The Coup by John Updike Page B

the less-than Jvlany, Who in the course of his caret Moc backslash ery of a Tggeign appropriated to Himself the caret Means of Production and the Headwaters of Revenue, as well as Wantonly and without caret Jvlercy ordering the Deaths and Ignominies of those who served Him, and privately doubting to his Intimates the One True Qod, the Compassionate and caret Merciful, Whose Prophet is caret Mohamet.
    Aforesaid

Couldumu's
    Very
    Vresence in the
    @land dilutes and Undermines the Scientific Socialism of Rush; this 'Blot upon Our Flag will be Joyously T caret emoved the twelfth Day of Shawwal in this Year st59J caret A. h., in the Square of the caret Mosque of the Day of Disaster, within the Holy Qapital of Istiqlal.
    Colonel H. F. Ellellou
    President of Kush Chairman of SCRME
    This announcement, printed on green placards, was posted on the walls of the city, and was chanted, in Arabic, Berber, French, Tamahaq, Salu, Sara, Tshi, and Ga, from the minarets of the mosques, from the windows of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, from the weathered wooden balconies of the Indian shops and the reed roofs of the riverside souk. Word had even been posted in the panoramic revolving restaurant of the glass skyscraper the East Germans had erected to the glory of socialism. Yet the crowd that came to the execution was small. By mid-morning the sun stood high and the clay of the square, packed by the passage of footsteps to the smoothness of ivory, was white to the eye and scalding to unsandalled feet. Several military trucks had been aligned and the sides removed, to make a platform for the ceremony. King Edumu, bobbing with the aftereffects of his interrogation, which had focussed on the soles of his feet, and blinking in this unaccustomed breadth of light, which penetrated even his crazed corneas, was led forth in white robes by some soldiers who, it was clear from their carriage and aura, had greeted this great day with tumblers of kaikai. The meagre throng, at least half of them children given a school holiday, attempted a cheer that ebbed into puzzled sullen silence as the king, his little body more than once having to be disentangled from his voluminous, luminous lungi, was lifted into position on the flatbed of the central truck, where Ellellou, Ezana, and the nine other colonels were seated on folding chairs. A headblock had been hacked of blood-red camwood. The king stood awkwardly beside it, not knowing at first which way to face. Behind him, in a ragged arc doubled, as a rainbow is sometimes doubled, by an arc of parasols above it, wives and offspring and lesser government officials crowded the subsidiary trucks and even perched on the cab roofs. Of Ellellou's four wives, none had deigned to appear, but Kutunda Traore was present, resplendent in a cascading emerald boubou and a turban that Sittina had designed. Vivaciously speaking to one bureaucrat and then another, tossing her head and switching her hips, she had appointed herself the hostess of the occasion. Ellellou searched her face vainly for traces of the smudged whore he had found among the well-diggers. Why, he wondered, generation after generation, century after century, must vulgarity repossess all the energy? Still, Kutunda's childish delight and stocky self-importance alone struck, in this atmosphere of embarrassed, underpopulated anti-climax, the ringing bronze note of gleeful release and public complicity he had hoped for. Not quite alone; for there was another who entered unembarrassed into the occasion, and that was the king. Though crippled by age and inquisition, and more insecure in his gestures under the vacuous dome of sky than in the close-walled cells of his confinement, the king had the forms for his feelings. Beneath the glitter of his gold headband and the cloud of his unshorn wool his fig-dark features shone with formal courage. The little arc of his nose aimed, amid the insolent hubbub, in the direction of the citizenry. They, with the exception of