Mount Pleasant Read Online Free PDF Page A

about whose tribulations Sara would soon learn. Still, Bertha considered the girls she trained, and the babies that they in turn offered to Njoya, as her own.
    Training the sultan’s wives was no small task, oh, no! Even back in Foumban, the work had eaten up her life, although she could only glimpse that truth reflected in the eyes of others. Sara became her eyes, though it did her no good. Now in Yaoundé, Bertha never imagined anyone had a past outside the walls of Mount Pleasant, and it is no exaggeration to say that she lived as if she had no future: that was the price paid for the right to see the sultan naked.
    Then one day the matron read that same absence of a future in Sara’s frantic, unfocused eyes. How could they have been friends? If the girl had opened her lips, her mouth would have spoken words the matron couldn’t understand. It was already bad enough that Sara hadn’t passed the virginity test she had been forced to undergo. But when Bertha saw the layers of silenced stories spread out before her eyes, questions she had previously thought necessary only for Bamum girls were unleashed.
    â€œWho did you sleep with, you hussy?”
    Followed by: “Just one man?”
    Girls from Yaoundé don’t have enough fingers to count the number of men who have been between their legs. How sad that virtue is lost so quickly! Sara flinched at each of these remarks, especially since Bertha screamed them in her ears. Yes, the matron was shouting, convinced that that was how to get through to a person who didn’t speak her language. The girl’s frightened eyes sought refuge in the dark from the thousands of images that haunted her past. The matron shouted, and Sara kept quiet. For the girl more than for anyone else, the beginning was also an end.

 
    7
    A Mean Woman
    â€œDidn’t you try to escape?” I ventured.
    â€œOf course I did. And not just once,” Sara confessed. “I always wanted to go back to my mother.”
    One day she left the matron’s rooms and set off down the corridors of Mount Pleasant. She walked on and on, passing sleepy-faced guards, family homes with their whispered secrets, happy invitations to come play in the sultan’s dead car. She walked on and on. She didn’t run, so as not to attract the attention of the men sitting on the ground in the inner courtyards, busily playing ngeka , the mathematical game so popular among the Ewondo. Finally she found herself back in front of Bertha, who was standing in her doorway wrapped in her blue pagne. Bertha, whose anger was evident in the fists propped on her hips.
    â€œWhere did you think you were going?” the furious matron shouted.
    Sara kept silent. Even on that day Bertha couldn’t wrest one word from the girl. Not one! The matron turned away from Sara, who thought the episode forgotten; she would soon learn the price of her refusal to speak. Bertha disappeared into the main courtyard and quickly returned, a stripped eucalyptus branch in her hands. She tested the elasticity of the whip, bending it in front of the terrified little girl before grabbing her by the arm. The old woman grimaced as she raised the whip. But then her hand froze. She couldn’t seem to make her body inflict the punishment. Again she raised her whip, and again she froze, her body thrust forward, her hand above her head. Tears ran down her face.
    â€œWhere were you, you miserable child?”
    Sara didn’t answer. The matron tried again.
    â€œNever run away again, or I’ll really have to show you!”
    â€œI want to go home to my mother!”
    These words reduced the woman to silence. She threw down her whip and walked away in defeat. Another time, she got so angry she sent Sara herself to the courtyard to pick the whip for her punishment. Some of the children from the compound helped the girl to complete her absurd task, reveling in the opportunity to turn from their simple games to