The Coup (4 page)

was the Soviet exclusiveness confident and inward, like that of the French. By the terms of their treaty-at their insistence, not ours-a soldier or technician found afoot in the open air was to be jailed and segregated from the populace. One's impression could only be of a power immensely timorous, a behemoth frightened of even such gaunt black mice as we poor citizens of Kush. We shook hands, the colonel and I. I thanked him for his hospitality, he thanked me for mine. He said Russia and Kush were brothers in progressivism and in the unanimous patriotism of their polyglot peoples. I responded to Colonel Sirin (his bespectacled interpreter being still abed comatose) as exactly as I could; our two peoples, I said, were possessed of an "essence religieiise" and our lands of u les vacances magni-fiques." Mtesa and Opuku witnessed this unintelligible exchange wonderingly, and the Mercedes, coughing on its heady swig of Siberian diesel fuel, took us up the ramp, to the slab of desert that lifted on pneumatic hinges to admit scalding floods of light and to reveal again the shimmering horizons of our journey. The Hulul Depression, its gravels and crusty sands ruddy in color, as if the rivers that had long ago emptied into this cracked lakebed had been tinged with blood, gave way, while the sun climbed toward its incandescent apogee, to the foothills of the Bulub Mountains. The piste diminished to a winding track, treacherously pitted and strewn with a flinty scrabble that well challenged the mettle of our Michelin steel-belted radials. The distances became bluish; as we rose higher, clots of vegetation, thorny and leafless, troubled the rocks with their grasping roots. In the declivities that interrupted our grinding, twisting ascent, there were signs of pasturage: clay trampled to a hardened slurry by hooves, excrement still distinguishable from mineral matter, some toppled skeletons of beehive huts, their thatch consumed as a desperate fodder. Aristada, which thrives on overgrazed lands, tinged with green this edge of desolation. Our route went not directly across the Bulubs, but along their shoulder; to the east the horizon was low, though undulating, and the smoke of a nomadic encampment, of Teda or the dreaded Tuareg, manifested itself to the keen eyes of my companions. I, in seeking to verify their glimpse of potentially sinister smoke, seemed to see an altogether different apparition: two golden parabolas showed above a distant deckled ridge and, as I gazed incredulously, slowly sank from sight, the motion of the car carrying us behind an escarpment. Neither Mtesa nor Opuku could confirm my sighting, though we halted the car and prowled the searing terrain for a vantage. The rocks here held iridescent streaks of strange sleek minerals. Having halted, we performed our salat az-zuhr and fell asleep in the shade of a ledge, where lizards came to skitter across us as if our dozing bodies had joined the vast insensate chorus of changeless stone, the touch of their feet daintier than the first tingling drops of a rain. The days of the journey merge in my memory after that poisonous glimpse of golden parabolas; a sort of delirium of distance overtook us. We traversed many sorts of naked soil-flinty orange gorges, black clay where slatelike slabs had been set with the regularity of a demented divine masonry, stretches of purple gravel varied by shifting hillocks of amber sand. In the wide belt of transition between withered sudan and stark desert, there were islands of what had been, before the drought, pasture land, whose inhabitants, human and animal, had been stranded by the rising sea of dearth. We saw strange sights; we saw naked women climbing mimosa trees to crop the twig-tips for cooking, we saw children gathering the wild nettle called cram-cram, we saw men attacking and pulverizing anthills to recover the crumbs of grain that had been stored there. Even the most brackish water holes had been drunk dry, and the trees rimming them reduced to stumps stripped of bark by savage hunger. My hand grows too heavy to write as I remember this misery. iMost grotesquely, the sun each day beat upon these scenes with the serene fury of an orator who does not know he has made exactly the same points in a speech delivered the day before. As we neared our destination on the northwest border, and the population thickened in consequence of the rumored excitement there, I abandoned the Mercedes and assumed the wool rags of a Sufi, the better to mingle with my people in their suffering. A party of itinerant well-diggers took me up, to bring them luck. In truth, they had need of it-a party of four, two male Moundangs, a Galla dwarf, and a Sara woman who cooked and serviced us all. The leader, Wadal, a tall morose man whose lassitudinous brown length seemed an enlarged analogue of his impotent penis, which he kept morosely displaying through the rents in his tattered galabieh, had no nose for water. Repeatedly his party had been greeted with rejoicing in the encampments, welcomed with a clattering of tambourines and the booming of the chief's great tobol, only to be, after a few days of digging, while they fed their futile exertions upon the herdsmen's precious morsels of seed grain and caked blood, called into solemn conference with the ca'id and sent away beneath a hail of Tamahaq curses and flung pebbles. Wadal presented himself to me as a man of former property, whose plenteous herds of humped zebu had been turned to bones by the drought; but his woman whispered to me that he was a rascal without a tribe, who had never had so much as a pet pi-dog to his name. His father had been a dibia in a village to the south, and the son had been banished for blasphemy, for urinating on the fetishes in a fury of despair over his own impotence, which she assured me her lewdest wiles had proven intractable. Yet her fate had been cast with his when, a beautiful virgin asleep in her father's compound, this wretched outcast had crept into her hut and, as he had done to the fetishes, polluted her and rendered her forever unfit for marriage. She had nowhere to go but with him, though her father had owned herds that blanketed the hills, and her mother had been the granddaughter of an immortal leopard whose outline could now be traced in the stars in the sky. She may have told me these things to pass the night, for she slept little, and came to me even after she had ministered to another, during the days when we made our way north through the clustered encampments, begging and dancing and promising a deluge if our lives were spared. Named Kutunda, she showed herself by moonlight to be a wild and wakeful woman, lost in her stories, adept at languages, bewitched by the running of her tongue, which was as strong as her smell. I was sensitive to her tongue's strength, for my own mouth was tender; to prove my authenticity as a dervish I had, more than once, held a hot coal from the campfire in my mouth and mimed swallowing it. Such things are possible, when the needful spirit transfixes the body, and fear does not dry up the saliva. God is closer to a man than the vein in his neck, the Koran says. A Salu proverb has it, A man's fate follows him like the heel of his foot. Kutunda's rank smell grew sweet to me, and her low sharp laugh in the act of love lies within me like a bit of flint. We would sleep, often, in the ditches of our unsuccessful wells. The well we dug deepest-I was not precisely digging but standing on the edge of the pit chanting sacred verses and dodging clumps of dirt the dwarf tossed in my direction-yielded instead of water a Roman vase, banded with the scrolling waves of the fabulous wine-dark sea impossibly far to the north; also, a corroded metal disc that must once have served as a mirror. The Sahara long ago was green, and men crossed its grasslands in chariots. That was the meaning of our national flag, its field of bright and rampant green. The soil here had become gun-metal gray, with flickers of spar, and the people we travelled among had turned that gray tint which, in a black man, presages death. The blacks were slaves, bouzous, for we were in the territory of the Tuareg, whose pale eyes glittered above the indigo of the tagilmst-so wound, all six meters of it, as to cover their mouths, which they regard as obscene, the hole that takes in as obscene as the hole that expels. The camels were humpless and dying with that strange soft suddenness of camels, settling on their haunches and letting the spirit depart without a sigh. Among the tents, when the murmur of the day's prayers had subsided, a silence descended worse than the silence of death, because willed; only the children whimpered, and these only below the age of eight, before they could receive the consolatory discipline of religion. In their reduced state, their bodies took on a sculptural beauty-the amorphous padding of flesh lifted to reveal the double chord of curved ribs, the arms and legs similarly demarcate, femurs and fibias wrapped tightly, the same tightness pulling the lips back against the teeth and covering the temple concavities of the skull with pulsing drumheads, while in contrast certain protuberances acquired a glossy bulging smoothness, the bloated bellies and those pop eyes magnetically alert beneath the children's brows like the stares of gods through ritual masks. The cattle had grown too emaciated to bleed, and in these steppes blood mixed with curdled milk into a coagulated, chewy porridge was a staple of the diet. From being fed, our party of well-diggers turned into feeders, sharers of the stores of goat cheese, peanut paste, and dried smelt that at night I received from the refrigerated hampers of the Mercedes, which followed us some miles behind, gray as a ghost, nearly invisible, but for the pillars of dust it raised and that stood motionless above the steppes for hours on end. When I asked those around me, in my rusty Salu or my defective Berber, if they blamed Allah for their condition, they stared uncomprehendingly, asserting that God is great, God is beneficent. How could the proclaimed source of all compassion be blamed? And several, with burning eyes, with the last embers of their energy, picked up a stone to hurl, had I not turned my back. And when I asked others if they blamed Colonel Ellellou, the President of Kush and Chairman of SCRME, one man responded, "Who is Ellellou? He is the wind, he is the air between mountains." And I felt sickened, hearing this, and lost in the center of that great transparent orb of responsibility which was mine. Another told me, "Colonel Ellellou is expelling the kafirs who have stolen our clouds; when the last white devil has embraced Islam or his head has rolled in the dust, then Ellellou will come and bleed the sky as the herder slits the neck-vein of his bullock." And I felt myself a deceiver, in my dirty disguise, my mouth still sore from last night's magic. A third shrugged and said, "What can he do? He is a little soldier who to secure his pension killed the Lord of Wanjiji. Since Edumu passed to his ancestors, the underworld has sucked happiness from the earth." And this vexed me with a question of policy: should I kill the king? Some had not heard of Ellellou, some thought he was a mere slogan, some hated him for being a freed slave, one of the harratin, from the south. None seemed to look to him to lift the famine from the land. Only I expected this of Colonel Ellellou, who should have been in Istiqlal, signing documents and reviewing parades, instead of making his way with a few outcasts through the cloud of nomads that had been drifted toward the border by rumors of an impending miracle. The border of Kush in the northwest is nine-tenths imaginary. Through the colonial decades the border was ignored by the proud Reguibat, Teda, and Tuareg who drove their herds back and forth across it without formality or compunction; the vast departments of French West Africa were differentiated only in the mysterious accountancies of Paris. But since 1968, when our purged nation took on a political complexion so different from that of neighboring Sahel-Rush's geographical twin but ideological antithesis, a model of neo-capitalist harlotry decked out in transparent pantaloons of anti-Israeli bluster-border outposts have been established to safeguard symbolically, in the ungovernable vastness, our Islamic-Marxist purity. As we approached the border station we could see, all the length of a day's travel, sometimes striated and inverted by the atmospheric mirrors of mirage, an unnatural mountain, made of tan boxes. A crowd of thousands, a lake-sized distillation from the emptiness, had gathered about this apparition, which loomed a few meters over the border, at this place called Efu. The station consisted of three low buildings of flint, flattened cans, and sun-baked mud: the barracks for the soldiers, the detention rooms where no one had ever been detained, and the customs office, its roof not flat like the other two but a pise dome from whose pinnacle the beautiful Kushian flag fluttered as the day swiftly expired. A flash of green, indeed, signalled a phase of the sun's withdrawal-a kind of shout of expiration from just below the horizon, whose parched reaches were duplicated by a saffron strip at the base of the westward sky, slag residue of the day's furnace. Directly overhead, an advance scout of the starry armies trembled like a pearl suspended in a gigantic crystalline goblet of heavenly nectar. By these mingled lights, amid the lip-music of camels and the clack of camel-bells, through the fragrance of cooking-fires fed by dried dung and hacked tamarisk, I threaded my way among the Kushites toward a space of confrontation, where the four young border guards, in pith helmets and parade whites, none of them older to my eye than eighteen, rigid and luminous in their terror, faced the muttering horde drawn to this place by the hill of aid heaped on the edge of enemy Sahel. Ruled by a foppish Negritudinist whose impeccable alexandrines on brown beauties swaying under their laden calabashes followed the poems of Valery in Le Livre de Poche anthologies and whose successive Parisian wives were kept svelte by lubrications of bribery from the toubab corporations and the overachieving Japanese, Sahel from the air presented a patchwork of tin roofs and hotel swimming pools, drenched golf courses and fields perforated like colanders by the patient mudholes of hand-dipped irrigation. Contempt inspired me, enlarged me, at the thought of my rival state and its economic inequities, so that by the time I had wormed to the front of the crowd, I had forgotten my mystic's rags and presented myself to the soldiers as if my authority were manifest. The sergeant in command lifted his rifle and levelled it at my chest as I stepped forward too boldly. "I am Ellellou," I announced. Kutunda, unasked, out of female curiosity or