II

 

In the season the toubabs call fall, Colonel Ellellou returned to Istiqlal, his recessive mood deepened by an incident on the straight road south of Huhil, near the vanished city of Hair.

    The trinity of himself, Mtesa, and Opuku had been squared by the addition of Kutunda, whose unwashed female body brought to the interior of the Mercedes an altogether new fragrance, overlaid upon the oily distant scent of German workmanship, the clinging understink of camel dung, and the haunting aroma of the dreadful bonfire, which had crept in the windows and permeated the gray velour inexpungably as an evil memory. They were silent for miles, as each brain whirred its own wheels: Mtesa intent upon steering his marvellous machine, Kutunda wondering what would become of her and putting out through her shabby coussabe pungent feelers of fright and compliance, and Opuku apparently asleep, his round skull scarcely lolling on his muscle-buttressed neck as his dreams revolved (ellellou surmised from the man's moans of unease) images of violence, of flame, of lust for the pale, straight-nosed, black-clad nomad women. In Kush we never cease dreaming of intercourse between dark and fair skin, between thick lips and thin lips, between wandering herdsman and sedentary farmer.

    The Mercedes had driven all night, to erase the fire from the dark of our minds. Dawn had broken and passed. The landscape in the vicinity of Hair is pink and flat, salty and shimmering; a dot in the distance dissolves or becomes a blood-colored boulder the spaces themselves seem to hurl. Ellellou in his rumpled khaki was gazing forward through the windshield over the shoulder of his driver while the head of the oblivious Kutunda rested heavily on his shoulder. Then a dot placed at the unsteady apex of the triangle the road's breadth dwindled to-the horizon teetering upon its fulcrum, some bumpy paws of the Bulub foothills being retracted on the right, a thorn-mantled zareba just perceptible in the dusty depths to the left-this dot enlarged with a speed out of proportion to that of the Mercedes and declared itself, at a distance perhaps of two kilometers, to be another vehicle. Within a few seconds, of time stretched like rubber by the laws of relativity, the alien vehicle was by, quick as the shadow of the wing of a hawk.

    Ellellou marvelled, for the thing had appeared to be, not an explicable peanut lorry or piece of military transport, but a vehicle such as could not possibly be roaring along in Kush-that is, a large open-backed truck to whose flatbed were chained twin tacks of mechanically flattened bodies of once-bulbous, candy-colored American automobiles. Their engines had been removed, the space had been crushed wherein children had quarrelled, adolescents had made love, and oldsters had blinked mileage-mad holidays away.

    In jerking his head to follow the truck's swift disappearance into the trembling pink folds of the north, Ellellou awoke the fair Kutunda. For fairish, or merely dusky, she was, beneath the layers of dirt, with a moonish face and lips broad but not everted in form.

    Her lips as she attempted to respond to arousal seemed stuck by the mucilage of sleep to her small, rather inturned teeth. Her eyes widened, sensing Ellellou's alarm. The colonel had grasped Mtesa's shoulder and, in the barking, shrill voice with which, over the state radio, he would announce some new austerity or reprisal, he was asking, "What was it? Did you see it?"

    "Truck," the driver answered.

    "What kind of truck?"

    "Big. Fast. No speed limit out here."

    "Did you ever see any other truck like it?"

    The answer came after maddening deliberation. "No."

    "Where do you think it came from?"

    The driver shrugged. "Town."

    "Istiqlal? Never. Where would it get those-those things it was carrying? Where was it taking them?"

    "Maybe from Zanj going to Sahel. Or other way around."

    "Who would let it through the border? Who would sell it fuel?"

    Mtesa conceded, "Funny thing," but with no more concern than if he had seen an unusual bird at a water hole, or a bi-zarrely maimed beggar on the street. The ignorant see miracles every day.

    It occurred to Ellellou that Mtesa was bluffing, humoring him; he had seen nothing. He commanded, "Tell me what you saw.

    What funny thing?"

    "Big truck toting squashed voitures."

    "What kind of voitures?"

    "Not Benzis."

    Ellellou slumped back defeated. He would have preferred that the truck have been his private hallucination. Better his own insanity, he reasoned, than that of the nation. The vision, if actual, placed upon him an unwelcome necessity to act, to cope with a strange invasion, for he knew that the affronting apparition was a commonplace sight on the clangorous, poisonous, dangerous highways of the United States.

    Kutunda, who had been asleep, and to whom the thing had been invisible, felt to occupy the only undistorted quadrant of the car, and in his weariness Ellellou toppled into the comfortable vacancy of her fragrance of musk and dung, of smoke and hunger, of Kush.

    Evidently upon his return to Istiqlal Ellellou established Kutunda in an apartment above a basket-weaving shop whose real dealings were in hashish and khat; her presence here, and his suspicion of a conspiracy whose headquarters were in the capital, reinforced his habit of venturing disguised into the city, especially the disreputable section known as Hur-riyah, which rises, like heaps of mud boxes stacked for removal, against the eastern wall of the vast Palais d'Administration des Noires, with its sixteen pilasters representing the sixteen most common verbs that require etre instead of avoir as auxiliary in all compound tenses. Its facade is topped with eight marble statues of an unreal whiteness, uneroded in this climate, that symbolize the eight bourgeois virtues- Assiduite, Economie, Mediocrite, Conjugalite, Temperance, Optimisme, Dyna8nisme, and Mo d emit every.

    Its blank side glows in the dawn like the flank of an eternal, voluptuous promise heaving itself free of the earth, above the little roofs of thatch, cracked tile, and rock-weighted tin.

    So it loomed in Ellellou's eyes, as he blinked from the pallet he shared with Kutunda. In sleep her stringy, lustreless hair-so different from the soft and wiry curls that adorned, cut close or braided in ornate patterns, the skulls of Ellellou's Salu sisters, and three of his four wives-had drifted stickily across her face; her hair held red streaks amid the black, and the kohl with which she had beautified her eyes had smudged. The dusty brown of her cheeks showed in the slant light linear shadows of a single diagonal tribal cicatrice, one on each cheekbone. The noises about them in the slum, the banging of calabashes and scraping of warm ashes and the unwrapping of hashish packets concealed in fasces of rattan below and the buzzing of children's recitation from the Koran school across the steep ochre alley, made it hard to return to sleep, his salat as-subh performed, and Ellellou lay there beside her hard-breathing unconsciousness like a thirsty man lying on the lip of a well, conscious that the nation was dying, that the beginnings of its day were the leavings of the night, that the dry sounds he heard, of rattling, scraping, unwrapping, reciting, were hopeless sounds, scavenging sounds, of chickens too thin to slaughter pecking at stones that would never be seeds. Allah Himself was dried-up and old, and had wandered away.

    When Kutunda awoke, he asked her, "Would it help, to kill the king?"

    She performed her duties in a pot and went about the room naked, carelessly mingling her limbs with the swords and sentinels of sun the horizontally slatted windows admitted in impalpable ranks.

    Shafts of radiant dust swirled like barber poles. The room was irregular in shape, with rafters of twisted tamarisk. The walls of hardened clay mirrored her skin, flickeringly, as, with the quickness of greed, with the slowness of delight, my mistress assembled the decorations and ornaments-the dab of antimony on each eyelid, the manacles of gold about her wrists, the heaped necklaces of fine beads tightly strung on zebra-tail hairs-allowable to the dictator's concubine. As a perquisite of this position, my waif set her jaw to give advice. Removed from the shadows of the tents and ditches of the north, Kutunda appeared older than when I had seduced her. Determined creases in her brow and about her pursed mouth betrayed some previous years of taking thought; vexations had worn their channels; perhaps a decade had passed since her first uncleanness. She had a squint; perhaps she needed glasses. "Tell me about this king," she said.

    "He is feeble but clever, my captive and yet my protector, in some sense that made me reluctant to order his execution when L'Emergence broke forth, and when his violent death would have seemed unexceptional. All of Edumu's political and cultural conditioning tended to estrange him from the working classes and the peasantry. His regime was corrupt, in regard both to his personal tyranny-he was carelessly cruel in the antique, sensuous manner-and to the bourgeois ideology of his ministers, who to maintain their own prosperity within the pathetically unrepresentative elite were selling to the Americans what their fathers had sold to the French, who for that matter thought they still owned it. Their only maneuver, in the nation's war against misery, was to solicit, with much incidental bribery, another foreign concession, to build another glass hotel to function as a whorehouse for the kafirs.

    The difficulty with government in Africa, my dear Kutunda, is that in the absence of any considerable mercantile or industrial development the government is the only concentration of riches and therefore is monopolized by men who seek riches. The private vices of Edumu would have been trivial had his political orientation been correct, that is, had he offered in any way to overthrow the ancient patterns of adventurism and enlightened self-interest which were tolerable when moderated by the personal interplay of the small tribal unit but which are sheerly brutalizing when that interplay is outgrown. His conservatism, which I would rather describe as a feckless impotence, was masked by considerable personal charm, even kindliness to his chosen intimates, and by the smiling obscurantism of the hopeless cynic."

    "The king," Kutunda said, her squint drawing her cheek-scars up, underlining what I perceived as a recalling of me to the business at hand, away from the rhetoric of "Poli Sci," with a seriousness that made me shudder in fear for Edumu, for this wanton woman (her odorousness now enriched by the spices and perfumes of the black-market shops) had a hard head for men's affairs, "the king is old?"

    "Older than anyone knows, but not likely, I fear, to do us the favor of dying."

    "That would be no favor," Kutunda said. "It would deprive the government of whatever appearance of incentive might be gained by his execution as a sky-criminal."

    She used here a technical Sara term referring to an offender not against his fellow men but against the overarching harmony of common presumptions: "political criminal" might be our modern translation. Naked but for the bangles and unguents of beautification, Kutunda began to strut with the importance my ears lent her words. Her heels firmly struck the floor; her toes seemed to prolong her grip; her stride, back and forth in the little room, gave me cause to remember that her grandmother had been a leopard. Her legs were thick and slightly bowed; her buttocks had that delicious wobble of maturity. I began vaguely to long for sex. It stretched my bones, to think how much of my life had been spent listening to naked women talk. "One must look for the center of unhealth," she explained. "This center lies not, I think, within the king, who cannot help being the type of man he is, but within your mercy toward him."

    "He took me up when I was less than a grain of sand, a soldier with falsified papers, and set me at his side. He made me a son, when he had fifty sons already. I would sooner spill the blood of my true father, a Nubian raider whose face vanished with the wind, than this old tyrant who forgave me everything, and still forgives."

    "What have you done to forgive?"

    "I was born of a rape. And now I govern a starving land."

    "Why were your papers falsified?"

    "Because the truth would have done me no good, nor will it benefit you."

    Her sable eyes, that seemed to strain for focus, slid toward me, seeing that she had presumed. Her tongue moved on, more humoringly. "We must locate the center of the evil that makes the sky avoid the earth. They are lovers, the earth and the sky, and in the strength of their passion fly apart as quickly as they come together. They are like one of the white men's mighty machines; a single speck of evil will bring it to a halt. Now a demon does not occupy the entire body, but a pinhead point within it, for a demon has no necessary size, and must be small to fly. It may enter by a nostril or the anus, and take up residence in the gizzard or the little toe.

    Have you tortured the king, to find a spot where there is no pain? There the demon likely resides, and a heated dagger, thrust smartly in, will drive him out.

    But the surgery must be exact. Fingers make favorite burrows for the bad spirits; a reasonable precaution would be to slice off the old king's hands.

    I see you do not like that plan."

    I had said nothing, merely attempted to visualize the event- the wrist veins pumping like the mouth of a jug, the eerie Dasein of the severed hand, still bearing its fingerprints, and the life-lines of its palm, though lifeless as wax.

    Kutunda's head disappeared in her new green coussabe, one of several that had replaced the rags in which I had found her. Golden stitching of ecstatic concentricity stiffened its sleeves.

    Clothed, she became flirtatious and slimmer, and her gravely politic air dissolved into suggestions that were plainly malicious and jealous; she was jealous of my love for the king. "Cut off his testicles," she suggested, "and display them in the scales of the statue of Justice above the main portal of the Palais.

    Wanjiji" she scornfully pronounced. "There has been no Wanjiji since my grandfather's time, and even then its men were famous for their cowardice and gluttony. In war they waited till the men of the other village were gone and then came in and butchered the children. Tear out his eyes and stuff them up his rectum, so they can spy out where his demon lives."

    "A demon has come to live in you,"

    I observed, grabbing at the gaudy cloth as she swirled by. Her ankle-rings of bronze and silver tintinnabulated.

    "God has nowhere to alight in Kush!" She dodged me, her lips snarled back from her inturned teeth.

    "On the highest peak there sits a wrinkled old man in a cell, guarded by a soldier in khaki who wishes to hide in the dust. So the Compassionate One flies on, His river flows on, the sky remains bright, and Kush remains barren. You need to make a show, Colonel Ellellou, so Allah will notice us all. We are easy to forget. There must be blood. Blood is spirit, it draws down spirit. Dismember the king; tie his limbs to four stallions and give them the whip. His shrieks will dislodge the atom of evil and happiness will descend." She exposed her childish teeth in a grin, tilted her round head, and began to do up her greasy braids.

    "Your plan has something to it," I heard myself concede, though at the thought of my patron's dismemberment my own limbs, their stir of lust ignored and dissipated, felt leaden.

    Not that, at this stage of his disintegration, the colonel conspicuously neglected his official duties.

    He was generally at his desk, military green steel in his fanatically austere office on the corner of the Palais d'Administration des Noires overlooking Also-Abid-the rotting canopies of its dusty souk, its rickety wharves and pirogues slender as spears-for hours before Michaelis Ezana reported from his adjoining office, and the two drank together their morning chocolate and in their unending dialectical contention mapped the nation's path into the future.

    Ezana was all facts and figures, a proponent of loans from the World Bank and grants from UNESCO, of schemes for dams and irrigation, of capital investments cleverly pried from the rivalry between the two superpowers (and that shadowy third, China, that has the size but not as it were the mass, the substance, to be called super), and more lately of hopes of financial rescue from their brethren in Islam, the oily, dollar-drunk sheiks of Kuwait and Qatar. At the outset of L'fimer-gence, Ellellou had shared Ezana's enthusiasm for these manipulations of their sovereignty, as elaborate and phantasmal as the manipulations of the teeming spirit-world conducted by the witches and marabouts beyond the Grionde. But, seeing the plans come to nothing, or less than nothing-the expensive peanut-shelling equipment fall into disuse for want of repairmen, the wells drilled become the focus of a ravaged pasturage, the one dam constructed become the source of a plague of bilharzia-infested snails-Ellellou had retreated from these impure involvements and watched with a sardonic detachment Ezana's energetic attempts to engage the world in the fortunes of Kush. The Minister of the Interior's habitual dress, formerly the rude khaki of a fighter for the people, now tended toward suits tailored in London, Milanese loafers, Parisian socks with rococo clocks, and, though silk was expressly forbidden to men by all the accreted moral authority of Islam, Hong Kong shirts of a suspicious suppleness; on his wrist he wore a Swiss watch of which the face, black, lit up with the hour and minute in Arabic numerals when a small side button was pressed. This watch fascinated his subordinates, who wondered where, in its scanty black depths, the device coiled the many minutes it was not called upon to display. So it was with Michaelis Ezana, who could produce whatever facts and figures were asked for, yet whose depths remained opaque. And scanty; for, however able and ambitious, Ezana utterly lacked that inward dimension, of ethical, numinous brooding, whereby a leader bulges outward from the uncertainties of his own ego and impresses a people. An observer seeing the two leaders bow their heads together in conference would have noticed that, though equally short and black, of the two Ezana gave more blackness back; blackness irrepressibly bounced and skidded off the spherical, luminous surfaces of his face.

    Whereas Ellellou's was a mat black, the product of a long soaking-in. He tolerated Ezana because it was etched, on the crystal plane of things possible, that Ezana would never succeed him.

    Ellellou's popularity, as reports drifted south of his flamboyant personal victory on behalf of the people against capitalist subversion, had surged to a height where suppositions of madness would not disturb it; so he dared, this morning, as the chocolate cooled at their elbows, to confide his visions to Ezana.

    "Returning from the site of the repelled invasion,"

    Ellellou said, "in the region of Hair, we saw a strange thing."

    "A strange truck," Ezana quickly clarified.

    "As Minister of the Interior, Comrade, I have taken this sinister matter firmly in hand. The Bureau of Transport is at a loss. Of the two hundred twenty-six motored vehicles registered in Kush, seventy-seven of them public taxis and one hundred and four at the disposal of members of the government, the remaining forty-five registrants have been investigated and none answers to the description of a flatbed four-axle carrier of compressed scrap chassis."

    "Who gave you, Comrade Ezana, such a complete description?"

    "There were four of you in the automobile, of whom two, I believe, were awake. Draw your own conclusions."

    Mtesa, a traitor?

    Ezana smiled reassuringly. His plump fingers, loaded with gems like especially bright droplets of an enveloping lubricity, slid descriptively through the air. "The air of Kush is transparent, there are no secrets, only reticences," he said.

    "The truck is the thing. I cannot account for it. It is unaccountable."

    "Also," Ellellou ventured, comforted by the other's thoroughness, which brought all things shadowy into the light of numerical investigation, and might dispel even the dictator's unconfessed lassitude, "on the way north, in a gap of the Bulub hills, I glimpsed far off a golden arc, perhaps two golden arcs, I am not certain."

    Ezana's fluid manner stiffened. "Did anyone other than yourself, my President, observe this apparition?"

    "Neither Mtesa nor Opuku could confirm my sighting, though we halted the car and prowled the terrain for a vantage. Opuku had just pointed out the smoke of an encampment, and thus had drawn my gaze in that direction. If they had... one would have said...

    I thought... the region is strange."

    "This was, I believe, the morning after your fatiguing night in the ICBM crib with the Russians, an experience in itself rather conducive to the unwilling suspension of reality."

    "It was. But I was not so tired, nor so susceptible to the fumes of the alcohol spilled by uproarious barbarians, as to mistake my own eyesight. Could there be, I wonder, an ancient ruin in the vicinity, or an accessory Soviet installation the Minister of the Interior has omitted to acknowledge?"

    "You are the Minister of Defense, and you know my opin- ion of this paramilitary foolery between the superparanoids. No need exists to double dummy rockets; and if it were the case why advertise the site with shining spires?"

    "Not spires, arches."

    "Whatever. The shimmer of the sand and the heated layers of air play strange tricks. Roul the desert devil delights in trompe-Voeil.

    Rest your mind, my President; I think the rumors of famine have troubled your peace of mind unduly."

    "Rumors? They are facts."

    "Exaggerated, moot facts. The Western press delights in making us appear incompetent. The nomads have always dragged our statistics down. Their way of life is archaic, wasteful, and destructive. Their absurd coinage of cattle has become ruinously clumsy. We must seize this opportunity to urbanize them. Already, the displaced nomads, and the sedentary farmers whose crops have failed or been consumed by the lawless herds, crowd to the edges of Istiqlal, where the tents and shacks, adjacent to the airport in full view of incoming flights, breed misery unalloyed by any suggestion of the picturesque. Their ancient nations have failed them; they are the citizens of our new nation, no longer of the Tuareg or the Salu or the Fulani or the Moundang but of Kush; Kush must reach down and house them, educate them, enlist them. This famine that so troubles you in truth is L'fimergence, given a fortuitous climatic dimension."

    Ellellou, though moved by echoes of his own rhetoric, asked, "Who will supply the wealth to house, educate, enlist as you describe?"

    Ezana contemplated an upper corner of the room.

    "In the Ippi Rift," he began, "there is some interesting geology."

    Ellellou didn't hear. He had stood, to declaim, "The rich blocs each have client states whose prosperity is of more strategic moment than ours. Our place at the table will be the nethermost chair; let us remain standing, and at least trouble the conscience of the feast."

    Impatience cinched shut the shining curves of Ezana's visage. "This feast has never had a conscience," he said. "We are at the table, Comrade, there is no helping it. There is no way a nation cannot live in the world. A man, yes, can withdraw into sainthood; but a nation of its very collective essence strives to prosper. A nation is like a plant; it is a lower thing than a man, not a higher, as you would have it."

    "Yet the people look up, and must see something. You speak of the fortuitous; this is blasphemy. The famine exists, and therefore must have a meaning, both Marxist and divine. I think it means our revolution was not thorough enough; it left a pocket of reaction here in the Palais d'Administration, on the floor below us, in the far wing. I know you know the king still lives. What would you say to his public execution?"

    Michaelis Ezana shrugged. "I think it would be as an event not non-trivial. The king is already one with his ancestors."

    Ellellou warned, "It would horrify the world bourgeoisie, who are sentimental about monarchs.

    Their offers to bring us the benefits of their eight virtues might slacken, and your office would have less paper to handle."

    Ezana repeated his shrug, exactly. "It would sever a strand to the colonial past. He is your personal prisoner, deal with him as seems expedient." He reshuffled back into his briefcase the fanned papers-graphs, maps, computer print-outs-that again had failed to interest the President. Ellellou sat down and sipped his chocolate, which had grown cool. But no mere tepidity had subverted its taste: there was something added and subtracted, something malty, ersatz, adulterate, mild, mellow, vitaminized.

    Ambushed by recognition, Ellellou blurted out to Ezana the one word, "Ovaltine!"

    Sittina, my third wife, lived in a villa among bushes of oleander, camel's-foot, and feathery bamboo, among children she no longer even pretended were mine and half-completed paintings, weavings abandoned in mid-stripe on the loom, and shimmering gowns which needed only to be hemmed to be finished. On the harpsichord, The Well-Tempered Clavier always stood open to the same fugue. She was too variously talented to push anything through to mastery.

    Soot-black, slender, the huge hoops of her earrings pierced through the tops of her cup-shaped ears rather than the lobes and touching one shoulder or another as she moved her lovely small tipped-back head, she was elevated and detached in her view of me, and I found this oddly confirming.

    "So the Palais kitchen makes Ovaltine instead of pure Ghanaian chocolate for a change," she said. "What of it? You think you burned all the produce the Yankees are smuggling in?

    It's not that easy, they make tons more of junk every day. Don't worry about it, Felix. Face it, Africa is crazy about trading. Where else can you buy in the marketplace honest-to-God fingernail clippings? I mean, it's wild."

    She said all this glancingly, over her shoulder, in her offhand American English. The daughter of a Tutsi chief, she had been sent in a time of Hutu massacre to a small all-black college in the state of Alabama, and indeed had set several sprint records there. The turn of her calves and the length of her thighs had won my heart, in the heyday of Edumu's restored rule, when she competed in the Noire Pan-African games of 1962. Though she had ever been in our marriage elusive, like the wind she raced with, I could never consider her a bad wife. Often in the bed of another, in my virile thirties, in the carefree Sixties, the thought of her pointed tits and trim bean-shaped buttocks had given me rise. Yet the reality of her was more mixed than the thought, the inner image of her. Sittina and I had not made love for four years, though the youngest of the glossy, long-skulled children that wobbled and prattled through the room, chased by parrots and pet patas monkeys, was under two. Sittina was wearing a loose-throated long-sleeved dashiki with rainbow-dyed culottes of crushed voile; they flapped and swayed with the movements of her wonderful impatient legs. She was engaged, in one of her abortive projects, with fashion design, and her outfit, so contemporary and timeless both, so Western and African, was one of her creations. But, she explained, between bursts of attention to the needful children-each of whom cast at me, in my unadorned khaki, the glance one gives a gardener or messenger boy who has come six steps too far into the house-that it was impossible nowadays to obtain cloth or even needles and thread, that there was nothing for sale in the markets but the cheapest sort of merikani, faded bolts the missionaries must have brought, and that since the Revolution had reduced the European community so drastically there were no customers anyway, the wives of the Kuwaitis never came out of their compounds, the Albanian women were stringy-haired savages smelling of wet wool, and that awful Mrs. Ezana-how can he stand her?, she's such a bluestocking-went everywhere bare-breasted, as a sign of political undeviation.

    Pas chic, Sittina said. Her words had all the substance of a complaint but not, truly, the tone. I felt I had come on the afternoon of a visit to or by some lover; hence her benign, if abstracted and hurried, manner.

    She continued, "What are you doing about the drought?

    Even the price of a goat head is out of sight. A single cassava brings two hundred lu.

    You put some millet paste on the windowsill to curdle and in five minutes it's stolen. The refugees from the north come into town and rob- what else can the poor things do? My night guard had his throat slit the other night and walked home in a sulk. Don't ask me where still was, I forget.

    They took the stainless steel flatware and two of my old trophies but hadn't the sophistication to steal the Chagall." The Chagall, of the customary upside-down Jew smiling at a green moon, had been our wedding present from the king. Now it hung on the far wall between an Ife harvest-drama mask and a Somali saddle-cloth of an exceptionally elaborate pattern. Sittina, who bore the name of a Queen of Shendy, had furnished the spacious living-room of the villa in a scattered "artistic" style with sub-Saharan artifacts whose solemn blacks and browns, whose surfaces of red-stained animal hide and hollowed gourd still redolent of the organic matrix from which they had been gently lifted by the last stage of manufacture consorted with the glib rectilin-earity and mechanically perfect surfaces of the Danish armchairs and glass-and-aluminum coffee tables that had been salvaged from the pillage of the European quarters in 1968. The whole room, with its cracks and gaps and air of casual assemblage and incompleted intentions, seemed an insubstantial sham compared to a room I could suddenly remember, of white-painted moldings and unchipped knickknacks, of impregnable snugness and immovable solidity, tight as the keel of a ship, carpeted wall to wall, crammed with upright, polished, nubbled, antimacassared furniture including a cabineted television set and a strange conical table of three platterlike shelves that held a gleaming trove of transparent paperweights containing in their centers crinkled paper or plastic flowers, evil eyes of all colors whose stare seemed a multiform sister to the grave gray-green Cyclops stare of the unlit television screen, all this furniture in this exotic far-off room sharing a feeling of breathless fumigated intrusion-proof cleanness that pressed on my chest as I waited for someone, love embodied, as perfect and white as the woodwork that embowered her, to descend the stairs; the varnished treads and slender balusters did a kind of pirouette at the foot of the stairs, a skillful cold whirl of carpentry that broke, by one of those irruptions to which my mind was lately prone, through the dusky mud tints of Sittina's villa, the tender fragility of things African, the friable dishes and idols and houses of earth moistened and shaped and dried again, of hides and reeds crumbling back to grass and dust, of the people themselves for their bright moment of laughter rising out of the clay and sinking again, into the featureless face of Allah, which it is the final bliss for believers to behold, through the seven veils of Paradise. My memory laid a cold curse on the present moment. Sittina's offhand beauty, the sense of suspension her mind spun, in the disarrayed room, as she waited for me to leave, so she could proceed with that life of uncompleted curves that amused her, underlined the desolation known only to those who live between two worlds.

    But who, in the world, now, does not live between two worlds?

    "I'm glad," I said to her, of the Chagall; and of the drought: "We are taking steps."

    "God, Felix, the depression rolls off you like a stench."

    "Sorry. Something about you touched me just then."

    She made a swift movement, testing her hair, which was pulled back from her skull and intricately pinned by two dried fish spines. The women of Kush spare no pains to knit and knot their hair in extraordinary patterns. No doubt there is a Marxist explanation for this, having to do with a disproportion of available labor to available materials, all history testifying, with the tedious workmanship that crowds our museum cases, to a terrible excess of life, of time, that overruns all crannies as tropical tendrils embroider every inch of available light. Sittina's gesture had been flirtatious. She offered, haltingly, "I have an appointment to go out, but if my lord... has come in search of his... rights, I will stay.

    Cheerfully. It once... we... I am attempting to apologize for something I am not certain I caused.

    Until the Revolution, we were together enough. Is that not so?"

    "It is so, Sittina. Your shadow in a dark room ..." I could not finish, the memory slipped its sheath.

    "Did I become an enemy of the people, that I had to be rebuffed?"

    The recollection of her warm shadow, the sudden scissoring embrace of her long thighs, my hand underneath those taut buttocks, overlaid the stuffily immaculate living-room with its evil dance of balusters and staring glass objets, and I found myself too sliced, by successive waves of lost experience, to explain well what I did wish to share: "Under the old king, there was a kind of life possible, which we borrowed from him, his vitality and his unexamined assumption that he was right, right to demand and consume what so many strained to donate out of their poverty. When he was displaced, much that was let us say healthy and morally neutral went with him, inextricably involved as it was with the corruption, the bourgeois feudalism, the unpurged way of looking at things. You and I were among the innocent sweepings. I am sorry."

    She said, "I had forsaken my father for you, at a time when he lived hunted in the mountains. When the tide of massacre reversed, he beckoned me to take my place among the Tutsi as a princess. I declined. And still I stay here with you, though all Africa says you are crazy."

    "Is that so?"

    "It is so that they say it. The truth of what they say, I cannot judge. Our traditions treat madness as sacred, and we look to the sacred to rule us."

    "The appointment you are about to keep, does it excite you?"

    "It did. Now you've confused me."

    "Remember our trysts, under the stadium, when we were children of the king?"

    "The king, the king.

    You are king now."

    "Do you still make that cooing noise, when you spread your legs?"

    "I have said, I will stay." She spat, a Tutsi courtesy.

    "G. My blood is heavy in me."

    "I must say, you're spreading a lot of guilt around."

    "Some day, when the land is healthy again, it would please me to be enlisted among the men who serve you, Sittina."

    "You deserted, when this army contained no body but yours. And I understand you brought back a Sara wench from the north, and have installed her above a basket shop."

    "A matter of state, merely. The woman acts as my adviser."

    "Ask me my advice"-her words kept rhythm with the vigor of her circular motions as she wound a turban about her skull, and finished with a swash around her throat-"and it would be to give Kush back to old Edumu and the frogs and get some decent pate back in the shops."

    "I liked what you said about madness," I said.

    "Did you know," I went on, unwilling, somehow, to have this dishevelled visit terminate, "that the British once had a plan of flooding the entire Sahara, before they realized it was a plateau? They thought it would fill like a bathtub because it was under the Mediterranean on their maps!"

    Sittina was setting off, swooping here and there to kiss her children like a black heron dipping her narrow head to catch fish; half-unthinkingly she finished by kissing her husband, the swoop and dip being minimal here, because the dictator of Kush was a mere six inches shorter than she. Her breath, snatched inwards in the exultation of her departure, smelled of anise. As she retreated, the cut of her culottes, and a lift given her figure by the addition of the turban, made her look high-assed.

    "I love you," said Ellellou, unheard.

    The trial of the king proceeded smoothly. The revelation that he was still alive proved, surprisingly, to be no surprise. The populace had always sensed it. The monarch's health was still drunk in the palm-wine bars, in the narrow stalls where the faithful chew khat while the pagans swallow barasa and guinea-corn beer. Even in the public schools, in the lists of the Lords of Wanjiji, the reign of Edumu IV was learned with an open dash, without a date of termination.

    For the sake of the foreign press, then, developments within the Palais d'Administration des Noires were staged through a successive lifting of veils of rumor. The first rumor was that the king had been living in exile across the river, among the loyal Wanj who continued their life of trading fish and hippo teeth for salt and juju beads under the remote rule of Captain Bokassa of former Oubangui-Shari. The next rumor was that the king had ill-advisedly crossed the Grionde to lead a revisionist, pro-monarchial coup; this preposterous attempt, founded on fantastical CIA intelligence that the people of Kush were disenchanted with L"'@lmergence and SCRME, of course failed, encountering on the north bank of the river the magnificent solidarity of the Kushite national conscience. The third rumor claimed that, amid terrific loss of life among his followers, the king was taken into custody, and (this was the fourth rumor) captured papers revealed that the severe food shortages of recent years had been caused not by the climate of Kush nor its bountiful soil but by royalist conspirators within the administration. According to the fifth rumor, Lieutenant-Colonel Michaelis Ezana was superbly extirpating these anti-people, pro-feudalist traitors from the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Transport, which had been discovered exporting foodstuffs to neighboring Sahel, along whose border one massive illegal cache had been discovered and destroyed by the personal vigilance and action of Colonel Ellellou himself, in response to information provided by a female patriot, Kutunda Traore, a griot of the doughty Sara tribe.

    Mentioning Kutunda had been Ezana's idea, not mine. He had met her at my office, where she would visit me during the heat of the mid-day to enjoy the air-conditioning and to bring me lunch of peppered raw mutton and honied manioc from the Hurriyah market, and to borrow some lu.

    The rustle and intricate engraving of paper money delighted her innocence; in the village of her girlhood there had been, apart from heads of cattle, only two types of currency, both rare-giant bars of iron impossible for a woman to lift, and tiny round mirrors that, if dropped, were hard to find. Ezana spoke a rusty dialect of Sara, and spent hours with Kutunda, giggling and yelping over his own grammatical errors.

    For the people of Kush, a pronouncement was promulgated:

 

    TO caret ALL CITIZENS OF T caret USH @leaence Supreme Qonseil T caret evolutionnaire et Militaire pour Vandmergence announces that miserable Sdumu formerly known as @lgreater-than ord of Wanjiji has been found Quilty of High Qrimes and caret Misdemeanors against the People and "Physical environment of Kush, leading to Widespread Shortages, Dislocations, and Suffering.

 

The

 

TS-IATIONAL Honor of Kush and the

 

Will of less-than Allah demand that

 

Justice be

 

"Done to this T left-brace eactionary and "Discredited Exploiter of the less-than Jvlany, Who in the course of his caret Moc backslash ery of a Tggeign appropriated to Himself the caret Means of Production and the Headwaters of Revenue, as well as Wantonly and without caret Jvlercy ordering the Deaths and Ignominies of those who served Him, and privately doubting to his Intimates the One True Qod, the Compassionate and caret Merciful, Whose Prophet is caret Mohamet.

 

Aforesaid

 

Couldumu's

 

Very

 

Vresence in the

 

@land dilutes and Undermines the Scientific Socialism of Rush; this 'Blot upon Our Flag will be Joyously T caret emoved the twelfth Day of Shawwal in this Year st59J caret A. h., in the Square of the caret Mosque of the Day of Disaster, within the Holy Qapital of Istiqlal.

 

Colonel H. F. Ellellou

 

President of Kush Chairman of SCRME

 

This announcement, printed on green placards, was posted on the walls of the city, and was chanted, in Arabic, Berber, French, Tamahaq, Salu, Sara, Tshi, and Ga, from the minarets of the mosques, from the windows of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, from the weathered wooden balconies of the Indian shops and the reed roofs of the riverside souk.

    Word had even been posted in the panoramic revolving restaurant of the glass skyscraper the East Germans had erected to the glory of socialism.

    Yet the crowd that came to the execution was small.

    By mid-morning the sun stood high and the clay of the square, packed by the passage of footsteps to the smoothness of ivory, was white to the eye and scalding to unsandalled feet. Several military trucks had been aligned and the sides removed, to make a platform for the ceremony. King Edumu, bobbing with the aftereffects of his interrogation, which had focussed on the soles of his feet, and blinking in this unaccustomed breadth of light, which penetrated even his crazed corneas, was led forth in white robes by some soldiers who, it was clear from their carriage and aura, had greeted this great day with tumblers of kaikai.

    The meagre throng, at least half of them children given a school holiday, attempted a cheer that ebbed into puzzled sullen silence as the king, his little body more than once having to be disentangled from his voluminous, luminous lungi, was lifted into position on the flatbed of the central truck, where Ellellou, Ezana, and the nine other colonels were seated on folding chairs. A headblock had been hacked of blood-red camwood. The king stood awkwardly beside it, not knowing at first which way to face. Behind him, in a ragged arc doubled, as a rainbow is sometimes doubled, by an arc of parasols above it, wives and offspring and lesser government officials crowded the subsidiary trucks and even perched on the cab roofs.

    Of Ellellou's four wives, none had deigned to appear, but Kutunda Traore was present, resplendent in a cascading emerald boubou and a turban that Sittina had designed.

    Vivaciously speaking to one bureaucrat and then another, tossing her head and switching her hips, she had appointed herself the hostess of the occasion.

    Ellellou searched her face vainly for traces of the smudged whore he had found among the well-diggers.

    Why, he wondered, generation after generation, century after century, must vulgarity repossess all the energy? Still, Kutunda's childish delight and stocky self-importance alone struck, in this atmosphere of embarrassed, underpopulated anti-climax, the ringing bronze note of gleeful release and public complicity he had hoped for.

    Not quite alone; for there was another who entered unembarrassed into the occasion, and that was the king. Though crippled by age and inquisition, and more insecure in his gestures under the vacuous dome of sky than in the close-walled cells of his confinement, the king had the forms for his feelings. Beneath the glitter of his gold headband and the cloud of his unshorn wool his fig-dark features shone with formal courage. The little arc of his nose aimed, amid the insolent hubbub, in the direction of the citizenry. They, with the exception of a few children, had tucked themselves well back from the trucks, in the alley-mouths and beneath the cafe-awnings at the shady rim of the square. So far from continuous, a blanket of unified humanity as Ellellou had imagined, it was a crowd of clots, as recalcitrant-appearing perhaps as those clots of blood from which Allah first fashioned men. The king lifted his arms.

    He spoke in no language that Ellellou knew.

    A few of the crowd, its drowsy buzzing ceased, stepped forward from the alleys and the awnings onto the blazing clay, better to hear; these were the ones who understood Wanj. Thus the blackest and most stoic faces sifted forward, leaving behind the brown, the reddish-tan, the merely dusky. The king in his blindness stared directly into the sun, orating.

    "People of Wanj, rejoice with me! Today I go to join our ancestors, who live below, who are our blood!

    These mad soldiers who attempt to govern us are puppets of the ancestors, who dangle them a moment before they toss them aside. If their rule is just, why has the sky-god withheld rain these five years?

    They say Edumu is the center of the sickness, but when I was the Lord of Wanj and had bewitched the French with their little round hats to be my policemen and scribes, rain fell in abundance, and the palms poured their wine upon the ground, and there were not enough camels in Noire to carry our peanuts to Dakar! Of what am I accused by these poor soldiers, those apostles of He socialisme scientifique"

    [for Wanj had no words for this concept]? Of black magic, of being l un element indesirabWill within the fabled purity of Kush! I say Kush is a fiction, an evil dream the white man had, and that those who profess to govern her are twisted and bent double. They are in truth white men, though their faces wear black masks. Look at them as they sit behind me, with their fat wives and fatter children! What have these men to do with you? Nothing. They have come from afar, to steal and enslave. I challenge them by the ancient code of Wanjiji: let him who accuses me execute me! If a demon give his hand strength, then guilt shall travel up his arm and become his soul's burden. If he falter, then I will live, and those who speak Wanj will still have a Lord and a living connection with the gods of their ancestors!"

    The crowd hissed and murmured in its desultory way; the sun, mounting higher, was draining purpose and clarity from the holiday. Colonel Wambutti, who spoke Wanj, crouched forward and murmured the gist of the king's words into Ellel-lou's ear. The President promptly nodded, comprehending the challenge. He stood and glanced about for the executioner's sword.

    Credit the now (in some quarters) discredited Ellellou with the grandeur of his response in this hour.

    Squeamishly he had absented himself from the interrogations of the king, and upon the occasion when the old man, his feet so flogged their soles had become bubbles of livid flesh, had indeed confessed to conspiring with Roul the desert devil and with Jean-Paul Chremeau, the Christian, alexandrine-indicting premier of Sahel, to bring about drought and demoralization, Ellellou had been prowling the city disguised as an orange-seller; by the time the President could be located and brought to the dungeon, the king had recanted, and hurled at him an absurd litany of American trade-names-"Coca-Cola! Polaroid!

    Chevrolet! IBM!" Indeed, the scandalized marabouts and professional torturers agreed, devils were at work here. Ellellou had gone pale at the outburst, and turned on his heel.

    Not so now. A power beyond him descended and gave him calm. He stepped lightly to the king's side.

    The king said softly into the sun, "I know that step."

    "Are you sure?"

    The king did not turn his head, as if to avoid what glim- mers of my face might come to him. He preferred to rest his gaze in blank radiance. "Another saying came to me after our conversation."

    "What was it, my Lord?"

    "Wer andern eine Grube grdbt, fallst selbst hinein.

    Who digs the pit for others, falls in himself. It was said of their Fiihrer, by my old friends."

    "A pit awaits all of us. Yours is no deeper than others. You are simply at its lip."

    "I was not thinking of myself, but of Colonel Ellellou." He laughed; it was like a small fine box being crushed underfoot. His body smelled, faintly, of cloves.

    "It is not I who acts," I said, "but Kush."

    "Then, there can be no talk of mercy?"

    "It is not a lesson I was well taught."

    "Your teacher perhaps had too much to teach."

    "It would be an impiety to usurp the prerogative of the Most Merciful. Why talk of mercy among men, when justice can be achieved?"

    "Can it?"

    "See." Behind his back I extended my hand.

    Opuku was holding the giant scimitar, taken for this ceremony from its case in the People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities, for in the name of ethnic integrity the French had permitted executions in this classic manner until the importation of the guillotine, now also in the Museum. The Supreme Conseil had rejected the idea of bringing forth the guillotine for this state occasion as savoring of neo-colonialism. All of the executions during the early Emergence had been by firing squad. Blue smoke had risen from the inner courtyard of the Palais in rectangular clouds, like cloudy cakes released from a mold. Think of it. My mind in its exalted, distended condition had time to entertain many irrelevant images. Think of the blade of that guillotine, wrapped in straw and burlap to protect its edge, but perhaps gaps worked loose in the wrapping causing glints of reflection to fly across the desert as the pack-camel swayed on its way as it brought humanitarian murder to this remotest and least profitable heart of Africa.

    The handle of the scimitar, bronze worked to imitate wound cord, nearly fell from my hand, so unexpectedly ponderous was the blade. In this life woven of illusions and insubstantial impressions it is gratifying to encounter heft, to touch the leaden center of things, the is at the center of be, the rock in Plato's cave. I thought of an orange. I lifted the sword high, so that the reflection from its flashing blade hurtled around the square like a hawk of lethal brightness, slicing the eyes of the crowd and the hardened clay of the facades, the shuttered fearful windows, the blanched, pegged walls and squat aspiring minaret of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster. In the glare of the sky the swooping reflections were swallowed, disgorged again upon the earth as the scimitar was lowered and steadied. A speech in response to the king's seemed called for.

    "People of Kush! Be deaf to this criminal's blasphemies! Gladly your President takes into his hand the instrument of God's rectitude! Praise Him Who abides!

    The unbelievers love this fleeting life too well, and thus prepare for themselves a heavy day of doom!

    The day of doom has come to the alleged Lord of Wanjiji! He is an empty gourd, a mask without a face! When Edumu ruled, he gathered to himself riches that your labor created. He took to himself your most lissome women, and called your best land his own. The toubabs levied their taxes through the maze beneath his throne; under cover of his kingship the riches God has hidden in our mountains and our river were ferried away. Infidel harlots in countries of fog and clouds are adorned with our jewels because of this betrayer. Sentimental elements within the Supreme Conseil have preserved his life to this moment! This was a mistake, an abomination! God has cursed this land accordingly! By the sword in my hand I shall cleanse the land! Sacredly is it written: Idolatry is worse than carnage.

    Those of you who moved forward to hear the words of Wanj, hear these words! The Lord of Wanjiji is a clot of blood, a speck upon the purity of Kush. His life has been long and odious. He is cunning. His wisdom is barren. He has mocked Ellellou. He has mocked the Revolution. I act now not as myself, not as Ellellou, but as the breath of L'@lmergence, blowing away a speck of dirt! God's will gives my arms strength! Behold, those who doubt!!"

    Opuku meanwhile and one of the colonels-Colonel Batwa was my impression, an ex-prize fighter-attempted to bring the king to kneel and place his head on the saddle-shaped block of blood red.

    The king in his blindness, or out of some notion of abused dignity, resisted; there was more kick in his old body than one would have thought; the crowd chuckled a bit. I could feel, through the pink mists my verbal frenzy had set to swirling in my skull, his sensations, his struggling stiff frailty; I entered in, was pushed and pulled among jostling shelves of muscular darkness, of dazzling not-seeing. My hair was gripped, a hardness knocked against my chin, sun-hot camwood scorched my throat. A smoky smell. The orange in my mind rolled away. The king's head had been arranged on the block. Looking down, I had become perilously tall. The path the scimitar must descend through air appeared a long flaw in crystal. A few drops of sweat glinted in the net of wrinkles on the nape of the old man's neck, bared as Opuku, perhaps rougher than need be (it crossed my mind), tugged forward for me the mass of Edumu's hair, matted and yellowish like a sheep's. I eyed my spot between two vertebrae. Incongruously, there entered my mind from afar the image of a candy apple, such as one buys at county fairs in Wisconsin comxs tough glaze, its slender wooden stick, its little cap of coconut. The first bite is the most difficult. The king cleared his throat, as if to address one of us. But his thought went nowhere, a trickle in the hot sands of his terror, and an intense mechanical interest arose like a hiss of steam from the point between two cervical lumps where two wrinkles conveniently crossed. Opuku's hands gripped deeper into the wool, as if the king were tensing to struggle, and I saw that the moment I wanted with all my being behind me was still a fraction of a second ahead. The divine breath grunted into my chest and the scimitar descended. Though the blade struck through to the wood, the noise was clumsier, more multiple, than I had expected.

    Sun. The clay of the square was accepting yet another day's merciless brilliance. An edge of green metal, unpainted where the paint had chipped, the flatbed's crimped lip, took my eye. I found I was waiting, in the pocket of sharp quiet before the crowd loosed an appalled, triumphant roar, for the king, as his throat-clearing had promised, to say another word.

    The very ink in my pen coagulates at these memories.

    Robust Opuku held up the king's head at arm's length, as the center of an opposing basketball team demonstrates his intimidating one-handed grip.

    Relief at the thing accomplished flowed through me, so I was slow to notice how little blood flowed from the severed head. This medically explicable fact comthe brain in its fury to live had drawn blood up into itself like a sponge-was to haunt the kingdom I had inherited. The king's eyes were blissfully closed, while his body in its silken white lungi flipped about with a hideous undirected strength, even the arms flailing. Opuku with a booted foot pressed the body flat, as the chopped throat, romantically rich in purples and blues, spilled blood sobbingly. There came uninvited into my mind the flat side of that candy apple, where it has rested while hardening, and where the sugary semi-elastic glaze was thickest. The taste of this glaze, bitten into, and its stubborn texture were as vivid to me as Kutunda's cry of joy, a thrilled female keening less voluntary than a dog's howl, cutting through the stunned air. A host of gnats had come to drink.

    So it seemed from the truck-gnats, blood, a crimped edge of metal and irrelevant fairgrounds memories all compressed by the sunlight into one unfeeling, unmeaning moment, through which there coursed nevertheless a palpable liquid relief.

    From the vantage of the crowd, it looked far otherwise: Ellellou's neat brown figure, sunglassless, stepped forward andwitha leverlike stroke altered the quality of the smallest of the puppets posed on a makeshift stage. The head was held up. Then other puppets, unpredicted, appeared: blue-clad Tuareg, the lower halves of their faces covered by tagilmusts, perhaps twenty of them, on fine Arabian horses rode in from the eastern side of the square, mingled with the khaki men on the green trucks, and after a tussle carried off the smaller of the king's two bodily remains.

    Up close, Opuku received a slash on his arm, and Colonel Ezana's wife was the butt of an indecent suggestion; but the very speed of the attack (which had the crowd been as numerous as expected would have been disastrously impeded) and its apparently limited objective of carrying off the severed head enabled it to pass like a loud but harmless wind. Some of the crowd thought the episode merely a part of the governmental pageant that had been arranged.

    Ellellou with admirable presence of mind addressed those spectators that had not fled the scene.

    "Citizens of Kush! Fear not! The alleged Lord of Wanjiji is dead, his would-be rescuers have had to content themselves with the unspeakable refuse of his physical remains! His soul has gone to everlasting fire! The forces of imperialism and reaction have again been thwarted! There is no doubt that these brazen terrorists are hirelings of the American paper tiger, or perhaps fanatical capitalists disguised in the robes of the Tuareg! We of Le Supreme Conseil Revolutionnaire et Militaire pour l'@lmergence laugh at their presumption and invite the socialized people of Kush to defecate upon their individualistic, entrepreneurial violence!! The loathsome theft shall be avenged, have no fear! Disperse to your homes, and prepare for the deluge! You have witnessed the enactment of a purgation profoundly pleasing to Allah, and deeply beneficial to our green and pleasant land!"

    Ellellou shouted all this, in a rapture of abandonment to the furious wind within him, that could be vented only into the imaginary ear of his nation, but in his private aspect knew that his accusations were problematical, for he had seen the eyes of the raider who had snatched the king's head from Opuku's slashed arm, and they were not the wolvish eyes of a Targui or a North American, frosted and blue, but amber and slant like the survival-minded eyes of wild swine. Also, Ellellou, transfixed by his battle-calm, waiting through a microscopically lucid series of milliseconds to be tumbled like a rabbit by a lion, too tranquil to think of lifting his bloodied scimitar in self-defense, scented through the flurry of odors of unwashed flesh and Arabian horsehair, a subtle sweetness chiming with his memories of the banquet in the rocket bunker. Vodka.

    While the capital still buzzed of these portentous events (which the majority of the indolent populace had lacked the civic conscience to witness, and which, in the recounting to the unpatriotically absent, became unreal), Ellellou descended into the Hurriyah district in the disguise of an orange-seller, to visit Kutunda. Now that the effects of the drought and famine were felt even in the metropolis, there were no oranges to sell, and the peddler instead offered to the echoing, anfractuous alleys the mere image of oranges, put into song: "Round and firm as the breasts of one's beloved's younger sister, she ivho exposes her gums when she laughs, and spies from her pallet wondering when her time will come; to the touch delicately rough like one's own testicles, stippled waxy hides tearable and acrid when torn, staining one's fingers with the sharpest essence of the juice; when the hide is scattered like thick rose petals, the fruit is found partitioned in quarter-moons, each in its papery baby skin dulcet as dust; parted from its many brothers too greedily, each segment will weep bright tears of juice, foreshadowing the explosion in the consumer's mouth; how sweet is the water of the juice! Our lips sting, the rivers of our heart rush upward to greet the miracle secreted in this symmetry!

    And the color, what is the color? The color is that strip of the heavens closest to the dunes before the green flash amwunces the arrival of night."

    For such a song, which the singer elaborated through many variations-evoking in some versions the navel and the crusty button at the poles of the orange, dwelling rhapsodically in others upon the tasteless mossy inside of the skin that holds the drops of nectar like jewels in a felt-lined case, and in still others upon the joys of spitting out the seeds-coins or cowries would be cast from the windows, appearing in his path like a sudden spatter of the rains that had failed to come, or paper notes would be thrust at him by servants sent out by the wealthy; forwiththe drying-up of merchandise to buy, lu had become plentiful, and many were in a cash sense wealthy. People would attempt to bribe him to sing a song of bananas, or couscous, or spring lamb turned on a spit with peppers and onions, but he would say No, he was a seller of oranges, and could conjure up only their image amply enough to banish the reality of hunger.

    Kutunda was finding her quarters above the basket shop insufficient. Her new possessions-billowing clothes, bulky jewelry, inlaid tables, throw pillows, cuddly stuffed Steiff animals, mechanical beauty aids, a hair-blower and a Water-Pik comwere overwhelming the little pise-walled room which a month ago had seemed such a grateful improvement over the exiguous spaces of a tent or a ditch. Ellellou, removing the stained robes and net yoke of an orange-seller, noticed on her wrist a watch with a blank black face. "A gift," she admitted. "Look, you press here, and the numbers come up! It is what they call electronic wizardry."

    "In exchange for what service to Ezana?"

    "For my services to the state; my wisdom and counsel."

    "In urging the murder of the helpless old king?"

    "I merely urged what your heart had already decreed but lacked the courage to execute."

    "Lacked the madness, I now think. What good has come of it? The sky is as blank as your watch-face, and horror clouds my heart. Since the day, Ezana is formal and correct with me; I feel he is standing clear of my ruin."

    "Ezana will dodge as you turn. There is no leader left in Kush but my colonel. Let me show you the clothes I bought; the shopgirl said they were designed by a Tutsi princess." As she walked back and forth to her bulging cedar wardrobe, her heels thumped in the manner specifically enjoined by the twenty-fourth sura, And let them not stamp their feet in walking so as to reveal their hidden trinkets, the same sura that says consolingly, Unclean women are for unclean men, and unclean men for unclean women.

    She hurled one width of rainbow-dyed cloth over her head, wriggled it smooth, gazed at herself in the mirror with pursed lips, held a bloodstone earring against the lobe of one ear, and rejected the outfit by baring her tiny teeth, bowing her head, swinging her hands to the nape of her neck, giving the garment a sharp forward pull, and becoming naked again, her stout legs first. Her buttocks in the seriousness of this ritual had a tightened tuck, a flattening of their outward curve that touched me with its sign of pliant aging.

    Yet, in bed, in darkness, my manhood recoiled from her familiar maneuvers of hands and mouth, grown since our desert courtship to fit my predilections as closely as a worn saddle fits its camel's humps. Now her mouth, moist as it was, burned; whenever my stalk verged upon response, upon enlargement and erection, the picture entered my mind of the king's severed neck, its pulsing plumbing suddenly sliced across and emptying itself, by spurts that seemed sluggish, into the crystalline vacancy of that moment before the Tuareg, too late, galloped into the square. The blood of mine that had been flowing to produce the engorgement of potency fell back, alarmed. "You are angry with me,"

    Kutunda at last observed, weary of wanton exertions.

    "Why would I be?"

    "You mourn the king."

    "Had the whim ever seized him, he would have done worse to me. He took me up, I think, because he was amused by my ambivalences. Even his mercies were sardonic. He sat on the world lightly, like the spider that is immune from the web's stickiness."

    "Yet you found my hatred vulgar, and further bear against me the grudge men always bear against those women they have conquered. It is a puzzle: the men who need women hate them, and those who do not, like your comrade Ezana, do not."

    "More your comrade than mine now. You have a magical timepiece to mirror his, and the two of you giggle in Sara, hatching my doom."

    "You are hatching it," Kutunda said, as quickly as she had set an ornament to her ear and taken it away; yet she could not take this truth away, though from the pinch of her lips she wished she could.

    Unclean, we are all unclean, with our smudges of truth.

    I said to her, in explanation of my impotence, "You have lost the good smell of dirt you had in the ditches of the north. Now you stink of French soap. I cannot make love through the fragrance of our exploiters."

    "You are sad. Forgive me my fun with Ezana.

    He is an innocent man, but so full of words and ideas; his being practical gives us much to talk about. It is exciting. We talk of the refugee camps, of reeducation, of irrigation, of eliciting capital investment from the superpowers and multi-national corporations, with low interest rates and twenty-year moratoriums."

    "It is futile. We have nothing they need. We are no one's dominos. Tell me a story, Kutunda, to distract me from my shame, as you used to in the ditches, when you would come to me from poor limp Wadal." Remembering this man made me wonder, Could she be the source of impotence, driving her from man to man in an orgy of betrayal? These modern women have yet to evolve a modern male to service them.

    She told me a strange tangled story, of intricate blasphemy, as once of Wadal urinating on the fetishes, only now of Michaelis Ezana, who beneath his buttery black outward form was Roul the desert devil, a creature of blanched bones and arbitrary flesh, who sets lakes all around us, yet renders the spot where we stand burningly dry. Men in their thirst bite their fingertips and suck the salty blood; they kill their camels and drink the mucoid fluid in the stomach of the carcass. In this guise Ezana rules Kush, driving the whirlwind of the Tuareg on before him, eroding the pious and egalitarian republic of his archenemy Colonel Ellellou. In the remoteness of the Ippi Rift there is a city to rival Istiqlal; here men copulate with pangolins, and women allow hyraxes to enter their vaginas, and all the moisture that Allah had allotted for the land of Kush is kept in a giant transparent sack underground, entered through a cave mouth of golden arches, a wobbly sloshing bubble deeper than a gypsum mine, and descending into it Ezana takes the form of an octopus, and sucks screaming, drowning maidens into his beak, and awaits the maiden, a maiden dusky and fearless and virginal, with teeth dainty as seed-pearls, who with a scimitar of tourmaline will sever the octopus beak of Roul though he eject a cloud of ink; and then she will puncture the transparent sack so that water will flood the land, and the bones of her father's herds will come to life, lowing, and the tamarisk and Mimosa ferruginea will bloom, and camels will become intelligent dolphins, and what other turbulent nonsense Ellellou was never to know, for he fell asleep, amid the sliding of Kutunda's solid limbs and the nightmare shapes her voice conjured up.

    He was awoken at dawn by twin sharp needs: to urinate and to pray. His duties performed, he lay beside the woman; in her sleep her hair had made tentacles across her face and a trail of saliva from the corner of her lips gleamed indeed like some trace of a subaqueous struggle.