The Coup (23 page)

of petty comforts and artificial excitements, cannot but collapse into a cinder, into a gnawed bone whirling in space. Hasten that Day of Disaster, blessed soldiers of our patriotic army, and shoot the giant slave of grease mercifully in the throat, and restore this ancient Rift to its pristine desolation, beloved of Allah, the wise and all-know-+!" Ellellou identified the odor that had intruded: it was of the pink, "sanitizing" cake of soaplike substance that reposed within the bottom lip of urinals in the men's "rest" rooms of some American service stations and restaurants, and which had puzzled young Felix until he had been acclimated enough to understand it intuitively. "You may say these wells have brought water. I say the Almighty could have made a river flow in this Rift. You say grass grows here now, where sheep can feed, and date palms, and orange trees, and what cannot be grown is purchased. I say, the Sahara once was altogether green, and the Merciful bestowed upon it a superior beauty, the beauty of the minimal, the changeless, the unpolluted, the necessary. The battle now in the world lies between the armies of necessity and those of superfluity. Join that battle. God has placed in your hands today the power to pulverize and incinerate this evil visitation, this malodorous eruption!" But had he, intuitively or otherwise, understood its essence? The pink cake of strange substance, no doubt petroleum-derived, had sat across the porcelain slots meant to carry urine away; what purpose did this obstruction serve? A spiritual purpose, that of a talisman, a juju, an offering to the idea of purity. "You say," he called into the microphone, which now seemed the narrow neck of a great echoing calabash trumpet, "that life here is hard and the drought has made it harder. I say, the unclouded sky mirrors the unclouded heart of Kush, the heart released from the tyranny of matter. Magnify your Lord, cleanse your garments, and keep away from all pollution." The devils behind him were still consulting. The crowd, whose depths and reaches he could not see, felt to his sense like a sail on far-off Lake Timmebago, at that instant when either the wind would catch, bellying the sail out taut, or else, the wind's drift having been misjudged, the sail would luff. "My people: your President has carried our drought in his heart heavily, it has nearly dragged me down, until I made this recognition: the drought is a form of the Manifest Radiance, and our unhappiness within it is blasphemy. The Book accuses: Your hearts are taken up with worldly gain from the cradle to the grave. The Book promises: You shall before long come to know. Indeed, if you know the truth with certainty, you would see the fire of Hell: you would see it with your very eyes. Come, my people, let us build a great pyre. The white devils and their machinery have entered by the gate of our weakness, our wandering and unsteady dedication to the ideals of Islamic Marxism, the beauty of L'@lmergence, the glory of Kush that was the envy of the Pharaohs and anathema to the Christians of Axum! Redeem your wandering, my people! Destroy this vile temple to Mammon! Soldiers, shoot! Ellellou orders you to shoot!!" In the answering, teetering silence, the P-R man's voice muttered, "O.k., that's plenty." The microphone was pulled from the dictator's hand. The P-R man said into it, "The management has a question I'm sure everybody here would like to hear your response to. The question is, What makes you think you're Colonel Ellellou?" "It shall now be proven," he said serenely, and waited for the crowd to give way before the irresistible certification, the Presidential Mercedes. But the crowd failed to move as a single thing, as a sea pushed aside; instead, each head oscillated expectantly, amusedly, while the minute yielded no unifying phenomenon. Ellellou stood on tiptoe, then attempted to jump himself higher by placing a hand on the P-R man's winglike shoulder. He saw neither Mtesa nor Opuku-no, on the third leap, there was Opuku, standing as a passive spectator just outside the fence with, the fourth jump revealed, the gum-chewing girl in the apricot halter. Of Mtesa and his Mercedes there was no sign, except possibly the scarlet letters, quickly faded to salmon in the Sahara sunshine, atop a ramp-riddled concrete structure, spelling PARK. Beyond this sign, the sky was blank. The crowd, as no omen materialized, began to rumble, cheated. The white engineer-his face glazed with perspiration and the parallel harrow-marks of a comb fresh in his thin pale hair, hair the color of the dung of a sick goat-said into the indispensable microphone, "Whaddeya think, good people? I think we've given this fella his chance. Any of you folks thirsty, you can have one free beer each at the commissary, to the right of the front door as you enter. Don't push, there's plenty for everybody." "This is treason," Ellellou managed to shout, his last official utterance, before the crowd with murderous jubilation rolled over him. He became a beanbag, a toy. The wells continued to pump, and on the other side of town the lawn sprinklers continued to twirl. A little cloud covered the sun.

VII

The struggle between man and fate is a totally alien concept to Arab culture. -Sahair el-Calamawy, 1976 I live. Perhaps the white devil's offer of free beer saved my life, for the crowd was in too much of a thirsty hurry to halt and pummel me with the annihilatory zeal my address had attempted to instill. One cracked rib, a fat lip, the removal of my shoes, the bestowal of a quantity of derisive spittle, and they were through with my body. The life of a charismatic national leader cannot be all roses. My wallet, with its rainbow of lu, its snapshots of my four wives clothed and my mistress Kutunda in the nude, its credit cards and plastic perpetual calendar and embossed national air alert codes and Brezhnev's unlisted telephone number, had also been lifted, and no doubt this semeiotic treasure-lode enriches the arcana of some light-fingered ex-nomad secure in his niche in the burgeoning oil industry. A little picturesque behanding would set the rascal straight, I think-but then my judicial opinion is no longer solicited. To be barefoot and walletless in Kush, in even this modern- ized pocket of it, is to be at no very striking disadvantage. A few days and nights of soggy mendicancy, while the monsoon rains pattered down with their pre-@lmergence verve, and during which I was kicked from more than one melting doorway by the property-proud burghers of Ellellou, served to adjust me to the fact that I had indeed been abandoned by my bodyguard among the masses with whom it had once pleased me whimsically to mingle. After the loss of Sheba, such a fall followed as one segment of a telescope brings with it another, slightly smaller. No one to blow me, no one to bow to me. Takbir! I was driven to look for work and shelter amid the happy mud. In my student need across the seas I had held a variety of lowly jobs-"nigger work," in the friendly phrase of the lily-white elite of Franchise. The very luncheonette where, in the twilit last hours of my Presidency, I had treated myself to not one but two lime phosphates, hired me as a counterman, once I had demonstrated sufficient mastery of the junk cuisine with which the iron-stomached Satans of North America are poisoning the world. Cheeseburgers, baconburgers, pepperburgers; fried eggs in all their slangy permutations of ups and downs and overs; hash browns, onion rings, and hot pastrami were all within my repertoire at the sizzling, curdling grill. Egg rolls and pizza arrived frozen from the poles of Marco Polo's travels, needing only to be warmed. "Hero" sandwiches were cannibalized by my customers, who still believed, primitively, we become what we eat. From six to two, or from two to ten, I chopped, flipped, served. I juggled the orders in a rolling sea of music, for if the customers did not feed the ivory tune-selectors, Rose, as the toothy leggy waitress was called, did. She was a maddening hummer-along, and yet disappointingly uncooperative in other respects: my attempts to seduce her fell on barren soil-her hard-packed determination to achieve, with her husband Bud, upward mobility. They lived in an aluminum box on the edge of town, equipped with a chemical toilet and a fold-away kitchen sink. Once this domicile was mortgage-free they planned to sell and move onwards to a two-and-a-half-bedroom ranch house, with one-and-a-half children. The next stage of escalation would be a two-and-a-half-story fake-beam mock-Tudor overlooking the sixth green of the golf course, while Bud squirmed upwards through the greased tubing of the refinery. Such progress in husbanded half-steps was freedom to Rose, and my sidling attempts to drag her off the bandwagon into my anarchic arms were as idle as an attempt to seduce a locomotive from its tracks. No virtue as iron as that forged on the edge of poverty. When he came into the luncheonette, Bud, a big Moubi with arms that could have hurled a spear seventy meters, sat with those mighty arms meekly folded on the godless Formica as he stared up into the spectral works of a hierarchical machine, his lips pinched in unconscious imitation of the white man's scolding visage. They shared, as she slaved, one dream. Her only straying was in her head, as the lukewarm melodies bathed our ears in their moony ache day after day. Kush was the last stop on a long descent through levels of national development; these records, their grooves scoured of all but hoarse ghosts of song, had taken twenty years to reach the Ippi Rift from their source in the America of the Fifties. Over and over, hearty, hollowly healthy voices blended with violins toward an uplifted climax of pre-rock wail, a ululant submission to the patriotic, economic call to sublimate. "Love Me Tender," the youthful Presley requested; "Cry Me a River," Johnny Ray begged; "Que Sera, Sera," Doris Day philosophized, her voice snagging each time on some thorn in my soul. The regal voices of Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby lightly entwined in the drifting waltz of "True Love," and Debbie Reynolds as delicately lisped of her clinging attachment to "Tammy." There was, too, in counterpoint to these feminine trailings-off, a choral, masculine voice: "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Happy Wanderer": when these rousing tunes surged from the well of time, Rose and I slapped the plates down harder and shuffled more swiftly behind the counter (never failing, it seemed to me, to brush hips tantalizingly-was this altogether my doing?). "A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," Jerry Lee Lewis assured us, ecstatic as a dervish. Even the grill grew hotter, the fast food came faster. And when the whistling section of "The River Kwai March" penetrated us, we knew, knew in our bones, that we would win the Cold War. Freedom, like music, rolled straight through the heart. Oh Rose, my Secret Love and Queen of the Hop, my Sugarfoot Standing on the Corner amid Autumn Leaves, my Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, in this chronicle too crowded with vexed women yours is the unique aura of happiness, of the bubbling, deep-fat aroma of productive, contented labor, as hoped for by Adam Smith. Ellellou, known to his co-workers only as Flapjack, served as a short-order cook for three months, before grease burns compelled him to take employment as a parking attendant in the city's one multi-level garage. It was here, he imagined, that Mtesa had hidden the Mercedes at a crucial hour; but the car and the driver were gone, and the oil spots on cement were indistinguishable clues, and the girl in the apricot halter had vanished with Opuku. Yet one day, in a concrete nook at a turning of the third-tier ramp, he found, wrapped in a tagilmst like a baby in bunting, Sheba's anzad. The gift seemed a gentle enough irony. He smiled; like any believer, he was not affronted by the notion that he was being watched. He, who had always been chauffeured, became ruthlessly deft in the reverse-gear rearrangement of automobiles, mostly old chrome-heavy guzzlers from Detroit's Happy Times, well into the second revolution of their odometers and their dents beyond counting. Meanwhile, through the two months of Jumada, in this season the Tuareg term Akasa, rain continued to fall upon Kush, rain enough even for a namesake of Noah's grandson. Sweet grass grew tall in the vacant lots of Ellellou and in the millions of hectares around; the cattle of the pastoralists fed so handsomely their weakened legs snapped, and the herdsmen toppled to the earth with excess of festival dancing and millet beer. The very bones strewn parched upon the sands put on flesh and gave milk; seeds dormant several millennia hurled toward the serried nimbus giant blossoms and bulbous fruit absent from even the most encyclopedic botanic handbooks. All this, Ellellou thought sadly, I achieved by ceasing to exist. still was the curse upon the land. National news was hard to come by in the Rift; the local paper was boastfully devoted to parochial concerns: oil prices, OPEC conferences, the end of the embargo, new shopping centers in the area, zoning regulations to control the housing boom. No report of any coup was heard in Ellellou, where all civic projects, all literacy programs and health clinics, all paving, sewering, and dedication of parkland were carried forward in the name of the national leader who, with the grand elisions of historical myth, had singlehandedly and as it were simultaneously crushed the French, the king, and counter-revolutionary elements within SCRME. Events widely separated in time and causation, and some of them set in motion when I was a mere foot soldier and foreign student- the loi-cadre proclamation, de Gaulle's imperious withdrawal from France Outre-mer, the constitutional-monarchial inter- val, the revolt led by General Soba, the expulsion of the neo-colons, the incineration of Gibbs, the execution of the king-had been lumped and smoothed into one triumphant sequence whose signature was the green flag, whose climax was the green grass swaying like an ocean beneath the benevolent gray sky. Allah was mighty, immovable, and undis-cernible; so was President Ellellou; praise him. Anonymous within the bustling polls that had absorbed my name, I searched the papers for news of myself. Page two sometimes carried bulletins from the capital- as far away, remember, as Rome from Amsterdam, as the Crater Copernicus from the Lacus Somniorum. They referred always to a vague "People's Government" as it issued a vigorous barrage of new wage incentives, tax holidays for foreign investors, relaxations of import tariffs and tourist visas, official welcomes extended to Israeli experts in drip irrigation and USD malnutritionists, preliminary plans for a cantilevered Braille Library to be imposed on the center of Istiqlal, and other such political promiscuities savoring much of the trusting nature and unholy energy of Michaelis Ezana. Toward the end of my tenure as burger chef, beneath an item hailing the arrival of a team of Dutch specialists in flood control (i imagined them with whitened, waterlogged thumbs), a snippet of fine print said, Colonel Ellellou, President-for-Life and Supreme Teacher, has been away from the capital on a fact-finding mission. And so in a sense I was. Working by day, strolling the streets by night, I spent much time contemplating my fellow-Kushites, as they had developed in this isolated oasis of plenty. They had lost, make no mistake, the attractive muscular lightness of alert predators, the leanness that balanced them upon the land as airily as our maidens balance bundles of tamarisk faggots upon their heads. People no longer looked carved, as they had in the village, in the army, and even in those early days of independence and monarchy in Istiqlal. These bodies sauntering along the Avenue of the End of Woe, clothed in a decaled denim that did for holidays as well as labor days, had been less whittled than patted into shape. A loss of tension, of handsome savagery, was declared also in their accents, which had yielded the glottal explosiveness of their aboriginal tongues to a gliding language of genial implication and sly nonchalance. There was no longer, with plenty, the need to thrust one's personality into the face of the person opposite. Eye-contact was hard to make along the damp sidewalks of Ellellou, where puddles took tints from neon signs. The little hard-cornered challenges-to honor, courage, manliness, womanliness-by which our lives had been in poverty shaped were melting away, like our clay shambas and mosques, rounded into an inner reserve secret as a bank account; intercourse in Ellellou moved to a music of disavowal that new arrivals, prickly and hungry from the bush, mistook for weakness but that was in fact the luxurious demur of strength. The business of oil, of the businesses that clustered around the business of oil, pre-empted the mental spaces formerly devoted to battle and ritual, to death and God, so that these last two came to loom (i suspected) as not only strangers but monsters, un-thinkables, like the abstruse formulae of science whereby oil was lifted from its porous matrix and its tangled molecules sorted into saleable essences. The volume of mysteries upon which men float had been displaced, but the shimmer of small amusements and daily poetries, the sly willingness of people to be pleased, appeared perennial. I, submerged in posthumous glory, immersed in the future I had pitted all my will against, relaxed at last. Often I arose early, conveying my frame with its clinging dreams to the luncheonette or to the concrete spiral of the parking garage; on my way I witnessed the droll earnest children being herded to school by the educational imperatives of the industrial state, dangling their schoolbags and clutching their books, solemn in their confidence that a grave thing was being asked of them, and that by obediently responding they were creating a nation. Their figures, uniformed, some of them, in green-our Kushite green, no longer an arid remembrance of Green Sahara but here, all around us, in the flourishing grass-seemed mute in the early morning, little figures silent as in a painting, collecting in clots at the bus stops. One does not know what it is to love a country until one has seen its children going off to school. I was accumulating my earnings and assembling my shattered poise toward the inevitable return to Istiqlal. In the second month of my employment at the parking garage, when I had been promoted to the man who takes the ticket and the lu and releases the striped wooden arm at the bottom of the ramp, an idle task that leaves much time for reading, another item appeared on page two of the daily Rift Report: The Government today acknowledged official fears that Colonel EU-ELLOTI, Chairman of SCRME, while seeking to negotiate the phasing-out of Soviet Russian missile sites within the Hulul Depression, has been abducted by leftward-leaning terrorists. So the ground for his official extinction was being prepared. The President decided the moment had come for his return. As he hitchhiked south with Sheba's anzad strapped to his back, the sky brightened, as if blanching in dread of his return to power. A truck carrying bales of last year's Parisian fashions-shantung hip-huggers, see-through jumpsuits-from Algeria to the souks and boutiques of Istiqlal picked him up. The driver was a young Belgian seeking a better quality of life. The cab radio interrupted its playing of La Plus Haute Qua-rantaine to repeat a bulletin that the President, long missing, had been presumed dead, and the Acting President with reluctance and sorrow had taken up the reins of government. To formalize his succession of Ellellou, which of course is the Berber word for "freedom," the new leader had assumed the name Dorfu, an expressive Salu term with the double meaning of "solidarity" and "consolidation." The national anthem was played, followed by the theme song from 2001, by Richard Strauss. Actually, the Salu dorfu has the root meaning of