21
The Battlefield at Daybreak
Then in the morning, the mist rose gently over the desert. Like a white blanket gently pulled back, it lifted, revealing the debris of the battle scattered all around. The Italian forces had retreated with the night, Philothée noted. In fact, they’d been routed. The survivors had pulled back to the fort whence they’d come. His eyes filled with tears as he took stock of the disaster. The young man didn’t know where to turn his attention; the dunes were covered with the wounded and the dead. Several dozen, at least. Here one man whose face had been ripped open, there another who had lost an arm, or a foot, and next to him yet another half buried in the sand. A guy over there had been caught by surprise and burned to death in his truck. There were bits of metal everywhere. The blowing wind was covering up a foot over here, a face over there. The Sahara was quick to swallow up the secrets of the violence that had played out on its stage.
One fear alone had taken hold of Philothée’s mind: he hadn’t yet seen either Aloga or Hebga. His eyes ran over the cadavers, a sinking feeling in his gut. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that his comrades might be feeling the same thing. To think that now he couldn’t just set out across the battlefield and turn over each body, searching for his friends. The French officers’ orders were clear: separate the wounded from the dead, the whites from the blacks, the Italian soldiers from the Allied. Struggling not to vomit, he uncovered a face he recognized: a good fellow, one from his company, whose face had been shattered. Another of the bodies he examined was that of a man from Ubangi-Shari, someone he used to trade jokes with. A wave of nausea flooded over him. They were all fighting to liberate the desert, but he just couldn’t see beyond all the bodies.
He was struck by how many blacks had been killed. Clearly this war had turned into Africans killing Africans. He hadn’t given it much thought before. The red of the chechias worn by the Italian askaris troubled him: it was almost the same as those worn by the tirailleurs. What’s more, over the course of all the desert battles, their white uniforms had turned beige, just like the uniform he was wearing. His discomfort grew when he turned over a body buried in the sand that he thought belonged to a tirailleur, only to find that it was an askari. With dark skin and scarred cheeks, he might have been from Sudan or Chad. The thick mist added to the confusion of the scene. And it didn’t help—no, it really didn’t help—that amid the bodies and the burned-out shells of trucks Philothée found a tirailleur who had clearly lost his mind. The man sat there as if in mourning, rocking back and forth and repeating the same phrase over and over: “War not good!”
His words ricocheted across the chaotic expanse, then returned, echoing in Philothée’s mind. He had no idea what to say to the man. Philothée would have liked to ask him a question, to ask whether he had seen the Tirailleurs First-Class Hebga and Aloga, his two companions he’d lost in the battle.
“War not good,” said the soldier, “war not good.”
The strangest thing—Philothée jumped when he realized it—was that the tirailleur was holding the body of an askari in his arms. Like a brother. He was comforting him, caressing his hair, his forehead, his body. He spoke to him in his own native language and cried, then buried him in the sand, only stopping to take back up his refrain in French. Why treat an askari like a brother? Such fraternizing with the enemy went against all orders! Yet a thought he had heard Aloga voice several times echoed in his head: “The white man’s victory means the defeat of the blacks.” The black soldiers who had spent the night killing each other in the dark were in fact brothers. That reminded him that he still hadn’t found his two companions. Right then he recognized a muscular silhouette coming toward him through the mist, tripping over debris and bodies: it could only be Hebga.
Never had the two men hugged each other so tightly. In the chaos of the Second World War, among the hundred or so victims of this final Battle of Kufra, Philothée held his lost brother in his arms. For a long while they stood there, clinging to each other, silent in the bloody morning. His nails dug into Hebga’s flesh and he felt the woodcutter’s heart beat deep inside his own chest. In that moment, nothing else existed for the two silent men.
“Alo … Alo…” Philothée began.
Hebga didn’t let him finish.
“Dead.”
Philothée had one, two, three questions. For example: What? and When? and How? They were all meaningless, really, because there’s only one way that soldiers die on the front: violently. Behind them voices grew louder, the voices of French officers giving orders, telling them to hurry up and finish the job, “unless you want to be caught out here in the sun.” By that they meant: when the battle resumed. Because the battle had only paused because of the mist. Yet Philothée couldn’t give up looking for Aloga’s body. His stammered question and his tears ricocheted off Hebga’s gaze. They were surrounded by bodies, each seeming to say: “Here I am! Come here!”
“He’s over there,” Hebga answered.
“You … you … saw…”
“Yes, I saw him.”
Philothée leaped over the bodies, followed by Hebga, who tried to hold him back. He ran to where his friend pointed.
“No,” Hebga said. “He’s over there!”
Shit! Just where exactly? That’s what the young tirailleur would have said had his tongue allowed him to speak the words needed to express his shock, his pain, his suffering, his anger when he realized Hebga didn’t know either—that he knew nothing. He forgot that the war wasn’t over, that it was still going on all around them, that a break in the hostilities had already once proved a trap. Philothée forgot, yes, he did, that the whole world was at war! The French officers were in a rush because they didn’t want to leave their dead for the scavengers. They had discovered at their own expense just how vile the fascist brutes were. Yet Philothée wanted to see for himself that Hebga had really buried Aloga. Ah! How could Hebga tell him that a missile had at once dug their friend’s tomb and buried him in it?
The desert was a vast, silent cemetery where an army, pushed there by humanity’s violent battles, could disappear without a trace, swallowed up by nature’s great silent maw; where, no doubt, whole peoples and civilizations had been sucked down over the thousands of years of man’s history in Africa, with no one the wiser. Hebga struggled to find the words, suddenly he was the stutterer. As for Philothée, he burst into tears, realizing that Aloga, who’d previously been the butt of so many of his jokes, had shown him nothing but kindness. He realized that there was no one to sing a Bassa mourning song for Aloga, even though he’d sung such a poignant hymn as Bilong lay dying. Hebga had the bulging muscles of a boxer but, like Philothée, he lacked a silver tongue.
Philothée opened his mouth wide, trying to sing a song he wrote right there, trying to improvise a lullaby amid all those piles of bodies, at once so indistinct and so familiar. But his furious stutter wouldn’t let him get through the first verse, not even the first word. Unlike the distant forest, the desert did not recognize his hymn.
Hebga dragged him away.
22
A Domestic Squabble One Afternoon
Meanwhile, life in Yaoundé continued on its parallel track: Pouka must have been convinced that Um Nyobè would greet him with a good joke, because this was his third visit to his friend in a week. Ah! His guests from Edéa, those “thieves,” they were getting on his nerves. What had they done this time? Martha didn’t give him a chance to tell all the details of their “attacks” on his way of life, even though they were spilling out of his mouth. She had barely opened the door when he found himself thrust in the middle of a domestic squabble unlike anything he’d ever seen at his friend’s home.
“Come in, come in,” she said, “I’m sure he already told you.”
“Told me what, mama?”
He called Martha “mama” out of respect for her position as mother of a family. Pouka, caught off guard by her sharp comment, first smiled and then stuck out his cheek f
or the first of the four kisses usually offered as a greeting. On this occasion, Martha didn’t follow custom. She’s sulking, he thought. That’s women for you!
“What’s going on?”
“You tell me, you and your friend,” she snapped back at him. “I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s going on.”
These words left Pouka totally confused. His eyes scanned the living room, looking for Um Nyobè, but Martha kept on the attack.
“Yes, you tell me, Pouka, because you’re his accomplice.”
His accomplice? Pouka spied Um Nyobè and breathed a sigh of relief. His friend was sitting at the table, looking quite the father as he fed their little one, gently sliding small spoonfuls into his mouth. The child was struggling, refusing to eat, taking all his father’s attention. Martha paced back and forth in the living room.
“What’s wrong?” Pouka asked, sitting down next to his friend.
That was the question he’d been hoping his friend would ask him.
“Don’t ask me,” his friend whispered. “It’s about Ngo Bikaï.”
He spoke in French and also referred to his wife’s friend by her maiden name. Ah! Pouka had already forgotten the details of that story about Ngo Bikaï. Like any true poet, he thought the whole world revolved around him alone. Um Nyobè glanced away from the recalcitrant child for a moment and met the maestro’s confused gaze.
“So,” the tired poet replied, “now Pouka is your accomplice.”
Oh, women!
“Just what kind of men are you?” Martha demanded, staring at one and then the other. “I really don’t know, I just don’t know.”
Pouka was realizing that she tended to repeat each phrase twice when she was angry. But also that he had never really had a long conversation with her. Martha was his friend’s wife, that was all. If you think about it, he came by so rarely! Once Um Nyobè had pointed that out to him. “Women keep us apart, right?” he had said. Pouka would have said it was more about politics. In fact, each time he visited, Pouka found his friend in the middle of a group of friends. If it wasn’t the group from the chorus, it was those who played soccer, or those who were interested only in politics. When Um Nyobè and Pouka did get together, they barely had a chance to speak.
This time, however, a woman was making them allies, putting them on the same side of a fight. More specifically, this one woman, Martha, was angry at both of them, and it seemed she kept repeating why just to make herself even angrier. Still, her rage left the men perplexed.
“Someone told you that some tirailleurs raped my sister,” she said bluntly, “and you don’t even bother to tell me.”
Um Nyobè shuddered when he heard the word “rape” in French.
“No,” he protested, “I told you.”
“No. You didn’t tell me everything.”
“What more did you want me to tell you?”
He stared at Pouka as if he were the only person who might understand.
“The truth.”
What could be simpler?
“But I told you the truth,” Um Nyobè shouted.
“No. It was my neighbor at the market who told me. Do you even understand? My neighbor at the market!”
It wasn’t the French words she used, but her eyes that expressed the depth of her outrage.
“My God!” she exclaimed. “If that had happened to me, what would you have done?”
Pouka suggested that she wasn’t being fair, so she took aim at him.
“And you, I’m sure you’re convinced that people recognize you now because of that poem you read on the radio. That’s why you came here today, right? Go on, tell me how Mr. Pouka became a star. Has Mr. Pouka already met the governor? The governor must have awarded him a Colonial Medal, I’m sure of that. Yes, I’m sure.”
With that she grabbed the child from Um Nyobè’s arms.
“Just give me back my child if feeding him is too much for you.”
Pouka had never seen Martha angry. Now there was nothing left untouched by her anger. Each face, each object, each bag of fruit, each story, even her own child just added more fuel to her fire.
“Martha, you’re exaggerating,” her husband interrupted.
When a woman gets angry—and this Pouka knew from personal experience—no one gets off scot-free. The child was eating hungrily. The anger that his mother would have liked to throw in the faces of all the tirailleurs in Cameroon, she now threw at those two men who stood in their place, as far as she was concerned.
“Really? Now I’m exaggerating? The tirailleurs rape my sister, your friend there goes on the radio to tell us that they’re all heroes, and I’m the one exaggerating.”
Now it was Pouka’s turn to step up, because Martha wasn’t just exaggerating, she had gone too far.
“Leave Pouka out of this,” he said.
“Ah, right, you didn’t know anything about it, is that it?” she retorted sarcastically.
“Pouka didn’t know, oh no,” he insisted.
His friend was ashamed by his lack of solidarity.
“What difference does it make?” he interrupted. “She was raped, period and done.”
“The difference it makes,” Martha announced, “is that now I’m leaving for Edéa.”
The two men stared at each other in surprise.
“I can’t just sit here after hearing that tirailleurs raped my sister.”
Pointing the child’s spoon at them, she put the blame squarely on the two men sitting there across from each other.
“Ah!” said Um Nyobè. “So, when are you going to leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Once again, the men could only stare at each other.
23
Love’s Living Room
And that’s what happened. Let me fill you in. Fritz came to meet the Um Nyobès at the train station. He took the crying child from Martha’s hands, so she could get off the train more easily. Her husband followed behind her and waited for the porters to hand him their luggage. Some of the travelers jostling each other on the platform recognized him and greeted him warmly. He pointed at Martha, standing next to Fritz, and their faces lit up at the sight of the child. “How big the baby’s gotten!” Only when they were on their way could the friends really greet each other.
“We’ll talk back at the house,” Fritz said.
The trip was made in silence. Once in the courtyard, they were greeted by the happy shouts of children and by Ngo Bikaï, who came out to hug them. She certainly didn’t seem as distraught as Martha made her out to be. According to Martha, Ngo Bikaï would be in pieces, shut away in the house, imprisoned by her physical and mental distress, tearing at the skin on her face, beating her breast, and cursing heaven and earth.
“And I wasn’t even there to help her. Me, her sister!”
Um Nyobè had asked for time off from work, because he didn’t want his wife traveling alone to Edéa. And she would have done it, too. The writer had had to lie to his boss.
“Again?” his boss had said.
Um Nyobè invoked a death in the family, an “uncle,” forgetting that he’d used the same excuse the last time he’d gone back to the village.
“It was your uncle the last time, wasn’t it?” the white man asked.
“This time it’s on my mother’s side,” Um Nyobè explained apologetically.
“Your uncles are dying pretty quickly,” his boss noted.
It was the sort of reproach that was duly noted in his work file and that left his boss with the troubling impression that he was “up to something.” Um Nyobè hadn’t said anything else. Was his boss going to check with Martha? But once they arrived in Edéa and were greeted by Ngo Bikaï’s placid face, Um Nyobè almost thought that it was nothing, that nothing at all had happened to her. She was still taking care of her children, as usual, talking with them like the same energetic mother she had always been. What had Um Nyobè expected, after all? To find her in tears, still tearing her hair out several weeks later?
“I have to put the children to bed,” she said.
“Already?”
“It’s eight o’clock.”
She called the kids, who grumbled as they followed her. Martha headed to the bedroom after them. The door to the living room slammed shut and soon the women’s voices, like those of the children, faded off in the back of the house, leaving behind the silence that Um Nyobè so wanted to avoid.
Fritz also fell silent.
Just what was Um Nyobè after? Did he want his friend to go over all the details again when he’d already told him everything on the telephone the day after it had happened? He realized that this living room that he knew so well, where he had spent hours, this living room filled with love, had changed. Framed photographs of the couple, of their children—they had three—and their parents still hung on the walls. Fritz’s framed diplomas were displayed too, alongside a hanging that proclaimed “Christ is the Master of this Home.” He read it several times. It was probably a reflection of Ngo Bikaï’s faith, since Fritz, like Um Nyobè, described himself as “religiously lazy.”
Um Nyobè stifled the question that was burning on his lips: Did it happen here, in the living room? A stupid, meaningless question. For what would it have changed if it had happened somewhere else in the house or even outside? Yet he couldn’t get it out of his mind that somehow the living room was different now. Nothing had changed, no: the furniture was arranged as it had been, the walls were still the same color. In short, there was nothing that stood out. The living room was no different, really, from his own back in the city. Yet still Um Nyobè couldn’t shake the feeling—the feeling that he was standing on a field where a battle had taken place.
When the Plums Are Ripe Page 20
