The Coup (8 page)
1968. The whole room, with its cracks and gaps and air of casual assemblage and incompleted intentions, seemed an insubstantial sham compared to a room I could suddenly remember, of white-painted moldings and unchipped knickknacks, of impregnable snugness and immovable solidity, tight as the keel of a ship, carpeted wall to wall, crammed with upright, polished, nubbled, antimacassared furniture including a cabineted television set and a strange conical table of three platterlike shelves that held a gleaming trove of transparent paperweights containing in their centers crinkled paper or plastic flowers, evil eyes of all colors whose stare seemed a multiform sister to the grave gray-green Cyclops stare of the unlit television screen, all this furniture in this exotic far-off room sharing a feeling of breathless fumigated intrusion-proof cleanness that pressed on my chest as I waited for someone, love embodied, as perfect and white as the woodwork that embowered her, to descend the stairs; the varnished treads and slender balusters did a kind of pirouette at the foot of the stairs, a skillful cold whirl of carpentry that broke, by one of those irruptions to which my mind was lately prone, through the dusky mud tints of Sittina's villa, the tender fragility of things African, the friable dishes and idols and houses of earth moistened and shaped and dried again, of hides and reeds crumbling back to grass and dust, of the people themselves for their bright moment of laughter rising out of the clay and sinking again, into the featureless face of Allah, which it is the final bliss for believers to behold, through the seven veils of Paradise. My memory laid a cold curse on the present moment. Sittina's offhand beauty, the sense of suspension her mind spun, in the disarrayed room, as she waited for me to leave, so she could proceed with that life of uncompleted curves that amused her, underlined the desolation known only to those who live between two worlds. But who, in the world, now, does not live between two worlds? "I'm glad," I said to her, of the Chagall; and of the drought: "We are taking steps." "God, Felix, the depression rolls off you like a stench." "Sorry. Something about you touched me just then." She made a swift movement, testing her hair, which was pulled back from her skull and intricately pinned by two dried fish spines. The women of Kush spare no pains to knit and knot their hair in extraordinary patterns. No doubt there is a Marxist explanation for this, having to do with a disproportion of available labor to available materials, all history testifying, with the tedious workmanship that crowds our museum cases, to a terrible excess of life, of time, that overruns all crannies as tropical tendrils embroider every inch of available light. Sittina's gesture had been flirtatious. She offered, haltingly, "I have an appointment to go out, but if my lord... has come in search of his... rights, I will stay. Cheerfully. It once... we... I am attempting to apologize for something I am not certain I caused. Until the Revolution, we were together enough. Is that not so?" "It is so, Sittina. Your shadow in a dark room ..." I could not finish, the memory slipped its sheath. "Did I become an enemy of the people, that I had to be rebuffed?" The recollection of her warm shadow, the sudden scissoring embrace of her long thighs, my hand underneath those taut buttocks, overlaid the stuffily immaculate living-room with its evil dance of balusters and staring glass objets, and I found myself too sliced, by successive waves of lost experience, to explain well what I did wish to share: "Under the old king, there was a kind of life possible, which we borrowed from him, his vitality and his unexamined assumption that he was right, right to demand and consume what so many strained to donate out of their poverty. When he was displaced, much that was let us say healthy and morally neutral went with him, inextricably involved as it was with the corruption, the bourgeois feudalism, the unpurged way of looking at things. You and I were among the innocent sweepings. I am sorry." She said, "I had forsaken my father for you, at a time when he lived hunted in the mountains. When the tide of massacre reversed, he beckoned me to take my place among the Tutsi as a princess. I declined. And still I stay here with you, though all Africa says you are crazy." "Is that so?" "It is so that they say it. The truth of what they say, I cannot judge. Our traditions treat madness as sacred, and we look to the sacred to rule us." "The appointment you are about to keep, does it excite you?" "It did. Now you've confused me." "Remember our trysts, under the stadium, when we were children of the king?" "The king, the king. You are king now." "Do you still make that cooing noise, when you spread your legs?" "I have said, I will stay." She spat, a Tutsi courtesy. "G. My blood is heavy in me." "I must say, you're spreading a lot of guilt around." "Some day, when the land is healthy again, it would please me to be enlisted among the men who serve you, Sittina." "You deserted, when this army contained no body but yours. And I understand you brought back a Sara wench from the north, and have installed her above a basket shop." "A matter of state, merely. The woman acts as my adviser." "Ask me my advice"-her words kept rhythm with the vigor of her circular motions as she wound a turban about her skull, and finished with a swash around her throat-"and it would be to give Kush back to old Edumu and the frogs and get some decent pate back in the shops." "I liked what you said about madness," I said. "Did you know," I went on, unwilling, somehow, to have this dishevelled visit terminate, "that the British once had a plan of flooding the entire Sahara, before they realized it was a plateau? They thought it would fill like a bathtub because it was under the Mediterranean on their maps!" Sittina was setting off, swooping here and there to kiss her children like a black heron dipping her narrow head to catch fish; half-unthinkingly she finished by kissing her husband, the swoop and dip being minimal here, because the dictator of Kush was a mere six inches shorter than she. Her breath, snatched inwards in the exultation of her departure, smelled of anise. As she retreated, the cut of her culottes, and a lift given her figure by the addition of the turban, made her look high-assed. "I love you," said Ellellou, unheard. The trial of the king proceeded smoothly. The revelation that he was still alive proved, surprisingly, to be no surprise. The populace had always sensed it. The monarch's health was still drunk in the palm-wine bars, in the narrow stalls where the faithful chew khat while the pagans swallow barasa and guinea-corn beer. Even in the public schools, in the lists of the Lords of Wanjiji, the reign of Edumu IV was learned with an open dash, without a date of termination. For the sake of the foreign press, then, developments within the Palais d'Administration des Noires were staged through a successive lifting of veils of rumor. The first rumor was that the king had been living in exile across the river, among the loyal Wanj who continued their life of trading fish and hippo teeth for salt and juju beads under the remote rule of Captain Bokassa of former Oubangui-Shari. The next rumor was that the king had ill-advisedly crossed the Grionde to lead a revisionist, pro-monarchial coup; this preposterous attempt, founded on fantastical CIA intelligence that the people of Kush were disenchanted with L"'@lmergence and SCRME, of course failed, encountering on the north bank of the river the magnificent solidarity of the Kushite national conscience. The third rumor claimed that, amid terrific loss of life among his followers, the king was taken into custody, and (this was the fourth rumor) captured papers revealed that the severe food shortages of recent years had been caused not by the climate of Kush nor its bountiful soil but by royalist conspirators within the administration. According to the fifth rumor, Lieutenant-Colonel Michaelis Ezana was superbly extirpating these anti-people, pro-feudalist traitors from the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Transport, which had been discovered exporting foodstuffs to neighboring Sahel, along whose border one massive illegal cache had been discovered and destroyed by the personal vigilance and action of Colonel Ellellou himself, in response to information provided by a female patriot, Kutunda Traore, a griot of the doughty Sara tribe. Mentioning Kutunda had been Ezana's idea, not mine. He had met her at my office, where she would visit me during the heat of the mid-day to enjoy the air-conditioning and to bring me lunch of peppered raw mutton and honied manioc from the Hurriyah market, and to borrow some lu. The rustle and intricate engraving of paper money delighted her innocence; in the village of her girlhood there had been, apart from heads of cattle, only two types of currency, both rare-giant bars of iron impossible for a woman to lift, and tiny round mirrors that, if dropped, were hard to find. Ezana spoke a rusty dialect of Sara, and spent hours with Kutunda, giggling and yelping over his own grammatical errors. For the people of Kush, a pronouncement was promulgated:
TO caret ALL CITIZENS OF T caret USH @leaence Supreme Qonseil T caret evolutionnaire et Militaire pour Vandmergence announces that miserable Sdumu formerly known as @lgreater-than ord of Wanjiji has been found Quilty of High Qrimes and caret Misdemeanors against the People and "Physical environment of Kush, leading to Widespread Shortages, Dislocations, and Suffering.
The
TS-IATIONAL Honor of Kush and the
Will of less-than Allah demand that
Justice be
"Done to this T left-brace eactionary and "Discredited Exploiter of the less-than Jvlany, Who in the course of his caret Moc backslash ery of a Tggeign appropriated to Himself the caret Means of Production and the Headwaters of Revenue, as well as Wantonly and without caret Jvlercy ordering the Deaths and Ignominies of those who served Him, and privately doubting to his Intimates the One True Qod, the Compassionate and caret Merciful, Whose Prophet is caret Mohamet.
Aforesaid
Couldumu's
Very
Vresence in the
@land dilutes and Undermines the Scientific Socialism of Rush; this 'Blot upon Our Flag will be Joyously T caret emoved the twelfth Day of Shawwal in this Year st59J caret A. h., in the Square of the caret Mosque of the Day of Disaster, within the Holy Qapital of Istiqlal.
Colonel H. F. Ellellou
President of Kush Chairman of SCRME
This announcement, printed on green placards, was posted on the walls of the city, and was chanted, in Arabic, Berber, French, Tamahaq, Salu, Sara, Tshi, and Ga, from the minarets of the mosques, from the windows of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, from the weathered wooden balconies of the Indian shops and the reed roofs of the riverside souk. Word had even been posted in the panoramic revolving restaurant of the glass skyscraper the East Germans had erected to the glory of socialism. Yet the crowd that came to the execution was small. By mid-morning the sun stood high and the clay of the square, packed by the passage of footsteps to the smoothness of ivory, was white to the eye and scalding to unsandalled feet. Several military trucks had been aligned and the sides removed, to make a platform for the ceremony. King Edumu, bobbing with the aftereffects of his interrogation, which had focussed on the soles of his feet, and blinking in this unaccustomed breadth of light, which penetrated even his crazed corneas, was led forth in white robes by some soldiers who, it was clear from their carriage and aura, had greeted this great day with tumblers of kaikai. The meagre throng, at least half of them children given a school holiday, attempted a cheer that ebbed into puzzled sullen silence as the king, his little body more than once having to be disentangled from his voluminous, luminous lungi, was lifted into position on the flatbed of the central truck, where Ellellou, Ezana, and the nine other colonels were seated on folding chairs. A headblock had been hacked of blood-red camwood. The king stood awkwardly beside it, not knowing at first which way to face. Behind him, in a ragged arc doubled, as a rainbow is sometimes doubled, by an arc of parasols above it, wives and offspring and lesser government officials crowded the subsidiary trucks and even perched on the cab roofs. Of Ellellou's four wives, none had deigned to appear, but Kutunda Traore was present, resplendent in a cascading emerald boubou and a turban that Sittina had designed. Vivaciously speaking to one bureaucrat and then another, tossing her head and switching her hips, she had appointed herself the hostess of the occasion. Ellellou searched her face vainly for traces of the smudged whore he had found among the well-diggers. Why, he wondered, generation after generation, century after century, must vulgarity repossess all the energy? Still, Kutunda's childish delight and stocky self-importance alone struck, in this atmosphere of embarrassed, underpopulated anti-climax, the ringing bronze note of gleeful release and public complicity he had hoped for. Not quite alone; for there was another who entered unembarrassed into the occasion, and that was the king. Though crippled by age and inquisition, and more insecure in his gestures under the vacuous dome of sky than in the close-walled cells of his confinement, the king had the forms for his feelings. Beneath the glitter of his gold headband and the cloud of his unshorn wool his fig-dark features shone with formal courage. The little arc of his nose aimed, amid the insolent hubbub, in the direction of the citizenry. They, with the exception of a few children, had tucked themselves well back from the trucks, in the alley-mouths and beneath the cafe-awnings at the shady rim of the square. So far from continuous, a blanket of unified humanity as Ellellou had imagined, it was a crowd of clots, as recalcitrant-appearing perhaps as those clots of blood from which Allah first fashioned men. The king lifted his arms. He spoke in no language that Ellellou knew. A few of the crowd, its drowsy buzzing ceased, stepped forward from the alleys and the awnings onto the blazing clay, better to hear; these were the ones who understood Wanj. Thus the blackest and most stoic faces sifted forward, leaving behind the brown, the reddish-tan, the merely dusky. The king in his blindness stared directly into the sun, orating. "People of Wanj, rejoice with me! Today I go to join our ancestors, who live below, who are our blood! These mad soldiers who attempt to govern us are puppets of the ancestors, who dangle them a moment before they toss them aside. If their rule is just, why has the sky-god withheld rain these five years? They say Edumu is the center of the sickness, but when I was the Lord of Wanj and had bewitched the French with their little round hats to be my policemen and scribes, rain fell in abundance, and the palms poured their wine upon the ground, and there were not enough camels in Noire to carry our peanuts to Dakar! Of what am I accused by these poor soldiers, those apostles of He socialisme scientifique" [for Wanj had no words for this concept]? Of black magic, of being l un element indesirabWill within the fabled purity of Kush! I say Kush is a fiction, an evil dream the white man had, and that those who profess to govern her are twisted and bent double. They are in truth white men, though their faces wear black masks. Look at them as they sit behind me, with their fat wives and fatter children! What have these men to do with you? Nothing. They have come from afar, to steal and enslave. I challenge them by the ancient code of Wanjiji: let him who accuses me execute me! If a demon give his hand strength, then guilt shall travel up his arm and become his soul's burden. If he falter, then I will live, and those who speak Wanj will still have a Lord and a living connection with the gods of their ancestors!" The crowd hissed and murmured in its desultory way; the sun, mounting higher, was draining purpose and clarity from the holiday. Colonel Wambutti, who spoke Wanj, crouched forward and murmured the gist of the king's words into Ellel-lou's ear. The President promptly nodded, comprehending the challenge. He stood and glanced about for the executioner's sword. Credit the now (in some quarters) discredited Ellellou with the grandeur of his response in this hour. Squeamishly he had absented himself from the interrogations of the king, and upon the occasion when the old man, his feet so flogged their soles had become bubbles of livid flesh, had indeed confessed to conspiring with Roul the desert devil and with Jean-Paul Chremeau, the Christian, alexandrine-indicting premier of Sahel, to bring about drought and demoralization, Ellellou had been prowling the city disguised as an orange-seller; by the time the President could be located and brought to the dungeon, the king had recanted, and hurled at him an absurd litany of American trade-names-"Coca-Cola! Polaroid! Chevrolet! IBM!" Indeed, the scandalized marabouts and professional torturers agreed, devils were at work here. Ellellou had gone pale at the outburst, and turned on his heel. Not so now. A power beyond him descended and gave him calm. He stepped lightly to the king's side. The king said softly into the sun, "I know that step." "Are you sure?" The king did not turn his head, as if to avoid what glim- mers of my face might come to him. He preferred to rest his gaze in blank radiance. "Another saying came to me after our conversation." "What was it, my Lord?" "Wer andern eine Grube grdbt, fallst selbst hinein. Who digs the pit for others, falls in himself. It was said of their Fiihrer, by my old friends." "A pit awaits all of us. Yours is no deeper than others. You are simply at its lip." "I was not thinking of myself, but of Colonel Ellellou." He laughed; it was like a small fine box being crushed underfoot. His body smelled, faintly, of cloves. "It is not I who acts," I said, "but Kush." "Then, there can be no talk of mercy?" "It is not a lesson I was well taught." "Your teacher perhaps had too much to teach." "It would be an impiety to usurp the prerogative of the Most Merciful. Why talk of mercy among men, when justice can be achieved?" "Can it?" "See." Behind his back I extended my hand. Opuku was holding the giant scimitar, taken for this ceremony from its case in the People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities, for in the name of ethnic integrity the French had permitted executions in this classic manner until the importation of the guillotine, now also in the Museum. The Supreme Conseil had rejected the idea of bringing forth the guillotine for this state occasion as savoring of neo-colonialism. All of the executions during the early Emergence had been by firing squad. Blue smoke had risen from the inner courtyard of the Palais in rectangular clouds, like cloudy cakes released from a mold. Think of it. My mind in its exalted, distended condition had time to entertain many irrelevant images. Think of the blade of that guillotine, wrapped in straw and burlap to protect its edge, but perhaps gaps worked loose in the wrapping causing glints of reflection to fly across the desert as the pack-camel swayed on its way as it brought humanitarian murder to this remotest and least profitable heart of Africa. The handle of the scimitar, bronze worked to imitate wound cord, nearly fell from my hand, so unexpectedly ponderous was the blade. In this life woven of illusions and insubstantial impressions it is gratifying to encounter heft, to touch the leaden center of things, the is at the center of be, the rock in Plato's cave. I thought of an orange. I lifted the sword high, so that the reflection from its flashing blade hurtled around the square like a hawk of lethal brightness, slicing the eyes of the crowd and the hardened clay of the facades, the shuttered fearful windows, the blanched, pegged walls and squat aspiring minaret of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster. In the glare of the sky the swooping reflections were swallowed, disgorged again upon the earth as the scimitar was lowered and steadied. A speech in response to the king's seemed called for. "People of Kush! Be deaf to this criminal's blasphemies! Gladly your President takes into his hand the instrument of God's rectitude! Praise Him Who abides! The unbelievers love this fleeting life too well, and thus prepare for themselves a heavy day of doom! The day of doom has come to the alleged Lord of Wanjiji! He is an empty gourd, a mask without a face! When Edumu ruled, he gathered to himself riches that your labor created. He took to himself your most lissome women, and called your best land his own. The toubabs levied their taxes through the maze beneath his throne; under cover of his kingship the riches God has hidden in our mountains and our river were ferried away. Infidel harlots in countries of fog and clouds are adorned with our jewels because of this betrayer. Sentimental elements within the Supreme Conseil have preserved his life to this moment! This was a mistake, an abomination! God has cursed this land accordingly! By the sword in my hand I shall cleanse the land! Sacredly is it written: Idolatry is worse than carnage. Those of you who moved forward to hear the words of Wanj, hear these words! The Lord of Wanjiji is a clot of blood, a speck upon the purity of Kush. His life has been long and odious. He is cunning. His wisdom is barren. He has mocked Ellellou. He has mocked the Revolution. I act now not as myself, not as Ellellou, but as the breath of L'@lmergence, blowing away a speck of dirt! God's will gives my arms strength! Behold, those who doubt!!" Opuku meanwhile and one of the colonels-Colonel Batwa was my impression, an ex-prize fighter-attempted to bring the king to kneel and place his head on the saddle-shaped block of blood red. The king in his blindness, or out of some notion of abused dignity, resisted; there was more kick in his old body than one would have thought; the crowd chuckled a bit. I could feel, through the pink mists my verbal frenzy had set to swirling in my skull, his sensations, his struggling stiff frailty; I entered in, was pushed and pulled among jostling shelves of muscular darkness, of dazzling not-seeing. My hair was gripped, a hardness knocked against my chin, sun-hot camwood scorched my throat. A smoky smell. The orange in my mind rolled away. The king's head had been arranged on the block. Looking down, I had become perilously tall. The path the scimitar must descend through air appeared a long flaw in crystal. A few drops of sweat glinted in the net of wrinkles on the nape of the old man's neck, bared as Opuku, perhaps rougher than need be (it crossed my mind), tugged forward for me the mass of Edumu's hair, matted and yellowish like a sheep's. I eyed my spot between two vertebrae. Incongruously, there entered my mind from afar the image of a candy apple, such as one buys at county fairs in Wisconsin comxs tough glaze, its slender wooden stick, its little cap of coconut. The first bite is the most difficult. The king cleared his throat, as if to address one of us. But his thought went nowhere, a trickle in the hot sands of his terror, and an intense mechanical interest arose like a hiss of steam from the point between two cervical lumps where two wrinkles conveniently crossed. Opuku's hands gripped deeper into the wool, as if the king were tensing to struggle, and I saw that the moment I wanted with all my being behind me was still a fraction of a second ahead. The divine breath grunted into my chest and the scimitar descended. Though the blade struck through to the wood, the noise was clumsier, more multiple, than I had expected. Sun. The clay of the square was accepting yet another day's merciless brilliance. An edge of green metal, unpainted where the paint had chipped, the flatbed's crimped lip, took my eye. I found I was waiting, in the pocket of sharp quiet before the crowd loosed an appalled, triumphant roar, for the king, as his throat-clearing had promised, to say another word. The very ink in my pen coagulates at these memories. Robust Opuku held up the king's head at arm's length, as the center of an opposing basketball team demonstrates his intimidating one-handed grip. Relief at the thing accomplished flowed through me, so I was slow to notice how little blood flowed from the severed head. This medically explicable fact comthe brain in its fury to live had drawn blood up into itself like a sponge-was to haunt the kingdom I had inherited. The king's eyes were blissfully closed, while his body in its silken white lungi flipped about with a hideous undirected strength, even the arms flailing. Opuku with a booted foot pressed the body flat, as the chopped throat, romantically rich in purples and blues, spilled blood sobbingly. There came uninvited into my mind the flat side of that candy apple, where it has rested while hardening, and where the sugary semi-elastic glaze was thickest. The taste of this glaze, bitten into, and its stubborn texture were as vivid to me as Kutunda's cry of joy, a thrilled female keening less voluntary than a dog's howl, cutting through the stunned air. A host of gnats had come to drink. So it seemed from the truck-gnats, blood, a crimped edge of metal and irrelevant fairgrounds memories all compressed by the
sunlight into one unfeeling, unmeaning moment, through which there coursed nevertheless a palpable liquid relief. From the vantage of the crowd, it looked far otherwise: Ellellou's neat brown figure, sunglassless, stepped forward andwitha leverlike stroke altered the quality of the smallest of the puppets posed on a makeshift stage. The head was held up. Then other puppets, unpredicted, appeared: blue-clad Tuareg, the lower halves of their faces covered by tagilmusts, perhaps twenty of them, on fine Arabian horses rode in from the eastern side of the square, mingled with the khaki men on the green trucks, and after a tussle carried off the smaller of the king's two bodily remains. Up close, Opuku received a slash on his arm, and Colonel Ezana's wife was the butt of an indecent suggestion; but the very speed of the attack (which had the crowd been as numerous as expected would have been disastrously impeded) and its apparently limited objective of carrying off the severed head enabled it to pass like a loud but harmless wind. Some of the crowd thought the episode merely a part of the governmental pageant that had been arranged. Ellellou with admirable presence of mind addressed those spectators that had not fled the scene. "Citizens of Kush! Fear not! The alleged Lord of Wanjiji is dead, his would-be rescuers have had to content themselves with the unspeakable refuse of his physical remains! His soul has gone to everlasting fire! The forces of imperialism and reaction have again been thwarted! There is no doubt that these brazen terrorists are hirelings of the American paper tiger, or perhaps fanatical capitalists disguised in the robes of the Tuareg! We of Le Supreme Conseil Revolutionnaire et Militaire pour l'@lmergence laugh at their presumption and invite the socialized people of Kush to defecate upon their individualistic, entrepreneurial violence!! The loathsome theft shall be avenged, have no fear! Disperse to your homes, and prepare for the deluge! You have witnessed the enactment of a purgation profoundly pleasing to Allah, and deeply beneficial to our green and pleasant land!" Ellellou shouted all this, in a rapture of abandonment to the furious wind within him, that could be vented only into the imaginary ear of his nation, but in his private aspect knew that his accusations were problematical, for he had seen the eyes of the raider who had snatched the king's head from Opuku's slashed arm, and they were not the wolvish eyes of a Targui or a North American, frosted and blue, but amber and slant like the survival-minded eyes of wild swine. Also, Ellellou, transfixed by his battle-calm, waiting through a microscopically lucid series of milliseconds to be tumbled like a rabbit by a lion, too tranquil to think of lifting his bloodied scimitar in self-defense, scented through the flurry of odors of unwashed flesh and Arabian horsehair, a subtle sweetness chiming with his memories of the banquet in the rocket bunker. Vodka. While the capital still buzzed of these portentous events (which the majority of the indolent populace had lacked the civic conscience to witness, and which, in the recounting to the unpatriotically absent, became unreal), Ellellou descended into the Hurriyah district in the disguise of an orange-seller, to visit Kutunda. Now that the effects of the drought and famine were felt even in the metropolis, there were no oranges to sell, and the peddler instead offered to the echoing, anfractuous alleys the mere image of oranges, put into song: "Round and firm as the breasts of one's beloved's younger sister, she ivho exposes her gums when she laughs, and spies from her pallet wondering when her time will come; to the touch delicately rough like one's own testicles, stippled waxy hides tearable and acrid when torn, staining one's fingers with the sharpest essence of the juice; when the hide is scattered like thick rose petals, the fruit is found partitioned in quarter-moons, each in its papery baby skin dulcet as dust; parted from its many brothers too greedily, each segment will weep bright tears of juice, foreshadowing the explosion in the consumer's mouth; how sweet is the water of the juice! Our lips sting, the rivers of our heart rush upward to greet the miracle secreted in this symmetry! And the color, what is the color? The color is that strip of the heavens closest to the dunes before the green flash amwunces the arrival of night." For such a song, which the singer elaborated through many variations-evoking in some versions the navel and the crusty button at the poles of the orange, dwelling rhapsodically in others upon the tasteless mossy inside of the skin that holds the drops of nectar like jewels in a felt-lined case, and in still others upon the joys of spitting out the seeds-coins or cowries would be cast from the windows, appearing in his path like a sudden spatter of the rains that had failed to come, or paper notes would be thrust at him by servants sent out by the wealthy; forwiththe drying-up of merchandise to buy, lu had become plentiful, and many were in a cash sense wealthy. People would attempt to bribe him to sing a song of bananas, or couscous, or spring lamb turned on a spit with peppers and onions, but he would say No, he was a seller of oranges, and could conjure up only their image amply enough to banish the reality of hunger. Kutunda was finding her quarters above the basket shop insufficient. Her new possessions-billowing clothes, bulky jewelry, inlaid tables, throw pillows, cuddly stuffed Steiff animals, mechanical beauty aids, a hair-blower and a Water-Pik comwere overwhelming the little pise-walled room which a month ago had seemed such a grateful improvement over the exiguous spaces of a tent or a ditch. Ellellou, removing the stained robes and net yoke of an orange-seller, noticed on her wrist a watch with a blank black face. "A gift," she admitted. "Look, you press here, and the numbers come up! It is what they call electronic wizardry." "In exchange for what service to Ezana?" "For my services to the state; my wisdom and counsel." "In urging the murder of the helpless old king?" "I merely urged what your heart had already decreed but lacked the courage to execute." "Lacked the madness, I now think. What good has come of it? The sky is as blank as your watch-face, and horror clouds my heart. Since the day, Ezana is formal and correct with me; I feel he is standing clear of my ruin." "Ezana will dodge as you turn. There is no leader left in Kush but my colonel. Let me show you the clothes I bought; the shopgirl said they were designed by a Tutsi princess." As she walked back and forth to her bulging cedar wardrobe, her heels thumped in the manner specifically enjoined by the twenty-fourth sura, And let them not stamp their feet in walking so as to reveal their hidden trinkets, the same sura that says consolingly, Unclean women are for unclean men, and unclean men for unclean women. She hurled one width of rainbow-dyed cloth over her head, wriggled it smooth, gazed at herself in the mirror with pursed lips, held a bloodstone earring against the lobe of one ear, and rejected the outfit by baring her tiny teeth, bowing her head, swinging her hands to the nape of her neck, giving the garment a sharp forward pull, and becoming naked again, her stout legs first. Her buttocks in the seriousness of this ritual had a tightened tuck, a flattening of their outward curve that touched me with its sign of pliant aging. Yet, in bed, in darkness, my manhood recoiled from her familiar maneuvers of hands and mouth, grown since our desert courtship to fit my predilections as closely as a worn saddle fits its camel's humps. Now her mouth, moist as it was, burned; whenever my stalk verged upon response, upon enlargement and erection, the picture entered my mind of the king's severed neck, its pulsing plumbing suddenly sliced across and emptying itself, by spurts that seemed sluggish, into the crystalline vacancy of that moment before the Tuareg, too late, galloped into the square. The blood of mine that had been flowing to produce the engorgement of potency fell back, alarmed. "You are angry with me," Kutunda at last observed, weary of wanton exertions. "Why would I be?" "You mourn the king." "Had the whim ever seized him, he would have done worse to me. He took me up, I think, because he was amused by my ambivalences. Even his mercies were sardonic. He sat on the world lightly, like the spider that is immune from the web's stickiness." "Yet you found my hatred vulgar, and further bear against me the grudge men always bear against those women they have conquered. It is a puzzle: the men who need women hate them, and those who do not, like your comrade Ezana, do not." "More your comrade than mine now. You have a magical timepiece to mirror his, and the two of you giggle in Sara, hatching my doom." "You are hatching it," Kutunda said, as quickly as she had set an ornament to her ear and taken it away; yet she could not take this truth away, though from the pinch of her lips she wished she could. Unclean, we are all unclean, with our smudges of truth. I said to her, in explanation of my impotence, "You have lost the good smell of dirt you had in the ditches of the north. Now you stink of French soap. I cannot make love through the fragrance of our exploiters." "You are sad. Forgive me my fun with Ezana. He is an innocent man, but so full of words and ideas; his being practical gives us much to talk about. It is exciting. We talk of the refugee camps, of reeducation, of irrigation, of eliciting capital investment from the superpowers and multi-national corporations, with low interest rates and twenty-year moratoriums." "It is futile. We have nothing they need. We are no one's dominos. Tell me a story, Kutunda, to distract me from my shame, as you used to in the ditches, when you would come to me from poor limp Wadal." Remembering this man made me wonder, Could she be the source of impotence, driving her from man to man in an orgy of betrayal? These modern women have yet to evolve a modern male to service them. She told me a strange tangled story, of intricate blasphemy, as once of Wadal urinating on the fetishes, only now of Michaelis Ezana, who beneath his buttery black outward form was Roul the desert devil, a creature of blanched bones and arbitrary flesh, who sets lakes all around us, yet renders the spot where we stand burningly dry. Men in their thirst bite their fingertips and suck the salty blood; they kill their camels and drink the mucoid fluid in the stomach of the carcass. In this guise Ezana rules Kush, driving the whirlwind of the Tuareg on before him, eroding the pious and egalitarian republic of his archenemy Colonel Ellellou. In the remoteness of the Ippi Rift there is a city to rival Istiqlal; here men copulate with pangolins, and women allow hyraxes to enter their vaginas, and all the moisture that Allah had allotted for the land of Kush is kept in a giant transparent sack underground, entered through a cave mouth of golden arches, a wobbly sloshing bubble deeper than a gypsum mine, and descending into it Ezana takes the form of an octopus, and sucks screaming, drowning maidens into his beak, and awaits the maiden, a maiden dusky and fearless and virginal, with teeth dainty as seed-pearls, who with a scimitar of tourmaline will sever the octopus beak of Roul though he eject a cloud of ink; and then she will puncture the transparent sack so that water will flood the land, and the bones of her father's herds will come to life, lowing, and the tamarisk and Mimosa ferruginea will bloom, and camels will become intelligent dolphins, and what other turbulent nonsense Ellellou was never to know, for he fell asleep, amid the sliding of Kutunda's solid limbs and the nightmare shapes her voice conjured up. He was awoken at dawn by twin sharp needs: to urinate and to pray. His duties performed, he lay beside the woman; in her sleep her hair had made tentacles across her face and a trail of saliva from the corner of her lips gleamed indeed like some trace of a subaqueous struggle. Through the slats at the foot of the pallet the white flank of the Palais d'Administration des Noires glowed pink and mute in the first flush of light. Thus, Ellellou saw, loomed political power immemorially to the masses of men: a blank wall, a windowless palace that inscrutably shoulders us away. Also he perceived that a new strange sound had come to mix with the scratching dry noises of the Hurriyah slum-ashes being scraped, calabashes clicking, the Koran being murmured. From somewhere under him music was arising, rasping muffled music of an alien rhythm, with words, repeated in the tireless ecstasy of religious chant, that seemed to say: "Chuff, chuff, do it to me, baby, do it, do it. Momma don't mind what Daddy say, we're gonna rock the night away. Do it, do it, do it to me, baby, chuff, chuff, sho' enough, ohhhhh."
