The Coup by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

saw him as a child, in his parents' well-padded, musty home on some curving suburban street, squinting into the fragile glued frame of a model airplane, or licking the sweetened mounts of his stamp collection, unaware that, opening beneath him, an abyss in the carpet, a chute of time would bring him to the respectable adventurism of the foreign service and this evening moment, amid a mob of Tuareg, while a strip of saffron still lingered above the westward safety of Sahel. A stir of pity, like the first unease that will lead to vomit, I bit down. He was young on the ladder of power, still assigned to the negligible nations, the licorice and caramel and chocolate people in their little trays at the front of the store; hard work and no filching would take him, as his gray hair whitened and his sleek wife wrinkled, deeper into the store, to the back room where the wholesalers grunted, amid the aromas of burlap and vinegar, their penny wise accommodations. Better for him to have become a professor of Government at a small snowy Midwestern college. My mind's eye held his wife, who would be freckled and fair and already watching her weight and slightly hardened in the role of foreign service helpmate, too ready to repack the constantly pruned possessions, to adjust her manner to a new race of servants, to learn a new smattering of shopping phrases, to cater gaily, adroitly, and appropriately to those couples above them, below them, and beside them in the dance of legations and overseas offices. I even knew how she would make love: with abashed aggression, tense in her alleged equality of body, primed like a jammed bazooka on the pornographic plastic fetishes and sexual cookbooks of her white tribe and yet, when all cultural discounts are entered, with something of gracious-ness, of helpless feeling, of an authentic twist at the end.... The squirm of nausea again. I pictured their flat in Dakar or Lagos, their "starter house" in a suburb of Maryland or Virginia, with its glass tables and incessant electricity, an island of light carved from our darkness, and my pity ceased. I told the tall intruder, "I am a citizen of Kush, delegated to ask why you are troubling our borders and what means this mountain of refuse?" "This isn't refuse, pal-it's manna. Donated to your stricken area by the generosity of the American government and the American people acting in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. U. s. Air Force C-130's have been flying this stuff in to the emergency airfield in northern Sahel and I've been sent down here from the USD office in Tangier at the urging of the FAO people in Rome to locate the bottleneck vis-a-vis distribution of the emergency aid to the needy areas of Kush and to expedite the matter. I've been sitting out here in the underside of nowhere frying my ass off for two weeks trying to contact somebody in authority. Whoever the hell you are, you're the best thing I've seen today." "May I ask a few questions?" "Shoot." "Who was it, pray, who informed you of this supposed neediness?" He touched his sunburned forehead and shoved back the sheaf of dry hair there. His suit, designed for cocktail parties on embassy lawns, had rumpled, out here in these badlands. His sweat had caked dark not only on his collar but along the hems of his pockets, wherever skin repeatedly touched cloth. "W r ho're you trying to kid?" he asked me. "These cats are starving. The whole world knows it, you can see "em starve on the six o'clock news every night. The American people want to help. We know this country's socialist and xenophobic, we know Ellellou's a schizoid paranoid; we don't give a fuck. This kind of humanitarian catastrophe cuts across the political lines, as far as my government's concerned." "Are you aware," I asked him, "that your government's cattle vaccination project increased herd size even as the forage and water of this region were being exhausted?" "I've read that in some report,