I
The country of Kush, landlocked between the mon-grelized, neo-capitalist puppet states of Zanj and Sahel, is small for Africa, though larger than any two nations of Europe. Its northern half is Saharan; in the south, forming the one boundary not drawn by a Frenchman's ruler, a single river flows, the Grionde, making possible a meagre settled agriculture. Peanuts constitute the principal export crop: the doughty legumes are shelled by the ton and crushed by village women in immemorial mortars or else by antiquated presses manufactured in Lyons; then the barrelled oil is caravanned by camelback and treacherous truck to Dakar, where it is shipped to Marseilles to become the basis of heavily perfumed and erotically contoured soaps designed not for my naturally fragrant and affectionate countrymen but for the antiseptic lavatories of America-America, that fountainhead of obscenity and glut. Our peanut oil travels westward the same distance as eastward our ancestors plodded, their neck-shackles chafing down to the jugular, in the care of Arab traders, to find from the flesh-markets of Zanzibar eventual lodging in the harems and palace guards of Persia and Chinese Turkestan. Thus Kush spreads its transparent wings across the world. The ocean of desert between the northern border and the Mediterranean littoral once knew a trickling traffic in salt for gold, weight for weight; now this void is disturbed only by Swedish playboys fleeing cold boredom in Volvos that soon forfeit their seven coats of paint to the rasp of sand and the roar of their engines to the omnivorous howl of the harmattan. They are skeletons before their batteries die. Would that Allah had so disposed of all infidel intruders!
To the south, beyond the Grionde, there is forest, nakedness, animals, fever, chaos. It bears no looking into. Whenever a Kushite ventures into this region, he is stricken with mal a Yestomac.
Kush is a land of delicate, delectable emptiness, named for a vanished kingdom, the progeny of Kush, son of Ham, grandson of Noah. Their royalty, ousted from the upper Nile in the fourth century by the Christian hoards of Axum, retreated from Meroe, fabled home of iron, into the wastes of Kordofan and Darfur, and farther westward still, pursued by dust devils along the parched savanna, erecting red cities soon indistinguishable from the rocks, until their empty shattered name, a shard of grandeur, was salvaged by our revolutionary council in 1968 and, replacing the hated designation of Noire, was bestowed upon this hollow starving nation as many miles as years removed from the original Kush, itself an echo: Africa held up a black mirror to Pharaonic Egypt, and the image was Kush.
The capital is Istiqlal, renamed in i960, upon independence, and on prior maps called Caillieville, in honor of the trans-Saharan traveller of 1828, who daubed his face brown, learned pidgin Arabic, and achieved European celebrity by smuggling himself into a caravan from Timbuctoo to Fez and doing what hundreds of unsung Berbers had been doing for centuries, maligning them as brutes even while he basked in the loud afterglow of their gullible hospitality. Previous to French organization of the territory of Noire in 1905 (checking a British thrust arising in the Sudan), the area on both sides of the river had been known, vaguely, as Wanjiji. An Arab trading town, Also-Abid, much shrunken from its former glory, huddles behind the vast white-and-green Palais d'Administration des Noires, modelled on the Louvre and now used in its various wings as offices for the present government, a People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities, a girls' high school dedicated to the extirpation of the influences of Christian mission education, and a prison for the politically aberrant.
In area Kush measures 126,912,180 hectares. The population density comes to.03 per hectare. In the vast north it is virtually immeasurable. The distant glimpsed figure blends with the land as the blue hawk blends with the sky. There are twenty-two miles of railroad and one hundred seven of paved highway. Our national airline, Air Kush, consists of two Boeing 727's, stunning as they glitter above the also glittering tin shacks by the airfield. In addition to peanuts are grown millet, sorghum, cotton, yams, dates, tobacco, and indigo. The acacia trees yield some marketable gum arabic. The natives extract ingenious benefits from the baobab tree, weaving mats from its fibrous heart, ropes from its inner bark, brewing porridge and glue and a diaphoretic for dysentery from the pulp of its fruit, turning the elongated shells into water scoops, sucking the acidic and refreshing seeds, and even boiling the leaves, in desperate times, into a kind of spinach. When are times not desperate? Goats eat the little baobab trees, so there are only old giants. The herds of livestock maintained by the tribes of pastoral nomads have been dreadfully depleted by the drought. The last elephant north of the Grionde gave up its life and its ivory in 1959, with a bellow that still reverberates. "The toubabs took the big ears with them," is the popular saying. Both Sahel and Zanj possess quantities of bauxite, manganese, and other exploitable minerals, but aside from a streak of sulphur high in the Bulub Mountains the only known mineral deposit in Kush is the laterite that renders great tracts of earth unarable. (i am copying these facts from an old Statesman's Y'ear-Book, freely, here where I sit in sight of the sea, so some of them may be obsolete.) In the north there were once cities of salt populated by slaves, who bred and worshipped and died amid the incessant cruel glisten; these mining settlements, supervised by the blue-clad Tuareg, are mere memories now.
But even memory thins in this land, which suggests, on the map, an angular skull whose cranium is the empty desert. Along the lower irregular line of the jaw, carved by the wandering brown river, there was a king, the Lord of Wanjiji, whose physical body was a facet of God so radiant that a curtain of gold flakes protected the eyes of those entertained in audience from his glory; and this king, restored to the throne as a constitutional monarch in the wake of the loi-cadre of 1956 and compelled to abdicate after the revolution of 1968, has been all but forgotten. Conquerors and governments pass before the people as dim rumors, as entertainment in a hospital ward. Truly, mercy is interwoven with misery in the world wherever we glance.
Among the natural resources of Kush perhaps should be listed our diseases-an ample treasury which includes, besides famine and its edema and kwashiorkor, malaria, typhus, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, leprosy, bilharziasis, onchocerciasis, measles, and yaws. As these are combatted by the genius of science, human life itself becomes a disease of the overworked, eroded earth. The average life expectancy in Kush is thirty-seven years, the per capita gross national product $79, the literacy rate 6%.
The official currency is the lu.
The flag is a plain green field. The form of government is a constitutional monarchy with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed. An eleven-man Supreme Counseil Revolutionnaire et Militaire pour l'Emergence serves as the executive arm of the government and also functions as its legislature. The pure and final socialism envisioned by Marx, the theocratic populism of Islam's periodic reform movements: these transcendent models guide the council in all decisions. SCRME'S chairman, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Minister of National Defense, and President of Kush was (is, the Statesman's Y'ear-Book has it) Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou-that is to say, myself.
Yet a soldier's disciplined self-effacement, my Cartesian schooling, and the African's traditional abjuration of ego all constrain this account to keep to the third person. There are two selves: the one who acts, and the "I" who experiences. This latter is passive even in a whirlwind of the former's making, passive and guiltless and astonished. The historical performer bearing the name of Ellellou was no less mysterious to me than to the American press wherein he was never presented save snidely and wherein his fall was celebrated with a veritable minstrelsy of anti-Negro, anti-Arab cartoons; in the same spirit the beer-crazed mob of American boobs cheers on any autumnal Saturday or Sunday the crunched leg of the unhome-team left tackle as he is stretchered off the field. Ellellou's body and career carried me here, there, and I never knew why, but submitted.
We know this much of him: he was short, prim, and black. He was produced, in 1933, of the rape of a Salu woman by a Nubian raider. The Salu are a sedentary tribe in the peanut highlands of the west. His mother, a large, oppressively vital woman of the clan Amazeg, became the wife by inheritance of her husband's sister's husband, her own husband having been slaughtered the same night of her rape. The peanut lands are brown, the whispering feathery brown of the uprooted bushes as they dry, precious pods inward, in stacks two meters high, and Ellellou from the first, perhaps taking his clue from these strange fruits that can mature only underground, showed a wish to merge with his surroundings. In the public eye he always wore brown, the tan of his military uniform, unadorned, as monotonous and uninsistent as the tan of the land itself, the savanna merging into desert. Even the rivers in Kush are brown, but for the blue moment when the torrents of a rainstorm boil murderously down a wadi; and the sudden verdure of the rainy season soon dons a cloak of dust. In conformity with the prejudices of the Prophet, Ellellou resisted being photographed. Such tattered images, in sepia tints, as gathered fly specks in the shop windows and civic corridors of Istiqlal were hieratic and inexpressive. His one affectation of costume was the assumption, on some state occasions, of those particularly excluding and protective sunglasses whose odd trade name is NoIR.
It was said that his anonymity was a weapon, for armed with it he would venture out among the populace as a spy and beggar, in the manner of the fabled Caliph Haroun ar-Raschid. Colonel Ellellou was a devout Muslim. He had four wives, and left them all (it was said) unsatisfied, so consuming was his love for the arid land of Kush.
At the age of seventeen, to escape the constriction of village life, in whose order his illegitimacy and his mother's widowhood gave him a low place, he enlisted in the Troupes coloniales and eventually saw service in French Indochina prior to Colonel de Castries' defeat at Dienbienphu in 1954, by which time he had risen to the rank of sergeant. In battle he found himself possessed of a dead calm that to his superiors appeared commendable. In truth it was peanut behavior. Out of the tightest spot, even as when the hordes of General Giap outnumbered the defenders four to one and the Asiatic abhorrence of black skins was notoriously lethal to the troupes noires, Ellellou had faith that the pull of fate would rescue him, if he be numb enough, and submit to being shelled. During the subsequent campaigns of his division, which was called into fratricidal struggle with the independence-seekers of Algeria, Ellellou left no trace of himself on the military record.
He re-emerges from the shadows around 1959, with the rank of major, as an attache to King Edumu IV, Lord of Wanjiji. The Gallic imperialists' failure with Bao Dai had not totally soured their taste for puppet monarchs. The king was then in his sixties, and had spent a dozen years under house arrest by the colonial representatives of the Fourth Republic in retribution for his alleged collaboration with the Vichy government of Noire and their German sponsors, his shame doubled by the heroic example of resistance offered by Felix Eboue of French Equatorial Africa to the south. Ellellou continued in close association with the king andwiththe liberal-bourgeois-elitist administration to which the king lent his tarnished authority, until the coup of 1968, in which Ellellou, though secondary to the well-mourned people's hero Major-General Jean-Franc, ois Yakubu Soba, played a decisive, if not conspicuous, part. He became Minister of Information in 1969, Minister of Defense later that year, and upon the successful assassination attempt upon General Soba on the twelfth day of Ramadan, President. According to the Statesman's Year-Book, he keeps an apartment within the grandiose government building erected by the French and another in the military barracks at Sobaville. His wives are scattered in four separate villas in the suburb still called, as it was in the days of imperialist enslavement, Les Jardins. His domicilic policy is apparently to be in no one place at any specific time. More than this, of the legendary national leader and Third-World spokesman, is difficult to discover.
Why did the king love me? I ask myself this in anguish, remembering his infinitely creased face surrounded by wiry white hair and in color the sunken black of a dried fig, his way of nodding and nodding as if his head were mounted on a tremulously balanced pivot, his cackle of mirth and greed like a fine box crushed underfoot, his preposterously bejewelled little hands, so little thickened by labor as to seem two-dimensional, so lightly gesturing, lifting in a wind of hopeless gaiety and sadness such as lifts puffs of dust on the street. His pallid eyes, not blue yet not brown either, a green, rather, blanched by his blindness to a cat's shallow-backed yellow, always reminded me that his royal line had come from the north, contemptuous and foreign, however darkened-arrogant assailants, themselves in flight, bringing with them, worse than their personal cruelties, the terrible idea of time, of history, of a revelation receding inexorably, leaving us to live and die to no purpose, in a state of nonsense. What did this blind man see when he looked at me? I can only speculate that, amid so many possessed by their personal causes, by schemes of aggrandizement for themselves and their clans and their wives' clans, I was a blur of a new color, patriotism. This arbitrary and amorphous land descended to him from the French, this slice of earth with its boundaries sketched by an anonymous cartographer at the infamous Berlin Conference of 1885 and redrawn more firmly as a military zone for occupation a decade later, its pacification not complete until 1917 and its assets to this day mortgaged to La Banque de France and its beautiful brown thin people invisible on every map-what was it? The historic kingdom of Wanjiji had expanded and contracted like the stomach of some creature that does not eat for centuries; by the time the Gauls, at de Gaulle's mystical bidding, abandoned colonial rule and cast about for an agency wherewith to rule covertly, Wanjiji had shrunk to a name and a notion of infinite privilege in the head of one ancient prisoner. He, casting about in turn, saw in me, an exile returned with reeducated passions, what he failed to discern within himself: an idea of Kush.
In the Year of the Prophet 1393, which the comic arithmetic of the infidels numbers as 1973, at the end of the wet season, which had been dry, the President went to visit the king. The people thought the Lord of Wanjiji dead, executed with his ministers and his cousins those first tonic months of the Revolution, in the inner Cour de Justice, where now the girls of the Anti-Christian High School played hockey and volleyball. In truth King Edumu was held a secret captive in the Palais d'Administration des Noires, along the wall of whose endless corridors, at the level of a walking man's knuckles, ran a painted green strip like an interior horizon. The floor was speckled with flakes of lime fallen from the ceiling above, where the frosted foliations of Art Nouveau were a few of them unbroken. In the perpetual dusk of these halls soldiers saluted the dictator as he passed, and their whores with a whimper and a swirl of their rags hid in the doorways of offices become barracks. At this hour the smell of scorching feathers wafted from chambers where once clerks whose very mustaches appeared thin as penstrokes had scribbled a web of imaginary order. From the king's guarded apartment came a perfume of cloves and a drone of the Koran. The old man to relieve the boredom of his captivity and perhaps to curry favor with his fanatic captor had converted to the True Faith and for the hour before evening azan had read to him those suras which body forth Paradise.
"For the unbelievers We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire. But the righteous shall drink of a cup tempered at the Camphor Fountain, a gushing spring at which the servants of Allah will refresh themselves...
." The enchanting old villain formerly had taken pride in a barbarous animism of blood and substitution, and in the interstices of French supervision had exercised the fructifying privilege of royal murderousness. Young female attendants especially had fallen victims to his whim. And though their screams under the ax and the smothering pillows had escaped from the palace windows, there was never a shortage of nubile, trembling, onyx-skinned, heavy-breasted replacements, thrust forward not only by the sycophancy of their families but by something suicidal and, beneath their moist terror, voracious within themselves.
"Reclining there upon soft couches, they shall feel neither the scorching heat nor the biting cold. Trees will spread their shade around them, and fruits will hang in clusters over them."
The king's cell was lit by a clay-colored slant of late sun. He knew Ellellou's tread, andwitha divinely scant gesture signalled his reader, a young Fula wearing upon his shaved head a plum-red fez, to be silent.
Never large, the king had shrunken. His little hooked nose alone had resisted the reshaping of time and sat in the center of his face like a single tart fruit being served on an outworn platter. His shallow yellow eyes shifted rapidly and still appeared to see.
Indeed, an examining physician had reported that they remained sensitive to violent movement, and to a candle held close enough to singe his eyebrows.
"Splendor of Splendors," Ellellou began, "thy unworthy agent greets thee."
"A beggar salutes a rich man," the king responded. "Why have you honored me, Ellellou, and when will I be free?"
"When Allah the Compassionate deems thy people strong enough to endure the glory of thy reign."
They spoke in Arabic, until a more urgent tempo drove them to French. All their languages were second languages, since Wanj for the one and Salu for the other were tongues of the hut and the village council, taught by mothers and lost as the world expanded. All the languages they used, therefore, felt to them as clumsy masks their thoughts must put on.
"I am not asking to rule again," the king replied, "but merely to set my face beneath the stars."
"The very stars would enlist as your soldiers and put their spears to our throats; the people are parched, and your resurrection would set them afire."
"I cannot see the smile on your lips, Ellellou, but I hear mockery twist your voice. State your purpose, and leave irony to Allah, in Whose sight we are mice in the gaze of a lion. Have you some business worth the ruin of an old beggar's peace?" He returned his hand to his lap with a papery grace that belied its burden of garnets and emeralds and silver filigree; the king sat in a lungi of striped white silk in a nest of pillows and bolsters, his wrists resting symmetrically on the knees of his folded legs. Around his brow was tied a riband of spun gold in token of the curtain of the unsurpassable metal that formerly had shielded from his radiations the mortals who came grovelling to him in petition. His hair, long uncut, stood far out from his head in wiry rays, a halo of wool, as awesome as comical. Ellellou was reminded disagreeably of murky photographs he had seen in the Istiqlal underground press, Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche, of American "hippies," young scions of corporation lawyers and professorial rabbis who, to dramatize the absurd sexual spree their reactionary drug- addled hearts confused with the needed real revolution, affected headbands in presumptuous emulation of the red men their forefathers had unceremoniously exterminated.
Seen in this light, the king appeared so vulnerably displaced, so gallantly ridiculous, that Ellellou was moved to confess, as a wayward son to drunken father: "I have been north. My adventures there trouble me."
"Why do you seek to be troubled? A leader must not be divided within himself. He is the unmoved pivot, the frozen sun."
"The people starve. The rains now have failed for the fifth year. The herdsmen steal millet from their wives and children to feed the cattle; still the animals drop, and are fallen upon for the little meat left on their bones. I have seen vultures come to the feast and be themselves stoned and consumed. The people eat bats and mice, they eat skinks and scorpions, ger-bils and termites; they glean the carcasses that even jackals leave. The hair of the children turns orange. Their eyes and bellies bulge. Their heads are shaped like the skulls of mummies baked in the sand. When they grow too weak to whimper, their silence is the worst."
"It anticipates the silence of Paradise," smiled the king.
As their own silence widened, Ellellou felt he had failed. He felt himself at the center of a cosmic failure, his failure to communicate the reality of suffering at one with the cosmic refusal to prevent this suffering. Held mute in a moment without a pose, a mask, Ellellou felt the terror of responsibility and looked about him for someone with whom to share it. The attendant who had been reading from the Book of Books sat cross-legged on a green satin cushion, eyes downcast, his thumb curved to turn the page. At a glance I saw in him a police officer, and knew that my conversation with the king would be reported in full to Michaelis Ezana, my Minister of the Interior. I knew too that the king would eventually offer words of wisdom to fill the void between us where his smile had feathered. In the days when I had been his courtier his words would overnight condense in my mind like dew on the underside of a leaf. My eye continued about his cell. Though it contained objects of pure gold and of the fanatic workmanship that only extreme poverty coupled with faith in an afterlife produces, it also held much that could be termed rubble-scraps of torn cloth, sticks of wood bound together as by a playful idiot, small pouches of spicy dust, visible bones and bits of once-living matter dried and darkened out of recognition, and a certain amount of sheer dirt, most conspicuous in the corners but some of it apparently with deliberation sprinkled recently on the inlaid lid of an ivory chest, on the head and knobby shoulders of a pot-bellied ebony idol, and on the carved saddle-seat of the sacred stool of Wanjiji. This last had been tucked into a corner at a tilt, one lion-foot having been broken and not repaired.
How repair, indeed, so sacred an object? The workman's hands would uselessly tremble in such close proximity to the holy.
Amulets-Koranic phrases, often inauthentic, in little bark or leather cylinders-were littered here and there, and empty bowls in which, before their liquid had evaporated, a soul had been captured. My soul, perhaps. How often, I wondered, had my death been rendered in mime, and the king's escape been effected via the fragile fabrications of juju right-brace My palms prickled to think there were prayers of which I was the urgent object, prayers arising all over the land; like a massive transparent ball my terror, my responsibility, threatened to roll over me again. I flung my attention to the walls, where hung a number of framed portraits this king of eclectic sensibility had collected in the years of his constitutional reign, when he subscribed to Western magazines- de Gaulle, Nkrumah, Farouk, an etching of King Yohannes IV of Ethiopia, a poster of Elvis Presley in full sequinned regalia, Marilyn Monroe from a bed of polar bear skins making upward at the lens the crimson O of a kiss whose mock emotion led her to close her greasy eyelids, and a page torn from that magazine whose hearty name of Life did not save it from dying, torn roughly out but sumptuously framed, showing a female child dancer in patent-leather shoes poised in mid-step with bright camera-conscious eyes upon a flight of stairs leading nowhere. At her side stood a pair of long legs in checked trousers belonging, it was my growing belief, to a black man whose hands were muffled in white gloves and whose head was cut off by the top of the page. The king caught my mind in mid-flight.
"The white devils," he said, "give grain. And milk transmuted to powder. And medicine that by a different magic might turn the children's hair black again."
Disturbed by the decapitated black dancer, I exclaimed, "Food from filthy hands is filth! The integrity of Kush rejects the charity of imperialist exploiters!"
"Der Spatz in der Hand, my old friends used to say, ist besser als die Taube auf deni Dach."
"Gifts bring men, men bring bullets, bullets bring oppression. Africa has undergone this cycle often enough."
The king performed the dainty pragmatic shrug with which, in the days before the Revolution, he would have a page boy mutilated for dozing in an anteroom. "Your friends the Russians," he said, "are generous exporters of spies and last year's rockets.
They themselves buy wheat from the Americans."
"Only to advance the revolution. The peasantry of America, seeing itself swindled, seethes on the verge of riot."
"The world is splitting in two," said the king, "but not in the way we were promised, not between the Red and the free but between the fat and the lean. In one place, the food rots; in another, the people starve. Why emphasize the unkind work of nature that keeps these halves apart?"
"I am not the creator of this Revolution but its instrument," I told the king. "It is not I but the will of Kush that rejects offal. A sick man must vomit or grow sicker. When the Revolution occurred, the task of the Conseil-of General Soba, and Ezana, and myself-was The king nodded wearily, anticipating, his head on that delicate pivot, nodding, nodding.
"comwas not to inspire the people but to protect from their enthusiasm the capitalist intriguers who under your protection had infested Istiqlal; but for our intervention they would have been slaughtered ere they could be expelled."
"Enough were slaughtered. And their thin-lipped wives taken alive for the harems of the socialist elite."
"A phrase without meaning," I said.
The king said, "Let me tell you of an event without meaning: the hand of the giver is outstretched, and that of the beggar remains closed."
"Begging has its holy place on the streets, not in the corridors of government."
"Daily, I beg for my freedom."
"Your freedom consists of being hidden. I envy you that freedom."
"And well you might. The deaths in the north are on your head." The king smiled, lifting those blind eyes which were like loci upon a plane of crazed crystal. "It is good. The people adore the Lord who asks them to die.
Had I not been so tender a father to my children, had not my policies sheltered them from the rage of the absolute, they would not have turned their backs. Where there is poverty, there must be drama. Your rule will be long, Hakim Felix, if your heart does not soften."
I could not leave it like this. I pleaded, "The purity Kush is its strength. In the lands of our oppressors the fat millions have forgotten how to live and look to the world's forsaken to remind them. The American crates piled at our borders stank of despair; I went there and ordered them burned."
"Reflections of so signal a deed have flickered even in this remotest of caves. I commend you, Colonel Ellellou, ruler of lava and ash.
Only Satan has a like domain."
"Spoken like one of his legions, like one whose eyes are still closed to the light of the Prophet. Though you have taken upon yourself a pretense of Islam, your faith is centered across the Grionde, where terror and torture still reign, where juju still clouds the minds of men, as the tsetse fly poisons their blood. Here, the sky shows its face. There is one God, unknowable, without feature. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds."
"The Beneficent, the Merciful," the king responded. "You do an injustice to the sincerity of my adherence. I find Islam a beautifully practical religion, streamlined even, the newest thing in this line. But as to cruelty, the rain forest beyond the river holds none as rigorous as the fury of a jihad. I am blind, but not so blind as those righteous whose eyes roll upward, who kill and are killed to gain a Paradise of shade trees, as I hear in the Book." He gestured toward the reader, who remained impassive, quiet as a machine waiting to be activated; this police spy was young and smooth, his oval face rather feminine in its stolid fineness beneath the plum-colored fez. "Your sky," the king told me, "shines all day like the flat of a sword. The sky-spirit has come to hate the earth-spirit.
Your land is cursed, unhappy Felix. You have cursed this land with your hatred of the world."
"I hate only the evil that is in the world."
"You burn its food while your subjects starve.
And it is said you brought death in the north."
"An American committed suicide. We stood by helpless."
"That was an error. In Africa, one white death shrieks louder than a thousand black lives."
"You hear much, in your cave. I too have my ears, and they hear the people murmur that the old king somewhere lives, and drags the land with him into senility."
The king returned his heavy hand, gently as an ash drifts back to the hearth, 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 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 presumptuous loyalty, had followed me, and now embraced me from behind, lest I step into a bullet.
"Ellellou, Ellellou," the crowd murmured at my back, in widening, receding waves. They did not doubt; skepticism is wonderfully sapped by hunger.
The youngest of the four soldiers stepped forward andwiththe butt of his rifle, deftly as if dislodging a scorpion, knocked my clinging protectoress loose. "He is a poor magician!" she shouted from the sand, through bloodied lips. "Forgive him his madness!"
The soldier nodded in bleak disinterest and lifted his rifle again-of Czech manufacture, and obtained at a unit cost that Michaelis Ezana had more than once cited in his mockery of Communist brotherhood-to give me a similar tap, when I produced from the folds of my rags the medal the Soviets had awarded me the week before. Its brass star and bas-relief Lenin made the young man blink. And the crowd behind me, having taken up my name, was now returning it to the fore with such a windy swollen chorusing that my claim to authority seemed divinely reinforced.
"Ellelloti, Ellellou": it was a whirlwind. To the sergeant who, having inspected the medal, now pressed it against his own breast with a smile from which the two lower incisors had been removed, I suggested, within our growing complicity, that he compare my face with the portrait of the President of Kush that must hang somewhere in his official quarters.
Slowly comprehending, he sent his corporal to fetch such an image. The boy returned, after what seemed a long search, with a framed oleograph half occluded by ingrained dust. The framed face was set beside mine. As the sergeant considered, I considered the medal he still held to his chest. I tried to compose my features into Ellellou's calm, hieratic blur; at least our two faces were coated with the same dust.
Kutunda meanwhile was kissing my feet in some paroxysm; whether she was adoring me as her leader, or bemoaning me as a madman about to be shot, was not clear from the quality of her kisses, which felt like the ticklings of a fountain at the base of a statue. From out of the anxious mob behind me, out of the stench of dung fires and stale sweat and the bad breath that goes with empty stomachs, there came, sharp as a honed sword, a sweet and vivid whiff, alcoholic and innocent, of hair tonic such as would blow from the open doorway of a barbershop in Wisconsin. It came, and went.
In my trance I was too sanguine. I had underestimated the mischievous streak in my sergeant. He wanted that medal. "No resemblance," he pronounced aloud, in several languages, and I was being dragged away, Kutunda still ardently offering herself as an impediment underfoot, when my fate was dramatically reversed-put into reverse gear, one should say. The Mercedes clove through the crowd like the breath of Allah, and Opuku and Mtesa in their livery and armory of pistols and leather strapping put an end to the debate over my identity. Their guns said, He is Ellellou.
In a matter of minutes my khaki uniform and NoIR sunglasses were upon me, the sergeant was prostrate before me, and the medal had been bestowed upon him in ironical pardon.
Let me record, however, before proceeding to the climax of this adventure (whose details are, as I write, confounded with the tumbling of sea-smoothed pebbles), for the consolation of the less easily redeemed, that at the very moment of seizure, when it appeared I might be taken off to a summary execution or at best a prolonged interrogation more entertaining to others than to myself, that a merciful numbness and detachment seized me as well, and I saw myself as negligently as a sated hawk sees a jerboa scuttling to its hole in the desert floor.
Vested in my dignity, I faced the apparition that loomed beyond the border: a pyramid of crates, sacks, and barbarically trademarked boxes.
USA USA USA, they said, and Kix Trix Chex Pops.
The twilight in our land is brief, after the flash of green, and I could not make out the legends on the topmost boxes; there seemed to be barrels of potato chips. Of how this mountain of fetchingly packaged pap had materialized in the desolate aftouh of Efu there appeared little trace; stretching away into the heavily subsidized depths of Sahel, straight as a jet-trail, a beaten track testified to the passage of wheeled vehicles, none of which was visible. Nor was there any sign of human activity around the prefabricated fort that stood opposite to our outpost within the symmetrical vacancies of our unallied nations.
Only one man, a white man in a button-down shirt and a seersucker suit, showed himself, loping our way with that diffident, confident saunter that needs for setting an awninged main street during an American summer's lunch hour, when dozens of small businessmen, toothpicks between their lips, stroll, eye the competition, and glad-hand one another. This toubab had the tact, however, not to offer me his hand; days in the desert had wilted somewhat his certainty of being found lovable. His French was so haltingly and growlingly pronounced I switched our conversation into English.
His eybrows lifted, under the boyish bangs with their obligatory touch of gray. "You have an American accent."
"We are well trained in the tongues of others,"
I told him, "since no one troubles to learn ours."
"Who'd you say you were again?"
I felt I knew this man well. As is common in his swollen country, he was monstrously tall, with hands of many knuckles and fingernails the width of five-stw pasteboards. His age was not easy to estimate; the premature gray and show-me squint of these Yankees is muddled in with their something eternally puerile, awkward, winning, and hopeful.
They want, these sons of the simultaneously most expansionist and most avowedly idealistic of power aggregations, to have all things both ways: to eat both the chicken and the egg, to be both triumphant and coddled, to seem both shrewd and ingenuous. I saw him as a child, in his parents' well-padded, musty home on some curving suburban street, squinting into the fragile glued frame of a model airplane, or licking the sweetened mounts of his stamp collection, unaware that, opening beneath him, an abyss in the carpet, a chute of time would bring him to the respectable adventurism of the foreign service and this evening moment, amid a mob of Tuareg, while a strip of saffron still lingered above the westward safety of Sahel. A stir of pity, like the first unease that will lead to vomit, I bit down. He was young on the ladder of power, still assigned to the negligible nations, the licorice and caramel and chocolate people in their little trays at the front of the store; hard work and no filching would take him, as his gray hair whitened and his sleek wife wrinkled, deeper into the store, to the back room where the wholesalers grunted, amid the aromas of burlap and vinegar, their penny wise accommodations. Better for him to have become a professor of Government at a small snowy Midwestern college. My mind's eye held his wife, who would be freckled and fair and already watching her weight and slightly hardened in the role of foreign service helpmate, too ready to repack the constantly pruned possessions, to adjust her manner to a new race of servants, to learn a new smattering of shopping phrases, to cater gaily, adroitly, and appropriately to those couples above them, below them, and beside them in the dance of legations and overseas offices. I even knew how she would make love: with abashed aggression, tense in her alleged equality of body, primed like a jammed bazooka on the pornographic plastic fetishes and sexual cookbooks of her white tribe and yet, when all cultural discounts are entered, with something of gracious-ness, of helpless feeling, of an authentic twist at the end.... The squirm of nausea again. I pictured their flat in Dakar or Lagos, their "starter house" in a suburb of Maryland or Virginia, with its glass tables and incessant electricity, an island of light carved from our darkness, and my pity ceased. I told the tall intruder, "I am a citizen of Kush, delegated to ask why you are troubling our borders and what means this mountain of refuse?"
"This isn't refuse, pal-it's manna. Donated to your stricken area by the generosity of the American government and the American people acting in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. U. s. Air Force C-130's have been flying this stuff in to the emergency airfield in northern Sahel and I've been sent down here from the USD office in Tangier at the urging of the FAO people in Rome to locate the bottleneck vis-a-vis distribution of the emergency aid to the needy areas of Kush and to expedite the matter. I've been sitting out here in the underside of nowhere frying my ass off for two weeks trying to contact somebody in authority.
Whoever the hell you are, you're the best thing I've seen today."
"May I ask a few questions?"
"Shoot."
"Who was it, pray, who informed you of this supposed neediness?"
He touched his sunburned forehead and shoved back the sheaf of dry hair there. His suit, designed for cocktail parties on embassy lawns, had rumpled, out here in these badlands. His sweat had caked dark not only on his collar but along the hems of his pockets, wherever skin repeatedly touched cloth. "W r ho're you trying to kid?" he asked me. "These cats are starving.
The whole world knows it, you can see "em starve on the six o'clock news every night. The American people want to help. We know this country's socialist and xenophobic, we know Ellellou's a schizoid paranoid; we don't give a fuck.
This kind of humanitarian catastrophe cuts across the political lines, as far as my government's concerned."
"Are you aware," I asked him, "that your government's cattle vaccination project increased herd size even as the forage and water of this region were being exhausted?"
"I've read that in some report, but-was "And that the deep wells drilled by foreign governments disrupted nomadic grazing patterns so that deserts have been created with the wells at their center? Are you aware, furthermore, that climatic conditions in this region have been the same for five years, that the 'humanitarian catastrophe" you speak of is to us the human condition?"
"O.k., O.k.-better late than never.
We're here now, and what's the hang-up? I can't get anybody to talk to me."
At my back, the impatient murmur of the Tuareg intensified, and with it intensified, to fade quickly away, that misplaced barbershop sweetness.
"I will talk to you," I said, raising my voice so that our audience might understand, at least, that I was on the attack. "I am Ellellou. I speak for the people of Kush. The people of Kush reject capitalist intervention in all its guises. They have no place in their stomachs for the table scraps of a society both godless and oppressive. Offer your own blacks freedom before you pile boxes of carcinogenic trash on the holy soil of Kush!"
"Listen," he pleaded, "Zanj is taking tons of grain a day, and they have Chinese advisers over there. This thing cuts right through the political shit, and anyway don't yell at me, I marched for civil rights all through college."
"And have now been predictably co-opted," I said. "I am not as ignorant of your nation's methods as you may suppose. As to Zanj, I am told that you have favored its suffering citizens with tons of number two sorghum, a coarse grain grown for cattle fodder, which gives its human consumers violent diarrhea."
He shed some insolence at this information, and assumed a more confiding tone. "There've been some ball-ups, yeah, but don't forget these primitives are used to a high-protein diet of meat and milk. They eat better'n we do. We send what we have."
"I see," said I, gazing upward at the terrace of crates, fitfully illumined by some torches that had been lit in the throng of witnesses at my back.
Korn Kurls had been stamped across one whole tier, and Total in letters of great momentum repeated itself over and over on the wall of cardboard that reached into darkness, toward the blazing desert stars.
"Listen," the American was trying to sell me, "these breakfast cereals, with a little milk, sugar if you have it, are dynamite, don't knock "em. You're chewing cactus roots, and we know it." In another tone, boyish and respectful, he asked, "You really Ellellou? I love some of the things you wrote in exile. They were assigned in a Poli Sci course I took at Yale."
So he knew of my exile. My privacy was invaded. Confusion was upon me. I took off my sunglasses. The brightness of the lights shed by the torches was surprising. Should I be getting royalties? At the back of my skull the horde was chanting, "Ellellou, Ellellou..." As if to escape a lynch mob, I stepped forward, across the invisible Sahel-Kush border, toward the dark mountain of aid. Seeing this political barrier breached, my American confided, "They really want this stuff," in a voice that implied the battle was over; I would sign some papers, his starchy bounty could be abandoned, he would be received into his wife's freckled bed in Tangier, and his superiors would commend him all the way back to Washington. Alas, there was no safety for him in my heart, or in this night. His pallor, now that night was altogether upon us, appeared eerie, formless, or rather having the form of a parasite shaped to conform to the sunless innards of a nobler, more independent creature. The nomads and their rabble of slaves with a giant rustling crossed the border after me, pressing us with their flapping torches into a semi-circle of space against the cliff of cardboard-cardboard, giant letters of the Roman alphabet, and polypropylene, for our benefactors shipped their inferior sorghum in transparent sacks, whose transparency revealed wood chips and dead mice and whose slippery surfaces reflected the torches, torches that highlighted also with red sparks the rungs of an aluminum ladder set against the cliff, the drops of sweat on the American's parasite-gray neck, and the agitated eyeballs of the Tuareg. "Ellellou, Ellellou...."
As their murmur had conjured me from the desert, so I must conjure from within myself a gesture of leadership, an action.
Our toubab's slavish, hard-breathing, panic-suppressing demeanor begged for cruelty.
Scenting a "deal," a detente, he told me, "No kidding, there's a lot of real food value up there, I remember when they unloaded seeing Spam and powdered milk." He clambered up the ladder to look for these strata, while the Tuareg pressed closer, shaking their torches indignantly at such an act of levitation. I could scarcely hear his shouts: "dis.. here you go...
Carnation... add three parts water..."
"But we have no water!" I called up to him, trying, it seems now in hindsight, to buy time for both of us. "In Kush, water is more precious than blood!"
He was swallowed by darkness, between the torches and the stars. "No problem," his voice drifted down. "We'll bring in teams... green revolution... systems of portable trenching... a lily pond right where you're standing... here we go ... no, that's cream of celery soup...." His voice, pattering down upon them like a nonsensical angel's, had become an intolerable irritation to the Tuareg masses. As their torches drew nearer, the source of the voice could be seen, a white blur disappearing and reappearing, ever higher, among the escarpments and crevasses of combustible packaging.
Within my numbing orb of responsibility, my arm had become leaden; yet I lifted it high, and dropped it in solemn signal, so that the inevitable would appear to come from me.
Torches were touched to the base of the pyramid; it became a pyre. To his credit, the young American, when he saw the smoke and flames rising toward him, and all those slopes beneath him ringed by exultant Kushite patriots, did not cry out for mercy, or attempt to scramble and leap to a safety that was not there, but, rather, climbed to the pinnacle and, luridly illumined, awaited the martyrdom for which there must have been, in the training for foreign service provided by his insidious empire, some marginal expectation and religious preparation. We were surprised, how silently he died. Or were his cries merely drowned within the roar of the ballooning tent of flame that engulfed the treasure-heap his writhing figure for a final minute ornamented like a dark star? When he had stood beside me, I could smell on the victim, under the sweat of his long stale wait and the bland, oysterish odor of his earnestness, the house of his childhood, the musty halls, the cozy bathroom soaps, the glue of his adolescent hobbies, the aura of his alcoholic and sexually innocent parents, the ashtray scent of dissatisfaction. What dim wish to do right, hatched by the wavery blue light of the television set with its curious international shadows, had led him to the fatal edge of a safety that he imagined had no limits?
I checked my heart's tremor with some verses from the Book, that foresees all and thereby encloses all: On that day men shall become like scattered moths and the mountains like tups of carded wool. On that day there shall be downcast faces, of men broken and worn out, burnt by a scorching fire, drinking from a seething fountain. On that day there shall be radiant faces, of men well-pleased with their labors, in a lofty garden.
The Tuareg and their slaves were in a joyful tumult. Opuku and Mtesa came and guarded me from the confusion. There was a slithering in my palm of another, smaller hand. I saw that Kutunda, her broken lip scabbed, was still with me, that I had replaced Wadal as her protector.
Now the fire had taken its first giant draught, and our nostrils acknowledged the quantity of grain our triumphant gesture had consumed, for the scorched air was bathed in the benevolent aroma of baking bread; the desert night, as flakes of corrugated-cardboard ash plenteously drifted downward, knew the unaccustomed wonder of snow.