Gaddafi's Harem

by Cojean, Annick

  “Get undressed, whore!” the Guide ordered when I got to his bedroom.

  This time I felt it went too far. I burst out in sobs. “Why do you say that to me? Why? I’m not a whore!” That enraged him. He roared “Shut your mouth, whore” and raped me, making me understand that I was nothing but a possession of his, someone without any right to speak. When I went back down to my room I saw on the cell phone I had hidden under my pillow that Hicham had called me twenty-five times. At least there was someone who saw me as a person.

  The next night Gaddafi summoned me again and abused me once more. Then he forced me to snort cocaine. I didn’t want to; it scared me. My nose started bleeding and he put some on my tongue. I blacked out.

  I woke up with an oxygen mask on my face in the infirmary of the Ukrainians. Elena was caressing my hand and another nurse, Alina, was watching me anxiously. They didn’t say a word but I could see they were worried about me. They brought me back to my room, where I spent two days in bed, unable to stand. The only thing that kept me alive was thinking about Hicham.

  Amal G. didn’t find out what had happened to me until the next day. Though I was doing a little better I was in no mood to talk, but she took me by the hand and dragged me to the Guide. He was sitting in front of his computer. “Master! You’re not seriously giving drugs to this young one! It’s criminal. And dangerous. What’s come over you?” She was confronting him with astonishing audacity. Her hand in mine, the other on her hip, she was demanding an answer. She had dared to confront him! “Get the hell out!” he shouted, showing her the door. “And leave her here!”

  He jumped on me, crushing my chest, and yelled “Dance!” as he put on the music. Then he pinned me to the floor: “Why did you talk, you slut?”

  “I said nothing. They guessed it on their own.”

  He beat me and raped me, urinated on me, and as he went to take a shower he screamed: “Go away!” I went back downstairs, wet and wretched, convinced that no shower would ever wash me clean again.

  Amal G. stayed angry. And yet she had a true fascination with the Guide. Maybe she even loved him, as implausible as that seemed to me. She said that she was indebted to him for the house her family owned, for her car, for a comfortable life. I asked no questions; I hated him far too much. But when she said, “I swear it on Muammar’s head,” I knew I could believe her. She didn’t hesitate to put everyone at Bab al-Azizia in their place. She’d yell at the horrible Saada Al Fallah, one of the heads of the Department of Protocol, who called her a whore: “You’d do better to be quiet, you fag!” She’d shout and swear, as friendly as a porcupine, not caring at all about the others. But my distress worried her. In the morning she came into my room and said: “Come, I’m taking you home with me. They’ve given me permission. Bring enough things for a few days.”

  I threw my arms around her, kissed her. “All right, all right,” she said as she released herself, always a little aloof, but I could see she had tears in her eyes. So we left to go to her family’s house. How sweet it was at first, that impression of a normal family life: a house, parents, regular meals. I felt homesick for my own family and phoned Mama. “You have to come get me.” Amal G. hit the roof. “Don’t say you’re at my house! You absolutely can’t! If you tell your mother, I’m taking you back to Bab al-Azizia immediately.” She scared me. Anything but returning to my basement, seeing Gaddafi and Mabrouka again. Anything, including lying to Mama, something I’d never done before.

  That’s when I discovered the strange secret life of Amal G., the network she had built up to obtain alcohol, her nocturnal car trips, her friendliness with the police officers who crossed her path—“How is it going, Amal?”—and the mixture of Red Bull and vodka she’d drink at the wheel before she’d splash perfume on herself on her way back. It became clear to me she was hungry for money, and had dealings with businessmen who sent commissions her way. And I realized fairly quickly she was using me to attract powerful and wealthy men. She took me and other girls to parties that were eagerly attended by the country’s dignitaries and celebrities, where an abundance of alcohol and drugs was available, and where money circulated in exchange for sexual favors. Was that all they wanted from me? Was my body, which I despised, really the only thing I had to offer? Was that all I was worth, even outside the harem? Did my link to Bab al-Azizia raise my value in the eyes of certain men? A single night at the opulent home of a famous cousin of Gaddafi’s earned me five thousand dinars—money which Amal G. quickly pocketed and I never dared ask for. She had me in her power.

  One day, when I was on the phone with Mama, catching up on her news, she told me that Inas, my childhood friend from Benghazi, was in Tripoli and really wanted to see me again. She gave me Inas’s number, which I called right away. I really wanted to pick up the thread with normal people, people from my earlier life, although I didn’t know whether that was even possible anymore. Inas answered promptly and very enthusiastically. I asked for her address, suggesting that I come see her right there and then. “Oh, really? You can leave Bab al-Azizia?” She knew! I was dumbfounded. How did Mama dare tell her the truth when she’d been lying to the entire family from the start?

  I took a taxi and asked Inas to pay the driver when I got there. “How can it be that a girl who’s living at the president’s house has no money to pay for her cab?” she joked. I smiled but didn’t answer. How much did she know? What did “living at the president’s house” mean to her? Did she think it was my choice? A status symbol and a real job? I was going to have to walk on eggshells.

  We went into the house and the whole family greeted me with hugs and kisses. “We’ll call your mother so she can join us,” Inas said, suddenly very excited.

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “You shouldn’t . . . I’m temporarily with another girl, outside Bab al-Azizia, who doesn’t want people to know.”

  Everyone looked at me skeptically, in silence. So little Soraya was lying to her mother. And that ruined the atmosphere. “What is your relationship to Bab al-Azizia?” someone asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about that. Surely Mama told you my story.”

  Then I lit a cigarette, causing a mixture of dismay and disapproval in the family’s eyes. Soraya sure had turned out badly.

  I spent the night there. It was a break for me, a brief return to childhood, and it was lovely. Amal G. must have been crazy with anger and worry—I hadn’t accepted a single one of her many calls. When I finally did answer the next morning, she shouted at me.

  “How could you go out without alerting me?”

  “I needed some air, can’t you understand that? At your place I feel imprisoned all over again. Thank you for getting me out of Bab al-Azizia, but now let me breathe a little.”

  She kept on yelling, I started to cry, and then Inas picked up the phone. “I am a childhood friend of hers, and my family is taking care of her, don’t worry.” But Amal G. insisted and said that I was putting myself in a terribly dangerous situation whose consequences I wasn’t taking into consideration. So in the end Inas gave her address to Amal G. “I’m coming!” she said. That was what I had been afraid of. The only refuge I had left, the one that nobody at Bab al-Azizia would have known about, was going to be discovered. I felt hunted. So I called Hicham. “I beg you, please come get me. I don’t want to see anyone but you anymore.”

  He got there in a few minutes and all but kidnapped me. The car tore through the streets of Tripoli, then through the suburbs and into the countryside. He was tense at the wheel, focused on the road. I was watching his profile, my head back against the seat and more relaxed than I had been in ages. I wasn’t thinking any thoughts; I had no plan; I was smiling, simply trusting this man whom I’d met only twice before. I had made no mistake. He was strong and spirited. He drove me to a small vacation house and said: “Get some rest. I know your story and from now on I won’t le
t anyone hurt you.” Without my knowledge, Amal G. had gone to see him to tell him what my connection was with Bab al-Azizia, saying: “This is no girl for you.” And there she was calling me on my cell phone, having tried a dozen times already. “Pick up,” Hicham said. “You don’t need to be afraid of her anymore. Tell her the truth.”

  Trembling, I picked up. She exploded: “You are insane, Soraya! You’re really looking for trouble. How dare you escape when I was coming to get you?”

  “Leave me alone! I’m far away, staying with a girlfriend.”

  “You’re lying! I know you’re with Hicham!”

  I hung up. Hicham took the phone from me and called her back. “Leave her in peace. Forget her. You’ve hurt her enough. From now on I’ll defend her. And I’m quite capable of killing if anyone tries to harm her.”

  “You don’t know me, Hicham. You’ll pay very dearly for this. I’ll make sure you end up in prison.”

  For three days I was happy. The first twenty-four hours I did nothing but cry—I think I was just crying the overflow of five years’ worth of tears. Hicham was patient, gentle, soothing. He prepared food for me, cleaned up, wiped my tears away, and finally I was no longer alone. Perhaps there was life after Bab al-Azizia after all.

  But at the Gaddafi house the news of my escape exploded. Amal G. had taken Inas to my mother, who called me immediately: “I’m crushed, Soraya. You’ve been lying to me for two months! How is that possible? You’re in the city, you smoke, you run away with a man. What has become of my little Soraya? A slut! A whore! It would be better to see you dead than to imagine you living this life. I am so disappointed in you!” I took the blow. The way things looked was against me. But how could she not see that I was just trying to survive?

  Amal G. called me again: “Whatever you do, you’ll come back to Bab al-Azizia eventually.” And sure enough, the internal security forces in their 4x4s besieged the home of Hicham’s parents: “Where is your son? He must bring back the girl he kidnapped.” His brothers phoned him in a panic. So after three days we gave up.

  I went to Amal G., who gave me a choice: to be taken to my parents or to Bab al-Azizia. I chose my parents, but with great anxiety. I could tell that our bond of trust had been broken. Mama stared at me long and hard, as if my face had become a mirror of my depravity, as if I was no longer her poor stolen child but a guilty daughter, a fallen girl. My father welcomed me more affectionately. He looked me over carefully, seeming to not quite recognize me. I think I’d grown a little, but most of all I had aged. Still, he had to play the father’s role and quickly began to ask for an explanation. Who was this Hicham? I told him how lucky I’d been to have had this chance encounter, about his courage, his cool-headedness, and his gentlemanly manners, and about his wish to marry me. They listened to me with a look of disbelief. There was a distance between us that had never been there before.

  My mother didn’t want me leaving the house anymore, more out of fear of this new danger, Hicham, than of Bab al-Azizia. I had to resort to a subterfuge, pretending I was accompanying Papa somewhere and giving him the slip long enough to see Hicham, who provided me with cigarettes and a new card for my cell phone. This way neither Amal G. nor Mabrouka could call me again. At home the atmosphere was tense. It almost killed me not to be able to smoke and sometimes I would hide in the bathroom to have a cigarette, then use an air freshener afterward. I had nothing to talk about. It was as if I were hanging in the air.

  Then one morning at dawn I heard a knock at the door. It was the driver from Bab al-Azizia. “Come with me, Soraya, you are wanted over there.”

  So I left again. Icily, Mabrouka led me to the little lab, where a nurse took three vials of blood from me. I had to wait for an hour in a small room before Salma snarled: “Go upstairs!” The Guide was waiting for me in a jogging suit and a sleeveless T-shirt. “What a slut! I know you slept with other men.” He spat in my face, fucked me, and urinated on me, then concluded: “There’s only one solution left for you: to work under my command. You will sleep at home, but from nine in the morning until nine at night I want you here, at my disposal. You will finally learn to have the discipline of the revolutionary guards.”

  8

  ESCAPE

  The next morning a driver from Bab al-Azizia rang my parents’ doorbell at eight-thirty sharp. I was going to work, going to be a guard. I didn’t know what that was supposed to consist of and just hoped it meant I wouldn’t have any further contact with the Guide. What did a “revolutionary guard” actually do? How was I going to defend the revolution? The answer came very quickly: by serving drinks all day long to the Guide’s African guests! I was in the same house with the same people and the same mistress of the house as before! And at three o’clock in the morning I was still there. “This isn’t what the Guide told me I’d be doing,” I complained to Mabrouka.

  “Maybe not. And what’s more, you’ll be spending the night right here.”

  But I no longer had a room. A new girl had taken my place. So I got ready to sleep on one of the couches in the living room, as if I were just passing through. As soon as the last of the Africans left, I was summoned upstairs to the Guide, together with the new girl. None of this was “revolutionary.” I was as trapped as before.

  The next day I called my father on the sly. It was a short conversation; I could tell he was nervous. “Soraya, this is important. Join me as fast as you can with your passport.” I still had it! It was amazing but I still had it. Carelessness on Mabrouka’s part when we returned from the African journey. I told one of the drivers that I had to run a pressing errand, asked him to wait for me for a moment, and then jumped in a cab to meet Papa, who was waiting for me in his car. He took off and drove me to the French Embassy to submit an application for an emergency visa; they had needed a photograph and my fingerprints. With a little luck and an old connection of my father’s at the embassy, they assured us that it would be ready in a week instead of a month. Less than an hour later, after taking small alleyways, avoiding the bigger roads, and looking in his rearview mirror a thousand times, Papa dropped me off in a taxi that took me back to the driver, and I returned to Bab al-Azizia.

  The next day I was again playing the waitress role. The house was filled with famous people, even stars I recognized: a film director and a singer from Egypt, a Lebanese singer, dancers and television hosts. The Guide came out of his office to join them in the grand reception hall and sat down with them. Then he went upstairs to his bedroom. And quite a few of them joined him there, one after another. An overstuffed Samsonite waited for each of them before they departed.

  I could go home to my parents’ house, but I understood quickly enough that I no longer belonged there. I was a stranger. A bad example for everyone. Now quite distant toward me, Mama spent most of her time in Sirte with my sister and my youngest brother, the two older ones having left to study abroad. So only Papa and my other two brothers were now living in Tripoli. But living with my parents didn’t work. In fact, it was a real disaster. “What kind of a life is this?” Papa would ask. “What sort of an example for your brothers and the rest of the family?” It was so much simpler when they didn’t see me. I would have been less of an embarrassment if I were dead. So something unimaginable happened—I began to prefer life at Bab al-Azizia to being at home.

  Back to the lab. Blood test. Makeshift bed in the living room while waiting to be called for during the night. Then Papa phoned me: “Be ready. In four days you’ll have your visa for France.” So, taking my courage in both hands, I went to confront Gaddafi. “My mother is very sick. I’ll need three weeks off.” He gave me two. I went home again. But what an atmosphere! I had to hide to smoke cigarettes and phone Hicham, and I was getting on everyone’s nerves. I lied, pretending they’d called me back to Bab al-Azizia again, and went to meet my lover. I knew that this was serious, that I was out of my mind, but a little more, a little less . . . My whole life
had gone off the tracks a long time ago! Lying became a way to survive.

  I spent two days with Hicham in a bungalow lent to him by a friend. “I love you,” he said. “You can’t just leave me like this.”

  “It’s the only solution. I can’t live in Libya anymore. Bab al-Azizia will never leave me alone and my family sees me as a kind of monster. And I’ll only cause you trouble.”

  “Why can’t you wait so we can go abroad together?”

  “No. Here I’ll always be hounded and put you in danger. My only hope to have Gaddafi forget me is to leave.”

  I went home to pack my suitcase, moving like a sleepwalker, indifferent to everything happening around me. I’d been told that February in France was very harsh and that I would need real shoes and a really warm coat. In a closet, I found a stack of clothes that Mama had bought for me when she went to Tunisia. “That’s for Soraya,” she’d told my father. “I’m sure she’ll be coming back this year.” Mama . . . She’d been waiting for me to return for five years. During the day she’d face up to the insidious questions and keep the family firmly in hand. At night she would sob and pray to God to protect her little girl and bring her back safely. But I was not a little girl anymore, and I had disappointed her.

  Papa made me get up very early. His face was white. No, really it was green, but his lips were white. I had never seen him like that before—he was scared stiff. He had used gel to comb his hair back. He was wearing a dark suit I didn’t recognize underneath a leather jacket. The smoky sunglasses completed the picture to make him look like a gangster or a spy. I quickly slipped on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and wrapped myself in a black veil and sunglasses that made my face disappear. I called Mama to say goodbye. It was a short, cold phone call. Then we grabbed a cab for the airport. Papa kept throwing me irritated glances. “What’s wrong with you, Soraya? You look as if you don’t give a damn!” Oh, no, I did give a damn. But I was calm. What could possibly happen to me that was more serious than what I’d already lived through? Get killed? That would have been a relief.