When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “Looking for Pouka? Here he is,” he said, “come on, office number fifteen.”

  Um Nyobè couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Pouka asked, then quipped, “I’m not a woman, am I?”

  “Did you hear what was on the radio?”

  Pouka hadn’t heard anything on the radio. Just then, a white employee, one of Pouka’s colleagues, stopped in front of them, and gave them the news in a breezy way that Um Nyobè couldn’t have matched.

  “Hey,” said the white man, “I thought you were dead.”

  “Dead?”

  Stunned, Pouka stared at the two men who were staring at him.

  “Weren’t you listening to the radio?” Um Nyobè asked.

  “Clearly not,” the Frenchman confirmed.

  He took them to the radio station headquarters straightaway, without waiting for the announcement of the poet’s death to be rebroadcast. The journalist who had made the announcement was a young Frenchman with childlike round cheeks; he was wearing a colonial cap even inside his office. The man who’d driven them there in his car then took them all to the police station, where the officer was clearly just as thrilled to see that the poet was still alive and well.

  What had happened? A man carrying papers that identified him as Pouka, écrivain-interprète, had been found cut into pieces in a back alleyway in Briqueterie, “lying in a ditch.” The violence of the crime was unlike anything they’d ever seen before in Yaoundé. The machete had done its job. The commissioner, quite scandalized, couldn’t hide his indignation: never in his whole career in the colonies had he ever seen anything like it. The dead man’s genitals had been cut off.

  “They were the only pieces missing.”

  With his hand in his pocket, Pouka gave a quick squeeze to his testicles.

  “So, you maintain that you are Louis-Marie Pouka?”

  “Pouka, the son of M’bangue.”

  He searched his pockets for his identification, but no luck.

  “I don’t understand. I always carry my identification with me.”

  “In these times of war…” the police commissioner observed.

  Really, it wasn’t prudent to go out without your identification, especially when you were black. With the war, Yaoundé had suddenly become more violent and more suspicious; there were patrols circulating continually throughout the city, demanding that the black population show their papers. Pouka was lucky he hadn’t been stopped.

  “I must have left them at home.”

  “Are you sure?” the commissioner asked. “My men went to the place where this Pouka was employed. No one there knew him.”

  “I changed jobs,” Pouka replied, “because of the war.”

  He kept patting himself all over, checking his pockets, even his pants pockets, over and over again. Never had he been made so happy by such a turn of events: if it had been him…? He turned to Um Nyobè.

  “Yes, I can corroborate that,” he said. “He changed jobs.”

  The testimony of the French employee was written down first in the dossier. An old colonial habit that made no exceptions for the blacks who served in the French administration.

  It was a very long day for the two friends, because the commissioner wanted their statements for the report. The police officer who took care of it looked terrified. He kept on shaking his head as he typed, looking at Pouka and shaking his head. He stared at Um Nyobè’s identification with an intensity that surprised the two friends. He asked Pouka repeatedly why he didn’t have “his papers”?

  “Lost? Stolen?”

  “Lost,” Pouka said, for what else could have happened? The commissioner interrupted to give the officer a communiqué to type, another announcement he wanted broadcast on Radio Cameroon. Since his writing was chicken-scratch, the officer couldn’t decipher it, so the commissioner told him out loud what he wanted announced to the capital.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “The dead man found in Briqueterie was not an employee of the French administration.”

  He was smiling broadly. As for Pouka, despite the announcement that cleared up “a most unfortunate rumor in these troubled times,” he was aching to know the truth. Ah! Pouka, wasn’t this just the sort of announcement that has become all too common on Radio Cameroon since then? One of those announcements that seek to spread propaganda rather than to lay out the truth about Cameroon? He later learned that the French administration was less interested in spreading information than in dissipating the rumors about the “traitor working for France,” who had been liquidated.

  By whom?

  Pouka’s colleague questioned the commissioner on how the case would be handled. Visibly surprised, the commissioner looked at him kindly, then turned toward Pouka and smiled.

  “You are alive, my dear Mr. Pouka. Take joy in that and please accept my greetings on behalf of the French administration.”

  Later Pouka and Um Nyobè ran as they made their way into Madagascar. They hid their faces behind their briefcases.

  13

  After the Rain, the Moment of Doubt

  The day after a rainstorm the sky is always clear, as if the capital’s demons, once chased from the streets they had overrun, revealed the city’s true beauty. Clean streets, houses with newly washed walls, and fresh air signal the return of Yaoundé’s youth. When the rain falls hard enough, it doesn’t even leave mud behind. The people themselves feel lighter, because the rain doesn’t only wash the city, but bodies and souls as well. Yet when Pouka left his neighborhood, he noted the shifting gazes of the people around him, and wasn’t surprised. The rain that brightens the city also frees its monsters. At least that’s what people say.

  “Hello!” he said, although he normally only responded after others greeted him.

  “You slept well?”

  Some of his neighbors sped up.

  “Hello, my brother!” Pouka called after them, his words bouncing off their backs.

  “What are we going to do, hey?”

  He forced himself to be polite. Would he have to go from door to door, knocking at every home in the neighborhood, to assure everyone that he, Mr. Pouka, was alive and well? Would he have to let them pat him all over? Ah! He’d figure out a way to make them realize that he was the same old Pouka that they knew. The evening before, he had found Augustus shivering outside his door, distraught by what had happened. Still, Augustus was able to fill him in, tell him just what had happened to Xavier.

  “Did you go to the police?” Pouka asked him.

  “No.”

  Here’s what had happened. Xavier hadn’t stopped passing himself off as Pouka. Like a starving man who is hooked after his very first bite of a bean fritter, once Pouka had stripped him bare and chased him out of his house, he had come back disguised as the man who had allowed him to live the good life in the city. But why did he need to take on Pouka’s identity? Quite simply, because he hadn’t told the truth to the woman he’d fallen for in Briqueterie, the same woman he’d tried to tell Pouka about the other day. He knew—and it made Xavier miserable—that if he told her the truth, it would be the end of their affair. He was sure Pouka would understand. Because what woman, especially what whore in Briqueterie, yes, what whore anywhere in the capital, would take a villager between her legs as she did with him, if she had known he was just a native from the sticks?

  “She was feeding him and everything,” Augustus added.

  “On credit?”

  “He said he’d pay her at the end of the month.”

  Now, what whore from Briqueterie would have refused credit to a writer? But it happened that this wolowolos had a husband, or a lover, or a pimp—either Xavier didn’t know or he didn’t care, because what man employed as a writer by the French administration is afraid of a tirailleur? Xavier had asked her, the whore/married woman, to give him a quickie, vite-vite. Whore and married woman—those two things just don’t go together, Pouka had to admit. And to top it off, the woman’s name was a
flourish that made the poetic maestro roar because, as Augustus announced, “she was called the Marshal.”

  “The Marshal?”

  What a story! But okay, he’d just let that poor neighborhood story play out in meaningless verses because, he told himself, it was just the woman going on, and most likely when things between them were getting hot and heavy. Or maybe it was Xavier going on. But he didn’t take into account the jealousy of that tirailleur—“a Chadian,” Augustus added, as if that mattered when it came to the question of masculine jealousy, “who went by the name of de Gaulle.”

  “De Gaulle?”

  Whatever the case, the night before, the famous de Gaulle had caught his girl with her head between Xavier’s legs, and in the Marshal’s mouth a member that was not his own. He had reacted like the tirailleur he was when confronting a bad-bad enemy. He had grabbed his machete and—chop-chop!—decapitated Xavier, who didn’t even have the chance to cry “Help!” or to put his bangala back in his pants.

  “And how does my identity card fit into all of this?” Pouka interrupted, feeling quite nauseated by this whole affair that, frankly, was making his alexandrine verses explode.

  It had been in Xavier’s back pocket at that fateful moment.

  “He wasn’t even using it anymore,” Augustus added.

  “And what about the woman,” Um Nyobè asked, “where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Augustus had to admit.

  His hands were trembling, his mind was blank, and he really just didn’t know—nor could he say how she had escaped. He really wished he knew nothing about it at all, although he’d been watching Xavier’s exploits through a hole in the Marshal’s wall.

  Briqueterie could hide the worst of criminals, so don’t think you can just go there and find our Marshal in the mob of wolowolos in the neighborhood who all called themselves the Marshal. Not only did Augustus have no idea what her name really was, he couldn’t even remember her face clearly. Why would he have gone to the police? As for the criminal tirailleur de Gaulle, only France could say where he was hiding.

  “They’re gonna arrest me, aren’t they?” Augustus sobbed, sitting between the two French civil servants. “They’re gonna arrest me, right?”

  Um Nyobè imagined how the commissioner would react if Augustus came to his office. To the standard police question, “Your papers?” he’d reply that he had none. When asked “Who killed Xavier?” he’d say: “De Gaulle.” Going to the police station without proper identification would give the commissioner the right to hold the poor fellow in jail for forty-eight hours. And what would happen if he accused de Gaulle of murder?

  “The French will accuse me of killing him, right?”

  Pouka and Um Nyobè exchanged glances. The murder wouldn’t earn him a life sentence, but the death penalty.

  “What proof do they have?”

  “Proof?”

  In his own village logic, Augustus had understood how the police in the capital worked: What difference was there if the commissioner arrested Augustus or Xavier or Peter or Paul? This would be an open-and-shut case—a good thing, since the war was heating up on the home front. His desk was piled high with files about men who beat their wives, some of whom were pregnant, beat them so badly they broke their ribs; men who were drunk in public and insulted the French administration; thieves who committed crimes in broad daylight. One murder case closed meant one fewer on his desk. After all, the war was actually being fought elsewhere.

  “They’re gonna arrest me?”

  “You’re not going to run off now and hide in the maquis,” Pouka said.

  The poet didn’t know what else to say.

  “What do you think?”

  Yes, what did Um Nyobè think? He took stock of the disaster that was his friend’s home: there were books on the armchairs, clothes on the table, and in front of the door, a towel soaking wet from the rain was swinging back and forth with the wind. All clear signs of the absence of a woman’s touch, Martha would have said. He really liked Pouka, but suddenly he wondered just why he had come to pay him a visit, because now he had stepped right into the middle of some business with a Marshal that really had nothing to do with him.

  “This little guy needs a good lawyer,” he said.

  14

  The Insurrection of Soldier Fouret

  Alexandre Fouret was one of the rare white soldiers who could be found in the courtyard with the Senegalese tirailleurs. Exchanges among the soldiers fighting for Free France were not always smooth. The Africans sometimes made fun of him, as did the white soldiers, for that matter: everyone wondered what he was doing there. Had anyone paid more attention, they’d have realized that this intellectual—a student from the Sorbonne—had nothing at all to say to the legionnaires who had come there, as they put it, “to break some Fritz.” The book that sat by the bespectacled soldier’s bedside was, in fact, something written by Germans: The Manifesto. And he was reading it in the original, to boot.

  Philothée thought the Frenchman was Marxism personified. For Fouret, let’s be clear, the Senegalese soldier (only much later would Fouret learn that his friend was in fact from Cameroon) was something like a therapist. The war leads to all sorts of compromises. Chief among them: that you have to accept whatever ears she provides, especially if you intend to lead ideological training sessions.

  Philothée didn’t know that these sessions, where Fouret spoke and he listened, were courses on ideology. They sort of reminded him of Pouka’s little poetry circle, although only a little, since Pouka wasn’t white.

  “It is inconceivable,” Fouret said. “France asks black men to die for her, but she can’t even be bothered to treat them like men.”

  Believe me, those weren’t Philothée’s words—as you know, he had a stutter.

  “I have to write this down in my journal,” Fouret remarked, whenever he came up with a quoteworthy sentence. You see, he wasn’t just talking for nothing. His audience was at once his friend’s silent conscience and his own journal, in which he wrote about the future revolution. Because for him, war was a laboratory where he could try things out in advance of the real war, which would have to encompass the whole world.

  “A class war.”

  Yet Fouret had a moment of doubt there, when faced with Philothée’s eyes, eyes as silent as a goat’s. He wondered what mattered most, really: “class war or racial war.” War—and this camp in particular—had shown him a side of his analysis that he hadn’t thought about till then.

  “It can’t just keep on going like this,” he said.

  “Ngou … ngou…” stammered Philothée.

  “Impossible.”

  Philothée thought about the library that contained all this wisdom; now it was under German occupation. His heart ached at the thought that the books that had taught him about freedom were now held captive. As for Fouret, sometimes he was unsure about which path to follow, The Manifesto or The Insurrectionist, Vallès’s novel about the Paris Commune. For him, the insurrection needed to keep going, but can an insurrection be perpetual?

  “What am I even doing here in Africa?”

  He asked himself that question.

  “Idealism must be defended,” he replied, “because France is idealism’s homeland, and Paris its capital.

  “Ngou…” said Philothée again.

  “And then,” he whispered, “learning how to use weapons. You never know…”

  There was no school where one could take a course called “An Introduction to Revolutionary Action.” At the Sorbonne, his philosophy professors taught none of the authors that interested him, like Bakunin and other nineteenth-century thinkers. It was essential, he said, to adapt their ideas to the present day, to the burning questions of our times. Stalin’s USSR was no model, “because, unlike Lenin, that guy’s no idealist.”

  “You see what Stalin did with Hitler?” Fouret asked.

  He answered himself:

  “A real dirty trick! Now he’s paying the price. It wa
s inevitable, wasn’t it?”

  “Ngou…” said Philothée.

  “It was after the fall of Smolensk,” he confided, “that I joined Free France. They flattened that city, just like this desert here.”

  He gestured toward the desert of the Fezzan that spread out all around them. They stared out over its blanket of sand, where the wind spun around like a huge, angry monster. Sometimes their eyes fell on rocks, sometimes on palm trees, and sometimes, only rarely, on stone-paved roads. It didn’t matter whether he was hunkered down in a foxhole with walls of dancing sand—the only shelter the desert offered the soldiers—or if he spent the night marching, Fouret could always indulge in his revolutionary reveries.

  Suddenly a distant noise brought them to attention. The camp exploded in confusion as the warning rang out: “The Jerrys!”

  “It’s Fritz!”

  “The Germans!”

  In one leap the tirailleurs took their positions.

  Fouret ran back to his division.

  “Tirailleurs, take your positions!”

  War gives no advance warning. As for the revolution, it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  15

  In Jerry’s Shadow

  Fouret raced across the camp, cutting through the wind and the groups of soldiers on his left and his right who were getting into position, cutting through the shouts of the commanders whose deliberate words made order out of chaos. His mind heard nothing but the call to war, the drumbeat of his heart. “I am a soldier of Free France,” he repeated, “I am a soldier of Free France.” A piercing call made him run faster and faster, his feet sinking into the sand, breaking free only to plunge back down and, again, break free. He struggled over the little dunes whose stubborn sand kept dragging him back down. Finally, he threw himself behind a wrinkle of sand, and took his position in the ranks of the white column, behind the motorized cannon.