The Coup (5 page)

presumptuous loyalty, had followed me, and now embraced me from behind, lest I step into a bullet. "Ellellou, Ellellou," the crowd murmured at my back, in widening, receding waves. They did not doubt; skepticism is wonderfully sapped by hunger. The youngest of the four soldiers stepped forward andwiththe butt of his rifle, deftly as if dislodging a scorpion, knocked my clinging protectoress loose. "He is a poor magician!" she shouted from the sand, through bloodied lips. "Forgive him his madness!" The soldier nodded in bleak disinterest and lifted his rifle again-of Czech manufacture, and obtained at a unit cost that Michaelis Ezana had more than once cited in his mockery of Communist brotherhood-to give me a similar tap, when I produced from the folds of my rags the medal the Soviets had awarded me the week before. Its brass star and bas-relief Lenin made the young man blink. And the crowd behind me, having taken up my name, was now returning it to the fore with such a windy swollen chorusing that my claim to authority seemed divinely reinforced. "Ellelloti, Ellellou": it was a whirlwind. To the sergeant who, having inspected the medal, now pressed it against his own breast with a smile from which the two lower incisors had been removed, I suggested, within our growing complicity, that he compare my face with the portrait of the President of Kush that must hang somewhere in his official quarters. Slowly comprehending, he sent his corporal to fetch such an image. The boy returned, after what seemed a long search, with a framed oleograph half occluded by ingrained dust. The framed face was set beside mine. As the sergeant considered, I considered the medal he still held to his chest. I tried to compose my features into Ellellou's calm, hieratic blur; at least our two faces were coated with the same dust. Kutunda meanwhile was kissing my feet in some paroxysm; whether she was adoring me as her leader, or bemoaning me as a madman about to be shot, was not clear from the quality of her kisses, which felt like the ticklings of a fountain at the base of a statue. From out of the anxious mob behind me, out of the stench of dung fires and stale sweat and the bad breath that goes with empty stomachs, there came, sharp as a honed sword, a sweet and vivid whiff, alcoholic and innocent, of hair tonic such as would blow from the open doorway of a barbershop in Wisconsin. It came, and went. In my trance I was too sanguine. I had underestimated the mischievous streak in my sergeant. He wanted that medal. "No resemblance," he pronounced aloud, in several languages, and I was being dragged away, Kutunda still ardently offering herself as an impediment underfoot, when my fate was dramatically reversed-put into reverse gear, one should say. The Mercedes clove through the crowd like the breath of Allah, and Opuku and Mtesa in their livery and armory of pistols and leather strapping put an end to the debate over my identity. Their guns said, He is Ellellou. In a matter of minutes my khaki uniform and NoIR sunglasses were upon me, the sergeant was prostrate before me, and the medal had been bestowed upon him in ironical pardon. Let me record, however, before proceeding to the climax of this adventure (whose details are, as I write, confounded with the tumbling of sea-smoothed pebbles), for the consolation of the less easily redeemed, that at the very moment of seizure, when it appeared I might be taken off to a summary execution or at best a prolonged interrogation more entertaining to others than to myself, that a merciful numbness and detachment seized me as well, and I saw myself as negligently as a sated hawk sees a jerboa scuttling to its hole in the desert floor. Vested in my dignity, I faced the apparition that loomed beyond the border: a pyramid of crates, sacks, and barbarically trademarked boxes. USA USA USA, they said, and Kix Trix Chex Pops. The twilight in our land is brief, after the flash of green, and I could not make out the legends on the topmost boxes; there seemed to be barrels of potato chips. Of how this mountain of fetchingly packaged pap had materialized in the desolate aftouh of Efu there appeared little trace; stretching away into the heavily subsidized depths of Sahel, straight as a jet-trail, a beaten track testified to the passage of wheeled vehicles, none of which was visible. Nor was there any sign of human activity around the prefabricated fort that stood opposite to our outpost within the symmetrical vacancies of our unallied nations. Only one man, a white man in a button-down shirt and a seersucker suit, showed himself, loping our way with that diffident, confident saunter that needs for setting an awninged main street during an American summer's lunch hour, when dozens of small businessmen, toothpicks between their lips, stroll, eye the competition, and glad-hand one another. This toubab had the tact, however, not to offer me his hand; days in the desert had wilted somewhat his certainty of being found lovable. His French was so haltingly and growlingly pronounced I switched our conversation into English. His eybrows lifted, under the boyish bangs with their obligatory touch of gray. "You have an American accent." "We are well trained in the tongues of others," I told him, "since no one troubles to learn ours." "Who'd you say you were again?" I felt I knew this man well. As is common in his swollen country, he was monstrously tall, with hands of many knuckles and fingernails the width of five-stw pasteboards. His age was not easy to estimate; the premature gray and show-me squint of these Yankees is muddled in with their something eternally puerile, awkward, winning, and hopeful. They want, these sons of the simultaneously most expansionist and most avowedly idealistic of power aggregations, to have all things both ways: to eat both the chicken and the egg, to be both triumphant and coddled, to seem both shrewd and ingenuous. I saw him as a child, in his parents' well-padded, musty home on some curving suburban street, squinting into the fragile glued frame of a model airplane, or licking the sweetened mounts of his stamp collection, unaware that, opening beneath him, an abyss in the carpet, a chute of time would bring him to the respectable adventurism of the foreign service and this evening moment, amid a mob of Tuareg, while a strip of saffron still lingered above the westward safety of Sahel. A stir of pity, like the first unease that will lead to vomit, I bit down. He was young on the ladder of power, still assigned to the negligible nations, the licorice and caramel and chocolate people in their little trays at the front of the store; hard work and no filching would take him, as his gray hair whitened and his sleek wife wrinkled, deeper into the store, to the back room where the wholesalers grunted, amid the aromas of burlap and vinegar, their penny wise accommodations. Better for him to have become a professor of Government at a small snowy Midwestern college. My mind's eye held his wife, who would be freckled and fair and already watching her weight and slightly hardened in the role of foreign service helpmate, too ready to repack the constantly pruned possessions, to adjust her manner to a new race of servants, to learn a new smattering of shopping phrases, to cater gaily, adroitly, and appropriately to those couples above them, below them, and beside them in the dance of legations and overseas offices. I even knew how she would make love: with abashed aggression, tense in her alleged equality of body, primed like a jammed bazooka on the pornographic plastic fetishes and sexual cookbooks of her white tribe and yet, when all cultural discounts are entered, with something of gracious-ness, of helpless feeling, of an authentic twist at the end.... The squirm of nausea again. I pictured their flat in Dakar or Lagos, their "starter house" in a suburb of Maryland or Virginia, with its glass tables and incessant electricity, an island of light carved from our darkness, and my pity ceased. I told the tall intruder, "I am a citizen of Kush, delegated to ask why you are troubling our borders and what means this mountain of refuse?" "This isn't refuse, pal-it's manna. Donated to your stricken area by the generosity of the American government and the American people acting in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. U. s. Air Force C-130's have been flying this stuff in to the emergency airfield in northern Sahel and I've been sent down here from the USD office in Tangier at the urging of the FAO people in Rome to locate the bottleneck vis-a-vis distribution of the emergency aid to the needy areas of Kush and to expedite the matter. I've been sitting out here in the underside of nowhere frying my ass off for two weeks trying to contact somebody in authority. Whoever the hell you are, you're the best thing I've seen today." "May I ask a few questions?" "Shoot." "Who was it, pray, who informed you of this supposed neediness?" He touched his sunburned forehead and shoved back the sheaf of dry hair there. His suit, designed for cocktail parties on embassy lawns, had rumpled, out here in these badlands. His sweat had caked dark not only on his collar but along the hems of his pockets, wherever skin repeatedly touched cloth. "W r ho're you trying to kid?" he asked me. "These cats are starving. The whole world knows it, you can see "em starve on the six o'clock news every night. The American people want to help. We know this country's socialist and xenophobic, we know Ellellou's a schizoid paranoid; we don't give a fuck. This kind of humanitarian catastrophe cuts across the political lines, as far as my government's concerned." "Are you aware," I asked him, "that your government's cattle vaccination project increased herd size even as the forage and water of this region were being exhausted?" "I've read that in some report, but-was "And that the deep wells drilled by foreign governments disrupted nomadic grazing patterns so that deserts have been created with the wells at their center? Are you aware, furthermore, that climatic conditions in this region have been the same for five years, that the 'humanitarian catastrophe" you speak of is to us the human condition?" "O.k., O.k.-better late than never. We're here now, and what's the hang-up? I can't get anybody to talk to me." At my back, the impatient murmur of the Tuareg intensified, and with it intensified, to fade quickly away, that misplaced barbershop sweetness. "I will talk to you," I said, raising my voice so that our audience might understand, at least, that I was on the attack. "I am Ellellou. I speak for the people of Kush. The people of Kush reject capitalist intervention in all its guises. They have no place in their stomachs for the table scraps of a society both godless and oppressive. Offer your own blacks freedom before you pile boxes of carcinogenic trash on the holy soil of Kush!" "Listen," he pleaded, "Zanj is taking tons of grain a day, and they have Chinese advisers over there. This thing cuts right through the political shit, and anyway don't yell at me, I marched for civil rights all through college." "And have now been predictably co-opted," I said. "I am not as ignorant of your nation's methods as you may suppose. As to Zanj, I am told that you have favored its suffering citizens with tons of number two sorghum, a coarse grain grown for cattle fodder, which gives its human consumers violent diarrhea." He shed some insolence at this information, and assumed a more confiding tone. "There've been some ball-ups, yeah, but don't forget these primitives are used to a high-protein diet of meat and milk. They eat better'n we do. We send what we have." "I see," said I, gazing upward at the terrace of crates, fitfully illumined by some torches that had been lit in the throng of witnesses at my back. Korn Kurls had been stamped across one whole tier, and Total in letters of great momentum repeated itself over and over on the wall of cardboard that reached into darkness, toward the blazing desert stars. "Listen," the American was trying to sell me, "these breakfast cereals, with a little milk, sugar if you have it, are dynamite, don't knock "em. You're chewing cactus roots, and we know it." In another tone, boyish and respectful, he asked, "You really Ellellou? I love some of the things you wrote in exile. They were assigned in a Poli Sci course I took at Yale." So he knew of my exile. My privacy was invaded. Confusion was upon me. I took off my sunglasses. The brightness of the lights shed by the torches was surprising. Should I be getting royalties? At the back of my skull the horde was chanting, "Ellellou, Ellellou..." As if to escape a lynch mob, I stepped forward, across the invisible Sahel-Kush border, toward the dark mountain of aid. Seeing this political barrier breached, my American confided, "They really want this stuff," in a voice that implied the battle was over; I would sign some papers, his starchy bounty could be abandoned, he would be received into his wife's freckled bed in Tangier, and his superiors would commend him all the way back to Washington. Alas, there was no safety for him in my heart, or in this night. His pallor, now that night was altogether upon us, appeared eerie, formless, or rather having the form of a parasite shaped to conform to the sunless innards of a nobler, more independent creature. The nomads and their rabble of slaves with a giant rustling crossed the border after me, pressing us with their flapping torches into a semi-circle of space against the cliff of cardboard-cardboard, giant letters of the Roman alphabet, and polypropylene, for our benefactors shipped their inferior sorghum in transparent sacks, whose transparency revealed wood chips and dead mice and whose slippery surfaces reflected the torches, torches that highlighted also with red sparks the rungs of an aluminum ladder set against the cliff, the drops of sweat on the American's parasite-gray neck, and the agitated eyeballs of the Tuareg. "Ellellou, Ellellou...." As their murmur had conjured me from the desert, so I must conjure from within myself a gesture of leadership, an action. Our toubab's slavish, hard-breathing, panic-suppressing demeanor begged for cruelty. Scenting a "deal," a detente, he told me, "No kidding, there's a lot of real food value up there, I remember when they unloaded seeing Spam and powdered milk." He clambered up the ladder to look for these strata, while the Tuareg pressed closer, shaking their torches indignantly at such an act of levitation. I could scarcely hear his shouts: "dis.. here you go... Carnation... add three parts water..." "But we have no water!" I called up to him, trying, it seems now in hindsight, to buy time for both of us. "In Kush, water is more precious than blood!" He was swallowed by darkness, between the torches and the stars. "No problem," his voice
drifted down. "We'll bring in teams... green revolution... systems of portable trenching... a lily pond right where you're standing... here we go ... no, that's cream of celery soup...." His voice, pattering down upon them like a nonsensical angel's, had become an intolerable irritation to the Tuareg masses. As their torches drew nearer, the source of the voice could be seen, a white blur disappearing and reappearing, ever higher, among the escarpments and crevasses of combustible packaging. Within my numbing orb of responsibility, my arm had become leaden; yet I lifted it high, and dropped it in solemn signal, so that the inevitable would appear to come from me. Torches were touched to the base of the pyramid; it became a pyre. To his credit, the young American, when he saw the smoke and flames rising toward him, and all those slopes beneath him ringed by exultant Kushite patriots, did not cry out for mercy, or attempt to scramble and leap to a safety that was not there, but, rather, climbed to the pinnacle and, luridly illumined, awaited the martyrdom for which there must have been, in the training for foreign service provided by his insidious empire, some marginal expectation and religious preparation. We were surprised, how silently he died. Or were his cries merely drowned within the roar of the ballooning tent of flame that engulfed the treasure-heap his writhing figure for a final minute ornamented like a dark star? When he had stood beside me, I could smell on the victim, under the sweat of his long stale wait and the bland, oysterish odor of his earnestness, the house of his childhood, the musty halls, the cozy bathroom soaps, the glue of his adolescent hobbies, the aura of his alcoholic and sexually innocent parents, the ashtray scent of dissatisfaction. What dim wish to do right, hatched by the wavery blue light of the television set with its curious international shadows, had led him to the fatal edge of a safety that he imagined had no limits? I checked my heart's tremor with some verses from the Book, that foresees all and thereby encloses all: On that day men shall become like scattered moths and the mountains like tups of carded wool. On that day there shall be downcast faces, of men broken and worn out, burnt by a scorching fire, drinking from a seething fountain. On that day there shall be radiant faces, of men well-pleased with their labors, in a lofty garden. The Tuareg and their slaves were in a joyful tumult. Opuku and Mtesa came and guarded me from the confusion. There was a slithering in my palm of another, smaller hand. I saw that Kutunda, her broken lip scabbed, was still with me, that I had replaced Wadal as her protector. Now the fire had taken its first giant draught, and our nostrils acknowledged the quantity of grain our triumphant gesture had consumed, for the scorched air was bathed in the benevolent aroma of baking bread; the desert night, as flakes of corrugated-cardboard ash plenteously drifted downward, knew the unaccustomed wonder of snow.