The Coup (16 page)

Impressionist rendering of a beehive hut and a baobab tree. Stealthily past these images of an out-of-date intermingling Ezana crept, pondering the meaning of colonialism, the impossibility that a nation with the sublime literature and cuisine of France would subdue a scruffy sixth of an ungrateful continent in order to create flattering jobs for a few adventurous dregs, and the concomitant possibility that now this great land of Kush existed solely to give employment to a few revolutionary elitists like himself. The memorials of imperial atrocities stretched out their shadows as if not to let him go as he eased back the massive hexagonal bolt on a door beneath an oil portrait of Governor Faidherbe, action shots of the Hourst expedition, and photostats of especially atrocious pages from Colonel Toutee's famous diary. Ezana let himself stealthily into the corridor. It was empty. The flaking white ceiling, the green molding at the level of his hand, diminished toward infinity. Ghostly in his dirty prisoner's robe, his eyes bugging in his curvilinear face, his wristwatch holding the exact time to the second behind its own black face, Ezana moved close to the wall, pondering Ellellou, his leader's far journey, the unlikelihood that he would reach his destination. He pondered his own survival, weighed the odds against a Palais coup. But Ezana had no wish to lead. To advise, to raise quiet objections while chocolate quietly cooled, to train typists, sign directives, pull rafts of allied statistics from the consoles of filing cabinets, to see a nation and all its nebulous load of baffled human consciousness reduced to rigorous alignments of nouns and numbers, and furthermore to dress like a dignitary, to appear on an odd denomination of postage stamp, and to have an embezzled fortune banked against the Day of Disaster in a numbered Swiss account-all this he liked, but not to lead. A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish; hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. Ezana furthermore didn't see that leadership was very productive or progressive; the results that truly changed the condition of mankind were achieved by anonymous men, accumulators of correct facts and minute improvements, men of unspectacular gifts who add the culminating touch and arrive at the nearly obvious conclusion while the charismatic sloganeers and lightning rods of the media go through their symbolic motions-paper gods consumed by the primeval conflagration of human curiosity. They could be scrapped in a minute, but there would always be a place for a man like him. He crept along the corridor, and came at last to a stairway. Day-Glo-orange arrows pointed down and signs in six languages said down only. Ezana had reason to ask himself if indeed he did have a place. In his cheap robe of old merikani, its folds tapping his shaking knees and spherical buttocks, he felt transposed into that spatially vague afterlife so monotonously guaranteed by the rambling Mohamet. Did the stairway go down to the girls' high school or to the prison where dissident rural chiefs and adolescents addicted to contraband comic books underwent laborious courses of political reeducation, with seminars on the Thousand Uses of the Peanut and the Thought of Josef Stalin thrown in for second offenders? Ezana had no business in either of these places; his education felt complete. Against all official indications he took the stairway up, to the floor where his old offices were. The image of his old suite-the shag carpet, the glass-topped desk, the In basket, the Out basket, and the little tree of rubber stamps beside the postage scales-burned in his mind like an oasis in the imagination of a desert traveller. Once seated in that place, he could regrasp the levers of government. Ellellou, however far away, would feel the nation rumble under his feet, the gears of progress re-engaged. The contretemps concerning Gibbs and Klipspringer would pass like a woman's petulance. He and Ellellou needed one another as the earth needs the sky, as the traveller needs the camel. One determines, the other implements. Already Ezana was beginning to feel snug, nestled back into place and reconnected to the power terminals. The first thing he must implement, he saw with sudden executive clarity, was the cooling of Klipspringer. These Americans, they talk in billions, but turn out to have been "brainstorming." No matter: the quick winds of Washington would blow him away, and another bargainer would take his place. As for the Russians, he would work to rid Kush of their boisterous mischief. Obstructionists and familiars of confusion, profiteers of all disarray, they were behind this melancholy distraction of the President, Ezana had no doubt. The superparanoids, he had once amusingly called the world's present subdividers. He found them both gross, compared to the old imperialist powers, who in their chilly country houses and baroque chancelleries at least had partitioned the outgunned continents while being served delicacies beside which borscht and hamburger were so much dogfood. He was hungry, Ezana realized. He wound his way through three echoing turns of the cast-iron spiral stairs and came to a door of riveted plates, each stamped with Art Nouveau efflorations. These noodly motifs the French had brought, along with military science, the metric system, and punctilio. This door swung open at a touch. Why? Ezana wondered if his guards might have awoken from their comas and alerted the authorities. But what authorities? The carpeted corridors, with their water-coolers and framed citations for bureaucratic excellence, their cork bulletin boards shingled with yellowing, curling inter-office memos and facetiously annotated clippings from Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche, were empty at this hour, like a valley whose inhabitants have fled before the rumored invader could materialize. The narrow door of Ellellou's ascetic office was shut, its frosted glass inscrutable, intact, dark. But behind the larger glass of Ezana's own office door, two dozen steps along the corridor, past a circular table holding copies of Cuban and Bulgarian magazines whose covers featured tawny beauties beaded with water on the beaches of the Black and Caribbean seas, a light burned. A guttural laugh, as from a ditch, arose within. He put his ear-abnormally small and infolded, even for a black man-against the glass. He heard beneath Kutunda's laugh another voice, male, loudly at ease. They were waiting for him, a party was in progress. Delicately Ezana opened the door and moved through his old anteroom to the inner office. There he was greeted by the dazzling sight of Kutunda in lacy red underwear, her hair bleached platinum and teased to a bouffant mass, bringing a wire basket of papers, like a cocktail waitress bringing hors d'oeuvres, to the man behind the desk. This was the oval-faced young man who had once read the Koran to the king; he still wore his plum-colored fez and his expression of dense ebony calm, though in his hand was held, black and white and faintly blue, a gun. "We need each other," he told Michaelis Ezana.

V

Esmeralda Miller was an interesting color, a gray as of iron filings so fine the eye could not detect the individual grains. In Hakim's fancy the tint, which savored of manufacture, was a by-product of her beliefs, her economic determinism. At the same time she was an attractive, ecto-morphic young woman, with a lean prognathous face, almond-shaped eyes framed in pink plastic spectacles, and a bewitching way of thoughtfully swaying her jaw, as if testing molar crowns her father had made for her. "What are you trying to achieve?" she would ask the young deserter from Noire, across the table in the Off-Campus Luncheonette, or later in the Pure Dairy Products Ice Cream Parlor, or later still in the Badger Cafe, with its beer-soaked sawdust on the floor, and its bubbling, phosphorescent advertisements. "Messing around with this deluded bitch Candy." "Achieve? That's a rather other-directed way of putting it. What did Freud say? Pleasure is the removal of tension. There is a tension that screwing her relieves. No doubt the sex has a component of vengeance, of tasting evil, of stealing Charlie's prize, et cetera. From her side, kindred craziness. Still, we get along." "She's no prize, is what you can't see. She put the move on you in the first place. You just took it. You've been taking it for years, now, and she's got marriage in her eye. What happens when you graduate?" "I have told her, more than once, that I am married." "To some old black cow in the heart of nowhere? This white girl no more cares about that woman than a bug under a rock. She doesn't believe she exists, and neither do I. Anyway, who says you're ever going back? Let's face it, Haps, you're American as apple pandowdy. I try to talk sense to you friend to friend, and you give me back David Riesman and overheard Freud. I love you." This last was said as lightly as these words can be said, as Bob Hope or Clark Gable says them, but Felix took them in, and understood her advice now as propaganda. He began to play with her. "As a Muslim, I am entitled to four wives." "Shit. You're about as Muslim as I am Daddy Warbucks. I hope that stuff hasn't taken you in; it's just our usual native storefront I'm-comin'-home-Jesus routine, with a few funny phrases thrown in. Inshallah, Walla-Walla." "I don't mock your faith," he said stiffly. "Anyway, you're wrong about my never going back. You don't follow the African news in the back pages. The British have given in to Nkrumah, and de Gaulle has been brought to power to end the Algerian war. Only de Gaulle can face down the military." "God, you're impossible when you get on your great men kick. De Gaulle is just Ike with a bigger nose; they are balloons. History is happening underneath. When the op- pressed peoples rise up, they will just take. Meanwhile, nobody is giving them anything. France can bleed all it wants, international capital won't let it let go." "International capital, I believe, has decided colonies are obsolete. The companies themselves, and their insidious products, are the new armies." "The proletariat-was "The proletariat, there is no proletariat. Show me the proletariat here. You have the blacks, kept in ghettos because of a superstitious horror of their skins, their rolling eyes, their whiplike penises-was "Some are stubby," Esmeralda said. "You have the Indians," Felix went on, "who never knew what hit "em. And you have the white workers, who Marx to the contrary are thoroughly enrolled in consumerism, making junk and buying junk, drinking junk and driving junk. That is the revolution, surely-the triumph of the unnecessary. If Marx could see his English proletariat now, he wouldn't recognize such softness, such silliness, soaked through and through with ale and the telly. He thought the proletariat was a sponge that would have to be squeezed until a revolution ran out. What happened instead is it sopped up some of the surplus its labor had created and bloated, in a spongy way. There is a kind of poisonous mush abroad in the planet, Esmeralda, and the Muslims aren't quite wrong about its being devilish. It crowds out the good, it makes goodness impossible. Great fanatics can no longer arise; they are swamped by distractions." "There you go, into obscurantism again. Ideas go back to basics. Food and shelter and clothing, medicine and transportation and the rest of it. Everybody has the same needs, but ninety per cent of the world's wealth is in the hands of ten per cent of the world's people. A revolution has to come." "Movements have to come. Marx was right, the world is a machine; but he thought some parts, the parts he named, moved while the rest held still. I see two major motions in the world now. There is this seeping down and outwards of Euro-American consumerism. And there is this groping upwards of the dusky underdog. But a third motion encompasses both. As the poor man reaches upwards, the ground is sinking beneath his feet, he is sinking in the spreading poverty, the muchness of humanity divided into the same weary constant, the overused, overpopulated world." He sipped his beer; its bubbles reminded him: "In my boyhood the giraffes, the elephants, the lions were familiar deities, come to play on the horizon of our world. Soon there will be no animals left bigger than men. Then, only cockroaches, rats, and men. So these gestures of economics are like the reaching gestures on Geri-cault's painting of the raft of the Medusa, gestures that will never grasp their objects, because the raft is sinking. Your Communism is such a failed gesture. In the industrialized countries of Western Europe, where Marx reasoned the uprising must come, the Communist party officials wear suits with vests, and sidle forward for their share, as you Americans say, of the pie." Her silence, during which she appeared to be focusing closely upon his lips, emboldened him to continue, in what he fancied a Dostoevskian vein: "The age of any revolution is five years. After that, either its participants have wandered off, dismayed by failure, or else have succeeded and become an establishment, generally more tyrannous than the one they displaced. We Africans like de Gaulle. He reminds us of the giraffe, of the gods that no longer visit us. He will make a revolution, not from underneath but from above; give him five years. Algeria will get its independence, and with it, because the French are imperious and demand absolute logic of themselves, all the vast lesser bits of French West Africa, even my empty, unloved Noire. That is how history happens, in fits of impatience. Then de Gaulle will be thrown aside, like Robespierre; or else become a fussy old man losing quarrels with his Parliament. No matter; by then I will have returned. Au revoir, @ltats-Unis! Farewell, Esmeralda!" The future Ellellou had a strange sensation, sometimes, in talking to these Americans, black or white: their faces were units in a foreign language, they inhabited a stratum of reality, a slant of thought, so remote from his own that in the effort to be understood he grew dizzy. Esmeralda's solemn gray face, with that touch of languid sexuality working at the rounded points of her jaws, seemed across the table a chasm or a well he was looking straight down into, where his own head was distantly, waveringly mirrored. She said, "You should write some of that up and send it to The Journal of Underdeveloped Political Thought." The journal was really called Political Thought in the Underdeveloped Nations, and was published by a group of suspect liberals and malcontented expatriates in an adjacent Midwestern state, one also shaped like a mitten. Hakim took her advice, spinning out in a few long caffeine-crazed nights between terms that little string of articles mentioned sixteen years later, with unintended provocative effect, by the unfortunate Gibbs. They comprised in Hakim's mind the third triumph of his undergraduate career. The second had been his near-election, missing by four votes (his four black friends, he suspected), as Campus Organizer of Pep. His first had been his seduction of Candy. "You really taking that bitch back with you?" Esmeralda asked. He toyed with his empty beer glass, wondering if he should have another. "I had not thought so." "Good luck, black boy, losing her. These white chicks like to call the tune; leave off the loving, they holler rape." "My native land would seem a barren place to Candace." The balusters of her staircase, the claustrophobic comfort of her father's living-room, swirled through his mind, as he exposed his lower teeth in reflection, conscious of Esmeralda's abnormally intent focus upon his lips. Her stare was numbing his gums. "Somebody that strong-headed and spoiled thinks she could melt the North Pole if she went there. That's the weakness of a ruling class, they can't take in adverse information. How do you feel about Craven?" He flipped the little cardboard coaster, idly, to the side without an advertisement. "Unhappy. I believe there have been tender passages between them." "You can bet your ass on that. She'll fuck anything as long as it's not a boy her own age, race, and income bracket. That's her revolution. Haps, she's bad news. She's tough, and she's cold. What is the magic? You've been making yourself conspicuous with that girl since you set foot on free soil." He thought of Candy, her pink cheeks, her red knitted headscarf, her neurotic sharp smile, and of how, coming up to her along a diagonal path, standing next to her in the cold, he felt airy and towering. He told Esmeralda, "It's like eating snow." Even this seemed too much a confession, a betrayal; he became angry with his interrogator. "Why should I come to this country to sleep with a black woman?" he asked her explosively. "My country is nothing but black women." Still in that squeezed voice of anger, he said, "How about another beer?" "Beer back at the YCC," Esmeralda mumbled, submissively. The Young Communist Club kept two rooms in an asbestos-shingled tenement house on a back street of Franchise, for a rent that, though beyond the means of the meagre membership, was somehow met. Esmeralda could count, this night as on most nights, on having the place to herself. They walked along pavements packed with snow, only the heads of the parking meters protruding from the drifts, the whiteness hardened to ice and tinted by neon signs and the half-lit display windows of closed shops, ungrated in those safe days, even the windows of jewelry stores. Back from Commerce Street the pavements were erratically shovelled, so for some stretches, where a widow lived, or a family that had fallen below the social norms, glossy mounds had to be traversed on little paths, worn by the boots of schoolchildren. Candy for this weekend had gone away with her family, skiing in the Laurentians. The YCC quarters were identified only by the initials. No hammer and sickle, no red star. There had been problems with broken windows. Esmeralda turned up the heat. A mattress on the floor did for a bed. The term "crash pad" had not yet been invented. Esmeralda's body, naked on the sheetless ticking, was the same slate hue her face was, an even soft gray that moved him, taken with her stringy hips and underdeveloped breasts; the slaver's sperm, it seemed, had entered her blood line to steal shine from her skin, and joyful African protuberance from her body. When she left the bed, instead of glimmering in the darkened room like a candle, she vanished. What Felix liked best about these American seductions was not the exchange of salivas and juices but the post-coitus, the ritual cigarettes and the standing around in the kitchen rummaging up something to eat, their exploited genitals lit up by the sudden glow of the refrigerator, its polychrome wealth of beer cans, yogurt cups, frozen vegetables, packets of cheese and luncheon meats and other good bottled, wrapped, and encapsulated things. The young Communists, like any frat, kept a sweet, starchy, and spotty larder. To Hakim, reared on nuts 8: and porridges, this gentle, naked pecking after food-Esme-ralda concocted herself a sandwich of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff-savored of home and soothed the acerb aftereffects of the tragic act of love. She had had no climax, and he had been distracted by the giant red poster of Lenin, goateed and pince-nezed, staring upwards with the prophetic fury of a scholar who has just found his name misspelled in a footnote. "She ain't even taught you how to screw," Esmer-alda said, pleased to have an additional score on Candy, and depressing her lover with the hint that their fornication, in such romantic surroundings, had been merely an extension of a propaganda campaign. To an extent, it worked; he looked more kindly upon Marx thereafter, as Marx, from a poster on the other wall, grandfatherly and unfoolable, had looked kindly down upon the heaving buttocks of the future Ellellou. The time had come for them to leave the caravan. The flinty passes had widened and the Massif now tipped downwards toward the highlands of Zanj and, weeks to the northeast, the southwest corner of Egypt. We thanked Sidi Mukhtar with a purse of hundred-still pieces. Feeling that our relationship, though extended in time, had been less close emotionally than it might have been, I confided that I and my beautiful bride (as amorous, I further confided in coarse Berber, as she was shapely) had peeked into some of the caravan's cases and discovered their unexpected contents. His grin displaying the rift between his front teeth, and lifting a pearl-sized wart nestled in the flange of one nostril, our leader explained the eventual destination of the office supplies: Iran. "The Shahanshah," he said, "has much wish to modernize. In his hurry he buy typewriters from West Germans and paper from Swedes and then discover only one type spool fit type- writer, only one type eraser not smudge paper. American know-how meanwhile achieve obsolescence such that only fitting spool stockpiled in Accra as aid-in-goods when cocoa market collapse. Formula of typewriter eraser held secret and cunning capitalists double, redouble price when Shah push up oil price to finance purchase of jet fighters, computer software, and moon rocks. French however operating through puppet corporations in Dahomey have secured formula as part of multi-billion-franc deferred-interest somatic-collateral package and erect eraser factory near gum arabic plantations. Much borax also in deal, smuggled by way of Quagadougou. Now Sadat has agreed to let goods across Nile if Shahanshah agrees to make anti-Israeli statement and buy ten thousand tickets to son-et-lumiere show at Sphinx." I did not believe the rogue's garbled story, but deemed it prudent to suppress my doubts. Instead, I repeated our appreciation of his rejela (valor) and dhiyafa (hospitality), said that his skill at navigating through the perils of the Balak argued a pious intimacy with the purposes