The Coup by John Updike

forward andwitha leverlike stroke altered the quality of the smallest of the puppets posed on a makeshift stage. The head was held up. Then other puppets, unpredicted, appeared: blue-clad Tuareg, the lower halves of their faces covered by tagilmusts, perhaps twenty of them, on fine Arabian horses rode in from the eastern side of the square, mingled with the khaki men on the green trucks, and after a tussle carried off the smaller of the king's two bodily remains. Up close, Opuku received a slash on his arm, and Colonel Ezana's wife was the butt of an indecent suggestion; but the very speed of the attack (which had the crowd been as numerous as expected would have been disastrously impeded) and its apparently limited objective of carrying off the severed head enabled it to pass like a loud but harmless wind. Some of the crowd thought the episode merely a part of the governmental pageant that had been arranged. Ellellou with admirable presence of mind addressed those spectators that had not fled the scene. "Citizens of Kush! Fear not! The alleged Lord of Wanjiji is dead, his would-be rescuers have had to content themselves with the unspeakable refuse of his physical remains! His soul has gone to everlasting fire! The forces of imperialism and reaction have again been thwarted! There is no doubt that these brazen terrorists are hirelings of the American paper tiger, or perhaps fanatical capitalists disguised in the robes of the Tuareg! We of Le Supreme Conseil Revolutionnaire et Militaire pour l'@lmergence laugh at their presumption and invite the socialized people of Kush to defecate upon their individualistic, entrepreneurial violence!! The loathsome theft shall be avenged, have no fear! Disperse to your homes, and prepare for the deluge! You have witnessed the enactment of a purgation profoundly pleasing to Allah, and deeply beneficial to our green and pleasant land!" Ellellou shouted all this, in a rapture of abandonment to the furious wind within him, that could be vented only into the imaginary ear of his nation, but in his private aspect knew that his accusations were problematical, for he had seen the eyes of the raider who had snatched the king's head from Opuku's slashed arm, and they were not the wolvish eyes of a Targui or a North American, frosted and blue, but amber and slant like the survival-minded eyes of wild swine. Also, Ellellou, transfixed by his battle-calm, waiting through a microscopically lucid series of milliseconds to be tumbled like a rabbit by a lion, too tranquil to think of lifting his bloodied scimitar in self-defense, scented through the flurry of odors of unwashed flesh and Arabian horsehair, a subtle sweetness chiming with his memories of the banquet in the rocket bunker. Vodka. While the capital still buzzed of these portentous events (which the majority of the indolent populace had lacked the civic conscience to witness, and which, in the recounting to the unpatriotically absent, became unreal), Ellellou descended into the Hurriyah district in the disguise of an orange-seller, to visit Kutunda. Now that the effects of the drought and famine were felt even in the metropolis, there were no oranges to sell, and the peddler instead offered to the echoing, anfractuous alleys the mere image of oranges, put into song: "Round and firm as the breasts of one's beloved's younger sister, she ivho exposes her gums when she laughs, and spies from her pallet wondering when her time will come; to the touch delicately rough like one's own testicles, stippled waxy hides tearable and acrid when torn, staining one's fingers with the sharpest essence of the juice; when the hide is scattered like thick rose petals, the fruit is found partitioned in quarter-moons, each in its papery baby skin dulcet as dust; parted from its many brothers too greedily, each segment will weep bright tears of juice, foreshadowing the explosion in the consumer's mouth; how sweet is the water of the juice! Our lips sting, the rivers of