When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  In any event, that’s how Bilong came to find what he’d been looking for when he’d cozied up to the women.

  10

  The Courage of Tirailleur Bilong

  And how! Leclerc knew that only a child will run to catch fire with his bare hands. So he knew, Colonel Leclerc did, that the best tirailleur is a child, the ideal soldier an adolescent. That’s certainly why he hadn’t asked Bilong’s age when he signed up, why he wanted the boy to be chosen for this mission. The cruelty of a general is on scale with his victories, or so it seems, and Leclerc knew that his army’s mission was to liberate France. If his first priority had been to get shoes for all of his soldiers, my dear reader, then Paris would be German today!

  The Battle of Murzuk took place on January 11, 1941, right in the middle of the day. So the sun was high above when Bilong, Ngo Bikaï’s little brother, Nguet’s ndoss papa, Edéa’s child, lifted his head from behind the dune’s protective shelter to peer over the sand while his commander, d’Ornano, ordered him, with a thousand frantic gestures, to get back down.

  “Are you crazy?”

  Bilong stood up, Leclerc’s promise burning his back.

  “Take cover!” d’Ornano hissed. “Cover!”

  But Bilong wasn’t listening anymore. He charged forward. His feet sank into the sand, making him struggle for each step ahead. The Free French forces began shooting to give him some cover, the umbrella he didn’t have. Bullets whistled overhead, too close. He ran. He wasn’t wearing shoes, the sand burned his feet. It didn’t matter. The plane was the only thing on his mind, that plane in which he certainly would have loved to fly off to visit the most wondrous parts of the world, the most distant continents—that plane he’d been ordered to destroy, like an adolescent setting fire to his own dreams. As he faced the plane of his dreams, he heard Leclerc’s promise—the “colonel’s” promise—to make him an officer. He imagined himself in a uniform, covered with stripes, screwing Nguet to the squeaky music of those medals of bronze—no, of silver, no, gold!

  Now he no longer heard the bullets splitting the air above his head, only the screech of the medals, the meowing of his stripes, the cries of his lover, because he—an officer of Free France—was working her over. At the finish line of his race—of his lovemaking—he approached the plane as one does truth, with a whisper; as one discovers the infinite, step by step. He moved closer to reach that mutual orgasm that made him push into his girlfriend again and again. The plane was a star there at the finish line, a spark at the end of his dream, Nguet’s clitoris, the candy he so loved to suck on. Ah! The only thing on his mind was the nose of that plane! That’s why he didn’t feel the bullet shoot through his right shoulder. He shifted the grenade to his left hand and kept on running. Nor did he feel the bullet that shot through his thigh. He hopped on one leg. Another bullet went through his chest; he didn’t feel it, either, even as he fell. He lay there for a moment, stunned, dumbstruck. But soon, motivated by the vision of the clitoris that was so close, by the nose of the plane—of his Nguet—he got back up, limped for a few steps, and then started running again. He forgot his own body, he was pure force of will. He was surrounded by silence when, for the second time, he was felled by another bullet, but again he got back up and took off, holding the grenade between his own teeth. Maybe the Italians, surprised by his endurance—forza nero!—petrified by the impossibility of cutting down this lover, this soldier, just stopped shooting?

  For it was absolutely silent when Bilong threw himself on the plane—the plane that could have let him realize his adolescent dreams; the grenade sent him flying, high and away, in a gigantic explosion, unlike any he had known with Nguet. Amid the debris, he collapsed in a burst of light that tore open the sky, fell into the belly of the sand that reached up with open arms to welcome him. Silence blanketed his spirit and his body, leaving only the earth to bear witness to the beating of his heart, which kept on, thump, thump, thump. The sand freed his hand, which was still moving, animated by the force of will that had thrown him into death’s arms. Ah! The Battle of Murzuk lasted all day, a long terrible day that ended with the Italian retreat. Without their planes, yes, without their planes, which had all been reduced to charred carcasses by the tirailleurs Colonel Leclerc had thrown at them, one by one, like the most succulent tidbits—each holding a grenade. If the Italians hadn’t known before what a handful of tirailleurs in a column of Allied soldiers could do, well, they learned it that day.

  There was only one survivor: Bilong, “Charles,” Aloga would say, “the lucky little guy.”

  Bilong, yes, Bilong! How did he do it? Aloga, like his companions, kept reciting incantations, ritual phrases, and wiping the tears from his cheeks, for his prayers had been granted.

  “Twenty bullets in his body,” Leclerc will say when visiting the wounded in the clinic, “and he is still alive!”

  The colonel appreciated the courage of a tirailleur, the black force, though not according to the terms laid out in Charles Mangin’s book. Still, the secret of this specific tirailleur escaped him. Bilong was convinced it was his girlfriend, Nguet, who had saved him. Don’t ask me how he came to that conclusion. All I know is that in his delirium, he barked out sounds in which only one name was recognizable.

  “Nguet!” he cried.

  And in the darkest part of the night, his voice awoke the tents with his one obsessively repeated cry: “Nguet!”

  The cry of a man drunk with love, overwhelmed by the essence of his lover.

  “Nguet!”

  A man’s cry.

  Period.

  Lieutenant Colonel d’Ornano didn’t make it out alive from that battle in the desert. It seems he threw himself after Bilong’s shadow when the young soldier fell for the first time into the hollow of the sand and lay there twitching, still holding the grenade. After giving the order to provide cover for the soldier with a spray of bullets, D’Ornano tried to protect the wounded man himself. His head was shot through by an Italian bullet that dug down into the sand, still burning hot, shot from the rifle of a Sicilian marksman. He took aim and shut one eye before he pulled the trigger, then cursed, “Figlio di puttana!” D’Ornano didn’t have a chance to open his eyes, didn’t see Bilong, that true son of his mother, Nguet’s lover, his sister’s brother, in short, that lady’s man, lift up his foot, his knee, his whole body, and set off running at the plane Colonel Leclerc had given him the order to destroy if he wanted to become an officer in the Free French forces. The same Sicilian who killed d’Ornano also took Major Clayton prisoner—an exploit that earned him the highest honors awarded by the fascist regime. A small consolation, and insignificant, really, because that’s not the end of this story.

  In fact, this is how Leclerc took command of the battalion from Chad, comprised of black and white soldiers. The note from General de Gaulle didn’t waste time going over something that was already a fait accompli, because among the officers who returned unharmed from Murzuk, he was now the highest ranked.

  Really, history marches on.

  11

  German Shoes

  Obviously, history marches on, in its own way. For neither Bilong’s mother nor Ngo Bikaï knew that their boy was lying in the military clinic in Faya-Largeau, nor that he kept crying out the name Nguet, minute after minute. What would they have said had they known, huh? I can only imagine, because at that very moment Edéa, unlike Murzuk, was experiencing a rare burst of excitement. The town was learning the cost it had to bear so that General de Gaulle could brag to Churchill about a French victory off in a corner of the Sahara that neither man had heard of before. The cost of this prize, Edéa could have calculated it well before the battle of Murzuk, if only the Anglophone woman who sold plantains and plums in front of Mininga’s Bar hadn’t already shut up shop. Just seeing the rise in the price of plums would have shown the impact of the Second World War on the cost of filling a cooking pot back on the home front. But, frightened by the appetite of the recruits who looked at her like she was just
another succulent plum, the woman had stopped coming. She had gone back to her native Bamenda.

  “Na akwarar make a run from Edéa-o”: these words, saying she’d been chased out by a whore, were all she left behind after ten years in business.

  “Akwarar?” people asked.

  “She’s exaggerating!”

  Useless to say that this didn’t make Mininga happy—she thought the woman was talking about her! Between you and me, what was threatening Edéa had nothing to do with prostitution. War was the real problem. Everyone kept talking about the “war effort,” about “contributions” and “participation,” about “support” and “aid to the country in her time of need,” about “collecting funds.” Conversations only turn to money when cash is short, Fritz said. Those who are bankrupt dream of piles of cash, and Edéa was learning what happens to a small African village when the bankrupt in question is Free France.

  First there was a sermon by Father Jean that everyone remembered as the one about “German shoes.” The priest had announced the mass well ahead of time, and for once—perhaps for the only time in the history of the Catholic Church—it was the tirailleurs who spread the word for him. That the French army encouraged people to go to Sunday mass, that alone should have alarmed everyone, but surprising things just didn’t surprise anyone anymore. No one except for Fritz, that is. But let’s forget about him, since he was in Douala on business.

  Ngo Bikaï had gathered all her women, but really, everyone was trying to round up everyone else. Even the employees of La Seigneuriale were there. Mininga walked through the church dressed in an outfit so scandalously blue that everyone wondered why she was decked out so beautifully if she was in mourning. Her head was invisible, lost inside a big red hat adorned with a white flower. She went and took a seat right in front of the priest’s pulpit. Her serving girls filed in behind and took their places around her, treating her like the queen she certainly thought she was, except that she had to fan herself with a flyswatter she pulled out of her bag—well, at least that’s what people said. M’bangue was the only one in town who refused to leave his courtyard, convinced that de Gaulle’s efforts were useless, since Hitler had already committed suicide.

  The pro-German voices that had kept the flames of debate burning before the French soldiers arrived in town had finally quieted down, mostly because the youths who spent their days chatting away and who had bet on Germany had woken up to find themselves signed up for the French army, since it was the French who had come knocking on their doors. What I mean is that the time of endless chattering had come to an end. As for the old men who had lived through the era of German colonization, for the most part they had now rallied to the French cause and hoped that de Gaulle would take revenge for how badly that mustachioed Kaiser had kicked them in the balls.

  Edéa in 1941—it was a different day, a different era, a different war. Maybe that’s why, when Father Jean announced he was going to talk about German shoes, no one understood why he was reopening a closed question. As far as Edéa was concerned, in just a few months Germany had for the second time lost the Great War—a war some still remembered all too well.

  “Have you seen the feet of the Free French soldiers?” the priest asked, his clear voice echoing through the church.

  Obviously, everyone had seen the tirailleurs’ feet, even if we hadn’t paid too much attention, because who does look carefully at soldiers’ feet? But whatever, that was one of those rhetorical devices used by priests to capture the attention of the congregation.

  “They go barefoot,” he went on, “because even in its misery, Free France retains her humanity!”

  The bare humanity of the feet of the Free French soldiers would have passed unnoticed here, because, truth be told, whether they were serving Free France or not, they weren’t the only ones to go barefoot—even in the church there were a lot of people not wearing shoes. Even Ngo Bikaï, who was fairly well off, and the Mother of the Market to boot, often went barefoot, as had her mother before her. The people kept listening, curious as anyone would be to see just where the priest’s logic would lead, when instead of quoting the Bible, as he usually did, Father Jean opened the pages of a book he termed infamous and read several passages out loud to prove just how awful the situation was.

  “There you go,” he said, “it’s all written right there.”

  And he waved around the book that laid out all the misfortunes of the human race, especially of the black people.

  “It’s written by Hitler himself.”

  And that wasn’t all he said.

  “He wrote it with his own hand.”

  Everyone believed him.

  “In German.”

  The infamy was palpable, visible. No one asked to read the book in question because everyone knew it was the devil’s work. The priest came back to the tirailleurs’ bare feet.

  “Free France,” he said, his eyes lighting up as he scanned the crowd before him, “worthy France”—there he paused—“our eternal France refuses to manufacture shoes out of the skins of her black people!”

  He spread his hands out before him, one holding the Bible, the other the infamous book that he hadn’t yet named, and never would.

  “No,” he said, “just no!”

  The whole church agreed with him. Father Jean, acting as the referee in this match between two books with opposing ideas, looked at the two books, looked at his congregation, and then put down the horrible book and wiped his brow.

  “Rather than manufacturing boots with the skin of black people, as Nazi Germany does”—here he paused significantly—“Free France has decided to have her soldiers march barefoot.”

  Why didn’t everyone there applaud for Free France? Probably because the father—more a priest than a politician—kept going full throttle.

  “Unless you decide that you will provide shoes for our tirailleurs!”

  Very few people applaud when they are asked for money. The people of Edéa are no exception. Before anyone else would get up out of their seats, Mininga herself had to dig down into her purse and show everyone there the five-hundred-franc bill she pulled out—a huge sum of money for the time—before placing it in the collection basket in front of the priest’s pulpit. Father Jean needed to do something to prod people to action; again, it was Mininga who, with a wave of her hand, challenged everyone else to follow her lead: Can anyone top that? Then she made her exit, her heels clicking loudly, trailed by her serving girls, Nguet first among them. In my narrator’s notebook, those women deserve some leeway, despite all the stares that were fixed on them. They couldn’t know, of course, the sorry state Bilong was in right then in Faya-Largeau.

  But it wasn’t Mininga’s coss coss that everyone remembered from that day, but rather the German shoes Father Jean had talked about. Since then, the villagers exchange smiles whenever they talk about shoes; and given Edéa’s history, it’s no surprise that a lot of folks still preferred to walk barefoot after the war. There are those who stare intently at the feet of our soldiers, trying to see if they are wearing boots or galoshes, and our soldiers, for their part, stare back, trying to see which civilians are wearing boots. You never know, no, you never do. It’s a strange habit, though, one that brought a joke to Ngo Bikaï’s lips. One day three tirailleurs came knocking at her door. She gestured to the children, sending them to play out behind the house. The face of one of the soldiers seemed familiar, so she spoke to him first; in fact, he was one of the men who used to sweep the marketplace for her.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” she said apologetically.

  The man smiled. Wearing that uniform, he no longer looked like a beggar.

  “Your shoes suit you well,” she added.

  Those words relaxed the atmosphere.

  12

  The Neighbor Full of Surprises

  The story of that man, whose name she couldn’t recall, came back to Ngo Bikaï. At first he had worked in the women’s shadows, and then for Fritz. She was happy he had found
a place in the army. He seemed to be the leader of the group that showed up in her courtyard.

  “Please excuse us,” he began, his eyes scanning all around, without ever making contact with Ngo Bikaï’s. “Please excuse us.”

  “I understand,” she interrupted. “You need contributions.”

  “For the war effort.”

  “Yes.”

  He seemed to be searching for the words he needed.

  “No, it’s that…”

  “But I’ve already contributed,” Ngo Bikaï said, “at church.”

  “We heard,” he began, “that the women are…”

  He took a deep breath, looking at his companions, as if imploring them to come to his aid. Ngo Bikaï never would have believed that being a leader could weigh so heavily on someone’s shoulders.

  “The women?”

  “… are angry.”

  Ngo Bikaï would have burst out laughing if the tirailleur standing before her wasn’t sweating with each word he said.

  “My women?” she asked.

  The evening before, several women had come to see her with a complaint they needed to get off their chests. Their request was so urgent that Ngo Bikaï had to ask Nguet to leave. Nguet had stopped by to pay Ngo Bikaï a “friendly visit,” mumbling some story about Bilong she couldn’t make heads or tails of. “What are you trying to say? Your hot lover left with the white men!” the Mother of the Market had snapped in exasperation. “He is gone,” she repeated, clapping her hands as she spoke, to emphasize that this was old news, there was nothing else to say about it. Then her women had come to ask for her help, because life was getting so expensive, with the endless rounds of contributions. The wartime economy was making their lives more and more impossible. She barely had time to close the door behind Nguet before the women laid out what they wanted to know: how, in what ways, could they work together, either by catching catfish again, as they used to do to earn a bit of extra money on top of what their harvests brought them, or by getting the military authorities to intervene, since, as one of them said, “We just can’t keep on harvesting if we don’t plant the fields.”