At the People’s Assembly, Kaniürü’s adversary ran after him and shot him in the leg. Kaniürü fell, but despite the pain of his wound managed to limp away.
And then another crack of thunder, followed by six more, each louder than the previous one. It is raining bombs in the land! some people shouted, the entire place now a chaos of anguished cries and running feet.
Caught unaware, the armed forces at the assembly assumed that a coup was taking place at the State House. Soldiers and police waited for word from their superiors, who waited in turn for word from theirs, who waited for word from their commander in chief. Word never came. The chain of command seemed to have broken somewhere. Uncertainty and panic led to random shootings. Terrified people were running to and fro, pointing to the sky and saying, It is doomsday.
The mushroom clouds forming near the State House after the seven cracks of thunder astonished everyone.
Upon seeing the helicopter in the sky, Sikiokuu had given his thugs the go-ahead to carry out the kidnapping of the wizard. Now he was looking for paper to attest to his support of the revolution. Up with the revolution, he wrote and posted his broadside on the windshield. He stared in wonder at the all-consuming smoke, swallowing even the helicopter. Though now a supporter of the revolution, he did not want to be caught in the crossfire between the revolutionaries and defenders of the current regime. In a coup d’etat, it was everybody for himself.
Everyone with a car was trying to flee the capital for the countryside. The congestion was frightening. Impatient horns blared. Visibility was impaired by the thick, foul smoke bedeviling those fleeing in cars and on foot. Covering the body of the Wizard of the Crow with her own, Nyawlra felt warm blood oozing. Please, Kamltl, please, don’t die on me, she begged.
29
Furyk and company ran down State House Road, with Kaboca at the rear shouting directions and urging them not to give up hope for, as he put it, they were only minutes away from the American haven.
Ambassador Gemstone had already given orders that any white person escaping the violence of the revolution should be let in without questions. Those in front entered the haven without any restraint. Wilfred Kaboca was the last to arrive, only to see the gates close before his eyes. Thinking that the guards did not understand, he banged the gate, shouting, We were together! They are my colleagues, you know! But they did not.
A bullet from inside the embassy felled Dr. Wilfred Kaboca. Too shocked to even moan, he somehow raised himself, his right hand on the left side of his chest trying to hold back blood, and amid the foul darkness he went to the highway to seek help to the hospital. No driver would stop. Dr. Kaboca, personal physician to the dictator of Aburlria, bled to death on the side of the Ruler’s Highway.
30
The following day people took courage and went to the grounds of the Parliament buildings and law courts, the site of the People’s Assembly. Bloated corpses were strewn here and there. It was hard to tell whether the vile stench was from this decomposition or from the dark mist of the day before, issuing from the State House. The mist had spread across the sky, shutting out the sun, the moon, and the stars, plunging the whole country into darkness, and even later, when the sun, the moon, and the stars were able to penetrate the darkness, the whole country seemed enveloped in a sickening pollution.
SECTION II
1
When official word about the thunder, smog, and carnage was not forthcoming, people started saying that maybe the Ruler was dead and the military had taken over the government, the truth of this seemingly borne out by the only visible face of the government: armored vehicles now and then patrolling the streets of the capital and major cities. A six-p.m. curfew had been put in place, but it was not strictly enforced and nobody was arrested for ignoring it.
But why was the military not being forthright about assuming power? Some argued for a failed coup led by noncommissioned officers displeased with their wages like everybody else. Though the coup had failed, a bullet had struck the Ruler, who was now in hiding, giving his wound time to heal. Others said, No, he is merely playing mind games. Have you forgotten that other time, not so long ago, when he let out rumors that he was suffering from throat cancer, only to emerge from his seclusion to heap scorn on all who had prematurely celebrated his death? Did he not also do this and that? Every story was dissected, reinvented, reinterpreted, many times over, because people had no hard facts on which to base a true account of what had happened at the State House. Some claimed, without disclosing their sources, that after the first or second explosion, seven or eight white men were seen running from the State House, a black man giving chase, followed at some distance by black youth, and when the white men reached the American embassy, the gates were opened and the white men entered but the black man was left outside, wagging his finger at them, accusing them of having bombed the State House. The black man was shot and the youth who had been following fled the scene. The black man was never seen again, and neither, for that matter, were the seven or eight whites.
The more the unbearable stench of the foul smog suggested environmental disaster, the more frustration, anger, and fear grew. In every village in every region all over the country, people began to demand that the government tell the truth; there was even talk of resuming demonstrations. Religious leaders called for a day of prayer, and workers for a general strike. Multiparty democracy now became the new clarion call. Soon word was out: the Ruler would not come out in the open because he was scared of Mr. Multiparty.
The Global Bank released a statement that the current absence of leadership and the recent mysterious happenings were putting serious doubts in the minds of investors about the political stability in the country.
It was Big Ben Mambo, Minister of Information, who broke the news: the Ruler had set a date when he would address Parliament and the nation, to be carried live on radio and television. Newspapers were told to plan for special editions, because the Ruler would be announcing a special gift from himself to the nation.
Big Ben Mambo’s statement served only to stir the pot: what about the Ruler’s rumored illness? Since coming back from America, the Ruler had not appeared in public: why now? What had prompted this unlikely promise of generosity? And the unthinkable: was he about to abdicate?
2
Parliament was packed. The cabinet, members of Parliament, and even some foreign diplomats had arrived hours before the appointed time. The media, in full fever, hoped to glean anything that might make sense of the great Aburlrian mystery: the seven cracks of thunder and the unimaginable smog. American television, which had refused to grant the Ruler an interview when he was in America, now begged for an exclusive with the Ruler. Anyone with a radio or television was glued to his set, crowded by those without.
The speaker of the house struck the table with a mallet. The eagerly awaited session was about to begin.
“True, Haki ya Mungu, I kept wondering how he would come to the Parliament,” said A.G. “What carriage was he going to ride in? How would he enter the building, for I had not heard anything about the doors being enlarged. Would he be pushed through the entrance the way he was once squeezed into the jumbo jet? What would he talk about? Would he mention the fate of the Wizard of the Crow? And what would he say about the rumors of his pregnancy? Questions upon questions …”
Some workers had taken the afternoon off, a few unofficially, for nobody wanted the news to pass him by. A.G. knew of a tea shop, Wvra-no-nda, with a television, and he got there early only to find that others had gotten there before him, but he positioned himself where he could see the screen clearly. All crowded around the television set the way bees swarm around a hive, buzzing. When they saw the Ruler appear, they fell silent.
3
The Ruler entered Parliament and walked down the aisle on a red carpet. To his right was a woman dressed magnificently, wearing a diamond tiara. Was Rachael, the Ruler’s wife, being trotted out for a public viewing?
A.G. could hardl
y believe his eyes. This Excellency on television was hardly the Excellency he had last seen at the State House. This Excellency was tall and thin. He was dressed in a dark suit, with a boutonniere, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. In his left hand he held a club and a fly whisk. The usual patches of leopard skins were there. His head was the size of a fist, but his eyes bulged, resembling the late Machokali’s.
A.G. did not hear himself as he shouted, No, no, that is not him! over and over again, the others looking at him as at a crazy person, some of them barking impatiently, Shut up! How do you know? without allowing him to explain, to which he responded, What happened to his inflated body? And at this the people laughed, but when he tried to say, Look at his tongue, look at that tongue, they silenced him with poisonous looks. Yet some also noticed that when the Ruler was not talking he would sometimes flick his tongue in and out involuntarily, but most saw nothing strange in this, attributing it to his not having used his tongue in public for a long time. When A.G. now further insisted that the tongue was forked, people around started saying: The smog—see what it has done to this man’s head! And maybe he is not the only oner
The Ruler started by saying that he wanted to take the opportunity to introduce the person seated next to him, because when he gave her the job she now holds he had been in seclusion and so in no position to anoint her in person before the eyes of the nation, but there was a time for everything and he was now glad to tell the nation that this was Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie, Official National Hostess.
By the time the audience recovered from the shock, for in truth since her appointment she had never been seen in public, the Ruler was already in full speaking gear. He asked people, wherever they were, in Parliament, their homes, their workplaces, or on the roads, to stand up and observe one minute of silence in memory of those who died recently on the grounds of the Parliament buildings and the law courts. He said that the deaths were the result of the activities of some bad elements in the country who had hoped to bring about confusion as a first stage in a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government. I have only one question for them: Don’t they know that we defeated communism in the twentieth century? Communism is now as dead as a dodo. The so-called Movement for the Voice of the People had urged and agitated the mob to queue not because the movement genuinely cared for the real needs and grievances of the people but because it wanted to use the populace as instruments of its own evil designs. It had even hired sorcerers to confuse the minds of the innocents with very bad magic. The movement was exploiting genuine grievances, and he would be the first to admit that the country faced a few economic problems. But the whole world faced similar problems because these had to do with global economic forces and a global economic recession due to the oil crisis brought about by the selfish policies of OPEC.
Let me now turn to recent matters, the thunder and smog about which we are all concerned, he told an attentive Parliament and a curious nation.
It was the same self-styled Movement for the Voice of the People, in collusion with fundamentalists from the Middle East, who dropped bombs on the State House, but luckily the Ruler, aided by his experts, had managed to detonate them before calamitous harm could be done to the nation. When the evildoers realized this, they fired tear gas in the air to frighten the population and ignite a revolution. The point of the queues and agitation and the timing of the bombing was clear, but he would not say more about this for security reasons, because the matter was still under investigation.
He paused, in fact he had no choice, because members of Parliament were giving him a standing ovation with no end in sight because no MP or minister wanted to be the first to stop.
To the bemusement and then the discomfort of the foreign diplomats who sat through it all, the Ruler let the ovation go on for one hour and seven minutes before gesturing to the MPs to sit down, for he had a lot more to share with them. As for these misguided followers of the Movement for the Voice of the People, he continued, yes, those who had killed innocent citizens whose only crime was to celebrate their Ruler’s birthday, he had only one message for them: his security forces would hunt them down and bring them to justice.
The Ruler allowed that there were a few wrongs he wanted to set right so that the Movement for the Voice of the People would never again find grounds for deceiving the nation. He told Parliament that Marching to Heaven had been conceived by Machokali, a scheme so absurd as to boggle the mind. There was devilish cunning in it, and he, the Ruler, had gone along with the scheme only for the purpose of finding out the man’s real intentions. Well, unfortunately Machokali was not around to explain what he had in mind, so we shall never know what he was up to, and there is no point in speculation. The Ruler now lowered his voice and said that he was sad to say that the government had not yet been able to find out how or where the late Markus had met his fate, or even the nature of that fate. However, the private detectives he had hired from abroad had reported to him that this was a case of SID, self-induced disappearance. Let the scheme, like its author, go the way of SID.
Next, the Ruler said, he would respond to rumors that he was pregnant.
4
The Ruler thanked all those who had come to the grounds of Parliament and the law courts to celebrate his birthday, renaming it the Day of National Self-Renewal because according to an age-old African custom, cycles of birth and rebirth are celebrated through well-known rites of passage. He was also aware that there were those who were talking about his birthday, the Day of National Self-Renewal, as the day he would give birth.
“Well, they were not mistaken. The fact is, my people, I was pregnant. Yes, I was pregnant,” the Ruler emphasized to an astonished Parliament. “Every Aburlrian child knows that I am the Country and the Country is Me, which means that this Excellency, this Country, and this Nation are like the mystery of Three in One and One in Three creating the Perfect One.” That was why when the Ruler spoke, the nation spoke, and when he sneezed, the nation sneezed. Because the country and the head are one and the same, it follows that his birthday is the nation’s birthday and his day of giving birth is as that of the nation giving birth. “You want to see the pictures of the baby?”
On cue, Kaniürü, using crutches, hobbled into Parliament followed by four people carrying a huge board wrapped up in a white cloth and set it up in front of the Ruler.
And now, said the Ruler, I ask the official hostess to step forward and reveal what I have brought into the world. Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie walked to the board and lifted the cloth, revealing a drawing of the Ruler holding a baby vaguely resembling Aburlria in his fatherly arms. At the foot was the inscription in large Aburlrian national colors: BABY D. Behold Baby Democracy, he called.
The Ruler then grandly proclaimed the advent of multiparty democracy in Aburlria, to everyone’s shock. But he added that the new Aburlrian system was only making explicit what was latent in all modern democracies, in which parties were basically variations of each other. He would be the nominal head of all political parties. This meant that in the next general elections, all the parties would, of course, be choosing him as their candidate for the presidency. His victory would be a victory of all the parties, and more important for Aburlrians, a victory for wise and tested leadership.
As a sign of the new times, he decreed that the Ruler’s Party would now simply be called the Ruling Party.
“And in case our dear friends are worried that we might be going too far in our liberal measures,” he said, glancing in the direction of the row of Western ambassadors, he wanted to stress that whichever party from among the hundreds under his leadership came to power, Aburlria would remain a friend and trustworthy partner of the Western alliance. I worked hand in hand with you in fighting world communism, he said, and now we shall stand shoulder to shoulder in building the new global system of guided freedom and openness. That was why his new system would do away with secret ballots and introduce the queuing by which one openly stood behind the candidate of one�
��s choice. Direct democracy. Open democracy. Baby D is born.
For the first time all the envoys gave him warm applause; this spurred him on.
“If at this time there is anybody from the public gallery who would like to ask a question or make some comments, they can go ahead.”
This had never happened in the brief history of Aburirian Parliament: the gallery being allowed to intervene. Most people took it for a rhetorical gesture, except for one wizened old man who stood up and spoke in a thin, tremulous voice but one loud enough to be heard by all.
“Thank you, My Lord of Infinite Mercy and Kindness. I say thank you because once a long time ago I attempted to speak to you and the minister in charge of the ceremonies ordered the police to deny me the microphone and remove me from the platform. I went away screaming for you to hear me. You heard my cry. I know that is why you removed him. And that is why I thank you, Mkundu Wangu Mpya Rahisi, for hearing my cry then and now giving me a chance to redeem my name so dishonored by the late Machokali. I say with you, Down with state secrets.”
The phrase My New Cheap Arsehole had made A.G. suddenly recall the same old man trying to speak at the ceremony where the plan for Marching to Heaven was first revealed publicly. How was the leader going to handle this? But at that point the official hostess, Dr. McKenzie, whispered in the ear of the Ruler, who now asked the security to take the old man to the State House, where both would later meet for an exchange of views in endless leisure. The Ruler was a genius of double talk, A.G. said to himself, because he knew exactly what the security had been told to do with the old man. Every opinion counts, said the Ruler. The reign of Baby D has begun.
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