The Coup (18 page)

been born while he was a year away, against his chest, and patted it to ease its colic, its inner demons, and this infant wished upon him had burped air; the women gathered around like a single-bodied black continuum had praised this little hiccup. So Candy now wanted to be praised for her sobs. "He said," she forced out, "he'd kill you if you tried to marry me." "Marry you? And what did you say to that, darling?" "I said"-a shudder, a big gulp, a sob, and then-"he couldn't stop us, we'd elope." In his sleep with Sheba, Ellellou rotated, his robes entangled beneath him and enfolding lumpy pockets of the white dust of the cave floor. He was aware through his dreams of these lumps and of her body, sunk in forgetfulness but now and then roused to rotate like his own, two carcasses turned on parallel spits, touching with a rustle, their hunger and thirst borne by shrivelled organs submerged beneath the reach of pain. Yet no submergence quite concealed from that mass of sporadic lights, colors, and linkages that was his immortal consciousness the fact of this proximate woman, her scent and sadness and the warm skin beneath her own robes, that had come through the Balak faded as by too scalding a wash. His sleeping brain acknowledged the certain graciousness of her accompanying him, though from the Marxist standpoint it could be maintained that she had no choice, it was accompany him or wander the streets as a waif of poverty. But what was this, this trek through silicon and starlight and now this death in a cavern strewn with condoms and Kleenexes and other sedimented evidences of love, but poverty? In Ellellou's sleep an arch of pity and sorrowful gratitude built itself from his beating heart to this his rib, his mate, enclosing as in a crypt Sheba's body, her yielding lips, her blue-black brow smooth and round as a dome of tile. Then a scent of vodka was at his nostrils, and water was at his lips. "Prosnis , chernozhopyif" a Targui was shouting in my ear; and my first waking thought was that of course it must have been the Russians who stole the head of the king, for only they would have been so anthropologically obtuse within their own passionate, isolate culture and prodigious territories as not to know that the Tuareg were the traditional enemies of Wanjiji, holding the riverine kingdom in thrall when they were strong, retreating back into the desert when they were weaker. The Tuareg could not help but regard us as slaves, and we them as devils, devils from the desert, howling like the harmattan, their mouths masked because they had no jaws, just gaping throats that spewed vile yells and cruelty. These Tuareg succoring me had their mouths and noses swaddled; nothing showed but their wolvish pale eyes, and their muffled voices. "Eta chernaya pizda nichevo zhivchik, a?" "Spokoino, u nikh u vsekh sifilis." They muttered as if I had no ears. One of them wore steel-rimmed spectacles; when his comrades noticed I was awake, he began to address me in his slurred Iraqi Arabic and, his vocabulary failing, his sloshy French. "Rise up, Mr. President!" he cried through the haze of languages. "You are near the end of your journey! The path has been made easier! Vive Kush! Vive le peuple et la fraternite socialiste et islamique! tlcrase Pinfdme capitaliste, monopolise, et tres, tres decadent!" Several Tuareg women, their naked faces impassive, the wrists and ankles dyed blue, were laving Sheba's feet and re-braiding her hair; though my dear girl flickered toward me a feeble smile, her eyes, under a helpless pressure, kept closing, the lids freshly anointed with antimony. It was true, the upward path had been made easier. The steepness declined, as the summit neared, and an asphalt strip, wide enough for a golf cart, with green-painted pipe railings on the side of a precipitous falling-off, had been engineered where the natural trail might have seemed impassably rugged. Yellow signs advised Falling Rock and Oryx Crossing, and others advertised our growing closeness to the Oracle's Cave, to La Tete Qui Parle, to MaB3OJ-IEII 3ayMy HeTB-EPTORO. My old brown baggage camel, who had been fed a barrel of Ukrainian millet (or could it have been Nebraska sorghum?), fairly danced on his threadbare legs as he bouncingly bore along the sumptuous little body of Sheba, who had been slipped a few kola nuts and was chewing through a high. I felt, as one does after too deep a sleep, uncaught-up with myself: the physical half hurried along to expectancy's accel- erated heartbeat, while the spiritual man loitered behind in a fog, groping for the reason for his shadowy, guilty sensation of something undone, of something disastrous due. The path, briskly engineered through the rose-colored cliffs and abysses, was crossed by a newly built funicular railway; the crossing-marking, X, reminded me of something unpleasant I have always wanted to forget. "You are crazy," Oscar X firmly, patiently stated, as if reciting a memorized speech. "You are what the Messenger terms a black man with a white man's head. Man, you are sad. You are evil and you are sad. I wash my hands of you. I wish to wipe you from my mind. And la a'rifuka. The Nation of Islam is one thousand per cent opposed to what you are undertaking. The mixture of the races is a crime against purity. The Word of God unambiguously proclaims, sooner a black man mate with a lazy shit-smeared sow or the female of the alligator species than entrust his ebony penis to the snatch of a white devil mare." Felix imagined in the floridity of this indictment a simultaneous undercutting, a self-mocking. But he detected no humor or mercy in Oscar's face. People when they go behind the curtain of a creed become unknown. He said, "You know Candy. You like her." "I have tolerated her," Oscar said. "But I have not liked her. She is the offspring of the stock that has enslaved us, that spits on us whenever it chooses. This woman has spit upon you, and you don't have the mother wit to wipe your fucking face." He sipped his Ovaltine and came up with a scummy lip. Barry Little tried to help, telling Felix, "She was raised too clean. She needs to get down into it, but doesn't want to get real dirt on herself. So she tells herself a story in the dark. In her mind, you are the pimp and the customers both. That's a way these upper-class sheltered girls get their kicks, it's nothing personal in regards to you. Make it personal and permanent, that would be a big mistake. I'm not saying white and black can't live together, they got to, this separate black nation old Elijah Poole keeps plugging is fantastical purely. But in this particular case, of you and little Miss Cunningham, I'm saying that would be one fantasy on top of another. You don't know America, and she don't know Africa." "Perhaps we know each other." "You know each other in the dark," Barry said. "Out in the light, what do you see? Her momma's a washrag and her daddy's a redneck who'd fry your ass if he could find the button. Kiss her good-bye, you'd be doing her a favor as well as yourself. I'm not talking black or brown, I'm trying to talk to you straight. If you and she were both green in color, I'd have my doubts about the personalities." "No such thing as color blind," Turnip Schwarz interposed. "No such thing." Esmeralda said indignantly, "You're all talking to this boy as though he had a choice. Any choice he ever had he threw away. He's been hustled. He's in over his head and can't say No now." "Just get on the plane to Timbuctoo, the way to say No," Turnip said. Felix felt hemmed in, shoved, in the businesslike American manner. He resented their attempt to pry him open and meddle in the fate he was nurturing within; he could not explain to them how delicately all the truths they advanced were built into his plan, were included in the sprawling, devious budget that in the end would balance. It was true, Candy had come upon him and was sweeping him along; but we can propel ourselves only a little way out of ourselves and for the rest must play with the forces beyond us that impinge. He gazed steadily at Oscar and said, "I have been reading the Book of Books, as the Messenger advises. Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields as you please." Oscar blinked, and quoted back: "You shall not wed pagan women, unless they embrace the faith. A believing slave-girl is better than an idolatress, although she may please you." "Jesus preserve us," Esmeralda breathed. Candy had come in at the door of the luncheonette; even at a distance, through the smoke and jangle, the future Ellellou could see she had been crying. More trouble with her parents, or Craven, or some other white spokesmen. She came toward their black table timidly now, sensing that here too she was abhorred. Yet in honor of spring she had put on a forsythia-yellow sweater and a pleated white skirt. Felix lifted from his chair as a tide toward the moon. Oscar X stood up angrily. "I will not contaminate myself any longer," he stated so all could hear, hisby consorting with mongrel clowns and lackeys of the doomed devil-race." To Felix he said, again with the precision of something rehearsed, u L'anatu Allahi "alayka." He walked out, taking with him Temple Two and Temple Three, the joyful car rides together, the Brotherhood. His curse Felix felt as a blast of heat upon his face, the heat whose first wave had been, in infancy, the absence of his father. He felt this heat as Allah. Allah is the essential seriousness of things, their irreversibility. Our friends all die to us, some before we are born. Let us step back a moment, onto the spongy turf of psycho-historical speculation. There was in our young hero (not so young as he appeared to his clamorous advisers; by 1958 he was going on twenty-six) an adsorptive chemical will that made him adhere to just those surfaces that would have repelled him: he took away from the United States not only the frightened body of Candy Cunningham in a blue linen suit but the Nation of Islam, internalized as a certain shade of beige idealism mixed of severity, xenophobia, decency, and isolation. As New World immigrants preserve in their ethnic neighborhoods folk dances and items of cuisine that in the old country have become obsolete, so Ellellou held to a desiccated, stylized version of the faith that meanwhile failed for Oscar X, who fell away in the mid-Sixties, when the scandals of the Messenger's sexual strayings (not one but two secretaries pregnant!) unfolded to a bloody climax in the gunning-down of his schismatic Chief Minister Malcolm in New York City, on West 166th Street. So the Nation of Islam was just another gangland after all. In the strength of his disillusion Oscar became a trainee with the Chicago police, and with unfeigned enthusiasm helped bop long-haired protester heads at the 1968 Democratic Convention, at the same time as his repudiated brother was fomenting the revolution that overthrew Edumu IV and brought Islamic socialism to Noire, renamed Kush. Now the path was continuously paved, and littered with bits of paper-torn tickets and Popsicle wrappers. The pigeons were thick about us, throbbling and strutting in their streetwise self-importance, too full of crushed Fritos and dropped popcorn to flutter away. The first people we saw were Chinese-a small close flock of official visitors, in their blue-gray many-pocketed pajamas, their mass-produced wire-frame spectacles (no doubt of identical prescription) resting on the fat of their cheeks as they smilingly squinted up from their guidebooks toward something on high we could not yet see. We had come upon them around a corner and, as if the dusty spectacle of the disguised President and his delectable, stoned consort on foot and camelback respectively had been organized for them as an additional local wonder, they obligingly switched, in a unified motion, their twinkling attention full upon us. These tourists appeared amazed when the weary camel plodded straight toward them, rippling his upper lip contemptuously, forcing them to break formation and crowd to the sides of the path. They joked among themselves in their curious pitch-chirping. How had these Confucians come here? The question was answered by the next turn in the path, which revealed a parking lot blasted from the outcroppings and holding six or seven large tourist buses, some striped like zebras and others spotted like giraffes. Emblazoned on their sides was the name of a Zanj tourist agency, the same which in other directions exposed to the stupefied gaze of aliens, through smoky-blue windows that bathed our Africa in perpetual twilight, the oceanic herds of the Tanzanian grasslands, Lalibela's cathedrals carved from solid rock, the inexhaustible salt quarries of the Danakil Depression, and what other bleak marvels were exploitable in this continent whose most majestic feature is the relative absence of Man. To such buses the Zanj border was not far away, and evidently the entrepreneurs found no insurmountable obstacle there. I must create one. "I will close the border," I confided to Sheba. "This is an atrocity." "I think it's an improvement," she said languidly, from within her trip. "Can I have another lemonade?" We had patronized a refreshment stand manned by a detrib-alized Djerma, offering beverages in all bubbling colors. "The delicate ecology of the Balak," I told her, "is being devastated." "There's lots left," she pointed out. "One germ can kill a giant," I explained to her, vowing, "I'll have old Komomo's hide for this." Wamphumel Komono, President-for-Life of Zanj: height six foot six, weight three hundred seventy pounds. He wore (and still wears, but for my own peace of mind let this description be consigned to the past tense) garish robes so intricately worked each sleeve cost a seamstress her sight and a crown that consisted of a cheetah's snarling skull, gilded. Worse, he was a flirt. The British had taught him this. They had flirted with him by capturing him when he was a guerrilla leader, placing him in prison, scheduling his execution, and then, when the rising tides of freedom forced them to decamp, suddenly installing him as President, in return for his promise not to expel the white settler community from the fertile highlands and along the little seacoast. The shape of Zanj reached out to include its miserable Red Sea port like a child touching wet paint while looking the other way. The bulk of Zanj was as infertile, unprofitable, and stately as Kush. But old Komomo, with his picturesque regalia of catskins, ornamental welts, and medals from the lesser European armies, tirelessly flirted with the international community, inviting the Americans in to build him a desalination plant and then expelling them, inviting the Russians in to train his air force and then expelling them, milking even the Australians and the post-Sukarno Indonesians for their dollop of aid, their stretch of highway, their phosphate
refinery, or mile-high broadcasting antenna. Now his pets were the Chinese, who were building him a railway from his nasty little port to the preposterous new capital he had ordained in the interior, Komomo-glorifying Zanjomo, its street-plan cribbed from Baron Haussmann, its government buildings based on photos of forgotten World Fairs, its central adornment a mock-heroic bronze stalagmite bearing Komomo's shifty features in imitation of Rodin's Balzac and likely to survive the model's death for one week, by which time the old nepotist's competing sons-in-law will have melted it down for bullets. Not a tuck in his patriarchal robes ungarnished by private gain, which he extracted from the toubab corporations as blithely as his forebears the cannibal chiefs extracted bongo from the Arab slavers, Komomo flirted moreover with all the elements within his country, appearing in ostrich feathers in a veldt village and a hardhat in a magnesium mine, placating the Africa Firsters by taxing the Indian shopkeepers and placating the Asian community with public readings from the Upan-ishads, balancing his denunciations of Ian Smith and the still-exclusivist Zanj Athletic Club with frequent photographs of himself embracing some visiting devil or local "landowner" and "business leader," touting with scrupulously equal decibels the "tribal integrity" of "our great African masses" and the "total impartiality" of "our color-blind Constitution." The American press loved this artful clown; in their rotogravures he looked like a negative print of Santa Claus. Now he was flooding my purified, penniless but proud country with animalistic buses stuffed full of third-echelon Chou Shmoes, German shutterbugs, British spinsters, bargain-seeking Bulgarians, curious Danes, Italian archaeologists, and trip-crazed American collegians bribed by their soused and adulterous parents to get out of the house and let capitalism collapse in peace-all to see a dead head in the dead center of the Bad Quarter. At the next turn of the path, as the bridle burned in my hands, so hard was it being tugged by my pack camel in the frisky throes of restored vitality, I could see a polychrome, polyglot little mob gathered at the mouth of what must be the cave. It looked artificial, but badly made, like a department-store window display, besprinkled with greenish glitter-dust. It is said that God, as he created these mountains of the Balak, worked in haste. It is also said that the royalty of Kush, chased from Meroe by the Christian hoards of Axum, may have come this way, constructing as they went cities scarcely distinguishable from the rocks. Or perhaps-a third possibility comthe unsubtle Soviets, having selected this as the site from which to broadcast slander against the incorruptible President of Kush, had with their usual heavy hand engineered the locale to resemble one of those concrete medleys of domes and parapets that speak to their huddling hearts. One of Dr. Frederic (without the k, yes) Craven's courses in the Government Department of McCarthy College was "U. s. vs. USSR: Two Wayward Children of the Enlightenment." Another course was "Plato to Pound: Totalitarianism as the Refuge of Superior Minds." There was a sardonic touch, too, to his seminars: "Bureaucratic Continuity During Political Crises" studied, with use of original documents, phenomena such as the adjudication of misdemeanors and traffic fines during the French Revolution and mail delivery during the American War Between the States. "Weak or Strong?: The Presidency from Fillmore to the Second Harrison" took the paradoxical position that American history would have been much the same if the opponents of these Chief Executives had been elected instead, and that the average man fared better under Pierce and Grant than under Lincoln. He also taught the only course that touched upon the darkest continent: "The Persistence of the Pharaonic Ideal in the Sudanic Kingdoms from 600 to 1600 a.d." Felix and Candace took this course together; their shoulder-rubbing proximity during lectures gave the lecturer pain. Candy was one of Craven's "pets." In that sinister way of American intellectual men, he had grown handsomer with age, his boyishly gaunt figure filling out without ceasing to be essentially youthful; kept tendony by tennis and tan by sailing through September on the cerulean, polluted surface of Lake Timmebago, he had created in time a kind of vertical harem of undergraduate mistresses, whom graduation disposed of without his even having to provide a dismissive dowry. Candy, apparently, in some interstice or worn spot of her harassed liaison with the future Ellellou, had placed herself among Craven's concubines, and had renewed the relationship when the young African-understandably, to all but her-had waffled or responded sluggishly to her female call for a "commitment" that translated into elopement, bigamy, and for all he knew, American arrest and incarceration. One warm day deep in the reign of Dwight Eisenhower, Craven invited the black student to his office, a cozy cave lined with leaning gray government manuals and smelling of the peculiarly sweet pipe smoke it was one of Craven's vanities to emit. He offered Felix a low seat on his Naugahyde seducer's couch but the youth, his manner stiff with a wary dignity, took instead a hard straight chair whose seat, all but the edge, was loaded with blue exam booklets. End of term was at hand. "Hakim Felix," the professor began, evidently imagining this mode of address was swankily parallel to use, in Russian, of the patronymic, "let me begin by confessing some slight disappointment in your exam. You had the facts down pat, but, if I may say so, you seemed to show less gut feeling for the African ethos than some of the middle-class white kids in the course. Miss Cunningham, for instance, wrote an essay on kinship that damn near made me cry." The student perched still farther forward on the overburdened chair. "Africa is large," was the best excuse he could offer for his curious failure. "Also, the French did not encourage our ethos, they were intent upon inculcating their own. "Well," Craven briskly conceded, sucking lip-smackingly upon his pipestem, releasing a blue wraith of saccharine alter-ego, "far be it from me to out-African an African. There was nothing strictly wrong, just my nebulous sense of something missing." "Perhaps that is the very African ingredient." Craven closed his pale, rather too mobile lips upon the amber of his pipestem. He did not relish fancy thinking not his own. "I asked you in, though, not to talk about that but to wish you well, really. Can you tell me your plans, Felix?" "I plan to return, sir. The U.S. immigration officials have never been happy with my status here, though the college has been most liberal and supportive. In Noire, King Edumu, placed back on his throne-placed, I should say strictly, on a throne he never before occupied-in the wake of Guy Mollet's loi-cadre proclamation two years ago, has instituted a policy of amnesty toward political criminals under colonialism. And now that de Gaulle has offered the territories either internal autonomy with assistance or complete autonomy without, I think a new era is even more decisively under way, and I will be able to rejoin the military, and serve the new nation, without fear." "There is no politics without fear," Craven said, "as there is no organization without coercion. However, I wish y out well. Have you no fear, may I ask, of having lost touch, these four years, with the realities of your own people?" "As your examination suggests I have. I do not know. My guess is, America will fade for me as even the most intense dreams fade, and in any case the realities of my people are not static, but in the process of transformation. Perhaps I can help create new realities." "Perhaps." The pipe came into even more elaborate play, the amber stem pointing this way and that as Craven knocked, blew into, and rapidly reamed this little instrument of pleasure. "Will America fade, I wonder, so rapidly if you take a piece of it with you? A living piece. You know to whom I refer." "I do, and assume your concern is for my political future. Rest easy, I beg you. The new President of Sahel, a poet of sorts, has for wife a mignette from Lyons. The mighty Sulie-man, as you well know, made his queen Roxelana, a consort of Russian blood paler than even the lovely strawberry-blond Mrs. Craven, to whom I hope you will forward my parting regards." "I will," he said, in unwilled echo of his broken wedding vows. "Surely," the student meekly persisted, "distinctions in tint of skin have no priority in the world that my professors, you foremost, have taught me must be welded into one, lest the nuclear holocaust transpire. I have come here in innocence, anxious to learn, and part of my American experience has been to fall in love; how could it have been otherwise? This is the land where love is broadcast with the free hand of Johnny Appleseed." "Be that as it may"-one of Craven's favorite phrases, while he searched for his place in the lecture-"in the instance I have in mind, sentimental exogamist though I am bound to be, I can see, frankly, little good. The female is spoiled, neurotic, headstrong, and too young to know her own mind. You are older, a man of some experience, though I sometimes wonder if your experiences as you describe them do not partake of the fabulous. Why could you not be, for example, an American from, say, Detroit, who affects a French accent and the prissy African manner? That would explain why, in your examination, you showed so little feel for the, shall we say, heart of the matter." "Might it be the instructor who lacks the feel? Africa is not only log drums and sand dunes; we have cities, we have history, which you proposed to teach. We have languages, more than any other continent. We are a melting pot that will not boil over with the addition of one more female Caucasian. I think in your intelligence you have made an idea of blackness; when you look at me, you see an idea, and ideas do not talk back, ideas do not lust for the unlikely, ideas do not carry away the professor's-what do they say, in comic books?- 'date bait." his "You speak as though you are the abductor. The impression I gather from your friends, mon bon Felix, is that you are the abducted." "If by my friends you mean Esmeralda and Oscar, they have their own points of view, their own reasons for jealousy and malice. I cannot really see why you are bothering to hector a student on the subject of his personal life. If you have a claim to exert over Miss Cunningham, or a proposal to make to her alternative to mine, then do so; otherwise, let her join in silence the ranks of your lovely one-time students." "Your welfare concerns me as well as Candy's." "Let me ask you this: were I a Swiss or a Swede or even a pale-skinned Tibetan, would you be so concerned? Would you, even if you were, presume to call me in, like some shoeshine boy who has applied the wrong color polish?" "I resent your implication. I have friends of every race; I was a vocal supporter of the civil rights movement long before it became fashionable. I am a charter member of the Franchise Fair Housing Committee. The fact that you and she are black and white is not the issue. Your education here has been an utter waste if you imagine that it is." "My education here has been strange," Felix told Craven, contemplating with loathing the toubab's dry, prematurely gray hair; his soft broad lips like two worms bloodless and bloated; his complacent, ever youthful eyes. This man, the African thought, sails on the black waters of the world's suffering; the future Ellellou announced, "Your warnings about myself and Candy are not altogether foolish. Nevertheless, I will take her with me." "Why on earth?" "Two reasons at least. Because she wishes it, and because you do not. She has asked to be rescued, to be lifted from the sickly sweetness of her life in this sickening-rich country and replanted in an environment less damaged. Though you would all, black and white, deny her this, I will grant it. I will grant her freedom, in the style of your heroes, with their powdered hair and rouged faces, the Founding Fathers; Liberty or Death is the slogan you fling from your ivied fortress, your so-called Department of Government; I fling it back, demonstrating that your instruction has not been entirely wasted upon me. I thank you, Professor Craven. Good luck in your Cold War, your battle against Sputnik. Good luck in your magnificent campaign of seduction of ignorant virgins, so as to avoid looking into the ravishing eyes of the loyal, sorrowing Mrs. Craven." Craven's white face had gone whiter, realizing through the sweetish pipesmoke that he was closeted with a demagogue. The dictator, remembering the incident, one of a number of better-forgotten run-ins obstructing his departure with Candy from America, realized that Craven (who had given him, in petty retaliation for this interview, on a postcard that took seven months to arrive in the then Caillieville, a B- for the course) had somewhat resembled the martyred Gibbs. The Kush International Airport, a single runway east of Also-Abid, shimmers like a mirage amid the whistling-thorn. The tires of planes touching down frequently explode from the heat. Zebu, before the drought reduced the herds to hides and bones, were a sometime hazard. Now, the government has erected a two-meter aluminum fence to protect incoming visitors from the squalid, disease-infested emergency camps of refugee pastoralists from the deserted savanna. The glinting fence and the riveted wings of the Air Kush 727 and the great metallic sheet of cloudless sky contracted to pained pinpricks the pupils of the two Americans disembarking and exchanging greetings with the three-person welcoming committee: an oval-faced young Fula wearing a fez; a shorter plumper older African affecting Italian shoes, an English suit in the flared mod cut, and a wristwatch without a face; and a fetching if slightly stocky Sara woman accoutered in seersucker and secretarial half-glasses resting on her bosom, hung from a wildebeest-hair cord about her neck. Had the encounter been witnessed by an interested observer (instead of by the indifferent, wraithlike mechanics in sagging gray coveralls drifting through the haze of hunger, heat, and jet fuel fumes) he might have deduced that a reunion among long-separated kin had been effected. In truth, there was a similarity between the effusive welcomers and the greedily welcomed, though the former were solid black and the latter all-American. There were two, a man and a woman. The woman was blond, not in the flaxen way of Candy but brassily, glintingly, with a tinge of tangerine; her peach-colored suit was too hot for this climate and a rose flush overspread her face in the first minute, before she was completely