When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  He was roused from his reflections by Fritz’s voice.

  “They wanted to break our spirit … to break our spirit.”

  Um Nyobè looked closely at his friend. Never had he seen him so miserable; his sincerity moved him to tears. If he asked “What can we do?” he would be admitting that they had surrendered. But in Fritz’s eyes he saw something quite different than capitulation. He didn’t really want to talk to Fritz but to Ngo Bikaï herself. But what did he want to say? To apologize for taking so long to come? For having dragged his feet? To offer condolences? Just what does one say to a woman who’s been raped? Assia? Did he want to talk to her just to avoid the philosophical and theoretical questions raised by his friend, questions he knew all too well, really? Was that it? Did he want to talk to Ngo Bikaï in order to escape from Fritz, who was there beside him saying the very things he himself would have said if their situations were reversed, even though what he had imagined was something totally different, precisely because he’d never been in that situation before? Um Nyobè thought that by putting the children to bed the two women had cut the men off from the conversation he would have wanted to have, from the only story he would have wanted to hear: Ngo Bikaï’s.

  “So, how is she?” he asked his friend.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Okay?” he insisted.

  “More or less.”

  Except Fritz said those words in French: “Comme ci, comme ça.”

  24

  The Belly of Anger

  Meanwhile, the women were planning their next move. One thing still bothered Ngo Bikaï: Who had told the French that her women weren’t happy? Suspicion is a dangerously sharp saw, and she couldn’t rid herself of mistrust and doubt. When she crossed paths with a mother wearing a tightly wrapped kaba ngondo, a woman who sold macabo in the market, she couldn’t help but wonder: What if it was her? Then she’d look at another, a bayamsallam lazily nibbling on the slender stick of wood women use to clean their teeth, and the same question would flash across her mind: Why not her? Even that pregnant woman over there caught her attention: Maybe her pregnancy helped cover up her acts of espionage?

  Continually assailed by doubt, Ngo Bikaï knew she needed someone she could trust. So she was glad Martha had come from Yaoundé. She didn’t need the sort of friend she could chat with when times were good, but rather a woman she could count on as she prepared to fight. She didn’t mince her words, because as she saw it, this was really about war. When she said “war,” her eyes gleamed with the anger Martha had been looking for since her arrival. Ngo Bikaï shuddered, then held her head up boldly and said:

  “I know it was her.”

  “Who?”

  “Mininga.”

  The facts spoke for themselves: the new opulence of La Seigneuriale; her collusion with the Free French soldiers; and most of all, her own treachery. Still, there was one thing that bothered Ngo Bikaï: there was a missing link, a transmission chain, she said in French, that brought the women’s words to “that hyena’s” ears.

  “So, one of your women?”

  That was precisely the question that was bothering her so.

  “I just can’t imagine who could have done it.”

  Ngo Bikaï confided in Martha that, since “the events,” she hadn’t stopped running through the list of her women, but none of them seemed guilty. Besides, they had all shown her such care and compassion, coming by to visit all the time. The importance of the women’s sympathy was clear to Martha the very next day: Ngo Bikaï didn’t have to seek out her friends to remind them that she was there. They came to see her on their own, sometimes several times in one day.

  “How can I accuse any of them?” Ngo Bikaï asked. “How?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “Even the hyena came to see me one day, let me tell you.”

  “What?”

  Um Nyobè’s wife just couldn’t get over that. And yet, Ngo Bikaï told her, Mininga had shown up one day, kougna, kougna, kougna, shaking her hips with each step, coss, coss, coss, scuffling her feet on the ground as she always did, and then, toc, toc, toc, Ngo Bikaï heard her knock on the door of her own house.

  “Oh, my dear,” she implored, “please tell me it’s not true.”

  How had Ngo Bikaï been able to control herself and not throw her right out into the courtyard? Just thinking about it, even now, made her blood boil. Because, she went on, Martha didn’t know just what Mininga had become since her last visit. Then Ngo Bikaï described how the bar had changed; no longer the simple, nameless place where you could buy this or that, where porters were able to rest and catch their breath, it had become a veritable “hub of Franco-African relations,” and was now called “La Seigneuriale”—as Martha could see for herself. Ngo Bikaï burst out laughing.

  “La Françafrique, that’s what that bar should be called!”

  A scandal, really, she went on. Martha would never believe it, but even Leclerc, yes, Colonel Leclerc had been there. De Gaulle himself, who according to Fritz was spending a lot of time in Cameroon, had almost come to see it. Was there anything that didn’t happen in La Seigneuriale? Even the “Putsch in Ongola”—as Fritz called Leclerc’s entry into Yaoundé—had been planned right there! Yes, they were making plans there for the liberation of Paris, yes, in fact, for winning the Second World War!

  “The Second World War?”

  “Well, at least the French side of it.”

  Ngo Bikaï mentioned how soldiers were being recruited for the Free French forces, citing her own brother as a case in point: “Bilong, my own little brother,” who’d become a tirailleur after having been dragged into that bar, and who’d even taken on a new name, Charles.

  “Charles?”

  “Let me tell you. I told him that I’d keep calling him Bilong until the day I died,” said Ngo Bikaï with a snort. “It was Fritz’s friend, you know, the one who’s there with you in Yaoundé, who took him to that place.”

  “Pouka?”

  “Yes, Pouka. He was teaching French poetry there in Mininga’s Bar.”

  And just like that, with no warning, her brother had become the lover of some woman named Nguet, as if that had anything to do with French poetry. And then, because of that Nguet, he stopped sleeping at home, which broke his mother’s heart, and all he ever talked about, twenty-four hours a day, was Nguet: Nguet, morning, noon, and night.

  “Nguet?” exclaimed Martha. “But she was my friend from school!”

  The two women fell silent, thinking about Nguet’s career: she had gone to school to learn how to keep a home and had ended up in La Seigneuriale … That she had become a whore, a wolowolos, in Edéa was rather surprising. They didn’t pause to think about the twists and turns of her story, not about how someone like them had fallen or who had orchestrated it. Martha in particular couldn’t hold back.

  “How can it be!”

  Anger—yes, anger! It’s not just something that ties your belly up in knots. It takes hold of your mind, too, twists your sense of right and wrong. Martha began to realize just how anger had tied her sister’s belly into knots, twisting her mind and her sense of right and wrong. But as the words spilled out of Ngo Bikaï, in bursts of anger that turned her eyes red, Martha’s thoughts returned to the Nguet she used to know. She imagined her wearing the new outfit Ngo Bikaï had described and pressed her hand to her lips, unable to believe it: A whore?

  But I can tell you, after just a few evenings, a few whispered conversations as they put the children to bed, Ngo Bikaï and Martha were able to trace the transmission chain that linked La Seigneuriale to the market women and their Mother. Because Ngo Bikaï suddenly remembered that Nguet had stopped by on the very day that some of the women had come to her to complain about the French. What had they wanted? She couldn’t really remember. In any event, Nguet had crossed paths with the angry women there at her door! That was the only possible answer: “It was her!”

  Finally, the traitor had a name: Nguet. Martha decided it wa
s time to pay her a visit.

  “Just to say hello.”

  25

  Preparing for Battle

  The women wasted little time on greetings. They were clear about what had brought them together, and their meeting only confirmed it: they needed to approach this with cool heads, and systematically. Most important, they must not chase after catfish when there were whales swimming free. And Nguet, one older woman said, was only a catfish. Besides, that story about her and Ngo Bikaï’s brother was old news! All the women agreed that they needed to focus on the big fish, the whale. Then one very skinny woman (multiple pregnancies had clearly taken a toll on her body but hadn’t slowed down her mouth!) stressed that as far as she was concerned, the real whale was France.

  “Why France?”

  The woman pointed toward the military camp that had emptied all the men from Edéa’s courtyards and turned the village’s brave young men into their sisters’ rapists, or even their mother’s murderers. Ngo Bikaï said not to exaggerate, since after all, her little brother was a tirailleur, too. And besides, she added, it wasn’t France that had invaded her home that evening, “so let’s not exaggerate.”

  “Let’s be careful,” added another frightened woman, “they have rifles in that camp.”

  She paid no mind to the baby in her arms, sucking greedily at her breast.

  “And cannons.”

  “And tanks.”

  “And planes. Don’t you remember that plane?”

  “How could we forget?”

  In short, they’d surely provoke a massacre if they dared to follow through with what they had in mind! Declaring war on France! No, they needed to choose their battles carefully. Shifting their attention from France brought them logically back to a decidedly smaller fish, La Seigneuriale, and to Mininga in particular. However, each of the punishments they imagined inflicting on the guilty party was quickly dismissed, one after the other, because, as one woman cut in, “Between us, she’s not really the one who did it.”

  “And besides,” added another woman with rather short legs, “she’s a woman, like us.”

  “Me? I’m not a whore!” protested one bayamsallam, her head tightly wrapped in a red scarf.

  “So you’re saying you have a pebble between your legs?”

  “A pebble?”

  The market was bubbling with the women’s lively banter. They had decided to meet there because they didn’t want to put the woman they considered their Mother in any more danger. And really, sometimes it’s best to hide in plain sight. In their anonymous stands, they could speak more freely than if they had gathered in Ngo Bikaï’s home, where everyone would have noticed them.

  “My sisters,” added the fearful woman, “we’re acting like cowards, no? I mean, blaming another woman instead of…”

  “Of what?”

  “Of attacking France.”

  “Don’t you see?” snapped a pregnant woman. “Mininga has become the long arm of France here.”

  “We just need to tell her that we’re not happy,” the woman next to her chimed in. “That’s all.”

  “That’s all.”

  “We won’t do anything to her.”

  “Just tell her.”

  “One or two things.”

  “Like what?”

  The women congratulated Martha, who had come “from so far away,” all the way from Yaoundé, and who had already done them such a service. You see, the day before, she had gone to Mininga’s Bar, where none of them set foot anymore. In the past they’d have been able to count on the Anglophone woman who sold plantains and plums to be their spy, but she had left the place a while back. “She would have warned us!” one woman added.

  Thanks to the information provided by Martha, the women were able to trace out the floor plan of La Seigneuriale, to sketch out all the entrances and exits, to get a clear idea of what the walls were made of, where the serving girls slept, and all the other details a general would need before a battle. Her visit to Nguet, “after all these years,” had borne fruit. To be sure, the women of Edéa wanted to give their regards to Nguet, but mostly they had a message for her boss. Not to do any real damage, just to give her a little lesson in civility, you know.

  26

  The Final Assault

  Here’s what happened: Early in the morning a woman knocked on the door of La Seigneuriale. When Nguet opened it, she was surprised to see so many women in the courtyard. They were all wearing kaba ngondos cinched around their waist with a pagne. Some were wearing trousers underneath. The serving girl didn’t immediately call for her boss, because she assumed that the women were heading off to catch catfish. There’d been a lot of talk about catfish lately, because money was tight, due to the “events,” and once again the women had to resort to the things that helped tide them over when the harvests were poor.

  “If the woman who sold grilled plantains were still here,” said Nguet, by way of an apology, “she would have something for you to eat.”

  Because, you see, it was still quite early! But, when one woman took de Gaulle’s photograph off the wall, she quickly realized that they hadn’t come that early to La Seigneuriale to buy plantains and plums from the Bamenda woman. A second woman, instead of sitting down, picked up a chair and passed it to her friend, who passed it on to another woman, and another, all along a line that went from the inside of the bar out to the back of a pickup truck in the courtyard, where the chair found its place. Nguet thought she recognized Martha behind the wheel, or something like that. Her mind was spinning so fast she couldn’t even ask what was going on. She called out for her boss.

  When Mininga appeared, followed by her girls, she was greeted by an elderly woman with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes.

  “We’re helping you move, ma chérie,” she told her. The French word emphasized her sarcasm.

  “You asked for our help, don’t you remember?”

  Obviously, our Mininga did not remember, but could she even recall anything at that point? She waved her flyswatter left and right.

  “Move? Where?”

  “You need to tell us that, ma chérie.”

  The women burst out laughing, and kept passing things down the line without missing a beat.

  “We’re just here to do our job, as you can see.”

  The woman who said that was carrying a table, which she handed off to another standing at the back of the truck.

  “Who gave you the order to do this?”

  “How could you forget?” said the woman at the back of the truck. “Show her.”

  An older woman reached down between her breasts and pulled out a purse. Waving a few bills, she added, “You’re the one who gave me all this, aren’t you?”

  “You paid up front.”

  “Two hundred francs.”

  “Ma chérie, do you want me to count them for you?”

  Mininga was done listening to this farce.

  “I’ll show you, you fools!”

  The insult made the women roar. Mininga jumped up and, in a rustle of jewels and lace, cut through the crowd, calling women out as she went: “Madam, I’ve never verbally assaulted you, have I? And as for you, madam, I suggest you watch your behavior, huh!” Her anger stood in stark contrast to the good humor of all the ladies who seemed so eager to get to work, even at this early hour of the morning: they’d come to have fun, at long last, to have some fun! Greetings and salutations!

  “You’ll see,” Mininga kept repeating. “I’ll go to the military camp.”

  Poor Mininga! She would soon learn two basic rules of war. First, you can only count on allies who have a real stake in the outcome of your battle. When Mininga arrived at the gate of the camp, it was still shut tight. It was barely seven in the morning. The soldiers on guard recognized her, of course, but they still wouldn’t let her in. Had she been a potential recruit, they would certainly have opened the gate, and even offered her breakfast as a bonus for signing up as a tirailleur. But when a woman of her age came knockin
g at the camp—even if she had kept her looks, even excessively perfumed and decked out in jewels like no one else around—well, she was nothing more than an old woman, and France had no need to enlist African women as tirailleuses!

  The second rule that Mininga learned was that if a general fails to carry through on an ultimatum, he loses the upper hand. When she returned to her courtyard without the promised squadron of tirailleurs, she was greeted with smiles and even some chuckles.

  “Ah,” said a woman carrying a hot plate, “we thought your tirailleurs were coming to help us.”

  “So just where are your tirailleurs?” another added.

  The crowd roared with laughter.

  “Aren’t they men, after all?” another asked.

  “Is their bangala all they have?”

  “Ah! They’re afraid to use a hammer?”

  “Cowards!”

  “Rude boys!”

  “Are they afraid of women now?”

  “They only know how to rape women, huh?”

  “They’re hiding back in the French camp, right?”

  “Why don’t they come here to look for their mamas?”

  “Or their sisters?”

  “Are they tirailleurs or manioc roots?”

  “Tirailleurs or potatoes?”

  Mininga looked on as her business was taken apart, watching as women climbed onto the roof of La Seigneuriale, screwdrivers in hand.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re taking down the roof of your bar. Do you want to give us a hand, chérie coco?”

  “Here, take a hammer.”

  One sheet of metal after the other, the roofing of La Seigneuriale came down, followed by the doors and the windows. There were protests when the women started in on the serving girls’ rooms, but Nguet was able to convince them that the battle was lost and it was better to surrender.