The Coup Read Online Free PDF

respective alphabets. "IH!" the colonel proposed, milking the explosive sound for its maximum richness. I tactfully responded with the beautiful terminal form of "3K to to was he boasted, "le plus belle letter all over goddam world!" I outdid him, I dare believe, gracefully proposing, "@l." There was a presentation of medals, and a monumental picture-book of the treasures accumulated by the subterranean monks of Kiev, and then these strange men began to dance from a squatting position and in demonstration of manliness to chew their liquor glasses like so many biscuits. Since they were their own best audience for these feats, I persuaded a young and relatively sober aide to show us to our chambers. Several of the officers staggered along, and one especially burly Slav playfully planted a foot in Mtesa's backside as we knelt to our deferred salat al-isha. Failing to fall asleep promptly within the smothering soft- ness of the Soviet bed, with its brocaded canopy and its stony little packets for pillows, I reflected back upon the customs and the orgy we had been privileged to witness, and located along the borders of my memory an analogy that seemed clarifying: with their taut pallor, bristling hair devoid of a trace of a curl, oval eyes, short limbs, and tightly packed bodies whose muscular energy seemed drawn into a knot at the back of their necks, these Russians reminded me of nothing so much as the reckless, distasteful packs of wild swine that when I was a child would come north from the bogs by the river to despoil the vegetable plantings of our village. They had a bristling power and toughness, to be sure, but lacked both the weighty magic of the lion and the hippo and the weightless magic of the gazelle and the shrike, so that the slaughter of one with spears and stones, as he squealed and dodged-the boars were not easy to kill-took place in an incongruous hubbub of laughter. Even in death their eyes kept that rheumy glint whereby the hunted betray the pressures under which they live. Once during the night the telephone in our overfurnished chamber rang. When I picked it up, there was no voice at the other end, nor was there a click. Through the long tunnel of silence I seemed to see into the center of the Kremlin, where terror never sleeps. And our hosts were up early to see us off. Their uniforms were fresh and correct, and their faces com^th square semi-Asiatic faces that appear too big for their thin features-were shaved, betraying only in an abnormally keen sheen, a drained, thin-skinned look, their carousal of a few hours before. It was their rule never to stray aboveground, even when, before the famine became extreme, fresh milk and meat might have enhanced their diet of frozen and powdered provisions-as if even one slice of authentically rank native goat cheese would fatally contaminate this giant capsule, this hermetic offshoot of the insular motherland. In this they were unlike the Americans, who wandered everywhere like children, absurdly confident of being loved. Nor was the Soviet exclusiveness confident and inward, like that of the French. By the terms of their treaty-at their insistence, not ours-a soldier or technician found afoot in the open air was to be jailed and segregated from the populace. One's impression could only be of a power immensely timorous, a behemoth frightened of even such gaunt black mice as we poor citizens of Kush. We shook hands, the colonel and I. I thanked him for his hospitality, he thanked me for mine. He said Russia and Kush were brothers in progressivism and in the unanimous patriotism of their polyglot peoples. I responded to Colonel Sirin (his bespectacled interpreter being still abed comatose) as exactly as I could; our two peoples, I said, were possessed of an "essence religieiise" and our lands of u les vacances magni-fiques." Mtesa and Opuku witnessed this unintelligible exchange wonderingly, and the Mercedes, coughing on its heady swig of Siberian diesel fuel, took us up