The Coup (21 page)

eyes to ignite the other end with a propane-flame lighter. The man in the red fez noticed the lighter with admiration, and Klipspringer passed it to him. "It's yours," he said, with a soft chop of his manicured plump hand. And, with further delightful gratuity, blew a perfect smoke ring, that came spinning from beneath his pert mustache like a new-fangled missile. "Our President also," Ezana continued to the pallid American beauty, "rules by mystical dissociation of sensibility, if I understand the phrase. Leaving the development of a plausible pragmaticism to those of us that stay behind in fallible Istiqlal, he explores the wider land for omens, to discover the religious source of the drought." The man in the red fez, who was growing to understand more English than the others expected, interrupted with a spate of local language to which Ezana listened at first amusedly, then with some gravity. By a smart soft chop of his hand the speaker indicated he wished Ezana to translate. "He says," Ezana told Klipspringer, "there is no drought. The nomads have survived many worse, by loaning their cattle to sedentary farmers in the south and reclaiming them when the dry sahel recovers again. The introduction of the cash-crop economy at the behest of the French has made this system difficult. The farmers no longer traffic with nomads, they need paper money to buy their wives Japanese sandals and transistor radios. And he says furthermore the well-meaning white men drilled wells and vaccinated against rinderpest, and this increased herd size to the point where desert was formed by the livestock. He says there is no drought, just bad ecology." Klipspringer's eyebrows were elegant silvery structures, trimmed but not overtrimmed, riding up and down on the emotions behind his brow like the vessels of Ra on eddies of spirit. They had arched high, lifting his heavy careful lids; in the space thus cleared his liquid brown eyes poured forth to the faces at the table all their luminous gift of caring. His baritone trembled with emotion. "Mike," he said, "you tell the man for me, No problem. Our technical boys can mop up any mess technology creates. All you need here is a little developmental input, some dams in the wadis and some ex- tensive replanting with the high-energy pampas grass the guys in the green revolution have come up with. You have a beautiful country here, basically, and we're prepared to make a sizeable commitment to its future. You tell the man we're very sensitive to the ecological end of things, not to worry. They were worried in Alaska and now they've stopped worrying. The caribou've never been better off. Miracles are an everyday business for our boys." "I want this murderer brought to justice!" Mrs. Gibbs suddenly cried from the depths of her sorrow and impatience, her queasiness and interrupted sexuality. "I want Don avenged." Baring her teeth, she exposed a fleck of lipstick on one incisor. Klipspringer put his hand adroitly over hers. "Angelica, revenge isn't part of the international picture. Internationally speaking, revenge is a no-no. What we have instead are realignments." "Madame is a guest of the state," Ezana reassured her. "It pains me to think she should be denied anything she desires in Kush." Kutunda, jealous of her former patron's infatuation with this freckled she-devil from the land where ice grows downward, launched into a long story of how she had been taken captive by Ellellou; he had broken into her hut where she slept, the chaste daughter of a widely respected dibia, and had desecrated her body with his urine so that, unmarriageable, she had no choice but to become his concubine. He kept her in a closet, illiterate, and compelled her to perform unclean acts; he even refused to give her typing lessons. The young man in the fez, whose Sara was nearly as good as his Fula, expressed rapture at her telling; he choked back his laughter, lest he miss a word. Ezana's Sara was not fluent enough to follow the torrent of vigorous and redolent idioms, and he contented himself with saying brusquely, at the tale's end, to the white widow, "This lady, a cultural attache, also has grievances against our President. It is regrettably true, he has committed many unpopular actions in the last half-year. His inspirations are not always happy. He put to death our old king, whom many of the river-folk superstitiously venerated." "Where is he? Where is he?" Angelica all but screamed. "He has ventured, you might say, upon a good-will mission," Ezana said, glancing at the black face of his wristwatch, as if space as well as time were packed into its shallow depths, like life in a coil of DNA. "It is hard to say where." "Where-iss-ee. his was the Acting Minister of the Interior suddenly enunciated, in halting but vivid English. "Ee-iss- here!" Everyone laughed, except Mrs. Gibbs, and Ezana turned to Klipspringer. "Let us discuss what you call our expanding relations. If the Braille Institute is to be built, it must be by local laborers, enlisted from our new masses of the urban unemployed, and following an indigenous design, in conformity with African humanism." The American diplomat lowered his eyelids and rounded his cigar ash on the rim of the plate holding a few discreet shreds of sauerkraut and the rubbery tied ends of his consumed knackwurst. "You bet," he said. "Maybe with a little souklike string of shops, boutiques and travel agencies, nothing noisy, along the ground-level mall. We want to help you become yourselves. A settled identity is the foundation of freedom. An unsettled nation is an enemy of freedom. A nation hates America because it hates itself. A progressive, thriving nation, whatever its racial balance and political persuasion, loves America because, frankly, in my not so unprejudiced opinion, but the facts pretty well bear me out, America is downright lovable. America loves all peoples and wants them to be happy, because America loves happiness. Mr. Ezana, you and the boss-man here"-his hand chopped toward the wearer of the plum-colored fez, who obligingly smiled and underneath the table squeezed Kutunda's knee so hard her own smile widened with pain-"may wonder why the American revolution has lasted nearly two hundred years, and yours is limping after only five. The answer is, All our Founding Fathers promised was the pursuit of happiness. Our people are still pursuing it, they'll never catch up to it; if they did, they'd turn right around and blame the Revolution. That's the secret, if you follow me." "Ed, cut it out," Mrs. Gibbs said. "What are you doing about Don?" "We're working on that," he assured her. "First you said you wanted his ashes, now you want revenge." "There is a city," Ezana offered, "perhaps prematurely named, we might instead call Gibbsville." "Where is this city?" she asked. A spark of communication ran around the ring of faces, and Ezana sadly confessed, "We are not at liberty to divulge." She looked at her companions at the table and saw through her tears black faces smilingly sealed upon secrets, secrets. Ezana looked at her and saw beyond the brassy toss of her hair, through the tilted plate glass set there to make a panorama around the restaurant, at such a height above the city no odor or peep of misery could arise, Istiqlal to the southeast: the bristling rectilinear business section directly underneath the skyscraper, narrow polychrome boxes whose sides were scrawled with lettering in many languages including even the native Hindi of the shopowners; the rows of camels and bicycles tethered and parked in the clay square of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster; the mosque itself, its minaret a dusky phallus, its dome a blue-tiled breast; the boulevards the French had diagonally cut through the maze of mud rhomboids and irregular alleyways; the dead chestnuts and poplars lining the boulevards and resting like a tenebrous cloud upon the pastel villas of Les Jardins; the scrappy glinting quilt of the shantytown at Also-Abid; to the left, the airport and the slender road to Sobaville; to the right, the venerable jumbled hump of Hurriyah lifted like a coy shoulder into the rosy cliff of the west wing of the Palais d'Administration des Noires; beyond, the souk and the rickety dock and the pirogues; and farther beyond, a black curve of the blue Grionde. still love you, 1 love you ran through Michaelis Ezana's mind dizzily, and the white woman's weary queasy face, the merriment arising between the red fez and Kutunda's bleached hair, the American's blanketing gray confidence that all would be taken care of-all merged in this embracing, spiralling, panoramic feeling. In Kush, the politics of love was being born. The Ippi Rift is a global curiosity that hides itself among the valleys of Northern Europe, belches forth its tensions at Mount Etna and the Valle del Bove, slips beneath the Mediterranean, and continues south to the vicinity of Johannesburg. Astronauts in their orbits see it plainer than China's Great Wall. Those who live in it do not see it at all. According to the theory of continental drift, the Rift marks the line along which Africa will eventually break in two-not, as would seem from a human standpoint sensible, along an east-west axis, so that the Islamic/caucasoid third would separate from the predominantly Negroid area south of the fifteenth parallel, but longitudinally, with all our latitudinal diversity of race and climate not only preserved but duplicated. The lengthy fault, whose incidents include the 0resund, the po- litical division of the Germanies, Lake Tanganyika, and the Kimberly diamond fields, excites geological aberrations, and there have long been rumors of oddities-oases, rumblings, auroras-in its vicinity as it cleaves the otherwise featureless desolation of central Kush. Nevertheless, the President of the nation was surprised, on the second day of his droning, mournful ride with the sulky Opuku and the evasive Mtesa, by the bulge of emerald that jumped through their windshield at a turning of their descent, in second gear, down the steep, pink-gray slope of the Rift's eastern bank. In some parts of the world this green would have been a simple suburban lawn; here it appeared with an evil intensity, as a sudden face of Roul. Back upon the lawn crouched a menacing fabrication, a low "ranch" house, a facade of bricks gratuitously whitened in splotches and of aluminum siding that feigned the wooden condition of clapboards. Similar, though not quite identical, houses were arrayed along both sides of this road, which had become one of those curbed asphalt curves realestate developers dub "crescents." Lawn sprinklers hurled rainbows against the crystalline aridity of the air. Otherwise there was no sign of life, not even a lone postman. The children must be at school, the housewives at the supermarket. Or else the whole development was a mock-up constructed to torment him. Ellellou felt a skimpiness, a threadbare nameless something as of those towns that come and go while the passenger dozes above the road map in his lap and the driver fiddles with the radio, seeking a non-religious station. As for the unbelievers, their works are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty traveller thinks it is water, but ivhen he comes nearer he finds that it is nothing. He finds Allah there, who pays him back in full. Too soon, considering the spaces the city-builders had at their disposal, the crescents yielded to an unlovely straightaway with supermarkets and trash dumps and low windowless go-go dives. In the front seat, Mtesa and Opuku were becoming noisy; they had never before seen gasoline stations with plastic twirlers, or ice-cream stands in the shape of a sundae cup, with a painted cherry on top doubling as an air-conditioner vent. Or the golden parabolas of a MacDonald's, a meagre hutch of an eatery dwarfed by both its monumental self-advertisement and its striped lake of a parking lot. The sight of these wonders at first caused them to mutter and then to jubilate aloud, hilariously, as people will laugh with terrified exhilaration when immersed in the mist and tumult of a waterfall. The straightaway thickened into a drab little "downtown," with pavements and traffic lights. Here, the sight of their countrymen wearing cowboy hats, blue jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and summer-weight business suits provoked even louder delight, infuriatingly, for Ellellou was trying to plan his attack, to screen out the superfluous, to concentrate. He put on his NoIR sunglasses. The Mercedes had slowed to a stop-and-go crawl. A young girl, younger and coarser than Sheba, but with a touch of the ruminating insouciance Ellellou painfully remembered, strolled past beneath the awnings, beside the parking meters, wearing an apricot halter tied high, tattered denim cut-offs the buttocks of which were patched with two faded cotton heart-shapes, and shiny-green platforms ten centimeters thick at the heels. She was chewing bubble gum with all of her brain. Opuku leaned out and called to her in demotic Arabic, "Where you goin', little girl?" "Wherever you ain't, fat man," was her answer, capped by a popped bubble, which sprung forth fresh hilarity from the two soldiers. The girl, who had delivered her rebuff with yet that Ian- guid provocative sideways tug of the eyes that Kushite women affect in potentially compromising social intercourse, was strolling past the window of a cinq et dix, and the ill-assorted muchness of its windows-the gimmicky, plasticky, ball-and-jacky, tacky, distinctly dusty abundance of these toys, tools, hobby helps, and cardboard games-agitated Ellel-lou's breast with the passion to destroy, to simplify, to make riddance of. His hands trembled. He tried to reason. This excrescence in the heart of Kush was not lava, it was an artifact, a plurality of artifacts, that had been called here by money. Where money exists, there must have been pillage: Marx proves this much. There must be capital, exploitation, transmutation of raw materials. In a word, industry. Where there is industry, there is machinery, delicately poised and precariously adjusted. This poise, this adjustment, can be destroyed, and the whole devilish fabric with it. There was a blue-collar stink to this town. Franchise had been cleaner, with its breezy lake, its ivied sanctuary. A4any of the men on this street wore oily coveralls, and some affected aluminum hardhats. Ellellou bid Mtesa stop the Mercedes before the entryway to an Army and Navy store, which, he discovered within, catered principally to the proletarian fads of youth, and was so far, here in the Ippi Rift, from the centers of distribution that its stock, especially for a man of Ellellou's precise and wiry stature, was absurdly limited. In exchange for his khaki uniform-the Galla trader behind the counter was happy to have it, for the sheen and softness acquired during natural wear cannot be machine-imitated, and is much prized by the
young-and several thousand lu Ellellou obtained a pair, not of the greasy gray coveralls conspicuous on the streets but of blue bib overalls stiff with newness and double-stitching, an antique pith helmet in lieu of a hardhat, and a lemon-yellow T-shirt upon which were stencilled the words Left Handers Are Easy to Love. Thus attired, the dictator commenced, as was his way, to mingle with his people, leaving Mtesa and Opuku illegally parked in a loading zone. The Saharan sun beat down dryly upon the twinkling conveniences of this doomed suburb of nothingness. Ellellou felt this doom blazing within him. Thirsty, he entered a corner drugstore. It was cool within. Tall phials of colored water symbolized the healing magic of pharmaceutics. A rack of sunglasses stood dim with dust, untouched. The commercial contents of the shelves were a mere scattered shadow of the merchandise of the drugstore in Franchise. Lest the reader imagine that the disembodied head's facile diagnosis of the dictator's supposed psychotic condition was here being borne out by an hallucinatory echo of Franchise, Wisconsin, he should understand that this city was in every respect inferior to that prosperous lakeside paper-town; it was a Third-World stab at an industrial settlement, scarcely a block deep on either side of the main "drag," thin of soil and devoid of history and shade trees, its citizens transparently African, its commercialism sketchy and even, one could say, humorously half-hearted. Franchise was to this place as a fondly pruned and deeply rooted hydrangea bush would be to a tumbleweed. The druggist, a tall black Hassouna in the traditional high-buttoned antiseptic jacket, glanced at the disguised tyrant's pith helmet with amusement. "Allah is good," he said. "How can I serve you, sir?" "I am thirsty," Ellellou explained. "Do you have a soda fountain?" "Such frills went out of modern use years ago," the druggist explained, "when the minimum wage for soda jerks went sky-high. You are living in the past, it seems. A machine that vends cans of soft drinks purrs in the rear of the store, next to the rack of plastic eggs holding gossamer panty hose. Take care, my friend, not to drop the pull-tab, once removed, back into the can. Several customers of mine have choked to death in that manner. We call it the Death of the Last Drop." "I also, effendi, need advice," Ellellou told him, less timorous now that he had caught something of the man's accent and style. For all its brave show of consumer-goods, the shop seemed infrequently visited, and its keeper had not lost the desert love of conversation. Words will bloom where nothing else does. Ellellou confided, "I am looking for useful work." The druggist lifted his elbows and polished the top of his case with his hands, which were long and limp as rags. "What sort of work might the gentleman be able to perform?" The dictator was at a sudden loss. Fakir, digger, orange-peddler-his costume corresponded to none of his priorly assumed professions. He thought of Mr. Cunningham, his patchy florid face, his starched white shirts. He said, "I am in the insurance racket. I am a claims adjuster." "I have heard of such men," the druggist admitted. He straightened up with startling briskness, as if suddenly awakened to the possibility that this stranger might be a hold-up man. His voice took on a solemn hollow threatening tone. "Well, sir, around here, the only work is to be had at the wells. Without the wells, and the toubab know-how, this would still be wilderness. You have heard, I dare say, of the wells?" "Of course," Ellellou lied. "A tremendous natural resource," the other solemnly affirmed, having relaxed again, and replaced his tattered elbows upon the glass case, which his dusting had revealed to contain packets of candy-colored condoms and a fan of cream-colored vibrators, like smooth flashlights searching in all directions. "Hydrocarbons," the druggist intoned. "That is the future in a word, sir. The path away from poverty, the redemption of the nation. Gross national product, balance of trade, you know all these terms, I am sure. They might well have need for a man of your experience, sir. I have heard tell of accidents amid the machinery, of near-explosions. I recommend that you apply, and my baraka go with you. Would you like to freshen up on your way to the personnel offices? Some deodorant, a swig of mouthwash? Personal hygiene counts for a lot with these infidels. God sees the soul; men smell the flesh." A wearisome fellow, really. A nation of shopkeepers is a morass of pleasantries. Woe to the economy that puts its goods on the rack of petty mark-ups. Nationalize, Ellellou thought furiously. Nationalize. He asked, "How do I find these wells?" "You follow your nose, man. Where have you been living, beneath the ground?" "I have come from the Balak," the traveller apologized. "I have been a long time tracking down a claim. Permit me one more question, of a simplicity that may astonish you. Pray, what is the name of this town in which I find myself?" The druggist indeed looked astonished. "Ellellou," he said. He straightened again to his height before the banked Latinate myriads of his medicine-shelves, his dried herbs, his poisons distilled from convolute carnivorous flowers, his love-potions, sleeping-potions, antihistamines, and diuretics. "Ellellou" he boomed, with the volume of a muezzin calling. "Our national independence leader, a god descended to us to fight for our freedom, a great man whose iron will is matched by his penis of steel." The druggist leaned far over the counter and whispered, "I trust you are not among those who with the arch-traitor Michaelis Ezana conspired against the purposes and teachings of our inspired head." "I am a simple apolitical professional man," the disguised dictator replied, with dignity, "seeking employment in the midst of a drought." "No drought here, my good man. Our peerless leader, whose enemies foreign and domestic gnash their teeth in vain, perceived that the Rift, in its geological contradictions, would trap all life-enhancing fluids-water and petroleum, to name the foremost two." Ellellou had the irritating impression, from the discontinuous vigor with which the druggist adopted one manner after another, of a systematic insincerity that might relate (it occurred to him) to his failure to make a purchase. Still thirsty, but embarrassed and anxious to be off, he said in farewell, "God is good." "God is great," was the disappointed answer. Outside, the Saharan sun pounded down upon the faded awnings, unlit neon signs, and brick false fronts of the Avenue, a sign proclaimed, of the End of Woe. Ellellou entered a luncheonette, narrow as a running man's stride and every surface of it coated with a film of wiped-away thumbprints and spillings. He ordered a lime phosphate, which he drank up with a single long lunge through the straw. The short-skirted waitress read his T-shirt and giggled. Her face was ugly-her teeth stuck straight out-b her legs were firm and smooth and the color of good healthy shit. He ordered a second lime phosphate and took it to a booth. Each booth had a mock-ivory selector for the jukebox at the back of the luncheonette, and he was surprised, flipping its yellowed leaves, to recognize some of the songs: "Sixteen Tons," by Tennessee Ernie Ford; "The Rock and Roll Waltz," by Kay Starr; "Blueberry Hill," by Fats Domino; "My Prayer," by the Platters. This last he could almost hum, as green fields and silver silos skimmed by. He began to feel bloated with flavored carbonation. And the Formica tabletop depressed him, its oft-wiped smoothness too much like the blankness of the sky. Ellellou got up, paid, tipped the waitress a lu, and left. As he went out the door, the jukebox began to play, very scratchily, "Love Letters in the Sand." A siesta emptiness possessed the streets. At the intersection where the Avenue of the End of Woe met another, an oblong traffic island held a statue of himself in bronze-even his sunglasses and bootlaces in oversize bronze, his face deep in shadow, his kepi and epaulettes whitened by guano-within a fountain, whose rhythmic surges of water tossed upwards veils and ghosts of spray that evaporated before the droplets could fall back into the stone bowl from which these patient explosions were fed. Around the rim of this great bowl the nation's twelve languages spelled their word for Freedom. In Wanj there was no word, all of life was a form of slavery, and this gap in the circle of words children had worn smooth, clambering to frolic in the water. There were no children now. They were captive in school, he imagined, thinking of how aptly this fountain symbolized the universe, that so dazzlingly and continuously pours forth something into nothing. Sinuous green growth of a Venezuelan density nourished in the lee of the fountain, whose wafted breath licked him like a tongue as he crossed the shimmering intersection. Alone on the pavements with his sharp small shadow, helmeted and baggy, Ellellou followed his nose. The shopping district thinned to barbershops and grimy-windowed printing emporia with cases of their alphabets gathering dust beside the quiet presses. Low cafes and pombe bars awaited the after-hours wave of worker clientele. Single-bladed ceiling fans desultorily turned within; there was sawdust on the floors, and big green bottles keeping cool under soaked burlap. An odor met his nostrils as sulphuric even, as caustic and complex, as the scent of the lakeside paper mills in Franchise. There, too, there had been, along the approaches to the industrial heart of the place, its satanic raison d'etre, this multiplication of trailer-homes with bravely set-out windowboxes and bird-baths, ever more overwhelmingly mingled with low cinder-block buildings enigmatically named or in naked anonymity serving the central complex, which was enclosed in apparent miles of link fence hung with scarlet signs warning of high voltage, explosive materials, and steep fines for even loitering on the fringes. Ellellou approached this fence and looked in. Across a large margin of macadamized desert that made absolute dimensions difficult to grasp, a dark heap of slant-roofed sheds, inscrutable chutes, black-windowed barracks, tapered chimneys, towers with flaming tips, and rigs for pounding pumps belched forth a many-faceted clatter and the oceanic chemical stench of hydrocarbon refining. The ball-topped fractionating towers, the squat storage tanks were linked to their underworld source of supply by a silver spaghetti of parallel piping. Little pennants of burn-off flame adorned the construct like a castle. Though Ellellou's eyes spotted few human figures, which perhaps in this uncertain scale would have been invisible, the whole monstrous thing was delicately in motion, eating something from the soil and digesting it into a layered excrement palatable to the white devils worlds away. Beyond and above the stinking, smoking, churning, throbbing emissary of consumerism, the lavender western wall of the Rift, too precipitous for any road, too barren for any life, hung like a diaphanous curtain behind which waited like a neglected concubine the idea of Kush. But Ellellou could not smell the desert. Everything in the land his heart knew had been erased, save the blank sky, its blue so intense it verged on purple, overhead. He moved along the fence, through the litter of drained cans and discarded brown pay-envelopes, until he came to a guard post, a plywood shack no wider than a telephone booth, and asked the man slumped in there for admission. "Show me your pass." "I have no pass, but I have business inside." "Those at the main gate will determine that. What sort of business? You are dressed like a fool." "I have a claim to adjust. I am a claims adjuster. There has been an accident inside." This guard, a long limp Moundang in an unclean burnoose, studied him suspiciously. "There's been no accident here." "From my mother I inherited the gift of foresight, maybe the accident is soon to occur," Ellellou replied, and was about to improvise an ingratiating fable when he recognized the other man. "Wadal!" he cried. "Wadal the well-digger-have you forgotten your servant? We met north of the Hulul, in Ramadan, and together we repelled the American infiltration." From within the hood of his burnoose Wadal studied me with deepened suspicion, and placed his hand on the rifle in the sentry box. "I remember much confusion and smoke," he said. "And my Kutunda being taken from me." "Kutunda for whom you had no use, and whom you had taken from another, and who in turn has been taken from me, by one who will not keep her long. You exploited her because you have been exploited. Let me in, Wadal, and we will bring these desecrators and exploiters of the poor to justice. There is fuel for much smoke here." He was still trying to fix me in his mind, as, emerging from the shadows of his tent, a traveller squints to distinguish mirage from mountain. "You claimed to be Ellellou," he said, "and were clumsy with a shovel." "I was clumsy because you chose unworthy places to dig. But now your nose has led you nobly. How did you come to this place? How long has it been here? How is it capitalized, and who provides the expertise? Who is its manager, its president?" "We never see him, and we never ask," Wadal said, still unfriendly, the gun brought in close to his body. Through a rent in his burnoose I glimpsed his penis, languid. "He feeds us and pays us, and that is enough. He generates employment and boosts the gross national product. A few more wells, and we will be another Libya, another Oman." "Another Bayonne, another Galveston," Ellellou replied. He commanded, "Admit me to this inferno." Instead of obeying, Wadal lifted his rifle as if to strike with the butt. A happy spark, the prospect of righting an old imagined wrong, lit his morose face from within; but at that moment a gray Mercedes in the silence of its perfect workings slid by on the crackling, littered gravel alley that ran beside the fence, and Wadal lowered his weapon. Ellellou waved the car on, and turned his back upon the guard, having formed a more visionary plan than brute coercion wherewith to secure admission. He went back through the streets of this new world named for him, into the barbershops and drugstores, the economy furniture outlets and the cinq et dix stores, the pombe bars and realestate offices, the dens wnere men labored to repair electrical appliances engineered to be irreparable and the cinemas where numb heads pondered giant pink genitals laboring to symphonic music, and Ellellou asked the citizens of Kush he found in these places, "Are you happy?" When their embarrassment produced a silence, or a grunted "What's it to you?" or a defiant "Yes" or an equally defiant "No" or an evasive measured response, he pursued the issue, saying, "Those who are not perfectly