Read Online The Coup by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

rotting canopies of its dusty souk, its rickety wharves and pirogues slender as spears-for hours before Michaelis Ezana reported from his adjoining office, and the two drank together their morning chocolate and in their unending dialectical contention mapped the nation's path into the future. Ezana was all facts and figures, a proponent of loans from the World Bank and grants from UNESCO, of schemes for dams and irrigation, of capital investments cleverly pried from the rivalry between the two superpowers (and that shadowy third, China, that has the size but not as it were the mass, the substance, to be called super), and more lately of hopes of financial rescue from their brethren in Islam, the oily, dollar-drunk sheiks of Kuwait and Qatar. At the outset of L'fimer-gence, Ellellou had shared Ezana's enthusiasm for these manipulations of their sovereignty, as elaborate and phantasmal as the manipulations of the teeming spirit-world conducted by the witches and marabouts beyond the Grionde. But, seeing the plans come to nothing, or less than nothing-the expensive peanut-shelling equipment fall into disuse for want of repairmen, the wells drilled become the focus of a ravaged pasturage, the one dam constructed become the source of a plague of bilharzia-infested snails-Ellellou had retreated from these impure involvements and watched with a sardonic detachment Ezana's energetic attempts to engage the world in the fortunes of Kush. The Minister of the Interior's habitual dress, formerly the rude khaki of a fighter for the people, now tended toward suits tailored in London, Milanese loafers, Parisian socks with rococo clocks, and, though silk was expressly forbidden to men by all the accreted moral authority of Islam, Hong Kong shirts of a suspicious suppleness; on his wrist he wore a Swiss watch of which the face, black, lit up with the hour and minute in Arabic numerals when a small side button was pressed. This watch fascinated his subordinates, who wondered where, in its scanty black depths, the device coiled the many minutes it was not called upon to display. So it was with Michaelis Ezana, who could produce whatever facts and figures were asked for, yet whose depths remained opaque. And scanty; for, however able and ambitious, Ezana utterly lacked that inward dimension, of ethical, numinous brooding, whereby a leader bulges outward from the uncertainties of his own ego and impresses a people. An observer seeing the two leaders bow their heads together in conference would have noticed that, though equally short and black, of the two Ezana gave more blackness back; blackness irrepressibly bounced and skidded off the spherical, luminous surfaces of his face. Whereas Ellellou's was a mat black, the product of a long soaking-in. He tolerated Ezana because it was etched, on the crystal plane of things possible, that Ezana would never succeed him. Ellellou's popularity, as reports drifted south of his flamboyant personal victory on behalf of the people against capitalist subversion, had surged to a height where suppositions of madness would not disturb it; so he dared, this morning, as the chocolate cooled at their elbows, to confide his visions to Ezana. "Returning from the site of the repelled invasion," Ellellou said, "in the region of Hair, we saw a strange thing." "A strange truck," Ezana quickly clarified. "As Minister of the Interior, Comrade, I have taken this sinister matter firmly in hand. The Bureau of Transport is at a loss. Of the two hundred twenty-six motored vehicles registered in Kush, seventy-seven of them public taxis and one hundred and four at the disposal of members of the government, the remaining forty-five registrants have been investigated and none answers to the description of a flatbed four-axle carrier of compressed scrap chassis." "Who gave you, Comrade Ezana, such a complete description?" "There were four of you in the automobile, of whom two, I believe, were awake. Draw your own conclusions." Mtesa, a