The Coup (9 page)

Ill

Soldiers at the command of the government systematically searched the hovels of Hurriyah for transistor radios, cassette players, four-track hi-fi rigs, and any musical instrument other than the traditional tambourine, alghaita, kakaki, hu-hu, hour-glass drum, end-blown reed flute, or that single-stringed instrument, whose sounding box is a goatskin-covered calabash, called the anzad. Ellellou at this point in time vigorously prosecuted the cause of cultural, ethical, and political purity in Kush. Any man caught urinating in a standing position, instead of squatting in the manner of Mohamet and his followers, was detained and interrogated until the offender could prove he was a pagan and not a Christian. Overzealous enlistees from the swaddled north seized and flogged young girls on the banks of the Grionde, under the impression that their bare breasts imitated decadent French fashions. The flocks of secretaries working within the corridors and anterooms of the Palais d'Administration des Noires were enjoined from wear- ing tight skirts and blouses; the corridors and anterooms were obediently thronged with loose boubous and kangas. Yet underneath these traditional wrappings, Colonel Ellellou suspected, the women were wearing elastic Western underwear, spicy brands called Lollypop and Spanky. Within the inner rooms of the Palais he and Ezana conferred not quite as usual; a new note, a post-coital irritability, had entered their discussions since the execution of the king. That had been Ellellou's trump; Ezana still held his cards. Though for state occasions he still appeared in the revolutionary uniform of khaki, taking his place in the row of SCRME sub-colonels as alike as the ten digits of two gloves on their balcony or viewing platform, in the privacy of his office he had taken to wearing powder-blue or even salmon-pink leisure suits, with a knit shirt open at the neck and cuffless trousers of tremendous flare. The Marxist explanation for this flare, Ellellou thought, would be the same as for a sultan's pantaloons, or a burgomaster's lace. He felt his own thin khaki tight on his back as he leaned forward, appearing to plead, in that tense voice which even when amplified by giant loudspeakers had something of the anxious, as of an impediment overcome, about it: "There is a conspiracy. The dreams of the people are being undermined." Ezana smiled. "Or is it the dreams of the people that are doing the undermining?" Ellellou said, "They would all acknowledge that we are on the right path, were it not for this cursed, adventitious drought." Ezana's smile contained one gold tooth, which seemed squarer than the others. "The drought cannot be adventitious and cursed both. If we believe in curses, we do not believe in accidents. At any rate, my comrade, who in Kush denies that we are on the right path? Save for the paltry few imperialist quislings and extinct fossils enjoying reeducation in what were once the wine cellars of the French? The security forces of the Department of the Interior, supplemented by anti-terrorist squads of the Kushite army, have found no radios, no trucks loaded with crushed Fords and Chevrolets. True, in a closet of a Koran school, the troops unearthed a cache of bubble gum. But we have always known that there is a black market dealing in Western luxuries smuggled in from our doctrinally unsympathetic neighboring states, or lingering from our own lamentable pre-revolutionary era. "Let us not, however," Ezana continued, and Ellellou marvelled at the inexhaustible smooth machinery of the man's mouth, that functioned within the resonating mellow hum of self-delight, "discuss trifles. Let us discuss peanuts. To natural disaster, my President, world geopolitics has added economic distress. The nub of it is, now that the Americans are no longer vexed by Vietnam and the Watergate imbroglio promises to remove from their chests the incubus of Nixon, they have woken to the fact, long patent to the rest of the world, that they as a race are morbidly fat. An orgy of dieting, jogging, tennis, and other narcissistic exercises has overtaken them, and-this is the crux- among the high-calorie casualties of their new regimen is the unsavory stuff called peanut butter. Apparently, spread on so-called "crackers" and unappetizingly mixed with fruit-imitative chemical "jellies" between slices of their deplorable rubbery bread, this paste formed a staple of the benighted masses' diet. Well, in the national lunge toward athletic slimness and eternal physical youth, less peanut butter is being consumed, and the peanut growers of their notoriously apartheid South are compelled to export. "Nothing, Comrade Colonel," Ezana went on, with a louder and more urgent tone, seeing his auditor stir and threaten to interrupt, "more clearly advertises the American decline and coming collapse than this imperative need, contrary to all imperialist principles, to export raw materials. Nevertheless, for the time being, their surplus peanuts are underselling our own in Marseilles, and those farmers who at governmental urging devoted their land to a cash crop now wish they had grown millet and yams to feed their own children. Without the francs the peanuts would have brought, we lack the hard currency with which to procure replacement parts for the Czech dynamos, and electricity will fail in Istiqlal." "Not a bad thing, perhaps," Colonel Ellellou offered, caressing his cup of chocolate, which he had tasted warily, and found unimpeachable. "Kush will revert to God's light, and not turn the night to uses inveighed against by Mohamet. By the light of day, and by the fall of night, your Lord has not forsaken you. What has electricity brought us, I ask, but godlessness and ever more dependence upon the Czech middlemen?" Ezana's gold tooth flashed as he flipped a piece of yellow paper across his desk to the President. "Without the mercy of electricity," he said, "we would be deprived of communications such as this." Ellellou read: reply soonest all info relating disappearance DONALD GIBES OFFICER USD ACTING CONJUNCTION Wst FAO AND WFP NEAR NW BORDER KUSH SEP 197 3. URGENTEST.

KLIPSPRINGER UNDRSCTRY DEPT STATE USA.

Ellellou said, "They must have meant Gibbs. Nobody is called Gibes in America." "The probable," Ezana told him, "is not always the actual. In regard to this cable, what shall our government do?" "No answer is more eloquent," Ellellou answered, "than no answer." "Men may follow this piece of paper. And after the men, guns and airplanes. This Gibes was precious to somebody." "Gibbs, it must be," Ellellou said. "Gibes is an insult." "Be that as it may, if his government make this man's fate a point of honor, the effects may be disproportionate, as so lamentably often proves true in affairs between nations. The Americans have not the Asian discretion of our friends the Soviets, who take such lasting pleasure in bullying the already subdued, and in surviving the incarceration of their own winters. The Americans have the chronic irritation of their incessant elections to goad them into false heroics, and if I understand them historically have reached that dangerous condition when a religion, to contradict its own sensation that it is dying, lashes out against others. Thus the Victorians flung their Christianity against the heathen of the world after Voltaire and Darwin had made its tenets ridiculous; thus the impoverished sultan of Morocco in 1591 hurled troops across the Sahara to occupy Gao and Timbuctoo, a conquest that profited him nothing and destroyed the Songhai empire forever." "I do not know Americans," Ellellou lied. "But I do not think that having just extricated themselves from the embrace of General Thieu they will risk themselves against the starvelings of Kush." "Exactly not," Ezana agreed, with a pounce as jarring as disagreement. "Until the moralistic Vietnam misadventure fades, they will content themselves, like our exmentors the French, with selling hardware to all sides of local conflicts and keeping the peanut-oil supply lines open." "In that matter of peanuts and electricity," Ellellou ventured, "might the Banque de France consider another loan?" "Interest on present loans, my good President, plus the salaries of our civil service, account for a hundred and eleven per cent of the Kush national budget." Ellellou's heart sank at the statistic. But Ezana said, "Not to worry. These debits are in fact credits, for they persuade the capital-holding countries to hold us upright. Meanwhile, all capital drifts to the oil-exporting nations. From there, however, it drifts back to the countries that produce machinery and luxury goods. Praise Allah, we need no longer, in a sense, concern ourselves with money at all, for it exists above us in a fluid aurosphere, that mixes with the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and the ionosphere, blanketing us all with its invisible circulations." "By these as by other circulations, it never rains on Kush." "You exaggerate. There was an exceptionally heavy dew just this morning. In the global aurosphere there can be transient lows and highs, but by the laws of the gases nothing like a complete vacuum. Our turn will come; perhaps it is already coming." "In the form of Big Stick telegrams." Ellellou found this conversation depressing, all the more deeply so because of Ezana's mental nimbleness. This man's twinkling joy in being among the elite was the opposite of infectious. To take pleasure in power seemed childish sacrilege. Power was reality, power was grief. Ellellou felt his heart falling down through the veils of semblance into the utter vacuity upon which all things rested. Lives, millions of lives, hung on Ellellou's will and dragged it down. The famine weighed upon him sickeningly. Energy had silted to the bottom of his soul. He had returned to this hypothetical slice of desert, steppe, and savanna grateful for its searing simplicity, on fire with the wish to seal off its perfection; but his will had not averted congestion-rather, had become an element within it, this confused, derivative congestion of the actual, of which Ezana, with his rapid ringers and shapely leisure suit, was the condensation, the gleaming dewdrop on the nettle of the nation. "What if we respond," he was suggesting, tirelessly, of the cable, which in Ellellou's mind had already been consumed, and turned into snow like the first dry biting flakes that announced the November beginnings of the Wisconsin winters, when a second, white continent was imposed upon the green, brown first, "with a cable protesting CIA interference in the internal affairs of Kush, that is, their clumsy and ghoulish, how can we say, caputmpp'mg of the king, who was executed with full legality, by the Koranic and Marxist codes? We would have no trouble producing evidence of culpability; even the footprints they left on the dust showed a tread-pattern peculiar to American sneakers." "They were on horseback." "Several dismounted, in the flurry. Abundant clues fell from their pockets. Jackknives, dental floss." "Overabundant," Ellellou said. "We can send irrefutable wirephotos. Cheaper, we can leak glossies to Noiwelles en Noire et Blanche, to which every Western embassy subscribes." "And yet," Ellellou said, "the one Targui who passed close to me had Russian breath. Beets and vodka." Ezana shrugged. "There is a sweet green tea the Tuareg drink that smells similarly." "And yet you say this was not the Tuareg, but the CIA." "I do. This CIA, did it not arrange for the assassination of its own President and his brother? There is no fathoming their devious designs. They are a cancer that grows of its own mad purposes." "This fury of anti-Americanism," Ellellou observed, "comes strangely from my Minister of the Interior." Ezana spread his fingers, their nails manicured to a lunar lustre, upon his glass desktop as if to confess "the jig was up" and he would "level." He said, "I wish to discredit in advance rumors that may distract my President." "Rumors of what?" "Of a sad absurdity. Among the superstitious rabble of our poor retrograde nation, some say that the king's head, magically joined to its spiritual body, talks prophecies from a cave deep in the mountains." Ellellou had not heard this rumor, and it lit his depression like a splinter of moon in the depths of a well. "Again," he pointed out, "something Russian in this. The Bulubs are proximate to the missile crib." Ezana sat back, and sipped his chocolate, contemplating his President much as the black face of his wristwatch contemplated the turn of the heavens. Ellellou, his heart lightly racing at the possibility that the king had in some sense survived and therefore his own responsibility was in some sense mitigated, sipped his own chocolate. "Not the Bulub Mountains," Ezana told Mm, "but the Balak." "The Balak? In the Bad Quarter?" Ezana nodded complacently. "Where not even the National Geographic has been." The Bad Quarter: the trackless northeastern quadrant that borders on Libya and Zanj. Neither scorpions nor thorns thrive there, not even the hardy Hedysarmn alhagi eulogized by Caillie. Wide wadis remember ancient water, weird mesas have been whipped into shape by wicked, unwitnessed winds. By day the desert is so blindingly hot and pure the sands in some declivities have turned to molten glass; by night the frost cracks rocks with a typewriter staccato. Geometrically perfect alkali flats end as abruptly as floors at the base of metamorphic walls soaring as by reversed lava flow to crumpled crests where snow had been sighted by Victorian explorers, in a century more humid than ours. "I must go there," Ellellou said, the will to do so being born in him as airily as a dust devil on the Square by the Mosque of the Day of Disaster; Ezana's complacence evaporated. "I cannot advise that, my President," he said. "You are putting yourself at the mercy of fate." "Where all men are, at all times." "Some in more dignified postures than others." "My posture is always, simply, one of service to my coun-try." "How can you serve your country by chasing phantoms?" "How else?" It may be, Ellellou reflected [and I now, with greater distinctness, write], that in the attenuation, desiccation, and death of religions the world over, a new religion is being formed in the indistinct hearts of men, a religion without a God, without prohibitions and compensatory assurances, a religion whose antipodes are motion and stasis, whose one rite is the exercise of energy, and in which exhausted forms like the quest, the vow, the expiation, and the attainment through suffering of wisdom are, emptied of content, put in the service of a pervasive expenditure whose ultimate purpose is entropy, whose immediate reward is fatigue, a blameless confusion, and sleep. Millions now enact the trials of this religion, without giving it a name, or attributing to themselves any virtue. That rumored cave, undoubtedly a trap, which Ezana for some devious reason wished me to avoid, though he would enjoy the freedom of my being away from Istiqlal, beckoned to me; my whim as man, my duty as President, compelled me there. For have not African tyrants been traditionally strangers to their domains, and should not ideal rule attempt to harmonize not only the powers, forces, and factions within the boundaries but the vacancies as well, the hallucinations, the lost hopes, the dim peoples feeble as ropes of sand? Yet Ellellou was slow to depart, and remained in Istiqlal all the month of Shawwal, which the Salu call the moon of hesita- tion. The Tuareg iklan, whom the Western press unfairly referred to as slaves, pried loose cakes of salt from the crusted bed of Lake Hulul and brought them south to trade for smelt, yams, amulets, and the aphrodisiac powder whose principal ingredient was ground rhinoceros horn. Michaelis Ezana zealously watched the economic indicators for signs that this annual salt harvest might be reversing the long Kushite recession. One day Ellellou, in full panoply of state, the solid green national flag fluttering from the fender of his Mercedes, visited his first wife, Kadongolimi, at her overcrowded villa in Les Jar dins. He was met at the door by a bony bare-chested man with the slant eyes and taut coffee skin of the Hausa; though the hour was eleven in the morning, this fellow was already drunk on palm wine, and Ellellou identified him as a son-in-law. Within the villa, the rooms had been so bestrewn with goat hides and raffia and the ceilings so blackened with the smoke of cooking-fires that the atmospheric tang duplicated that of the dictator's native village, where he had wed Kadongolimi at the age of sixteen. Children, some of them presumably his grandchildren, teemed and shrilled through the battered, notched, bedaubed doorways of the villa; the louvers and latches of the windows had been smashed and jammed so that a hut darkness reigned in rooms designed as if to admit the colorful kind light of southern France. The smells of rancid butter, roasted peanuts, pounded millet, salted fish, and human eliminations mixed in an airy porridge that Ellellou's nostrils, after a minute of adjustment, found delicious: the smell of being Salu. He unbuttoned the top button of his khaki shirt and wondered why he didn't visit Kadongolimi more often. Here was earth-strength. A chastely and utterly naked young woman came and took his hand, with a naturalness that only a daughter could bring. He fished for her name and came up with only the memory of her face, with its arching little braids and slightly drooping Kadongolimi-like lips, mounted on a shorter, chubbier body, without this swaying adolescent slimness. She led him through the maze of clatter and clamor, the rooms alive with squatting groups and pairs mending, stirring, crying, feeding, scolding, crooning, loving, and breathing, all under the sanction of the fibrous, staring fetishes of hacked wood and stolen fur and feathers, supernatural presences not repugnant or ridiculous in their setting but one with the mats, the grinding stones, the wide bowls and tall pestles, not disposed decoratively as in Sittina's eclectic villa but here used as the furniture of daily life, brown and rough as a seed pod splitting to let new life through. His old tongue came back to him, spoken with that accent of overemphasis peculiar to his native stretch of the peanut lands, with the swallowed st"s and pop-eyed clacks of his mother's people. Nephews, daughters-in-law, totem brothers, sisters by second wives of half-uncles greeted Ellellou, and all in that ironical jubilant voice implying what a fine rich joke he, a Salu, had imposed upon the alien tribes in becoming the chief of this nation imagined by the white men, and thereby potentially appropriating all its spoils to their family use. For there lay no doubt, in the faces of these his relatives, that through all the disguises a shifting world forced on him he remained one of them, that nothing the world could offer Ellellou to drink, no nectar nor elixir, would compare with the love he had siphoned from their pool of common blood. And it was true, at least, that since he had taken office this villa had absorbed the villas to the right and left of it and become a sprawling village compound in the heart of Les Jardins, lacking only the spherical granaries of whitened mud looped around the huts like giant pearls. His naked daughter led him across a courtyard where the flagstones had been pried up to form baking ovens. Across the way, through a cloister, Kadongolimi had established sedate quarters, darkened and fragrant, where she held court to the hosts of her progeny. She had grown fat as a queen termite, and spent hours propped in a half-reclining position in an alu-minum-and-airfoam chaise longue the white occupiers of this villa, great sunners and users of Bain de Soleil, had abandoned when one day the servants no longer answered their clapping and instead a boy of a soldier appeared and announced that they, being the wrong color now, had been deposed from the Istiqlal elite. Kadongolimi when she took possession had had the chaise longue dragged indoors and made it her daybed. Two docile tots fanned her bulk with palm fronds. Her cheeks were marked with the semi-circular tattoos that, until outlawed by SCRME, identified and beautified the brides of the Salu. Her earlobes had been pierced and distended to receive fist-sized scrolls of gold on days of festivity and pomp; today, empty, her lobes hung like loops of thick black shoestring to her shoulders. She lifted a pink hand, a pulpy-petalled small flower put forth by a swollen old limb. "Bini," she said. "You look like carrion. What is eating at you?" She called him "Bini," his Amazeg name, by which she had known him since the age when he had squirmed down from his mother's hip and begun to walk. Kadongolimi was four years older than he. When he was five, she was a leggy screeching personage of nine, bossy as a mother. A cousin, her hands had rattled on his skull in the courteous search for lice. When they married, she had been a woman for a third of her life, and the
shuddering, rustling bushes of her experience interposed between them their first nights. Her superiority never left them but became enjoyable. Ellellou in her presence floated as in an oily bath, underestimated, weightless, coy. To Kadongolimi he would always be a child who had just left his mother's hip. There being no chair in the room, he squatted down on his hams, plucked a twig from a bush poking through a hole in the wall, and began to clean his teeth. "The gods," he answered diffidently, tasting the twig. Some substratum in the phloem or xylem savored smartly of those little glossy red American candies prevalent in wintertime, that relenting time of winter when the icicles crash from the eaves and the black streets shine with the melting of drifts. "You should never have forsaken the gods of our fathers," Kadongolimi told him, gingerly shifting her pontifical weight in the precarious hammock of aluminum. "What had they given our fathers," Ellellou asked his wife, "but terror and torpor, so the slavers Arab and Christian alike did with us as we did with animals? They had the wheel, the gun; we had juju." "Have you forgotten so soon? The gods gave life to every shadow, every leaf. Everywhere we looked, there was spirit. At every turn of our lives, spirit greeted us. We knew how to dance, awake or asleep. No misery could touch the music in us. Let other men die in chains; we lived. Bini, as a boy you were always active, always pretending to be something else. A bird, a snake. You went away to fight in the white man's wars and came back from across the sea colder than a white man, for at least he gets drunk and he fucks." Ellellou nodded and smiled and tasted the twig, moving it from tooth to tooth. She had said these things before, and would say them again. His replies too had the predictability of song. He said, "I returned with the true God in my heart, the Lord of the Worlds, the Owner of the Day of Judgment. I brought back to Kush the God half of its souls already worshipped." "The empty half, the cruel half. This God of Mohamet is a no-God, an eraser of gods; He cannot be believed in, for He has no attributes and is nowhere. What is believed in in our land, what gives consolation, is what remains of the old gods, the traces that have not been erased. They are around us everywhere, in pieces. What grows, grows because they are in the stem. Where a place is holy, it is holy because they live in the stones. They are like us, uncountable. The God who made us all made us and turned his back. He is out of the picture, he does not want to be bothered. It is the little gods that make the connections, that bring love and food and relief from pain. They are in the gris-gris the leper wears around his neck. They are in the scraps of cloth the widow ties to the fire bush. They are in the dust, they are so many." Her great black arm, with a gleaming wart in the crease of the elbow, dropped at her side; she flung a pinch of dust at her squatting husband. Perhaps the twig he was chewing contained in the inner bark an hallucinogen, for the dust seemed to grow in the air, to become a jinni, a devil, with boneless hands and too many fingers: the spectre of the drought. Kadongolimi laughed, exposing toothless gums. "How are the children?" he asked. "Bini, we had no children, they all sprouted from other men. You were a boy who had no idea where his kiki should go. Then you returned from the land of the toubabs a twisted man and took younger wives. The long-legged Sittina, who has led you such a chase, and the One Who Is Always Wrapped. Then the idiot child Sheba, and now I hear there is yet another, a slut from the desert." "Kadongolimi, let not your grievances, which are somewhat real, destroy all other reality. The children born before the French conscripted me to defend their plantations in Asia surely were mine, though their names escape me." "You were not conscripted, you enlisted. You fled." "You had grown huge, in your flesh and in your demands." "Bini, you always fantasized. You left me slender as a bamboo." "And returned to find you big as a baobab." "Seven years later, how could I be unchanged? You avoided me. You avoided me because you knew I would discover the secrets of your absence. I discovered them anyway." "Spare me hearing them. Sell them to Michaelis Ezana. He has set up a talking head in the Bad Quarter to discredit my regime. I am going there to confront this marvel." Pity leaped in her, as a frog disturbs a pond. "My poor Bini, why not stay in Istiqlal, and rule as other leaders do-give your cousins assistant ministerships, and conduct border disputes with other nations to distract us from our poverty?" "Poverty is not the name of it. A barefoot man is not poor until he sees others wearing shoes. Then he feels shame. Shame is the name of it. It is being smuggled into Kush. A blow is needed, to reawaken our righteous austerity." Kadongolimi said, "You killed the king." "Imperfectly. Ezana manipulates the body." "Why do you blame Ezana?" "I feel him all about me, obstructing my dreams." "Reality obstructs your dreams. Ezana wishes only to administer a reasonable state." "A state such as Kush is too thin to be administered except by gestures. When we effected the Revolution, we discovered a strange thing. There was nothing to revolutionize. Our Minister of Industry looked for factories to nationalize, and there were none. The Minister of Agriculture sought out the large land holdings to seize and subdivide, and found that most of the land was in a legal sense unowned. There was poverty but no oppression; how could this be? There were fishing villages, peanut farmers, mammy markets, goats, elephant grass, camels and cattle and wells. We dug deeper wells, that we could do, and that proved a disaster, for the herds then did not move on but stayed until the grassland around the wells had been grazed to dust. We sought to restore autonomy to the people, in the form of citizens" councils and elections with pictographic ballots, but they had never surrendered autonomy in their minds. The French had been an apparition, a bright passing parade. The French had educated a few assimiles, given them jobs, paid them in francs, and taxed them. They were taxing themselves, to govern themselves. It was exquisitely circular, like their famous logic, like their vil-lanelles. Ezana does not see this. He admired the French, he admires the polluting Americans and their new running dogs the Chinese. He mocks our allies the Russians, whose torpid monism throbs in tune with our own. He hired Russian double agents to impersonate Tuareg, so I would become confused. He has seduced my Sara protegee with promises of an office of her own, and typing lessons, and contact lenses! Forgive me, Kadongolimi, for troubling your repose with this tirade. I feel sore beset, infiltrated. I can appear thus disarmed only with you. Only you knew me as I was, hoeing the peanut fields, and playing ohtvari by the hour. You remember my mother, her violence. My father, his absence. My brothers, their clamor and greed. My uncle Anu, his lopsided smile and lasciviousness, that extended even to she-goats, and the leg, its nerves severed by a Nubian bayonet, that compelled him to become a carver of masks. I came to ask after our seed, our children. That silent girl with budding breasts who led me in, was she ours? We last clasped a dozen years ago, and she would be not younger than that. Kadongolimi, remember the games we would play-I the lion, you the gazelle?" "I remember less each year I lie here, forgotten by my husband. I remember a boy who didn't know where his kiki should go." Ah, Ellellou. He was stricken with the unsatisfiable desire to rescue this his first woman from the sarcophagus of fat into which she had been lowered and sealed, to have her come forth as again half of the young lithe couple they had been, amid curtains of green, the conical roofs and circular granaries of their village scattered like dewdrops along a web of paths that threaded outward into cassava patches and pastures yielding to the broad peanut fields with their elusive musky fragrance of starch. And when the wind blew, the grasslands beyond whitened in clusters of racing pallor like racing deer, white-throated, white-rumped waterbuck and the oryx with his slim slant horns. Giraffes would come into the peanut fields from the acacia plains and with splayed front legs and lowered necks feed from the tops of the drying stacks, and be chased away by the boys of the village clapping together bowls and pestles and rattling gourds. Drifting like clouds the giraffes would canter away, their distant mild faces unblaming, the orbs of their great eyes more luminous than the moon. In this village, where all was open and predetermined and contiguous and blessed, Kadongolimi had confided to him in the dappled shelter of sun-soaked bushes the smell of her pleasure, the taste of her sweat. In harvest season they would hollow caves in the heaped mountains of uprooted, drying peanut plants. The skin of her back took a hatched imprint. She had been careless of herself, bestowing her body wherever she was admired with the proper courtesies, the requisite hours of dancing, heels stamping the earth, the ceremonial sleeplessness. But when betrothed to Bini she drew upon herself, with the shaved skull and crescent tattoos, the dignity of a bespoken woman. He remembered the long arc of cranium the shaving exposed, and the silver curve of sun upon it when she came, still wet from her ritual bathing, to be accepted by his mother as her daughter. By the forms of the marriage, which lasted days, Kadongolimi curled on a mat like a newborn while her mother-in-law touched her lips with milk symbolic of her own. Bini watched this awestruck by its implication of a solemn continuum of women, above him, around him, always. And he remembered how the shaved skull thrust forward Kadongolimi's face, the insolent long jaw, the heavy lips like numb, dangerous fruit. He remembered her ears, then delicate and perforated to receive only the smallest rods of gold. And in their own hut her soft muffled salty smell, and her genitals simple as a cowrie. While he slept, the morning outside resounding to the blows of her pounding millet to meal, for him, her husband. Sun shuddered in the heaved fan of chaff. The depth of lost time made him dizzy; he stood, spitting out the twig. His thighs ached, their muscles stretched by the unaccustomed squat. Kadongolimi, too, met resistance, seeking to arise. The naked girl, who had been standing unnoticed in the shadows, stepped forward; Ellellou, startled by the motion, turned his head, and his gaze was splashed by the sun-saturated bougain-villea the vanished colonists had planted in the patio, now gone wild. He and the girl raised Kadongolimi to her feet; the woman gasped, astonished to find her spirit wrapped in so much inertia, in the weight that sagged as if to crack his arms and shoulders and then swayed away onto the slender girl, whose breasts were the shape of freshly started anthills. "Tell me," Ellellou whispered to his wife, "is she not ours?" "Oh, Bini," she grunted. The effort of standing nearly smothered her words. "You are the father of us all. What matters the paternity of this good child? You yourself were born of a whirlwind. She loves you. We love you. In this house you will be welcome when all else crumbles. Only be not too long. In your absence, weeds spring up. Even the earth forgets." One bright day Ellellou, walking the streets in the stiff blue disguise of a government messenger boy, saw, along one of the narrow sandy lanes that zigzagged down from Hurriyah, a Muslim woman wearing freaky sunglasses. Unlike his severe NoIR'S, they were round-square in shape, oversized, attached to the temples below center, and more darkly tinted at the top of the lens than at the bottom. Otherwise she was wearing the traditional black buibui of Muslim women, thong sandals, and a veil. She disappeared into a doorway before Ellellou could halt her and ask at what illegal and subversive market she had made her purchase. He would have cited to her the holy verse, Unbelievers shield their eyes; the truth continues to blaze. In the void created by her vanishing there blossomed then the memory of a tree of sunglasses he had seen when new in the land of the devils, in 1954, he a young deserter enrolled as a special student at a liberal arts college in the optimistic city of Franchise, Wisconsin. He had wandered on that September day, its slanting sunlight peppered with sprinkles of scarlet in the ponderous green of these North American trees, among a thousand white students, through the questionnaires and queues of college enrollment, and across the wide main street, as a-whirl with traffic as a dance of knives, to the awninged bookstore, where in accordance with his course requirements he loaded up with Tom Paine, the Federalist papers, the Arthur Schlesingers, a typographically frenzied scrapbook of masterly American prose, a lethally heavy economics text in a falsely smiling cover of waxen blue, and empty notebooks that he himself was to scribble full of lectured wisdom, their covers mottled like long-rotten wood and their pages suggesting fields of endless thin irrigation ditches. His purchases left him thirsty. From under the awning next to the bookstore he glimpsed through a wide pane of reflection-shuffling glass, above a jumble of faded cardboard totems, a counter that promised some kind of drink, perhaps a silvery arak or, in accordance with the symbols advertising sun-tan lotion, palm wine. Ellellou was not then the devout and abstemious Muslim he became. He entered. The hazards and betrayals of military service and his remarkable flight, which had taken him from Dakar, where he was to have been reassigned to the Algerian struggle, to Marseilles and then London and Toronto, where he was hidden in the French-speaking ghetto behind Queen Street, had not prepared him for the interior of this American drugstore, these walls and racks crowded with intensely captive spirits, passionate, bright, and shrill, their cries for the release of purchase multiplied by the systematic madness of industrial plenty. Boxes contained little jars, little jars contained capsules, capsules contained powders and fluids that contained relief, catharsis, magic so potent, as advertised by their packaging, that young Hakim feared they might explode in his face. In another area there were intricate instruments, sealed upon cardboard with transparent bubbles, for the plucking and curling and indeed torturing of female hair, and next to these implements blunt-nosed scissors, children's crayons, paper punches and yo-yos and, farther on, rows of Mars Bars and Good "n" Plenties and Milky Ways laid to bed in box after box proximate to a rack of toothbrushes, dental floss, and abrasive ointments phallically