by Carson, Tom
Once I’d got her inside the Residence, I had a glum chore to perform. “Carol,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. You were completely right. I had no call to blow up that way.”
Looking up from a sofa between Tommie and the younger Sawyer boy, who was still dolefully toying with his Spirit of ’76 flute—not unintelligently, she’d made him take off the head bandage—Carol relished her new Get Out of Jail Free card. My tantrum had cost me any right to go on obliquely exiling her for oinking it up with Ned the summer before. Not that I’d ever been rude: Hopsie would’ve caned me. In a group of women this small, you could still do a lot just by whose conversational gambits you seized on.
“We all know it isn’t an average day. It’s just—Pam, if you were a mother, you’d know how sensitive they are at that age.”
I would love to report Tommie was pulling the wings off flies just then. But if so, he was only pulling them off with his eyes.
“Tommie! Je vous demande pardon. J’avais tort,” I said.
“Say thank you, Tommie,” Carol prodded. “Be gracious for once in your life.”
“Why?” he said sullenly. “Just because Cruella’s married to Dad’s stupid boss?”
I looked at Carol, she looked at me. Then we shared our friendliest laugh since the Sawyers got to Nagon. “Yes,” she said.
“Darn tooting,” I said. “But never mind. It’s all right.”
“What’s happening, Pam?” Nan Finn asked. “Outside.”
I beamed. “Well! Since I’m not a mother, I’m going right back out to find out.”
Posted by: Pam
I’d barely stepped onto the Residence’s now diplomatically jammed porch when Nan followed me. “Oh, I mean the hell with it,” the glorious girl laughingly said, holding up her Kodak. “When’ll I get a chance to see this again?”
“What about Sean?”
“Cruella, thank God you own a copy of The Longest Day.”
“Signed, too.” Something clicked. “When’s Sean’s birthday?”
“November. Did I tell you what I’m trying to get him?”
“Uh-uh.”
“A cannon from Ouibomey. The Portuguese consul still has some sort of squatter’s rights at the fort, and—oh, my God. That’s them.”
Indeed it was. Festooned with shouting and singing soldiers, one after another of the snowplows of the 1er Régiment Blindé clanked and squealed over crumbling, patchy hundred-degree asphalt past our Fourth of July frieze of diplomats greasy with fried chicken, Bermuda-shorted secretaries munching hot dogs, and white-coated Residence houseboys passing Coca-Cola and popcorn. As each of them reached the gates mounted with our portraits of JFK and Jackie, there were cries of “Vive l’Amérique!” and “Vive le Président Kennedy!”
“Propaganda,” Goliadkin said. “N’Koda coached them. They don’t know what they’re—”
“Nous t’aimons, Jacqueline!” an exuberant voice called brawnily from the third snowplow.
More single-minded and also less interested in what they were trotting past, N’Koda’s northern tribal kinsfolk began a steady chant of “À bas M’Lawa! Vive le Nagon libre.” Even so, Hopsie couldn’t resist teasing Goliadkin. “Such a pity Chairman Kruschev married so young,” he said, stuffing a pipe that told me he was convinced we were safe.
“We still don’t know what’s happening in Ouibomey,” Goliadkin reminded him. “There, I’m sure the Nagonese people’s expressions of devotion to the Chairman and his impressive wife are extraordinary.”
“Yes, they would be. Nan! Stay on the porch, please.”
“Sorry!”
“Well, I think he’s full of shit, Mr. Ambassador. Excuse my French,” Virgil Scoleri unexpectedly took it upon himself to bellow. “Those goddam snowplows! Goliadkin, do you think we’re stupid?”
“Can you rephrase that in the first person singular? I’m a guest here, Mr., ah—”
“Virgil Scoleri!” our Admin guy thundered, shoving out a paw. “Pleased to meet you! Put ’er there. Take a pew.”
“Virgil,” said Cadwaller quietly. “Go to the Embassy. Wait to see if anything comes in by teletype. Short of our death en masse, under no circumstances are you to compose or send a cable of your own to the Department. You must have one like him,” he added to Goliadkin once Virgil’s bull neck and sweat-palimpsested white shirt were stalking Embassyward.
After a hesitation, Goliadkin held up three fingers. He didn’t need to say a word.
We heard the rest later. How the fifty or so Presidential Guards who didn’t decamp tried desperately to get the sixth snowplow off its plinth to barricade the Palais’s main gate; of course its engine hadn’t tasted gas since it rolled off the jetty. How the lead rebel snowplow smashed through, spilling soldiers off its flanks who didn’t need to do too much shooting before forty-seven or so Presidential guards realized that losing your life for Jean-Baptiste M’Lawa was one moronic way to go.
How the radio station followed the announcement of the Provisional Government—“when that term’s not a lie, it’s redundant,” Cadwaller said—with West Africa’s hit Francophone version of “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “Combien de routes doit le Nagon marcher/Avant qu’on l’appelle un pays?/Et combien de voûtes doit le Togo chercher/Avant qu’on récolte le maïs?” After a baffled pause—what now?—it was followed by “Dominique.”
How M’Lawa and Mme M’Lawa were intercepted by the fourth snowplow as they drove on a back road to the Plon-Plon-Ville airport and brought back to the Palais du Président under arrest. That wasn’t because N’Koda didn’t want them gone; they were in Nice a week later. He just wanted the Nagonese left in no doubt that they were going into exile on his orders, not escaping.
Besides, even if M’Lawa had talked the pilot into it, the Nagonese Air Force couldn’t have withstood the departure of its only plane. So he and Celeste ended up journeying to their new life on the Riviera on first Air Afrique, then Air France. Economy class, to punish his excesses—not that the distinction was an especially vivid one to most of their former compatriots.
We heard a lot of it from N’Koda himself before sunset. By late afternoon, it was obvious the shooting had mostly stopped. It’s not wholly unlike listening for the rate of popping popcorn to slow. Most of the diplomats at our Fourth of July reception and cookout had gone back to their Embassies to start cabling.
Released from the Residence, though not yet the compound, the kids on the post were vying to outdo each other’s confused shouts of “À bas Jacqueline!” and “Pan, pan.” Then at twilight the vast Presidential convertible, sans blatting cat’s cradle of motorcyclists, pulled up once again at our reopened gate.
“General N’Koda,” Hopsie said, extending his hand. “We worried we wouldn’t see you today.”
“I’m a respecter of custom, Mr. Ambassador. Nagon’s head of state arrives last.”
Once we’d assembled our info, Hopsie gave Ned Finn the job of writing the cable. It spent a few months as a C Street legend, rivaled only by Ehud Tabor’s light-hearted report to Tel Aviv recommending that the Israelis look into the uses of converted snowplows as terror weapons. Of course that was the idea he revived in earnest as Defense Minister thirty years later, to no end of suffering on the West Bank.
Ned’s cable had no such consequences. Yet from its opening words (“staff was celebrating Independence with dependents”) to its repeated identifications of the trotting northern tribesmen as “General n’koda’s force de frappe”—as in, “The force de frappe’s bows and arrows demonstrated to m’lawa that the ball was now in the other Agincourt”—it was generally reckoned to be one of his triumphs. Even glum Dean Rusk was alleged to have cracked a smile at the coda: “no amcits or amgovs or usgov property harmed, though human elements of foregoing much bemused. we’re all right, jack. yours truly finn, u.s. embassy, plon-pl
on-ville, nagon.”
It won him his dearest wish, too. When Andy Pond’s final message on the subject from the Secretariat reached us a week later—your cable of 5/7/63 read aloud in oval office to much hilarity. congratulations ned we knew you could do it—Ned Finn walked on air until August.
Nan Finn told me years later that despite knowing better, Ned couldn’t help nursing a fantasy that the Oval Office’s occupant would request a meeting with that clever cable’s witty author on the Finns’ next home leave. They were due to head back to the States for six weeks’ R&R in mid-December 1963.
Posted by: Pam
I saw Ned Finn get blubbery in his cups a number of times. I heard him cry sober just once, and I had no option but to retreat from the Residence’s porch without a word. That kind of loneliness can’t be cured by companions—male, female, or child.
I too was in shock, of course. We all were for a week. The welcome exception was Virgil Scoleri: our Admin guy’s lack of any imagination had its plus side for once. Less welcome was Dunc McCork’s blitheness. But my shock stayed dry-eyed until the ultimate triumph of the art of Nagon.
The first dislocation is that to us it was night. The cable from Washington clicked over the teletype in an empty Embassy, wasn’t read ’til the following day. We had no TV, as I’ve said. Instead, we nearly all listened to the BBC World Service in the evenings, and that was the reason that first Ned and Nan Finn, then the Sawyers—the Warrens were in Greece by then—stumbled on foot in the dark to the Residence, children still dressed for bedtime in tow. We were expecting them too, with no need for acknowledgment. I’d made coffee by then in the big urn for parties, not the old percolator we used when alone.
The second dislocation is that we were an American handful abroad, surrounded not by compatriots but foreigners. Over the next few days, that was both a reprieve and a burden, for we were suddenly magical. People looked at us as if there were something wondrous in the fact that we were still in Nagon, moving around and speaking as if we were still real.
I’ve never had so many strangers, European and African, invent reasons to touch me. I’ve still never forgotten that after the Finns and the Sawyers, the third and last knock on our door was Ehud Tabor’s. If it was policy, I’d rather not know.
Because we were so few and so far from home, we felt one added incredulity. The thing was, we’d had our death on the post for the year. Faddle had been pulled down by her shark just weeks earlier, and if you’re wondering, yes: we’d gone right on swimming. What were the odds of its happening twice?
Nagon’s climate and lack of facilities had left us no choice except to seal Faddle’s remains in the biggest of our Sears-consignment coolers, in which I’m afraid they fit comfortably. It was the same one she’d stocked with Coke on the Fourth of July, wearing Bermuda shorts and popping her bubble gum. Awaiting her last plane home, she’d lain in state for three days in the Residence’s big freezer, and I was enough of a coward that I couldn’t bring myself to fetch anything out of it for weeks even after Faddle’s Sears cooler went back Stateside for burial. It seemed preposterously excessive to lose another member of our tiny Embassy so soon afterward, even though his only job there had been as a portrait in the reception area.
Unbelievably, none of us—not even Ned Finn, or perhaps him especially—had a drink for a week. That was among the reversions to normal life that would’ve seemed sacrilegious, and we had so little control of our emotions on coffee that one gin and tonic could have triggered delirium. Ned even tried to quit smoking, but he was only human and that bobbing Marlboro stayed his equivalent of our Checker limo’s tin flag. The dazed kids on the post agreed to have their toy guns locked away until Christmas, since we couldn’t bear the sight of them or a shout of “Pan, pan.”
Nell Finn learned to sew by helping the post’s wives stitch black mourning bunting on the Embassy flags. Carol Sawyer was in charge of that, since she was the seamstress among us. Reducing our wardrobes considerably, none of us women could stand to wear anything alluding to Jackiehood. When grabby short curly-haired Beth McCork turned up at the Residence in a white A-line dress two days into it, we had such trouble speaking to her that she went home and changed.
That same evening, I was on about my twentieth cup of coffee—and smoking one of Ned’s cigarettes too, for all that I’d mostly quit a year earlier—when Nell Finn, sucking her thumb (not regression: no thimbles), came to stand in front of me. Taking advantage of a private new license she’d adopted since my forty-second birthday, she said, “Pamela, how come everything’s staying so strange? Is this just what we’re like from now on?”
“Oh, no, honey. It’s just—well, right now we don’t know what’s expected of us, either.” It was the only time I’d alluded to our strange dialogue as snowplows clanked toward us on the day of the coup. “All in the same boat at last,” I tried to smile.
Naturally, that week was also bereft of music. Our Scandinavian hi-fi sets gathered dust. Neither Hopsie’s Victory at Sea nor Ned Finn’s “Seventy-Six Trombones” nor the one the kids loved—“Dis-donc, dis-donc” from Irma la Douce—broke the silence of our American camp. But soon after Nell went out on the Residence’s porch and sat down fists to chin to gaze at and inhale the redolent Nagonese night, I heard her quietly singing, “Il était un petit navire, il était un petit navire…”
Somehow I knew she meant the Pélérin, which indeed we didn’t take out again for two months. Too reminiscent of a PT boat or a Cape Cod pleasure skiff, even after Christmas came and we let the boys have their toy guns back. They even got some new ones, but of course that Sears consignment had been ordered months ago.
Installed in the Palais du Président since July and busy merging the Presidential Guard with the Army, N’Koda pulled up in his inherited Presidential convertible the first morning to pay a formal condolence call to the Embassy with his wife, an upcountry woman as bulky and tribally scarred on both cheeks as Celeste M’Lawa had been sleek and cheek-pecking. Once they’d gone, Hopsie came over to the Residence with a peculiar expression. “N’Koda’s going to give him a state funeral.”
“A memorial service, you mean.”
“No, that’s just it. A funeral. It seems…well! It seems that was the custom in mission civilisatrice days when French heads of state died. Binding the colonies to the mother country, and not at all stupid when you think about it. They haven’t done it since Independence, nor ever for a foreign one. But he wants one for Jack.”
“Hopsie!” I said. “You never called him that in your life.”
“No, and wouldn’t have dreamed of it,” Cadwaller agreed. Then he got a look on his face I’d never seen before. “Now I can,” my husband said softly, knocking the ash from his pipe.
Posted by:Pam
The funeral was in the grim Catholic church from mission civilisatrice days, flinty and gray as a Breton squall made of stone. It stood on Plon-Plon-Ville’s erratically paved, bicycle-rattling main east-west road, which our Yankee Doodley picnic convoys drove down less often now that the Warrens were gone. Officially the Boulevard du Quatre Juillet since N’Koda’s coup, it was still known to all of us, Nagonese and foreigners alike, by its traditional name: the rue d’Écu.
Thanks to its respelling once the church had been consecrated, that was a bowdlerization of its rough-and-ready monicker when the mission civilisatrice was no more than a French Army outpost. Back then it was the road where African girls in lantern-lit cribs had serviced the garrison for a few grubby francs at a time, presumably gratified by their introduction to Western economics and also relieved that they got to do so on Nagonese soil rather than in Haiti, Brazil, or Alabama. Plon-Plon-Ville’s own name was another memento, some sergeant’s satiric mess-hall tribute to the newly departed Napoleon III’s most blackguardy cousin.
Checking the protocol, we learned I needed a mourning veil, something I despaired
of finding on either short or long notice in Nagon or even Lagos. Carol Sawyer sewed me one, not that I wanted to know where our seamstress had gotten its filmy black gauze and lace trimming or cared to think about where it might’ve been before landing in front of my nose.
Hopsie’d said “funeral,” Hopsie’d said “state.” The coffin was alarming anyway. Covered by a taut and immaculate Stars and Stripes on loan from the Embassy, it stood just feet away from the front pew where we sat. Beside us was N’Koda in full uniform, his medals from Vichy, the Free French, and M’Lawa now augmented by those of the new Ordre des Compagnons du Quatre Juillet. Mme N’Koda’s yards of black silk and black kerchief kept looking like a trick of photography, since the tribal costumes her mourning garb mimicked were always of cotton and festively colored.
Dank as a laundry, the church’s interior was as grim as its outside. Grim rough-chinked stone walls, dark banquettes, no stained glass or saints’ statues at all. Over the altar, the Christ on the cross—the work of the grandfathers of Ouibomey’s woodcarvers—may have been unique in all Christendom. That’s because he was nude, his never used (so they say) dowsing rod projecting down toward the coffin. As the Church often did elsewhere, the mission civilisatrice’s French Catholic priests had amalgamated local cults’ customs into their liturgy, and an uncocked Christ made no sense in Nagon.
Gazing up at dowsing-rod Jesus through a mourning veil made of Carol Sawyer’s old lingerie, irreligious Pam found herself recalling a line from Sinclair St. Clair’s least favorite poet, apt here for the only time in my experience: Polyphiloprogenitive, the sapient sutlers of the Lord. The church’s only other decoration was the portrait placed on the altar, which we’d also loaned from the Embassy; which indeed we had given, since we had no further official use for it. That’s unless you consider the empty coffin decorative, which I might’ve been able to from the back row but peculiarly couldn’t when sitting this close.
