The Coup (7 page)

bright, and Kush remains barren. You need to make a show, Colonel Ellellou, so Allah will notice us all. We are easy to forget. There must be blood. Blood is spirit, it draws down spirit. Dismember the king; tie his limbs to four stallions and give them the whip. His shrieks will dislodge the atom of evil and happiness will descend." She exposed her childish teeth in a grin, tilted her round head, and began to do up her greasy braids. "Your plan has something to it," I heard myself concede, though at the thought of my patron's dismemberment my own limbs, their stir of lust ignored and dissipated, felt leaden. Not that, at this stage of his disintegration, the colonel conspicuously neglected his official duties. He was generally at his desk, military green steel in his fanatically austere office on the corner of the Palais d'Administration des Noires overlooking Also-Abid-the rotting canopies of its dusty souk, its rickety wharves and pirogues slender as spears-for hours before Michaelis Ezana reported from his adjoining office, and the two drank together their morning chocolate and in their unending dialectical contention mapped the nation's path into the future. Ezana was all facts and figures, a proponent of loans from the World Bank and grants from UNESCO, of schemes for dams and irrigation, of capital investments cleverly pried from the rivalry between the two superpowers (and that shadowy third, China, that has the size but not as it were the mass, the substance, to be called super), and more lately of hopes of financial rescue from their brethren in Islam, the oily, dollar-drunk sheiks of Kuwait and Qatar. At the outset of L'fimer-gence, Ellellou had shared Ezana's enthusiasm for these manipulations of their sovereignty, as elaborate and phantasmal as the manipulations of the teeming spirit-world conducted by the witches and marabouts beyond the Grionde. But, seeing the plans come to nothing, or less than nothing-the expensive peanut-shelling equipment fall into disuse for want of repairmen, the wells drilled become the focus of a ravaged pasturage, the one dam constructed become the source of a plague of bilharzia-infested snails-Ellellou had retreated from these impure involvements and watched with a sardonic detachment Ezana's energetic attempts to engage the world in the fortunes of Kush. The Minister of the Interior's habitual dress, formerly the rude khaki of a fighter for the people, now tended toward suits tailored in London, Milanese loafers, Parisian socks with rococo clocks, and, though silk was expressly forbidden to men by all the accreted moral authority of Islam, Hong Kong shirts of a suspicious suppleness; on his wrist he wore a Swiss watch of which the face, black, lit up with the hour and minute in Arabic numerals when a small side button was pressed. This watch fascinated his subordinates, who wondered where, in its scanty black depths, the device coiled the many minutes it was not called upon to display. So it was with Michaelis Ezana, who could produce whatever facts and figures were asked for, yet whose depths remained opaque. And scanty; for, however able and ambitious, Ezana utterly lacked that inward dimension, of ethical, numinous brooding, whereby a leader bulges outward from the uncertainties of his own ego and impresses a people. An observer seeing the two leaders bow their heads together in conference would have noticed that, though equally short and black, of the two Ezana gave more blackness back; blackness irrepressibly bounced and skidded off the spherical, luminous surfaces of his face. Whereas Ellellou's was a mat black, the product of a long soaking-in. He tolerated Ezana because it was etched, on the crystal plane of things possible, that Ezana would never succeed him. Ellellou's popularity, as reports drifted south of his flamboyant personal victory on behalf of the people against capitalist subversion, had surged to a height where suppositions of madness would not disturb it; so he dared, this morning, as the chocolate cooled at their elbows, to confide his visions to Ezana. "Returning from the site of the repelled invasion," Ellellou said, "in the region of Hair, we saw a strange thing." "A strange truck," Ezana quickly clarified. "As Minister of the Interior, Comrade, I have taken this sinister matter firmly in hand. The Bureau of Transport is at a loss. Of the two hundred twenty-six motored vehicles registered in Kush, seventy-seven of them public taxis and one hundred and four at the disposal of members of the government, the remaining forty-five registrants have been investigated and none answers to the description of a flatbed four-axle carrier of compressed scrap chassis." "Who gave you, Comrade Ezana, such a complete description?" "There were four of you in the automobile, of whom two, I believe, were awake. Draw your own conclusions." Mtesa, a traitor? Ezana smiled reassuringly. His plump fingers, loaded with gems like especially bright droplets of an enveloping lubricity, slid descriptively through the air. "The air of Kush is transparent, there are no secrets, only reticences," he said. "The truck is the thing. I cannot account for it. It is unaccountable." "Also," Ellellou ventured, comforted by the other's thoroughness, which brought all things shadowy into the light of numerical investigation, and might dispel even the dictator's unconfessed lassitude, "on the way north, in a gap of the Bulub hills, I glimpsed far off a golden arc, perhaps two golden arcs, I am not certain." Ezana's fluid manner stiffened. "Did anyone other than yourself, my President, observe this apparition?" "Neither Mtesa nor Opuku could confirm my sighting, though we halted the car and prowled the terrain for a vantage. Opuku had just pointed out the smoke of an encampment, and thus had drawn my gaze in that direction. If they had... one would have said... I thought... the region is strange." "This was, I believe, the morning after your fatiguing night in the ICBM crib with the Russians, an experience in itself rather conducive to the unwilling suspension of reality." "It was. But I was not so tired, nor so susceptible to the fumes of the alcohol spilled by uproarious barbarians, as to mistake my own eyesight. Could there be, I wonder, an ancient ruin in the vicinity, or an accessory Soviet installation the Minister of the Interior has omitted to acknowledge?" "You are the Minister of Defense, and you know my opin- ion of this paramilitary foolery between the superparanoids. No need exists to double dummy rockets; and if it were the case why advertise the site with shining spires?" "Not spires, arches." "Whatever. The shimmer of the sand and the heated layers of air play strange tricks. Roul the desert devil delights in trompe-Voeil. Rest your mind, my President; I think the rumors of famine have troubled your peace of mind unduly." "Rumors? They are facts." "Exaggerated, moot facts. The Western press delights in making us appear incompetent. The nomads have always dragged our statistics down. Their way of life is archaic, wasteful, and destructive. Their absurd coinage of cattle has become ruinously clumsy. We must seize this opportunity to urbanize them. Already, the displaced nomads, and the sedentary farmers whose crops have failed or been consumed by the lawless herds, crowd to the edges of Istiqlal, where the tents and shacks, adjacent to the airport in full view of incoming flights, breed misery unalloyed by any suggestion of the picturesque. Their ancient nations have failed them; they are the citizens of our new nation, no longer of the Tuareg or the Salu or the Fulani or the Moundang but of Kush; Kush must reach down and house them, educate them, enlist them. This famine that so troubles you in truth is L'fimergence, given a fortuitous climatic dimension." Ellellou, though moved by echoes of his own rhetoric, asked, "Who will supply the wealth to house, educate, enlist as you describe?" Ezana contemplated an upper corner of the room. "In the Ippi Rift," he began, "there is some interesting geology." Ellellou didn't hear. He had stood, to declaim, "The rich blocs each have client states whose prosperity is of more strategic moment than ours. Our place at the table will be the nethermost chair; let us remain standing, and at least trouble the conscience of the feast." Impatience cinched shut the shining curves of Ezana's visage. "This feast has never had a conscience," he said. "We are at the table, Comrade, there is no helping it. There is no way a nation cannot live in the world. A man, yes, can withdraw into sainthood; but a nation of its very collective essence strives to prosper. A nation is like a plant; it is a lower thing than a man, not a higher, as you would have it." "Yet the people look up, and must see something. You speak of the fortuitous; this is blasphemy. The famine exists, and therefore must have a meaning, both Marxist and divine. I think it means our revolution was not thorough enough; it left a pocket of reaction here in the Palais d'Administration, on the floor below us, in the far wing. I know you know the king still lives. What would you say to his public execution?" Michaelis Ezana shrugged. "I think it would be as an event not non-trivial. The king is already one with his ancestors." Ellellou warned, "It would horrify the world bourgeoisie, who are sentimental about monarchs. Their offers to bring us the benefits of their eight virtues might slacken, and your office would have less paper to handle." Ezana repeated his shrug, exactly. "It would sever a strand to the colonial past. He is your personal prisoner, deal with him as seems expedient." He reshuffled back into his briefcase the fanned papers-graphs, maps, computer print-outs-that again had failed to interest the President. Ellellou sat down and sipped his chocolate, which had grown cool. But no mere tepidity had subverted its taste: there was something added and subtracted, something malty, ersatz, adulterate, mild, mellow, vitaminized. Ambushed by recognition, Ellellou blurted out to Ezana the one word, "Ovaltine!" Sittina, my third wife, lived in a villa among bushes of oleander, camel's-foot, and feathery bamboo, among children she no longer even pretended were mine and half-completed paintings, weavings abandoned in mid-stripe on the loom, and shimmering gowns which needed only to be hemmed to be finished. On the harpsichord, The Well-Tempered Clavier always stood open to the same fugue. She was too variously talented to push anything through to mastery. Soot-black, slender, the huge hoops of her earrings pierced through the tops of her cup-shaped ears rather than the lobes and touching one shoulder or another as she moved her lovely small tipped-back head, she was elevated and detached in her view of me, and I found this oddly confirming. "So the Palais kitchen makes Ovaltine instead of pure Ghanaian chocolate for a change," she said. "What of it? You think you burned all the produce the Yankees are smuggling in? It's not that easy, they make tons more of junk every day. Don't worry about it, Felix. Face it, Africa is crazy about trading. Where else can you buy in the marketplace honest-to-God fingernail clippings? I mean, it's wild." She said all this glancingly, over her shoulder, in her offhand American English. The daughter of a Tutsi chief, she had been sent in a time of Hutu massacre to a small all-black college in the state of Alabama, and indeed had set several sprint records there. The turn of her calves and the length of her thighs had won my heart, in the heyday of Edumu's restored rule, when she competed in the Noire Pan-African games of 1962. Though she had ever been in our marriage elusive, like the wind she raced with, I could never consider her a bad wife. Often in the bed of another, in my virile thirties, in the carefree Sixties, the thought of her pointed tits and trim bean-shaped buttocks had given me rise. Yet the reality of her was more mixed than the thought, the inner image of her. Sittina and I had not made love for four years, though the youngest of the glossy, long-skulled children that wobbled and prattled through the room, chased by parrots and pet patas monkeys, was under two. Sittina was wearing a loose-throated long-sleeved dashiki with rainbow-dyed culottes of crushed voile; they flapped and swayed with the movements of her wonderful impatient legs. She was engaged, in one of her abortive projects, with fashion design, and her outfit, so contemporary and timeless both, so Western and African, was one of her creations. But, she explained, between bursts of attention to the needful children-each of whom cast at me, in my unadorned khaki, the glance one gives a gardener or messenger boy who has come six steps too far into the house-that it was impossible nowadays to obtain cloth or even needles and thread, that there was nothing for sale in the markets but the cheapest sort of merikani, faded bolts the missionaries must have brought, and that since the Revolution had reduced the European community so drastically there were no customers anyway, the wives of the Kuwaitis never came out of their compounds, the Albanian women were stringy-haired savages smelling of wet wool, and that awful Mrs. Ezana-how can he stand her?, she's such a bluestocking-went everywhere bare-breasted, as a sign of political undeviation. Pas chic, Sittina said. Her words had all the substance of a complaint but not, truly, the tone. I felt I had come on the afternoon of a visit to or by some lover; hence her benign, if abstracted and hurried, manner. She continued, "What are you doing about the drought? Even the price of a goat head is out of sight. A single cassava brings two hundred lu. You put some millet paste on the windowsill to curdle and in five minutes it's stolen. The refugees from the north come into town and rob- what else can the poor things do? My night guard had his throat slit the other night and walked home in a sulk. Don't ask me where still was, I forget. They took the stainless steel flatware and two of my old trophies but hadn't the sophistication to steal the Chagall." The Chagall, of the customary upside-down Jew smiling at a green moon, had been our wedding present from the king. Now it hung on the far wall between an Ife harvest-drama mask and a Somali saddle-cloth of an exceptionally elaborate pattern. Sittina, who bore the name of a Queen of Shendy, had furnished the spacious living-room of the villa in a scattered "artistic" style with sub-Saharan artifacts whose solemn blacks and browns, whose surfaces of red-stained animal hide and hollowed gourd still redolent of the organic matrix from which they had been gently lifted by the last stage of manufacture consorted with the glib rectilin-earity and mechanically perfect surfaces of the Danish armchairs and glass-and-aluminum coffee tables that had been salvaged from the pillage of the European quarters in