Mount Pleasant (14 page)

“A chair?”

“Yes, I want to make a chair for the sultan,” he answered, rubbing his long beard and smiling.

“I don't understand,” interrupted the chief architect. “You want a chair to make a chair?”

The artisans looked at one another in amusement, and with good reason. Ah, these white people!

“Yes,” the priest continued, carried away with his idea. “A special chair.”

He stressed
special
in his most convincing voice.

“A special chair,” old Monlipèr repeated, closing his eyes the better to see how special the chair would be. “Yes.”

“A throne, if you will,” Father Vogt added. “But I need a chair to build it.”

Monlipèr was in charge of all the tools and materials in the palace. The prelate's surprising proposal was crossing a line, but since he had made his way into Mount Pleasant, Father Vogt basked in the prestige of his medical talents. No one refused him anything, even if it would have been unthinkable for anyone else. He wanted a chair? Here's a chair! He wanted to make a throne? Well, let him do it! Mount Pleasant's artists would judge his work on its merits; that's really all the man was asking.

Father Vogt worked all afternoon. Under the compound's watchful eyes, he attached the wheels of his bicycle to the chair they'd provided; then he stood up, stretched his legs, and looked around at the skeptics he knew he had won over. He sat down on the chair and made it roll, turning the wheels with his hands. When he stopped, his broad smile faded quickly under the glare of Ngutane's eyes as she burst onto the scene.

“My father will walk,” Njoya's daughter declared tersely.

Father Vogt quickly fell back on his double role as doctor and priest.

“Of course he will walk,” he said, standing up. “By the grace of God, he will walk.”

Ngutane didn't listen to what he had to say. The bright colors of her robe were a symbol of her certainty; she disappeared into Njoya's chambers. Father Vogt turned back to the gathered crowd.

“This chair will help him to walk again.”

What Father Vogt didn't realize was that Ngutane was the least of his problems. In fact, the talents of the community assembled around him were insulted by his audacity; up till then, they had refrained from reacting, out of respect for the sultan. Just who did he think he was? Did he really think Njoya would sit on that thing, even if it did roll? Or that the artists, blacksmiths, and carpenters—whose hands had sculpted the sultan's seats their whole life—would just accept this? These thousand questions silenced those who had gathered around the priest, but he, blinded by his faith, had no idea and just showed off his handiwork, taking their silence as an open invitation.

“It's a rolling throne,” Father Vogt repeated.

The priest caught Nji Mama's eye. The chief architect was calmly stroking his beard.

“A rolling throne, yes,” Monlipèr murmured, his face breaking into a smile. “Not bad. Not bad.”

 

4

Black in Berlin

Sara had interrupted her own story because she was afraid for her father, and rightfully so. She was caught up in Ngono's tale. Being unemployed in 1913 Berlin was no small problem, especially if you were black. He really was a poet, the doyenne said, or else her father would have thought long and hard before quitting. Sara, however, would soon learn that Joseph Ngono just followed his impulses, unlike the chief, that master of careful calculations. When the Ewondo lecturer left the institute, he didn't realize that he had become the centerpiece of one of the vice squad's special dossiers, nor that his boss had made the call to put the police on his trail. This dossier, fifteen pages long, can still be consulted in the Staatsarchiv. It's a monument of detective work, spiced up with satirical comments that say a lot about the sort of people Sara's father was dealing with.

Once the doors of the institute had closed behind him, Ngono suddenly found the German capital inspiring. He meandered through it for one, then two hours, heading no place in particular, lost in his thoughts, his hands stuffed into his pockets. In the neighborhood known as Wedding, he went into a bar where German workers stopped for a drink. It was his first time in such a place, but he really needed a strong one. He sat at a table in the corner and waited for a waitress. Patting the pocket of his jacket, he realized that he had left his copy of Rilke behind (once again, the archives don't tell us what book he was reading; whose fault is that?). The book had been left on his desk. He got up to go back and get it, but he stopped at the bar, where men were trading drinking stories.

“Darf ich bitte um Bier ersuchen?”
he asked.

Yes, Ngono actually said, “Beg your pardon, might I request a beer?”

Surprised, the bartender looked him over from head to toe. Because of his clothes, perhaps? It must be said that Ngono was dressed like a Prussian civil servant of the day. The lecturer realized that all the faces at the bar were locked on him. As if they had just discovered a scandal.

“What did you say, comrade?” asked the heavyset man beside him as he put his hand on Ngono's shoulder in a friendly gesture.

“Ersuchen?”
added the man next to him, who was missing two teeth.

“Darf ich bitte um Bier ersuchen?”
Ngono repeated, feeling less and less sure of his German.

Sara's father thought the chuckling workers were trying to start a fight, but the laugh that shook the bar was a welcoming one. The labyrinths of ignorance hold many surprises. These dapper gents appreciated the flavor of his words, so different from their usual call for
“n'Bier.”

How could they have imagined that the lecturer had memorized that phrase after reading
Buddenbrooks
, which he finished right before he started on Rilke. And how could Ngono have known that at the very same moment when he, in his bedroom on the Koloniestrasse, was flipping through Mann's pages and enjoying the characters' banter, in the green mountains of Foumban, a missionary named Göhring was reading the same pages to Sultan Njoya, translating as he went.

Amused by this learned black civil servant, the man with the missing teeth offered Ngono a beer, which he didn't refuse.

“Can you say it again, comrade…” he pleaded.
“Er…”

He couldn't even say the word without bursting into laughter.

“Suchen?”

This was a kind of German these men never heard in this red part of town. To think it was an imperial subject who brought it into their dusty bar! The African had awoken in them a paternalism they never would have expected to find in their Communist hearts. One after the other they bought him a beer, and surprisingly, Ngono never said no. Did he have that many worries to drown? Did the memory of the job he'd quit hurt that much? Probably not. No, it was more likely a sudden wave of homesickness, a longing for a certain type of liquor, a certain dish, a certain smell of the earth. Ngono knew that bottles of German beer wouldn't fill his need, for he couldn't even name what he was missing without bursting into tears. Was he already as drunk as the men he was talking to? If he was laughing with them, it was because laughing lifted his melancholy. If he drank all those bottles offered by his newfound friends, it was for a very simple reason: it was the cheapest way to get drunk.

“Comrade,” said the men.

And he answered,
“Jawohl!”

That night's police report ended with a simple question: Had Ngono become a Communist? Nothing proved he had read Marx as enthusiastically as Mann and Rilke. So let's set that aside. When the bar shut its doors behind him, the lecturer found himself once more on the painful path he thought he had drowned. His furtive shadow scurried away like a black cat. Ngono was too far gone to follow it. And yet he knew the far-off place where his torment hid. He looked at the stars, smiled at their nightly dance, then recited poems by Rilke to bolster his courage. His mother tongue brought to mind a certain Ewondo song from his village, which he whistled and sang through the streets of Berlin. It was a counting song, and it warmed his heart. When the song faded in his mouth, he started talking to the lampposts in Ewondo. And just maybe, thanks to all he'd had to drink, the lampposts answered, bending down to tip their hats and swathe him in their satiny glow.

“Comrade!” they said.

He was clearly drunk, but Ngono was sure of what he heard. He was so convinced of the good manners of Berlin's lampposts that when a voice behind him called out “Nigger,” he knew it wasn't a lamppost that had spoken, but a stranger.

“Hey! You, nigger!” the voice shouted.

Another voice added, “Don't you hear us?”

What Ngono heard were footsteps, hurried footsteps coming from a dark alleyway. He started to run.

The footsteps ran with him.

 

5

Love's Apprenticeship

Still in 1913, but thousands of kilometers away. It is impossible to flee your mother's welcoming breast! Nebu, then a young man, learned this at his own expense when he jumped out the window of the House of Passion, raced through the forest, and realized that his steps were leading him inexorably back to his mother's house in Foumban.

“Here's what happened,” said the doyenne.

She was telling this story in such a way that I would have sworn she had lived it herself. It was as if Nebu's life had taken possession of her. She let her soliloquy flow, her eyes fixed on a past that came back to her in spurts of blood. She had become Nebu, yes, and what's more, I could hear a new intonation in her voice. Once again, eighty years later, Bertha's son reappeared in her volcanic flesh. But she was also Sara, the little girl disguised as a boy so that the stories of far-off men and women might find their resolution. Sara relived the stages of her metamorphoses; she became Ngungure, the girl starving for a body. Her voice changed again; she barked and shrieked because she needed me to know all the details of what had happened in the House of Passion …

“How do you know all this?” I asked again and again.

Sara just smiled, then replied ironically, “And you, just how do you know what you're telling me about my father?”

“The archives,” I explained. “The German archives.”

“My body is an archive,” retorted the doyenne. “It remembers stories that I don't know.”

Where should I put my trust? In the capricious memory of an old lady or in the colonial archives? In the written lies of Berlin's vice squad or in the faded image of Foumban's courtyards, where, by all accounts, Sara had never set foot? Should I just put my faith in the heartbeats around me, searching Nsimeyong's winding pathways, looking for the truth of a story that had taken place in the most forgetful neighborhoods imaginable? There are choices I would have preferred not to make—that's for sure!

All around us, life spread out in wild abandon. My mind searched for a bit of calm in the tornado. Music from the bar next door shook the walls. A two-year-old child crawled around in the dust and the adults paid no attention. He picked up a clump of earth and ate it absentmindedly. Like him, I would have liked to eat the earth, to let Foumban's history move through my body, coursing through my veins and rising up to my nostrils like alcohol. Sara chewed silently on a kola nut, her eyes seeking mine. She offered me a piece of the bitter fruit and chuckled at the grimace I made. My neighborhood friends chewed on their pieces of kola with a childlike pleasure, which reminded me how estranged my body had become from the city where I'd grown up. How our own past becomes like a stranger to us all.

Sara's story had the bittersweet taste of a kola nut. We were in 1913, I told her. When Nebu left the House of Passion, he knew his game of hide-and-seek was over, even if, till the very end, he'd insist to his mother that he was right. After all, his father had stolen his girlfriend. Bertha's son had understood that the game was up long before its bloody climax. The day Ngungure told him that she had the right to do what she wanted with her body, Nebu knew that she wasn't a woman to marry and that, with her, he was taking on a whole set of problems—just as his mother had warned him. He was reassured when she confided that she was “giving her body” to him. Honestly, he was so in love he would have agreed to anything. “Because I love you,” she added, “because I love you eternally. Eternally.”

As a slave, Nebu didn't have the money to buy a wife, but Ngungure didn't mention that. No, she talked about love, and love has no price. Bertha's son had no other choice than to let his girlfriend define love as she pleased. Oh, if only he had realized what lay hidden beneath Ngungure's words. When his mother told him that
that girl
was going to marry his father, Nebu couldn't believe it. He remembered Ngungure's words and slapped his leg.

“Women!” he exclaimed. “Why?” he asked his mother. “Why would she do that?”

“Because she's the Devil, my son, don't you get it?”

Nebu then asked Ngungure herself.

“Why?”

“Why?” the girl echoed.

“Yes, why?”

“Because I love you eternally, my dear, eternally.”

It made no sense.

“I love you so much,” Ngungure continued, “that I want you by my side twice, ten times, a thousand times: eternally at my side.”

Nebu did not understand this mathematics of love.

“I love you so much,” Ngungure added, “that even your shadow is precious to me.”

“Then is it still love?” he asked.

Was it that love that had pushed her into his father's bed? A wave of nausea overcame Nebu, his ears ringing with a mad hymn. Death—two, ten, a thousand deaths—whistled a song in his ears.

But Bertha's son soon retraced his steps, took back his words, and gave back his body, drawn in by the girl's scent; he was addicted to her. He returned to her, unaware of what he'd done until he woke up and found Ngungure naked at his side. Was this madness? Yes, of course, only madness could have propelled him back between the legs of that woman, that girl, in the bedroom he knew was his father's. It was madness that made him believe, there in the paternal bed, that a solution could be found.