I, Eric Ngalle

by Ngalle, Eric;

  The soldier in front of me had his gun pointed directly at my head. I had tremendous flashbacks. I started seeing the faces of my father’s family members, specifically those who had attended the court on the final day of the hearing with regards to my father’s estate. I started seeing the villagers, especially the local town crier and tramp from Longstreet who had placed herself in front of us and had broken the news to the entire village. I saw those women who pointed fingers and mocked my mother.

  *

  To this day, I have not seen a picture of my father. I love my name ‘Ngalle’, because it is the one thing I have that attaches me to my late father, for ‘Eric’ and ‘Charles’ are colonial implants. I used to go through the collection of photographs in my aunt’s house, but there was not a single picture of my father. When I visited the printing press where my father had worked, his belongings had been given to my adopted sister but his photographs had disappeared; in fact, my father’s job was handed to my adopted sister upon his death.

  My mother would always point and show me the window from whence my father first spotted her—I promise I will write about this window one day, the window from where the gods congregated and planned my fallopian explosion into my first exile; the window from whence my father whispered to the winds, who took their turns in whispering to the trees, who carried his whispers into my mother’s kitchen and into her ears. Every time my mother went past this window, she stood and stared—she too was once in love. I could tell and I would ask, ‘Did you love my father?’ She would smile wryly and slap me gently on the back of the head.

  I dread to think my father’s family had been planning to erase his memory from me and, in so doing, erase him effectively. I sincerely dread this prospect. My father’s name never came up in any conversations, I was just the child of a loose woman who had been condemned and found guilty by the villagers and my paternal kinsmen.

  *

  I wanted to go back to Cameroon; Russia was a stranger to me. I was going to lay my father’s compound in ruins and anything or anyone that was inside. I couldn’t care less, I was ready to lobotomise that part of my brain that thought of Wonya Morake or Oscar or Ngalle. These are the perfect laid plans I was nursing in my mind until I arrived in Moscow. As the gun got closer to me, I prayed although my faith in God was dwindling. I pleaded and asked God and Satan, (both had possessed me) that even if I were to die that day, my spirit would return to Cameroon and forever wreak havoc on those who had done this damage to me, as here I was, about to be shot dead in a foreign field. I hated my village, I hated my father and, more so, I hated his family.

  The soldiers kept shouting—they must have thought we were terrorists who had sworn allegiance to the gods of a voiceless clan. We didn’t have a clue what they were shouting about but we knew that we were in immediate danger.

  It transpired that we had managed to find ourselves in the middle of a war zone, between Russia and Chechnya, and we were considered to be Chechen dissidents. We were handcuffed, bundled into four different Land Rovers and driven off to a police station. We were locked in different cells with our handcuffs left on. After a few hours, we were taken into a room with four chairs and were interviewed at length by the Chief Inspector; she was stunningly beautiful. Mercifully, she soon established that we were residents of Stavropol and not Chechen rebels. She resorted to speaking in the most perfect English and explained to us that Mineralnye Vody was a buffer zone between Russia and Chechnya. She warned us about the dangers of roaming the area, without an appropriate guide, and spoke about the Chechen war at length. She then gave us tea, sardines, bread and cheese.

  Once we had finished eating, she called some plain clothes officers who proceeded to accompany us to the train station and waited for us to get on the train. We arrived back in Stavropol without further mishap. That night, I missed my mother. I ventured out onto the hostel’s balcony and prayed—I even poured tea onto the ground, a tradition we always did back home, calling upon my ancestors to come and fly me home; they never did, maybe because I had used a non-alcoholic drink. I felt very homesick; even the Russian skies were alien to me. There was nothing familiar.

  Chapter 3

  Returning to Sochi

  Although the AIDS headline in the newspaper had caused us much derision, our reputation as black exotic students was to be restored by the visit of the pop group Boney M. to Stavropol. As I was not a student, I was not restricted by the guidelines imposed by the university, which declared, ‘You should not make friends with Russians.’ In fact I did not have a choice. I had to roam; I had to look for greener pastures. In so doing I was making friends and acquaintances.

  One such friend was Vladimir who, I was quite excited to discover, spoke English. Vladimir had a receding hairline and was dressed like a pimp; everything about him was shiny. He was an extrovert indeed, he smiled a lot and, for the duration of time I knew him, he was never angry. He had come up with the idea of starting a Black Dance and Arts Class in Stavropol and decided that the best place to recruit members was our hostel.

  One afternoon Vladimir came to the hostel with two tickets for a concert at the Dynamo Stavropol Stadium and a fellow Cameroonian and I were the lucky ones to be at home in room 11 that afternoon.

  These were not just any tickets, they were front row tickets, and they gave us backstage access as well. The stadium itself was packed, full capacity. We danced to all their songs—including ‘Ra Ra Rasputin’—and a young black guy with them was performing all sorts of acrobatics on-stage. We forgot all about our woes and got up and danced. Then Boney M. spotted us and they moved in our direction and the whole crowd cheered.

  It got even better as Chris and I accepted their invitation to join them on stage. This was heaven for us. We had never been to a music concert before, let alone one of such magnitude. The whole of the stadium waved as we danced. Boney M. looked like they’d come from another planet, they were black, I mean American black—it was like they’d use coco butter on their skin whilst we had been using coco soap. They looked perfect, majestic.

  After the concert, they took us to their hotel. We ate like people who had been deprived of food. Vladimir must have told them we were on the verge of starvation as they passed all their food to us. From shrimps to caviar to fish soup, it all came our way. We had a camera from somewhere and took lots of photographs or selfies, as you would call them today. If only there had been Instagram back then we would have been trending.

  We became famous again in Stavropol; momentarily people had forgotten about their AIDS concerns. People would wave to us on the streets, thinking we were part of the Boney M. clan. After a couple of weeks, the novelty had passed and people started noticing that our black skin was not as perfect as that of Boney M. First the ticket controllers were hot on our case and secondly, when we were on the bus, most people just moved away. We became like the plague again.

  It was during this time that a small selection of Cameroonians decided that I should go back to Sochi and explore the possibility of travelling to Istanbul once more. While I knew there was no way we would be able to cross Russian waters into Turkey without an exit visa, I encouraged them to try. My thinking was that if I could manage to get the students to Sochi, I could concoct a scam of my own and charge inflated prices, which would give me enough money to vamoose to Moscow and arrange for my repatriation to Cameroon. So I made my way to the coast once more.

  When you arrive in Sochi you are greeted by the beautiful sight of a fleet of boats, yachts and warships on the water and on a perfect summer’s day one can see across to Ukraine. My journey was smooth; I slept on the train and arrived in Sochi first thing in the morning. I caught a taxi to Zhemchuzhina Grand Hotel, the same place we had stayed during our first visit, and discovered music blasting from the seafront.

  I decided to explore and was surprised as I walked along the beach, that a lot of people approached and took pictures with me. Some of them shouted ‘Black monkey!’ and I laughed as they mocked me
. I loved the attention and it was water off a duck’s back to me.

  I saw a tanned white guy on a boat who beckoned me over and offered me some vodka and pomidory (tomato). I climbed on-board and he asked about the reason for my visit to Sochi. We spoke for a while and then he took me for a twenty-minute sail during which I made my pitch. It was the same thing, they could take us to Istanbul for a fee of three hundred dollars per head, however, we needed those exit visas.

  When I returned to the hotel, I communicated this to the students in Stavropol, but I had inflated the price from three to four hundred dollars. I also insisted that we did not need exit visas. This was a big, fat lie. It wasn’t a surprise when a mysterious courier conveyed to the students what my master plans were—the Ibo Nigerians who were part of our first visit to Sochi had grassed me up.

  I sat back and waited for the students to arrive but they never turned up. On the fifth day, when I phoned the hostel, there was no answer. Panic kicked in. I had gone two days without making payment at the hotel; once again I had told the management that my friends were coming with money to cover the hotel bills. I spent most of the evenings sat on the benches outside the hotel with dreams floating back and forth between my village and where I now was. On one evening a Russian woman came and sat next to me. She had a Playboy magazine and together we perused the pages. Before I knew it, she was kissing me. We soon disappeared into my hotel room and we had sex. Afterwards I smoked my first ever cigarette. My bliss was soon dispelled when I was summoned to the hotel security lodge and told I had until Sunday to pay for my accommodation, or my passport would be handed to Sochi immigration.

  Then I met Froy. ‘Excuse me, are you a born-again Christian?’ This was the opening line of conversation between Froy and me. This was a very strange question; little did I know that Froy was an angel. I was brought up a Roman Catholic with very strict morals; in fact, after my A-levels, I had joined the Apostolic movement and followed them around as they did vigils in different villages.

  ‘Are you familiar with the book of Daniel?’ Froy asked, handing me a bible.

  He then enquired about my accommodation arrangements before saying, ‘My mother and I have rooms at our house; we rent them out in the summer to families who come to visit the Black Sea. We charge cheaper rents than the hotels. If you wanted to, I could pick you up from the hotel car park tomorrow and you could stay with us?’

  This was divine intervention; I could not say no. I told Froy that old lie, ‘My parents will be sending me some money shortly.’

  *

  I was used to being shifted around. Once my mother had gone off with her friends, as they used to help each other in communal farming, and I was left at home with my nephew, Collins, and my younger sister, Queenta. Once, after I became hungry, I abandoned my sister and cousin and walked all the way to my grandfather’s compound, which was around an hour and a half away, to report my mother missing. My grandfather, being the chief, summoned all the villagers and went off to search for my mother. When they arrived at our house in Tole, my mother was in the kitchen cooking. She was shocked; she had to buy three crates of beer for the elders and cook extra food for those who had gone to search for her.

  A couple of weeks after this incident, my mother was involved in a car accident—she was knocked over and the wheels went over her stomach. She would have died if we had stayed at the Buea General Hospital, which served our village of Small Sappo. My mother was in so much pain but thanks to the insistence of my elder sisters, Elizabeth and Ndinge, she was rushed to a private hospital in Tiko, where they stopped her internal bleeding. I never left my mother’s bedside.

  When she felt better and we had returned home, I was summoned into the kitchen and told that I had to go and live with my sister, as it was my fault she’d been knocked over. Her theory was, I had angered the villagers by making them go on a search for her, and the villagers had placed a curse on her and the accident came to be. So, you see, I am used to being exiled.

  *

  The next day I packed my meagre belongings into my bag and I left the hotel. I did not pay the bill, the guards did not chase me, they simply handed my passport over to the Sochi Immigration Service, which was located not very far from one of the piers overlooking the Black Sea. Froy picked me up and that was the first time I saw a disabled person drive a car—Froy was dysfunctional from his waist down but had an extremely strong upper body.

  We had a disabled guy in my village, he was a brother to everyone and we would all help to push him in his wheelchair but I could never imagine a scenario where he drove. I was shocked when Froy showed me his specialised Lada car. Froy spoke with so much passion and had an enthusiasm for life that was contagious.

  Chapter 4

  After settling in my new lodgings, Froy turned to me and said, ‘Well Eric, for a fee of one hundred dollars a month, I will teach you how to speak Russian and show you around Sochi and introduce you to my friends at our Presbyterian Church.’ That was my agreement with the Vladimirs. Every day after breakfast and his morning exercises, Froy dedicated two hours of his time towards teaching me the Russian language. Froy was patient and a very good teacher. We finished each lesson with an assignment for which I had plenty of help thanks to Tyotia, a ninety-seven-year-old babushka (babushka means old woman or grandmother), who lived opposite the Vladimirs. I cried when Tyotia died.

  One of the first things Froy and I did was to go for a swim in the Black Sea. I made him laugh by asking if there were any crocodiles in the water. He remarked, ‘You are a bushman, aren’t you?’ We both laughed.

  *

  When I was a boy, I had tried swimming to no avail; I even tried gymnastics but I failed at that too. I remember once, during one of the village’s 20th May celebrations—our National Holiday after a referendum in 1972 to become a unitary country—being paired with another boy who was even fatter than I was. We were to do a chained cartwheel; the combination of our blubber shook the ground as we rolled. People shouted and clapped—we thought they clapped because we were good, not knowing that as we were rolling, we took out anything and everyone that was in our path. Those were the days. I was even worse at swimming.

  *

  Froy could swim. There were long concrete slabs, which reached far out into the sea, that you could run along and dive off performing all kinds of acrobatics. Some people even swam as far as the boats that could be seen on the horizon.

  Slowly but steadily Froy taught me how to swim and how to speak the Russian language. He also introduced me to the Presbyterian faith.

  I had used their house telephone to contact my maternal uncles in America. My mother has three brothers in America who are all citizens and one of whom, Uncle Evella, is a doctor and also in line to be the chief of my village. She explained that I was in terrible circumstances and needed around a thousand dollars. Froy was with me when I made this telephone call and heard the promises from my uncles that they would send me some money. The money never came. My uncles reassured my mother that they’d sent me some financial assistance, but this was not the case. Still, I am grateful they told white lies to my mother.

  Froy also introduced me to a guy known as Anthony who was a small-time mafia guy. Anthony and his friend Aaron, an Armenian who owned a small garage just outside the city centre, were to be very kind to me. Somehow the immigration officials in Sochi had tracked me down and visited the Vladimir’s household. Fortunately Anthony and Aaron came up with the two hundred dollars I owed the hotel and paid a total of two hundred and fifty dollars to retrieve my passport. However, I was told very strongly that I was not a resident of Sochi, I had no reason to be there, and I was illegal. I was only legally allowed to stay in Stavropol but that privilege too was expiring in a matter of months.

  Tania, Froy’s mother, was in her early fifties and unhappy; you could see this by the extra wrinkles that appeared on her face every morning. Her husband spent most of his summer at their dacha (a holiday home). If you met Tania, you would know tha
t she must have been an absolute beauty when she was younger; she was tall, elegant and had those extra-long legs, which suited her career choice: dancer and ballerina.

  She invited me several times to see her performing and to watch the Sochi Symphony Orchestra. Tania was unhappy that since my stay in their family home, I had not made any monetary contributions into the family coffers. No one knew how to help me; I didn’t know how to help me. Despite all this, Tania took pity on me and treated me like her own child; I was falling in love with the family, the more I did so the more I hated my paternal family. I cursed them.

  Then one September evening, Anthony and his friend Aaron, smuggled me out of Griboedova to a small Armenian village—where Aaron lived—on the lands that gradually stretch up to form Mount Akhun. I had picked up a great deal of the Russian language by this time and Anthony had invited me to a family wedding. The wedding was a feast. The whole table was full of food from top to bottom—it reminded me of a scene in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where the food was piled so high that only after it had been consumed did visitors realise their family members were on the other side of the table.