The Dictator's Last Night

by Yasmina Khadra

  Ground down by thirst and dizzying heat, Fezzan was like me. I was as naked and empty as the desert expanding the circle of its desolation.

  Sitting under an acacia, I daydreamed about nomads, brigands, pilgrims, deserters, caravan drivers, adventurers, travellers who had lost their way, lords and servants who had paused under this tree, bristling with thorns, wondering what roads they had taken after their rest and whether they had arrived at their destination.

  I was more unhappy than it is normally possible to be, as miserable as the skeletal shadow of the acacia brushing away the sand, as frantic as the wild, spindly roots tangled around me, not knowing where to bury their sorrow.

  The furnace around me was nothing to the furnace that was burning my soul.

  What had I come to find in the desert? The retreat of silence or the agony of time passing? There was nothing for me here. My points of reference had as much solidity as the mirages shimmering deceptively in the distance. Had I come to listen to the Voice, or to erase the sergeant’s voice? Neither seemed capable of reaching me in the tumult of my frustration. Like a tightrope walker I wobbled in the void, sure that flying away would be as tragic for me as falling.

  I sat moping all day under the acacia tree, where my uncle, tired of waiting for me, eventually came to find me.

  He said, ‘Why are you sitting here, Muammar?’

  ‘Where else should I go?’

  ‘Come home. You’ve been roasting in the sun for hours. It’s not good for you. You’ll get sunstroke.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Is it true what they’re saying, that you’ve been dismissed from the army?’

  ‘They have suspended me.’

  ‘How is it possible?’

  ‘I punched an officer.’

  ‘You punched an officer?’

  ‘I would have punched the king himself.’

  ‘What has got into you, my son?’

  ‘I am not anyone’s son.’

  I faced him.

  With his spine stooped under the burden of his years and his face like a halo of dust, my uncle looked like a cloth stuck on a pole. Poverty had sucked him dry, leaving him just his old hands to reflect his fate.

  I challenged him.

  ‘Who is Albert Preziosi?’

  He put a finger to his cheek, eyelashes lowered, and thought for a long time.

  ‘Is it a name from among us?’

  ‘It is a Christian name.’

  ‘I have never known a Christian in my life.’

  ‘Try and remember. It goes back a long way, to a time when the Christians used to turn up in our houses uninvited.’

  ‘The colonists preferred to be near the sea. The desert was not for them.’

  I got to my feet, towering over him by a full head. He looked smaller than a gnome.

  ‘Are you telling me that not a single infidel soldier ever ventured into our territory? There are places here that still bear the traces of the Afrika Korps’s Panzers. Relics of tanks less than three kilometres from this spot. By the 1940s you were already a father. You must have come across a Christian or two. A deserter or a wounded man whom the clan looked after, out of Muslim charity.’

  He shook his head, his brow furrowed.

  ‘You do not remember a plane shot down in a dogfight that crashed near here in 1941?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘The pilot was not killed. Our people went to his aid and hid him and nursed him … It is impossible that you can have forgotten an event of that kind. He was a Frenchman, a Corsican …’

  ‘No plane came down here. Not during the war, or before or after.’

  ‘Look at me!’

  He stood in front of me, shaking his chin from left to right.

  My voice snapped like an explosion.

  ‘Is it true that I am a bastard, the piss of some dog of a Corsican who passed through here?’

  The crudity of my speech made him flinch. It is not in our upbringing to utter obscenities in front of those who are older than us. But he did not protest. He saw how angry I was and did not feel capable of confronting it. What he said next, in a whisper, he did not mean to say.

  ‘I don’t see what you mean.’

  ‘Do you ever see anything apart from the end of your nose? Go on, tell me the truth. Is it true that I am the runt of some dog of a Corsican?’

  ‘Who has said such an outrageous thing to you?’

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  ‘Your father died in a duel. I’ve told you a thousand times.’

  ‘In that case, where is his tomb? Why is his body not in our cemetery with the rest of our departed?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Be quiet. You are nothing but a liar. You have all lied to me. I have no reason to be grateful to you in the slightest. If my father is still in this world I shall find him, even if I have to turn over every stone on earth. If he is dead I shall find his tomb eventually. As for all of you, I banish you from my heart and I will spend the rest of my days cursing you until the good Lord cries out, “Enough!”’

  I never spoke another word to my uncle.

  After I had overthrown the king and proclaimed the republic, I went back, my head still ringing with the crowd’s acclamation, to celebrate my revolution in my tribe. I was coming back to take my revenge on my clan. They had kept a secret from me, and I had proved that I could survive it. Fezzan changed its look for me that morning. The desert was offering its nakedness to me as a blank page, ready to receive the epic of my unstoppable rise.

  Sitting cross-legged in the kheïma of the most senior elder, my smile wider than the crescent on the top of a minaret, I relished the rapture I aroused among my people. They no longer looked down on me, they were prostrating themselves at my feet. The kids were running all over the place, overexcited by my presence; the women spied on me from the depths of their hiding places; the men pinched themselves until they drew blood. In my tailored uniform, like a prince in his state regalia, I had drunk tea with my nearest relations and a few comrades. The desert rang with our bursts of laughter. A full moon graced the sky, heated white-hot. In the middle of the day. My uncle stood outside the tent, not knowing if he should rejoice at my return or feel its pain. I had not acknowledged him. It was no longer very important to me to know if I was a Corsican’s bastard or a brave man’s son.

  I was my own offspring.

  My own begetter.

  Are we all our fathers’ children? Was Isa Ibn Maryam the son of God, or the child of a rape that went unacknowledged, or just the result of a rash flirtation? What does it matter? Jesus knew how to fashion his short young life into immortality, to turn his Calvary into a Milky Way and his name into the password for paradise. What counts is what we succeed in leaving behind us. How many world-class conquerors have fathered good-for-nothing kings? How many civilisations have disappeared the moment they were handed on to heirs of insufficient calibre? How many shackled slaves have broken their chains to build colossal empires? I had no need to know who my father had been, or to look for the grave of an illustrious stranger. I was Muammar Gaddafi. For me the Big Bang had taken place the morning I took over the radio station in Benghazi to announce to a drowsing populace that I was their saviour and their redemption. Bastard or orphan, I had transformed myself into a nation’s destiny by becoming its legitimate path and identity. For having given birth to a new reality, I no longer had anything to envy the gods of mythology or the heroes of history.

  I was worthy of being only Myself.

  9 During the clean-up operation, which I took personal charge of, to disinfect the republic’s institutions of the monarchist vermin, I forced Major Jalal Snoussi to dig his own grave with his bare hands.

  11

  I am reading the Koran, shut away in my room, when the air strike hits District Two, one missile, then another … The third is so powerful that the last panes are blasted out of the windows and hit the floor in a chilling shattering of glass.

  The
awaited coalition attack has begun.

  I go out into the corridor. On the ground floor I hear someone shouting orders to switch off all the lights and not to go out into the courtyard. The few candles lighting the living room downstairs are quickly put out. A fourth missile hits, not far from our school headquarters. A sort of feverishness takes hold of me, making me excited and curious. I want to be present at the bombardment of my city, and I take the stairs that lead to the terrace four at a time.

  I expected something climactic, a sky slashed by shooting stars, adorned with balls of fire the size of exploding suns, with searchlights aimed in the direction of the attack, soldiers returning fire, fire engines tearing to where the missiles have hit and burning winds starting up on every side – but all I get is a low-grade performance as miserable as it is amateurish, seeing only a city without courage exposed to the fury of the drones, inert in its dust and dirt like a tart in her filthy sheets. Apart from the bombs raining down from an indifferent sky and the targets smoking like shreds of rags carried away on the wind, Sirte is as depressing as one of History’s rejects. Not a single pair of headlights, not one alarm wailing, not a shot fired from a rooftop: nothing but the crump of explosions and a darkness filled with poltergeists who have suddenly gone to ground, their fingers to their lips so they do not give themselves away.

  I am disappointed.

  I remember the night of Friday 28 March 2003, when a rain of fire deluged Baghdad. I was pinned to my armchair at Bab al-Azizia, in front of my plasma screen, completely transfixed by the blue-green darkness saturating the city of Harun al-Rashid. The flares swelled in the middle of the Tomahawk ballet, the anti-aircraft machine guns traced exciting phosphorescent lines of dots in the sky, buildings collapsed in a tumult of concrete and steel, ammunition dumps burst in great arrays of sizzling comets. It was a magical sight, a terrible wonderland. The coalition’s apocalyptic firework display came up against the Iraqis’ valour. David and Goliath were waging a titanic battle in a performance designed by a choreographer of genius. The air-raid sirens merged with the ambulance sirens to make a symphony of misfortune that was unbearable in its intensity and beauty. I could have died that night in Baghdad’s wounded arms, at the heart of a proud nation so admirable in its fighting spirit; I would have liked to die pinned to a column that shattered into a thousand pieces, or be blown apart by a shell, shouting, ‘Death to the invader.’ Nothing can be more gratifying for a martyr than to give up his soul without surrendering, identifying himself with every fireball, every rattling breech, every piece of flesh caught in the coil of the supreme sacrifice.

  What a disappointment not to see any of that in my own country.

  Sirte is the pits, an old, rotting rug being beaten to pieces, a doormat to wipe your filthy boots on. It looks like the kind of place the gods chose to mourn their Olympus.

  ‘Don’t stay out there, Brotherly Guide.’

  Abu-Bakr begs me to take cover. He stands at the top of the stairs, too frightened to join me on the terrace. His pallor gleams in the half-light, like a candle in a death chamber.

  ‘Brotherly Guide, please, this way.’

  I feel like spitting at him.

  Mansour and Lieutenant-Colonel Trid come running.

  ‘Please, Rais, don’t stay there.’

  ‘Why not?’ I say. ‘It is my city they are destroying. How can I look elsewhere, or cover my face?’

  Abu-Bakr ventures out onto the terrace.

  ‘Go back to your hole,’ I order him. ‘I am not like Ben Ali, ready to sneak away. I was born in this land and this land will be my tomb.’

  ‘You could be injured.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘We need you, Rais.’

  ‘Go. That is an order. I am not afraid of dying.’

  A missile hits a few blocks away from the school. The defence minister retreats to the top of the stairs, his hands covering his ears, bent double. Mansour throws himself down. Only the lieutenant-colonel dares to come towards me, not knowing how to convince me to follow him.

  The building that has been hit turns into a gigantic torch. The trees around it catch fire in turn, casting an unearthly light on the street, strewn with white-hot rubble.

  Intoxicated by the noise of weapons and the folly of men, I find myself yelling, my arms out wide, calling down the heaven’s thunder.

  ‘You will not take me alive. I am not a clove of garlic to be strung up on a rope. I will fight to the last drop of my blood … Come and get me, you dogs! I am a soldier of Allah; death is my mission. My place is in paradise, at the side of the prophets, surrounded by angels and houris, and my earthly tomb will carry as many crowns as a meadow has flowers … What did you think? That I would hide down a well until someone came to flush me out? You will not swab my cheek with your cotton swabs. You will not expose me on prime-time TV with a tramp’s beard. And you, Sarkozy, you will not have the honour of flying my scalp on the roof of your National Assembly.’

  ‘I beg you, Rais, come with me,’ Trid pleads with me.

  I am not listening to him.

  I hear only my own piercing cries, ringing out over the chaos of the explosions. I am a roaring inferno. A supernatural force has taken hold of me. I feel capable of confronting hurricanes.

  A bomb explodes close to the school. Its shock wave stings my face, whipping up my anger. I climb up onto the parapet, open my arms wide, my chest thrust out, my chin forward.

  The lieutenant-colonel grips my waist to stop me stepping up onto the wall’s outer ledge. He suspects that I am about to throw myself off. I push him away with a hand, turn back to the massacre and go on with my railing against the entire world.

  ‘Look! I’m up here, flesh and blood, on my pedestal. Must I sacrifice myself before you see me? Come on, show some guts, you cowards; come and get me if you’re man enough. You’ll find that I’m not Ben Ali, or Saddam or Bin Laden.’

  ‘Rais, there’ll be snipers across the street.’

  ‘Then let them show themselves. They couldn’t hit a mountain, they’re shaking with fear.’

  The lieutenant-colonel wraps his arms around my waist again. It is as if his embrace is pressing on my rage to squirt it up to the stars. I lean on him for support, put my hands around my mouth like a megaphone and hurl my cries further than an artillery shell.

  ‘Curses be upon you, Saddam Hussein! Why did you let yourself be taken alive and executed on the first day of Eid? You could have put a bullet in your brain and robbed the Crusaders of the pleasure of their ghoulish revenge. Because of you, the prophet Muhammad and his people do not dare raise their eyes to God any longer … But I shall stand straight before the Lord. I shall look him in the eye till He turns away. Because He wouldn’t trouble himself to unleash the Ababil on these infidels who heap calumnies and defecate without restraint upon a Muslim land.’10

  My shouts pour out into space like a raging torrent of the elements; the sky and earth intermingle, then the abyss …

  10 In the Koran the Ababil were a race of birds that saved Mecca from the Yemeni army by dropping clay bricks on its elephants as they approached.

  12

  I am cold.

  In the cavern in which I find myself it is as black as if no light had shone there since the beginning of time. I grope my way, fear clawing at my stomach; I have no idea where I am going, but I know that I am not alone. An intangible presence is hovering around me. I hear the sound of footsteps. When I stop, the sound stops too.

  ‘Who is there?’

  Silence.

  ‘Who is there? I am not deaf. Play hide-and-seek as much as you like, I can hear you.’

  ‘All you can hear is the echo of your own fear, Muammar.’

  I turn towards the Voice; it rings through the cavern, ricocheting off the stone, washing over me and dying away in a yawning sigh.

  ‘I am not afraid.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘Who should I be afraid of? I am the dauntless Guide, and I walk wit
h my head held so high that the very stars draw back from me.’

  ‘In that case, why do you retreat in the darkness?’

  ‘Perhaps I am dead.’

  ‘Having skipped your punishment? Too easy, don’t you think?’

  ‘Who are you? Angel or devil?’

  ‘Both. I was even God, once.’

  ‘Then show yourself, if you are brave enough.’

  Something moves in the depth of the cavern and comes closer. I can just make out a human form. It is a wretch dressed in rags, with a shaggy tangled beard and an endless rope tied around his neck that he drags with him, among his chains.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Don’t you recognise me? No more than a minute ago you were heaping curses on me.’

  ‘Saddam Hussein?’

  ‘Or what is left of him: a poor devil wandering in the darkness.’

  ‘Then I am dead.’

  ‘Not yet. For your soul to rest, it must first make sure it undergoes the suffering of your flesh.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘To look you in the face and read the terror that’s written there now. You’ve insulted me, cursed me and spat on me. Let me remind you that I was hanged by America and its allies, but you will be lynched by your own people.’

  ‘Your people betrayed you too.’

  ‘It’s not the same, Muammar. Under my reign Iraq was a great nation. Harun al-Rashid was no greater a ruler than I was. My universities produced geniuses. Every night Baghdad made merry, every seed I sowed sprouted before it touched the ground. But you, Muammar, what did you turn your people into? A starving mob who’ll devour you whole.’

  ‘I can’t know your fate, Hussein. But my destiny is in my hands. And God’s too.’

  ‘God is with no one. Didn’t He let His own son die on the cross? He won’t come to your aid. He’ll watch you die like a dog under a hail of stones. And when your soul departs your body He won’t even be there to meet it. You’ll wander in the darkness, as I do, until you become no more than a shadow among the shadows.’