Ill

 

Soldiers at the command of the government systematically searched the hovels of Hurriyah for transistor radios, cassette players, four-track hi-fi rigs, and any musical instrument other than the traditional tambourine, alghaita, kakaki, hu-hu, hour-glass drum, end-blown reed flute, or that single-stringed instrument, whose sounding box is a goatskin-covered calabash, called the anzad.

    Ellellou at this point in time vigorously prosecuted the cause of cultural, ethical, and political purity in Kush. Any man caught urinating in a standing position, instead of squatting in the manner of Mohamet and his followers, was detained and interrogated until the offender could prove he was a pagan and not a Christian. Overzealous enlistees from the swaddled north seized and flogged young girls on the banks of the Grionde, under the impression that their bare breasts imitated decadent French fashions. The flocks of secretaries working within the corridors and anterooms of the Palais d'Administration des Noires were enjoined from wear- ing tight skirts and blouses; the corridors and anterooms were obediently thronged with loose boubous and kangas.

    Yet underneath these traditional wrappings, Colonel Ellellou suspected, the women were wearing elastic Western underwear, spicy brands called Lollypop and Spanky.

    Within the inner rooms of the Palais he and Ezana conferred not quite as usual; a new note, a post-coital irritability, had entered their discussions since the execution of the king. That had been Ellellou's trump; Ezana still held his cards.

    Though for state occasions he still appeared in the revolutionary uniform of khaki, taking his place in the row of SCRME sub-colonels as alike as the ten digits of two gloves on their balcony or viewing platform, in the privacy of his office he had taken to wearing powder-blue or even salmon-pink leisure suits, with a knit shirt open at the neck and cuffless trousers of tremendous flare. The Marxist explanation for this flare, Ellellou thought, would be the same as for a sultan's pantaloons, or a burgomaster's lace. He felt his own thin khaki tight on his back as he leaned forward, appearing to plead, in that tense voice which even when amplified by giant loudspeakers had something of the anxious, as of an impediment overcome, about it: "There is a conspiracy. The dreams of the people are being undermined."

    Ezana smiled. "Or is it the dreams of the people that are doing the undermining?"

    Ellellou said, "They would all acknowledge that we are on the right path, were it not for this cursed, adventitious drought."

    Ezana's smile contained one gold tooth, which seemed squarer than the others. "The drought cannot be adventitious and cursed both. If we believe in curses, we do not believe in accidents. At any rate, my comrade, who in Kush denies that we are on the right path? Save for the paltry few imperialist quislings and extinct fossils enjoying reeducation in what were once the wine cellars of the French? The security forces of the Department of the Interior, supplemented by anti-terrorist squads of the Kushite army, have found no radios, no trucks loaded with crushed Fords and Chevrolets.

    True, in a closet of a Koran school, the troops unearthed a cache of bubble gum. But we have always known that there is a black market dealing in Western luxuries smuggled in from our doctrinally unsympathetic neighboring states, or lingering from our own lamentable pre-revolutionary era.

    "Let us not, however," Ezana continued, and Ellellou marvelled at the inexhaustible smooth machinery of the man's mouth, that functioned within the resonating mellow hum of self-delight, "discuss trifles. Let us discuss peanuts. To natural disaster, my President, world geopolitics has added economic distress. The nub of it is, now that the Americans are no longer vexed by Vietnam and the Watergate imbroglio promises to remove from their chests the incubus of Nixon, they have woken to the fact, long patent to the rest of the world, that they as a race are morbidly fat. An orgy of dieting, jogging, tennis, and other narcissistic exercises has overtaken them, and-this is the crux- among the high-calorie casualties of their new regimen is the unsavory stuff called peanut butter. Apparently, spread on so-called "crackers" and unappetizingly mixed with fruit-imitative chemical "jellies" between slices of their deplorable rubbery bread, this paste formed a staple of the benighted masses' diet.

    Well, in the national lunge toward athletic slimness and eternal physical youth, less peanut butter is being consumed, and the peanut growers of their notoriously apartheid South are compelled to export.

    "Nothing, Comrade Colonel," Ezana went on, with a louder and more urgent tone, seeing his auditor stir and threaten to interrupt, "more clearly advertises the American decline and coming collapse than this imperative need, contrary to all imperialist principles, to export raw materials. Nevertheless, for the time being, their surplus peanuts are underselling our own in Marseilles, and those farmers who at governmental urging devoted their land to a cash crop now wish they had grown millet and yams to feed their own children. Without the francs the peanuts would have brought, we lack the hard currency with which to procure replacement parts for the Czech dynamos, and electricity will fail in Istiqlal."

    "Not a bad thing, perhaps," Colonel Ellellou offered, caressing his cup of chocolate, which he had tasted warily, and found unimpeachable.

    "Kush will revert to God's light, and not turn the night to uses inveighed against by Mohamet.

    By the light of day, and by the fall of night, your Lord has not forsaken you.

    What has electricity brought us, I ask, but godlessness and ever more dependence upon the Czech middlemen?"

    Ezana's gold tooth flashed as he flipped a piece of yellow paper across his desk to the President. "Without the mercy of electricity," he said, "we would be deprived of communications such as this."

    Ellellou read: reply soonest all info relating disappearance DONALD GIBES OFFICER USD ACTING CONJUNCTION Wst FAO AND WFP NEAR NW BORDER KUSH SEP 197 3. URGENTEST.

 

    KLIPSPRINGER UNDRSCTRY DEPT STATE USA.

 

    Ellellou said, "They must have meant Gibbs.

    Nobody is called Gibes in America."

    "The probable," Ezana told him, "is not always the actual. In regard to this cable, what shall our government do?"

    "No answer is more eloquent," Ellellou answered, "than no answer."

    "Men may follow this piece of paper. And after the men, guns and airplanes. This Gibes was precious to somebody."

    "Gibbs, it must be," Ellellou said. "Gibes is an insult."

    "Be that as it may, if his government make this man's fate a point of honor, the effects may be disproportionate, as so lamentably often proves true in affairs between nations. The Americans have not the Asian discretion of our friends the Soviets, who take such lasting pleasure in bullying the already subdued, and in surviving the incarceration of their own winters. The Americans have the chronic irritation of their incessant elections to goad them into false heroics, and if I understand them historically have reached that dangerous condition when a religion, to contradict its own sensation that it is dying, lashes out against others. Thus the Victorians flung their Christianity against the heathen of the world after Voltaire and Darwin had made its tenets ridiculous; thus the impoverished sultan of Morocco in 1591 hurled troops across the Sahara to occupy Gao and Timbuctoo, a conquest that profited him nothing and destroyed the Songhai empire forever."

    "I do not know Americans," Ellellou lied. "But I do not think that having just extricated themselves from the embrace of General Thieu they will risk themselves against the starvelings of Kush."

    "Exactly not," Ezana agreed, with a pounce as jarring as disagreement. "Until the moralistic Vietnam misadventure fades, they will content themselves, like our exmentors the French, with selling hardware to all sides of local conflicts and keeping the peanut-oil supply lines open."

    "In that matter of peanuts and electricity,"

    Ellellou ventured, "might the Banque de France consider another loan?"

    "Interest on present loans, my good President, plus the salaries of our civil service, account for a hundred and eleven per cent of the Kush national budget."

    Ellellou's heart sank at the statistic.

    But Ezana said, "Not to worry. These debits are in fact credits, for they persuade the capital-holding countries to hold us upright. Meanwhile, all capital drifts to the oil-exporting nations. From there, however, it drifts back to the countries that produce machinery and luxury goods.

    Praise Allah, we need no longer, in a sense, concern ourselves with money at all, for it exists above us in a fluid aurosphere, that mixes with the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and the ionosphere, blanketing us all with its invisible circulations."

    "By these as by other circulations, it never rains on Kush."

    "You exaggerate. There was an exceptionally heavy dew just this morning. In the global aurosphere there can be transient lows and highs, but by the laws of the gases nothing like a complete vacuum. Our turn will come; perhaps it is already coming."

    "In the form of Big Stick telegrams."

    Ellellou found this conversation depressing, all the more deeply so because of Ezana's mental nimbleness. This man's twinkling joy in being among the elite was the opposite of infectious. To take pleasure in power seemed childish sacrilege. Power was reality, power was grief. Ellellou felt his heart falling down through the veils of semblance into the utter vacuity upon which all things rested. Lives, millions of lives, hung on Ellellou's will and dragged it down. The famine weighed upon him sickeningly. Energy had silted to the bottom of his soul. He had returned to this hypothetical slice of desert, steppe, and savanna grateful for its searing simplicity, on fire with the wish to seal off its perfection; but his will had not averted congestion-rather, had become an element within it, this confused, derivative congestion of the actual, of which Ezana, with his rapid ringers and shapely leisure suit, was the condensation, the gleaming dewdrop on the nettle of the nation.

    "What if we respond," he was suggesting, tirelessly, of the cable, which in Ellellou's mind had already been consumed, and turned into snow like the first dry biting flakes that announced the November beginnings of the Wisconsin winters, when a second, white continent was imposed upon the green, brown first, "with a cable protesting CIA interference in the internal affairs of Kush, that is, their clumsy and ghoulish, how can we say, caputmpp'mg of the king, who was executed with full legality, by the Koranic and Marxist codes? We would have no trouble producing evidence of culpability; even the footprints they left on the dust showed a tread-pattern peculiar to American sneakers."

    "They were on horseback."

    "Several dismounted, in the flurry. Abundant clues fell from their pockets. Jackknives, dental floss."

    "Overabundant," Ellellou said.

    "We can send irrefutable wirephotos. Cheaper, we can leak glossies to Noiwelles en Noire et Blanche, to which every Western embassy subscribes."

    "And yet," Ellellou said, "the one Targui who passed close to me had Russian breath. Beets and vodka."

    Ezana shrugged. "There is a sweet green tea the Tuareg drink that smells similarly."

    "And yet you say this was not the Tuareg, but the CIA."

    "I do. This CIA, did it not arrange for the assassination of its own President and his brother?

    There is no fathoming their devious designs. They are a cancer that grows of its own mad purposes."

    "This fury of anti-Americanism," Ellellou observed, "comes strangely from my Minister of the Interior."

    Ezana spread his fingers, their nails manicured to a lunar lustre, upon his glass desktop as if to confess "the jig was up" and he would "level." He said, "I wish to discredit in advance rumors that may distract my President."

    "Rumors of what?"

    "Of a sad absurdity. Among the superstitious rabble of our poor retrograde nation, some say that the king's head, magically joined to its spiritual body, talks prophecies from a cave deep in the mountains."

    Ellellou had not heard this rumor, and it lit his depression like a splinter of moon in the depths of a well. "Again," he pointed out, "something Russian in this. The Bulubs are proximate to the missile crib."

    Ezana sat back, and sipped his chocolate, contemplating his President much as the black face of his wristwatch contemplated the turn of the heavens.

    Ellellou, his heart lightly racing at the possibility that the king had in some sense survived and therefore his own responsibility was in some sense mitigated, sipped his own chocolate. "Not the Bulub Mountains," Ezana told Mm, "but the Balak."

    "The Balak? In the Bad Quarter?"

    Ezana nodded complacently. "Where not even the National Geographic has been."

    The Bad Quarter: the trackless northeastern quadrant that borders on Libya and Zanj.

    Neither scorpions nor thorns thrive there, not even the hardy Hedysarmn alhagi eulogized by Caillie. Wide wadis remember ancient water, weird mesas have been whipped into shape by wicked, unwitnessed winds. By day the desert is so blindingly hot and pure the sands in some declivities have turned to molten glass; by night the frost cracks rocks with a typewriter staccato.

    Geometrically perfect alkali flats end as abruptly as floors at the base of metamorphic walls soaring as by reversed lava flow to crumpled crests where snow had been sighted by Victorian explorers, in a century more humid than ours. "I must go there," Ellellou said, the will to do so being born in him as airily as a dust devil on the Square by the Mosque of the Day of Disaster; Ezana's complacence evaporated.

    "I cannot advise that, my President," he said.

    "You are putting yourself at the mercy of fate."

    "Where all men are, at all times."

    "Some in more dignified postures than others."

    "My posture is always, simply, one of service to my coun-try."

    "How can you serve your country by chasing phantoms?"

    "How else?" It may be, Ellellou reflected [and I now, with greater distinctness, write], that in the attenuation, desiccation, and death of religions the world over, a new religion is being formed in the indistinct hearts of men, a religion without a God, without prohibitions and compensatory assurances, a religion whose antipodes are motion and stasis, whose one rite is the exercise of energy, and in which exhausted forms like the quest, the vow, the expiation, and the attainment through suffering of wisdom are, emptied of content, put in the service of a pervasive expenditure whose ultimate purpose is entropy, whose immediate reward is fatigue, a blameless confusion, and sleep. Millions now enact the trials of this religion, without giving it a name, or attributing to themselves any virtue. That rumored cave, undoubtedly a trap, which Ezana for some devious reason wished me to avoid, though he would enjoy the freedom of my being away from Istiqlal, beckoned to me; my whim as man, my duty as President, compelled me there.

    For have not African tyrants been traditionally strangers to their domains, and should not ideal rule attempt to harmonize not only the powers, forces, and factions within the boundaries but the vacancies as well, the hallucinations, the lost hopes, the dim peoples feeble as ropes of sand?

    Yet Ellellou was slow to depart, and remained in Istiqlal all the month of Shawwal, which the Salu call the moon of hesita- tion. The Tuareg iklan, whom the Western press unfairly referred to as slaves, pried loose cakes of salt from the crusted bed of Lake Hulul and brought them south to trade for smelt, yams, amulets, and the aphrodisiac powder whose principal ingredient was ground rhinoceros horn. Michaelis Ezana zealously watched the economic indicators for signs that this annual salt harvest might be reversing the long Kushite recession.

    One day Ellellou, in full panoply of state, the solid green national flag fluttering from the fender of his Mercedes, visited his first wife, Kadongolimi, at her overcrowded villa in Les Jar dins.

    He was met at the door by a bony bare-chested man with the slant eyes and taut coffee skin of the Hausa; though the hour was eleven in the morning, this fellow was already drunk on palm wine, and Ellellou identified him as a son-in-law. Within the villa, the rooms had been so bestrewn with goat hides and raffia and the ceilings so blackened with the smoke of cooking-fires that the atmospheric tang duplicated that of the dictator's native village, where he had wed Kadongolimi at the age of sixteen. Children, some of them presumably his grandchildren, teemed and shrilled through the battered, notched, bedaubed doorways of the villa; the louvers and latches of the windows had been smashed and jammed so that a hut darkness reigned in rooms designed as if to admit the colorful kind light of southern France. The smells of rancid butter, roasted peanuts, pounded millet, salted fish, and human eliminations mixed in an airy porridge that Ellellou's nostrils, after a minute of adjustment, found delicious: the smell of being Salu. He unbuttoned the top button of his khaki shirt and wondered why he didn't visit Kadongolimi more often. Here was earth-strength.

    A chastely and utterly naked young woman came and took his hand, with a naturalness that only a daughter could bring.

    He fished for her name and came up with only the memory of her face, with its arching little braids and slightly drooping Kadongolimi-like lips, mounted on a shorter, chubbier body, without this swaying adolescent slimness. She led him through the maze of clatter and clamor, the rooms alive with squatting groups and pairs mending, stirring, crying, feeding, scolding, crooning, loving, and breathing, all under the sanction of the fibrous, staring fetishes of hacked wood and stolen fur and feathers, supernatural presences not repugnant or ridiculous in their setting but one with the mats, the grinding stones, the wide bowls and tall pestles, not disposed decoratively as in Sittina's eclectic villa but here used as the furniture of daily life, brown and rough as a seed pod splitting to let new life through. His old tongue came back to him, spoken with that accent of overemphasis peculiar to his native stretch of the peanut lands, with the swallowed st"s and pop-eyed clacks of his mother's people. Nephews, daughters-in-law, totem brothers, sisters by second wives of half-uncles greeted Ellellou, and all in that ironical jubilant voice implying what a fine rich joke he, a Salu, had imposed upon the alien tribes in becoming the chief of this nation imagined by the white men, and thereby potentially appropriating all its spoils to their family use. For there lay no doubt, in the faces of these his relatives, that through all the disguises a shifting world forced on him he remained one of them, that nothing the world could offer Ellellou to drink, no nectar nor elixir, would compare with the love he had siphoned from their pool of common blood. And it was true, at least, that since he had taken office this villa had absorbed the villas to the right and left of it and become a sprawling village compound in the heart of Les Jardins, lacking only the spherical granaries of whitened mud looped around the huts like giant pearls.

    His naked daughter led him across a courtyard where the flagstones had been pried up to form baking ovens.

    Across the way, through a cloister, Kadongolimi had established sedate quarters, darkened and fragrant, where she held court to the hosts of her progeny. She had grown fat as a queen termite, and spent hours propped in a half-reclining position in an alu-minum-and-airfoam chaise longue the white occupiers of this villa, great sunners and users of Bain de Soleil, had abandoned when one day the servants no longer answered their clapping and instead a boy of a soldier appeared and announced that they, being the wrong color now, had been deposed from the Istiqlal elite. Kadongolimi when she took possession had had the chaise longue dragged indoors and made it her daybed. Two docile tots fanned her bulk with palm fronds. Her cheeks were marked with the semi-circular tattoos that, until outlawed by SCRME, identified and beautified the brides of the Salu. Her earlobes had been pierced and distended to receive fist-sized scrolls of gold on days of festivity and pomp; today, empty, her lobes hung like loops of thick black shoestring to her shoulders. She lifted a pink hand, a pulpy-petalled small flower put forth by a swollen old limb. "Bini," she said. "You look like carrion. What is eating at you?"

    She called him "Bini," his Amazeg name, by which she had known him since the age when he had squirmed down from his mother's hip and begun to walk.

    Kadongolimi was four years older than he. When he was five, she was a leggy screeching personage of nine, bossy as a mother. A cousin, her hands had rattled on his skull in the courteous search for lice. When they married, she had been a woman for a third of her life, and the shuddering, rustling bushes of her experience interposed between them their first nights.

    Her superiority never left them but became enjoyable. Ellellou in her presence floated as in an oily bath, underestimated, weightless, coy.

    To Kadongolimi he would always be a child who had just left his mother's hip.

    There being no chair in the room, he squatted down on his hams, plucked a twig from a bush poking through a hole in the wall, and began to clean his teeth.

    "The gods," he answered diffidently, tasting the twig. Some substratum in the phloem or xylem savored smartly of those little glossy red American candies prevalent in wintertime, that relenting time of winter when the icicles crash from the eaves and the black streets shine with the melting of drifts.

    "You should never have forsaken the gods of our fathers,"

    Kadongolimi told him, gingerly shifting her pontifical weight in the precarious hammock of aluminum.

    "What had they given our fathers," Ellellou asked his wife, "but terror and torpor, so the slavers Arab and Christian alike did with us as we did with animals? They had the wheel, the gun; we had juju."

    "Have you forgotten so soon? The gods gave life to every shadow, every leaf. Everywhere we looked, there was spirit. At every turn of our lives, spirit greeted us.

    We knew how to dance, awake or asleep. No misery could touch the music in us. Let other men die in chains; we lived. Bini, as a boy you were always active, always pretending to be something else.

    A bird, a snake. You went away to fight in the white man's wars and came back from across the sea colder than a white man, for at least he gets drunk and he fucks."

    Ellellou nodded and smiled and tasted the twig, moving it from tooth to tooth. She had said these things before, and would say them again. His replies too had the predictability of song. He said, "I returned with the true God in my heart, the Lord of the Worlds, the Owner of the Day of Judgment. I brought back to Kush the God half of its souls already worshipped."

    "The empty half, the cruel half. This God of Mohamet is a no-God, an eraser of gods; He cannot be believed in, for He has no attributes and is nowhere. What is believed in in our land, what gives consolation, is what remains of the old gods, the traces that have not been erased. They are around us everywhere, in pieces.

    What grows, grows because they are in the stem. Where a place is holy, it is holy because they live in the stones. They are like us, uncountable. The God who made us all made us and turned his back. He is out of the picture, he does not want to be bothered.

    It is the little gods that make the connections, that bring love and food and relief from pain. They are in the gris-gris the leper wears around his neck. They are in the scraps of cloth the widow ties to the fire bush.

    They are in the dust, they are so many." Her great black arm, with a gleaming wart in the crease of the elbow, dropped at her side; she flung a pinch of dust at her squatting husband.

    Perhaps the twig he was chewing contained in the inner bark an hallucinogen, for the dust seemed to grow in the air, to become a jinni, a devil, with boneless hands and too many fingers: the spectre of the drought.

    Kadongolimi laughed, exposing toothless gums.

    "How are the children?" he asked.

    "Bini, we had no children, they all sprouted from other men. You were a boy who had no idea where his kiki should go. Then you returned from the land of the toubabs a twisted man and took younger wives. The long-legged Sittina, who has led you such a chase, and the One Who Is Always Wrapped. Then the idiot child Sheba, and now I hear there is yet another, a slut from the desert."

    "Kadongolimi, let not your grievances, which are somewhat real, destroy all other reality. The children born before the French conscripted me to defend their plantations in Asia surely were mine, though their names escape me."

    "You were not conscripted, you enlisted. You fled."

    "You had grown huge, in your flesh and in your demands."

    "Bini, you always fantasized. You left me slender as a bamboo."

    "And returned to find you big as a baobab."

    "Seven years later, how could I be unchanged? You avoided me. You avoided me because you knew I would discover the secrets of your absence. I discovered them anyway."

    "Spare me hearing them. Sell them to Michaelis Ezana. He has set up a talking head in the Bad Quarter to discredit my regime. I am going there to confront this marvel."

    Pity leaped in her, as a frog disturbs a pond.

    "My poor Bini, why not stay in Istiqlal, and rule as other leaders do-give your cousins assistant ministerships, and conduct border disputes with other nations to distract us from our poverty?"

    "Poverty is not the name of it. A barefoot man is not poor until he sees others wearing shoes.

    Then he feels shame. Shame is the name of it. It is being smuggled into Kush. A blow is needed, to reawaken our righteous austerity."

    Kadongolimi said, "You killed the king."

    "Imperfectly. Ezana manipulates the body."

    "Why do you blame Ezana?"

    "I feel him all about me, obstructing my dreams."

    "Reality obstructs your dreams. Ezana wishes only to administer a reasonable state."

    "A state such as Kush is too thin to be administered except by gestures. When we effected the Revolution, we discovered a strange thing. There was nothing to revolutionize. Our Minister of Industry looked for factories to nationalize, and there were none. The Minister of Agriculture sought out the large land holdings to seize and subdivide, and found that most of the land was in a legal sense unowned.

    There was poverty but no oppression; how could this be?

    There were fishing villages, peanut farmers, mammy markets, goats, elephant grass, camels and cattle and wells. We dug deeper wells, that we could do, and that proved a disaster, for the herds then did not move on but stayed until the grassland around the wells had been grazed to dust. We sought to restore autonomy to the people, in the form of citizens" councils and elections with pictographic ballots, but they had never surrendered autonomy in their minds. The French had been an apparition, a bright passing parade. The French had educated a few assimiles, given them jobs, paid them in francs, and taxed them.

    They were taxing themselves, to govern themselves. It was exquisitely circular, like their famous logic, like their vil-lanelles. Ezana does not see this.

    He admired the French, he admires the polluting Americans and their new running dogs the Chinese. He mocks our allies the Russians, whose torpid monism throbs in tune with our own.

    He hired Russian double agents to impersonate Tuareg, so I would become confused. He has seduced my Sara protegee with promises of an office of her own, and typing lessons, and contact lenses! Forgive me, Kadongolimi, for troubling your repose with this tirade. I feel sore beset, infiltrated. I can appear thus disarmed only with you.

    Only you knew me as I was, hoeing the peanut fields, and playing ohtvari by the hour. You remember my mother, her violence. My father, his absence. My brothers, their clamor and greed. My uncle Anu, his lopsided smile and lasciviousness, that extended even to she-goats, and the leg, its nerves severed by a Nubian bayonet, that compelled him to become a carver of masks. I came to ask after our seed, our children. That silent girl with budding breasts who led me in, was she ours? We last clasped a dozen years ago, and she would be not younger than that. Kadongolimi, remember the games we would play-I the lion, you the gazelle?"

    "I remember less each year I lie here, forgotten by my husband. I remember a boy who didn't know where his kiki should go."

    Ah, Ellellou. He was stricken with the unsatisfiable desire to rescue this his first woman from the sarcophagus of fat into which she had been lowered and sealed, to have her come forth as again half of the young lithe couple they had been, amid curtains of green, the conical roofs and circular granaries of their village scattered like dewdrops along a web of paths that threaded outward into cassava patches and pastures yielding to the broad peanut fields with their elusive musky fragrance of starch. And when the wind blew, the grasslands beyond whitened in clusters of racing pallor like racing deer, white-throated, white-rumped waterbuck and the oryx with his slim slant horns. Giraffes would come into the peanut fields from the acacia plains and with splayed front legs and lowered necks feed from the tops of the drying stacks, and be chased away by the boys of the village clapping together bowls and pestles and rattling gourds.

    Drifting like clouds the giraffes would canter away, their distant mild faces unblaming, the orbs of their great eyes more luminous than the moon. In this village, where all was open and predetermined and contiguous and blessed, Kadongolimi had confided to him in the dappled shelter of sun-soaked bushes the smell of her pleasure, the taste of her sweat. In harvest season they would hollow caves in the heaped mountains of uprooted, drying peanut plants. The skin of her back took a hatched imprint. She had been careless of herself, bestowing her body wherever she was admired with the proper courtesies, the requisite hours of dancing, heels stamping the earth, the ceremonial sleeplessness. But when betrothed to Bini she drew upon herself, with the shaved skull and crescent tattoos, the dignity of a bespoken woman. He remembered the long arc of cranium the shaving exposed, and the silver curve of sun upon it when she came, still wet from her ritual bathing, to be accepted by his mother as her daughter. By the forms of the marriage, which lasted days, Kadongolimi curled on a mat like a newborn while her mother-in-law touched her lips with milk symbolic of her own. Bini watched this awestruck by its implication of a solemn continuum of women, above him, around him, always. And he remembered how the shaved skull thrust forward Kadongolimi's face, the insolent long jaw, the heavy lips like numb, dangerous fruit. He remembered her ears, then delicate and perforated to receive only the smallest rods of gold. And in their own hut her soft muffled salty smell, and her genitals simple as a cowrie. While he slept, the morning outside resounding to the blows of her pounding millet to meal, for him, her husband. Sun shuddered in the heaved fan of chaff. The depth of lost time made him dizzy; he stood, spitting out the twig.

    His thighs ached, their muscles stretched by the unaccustomed squat.

    Kadongolimi, too, met resistance, seeking to arise. The naked girl, who had been standing unnoticed in the shadows, stepped forward; Ellellou, startled by the motion, turned his head, and his gaze was splashed by the sun-saturated bougain-villea the vanished colonists had planted in the patio, now gone wild. He and the girl raised Kadongolimi to her feet; the woman gasped, astonished to find her spirit wrapped in so much inertia, in the weight that sagged as if to crack his arms and shoulders and then swayed away onto the slender girl, whose breasts were the shape of freshly started anthills. "Tell me," Ellellou whispered to his wife, "is she not ours?"

    "Oh, Bini," she grunted. The effort of standing nearly smothered her words. "You are the father of us all.

    What matters the paternity of this good child? You yourself were born of a whirlwind. She loves you. We love you. In this house you will be welcome when all else crumbles. Only be not too long. In your absence, weeds spring up. Even the earth forgets."

    One bright day Ellellou, walking the streets in the stiff blue disguise of a government messenger boy, saw, along one of the narrow sandy lanes that zigzagged down from Hurriyah, a Muslim woman wearing freaky sunglasses. Unlike his severe NoIR'S, they were round-square in shape, oversized, attached to the temples below center, and more darkly tinted at the top of the lens than at the bottom. Otherwise she was wearing the traditional black buibui of Muslim women, thong sandals, and a veil. She disappeared into a doorway before Ellellou could halt her and ask at what illegal and subversive market she had made her purchase. He would have cited to her the holy verse, Unbelievers shield their eyes; the truth continues to blaze.

    In the void created by her vanishing there blossomed then the memory of a tree of sunglasses he had seen when new in the land of the devils, in 1954, he a young deserter enrolled as a special student at a liberal arts college in the optimistic city of Franchise, Wisconsin. He had wandered on that September day, its slanting sunlight peppered with sprinkles of scarlet in the ponderous green of these North American trees, among a thousand white students, through the questionnaires and queues of college enrollment, and across the wide main street, as a-whirl with traffic as a dance of knives, to the awninged bookstore, where in accordance with his course requirements he loaded up with Tom Paine, the Federalist papers, the Arthur Schlesingers, a typographically frenzied scrapbook of masterly American prose, a lethally heavy economics text in a falsely smiling cover of waxen blue, and empty notebooks that he himself was to scribble full of lectured wisdom, their covers mottled like long-rotten wood and their pages suggesting fields of endless thin irrigation ditches. His purchases left him thirsty. From under the awning next to the bookstore he glimpsed through a wide pane of reflection-shuffling glass, above a jumble of faded cardboard totems, a counter that promised some kind of drink, perhaps a silvery arak or, in accordance with the symbols advertising sun-tan lotion, palm wine. Ellellou was not then the devout and abstemious Muslim he became. He entered. The hazards and betrayals of military service and his remarkable flight, which had taken him from Dakar, where he was to have been reassigned to the Algerian struggle, to Marseilles and then London and Toronto, where he was hidden in the French-speaking ghetto behind Queen Street, had not prepared him for the interior of this American drugstore, these walls and racks crowded with intensely captive spirits, passionate, bright, and shrill, their cries for the release of purchase multiplied by the systematic madness of industrial plenty. Boxes contained little jars, little jars contained capsules, capsules contained powders and fluids that contained relief, catharsis, magic so potent, as advertised by their packaging, that young Hakim feared they might explode in his face. In another area there were intricate instruments, sealed upon cardboard with transparent bubbles, for the plucking and curling and indeed torturing of female hair, and next to these implements blunt-nosed scissors, children's crayons, paper punches and yo-yos and, farther on, rows of Mars Bars and Good "n"

    Plenties and Milky Ways laid to bed in box after box proximate to a rack of toothbrushes, dental floss, and abrasive ointments phallically packaged and chemically fortified to resist the very decay that these celestial candies, marshalled inexorably as soldiers on a parade ground, were manufactured to generate. Hakim's instinct was to smash, to disarray this multifaceted machine, this drugstore, so unlike the chaste and arcane pharmacies of Caillieville, where the sallow Frenchman in his lime-green smock guarded his goods behind a chest-high counter showing only a few phials of colored water. This place was more like a witch's hut of murky oddments hurled to infinity by omnipresent mirrors, even mirrors overhead, circular suspended convex mirrors which foreshortened into dwarves the slack-faced toubab sons and daughters as they shuffled along these artificially cooled aisles like drugged worshippers selecting a pious trinket or potion from the garish variety of aids to self-worship.

    Sickly music flowed from invisible tubes in the walls. Hakim, in the loose brown suit of an overweight separatist who ran a bistro in colonized Ontario, paused before an upright rack of tall cards, vulgar and facetious, yet which these U. s. indigenes in their ancient freedom were apparently meant to mail to one another in ritualized insult; many of the cards had a tactile element, a piece of fuzz glued to a bit of cartoon clothing, a passage of cardboard raised in the manner of hammered trays from Baghdad, and even, in some of the cards, a hole that appeared to reveal something indecent (un derriere), which, when one opened the card, was revealed as something innocuous (a plate of pink ice cream).

    "Don't touch."

    "Pardon?"

    He identified the voice as arising in the loose-skinned throat of a scrawny besmocked oldster, prodigiously pallid, his forehead blotched by some evidently non-tropical skin disease. "Hands off, young fella. Get those cards dirty, they ain't worth nothin' to nobody."

    "Je vois."

    Dirty? Moving away, he nearly bumped into a tree of sunglasses. Less a tree, in truth, than a bush, the height of a man, armored in many dark eyes. The whole thing sluggishly, unsteadily rotated. Bini, the future Ellellou, quickly put his dirty hands behind his back, to display to the querulous attendant that it was not he who was touching this prodigious, fragile array, causing it to tremble.

    It was, he saw, a young white woman on the other side. With impatient authoritative jerks of her slender bare arms she was pushing at the rack to make it disgorge the, for her, ideal pair of sunglasses. She plucked out a pair with flared tinsel frames, set them deftly but rather roughly on her thin-lipped, decisive face, and sharply asked Hakim, "Whaddeya think?"

    "Charmante," he brought out, when he realized she was addressing him.

    She replaced the frames, not in the slot where she had found them, and seized a pair with rims of pale-blue plastic, the lenses also blue. These, blanketing the upper half of her face, emphasized the chiselled prettiness of her mouth and the angry-seeming spatter of freckles across her nose. "Not so good," he said, remembering to speak English this time. "Too much blue."

    The girl put on a third pair, and this time smiled-a fierce quick smile that pounced upon the space between her pointed chin and bone-straight nose-for when I solemnly looked to give my third verdict, the dark lenses were mirrors, and what I saw, my brown suit swallowed by the two receding drugstores packed into the girl's mocking sockets, was myself, badly shaven, badly dressed, bug-eyed with youth and fright. Her name was Candace. We were to meet often, as fellow freshmen, and became lovers. She was blond. When her summer's freckles faded, her whiteness was so powdery I imagined I could lick it off.

    "Our parched lips sting still and the rivers of our heart rush upward still to greet the vivid juice of symmetry," Ellellou sang, climbing the narrow brick stairs that ascended to the second floor from the panelled and bossed ancient doorway, so low even he had to stoop, that stood beside the doorway into the basketry-and-hashish shop like an overdressed child beside its preoccupied mother; the shop door stood ajar, yielding to the nameless itinerant seller of images of oranges a murky glimpse of the shop's proprietor leaning forward from beneath his overhanging wilderness of drying raffia and completed but unshaped weaves to exchange with a customer shrouded in rags an elongate packet for a sheaf of rustling, dust-colored lu.

    Beneath the customer's ragged hem Ellellou glimpsed, or imagined he glimpsed, denim cuffs and the coarse arabesque of platform soles. A tourist, perhaps. Ezana's figures (the Ministry of the Interior had jurisdiction over the Bureau of Tourism) showed that tourists, against all discouragements, were arriving in ever greater numbers, to feast their eyes upon the disaster of the famine, to immerse themselves in the peace of a place on the crumbling edge of nothingness.

    Eradicate tourism: he made the mental note, and tapped the three syllables of his name, Elstlelstlou, on Kutunda's door, beneath the brass anti-burglary lock she had recently installed.

    Eradicate property, he thought, eradicate theft.

    Kutunda was dressed, for it was mid-morning, in the trim Dacron skirt and jacket, with secretarial upsweep and sensible dearth of bangles, in which she reported to her office in the Palais d'Administration des Noires. And Ellellou had seen her flitting in and out of Ezana's office wearing reading glasses like two half-moons cradled on their backs; when she gazed level across their tops, her brown, nearly black eyes appeared startled, her brain beating time behind them and the inquisitive, interrupted arch of her eyebrows also offending him, for she had taken to plucking only the hairs between them, whereas in the desert, with a flint for a razor, she had for beauty's sake painfully scraped them to a thin line. When women cease to beautify, Marx warns, an economic threat is posed to men. "I have an appointment," she told him, as if in truth and not in disguise he was a seller of oranges, with none to sell.

    "With your President. Now," Ellellou told her. "Take off that absurd capitalist costume."

    Her tone slipped to a more deferential notch as she offered, "I can put myself at your service any time after lunch, my lord."

    "Allah reprieves no soul when its term is ended," he quoted, and slipped from his own costume. A fearful reluctance, for she had been imbued with un-Kushite ideals of punctuality, dragged at her hand as together they undid the buttoned, zippered work of the past hour's dressing. The uncovering of her brassiere, and the prim clean underpants, excited him; in the America he had known, a lust had attached to these radiantly laundered undergarments greater than that assigned the naked body, which had confusing associations of aesthetic beauty and the inviolability of marble. Her eyes unaided by spectacles perceived the sign and sceptre of his having been stirred; the dictator bade her, still in her elastic underwear, to kneel to him. Amusement flavoring her indignation, Kutunda with her generous mouth, whose lips had the width but not the eversion of the blacker maidens of the Grionde, and whose little inturned teeth tingled like stars in the night of his nerves, rhythmically swallowed him; their silhouettes, as shallow in relief as figures on a Pharaoh's wall, were almost motionless in the full-length mirror she had installed, between two of the big armoires she had bought to hold her swelling wealth of clothes. In addition to these, silk-lined and papered outside with reproductions of La chasse de la licorne and other Flemish menues verdures, Swiss reproductions so fine one could see every thread of the tapestries, Kutunda had acquired a steel desk supporting what appeared to be a dictating machine, plus tiers of plastic in-out trays, and flanking this desk two new powder-gray four-drawer filing cabinets, so that when Ellel-lou elected to drive home the seed his skillful and by now inspired mistress had brought to the verge of light, it was not easy to find a space of floor in which to execute his decision; the dramatic tug whereby he removed her underpants also brought his elbow into sharp contact with an edge of metal and tears to his eyes. The red thought, Sex is atrocity, flashed into his mind, along with the holy text, Impatience is the very stuff ivhich man is made of.

    He pushed on; down among the steel handles and jutting drawers he recovered the earthy closeness, if not the satisfactorily rank aromas, of their first love-bouts, in the gritty ditches of unsuccessful wells. He laughed as her gutteral cries exactly fitted his recollections.

    "My President," she said, when her breathing eased, "has found himself again."

    "One finds many things thought to be lost, in the preparations for a trip."

    "A trip again? It's just a few months since you went north to the border and repelled the American invasion."

    "And rescued the lovely Kutunda."

    "And rescued the lovely Kutunda," she repeated mechanically. She was throwing on clothes and glancing at her wrist-watch, pinching it to redden its face with numbers.

    "What appointment with Ezana and his underlings,"

    Ellel-lou asked, "can take such precedence over your adored?"

    "You take everything so personally," the wench accused, retightening her chignon and snatching up her briefcase. "I adore you, but it's not much of a career, is it, sitting around above a hash shop waiting to turn on the adoration? Michaelis gives me things to do; I can't really read yet, but I can talk on the telephone, and almost every day now I have these fascinating conversations with a woman whose Sara is quite fluent but really so funnily accented, I have to control myself from laughing sometimes-she phones all the way from Washington nearly every morning, I forget what hour it is their time, I really can't see why the imperialists don't have the same time we do, they must be going to bed at dawn and having lunch under the stars. Michaelis has tried to explain a thousand times, he says the world is round like an orange, and spins, and the sun is another orange-was "What do you talk about, with this woman from Washington?"

    "Oh, anything, we just warm the line up. She tells me what the weather is like, and how long the lines are at the gas stations, and what a nice man Mr. Agnew was, always so well-spoken and well-groomed"-she glanced about wildly, looking for something she lost, and then found it, the alligator case containing her reading glasses-"and then Mr.

    Klip-springer comes on and talks to Michaelis."

    "And what does this lackey of the oppressors say to Colonel Ezana?" I asked, my fury, which pressed inside my head like corked champagne, defizzed by the melancholy observation that she no longer moved like the great-granddaughter of a leopard, but more electrically, twitchily, like a modern woman connected to a variety of energy-sources. Her nobly stout legs, with their calloused, broadened heels and pantherlike thighs, had been slimmed, by some (i imagined) calibrated diet whose pseudo-medical niceties were catered to even in the depths of our famine.

    "Oh, I don't know, they talk in English, I suppose about the reparations-was "Reparations?"

    My doxy was frightened, seeing that these matters, which had become commonplace in her bureaucratic life, were a scandal to me; feigning, this time, a search, she with her briefcase and Dacron suit and trim legs and taut shiny hair from which all sand and mutton grease had been rinsed, looking everywhere but into my face, backpedalled and dodged about the cluttered, compressed room, before whose door I stood guard, soldierly though naked, a small brown man not really weary of being deceived. The knot of guilt in my belly needed still more digestive acid.

    "My President surely knows," Kutunda fluttered, "of the negotiations concerning the American, Gibbs, who immolated himself on the pile of contraband either in madness or in protest of his nation's continued efforts to subvert Southeast Asia, or of American complicity in the recent renewed Israeli assault upon Arab integrity.

    Apparently at college he had been radical.

    His widow wants his ashes. At the moment, if my understanding is accurate, and it may well not be, in exchange for the ashes and an apology to President Chremeau, whose territory was violated-was "Never! He violated ours by giving the white devils free passage."

    "And you know, of course, about the Koran in Braille."

    "Braille?"

    "A wonderful invention," Kutunda explained with innocent enthusiasm, "that enables the blind to read with their hands. As his part of the bargain Klipspringer is going to ship thousands-ten thousand, twenty thousand, he's waiting for Michaelis to pull together the 1970 census figures-and along with them twenty or thirty absolutely apolitical instructors in this alphabet, you tattoo it onto the paper, I've felt some, it tingles, you can't see it but you can feel it, for a study center they would be willing to put up in Istiqlal, on the site of the USIS library that got burned down in the coup five years ago. It's quite dramatic-looking, I've seen blueprints, concrete wings supported by polyurethaned nylon cables, and stainless steel letters all across the front, naming it for, they wondered if you'd object, the old king Edumu, because he was blind. You must know about it. Hasn't Klipspringer talked to you over the phone too? He talks to me, sometimes, before Michaelis comes on, only his Arabic is about as simple as mine, he gets me to giggling. Please don't frown.

    Klipspringer absolutely promises there won't be any CIA people among the Braille instructors, he hates the CIA more than we do, he says they've gone and pre-empted the policy-making powers of Congress, whatever that means, and nobody in Washington will have them to any parties. You did know all of this, didn't you? Tell me you're just teasing."

    "I never tease my Kutunda, because she tells me such good stories. Take a message, if you will, to my old comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, once Corporal, Ezana. Tell him it has come to my attention that he verily is Roul, the desert devil."

    "And I can go? That's super. I haven't missed too much of the meeting, it was going to be a slide show and those are always slow to set up. Klipspringer has sent us a whole crate of carousels showing agriculture and irrigation in the Negev. You could come too. You could give me a ride. Don't you have anything to do up at the Palais? We could make love after lunch if you wanted, I'm sorry if I seemed preoccupied this morning, you caught me at a bad time, but I didn't fake my climax, I swear it. It was a beautiful climax, really.

    Only my President can lead me so utterly to forget myself, I am led to the brink of another world, and grow terrified lest I fall in and be annihilated. It's neat."

    It heartened me to see the desert child in her revived, wheedling and winsome, at the thought of a ride in my Mercedes.

    "I'll drop you on the way," I said. "I still have my morning prayers to do."

    The little Mosque of the Clots of Blood was obscurely placed in the east of Also-Abid, from which remote section the Palais showed its unfinished side, the unstuccoed mud bricks no crumbling cariously. Here the land becomes flat and the space between the square earth houses, the tembes, widens and tufts of dry grass where footsteps neglect to tread evoke the savanna that once flourished here, before goats and God killed it. The mosque has no minaret, and protruding support timbers stick from its sides like toothpicks from an olive. All civic prestige was a century ago transferred to the Mosque of the Day of Disaster; but within the vacant court a limestone fountain whose worn lip was edged with a raised inscription that could be made out to be the first verse of the ninety-sixth sura, Recite in the name of your Lord, the Creator, who created man from clots of blood, offered through all the hours of the days and nights of our drought fresh water for the ablutions of the pious. From what source? Touching my hands to the reverently incised stone, then to the startling running cool crystal of the liquid, then to my lips and eyelids in the prescribed manner, I thought of thirst, of its passion greater than any other save the passion for pain to cease, and of the unknown men, their names and bones now lost as thoroughly as grains of sand underfoot in Istiqlal, who had dug down to this undying spring, where so few chose to come.

    The interior of the Mosque of the Clots of Blood was empty, always empty but for the senile imam at the five appointed prayers of the day, between which appointments it stood open to the unpopulated peace of Allah.

    Turn up your eyes: can you detect a single flaw?

    The wall containing the mihrab had been covered with a pale-blue tile, patternless. I knelt; prostrated myself; repeated the rak'a thrice; then sat back on my heels, my hands at rest on my thighs, and let the meditative backwash of prayer move through me, purifying.

    In America my friends, late at night, confidential and searching on wine and beer, for hashish then was known only to musicians, would inquire about my religion, proposing the possibility-to their minds, an empirical certainty-that God did not exist, as if this possibility rendered futile the exercises of my piety, which to their minds appeared a wasted enterprise, a bad investment. My faith was not then beyond being troubled, and if in those small inebriated hours I gazed down within myself I saw many shifting transparencies and at the bottom of them no distinct and certain God. Indeed on the rational level many contra-indications could be espied. But then the God of our Koran is the last God to be born, a furious Last Gasp that set the tongue of the Prophet to whirling in terror and whose mystics have whirled ever since, a God Who cuts like a hot knife through the polyheaded pictorial absurdities of the Hindu and the Catholic, the Methodist and the fetishist, a God without qualities; so perhaps belief in Him also lacks qualities. Some of our Sufis have divulged that at the height of purity in which Godhead dwells existence and the lack of it are trivial quibbles; the distinction amid that radiance looms imperceptible.

    What can be purer than non-existence? What more soothing and scourging? Allah's option is to exist or not; mine, to worship or not. No fervor overtops that which arises from contact with the Absolute, though the contact be all one way. The wall of pale-blue tiles echoed the repose and equilibrium within me, a silence never heard in lands of doubt and mockery.

    Blue tile. A single fly, whose motions showed supernatural intelligence in their avoidance of repetition and any curve that might be broken down as geometric. My mind flowed with this fly into emptiness. I saw what I must do. It was a step along transparent stairs. All praise be to Allah, the Magnificent, the Merciful. A single small window, the scallops of its arch half-crumbled into dazzling dust, showed the depth and strength of the blue day besieging in vain the little mosque's thick walls. My gaze drank these tiles.

    Ezana looked up, surprised to see me, more surprised to see Opuku and Mtesa behind me. It was not our usual hour for consultation. In the hour of dusk, he had put on a sashed robe of paisley silk and was sipping from a tall glass in which a slice of lime floated, while the air conditioner purred at his ear. He was reading a book, an American novel, no doubt concerning the grotesque sexual misadventures of a Jewish intellectual or a self-liberated woman. Its contents were making him smile, and the smile was slow to leave his face. His manner remained mellow well into our conversation. He lifted his feet, slippered in Italian leather, from the Moroccan hassock where they rested and would have risen in greeting had I not signalled him to stay at ease. "I have come to be briefed," I said, "upon the negotiations with the Americans that I understand are proceeding."

    "Not negotiations, conversations," he said. "This fellow Klipspringer is rather hard to cut short, he is so-what do you Americans say?- giving."

    "You Americans?"

    "Forgive me, my President, the Americans. You have just walked into this book I am reading, full of these poor benighted bourgeoisie struggling to psychoanalyze the universe. I am tasting this trash the better to understand our enemy. They are a strange lost race, poorer than they know.

    I wonder if we of the Third World might not have eventually to welcome them among us-they too have a deficient balance of trade, a high unemployment rate, an agricultural bias in the national temperament, and the need for a protectionist tariff if their struggling native industries are not to be overwhelmed by the superior efficiency and skill of the old Axis powers. Indeed, Comrade President, at a time when the Arabs have all the capital, the Siberians and the Brazilians all the undeveloped resources, and the Chinese all the ideological zeal, one wonders if in the interests of global stability a grant of aid to the United States might not be a prudent apportionment within our next year's national budget.

    I jest, of course."

    "Of course. Yet it does sound as though this Klipspringer has all too amiably insinuated confusions into the mind of my chief minister. These people are pirates. Without the use of a single soldier their economy sucks wealth from the world, in the service of a rapacious, wholly trivial and wasteful consumerism. My order was, in answer to their overtures, no answer."

    "But no answer is an answer, which goads the interrogator. By discussing, we are delaying, and dissolving. This wretched Gibbs has not been mentioned for days. We cannot pretend the Americans do not exist; they have leverage upon the French, and if the French cease to underwrite our peanuts we cease to exist in the world."

    "Or begin to exist in a better world."

    "Also, as my Colonel knows, some reactionary elements evaded our revolution and took refuge in Sahel; an infusion of American arms might turn these ridiculous dissidents into an invading force, which would find our borders permeable and our population, however loyal to the name of Ellellou, desperately weakened by drought."

    "Hungry men make good soldiers," I pointed out. "When it comes to battle, the poor retain a golden weapon: they have little to lose. Their lives are a shabby anteroom in the palace of the afterlife. The Prophet's vivid Paradise is our atomic bomb; under its blast the poor toubabs shrivel like insects clinging to soulless existence.

    Of the life to come they are heedless.

    As to the French, they are too busy stuffing their money down the throat of the Concorde to look up; the entire wealth of a nation of misers has been swallowed by this aeronautical goose. Forget the infidels, they are mired in materialism and its swinish extinction of spirit. Defiance is our safest as well as noblest policy."

    "Even your shy friends the Soviets," Ezana pursued, "are not exempt from American influence, now that the unspoken standoff has been translated into detente."

    "What has driven you, Comrade, so low, into this slime of Realpolitik?

    I will save you from the demon you have inhaled. If another call from this Klipspringer is honored with courtesy, the cables to the Palais shall be cut on my order."

    His face, all hemispheres and highlights, went dull with disappointment. His gold tooth winked out; his lower teeth showed in a grimace of grief. "But tomorrow we were to discuss the possibility of an addition to the Braille Library, a leprosarium dedicated to the memory of my father. Yours, I know, was a whirlwind, a pinch of fertilizing dust; my father I knew and loved. He had been a warrior, then, as the French pacification spread, a ferryman, at a bend of the Grionde where the banks draw close.

    Perhaps because of his ventures to the southern side, he contracted leprosy in mid-life, turned silver and perished limb by limb. His nose, his fingers. I watched it transpire. My present dignity and the indignation that enrolled me in the Revolution alike stem from a vow he extracted from me with his final breaths. I vowed that I would climb high into the order of things, that other citizens of Noire would never have to endure suffering and humiliation as unmitigated as his."

    "Better, perhaps, to have vowed to face your own end with less complaining than, from the sound of it, your progenitor."

    Ezana blinked away this insult to his father. He leaned forward from his easy chair, to confide his message urgently, to press its warmth into the sinuous channels of my ear. My comrade in his foppish accoutrements became more naked to me than since the fury and fear of L'Emergence, and that aftermath in which we conspired together to do away with the empty-headed Soba. Ezana said to me, "The world is not what it was. There is no longer any deep necessity to suffer. The only lesson suffering ever gave was how to endure more suffering. What gives men pain, with some lingering exceptions, can now be cured. Smallpox, even in our bedevilled land, is being encircled and exterminated. We know what children need in their bellies, even when we cannot put it there. The fading of an afterlife-for it has faded, my friend Ellellou, however you churn your heart-has made this life more to be cherished. When all is said and done about the persisting violence on our planet, and the pronouncements of SCRME are set against the fulminations of Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche, the fact remains that the violence, relatively, is small, and deliberately kept small by the powers that could make it big. War has been reduced to the status of criminal activity-it is no longer the sport of gentlemen. This is a great thing, this loss of respectability. We feel it everywhere, even in the vacancies of Kush. Hatred on the national scale has become insincere. The self-righteousness has vanished, that justified great slaughter. The units of race and tribe, sect and nation, by which men identified themselves and organized their youth into armies no longer attract blind loyalty; the Cubans and Belgians, the Peruvians and Indonesians, all mingle at our Palais receptions, lusting after one another's wives and complaining alike about the tedium of the diplomatic service in this Allah-forsaken penalty post of a backwater. Such interplay betokens an increase of humane pragmatism and a decrease of demented energy that makes my vow to redeem my father's life inevitable of success."

    "These units you disparage," I said, "were mankind's building blocks. If they dissolve, we have a heap of dust, of individual atoms. This is not peace, but entropy. Like all comfortable cowards, Comrade Ezana, you overvalue peace. Is it possible," I asked, "that some principle of contention is intrinsic to Nature, from the first contentious thrust of bare existence against the sublime, original void? The serene heavens, as witnessed by astronomers, shine by grace of explosion and consumption on a scale unthinkable, and the glazed surface of marble or the demure velvet of a maiden's eyelid are by the dissections of particle physics a frenzy of whirling and a titanic tension of incompatible charges. You and I, for additional example, have long been at odds, and the government of Kush has been born of the dialectical space between us. Out of the useful war between us, a synthesis has emerged; a synthesis, for a while at least, does package the conflicting energies that met within it."

    Ezana's fingers, forced apart by the thick rings upon them, spread wider, in careful thought, upon the glass of his desktop. "I sometimes wonder, my President, if even the fruitful diagrams of Marx do schematic justice to the topology of a world where the Soviet proletariat conducts a black market in blue jeans while the children of the capitalist middle class manufacture bombs and jovial posters of Mao."

    "Or where," I added, "the chief minister of a radical junta holds subversive conversations with the American secret intelligence and attempts to infect his own President with the false, sentimental, atheistical pluralism acquired thereby."

    Ezana's rejoinder was aborted, for Kutunda, her secretarial suit concealed, as per government regulations, in a flowing boubou, burst into Ezana's office accompanied by an oval-faced young man whom I recognized, through the veil of his formal blandness, as the young Fula policeman who had read the Koran to the king. He still wore his plum-colored fez, but the white vest and pantaloons of the high-servant caste had been exchanged for a tapered shirt of needle-fine stripes and taupe slacks of indecently close tailoring about his hips yet so wide at the cuff only the square enamelled-looking tips of his shoes were unenveloped.

    Both Kutunda and he were holding full glasses and returning to a species of party. She also held a box of those salty biscuits called HiHo, and her young escort a red-rimmed crescent of Edam cheese. They had returned, however, to witness their host's being taken into custody by Mtesa and Opuku, at my command, as a traitor to the state, and as a wearer of silk. Ezana was confined to the king's old rooms in the barracks wing of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, above the floor occupied by the People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities and within earshot of the shrieks of the Istiqlal Anti-Christian High School for Girls volleyball team.

    His protests, his pleas, would fatigue me to scribble. One of them was, "My President, if you incarcerate your Chief Minister, and simultaneously proceed with your individualistic, entrepreneurial pilgrimage to the rumored cave in the Balak Massif, you will leave Kush without a head of state!"

    I doubted that Kush would notice, but to be on the safe side, and to demonstrate to Ezana my liberated, inspired powers of decision, I turned to the young fez-wearing spy and appointed him Acting Minister of the Interior, Chief of the Bureau of Transport, Co-ordinator of Forests and Fisheries, and Chairman of the Board of Tourism. Kutunda, I said, would instruct him in his duties.

    Duties, duties. Before I could depart it was necessary that I visit my second wife, that I press my little thornbush to my bosom. She lived, the Muffled One, in a shuttered villa in the most venerable part of Les Jardins, where the plane and chestnut trees imported by the colons had grown tall in the fifty wet years prior to 1968, only to falter, droop, and die in the five years since. Their blanched skeletons, brutally cropped in the Gallic manner, lined the curving avenues. Candace's villa had been rankly overgrown, but the drought had done some work of pruning where the hand of man had been idle; a sapless, leafless Petrea volubilis made its desiccated way along cracks in the stucco facade, clutching the shutters with splintering fingers and spiralling up the little Ionic pillars of the front portico. The vine had been prying loose the tiles from the portico roof when its life had been arrested. My ring of chimes produced a strange rustling noise within, but Candace was at the door quickly, as if she had been watching my approach through the blind walls.

    Or perhaps she had been about to go out, for she was muffled head to toe in a dull black buibui with the addition of a face-veil that covered even her brow. A scattering of holes smaller than the holes in a cabbage-grater permitted her to see, in speckled fashion. Perhaps some retrograde corner of Afghanistan or Yemen still holds a crazed old spice merchant, sheik, or bandit who keeps his concubines thus; but in Istiqlal, where socialist progressivism had reinforced the traditional insouciance of African womanhood, such a costume had to be taken as an irony, a sour joke upon me.

    "Holy Christ, look who it isn't," her voice exclaimed through the layers of muslin.

    Behind her stood a big Songhai maid with a basket on her arm. This girl's face showed alarm at my visit; to her I was the ghost of authority, and her ultimate employer. Candy had no other servant, and not because of any penuriousness of mine. In the early years of our marriage, when I had lived with her half, then a third, of my time, the household was appropriately staffed. As my visits dwindled, she bade the attendants drop away, racing through the housework once a month, even poking in the vegetable patch, until the sun nearly smothered her. Now she and her girl were going out shopping; but since Candy almost never purchased anything, preferring to order all non-perishable goods from the United States by mail-order, I could only conclude that the purpose of these expeditions was to display herself, muffled, as a mystery and, among rumormongers, a national scandal. People said that Ellellou had mutilated this wife in a passion, or to satisfy a perverse sexual need had married a monster of deformity.

    "You have your fucking nerve," she continued, "showing up here in your little soldier outfit as if I owe you anything but a-a good kick in the balls."

    Her native inhibitions had given pause to the phrase that her native freedom of speech and, now, her feminist consciousness of genital oppression had suggested. But Candace was not a ball-kicker, she was a heart-stabber.

    "My adored," I said, "I have come to bid thee good-bye. I am about to walk the edge of my fate, and may fall off."

    My Islamic courtesies of course infuriated her. "Don't give me any of this Kismet crap," she said. "I knew you when you couldn't tell the Koran from the Sears Roebuck catalogue."

    As if in recoil from this stab, she angrily turned, my pillar of cloth, and it was alarming, how closely her back resembled her front. In full purdah she seemed less a person than a growth, a kind of gray asparagus. Candace waved the frightened Songhai away, with that jerky embarrassed roughness of those who think their servants should be their friends, and let herself drop wearily into an imitation Chippendale armchair ordered from Grand Rapids.

    She had tried to recon- stitute, in this French villa spun of sub-Saharan materials, the rectilinear waterproof comfort of a Wisconsin living-room. But the tile floor, the banco walls, the rattan furniture betrayed the illusion, which termites and the breakage occasioned by our terrible dryness had further undermined. Without removing any of her wrappings, Candace put her sandalled feet up on a curly-maple butler's tray table whose leaves had warped and loosened in the weather. Where her parents might have had a pair of painted-porcelain mallards with their hollow backs bedding narcissus bulbs rooted in pebbles, she had set an earthen dish holding some unshelled peanuts.

    I took one, cracked it, and ate it. There is a sweetness, a docile pithy soul-quality of taste, to our Kushian goobers that I have never met elsewhere. "Well, chief," my wife said, "how's top-level tricks? Chopping old Edumu's noggin off didn't seem to raise the humidity any."

    "These spiritual balances are not easy to strike. I have put Michaelis Ezana into the king's old cell, which might make the difference. He has been compromising the honor of our country with your ex-compatriots."

    "Poor guy, probably just trying to bring a little rationale into Ellellou's heaven on earth."

    "Tell me," I countered, "the rationale of the Universe, and I will order my heaven accordingly."

    "Don't undergraduate on me," Candace said. "That's how you got me into this hellhole, being all winsome and philosophical, building the no-nations up from scratch. Scratch is the word. Scratch is where you start, and scratch is where you end. God, it's hot in this damn bag."

    "Take off the veil," I suggested. "Your joke is wasted on your forbearing husband."

    "Joke, my ass," she said, and my own nervousness eased at the hardening of her voice, certain as daybreak to go harder and higher. "Who was it who smuggled me in in wraps in the first place? Who was it used to tell reporters I was a zaiviya Berber too pious to be seen? And then after those rotten Pan-African games leaked it around that Sittina was his second wife instead of his third?

    Who was it, Mr. Double-still double-i oo, who put me deeper into wraps when came the Revolution and every Yank in Istiqlal was shipped back to Ellis Island? Christ, if you don't think I wouldn't have been over-goddam-joyed to go back with the rest of them where you can have a drink of water without lifting out the centipedes first and bowing toward smelly Mecca five times a day and having to kick starving kids out of your way every time you walk the goat, you have another think coming. But oh no, not me, crazy old Candy, all A's in Poli Sci but loyal as a mutt out of class, crazy, conditioned to be some man's slave, sitting here watching my fucking life melt away, and you call it a joke.

    You would"

    Candace said, and undid her head wraps with furious counterclockwise motions. A trembling white hand unclasped her veil.

    Her face. Much as I had first seen it, without the mirroring sunglasses, the receding aisles of evil goods, her cheeks still round and firm, her chin pointed, her nose bone-white, bone-straight. She even smiled, her fierce quick smile, in relief at her head's being free. "Christ, I can breathe," she said. Flaxen wisps looped in damp deshabille onto her flushed brow; from the corners of her blue eyes, the milky blue-green of beryl, fanned vexed wrinkles that could have been produced, in another life, by laughter. Her powder-pale skin was still young; it had not suffered in my country as it would have in her own, had not been baked and whipped by the sun of golf courses and poolside patios and glaring shopping center parking lots in these years when, as the Wrapped One, she had sheltered herself amid the mysteries of Istiqlal.

    I was glad of this. Watch- ing her unwind her headshawl, and then unveil, I remembered how I had seen her naked, and the memory of her body moving pale, loose, and lithe in the neon-tinged darkness of an off-campus room numbed me so that had all the world's sorrow been at this moment funnelled into my poor narrow being I would not have felt an iota more: I was full.

    With the air she could now breathe she had launched a bitchy monologue. "How is dear Sittina? Still chasing cock and playing Bach?

    And my big momma Kadongolimi? You still mosey round to your old aiva for your fix of tribal juice? And that other idiot, little Sheba-has she learned to chew with her mouth shut yet? But you like that, don't you? You like these dyed-in-the-wool down-home Kushy types, don't you? Hakim Happy Ellellou, de mon ob de peeple.

    De mon what om, right? Well here's one cunt that hates your guts, buster. You better stick a stamp on me and send me home."

    "You belong here."

    "Divorce me. It's easy. All you have to do is say "TallaqtukVery three times. Come on, say it. One, two- Divorce me and you'll have a slot for this new twat, what's her name."

    "Kutunda. Our connection is entirely official. As to you, my beloved Candace, my personal attachment aside, you serve a purpose for the nation. There is pressure on our borders.

    When the Day of Disaster comes, I can point to you as proof that the President of Kush is anti-imperialist but by no means anti-American."

    "You don't know what you are, you poor little spook.

    You are the most narcissistic, chauvinistic, megalomaniacal, catatonic schizoid creep this creepy continent ever conjured up. And that's saying a lot."

    Her clinical epithets reminded me of her book-club books comthe warping, fading, termite-riddled stacks and rows of volumes imported from her native land, popular psychology and sociology mostly. How to succeed, how to be saved, how to survive the mid-life crisis, how to find fulfillment within femininity, how to be free, how to love, how to face death, how to harness your fantasies, how to make dollars in your spare time-the endless self-help and self-exploration of a performance-oriented race that has never settled within itself the fundamental question of what a man is.

    A man is a clot of blood. Hopeful books, they disintegrated rapidly in this climate; she had run out of shelf space and stacked this literary foreign aid on the floor, where our great sub-continent of insects hollowed out the covers from underneath, their invisible chewing a rerun of the chewing of her eyes as she read away the monotonous succession of her days, weeks, and years.

    Candace was on her feet and speechifying. "I hate you. I hate this place. I hate the heat, the bugs, the mud. Nothing lasts here, and nothing changes. The clothes when you wash them dry like cardboard. A dead rat on the floor is a skeleton by noon. I'm thirsty all the time, aren't you?

    Happy"-the nickname she gave me in college-"I'm sinking, and I can't do anything about it. I'm seeing the only shrink in Istiqlal and he shrugs and says, 'Why don't you just leave?"'"

    I tell him, 'I can't, I'm married to the President!" his

    Her straw-blond, straw-bright hair fell forward as if to veil her sobbing; my impulse to reach and offer comfort was checked only by my certain knowledge that this offer would fail, that my loving touch would feed her anger as the books on how to be happy fed her unhappiness.

    She lifted her head, her eyes red-rimmed but abruptly dry. In the simple bold style with which she had once asked me, "How do I look?", she asked, "Can't you get me out of this?"

    "This, as perhaps your friend the Freudian marabout has already suggested, is you. You have chosen. I am powerless to alter your choices. When we were in your land, not mine, it was you who courted me, and I in my poverty, my strangeness, my blackness, was slow to respond. I was afraid of the consequences. You were heedless. Your heart demanded. So be it. Here you are. Had you allowed me, fifteen years ago, to give you the children I then wanted, your son would be taller than you now, and your daughters would be cheerful company."

    "Shit on that," Candace mumbled. "I wasn't sure. You weren't either. We didn't want to take on that responsibility, everything was difficult enough, we knew what we were doing might not work."

    "You didn't wish," Ellellou told her, histo become the mother of Africans."

    "It's not that simple, and you know it. You were different once we got here, you didn't make me feel secure. Big Momma had you half the time, and then you got so thick with the king. Anyway, I didn't always use the diaphragm, either, and nothing happened. Maybe one of us is sterile. Your other wives, are those children yours? We should have discussed things like this years ago. Where were you?"

    "Tending to duty." The primness of Ellellou's answer indicated that the conversation had exhausted its usefulness for him. He had suffered enough recrimination to fuel his departure.

    Sensing him about to slip away, Candace clung and asked, "If I tried to go home, would you stop me?"

    "As your husband, I would indulge you in all things.

    As father, however, of all the citizens of Kush, I would feel obliged to discourage defection. In this time of crisis and dearth, our human resources must be conserved. Border patrols have been instituted to confine the nomads. Every peanut caravan as it departs includes a quota of spies and enforcers.

    I wish the imperialist press, which describes our socialist order as a squalid police state, to receive no malicious hint confirming rumors of maladministration within Kush. Your presence," Ellellou told his wife, "is especially cherished here. Let me add that Opuku's brother, whom you have not met, nor would I wish it, has in his patriotic love of order developed a number of interesting ways to inflict discomfort without leaving any mark upon the bod -. I confide this to you in a spirit of tenderness and affection."

    The white woman's eyes blazed; the rims of her lips wrinkled with tension. "You sadistic little turd.

    When I think of what I wanted to give you. You know what everybody at college used to say to me? They said I was crazy to put myself at the mercy of a Negro."

    "You needed to prove them right," Ellellou said, bothered by a certain poignant twist in her body, as in some late-Hellenic robed statues, implying the erotic axis of the body within, and within that an ambivalent torque of the soul-in Candace's case, between taunting and plea, a regret that even in her extremity of rage she should taunt her husband with the blackness that had made him fascinating and herself noble and the two of them together undergraduate stars at McCarthy College, in that distant city of Franchise.

    "I shouldn't tell you this, but you know what Professor Craven used to say to me? I won't say it."

    "Say it, if it will help you."

    "He said, Today's slave, tomorrow's tyrant."

    "Excellent. By the same token, Today's liberal, tomorrow's bigot. You could have had Professor Craven, you could have been for a time his reigning student concubine, but you chose to slight him."

    "He was married."

    "So was I."

    "I couldn't believe it. When I met Kadongolimi here, when I saw she really existed, I nearly died. How could you dGo that to me?-have such a big fat wife. I thought you were making her up. We were in America. You were so touching, such a ragamuffin."

    Ellellou slapped her, so little did he like being reminded of the pathetic figure he had cut in those days. Lest she think the blow had been unconsidered, he repeated it; the pink stain on her cheek glowed wider than his hand as it deepened to red.

    She would have twisted quite away had he not held her shoulders. Her pose reminded him now of those thin-lipped, super-naturally cool Flemish Virgins impassive, with averted eyes, beside a pointed arch giving upon a tiny crowded turquoise landscape. The rift of sorrow in him widened. Terrible, he thought, that rebuke had come upon her not for any of her insults but for a moment of innocent openness, remembering a ragamuffin.

    "Believe this then," Ellellou told her harshly, in apology. "For your safety: you are my wife.

    For your comfort: this will pass. I will not always be President."

    Colonel Ellellou finally departed from Istiqlal in the last month, Dhii "1-Hijja, of that troubled year. The afternoon temperature in the square of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster was 112 dg F., 44.4dg C. The dictator took with him, along with the faithful Opuku and Mtesa, his fourth wife, Sheba.