When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “God is great,” he concluded.

  “Amen!”

  His benediction signaled the start of the meal. At Nguet’s signal—yes, you are reading that right, Nguet—several people rose to serve themselves from the dishes. They sat right back down, however, when M’bangue indicated that he wanted to speak. He cleared his throat. There are things that are best not to hear with your mouth full. People started to whisper, worried that he was going to start talking about Hitler. Yes, there are some topics that will spoil your appetite. But no one was going to interrupt the Old Man, especially not Nguet. M’bangue looked around, as if surprised to be given such leeway.

  “It is good that you’ve gotten married,” he said to the happy couple. “At last.”

  That eased the tension.

  “Especially as you’re getting to your older days,” he added.

  That’s just how M’bangue spoke, always making reference to “older days.” In Edéa the devastating force of his pronouncements was well known, as was his sense of humor, so everyone there was hanging on each of the words he delivered so sparingly. The married couple most of all. But a smile could be seen on M’bangue’s face. The beam of light from the sky that fell on him drew all the guests close together in the living room, even as curious onlookers gathered to peek in through the windows. More than anyone else, Fritz and Ngo Bikaï were pleased that M’bangue seemed uplifted by a touch of grace.

  “The sky has opened up,” said the old man, “the future is yours.”

  His esoteric words surprised no one. But people exchanged glances when he lifted up a bottle of whiskey that he was drinking all by himself.

  “For the French are going to leave this country.”

  This was in 1942! No prediction could have been more poorly received. Ngo Bikaï’s women, who were trying to keep things organized around the table, turned into real police officers. Even Um Nyobè stood up in exasperation. It’s so easy to spoil a mood with talk of politics! Who knew that better than he? M’bangue’s speech had sent a wave through the crowd, turning all eyes toward Father Jean. The only Frenchman present was smiling politely.

  “Papa, we’ve heard you,” Martha said.

  Called from the back of the house by Nguet, she knew she had to do something.

  “I’m not done yet,” M’bangue insisted. “I’m not done.”

  “We know,” Martha cut in, “we know!”

  “France has lost Africa’s future. Cameroon will be independent,” he said, his voice rising above the chaos his revelation had provoked. “Independent.”

  Shaking in spasms, he seemed in the grips of a larger vision. He brandished the whiskey bottle threateningly, his eyes ablaze. The hungry crowd was growing impatient. Fritz started to stand up. Discreetly, his wife held him back: M’bangue was in good hands, that was clear.

  “Papa,” Martha interrupted. “Keep your visions for tomorrow.”

  Another woman added, “For now, just sit down like everyone else.”

  “And eat.”

  “Drink.”

  The authority of those women was all it took; M’bangue lowered his eyes, just as one might close the Book of the Future. Never before had women given him an order, and he couldn’t get over it. He cursed these new times that showed no respect to old age, and especially the women who clearly didn’t give a damn about the future of the country and the world. The visionary’s silence gave way to the devil’s vitriol. Didn’t he know that, whether true or not, there are only a few select visions that can be shared at a wedding table?

  “You can’t change the future,” he grumbled.

  “We know,” Martha kept repeating. “Papa, we know.”

  “Cameroon will be independent.”

  She politely made him take a seat.

  “We know.”

  7

  A Surprising Catch

  Yes, it was Ngo Bikaï’s women who had taken charge of the wedding. Not only the party, but also dressing the bride; they bought all the things needed for the dinner and cooked the food, too. A few days before, they had gone to catch catfish. They wanted both to get something to eat, since most everything was in short supply, and to work on a project together. The Mother of the Market organized it. Since Martha had arrived in Edéa a week before Um Nyobè, who had stayed behind for work, she was acting as the Mother of the Market’s right hand. Ngo Bikaï had insisted on it.

  Um Nyobè’s wife had been her true confidante for some time. Especially since the whole to-do with Mininga—that’s what Ngo Bikaï called the incident that had brought the two women closer together despite the distance. Fishing for catfish, she hoped, would be another step on the path of their friendship’s renewal. In fact, more than friendship, it was working together that allowed the women to define their social structure. It reinforced the authority of the Mother of the Market, showing the women who had put their stands under her control that she could take care of them when times were tough. Public opinion—by that I mean men’s—didn’t recognize her importance, and it was wrong. The collective power of the women was rooted in her.

  It was up to the Mother of the Market to choose the activity for the women. They could, for example, work together in someone’s field, say our Sita’s. The project’s success confirmed the woman’s authority. For our Sita, death had signaled both the end of her reign and, really, her failure. Ngo Bikaï had decided to go for fishing because her father was a fisherman. The Sanaga River was her domain and, having grown up in the fishing trade, she convinced herself that the river would help her to show everyone the strength of her hand. The women didn’t use pirogues—those were reserved for men. But the smaller branches of the river were just what they needed to catch catfish.

  They set out early in the morning, paying no heed to the rain that followed them along. At sunrise they were already singing as they pulled gourds full of water from the stream: joyous apparitions covered in mud. Their faces were dripping with both sweat and water. They’d wipe their faces off with one hand and dive back into the water, into the mud. They told each other stories to lift their spirits, traded jokes to keep up their courage, wisecracks to make the work go faster. Rarely did the women express as much joie de vivre as when they were working together. Martha, who’d been cut off from these moments since she’d moved to the city, realized how much she’d missed them, and also how hard she had to work to keep up.

  “You’re doing just fine,” one older woman said encouragingly.

  Whether they had a kaba ngondo tied tightly around their hips, a pair of trousers, or just a simple loincloth, the women wore nothing on top, leaving their tattooed chests and backs exposed to the sky and its water, while their feet massaged the mud in an endless dance. Martha’s clothes made it clear she had really come home to the village. Everyone still recalled with a smile how she had led the campaign to kick Mininga out of town. What am I saying, “recalled”? It was still the news of the day, the basis of their lively banter. It made all the women laugh to see how Martha had changed—no longer the city woman she’d seemed at first.

  “You should have seen her,” said one woman, imitating how Mininga walked. “You should have seen her heading off to see her tirailleurs.”

  “Kougna, kougna, kougna.”

  “It seems she walked right out of town.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “In those high heels of hers?”

  Suddenly the rain came pouring down, but that didn’t dampen the women’s spirits. Sitting under a tree on the stream’s bank, Ngo Bikaï watched them work. From time to time she’d start singing a song and the women would join in. Although she sat a ways off, protected from the weather, she was in charge of the work. When she gave the signal, the women stopped chattering and, with nimble hands, began rhythmically tossing basins full of water over the little dam they’d built in the stream, a dam of twigs, stones, and whatever else they’d found. Women work with a focus like none other! Conversing all the while, they built their own little dam there
on the stream’s muddy bottom. Soon a catfish splashed in a woman’s hands, the first catch met with joyous shouts. That catfish was cause for celebration; as the women sang, it was lifted up to the sky, offered to the universe that blessed it with a light drizzle of rain, encouraging other fish to make the same decisive leap.

  “Look there,” said one of the fisherwomen.

  In the distance, a silhouette was cautiously approaching.

  The women froze, speechless. Slowly, each step seeming like a provocation, Nguet came into the silence her appearance had created. She was dressed in mourning clothes: a white robe. Flustered when she hadn’t found Ngo Bikaï at the market, she had come to look for her at the river, dressed as she was. Nguet had clearly walked through the rain, for she arrived under the shelter of a multicolored umbrella. Her ghostly appearance, the water falling from the sky, everything made her seem quite lost—and in fact she was unsure of where she was headed. Still, she was beautiful, projecting a calm that pierced through her grief. It was only when a gust of wind tore the umbrella from her hands and tossed it upside down on the water that the women woke from their trance. Martha took several steps toward her.

  “Do you want to join us?” she asked.

  Nguet was hoping for nothing more.

  “First you have to speak with our Mother,” Martha added, gesturing with her gourd toward the spot were Ngo Bikaï sat.

  Silently, Nguet moved toward Ngo Bikaï, still carefully weighing each step. The women paused in their work, trying to follow the conversation unfolding between the two who had been joined by life’s tragedies, but they couldn’t make out a single word. They could only guess at the depths of their whispered exchange, and all breathed a collective sigh of relief when the two women hugged each other long and hard. Some women applauded, and joyful laughter erupted when Nguet asked Martha if she had an extra gourd. Um Nyobè’s wife replied with a bright smile.

  “Wandafoot,” she exclaimed. “You want to catch catfish and you don’t even have a gourd!”

  The joke did the trick. Everyone burst out laughing.

  “And dressed like that!”

  They welcomed Bilong’s girlfriend into their ranks with raucous good humor. Nguet lifted up the hem of her robe before wading into the water, a reflex or habit from her past life of gallantry. The women laughed again, and even harder, when they saw her stylish shoes. She hesitated, as if unwilling to get her clothes wet, although she was already soaked through, or to dirty her muddy feet.

  “Mamy nyanga,” said one woman, “you want to fish wearing those coss coss?”

  “You’ll ruin them!”

  The beautiful girl didn’t reply, but just stepped into the mud, and so brought this long story, this reminiscence of a painful war, to a close. Later, Martha will tell her husband that those belated condolences were the best catch of that rainy day when the women went looking for catfish; and that she had emerged from her mud bath with a clean conscience.

  8

  The Universe in Ecstasy

  The real news of the day was that Martha caught a threadfish—a “captain,” as we call it. Oh yes! No one believed her at first when she said her basket had captured the chief of all fish, a captain. She didn’t even believe it herself.

  “A captain!” she cried. “A captain!”

  She lifted her basket into the air, displaying the big dancing fish, the biggest catch of the day.

  “A captain!”

  The women dropped their basins and came running. The captain was a surprising catch in this stream. The men were lucky if they hauled one out of the Sanaga River with their big nets. But here in this stream?

  “A captain!”

  Martha was so happy that she dropped the fish. It jumped out of her basket and fell in the mud at her feet. The women pounced on it, managing to grab it with their hands. Everyone was thrilled with this lucky catch. The fish was now struggling in the more confident arms of an old woman who ran from the water and threw it up on the shore, where it kept flopping. The women’s many voices filled the space with shouts of joy, and ululations that wrapped the rain and the very universe itself in an incomparable brilliance—really beyond compare.

  “This is for our Mama,” declared an older woman.

  “Woudidididididi!”

  There was Ngo Bikaï.

  “Take this.”

  The older woman handed her a machete, and Ngo Bikaï gently rapped the fish on the head, methodically, like she was counting out a beat. Caught up in the moment, the women responded to each rap with a joyous shout. The fish kept struggling for a while longer, writhing.

  “Do you need help?” a happy voice called out.

  It was a joke. A formality.

  “Ah! Ngo Bikaï, you are our captain!”

  The fish stopped struggling.

  “Captain!” a woman shouted.

  “Woudididididi!”

  “Our captain!”

  “Woudididididididi!”

  The fishing expedition reached its high point in this expression of universal ecstasy; the women crowned the one they had chosen to lead them. Martha began to sing and the others joined in. They danced around the fish that one woman held up over their heads, they danced around Ngo Bikaï who had joined in the dance, they danced and shouted. Holding gourds or fishing baskets, they were the color of the mud from which they’d emerged, and they were dripping with the water that had given them their treasure. Together they jumped, joined by a transformative joy.

  “Woudidi!”

  It was as if these women had been turned into spirits, water spirits whose faces and bodies were camouflaged by the brown earth, turning them into an indistinct magma that sang instead of speaking, that wove sounds instead of shaping syllables.

  The chorus turned to celebrate Ngo Bikaï.

  “Woudididididididi!”

  Having rested in the tree’s protective embrace, Ngo Bikaï was the only one who wasn’t the color of the earth, whose body wasn’t wet and muddy. She stood out among her women; she was their captain, like that fish one woman held up over her head. But water from the sky would link Ngo Bikaï to the mud of the river that had crowned her, because she, too, was earth, nothing but earth; because she was also water, and nothing but water; because she was a woman, and nothing but a woman. The thunder’s clashes could do nothing about it, nor could the gusts of wind that had the trees swaying left and right. And so, dancing and ululating, she was led back to the village, a woman among women, surrounded by her muddy pack.

  Ngo Bikaï walked at the front of the group of women, as they, with arms outstretched, held the biggest catch of the day over her head. The group followed her, their gourds filled with the catfish they’d caught. Their song brought everyone out of their homes, the children especially. The whole village came to greet them, joining in a spontaneous parade that foreshadowed the long-delayed wedding celebration.

  Several days later the group of women—now dressed in European fashion, perfumed, coiffed, and accompanied by several men in jacket and tie—went from Fritz’s home to Father Jean’s church, extending the ecstasy of the Mamy Watas who had emerged from the depths of the forest, from the depths of the river, and crowned their captain: Ngo Bikaï. Then a man called Fritz stood in front of the priest and took her as his wife.

  Only a handful of the fisherwomen were there to witness the blessings at Father Jean’s church. The others, under Martha’s leadership, had taken charge first of Ngo Bikaï’s rear courtyard and then, in the following days, of her kitchen. They scaled the captain’s back, pulled out its innards, cut off its fins, poked out its eyes, and slashed its skin with eight straight cuts. Using onions, bouillon cubes, lemons, olive oil, and spices—bongo, pèpè, and djansan—they made a marinade in which the fish swam for hours, twenty-four hours, yes, before it was cooked for thirty minutes and then given pride of place on the living room table, covered with onions and diced celery, surrounded by all the necessary accompaniments. It was a feast for the eyes of the many guests w
ho invaded the married couple’s living room, just waiting for the first among them to dig a fork into its exquisite flesh and taste the mbongo tchobi—the Bassa black stew.

  As we know, all of this happened before M’bangue gave his predictions for Cameroon’s future. He was interrupted. Because after the women had recognized Ngo Bikaï as their captain, after the tragic death of our Sita, there was nothing, really nothing that interested that happy crowd less than knowing what the French wanted.

  9

  That Schouain Rommel

  Since we’re talking about the French and their wants, if it hadn’t been for Captain Dio, Hebga would have given up on shooting practice and gone back to his ax. Things had been happening on the war front. Hebga, he would have said “Come what may,” and “Rommel, so what?”—even though that name sent the camp into an unparalleled uproar. Leclerc had a personal grudge against him, they said, because before coming to the Sahara he had occupied a part of France, including the colonel’s own village, and the one where de Gaulle had been born, too. Rommel was Free France’s bête noire. They even dubbed the cardboard cutouts that were placed on the sand hills as shooting targets “Rommels.”

  He was called the Desert Fox. Who cares about that fox? Hebga said to himself. You have to obey orders, put your gun to your shoulder, and aim.

  “Take a good look at him,” Dio said.

  Hebga stared at the silhouette spread out on the sand.

  “Do you see him?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Fire!”

  Hebga cocked his finger.

  “No, you’re too slow,” Dio snapped.