The Coup (26 page)

settled, under government plans, in communities practicing a profitable mix of peanut cultivation and light industry." "Dorfu. Are you aware that the word, in Salu, also signifies the torpor suffered by a reptile when it has swallowed too big a meal? Mothers putting their babies to sleep murmur dorfu, dorfu..." Kutunda blinked away her tears and resumed the hauteur befitting a cabinet member. "It is true, he wastes no motion, unlike his predecessor. How have you enjoyed these months of vagabondage since your resignation?" "I have been," Ellellou told her, "indescribably happy. The wet weather delights me as it does every patriotic citizen of Kush. But beyond that I found, in that town of Ellellouville, a middling happiness foreign, I fear, to both the mighty and the helpless of our continent. And in Istiqlal, to my surprise, I find that happiness intensified; indeed I now think that the natural condition of men is one of happiness, and that cities, being concentrations of rnen, are the happier in direct proportion to their size, and that the Koran was right to de-emphasize the tragic, except as it applies to non-believers, who are vermin and shadows in any case." "If you are happy, why have you sought me out, risking death? My guards are trained to shoot to kill; that is the only technique for fanatic terrorists. Ordinary selfish criminals can be reasoned with, and merely maimed. Opuku's brother heads the new Ministry of Discipline. He has revived, from the days of the Foreign Legion, the crapaudine." Her unreal blue lenses shed, Kutunda's face had softened- the sable irises flecked with gold or sand, the wide flat Sara face broadest across the jawbones, the mouth whose lips seemed the pod for many little white peas, the cinnamon freckles on her dusky cheeks, the wet-looking hair that wandered across her cheeks for all her crisp tailoring of power, her lovable look of being besmirched. I thought of her thighs and her buttocks wobbling with weight beneath the quicksilver folds of her queenly robe; my loins sweetened. I had too long been chaste. I said, "My dear Minister of the Interior and Protector of Female Rights, let me present three petitions. One, would you like, now, to marry me? Several vacancies have opened up in my sanctioned quartet of wives." "This petition comes too late. I am betrothed to the state, and to the ideals of Islamic Marxism, stripped of irresponsible adventurism and romantic individualism. Dorfu has lovingly explained to me that we must never, he and I, marry. Thus we will each stand separate but equal, living exemplars to the men and women of Kush. We will be like the frontal heroic statues in limestone of the Pharaoh and his sister-bride, rather than one muddled image, as in Rodin's The Kiss." "Or in the manner of Hitler and his Eva, rather than the amorously intertwined Roosevelts." "My President's especial admiration, among statesmen of that period, is for Canada's Mackenzie King, who conferred with his mother in the hereafter. 'The Canada of Africa" is the motto we intend to put on our license plates." She yawned, my freckled foundling, her open mouth a cave of bliss pillowed by her powerful tongue. "My appointments at the Palais begin at nine a. m. sharp," she said. "What was your second petition?" "For a pension, Madame. I am entitled to one, and with it I will leave the country forever, leaving it forever conscienceless. You will be free to do what you can with this hopeless, beautiful land." "We feel free now, Dorfu and I." "But you are not. You are now the actuality of Kush. Actuality breeds discontent, and if I were to reappear, as did Napoleon after Elba, the counter-counter-revolution would be launched. Already, my guess is, Michaelis Ezana chafes at the unofficial limbo in which he must operate, and he has acquired this toubab wife as a possible counter in the game you must, through your rash estrangement of my friends the Soviets, play with the Americans. Where their libraries come, Coca-Cola follows; as our thirst for Coca-Cola grows, our well of debt deepens, and the circle of sky above"-I drew one with my hands, beneath her dome of harsh lights-"is filled with Klipspringer's smile. The oil revenues will bring you dollars good for nothing but to buy what the makers of dollars also make." Kutunda asked, "Why pay you to leave, when a bullet costs less than a lu?" "The people know I am alive. I pass among them, and they do not need to name me. If I die, the dream of your rule will cease; it is built upon my safe sleep. Dorfu knows this, though you, who rashly advised me to kill the king, do not. were the king still alive, attracting all blame to himself, I would still be President." Her words were both clipped and bored. "Pensions are not my department." Yawn as she would, her known warmth in this pillowed room, some olfactional echo of her tangy, short-legged, downward-tugged volupte, had deeply stirred me. My sitting position and loose beggar's robes concealed a club that had grown like a fungus in the dark of my lap. "What was this third petition?" she asked. I rose and presented it, my dusty old lust reborn like the desert and so swollen that those of my teeth less than perfectly sound ached at their roots. "Or tell me one of your stories," I begged. "Tell me a vile tale as you used to in the ditch, coming to me under the moon still moist from Wadal and the dwarf." Kutunda too stood, her silk robe falling straight as armor from the tips of her breasts. "No. The time of fables is over for Africa. We must live among stern realities. You are arrested, as a traitor, an exhibitionist, and an indigent." The men that came into the room, one through the double door and the other down the resounding iron spiral stairs, from a listening post wherein no doubt all our noises had been taped, including my scratchy struggles with the two double locks and Kutunda's sexy yawns, were not Opuku and Mtesa, they were Opuku and iMtesa's spiritual descendants. Along with their handcuffs and mandatory arm-twisting they brought the something detached (like energetic young actors going through the motions of a play composed by an old homosexual fogey whose off-stage blandishments they have resisted and whose political-religious opinions they despise) and chillingly gentle that is their generation's contribution to the evolution of humanity. The king's cell had been only perfunctorily cleaned up. His rubble of royalty-the broken stool, les joujous, the rags once soaked in the blood of some poor shrieking sacrifice of poultry or livestock and now caked the dullest brown of earth-had been swept toward one corner, but the sweeper had wandered away, perhaps to answer the call to prayer, and had not returned. Michaelis Ezana's all-too-brief (in my book) tenure had added a slippery drift of magazines- Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Quel Tel, The Economist, the Italian edition of Playboy. Also filter-stubs of low-tar-content cigarettes, empty Ovaltine tins, and bedroom slippers of the softness of human genitals, the wool of unborn karakul lambs within and, without, the stitched hides of Greek lizards snared while sunning on the marbles of the Acropolis. Foreign imports, I thought, the Third World's ruination. Christendom and whoredom, two for the price of one. Still, such were no longer my problems; these had shrunk to the dimensions of my own imperilled hide. I dropped the slippers out the window, so they followed at an interval of time that barefoot descent of Ezana which my mind's eye has previously in these pages so vividly projected. The slippers plopped some seconds later, not quite simultaneously, refuting Galileo, in the courtyard below. This was the little dank Cour de Justice; in the courtyard beyond, over the tile roof of a kitchen passageway, I could see the schoolgirls of the Anti-Christian High School forming the circles and parallelograms of some after-school games. Their cries came like the calls of blue-uniformed birds feasting on grasshoppers stirred up whirring by the passing of a herd of wildebeests. Light from the clay-colored sun slanted horizontally into the cell; the call to salat al-"asr was sprung, with a twang, from the minaret of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster, and weakly echoed from the Mosque of the Clots of Blood. The supper smell of scorched feathers arose in the corridor, with the rustle and twitter of the soldiers" women. The brown shadows in the corners of my room turned blue; a pink blush seeped upwards into the sky, a delicate dye repelled, as by a dropping of wax, by a shadow-eyed three-quarters moon. The sun had set. The salat al-maghrib was intoned. A meal was brought to me, of fool and boiled goat's knuckles. I leafed around in Paris Match, which had devoted its issue to American porn queens and West German terrorists, the daughters of clergymen and Wirtschaftsivunderarchitekten. Both groups of young women looked drained by fatigue, the vampire shadow of the camera flash stark behind them on the empty walls. The rooms these photographs were taken in, and wherein these interviews were taped, appeared replications of the same room, a room hidden from the world yet, in effect, the world itself. Rooms, I thought-the world had become a ball of rooms, a hive, where once it had been a vast out-of-doors lightly dented by pockets of shelter. Our skulls are rooms, closeting each brain with its claustrophobic terror, and all Istiqlal, a mass of mud boxes, comprised a mosaic of inescapable privacies. The concealed cellars and apartments where the young celebrities of these wrinkled pages hatched their escapades and platitude.* with an identical soul-dead fervor implied a fearful space beyond, and the word room seemed to contain some riddle without whose solution the world's sliding could not be halted, its sorrow capped. As night filled all the corners I waited for the spirit of the dead king to repossess his room and with rustling and tapping revive his dead toys and terrify me; but nothing happened save the curious chemical capture and release of sleep. I awoke to hear a soft rain steadily falling. The city was melting, the wet lights of the distant airfield glimmered, enlarged. My life hung in the balance, but I was utterly relaxed. Thus have I seen a leopard dangle all its four limbs from a high branch of a swaying acacia, murderous dreams now and then twitching its front paws. Days passed in this rhythm; then at last Dorfu came to visit me, in the late afternoon, toward the end of the wet season. I was struck again by his beauty beyond gender, like that of polished wood, or of a supple vine whose graceful, gripping ascent into the light makes no mistakes. His smile within my cell was like the dab of sun that finds its way to the forest floor. His fez, his signature, was of a glossier plum, and his uniform, the color of a scrubbed winestain, harmonized without ostentation. In tailoring at least, Kush had found a leader to surpass Ellellou. He had that fine Fula skin, that seems always freshly oiled. Tall, he moved with a certain stiff economy of motion, refuting any presumption that his administration would be frivolous. A toubab might have marvelled at Dorfu's regal ease, he having been so recently a lowly police spy; but we Africans have little difficulty in adjusting upwards to luxury and power. Indeed it may be true for all the sons of Adam that no good fortune, however extravagant, seems out of keeping with our proper, Edenic inheritance. He spoke in a courtly mix of English and Arabic. He carried a book bound in gold cloth. "I believe," Dorfu smiled, "in some lands political prisoners are subjected to what is called reeducation. Here, we prefer to think of it as entertainment. I thought I would read to you, as I once did to the pious Edumu." He settled cross-legged on his green cushion, opened the Koran with curved thumb, and read, where he had left off nearly a year before, "dis.. and adorned with bracelets of silver. Their Lord will give them a pure beverage to drink" He looked up and asked, "What purer beverage than freedom?" "None purer," answered Ellellou. "I thirst for it." Dorfu continued to read. "The unbelievers love this fleeting life too well, and thus prepare for themselves a heavy day of doom. We created them, and endowed their limbs and joints with strength; but if We please We can replace them by other men." Dorfu and Allah both, Ellellou noticed, preferred to say We. A trick of leadership he himself had failed to master. Dorfu concluded the sura. "He is merciful to whom He will: but for the wrongdoers He has prepared a grievous punishment." The President lifted his eyes benignly from the glowing page. "A peculiar problem of African government," he said, "is the disposal of the bodies of the deposed. In Togo, the clever Sylvanus Olympio was inelegantly gunned down by the hand of his successor, Colonel Eyadema. In Mali and Niger, the ex-Presidents Keita and Diori are rather awkwardly incarcerated, awaiting their natural deaths. In this nation, our friend Edumu was manfully slain, but his body became a haunting marionette. Now you have suggested, in a taped interview with our sister Kutunda, that you be not only pardoned but assigned a pension in exile. A proposal as impudent as your ill-timed and obscene assault upon her cha/y." Ellellou felt in his throat an odd constriction, overruling even thirst. "Like every citizen of Kush," he said, "I entrust myself to your mercy." Dorfu's smile broadened. "You make a virtue of a necessity; that is the art of living. I have not forgotten who elevated me, albeit in haste, even with some scorn of my potential, to the rank of interim Minister. And I thought your reasoning, as expressed to Kutunda, not without all merit. She, I should inform you, has advised for you a variety of ingenious tortures, climaxed by cremation, that your lewdness no longer pollute the purity of Kush. I would hesitate to disregard her usually sound advice, but in this instance certain international and media considerations prevail. You died, as President, in the city that bears your name. Now the honor of the Presidency must be safeguarded. We must show our friends the Americans that we too value the office above the man." "I do not wish to survive thanks to some American superstition." "There is also the indigenous consideration that, on a continent where materialism has yet to cast its full spell, a live man far away is less of a presence than a dead man underfoot." The constriction in Ellellou's throat eased. "I would defer gladly to scruples authentically native. How much will my pension be, and when may I secure it?" "We have decided that a colonel's pension would be appropriate, added to by half again as much for each wife who accompanies you, and a third again for each dependent child. Enough will be advanced for your passage abroad; when you have an address, the checks will arrive monthly. All this contingent, of course, upon your