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  This novel is dedicated to Nomsa, my Bwonda’

  Cameroon, such as we know it today, has changed forms several times, and it gained independence in 1960 and 1961. But all those who fought for a true Independence were assassinated: namely, the leaders of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon, Ruben Um Nyobè, Félix Moumié, and the hero of this novel, Ernest Ouandié. The country experienced a terrible civil war from 1960 to 1970. Its leaders do not like those who remind them of it. In the face of such censure, writers and intellectuals developed various writing systems, including the Bagam writing—in other words, Bamileke writing—used by several characters in this novel. These writers, if they aren’t dismissed as fools, are thrown in prison or have simply left the country.

  Three Letters

  1

  This must be what death is like, what else could it be? Waking up groggy on a day when the sun is slow to rise. Slowly, ever so slowly, stretching, extracting oneself from the warm covers like a snail emerging from its shell. Tentatively reaching for the floor with one foot and then the other, the damp feel of bare boards. Feeling around tentatively for the slippers that he’ll never get used to, but are so warm once they’re on. Yawning, trying to conjure up some warmth to compensate for what the body is losing. Standing up. Opening the curtains to see the endless white stretch of the world, suddenly so different than the night before: the trees, their leaves, the bushes scattered around the yard, yes, the whole yard and even the sky itself, the horizon, shrouded by death. And it was of death that Nithap thought, of his own. Who could say, who could tell him, tell us, any of us, that death isn’t waking up to a snow-covered world?

  This fluttering of his mind, this fog blurring his brain, this cloud covering his consciousness, this sense of doubt, there’s no way that his son—whose name was Nithap Salomon, Sal for the Americans, Tanou for his family—could help him in his struggle against it. Tanou had already left for work, as had his wife, and the little one was at school, like every day of the week, leaving him, the grandfather, alone with this ill-defined, vaporous feeling that he’d never before felt so keenly: it was suffocating. Yet suddenly a burst of energy, a flood of warm blood through his veins, reminded him that there is no age at which one should cease to explore or stop learning. That’s what he always said, what he had said to everyone there in Bangwa the day he left. That lesson, renewed each day, was now taking shape in the flakes he watched gently floating down from the sky, carried by the wind that, in the warmth of his room, he could not feel, but that he knew to be cold, so very cold, a cold that had deadened his body, all the way to the tips of his ears, and cracked his lips, which he now had to cover with cream.

  He didn’t brush his teeth or take a shower, but headed downstairs in his pajamas, shuffling his slippered feet, egged on by his curiosity. His eyes brightened only when Marie, the little one, gave him English lessons, shaping her lips into rounds to show him how to pronounce the words.

  “Grandpa, snow,” she said in English.

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  The little one took the hand of her Old Papa—that was her nickname for him—and dragged him off, without answering his question, or perhaps answering it in her own way. She dragged him outside, under the watchful eye of her mother, who was busily cleaning off her own shoes.

  “What about school?”

  “Snow!”

  What child doesn’t like snow? This child, Marie, six years old, wanted to teach something to her seventy-five-year-old grandfather. She had jumped quickly out of the car, a Jeep Cherokee, angry with her mother, Angela, who was “wasting time”; she’d run into the living room, heading toward the stairs, where she met her Old Papa coming down. He was the one she wanted to teach something: snow. Her enthusiasm was so contagious that her grandfather didn’t even think to put on a coat, especially since Marie, already outside, was disappearing into the flurry of white falling from the sky, joining the universe in its dance. Suddenly remembering her duties—that she needed to introduce him to this new world, her realm—Marie grabbed two fluffy handfuls that she let fall, sprinkling down in front of Nithap’s astounded face. “Snow,” she said, as her own face lit up. She rounded her lips, emphasizing the right pronunciation: snow.

  “You’re going to catch cold!”

  Her mother’s voice interrupted their dream.

  And her mother was right, because her father-in-law was out there, in the middle of winter, wearing only his pajamas and slippers. He didn’t notice that his little one was dressed for the weather. School was closed but they’d heard the news too late, only after they were on their way. Angela came out with an overcoat and boots, since the grandfather was clearly carried away by his granddaughter’s enthusiasm, becoming his granddaughter in some sense, repeating what she wanted him to say, just like in their English lessons, holding out his hands and showing the clump of white: snow.

  * * *

  The mother shut the door on this literacy lesson in reverse, shutting out the cold and the promise the little girl had made to educate her grandfather by assigning a word to each thing around. With one eye on the screen of her phone, the mother turned on the stove to make hot chocolate, indispensable “after that crazy escapade,” as she heard shouts of joy outside. The little one was thrilled, as was her grandfather: you’d think the two had invented snow. As for the mother, she was getting worried: “Always such cheapskates,” she murmured. She was thinking about the place where she worked, and the university that had sent her husband out on the road so early that morning. She was sure the campus would announce it was closing once he was halfway to his office. “They are going to kill my husband one day!” Through the windowpane she watched the grandfather, who, following the little one’s orders, was both discovering the United States for the first time and coming back to life himself; she shook her head at the sight of them, but used her phone to capture the moment, taking pictures and even a short video—that was what led her to head outside again and join in the dance.

  * * *

  The snow had caught them all off guard, Tanou even more than the others, as he drove along I-95. Each time he had to stop, he took a quick glance at his phone, hoping to see a message, an announcement from the university. It didn’t arrive until he’d made it onto Route 13, heading toward the Verrazzano Bridge and Brooklyn. Campus closed today; all classes canceled: a simple phrase that he had hoped to see the night before, and then in the morning, and even as he anxiously drove to work. Feeling relieved, he had his left hand on the wheel and in his right the phone when his wife’s name popped up on the screen.

  “Finally,” he said, barely masking his frustration.

  “Same thing here.”

  “I was just about to call you.”

  Angela knew that he had once again made the drive for nothing, and so early in the morning, too, because he was headstrong and reluctant to heed her advice, as she often reminded him. “If only you’d listened to me.”

  But this wasn’t the time for a family squabble, and she knew it, too. She looked through the pictures she’d taken in the yard and sent him one.

  “Baby,” she said, “you should pull over if the roads are bad.”

  “Papa, school is closed.” The little one’s voice. Her excitement broke through the ice on the windows, cleared the snow off the roads. “Grandfather and I, we were outside.”

  The anxiety that he had inherited from his mother, Ngountchou.

  “Marie…” he began, but then he stopped, certain that she had already told her grandfather to be careful, to come in.

  “We’re all at home.” His wife’s voice was reassuring. “We’re waiting for you here.”

  “Papa, are you coming home? Your hot chocolate is getting cold.”

  “I sent you a picture—”

  “Baby, how can I look at the picture you sent, you know I’m trying to drive, and the roads are slippery.”

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  Taking out his stress on his wife, just like his father had done!

  “Finish what?”

  “You don’t have to rush home, I sent you pictures.”

  “Baby.”

  “I’ll send you a video, too.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with it?”

  His iPhone vibrated.

  “That way you can stop and see what we’re doing.”

  And then what?

  “You don’t have to be here.”

  * * *

  So that’s what he did. After turning back toward home, he pulled off at Exit 9 and stopped at a gas station. Then he called his wife to tell her the details of his trip, complaining about the tanker trucks, “those idiots,” telling her about an accident, “nothing serious,” on Route 27, and uttering the phrase, “I’m sorry,” which was necessary—absolutely necessary—to hold her attention, so that he could start again to explain his worries, now that she was really listening. He told her that, yes, he was safe and warm, that he wasn’t going to leave the gas station anytime soon, and that the highway would be sanded before
long—the plows were hard at work. He added that the Volvo drove just fine in the snow, that the video had arrived—“yes, yes,” he’d had a chance to watch it—and that what the little one was doing with her grandfather was terrific (he said that in English), but they needed to be careful not to get frozen, “especially not Old Papa, you know, he’s not used to snow.”

  “Yes, yes,” Angela reassured him. “We’re all safe and warm.”

  Get frozen. The phrase, the image of food in the freezer, made him smile when he hung up and noticed the somber faces around him, all the people who’d taken shelter together and whose minds were elsewhere, like his, one eye fixed on the image of a grandfather in a snow flurry, there on the iPhone screen. Beneath the overcoat—his own—he recognized the colors of a pair of pajamas and jumped. “Old Papa is gonna freeze!” He tapped on Angela’s number and, as soon as she answered, realized how silly he was being: she had already told him that they were safe and warm, in the living room, and so he was the only one out on the snowy roads.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  2

  Of those who had been surprised by the snow, Nithap was certainly the happiest. His son Tanou found him comfortably ensconced in the living room: looking outside, but safe and warm. The last FaceTime session had reassured him. He hadn’t been able to keep himself from calling one last time. Just as his wife had also called to make sure he was okay—“You’d said there were accidents on Route 27.” Or worse: he could have been killed by the police. “Black lives matter, you know,” she added, in English. The grandfather was sitting in front of the television with the little one, wearing out his eyes on a cartoon whose noisy twists and turns had the child so entranced that she didn’t even look up when her father opened the door.

  “Is anyone happy that I escaped death?” he tossed out.

  “Death?” Angela gave him a kiss. “Watch what you’re saying, baby.”

  His father was the one to welcome him home.

  “Do you want a coffee?”

  “This is your first snow,” he said to Old Papa as he took off his coat and shoes, and rubbed his hands, his breath still rising up in a cloud from his lips. “You can see what we were trying to avoid. And yes, I’d love a coffee.”

  “Avoid the snow,” that had been his mantra a few months ago when he’d gone to pick up his father at the airport. “At all cost, avoid the snow.” That meant avoiding the month of December. But his father’s illness had thrown a wrench in their plans and now it was January. What had started as a family reunion, “a chance to see your granddaughter,” had morphed first into a series of trips to the hospital, and then into a full schedule of appointments, one after the other, various moments where someone expressed surprise that Old Papa was still standing, a ritual chanting of all of his ills. The doctor would look up from his notebook.

  “Tell him,” Nithap insisted, “that I was a nurse.”

  “I already told him, Papa.”

  “Tell him again,” Old Papa insisted.

  He wasn’t convinced until the doctor turned to him with a smile:

  “A nurse, you say?”

  “I retired from the referral hospital in Bangwa in 1990.”

  He stressed the word referral.

  “Your father has insurance?”

  That’s the only thing that the young Indian doctor was worried about. The retired nurse couldn’t know that. His son didn’t translate his ensuing exchange with the doctor, during which he admitted that his father didn’t have health insurance; they’d pay out of pocket. His father, meanwhile, pressed his son to explain to the doctor the difficulties he’d been having each time he went to the bank.

  “Tell him how hard it was for me to sign all the forms.”

  The father described the absurd procedure imposed by his banker, “a young man who has known me for years”: he kept asking him to sign documents one after another, and once he’d signed, he refused to give him the money from his pension, “because the signature on file wasn’t the same.”

  “No joke.”

  This story elicited an unexpected laugh from his son and, once it had been translated, a smile from the doctor, but Nithap didn’t find it funny at all. He found it much more worrisome than his fainting spells, those “syncopes,” as he called them, which were the recurring symptom of his illness and the start of all these visits, the reason why he had extended his stay in the United States, even before the accident. The story had him so worried that he repeated it at least three times: first to the doctor, then at his next visit, when he nudged his son, “Don’t forget to ask him to prescribe something for me,” and then later to Marie. Four times, if you count the allusion he made to it when Big stopped by for a visit.

  * * *

  Big, that’s what we called the poet, the renowned poet. He lived at number 26, they at number 13. Nithap had first met him when the poet was taking his dog, Sahara, out for his daily walk, back when the weather still allowed it. And then he’d gotten to know him over a dinner organized by his son—“a dinner to welcome my father.” It was Sahara who had really brought them together.

  “What’s her name?”

  “His name is Sahara.”

  “That’s an African name! Have you been to Africa?”

  “Yes, to Senegal.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and Morocco, too.”

  “I went to Senegal, but a long time ago.”

  The grandfather hated all those signs that gave away his age, even as he claimed the rights due him because of it. That day Tanou was really amused when his father found out that Big was two years older than he.

  “I am in much worse shape than you are,” Big had said, smiling at a story about a tremor in his fingers.

  “Writing is a whole other story.”

  “Significant memory loss.” The doctor’s diagnosis, given after numerous visits, was cut-and-dried. “I’d like to see him again in two weeks.”

  After those two weeks came a month and then another, bringing Grandfather right into the middle of winter.

  “I’m not going to keep things from you,” Tanou told Marianne, who was like a sister to him, when he called the old country to tell her about the doctor’s appointment. “I think that the old guy is developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s.”

  “Alzheimer’s?”

  “Oh, what do I know?”

  “When he left here, he was just fine.”

  “Now you, too, Marianne! Ugh!”

  * * *

  Big was a writer. Robert Adams—a poet, author of some twenty books—didn’t look like the walking library he actually was. Despite his years, he still stood straight and tall like the basketball player he claimed to have been in his younger days. The black-and-white photos he showed everyone revealed a very different man, in shorts, svelte, holding a ball with both hands, his eyes fixed overhead.

  “What year was that?”

  “I think it was 1959.”

  “Yes, 1959,” his wife, Céline, chimed in.

  Suddenly lost in his own thoughts, Nithap picked up the photo. He turned it over as if expecting to find on the back an inscription predicting the future, details hinting at a larger story, something larger than life.

  “I was a student.”

  “1959.”

  He repeated the year two more times.

  “I wasn’t even born yet,” said little Marie, bringing a smile to everyone’s lips.

  “Of course not, my little one,” Big said, patting her head gently. “Your father wasn’t even born then.”

  Then the little one took hold of the photo, staring at it as if it were another of the cartoons that filled her days, or a picture from one of her storybooks. She snuggled into her grandfather’s arms, still gazing at the photo, before imitating its pose—much to everyone’s amusement.

  “I was just starting my work in Bangwa.”

  “Bangwa?”

  “At the hospital in Bangwa.”

  The details: first, explaining that Bangwa was in the west of Cameroon, in Bamileke land; then that the Bamilekes were one of the peoples of Cameroon—not a tribe, okay?—and that they were Bamileke. Those details, it fell to Tanou to fill them in.