When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  20

  The Ghost

  When Hebga emerged from the forest, he looked like a spirit, his body covered with grass, his head shaved, and his arms bound with charms, gris-gris: strength and beauty in motion. For how long had he disappeared into the forest? Maybe a month? Maybe a year? Or a few days? Who even remembered what time was? Hours, days, history—it was all swallowed up in a unique rhythm—very unique. The whole world had been swept up in a whirlwind—a lightning bolt for some, a tortoise for others.

  Imagine Paris occupied! Imagine de Gaulle in London! Still, one thing was true: Hebga was thirsty, thirsty for a good beer. Oh, he just wanted a break, for he still hadn’t caught the Man who had done that. Anyway, he’d still be there in the forest if, much to his own surprise, his feet hadn’t led him out. It was just a short truce. He had lost a battle, but the war raged on. He hadn’t yet quelled his pain.

  “Ah!” He was stunned by how strange the village looked.

  It was a child who recognized him and alerted the crowd. The market women didn’t give him a chance to dive back into the bush. Their happy cries greeted him as if they had thought he were dead. They hadn’t buried an empty coffin, no, but they’d come close. In fact, when they hadn’t seen him come out of the woods, many women had concluded that he’d never come back. Now they surrounded him with their songs, treated him like a hero, one who had overcome death and emerged unscathed from the battle. On he walked, the legendary boxer once more, and all around him the women danced, their bodies so graceful, while the children jumped and shouted. Every athlete has his poets.

  “Woudididi!”

  “He has come back!”

  “Woudididi!”

  “Hebga!”

  “Hebga the Ax!”

  “The Ax!”

  “The Ax!”

  As Hebga walked through the crowds of tirailleurs milling about in Mininga’s courtyard, mesmerized by the joyous celebration that had overtaken the village, they all turned to stare. With one hand on their weapons, the soldiers glared angrily. Hebga didn’t ask what they were doing there. He didn’t have the chance. For as Hebga reached the door of the bar, Pouka threw himself into his arms, as if he were returned from the dead.

  “Hebga!” he said. “Hebga!”

  The poet’s disciples, surprised to see such an effusive display by their maestro, stared as the two cousins hugged each other tight. Suddenly the woodcutter felt the pain that had taken hold of his spirit fading away from his heart. There in the arms of his cousin—who had once sung of his deeds, his punches, his exploits as a boxer—he came back to life, assuming again the stance of the athlete praised by the whole village. For a moment he was caught up in the excitement of this enchanting reunion. He heard the compliment Pouka whispered in his ear: “Indomitable lion.” The kingdom of childhood is a tempting antidote to the many terrors of life—of history!

  Then he pulled back.

  “Let’s go get a drink,” he said. “Let’s get a beer.”

  The two happy fellows walked past the tirailleurs, who were apparently transfixed by Pouka’s warm welcome of Hebga. In the time his cousin had been gone, Pouka had become Colonel Leclerc’s interpreter. Many other things had changed. Mininga’s courtyard now looked like a barracks. The tirailleurs who had come in from Douala weren’t the only ones camping there. Columns of soldiers from Chad had filled it up. In the back you could glimpse tanks, model H39, and even some cannons. They were parked on the marketplace as well as in the courtyards all around. Edéa had been transformed into a military camp. White soldiers walked back and forth nervously, shouting orders in all directions.

  Only Mininga hadn’t lost her joie de vivre, despite the village’s new face. She opened her arms wide to Hebga as if greeting an old lover, and hugged him hard and long.

  “This is my lucky day,” she said, without clarifying just what that meant. “My lucky day!”

  The night before, a certain Captain Massu had come into town with his men. He was the one who had filled the courtyard with cannons, tanks, and soldiers from Chad. He brought the reinforcements Governor Éboué had sent from Fort-Lamy. His use of the Nigerian corridor made clear all the advantages that England was offering the Free French forces. But it had only taken one day for Edéa to find out just how hard Massu’s head was. He was in charge of training the tirailleurs, and his voice, shouting orders and cursing, echoed far out in the distance. The night before he had drunk three cases of beer, that was what Mininga remembered most; she barely noticed how he kept looking at the behinds of her serving girls. Still, the arrival of Massu and his men wasn’t a blessing for her business, because it had taken the intervention of “the colonel himself,” as she put it, to prevent the rape of her girls.

  “You’d think they hadn’t seen a woman’s ass for three years,” she’d say later. “The animals!”

  And that wasn’t all.

  “Even Bamenda,” she said, pointing at the grilled plantain vendor whose face made clear the reason she found this so outrageous. “They wanted to screw her.”

  What a relief for her to see a familiar face walk into her bar: a man from the village!

  “We all thought you were dead, my dear,” she said.

  The bush, it seems, had taken hold of Hebga’s spirit. He spoke, and though everyone drank down his words, only the trees could have understood what he was saying.

  “What were you doing in the bush?” Pouka asked.

  Ah, did Hebga even know? Did he know? He raised the bottle of beer Mininga had opened for him, brought it to his lips, and took a long, slow drink.

  “The village has changed,” he said.

  “As you can see.”

  “But they’re only passing through,” Pouka added. “They’re leaving for Yaoundé.”

  He was talking about the Frenchmen and the tirailleurs.

  21

  The First Recruit

  “Yaoundé”?

  That was all it took. Just one word, Yaoundé. Leclerc saw Hebga come toward him. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He quickly realized the fellow possessed skills that would have automatically made him a captain, except that he was illiterate. That wasn’t his only sin. Our Sita’s son hadn’t even finished his beer when his eyes had fallen on the tirailleurs’ weapons. Once again, he saw his mother’s image and heard the distant echo of her words, forbidding him from following his destiny. Suddenly, the revelation of his freedom hit him like a burst of sunlight. His mother—yes, our Sita—had liberated him from the forest: yes, our Sita.

  “To Yaoundé?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me to your white man there,” he ordered Pouka.

  He had always thought that it would be chance, through one of its infinite combinations, that would wrest him from the depths of the forest and tear him away from his morning workouts. The forest had become a trap. But now destiny had decided otherwise. That’s how the two cousins came to walk back across the courtyard crowded with soldiers and to stand before the colonel. Leclerc hadn’t expected such a quick reaction. He had tried several times to convince the village boys to join his forces. Offering them the chance to fight for liberty, fraternity, and equality hadn’t been enough to get them to sign up, however, for everyone knew that de Gaulle had been sentenced to death. On top of that—and this, Leclerc didn’t know—many of the young men had put their bets on Germany.

  “I want to become a tirailleur.”

  When Hebga uttered these words in the approximative French he had picked up as a customer in Mininga’s Bar, Leclerc didn’t understand him at first. That must be why, instead of answering his request, he ordered his men to disarm Sita’s son. He was certainly right to do so. Smiling, Hebga complied, overjoyed at the thought of trading his outfit for a tirailleur’s pants. He had come to the bar holding his ax in his right hand, his body still damp with morning dew, his brow covered with bits of grass. Pouka needed to repeat what his cousin had said before the white man really understood.

  “He wants
to fight for France.”

  Then Leclerc looked him over from head to toe and realized that standing there before him was the best specimen of a soldier he had ever seen.

  “What is your name?”

  The experienced eye of this man—who had crossed the French countryside, the English Channel, the desert, and the bush looking for soldiers to build the military arm of the Free French, as de Gaulle expected him to do—allowed him to take the measure of other men. He had met hypochondriacs who said they were ready to cross the desert in three days, starving men who, without laughing, swore they would break the necks of three Germans at once, if not more. He had met veterans of the Great War who claimed they would take on whole armies with one hand tied behind their backs. If Hitler hadn’t been able to occupy France, it was because of the training he, Leclerc, had imposed on his soldiers. Now his men would have to work even harder to vanquish the dictator. He was able to ferret out the weakness hidden beneath a man’s vanity, but also to recognize the body of a perfect soldier.

  “The colonel wants to know your name,” Pouka repeated.

  Then Leclerc realized that his perfect soldier didn’t speak French.

  “Hebga.”

  “Captain Massu!” Leclerc shouted over his shoulder.

  A white man with a horse-like head appeared and gave a military salute.

  “Colonel?”

  “Here is your first recruit.”

  Leclerc pounded the ground several times with his cane. He was happy, even if Hebga couldn’t sign his own name. What Leclerc hadn’t yet realized was that in this boy he hadn’t just found the perfect soldier, he had also signed up the region’s most celebrated athlete: its golden boy, our Sita’s son. And what a prize, yes, for Edéa immediately began to offer up its offspring to him. The colonel did know, however, that a recruit like Hebga doesn’t come along every day, and what’s more, that an army, a good army, isn’t made up of just attackers. The second recruit was Philothée, to the great surprise of Pouka, who had thought he’d found a poet in that boy. But the maestro’s disappointment sprang from a different source: he could only stand by and watch, unable to stop the hemorrhaging of his little circle of poets.

  22

  War Council

  Things started speeding up. Okay, let’s not exaggerate. The army that Colonel Leclerc reviewed in the forest of Edéa, in advance of the war council that took place on September 3, 1940, was the most unbelievable, the most ragtag the earth had ever seen. Pouka would, of course, have recognized Hebga among the tirailleurs, and the uncertain face of Philothée, as well as those of our self-proclaimed Hilun (whom Pouka had dubbed Théophile Gautier) and Bilong. That says it all.

  Yet this army was also the most significant force assembled by the Free French up till then. And I say “significant” because, obviously, the hypothetical “African armies” that General de Gaulle had evoked during his meetings with Churchill in June, July, and August didn’t really count, since at that point the French general had not even one soldier on his side to make the Englishman take him seriously. Whoever saw the soldiers Leclerc had assembled to prepare for the assault on Yaoundé could only have agreed that Churchill was right to remain, shall we say, skeptical. And with good reason!

  “France is far greater than just the homeland,” said de Gaulle. “It is a vast empire. That’s what the marshal has forgotten. Its grandeur.”

  Hearing such a line, Churchill tapped his cigar on his ashtray. For Great Britain was an empire, too. And the British Prime Minister hoped that the day would never come when London would depend on the Sudanese or the Bengalis for her freedom.

  “Senegal,” de Gaulle continued, his eyes suddenly growing brighter, “Cameroon, Africa!”

  Churchill noted that the man speaking to him hadn’t ever set foot in a colony.

  “I know,” he replied, putting his cigar back between his lips. “I know.”

  Unlike de Gaulle, Churchill had had a long career along the shores of Cuba, in the dust of South Africa, and wherever else he had proven himself as a young officer. He knew the ins and outs of life in the colonies. Yes, all too well.

  What else could de Gaulle add? That his right-hand man had taken over Douala with just the twenty tirailleurs Captain Dio had placed at his command? The reality of the situation spilled over the table of experience that separated them: drip, drip, drop! As for Leclerc, he had quickly realized that many of the French who had chosen a career in the colonies had done so to avoid finding themselves on a battlefield in Europe. That was the reality of the tropics. Oh yes! The events of the past years, Munich especially, had filled the ministry with an avalanche of requests for transfer to the colonies. And now, to those who had come to Douala because they dreamed of palm trees and lions, Leclerc was proposing a military assault on Yaoundé. No surprise that the colonists spoke to him of duty and professional responsibility—although they weren’t actually supporters of Vichy—or that they advised him against revealing the spectacle of French disunity to the natives—although they weren’t really cowards.

  “It’s the overseas posting bonus,” one man intoned—a man with a wife and child, no doubt.

  “Our mission,” said another.

  Setting up camp in the bush around Edéa served this purpose: it allowed the army responsible for liberating France to take root; and, more important, to develop a valid strategy before launching its first attack on a capital of the French colonial empire under Vichy’s control.

  Between you and me, there was some good news, too. The best was that Colonel Larminat, stationed in Brazzaville, had rallied to de Gaulle’s cause. But there was also de Gaulle’s speech—or rather his bluff—the radio broadcast of August 29, when he announced that all of French Equatorial Africa had joined the Free French. Of course, this announcement gave him an argument that carried weight in his negotiations with Churchill—the speech really was a sort of wink in his direction. On the ground in Africa, however, it also sped up the timetable for the assault on Yaoundé. There wasn’t enough time to assemble troops. Yaoundé might get reinforcements arriving at once from Chad, Congo, and, of course, Douala. But the soldiers sent by Governor Éboué had already arrived with Massu.

  Looking at his army and his soldiers, Colonel Leclerc knew something was off. It wasn’t just that General de Gaulle’s speech had been given too soon or because of his own fraudulent promotions. No, it was really about the uniforms.

  The soldiers were dressed like bandits. There were a few officers, of course, Massu, Dio, Boislambert, Parant, who, like the French soldiers who had rallied to the Free French, were dressed respectably. But the rest, the tirailleurs who’d come from Chad, as well as the few new recruits, with their wrinkled outfits and their bare feet, looked more like waiters than soldiers in a world war. Since Great Britain hadn’t yet made good on its promise of supplies, the new recruits were training dressed in their own garb, with wooden rifles. For it was also a question of the need for weapons, not to mention ammunition. Leclerc imagined with horror the moment when his soldiers would have nothing to eat but what they could take from the colonial populations.

  “Captain Boislambert, what’s the status of the weaponry?”

  It would really take a lot of generosity not to see these men as thieves. Boislambert cleared his throat and squared his shoulders before speaking.

  “Three H39 tanks,” he said. “One cannon.”

  Leclerc didn’t really care what the answer was, for who among his men was unaware of the weakness of their position? Larminat hadn’t yet moved his forces from Brazzaville, which, as he explained in a telegram, was under threat of assault by the Vichy forces stationed in Gabon. “It is necessary to defend what we already hold,” he asserted, much to Leclerc’s chagrin. Can’t trust that scoundrel, Leclerc thought. What else was there, here in the bush of Edéa? The colonel mechanically tapped out a rhythm on the ground with his cane while Massu described the training of the troops of tirailleurs, punctuating his sentences with the refrain, “I
know them.” He spoke optimistically, and kept looking at Captain Dio, who, like him, had spent years in Africa, after graduating from Saint-Cyr. Of course, one week wouldn’t suffice to turn peasants into soldiers, especially not peasants who had never held a weapon before.

  “Except for one, a woodcutter.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Hebga.”

  Was the liberation of France to fall on the shoulders of a Bassa woodcutter? Not even Leclerc found this possibility amusing. For him, his soldiers’ only chance was deception.

  23

  And Speaking of Deception …

  Douala had fallen, that was a fact; Edéa, too, was in the hands of Leclerc’s soldiers, as we know. But Yaoundé? The Yaoundé whose fall had already been proclaimed by General de Gaulle? “As long as Yaoundé is still breathing, Cameroon is alive,” Leclerc murmured, there in the depths of the Bassa forest. And so it was that he entrusted the next part of the story to one Bassa man: to Pouka, whom he sent to Yaoundé. Yes, you are reading this correctly. Pouka had never before set foot in the commissioner’s palace, although he had long heard about it. Pouka was blown away: that says it all. The walls adorned with carvings of flowers, the triangular pattern on the wooden floor, the many chestnut armoires. He admired the hanging lamps, the wide seats, and most of all the sofas, but oh! he couldn’t turn his eyes away from the imposing windows. The classical style of the building had been described as colonial, which always bothered Pouka, since he thought this obscured the mythical roots of Ongola, the city center. Besides, Yaoundé wasn’t called the “City of Seven Hills” for nothing. The connection to Rome was undeniable. The city’s current plan was clearly modeled on that of its Roman ancestor. Which made Paris a close relative. Pouka’s eyes darted around and then stopped on the back wall, where a photo of Marshal Pétain dominated the room. He bowed his head.