The Dictator's Last Night
Page 13
Suddenly, in the midst of the storm, looking up, I see the sky above the repulsive masks salivating over me. For a fraction of a second it seems to me that the full moon has taken the place of the sun. In a final momentary revival, I offer a prayer at random: Lord, forgive them their sins as I forgive them, for they do not know what they do … A gunshot goes off. Point blank. It is for me. My coup de grâce. The Lord has decided to cut short my agony. I knew He would not abandon me. God does not desert His elected; He makes of their end the beginning of a new faith, of their suffering a proof of transcendence … I fall in slow motion to the ground, freed of my ties, relieved of my wrongdoings, delivered from my remorse; I am born again from my wounds, new like a soul who has just emerged from his mother’s womb. Slowly the cries fade one after another, then the faces, then the daylight. I am dying, but my stamp will remain. For having left my imprint on their consciousness, my reward is to live on in the memory of peoples, to surf the ages that will race at top speed towards the infinite, to bombard them with remembrance of me until History becomes my pyramid. I shall be missed; I shall be sung in schools; my name shall be engraved on the marble of stelae and sanctified in the mosques; the epic of my life shall inspire poets and playwrights; painters shall devote frescoes to me wider than the horizon; I shall be venerated, wept over at the moment of repentance, and I shall have as many saints as accomplices, as is fitting for exceptional guides.
I make my bow; I am already on the other side of things and living beings, there where no sacrilege is to be found, where no mistake or misunderstanding can make me believe that the love of a people is an unfailing oath that cannot be broken …
My soul is leaving my body.
I float above the dust, see the ambulance forcing its way through the mob to take me to who knows what horror show, see the rebels revelling in their ignoble ritual, others brandishing pieces of my bloody clothing; I see tyre marks on the tarmac, the breeches of weapons glinting in the sun, the rebel banners flapping in the wind, but I do not hear the din of their jubilation or the noise of the volleys as they fire into the air in exultation.
I see everything: the sweat on faces as tense as if they have cramp, the eyes rolling upwards, the thick foam at the corners of their mouths, the crowd congratulating itself non-stop, the voyeurs immortalising with their mobiles the moment of their spiralling descent, but I cannot hear anything, not even the cosmic breath that is breathing me in.
It is now that my mother summons me, from across all these mirages. Her voice reaches me from the depths of a Fezzan eaten away by the desert. I see her again, her head in her hands, angry at my wild, boyish mischievousness: You only listen with one ear, the one you willingly lend to your devils, while the other is deaf to all reason … And it is at that precise moment, just before I dissolve among the swirls of nothingness, that I understand why that diabolical van Gogh, with his mutilated ear, broke in on my nights and on my madness.
But it is too late.
About the Author
Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of award-winning Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul. His novels include The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad. In 2011 Yasmina Khadra was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de la littérature Henri Gal by the Académie Française.
Julian Evans is a writer and translator from French and German. His most recent translations are Michel Déon’s The Foundling Boy and The Foundling’s War.
Also by Yasmina Khadra
In the Name of God
Morituri
Double Blank
The Swallows of Kabul
Autumn of the Phantoms
The Attack
Wolf Dreams
The Sirens of Baghdad
Dead Man’s Share
What the Day Owes the Night
Cousin K.
The African Equation
Copyright
First published in France as La Dernière Nuit du Raïs
by Éditions Julliard, 2015
© Éditions Julliard, 2015
English translation copyright © Julian Evans, 2015
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,
London, SW1W 0NZ
All rights reserved
The right of Yasmina Khadra to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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