The Coup (24 page)

"crocodile-torpid-on-the comriverbank-b-far-f-dead," as distinguished from durfo, "crocodile-thrashing-around-with-prey." Michaelis Ezana and Angelica Gibbs were having dinner with Candy and Mr. Klipspringer. Candy had unwrapped herself and, out of purdah, looked, in a sensible yet snug gray wool knit dress with a single strand of cultured pearls, much what she was: an attractive woman nearing forty who had survived an unfortunate first marriage. Mrs. Gibbs, on the other hand, was resplendent in a crimson and mauve boubou, and she had hidden her brass-blond hair in a matching head-cloth. Her tan, acquired at the poolside of the reopened Club Sahare, where the punctilious ghosts of colonial officers made way for basking Dutch hydrologists and the brawny steel-workers assembling the adventurous skeleton of the Braille Library, would never be mistaken for the complexion of an African, though she now imitated the slit-eyed, careful, sidelong expression of native women. She was squatting on a packing crate of self-help books and asking Candy, "How can you bear to leave? The smells! The pace! For the first time in my life, I'm one with my blood. God, how I hated America, now that I think about it. Do this, do that. Turn right on red only. Rush, rush. Those dreadful slushy winters-they'll kill you." "I'm only afraid when I see my first snowfall I'll die of bliss." "Say, hasn't this rain been something?" Klipspringer exclaimed, rubbing his thighs to emphasize his enthusiasm, his tirelessness, his unflappability. "Right into August, wow!" The party was in farewell of him too. He had done his job here: established rapport, contacts, and a basis for expanded relations. His Arabic was now fluent, his Sara acceptable. He was wearing a dashiki purchased in Georgetown, D. c. Ezana tilted his head, so his round cheeks gleamed in the light of Candy's candles, the sole illumination remaining in her stripped, fixtureless villa. "And yet," he said, "it has not rained for a week. I think i an uneasy omen, this return of the sun. "Everything's mildewing," Candy said. "I tried to burn my furniture and it stank up the neighborhood." "All the flowering shrubs the French planted have come back into bloom," Ezana said. "It is as when I was a boy, and the Jesuits taught us Pascal and his calculus." Angelica laid a slender freckled hand on his tightly trousered thigh. "It's a beautiful city, dear," she said. "Everything changes, everything heals," Klipspringer abruptly observed. He lifted a glass of kaikai. "Here's to "er, Mother Change. A tough old bitch, but we love 'er." The other three responded, Angelica with a glass of Perrier water; she was taking instruction in the Koran, and had already learned how to pound millet. Michaelis Ezana frowned down at her touch; in her African garb she seemed less gid-dying, less a radiant wind from Paradise. An awkward baggage rather, her infatuation with him a heaviness. The present Mrs. Ezana was horrible-a bare-breasted Amazon, a bluestocking-but with a horror totally familiar; he had grown pleasantly deaf in the range of her squawks, and could conduct his side of their quarrels in perfect absent-mindedness. Like dark planets, their relationship was exquisitely inertial. She gave him space. Her repulsiveness boosted him aloft. Ezana's lips parted thoughtfully and his gold tooth gleamed like a cufflink as he turned to Klipspringer and began to discuss his favorite subjects, irrigation, electricity, and indebtedness. "The thing about indebtedness," Klipspringer told him, "is it's the best insurance policy you can buy. The deeper in debt the debtor gets, the more the creditor will invest to keep him from going under. You guys were taking an incredible risk, not owing us a thing all those years." "Our Great Teacher," Ezana admitted, "was perhaps too inspired for our imperfect world." "I don't feel I know you," Mrs. Gibbs impatiently blurted on his other side. She tugged at his hand with that fretful, proprietorial impatience of her wolvish race. "Michael, even in bed I feel it. Some secret you're withholding." "Don't bug him," Candy advised her. "They love their secrets, they really can't help it. The African man hates to have his photograph taken. My husband of sixteen years, he was supposed to be the father of our country and nobody knew what he looked like." "Sorry I never got to meet him," Klipspringer said. "He sounds like quite a character." Sounds: amid the rustling of palm fronds on the roof, the rats scurrying in the empty rooms, and the late-night patter of their conversation, rustling their blood in hopeful torrents, the knock at the door was muffled. "The male secret, of course," Ezana gallantly offered the ladies, "is our weakness, our need. But such a secret, like the symmetrically evolved ability of the female to nurture and soothe this need, becomes in exposure boring, monotonous, too-is this the word?-sempiternal. Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by vague memories of having read the reviews." Candace's big Songhai maid came into the room and said there was a beggar at the door. She had told him to go away, and he said he had oranges to sell. When she said they needed no oranges, he offered to dig a well or to sing a song. There was something autocratic about him, beyond her control, and would the mistress like to deal with him now? The beggar, an anzad strapped to his back, had shadowed the maid into the room. "Holy Christ, look who it isn't," Candy said. The intruder, wearing tattered blue jeans and a T-shirt from which the stencilled legend had faded, looked small, pathetically frail, on the edge of their candlelight. Angelica and Klipspringer were politely puzzled, sensing an extraordinary impertinence and tension. Michaelis Ezana perched forward to study the stranger and, touching a reassuring hardness near his left armpit, sat back, returning his face to shadow. "You have your fucking nerve," Candy was continuing, and Ezana thought, Would that change, so bumptiously saluted by our American emissary, were all there were to the world. As well, there is a deadly sameness. The infant cries for suck; the mother heeds; the child grows; the man dies. In his high-pitched nervous beggar's whine the interloper announced, "I have come not to disturb your feast, but to beguile it with a song." He removed the anzad from his back and with his bow of bent goa wood produced a wheedling of melody. He sang through his nose: "A land without a conscience is an empty land, a blasted land, a desert land where the children have red hair and bloated bellies, where the adults have covetous smiles and cruel laughs. A conscience is more central to a land than oil wells, foreign loans, and peanut co-operatives; a conscience puts erectitude into the posture of the young men and soft fire into the glances of the lady folk. But nowhere in the bureaucracy of Kush amid so many posts for stamp-lickers and boot-lickers is there regular employment for such a presence. I ask you, should not a national conscience have a pension?" The musician gave himself over to a partially fumbled riff in minor thirds, and rested the bow at his side. His hostess said, "Oh my God, Happy. Don't you realize you can be shot now? They've gone on without you." Ezana had taken an interest in the song and asked, "Is it not the essence of a conscience, that it be invisible and ignorable?" The intruder nodded. "Visible only in its benign effects. As with Allah, to be nakedly present would be to institute tyranny." "Then," Ezana ventured, "I would think a pension might be arranged, if the conscience in the past had performed services to the state. Unfortunately, I am in no official position to do more than speculate; for in the Dorfu administration Michaelis Ezana holds an emeritus position only. Which, however, is a promotion from his incarceration under the previous administration." There comes a time in a man's life, the beggar thought, when he thinks of himself in the third person. Angelica Gibbs, who had not yet mastered the African woman's sublime though deceptive attitude of subservience, asked irritably, "Who is this joker? Darling, why are we letting him ruin our party?" "Kinda fun, still think," Klipspringer interposed tactfully, his smile doubled by the up-tilting two gray thorns of his fine mustache. "This is their style here, they just let things happen. I think it's great." The beggar addressed the widow directly. "I bring you good news of the murderer of your husband. He like his victim is vanished in smoke. In time the two will become indistinguishable. Together their sacrifices have opened the sluices to American aid, whose triumph is signified by these twin jinn of the pragmatic, your lover and your husband. The Book says, Each soul shall come attended by one who will testify against it and another who will drive it on. Thus black and white, dry and wet, exert their rhythms. Your own pendulum, Madame, is swinging; I salute your costume, pure in its native authenticity. My own, I know, is a shabby mishmash. But you have long been in my mind's eye, and it rewards a life of wandering, that this beggar may gaze upon thee." The lady was affronted. "Where did he pick up his English?" she asked Ezana and, with a quick switch of her vexed face, "What did he mean, about Don's murderer?" "Our self-appointed conscience hopes to affirm," Ezana said, "for no doubt conscientious reasons of his own, that your husband willed his own passing, from which, however, much good has arisen." "I think the fella's making a plea," Klipspringer amplified, "for continuity and orderly transition in government. I'm with him there, one hundred and ten per cent. If your people can't find it in their hearts to grant him this pension he's angling for, I wonder if the USIS couldn't rummage him up a travelling fellowship. Hey, here's an idea. Make him a Donald- what was his middle initial?" "I've forgotten," Angelica said. "Make him a Donald X. Gibbs Travelling Fellow," Klip- springer concluded, rubbing his thighs with brisk satisfaction. "We can free up a grant somewhere." "I've forgotten a lot about Don," Mrs. Gibbs continued to confess. "I actually didn't see that much of him, he was always trying to help people. But he only liked to help people he didn't know. It kept us moving. I wonder if I hated him." "Such selflessness," Ezana reassured her, "you will not find here in Africa. Here, ego and id are still yoked to pull the oxcart of simple survival." Something sad in his tone, his assurance of an infinite Africa stretching before her, frightened the young widow, and she looked toward the other American woman for help; but Candy was leaving, not only Africa but leaving the room. With trembling hand she had taken the beggar aside, and moved him toward the front hall, suffused with the scent of Petrea volnbilis come again into bloom. Her trembling touched him, this wifely pulse beneath her skin, an amorous agitation superficially like anger, a sense of multiple percussions of blood chiming with his old impression of her as pouncing, as a predator that knows itself as a prey. "You really must get out of Kush," she told him sharply. "This new crowd in power doesn't have any of your irony. They're grim." "Would you like to take me back with you, to the land of milk and honey?" Her trembling increased. She gave him a little shove, as she had given the rack of sunglasses a shove. "No. I'm getting a divorce, Happy. This hasn't worked, and it would work even worse there. You did hate the States, you know, though you tend to remember the idyllic things. That's how Kush will be for me, I know, once I get out of it. But it's boring back home now. The Cold War is over, Nixon's over. All that's left is picking up the pieces and things like kissing OPEC'S ass. You'd be depressed. It turns out the Fifties were when all the fun was, though nobody knew it at the time." "I could become a professor of Black Studies. I could go into partnership with your father, and re-open the Chicago office, since I am a soul brother. They are looking now for tokens, are they not-your Establishment? We could create children, of a harmonious color. You could teach me to ice-skate." "Happy, no. That could have been once, maybe; but not now. We'd just embarrass each other, like we always did. I know it's hard for you to believe, but we're through. Honest." She was right, it is hard for a man to believe that his sexual power over a woman, however abused in its exercise, has diminished: as if we imagine that these our mysterious attractions travel in a frictionless ether, forever, instead of as they do, upon the rocky and obstructed ground of other human lives. The beggar said, "My best to your Dad," and, both of her white hands squeezed in one of his, whispered in the hollow hall, "Tallaqtuki. Tallaqtuki. Tallaqtuki" Kadongolimi had said, "In this house you will be welcome when everything else crumbles." But as Ellellou approached the villa in Les Jardins that had been transformed into a smoky, fragrant village compound, he saw that her other prophecy had already been fulfilled: weeds had sprung up. In the long rains rot had advanced through the thatch of the outbuildings and pulpy, hollow-stemmed vegetation had sprung up faster than footsteps could beat the ground bare. Without a word Ellellou was recognized through his disguise of jeans and sunglasses. The drunken bony man again met him; the naked girl again took his hand, but she led him to a grave. In the center of the courtyard where the flagstones had been pried up to make baking ovens, fresh earth, already adorned with a maidenhair of bright green grass, formed a mound of prodigious dimension. Kadongolimi then had sunk beneath her weight of flesh to displace this mass of forgetful earth. "Her heart was smothered, in the end she cried out for space, for the open skies," the girl told Ellellou, and he looked at her with surprise, hearing in her voice his first wife's dancing accent, seeing in this slim body the continuum of women asserted, the form reborn he had taken, once, into his arms. I the lion, she the gazelle. "Did she cry out for Bini?" I asked. "For him among many. But there were many to attend her. Our touches were all one. She lived to see the ground watered again, and told us that our father had succeeded." "I was going to ask her to take me back. Now I must ask you." "We are being moved. Dorfu has his own blood-ties, his own people. Already, you can see, the huts are empty, the yam plots are overgrown. White men have come and bought our tools and jujus for their museums. Anu and I are staying until the earth settles a little more upon our mother, and there is nothing left to desecrate." Anu had also been my evil uncle's name; the thread of his lechery and menace had descended, tangled with the thread of beauty that had come into my hand, through the skein of blood-ties that was, after all, the