The Coup (2 page)

the head of one ancient prisoner. He, casting about in turn, saw in me, an exile returned with reeducated passions, what he failed to discern within himself: an idea of Kush. In the Year of the Prophet 1393, which the comic arithmetic of the infidels numbers as 1973, at the end of the wet season, which had been dry, the President went to visit the king. The people thought the Lord of Wanjiji dead, executed with his ministers and his cousins those first tonic months of the Revolution, in the inner Cour de Justice, where now the girls of the Anti-Christian High School played hockey and volleyball. In truth King Edumu was held a secret captive in the Palais d'Administration des Noires, along the wall of whose endless corridors, at the level of a walking man's knuckles, ran a painted green strip like an interior horizon. The floor was speckled with flakes of lime fallen from the ceiling above, where the frosted foliations of Art Nouveau were a few of them unbroken. In the perpetual dusk of these halls soldiers saluted the dictator as he passed, and their whores with a whimper and a swirl of their rags hid in the doorways of offices become barracks. At this hour the smell of scorching feathers wafted from chambers where once clerks whose very mustaches appeared thin as penstrokes had scribbled a web of imaginary order. From the king's guarded apartment came a perfume of cloves and a drone of the Koran. The old man to relieve the boredom of his captivity and perhaps to curry favor with his fanatic captor had converted to the True Faith and for the hour before evening azan had read to him those suras which body forth Paradise. "For the unbelievers We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire. But the righteous shall drink of a cup tempered at the Camphor Fountain, a gushing spring at which the servants of Allah will refresh themselves... ." The enchanting old villain formerly had taken pride in a barbarous animism of blood and substitution, and in the interstices of French supervision had exercised the fructifying privilege of royal murderousness. Young female attendants especially had fallen victims to his whim. And though their screams under the ax and the smothering pillows had escaped from the palace windows, there was never a shortage of nubile, trembling, onyx-skinned, heavy-breasted replacements, thrust forward not only by the sycophancy of their families but by something suicidal and, beneath their moist terror, voracious within themselves. "Reclining there upon soft couches, they shall feel neither the scorching heat nor the biting cold. Trees will spread their shade around them, and fruits will hang in clusters over them." The king's cell was lit by a clay-colored slant of late sun. He knew Ellellou's tread, andwitha divinely scant gesture signalled his reader, a young Fula wearing upon his shaved head a plum-red fez, to be silent. Never large, the king had shrunken. His little hooked nose alone had resisted the reshaping of time and sat in the center of his face like a single tart fruit being served on an outworn platter. His shallow yellow eyes shifted rapidly and still appeared to see. Indeed, an examining physician had reported that they remained sensitive to violent movement, and to a candle held close enough to singe his eyebrows. "Splendor of Splendors," Ellellou began, "thy unworthy agent greets thee." "A beggar salutes a rich man," the king responded. "Why have you honored me, Ellellou, and when will I be free?" "When Allah the Compassionate deems thy people strong enough to endure the glory of thy reign." They spoke in Arabic, until a more urgent tempo drove them to French. All their languages were second languages, since Wanj for the one and Salu for the other were tongues of the hut and the village council, taught by mothers and lost as the world expanded. All the languages they used, therefore, felt to them as clumsy masks their thoughts must put on. "I am not asking to rule again," the king replied, "but merely to set my face beneath the stars." "The very stars would enlist as your soldiers and put their spears to our throats; the people are parched, and your resurrection would set them afire." "I cannot see the smile on your lips, Ellellou, but I hear mockery twist your voice. State your purpose, and leave irony to Allah, in Whose sight we are mice in the gaze of a lion. Have you some business worth the ruin of an old beggar's peace?" He returned his hand to his lap with a papery grace that belied its burden of garnets and emeralds and silver filigree; the king sat in a lungi of striped white silk in a nest of pillows and bolsters, his wrists resting symmetrically on the knees of his folded legs. Around his brow was tied a riband of spun gold in token of the curtain of the unsurpassable metal that formerly had shielded from his radiations the mortals who came grovelling to him in petition. His hair, long uncut, stood far out from his head in wiry rays, a halo of wool, as awesome as comical. Ellellou was reminded disagreeably of murky photographs he had seen in the Istiqlal underground press, Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche, of American "hippies," young scions of corporation lawyers and professorial rabbis who, to dramatize the absurd sexual spree their reactionary drug- addled hearts confused with the needed real revolution, affected headbands in presumptuous emulation of the red men their forefathers had unceremoniously exterminated. Seen in this light, the king appeared so vulnerably displaced, so gallantly ridiculous, that Ellellou was moved to confess, as a wayward son to drunken father: "I have been north. My adventures there trouble me." "Why do you seek to be troubled? A leader must not be divided within himself. He is the unmoved pivot, the frozen sun." "The people starve. The rains now have failed for the fifth year. The herdsmen steal millet from their wives and children to feed the cattle; still the animals drop, and are fallen upon for the little meat left on their bones. I have seen vultures come to the feast and be themselves stoned and consumed. The people eat bats and mice, they eat skinks and scorpions, ger-bils and termites; they glean the carcasses that even jackals leave. The hair of the children turns orange. Their eyes and bellies bulge. Their heads are shaped like the skulls of mummies baked in the sand. When they grow too weak to whimper, their silence is the worst." "It anticipates the silence of Paradise," smiled the king. As their own silence widened, Ellellou felt he had failed. He felt himself at the center of a cosmic failure, his failure to communicate the reality of suffering at one with the cosmic refusal to prevent this suffering. Held mute in a moment without a pose, a mask, Ellellou felt the terror of responsibility and looked about him for someone with whom to share it. The attendant who had been reading from the Book of Books sat cross-legged on a green satin cushion, eyes downcast, his thumb curved to turn the page. At a glance I saw in him a police officer, and knew that my conversation with the king would be reported in full to Michaelis Ezana, my Minister of the Interior. I knew too that the king would eventually offer words of wisdom to fill the void between us where his smile had feathered. In the days when I had been his courtier his words would overnight condense in my mind like dew on the underside of a leaf. My eye continued about his cell. Though it contained objects of pure gold and of the fanatic workmanship that only extreme poverty coupled with faith in an afterlife produces, it also held much that could be termed rubble-scraps of torn cloth, sticks of wood bound together as by a playful idiot, small pouches of spicy dust, visible bones and bits of once-living matter dried and darkened out of recognition, and a certain amount of sheer dirt, most conspicuous in the corners but some of it apparently with deliberation sprinkled recently on the inlaid lid of an ivory chest, on the head and knobby shoulders of a pot-bellied ebony idol, and on the carved saddle-seat of the sacred stool of Wanjiji. This last had been tucked into a corner at a tilt, one lion-foot having been broken and not repaired. How repair, indeed, so sacred an object? The workman's hands would uselessly tremble in such close proximity to the holy. Amulets-Koranic phrases, often inauthentic, in little bark or leather cylinders-were littered here and there, and empty bowls in which, before their liquid had evaporated, a soul had been captured. My soul, perhaps. How often, I wondered, had my death been rendered in mime, and the king's escape been effected via the fragile fabrications of juju right-brace My palms prickled to think there were prayers of which I was the urgent object, prayers arising all over the land; like a massive transparent ball my terror, my responsibility, threatened to roll over me again. I flung my attention to the walls, where hung a number of framed portraits this king of eclectic sensibility had collected in the years of his constitutional reign, when he subscribed to Western magazines- de Gaulle, Nkrumah, Farouk, an etching of King Yohannes IV of Ethiopia, a poster of Elvis Presley in full sequinned regalia, Marilyn Monroe from a bed of polar bear skins making upward at the lens the crimson O of a kiss whose mock emotion led her to close her greasy eyelids, and a page torn from that magazine whose hearty name of Life did not save it from dying, torn roughly out but sumptuously framed, showing a female child dancer in patent-leather shoes poised in mid-step with bright camera-conscious eyes upon a flight of stairs leading nowhere. At her side stood a pair of long legs in checked trousers belonging, it was my growing belief, to a black man whose hands were muffled in white gloves and whose head was cut off by the top of the page. The king caught my mind in mid-flight. "The white devils," he said, "give grain. And milk transmuted to powder. And medicine that by a different magic might turn the children's hair black again." Disturbed by the decapitated black dancer, I exclaimed, "Food from filthy hands is filth! The integrity of Kush rejects the charity of imperialist exploiters!" "Der Spatz in der Hand, my old friends used to say, ist besser als die Taube auf deni Dach." "Gifts bring men, men bring bullets, bullets bring oppression. Africa has undergone this cycle often enough." The king performed the dainty pragmatic shrug with which, in the days before the Revolution, he would have a page boy mutilated for dozing in an anteroom. "Your friends the Russians," he said, "are generous exporters of spies and last year's rockets. They themselves buy wheat from the Americans." "Only to advance the revolution. The peasantry of America, seeing itself swindled, seethes on the verge of riot." "The world is splitting in two," said the king, "but not in the way we were promised, not between the Red and the free but between the fat and the lean. In one place, the food rots; in another, the people starve. Why emphasize the unkind work of nature that keeps these halves apart?" "I am not the creator of this Revolution but its instrument," I told the king. "It is not I but the will of Kush that rejects offal. A sick man must vomit or grow sicker. When the Revolution occurred, the task of the Conseil-of General Soba, and Ezana, and myself-was The king nodded wearily, anticipating, his head on that delicate pivot, nodding, nodding. "comwas not to inspire the people but to protect from their enthusiasm the capitalist intriguers who under your protection had infested Istiqlal; but for our intervention they would have been slaughtered ere they could be expelled." "Enough were slaughtered. And their thin-lipped wives taken alive for the harems of the socialist elite." "A phrase without meaning," I said. The king said, "Let me tell you of an event without meaning: the hand of the giver is outstretched, and that of the beggar remains closed." "Begging has its holy place on the streets, not in the corridors of government." "Daily, I beg for my freedom." "Your freedom consists of being hidden. I envy you that freedom." "And well you might. The deaths in the north are on your head." The king smiled, lifting those blind eyes which were like loci upon a plane of crazed crystal. "It is good. The people adore the Lord who asks them to die. Had I not been so tender a father to my children, had not my policies sheltered them from the rage of the absolute, they would not have turned their backs. Where there is poverty, there must be drama. Your rule will be long, Hakim Felix, if your heart does not soften." I could not leave it like this. I pleaded, "The purity Kush is its strength. In the lands of our oppressors the fat millions have forgotten how to live and look to the world's forsaken to remind them. The American crates piled at our borders stank of despair; I went there and ordered them burned." "Reflections of so signal a deed have flickered even in this remotest of caves. I commend you, Colonel Ellellou, ruler of lava and ash. Only Satan has a like domain." "Spoken like one of his legions, like one whose eyes are still closed to the light of the Prophet. Though you have taken upon yourself a pretense of Islam, your faith is centered across the Grionde, where terror and torture still reign, where juju still clouds the minds of men, as the tsetse fly poisons their blood. Here, the sky shows its face. There is one God, unknowable, without feature. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds." "The Beneficent, the Merciful," the king responded. "You do an injustice to the sincerity of my adherence. I find Islam a beautifully practical religion, streamlined even, the newest thing in this line. But as to cruelty, the rain forest beyond the river holds none as rigorous as the fury of a jihad. I am blind, but not so blind as those righteous whose eyes roll upward, who kill and are killed to gain a Paradise of shade trees, as I hear in the Book." He gestured toward the reader, who remained impassive, quiet as a machine waiting to be activated; this police spy was young and smooth, his oval face rather feminine in its stolid fineness beneath the plum-colored fez. "Your sky," the king told me, "shines all day like the flat of a sword. The sky-spirit has come to hate the earth-spirit. Your land is cursed, unhappy Felix. You have cursed this land with your hatred of the world." "I hate only the evil that is in the world." "You burn its food while your subjects starve. And it is said you brought death in the north." "An American committed suicide. We stood by helpless." "That was an error. In Africa, one white death shrieks louder than a thousand black lives." "You hear much, in your cave. I too have my ears, and they hear the people murmur that the old king somewhere lives, and drags the land with him into senility." The king returned his heavy hand, gently as an ash drifts back to the hearth,