The Coup by John Updike Page A

bathtub because it was under the Mediterranean on their maps!" Sittina was setting off, swooping here and there to kiss her children like a black heron dipping her narrow head to catch fish; half-unthinkingly she finished by kissing her husband, the swoop and dip being minimal here, because the dictator of Kush was a mere six inches shorter than she. Her breath, snatched inwards in the exultation of her departure, smelled of anise. As she retreated, the cut of her culottes, and a lift given her figure by the addition of the turban, made her look high-assed. "I love you," said Ellellou, unheard. The trial of the king proceeded smoothly. The revelation that he was still alive proved, surprisingly, to be no surprise. The populace had always sensed it. The monarch's health was still drunk in the palm-wine bars, in the narrow stalls where the faithful chew khat while the pagans swallow barasa and guinea-corn beer. Even in the public schools, in the lists of the Lords of Wanjiji, the reign of Edumu IV was learned with an open dash, without a date of termination. For the sake of the foreign press, then, developments within the Palais d'Administration des Noires were staged through a successive lifting of veils of rumor. The first rumor was that the king had been living in exile across the river, among the loyal Wanj who continued their life of trading fish and hippo teeth for salt and juju beads under the remote rule of Captain Bokassa of former Oubangui-Shari. The next rumor was that the king had ill-advisedly crossed the Grionde to lead a revisionist, pro-monarchial coup; this preposterous attempt, founded on fantastical CIA intelligence that the people of Kush were disenchanted with L"'@lmergence and SCRME, of course failed, encountering on the north bank of the river the magnificent solidarity of the Kushite national conscience. The third rumor claimed that, amid terrific loss of life among his followers, the king was taken into custody, and (this was the fourth rumor) captured papers revealed that the severe food shortages of recent years had been caused not by the climate of Kush nor its bountiful soil but by royalist conspirators within the administration. According to the fifth rumor, Lieutenant-Colonel Michaelis Ezana was superbly extirpating these anti-people, pro-feudalist traitors from the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Transport, which had been discovered exporting foodstuffs to neighboring Sahel, along whose border one massive illegal cache had been discovered and destroyed by the personal vigilance and action of Colonel Ellellou himself, in response to information provided by a female patriot, Kutunda Traore, a griot of the doughty Sara tribe. Mentioning Kutunda had been Ezana's idea, not mine. He had met her at my office, where she would visit me during the heat of the mid-day to enjoy the air-conditioning and to bring me lunch of peppered raw mutton and honied manioc from the Hurriyah market, and to borrow some lu. The rustle and intricate engraving of paper money delighted her innocence; in the village of her girlhood there had been, apart from heads of cattle, only two types of currency, both rare-giant bars of iron impossible for a woman to lift, and tiny round mirrors that, if dropped, were hard to find. Ezana spoke a rusty dialect of Sara, and spent hours with Kutunda, giggling and yelping over his own grammatical errors. For the people of Kush, a pronouncement was promulgated:
    TO caret ALL CITIZENS OF T caret USH @leaence Supreme Qonseil T caret evolutionnaire et Militaire pour Vandmergence announces that miserable Sdumu formerly known as @lgreater-than ord of Wanjiji has been found Quilty of High Qrimes and caret Misdemeanors against the People and "Physical environment of Kush, leading to Widespread Shortages, Dislocations, and Suffering.
    The
    TS-IATIONAL Honor of Kush and the
    Will of less-than Allah demand that
    Justice be
    "Done to this T left-brace eactionary and "Discredited Exploiter of