The Coup by John Updike

curves that amused her, underlined the desolation known only to those who live between two worlds. But who, in the world, now, does not live between two worlds? "I'm glad," I said to her, of the Chagall; and of the drought: "We are taking steps." "God, Felix, the depression rolls off you like a stench." "Sorry. Something about you touched me just then." She made a swift movement, testing her hair, which was pulled back from her skull and intricately pinned by two dried fish spines. The women of Kush spare no pains to knit and knot their hair in extraordinary patterns. No doubt there is a Marxist explanation for this, having to do with a disproportion of available labor to available materials, all history testifying, with the tedious workmanship that crowds our museum cases, to a terrible excess of life, of time, that overruns all crannies as tropical tendrils embroider every inch of available light. Sittina's gesture had been flirtatious. She offered, haltingly, "I have an appointment to go out, but if my lord... has come in search of his... rights, I will stay. Cheerfully. It once... we... I am attempting to apologize for something I am not certain I caused. Until the Revolution, we were together enough. Is that not so?" "It is so, Sittina. Your shadow in a dark room ..." I could not finish, the memory slipped its sheath. "Did I become an enemy of the people, that I had to be rebuffed?" The recollection of her warm shadow, the sudden scissoring embrace of her long thighs, my hand underneath those taut buttocks, overlaid the stuffily immaculate living-room with its evil dance of balusters and staring glass objets, and I found myself too sliced, by successive waves of lost experience, to explain well what I did wish to share: "Under the old king, there was a kind of life possible, which we borrowed from him, his vitality and his unexamined assumption that he was right, right to demand and consume what so many strained to donate out of their poverty. When he was displaced, much that was let us say healthy and morally neutral went with him, inextricably involved as it was with the corruption, the bourgeois feudalism, the unpurged way of looking at things. You and I were among the innocent sweepings. I am sorry." She said, "I had forsaken my father for you, at a time when he lived hunted in the mountains. When the tide of massacre reversed, he beckoned me to take my place among the Tutsi as a princess. I declined. And still I stay here with you, though all Africa says you are crazy." "Is that so?" "It is so that they say it. The truth of what they say, I cannot judge. Our traditions treat madness as sacred, and we look to the sacred to rule us." "The appointment you are about to keep, does it excite you?" "It did. Now you've confused me." "Remember our trysts, under the stadium, when we were children of the king?" "The king, the king. You are king now." "Do you still make that cooing noise, when you spread your legs?" "I have said, I will stay." She spat, a Tutsi courtesy. "G. My blood is heavy in me." "I must say, you're spreading a lot of guilt around." "Some day, when the land is healthy again, it would please me to be enlisted among the men who serve you, Sittina." "You deserted, when this army contained no body but yours. And I understand you brought back a Sara wench from the north, and have installed her above a basket shop." "A matter of state, merely. The woman acts as my adviser." "Ask me my advice"-her words kept rhythm with the vigor of her circular motions as she wound a turban about her skull, and finished with a swash around her throat-"and it would be to give Kush back to old Edumu and the frogs and get some decent pate back in the shops." "I liked what you said about madness," I said. "Did you know," I went on, unwilling, somehow, to have this dishevelled visit terminate, "that the British once had a plan of flooding the entire Sahara, before they realized it was a plateau? They thought it would fill like a