The Coup (3 page)

to its site on his knee. "Then show me to the people in my vigor." "What they say is true. You are old. You were old when I was young." "Young and helpless: who was it who plucked you from the shadows where you had been hiding, hiding in such fear you had almost forgotten the languages of Kush, and set you at his side, in a resplendent new uniform, and taught you statecraft?" "The question answers itself, my lord. And the fact that you have breath to ask it testifies sufficiently to my gratitude. Even when I was young, you lied to minimize your age, and a generation has grown whiskers since." "What concern is my physical state to anyone but myself, since I am no longer king?" "The people, though we seek to educate them, believe as did their fathers that there is no way to leave the royal stool but through the gate of blood. The natural death of a king is an abomination unto the state." "And you? What do you believe?" "I believe-I believe the debts between us have been paid." "Then kill me. Kill me in the square by the Mosque of the Day of Disaster and show the people my head. Water the land with my blood. I have no fear. My ancestors bubble in the earth like pombe brewing. The thought of death is sweeter to me than honey dipped from the tree." "The people will ask, Why was this not done before, in the morning of L'@lmergence? The king's ministers and lackeys were relieved of the misery of their lives, why was he spared? Why for these five years of blight has Ellellou kept the heart of reaction alive?" The king said swiftly, "The answer is plain: out of love. Inopportune love, and the unpolitic loyalty of the fearful. Tell them, their colonel is a man who holds within himself many possibilities. Tell them, it is not they the ignorant who hug to themselves the bloody madness of juju but their leader as well, the progressive and passionate embodiment of Islamic Marxism, who to mitigate their suffering proposes nothing better than the murder of the decrepit old prisoner who was once the alleged chief of benighted, mythical Wanjiji!" The king laughed, a frightening crackling of his crystal plane, which Ellellou in his orb of numbness felt to be a plane of his fate. The king spoke on, his little silken figure agitated, lifted upwards, as if by strings of song. "Tell them, the madness of the divine anoints their leader, rendering Kush the beacon of the Third World, the marvel and scandal of the capitalist press, the kindling of glee in a billion breasts! But remember, Colonel Ellellou, murder me once, the dice have been thrown. There will be no more magic among the souvenirs of Noire." His tongue rattled and fell away to a whisper within the prolonged r of this abhorrent old name. His eyes, shallow-backed, reflected the last light from the window, the scabbing green-painted frame of which admitted as well the muezzins' twanging call to first prayer, salat al-maghrib; it echoed under the cloudless sky as under a darkening dome of tile. "The day has begun," the king said. "Go to the mosque. The President must display his faith." As Ellellou walked down the corridor, where the smell of scorched feathers had thickened, and the muttering of the soldiers and their whores had grown richer and more con- spiratorial, the pretty young reader's voice picked up the dropped thread: "They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, ivho to the beholder's eyes will seem like scattered pearls. When you gaze upon that scene you will behold a kingdom blissful and glorious." They shall be arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade, and adorned with bracelets of silver. Their Lord will give them a pure beverage to drink. Indeed, it had been dry in the north. By noon of the first day's drive, our party of three having gathered in the Palais garage at dawn, the wideflung peanut fields broke up into scattered poor plantings of cassava and maize that scratched our eyes with their look of hopeless effort. The rarely glimpsed cultivator of those gravelly fields would lift a bony arm in greeting as our Mercedes poured past, trailing its illusory mountain of dust. The pise rectangles of Istiqlal, their monotony of dried mud broken in the center of town by the wooden facades of Indian storefronts, a-swirl with Arabic and Hindi, and the concrete-and-glass abominations flauntingly imposed, before the Revolution, by the French and, since, by the East Germans, soon dissolved-once the tin shantytown of resettled nomads was behind us-into the low, somehow liquid horizon, its stony dun slumber scarcely disturbed by a distant cluster of thatched roofs encircled by euphorbia, or by the sullen looming of a roadside hovel, a rusted can on a stick advertising the poisonous and interdicted native beer. More than once we had to detour around a giraffe skeleton strung across the piste, the creature drawn there on its last legs by the thin mane of grass that in this desolation sprang up in response to the liquid that boiling radiators spilled in passing. Yet all morning we saw not another vehicle. As the heat of the high sun overpowered even our splendid machine's air-conditioning, Mtesa, my driver, pulled into a cluster of huts woven of thorn-strands over an armature of acacia boughs and compacted with mud; these shelters had hovered on the horizon for half an hour. Opuku, my bodyguard, rummaged through the napping inhabitants and found a withered crone who mumblingly muddled together some raffia mats for our repose and brought us grudging portions of oversaked couscous. The water from her calabash tasted sweet and may have been drugged, for we slept so soundly that we were awakened well after the time of salat al-asr, and then forcibly, by a young woman, naked but for her pointed nosepiece and throat-rings of rhino hair, who evidently wished to soothe us further with the gift of her charms, which had been rubbed to a noxious gleam with rancid butter. This sad and graceful slave received a kick from Opuku, a sleepy curse from Mtesa, and words of enlightenment from me in regard to the Prophet's exfoliation of cha/y in women, and of his admonishments to men that they not abuse female orphans. Our afternoon prayers hastily performed, we offered the old woman a handful of paper lu-so called, the malicious wit of the departing French had it, because they were circulated in lieu of hard currency. Upon being thunderously informed by bull-necked Opuku that I was President of the nation, with power of life and death over all Kushites, while in sober proof Mtesa drove up in the Mercedes with its fluttering flag of stark green on the fender, our venerable hostess sank to her knees wailing, closed her eyes against our largesse, and begged instead for mercy. This she received, in the form of our departure. We drove into the night, a night of creamy blue, without lights, or one wherein the occasional far speck of a campfire shone with the unaccountable watery beauty of a star. By prearrangement we were to spend the night in the region called Huliil, at the secret Soviet installation there. No road marked the way to the buried bunkers, and no conspicuous ventilation shafts or entrance ports betrayed their presence. The occasional straggle of nomads with their camels and goats may have noticed that acres of the soil had been dislocated and reconstituted, or may even have stumbled across extrusions of cement and aluminum masked by plastic thorn-bushes and elephant grass; but when the nomad does not understand, he moves on, his mental narrowness complementing the width of his wandering life, which might derange more open minds. In a sense the land itself is forgetful, an evaporating pan out of which all things human rise into blue invisibility. Not far off, for instance, in the Hulul Depression stood the red ruins of a structure called Hallaj, and no one remembered why it was so named, or what congregation had worshipped what god amid its now unroofed pillars. Even the secret at hand had its inconsequential side. Three sets of MIRV-ED SS-9 ICBM'S in their subterranean sheaths pointed north to the Mediterranean, west toward similar U. s. installations in the lackey territory of Sahel, and east to the remote Red Sea ports of Zanj, which in certain permutations of nuclear holocaust might become strategically significant enough to vaporize. Our Kushite rockets were "third wave" weaponry; that is, by the time they were utilized the major industrial and population centers would be erased from the globe. Like the players of a chess contest reduced to a few rooks, pawns, and the emblematic kings, the major powers, yawning over their brandy, would be pursuing a desultory end game, to determine which style of freedom-freedom from disorder, freedom from inhibition-would suffuse the spherical desert that remained. That world, amusing to contemplate, would not only be Saharan in aspect but would be dominated by underdamaged Africa, in long-armed partnership with Polynesians, Eskimos, Himalayan Orientals, and the descendants of British convicts in Australia. More amusingly still, Michaelis Ezana, a nagging doubter of our Soviet allies, maintained that the rockets were in truth dummies, sacks of local sand where the warheads should be, set here by solemn treaty merely to excite the opposite superpower to install, at burdensome expense, authentic missiles in neighboring Sahel. Whatever the case, a slab of earth eight meters wide and two thick lifted at the prearranged signal from our headlights (dim, undim, out, dim), and the party of Russian soldiers below rejoiced, amid the furious electricity of their vast bunker, at this diversion. In preparation for our visit they had all become drunk. Mtesa and Opuku, blinking in amazement at this bubble of sun captured underground, were swamped with hairy embraces, Cyrillic barks, and splashing offers of vodka, which Opuku did not initially refuse. I informed them, in my loudest French, that "N'alcoolison pas, le Dieu de notre gens interdit cela" and upon many repetitions of this baffling negation won for myself and my small party the right to respond in chalky Balkan mineral water (fetched from the sub-cellar) to their interminable toasts and to observe with sobriety this foreign enclave. The Russians had been here since the secret SAND (soviet-Allied Nuclear Deterrants) talks of 1971 and in the two years since had amply furnished the bunker in the stuffy tsarist style of Soviet supercomfort, from the lamps with fringed shades and soapstone bases carved in the shape of tussling bears resting on runners of Ukrainian lace to the obligatory oil paintings of Lenin exhorting workers against a slanted sunset and Brezhnev charming with the luxuriance of his eyebrows a flowery crowd of Eurasiatic children. The linguist among them, a frail steel-bespectacled second lieutenant whose Arabic was smeared with an Iraqi accent and whose French sloshed in the galoshes of Russian zhushes, fell dead drunk in the midst of the banquet; we carried on with minimal toasts to the heroes of our respective races. "Lu- mumba," they would say, and I would answer, as their glasses were refilled, "A Stakhanov." "Nassar, da, Sadat, nyef was met, amid uproarious applause, with "Vive Sholokov, eerase Solzhenitsyn," to applause yet more tumultuous. My opposite number, Colonel Sirin, who in this single installation commanded perhaps the equivalent in expenditure of the entire annual military budget of Kush, discovered that I comprehended English and, no doubt more coarsely than he intended, proposed honor to "all good niggers." I responded with the seventy-seventh sura of the Koran ("Woe on that day to the disbelievers! Begone to that Hell which you deny!") as translated into my native tongue of Salu, whose glottal rhythms enchanted the Reds in their dizziness. Our store of reciprocal heroes exhausted, the briefing blackboard was dragged forth and we matched toasts to the letters of our respective alphabets. "IH!" the colonel proposed, milking the explosive sound for its maximum richness. I tactfully responded with the beautiful terminal form of "3K to to was he boasted, "le plus belle letter all over goddam world!" I outdid him, I dare believe, gracefully proposing, "@l." There was a presentation of medals, and a monumental picture-book of the treasures accumulated by the subterranean monks of Kiev, and then these strange men began to dance from a squatting position and in demonstration of manliness to chew their liquor glasses like so many biscuits. Since they were their own best audience for these feats, I persuaded a young and relatively sober aide to show us to our chambers. Several of the officers staggered along, and one especially burly Slav playfully planted a foot in Mtesa's backside as we knelt to our deferred salat al-isha. Failing to fall asleep promptly within the smothering soft- ness of the Soviet bed, with its brocaded canopy and its stony little packets for pillows, I reflected back upon the customs and the orgy we had been privileged to witness, and located along the borders of my memory an analogy that seemed clarifying: with their taut pallor, bristling hair devoid of a trace of a curl, oval eyes, short limbs, and tightly packed bodies whose muscular energy seemed drawn into a knot at the back of their necks, these Russians reminded me of nothing so much as the reckless, distasteful packs of wild swine that when I was a child would come north from the bogs by the river to despoil the vegetable plantings of our village. They had a bristling power and toughness, to be sure, but lacked both the weighty magic of the lion and the hippo and the weightless magic of the gazelle and the shrike, so that the slaughter of one with spears and stones, as he squealed and dodged-the boars were not easy to kill-took place in an incongruous hubbub of laughter. Even in death their eyes kept that rheumy glint whereby the hunted betray the pressures under which they live. Once during the night the telephone in our overfurnished chamber rang. When I picked it up, there was no voice at the other end, nor was there a click. Through the long tunnel of silence I seemed to see into the center of the Kremlin, where terror never sleeps. And our hosts were up early to see us off. Their uniforms were fresh and correct, and their faces com^th square semi-Asiatic faces that appear too big for their thin features-were shaved, betraying only in an abnormally keen sheen, a drained, thin-skinned look, their carousal of a few hours before. It was their rule never to stray aboveground, even when, before the famine became extreme, fresh milk and meat might have enhanced their diet of frozen and powdered provisions-as if even one slice of authentically rank native goat cheese would fatally contaminate this giant capsule, this hermetic offshoot of the insular motherland. In this they were unlike the Americans, who wandered everywhere like children, absurdly confident of being loved. Nor