Free The Coup by John Updike Page B

even needles and thread, that there was nothing for sale in the markets but the cheapest sort of merikani, faded bolts the missionaries must have brought, and that since the Revolution had reduced the European community so drastically there were no customers anyway, the wives of the Kuwaitis never came out of their compounds, the Albanian women were stringy-haired savages smelling of wet wool, and that awful Mrs. Ezana-how can he stand her?, she's such a bluestocking-went everywhere bare-breasted, as a sign of political undeviation. Pas chic, Sittina said. Her words had all the substance of a complaint but not, truly, the tone. I felt I had come on the afternoon of a visit to or by some lover; hence her benign, if abstracted and hurried, manner. She continued, "What are you doing about the drought? Even the price of a goat head is out of sight. A single cassava brings two hundred lu. You put some millet paste on the windowsill to curdle and in five minutes it's stolen. The refugees from the north come into town and rob- what else can the poor things do? My night guard had his throat slit the other night and walked home in a sulk. Don't ask me where still was, I forget. They took the stainless steel flatware and two of my old trophies but hadn't the sophistication to steal the Chagall." The Chagall, of the customary upside-down Jew smiling at a green moon, had been our wedding present from the king. Now it hung on the far wall between an Ife harvest-drama mask and a Somali saddle-cloth of an exceptionally elaborate pattern. Sittina, who bore the name of a Queen of Shendy, had furnished the spacious living-room of the villa in a scattered "artistic" style with sub-Saharan artifacts whose solemn blacks and browns, whose surfaces of red-stained animal hide and hollowed gourd still redolent of the organic matrix from which they had been gently lifted by the last stage of manufacture consorted with the glib rectilin-earity and mechanically perfect surfaces of the Danish armchairs and glass-and-aluminum coffee tables that had been salvaged from the pillage of the European quarters in 1968. The whole room, with its cracks and gaps and air of casual assemblage and incompleted intentions, seemed an insubstantial sham compared to a room I could suddenly remember, of white-painted moldings and unchipped knickknacks, of impregnable snugness and immovable solidity, tight as the keel of a ship, carpeted wall to wall, crammed with upright, polished, nubbled, antimacassared furniture including a cabineted television set and a strange conical table of three platterlike shelves that held a gleaming trove of transparent paperweights containing in their centers crinkled paper or plastic flowers, evil eyes of all colors whose stare seemed a multiform sister to the grave gray-green Cyclops stare of the unlit television screen, all this furniture in this exotic far-off room sharing a feeling of breathless fumigated intrusion-proof cleanness that pressed on my chest as I waited for someone, love embodied, as perfect and white as the woodwork that embowered her, to descend the stairs; the varnished treads and slender balusters did a kind of pirouette at the foot of the stairs, a skillful cold whirl of carpentry that broke, by one of those irruptions to which my mind was lately prone, through the dusky mud tints of Sittina's villa, the tender fragility of things African, the friable dishes and idols and houses of earth moistened and shaped and dried again, of hides and reeds crumbling back to grass and dust, of the people themselves for their bright moment of laughter rising out of the clay and sinking again, into the featureless face of Allah, which it is the final bliss for believers to behold, through the seven veils of Paradise. My memory laid a cold curse on the present moment. Sittina's offhand beauty, the sense of suspension her mind spun, in the disarrayed room, as she waited for me to leave, so she could proceed with that life of uncompleted