The Coup (20 page)

translator was struggling to keep up. "Travellers," Ellellou sweepingly replied, "were never meant to trivialize these peaks. But find me my Sheba unharmed, Colonel Sirin, and we will let this amusement park endure as a memorial to the happy event. Otherwise by my decree its desolation shall forever objectify the desolation of my heart." "I offer a theory," the translator said in his own words, whether couched in sloshy French or muddy Arabic, I forget. "There were among us some authentic Tuareg, acting as advisers, scouts, and regional experts." In the exhilaration of speaking his own thoughts he went on, "Do you know, some say-it is very interesting-the Tuareg are descended from Christian medieval crusaders who strayed; hence their fre- quent use of the cross as decoration, and their chivalric refusal to work with their hands?" "That is interesting," Ellellou agreed. "Where are these kafirsPeople" It was soon discovered, amidst the swirling dust of poured concrete being pulverized and immobilized buses being overturned, that there were only false Tuareg, that the true had fled. "They will sell her to the Yemenis!" Ellellou cried. "If so," the translator offered, "that too is not without historical interest, for Yemen was, in Biblical times, the land of Sheba. Perhaps she will feel at home there." She would have a kitchenette, a frozen food locker, a little ranch house with chimes for a doorbell and Muzak piped into the den. She would wear an apron and house slippers, she would learn to push a vacuum cleaner. She would forget him; he would shrink to the size of a hi in her mind. The strong man wept. Ellellou ordered Opuku to line up all the tourists and machine-gun them. His child, like himself, would have a rumor, a gust of wind, for a father. This fantasy, that he had impregnated the disparue Sheba, hardened to a conviction as, having left the contrite Soviets in charge of restoring their developed hectare of the Balak to its pristine condition, Ellellou descended in the Mercedes westward toward the Ippi Rift. The hum of the highway dulled his ears. His mind was carried back to the times when he and Oscar X and some one or two others (such as John 46X, who had kicked the heroin habit with the aid of Allah, had tried out for defensive lineman with the Packers, and had shoulders as broad as Opuku's, so when he came along Felix had to sit in the back seat) would descend south from Franchise to worship at the temple in Milwaukee or, an hour farther to the south, the Holy of Holies in Chicago. The green fields of Wisconsin would swing past like the swells of a soft sea. The white barns and silver silos bespoke an America where they in their gas-guzzling, mufflerless Olds were a devilish impurity, black corpuscles cruising along America's veins, past heaves of soil that, though casual as the shrugs of an ocean, had been memorized by farmers' footsteps, generation after generation. Over the car radio came Doris Day and twanging country plaints and, as the city neared, Dinah Washington and the rickety, jolly, hot-from-the-cozy-dark black man's jazz. Those tinkling notes never failed to catch the edge of the wave. Set on a ridge with the pride of a castle, a gaunt gabled farmhouse kept company with its one big tree. Poverty had roofed a house here and there with a patchwork of discounted shingles six different colors. Felix was fascinated by the power-line towers, steel skeletons whose shape suggested giants daintily holding threads of pure force in tiny arms hanging straight down, insulators. The delicate grandeur of their latticed forms repeated to the rolling horizon, and in moments the swiftly altering perspective from the back seat stamped one upon the other; such moments, like those of dejd vu, were thrilling, with a resonance beyond their visual proof that the towers diminished along a perfectly straight line. And Felix felt a meaning too in the backs of billboards, visible on the left, slatted structures solemnly designed, cut, trussed, and nailed to carry a commercial message fleetingly; one billboard had a curved silhouette which a backwards glance revealed to be that of a pickle, and another the outline, ominous when seen from afar, of a steer advertising his own demise through the channels of a local steakhouse. In the occasional distance a water-tower stood on its long legs like a Martian invader puzzling what to do next. In winter these fields turned white, white sprinkled with the black calligraphy of snow fences and leafless trees, a landscape as void of growth as the one his gray car was endlessly speeding through, gobbling one horizon only to be faced with an identical other. At times the dictator wanted to flog his country for being so senselessly vast. The day arched like a blinding headache above their endless meal of kilometers. Ellellou, alone in the back seat, his motionlessness a mask for his suffocating struggle with the resurging, undownable fact of Sheba's absence, was slow to sense the constraint in the car, a tension and disapproval emanating from the back of Opuku's round bald skull, connected to the mass of his shoulders by a glistening pyramidal neck. Ellellou recalled that he had never heard machine-gun fire, though he had ordered some. He leaned forward and asked, "The tourists-did they die well?" Opuku held silent. Ellellou persisted, "Or did they die ignobly, begging and cackling for mercy? Pigs." He quoted, "When the Hour of Doom overtakes them, the ivrongdoers will sivear that they had stayed away but one hour." Opuku confessed, "I didn't shoot them. I told them, Run away into the rocks. Those too frightened and feeble hid behind buses." Ellellou, his heart engulfed by rhythmic waves of grief, asked his bodyguard why he had thus betrayed L'fimergence. The motions of his heart, when he focused upon them, were like the attempts of a man with clumsy mechanical hands to drown in a bucket of bendable, skidding plastic a cat crazy to live. "No betrayal," Opuku said. "Those poor toubabs just dragged in by Zanj tourist package. Old ladies. Gentlemen marabouts." "Capitalist vermin," Ellellou replied apathetically, gazing out the window at the streaming void. "Warmongers and exploiters." "Slant-eyes too," Mtesa pointed out. "Nixon-lovers," was the reply, still lacking in spirit. But he did not like Mtesa's siding with Opuku. Their little counterrevolution must be quelled. The President took his eyes from the congenial dun vacancy visible and sought to ignite with a spark of his old fervor the predictable were idling of his rhetoric. "You had the gun in your hands and their faces before you," he told Opuku, "and pity intervened. Pity is our African vice. We pitied Mungo Park, we pitied Livingstone, we pitied the Portuguese and let them all live to enslave us." A sickening clothy memory, of Sheba mounted on her pink camel in full regalia, squeezed his body down, so his discourse continued in a higher pitch. "Imagine yourself a statistic on a toubab's accounting sheet, and further imagine that by inking you out, you and a thousand others, he can save a dollar, a shilling, a franc or even a lu on the so-called bottom line. Do you imagine, Lieutenant Opuku, that his finger will hesitate to pull that particular trigger? No, the ink will flow. You will be Xed out by Exxon, engulfed by Gulf, crushed by the U. s., disenfranchised by France, not only you but your entire loving nation of succulent wives, loyal brothers, righteous fathers, and aged but still amusing mothers. All inked out, absolutely, without the merest flourish of compunction. In the vocabulary of profit there is no word for "pity." So your squeamish refusal to follow my distinct orders was a laughable freak, a butterfly from the moon, speaking an incomprehensible language to these deaf and dumb earthlings, who have no hearts, whose bodies are compounded of minerals utterly foreign to your own elastic arteries and stalwart bones. These people consist entirely of numbers; pulling the trigger of your government-financed-I am obliged to point out-machine gun, your superb Berthier mitrailleuse, would have constituted an act of erasure impeccable in its innocence, as well as being a gift of obedience pleasing to your President, and a polite enough message that even old addle-pated Komomo, the king clown of pan-African confusion, might have comprehended. Opuku, remember the Book: Mohamet is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one anotherPeople Ellellou sank back into the velour, exhausted. He tucked little remembered bits of Sheba-her earrings, the fleshy bump in the center of her upper lip-around himself like ends and corners of a blanket. But he could not doze; the tension in the car remained. Opuku smoked a plastic-tipped cigarillo, having sulkily removed the highly crinkly wrapper, and Mtesa steered unswervingly through the flatnesses of the Ihoo, a plain of hardened talcum hammered to its present form by millennia of the sun's stagnant fury. In such a world Ellellou's mind could fashion no shelter for itself, though his eyelids closed. He saw green fields, the slatted backs of billboards, and heard Mtesa suddenly grunt. "Another truck?" Ellellou asked. He was resigned, now, to such wonders multiplying. "No truck, sir. Look to the left." Perhaps seven kilometers to the south, a lost city shimmered comone of the red cities that, some archaeologists believe, the refugee royalty of conquered Kush erected in what was then grassland. Others thought they were Christian monasteries, whose cells were later used to house the harems of wilderness sheiks expatriate from Darfur. The stones of the walls, blue-speckled bricks it takes two modern men to lift, are silent, and for all their solidity have crumbled, so that at this distance, to Ellellou's eyes, which also were not what they once were, they suggested that ring of fragile shred which remains when a wasps' nest is knocked down. Out of this ragged papery rim rose, still intact and scarcely weathered, hewn from imperishable indigenous stone, a monolithic stairway leading nowhere. Meanwhile (to extrapolate), at a choice table of the Afri-kischfreiheitwursthaus the East Germans had installed on the top story of their skyscraper, Mrs. Gibbs, Mr. Klipspringer, Michaelis Ezana, Kutunda Traore, and the young police spy in the plum-colored fez were enjoying a glittering luncheon. Ezana was happy, in his element among the twinkling imported cutlery and crystal steins, talkative, giddy on Liebfrau-milch, and in love with the brassy-haired American widow, whose natural grief was underlined by stomach troubles and an ear problem originating in the imperfectly pressurized Air Kush 727. Ezana was showing off his African cynicism and gift of tongues, and though his coquetry was wasted upon its object, it was enjoyed by her benignly smiling, heavy-lidded, delicately mustachioed escort, the professionally patient Mr. Klipspringer. "Your Mr. Nixon," Ezana prattled in his musical, trippingly accented English, "I do not think this Watergate matter should do him any harm. How could such a puny contretemps offset his stirring accomplishments of the last six months? He has ceased to bomb Cambodia, renewed relations with Egypt, created trustworthy governments in Chile and in Greece, provided himself with a new Vice-President as tall and handsome if not as eloquent as the old, and enhanced the American economy by arranging with the Arabs to double the price of oil. Truly, a charismatic dynamo, who has fascinated the American people again in the workings of their own democracy." Klipspringer chuckled. This man, what good nature, what tireless tact! "Maybe so, Mike," he allowed. "But from where I sit he looks like a loser." "Indeed, a loser in a narrow sense; but reflect upon the purgative value of a leader who unravels before a nation's riveted eyes. If he falls, he will carry your nation's woes with him into the abyss. Twice recently, if I mistake not, your federation has been humiliated, by the North Vietnamese with their mortars, by the Arabs with their embargo. What more poetic and profoundly satisfying"-here he bestowed a dazzling, ignored smile upon the American widow, who was studying her plate wondering what, exactly, had gone into this sausage-"psychotherapy, if my term is correct, than the evisceration of a President, out of whom tumble in majestic abundance tapes, forgeries, falsified income taxes, and mealy-mouthed lies? This is theatre in the best African tradition, wherein the actor is actually slain!" "Your own President, where is he?" asked Angelica Gibbs, prodding herself out of absorption with her own, obscurely troubled interior. Ezana translated the inquiry into Sara for Kutunda and Fula for the man in the fez, who both laughed, that wicked bubbling African laughter connecting directly with the underworld; it rang in Ezana's ears as a permutation of his own intoxication with this tired-looking, diarrhetic angel who had come from afar to sit opposite him across the Afrikischfrei-heitwursthaus's laundered linen. Instead of answering her, he lifted a fork before his face and said through its thoughtfully twirled tines, "The channels of the mind, it may be, like those of our nostrils, have small hairs-cilia, is that the word? If we think always one way, these lie down and grow stiff and cease to perform their cleansing function. The essence of sanity, it has often been my reflection, is the entertainment of opposite possibilities: to think the contrary of what has been customarily thought, and thus to raise these little-cilia, am I wrong?-on end, so they can perform again in unimpeachable fashion their cleansing function. You want examples. If we believe that Allah is almighty, let us suppose that Allah is non-existent. If we have been assured that America is a nasty place, let us consider that it is a happy place." "It's the place for me," Mr. Klipspringer cheerfully interposed, "and I've been to Hell and gone. When I see that old soapy-looking Capitol dome from the window of the jet, I think, This is it. This is me." Ezana would not cease his flirting with the poor fatigued Mrs. Gibbs. "Now your President," he informed her, "is a master of such alternations of assumption. Let us suppose, he says, that China is not a bad place but a good place, a friendly place. We have many pleasant Chinese restaurants in the United States, he reasons, perhaps China is equally pleasant. Or let us suppose, he says, that the way to rule is not to lead and inspire the people but to hide from them, to absent oneself increasingly, like the ancient Tiberius, who frolicked upon his island while Jesus Christ was spreading subversion-are my facts correct?" "I never heard it put quite that way, Mike," Klipspringer said, closing his lips then upon the wetted end of a Cuban cigar, which had cost him twenty lu in a basket shop where stacks of them were rotting, and crossing his