The Fishermen

Chapter 8: The Locusts

THE LOCUSTS

Locusts were forerunners:

They swarmed Akure and most parts of Southern Nigeria at the beginning of rainy seasons. The winged insects, as small as the brown brush flies, would leap out of porous holes in the earth in a sudden invasion and converge wherever they saw light — it drew them magnetically. The people of Akure often rejoiced at the arrival of the locusts. For, rain healed the land after the dry seasons during which the inclement sun, aided by the Harmattan wind, tormented the land. The children would switch on bulbs or lanterns and hold bowls of water close so they could knock the insects into them or cause them to shed their wings and drown in the water. The people would gather and feast on the roasted remains of the locusts, rejoicing at the oncoming rain. But the rain would come down — usually on the day after the locust invasion — with a violent storm, plucking out roofs, destroying houses, drowning many and turning whole cities into strange rivers. It would transform the locusts from harbingers of good things into the heralds of evil. Such was the fate the week that followed Boja’s head injury brought to the people of Akure, to all Nigerians, and to our family.

It was the week in August when Nigeria’s Olympic “Dream Team” got to the final of the men’s football. In the weeks before that, marketplaces, schools, offices had lit up with the name Chioma Ajunwa, who had won gold for the ramshackle country. And now, the men’s team, having beaten Brazil in the semi-final, was now in the final with Argentina. The country was mad with joy. As people waved the Nigerian flags in the summer heat in faraway Atlanta, Akure slowly drowned. Thick rain, armed with a fierce wind, which had left the town in a blackout, poured through the eve of the night of the final match between Nigeria’s Dream Team and Argentina. The rain dragged into the morning of the match, the morning of August 3rd, and pummelled zinc and asbestos roofs until sunset when it weakened and ceased. No one went out of the house that day, including Ikenna, who spent most of the day confined to his room, silent except for times when his voice rose as he sang along to a tune on the portable radio cassette player that had become his main companion. His isolation had, by that week, become fully formed.

Mother had confronted him for the injury he’d inflicted on Boja, and he’d argued that he was right because Boja had threatened him first. “I could not have kept quiet and watched a little boy like him threaten me,” he’d insisted, standing at the threshold of his room even though Mother had begged him to sit down in the sitting room and talk. Then, after he’d said that, he burst into tears. Perhaps ashamed of this outburst, he ran into his room and shut the door. Mother would say that day that she was now certain that Ikenna was obviously out of his mind, and that everyone should avoid him until Father returned to bring him back to his senses. But my fear of what Ikenna had become was already growing stronger by the day. Even Boja, despite his initial threat that he would no longer be cheated, complied with Mother’s directions and stayed clear of Ikenna’s way. He’d now fully recovered from his wound and the plaster had been taken off, revealing a curved dent where the stitch had been made.

The rain stopped in the evening, close to the time when the match was to begin. Once it drew near, Ikenna disappeared. We’d all waited for electricity to be restored in time to see the crucial match, but at eight in the evening, there was still a blackout. All day, Obembe and I sat in the sitting room, reading by the dim light of the grey sky. I was reading a paperback edition of a curious book, in which animals spoke and had human names and all of them were domesticated — dogs, pigs, hens, goats, etcetera. The book did not have the wild ones I liked in it, but I read on, drawn by the way the animals spoke and thought like humans. I was deep into the book when Boja, who had been sitting quietly all along, told Mother that he wanted to go see the match at La Room. Mother was seated in the sitting room playing with David and Nkem.

“Isn’t it too late now — must you see the match?” Mother said.

“No, I will go; it is not too late—”

She seemed to ponder it a little while after which she looked up at us and said, “Okay, but be careful.”

We took the torchlight from Mother’s room and went out into the darkening street. All around there were pockets of buildings powered by generators that buzzed noisily, filling the neighbourhood with a confluence of white noises. People generally believed that in Akure, the rich bribed the National Electric Power Authority branch to interrupt power during big matches like this one so they could make money by setting up makeshift viewing centres. La Room was the most modern hotel in our district: a four-storeyed building, walled around with a high barbed-wire fence. At night, even in the absence of electricity, the bright fluorescent lamps stretching from within its walls cast a still pool of light over a stretch of the surroundings. La Room had that night, as on most nights when this power interruption occurred, turned its reception hall into a makeshift viewing centre. A big signboard outside the hotel attracted people with a coloured poster with the logo of the Olympic Games and the inscription: Atlanta 1996. And indeed, the hall was full when we got there. There were people in every corner of the hall, in different positions, trying to glean a view from the two fourteen-inch television sets placed opposite each other on two high tables. The viewers who had arrived the earliest had occupied the plastic seats closer to the television sets and a growing crowd now massed up behind them, watching.

Boja found a spot from which one of the televisions could be glimpsed and sneaked in between two men, leaving Obembe and me, but we, too, finally found a spot from where we could only see intermittently if we bent leftwards through a small space between two men whose shoes reeked like rotten pork. Obembe and I were submerged for the next fifteen minutes or so in a sickening claustrophobic sea of bodies that gave off the most profound smell of humanity. One man smelt of candle wax, another smelt of old clothes, another of animal flesh and blood, another of dried paint, another of petrol, and one, of sheet metal. When I got tired of covering my nose with my hand, I whispered into Obembe’s ear that I wanted to go back home.

“Why?” he asked, as if surprised, although he too was scared of the big-headed man behind him, and probably wanted to leave as well. The man had eyes that stared inwards at each other, the kind of eyes commonly known as quarter-after-four eyes. Obembe was also afraid because this scary-looking man had barked that he should “stand properly,” and rudely shoved Obembe’s head with his dirty hands. The man was a bat: ugly and terrible.

“We shouldn’t go; Ikenna and Boja are here,” he whispered back, stealing gazes at the man from the corner of his eyes.

“Where?” I whispered back.

He let a good time pass, slowly tilting his head backwards until he was able to whisper: “He’s seated in front, I saw—” But his voice was ferried away by the sudden uproar that broke out. Frantic cries of “Amuneke!” and “Goal!” rent the air, throwing the hall into a tumult of jubilation. The bat-like man’s companion elbowed Obembe in the head while flailing his arms in the air, shouting. Obembe let out a yelp that was absorbed by the riotous wail so that it appeared as if he was rejoicing with the men. He fell against me, cringing with pain. The man who’d hit him did not even notice, but went on shouting.

“Let’s go home, this place is bad,” I said to Obembe after I’d said a dozen “Sorry, Obe.” But feeling this might not convince him, I said what Mother often said when we insisted on going out to see a football match: “We mustn’t see this match. After all, should they win, the players aren’t going to share the money with us.”

This worked. He nodded in acceptance, stifling tears. I managed to edge forward and tapped Boja on the shoulder where he stood, sandwiched between two older boys.

“What?” he asked hurriedly.

“We’re going.”

“Why?”

I did not reply.

“Why?” he asked again, eager to return his eyes to the screen.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Okay, see you then,” he said, and swiftly turned back to the television.

Obembe asked for the torchlight but Boja did not hear the request.

“We don’t need the torchlight,” I said, as I struggled for space between two tall men. “We can walk slowly. God can guide us home safely.”

We went out, his hand on the place the man had elbowed, perhaps feeling it to see if it had swollen. This night was dark — so dark we could barely see except for the light of cars and motorcycles intermittently passing on the road. But they were very few because everyone seemed to be somewhere, watching the Olympic match.

“That man’s a wild animal, he couldn’t even say sorry,” I said, fighting the increasing urge to cry. It was as though I could feel Obembe’s pain just as he did; the urge to cry overwhelmed me.

“Shhhh,” Obembe said just then.

He pulled me into a corner close to a wooden kiosk. At first I did not see anything, and then I, too, saw what he’d seen. For there, standing by the palm tree outside our gate was Abulu the madman. The sight had come with such suddenness that it seemed unreal to me at first. I had not seen him since the day we encountered him at Omi-Ala, but in the days and weeks that passed, in absentia — or perhaps from a distance — he’d gradually filled my life, our lives, with his afflictive presence. I’d heard his story, been warned against him, had prayed against him. Yet I’d not seen him, and without knowing it, I’d been waiting to — even wanting to see him. And there he was, standing in front of our gate, staring intently into our compound, but seemingly not trying to enter it. Obembe and I stood there watching him as he gesticulated, waving his hand in the air as if in a conversation with someone he alone could see. Then, suddenly turning, he began walking towards us, whispering something as he went along. As he passed us, we heard — between muffled breaths — the whispering of something that I reckoned Obembe had heard distinctly, too; for he grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the madman’s path. Panting, I watched him walk away into the outstretched darkness. A shadow of him created by the headlamps of our neighbour’s truck loomed briefly over the street and then vanished as the truck drew closer.

“Did you hear what he was saying?” Obembe asked me once we lost sight of him.

I shook my head.

“Didn’t you?” he breathed.

Just as I was about to answer, a man carrying a child on his shoulders waddled past. The child was mumbling a nursery rhyme:

Rain, rain, go away

Come again another day

Little children want to play…

They were barely out of earshot when Obembe asked again.

I shook my head — to gesture that I hadn’t, but it was a lie. Although not distinctly, I’d heard the word Abulu had repeated as he passed. It had sounded the same way it did the day the end of our peace was initiated: “Ikena.”

A dubious joy swept through Nigeria, spreading from evening into morning the way locusts pour down at night, and vanish by sunrise, leaving their wings scattered through the town. Obembe, Boja and I rejoiced deep into the night, listening as Boja gave us a minute-by-minute commentary of the game, movie-like, so that Jay-Jay Okocha dribbled the opponents the way Superman delivered the kidnapped, and Emmanuel Amuneke had jet-balled his goal-scoring kick like a Power Ranger. Mother had to intervene around midnight, insisting that we retire to bed. When at last I slept, I had a million dreams and was asleep into the morning when Obembe tapped me forcefully, screaming “Wake up! Wake up, Ben — they are fighting!”

“Who, what?” I asked in confusion.

“They are fighting,” he clattered. “Ikenna and Boja. It’s a serious fight. Come.” He moved in the ray of light like a disoriented moth and then, turning to see me still in the bed, cried: “Listen, listen — it is fierce. Come!”

Long before Obembe woke me, Boja had woken up, cursing. The rickety lorry of our cross-wall neighbours, the Agbatis had torn through the thin layer that separated the dream world from the unconscious world with the sporadic buzz of vroom! vroommm! vroommmmm! Although the truck woke him, he’d wanted to wake early so he could go practise drum-beating with other boys of our church. He had a bath, ate his portion of the bread and butter Mother, who’d gone to her shop with David and Nkem, had left for us, but had to wait to change into a new shirt and trousers, because — although he had stopped sleeping in the room he shared with Ikenna — his possessions were still in his closet. Mother, the falconer, had repeatedly pleaded that he move in with Obembe and me, saying: “Ha pu lu ekwensu ulo ya—Leave the devil to his den.” But Boja did not yield. He contended that the room was his as well as Ikenna’s, and that he would not leave. And since Ikenna and he were not speaking, Boja had to often wait for Ikenna to wake and unlock the door without having to ask Ikenna to open it. Ikenna, however, had stayed out for most of that night to partake in the wild street celebrations that had swept through Nigeria, and remained in the room well into noon. Obembe would add, too, much later to me alone that Ikenna had returned home drunk. He’d said he’d perceived a strong smell of alcohol on Ikenna when Obembe let him in through our shutters because Mother locked the main door and gate at midnight.

Boja waited restlessly with roiling anger. Then, close to eleven, his patience had all been used up, and he went to the door and knocked, first softly, then desperately. Obembe said Boja, in frustration, pressed his ear to the door as though it was a stranger’s house and turned to him as if struck by lightning, and said: “I can’t hear any sign of life. Are you sure Ikenna is still alive?”

Boja had asked this question, Obembe said, with genuine concern as if he was scared something evil had happened to Ikenna. Boja had then listened afresh for signs of life, before beginning to knock again, this time louder, calling on Ikenna to open the door.

When no response came, Boja began ramming his body against the door desperately. When he stopped, he stepped back, his eyes filled with relief and fresh fear.

“He is inside,” he mumbled to Obembe as he moved away from the door. “I heard movements just now — he is alive.”

“Who is the madman that was disturbing my peace?” Ikenna barked from the room.

Boja didn’t speak at first. Then he shouted, “Ikenna, you are the madman not me. You’d better open the door right now; the room is mine, too.”

A few hastened footfalls, and in a flash, Ikenna was out. He’d come out with such speed that Boja had not even seen the blow coming, he’d simply found himself on the ground.

“I heard all you said about me,” Ikenna said as Boja attempted to rise back to his feet. “I heard it all — how you said I was dead and not alive. You, Boja, with all I’ve done for you, wish me dead, right? And, upon that, you even call me a madman. Me? I will show you today—”

He was still speaking when Boja, in a move as quick as lightning, scissored his legs, and sent him crashing against the door and into the room. Boja sprang up as Ikenna, grimacing in pain, swore and cursed.

“I am ready for you, too,” Boja said from the threshold of the main door. “If this is what you want, come out to the open space in the backyard so we don’t destroy anything in the house, so that Mama will not find out what happened.”

Once he said that, he dashed out to the backyard, where the well and the garden were located, and Ikenna followed him.

The first thing I saw when I got to the backyard with Obembe was Boja trying to duck a blow from Ikenna’s clenched fist, but failing so that the blow landed on his chest and sent him staggering backwards. As Boja tried to steady his feet, Ikenna pushed him down with his leg. He followed him to the ground as they tore at each other like gladiators of fisticuffs. I was gripped with indescribable horror. Obembe and I were transfixed in the doorway, unable to move, pleading with them to stop.

But they paid no heed, and we were soon distracted by the fierceness of the blows and stunned by the feral quickness of their legs as they swirled together. Obembe screamed when a blow hit one of them and gasped when either of them yelped in pain. I could not stand the scene either. I’d sometimes close my eyes when one of them made a violent move and open them when the move had been completed, my heart thumping. Obembe resumed pleading again when Boja started bleeding from a cut above his right eye. But Ikenna chewed him out.

“Shut up,” he snarled, spitting into the dirt. “If you don’t shut up, now, both of you will join him. Idiots. Didn’t you see when he talked to me the way he did? I’m not to be blamed. He started this and—”

Boja cut him off with a ferocious punch to his back, grappling for Ikenna’s waist; they crashed onto the earth, raising a fume of dust. They fought on with fierceness uncommon when boys of that age engage their siblings in a fight. Ikenna punched with a zeal that was far greater than he’d punched the chicken-selling boy at the Isolo market who called Mother an ashewo—a whore, when she refused to buy his chicken one Yuletide season. We’d cheered him and even Mother, who detested every form of violence, had said — after the boy got back on his feet, picked up his portable raffia-plaited poultry cage and took flight — that the boy had deserved the beating. Yet, Ikenna’s blows this time were far harder — far weightier — far stronger than ever before. Boja too kicked and lunged with more daring than he did when he fought the boys who’d threatened to stop us from fishing at Omi-Ala one Saturday. This fight was different. It was as though their hands were controlled by a force that possessed every bit of their beings, even down to the smallest plasma of their blood, and it was perhaps this force — and not their conscious beings — that caused them to deploy such heavy-handed tactics against each other. As I watched them fight, I was seized by the presentiment that things would not remain the same after this. I feared that every blow was imbued with an impregnable power of destruction that cannot be stayed, contained or reverted. As these feelings seized me, my mind — like a whirlwind gathering dirt into its concentric fold — went into a mad spin of frenzied thoughts, the most dominant of which was the strange and unfamiliar thought that overpowered all else: the thought of death.

Ikenna broke Boja’s nose. Blood gushed out in spurts and dripped down from his jaw to the dirt. In visible pain, Boja sank to the ground, weeping and dabbing his bloodied nose with the rags his shirt had become. Obembe and I, at the sight of Boja’s bloodied nose, began to cry. I knew that the fight was long from being over. Boja would avenge this terrible blow, for he was never one to chicken out. When I saw him beginning to creep towards the garden, attempting to rise, an idea came to me. I turned to Obembe and told him we should get a grown-up to separate them.

“Yes,” he agreed, tears trickling down his cheeks.

We dashed off at once into the next house, but there was a padlock on the gate. We’d forgotten that the family had travelled out of town two days before and would not return until later that evening. As we made off from here, we saw Pastor Collins — the pastor of our church — driving past in his van. We waved at him frantically, but he did not see us. He drove on, bobbing his head to some music on the car’s stereo. We hopped an open sewer in which was the mangled body of a dead snake, one that appeared to be growing into a python, smashed dead with stones and pelts.

The man we found at last was Mr Bode, the motor mechanic, who lived three blocks from our house in a chain of unpainted and unvarnished bungalows. It was a half-completed building with pieces of wood and small heaps of sand lying about. Mr Bode had a military appearance: a towering height, heavy biceps, and a face that was as stern as the cavernous bark of an iroko tree. He’d just returned from his workshop to relieve himself at the latrine he shared with the other occupiers of the five rooms of the bungalow when we found him. His trousers were still unbuckled, his boxers pulled up to his waist as he washed his hands at the long-necked tap that sprouted out from the ground near the wall, humming a tune.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Obembe greeted.

“My boys,” he replied and raised his head to look at us. “How are you?”

“We are fine, sir,” we chorused.

“What is it, boys?” he asked, wiping his hand against his trousers, which was black with grime and car oil.

“Yes, sir,” Obembe replied. “Our brothers are fighting and we — we—”

“They are bleeding, eje ti o po—much blood,” I said, seeing that Obembe could not continue. “Please come and help us.”

The man’s face contracted as he gazed on at our tearful faces as if attacked by a sudden stroke. “What kind of thing is this?” he said, waving his wet hands to dry them. “Why are they fighting?”

“We don’t know, sir,” was Obembe’s curt riposte. “Please come help.”

“Okay, let’s go,” Mr Bode said.

He darted back towards the house as if going for something, but stopped short and gesturing forward, said: “Let’s go.” Once on the way, my brother and I began to run but stopped so Mr Bode could catch up.

“We have to be quick, sir,” I begged.

At this, Mr Bode began running, too, barefooted. Close to home, two women blocked the edge of the sidewalk. They were dressed in cheap grime-tainted gowns, and each bore a sack laden with corn on her head. Obembe brushed past one of them and two small cobs fell from a hole in the sack. The woman swore as we raced away.

The first thing we saw when we got to our compound was the pregnant goat with a bloated belly and sagging udders, owned by our neighbours. It crouched near the gate, bleating with its tongue unfurled from its mouth like adhesive tape unrolled from its spool. All around its dark, heavy and reeking body were small black pods of its faeces, some squashed into brown pus-like paste and others coagulated in twos, threes and multiples. The only sound I could hear from the compound was the huee, huee sound of the goat’s heavy breathing. We ran to the backyard, but all we saw were pieces of rags from what had been their clothes, bloodstains streaked into the dirt, and a palimpsest of rich dirt defaced with their footprints. It was impossible to have imagined they could have ended the fight without mediation. Where had they gone? Who’d intervened?

“Where did you say they were fighting?” Mr Bode asked, bemused.

“Here, on this spot,” Obembe replied, pointing to the dirt, tears welling in his eyes.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir,” Obembe said, “here, right here is where we left them. Here.” Mr Bode looked at me and I said, “Here, they were fighting here. See the blood.” I pointed to the spot where blood had mixed with earth and formed into a lump, and another spot where there was a wet, rounded, dark patch the shape of a half-closed eye.

Mr Bode gazed on in confusion and said: “Then where might they be?” He began looking about him again and as he did, I wiped my eyes and blew my nose into the dirt. A low-flying bird, a pigeon, perched on the fence by my right hand, fluttering its wings rapidly. As though threatened, the bird leapt off, and glided over the well to the fence. I looked up to see if Igbafe’s grandfather was still where I’d seen him seated during the fight. But he, too, was no longer there. A plastic cup was on the chair where he’d sat only a while ago.

“Okay, let us go look inside the house,” I heard Mr Bode say. “It is well, let’s go. Maybe they stopped fighting and went back inside.”

Obembe nodded and led the way while I remained in the backyard. The goat came doddering towards me, bleating. I made a move to deter it, but it merely halted, raised its horned head and bleated like a speechless creature that, having witnessed something terrible, was mustering all its strength to force out a sensible speech to report it. But even in its best effort, the best it could only come up with was a deafening bleat of mbreeeeeeeeeeeh! — a bleat which, looking back now, I recognize must have been a plea in hircine-speak.

I left the goat and headed for the garden. Obembe and Mr Bode went inside the house, calling my brothers’ names. I was negotiating my way through the heads of corn that had started thriving in the soft rain of August and had almost reached the end of it — where the old asbestos sheets lay piled against the wall — when I heard a sharp cry from the direction of our kitchen. At once, I made a mad rush towards there. I found the kitchen in disarray.

The top shelves were opened and inside them was an empty bottle of Horlicks, a can of yellow custard and old coffee tins that sat atop each other. Lying by the door, broken at the arm, and pointing its soot-black feet upwards, was Mother’s plastic kitchen chair. A pool of reddish palm oil mapped across the top of the board beside the sink filled with unwashed plates, dripping down its edge to the floor. The blue cask in which the oil had been stored now lay on the ground on its side, blackened at the dregs, the last of the oil still in it. A fork lay like a dead fish, still, in the pool of red oil.

Obembe was not alone in the kitchen. Mr Bode stood beside him, his hands on his head, gnashing his teeth. Yet, there was a third person, who, however, had become a lesser creature than the fish and tadpoles we caught at Omi-Ala. This person lay facing the refrigerator, his wide-opened eyes still and fixed in one place. It was obvious these eyes could not glimpse a thing. His tongue was stuck out of his mouth from which a pool of white foam had trailed down to the floor, and his hands were splayed wide apart as though nailed to an invisible cross. Half-buried in his belly was the wooden end of Mother’s kitchen knife, its sharp blade deep in his flesh. The floor was drenched in his blood: a living, moving blood that slowly journeyed under the refrigerator, and, uncannily — like the rivers Niger and Benue whose confluence at Lokoja birthed a broken and mucky nation — joined with the palm oil, forming an unearthly pool of bleached red, like puddles that form in small cavities on dirt roads. The sight of this pool caused Obembe, as if possessed of a prating demon, to continue to utter with quivering lips the refrain “River of red, river of red, river of red.”

It was all he could do, for the hawk had taken flight, soaring on an unapproachable thermal. All that there was to do was scream and wail, scream and wail. I, like Obembe, stung to stillness by the sight, cried out the name, but my tongue became lost to Abulu’s so that the name came out corrupted, slashed, wounded, subtracted from within, dead and vanishing: Ikena.