When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  Hebga had learned from his father how to train his body, and the importance of always keeping his muscles on alert. He had planted the roots of Hebga’s future. Hebga remembered his father’s words: “The woodcutter’s enemy isn’t the tree, it’s his own body.” And that enemy appeared in the form of horrible cramps. Getting rid of them required consistent training of the arms, feet, spinal column, neck, and hands. You had to take care of your muscles continually, coax them on, tone them up. You had to exercise each part of your body every day, because cutting down a baobab tree required that the whole organism work together in a gigantic symphony of effort. I can say, yes, that if Hebga’s father had treated his body like a perpetual opponent, for his son it was the tree—the tree that had crashed down on his father one day—that was the real enemy. Each of Hebga’s gestures was dictated by his focus on that goal, but that first victorious fight against a clown of a boxer had released adrenaline he didn’t even know he had.

  The woodcutter, who thought he had found his enemy in the silent trees, suddenly realized that in a true battle, your opponent gives it back to you blow for blow. Fair play is the rule of a good fight, but only training reveals your moral fiber. That’s why Hebga began training against hypothetical enemies. At first he imagined them using only their fists, like the boxer he had knocked down. Then he imagined that, out of treachery, his opponent used his feet, too. He trained to take on anyone who would use both their hands and their feet. The list of weapons kept on growing, since, if they could use their feet, why not their head? Yes, why not their head? Soon Hebga grew accustomed to using a knife, and then a cutlass. By the time he switched from a cutlass to a straight blade, and then to a curved one, Pouka no longer accompanied him into the bush. Nor was Pouka there when he began developing attacks with first a small and then a long lance. The missionary school had swallowed up the boy.

  In the end, Hebga had closed the circle, coming back to the place his father had shown him. Of all weapons, the one he preferred was the ax. He held it delicately with both hands and kept his movements slow, to avoid stressing his joints. He splayed his feet and set his legs in a solid triangle. He raised his arms, now holding the ax firmly and lifting it up to the boundless and evanescent sky above. A ray of sunlight peeked through the trees, sliding along the dew-covered leaves and glinting on the blade of his weapon. It was as if the spirits gave him their blessing, letting their silent strength flow through him. He’d let his hands fall and strike: bam! He’d repeat the move several times: bam! In the end, he’d be covered in sweat. Or maybe it was the morning breeze that covered him with its cottony shroud. Then he’d sit down in the shade of a tree, breathing deeply, attentive to all the pulsing of his body. He knew that little by little he had transformed his lungs into a prayer. He looked at his hands, which had grown tough as rocks. His pectoral muscles, as hard as wood, rose and fell. His biceps, covered with circular tattoos, trembled. It was as if the trees that stretched out above him toward the heavens knelt down to offer him the whispered praise he no longer got from his cousin, now that the missionary school had torn him from the forest and led him off to Yaoundé. As if, with their rhythmic murmur, they intoned the hymn of the champion that Pouka hadn’t yet composed, and that he never again tried to write.

  The Ax!

  The Ax!

  That’s the big strong man who, surrounded by his friends, there in the clamor of drinks and words, now asked his cousin to tell him about Yaoundé.

  “Tell me about Yaoundé,” Hebga begged.

  More than a thirst, it had become an obsession.

  7

  The Reversal

  Still in 1940: one day Um Nyobè announced to his friends who had gathered at Mininga’s that General de Gaulle had become a dissident and had called on all French forces, wherever they might be, to continue to fight. “In short, to join the Resistance.” Doing so, Um Nyobè showed one of the traits that would never cease to amaze Pouka, and which Pouka would later invoke when he wrote the long, never-published poem “Rubenism: The Hymn of Cameroon,” which he dedicated to his childhood friend. How had Um Nyobè gotten hold of that news? For the moment, the question on everyone’s lips was simple.

  “De Gaulle?”

  Hebga put it more clearly.

  “Who is this de Gaulle?”

  Even Um Nyobè couldn’t provide a simple answer, and he was the most political of the bunch. He tried to recall the members of the Lebrun government, his eyes flickering this way and that, but the image that kept coming to mind was the impassive face of Pétain, which he’d seen in various administrative brochures.

  “And where is he, this general of yours…?” Hebga asked, snapping his fingers as he tried to remember the name. “… De Gaulle?”

  “In England.”

  No one burst out laughing, but they came close.

  “In short…” Fritz began. He slunk down in his chair, crossed his legs, carefully weighing each of his words to lend them heft, holding his bottle in midair. “If I understand well, he has fled?”

  He stressed the word “fled,” with a knowing nod. Hebga and Pouka looked at each other warily. Fritz wasn’t done yet.

  “Fled,” Hebga echoed.

  “And,” Fritz continued in the silence that followed his words, gesturing dramatically with his hands like an orator, “he’s asking others to fight.”

  The silence that had fallen over the bar was broken only by Mininga’s heady perfume; she brought another round of beers and set them down in front of the talkative friends.

  “If he has fled,” she tossed out in the arena, “then let him come to Edéa. We’ll hide him in the forest, right?”

  Her smile lit up the fellows’ faces, although her suggestion raised an interesting question. They hadn’t really thought about it, but why not? Of course, they would have hidden de Gaulle in the maquis—in the bush around Edéa—or maybe in the bar. Mininga’s question caught them off guard and made everyone laugh. So the woman who had added her coda to their story stood there for a moment, hands on her hips.

  “We’ll feed him ourselves,” she went on, “with grilled plantains and plums, am I right?” She glanced at the woman selling grilled plantains.

  She was amused by the idea.

  “Na so-o,” said the vendor, “bean fritters a day for ya.”

  “Or else,” Mininga wondered, “we’d be guilty of … oh … what is that called…?”

  Her questioning eyes scanned the drinkers’ faces. None of them could guess the word she was looking for. She didn’t wait for them to reply. No, standing behind her bar, next to the barmaid who was helping her, she just continued with her thought as blithely as she’d begun.

  “Failure to assist a person in danger.”

  A loud burst of laughter.

  “Hey, war isn’t some sort of lottery…!”

  “Of course he wants the fight to go on,” Fritz added, looking at each of his friends closely before hammering home his point. “He’ll be safe in London.”

  Everyone laughed, but Fritz pretty well summed up the idea that had almost been derailed, first by Mininga’s exuberant suggestions, and then by someone else who chimed in, “And speaking of plantains, can you bring me…”

  His eyes met Um Noybè’s.

  “The whites are tearing into each other,” he concluded. A wave of emotion flowed through his veins. Only a German word could express it: Schadenfreude. He didn’t say it, but just rubbed his hands.

  “Okay, so de Gaulle is in England,” Hebga summarized, as he stood up, “with the Allied forces.”

  “You mean he’s deserted, right?”

  “Which means he’s done for.” Hebga stood there chuckling. “So where are the toilets in this place, my mamy nyanga?”

  “Who knows?”

  That was Fritz.

  “The way to the toilets hasn’t changed since yesterday, uncle.”

  “The French are unbelievable, am I right?”

  The woodcutter’s laughter faded away in
the back of the bar, drowned out by the splash of piss hitting a stone. That’s how things stood in that middle of June, when friends back in the village on vacation gathered at the bar, childhood friends happy to see each other after several years apart. They needed something new to talk about, for surely there were more interesting things than the fate of a general from faraway France who was on the run. After all, nothing had changed on the home front. But what could they say? Whenever these friends got together, the talk always turned to Paris. Not long before, Pétain’s portrait had appeared in all the government buildings in Yaoundé, as well as in Douala. Even after the defeat, French colonists still wrote the laws in Cameroon. Um Nyobè was just making that point when Fritz called him out: “But for how long?”

  Those two had a long history of arguments. Since elementary school, people said, they never missed a chance to debate each other, even as their lives kept drawing them closer together. It was as if they’d come into this world just so they could always disagree, although they followed similar paths in life. It was obvious to all that they were really athletes playing the same game, each strengthened by their ongoing struggle: verbal boxers, if you will! In his house, for example, the young patriarch Fritz reigned over his living room from his bamboo chair at the head of the table, the place reserved for the father. He sat like a king on a throne, with a sailor’s hat on his head, a shirt on his back, a pagne wrapped around his waist: you’d think he’d inherited it all, just like that. Um Nyobè, on the other hand, who would take his seat at the far end of the table, his head held high and no less proud, had opted to pursue the meaning of life in the hallways of the colonial administration. Neither one had really chosen his path, though they shared a number of experiences: the mission school, then the normal school in Foulassi, teaching as a moniteur indigène. In that living room, the dining table became the arena where they jousted.

  Fritz, who had inherited his place as head of the family too soon, had needed to grow up fast because he had to take care of all of his father’s kids, as well as his wives: so he had quit teaching. Um Nyobè, on the other hand, had followed a path marked out by the sharp edges of his temperament. Rebellious by nature, he had been kicked out of the normal school on disciplinary grounds: it seems he had organized a strike among the students to protest the bad quality of the food served in the canteen. Everybody had been surprised, except his father, who recognized in his son his own boiling blood; in his day he had protested against forced labor. Back then, the Nyobès lived in Makon, the center of German colonial power, since it was the hub for the railway. One word too many had earned Um Nyobè’s father a sort of exile, if that’s what you can call being expelled from the German enclave. Now he had gone to live in his second wife’s village—his first wife, Um Nyobè’s mother, had died in childbirth. As for Um Nyobè, he preferred Edéa over the new village, even though that meant he had to live with friends instead of family. For now, it seemed, he was staying with Fritz.

  “I always told you that France wasn’t worth it,” Um Nyobè hammered home. “Look at what’s happened to her.”

  “And yet you work for her,” Fritz shot back.

  Then he poured himself a glass of beer. Among his friends, Um Nyobè was known for his obstinacy. In short, once he took a position, it was hard to convince him otherwise. He’d cling to his ideas, even to the point of absurdity. Fritz seemed to have come into this world just to help him see how murky his thoughts were; a bit older than his friend, he used that to his advantage.

  “No one can ever talk with you two,” Pouka often said, and he was certainly right.

  In Um Nyobè’s eyes, Pouka lacked conviction.

  Hebga would just have said, “He’s a little brother.”

  As for me, I’d say they were old friends, back together and reliving old stories.

  8

  Creating a Poetry Circle in the Forest

  Pouka was correct, history is a difficult thing to write. Which is why he wanted to take a break from it. I’d say, and maybe you’d agree, that Pouka had chosen a bad time. To his mind, however, there was no better time. He had already waited three years, with his belly full of alexandrine verses, his mouth full of impatient rhymes. Talking with his friends, he was distracted. Not just because of the intense memories the place had awoken. His eyes scanned around Mininga’s Bar, looking at the few illegible signs posted, and pausing when he saw the bar’s display of drinks. He tried to reinvent the place as a reading room, and to imagine Nerval—yes, Nerval!—and Gautier, too—no joke!—there with their friends, sitting on overturned crates and discussing art. Of course, it was no longer 1830, no, and we were certainly not in Paris, but in a disreputable corner of Edéa. Yet it was precisely that difference that made him wonder. A poetry circle in the forest, yes, that was his idea. His goal.

  When he came back to the bar the next day, other people were sitting there. He recognized two or three regulars who stood up as he came in and greeted him with respect and also with surprise—surprise at seeing the colonial civil servant, the ngovina, as he was called behind his back, there two days in a row. He went straight to the bar, trying to gauge Mininga’s mood.

  “Just say that you missed me, mon chéri,” she teased.

  She had said mon chéri in French. That woman’s playing to the crowd, he thought. But Mininga wasn’t through. She was the mistress of the place—“madam” would be a word too light to describe her. She had the easygoing attitude of someone not from around there; the brazenness of someone who doesn’t know what the taboos are and so transgresses them innocently or because she doesn’t give a darn; and the comfortable ease of someone who speaks the local language extraordinarily well, without any accent, even if her choice of adjectives, just like the colors she wore, always surprised the locals. When she spoke, she touched her clients as if each were her lover. She was Ewondo.

  Mininga placed a bottle of beer in front of Pouka.

  “I haven’t forgotten what you drink,” she added as she opened the bottle, “isn’t that right, mon chéri?”

  She shimmied a bit, showing off her generous breasts. Pouka began to think he’d made a mistake coming back to this place where a reputation could be ruined in a minute. Feeling a slight pang of despair, he took hold of the woman’s hand and, happily, she fell silent.

  “A tontine?” she asked, after listening to the details of his plan.

  “Pretty much,” he said, “pretty much.”

  It wasn’t easy for this businesswoman to accept that her stools would be filled for several hours by people who wouldn’t be buying drinks, but she consoled herself with the thought that they’d be coming in the morning.

  “When you don’t have any customers yet.”

  “I always have customers,” she protested, looking at the three regulars sitting in a corner; even at that early hour their eyes were already bleary.

  It was just a formality, really, Pouka knew it. Yet he didn’t want to offer more than the compensation he had already decided upon. Just as important as what Mininga thought was what the priest thought. Not that the man had any ideas about poetry—it was all canticles to him. But Father Jean was the one who had convinced Pouka’s father to send him to the mission school way back when, and the priest remained, in a sense, his benefactor. The priest’s protection would allow him to organize something in the village without attracting the attention of the colonial administration. For the moment, he would have to convince the man that the little poetry circle wasn’t just some sort of midnight mass.

  “Sadly the schoolkids and students are on vacation,” he began, “or else I would have gone to the headmaster. This is just something to fill up the vacation, after all.”

  Too feeble an excuse to be taken seriously. Pouka realized that even before he saw Father Jean’s skeptical face.

  “I would have held it in the church, if it weren’t for catechism,” he continued, “obviously.”

  That was the best he’d come up with. Father Jean smiled. Even th
ough he was a priest, he knew when someone was giving him a line. The only thing that had ever tripped Pouka up was his own vanity. Neither Catholicism nor his job as a writer were responsible for turning the boy he used to know into the man he saw before him. Regardless, the priest’s opinion of Pouka was too clouded by paternalism to be taken seriously.

  “Precisely,” the priest began, “you should come say hello to the catechumens. They’ll be happy to see you.”

  He spoke of the zeal of the new generation and the promising futures he saw for them.

  “You could organize a course of Bible study.”

  Pouka had been part of the first class the priest had taught. Evidently, the priest had expected his efforts to be paying off already. He had been pleased when Pouka first chose to study for the priesthood. That he later decided to become a writer hadn’t surprised the prelate—the colonial administration was particularly tempting for the local youth—but he couldn’t think of it without feeling sad. The village, on the other hand, had rubbed its hands in anticipation when Pouka, who had been a moniteur-indigène at the petit séminaire, the church-run school at Akono, had abandoned the robe. Father Jean said that if it hadn’t been for all those poetry prizes, maybe he wouldn’t have lost his young colt, who had been dubbed by his teachers the “Luther of Africa.”

  “Why not at your father’s home?” the priest asked.

  “You know my father,” Pouka replied; he and the priest both sighed.

  The cleric recognized that if it was difficult to organize poetry gatherings in a church, it was out of the question that they take place in a pagan temple. So Pouka and the priest found common ground in opposition to the Old Man, and for the defense and promotion of poetry in Edéa.