Fritz!
“The children will stay here,” she said simply, “with me.”
“You’re keeping the children?”
Never had Fritz felt so powerless as on that day in the living room of his own house. Standing before a woman. Looking around him, he saw the photographs of his family, the walls of his home, the Christian motto that was hanging there, and then he paused, his eyes on a picture from his wedding day, one they’d had taken after the ceremony in Father Jean’s church. What hypocrisy! Suddenly he exploded.
“What about me?”
Fritz, shut up!
“You,” his wife said, “you are leaving for Douala, no?”
“I’m talking about the children.”
“They are your children, Fritz,” she said gently. “I have no intention of separating them from their father.”
“Separating them from their father! But that’s just what you are doing!”
“You’re the one who’s leaving, Fritz,” she clarified. “No one is keeping you from staying here with us.”
Then Ngo Bikaï went back to her room, where the children were still sleeping, leaving Fritz alone in the living room. The water that was still flowing made a circle around his feet.
19
How Many Months of Silence
In fact, that was the first conversation Fritz and Ngo Bikaï had had in that living room as a married couple. After “the events,” you understand. That tempers flared is regrettable, I’d say, but, all things considered, it was better that this living room, which had been filled with love and the liveliest of political debates, find its voice again. Really, since what had happened there, silence had taken over. Fritz had never found the words to tell his wife what he felt after the rape. Ngo Bikaï had told him what had happened, and together they had scoured the town to find the criminal who, everyone said, must have been mobilized and was perhaps already in the Fezzan, out in the middle of the Sahara desert, one of the thousands of tirailleurs who’d enlisted in Colonel Leclerc’s column in order to liberate Paris and France from the Nazi boots.
And sex? Fritz hadn’t ever stopped making love to his wife, because Ngo Bikaï had continued coming to his room once the children were asleep. Ah, dear reader, don’t ask me whether it was Fritz or Ngo Bikaï who made love more passionately, because that’s asking too much of a narrator. Okay, for those who want to know all the details of the Book of Love, after “the events,” it was as if Ngo Bikaï were overcome with a desire to feel her husband penetrate her. An overwhelming urge to feel “Fritz’s bangala rubbing my vagina,” adding “right in the middle of the day, sometimes I was as wet as a river.” Those are her own words, yes, and she added that she wanted to make love even when she had her period. What positions didn’t she propose? Fritz penetrated her on the chair, on the edge of the bed, up against the wall, “doggy-style.” When he wanted to pull out, she held on to his testicles, begging him at times, and when he was wiped out, she’d take his penis in her mouth and suck, and suck. She screamed so much when she was about to climax that Fritz would slow down, and then, trembling, she’d sob and say, “Hold me.”
And, then, for you who don’t want to read all those sorts of details in a novel, let’s just say that Fritz loved Ngo Bikaï. Fritz had always loved Ngo Bikaï. What made their separation so difficult was that they had nothing to blame on each other. Even the love they shared had not waned. It was as unchanged as the furniture of their home.
But it wasn’t in their living room that Fritz had asked her to marry him; it was in his bedroom.
“We’re already married, you fool,” she’d replied.
They had just made love. He had watched her get up and wipe between her legs with a towel. She was about to go back to join the children when he grasped her hand.
He had laughed, because she had, too, and then swatted him with the towel.
“Let’s get married again,” he insisted earnestly.
She stopped laughing.
“In the church,” he added.
Yes, it was Fritz’s idea that they get married in Father Jean’s church! She hadn’t said yes. No, Ngo Bikaï had left him there in his bed that still smelled of her. The next day she said, “If you still want to marry me, know that Father Jean insists there be a sponsor.”
“A sponsor?”
He had expected her to say a witness, but what was the difference? They had thought about it together, lying in each other’s arms, going through the names of their friends one by one, those from Edéa at first, and then those living elsewhere. They thought of Pouka and then Um Nyobè. “Yes, Um Nyobè.” Because of his “calm strength.” That’s how Fritz put it. And it really did sum him up. They had kept Pouka in mind as a backup in case Um Nyobè couldn’t escape from his “job for the white men.” That’s why they’d burst out laughing when Pouka had sent his regrets for not being able to be there. Yes, they had made the right choice.
“I told you so,” Fritz declared.
Ngo Bikaï wished her brother Bilong could be there, but obviously, there was nothing she could do about it. The war! That awful thing! But she had hesitated over having Um Nyobè as sponsor, because of Martha.
“She’s my sister,” she explained.
“And so?” Fritz asked.
“It’s like we don’t have any friends in Edéa.”
Yet Um Nyobè and Fritz had a lot of friends, as we all know. Choosing someone from Edéa as sponsor would have certainly ruffled the feathers of more than one person, but grown-ups always find a way to smooth out those sorts of things. Their friends were grown-ups, capable of understanding the most complicated issues, the most political of negotiations, the most unexpected decisions. That’s really what makes up most of an adult’s life and conversations. Fritz had debated the pros and cons of a religious ceremony with his friends, laughed when they teased him, discussed the possibility of holding the ceremony somewhere else, and sighed because La Seigneuriale was no longer there.
But, since “the events,” Fritz felt that something inside him had died. He couldn’t put his finger on it, and didn’t really want to know, because it wasn’t to him, but to his wife that the tirailleur had done that. Because he didn’t really want to know, he had gotten caught up in philosophical questions when he confided in Um Nyobè the next day on the phone.
“They wanted to break our spirit … to break our spirit.”
“I don’t see any other explanation,” Um Nyobè admitted, as I’m sure you recall, my dear reader. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s in the chapter “Love’s Living Room” of this very book.
From the “we” implied by “break our spirit”—a “we” that meant Fritz and Um Nyobè—Fritz had moved on to talk about a second one, the “we” of his marriage with Ngo Bikaï. That’s the “we” at the forefront of this chapter. He used the first when he spoke in the living room, the second, he said it in his bedroom, love’s bedroom. Don’t lose patience, because in the dizzying confusion between those two “we’s,” you’ll find yourself caught up in what I call the drunkard’s psychology. Fritz’s decision to move to Douala had been made when he was blind drunk, and Ngo Bikaï knew it was her own body that he was running away from, a body that was in some sense dead to him. Although he didn’t have the courage to tell her, Ngo Bikaï realized it quite quickly on her own. She knew you can’t save a marriage that has grown cancerous by running away, and that’s why she had decided not to go to Douala. She wouldn’t find happiness there. And she knew it.
20
A Problem for a Lawyer
So there in Edéa, an exemplary couple was being torn apart by the circumstances. At the same time, in Yaoundé, Pouka and Um Nyobè were facing a different problem. A problem for a lawyer. They were worried about the poor peasant who’d lost his way in the city and gotten caught up in a story involving a Marshal and a de Gaulle—one of those poor-neighborhood stories. Both of them saw him as the perfect victim.
“Ah! If only Delarue were here!” Um Nyobè crie
d.
“Delarue?” Pouka asked in surprise.
That’s when Um Noybè told him the true story of his connection to “that famous Jacques Delarue you asked me about, you remember?” He listed all the political advantages that connection would have meant if Delarue hadn’t been “chased out of the country.”
He remembered how Marc had served as an intermediary: maybe if he dug through the archives of his dealings with his now-expatriated colleague, he’d know whom to contact.
“We could all go to his house,” Augustus suggested.
Yes, that was the victim speaking. Even Um Nyobè was shocked. So he changed the topic.
That’s just how Um Nyobè was: more straightforward than secretive, more practical than theoretical, or, as Pouka might have said, “more prosaic than poetic.” In any event, here his common sense came through. They really did need to get in touch with his friend.
“Okay, then,” he said, “I’ll take care of it.”
“How so?”
“I’ll go to his house.”
Pouka, aware of the irony of the situation, looked at Augustus.
“What about him?” he asked. “Will he just stay here?”
“Where do you think he should go?” Um Nyobè replied. “Besides, it’s raining, don’t you see?”
And so once again Pouka found the offender, whose bags he’d tossed out into the courtyard, back in his living room. He didn’t pause to think what would have happened had he not thrown the two fellows out of his house.
As for Um Nyobè, when he got to Marc’s house his friend wasn’t there, so he waited a few minutes, at the suggestion of Marc’s wife. She was surprised, to say the least, that her husband wasn’t already home, given the hour.
“It’s the rain,” she kept saying, “it’s surely the rain.”
Um Nyobè knew Marc. He knew he was too busy with politics to have a mistress, so he tried to reassure his friend’s wife. Marc must be at a meeting in town, he said, that must be it. Then he suddenly realized that there was no one telling his own wife not to worry!
He decided to say goodbye to Marc’s wife and rush home to reassure his own before Martha got any crazy ideas. He didn’t want her to be left alone with their child for dinner that evening, especially since you just don’t know what could happen in times of war. And then Martha had certainly heard the story of Pouka’s supposed murder in Briqueterie. It wasn’t her husband who’d been killed, of course, but still, that kind of news would make anyone nervous. So Um Nyobè ran home rather than back to Pouka’s as he’d promised. He planned on giving him a call the next morning as soon as he got to the office, to let him know he hadn’t caught up with Marc and to revisit the question of the lawyer—in other words, to find some other solution. Yes, that’s what he’d do first thing in the morning.
When Um Nyobè called Pouka, the phone rang but no one picked up. It was noon before he was able to reach his friend.
“I’ve been looking for you for hours,” was the first thing he said.
“So now you’re my boss?” Pouka snapped. Quickly changing tone, he added, “I was at the bus station.”
“Why?”
“The villager, don’t you remember?”
This wasn’t the sort of conversation they could have on a phone belonging to the French administration. That evening, at Pouka’s, Um Nyobè realized that his friend had actually kicked Augustus out again.
“Why?”
Pouka was visibly upset; his conscience was eating away at him.
“Pouka paid for his ticket.”
“All that because of a problem with a lawyer?” exclaimed Um Nyobè.
“And Pouka waited for the bus to leave.”
Just what had gone on in that house last night? Um Nyobè would never find out, and for good reason.
“Now he can go look for that de Gaulle of his in Edéa.”
“You went too far.”
“By now he’s already there. Pouka isn’t going to fall into the same trap twice.”
Um Nyobè shook his head. How cruel Pouka could be! Who would have thought that the maestro would close the book so brutally on the failed poetic experiment he’d begun with the little poetry circle? Did anyone need to remind him of that old story? That eccentric adventure? He was still just as vain. Yet now that was all water under the bridge! History is our only mistress.
21
Three Mutually Exclusive Mathematical Possibilities
It was 1942: there’s no way Pouka could have known that another one of the rejects from his little poetry circle was continuing his Gallic peregrinations. In several cities abandoned by the Italians—by the “Daniels”—the Free French soldiers were greeted with tricolored banners that read THE FRENCH, or sometimes FRANCESCI, or even GAULLISTI. Philothée was there with them. Hebga too. Children darted around the tanks and trucks loaded with heavy machine guns and cannons. Victory is a deliciously addictive intoxicant, and the soldiers—white and black alike—who until then had only the desert as a companion, suddenly became men once more, that is to say, vulnerable to victory’s cycles of ecstasy. Why didn’t Leclerc warn them about the carelessness born of joy? Was he too busy reading the congratulatory telegrams pouring in from unlikely places—from General Giraud, even!—that he didn’t think that the loser gave his kiss with a knife hidden behind his back?
Let’s leave those two Cameroonian soldiers alone for the moment. Let’s not blame the victim, though you can’t say he’s totally innocent, either! There are differences of degree, differences erased by euphoria, by soldiers who dance in courtyards brought under submission, by the exuberance of people who don’t even understand the language spoken all around them—Arabic, in this case. Do not tell me that Leclerc was a lover of the French language! Do not tell me that it was the emotion he felt when he read General de Gaulle’s name there in Italian that made his mind go blank. But it may have been the Fezzan’s rapid fall that led him to believe things were going to be easy from then on.
Ah, Leclerc!
He’d not yet come face-to-face with the tanks of that schouain Rommel, the bête noire of Free France—and yet now he took a vacation! I can’t come up with any other word to describe the fact that he took ten days away from the front on the pretext of an inspection tour with General de Gaulle, a tour that brought the two men to Yaoundé and many other places across French Equatorial Africa. You can try to tell me that he still needed more soldiers, for without soldiers, war doesn’t work. But did he have to go look for them himself? What other explanation is there for this tour except that General Leclerc—he’d been promoted after Kufra—felt that the Italians didn’t matter anymore, so he could gad about from one side of his fiefdom to the other? Ah! You could say he was retracing his steps—the victor who still hadn’t liberated Paris, or rather Strasbourg, for that matter. He was retracing his steps because the recruiting drives in Yaoundé had been wildly successful, especially since the high chief of the Ewondo had put his weight behind them.
Leclerc was heading back to Ongola because the voice of Charles Atangana—yes, the one from Mount Pleasant—had succeeded in doing what neither Radio Cameroon and its endless propaganda nor the governor of Cameroon had been able to do: enroll all the young Ewondo men as tirailleurs for Free France and raise an army of twenty thousand men in Yaoundé.
And so on and so forth.
You must understand that I am angry about this, because someone has to take responsibility for how blithely the tirailleurs headed into the desert. Yes, I know, they ought to have been more careful—yes, I mean our dear Philothée; they ought to have screwed a little less in the cities they conquered—and yes, I mean our dear Hebga. And what else? Really, what else? If you must blame the victim, you also have to recognize that the fault does not lie wholly upon the subaltern’s shoulders! Think about it: cheered up by the mangled bits of metal scattered along the path his company followed, under the protection of the planes that cleared the way ahead each morning, carrying a machine gun pro
vided by England and the United States, fed meals that the war subscriptions of villages across French Equitorial Africa provided without interruption—“Send meat! Meat!” General de Gaulle had said long ago in that speech in Douala—even Philothée was head over heels about his old rifle, his Chasse-pot, and that says it all. Who could blame him? Who?
“Made in 1866!” Fouret had roared during one of his sessions with Philothée, indignant at the sight of the thing the Bassa man was cleaning. You try to explain why Hebga’s being issued a weapon from 1866 in 1942, especially when he was about to face the schouain Rommel’s panzer division, was a “lousy crime.” Clearly those were Fouret’s words. As we know, Philothée didn’t answer, or at most made indistinct grunts, because he was actually speaking less and less in this desert that parched his throat and troubled his mind. Maybe fatigue was getting the best of the men, especially the tirailleurs from the forest: “Cameroon mounted company, attention! March!” The very smell of the desert had left them stunned; like dead plants, they swayed back and forth, buffeted by the wind that roared endlessly over the dunes. They lifted up clouds of sand with each of their steps and then buried their feet again, as if they were moving statues.
Still, when the Italian land mine sent him flying up into the sky with a spray of sand, Philothée was open to considering all possible explanations. What am I saying, “was open to”? He was scattered in a thousand pieces over a huge swath of the desert. A hand here, a foot there, his trunk lying on the sand, covered with clumps of red, black, and yellow. Curiously, his mouth, still attached to the charred trunk, opened to scream through the layers of sand, to scream and scream.
“You mamy pima!” he said.
Buried deep in the sand, he caught his breath and cried out.
“You mamy pima!”
He had stopped stuttering.
When the Plums Are Ripe Page 29
