VII

 

The struggle between man and fate is a totally alien concept to Arab culture.

    -Sahair el-Calamawy, 1976 

I live. Perhaps the white devil's offer of free beer saved my life, for the crowd was in too much of a thirsty hurry to halt and pummel me with the annihilatory zeal my address had attempted to instill. One cracked rib, a fat lip, the removal of my shoes, the bestowal of a quantity of derisive spittle, and they were through with my body. The life of a charismatic national leader cannot be all roses. My wallet, with its rainbow of lu, its snapshots of my four wives clothed and my mistress Kutunda in the nude, its credit cards and plastic perpetual calendar and embossed national air alert codes and Brezhnev's unlisted telephone number, had also been lifted, and no doubt this semeiotic treasure-lode enriches the arcana of some light-fingered ex-nomad secure in his niche in the burgeoning oil industry. A little picturesque behanding would set the rascal straight, I think-but then my judicial opinion is no longer solicited.

    To be barefoot and walletless in Kush, in even this modern- ized pocket of it, is to be at no very striking disadvantage. A few days and nights of soggy mendicancy, while the monsoon rains pattered down with their pre-@lmergence verve, and during which I was kicked from more than one melting doorway by the property-proud burghers of Ellellou, served to adjust me to the fact that I had indeed been abandoned by my bodyguard among the masses with whom it had once pleased me whimsically to mingle. After the loss of Sheba, such a fall followed as one segment of a telescope brings with it another, slightly smaller. No one to blow me, no one to bow to me.

    Takbir!

    I was driven to look for work and shelter amid the happy mud. In my student need across the seas I had held a variety of lowly jobs-"nigger work," in the friendly phrase of the lily-white elite of Franchise.

    The very luncheonette where, in the twilit last hours of my Presidency, I had treated myself to not one but two lime phosphates, hired me as a counterman, once I had demonstrated sufficient mastery of the junk cuisine with which the iron-stomached Satans of North America are poisoning the world.

    Cheeseburgers, baconburgers, pepperburgers; fried eggs in all their slangy permutations of ups and downs and overs; hash browns, onion rings, and hot pastrami were all within my repertoire at the sizzling, curdling grill. Egg rolls and pizza arrived frozen from the poles of Marco Polo's travels, needing only to be warmed. "Hero" sandwiches were cannibalized by my customers, who still believed, primitively, we become what we eat. From six to two, or from two to ten, I chopped, flipped, served. I juggled the orders in a rolling sea of music, for if the customers did not feed the ivory tune-selectors, Rose, as the toothy leggy waitress was called, did. She was a maddening hummer-along, and yet disappointingly uncooperative in other respects: my attempts to seduce her fell on barren soil-her hard-packed determination to achieve, with her husband Bud, upward mobility. They lived in an aluminum box on the edge of town, equipped with a chemical toilet and a fold-away kitchen sink. Once this domicile was mortgage-free they planned to sell and move onwards to a two-and-a-half-bedroom ranch house, with one-and-a-half children. The next stage of escalation would be a two-and-a-half-story fake-beam mock-Tudor overlooking the sixth green of the golf course, while Bud squirmed upwards through the greased tubing of the refinery. Such progress in husbanded half-steps was freedom to Rose, and my sidling attempts to drag her off the bandwagon into my anarchic arms were as idle as an attempt to seduce a locomotive from its tracks. No virtue as iron as that forged on the edge of poverty. When he came into the luncheonette, Bud, a big Moubi with arms that could have hurled a spear seventy meters, sat with those mighty arms meekly folded on the godless Formica as he stared up into the spectral works of a hierarchical machine, his lips pinched in unconscious imitation of the white man's scolding visage. They shared, as she slaved, one dream. Her only straying was in her head, as the lukewarm melodies bathed our ears in their moony ache day after day. Kush was the last stop on a long descent through levels of national development; these records, their grooves scoured of all but hoarse ghosts of song, had taken twenty years to reach the Ippi Rift from their source in the America of the Fifties. Over and over, hearty, hollowly healthy voices blended with violins toward an uplifted climax of pre-rock wail, a ululant submission to the patriotic, economic call to sublimate. "Love Me Tender," the youthful Presley requested; "Cry Me a River," Johnny Ray begged; "Que Sera, Sera," Doris Day philosophized, her voice snagging each time on some thorn in my soul. The regal voices of Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby lightly entwined in the drifting waltz of "True Love," and Debbie Reynolds as delicately lisped of her clinging attachment to "Tammy." There was, too, in counterpoint to these feminine trailings-off, a choral, masculine voice: "The Yellow Rose of Texas,"

    "The Happy Wanderer": when these rousing tunes surged from the well of time, Rose and I slapped the plates down harder and shuffled more swiftly behind the counter (never failing, it seemed to me, to brush hips tantalizingly-was this altogether my doing?). "A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," Jerry Lee Lewis assured us, ecstatic as a dervish.

    Even the grill grew hotter, the fast food came faster. And when the whistling section of "The River Kwai March" penetrated us, we knew, knew in our bones, that we would win the Cold War.

    Freedom, like music, rolled straight through the heart. Oh Rose, my Secret Love and Queen of the Hop, my Sugarfoot Standing on the Corner amid Autumn Leaves, my Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, in this chronicle too crowded with vexed women yours is the unique aura of happiness, of the bubbling, deep-fat aroma of productive, contented labor, as hoped for by Adam Smith.

    Ellellou, known to his co-workers only as Flapjack, served as a short-order cook for three months, before grease burns compelled him to take employment as a parking attendant in the city's one multi-level garage. It was here, he imagined, that Mtesa had hidden the Mercedes at a crucial hour; but the car and the driver were gone, and the oil spots on cement were indistinguishable clues, and the girl in the apricot halter had vanished with Opuku. Yet one day, in a concrete nook at a turning of the third-tier ramp, he found, wrapped in a tagilmst like a baby in bunting, Sheba's anzad.

    The gift seemed a gentle enough irony. He smiled; like any believer, he was not affronted by the notion that he was being watched.

    He, who had always been chauffeured, became ruthlessly deft in the reverse-gear rearrangement of automobiles, mostly old chrome-heavy guzzlers from Detroit's Happy Times, well into the second revolution of their odometers and their dents beyond counting.

    Meanwhile, through the two months of Jumada, in this season the Tuareg term Akasa, rain continued to fall upon Kush, rain enough even for a namesake of Noah's grandson. Sweet grass grew tall in the vacant lots of Ellellou and in the millions of hectares around; the cattle of the pastoralists fed so handsomely their weakened legs snapped, and the herdsmen toppled to the earth with excess of festival dancing and millet beer. The very bones strewn parched upon the sands put on flesh and gave milk; seeds dormant several millennia hurled toward the serried nimbus giant blossoms and bulbous fruit absent from even the most encyclopedic botanic handbooks. All this, Ellellou thought sadly, I achieved by ceasing to exist. still was the curse upon the land.

    National news was hard to come by in the Rift; the local paper was boastfully devoted to parochial concerns: oil prices, OPEC conferences, the end of the embargo, new shopping centers in the area, zoning regulations to control the housing boom. No report of any coup was heard in Ellellou, where all civic projects, all literacy programs and health clinics, all paving, sewering, and dedication of parkland were carried forward in the name of the national leader who, with the grand elisions of historical myth, had singlehandedly and as it were simultaneously crushed the French, the king, and counter-revolutionary elements within SCRME. Events widely separated in time and causation, and some of them set in motion when I was a mere foot soldier and foreign student- the loi-cadre proclamation, de Gaulle's imperious withdrawal from France Outre-mer, the constitutional-monarchial inter- val, the revolt led by General Soba, the expulsion of the neo-colons, the incineration of Gibbs, the execution of the king-had been lumped and smoothed into one triumphant sequence whose signature was the green flag, whose climax was the green grass swaying like an ocean beneath the benevolent gray sky. Allah was mighty, immovable, and undis-cernible; so was President Ellellou; praise him.

    Anonymous within the bustling polls that had absorbed my name, I searched the papers for news of myself. Page two sometimes carried bulletins from the capital- as far away, remember, as Rome from Amsterdam, as the Crater Copernicus from the Lacus Somniorum. They referred always to a vague "People's Government" as it issued a vigorous barrage of new wage incentives, tax holidays for foreign investors, relaxations of import tariffs and tourist visas, official welcomes extended to Israeli experts in drip irrigation and USD malnutritionists, preliminary plans for a cantilevered Braille Library to be imposed on the center of Istiqlal, and other such political promiscuities savoring much of the trusting nature and unholy energy of Michaelis Ezana. Toward the end of my tenure as burger chef, beneath an item hailing the arrival of a team of Dutch specialists in flood control (i imagined them with whitened, waterlogged thumbs), a snippet of fine print said, Colonel Ellellou, President-for-Life and Supreme Teacher, has been away from the capital on a fact-finding mission.

    And so in a sense I was. Working by day, strolling the streets by night, I spent much time contemplating my fellow-Kushites, as they had developed in this isolated oasis of plenty. They had lost, make no mistake, the attractive muscular lightness of alert predators, the leanness that balanced them upon the land as airily as our maidens balance bundles of tamarisk faggots upon their heads. People no longer looked carved, as they had in the village, in the army, and even in those early days of independence and monarchy in Istiqlal. These bodies sauntering along the Avenue of the End of Woe, clothed in a decaled denim that did for holidays as well as labor days, had been less whittled than patted into shape. A loss of tension, of handsome savagery, was declared also in their accents, which had yielded the glottal explosiveness of their aboriginal tongues to a gliding language of genial implication and sly nonchalance. There was no longer, with plenty, the need to thrust one's personality into the face of the person opposite. Eye-contact was hard to make along the damp sidewalks of Ellellou, where puddles took tints from neon signs. The little hard-cornered challenges-to honor, courage, manliness, womanliness-by which our lives had been in poverty shaped were melting away, like our clay shambas and mosques, rounded into an inner reserve secret as a bank account; intercourse in Ellellou moved to a music of disavowal that new arrivals, prickly and hungry from the bush, mistook for weakness but that was in fact the luxurious demur of strength. The business of oil, of the businesses that clustered around the business of oil, pre-empted the mental spaces formerly devoted to battle and ritual, to death and God, so that these last two came to loom (i suspected) as not only strangers but monsters, un-thinkables, like the abstruse formulae of science whereby oil was lifted from its porous matrix and its tangled molecules sorted into saleable essences. The volume of mysteries upon which men float had been displaced, but the shimmer of small amusements and daily poetries, the sly willingness of people to be pleased, appeared perennial. I, submerged in posthumous glory, immersed in the future I had pitted all my will against, relaxed at last. Often I arose early, conveying my frame with its clinging dreams to the luncheonette or to the concrete spiral of the parking garage; on my way I witnessed the droll earnest children being herded to school by the educational imperatives of the industrial state, dangling their schoolbags and clutching their books, solemn in their confidence that a grave thing was being asked of them, and that by obediently responding they were creating a nation. Their figures, uniformed, some of them, in green-our Kushite green, no longer an arid remembrance of Green Sahara but here, all around us, in the flourishing grass-seemed mute in the early morning, little figures silent as in a painting, collecting in clots at the bus stops.

    One does not know what it is to love a country until one has seen its children going off to school.

    I was accumulating my earnings and assembling my shattered poise toward the inevitable return to Istiqlal. In the second month of my employment at the parking garage, when I had been promoted to the man who takes the ticket and the lu and releases the striped wooden arm at the bottom of the ramp, an idle task that leaves much time for reading, another item appeared on page two of the daily Rift Report: The Government today acknowledged official fears that Colonel EU-ELLOTI, Chairman of SCRME, while seeking to negotiate the phasing-out of Soviet Russian missile sites within the Hulul Depression, has been abducted by leftward-leaning terrorists.

    So the ground for his official extinction was being prepared. The President decided the moment had come for his return. As he hitchhiked south with Sheba's anzad strapped to his back, the sky brightened, as if blanching in dread of his return to power. A truck carrying bales of last year's Parisian fashions-shantung hip-huggers, see-through jumpsuits-from Algeria to the souks and boutiques of Istiqlal picked him up. The driver was a young Belgian seeking a better quality of life. The cab radio interrupted its playing of La Plus Haute Qua-rantaine to repeat a bulletin that the President, long missing, had been presumed dead, and the Acting President with reluctance and sorrow had taken up the reins of government. To formalize his succession of Ellellou, which of course is the Berber word for "freedom," the new leader had assumed the name Dorfu, an expressive Salu term with the double meaning of "solidarity" and "consolidation." The national anthem was played, followed by the theme song from 2001, by Richard Strauss.

    Actually, the Salu dorfu has the root meaning of "crocodile-torpid-on-the comriverbank-b-far-f-dead," as distinguished from durfo, "crocodile-thrashing-around-with-prey."

    Michaelis Ezana and Angelica Gibbs were having dinner with Candy and Mr. Klipspringer. Candy had unwrapped herself and, out of purdah, looked, in a sensible yet snug gray wool knit dress with a single strand of cultured pearls, much what she was: an attractive woman nearing forty who had survived an unfortunate first marriage. Mrs.

    Gibbs, on the other hand, was resplendent in a crimson and mauve boubou, and she had hidden her brass-blond hair in a matching head-cloth. Her tan, acquired at the poolside of the reopened Club Sahare, where the punctilious ghosts of colonial officers made way for basking Dutch hydrologists and the brawny steel-workers assembling the adventurous skeleton of the Braille Library, would never be mistaken for the complexion of an African, though she now imitated the slit-eyed, careful, sidelong expression of native women. She was squatting on a packing crate of self-help books and asking Candy, "How can you bear to leave? The smells! The pace! For the first time in my life, I'm one with my blood. God, how I hated America, now that I think about it. Do this, do that. Turn right on red only. Rush, rush. Those dreadful slushy winters-they'll kill you."

    "I'm only afraid when I see my first snowfall I'll die of bliss."

    "Say, hasn't this rain been something?"

    Klipspringer exclaimed, rubbing his thighs to emphasize his enthusiasm, his tirelessness, his unflappability. "Right into August, wow!" The party was in farewell of him too. He had done his job here: established rapport, contacts, and a basis for expanded relations. His Arabic was now fluent, his Sara acceptable. He was wearing a dashiki purchased in Georgetown, D. c.

    Ezana tilted his head, so his round cheeks gleamed in the light of Candy's candles, the sole illumination remaining in her stripped, fixtureless villa. "And yet," he said, "it has not rained for a week. I think i an uneasy omen, this return of the sun.

    "Everything's mildewing," Candy said. "I tried to burn my furniture and it stank up the neighborhood."

    "All the flowering shrubs the French planted have come back into bloom," Ezana said. "It is as when I was a boy, and the Jesuits taught us Pascal and his calculus."

    Angelica laid a slender freckled hand on his tightly trousered thigh. "It's a beautiful city, dear," she said.

    "Everything changes, everything heals," Klipspringer abruptly observed. He lifted a glass of kaikai.

    "Here's to "er, Mother Change. A tough old bitch, but we love 'er."

    The other three responded, Angelica with a glass of Perrier water; she was taking instruction in the Koran, and had already learned how to pound millet.

    Michaelis Ezana frowned down at her touch; in her African garb she seemed less gid-dying, less a radiant wind from Paradise.

    An awkward baggage rather, her infatuation with him a heaviness. The present Mrs. Ezana was horrible-a bare-breasted Amazon, a bluestocking-but with a horror totally familiar; he had grown pleasantly deaf in the range of her squawks, and could conduct his side of their quarrels in perfect absent-mindedness. Like dark planets, their relationship was exquisitely inertial. She gave him space. Her repulsiveness boosted him aloft.

    Ezana's lips parted thoughtfully and his gold tooth gleamed like a cufflink as he turned to Klipspringer and began to discuss his favorite subjects, irrigation, electricity, and indebtedness.

    "The thing about indebtedness," Klipspringer told him, "is it's the best insurance policy you can buy. The deeper in debt the debtor gets, the more the creditor will invest to keep him from going under. You guys were taking an incredible risk, not owing us a thing all those years."

    "Our Great Teacher," Ezana admitted, "was perhaps too inspired for our imperfect world."

    "I don't feel I know you," Mrs. Gibbs impatiently blurted on his other side. She tugged at his hand with that fretful, proprietorial impatience of her wolvish race. "Michael, even in bed I feel it. Some secret you're withholding."

    "Don't bug him," Candy advised her. "They love their secrets, they really can't help it. The African man hates to have his photograph taken.

    My husband of sixteen years, he was supposed to be the father of our country and nobody knew what he looked like."

    "Sorry I never got to meet him," Klipspringer said. "He sounds like quite a character."

    Sounds: amid the rustling of palm fronds on the roof, the rats scurrying in the empty rooms, and the late-night patter of their conversation, rustling their blood in hopeful torrents, the knock at the door was muffled.

    "The male secret, of course," Ezana gallantly offered the ladies, "is our weakness, our need. But such a secret, like the symmetrically evolved ability of the female to nurture and soothe this need, becomes in exposure boring, monotonous, too-is this the word?-sempiternal.

    Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by vague memories of having read the reviews."

    Candace's big Songhai maid came into the room and said there was a beggar at the door. She had told him to go away, and he said he had oranges to sell.

    When she said they needed no oranges, he offered to dig a well or to sing a song. There was something autocratic about him, beyond her control, and would the mistress like to deal with him now?

    The beggar, an anzad strapped to his back, had shadowed the maid into the room. "Holy Christ, look who it isn't,"

    Candy said. The intruder, wearing tattered blue jeans and a T-shirt from which the stencilled legend had faded, looked small, pathetically frail, on the edge of their candlelight. Angelica and Klipspringer were politely puzzled, sensing an extraordinary impertinence and tension. Michaelis Ezana perched forward to study the stranger and, touching a reassuring hardness near his left armpit, sat back, returning his face to shadow. "You have your fucking nerve," Candy was continuing, and Ezana thought, Would that change, so bumptiously saluted by our American emissary, were all there were to the world. As well, there is a deadly sameness. The infant cries for suck; the mother heeds; the child grows; the man dies.

    In his high-pitched nervous beggar's whine the interloper announced, "I have come not to disturb your feast, but to beguile it with a song." He removed the anzad from his back and with his bow of bent goa wood produced a wheedling of melody. He sang through his nose: "A land without a conscience is an empty land, a blasted land, a desert land where the children have red hair and bloated bellies, where the adults have covetous smiles and cruel laughs.

    A conscience is more central to a land than oil wells, foreign loans, and peanut co-operatives; a conscience puts erectitude into the posture of the young men and soft fire into the glances of the lady folk.

    But nowhere in the bureaucracy of Kush amid so many posts for stamp-lickers and boot-lickers is there regular employment for such a presence. I ask you, should not a national conscience have a pension?"

    The musician gave himself over to a partially fumbled riff in minor thirds, and rested the bow at his side. His hostess said, "Oh my God, Happy. Don't you realize you can be shot now? They've gone on without you."

    Ezana had taken an interest in the song and asked, "Is it not the essence of a conscience, that it be invisible and ignorable?"

    The intruder nodded. "Visible only in its benign effects. As with Allah, to be nakedly present would be to institute tyranny."

    "Then," Ezana ventured, "I would think a pension might be arranged, if the conscience in the past had performed services to the state. Unfortunately, I am in no official position to do more than speculate; for in the Dorfu administration Michaelis Ezana holds an emeritus position only. Which, however, is a promotion from his incarceration under the previous administration."

    There comes a time in a man's life, the beggar thought, when he thinks of himself in the third person.

    Angelica Gibbs, who had not yet mastered the African woman's sublime though deceptive attitude of subservience, asked irritably, "Who is this joker? Darling, why are we letting him ruin our party?"

    "Kinda fun, still think," Klipspringer interposed tactfully, his smile doubled by the up-tilting two gray thorns of his fine mustache. "This is their style here, they just let things happen. I think it's great."

    The beggar addressed the widow directly. "I bring you good news of the murderer of your husband. He like his victim is vanished in smoke. In time the two will become indistinguishable. Together their sacrifices have opened the sluices to American aid, whose triumph is signified by these twin jinn of the pragmatic, your lover and your husband. The Book says, Each soul shall come attended by one who will testify against it and another who will drive it on.

    Thus black and white, dry and wet, exert their rhythms. Your own pendulum, Madame, is swinging; I salute your costume, pure in its native authenticity. My own, I know, is a shabby mishmash. But you have long been in my mind's eye, and it rewards a life of wandering, that this beggar may gaze upon thee."

    The lady was affronted. "Where did he pick up his English?" she asked Ezana and, with a quick switch of her vexed face, "What did he mean, about Don's murderer?"

    "Our self-appointed conscience hopes to affirm,"

    Ezana said, "for no doubt conscientious reasons of his own, that your husband willed his own passing, from which, however, much good has arisen."

    "I think the fella's making a plea,"

    Klipspringer amplified, "for continuity and orderly transition in government. I'm with him there, one hundred and ten per cent. If your people can't find it in their hearts to grant him this pension he's angling for, I wonder if the USIS couldn't rummage him up a travelling fellowship. Hey, here's an idea.

    Make him a Donald- what was his middle initial?"

    "I've forgotten," Angelica said.

    "Make him a Donald X. Gibbs Travelling Fellow," Klip- springer concluded, rubbing his thighs with brisk satisfaction. "We can free up a grant somewhere."

    "I've forgotten a lot about Don," Mrs.

    Gibbs continued to confess. "I actually didn't see that much of him, he was always trying to help people. But he only liked to help people he didn't know. It kept us moving. I wonder if I hated him."

    "Such selflessness," Ezana reassured her, "you will not find here in Africa. Here, ego and id are still yoked to pull the oxcart of simple survival."

    Something sad in his tone, his assurance of an infinite Africa stretching before her, frightened the young widow, and she looked toward the other American woman for help; but Candy was leaving, not only Africa but leaving the room. With trembling hand she had taken the beggar aside, and moved him toward the front hall, suffused with the scent of Petrea volnbilis come again into bloom.

    Her trembling touched him, this wifely pulse beneath her skin, an amorous agitation superficially like anger, a sense of multiple percussions of blood chiming with his old impression of her as pouncing, as a predator that knows itself as a prey. "You really must get out of Kush," she told him sharply. "This new crowd in power doesn't have any of your irony.

    They're grim."

    "Would you like to take me back with you, to the land of milk and honey?"

    Her trembling increased. She gave him a little shove, as she had given the rack of sunglasses a shove. "No. I'm getting a divorce, Happy. This hasn't worked, and it would work even worse there. You did hate the States, you know, though you tend to remember the idyllic things. That's how Kush will be for me, I know, once I get out of it. But it's boring back home now. The Cold War is over, Nixon's over. All that's left is picking up the pieces and things like kissing OPEC'S ass.

    You'd be depressed. It turns out the Fifties were when all the fun was, though nobody knew it at the time."

    "I could become a professor of Black Studies. I could go into partnership with your father, and re-open the Chicago office, since I am a soul brother. They are looking now for tokens, are they not-your Establishment? We could create children, of a harmonious color. You could teach me to ice-skate."

    "Happy, no. That could have been once, maybe; but not now. We'd just embarrass each other, like we always did. I know it's hard for you to believe, but we're through. Honest."

    She was right, it is hard for a man to believe that his sexual power over a woman, however abused in its exercise, has diminished: as if we imagine that these our mysterious attractions travel in a frictionless ether, forever, instead of as they do, upon the rocky and obstructed ground of other human lives. The beggar said, "My best to your Dad," and, both of her white hands squeezed in one of his, whispered in the hollow hall, "Tallaqtuki. Tallaqtuki. Tallaqtuki"

    Kadongolimi had said, "In this house you will be welcome when everything else crumbles." But as Ellellou approached the villa in Les Jardins that had been transformed into a smoky, fragrant village compound, he saw that her other prophecy had already been fulfilled: weeds had sprung up.

    In the long rains rot had advanced through the thatch of the outbuildings and pulpy, hollow-stemmed vegetation had sprung up faster than footsteps could beat the ground bare. Without a word Ellellou was recognized through his disguise of jeans and sunglasses. The drunken bony man again met him; the naked girl again took his hand, but she led him to a grave. In the center of the courtyard where the flagstones had been pried up to make baking ovens, fresh earth, already adorned with a maidenhair of bright green grass, formed a mound of prodigious dimension. Kadongolimi then had sunk beneath her weight of flesh to displace this mass of forgetful earth. "Her heart was smothered, in the end she cried out for space, for the open skies," the girl told Ellellou, and he looked at her with surprise, hearing in her voice his first wife's dancing accent, seeing in this slim body the continuum of women asserted, the form reborn he had taken, once, into his arms. I the lion, she the gazelle.

    "Did she cry out for Bini?" I asked.

    "For him among many. But there were many to attend her.

    Our touches were all one. She lived to see the ground watered again, and told us that our father had succeeded."

    "I was going to ask her to take me back. Now I must ask you."

    "We are being moved. Dorfu has his own blood-ties, his own people. Already, you can see, the huts are empty, the yam plots are overgrown.

    White men have come and bought our tools and jujus for their museums. Anu and I are staying until the earth settles a little more upon our mother, and there is nothing left to desecrate." Anu had also been my evil uncle's name; the thread of his lechery and menace had descended, tangled with the thread of beauty that had come into my hand, through the skein of blood-ties that was, after all, the one robe in which I would always be clothed, even in death, as long as the griots could sing my ancestry. The compound around me was returning to nature. The narrowest of footpaths, like the paths rabbits trace in the savanna, led diagonally across patios where the stringy bronzed wives of French administrators had laid aside their Bain-de-Soleil-spotted copies of de Beauvoir and loudly clapped for their servants to bring more citron presse, more Campari-and-soda, more love disguised as servi- tude. Kadongolimi had lain on one of their abandoned chaise longues and then it had collapsed, heaving up this monstrous splash of earth at my feet. A miniature mountain, whereupon rain had begun to work erosion between the little weeds.

    I asked the girl, "Will you go back to the village?"

    "The village site is no longer ours. The land, they say, is zoned for agribusiness, subsidized by the new government. The government has plans, many plans."

    "Do you hate the new government?"

    "No," the girl said solemnly, in the dead tone of prudent words. "They are an aftermath, they are men with flat heads, who cannot be blamed.

    Kadongolimi talked with them, of our eviction, and was much amused. She forgave them. She told them there had been too much magic in Kush, that after a while magicians become evil men. She did not mind their flat heads. They offered her a pension."

    Ellellou was interested. "And did she accept it?

    Where is it? Did she fill out forms?"

    "My mother refused. She said her youth had been sweet, and she had tasted it fully, and now she wished to taste unsweetened the bitterness of dying.

    She said her world was dying, her life had performed its circle; she asked them for a month undisturbed, that her body could be weighted to sink. For me she asked a scholarship. I think I will become an agronomist, or a pediatrician. Do I have your blessing?"

    "Why ask? You have no need of it. The government proceeds without Ellellou, his craziness got in the way, technology rules instead of craziness, man has resigned himself to being the animal of animals, the champ. Go farm your wombs, or whatever other microscopic deviltry the toubabs urge upon you.

    Their knowledge is nothing but Hell; they know this now, still they thrust it upon us, they drag us along, that were standing by the side of the march, they take from us all hope of Paradise. They look into the microscope and tell us there is no spirit. There is no way to imagine the next thousand years upon Earth without imagining Hell, life under one big microscope."

    The girl said, "My mother told me you were my father and would not refuse a blessing. Even in the snake, each new skin is caressed by the old as it leaves." The words were no doubt Kadongolimi's, but pronounced softer, with no hint of teasing, of what in Salu we call having-it-both-ways.

    "Where will your scholarship take you?"

    "Some say Cairo. Some say Florida. It is a United State. Our government, with their oil revenues, are establishing a program there."

    "I have heard the climate is oppressive. Be sure to take malaria pills. And your Uncle Anu-what will be happening to him?"

    "I believe he has been hired by the Postal Department, as a sorter. He has merely to sit on a stool and toss envelopes into bags. The bags then are thrown into the Grionde. Since our ties with the revolutionary government in America have been strengthened, there has been a great influx of third-class mail. I have not heard your blessing."

    "Why bless the unavoidable?"

    "It is just that," she said, "which needs to be blessed. The impossible is self-sufficient."

    I turned away. I thought, if I listened, I could hear Kadong-olimi speak, out of this mound of earth that was so little different from her last manifestation to me. What we most miss, of those that slip from us, is their wit, the wit that attends those who know us-lovers, grandmothers, children. The sparks in their eyes are kindled just once by our passing. The girl waited with me for Kadongolimi to speak, until we realized together that these flourishing weeds, and these rivulets of erosion on the heaped mud, were her words. There came now, from the dilapidated thatch of the compounds, a scent reminiscent of the stocked peanut fodder that served, for the young of the village in their years of license, as cave and bed both; in my mind the shadows of the foraging giraffes loped away, incredible orb-eyed marauders fleeing, floating stiff-legged away from the clacking of mortars and pestles brandished by overexcited small boys.

    Kadongolimi had taken these shadows into the earth with her, leaving me now no shelter save that which I could fabricate. Rain had started up again, pecking at the grave, twitching the ticking leaves. The naked girl beside me shivered. I put both hands on her head, its hair set out in tight braided rows, and pronounced, in the disappearing accent of the Amazeg, my blessing.

    Kutunda was not easy to glimpse, let alone confront. She still lived, with the simplicity the powerful sometimes affect, to cloak their power, in the narrow slum building in Hurriyah where she, an illiterate doxy, had been established by Ellellou upon their return from the Sahel border in the Mercedes. Now this same Mercedes, driven still by Mtesa, whose mustache had flourished, carried her back and forth along the steep sandy alleys between her apartment and the Palais d'Administration des Noires; but the windows had been replaced by a murky bulletproof glass through which only the little tipped smudge of a profile could be glimpsed.

    Photographs of her, by Dorfu's side at this or that public ceremony, were frequently in the now-official pages of Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche; but the Kushite printing hands had not yet mastered the newly imported American offset presses, and Kutunda's image was mottled or smeared beyond recognition. (before it had gone underground in 1968, as a subversive counter-revolutionary sheet, having degenerated under the king's constitutional reign into a scandalous tabloid dealing in the pornography of thalid-omide freaks and the astrology of the starlets, Nouvelles had been handsomely produced on a flatbed letterpress by Frenchmen who, working with Didot fonts and scorning all pictography, had printed the same hermetically inclusive and symmetrical regulations over and over, along with meditations upon Negritude from the latest masterpieces of Gide, Sartre, and Genet.)

    The basket shop beneath Kutunda's rooms still operated, and the hollow-cheeked young addicts still emerged clutching their contraband wrapped in raffia, but the place now was clearly manned by government bodyguards. Indeed more than once Ellellou spotted Opuku, his bald head masked by a narrow-brimmed fedora and his great shoulders clothed in an FBI-ISH gray suit, running a security check on this outpost of the internal police. The Mercedes came early in the morning and brought Kutunda back rarely earlier than midnight. By then, a single dull green light in the basket shop showed the presence of a drowsy lone plainclothesman, and the agile beggar skulking in the archway of the Koran school down the alley dared move with his anzad to a position beneath her narrow slatted window, which the slope of the hill here put so close above his head he hardly had to lift his voice, singing, "Round and firm as the breasts of one's beloved's younger sister, she who exposes her gums when she laughs, and spies from her pallet wondering when her time will come, one final orange floats in the mind like a moon that has wrested itself free of the horizon but still is entangled in the branches of the baobab tree..."

    Kutunda's voice, at conversational pitch, said sharply, "Come up." A heavy tangle of keys was slithered through the slats and fell like a star at the beggar's feet. It was not easy, by moonlight, to distinguish the key that disconnected the alarm from the key that opened the door at the foot of the narrow stairs, and again to decipher, while the narrow pise walls seemed to be leaning in, listening, the four keys needed for the two double locks on the two steel doors where once there had been a single great plank of mpafu he could open by tapping out the syllables of his name.

    Ellellou manipulated the keys clumsily, taking the longest possible route: the first lock was opened by the fourth key he tried; of the three remaining, the third opened the second lock and the second of the two unused keys opened the third; then, in the last lock, the fourth key failed to turn! He tried the others, in reverse order, and found at last that the first key worked. This second door, reinforced with a lattice of riveted ribbing, bore a tiny brass plaque engraved in a script that would have been invisible but for the faint traces of brass polish left within the intaglio.

    He made out the inscription Minister of the Interior Protector of Female Rights A space of clean brass below awaited further titles. As delicately as Ezana some months before had touched open his old office door, Ellellou touched this one. The door swung open upon a cube of light whose center held a shadow, a dim human core. His eyes, habituated to alley darkness, smarted.

    She wore a silk bathrobe of queenly length and her eyes, once brown and flecked, were solid blue. Her posture, too, had changed; the heavy-haunched, cautious stoop of the woman as servant, reluctantly daring to lift herself from the earth, had become the slim erectitude of one who gives orders. At a light indication of her hand, he closed the door behind him. The intimate room he remembered had been expanded upwards, so that where there had been twisted rafters and falling plaster tufted with camel hair a hung dome held a grid of little round dressing-mirror bulbs adjustable to provide (he surmised) appropriate illumination for every situation, however confidential. For this occasion Kutunda had set the rheostat at full cold blaze. Her eyes unnaturally flashed. She wore contact lenses.

    "You have run out of masks," she told him. "That was not a good song."

    "It entranced my mistress once," the beggar said, hunched against the glare of her apartment, of her authority. Where the walls had been crowded with filing cabinets an executive bareness reigned, relieved only by silver abstractions ordered, he imagined, from Georg Jensen or the Franklin Mint. Her overstuffed armoires had vanished, her wardrobe and beautification equipment fled to another room-for this entire building and its neighbor, the hash shop downstairs reduced to a mere front, had been hollowed out to house Kutunda. Where her pot had been, a spiral iron staircase painted ivory led to the second floor of a bachelor-girl duplex. The dirty pallet from which her lover would contemplate the blank side, glowing rose at dawn, of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, had become a waterbed heaped with brocaded pillows, and her steel desk a rosewood escritoire exquisite in its fleur-de-lis pulls. Here, papers of state slipped from their pigeonholes and were, he imagined, initialled. She had vaulted from illiteracy into that altitude of power where reading and writing are a condescension.

    "Sit down," she said, indicating a chair that was molded plastic as in an airport waiting-room, taking for herself an oval-backed, satin-covered Louis XVI armchair. "Tell me what you've been doing since the coup."

    "I worked in that oil town in the Rift-was "We call it Ellellou," she said. "For lack of a better name."

    "comand when I had a little stake I hitched back to Istiqlal."

    "Have you seen the new library?"

    "I've watched them pouring endless cement. I wonder if those wings suspended on the cables won't crack when the harmattan blows. Gravity, as you know, is a little extra near the equator. Or do you still doubt that the earth is round?"

    She replied pompously, "We have experts to worry about that."

    "When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people, is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also, about the library, but applicable to many ventures-am I boring you? you, who told tales so amusingly in a ditch?-people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic.

    The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid."

    "Then you will be pleased to know that the Braille Library is no longer to be named after your patron King Edumu.

    Michaelis Ezana has asked that the building be designated the Donald X. Gibbs Center for Trans-Visual Koranic Studies, as a wedding present to his new wife, Gibbs's rapidly acclimated widow."

    The beggar said, "A beautiful gift, to crown a coupling so ill-fated. And a suitable monument for that insipid devil who in his racist blindness attempted to dump chemical pap and sorghum for cattle into the stomachs of our children."

    "The gift she asked for, and has been refused, was your head in a basket. She wished to have you named as public enemy, found, and prosecuted. We have held back from that. We wish instead that your name be venerated, especially by schoolchildren."

    "But there exists a venerable tradition of the criminal-king, from Nero to the sultans, from Ivan the Terrible to our own mischievous Edumu. A nation comes to take perverse pride in the evil it could support, the misgovernment it has survived. You scrupled too much, dear Kutunda, who for all your shimmering robes of high office retain the shifty-eyed timidity of a polluted, detribalized wench. Speaking of eyes, how have yours changed color?"

    "Contact lenses, if you must know. They've been in sixteen hours, and they hurt."

    "Take them out," he commanded. "And tell my successor, I forget his pseudonym, that in the annals of history moderation is invisible ink."

    "I am not sure," she said, pausing to pry with the fingers of one hand her lids apart so that the lens fell into the cupped palm of the other, and then gazing at him bichromatically, "you should be talking to me like this."

    Picassoesque imbalances, he felt, radiated outwards through the room like the shatter of a windshield from the central asymmetry of her eyes. She bowed her head and removed the other lens, and gropingly removed from a pocket of her robe the curious capsule that held, one on each convex end, the lenses as hard to find, if dropped, as the obsolete Kushite coinage of mirrors.

    Ellellou asked, "Why have you made your eyes blue? Their beauty was brown."

    "Dorfu has a penchant for Tuareg women, though the Tuareg are anachronistic, and will soon be settled, under government plans, in communities practicing a profitable mix of peanut cultivation and light industry."

    "Dorfu. Are you aware that the word, in Salu, also signifies the torpor suffered by a reptile when it has swallowed too big a meal? Mothers putting their babies to sleep murmur dorfu, dorfu..."

    Kutunda blinked away her tears and resumed the hauteur befitting a cabinet member. "It is true, he wastes no motion, unlike his predecessor. How have you enjoyed these months of vagabondage since your resignation?"

    "I have been," Ellellou told her, "indescribably happy. The wet weather delights me as it does every patriotic citizen of Kush.

    But beyond that I found, in that town of Ellellouville, a middling happiness foreign, I fear, to both the mighty and the helpless of our continent. And in Istiqlal, to my surprise, I find that happiness intensified; indeed I now think that the natural condition of men is one of happiness, and that cities, being concentrations of rnen, are the happier in direct proportion to their size, and that the Koran was right to de-emphasize the tragic, except as it applies to non-believers, who are vermin and shadows in any case."

    "If you are happy, why have you sought me out, risking death? My guards are trained to shoot to kill; that is the only technique for fanatic terrorists.

    Ordinary selfish criminals can be reasoned with, and merely maimed. Opuku's brother heads the new Ministry of Discipline. He has revived, from the days of the Foreign Legion, the crapaudine."

    Her unreal blue lenses shed, Kutunda's face had softened- the sable irises flecked with gold or sand, the wide flat Sara face broadest across the jawbones, the mouth whose lips seemed the pod for many little white peas, the cinnamon freckles on her dusky cheeks, the wet-looking hair that wandered across her cheeks for all her crisp tailoring of power, her lovable look of being besmirched.

    I thought of her thighs and her buttocks wobbling with weight beneath the quicksilver folds of her queenly robe; my loins sweetened. I had too long been chaste. I said, "My dear Minister of the Interior and Protector of Female Rights, let me present three petitions. One, would you like, now, to marry me? Several vacancies have opened up in my sanctioned quartet of wives."

    "This petition comes too late. I am betrothed to the state, and to the ideals of Islamic Marxism, stripped of irresponsible adventurism and romantic individualism. Dorfu has lovingly explained to me that we must never, he and I, marry.

    Thus we will each stand separate but equal, living exemplars to the men and women of Kush. We will be like the frontal heroic statues in limestone of the Pharaoh and his sister-bride, rather than one muddled image, as in Rodin's The Kiss."

    "Or in the manner of Hitler and his Eva, rather than the amorously intertwined Roosevelts."

    "My President's especial admiration, among statesmen of that period, is for Canada's Mackenzie King, who conferred with his mother in the hereafter.

    'The Canada of Africa" is the motto we intend to put on our license plates." She yawned, my freckled foundling, her open mouth a cave of bliss pillowed by her powerful tongue.

    "My appointments at the Palais begin at nine a. m. sharp," she said. "What was your second petition?"

    "For a pension, Madame. I am entitled to one, and with it I will leave the country forever, leaving it forever conscienceless. You will be free to do what you can with this hopeless, beautiful land."

    "We feel free now, Dorfu and I."

    "But you are not. You are now the actuality of Kush.

    Actuality breeds discontent, and if I were to reappear, as did Napoleon after Elba, the counter-counter-revolution would be launched. Already, my guess is, Michaelis Ezana chafes at the unofficial limbo in which he must operate, and he has acquired this toubab wife as a possible counter in the game you must, through your rash estrangement of my friends the Soviets, play with the Americans. Where their libraries come, Coca-Cola follows; as our thirst for Coca-Cola grows, our well of debt deepens, and the circle of sky above"-I drew one with my hands, beneath her dome of harsh lights-"is filled with Klipspringer's smile. The oil revenues will bring you dollars good for nothing but to buy what the makers of dollars also make."

    Kutunda asked, "Why pay you to leave, when a bullet costs less than a lu?"

    "The people know I am alive. I pass among them, and they do not need to name me. If I die, the dream of your rule will cease; it is built upon my safe sleep. Dorfu knows this, though you, who rashly advised me to kill the king, do not. were the king still alive, attracting all blame to himself, I would still be President."

    Her words were both clipped and bored. "Pensions are not my department."

    Yawn as she would, her known warmth in this pillowed room, some olfactional echo of her tangy, short-legged, downward-tugged volupte, had deeply stirred me. My sitting position and loose beggar's robes concealed a club that had grown like a fungus in the dark of my lap.

    "What was this third petition?" she asked.

    I rose and presented it, my dusty old lust reborn like the desert and so swollen that those of my teeth less than perfectly sound ached at their roots. "Or tell me one of your stories," I begged. "Tell me a vile tale as you used to in the ditch, coming to me under the moon still moist from Wadal and the dwarf."

    Kutunda too stood, her silk robe falling straight as armor from the tips of her breasts. "No.

    The time of fables is over for Africa. We must live among stern realities. You are arrested, as a traitor, an exhibitionist, and an indigent."

    The men that came into the room, one through the double door and the other down the resounding iron spiral stairs, from a listening post wherein no doubt all our noises had been taped, including my scratchy struggles with the two double locks and Kutunda's sexy yawns, were not Opuku and Mtesa, they were Opuku and iMtesa's spiritual descendants.

    Along with their handcuffs and mandatory arm-twisting they brought the something detached (like energetic young actors going through the motions of a play composed by an old homosexual fogey whose off-stage blandishments they have resisted and whose political-religious opinions they despise) and chillingly gentle that is their generation's contribution to the evolution of humanity.

    The king's cell had been only perfunctorily cleaned up. His rubble of royalty-the broken stool, les joujous, the rags once soaked in the blood of some poor shrieking sacrifice of poultry or livestock and now caked the dullest brown of earth-had been swept toward one corner, but the sweeper had wandered away, perhaps to answer the call to prayer, and had not returned. Michaelis Ezana's all-too-brief (in my book) tenure had added a slippery drift of magazines- Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Quel Tel, The Economist, the Italian edition of Playboy.

    Also filter-stubs of low-tar-content cigarettes, empty Ovaltine tins, and bedroom slippers of the softness of human genitals, the wool of unborn karakul lambs within and, without, the stitched hides of Greek lizards snared while sunning on the marbles of the Acropolis. Foreign imports, I thought, the Third World's ruination. Christendom and whoredom, two for the price of one. Still, such were no longer my problems; these had shrunk to the dimensions of my own imperilled hide.

    I dropped the slippers out the window, so they followed at an interval of time that barefoot descent of Ezana which my mind's eye has previously in these pages so vividly projected. The slippers plopped some seconds later, not quite simultaneously, refuting Galileo, in the courtyard below. This was the little dank Cour de Justice; in the courtyard beyond, over the tile roof of a kitchen passageway, I could see the schoolgirls of the Anti-Christian High School forming the circles and parallelograms of some after-school games. Their cries came like the calls of blue-uniformed birds feasting on grasshoppers stirred up whirring by the passing of a herd of wildebeests. Light from the clay-colored sun slanted horizontally into the cell; the call to salat al-"asr was sprung, with a twang, from the minaret of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster, and weakly echoed from the Mosque of the Clots of Blood. The supper smell of scorched feathers arose in the corridor, with the rustle and twitter of the soldiers" women. The brown shadows in the corners of my room turned blue; a pink blush seeped upwards into the sky, a delicate dye repelled, as by a dropping of wax, by a shadow-eyed three-quarters moon. The sun had set. The salat al-maghrib was intoned. A meal was brought to me, of fool and boiled goat's knuckles. I leafed around in Paris Match, which had devoted its issue to American porn queens and West German terrorists, the daughters of clergymen and Wirtschaftsivunderarchitekten.

    Both groups of young women looked drained by fatigue, the vampire shadow of the camera flash stark behind them on the empty walls. The rooms these photographs were taken in, and wherein these interviews were taped, appeared replications of the same room, a room hidden from the world yet, in effect, the world itself.

    Rooms, I thought-the world had become a ball of rooms, a hive, where once it had been a vast out-of-doors lightly dented by pockets of shelter. Our skulls are rooms, closeting each brain with its claustrophobic terror, and all Istiqlal, a mass of mud boxes, comprised a mosaic of inescapable privacies. The concealed cellars and apartments where the young celebrities of these wrinkled pages hatched their escapades and platitude.* with an identical soul-dead fervor implied a fearful space beyond, and the word room seemed to contain some riddle without whose solution the world's sliding could not be halted, its sorrow capped.

    As night filled all the corners I waited for the spirit of the dead king to repossess his room and with rustling and tapping revive his dead toys and terrify me; but nothing happened save the curious chemical capture and release of sleep. I awoke to hear a soft rain steadily falling. The city was melting, the wet lights of the distant airfield glimmered, enlarged. My life hung in the balance, but I was utterly relaxed. Thus have I seen a leopard dangle all its four limbs from a high branch of a swaying acacia, murderous dreams now and then twitching its front paws.

    Days passed in this rhythm; then at last Dorfu came to visit me, in the late afternoon, toward the end of the wet season. I was struck again by his beauty beyond gender, like that of polished wood, or of a supple vine whose graceful, gripping ascent into the light makes no mistakes. His smile within my cell was like the dab of sun that finds its way to the forest floor. His fez, his signature, was of a glossier plum, and his uniform, the color of a scrubbed winestain, harmonized without ostentation. In tailoring at least, Kush had found a leader to surpass Ellellou. He had that fine Fula skin, that seems always freshly oiled. Tall, he moved with a certain stiff economy of motion, refuting any presumption that his administration would be frivolous.

    A toubab might have marvelled at Dorfu's regal ease, he having been so recently a lowly police spy; but we Africans have little difficulty in adjusting upwards to luxury and power.

    Indeed it may be true for all the sons of Adam that no good fortune, however extravagant, seems out of keeping with our proper, Edenic inheritance. He spoke in a courtly mix of English and Arabic.

    He carried a book bound in gold cloth.

    "I believe," Dorfu smiled, "in some lands political prisoners are subjected to what is called reeducation. Here, we prefer to think of it as entertainment. I thought I would read to you, as I once did to the pious Edumu." He settled cross-legged on his green cushion, opened the Koran with curved thumb, and read, where he had left off nearly a year before, "dis.. and adorned with bracelets of silver. Their Lord will give them a pure beverage to drink"

    He looked up and asked, "What purer beverage than freedom?"

    "None purer," answered Ellellou. "I thirst for it."

    Dorfu continued to read.

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

    We created them, and endowed their limbs and joints with strength; but if We please We can replace them by other men."

    Dorfu and Allah both, Ellellou noticed, preferred to say We.

    A trick of leadership he himself had failed to master.

    Dorfu concluded the sura.

    "He is merciful to whom He will: but for the wrongdoers He has prepared a grievous punishment."

    The President lifted his eyes benignly from the glowing page. "A peculiar problem of African government," he said, "is the disposal of the bodies of the deposed. In Togo, the clever Sylvanus Olympio was inelegantly gunned down by the hand of his successor, Colonel Eyadema. In Mali and Niger, the ex-Presidents Keita and Diori are rather awkwardly incarcerated, awaiting their natural deaths. In this nation, our friend Edumu was manfully slain, but his body became a haunting marionette. Now you have suggested, in a taped interview with our sister Kutunda, that you be not only pardoned but assigned a pension in exile. A proposal as impudent as your ill-timed and obscene assault upon her cha/y."

    Ellellou felt in his throat an odd constriction, overruling even thirst. "Like every citizen of Kush," he said, "I entrust myself to your mercy."

    Dorfu's smile broadened. "You make a virtue of a necessity; that is the art of living. I have not forgotten who elevated me, albeit in haste, even with some scorn of my potential, to the rank of interim Minister. And I thought your reasoning, as expressed to Kutunda, not without all merit. She, I should inform you, has advised for you a variety of ingenious tortures, climaxed by cremation, that your lewdness no longer pollute the purity of Kush. I would hesitate to disregard her usually sound advice, but in this instance certain international and media considerations prevail.

    You died, as President, in the city that bears your name. Now the honor of the Presidency must be safeguarded. We must show our friends the Americans that we too value the office above the man."

    "I do not wish to survive thanks to some American superstition."

    "There is also the indigenous consideration that, on a continent where materialism has yet to cast its full spell, a live man far away is less of a presence than a dead man underfoot."

    The constriction in Ellellou's throat eased. "I would defer gladly to scruples authentically native. How much will my pension be, and when may I secure it?"

    "We have decided that a colonel's pension would be appropriate, added to by half again as much for each wife who accompanies you, and a third again for each dependent child. Enough will be advanced for your passage abroad; when you have an address, the checks will arrive monthly. All this contingent, of course, upon your anonymity and silence."

    "You will get off cheap. No wife will come with me."

    "There is one, our intelligence-gathering arm reports, that you have not asked. But that is your affaire, as the French say." He bowed his head and read again the verses, "Let him that will, take the right path to the Lord. Yet you cannot will except by the will of Allah."

    Dorfu closed the Koran yet seemed in no hurry to go. Something lingered in the cell, with its jumbled relics and orange slant of late-afternoon sun, congenial to both men.

    "Strange," Dorfu said. "You took the name Freedom, and have been captive, until now, of your demons. Our capital is called Independence, yet our polity is an interweave of dependencies. Even the purity of water is a paradox; for unless it be chemically impure, it cannot be drunk. To be free of hunger, men gave up something of themselves to the tribe. To fight against oppression, men must band in an army and become less free, some might say, than before. Freedom is like a blanket which, pulled up to the chin, uncovers the feet."

    "You are saying, perhaps," ventured the prisoner, "that freedom is like all things directional. One of the magazines that Ezana abandoned, Les Mechaniques Populaires I believe, assures its credulous readers that all things move swiftly in some direction or other; even the universe by which we measure the separate motions of the earth and the sun itself moves, through some unimaginable medium, toward some unimaginable destination. How delicious it is, my President, to pause in movement, and to feel that divine momentum hurtling one forward!"

    "It must have been the rushing of your blood you heard.

    The wind does not feel the wind. To be within the will of Allah is to know utter peace. Once, in the course of my training as a member of the coercive branch of government, I parachuted, expecting tumult; instead there was peace beyond understanding as the earth lifted beneath me, offering as on a platter its treetops, the branching patterns of its dried riverbeds, the starlike dots of its herds, and the thatched rooftops from whose cooking-fires smoke drifted as I did. This was near Sobaville, and I noticed how perilously slender the road between the barracks and the capital appeared. One of my first acts, as Acting Minister of the Interior, was to have this highway made four-lane.

    In our infant governments, the connection between the head and the coercive arm must be close. Your wanderings as President perhaps should have included more visits to Sobaville."

    "I had some taste for battle," Ellellou allowed, "but none for the forced camaraderie, the latrine humor, of peacetime barracks. Men together generate unhealthy vapors. Am I free to leave, and, if so, when, Mr. President?"

    With a little pragmatic shrug Dorfu lifted his hands from where they gracefully rested, wrists on knees.

    "When you are free within yourself, to terminate."

    "I'd like to try it right now," I said. The main obstacle was my sensation that he needed me, and this, I saw, was a delusion.

    Dorfu smiled. "Do not forget Sheba's anzad."

    He added, "You should write some of your songs down."

    "The pension-is it to be paid in lu, or a less chimerical currency?"

    "On the strength of the projected peanut harvest, we are thinking of making the lu convertible and letting it float. However, if you would rather be paid in dollars-was "Dollars!" Ellellou cried, flaring up as when an evening breeze makes dark coals glow again.

    "That green scum which sits on the stagnant pond of capitalism, that graven pilfering of our sacred eagles and brooding pyramids, that paper bile the octopus spews forth! Pay me in francs."

    Dorfu nodded; the round top of his fez winked violet, floating like a momentary UFO in the horizontal, ebbing light. The four-color photograph Edumu had once upon a time framed, of a little girl and a presumed black man frozen in mid-tap on a make-believe staircase, had been removed from its sumptuous frame, the frame stolen for its gold but the paper image reverently tacked back up. It fluttered, as the evening call to prayer entered in at the green-silled window.

    Sittina's villa was one vast flower, all overgrown by the oleander, bottlebrush, hibiscus, and plumbago that flourished in our hospitable climate. She herself was not at home, though the sounds of her children squabbling and playing nostalgia-rock records arose from within. I looked through a window.

    Her Well-Tempered Clavier gathered dust on the harpsichord, its pages open to a fugue whose five sharps had stymied her. Our Chagall still hung on the far wall. The Ife mask looked tatty and askew. As I turned to leave, Sittina came along loping through the morning mists, through the shade of the fully leafed chestnut trees, clad in a blue jogging suit, her hair no longer held back by fish spines but cut close as a cap to her head. As she ran, she looked bow-legged in the manner of runners, the shins incurved so the resilient feet can keep pace on an invisible straight line. "Felix," she said to me, scarcely panting, and continuing to jog up and down as she talked, "why-are you wearing-a three-piece business suit?"

    "It's what they give you when you leave prison,"

    I told her. "Also a beggar's disguise gets you arrested. Begging has been declared non-existent by the government. Long life to Dorfu! Death to extremists of both rightist and leftist tendencies!"

    "Don't make me-laugh," she said, "it throws-my breathing off. It's ecstasy-once you hit-your stride. I've lost-five pounds.

    Unfortunately-it's all come off my ass-instead of my belly."

    "That's middle age," I told her.

    "I thought-you were-evaporated."

    "Demoted," I said. "Can't we go inside? I'm getting a headache watching you jiggle."

    "I've been offered a job-calisthenicist for the work teams-being organized in the refugee camps-over at Also-Abid."

    "You want the job?"

    "No. You know me. I hate being-tied down. But I need the lu- since you blew the dictatorship."

    In addition to cropping her hair, she had minimized her wind-resistance by substituting for her great hoop earrings little sleepers of agate. Her narrow Tutsi skull offered to the air as compliant an edge as the prow of a yacht to the waves, as the profile of Nefertiti to the oceans of time.

    Sittina showed me this profile, saying over her shoulder, "Come on in"; she swept back a shaggy branch of feathery bamboo and tugged open her swollen front door. "The house's a mess," she apologized. "The last au pair I had took a cushy government job, in the Bureau of Detribalization. The Tuareg are all busy being house-guards for the people who got rich during the famine, and the government's trying to retrain the slum-dwellers to become nomadic herdsmen, because the nomads are good for the ecology. Mind if I take a quick shower? Otherwise the leg muscles cramp."

    Her children had gathered around me curiously, solemn appraisers of a line of lovers. One child had orange hair-a sign, it relieved me to see, not of kwashiorkor but of Celtic sperm. "What is your name?" I asked him.

    "Ellellou."

    "Do you know what that means?"

    "It means solidarity."

    "No, that is wrong. It means freedom."

    "I don't care," the child told me, and turned on his heel to hide a trembling lip. He was gleefully pounced upon by his siblings as he sought to control his humiliated sobbing. They jostled and tumbled him like hyaenas at a hamstrung impala; but when they let him up, he was laughing. It was right, that I had not intervened. In the skirmish I had counted six heads, which totalled up, in welfare's new arithmetic, to two full pensions. My vest hugged my belly with premonitions of bourgeois comfort. A child slightly larger than the frizzy redhead, a girl in a Gucci pinafore, with a Nilotic slant to her eyes, asked me, "You love my mommy?"

    "I admire her speed," I said.

    "You going to take care of us?"

    Before I could frame another evasion, Sittina raced through the living-room wet and nude. Her long tapered thighs, her bean-shaped buttocks. "Damn towels are in the dryer," she called over her shoulder. "Tell the kids it's time for the bus."

    One of her children had been watching through a window, where the crowding flowers permitted a peephole; when he shouted, the others scrambled for their books, their slates, their hand-computers, their spiral-bound notebooks and supplementary cassettes. I helped them through the door, through the tangle of their rubber boots and clinging pet patas monkeys. The bus, imported yellow but overpainted with the national green, lurched to the shady corner and held its stop long enough to receive their noisy, needful bodies. Even the three-year-old was enrolled in a Montessori beadwork group. I breathed, in amplification of the salat as-subh with which I had ceremonialized the dawn, a silent prayer of thanks for free public education, the cornerstone of participatory democracy and domestic bliss.

    Sittina had returned to the living-room still naked.

    Her sharp small breasts, her high central pocket of soft curls. "Weren't in the dryer either," she said. "I remember I put them out on the line to save electricity. But nothing dries outdoors anymore. I'd go see, but some lousy American tourist'd take my picture.

    Really, they're so awful. The women in the souk, with those long red fingernails and blue hair in bandanas and those cracked whiskey voices. The West Germans are worse-all straps and fat and hiking boots.

    Remember how I used to complain about the Albanians? I'm sorry, you were right. I was wrong. We should have stayed isolationist. There are nice things in the shops now but who can afford them except the tourists? The boutiques up under the Gibbs Center are chic but they're always full of lepers." Noticing my eyes upon her body, she spun, in that room of incompleted curves, and asked. "What do you think? Don't tell me. I know. My ass is too skinny."

    As usual, she had raced on ahead of me.

    Later, when, with trembling legs, I went to the bathroom, there were plenty of towels there, fluffily clean and shockingly white, white as new snow, as raw salt. She, scenting the eschatological drift of my call, had chosen to sustain her side of our exchange in elemental, traditional costume. "Not too skinny," I answered numbly. "Just right." The numbness-Livingstone's in the mouth of the lion, the pious man's in the grip of his fate-I had experienced before in the course of this narrative, at most of its crucial turns.

    "Still?" Sittina asked flirtatiously, in profile, the long round brow of the Tutsi royal line as erotic, as meek and glistening, as the twin bulges of her taut buttocks. Her nipples were long and blue.

    "Still," Ellellou said, adding, "I must go away."

    "To the Balak with Sheba again?"

    "No."

    "Back to the Bulub with Kutunda?"

    "I think not."

    "Down to the underworld with Kadongolimi?"

    "This is a cruel litany."

    "Off to the States with Candy?"

    "She's left already. We're divorced. None of our friends was surprised; mixed marriages have a lot of extra stresses."

    "Any marriage is mixed. Where will you go now, poor Felix, and who with?"

    "With you? It's just a scenario. We could go somewhere where you could paint more seriously."

    "Not sure seriously's my style," she said, striding on long legs into her long living-room, with harassed-looking waves of both arms indicating the fibrous brown masks and musty Somali camel saddles that overlooked like a baffled animal chorus her twinkling furniture of smudged glass and scratched aluminum. Among the Africana she had hung or propped canvases more or less eagerly begun but left with blank corners and unfilled outlines. "I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. Or a finished anything, in this climate. Maybe it's palm trees and clay houses. You slave away, and what do you have in the end? A picture postcard from Timbuctoo."

    "The South of France," Ellellou said, "has very paintable trees." He had taken a step after her, she had grown so slender with distance, and Sittina answered his step by striding back to him, brown between her brown walls, and draping her long arms lightly on his shoulders. Tufts of armpit hair, still wet from the shower. Mustache traces above the corners of her smile, at the level of his eyes. "You smell like you want something," she said.

    "I want to consolidate," Ellellou confessed.

    "Then we ought to try us, as a starter."

    She did still coo, when she spread her legs. The mats on the floor, once they cleared away the children's toys, seemed in their marital haste soft enough. Beds are for toubabs, whose skins Mr.

    Yacub bred to lack the resilient top layer.

    Ellellou was excited by the five-petalled faces of the audience of oleander at the windows. He in her-his pelvis cradled in her elegant thighs, his hand cupping the firm ellipses beneath- Sittina rolled her eyes in wild Watusi display of the bloodshot whites, taking in the furniture and wall ornaments upside-down. She moaned, "My God, think of the packing! And the children's dental appointments!!"

    The good citizens of France no longer look up at the sight of noirs strolling down their avenues. Their African empire, which a passion for abstraction led them to carve from the most vacant sector of the continent, backed up on them a bit, like those other cartographic reservoirs for a century flooded with ink of European tints, and doused the home country with a sprinkling of dark diplomats, students, menial laborers, and political exiles. Even in Nice, along La Promenade des Anglais, which becomes Le Quai des @ltats-Unis, amid the singing of the beach pebbles and the signing of autographs by topless young leftovers from the Cannes Film Festival, an ebony family, decently attired, draws only that flickering glance with which a Frenchman files another apergu in the passionate cabinets of his esprit.

    Africa has been legitimized here by art.

    Delacroix skimmed the Maghrib and Picasso imported cubism from Gabon. Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet... noire est belle.

    The woman is extremely chic: tall as a model, with a little haughtily tipped head and a stride that swings the folds of her rainbow-dyed culottes.

    The man with her is relatively unprepossessing, insignificant even, shorter than she, half his face masked in NoIR sunglasses.

    He does not appear to be the father of the variegated children who march at their sides. From his carriage he might have been a soldier. The boys from their look of well-fed felicity will never be soldiers, or will make bad ones. The girls, the girls will be many wonderful things-dancers, mothers, strumpets, surgeons, stewardesses, acrobats, agronomists, magicians' assistants, mistresses, causes celebres, sunbathers, fading photographs in mental albums, goddesses glimpsed like cool black swans amid the glitter of an opera house, caped in chinchilla, one gloved hand resting on the gilded balcony rail as they turn to go. The pagans pray to females. It gladdens the writer's heart, to contemplate the future of his girls. The boys, he worries about. He fears they may fall, civilian casualties in the war of muchness that is certain to overtake the planet.

    The family lives, apparitions from a rumored continent, beyond Carabacel, where the streets become steep and the tile-topped garden walls bear a profusion of bougainvillea and a forgotten rusting pair of scissors, in the Rue de Ste.-Clement. Behind their walls they are assiduous, economical, conjugal, temperate, optimistic, dynamic, middling, and modern. The woman, it is rumored, paints. The children, the neighbors attest, take violin, anzad, clarinet, kakaki, piano, and sanza lessons. The small black man can be seen sitting at round white tables along the Quai, or a few blocks inland from the distracting, sail-speckled Mediterranean, at open-air cafes beside the river of traffic along the Esplanade de General de Gaulle. He has always a drink at his elbow, a Fanta, Campari-and-soda, or citron presse with a dash of anisette; he seems to be an eternally thirsty man. His other elbow pins down a sheaf of papers. He is writing something, dreaming behind his sunglasses, among the clouds of Vespa exhaust, trying to remember, to relive.

    Little news of Kush comes here. France has become what China once was-an island of perfect civilization, self-satisfying, decaying, deaf.

    What does it care for the smoothly continuing coups in sandy lands where once its second sons in cerulean pillbox hats chased blue-skinned Tuareg deeper and THE COUP deeper into the dunes? At an OPEC conference in Geneva, among the oil ministers taken hostage and harangued by an Austrian divinity-school dropout and his emaciated girl friend, was named one Michael Azena [misprint] of Couche. He survived the episode, though the revolutionaries smashed his wristwatch. Otherwise, Kush comes as a dusky whiff reminiscent of peanut fodder, or a green band of sunset sky toward Biot, or the taste of orange in a sip of Cointreau, or the shade of the Cinzano ombrelle overhead, faintly suggestive, when the sea breeze flaps its fringed edges, of the shade of a tent, the most erotic shelter in the world. Kush is around us in these hints, these airy coded bulletins, but the crush of present reality-the oblique temperate sun, the sensational proximity of the sea-renders these clues no more than fragile scraps of wreckage that float to the surface, fewer and fewer as the waves continue to break, to hiss, to slide, to percolate through the pebbles. All yesterdays are thus submerged, continental chunks sunk from sight that once were under our feet. How did he come here? the pink passersby perhaps ask, insulted by the negre's air of preoccupation, amid the beauties of their city, his face downcast to the cahiers in which he pens long tendrils like the tendrilous chains of contingency that have delivered us, each, to where we sit now on the skin of the world, water-lilies concealing our masses of root.

    Those ivho have gone before them also plotted, but Allah is the master of every plot: He knows the deserts of every soul.

    The man is happy, hidden. The sea breeze blows, the waiters ignore him. He is writing his memoirs. No, I should put it more precisely: Colonel Ellellou is rumored to be working on his memoirs.

 

The End