daddy.”

In reply, Father sank his head down to his palms, weeping. It dawned on me for the first time that Father, our Father, the strong man, could not help me; he’d become a tamed eagle with broken claws and a crooked beak.

“Ben, listen,” Mr Bayo began but I was not listening. I was thinking of flying in an actual plane, soaring like a bird in the sky. It would be long after he’d spoken that I would recall he’d said: “I cannot take you now because, you know, they will arrest your father. We need to face them first. Don’t worry, they will free you. They have no other choice.”

He reached for my hand and slipped a handkerchief in it, saying: “Wipe your tears, please.”

I buried my head in the handkerchief so that I could recline away — even if for a moment — from a world that had now become a pool of fire threatening to obliterate me, a mere little moth.