The Fishermen

Chapter 18: The Egrets

THE EGRETS

David and Nkem were egrets:

The wool-white birds that appear in flocks after a storm, their wings unspotted, their lives unscathed. Although they became egrets in the midst of the storm, they emerged, wings afloat in the air, at the end of it, when everything as I knew it had changed.

The first was Father: the next time I saw him he had grown a grey beard. It was on the day of my release and I had not seen him and the rest of my family in six years. When they finally came, I noticed they had all changed beyond recognition. I was saddened by what Father had become — a gaunt, wiry man whom life, like a blacksmith, had beaten into the shape of a sickle. Even his voice had accrued a certain rancour as though the detritus of words long left unsaid inside the cave of his mouth had become rusty and scattered in tiny bits on the top of his tongue whenever he opened his mouth to speak. Although I could tell he had undergone many medical procedures over the past years, the changes were difficult to fully describe.

Mother had got much older, too. Like Father, a certain weight had gathered like a lump behind her voice, making her words come forth as if bogged down, the way obesity affects a person’s gait, causing them to lumber. While we sat on a wooden bench inside the prison house awaiting the final signature of the head warden, Father had told me about how the spiders returned to her vision after Obembe and I left home, but that she soon recovered. As he spoke, I looked at the opposite wall that was littered with different portraits of hateful men in uniforms and obituaries printed on cheap posters. The blue paint was weak, faded and mildewed from humidity. I let my eyes focus on the clock on the wall because I hadn’t seen one in a long while. The time was forty-two minutes after five and the little hand was moving towards the six.

But of all of them, it was the change that I noticed in David that surprised me the most. When I saw him, it struck me how he’d taken up Boja’s exact body. There was almost no difference in him except that, while Boja was characteristically spirited, David came across as shy and somewhat restrained. The first time he said anything after the initial pleasantries we shared at the prison compound was when we drove close to the heart of the town. He was ten. This was the same child, I recalled, for whom, in the memorable months leading to his birth (and Nkem’s), Mother would often break into a song she believed gave the unborn child joy, and we all believed this back then. My brothers and I would gather when she began singing and dancing, for her voice was enthralling. Ikenna would become a drummer, and would drum with spoons on the table. Boja would become a flautist, and he would make flute sounds with his mouth. Obembe would become a whistler, and he would blow whistles to the tune. I would become a cheerer, clapping to the beats while Mother repeated the refrain:

Iyoghogho Iyogho Iyoghogho, Ka’nyi je na nke Bishopu

na five akwola Let us go to the Bishop’s,

it is five o’clock Ihe ne ewe m’iwe bun

a efe’m akorako I’m only sad because

my laundry is still wet Nwa’m bun a-afo

na’ewe ahuli But I’m relieved to know that

the child in my womb is happy

A strong urge to draw David to myself and embrace him had seized me, when Father suddenly said: “Demolitions,” as if I had asked him. “Everywhere.”

He’d seen a crane somewhere in the distance pulling down a house, people gathered around it. I had seen a similar scene somewhere earlier, near an abandoned public toilet.

“Why?” I asked.

“They want to make this place a city,” David said without looking at me. “The new Governor has asked that most of those houses be brought down.”

A preacher, the only person allowed to see me, had told me about the change in government. Because of my age at the time, the judge had deemed me unworthy of a life imprisonment or capital punishment. And, also, I was not worthy of juvenile prison because I’d committed murder. Hence, they decided that I serve an eight-year incarceration without visits or contact with my family. That session, all of it, had been stored in a sealed bottle, and many nights in the cell, while mosquitoes buzzed around my ears, I’d catch sudden glimpses of the courthouse, green curtain waving, and the judge seated across on the elevated podium, his voice deep and guttural:

… you will be there till society deems you an adult, able to conduct yourself in a civilized way acceptable to the society and mankind. In light of this, and by the powers conferred in me by the Federal Justice System of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and by the recommendations of the jury that justice be tempered with mercy — for the sake of your parents, Mr and Mrs Agwu, I hereby sentence you, Benjamin Azikiwe Agwu, to eight years’ confinement without familial contacts — until you, now ten, shall reach societal-proved maturity age of eighteen. The court is hereby dismissed.

Then I would see how, in the immediate fear that seized me, I shot a glance at my father and saw a smile hop to his forehead like a praying mantis as Mother, with an outcry, and hands that helicoptered over her head, pleaded with God who lived there that He couldn’t afford to be silent when all this was happening to her, not this time. Then when the wardens handcuffed me, and began pushing me towards the back exit, my understanding of things suddenly shrunk to that of an unformed child — a foetus, as if everyone there were visitors who’d come to see me in my own world and were now about to leave — as if it wasn’t me, but them that were being taken away.

The prison, by policy, allowed a preacher to visit the inmates. One of them, Evangelist Ajayi, came every fortnight or so, and it was through him I kept abreast of the happenings in the outside world. He’d said, a week before I was told that I was to be released, that in the spirit of the first ever transition from military to civilian rule in Nigeria, Olusegun Agagu, the governor of the state of Ondo whose capital was Akure, had decided to free some prisoners. Father said my name had topped the list. And that sweltering day of May 21st, 2003 was fixed as the day of our release. But not all prisoners had been lucky. A year after I got into prison, in 1998, Evangelist Ajayi brought news that General Abacha, the dictator, died frothing at the mouth, and news floated that a poisoned apple had killed him. Then, exactly one month later, as he was about to be released, Abacha’s prime prisoner and arch enemy, M.K.O. died much the same way — after drinking a cup of tea.

M.K.O.’s afflictions had begun a few months after we met, when the 1993 election he was believed to have won was annulled, setting off a chain of events that put Nigeria’s politics on an unprecedented slide for the mud. One day in the following year, while gathered in the sitting room to watch the NTA national network news, we saw M.K.O. rounded up in his house in Lagos by a convoy of about two hundred heavily armed soldiers in armoured tanks and military vehicles, and then led off in a Black Maria; he’d been accused of treason and his long incarceration had begun. But although I had been aware of M.K.O.’s troubles, the news of his death came to me with the force of a blow from a weighted fist. I recall how I hardly slept that night, how I lay on the mattress, covered in the wrappa Mother gave me, and thought of how much that man had meant to my brothers and me.

We crossed a portion of the Omi-Ala, the largest in the town and I caught sight of men paddling the mud-coloured water, a fisherman casting a fishnet into the waters. A long line of street-lamp poles ballasted into the concrete lane divider tracked along the road. As we drove towards home, forgotten details of Akure began to open their dead eyes. I noticed that the road had changed a great deal, and that a lot had changed in six years in this city where I was born, in whose soil my feet had been planted. The roads had widened so that the sellers got pushed back many metres from the jumbled roadways, which often filled with cars and trucks. An overhead bridge had been constructed over the road on two sides. Everywhere, the cacophony of vendors crying their wares roused the silent creatures that had crept into my soul. A man dressed in a faded Manchester United jersey ran along as we stopped in the middle of the clogged traffic, banging on the car, as he attempted to shove a loaf of bread through the window near Mother’s side. She wound up the glass. In the distance beyond the nearly thousand cars that were honking and raving with impatience was a mighty semi making a slow U-turn under the overhead pedestrian bridge. It was this vehicular dinosaur that had brought the entire traffic to a halt.

Everything that moved around me now was in strong contrast to the years in prison — when all I did was read, gaze, pray, cry, soliloquize, hope, sleep, eat and think.

“Many things have changed,” I said.

“Yes,” Mother said. She smiled now and I remembered, in flashes, how spiders had tormented her.

I returned my eyes to the streets. As we drew near home, I heard my own voice say “Daddy, do you mean Obembe has not returned at all, all these years?”

“No, not even once,” Father answered sharply, shaking his head.

I wanted to catch Mother’s eyes when he said this, but she was staring out of the window and instead, my Father’s eyes met mine from the overhead mirror. I felt like telling them Obembe wrote to me a few times from Benin, that he said he was now living with a woman who loved him, and adopted him as a son. He’d entered a bus from Akure and travelled to the city of Benin the morning after he left home. He said he’d simply thought of Benin because of the story of the great Oba Ovonramwen of Benin who defied the British imperial rule and decided to go there. When he arrived at the city, he saw a woman coming out of a car and walked up bravely to her and told her he had nowhere to sleep. She took pity on him and took him to her house where she lived alone. He wrote that there were things that would sadden me if he told me and some things he thought I was too young to hear and may not understand, but he promised he would tell them later. The few things he said I should know, for now, were these: the woman was a widow who lived alone, and that he had become a man. He said, in that same letter, that he’d calculated the exact date of my release — February 10th, 2005—and that he would return to Akure that same day. He said Igbafe would keep him abreast of developments, and that way, he would know what happens to me.

Igbafe delivered his letters to me. My brother first met Igbafe when, once — after the first six months in exile — he tried to return home. He’d made the journey, but had been too afraid to enter our compound. He’d sought out Igbafe instead who told him everything and promised to deliver letters to me. He wrote almost every month over the next two years, through Igbafe, who would then give the letters to a junior warden to pass to me — usually with a bribe to persuade them. I often replied to the letters while Igbafe waited outside. But after the first three years, Igbafe suddenly stopped coming, and I never found out why or what became of Obembe. I waited for days and months and then years but nothing. Then all I got was the occasional letter from Father and once, from David. I began to read and reread the letters, about sixteen of them, that Obembe had sent me until the entire content of the last one he dated November 14th, 2000—it became stored in my head like water in a coconut:

Listen, Ben,

I can’t face our parents now and alone. I can’t. I’m to blame for everything that happened, everything. It was I who told Ike what Abulu said when the plane flew past — I’m to be blamed. I was so stupid, so stupid. Listen, Ben, even you have suffered because of me. I want to go to them, but, I can’t face them alone. I will come the day they release you so we can meet them together and beg them forgiveness for all we’ve done. I need you to be there when I come.

Obembe

As I thought of the letter, it struck me to ask about Igbafe. I thought I could perhaps find out from him why my brother had stopped writing. When I asked if Igbafe was still living in Akure, Mother gazed at me with a startling measure of surprise.

“The neighbour?” she said.

“Yes, the neighbour.”

She shook her head.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“What?” I gasped.

She nodded. Igbafe had become a truck driver like his father, ferrying timber from forests to Ibadan for two years. He died in an accident when his truck skidded off the road into a deathly crater carved by devastating erosion.

I held my breath when she relayed this. I’d grown up playing with this boy; he’d been there from the beginning and had fished the Omi-Ala with my brothers and me. It was terrible.

“How long ago was this?”

“Two years or so ago,” Mother said.

“Incorrect! — two and a half,” David interjected.

I looked up when he said this, seized by a strong feeling of déjà vu. I thought for a moment that this was 1992 or 1993 or 1994 or 1995 or 1996 and that it was Boja correcting Mother in that exact way. But this was not Boja, it was his much younger brother.

“Yes,” Mother said with half a smile, “two and a half years.” Igbafe’s death shocked me even more because I had not contemplated, at the time, the possibility that anyone I knew could have died while I was in prison, but many had. Mr Bode, the motor mechanic, was one of them. He was killed in a road accident, too. Father had written this in a letter, one in which I could almost feel his anger. The last three lines of that letter, charged and powerful, would stand strong in my memory for many years:

Young men are killed on rutted and dilapidated highway “death traps” called roads every day. Yet, these idiots at Aso Rock claim this country will survive. There lies the issue, their lies is the issue.

A pregnant woman rushed carelessly into the road and Father pulled to an abrupt halt. The woman waved in apology as she crossed. We soon entered where I reckoned was the beginning of our street. The streets from here had been cleaned up and new structures had been erected everywhere. It was as though everything had become new, as though the world itself had been born again. Familiar houses popped into sight like vistas rising from a fresh battleground. I saw the spot where Abulu’s old decrepit truck used to stand. All that was left was a few pieces of metal, like fallen trees, tangled in a garden of esan grass. A chicken and its chicks were grazing there, dipping their beaks mechanically into the soil. I was amazed at this sight, and I wondered what had happened to the truck, who had removed it. I began to think of Obembe again.

The more we drew near home, the more I thought of him and these thoughts threatened my infant joy. I began to feel that thoughts of a sun-splashed tomorrow — if Obembe did not return — would not breathe for too long. It would slump and die like a man staggering on with bullet holes. Father had told me that Mother had believed Obembe was dead. He said she buried a photo of him four years ago just after she returned from her year-long institutionalization at the Bishop Hughes Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. She said she had dreamt that Abulu killed Obembe like he killed his brother, impaled him with a spear to a wall. She’d tried pulling him off the wall, but he’d died slowly before her eyes. Convinced the dream was real, she began to mourn Obembe, wailing, refusing to be pacified. Father, who believed otherwise, felt it was best to agree with her for the sake of her healing. His friend, Henry Obialor, had advised him to let her get away with it as it was not wise to argue with her. David and Nkem had refused to allow it at first, citing that Abulu, being dead, could not have killed Obembe. But Father cautioned them, and allowed the belief to stay. He followed her to where she’d buried him beside Ikenna in a session she’d forced him to attend, threatening to take her own life if he didn’t. But what she buried was not him; it was a photo of him.

Father had changed so much that when he talked, he no longer made eye contact. I’d observed this in the prison reception hall where he’d told me about Mother. He used to be a stronger man; an impregnable man who defended fathering so many children by saying he wanted us to be many so that there could be diversity of success in the family. “My children will be great men,” he’d say. “They will be lawyers, doctors, engineers — and see, our Obembe, has become a soldier.” And for many years, he’d carried this bag of dreams. He did not know that what he bore all those days was a bag of maggoty dreams; long decayed, and which, now, had become a dead weight.

It was almost dark by the time we got home. A girl I immediately — but not without troubles — recognized to be Nkem opened the gates. She had Mother’s exact face and was much taller than a seven-year-old. She wore long braids that stretched down her back. When I saw her, I realized, at once, that she and David were egrets: the snow-white dove-like birds that appear after a storm, flying in groups. Although both of them had been born before the storm that shook our family, they did not experience it. Like a man asleep in the midst of a violent storm, they’d slept through it. And even when — during Mother’s first medical exile — they’d felt a touch of it, it had merely been a whimper, not loud enough to have awakened them.

But the egrets were also known for something else: they were often signs or harbingers of good times. They were believed to cleanse the fingernail better than the best nail files. Whenever we and the children of Akure saw them flying in the sky, we rushed out and flapped our fingers after the low-flying white flock travelling overhead, repeating the one-line saying: “Egrets, egrets, perch on me.”

The harder you flapped your fingers, the faster you sang; the harder and the faster you flapped your fingers and sang, the whiter and cleaner and brighter your nails became. I was thinking of these when my sister ran into my arms, and gave me a warm embrace, bursting into sobs while saying “Welcome home, brother, Ben” repeatedly.

Her voice sounded like music to my ears. My parents and brother, David, stood behind us, by the car, watching us. I was holding her, muttering that I was happy to be back when I heard someone toot aloud twice. I raised my head and saw, in that moment, the shadowy reflection of a person move across the fence of the compound near the well where many years ago, Boja had been pulled out. The sight startled me.

“There’s someone there,” I said, pointing towards the near darkness.

But no one moved; it was as if they had not heard me. They all stood there, watching, Father’s arms around Mother and a bright smile splayed on David’s face. It was as if they asked me, with their eyes, to find out what it was, or that they thought I was wrong. But as I looked in the direction where years ago, my brothers had fought, I saw the reflection of two legs climbing up the fence. I inched closer, the frenzied tom-toms of my heart roused to a fresh awakening.

“Who is there?” I asked aloud.

At first, there was no word, no movement, nothing. I turned back to my family behind me to ask who was there, but they were all fixed in one spot, staring at me, still unwilling to say a word. The darkness had enraptured them and they’d formed a backcloth of silhouettes. I turned again to the spot and saw the shadow rise against the wall and then stand still.

“Who is there?” I said again.

Then, the figure answered and I heard it loud and clear — as if no cause, no bars, no hands, no cuffs, no barriers, no years, no distance, no time had come between the time I last heard his voice and now; as if all the years that had passed were nothing but distance between when a cry was let out and the time it tapered off. That is: the time I realized it was him and the time I heard him say “It is me, Obe, your brother.”

For a moment, I stood still as his form began to move towards me. My heart leapt like a free bird at the thought that it was him, my veritable brother, that had now appeared as real as he once was, like an egret after my storm. As he came towards me, I remembered how in court, on the final day of my judgment, I’d seen what seemed like a vision of his return. Before I mounted the stand that day, Father had noticed that I had begun to cry again and pulled me aside to a corner of the courtroom, close to the massive aquamarine wall.

“This is not the time for this, Ben,” he whispered once we got there. “There isn’t—”

“I know, Daddy, I’m only sad for Mama,” I replied. “Please tell her we’re sorry.”

“No, Azikiwe, listen,” he said. “You will go there like the man I’ve trained you to be. You will go like the man you were when you took up arms to avenge your brothers.” A tear dropped down his nose as he carved the invisible torso of a huge man with his hands. “You will tell them how it all happened, you will say it all like the man I brought you up to be — menacing, juggernauts. Like — remember, like—”

He paused, his stray fingers on his shaven head, searching his mind for a word that appeared to have fallen to the back of his mind.

“Like the Fisherman you once were,” his quivering lips uttered finally. “Do you hear me?” He shook me. “I said do you hear me?”

I did not answer. I could not, even though I noticed that the commotion outside had increased and the wardens, who held me before, were now approaching. More people were trooping into the court, some of them newsmen with cameras. Father saw them and his voice soared with urgency. “Benjamin, you will not fail me.”

I was crying freely now, my heart pounding.

“Do you hear me?”

I nodded.

Later, after the court had been seated and my accuser — a hyena — had described details of Abulu’s wounds (“… multiple holes from a fish hook found on the body of the victim, a bust in the head, a punctured vascular tube on the chest…”), the judge asked to hear my defence.

As I made to speak, Father’s words—“menacing, juggernauts”—began to repeat themselves in my head. I turned and looked at my parents, who were seated together, and David beside them. Father caught my eyes and nodded. Then he moved his mouth in a way that made me reply with a nod. And once he saw me nod, he smiled. It was then that I let the words pour out, my voice soaring over the arctic silence of the courthouse as I began the way I had always wanted to begin.

“We were fishermen. My brothers and I became—”

Mother let out a loud piercing cry that startled the court, throwing the session into a tumult. Father struggled to cover her mouth with his hand, his whispered entreaties that she be mum, breaking out aloud. All attention went to them as Father’s voice leapt from communal apology: “I’m deeply sorry, your Lordship,” to “Nne, biko, ebezina, eme na’ife a—Do not cry, don’t do this.” But I did not look at them. I kept my eyes on the green curtains that covered the heavily panelled and dust-covered louvres high above the level of the seats. A strong push of wind flayed them gently so that they looked for a moment like green waving flags. I closed my eyes while the commotion lasted and reclined into an encompassing darkness. In the darkness I saw the silhouette of a man with a rucksack walking back home the same way he’d left. He was almost home, almost within reach when the judge knocked his staff on the table three times and bellowed: “You may now proceed.”

I opened my eyes, cleared my throat, and started all over again.