The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  Beneath the shower now, she reenacted the scene of a few moments’ past. She was making (how did they say it) “a mountain out of a molehill.” It meant absolutely nothing. And yet there was that briefest of moments when she’d responded to those sensual and devilish lips, one-hundredth of a second when she kissed him back and then suddenly withdrew as if she’d been bitten by a deadly mamba. It meant absolutely nothing. He had taken her by complete surprise was all. He could never mean anything to her, except that he was just a person, a human being, asexual actually, part of a plan to liberate the Mother Continent. A mere fortuitous convenience. Fate had chosen him to play a role in this charade for liberation. Nothing more. He was a typical American womanizer. African or European, they were all the same. She’d met many of his kind in London when she’d studied at the university. She would never take the ersatz PM seriously. He was extraordinarily macho, vain, egomaniacal in that regard, lacking in depth of feeling, or even intellectuality. Too handsome for his own good.

  She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a terry cloth towel. She took the towel from around her as she stood before the floor-to-ceiling mirror in her bedroom. Her reflection stared back, critically, at a medium-height statuesque woman, five-feet-fourish, slimly constructed and curvaceous (she seemed taller than her actual height), tiny waisted, with a wee bit of lingering baby fat here and there about the midriff. Her taut breasts were not overly large; neither were they undersized particularly, but firm and very darkly nippled and forever pointed heavenward somewhat like a nubile maiden. Ever graceful, she seemed always on the move, her body never static, effortlessly evanescent.

  She would work closely with him and at the same time keep him at a distance. It would not be difficult. It might be (if she were emotionally involved, and she definitely was not); it was simply because of his striking resemblance to her extremely handsome cousin, Jaja, whom she loved and admired as if he were her own brother. Though he appeared to be her cousin’s identical twin, facially and physically (she would not have been surprised to find that they were the same height, same weight, and likewise in the waist and shoulders, even the same shoe size), she knew there was a fundamental difference in them, the way they handled themselves, the way they moved about. Whereas Jaja exuded solid strength, feet firmly planted in the earth, Jimmy Johnson’s strength was tiger-quick with a tiger’s gracefulness, ready to spring at a moment’s notice. Jaja was intractable with the totally awesome strength of his convictions. Durable. The marathon man. Jimmy Johnson was the incorrigible romantic. Jaja had always waged a total all-consuming, no-holds-barred romance with change and revolution, with little or no time for the frivolities of flirtation or chitchat. Whereas Jimmy Johnson carried on an unrelenting romance with himself and with dare-deviltry. Like Robeson, whom she’d seen in London as a child, Jaja walked this earth with a dignity that came naturally. Whereas Jimmy Johnson strutted. Perhaps his strutting also came naturally.

  She stretched her entire slender body. She moaned and sighed pleasurably. She donned her nightdress and she eased herself into the canopied four-poster. Again, she stretched her long slim body, as the exhaustion of the frenetic day came down suddenly upon her in every nook and cranny of her being from her head down to her tingling toes. Albeit a sweet exhaustion that she somehow reveled in. She felt her sensuality now, and joyously. She recognized it as a feeling entirely rare to her, a feeling she would not bother to investigate, or analyze, except to tell herself it had nothing to do with Jimmy Johnson.

  She felt her womanness more than ever now and felt a weary welcomed smile move over her body from her face down to her tingling-more-than-ever toes, sensuous and sensual, as her mind recaptured the last few days. The feverish preparations for the trip, the discovery of the plot; enter Mr. Jimmy Johnson, the superb impersonator, the tutoring of Jimmy Johnson, the proximity of Jimmy Johnson, the scene out at the airport, Jimmy Johnson at the White House party. This man meant not a thing to her.

  She thought fondly of the elderly distinguished man back in Bamakanougou who was her husband. She had married him at the age of seventeen, a man who had been more than twice her age. It had been much more than a marriage of political expediency, though political expediency had certainly been a factor. Ever since she could remember, she had regarded John Segu Mamadou, worshipfully, as the legendary leader of her country in its struggle for independence. Even as a little one she had loved him from a distance as vast as the Atlantic, loved him, respectfully, before she had fully awakened to her dormant sexuality just coming into being, not fully realized yet. Their marriage had been an occasion for joyous celebration through the nation’s capital and the villages nearby. It was a marriage sanctioned and arranged from above by African gods with assistance here and there by the families in question, as was the tradition in Guanaya.

  A marriage consummated more out of respect than romance or sexuality, but no less sacred, no less holy matrimony. Perhaps the lack of sexual passion made it even holier. As the years passed, he grew aged and sickly, but no less regarded as a legend. Mamadou had had several wives, all of whom had demised, before he took Maria Efwa to his lone connubial couch, and suddenly adopted monogamy as a way of life. She had never violated her marriage vows, nor had she been tempted to.

  And she certainly wouldn’t begin now with this egotistic macho man of African Americano.

  She got nimbly out of bed and went to the bedroom door and took the chair away from beneath the knob. She tested the lock. It was secure. She glided blithesomely back across the room and took herself again to bed.

  And smilingly she fell asleep.

  * * *

  About three o’clock in the morning the President of the United States talked in his sleep for the first time in a very long time. And he said, “Lolliloppi, Mississippi!” And he spoke so loudly he woke himself up, and he called the Prime Minister of Guanaya on the extra-special private telephone.

  The lady at the hotel switchboard said, “I’m sorry, sir, but they’re all asleep up there and we have orders not to awaken them till nine thirty in the morning.”

  Hubert Herbert Hubert said, “I don’t give a damn how asleep they are, ring them. This is the fucking President of the United States.”

  When he finally convinced her, and when he finally got the sleepy-headed Prime Minister on the phone, the President said, “Did I understand you to say, Your Fuh-fuh-fuh-fabulous Excellency, you wanted to visit Lolliloppi, Mississippi?”

  The bogus PM said, still half asleep, “Yeah—but I don’t feel like going this time of the morning.” And unquietly he banged the phone back on the hook and went immediately to sleep again.

  About three quarters of an hour later he awoke again with a start. He thought he’d heard a telephone ringing somewhere in the Western world. He reached for it sleepily and suddenly realized that it wasn’t really ringing. He lay down and then jumped straight up in bed again. He was fully awake now, as he realized what had happened. He had banged the telephone down on the President of the United States! Unceremoniously! Good Lord! He felt pimples of perspiration breaking out all over his body. He must apologize immediately. He reached for the telephone and when he got the operator, he said, “Operator, this is Jimmy Johnson. Get me the President of the United States tout-damn-suite!”

  She said, “Jimmy who? What is this, some kind of big joke at this time of the morning? What are you? Some kind of a stay-up-latenik nut or something? And what are you doing in the African quarters?”

  He heard a clock somewhere in the sleeping city striking four o’clock in the morning, as he replaced the receiver slowly back in place, softly and tenderly, even though his hand was trembling. He had called himself “Jimmy Johnson” to the operator, despite the fact that he was really His Excellency Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki. He had to always remember who he was. He must remember, sleep or wake.

  He stumbled to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, and was relieved to find that he was still the same person he always was, bu
t was at the same time somehow different, and that was the thing he must always remember and yet somehow forget. It was damn confusing. He wouldn’t take any chances. He left the bathroom and looked frantically for his phony beard. And when he found it, he put it on his face again with a sigh of profound relief and went back to bed and closed his eyes with a soft smile on his face. And he was scared, even as he drifted sweetly into that strangely familiar land of nervous nod and nap, that turf that was the sandman’s territorial prerogative.

  No matter, he was nonchalant, even as he slumbered.

  13

  The next day Jimmy and his entourage had a conference with the President at the White House, which lasted several hours in the Cabinet Room. The Cabinet Room was chosen instead of the Oval Office, because of the convenience of its long conference table, with Lincoln staring at them from above the fireplace. The Cabinet Room instead of the Oval Office was a presidential preference, almost a superstition with this President. It was common knowledge that Lincoln was his patron saint.

  It was a friendly chat that Tangi seemed very pleased with, but which kept the nervous His Wife’s Bottom, Mr. Lloyd, clearing his scratchy ministerial throat every minute. And Maria Efwa was proud of the way Jimmy handled the situation. He could tell from the rays of warmth that were beginning to beam from her to him, or were they beaming from him to her? And he, himself, was beginning to enjoy the role of His Excellency the Prime Minister of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, even though he could never completely dispel the fear of sudden discovery, imprisonment, disgrace, and disgrace not only to him, but also to the proud little Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya. Sometimes he made-believe even to himself that he was the real thing. He was, in fact, His Excellency Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, in person! And it felt damn good, even though he knew that therein lay potential madness and great danger. He nevertheless indulged himself in self-deception. While in a corner of his mind lurking always the smiling face of William Clarence Barnsfield the Fifth of the Ambassador Palace Hotel lounge in Bamakanougou and more recently, of the presidential reception at the White House, Washington, DC. He expected the handsome friendly faced American plug-ugly to show up, anywhere and everywhere and at any moment, shouting for all the world to hear: “You’re an American! You’re an American! I know it—I know it! I know it!” He looked and listened for Bill Barnsfield the Fifth with all his senses in every gathering large or small. He was always on his everlasting guard. It was a nerve-racking business.

  Meanwhile the Cabinet Room was like Grand Central Station and the United Nations Delegates Lounge and Union Square subway station at five o’clock all rolled into Bellevue. Diplomats, military aides, and intelligence experts who didn’t look very intelligent (maybe the stupid look was a disguise, Jimmy thought), and protocol officers, moving to and from, tiptoeing in and out of the Cabinet Room smiling politely, standing nearby, making comments, keeping their mouths shut, asking questions. Being obviously and boisterously unobtrusive. They were as subtle as the hydrogen bomb. And Jimmy thought that all of them were nervous wrecks. In the words of Jesse B. Simple, “It were a proper mess.”

  Also, meanwhile, during the frenetic moving back and forth, the constant whispered chatter, Jimmy Jay’s mind wandered capriciously back to Bamakanougou and to all of Africa. Even as he stared out of the lordly french doors of the Cabinet Room past the famous Rose Garden to a vague imagined impression of the Jefferson Memorial in the far-off distance, he vividly remembered the many trips he’d made outside Guanaya. He had Mondays off at the club. And every weekend he would take off to a different place, to fulfill a different dream he’d dreamed, by air flight or in an old secondhand Land Rover he had purchased. He’d take off for Lagos, for Ibadan and eastward to Enugu. He flew to Khartoum and to Cairo. One Monday on a whimsy, he drove from Gao along the southern edge of the desert all the way to Timbuktu, got lost on the way. He was gone an entire week. No one knew what had happened to him. A veritable APB was put out for him. His missing was announced every day every hour on the radio. His missing became a national incident. They were overjoyed at his return. Guanaya loved their Jimmy Johnson and the love affair did not go unrequited.

  President Hubert Herbert Hubert had earlier that morning called his cabinet and White House staff and his subcabinet, whatever that was, and a few select congressmen and senators together in the Oval Office, and he read to them the riot act. He’d walked back and forth in front of them. He had large hands that made him look as if he were always wearing boxing gloves. He seemed never to know what to do with them. He’d try to hide them in his pockets, which made such unseemly bulges, as if he were doubly endowed on each side instead of in the middle of him. He sometimes waved his hands above his head, as if he had just won the world heavyweight championship. He sometimes tried to hide them behind his big head, behind his back sometimes. To paraphrase the great Joe Louis, his hands could run but they could not hide. He would put the knuckles of both fists in his mouth sometimes, nibbling at them nervously, as if he thought that, through attrition, he would wear them down to normal proportions. They had never seen him work up such a sweat before. He pounded his great fat fist into his fat other hand.

  “There must not be a single slipup,” the gentle Prexy badgered them. “There must be no incident at all. This is the most important African nation in the Western hemisphere—I mean—anywhere in the entire world! And another thing—we must not be overly pushy at the conference table. We must be very subtle. Africans are very sensitive, especially the new breed. While they’re in our country we must protect them from any isolated incidents of racial strife.” He stopped and banged his desk and shouted. “They must not, under any circumstances, be treated as if they are Black Americans, or fuh-fuh-fucking heads will roll! Do I make myself clear?”

  Parkington spoke up in a trembly voice. He’d never seen his chief of state in such a state. “I was telling Carlton Carson yesterday; we must make our Guanayan guests feel at home. We must make them know that we don’t see the color of their skins at all, and that we don’t look upon them as Negroes, but as ordinary people.” He was considered an expert on the African scene, had spent six months as cultural attaché to the American embassy in Bamakanougou.

  Carlton Carson countered with, “But they are Negroes. They sure don’t look like Eskimos.”

  The President said angrily, “They are not Negroes! They are not people! They are dignitaries! Or fucking heads will roll!”

  The conference between the Guanayan delegation and the President included, among others, Jeffry Hillman, great American scientist and engineer, chairman of the Atomic Energy Bureau. He was a beetle-browed personable chap in the all-American tradition, with a Harvard-type Southern accent or maybe a Yale type or a Princeton type. It didn’t make that much difference. He looked like an improbable combination of Steve Allen and Scotland Yard or John L. Lewis and Caspar Milquetoast. And maybe even Frank Sinatra. Sometimes he lapsed into a German accent, unconsciously or otherwise, possibly because in those days, the popular view of the American atomic scientists was that they were all of German descent and spoke in guttural accents. It seems that many of them had been Nazis and/or had cooperated with the Nazi regime, not out of any love for Der Führer. Heavens forbid! Actually, they were anti-Hitlerites one and all. Their theory was that the more atrocities they committed in the name of Herr Schickelgruber, the more insufferable they would make life for the freedom-loving German people, and the quicker the people would rise up and say “No more!” And throw off the Nazi yoke. The only thing that prevented this from happening was the treachery of the Russian army, which would not wait until the regime fell of its own weight and calumny, which surely would have happened, eventually (nobody seriously believed Der Führer’s boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years). The whole thing was one mendacious Communist plot to prevent the natural evolution of the democratic process
. Anyhow, Dr. Hillman was not really German anyhow. Even though there was a strong resemblance between him and Henry Kissinger.

  The great scientist thought to disarm the Prime Minister with a charming smile, but his teeth were bad yellowish and tobacco stained, and the bogus PM had a bias against bad-teethed people. Dr. Hillman said, “Do you have any idea at all, Your Excellency, how much cobanium there is in Northern Province?”

  The PM stared at the smiling scientist with the decadent teeth and cleared his throat. With dignity. This seemed to be a signal for Mr. Tobey, his personal secretary, to clear his own throat, significantly, and stare at Mr. Langford, who was the American chief of protocol officer, which seemed to be a signal for Mr. Langford to clear his own throat, cautiously. “I think we’d better leave the technical questions to the technical people, Dr. Hillman,” Mr. Langford said.

  Dr. Hillman looked at the amiable President, who cleared his throat wholeheartedly and smiled his agreement, at which point Dr. Hillman turned to Mr. Langford and smiled and said, “Yes—” who turned to Mr. Tobey and on down the line till they got back to the Prime Minister, who looked at Maria Efwa and then turned to Dr. Hillman and said, “I don’t mind the question at all. There are inexhaustible beds of cobanium in the Northern Province. Not to mention the other provinces.” He threw the last sentence in for good measure, or out of pure cussedness.

  Not only did Dr. Hillman nibble at the line, he took the whole bait in his teeth and started for the open sea. He was like a dog who’d just caught scent of the rabbit. He asked excitedly, “You mean to say, Sir, that cobanium has been discovered in the other provinces?”

  The fake PM stared up at the chandelier above the darkly polished conference table and deliberately assumed a crafty expression. Always with dignity. “No, sir. I meant to say just what I said. Nothing more.”