of wanton exertions. "Why would I be?" "You mourn the king." "Had the whim ever seized him, he would have done worse to me. He took me up, I think, because he was amused by my ambivalences. Even his mercies were sardonic. He sat on the world lightly, like the spider that is immune from the web's stickiness." "Yet you found my hatred vulgar, and further bear against me the grudge men always bear against those women they have conquered. It is a puzzle: the men who need women hate them, and those who do not, like your comrade Ezana, do not." "More your comrade than mine now. You have a magical timepiece to mirror his, and the two of you giggle in Sara, hatching my doom." "You are hatching it," Kutunda said, as quickly as she had set an ornament to her ear and taken it away; yet she could not take this truth away, though from the pinch of her lips she wished she could. Unclean, we are all unclean, with our smudges of truth. I said to her, in explanation of my impotence, "You have lost the good smell of dirt you had in the ditches of the north. Now you stink of French soap. I cannot make love through the fragrance of our exploiters." "You are sad. Forgive me my fun with Ezana. He is an innocent man, but so full of words and ideas; his being practical gives us much to talk about. It is exciting. We talk of the refugee camps, of reeducation, of irrigation, of eliciting capital investment from the superpowers and multi-national corporations, with low interest rates and twenty-year moratoriums." "It is futile. We have nothing they need. We are no one's dominos. Tell me a story, Kutunda, to distract me from my shame, as you used to in the ditches, when you would come to me from poor limp Wadal." Remembering this man made me wonder, Could she be the source of impotence, driving her from man to man in an orgy of betrayal? These modern women have yet to evolve a modern male to service them. She told me a strange tangled story, of intricate blasphemy, as once of Wadal urinating on the fetishes, only now of Michaelis Ezana, who beneath his buttery black outward form was Roul the desert devil, a creature of blanched bones and arbitrary flesh, who sets lakes all around us, yet renders the spot where we stand burningly dry. Men in their thirst bite their fingertips and suck the salty blood; they kill their camels and drink the mucoid fluid in the stomach of the carcass. In this guise Ezana rules Kush, driving the whirlwind of the Tuareg on before him, eroding the pious and egalitarian republic of his archenemy Colonel Ellellou. In the remoteness of the Ippi Rift there is a city to rival Istiqlal; here men copulate with pangolins, and women allow hyraxes to enter their vaginas, and all the moisture that Allah had allotted for the land of Kush is kept in a giant transparent sack underground, entered through a cave mouth of golden arches, a wobbly sloshing bubble deeper than a gypsum mine, and descending into it Ezana takes the form of an octopus, and sucks screaming, drowning maidens into his beak, and awaits the maiden, a maiden dusky and fearless and virginal, with teeth dainty as seed-pearls, who with a scimitar of tourmaline will sever the octopus beak of Roul though he eject a cloud of ink; and then she will puncture the transparent sack so that water will flood the land, and the bones of her father's herds will come to life, lowing, and the tamarisk and Mimosa ferruginea will bloom, and camels will become intelligent dolphins, and what other turbulent nonsense Ellellou was never to know, for he fell asleep, amid the sliding of Kutunda's solid limbs and the nightmare shapes her voice conjured up. He was awoken at dawn by twin sharp needs: to urinate and to pray. His duties performed, he lay beside the woman; in her sleep her hair had made tentacles across her face and a trail of saliva from the corner of her lips gleamed indeed like some trace of a subaqueous struggle. Through the slats at the foot of the pallet the white flank of the Palais
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