The Coup (25 page)

one robe in which I would always be clothed, even in death, as long as the griots could sing my ancestry. The compound around me was returning to nature. The narrowest of footpaths, like the paths rabbits trace in the savanna, led diagonally across patios where the stringy bronzed wives of French administrators had laid aside their Bain-de-Soleil-spotted copies of de Beauvoir and loudly clapped for their servants to bring more citron presse, more Campari-and-soda, more love disguised as servi- tude. Kadongolimi had lain on one of their abandoned chaise longues and then it had collapsed, heaving up this monstrous splash of earth at my feet. A miniature mountain, whereupon rain had begun to work erosion between the little weeds. I asked the girl, "Will you go back to the village?" "The village site is no longer ours. The land, they say, is zoned for agribusiness, subsidized by the new government. The government has plans, many plans." "Do you hate the new government?" "No," the girl said solemnly, in the dead tone of prudent words. "They are an aftermath, they are men with flat heads, who cannot be blamed. Kadongolimi talked with them, of our eviction, and was much amused. She forgave them. She told them there had been too much magic in Kush, that after a while magicians become evil men. She did not mind their flat heads. They offered her a pension." Ellellou was interested. "And did she accept it? Where is it? Did she fill out forms?" "My mother refused. She said her youth had been sweet, and she had tasted it fully, and now she wished to taste unsweetened the bitterness of dying. She said her world was dying, her life had performed its circle; she asked them for a month undisturbed, that her body could be weighted to sink. For me she asked a scholarship. I think I will become an agronomist, or a pediatrician. Do I have your blessing?" "Why ask? You have no need of it. The government proceeds without Ellellou, his craziness got in the way, technology rules instead of craziness, man has resigned himself to being the animal of animals, the champ. Go farm your wombs, or whatever other microscopic deviltry the toubabs urge upon you. Their knowledge is nothing but Hell; they know this now, still they thrust it upon us, they drag us along, that were standing by the side of the march, they take from us all hope of Paradise. They look into the microscope and tell us there is no spirit. There is no way to imagine the next thousand years upon Earth without imagining Hell, life under one big microscope." The girl said, "My mother told me you were my father and would not refuse a blessing. Even in the snake, each new skin is caressed by the old as it leaves." The words were no doubt Kadongolimi's, but pronounced softer, with no hint of teasing, of what in Salu we call having-it-both-ways. "Where will your scholarship take you?" "Some say Cairo. Some say Florida. It is a United State. Our government, with their oil revenues, are establishing a program there." "I have heard the climate is oppressive. Be sure to take malaria pills. And your Uncle Anu-what will be happening to him?" "I believe he has been hired by the Postal Department, as a sorter. He has merely to sit on a stool and toss envelopes into bags. The bags then are thrown into the Grionde. Since our ties with the revolutionary government in America have been strengthened, there has been a great influx of third-class mail. I have not heard your blessing." "Why bless the unavoidable?" "It is just that," she said, "which needs to be blessed. The impossible is self-sufficient." I turned away. I thought, if I listened, I could hear Kadong-olimi speak, out of this mound of earth that was so little different from her last manifestation to me. What we most miss, of those that slip from us, is their wit, the wit that attends those who know us-lovers, grandmothers, children. The sparks in their eyes are kindled just once by our passing. The girl waited with me for Kadongolimi to speak, until we realized together that these flourishing weeds, and these rivulets of erosion on the heaped mud, were her words. There came now, from the dilapidated thatch of the compounds, a scent reminiscent of the stocked peanut fodder that served, for the young of the village in their years of license, as cave and bed both; in my mind the shadows of the foraging giraffes loped away, incredible orb-eyed marauders fleeing, floating stiff-legged away from the clacking of mortars and pestles brandished by overexcited small boys. Kadongolimi had taken these shadows into the earth with her, leaving me now no shelter save that which I could fabricate. Rain had started up again, pecking at the grave, twitching the ticking leaves. The naked girl beside me shivered. I put both hands on her head, its hair set out in tight braided rows, and pronounced, in the disappearing accent of the Amazeg, my blessing. Kutunda was not easy to glimpse, let alone confront. She still lived, with the simplicity the powerful sometimes affect, to cloak their power, in the narrow slum building in Hurriyah where she, an illiterate doxy, had been established by Ellellou upon their return from the Sahel border in the Mercedes. Now this same Mercedes, driven still by Mtesa, whose mustache had flourished, carried her back and forth along the steep sandy alleys between her apartment and the Palais d'Administration des Noires; but the windows had been replaced by a murky bulletproof glass through which only the little tipped smudge of a profile could be glimpsed. Photographs of her, by Dorfu's side at this or that public ceremony, were frequently in the now-official pages of Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche; but the Kushite printing hands had not yet mastered the newly imported American offset presses, and Kutunda's image was mottled or smeared beyond recognition. (before it had gone underground in 1968, as a subversive counter-revolutionary sheet, having degenerated under the king's constitutional reign into a scandalous tabloid dealing in the pornography of thalid-omide freaks and the astrology of the starlets, Nouvelles had been handsomely produced on a flatbed letterpress by Frenchmen who, working with Didot fonts and scorning all pictography, had printed the same hermetically inclusive and symmetrical regulations over and over, along with meditations upon Negritude from the latest masterpieces of Gide, Sartre, and Genet.) The basket shop beneath Kutunda's rooms still operated, and the hollow-cheeked young addicts still emerged clutching their contraband wrapped in raffia, but the place now was clearly manned by government bodyguards. Indeed more than once Ellellou spotted Opuku, his bald head masked by a narrow-brimmed fedora and his great shoulders clothed in an FBI-ISH gray suit, running a security check on this outpost of the internal police. The Mercedes came early in the morning and brought Kutunda back rarely earlier than midnight. By then, a single dull green light in the basket shop showed the presence of a drowsy lone plainclothesman, and the agile beggar skulking in the archway of the Koran school down the alley dared move with his anzad to a position beneath her narrow slatted window, which the slope of the hill here put so close above his head he hardly had to lift his voice, singing, "Round and firm as the breasts of one's beloved's younger sister, she who exposes her gums when she laughs, and spies from her pallet wondering when her time will come, one final orange floats in the mind like a moon that has wrested itself free of the horizon but still is entangled in the branches of the baobab tree..." Kutunda's voice, at conversational pitch, said sharply, "Come up." A heavy tangle of keys was slithered through the slats and fell like a star at the beggar's feet. It was not easy, by moonlight, to distinguish the key that disconnected the alarm from the key that opened the door at the foot of the narrow stairs, and again to decipher, while the narrow pise walls seemed to be leaning in, listening, the four keys needed for the two double locks on the two steel doors where once there had been a single great plank of mpafu he could open by tapping out the syllables of his name. Ellellou manipulated the keys clumsily, taking the longest possible route: the first lock was opened by the fourth key he tried; of the three remaining, the third opened the second lock and the second of the two unused keys opened the third; then, in the last lock, the fourth key failed to turn! He tried the others, in reverse order, and found at last that the first key worked. This second door, reinforced with a lattice of riveted ribbing, bore a tiny brass plaque engraved in a script that would have been invisible but for the faint traces of brass polish left within the intaglio. He made out the inscription Minister of the Interior Protector of Female Rights A space of clean brass below awaited further titles. As delicately as Ezana some months before had touched open his old office door, Ellellou touched this one. The door swung open upon a cube of light whose center held a shadow, a dim human core. His eyes, habituated to alley darkness, smarted. She wore a silk bathrobe of queenly length and her eyes, once brown and flecked, were solid blue. Her posture, too, had changed; the heavy-haunched, cautious stoop of the woman as servant, reluctantly daring to lift herself from the earth, had become the slim erectitude of one who gives orders. At a light indication of her hand, he closed the door behind him. The intimate room he remembered had been expanded upwards, so that where there had been twisted rafters and falling plaster tufted with camel hair a hung dome held a grid of little round dressing-mirror bulbs adjustable to provide (he surmised) appropriate illumination for every situation, however confidential. For this occasion Kutunda had set the rheostat at full cold blaze. Her eyes unnaturally flashed. She wore contact lenses. "You have run out of masks," she told him. "That was not a good song." "It entranced my mistress once," the beggar said, hunched against the glare of her apartment, of her authority. Where the walls had been crowded with filing cabinets an executive bareness reigned, relieved only by silver abstractions ordered, he imagined, from Georg Jensen or the Franklin Mint. Her overstuffed armoires had vanished, her wardrobe and beautification equipment fled to another room-for this entire building and its neighbor, the hash shop downstairs reduced to a mere front, had been hollowed out to house Kutunda. Where her pot had been, a spiral iron staircase painted ivory led to the second floor of a bachelor-girl duplex. The dirty pallet from which her lover would contemplate the blank side, glowing rose at dawn, of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, had become a waterbed heaped with brocaded pillows, and her steel desk a rosewood escritoire exquisite in its fleur-de-lis pulls. Here, papers of state slipped from their pigeonholes and were, he imagined, initialled. She had vaulted from illiteracy into that altitude of power where reading and writing are a condescension. "Sit down," she said, indicating a chair that was molded plastic as in an airport waiting-room, taking for herself an oval-backed, satin-covered Louis XVI armchair. "Tell me what you've been doing since the coup." "I worked in that oil town in the Rift-was "We call it Ellellou," she said. "For lack of a better name." "comand when I had a little stake I hitched back to Istiqlal." "Have you seen the new library?" "I've watched them pouring endless cement. I wonder if those wings suspended on the cables won't crack when the harmattan blows. Gravity, as you know, is a little extra near the equator. Or do you still doubt that the earth is round?" She replied pompously, "We have experts to worry about that." "When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people, is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also, about the library, but applicable to many ventures-am I boring you? you, who told tales so amusingly in a ditch?-people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic. The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid." "Then you will be pleased to know that the Braille Library is no longer to be named after your patron King Edumu. Michaelis Ezana has asked that the building be designated the Donald X. Gibbs Center for Trans-Visual Koranic Studies, as a wedding present to his new wife, Gibbs's rapidly acclimated widow." The beggar said, "A beautiful gift, to crown a coupling so ill-fated. And a suitable monument for that insipid devil who in his racist blindness attempted to dump chemical pap and sorghum for cattle into the stomachs of our children." "The gift she asked for, and has been refused, was your head in a basket. She wished to have you named as public enemy, found, and prosecuted. We have held back from that. We wish instead that your name be venerated, especially by schoolchildren." "But there exists a venerable tradition of the criminal-king, from Nero to the sultans, from Ivan the Terrible to our own mischievous Edumu. A nation comes to take perverse pride in the evil it could support, the misgovernment it has survived. You scrupled too much, dear Kutunda, who for all your shimmering robes of high office retain the shifty-eyed timidity of a polluted, detribalized wench. Speaking of eyes, how have yours changed color?" "Contact lenses, if you must know. They've been in sixteen hours, and they hurt." "Take them out," he commanded. "And tell my successor, I forget his pseudonym, that in the annals of history moderation is invisible ink." "I am not sure," she said, pausing to pry with the fingers of one hand her lids apart so that the lens fell into the cupped palm of the other, and then gazing at him bichromatically, "you should be talking to me like this." Picassoesque imbalances, he felt, radiated outwards through the room like the shatter of a windshield from the central asymmetry of her eyes. She bowed her head and removed the other lens, and gropingly removed from a pocket of her robe the curious capsule that held, one on each convex end, the lenses as hard to find, if dropped, as the obsolete Kushite coinage of mirrors. Ellellou asked, "Why have you made your eyes blue? Their beauty was brown." "Dorfu has a penchant for Tuareg women, though the Tuareg are anachronistic, and will soon be