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make fun of the sultan’s shadow like that. As for Sara, she was happy to be left in peace at last, although she would have liked a chance to play with kids her own age.
    â€œIf walking around with a shaved head was the price to pay for being free from the matron’s whip, that was a good deal,” the doyenne added, her grandmotherly pragmatism reflected in the set of her jaw.
    But that wasn’t all: Bertha also ran hot stones over Sara’s chest to delay the development of her breasts. To tell the truth, this routine was no surprise to the girl: her mother had done it to her several times, too. Except that the matron wasn’t trying to slow down the rapid growth of a woman. She wanted to bring her son back to life. She wanted to turn Sara into the boy she had become by chance: Nebu.
    â€œWhy did you go along with it?” I asked the doyenne.
    Sara told the saga of her life without losing her smile; she took another pinch of tobacco, as if there were nothing strange about her story. She was thrilled that she had tricked the omniscient Sultan Njoya, and she still laughed about how a simple garment had changed the life of a little girl.
    â€œEven the witch was completely taken in by it,” Sara told me. “I was a perfect little boy.”
    â€œAnd did you like that?”
    â€œWhat do you think?”
    Her transformation into a boy had freed not just one but two women from the tragedies of their lives. If the tears that streamed down the matron’s face each time she raised the whip to hit her allowed Sara to guess what was going on, only later would she really understand what it meant for Bertha to call her, forever after, “my son.”

 
    9
    The Labyrinths of Childhood
    The exquisite pleasure of being someone else, that’s what finally freed Sara from her suffering. The girl entered into a house, excuse me, into a life, where she didn’t meet any children her own age, but where her ears were filled with a thousand stories. She entered into an existence where a specific task was assigned to her. Sara entered, in fact, into a house of mystery, a house of a thousand whispers, where silence was always menacing, filled with invisible ghosts. By an absurd stroke of luck, the sultan was in need of a shadow—the previous one had quit, preferring to live out his exile in the city’s poorer quarters.
    The little girl had to get used to the name Bertha gave her. Happily, her entrance into Njoya’s inner circle was facilitated by her decision to remain silent. The sultan’s secrets, along with her name, would remain buried in her mouth as if in a tomb—just as Bamum tradition required.
    â€œAh, I was only a slave,” Sara told me. “Nothing but a slave!”
    Was she serious? I could have replied that since slavery had been abolished in the protectorate by colonial decree, her status was rather ill defined. There are questions that must be asked, especially if one has spent time in America.
    â€œTell me,” I asked her, “what did it mean to be a slave in those days?”
    â€œI was the sultan’s property. Only,” she added, raising her finger to emphasize her point, “he wasn’t my master!”
    Did Sara realize I didn’t understand her answer?
    â€œYour silhouette doesn’t belong to you, does it?” she continued with a smile.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBut it follows you everywhere.”
    â€œYes, it follows me everywhere.”
    â€œExcept that,” she added, giving a quick look around, “sometimes you don’t see it. Well, that’s the kind of life I had. The life of a shadow.”
    Sara might have saved herself a lot of trouble had she answered Bertha’s calls with less impertinence. The matron was exploring the unexpected consequences of her renewed motherhood. Breaking with tradition, Bertha insisted that the sultan’s shadow spend his nights “at home.” What a strange