I, Eric Ngalle

by Ngalle, Eric;

  My mother had a few court luxuries as her sister, my Aunty Ndinge was a court official. Day in, day out, we gathered at Mr Paul’s chambers. My mother gave evidence, talking about the circumstances under which she had met my father.

  During the hearing, when people were giving evidence, I would cling onto my mother—my body was in pain and I was terrified of the angry looks from my father’s side of the family. I was just a boy enjoying my youth. Every day I had to face my father’s sister and her powerful entourage—aunts and uncles from both sides and my father’s friends. The villagers also attended the hearing, known and unknown faces—they were all there. The case had divided the village right down the middle, it had become the focus of local gossip, saying how dare my mother take on the might of the WonyaMorake, the wealthy segment of what was my father’s family. I was terrified, yet these were people I had grown to love unconditionally.

  I can still feel Aunty Ndinge patting my back the night before I was at a children’s graveyard in New Layout in a town call Tiko. In the middle of the night, in total darkness, under the blackest skies you could imagine, my only companion was one Mr Mbua the juju man. Together we dug open a grave, he had a bottle of beer ready, he would sip and pour some into the grave, an incantation, calling my father’s name, before going into a trance, this made the maggots and ants excited. The truth is I never saw my father, not his ghost, not Hamlet’s skeleton. I saw a tree move but I am now certain it was my mind playing tricks. I was still terrified.

  After gathering a few maggots, some ants and bones, Mola Mbua the juju man mixed them with herbs, which he had prepared earlier, and each joint of my body was slashed open with a razor blade, my blood then dripped onto a machete, not any machete, the one used by palm wine tappers, with a massive head. I am not an Ogbanje child (a child who plagues his or her family with misfortunes. Once recognised as an Ogbanje child you are marked by your family when you die—some children have their nose, ear or even fingers cut off so if you chose to return to the land of the living, you would be recognised.) Instead the juju man was doing this to protect me from what my mother had anticipated as an impending danger. I carry these scars with me as testimony to these events, they are marked all over my body.

  As the blood dripped, the juju man rubbed his concoction into my body; it was excruciating. Blood flowed from my wounds onto the machete and slowly into the grave. The ants and maggots increased their pace, sipping on my blood in a mad rush of excitement. At no time during this ritual did I see my father’s ghost, a dim light in the distance, and a whiff of cannabis in the air, that was all. I bled.I wished I were stillborn.

  Two elephants were fighting, the Kanges, (my mother’s family) and the Morakes (my father’s family) and I was caught in the middle. It was the price I paid, the price my mother paid for my father’s indiscretion, the price my mother was paying for loving one Oscar Ngalle Charles, a father, my father, whose memory was slowly eroding.

  I was born out of wedlock you see; does this make me a bastard? The brothers, the sisters, those with whom I ate and danced with, seemed to have had their tongues cut off, they looked at me with such disdain. Suddenly I was a curse, I was to be blamed for all the misfortunes that had befallen the Oscar Ngalle Charles clan. My mother was the most hated woman in the village, for how dare she challenge my father’s family? Every evening, village gossipers would congregate and sit at my father’s veranda and point mocking fingers at my mother and me as we walked home from the court case. There was no ‘hello’ nor ‘goodbye’ from people whom only a week earlier confessed their unconditional love for me and were quite contented that I was growing up to be exactly like my father.

  Yes, on the last day of the hearing, my life was flipped upside down, I became a nocturnal being. My eyes were red as the devil himself for truly devils and their henchmen, maybe one or two angels surrounded me. Mr Paul looked at me with the eyes of someone tired, he looked drained, for his eyes had lost their spark. When I first met Chief Justice Paul, I wanted to become a judge. During the week of hearing evidence and counter evidence, like me, Mr Paul had become lifeless, there seemed a complete disconnection between his body and his thoughts. As for me, I was asking questions of myself, I was floating.

  On the last day of the hearing Mr Paul, whose voice still rings in my ear, asked my father’s family, one at a time, the same question.

  ‘Do you know Eric, the boy sitting next to you?’

  Sister Monjowa answered, ‘No I don’t. I have never seen him before.’

  ‘Do you know Eric, the boy sitting next to you?’

  Aunty Ewuwe looked at me intently and said, ‘No your honour, I have never seen him before. I do not know him.’

  ‘Do you know Eric, the boy sitting next to you?’

  My father’s sister looked at me with a face that seemed to suggest I was a wicked child. ‘No your honour,’ she said, ‘I do not know him. I have not seen him before.’

  The question was repeated to all the five individuals who were challenging my father’s will. As each one said, ‘No, I do not know him’, I could see Justice Paul shrinking. Every one in my father’s family rejected me, they refused any knowledge of me. The judge asked them repeatedly; even he could not fathom the evil that was unfolding. One by one they repeated their answers, ‘No, I do not know him.’

  With nothing else to do, the judge apologised and asked my mother and I to vacate his chambers and he awarded the property to my father’s people. Outside the courthouse my father’s family had arranged a traditional dance group to help them celebrate their victor— they even sang and danced to one of my favourite traditional songs.

  This was the day I died. It was as if the devil had placed his hands deep in my throat and into my stomach. I had been disembowelled and my entrails dropped to the ground and stampeded upon. I prayed for death and pitied my mother – it would have been better if I had died that day, as the axe forgets what the tree remembers. I have not been able to put the shattered pieces of my heart back together since that day.

  Walking home was made more tedious by the fact that the local town crier, a village slag, had carried the news to the village, spreading it like wildfire, and women stood by their doors to greet us and mocked my mother. One old Mamba, who used to call me Oscar Charlie, my father’s name, was pointing at my mother as if she wanted to kill her. Yes, that was the day I died, that was the day my soul died, that was the day Satan flew away with me. I became the devil himself. How dare they? Who dares to make my mother cry? My sisters, my aunts, my uncles—they were marked. I was going to initiate a plan. Today I draw in my tears, whilst here in exile in Wales, strangers build thrones in my father’s house. I laugh.

  Chapter 9

  As I looked around and savoured my environment, I no longer felt intimidated by Moscow. I was well dressed and I was starting to feel like a baron; I felt as though I could fly.

  I had picked up the Russian tradition of drinking homemade beer with dried and salted fish, so imagine my happiness when I saw a babushka selling such fare. Christmas had come early for the babushka. At first the guys were a bit squeamish but after a few bites and a few sips they were all saying how delicious it was. We stayed on the platform drinking. We drank her keg dry and ate all her fish. She tried offering us semechki, some sort of dried salted pumpkin seeds, it is good but demanding work – it helps when one is bored; so we kindly declined.

  Other Russians joined us, some offered us vodka and stayed chatting to us, and the police officers patrolling the station did not bother us, not once. Moscow greeted me with a smile upon my return—this time I was prepared for her, I had money and I had people I knew very well. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two lovers kissing, entangled in a perpetual embrace. I laughed.

  ‘Guys! Guys! Come here.’ It was The President calling us. He had used the telephone at the train station to call the hostel in Stavropol. He handed me the telephone and I could hear the voice of one of the students who resided in the hostel on the other
end saying that the Russian guys had been to look for us, and that they were now driving to Moscow. (He later migrated to Italy and then to the USA. We used to talk on social media about our different experiences in Russia. One day his wife found him slumped on the sofa in the living room but by the time the paramedics got there, he was dead. I wept.)

  Aaron and his friends had been to the hostel looking for us and, because they could not remember what we looked like, they had beaten a few people. They only left the hostel when one of the residents telephoned the police but not before Aaron and his entourage were told that we had gone to Moscow. Apparently, they were now on their way to Moscow, headhunting us.

  This telephone call did not change my plans in the slightest. I was still aiming to head to the Cameroonian Embassy to ask for an exit visa and go back to Cameroon. I had enough money to buy my own air ticket and I could not anticipate any problems. The President decided to get another train and head for Belorussia, he had a few friends there, while his associates headed to Babushkinskaya to meet with another Nigerian.

  I was a bit tipsy so could not immediately go and present myself to the Cameroonian embassy, in fact Alphonse was not up for taking me to where the embassy was, so instead we headed for Kiyevskaya Metro and to the Diplomatic Corpus (a gated area reserved for diplomats) with the hope of staying the night. We stopped at the McDonald’s in Kiyevskaya, which Alphonse told me was the first McDonald’s store to open in Russia. During its launch in 1990, the staff and management only expected around a thousand people. Instead thirty thousand people turned up to enjoy Big Macs, making it the biggest launch of a food restaurant anywhere in the world.

  Kiyevskaya McDonald’s was packed with Russians (I was in post-communist Russia after all). We sat next to a Russian family but their little boy started crying. He was pointing at Alphonse saying, ‘Monkey. Monkey.’ Poor child. His parents tried to shut him up but that made matters worse and he cried louder. His poor mother tried calming him by saying, ‘They are human, they are just black.’ The child would have none of it. I didn’t know what to say, I spared the family their embarrassment by pretending we didn’t understand Russian.

  As we were leaving, two armed officers holding a huge German Shepherd stopped us—security was on high alert as Chechen militants had made their way into Moscow. I engaged in friendly banter with the officers as they examined our documents. They asked why I was in Moscow given that I was residing in Stavropol and why it was that my residence permit had not been renewed? I said it was for those very reasons we were going to the Diplomatic Corpus to see a Cameroonian consul member to rectify the residency issue. I offered the younger officer some dried fish, he politely declined and advised us to be careful. I met with this officer several times after this but he never stopped me again.

  We could not stay at the Diplomatic Corpus, as we had hoped, as the house of the Cameroonian consul was full of all kind of characters; there was one guy who was so fat, it looked like he had grown into the chair, a girl who kept looking at the clock and another girl who had just been given a visa to go to America—by the way she walked and carried herself it was if she owned the world.

  I remember the consul’s wife very well, she looked tired, grumpy and disgruntled like one of those people in the village who would normally have witchcraft. It didn’t help that she was a bit overweight. When we entered, she looked at us and did the lips and tongued gesture that most African Caribbean women do—she twisted her lips making a sound, expressing her disgust at seeing us.

  Alphonse interacted with a few of the people and then we visited a British priest who lived in the same building. This was supposed to be our second place of abode but it turned out a Cameroonian, who had been adopted by the British church and who stayed at the Diplomatic corpus with father Francis, had gone into the church coffers and stolen all the tithes, which amounted to ten thousand dollars. The guy had simply disappeared into thin air. Though father Francis offered us cheese and pineapple on sticks, we were not welcome to stay at his residence (I had never dreamt of having a combination of cheese and pineapple before, it was my first time but I liked it; now it is the first thing I go for when invited to a party). I really do not think we were ever meant to be staying in any of these residencies, however, this is where Alphonse kept his loot, and this gesture would save his life later.

  I was now homeless in Moscow. I had money and I knew that if it came to it, I could check into a hotel and make my way to the Cameroonian embassy the next day but Alphonse decided that we should go to Verdinha suburb and visit one of his friends called Vincent; maybe he had rooms to spare in his house.

  We took the train and, looking out the window, I was awed by Moscow, at how beautiful it was. There was nothing that I saw that reminded me of home, apart from the trees, but even they looked well-groomed. Verdinha itself was amazingly beautiful, the roads were lined with diverse types of fruit trees, the flowers blossomed as if pollinated by a very special kind of bee and the houses were magnificent as we walked along. The only other place I had seen with such immense beauty was in Wales, when I was doing my Access Certificate (Sociology, Psychology and Law), at Coleg Glan Hafren in Cardiff, and we went on a college trip to Gregynog and stayed in a castle; my God that place was so beautiful, it satisfied my thoughts and dreams of what heaven would look like. Verdinha was like that— it’s no wonder Mikhail Gorbachev chose it as a place to have his dacha.

  Vincent had a well-decorated two-bedroom flat, which was quiet in the day but housed around eight people at night. We were told we could stay for a month for a small rent of one hundred dollars each. Vincent had been in Moscow for a long time and spoke Russian but not as well as me. I was happy to stay at Vincent’s, this meant I had ample time to return to the Cameroonian embassy and arrange my return trip.

  I did not need a Moscow underground map as Alphonse was with me. Alphonse had tried to persuade me to stay in Moscow, he said we formed a formidable team and had the potential to become businessmen and eventual millionaires. The idea was fine—I had made one thousand dollars after a couple of hours of translation—but I had already made up my mind about going back to Cameroon. On a personal level my heart was burdened, I was having an introspection. I would never see Anna again and, in my haste, I had left behind my small diary, which contained information including address and telephone numbers of Natalia both in Sochi and in York in the United Kingdom where she worked as an au pair. I had also left Lola heartbroken—and that kiss with Nadia was the best I had ever had. I had just disappeared from their lives, from their worlds.

  Central Moscow was not as heavily policed as I had anticipated and we were not stopped at any point on our way to the embassy. The embassy itself was not heavily guarded and had just two officers in a small cubicle there to greet us. One of them was busy smoking a cigarette, the other had both hands on his gun as he paced up and down slowly; he looked homesick. I noticed a black and white cat on the wall. An ill omen I thought. I pressed the doorbell and within a few seconds the door was opened. I wasn’t surprised not to be greeted in Russian but I was pissed off by the fact that the gentleman who opened the door simply assumed we spoke French.

  Alphonse stayed outside and smoked a cigarette. As I walked up the stairs, I contemplated the fate of southern Cameroon’s English-speaking Cameroonians; it seems we are obligated to speak French whereas French Cameroonians couldn’t be bothered to speak English. The reception area was full of people with different problems. I gathered, from their conversations, that some of them had been coming to the embassy for almost a month. Everyone looked depressed. There was an imposing picture of the President of Cameroon, His Excellency Paul Biya, he had been on that wall since 1982, yet his campaign slogan for the 2018 election was ‘It’s Time for Change’. No matter how you positioned yourself, the imposing gaze of the president followed you. It reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984—Biya is the epitome of Big Brother.

  After what seemed like hours, a small man came out of the room and,
without saying a word, handed me a piece of paper. Written in French was: name, date of birth, place of birth and reason for visiting the embassy. I filled the form in and stated my reasons in bold letters, ‘I would like an exit visa to return to Cameroon.’ I had to state this in French due to conformity and all that. I added, ‘I have money to pay for my ticket.’ The cost of the ticket was four hundred dollars on the Russian airline, Aeroflot.

  The longer I waited in that room, the more depressed I got. There was one guy who had been beaten by skinheads in a place called Padorlski. Everyone knew about Padorlski. Many have gone there but only a few have returned. There was another guy whose brother was in a hospital in Dynamo—skinheads had also attacked him—and another guy had had his money stolen. There were a few who were homeless and looked skeletal; their stories were gruesome.

  There was one Bakossi boy who looked like a ghost, when he walked it was as if his clothes were still in the cupboard. He had growths all over his body and his face looked like he had a fungal infection, scurvy or beriberi, for he had been in a Russian prison for two years for drug dealing. He looked finished. His case was even worse because while he was in prison his savings from dealing, around five thousand dollars, had been taken by his girlfriend who was now in Germany.

  The imposing picture of the president had changed: he wasn’t smiling, but instead looked slightly annoyed. His left eye faced three o’clock, his right faced nine o’clock. One by one we were called into the office, I was given an official appointment for the following week. I was happy, I was going home and I was going to face my father’s family head on.