Mount Pleasant (18 page)

 

10

Even the Animals …

Yes, people talked about the dancing city for a good long time.

“For days on end,” Sara told me.

The sultan's marvelous waltz brought a new wave of visitors to Njoya's bedside, she added. If Africa had been made aware of the fall of a great man, the whole universe showed up after the mythic dance. They came from unheard-of places, from unknowable cities, drawn in by the allure of this far-off miracle. The visitors never failed to dress as if they were going to an imperial ball. It started with one peacock who appeared, lighting up the corridors of the house with his iridescent tail feathers; even the animals were caught up in the mad dance. And they all met on the way to Mount Pleasant.

At night, masses of butterflies gathered around the sultan's bed to tell him the story of their transformation, how ugly maggots became beautiful. They danced dreamily around the hurricane lamp, moving to the sounds of a symphony played by dogs and cats in the distance. The cats led the moon in a joyful hymn. Sitting on the roof of the house, they sang poems of love and despair. The sultan's household awoke to strains of birdsong proclaiming the glory of the newborn day in rhyming couplets.

A colony of northern birds flew down from Europe, no joke, to sing of the beauty of winter for Njoya's ears and to tell him how lucky he was to live in the warm embrace of Africa's eternal sun. Ducks crossed the city to bring him the tale of their collective death on life's starving streets. Slaves had to use flaming branches to sweep away the lines of ants marching to Njoya's bedroom, where they hoped to tell him how, by working together, they had transformed dust into a golden mountain. What to say of that animal—what is it called? Sara struggled to find the right name—that swore he was too busy to dance? No one, the animal went on, “not even the sultan of the Bamum,” suffered as much as he. He grew angry when Ngutane told him that her father's curse was the same as had befallen Sisyphus.

“What?” he shouted. “Just who is this Sisyphus?”

“A Greek god.”

Njoya's daughter told him the story.

“Me, I have to push balls of poop with my feet,” the animal complained. “Did your Sisyphus have to do that?”

Ngutane didn't answer. She understood the poor animal—he would have filled her days recounting the gloomy twists and turns of his incomparable hell had Ngutane not chased him away. Another day, slaves killed a boa as it zigzagged along the walls of the House of Stories. It was coming to tell the sultan how it had swallowed an antelope. Yes, Sara confirmed, the whole mad world met at Njoya's doors, wanting to share its wondrous tales.

After the boa incident, no one had the courage to get the magical gramophone's pedal going again. Still, the sultan's happiness remained in everyone's memory. The universe would never be the same, and everyone knew it.

 

11

Coffee and Cake on a Hot Afternoon in Berlin

Although Sara had broken with our normal routine and told two stories in a row, I hadn't interrupted her. After all, I was there to listen. And yet I had some good news to share. It was connected to Franz Ferdinand and the drama that followed his assassination. The Germans reacted as if it were their own kaiser who had been killed, and they weren't the only ones. Most European nations already had a declaration of war signed, sealed, and ready to deliver to their enemies long before a bullet pierced the chest of the Hapsburg heir. If that bullet hadn't been shot, no doubt they would have found another pretext.

For Sara's father, on the other hand, World War I was a blessing. We'll never know how he felt in those moments of collective hysteria, or what he was thinking. Nor will we know who he was with and what he was doing the day war broke out. Did he join the excited crowd and dance with joy in the streets of Berlin? Was he even in a crowd?

I found just one note in the archives of Berlin's Anthropological Society, dated May 1914, that mentioned her father's name.

“About my father?” the old lady asked, unable to speak.

“An official document bearing his signature,” I confirmed.

It was a document donating his body to science in the event of his death. A better fate than that of the many unknown soldiers who fell as the war started. Still, this bit of information horrified the doyenne. I suspected that perhaps it was a bargain he struck with the famous Dr. Mult, who had bailed him out of jail. Alas, I wasn't able to find a picture of him in the anthropology museum's collection of photographs of Africans, each one taken of a naked subject and noting the measurements of his or her skull. But some of the snapshots didn't give the subject's name. I was, I'll admit, relieved by this shadow of doubt, for I wouldn't have dared show those pictures to Sara, who had made it clear that she didn't want just any old guy for a father. If only she knew what a poet is capable of doing to survive.

Joseph Ngono had lived through those painful, leaden years, I could prove that, and that was enough. I could also reassure her that while the mud and rain of the trenches of the Marne and Verdun provided the world with ample memories of savagery, the domestic front offered her father a seemingly limitless freedom. He was lucky that the war had taken thugs like Adolf off the streets of Berlin—that they were much happier at the thought of fighting in the Great War than brawling with Communists and blacks.

“To war!”

In their drunken zeal, they shouted across the city. They threw their hats into the air and kissed girls.

“To war!”

“Thank God!”

“To war!”

Their noses had ferreted out new species of prey. They raced frantically to join up.

“To Paris!” they cried.

“To Paris!”

“To Moscow!”

History books overflow with their demented cries, their demands for vengeance; their hysteria fills the archives of Europe through 1918. Amidst the chaos of this loud descent into hell, I'll keep asking my question: Who then took over the streets of Berlin? Ngono had never seen himself as a hero, that I knew for sure. I bet that if they could talk, many of the cities, many of the houses and beds of those absent heroes, could have told stories of Ngono's volcanic passage. I could see Sara's father traveling from the north to the south when Germany was at war, a pack on his back and nothing else to offer but his love, hoping for just a little warmth in return. I imagined him sleeping under bridges when necessary but preferring to find shelter for the night in the secretive beds of temporary lovers. He felt free, free and carefree, for the first time in his life. He feared only the thunderous quarrel that was playing out far overhead.

His fate wasn't the worst, if you compare it to what happened to others.
THE FRENCH ARE DONE FOR
read the headline of the
Saarbrücker Rundschau
. “They're recruiting niggers to fight for them!” Thank God, Ngono could say, thank God the Germans don't think I'm worthy of dying for them!

In Leipzig, he met Ludwig M'bebe Mpessa, a compatriot, built like a boxer, who worked as a bartender and dreamed of starting a black theater troupe. Later Ludwig Mpessa took the name of Louis Brody, better suited to his dreams of grandeur. Sadly, his film career was limited to playing crazed tribal chiefs caught in the nets of racist plots.

Ngono became his companion. Together they founded the People's Theater. Ngono excelled in the role of the African, which paid rather well. The Germans liked it; the domestic front was starved for entertainment. Wives and single girls, who feared their husbands or lovers would come back missing their essential parts, took their minds off their worries in the company of these black men who were playing at being actors.

This was the first time Ngono worked together with other blacks. Had the reader of Mann and Rilke undergone some sort of change? Had he gained what could be called “race consciousness”? Only the outcome of his story can tell us that. What is certain is that belonging to the People's Theater made it easier for him to travel. At the same time, it was the first way he'd found to earn money since quitting the institute; in short, it freed him from the kindness of bosses who were too happy to put the police on his trail.

In 1917 he married a woman from Saxony, but I've found no record of any children. Luckily, that is, because I would certainly have had to tell the doyenne that her siblings had been arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they disappeared.
Endlösing
, the Final Solution. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Sticking to her father's story, the vice squad's records indicate that in 1918 he belonged to a League for the Defense of the Negro Race, founded along with “a certain Louis Brody.”

This league, with only a handful of members, was classified along with the groups of radical ex-soldiers who were cut off from the blood and action, shunted into the unemployment line when they returned from the front, and kept political activism alive in postwar Berlin. A rather dubious analysis, for how could one seriously imagine the few blacks who could be found in Berlin meeting in a cellar to plot a Bolshevik-style revolution? Maybe some of them had read Marx, their ears abuzz with what had happened in Russia in 1917, and maybe there was a poster of Lenin on their wall as well. But all the same, let's not exaggerate.

Yet it was in the notes left by these young men, notes peppered with rage as well as optimism, that I found Ngono's trail: for the first time, he found a way to give meaning to that sense of emptiness that had once made him laugh and cry and rush into the first corner bar he found for a strong drink. Alongside his new friends, he formulated a few ideas that would play an important role in his life back in Cameroon.

“Run, black man, run!” It was no longer his father's voice or the lampposts that urged him on, but his joyous friends from the People's Theater. Maybe it was the league's forceful resolutions or daring quotes culled from books that swayed his mind; clearly, the echo of the brawls that burst out in the streets of Berlin in 1918 played their part.

And Joseph Ngono would rebel once again: “I am not running anymore!”

Like many others during those dark years, the Ngono who emerged from the war was a changed man. But the question that keeps coming up in the police notes—Did he become a Marxist?—misses the point. Alas, a subsequent war destroyed the documents that might have provided an answer. I read that Sara's father was in Berlin on November 9, 1918, when the Republic was proclaimed. Perhaps he was part of the crowd of ecstatic young men who, just as in 1914, threw their hats in the air, kissed girls, and screamed, “Long live the Republic!”

“Socialism!”

“Democracy!”

“The Socialist Republic!”

“The Democratic Republic!”

Maybe, sickened by this collective madness, Ngono turned back to his friends, Brody for example, who dreamed of being a movie star after the war, and who in 1918 was impatient for change. Maybe together they calculated their chances of finding happiness in the Germany of the future, imagining that the new life afforded blacks in that Germany could only “be better,” as Brody the optimist put it. For Ngono, it would have been enough that the streets of the capital were rid of thugs like Adolf. That would have sufficed to make him happy, yes. How to think otherwise?

Maybe Sara's father ended up instead in the home of Mandenga, the Landlord, as he was known in Berlin's black community, because he was the oldest and most established. The ex-lecturer told him the story of the brawl he'd been in, about his assailant's crushed testicles and bloody mustache.

“I can't even lift my hand to eat without thinking of that idiot—”

“The real problem,” someone interrupted, “is that you can't wave at the ladies as you'd like. Come on, tell us the truth!”

“Whoever did that to you…” Mandenga started, but a wave of nausea kept him from finishing his thought.

Everyone understood and nodded in agreement.

Whatever may have happened, on that ninth of November Ngono certainly listened to his friends talk, eating cakes and drinking coffee as the Landlord's children played around him; meanwhile, out in the street, the mad world grew calmer. In one corner of the living room some compatriots were in a heated debate.

“A republic?” one said.

“Not one, two,” replied Theophilus Wonja. “Two republics, my dear.”

Wonja was another Cameroonian soul lost in the winter.

“You're joking!”

“Check for yourself.”

“The same day?”

“The same day.”

“What a country!”

Ngono swallowed a bite of cake. “So what?” he said, exasperated.

He had underestimated the Landlord's political drive.

“So what?” Mandenga shouted. “It should mean something to us, shouldn't it? That's the problem for us Africans. Nothing that happens ever matters to us! How can Africa have a future if nothing ever matters to us? If we have no faith in our actions, can anything really happen on our continent? If we Africans don't do anything, will anything happen to Africa other than what the Europeans decide?”

And that was the start of another endless discussion, just like always in this House of Exile, a discussion where the people of the diaspora ripped into one another. Did these exchanges send lost black souls flying out of Mandenga's door? Ngono felt empty; he had no more arguments to make. He was tired. Or was he suddenly disappointed by the futility of these gatherings? In any case, he decided to go back to Cameroon. With no tam-tams, and far from Berlin's inflamed crowds. There, holding a cup of coffee and a piece of cake in the home of Mandenga the Landlord, who was talking about “action” and “political action,” but who stayed in his seat.

Just like that.

 

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