Mount Pleasant

by Patrice Nganang

  Amused by this learned black civil servant, the man with the missing teeth offered Ngono a beer, which he didn’t refuse.

  “Can you say it again, comrade…” he pleaded. “Er…”

  He couldn’t even say the word without bursting into laughter.

  “Suchen?”

  This was a kind of German these men never heard in this red part of town. To think it was an imperial subject who brought it into their dusty bar! The African had awoken in them a paternalism they never would have expected to find in their Communist hearts. One after the other they bought him a beer, and surprisingly, Ngono never said no. Did he have that many worries to drown? Did the memory of the job he’d quit hurt that much? Probably not. No, it was more likely a sudden wave of homesickness, a longing for a certain type of liquor, a certain dish, a certain smell of the earth. Ngono knew that bottles of German beer wouldn’t fill his need, for he couldn’t even name what he was missing without bursting into tears. Was he already as drunk as the men he was talking to? If he was laughing with them, it was because laughing lifted his melancholy. If he drank all those bottles offered by his newfound friends, it was for a very simple reason: it was the cheapest way to get drunk.

  “Comrade,” said the men.

  And he answered, “Jawohl!”

  That night’s police report ended with a simple question: Had Ngono become a Communist? Nothing proved he had read Marx as enthusiastically as Mann and Rilke. So let’s set that aside. When the bar shut its doors behind him, the lecturer found himself once more on the painful path he thought he had drowned. His furtive shadow scurried away like a black cat. Ngono was too far gone to follow it. And yet he knew the far-off place where his torment hid. He looked at the stars, smiled at their nightly dance, then recited poems by Rilke to bolster his courage. His mother tongue brought to mind a certain Ewondo song from his village, which he whistled and sang through the streets of Berlin. It was a counting song, and it warmed his heart. When the song faded in his mouth, he started talking to the lampposts in Ewondo. And just maybe, thanks to all he’d had to drink, the lampposts answered, bending down to tip their hats and swathe him in their satiny glow.

  “Comrade!” they said.

  He was clearly drunk, but Ngono was sure of what he heard. He was so convinced of the good manners of Berlin’s lampposts that when a voice behind him called out “Nigger,” he knew it wasn’t a lamppost that had spoken, but a stranger.

  “Hey! You, nigger!” the voice shouted.

  Another voice added, “Don’t you hear us?”

  What Ngono heard were footsteps, hurried footsteps coming from a dark alleyway. He started to run.

  The footsteps ran with him.

  5

  Love’s Apprenticeship

  Still in 1913, but thousands of kilometers away. It is impossible to flee your mother’s welcoming breast! Nebu, then a young man, learned this at his own expense when he jumped out the window of the House of Passion, raced through the forest, and realized that his steps were leading him inexorably back to his mother’s house in Foumban.

  “Here’s what happened,” said the doyenne.

  She was telling this story in such a way that I would have sworn she had lived it herself. It was as if Nebu’s life had taken possession of her. She let her soliloquy flow, her eyes fixed on a past that came back to her in spurts of blood. She had become Nebu, yes, and what’s more, I could hear a new intonation in her voice. Once again, eighty years later, Bertha’s son reappeared in her volcanic flesh. But she was also Sara, the little girl disguised as a boy so that the stories of far-off men and women might find their resolution. Sara relived the stages of her metamorphoses; she became Ngungure, the girl starving for a body. Her voice changed again; she barked and shrieked because she needed me to know all the details of what had happened in the House of Passion …

  “How do you know all this?” I asked again and again.

  Sara just smiled, then replied ironically, “And you, just how do you know what you’re telling me about my father?”

  “The archives,” I explained. “The German archives.”

  “My body is an archive,” retorted the doyenne. “It remembers stories that I don’t know.”

  Where should I put my trust? In the capricious memory of an old lady or in the colonial archives? In the written lies of Berlin’s vice squad or in the faded image of Foumban’s courtyards, where, by all accounts, Sara had never set foot? Should I just put my faith in the heartbeats around me, searching Nsimeyong’s winding pathways, looking for the truth of a story that had taken place in the most forgetful neighborhoods imaginable? There are choices I would have preferred not to make—that’s for sure!

  All around us, life spread out in wild abandon. My mind searched for a bit of calm in the tornado. Music from the bar next door shook the walls. A two-year-old child crawled around in the dust and the adults paid no attention. He picked up a clump of earth and ate it absentmindedly. Like him, I would have liked to eat the earth, to let Foumban’s history move through my body, coursing through my veins and rising up to my nostrils like alcohol. Sara chewed silently on a kola nut, her eyes seeking mine. She offered me a piece of the bitter fruit and chuckled at the grimace I made. My neighborhood friends chewed on their pieces of kola with a childlike pleasure, which reminded me how estranged my body had become from the city where I’d grown up. How our own past becomes like a stranger to us all.

  Sara’s story had the bittersweet taste of a kola nut. We were in 1913, I told her. When Nebu left the House of Passion, he knew his game of hide-and-seek was over, even if, till the very end, he’d insist to his mother that he was right. After all, his father had stolen his girlfriend. Bertha’s son had understood that the game was up long before its bloody climax. The day Ngungure told him that she had the right to do what she wanted with her body, Nebu knew that she wasn’t a woman to marry and that, with her, he was taking on a whole set of problems—just as his mother had warned him. He was reassured when she confided that she was “giving her body” to him. Honestly, he was so in love he would have agreed to anything. “Because I love you,” she added, “because I love you eternally. Eternally.”

  As a slave, Nebu didn’t have the money to buy a wife, but Ngungure didn’t mention that. No, she talked about love, and love has no price. Bertha’s son had no other choice than to let his girlfriend define love as she pleased. Oh, if only he had realized what lay hidden beneath Ngungure’s words. When his mother told him that that girl was going to marry his father, Nebu couldn’t believe it. He remembered Ngungure’s words and slapped his leg.

  “Women!” he exclaimed. “Why?” he asked his mother. “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she’s the Devil, my son, don’t you get it?”

  Nebu then asked Ngungure herself.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” the girl echoed.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because I love you eternally, my dear, eternally.”

  It made no sense.

  “I love you so much,” Ngungure continued, “that I want you by my side twice, ten times, a thousand times: eternally at my side.”

  Nebu did not understand this mathematics of love.

  “I love you so much,” Ngungure added, “that even your shadow is precious to me.”

  “Then is it still love?” he asked.

  Was it that love that had pushed her into his father’s bed? A wave of nausea overcame Nebu, his ears ringing with a mad hymn. Death—two, ten, a thousand deaths—whistled a song in his ears.

  But Bertha’s son soon retraced his steps, took back his words, and gave back his body, drawn in by the girl’s scent; he was addicted to her. He returned to her, unaware of what he’d done until he woke up and found Ngungure naked at his side. Was this madness? Yes, of course, only madness could have propelled him back between the legs of that woman, that girl, in the bedroom he knew was his father’s. It was madness that made him believe, there in the paternal bed, that a
solution could be found.

  Nebu had attended Njoya’s school, where his father taught writing. His father found only rational solutions to life’s problems—he made no allowance for superstitions, none at all. He had worked as a copyist for the sultan for five years. Father and son could have talked it out themselves, there was no need for a judge. But good God, where we come from, where can a father talk to his son about love? So for Nebu, it was clear: there was no bar, no room, no place where he had the right to speak to his father’s wife without addressing her as “Mother.” Besides, with him lying there in his father’s bed, it was already too late for them to talk. Moreover, he knew that the oral tradition was lying in wait, with its curses and its proverbs. And if necessary, the elders would invent new proverbs that would justify killing him.

  Njoya had done away with many of the laws that would have justified stoning the boy. But when this story took place, the sultan was still writing the first version of his “Book of Love,” the Lewa Nuu Nguet, in which he describes the one hundred and seventeen positions that will allow a man and a woman to reach multiple orgasms. So Nebu was wise to escape out the window when he awoke to the sound of his father’s voice. He ran and ran until he realized that his treacherous feet had led him into a forest with no way out. When he saw a glimmer of light between the trees, he had no idea it was the streets of Foumban. And yet he soon found himself standing at his mother’s door.

  There’s no question that Bertha had heard her son calling her in the woods. When he appeared at her door, she opened her arms and shut her mouth. Nebu was as naked as the day he was born. His eyes were unfocused. Only one question echoed in the boy’s head: “Was it love?” How could she answer? Love had stopped Bertha from chasing her crazy son. Love had made her check, frantically, that no one had seen Nebu knock at her door and be let in. Love had made her lie to the palace police when they came asking questions, made her maintain that her son had left for Bamenda the day before. It was love that hit her right then in the chest and made her tell Ngungure’s whole sordid story to her disbelieving son. But he didn’t believe her! Oh, no!

  Nebu listened to his mother going on about a mad love—his father’s—with gestures seasoned with tears. And in his mother’s song, the son saw his lover’s head bouncing at the Dog’s feet, bouncing and shouting, “I love! I love! I love!”

  Of course it was love, Nebu thought, that had caused his beloved’s death—what else could it be! It was love’s throbbing that had kept Ngungure’s heart beating even after her death, kept her body writhing sadly as it danced on the ground.

  Nebu was suddenly filled with fear at the thought that he hadn’t loved his mother as she deserved, and that he hadn’t loved Ngungure as she had hoped. His rage exploded, forming a question that lashed at his soul: Didn’t I love you enough?

  Even today, as I transcribe Sara’s words, I carefully weigh my own because I still see the flames that lit up a mother’s eyes. I still hear my friends from Nsimeyong voicing their disgust. Lost in the forest, prevented from being anything but a witness, Nebu hadn’t been able to stop the unfolding of the story set in motion by his love. In Bertha’s arms, the young man opened his ears, the better to understand the twists of his own fate, his eyes lost in his mother’s as she told him the incomprehensible story of his life.

  How strange are the paths of love! When Foumban awoke one day, shocked to hear the town crier announcing that no longer would anyone trouble the city’s inhabitants by begging for his own death, there were some who smiled. The Dog had been found hanging from a tree, his feet swinging in the air, his tie having finally served its purpose. The sultan sent his police to find out who had fulfilled the wishes of the madman whose life on the city’s margins had been protected by one of the sultan’s official decrees, but, since no reward was offered for turning in the guilty party, and especially because a death penalty awaited whoever had done what was generally deemed a public service, no one stepped forward.

  “Would you have stepped forward?” Sara asked me.

  Her question tore me from the madness of Nebu’s tale and from Bertha’s bitter hands.

  “Me?”

  Ngungure’s story disappeared into the whisperings of the raffia-wine drinkers, reappearing as that bit of wisdom that advises men to love by small drops, one woman after the other. Some breathed more easily, released by the death of Nebu’s father, but no one asked what Bertha felt. It’s true that the Dog’s death meant nothing to her, really, nothing. And with good reason.

  “Not even hatred,” Sara stressed. “Nothing at all.”

  She spit out the bitter kola juice and declared, “She always wore a brightly colored pagne beneath her ndjutchu, her widow’s robe.”

  In a culture that has no word to describe the suffering of a mother who has lost her only son, or any other child, but that devised hundreds of rituals to inscribe a husband’s death on a woman’s body, Bertha had to hide her feelings of joy beneath a widow’s blue. She shaved her head and wore the obligatory ndjutchu, but none of the rituals held any real meaning for her.

  Nebu, however, felt entirely differently. He realized that he missed something about his father, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps his gruesome epileptic fits? The seductive power of abjection? One month and thirteen days after the Dog’s death, Nebu went to Herr Habisch’s shop, where, with the money he had saved, he bought a black tuxedo, a tie, gloves, a white shirt, and shiny leather shoes. The Swiss merchant assured him, too, that this was how gentlemen dressed in Berlin when they were happy. Nebu refused to let his mother shave his head, as tradition requires after the death of a close relative—especially a father. No. He asked his mother to shave two parts into his hair, Bamum fashion. Bertha was dumbstruck!

  “If I do anything to your hair, I’m cutting it all off!”

  Bertha didn’t care about Herr Habisch, what he said about fashion and all the European gentlemen. Her pain—the flip side of love—was the only measure of her actions. To put an end to the conversation, Nebu went back to the Swiss merchant and bought a top hat. When his mother saw him “dressed like a madman”—those were her words—she didn’t think of cursing Herr Habisch and all his kind, but rather her husband. She also thought about Ngungure and that girl’s evil tricks.

  “What has gotten into you?” she asked her son. “What are you trying to prove?”

  “Nothing, Mama, nothing at all.”

  “Don’t say ‘nothing.’ Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”

  “Well, if you already know…”

  “The Devil has gotten into your head, too,” Bertha insisted. “He’s still here, I’m sure of it.”

  Like all mothers, she looked at her son and remembered the suckling infant he had been, how he had refused to be born because he was afraid of being overwhelmed by the force of his mother’s love. Nebu was hiding something from her, she was sure. She instinctively held him all the tighter, loved him even more—just like the baby he had once been—and tried to make him spit out the secrets of his soul.

  6

  The Temptation of the Final Solution

  It’s a fact: no one can escape his fate. Hide beneath your bed and she’ll toss a venomous snake in after you. Stand under a tree and she’ll have lightning grill you alive. Hide under water and she’ll send you a starving crocodile. All these thoughts whipped through Ngono’s mind as he ran onto the Frühlingstrasse. He thought of his parents, his ancestors, his childhood in the missionary school. He saw his friends, especially Charles Atangana. He thought of all the children playing in the streets of Yaoundé, and suddenly he felt hope. Berlin’s lampposts were transformed into spirits sent by his faraway hometown to guide his feet. He knew they’d protect him, yes. He remembered the day when lampposts had been installed in Yaoundé.

  “They’re the spirits of the dead,” people said, and also “of the unborn.” Ngono thought of his father, who just laughed at all this silliness. He also thought of his mother, who believed it.
He saw her face on one of the lampposts. She begged him to run, to run and keep running. He saw his brothers and sisters, who also asked him to run and keep running. Lampposts. Ngono thought about those who loved him: the women, men, and children who lived in his family’s compound in Yaoundé. All of them—uncles, aunts, nephews, grandparents—asked him to run and save his life: “Run, Ngono, run!” They reminded him that he was the first of his ethnic group to go to the white man’s land. “Run, Ngono, run!”

  Really, the stupidest thing a black man can do is let a racist kill him. It’s simply not worth it. Ngono knew this. So he listened to the voices of his kin. Especially his father’s: in Ewondo his father called him a coward.

  “What are you running from, huh?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you’re running from those sons of rats! You don’t run away from mosquitoes, do you?”

  His father burst out laughing. “Whites aren’t men, is that what you think? Are you such a coward that you run away from men just like you?”

  “I’m not a coward!” Ngono protested.

  He didn’t turn around to confront the shadows that were chasing him, forcing him to run through the night. Suddenly the refusal to live like a coward slowed his steps. He stopped and turned to face his assailants; he went at them, even, determined to prove to his father that he wasn’t a coward, no, not him, Ngono junior. No Ewondo had ever lived like a coward, and he wouldn’t be the first to break the rule. The police report is clear: it’s the “nigger” who struck the first blow. Alas, there are no other documents about the affair. So I’ll just have to take it as truth: Ngono wasn’t the victim.