A MOMENT OF GLORY

She woke up over Mali, went back to sleep. She woke up over Kano for the breakfast tray. The earth was bright orange. The place names came up on the flight information screen. Above Jos she saw a river and a huge dark triangle—she couldn’t tell whether it was a lake or a rocky mountain range. Then a series of parallel grey lines, one after the other. Then clouds. Suddenly Mount Cameroon, a red island in the white sea. Then they began the descent into Douala. She couldn’t see anything, not the mangroves as promised in Google Earth, nor the river heading into the sea. They landed in clouds. Clouds of hot water. She took off her sweater. The clouds were in the city, in the airport. It smelled like fuel, sewers and sugar. Under the sign If you are accosted by unauthorised taxi drivers, call this number were thirty taxi drivers, all asking, ‘What’s it like over there?’ As if they were fans, she smiled and waved, aloof. She saw on the screen that there was a delay of six hours for her connecting flight to Yaoundé. The counter where she stood to make a complaint was so wet she thought someone had spilt a glass of water. ‘Wait here,’ advised the stewardess in a Cameroon Airlines boubou, ‘and don’t get in a taxi.’ Was it dangerous? No, but with the traffic jams, she probably wouldn’t make it back—the bridge was impassable at that time.

Nevertheless, she was not going to spend six hours here without seeing some of the city where he had spent his adolescence, the beach where he must have daydreamed, out on boats, cargo ships. As soon as she had left the shade of the airport, she coated herself in SPF50 sunscreen. She had studied the area on the satellite app and located the highway, as well as a path on the right to the sea. She dragged her hand luggage and the wheels made a noise on the worn-out asphalt. Lots of people were on foot like her, and, like her, dragging or pushing paraphernalia, but, unlike her, they were all black. Women with objects on their heads, including a Dell computer. Children with goats. Daring motorbike riders with three or four passengers who called out to her, ‘What do they do over there?’ And cars tooted at her. There was no footpath. The way to the beach was there, off to the right, an ochre dirt path. A woman was selling mangoes. The beach? It was more like the port down there. Wasn’t it lucky that all these people spoke French. This was Kouhouesso’s country, this was his birth-place—to hell with Canada.

Soon a wheel broke and anyway it was awkward dragging the little suitcase. She put her passport and her money in a pocket and hid the case under some leaves she would later learn were called ‘elephant ears’. Right then they looked to her more or less like the philodendrons in dentists’ waiting rooms. The path was no longer yellow but brown, and soft; her sneakers subsided and she felt momentarily demoralised when her toes became immersed in black water. A plane took off right over her head; the air smelled of kerosene and flattened vegetables.

They reached the river she had seen on the satellite app—a sewer, unfortunately, lined with garbage, and foul-smelling. Giant ficus trees or other green things had grown into tangled creepers. You would need to be the size of a frog and have the same skills. The jungle must have grown back since the satellite image had been taken; she had heard about this phenomenon: in the same way objects become coated with limestone in petrified waterfalls, so tropical plants grow over abandoned bodies.

She still had four hours but she retraced her steps. Her suitcase was there, covered in bees and water droplets. At the edge of the highway, she bought a fizzy grapefruit drink. It was all they had on the little stall called Moments of Glory. They didn’t have it in ‘lite’. Four hundred CFA francs: something like half a euro. Without change, she left a five-hundred-franc note. Traffic jams. Heading to the airport, the traffic was fine. A taxi was two thousand francs (still no change). ‘You’re on Cameroon Airlines?’ The driver laughed. ‘Here we call them Maybe Airways. You haven’t reached the end of your journey yet.’

In the haze, night fell in a colourless sky. There was a sea of sorts, flat and metallic, a distillery, lovers sitting on rocks. No beach, a coast without a seaside, a muddle of vegetable fibre and water. It was not clear where the land began and where the water ended or which bit was the river. At the Cameroon Airlines counter the stewardess told her that the flight had been brought forward: they were waiting for the white passenger. She had to slip through the luggage airlock, behind the counter, quickly, with ten other latecomers rushing along. The little green, orange and yellow plane, the colours of a parrot, was sitting on the runway; she and the others ran towards it.

She had handled things like a pro. She would tell Kouhouesso all about it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would see him. She mused on the fact that she had only thought about him occasionally: the exotic is a distraction.