Mount Pleasant (15 page)

Nebu had attended Njoya's school, where his father taught writing. His father found only rational solutions to life's problems—he made no allowance for superstitions, none at all. He had worked as a copyist for the sultan for five years. Father and son could have talked it out themselves, there was no need for a judge. But good God, where we come from, where can a father talk to his son about love? So for Nebu, it was clear: there was no bar, no room, no place where he had the right to speak to his father's wife without addressing her as “Mother.” Besides, with him lying there in his father's bed, it was already too late for them to talk. Moreover, he knew that the oral tradition was lying in wait, with its curses and its proverbs. And if necessary, the elders would invent new proverbs that would justify killing him.

Njoya had done away with many of the laws that would have justified stoning the boy. But when this story took place, the sultan was still writing the first version of his “Book of Love,” the
Lewa Nuu Nguet
, in which he describes the one hundred and seventeen positions that will allow a man and a woman to reach multiple orgasms. So Nebu was wise to escape out the window when he awoke to the sound of his father's voice. He ran and ran until he realized that his treacherous feet had led him into a forest with no way out. When he saw a glimmer of light between the trees, he had no idea it was the streets of Foumban. And yet he soon found himself standing at his mother's door.

There's no question that Bertha had heard her son calling her in the woods. When he appeared at her door, she opened her arms and shut her mouth. Nebu was as naked as the day he was born. His eyes were unfocused. Only one question echoed in the boy's head: “Was it love?” How could she answer? Love had stopped Bertha from chasing her crazy son. Love had made her check, frantically, that no one had seen Nebu knock at her door and be let in. Love had made her lie to the palace police when they came asking questions, made her maintain that her son had left for Bamenda the day before. It was love that hit her right then in the chest and made her tell Ngungure's whole sordid story to her disbelieving son. But he didn't believe her! Oh, no!

Nebu listened to his mother going on about a mad love—his father's—with gestures seasoned with tears. And in his mother's song, the son saw his lover's head bouncing at the Dog's feet, bouncing and shouting, “I love! I love! I love!”

Of course it was love, Nebu thought, that had caused his beloved's death—what else could it be! It was love's throbbing that had kept Ngungure's heart beating even after her death, kept her body writhing sadly as it danced on the ground.

Nebu was suddenly filled with fear at the thought that he hadn't loved his mother as she deserved, and that he hadn't loved Ngungure as she had hoped. His rage exploded, forming a question that lashed at his soul: Didn't I love you enough?

Even today, as I transcribe Sara's words, I carefully weigh my own because I still see the flames that lit up a mother's eyes. I still hear my friends from Nsimeyong voicing their disgust. Lost in the forest, prevented from being anything but a witness, Nebu hadn't been able to stop the unfolding of the story set in motion by his love. In Bertha's arms, the young man opened his ears, the better to understand the twists of his own fate, his eyes lost in his mother's as she told him the incomprehensible story of his life.

How strange are the paths of love! When Foumban awoke one day, shocked to hear the town crier announcing that no longer would anyone trouble the city's inhabitants by begging for his own death, there were some who smiled. The Dog had been found hanging from a tree, his feet swinging in the air, his tie having finally served its purpose. The sultan sent his police to find out who had fulfilled the wishes of the madman whose life on the city's margins had been protected by one of the sultan's official decrees, but, since no reward was offered for turning in the guilty party, and especially because a death penalty awaited whoever had done what was generally deemed a public service, no one stepped forward.

“Would you have stepped forward?” Sara asked me.

Her question tore me from the madness of Nebu's tale and from Bertha's bitter hands.

“Me?”

Ngungure's story disappeared into the whisperings of the raffia-wine drinkers, reappearing as that bit of wisdom that advises men to love by small drops, one woman after the other. Some breathed more easily, released by the death of Nebu's father, but no one asked what Bertha felt. It's true that the Dog's death meant nothing to her, really, nothing. And with good reason.

“Not even hatred,” Sara stressed. “Nothing at all.”

She spit out the bitter kola juice and declared, “She always wore a brightly colored pagne beneath her
ndjutchu
, her widow's robe.”

In a culture that has no word to describe the suffering of a mother who has lost her only son, or any other child, but that devised hundreds of rituals to inscribe a husband's death on a woman's body, Bertha had to hide her feelings of joy beneath a widow's blue. She shaved her head and wore the obligatory
ndjutchu
, but none of the rituals held any real meaning for her.

Nebu, however, felt entirely differently. He realized that he missed something about his father, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Perhaps his gruesome epileptic fits? The seductive power of abjection? One month and thirteen days after the Dog's death, Nebu went to Herr Habisch's shop, where, with the money he had saved, he bought a black tuxedo, a tie, gloves, a white shirt, and shiny leather shoes. The Swiss merchant assured him, too, that this was how gentlemen dressed in Berlin when they were happy. Nebu refused to let his mother shave his head, as tradition requires after the death of a close relative—especially a father. No. He asked his mother to shave two parts into his hair, Bamum fashion. Bertha was dumbstruck!

“If I do anything to your hair, I'm cutting it all off!”

Bertha didn't care about Herr Habisch, what he said about fashion and all the European gentlemen. Her pain—the flip side of love—was the only measure of her actions. To put an end to the conversation, Nebu went back to the Swiss merchant and bought a top hat. When his mother saw him “dressed like a madman”—those were her words—she didn't think of cursing Herr Habisch and all his kind, but rather her husband. She also thought about Ngungure and that girl's evil tricks.

“What has gotten into you?” she asked her son. “What are you trying to prove?”

“Nothing, Mama, nothing at all.”

“Don't say ‘nothing.' Do you think I don't know what's going on?”

“Well, if you already know…”

“The Devil has gotten into your head, too,” Bertha insisted. “He's still here, I'm sure of it.”

Like all mothers, she looked at her son and remembered the suckling infant he had been, how he had refused to be born because he was afraid of being overwhelmed by the force of his mother's love. Nebu was hiding something from her, she was sure. She instinctively held him all the tighter, loved him even more—just like the baby he had once been—and tried to make him spit out the secrets of his soul.

 

6

The Temptation of the Final Solution

It's a fact: no one can escape his fate. Hide beneath your bed and she'll toss a venomous snake in after you. Stand under a tree and she'll have lightning grill you alive. Hide under water and she'll send you a starving crocodile. All these thoughts whipped through Ngono's mind as he ran onto the Frühlingstrasse. He thought of his parents, his ancestors, his childhood in the missionary school. He saw his friends, especially Charles Atangana. He thought of all the children playing in the streets of Yaoundé, and suddenly he felt hope. Berlin's lampposts were transformed into spirits sent by his faraway hometown to guide his feet. He knew they'd protect him, yes. He remembered the day when lampposts had been installed in Yaoundé.

“They're the spirits of the dead,” people said, and also “of the unborn.” Ngono thought of his father, who just laughed at all this silliness. He also thought of his mother, who believed it. He saw her face on one of the lampposts. She begged him to run, to run and keep running. He saw his brothers and sisters, who also asked him to run and keep running. Lampposts. Ngono thought about those who loved him: the women, men, and children who lived in his family's compound in Yaoundé. All of them—uncles, aunts, nephews, grandparents—asked him to run and save his life: “Run, Ngono, run!” They reminded him that he was the first of his ethnic group to go to the white man's land. “Run, Ngono, run!”

Really, the stupidest thing a black man can do is let a racist kill him. It's simply not worth it. Ngono knew this. So he listened to the voices of his kin. Especially his father's: in Ewondo his father called him a coward.

“What are you running from, huh?” he asked. “Don't tell me you're running from those sons of rats! You don't run away from mosquitoes, do you?”

His father burst out laughing. “Whites aren't men, is that what you think? Are you such a coward that you run away from men just like you?”

“I'm not a coward!” Ngono protested.

He didn't turn around to confront the shadows that were chasing him, forcing him to run through the night. Suddenly the refusal to live like a coward slowed his steps. He stopped and turned to face his assailants; he went at them, even, determined to prove to his father that he wasn't a coward, no, not him, Ngono junior. No Ewondo had ever lived like a coward, and he wouldn't be the first to break the rule. The police report is clear: it's the “nigger” who struck the first blow. Alas, there are no other documents about the affair. So I'll just have to take it as truth: Ngono wasn't the victim.

“I'm not a coward!” His voice echoed in the depths of the night. He spoke in Ewondo because he was talking to his father, his ancestors, his tribe. His cry echoed in the far reaches of 1913 Berlin like a declaration of tribal war.

“I'm not a coward!” Ngono shouted again, and threw himself at his pursuers. He head-butted one, hitting him hard in the jaw and sending him flying. Later he'd recall that the man had a mustache. But then he just saw him fall like a tree. Ngono's sudden offensive, his war cry, his “call for tribal warfare,” the madness of it all stopped his assailants in their tracks. They hadn't expected Ngono to react so savagely. Ngono himself was unaware that deep inside his head hid a warrior just waiting to smash the face of a German racist.

“You want to play cat and mouse?” taunted one of the men, putting up his bare fists.

“Let's get out of here,” suggested another. “It's not worth it.”

“No,” said a third. “Let's stay here!”

“Let's civilize him!” said the one with the smashed face.

Ngono heard the trio of his sad fate. He remembered his father's lessons: “Go after one of them, just one, and make him rue the day he was born.”

“Cowards!” the lecturer shouted. “
Imperialistische Feiglinge!
Imperialist cowards!”

The man with the bloody mustache said to his friends, “He's calling us cowards? Did you hear that?”

He pointed at Ngono and laughed.

“Cowards?”

“Us?”

One of the three, a small guy with a large bald spot, dove at Ngono, hitting him right in the stomach. The police report had no words to describe the chaos that followed. Ngono was hit in the stomach, on the back, on the head; feet, words, and fists all came at him. He was hit with chunks of asphalt and slurs; he saw blood. Ngono took a thousand blows; he was abandoned by the polite lampposts and by the moon herself, who shut her evil eye when his assailants left him for dead. His father's words filled his mind, contradictory bits of advice offered in both Ewondo and German at once.

“Did my loins produce this coward, this
Feigling
?”

“Cowards!” Ngono shouted in German.

The one with the mustache stopped dead.

“A coward, me?”

He brought his hand to his mouth and spat out blood.

“Adolf,” said the little bald one, “let him be, he's just a nigger.”

“A monkey,” said the third.

Clenching his fists like a boxer, Adolf came at Ngono, who was barely able to stand.

“Are you insulting me?”

Just then, Ngono thought of his father's words: “Go after one, just one, and make him regret that a woman ever gave birth to him! Make him wish his mother was a whore and regret that his father had balls.”

Ngono answered his father, and in his language, his words sounded like a magical incantation: he kept asking his father to “let him finish off the bastards.” His assailants stopped, speechless. The old man of the night kept spurring his son on: “Make that son of a bitch eat through his own asshole! Make them all fuck chickens!”

The Ewondo lecturer danced to the rhythm of his father's angry words, and he pointed his fingers at each of the three faces, one after the other.

“One by one!” he said. “I'll take you on one by one, that is if you are men!”

The men stared at him in amusement, unable to believe their eyes.

“One by one!” Ngono repeated.

Laughing, the three lined up, the one with the mustache in front. But they didn't laugh long. Ngono picked up a rock and threw it at them. He missed the bald spot of the little fat one, and a shout rang out. It was the cry of an animal, a dog or maybe a man. The rock landed on the asphalt in the distance. The men stepped aside.

“He is crazy,” one said.

“Ilang nuazut!”
shouted Ngono. “Your asshole! Come one at a time and I'll make you fuck your own cat!”

“Let's finish him off!”

As he spoke, the mustached man covered his bloodied mouth.