The Coup (10 page)

packaged and chemically fortified to resist the very decay that these celestial candies, marshalled inexorably as soldiers on a parade ground, were manufactured to generate. Hakim's instinct was to smash, to disarray this multifaceted machine, this drugstore, so unlike the chaste and arcane pharmacies of Caillieville, where the sallow Frenchman in his lime-green smock guarded his goods behind a chest-high counter showing only a few phials of colored water. This place was more like a witch's hut of murky oddments hurled to infinity by omnipresent mirrors, even mirrors overhead, circular suspended convex mirrors which foreshortened into dwarves the slack-faced toubab sons and daughters as they shuffled along these artificially cooled aisles like drugged worshippers selecting a pious trinket or potion from the garish variety of aids to self-worship. Sickly music flowed from invisible tubes in the walls. Hakim, in the loose brown suit of an overweight separatist who ran a bistro in colonized Ontario, paused before an upright rack of tall cards, vulgar and facetious, yet which these U. s. indigenes in their ancient freedom were apparently meant to mail to one another in ritualized insult; many of the cards had a tactile element, a piece of fuzz glued to a bit of cartoon clothing, a passage of cardboard raised in the manner of hammered trays from Baghdad, and even, in some of the cards, a hole that appeared to reveal something indecent (un derriere), which, when one opened the card, was revealed as something innocuous (a plate of pink ice cream). "Don't touch." "Pardon?" He identified the voice as arising in the loose-skinned throat of a scrawny besmocked oldster, prodigiously pallid, his forehead blotched by some evidently non-tropical skin disease. "Hands off, young fella. Get those cards dirty, they ain't worth nothin' to nobody." "Je vois." Dirty? Moving away, he nearly bumped into a tree of sunglasses. Less a tree, in truth, than a bush, the height of a man, armored in many dark eyes. The whole thing sluggishly, unsteadily rotated. Bini, the future Ellellou, quickly put his dirty hands behind his back, to display to the querulous attendant that it was not he who was touching this prodigious, fragile array, causing it to tremble. It was, he saw, a young white woman on the other side. With impatient authoritative jerks of her slender bare arms she was pushing at the rack to make it disgorge the, for her, ideal pair of sunglasses. She plucked out a pair with flared tinsel frames, set them deftly but rather roughly on her thin-lipped, decisive face, and sharply asked Hakim, "Whaddeya think?" "Charmante," he brought out, when he realized she was addressing him. She replaced the frames, not in the slot where she had found them, and seized a pair with rims of pale-blue plastic, the lenses also blue. These, blanketing the upper half of her face, emphasized the chiselled prettiness of her mouth and the angry-seeming spatter of freckles across her nose. "Not so good," he said, remembering to speak English this time. "Too much blue." The girl put on a third pair, and this time smiled-a fierce quick smile that pounced upon the space between her pointed chin and bone-straight nose-for when I solemnly looked to give my third verdict, the dark lenses were mirrors, and what I saw, my brown suit swallowed by the two receding drugstores packed into the girl's mocking sockets, was myself, badly shaven, badly dressed, bug-eyed with youth and fright. Her name was Candace. We were to meet often, as fellow freshmen, and became lovers. She was blond. When her summer's freckles faded, her whiteness was so powdery I imagined I could lick it off. "Our parched lips sting still and the rivers of our heart rush upward still to greet the vivid juice of symmetry," Ellellou sang, climbing the narrow brick stairs that ascended to the second floor from the panelled and bossed ancient doorway, so low even he had to stoop, that stood beside the doorway into the basketry-and-hashish shop like an overdressed child beside its preoccupied mother; the shop door stood ajar, yielding to the nameless itinerant seller of images of oranges a murky glimpse of the shop's proprietor leaning forward from beneath his overhanging wilderness of drying raffia and completed but unshaped weaves to exchange with a customer shrouded in rags an elongate packet for a sheaf of rustling, dust-colored lu. Beneath the customer's ragged hem Ellellou glimpsed, or imagined he glimpsed, denim cuffs and the coarse arabesque of platform soles. A tourist, perhaps. Ezana's figures (the Ministry of the Interior had jurisdiction over the Bureau of Tourism) showed that tourists, against all discouragements, were arriving in ever greater numbers, to feast their eyes upon the disaster of the famine, to immerse themselves in the peace of a place on the crumbling edge of nothingness. Eradicate tourism: he made the mental note, and tapped the three syllables of his name, Elstlelstlou, on Kutunda's door, beneath the brass anti-burglary lock she had recently installed. Eradicate property, he thought, eradicate theft. Kutunda was dressed, for it was mid-morning, in the trim Dacron skirt and jacket, with secretarial upsweep and sensible dearth of bangles, in which she reported to her office in the Palais d'Administration des Noires. And Ellellou had seen her flitting in and out of Ezana's office wearing reading glasses like two half-moons cradled on their backs; when she gazed level across their tops, her brown, nearly black eyes appeared startled, her brain beating time behind them and the inquisitive, interrupted arch of her eyebrows also offending him, for she had taken to plucking only the hairs between them, whereas in the desert, with a flint for a razor, she had for beauty's sake painfully scraped them to a thin line. When women cease to beautify, Marx warns, an economic threat is posed to men. "I have an appointment," she told him, as if in truth and not in disguise he was a seller of oranges, with none to sell. "With your President. Now," Ellellou told her. "Take off that absurd capitalist costume." Her tone slipped to a more deferential notch as she offered, "I can put myself at your service any time after lunch, my lord." "Allah reprieves no soul when its term is ended," he quoted, and slipped from his own costume. A fearful reluctance, for she had been imbued with un-Kushite ideals of punctuality, dragged at her hand as together they undid the buttoned, zippered work of the past hour's dressing. The uncovering of her brassiere, and the prim clean underpants, excited him; in the America he had known, a lust had attached to these radiantly laundered undergarments greater than that assigned the naked body, which had confusing associations of aesthetic beauty and the inviolability of marble. Her eyes unaided by spectacles perceived the sign and sceptre of his having been stirred; the dictator bade her, still in her elastic underwear, to kneel to him. Amusement flavoring her indignation, Kutunda with her generous mouth, whose lips had the width but not the eversion of the blacker maidens of the Grionde, and whose little inturned teeth tingled like stars in the night of his nerves, rhythmically swallowed him; their silhouettes, as shallow in relief as figures on a Pharaoh's wall, were almost motionless in the full-length mirror she had installed, between two of the big armoires she had bought to hold her swelling wealth of clothes. In addition to these, silk-lined and papered outside with reproductions of La chasse de la licorne and other Flemish menues verdures, Swiss reproductions so fine one could see every thread of the tapestries, Kutunda had acquired a steel desk supporting what appeared to be a dictating machine, plus tiers of plastic in-out trays, and flanking this desk two new powder-gray four-drawer filing cabinets, so that when Ellel-lou elected to drive home the seed his skillful and by now inspired mistress had brought to the verge of light, it was not easy to find a space of floor in which to execute his decision; the dramatic tug whereby he removed her underpants also brought his elbow into sharp contact with an edge of metal and tears to his eyes. The red thought, Sex is atrocity, flashed into his mind, along with the holy text, Impatience is the very stuff ivhich man is made of. He pushed on; down among the steel handles and jutting drawers he recovered the earthy closeness, if not the satisfactorily rank aromas, of their first love-bouts, in the gritty ditches of unsuccessful wells. He laughed as her gutteral cries exactly fitted his recollections. "My President," she said, when her breathing eased, "has found himself again." "One finds many things thought to be lost, in the preparations for a trip." "A trip again? It's just a few months since you went north to the border and repelled the American invasion." "And rescued the lovely Kutunda." "And rescued the lovely Kutunda," she repeated mechanically. She was throwing on clothes and glancing at her wrist-watch, pinching it to redden its face with numbers. "What appointment with Ezana and his underlings," Ellel-lou asked, "can take such precedence over your adored?" "You take everything so personally," the wench accused, retightening her chignon and snatching up her briefcase. "I adore you, but it's not much of a career, is it, sitting around above a hash shop waiting to turn on the adoration? Michaelis gives me things to do; I can't really read yet, but I can talk on the telephone, and almost every day now I have these fascinating conversations with a woman whose Sara is quite fluent but really so funnily accented, I have to control myself from laughing sometimes-she phones all the way from Washington nearly every morning, I forget what hour it is their time, I really can't see why the imperialists don't have the same time we do, they must be going to bed at dawn and having lunch under the stars. Michaelis has tried to explain a thousand times, he says the world is round like an orange, and spins, and the sun is another orange-was "What do you talk about, with this woman from Washington?" "Oh, anything, we just warm the line up. She tells me what the weather is like, and how long the lines are at the gas stations, and what a nice man Mr. Agnew was, always so well-spoken and well-groomed"-she glanced about wildly, looking for something she lost, and then found it, the alligator case containing her reading glasses-"and then Mr. Klip-springer comes on and talks to Michaelis." "And what does this lackey of the oppressors say to Colonel Ezana?" I asked, my fury, which pressed inside my head like corked champagne, defizzed by the melancholy observation that she no longer moved like the great-granddaughter of a leopard, but more electrically, twitchily, like a modern woman connected to a variety of energy-sources. Her nobly stout legs, with their calloused, broadened heels and pantherlike thighs, had been slimmed, by some (i imagined) calibrated diet whose pseudo-medical niceties were catered to even in the depths of our famine. "Oh, I don't know, they talk in English, I suppose about the reparations-was "Reparations?" My doxy was frightened, seeing that these matters, which had become commonplace in her bureaucratic life, were a scandal to me; feigning, this time, a search, she with her briefcase and Dacron suit and trim legs and taut shiny hair from which all sand and mutton grease had been rinsed, looking everywhere but into my face, backpedalled and dodged about the cluttered, compressed room, before whose door I stood guard, soldierly though naked, a small brown man not really weary of being deceived. The knot of guilt in my belly needed still more digestive acid. "My President surely knows," Kutunda fluttered, "of the negotiations concerning the American, Gibbs, who immolated himself on the pile of contraband either in madness or in protest of his nation's continued efforts to subvert Southeast Asia, or of American complicity in the recent renewed Israeli assault upon Arab integrity. Apparently at college he had been radical. His widow wants his ashes. At the moment, if my understanding is accurate, and it may well not be, in exchange for the ashes and an apology to President Chremeau, whose territory was violated-was "Never! He violated ours by giving the white devils free passage." "And you know, of course, about the Koran in Braille." "Braille?" "A wonderful invention," Kutunda explained with innocent enthusiasm, "that enables the blind to read with their hands. As his part of the bargain Klipspringer is going to ship thousands-ten thousand, twenty thousand, he's waiting for Michaelis to pull together the 1970 census figures-and along with them twenty or thirty absolutely apolitical instructors in this alphabet, you tattoo it onto the paper, I've felt some, it tingles, you can't see it but you can feel it, for a study center they would be willing to put up in Istiqlal, on the site of the USIS library that got burned down in the coup five years ago. It's quite dramatic-looking, I've seen blueprints, concrete wings supported by polyurethaned nylon cables, and stainless steel letters all across the front, naming it for, they wondered if you'd object, the old king Edumu, because he was blind. You must know about it. Hasn't Klipspringer talked to you over the phone too? He talks to me, sometimes, before Michaelis comes on, only his Arabic is about as simple as mine, he gets me to giggling. Please don't frown. Klipspringer absolutely promises there won't be any CIA people among the Braille instructors, he hates the CIA more than we do, he says they've gone and pre-empted the policy-making powers of Congress, whatever that means, and nobody in Washington will have them to any parties. You did know all of this, didn't you? Tell me you're just teasing." "I never tease my Kutunda, because she tells me such good stories. Take a message, if you will, to my old comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, once Corporal, Ezana. Tell him it has come to my attention that he verily is Roul, the desert devil." "And I can go? That's super. I haven't missed too much of the meeting, it was going to be a slide show and those are always slow to set up. Klipspringer has sent us a whole crate of carousels showing agriculture and irrigation in the Negev. You could come too. You could give me a ride. Don't you have anything to do up at the Palais? We could make love after lunch if you wanted, I'm sorry if I seemed preoccupied this morning, you caught me at a bad time, but I didn't fake my climax, I swear it. It was a beautiful climax, really. Only my President can lead me so utterly to forget myself, I am led to the brink of another world, and grow terrified lest I fall in and be annihilated. It's neat." It heartened me to see the desert child in her revived, wheedling and winsome, at the thought of a ride in my Mercedes. "I'll drop you on the way," I said. "I