When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  Then they did it again.

  “Imagine you’re looking at your enemy’s face.”

  But that was where things went wrong. For whatever Hebga tried—and he tried everything—he just couldn’t imagine the face of the Man who had done that. Dio knew nothing about that old story—that very long, old story.

  “Okay, tell yourself that he’s a very bad guy.”

  Hebga didn’t need to convince himself of that. He had lived through that evil, the evil committed by the Man who had done that. The image of our Sita’s severed arm came back to him. He spit onto the sand. Dio thought he hadn’t understood the point of the exercise, and struggled to find another way around the communication problem with the simplified French he and Massu used to speak to the tirailleurs.

  “Enemy bad bad,” he said.

  “Schouain,” Hebga replied.

  “Yes, him schouain.”

  “Him Nazi.”

  “Nazi.”

  “Nazi schouain.”

  “Nazi schouain.”

  The captain pointed again at the silhouette there on the sand.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  They’d go through it all again the next day, and the day after that. Because Captain Dio was the one charged with training the tirailleurs. Ah! He would have made things easier for himself if he had just used a picture or sketch of Rommel as a target. The problem was that for a Senegalese tirailleur, there was no difference between Rommel and Leclerc, or Dio himself, for that matter. Captain Dio realized it was just as hard to imagine an enemy there on the sand as a friend in the forest. Yet the tirailleurs needed to understand that de Gaulle was different from Rommel, because General Charles de Gaulle was not a Nazi.

  It was so hot that everyone always felt dizzy, like the sun was making your brain swell. Off in the distance, the wind sang its morbid song. It kicked up the sand, which got in your eyes and blinded you; got into your mouth and left you thirsty. The noises from afar were all jumbled together, cries and tirades, orders and groans. Dio couldn’t pay as much attention to each of the soldiers, but he knew that any lapse in shooting practice would be fatal. His soldiers would become cannon fodder for Rommel. Dio got himself back under control and focused again on Hebga, the man with the ax. Were the tirailleurs responsible for their own tragic fate? Ah! Dio, all too accustomed to blaming the army of Vichy France, could lay no blame on Free France! But there were all these new soldiers to train, the same lesson to go over again and again, each time slightly differently. The increase in the numbers of troops was posing unimaginable problems, especially with the assignment of black soldiers to the infantry. Free France was counting on them and at the same time needed to protect them, at the risk of having to bury them all in a mass grave! Captain Dio got himself back under control.

  “Let’s do it again.”

  “Him Nazi schouain.”

  “Very good. Now you shut left eye.”

  “Left eye.”

  Each time, Hebga closed his right eye. Dio was getting angry. What a shitty job this was!

  “You look enemy.”

  “Nazi schouain.”

  “Very good. Now, fire.”

  Hebga fired.

  “Very good, very good for today.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  The sun ate away at your brain, made your eyes bleary. There in the sand, an enemy’s silhouette looked like a mirage. The exercise was done without bullets. They had such limited supplies that, until England delivered what they needed, they couldn’t waste a single bullet. The balance of power had shifted since the United States had joined the war. But would those American soldiers be landing in Africa anytime soon? When? Dio imagined Free France’s meeting with soldiers of the Afrikakorps, which would include woodcutters who had no idea how to shoot a rifle. Cannon fodder. And Captain Dio imagined just what would happen when his soldiers needed to use machine guns. They’d have to start the training all over again. Bah!

  Hebga, if only he could have spoken to Dio in Bassa, he would have said that he wasn’t afraid of that schouain Rommel, and if needed, he’d take him on in hand-to-hand combat, like he’d done with those Italians. That schouain Rommel could ask who he was and anyone would tell him about Hebga. That schouain Rommel had a lot of machine guns, supersonic planes, all-terrain tanks, no doubt, but they only did one thing—the same thing as when our Sita had been torn limb from limb. And no one dies twice. The woodcutter grew all the more certain that the Man who had done that could be none other than that schouain Rommel himself. Captain Dio’s shooting practice was helping him to understand it all clearly. In his heart, Hebga thanked the French captain, because he had crossed whole countries—forest, plateau, steppe, and desert—looking for the Man who had done that, and now that his silhouette was slowly coming into focus there on the sand, all he had to do was wait, trembling, for the moment when he’d see the face of that Nazi schouain Rommel!

  10

  Getting Caught Up

  Life hadn’t stopped back in Yaoundé, things kept going, same as always. For example, Martha hated it when people traipsed into her living room on muddy feet. That was “the least of her flaws,” said Pouka, teasing her. This time, however, as he again came to visit his friend, he didn’t even have a chance to think that phrase to himself because, just as he caught the enticing smell of mbongo tchobi, Martha’s voice greeted him sharply from the living room: “Take off your shoes!”

  Um Nyobè had opened the door. It was raining as it rains only in Yaoundé. Despite his umbrella, Pouka was soaked. He took off his dripping wet socks and tossed them on a basket of avocados—the produce Martha sold and that she had lined up, as usual, along the wall. The wind buffeted the windows and doors in surprisingly violent gusts, as if the sky were taking revenge.

  “You’re here to get caught up again, huh?” said Um Nyobè.

  He was amused by his friend’s rather frequent visits, and whispered to him that he should put a damper on his appetite, even if the house held out the promise of a delicious meal: Martha wasn’t happy he had skipped her sister’s wedding in Edéa.

  “Tell her that I couldn’t get leave. Working for the white man isn’t like selling in the market, is it?”

  Pouka was stopped short by the reply:

  “Go tell her that yourself.”

  Thinking twice, the maestro decided it would be impolite to tell Martha that he hadn’t been there for Ngo Bikaï because of the French, especially after the “events.”

  “Ah, I’ll leave it alone,” he said. He went to sit down in the living room. “She can’t understand.”

  Pouka knew Martha. He understood her moods, her bad temper—which, according to him, came from being a bayamsallam—but also her angelic sweetness. He promised himself that he’d figure out what to say to her. He went over to the kitchen for a quick hello and then came back to talk with Um Nyobè about what had him so busy at work.

  “I never should have taken this job.”

  “Then you’d be unemployed?”

  “That’s true.”

  Um Nyobè described in detail the wedding ceremony and, most of all, his discussions with Fritz. His face grew serious.

  “Fritz says he wants to move to Douala.”

  “Douala?”

  Even Pouka was surprised.

  “His brother who works for the trains is down there, you know.”

  It was true. Yet this decision seemed to both men like running away. And then, why did he agree to get married if he was just going to leave town? Pouka and Um Nyobè knew Fritz well. His decision to move to Douala didn’t fit their image of him and they couldn’t figure out how to answer the thousands of questions that popped into their heads.

  “What does Ngo Bikaï say about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ngo Bikaï had been so busy organizing the wedding that Um Nyobè hadn’t found the time to talk to her openly. He would have asked her, of course, if she liked Douala so much that she was willing to abandon her wom
en. Pouka was sorry that Martha wasn’t part of the conversation. She was so close to Ngo Bikaï that she was sure to have an opinion about it.

  “With women,” Um Nyobè began philosophically, “you never know.”

  The falling rain muffled the sounds of their conversation, or else Martha would have heard them from the kitchen, where she was preparing the evening meal.

  “You should know,” Pouka observed.

  A delicate topic. How many times had Pouka changed the topic as soon as it turned to marriage? Suddenly, from the roof above came a clattering din. The two men looked at the ceiling. The rain falls violently in Yaoundé; sometimes it tears off roofs and leaves couples caught making love lying soaked in their bed. That’s the story people tell, at any rate.

  “Sometimes I think about moving,” Um Nyobè announced, “but maybe it’s not worth the trouble.”

  He wasn’t really talking about the roof. Pouka tried another topic. Um Nyobè then said he was thinking about asking for a transfer to Edéa.

  “Because of Fritz?”

  Um Nyobè had expected him to ask instead if it was because of Martha. There were times when Pouka’s obvious lack of interest in others really surprised him.

  “No,” he replied, “my boss is just driving me nuts.”

  “At least he let you go to Edéa.”

  “If you only knew…” Um Nyobè began.

  “Martha will be happy. Pouka is sure of that.”

  “If it were only up to her, we’d have left Yaoundé a long time ago.”

  “About that,” Pouka said, again changing the topic. “Do you know someone named Delarue? Jacques Delarue?”

  “I’ve met him a few times, at soccer games.”

  Um Nyobè didn’t go into detail about his relationship with Delarue. Not because he didn’t trust Pouka. He just wanted to know where the mention of his name would take their conversation. He still remembered Delarue’s words of caution, how he saw himself as the target of persecution, and how the stories he told always revolved around him. He also remembered why he’d come to Cameroon, the book he was writing, and the question Um Nyobè had asked himself when Delarue had talked about his activities: I’d like to know what the other Frenchmen think about him.

  “He was repatriated.”

  Those few simple words made the two men fall into a deep silence, broken only by the wind rattling the shutters on the window.

  “Um Nyobè,” Martha shouted, “will you shut the window? The rain is coming in, can’t you hear it?”

  “Ah! The rain!” he cursed.

  He was talking just to fill the space, because he was really thinking about what his wife had said about Delarue: “He’s a spy for the governor.” And now, not long after that, Delarue had been repatriated by that very governor. He smiled; it didn’t really surprise him at all. His friends would be disappointed, he thought. Especially Ouandié, who had been kept from meeting the French “defender of the black man” by his school examinations. The state of war made it easy to miss meetings. Outside, the rain was tapering off.

  The rain in Yaoundé is like that: violent and short-lived.

  11

  Identity Theft

  Pouka went back home without ever telling his friend what had been going on at his place. The mention of Delarue’s name had sent his conversation with Um Nyobè off on a tangent, and then the question of Fritz’s decision to move to Douala had left him speechless. He had left with a full belly, but without having told Um Nyobè that he had ended up kicking out his two guests, Xavier and Augustus.

  The two boys had just gone too far. They had started by using his name to buy things on credit at the neighborhood grocer’s. It had taken Pouka a while to realize what was going on because everyone in Madagascar respected him, since he was the only writer in the neighborhood, and then the reading of his poem on Radio Cameroon had made him a bit of a local star. Because he helped people out here and there, writing letters or other documents that can destroy the chances of anyone who is illiterate in their dealings with the colonial government, there were lots of people who owed him.

  The neighborhood residents readily agreed to give Xavier and Augustus credit when they claimed they were buying food or other things for the “maestro.” But everything has its limits, and you can’t just live your whole life on credit. Little by little, people noticed that the “big man” of the neighborhood was getting too much on credit. People wondered if he was in trouble at work. Or, rather, were the white men paying him enough?

  Everyone blamed the war for forcing them to tighten their belts, and of course Xavier and Augustus repeated, “The war, yes, the war!” When Pouka realized, he let the neighborhood know that Mr. Pouka always paid cash for his purchases and that he had no intention of changing his ways. But he didn’t blame his guests in public. He understood them: they were hungry and were looking for work.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” was all he asked.

  “Maestro,” Xavier replied, “we were ashamed.”

  “We were hungry,” added Augustus.

  “Shame doesn’t feed a man,” Pouka snapped.

  He started leaving them a little spending money, which he set on the table before he left for work, so as not to embarrass them.

  However, when the rains began and he found his shoes soaked and slightly muddy, though carefully replaced under his bed, he was alarmed. The incident with the wet towel came back to him. Someone had worn his shoes. They’d tried to polish them, more or less, but asking a villager to polish a pair of leather shoes the right way was like asking a plum to eat itself. At least, that’s what he thought.

  Oh! Pouka could have complained out loud about his guests that evening, or in the morning before he left for work, as he had done when things had started to go wrong. But he preferred to lay a trap for them. So one day he came home early. It was raining. His boss understood how the rain in Yaoundé affected his employees’ schedules, so he hadn’t even had to come up with an excuse. Once home, he sat down in the living room and waited for his two guests, who were still out. To pass the time, he picked up The Flowers of Evil and began reading, even though he already knew all the poems.

  He hadn’t finished reading “The Sun” when he heard his guests’ voices and Augustus came in.

  “Sit down,” he ordered.

  Xavier was right behind him.

  “So it’s you,” Pouka said, getting to his feet.

  The boy tried to escape, but Pouka blocked the door.

  “So it’s you,” he repeated.

  It was Xavier, in fact. Really? Someone just glancing in would have mistaken the boy for Pouka the Maestro. Dressed in the tergal jacket Pouka only wore on special occasions, and wearing his white striped shoes, he even had on the puffy multicolored cap that Pouka reserved for those moments when he wanted to look the part. When he was a “wandering poet,” as he said with no little pride. What’s more, the trousers he was wearing were wet from the calves down, as were the shoes, and they were muddy, too. Pouka was furious beyond words. Back when he was setting up the little poetry circle in Edéa, he had chosen for himself the role of Gérard de Nerval. His friends, Um Nyobè in particular, had warned him several times: he was losing his mind. In his vanity, he felt he had multiple personalities. Now, for the first time, in his own house, in his own living room, he really thought he was seeing the alter ego that amused his friends. He thought he was face-to-face with his double. Wasn’t it Pouka himself who was trying to escape?

  “Why?” he asked simply.

  He was asking himself, really.

  Believe me, Pouka breathed a sigh of relief when Xavier answered and he heard a voice that wasn’t his own.

  “There’s a girl in Briqueterie,” he began.

  “Nonsense! Nonsense!” Pouka was expecting to hear a whole romantic story, something fantastical, surprising, and Xavier was just stammering out some anecdote about a poor neighborhood, it made no sense, something about a whore he wanted to impress with his Europea
n finery, a tale about a piece of ass he was trying to scam, just another of those urban tales that circulate by the thousands in Yaoundé. Ah! Pouka couldn’t have been more disappointed, but he was also just as furious because he felt he’d been ripped off several times: by the villagers, by Yaoundé itself, which hadn’t been able to come up with a better, more fabulous story for them, and by literature, which hadn’t ever surprised him, not even once.

  “Get undressed,” he said curtly.

  Trembling, Xavier did as he was told. Piece by piece, he set his host’s jacket, shoes, pants, shirt, tie, and socks on the living room table, until he was standing there totally naked. He wasn’t wearing any underpants.

  “Now get the hell out,” Pouka said calmly.

  Xavier ran out, bumping into the table as he went. Some of the clothes fell. Pouka noticed that he didn’t even try to hide his genitals. Augustus hadn’t moved, as if he had nothing to do with it.

  “You, too,” said the master.

  Augustus jumped.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “What about my bags?”

  “Get the hell out.”

  Pouka had finally raised his voice, as if it had taken that last question about the bags to make him lose his cool. He went into the bedroom, gathered up the boys’ belongings, and threw them out the window, into the courtyard. Then he sat down in his living room and picked up his Baudelaire again. His hands were trembling with anger. Literature was how he calmed himself down when he was feeling crazy. The next day, right at the same time as he had kicked his guests out, he knocked on his friend Um Nyobè’s door. It was still raining, even more violently.

  Typical for Yaoundé.

  We already know what happened next.

  12

  I Am Not an Other

  A few days later, it was Um Nyobè who stopped by to visit Pouka—at his office. Did location figure into their equation of who was visiting whom? Honestly, Um Nyobè didn’t give it a second thought. He was out of breath, and the wind that rattled through the city brought him no relief. His friend appeared at the end of a corridor.