When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

“My dear man,” he said, “do you even know what kinds of weapons our enemies have?”

  Hebga waited guardedly.

  “The Italians have rifles.”

  Leclerc paused, just long enough for his words to penetrate the thick skull of the man he was addressing. He knew, yes, the colonel knew that this man’s insubordination would, in other circumstances, have been worthy of a court-martial, but obviously, in the Tibesti desert, the situation was more fluid. And besides, the soldier wasn’t refusing to fight; on the contrary.

  “Machine guns,” he added, “cannons, planes.”

  Another pause.

  “Our adversary is not a tree.”

  His comments were met by silence. Had the two men even understood? He glanced at Massu, who mimicked cutting grass:

  “Ax wassa wassa.”

  Then Massu acted out smashing the woodcutter’s head open with a quick blow to the temple. He was speaking in a clipped French, accompanied by theatrical gestures, that he said he had learned from the tirailleurs, but Colonel Leclerc interrupted him.

  “The rifle is faster than the ax,” he said simply, “the rifle is stronger.”

  He held out a clenched fist in front of the complainants’ eyes, as his own gaze moved back and forth between Hebga’s face and Philothée’s.

  “Stronger.”

  Hebga commented, in Bassa, that a cannon is stronger than a rifle, and that didn’t stop them from using rifles. He tried to catch the eyes of the stuttering translator, but Philothée was lost, searching in vain for the first word.

  “No ax, no pants,” the woodcutter repeated. And he motioned significantly at his naked flanks.

  Dio, who had kept quiet till that point, now wanted to intervene. Leclerc stopped him with a wave of his hand. Captain Dio really didn’t understand. It was Dio who had crafted the plan to recruit the Saras in Chad. Since they usually walked around naked, he figured they’d be drawn to the tirailleur’s uniform, precisely because it was the first bit of clothing they had ever put on. Even though he had led those men from one end of Nigeria to the other, he really didn’t understand what had gotten into the head of this bushman. And now Dio understood Leclerc’s order even less:

  “Give him back his thing.”

  For Captain Massu, this was the first and only time he’d ever seen anything like it: a black soldier who hadn’t obeyed was being protected by his own superior. He didn’t react, but also didn’t forget. Colonel Leclerc wasn’t sorry to move his perfect soldier out of the infantry; he was sure to find some way to make use of his talents. He ordered him to be reassigned to the trucks. What difference did it make to Hebga? Getting back his ax had lifted his spirits. He examined the sharpened length of its blade, caressing its body with the palm of his hand. It was as if he had found a lost limb.

  “Ax,” he exclaimed, “de Gaulle!”

  His face burst into a smile. His happy eyes met Colonel Leclerc’s, who turned toward Massu, then to Dio and the others. None of the French officers understood the woodcutter’s joy. The name “de Gaulle” brought the scene to a close. It gave everyone some satisfaction. One of them would later write in his memoirs of “natives whose attachment to Free France sometimes takes on surprising forms.” Hebga hooked his ax over his shoulder, just as he used to when he went into the forest, except that now it had a new name: “de Gaulle.” He turned around to leave when Massu’s order stopped him cold.

  “Attention!… March!”

  “You have to teach them everything,” murmured an officer in the shadows.

  Hebga headed off, standing tall, his feet striking out a rhythm on the ground, “One, two, one, two!” Outside the tent, a stinging cloud of hot sand whipped at him. When he reopened his eyes, his gaze met those of a large group of meharists camped next to their camels. The wind was puffing out their loose uniforms. The tirailleurs were happy to have given up the wooden rifles they had used for training now that the real weapons provided by England had arrived. The firearms brought out a childlike excitement in each of them, especially the Chadians. You’d have thought they’d found a long-lost lover. None of them understood Hebga’s attachment to his ax; they were content with the coupe-coupe provided by the French.

  The same for Leclerc; he really didn’t understand Hebga’s stubbornness.

  “The Bassas,” he remarked simply. “That’s just how they are. Stubborn.”

  2

  The Birth of the Senegalese Tirailleur

  Speaking of stubbornness, Bilong just wasn’t the same since the new equipment had been handed out, especially the uniforms. Back in the tent he paraded in front of the Bassas in the group, showing off. Yes, he was showing off. His shirt, his brown trousers that came down mid-calf and the half chaps that made him look a bit like a charlatan—but don’t say that to him. His toes peeked out at the end of his feet like little sparks, symbols of his happiness. He tried placing his chechia on his head at several different angles, but not the way Massu had shown them.

  “Tipped to the left?” he asked.

  Aloga tried to help.

  “Like this?”

  “No, a bit more to the right.”

  Philothée got involved.

  “Look, this is how you wear it, put it on like this.”

  “You now, too, Charles?” Aloga asked. “You just joined up so you could play the part of the red-hot lover, is that it?”

  When he said “red-hot lover”—chaud gars in French—it amused the other Bassas. He was also the only one who called Bilong Charles. This led to a bit of confusion, because everyone else just called him Bilong. Aloga had taken on the role of a strict father. And that’s what he was. He had signed up so he could feed his kids. At first it was because of his passel of kids that he fled his house and joined the little poetry circle, only to discover that being a poet didn’t get him the pay he would have earned as a day laborer, as he had hoped when he had joined the line in front of Mininga’s Bar. When Colonel Leclerc had arrived, he abandoned Maestro Pouka and his rhymes to become a soldier, a tirailleur. Had he fled his passel of screaming kids only to find himself here in this far-off desert, still subject to the caprices of a child?

  Bilong found this quite funny and kept chuckling about it with Philothée.

  “Charles, is that your given name, yes or no?” an exasperated Captain Massu finally asked one day in the middle of exercises.

  Bilong would have told him that it didn’t really matter, that he was Bilong for some, while his mother called him something else, and “his Nguet” called him Charles; besides, both Charles and Bilong were really nicknames, “they’re not the names my father gave me when I came out of my mother’s belly.” But the military code didn’t allow for this sort of exchange with your superior officer. So why didn’t he use the name his father had given him? And just what was it? Bilong would have reeled off a list of a dozen names, just to be able to talk about himself. That was one of his foibles, I’d say. Or, according to Aloga, it was one of the quirks that made him a center of attention.

  “You’re a daddy’s boy, is that right?” Aloga didn’t hide his disdain. “A real child.”

  It wasn’t far from the truth. Hebga observed all the theatrics going on around Bilong and spit on the ground. The woodcutter had become a soldier to avenge his mother. After searching everywhere in the forest for her assassin, he had concluded that the Man who had done that was hiding on the world’s endless roads. So he had headed off down those roads, had crossed forest, steppe, and desert, without realizing that by doing so, he was exposing himself to the global dimension of a very strange sort of war. He hadn’t yet found the Man who had done that, his invisible adversary. The rage within him was the other face of his love for his mother.

  Bilong, for his part, had signed up to escape from the smothering embrace of women. Even Hebga remembered that scene from the bar, the one about the wolowolos—really, tell me, could anyone have forgotten that? He was fleeing our Nguet’s imprisoning perfume. Or shall we say, instead, that Bi
long wanted to escape from his elder sister who had beat the drums of feminine rage in front of Mininga’s Bar? Or was it from Hebga’s mother, our Sita, the leader of that group of angry women? But maybe he was really fleeing Mininga herself? No. Had Nguet grown too possessive? One thing is certain, Bilong had become a soldier because of an excess of love. It was a childish reaction, just another way to try and impress the ladies.

  “You really are a child, huh?” Aloga repeated.

  Hebga could only agree with that. Bilong acted as if the soldiers in the camp at Faya-Largeau, there in the middle of the desert, were the mirror he had always sought out, as if they were the customers in Mininga’s Bar, or rather, as if they were the members of Pouka’s little poetry circle. He held his rifle against his hip and asked once again what people thought of his soldier’s uniform.

  Then Hebga got angry.

  “Hey, we are not your Nguet!” he said.

  Several times he had started to say: “And your Nguet, you know I…” but he had held back. Let’s give the kid time to grow up, he told himself; boredom was filling his mouth, so he again spit into the sand. Was he going to get into a fight with that kid in the middle of the desert over some woman who wasn’t even there? Because, truth be told, he knew what he was talking about when it came to Nguet; Hebga had a lot of stories he could tell, that was for sure. But he really didn’t want to humiliate “the little guy.” So he just said, “Be careful with those Bamum women,” as if that meant anything there in the middle of the Sahara. The other soldiers were listening closely now, their attention piqued by the racy stories the Cameroonians were telling each other in Bassa.

  “Hey, Cameroon-man,” said a voice from the corner, “we tired, huh!”

  “You talkin’ women, women, morning, noon, and night.”

  “Fuck, leave us alone.”

  Jealousy? The evenings were pretty boring after the rather stressful days. Sometimes, though only rarely, to tell the truth, the soldiers gathered in De Gaulle Hall to watch a movie. There were newsreels from England that a French soldier translated for them, that talked only of glory and of France. The Free French had distributed pornographic magazines, which they passed around to make it easier to masturbate. They’d get together and trade stories just to keep their spirits up. The four brave soldiers from Edéa were lucky; because they had headed off as part of Leclerc’s first group of recruits, they hadn’t been separated. It had started as a small group, no more than a hundred or so men; but as they’d crossed Cameroon, several hundred other soldiers had joined their ranks, some Bamiléké, others Bamum or Fulani—there were a lot of Fulani, yes. As their numbers swelled, the four Bassas grew even closer. Now they were tighter than family.

  “Fuck, leave us alone, too!” Bilong answered.

  The tirailleur who had insulted Bilong calmed himself down; he didn’t really want to take on Hebga, whose muscles made him a real threat. He was part of the so-called Senegalese contingent, although in fact there were only a few Senegalese among them. The phrase tirailleur sénégalais was really just a lazy turn of phrase on the part of the French that no one had bothered to correct, because Senegal, still under Vichy control, hadn’t yet given de Gaulle any soldiers. What’s more, Senegal had dealt de Gaulle his first military defeat, between September 23 and 25, 1940. And even worse, Leclerc’s companion, Boislambert, had been taken prisoner in the Battle of Dakar. Still, the very first contingent of soldiers to arrive in Chad came from Senegal. It’s said that it’s because those Senegalese soldiers didn’t want to shoot at the ones from Chad, as their French officers had ordered them to, and so always missed their mark, that they were given the epithet of tirailleurs—bad shooters. Who knows—but that’s what people say. Still, it remains that the French soon called all the African soldiers in their army “tirailleurs” and all the Africans they recruited were deemed “Senegalese.” It just made things easier, simpler. Like any other insult.

  The quarrel settled down. Aloga began to sing one of those songs he sang so well. It was a comforting lullaby that allowed each man to draw out his own memories, whether of the cottony sweetness of a woman or his mother’s embrace. For Hebga, the expanse of the desert that he had begun to measure for the first time when he’d arrived in camp was cut to the dimensions of his own pain. Our Sita hadn’t ever left his mind, not once since his departure. He remembered the words that several had repeated on the day his mother was buried: “It’s expected for a son to bury his mother.” The market—what am I saying, not the market, all of Edéa had repeated that to him, for the whole town had come to Sita’s courtyard to pay their final respects to her, in recognition of her grandeur. And it was into his arms, Hebga’s, that the town had delivered its soothing words. Those words had been of little consolation, really, for all it took was a few couplets of Aloga’s song for the pain to take hold of his body once more. The wind rushing over the sand in the distance took up his song, providing a rhythm for the couplets of the false Hilun who was still singing there behind him. To distract himself he thought of the Marshal and held his ax tightly to his heart.

  3

  The Mother of the Market

  Meanwhile, back in Edéa, Ngo Bikaï was quietly taking on her new role. The death of our Sita had made her the new Mother of the Market, and that was no small task. The departure of the soldiers hadn’t emptied out the courtyards, for Edéa had been turned into something of a military camp. All sorts of trucks and vehicles kept passing through. Once a long line of tanks moved through the courtyards and disappeared into the forest. Life had to be reorganized with this new reality in mind, and Ngo Bikaï threw herself wholeheartedly into her new role as Mother.

  “A new set of responsibilities,” she said.

  The war had upended life on the home front. Oh, what would she have done without the support of her husband, Fritz? Even if she was at home, in her courtyard, surrounded by her children, women came knocking at her door to get their orders, to ask her advice on shared business, or to tell her of their daily struggles. She listened and gave her opinion, talking now to this woman and later to another. Sometimes she sent one of “her women,” as she called them, to settle an affair far from town, but not too often. Essentially, her role, if you can call it that, was to allocate the market stalls and determine where people could sell their goods, collect fees, and ensure the place was kept clean and orderly.

  Taking care of this last bit meant she had a whole troop of young men chasing after her—those who didn’t have a field of their own to cultivate and who were waiting for the harvest season to sell their muscles to those who did. A number of them ended up becoming soldiers. Soon they started showing up in their new uniforms, which gave them a new air of respect that they’d never had when they were just sweepers or working in the fields for the season. They were experiencing a sort of renaissance, although the war didn’t really leave them enough time to take advantage of their new status—to get married, for example. Just a few days after they had signed up, Ngo Bikaï would find them sitting in the back of a truck that would soon take them far away.

  “War, it’s just like njokmassi,” Fritz said.

  Forced labor? Ngo Bikaï replied that he was exaggerating a bit and teased him: “Don’t you start talking to me, too, about man’s exploitation of his fellow man!”

  Ignoring the joke, her husband described the rows of soldiers marching in formation, their sad eyes, how they disappeared each day in the distance.

  “The exploitation of the black man by the white, you mean!” he continued. “Forced labor!”

  Ngo Bikaï tried to avoid discussing politics with Fritz. They were a unique sort of couple in Edéa, joined by love, even if they weren’t officially married, as Mininga never hesitated to make clear by stressing maliciously the prefix “Ngo” that defined her as an unmarried girl, as if that were some sort of dirty epithet. They had gotten together in a surprising way. Among the students in Fritz’s class, Ngo Bikaï was the only one who never contradicted him. That was bac
k when he was a moniteur indigène. Then one day she had disagreed with him over a question of French grammar, whether a certain threadfish—commonly called a captain—was “to eat” or had it “been eaten”: was it an infinitive or a past participle? In the end, they were both sort of right. And soon after that he had wooed her, gotten her pregnant. After Ngo Bikaï’s father had berated the young man, his own father told him to do the responsible thing and marry her. Fritz insisted that was beside the point, for no signature on a document could mean as much as the one she was carrying in her belly. That was before Fritz inherited his father’s land and set up a business transporting produce. Since then the couple had grown fairly wealthy, even if everything is relative, as Fritz would say, when he compared his way of life to that of his brother, who worked in Douala, or with his friends who “worked for the white man.”

  “We’re not doing too badly,” he concluded.

  This sort of comparison had been his obsession since he had left his position working for the white man, while others were still employed by the administration. It was a sort of never-ending one-upmanship. Fritz made a show of his wealth, especially because his brother was still renting the place where he lived in Akwa. Of course, Um Nyobè had built his own house in Yaoundé, or at least that’s what he’d been told. As for Pouka, Fritz preferred not to talk about him, for no one really understood what kind of life he was leading: still single although he could afford to get married, still renting although employed as an écrivain-interprète. Whatever … He said he was a poet—and Fritz really didn’t know what that meant. Fritz felt quite comfortable judging others, having set himself up as the arbiter of social behavior there in the forests of Edéa. Had anyone told him that he had just taken advantage of his brother’s departure for the city—which had resulted in his being disinherited—and that he owed all his wealth to that, he would have found some excuse to sidestep the issue and assert his own independence.