The Dictator's Last Night

13

I order the general and the commander of the People’s Guard to ready the troops to withdraw from District Two at the earliest possible opportunity and I invite the lieutenant-colonel to accompany me to my room.

I find it unbearable to be alone, sealed up inside four bare walls that radiate bad luck, telling my beads the way a tortured man counts the final moments of his ordeal.

I pick up my Koran again and attempt to read, but I cannot concentrate. My fasting is starting to fog my vision and to stiffen my muscles. My fingers have become so numb I find it hard to hold the holy book. Waves of dizziness wash over me and I feel like closing my eyes and never opening them again.

The lieutenant-colonel takes a seat on the chair opposite me. His features are creased with fatigue, but his eyes are bright.

I think about Mustafa, the orderly. What did he think he was proving by blowing his brains out? That he was worthy of my respect? Did he have any idea of what he was trying to do? It is strange how men aspire in death to what they have not achieved in life. I try to understand the workings of their minds, and wherever I put my finger on it my understanding is absorbed by the jelly-like surface of their mentalities. Long after thinking I have touched on a definite truth, I realise that I was reading Braille back to front and that the mysteries I was convinced I had unravelled have instead swallowed me whole.

Just now, on the roof, I too wanted death to give me what life is threatening to take away from me: my honour, my legitimacy as sovereign, my courage as a free man. I was ready to die a hero to keep my legend safe. There was no play-acting. By exposing myself on the parapet I wanted to be my own trophy, to claim all of my prestige. There is no shame in being beaten. Defeat has a merit of its own: it is proof that you fought. Only those who desert deserve no consideration, even less so if there are attenuating circumstances … What did my subordinates think when they saw me ‘making a spectacle of myself’? Did they think I had gone mad? I admit that I was being ridiculous — I can only see the inappropriateness of my fury now that a man who feared losing my trust has chosen to lose everything else with it — but I do not regret having bawled out my resolve loud and long.

Life is so complicated. And crazy. It is only a matter of months since the West, having cast aside all sense of shame, was rolling out the red carpet, showering me with honours, garlanding my colonel’s epaulettes with laurels. They let me pitch my tent next to the Champs-Élysées, excusing my boorishness, closing their eyes to my ‘outrages’. And today they are hunting me down on my own territory like an ordinary convict on the run. Strange the way time deals out these sudden reversals. One day you are idolised, the next an object of revulsion; one day the predator, the next the prey. You trust the Voice that deifies you in your heart of hearts and then one fine day, without warning, you find yourself hiding in a corner, naked and defenceless, without a friend in the world. In the immense solitude of my status as sovereign, where no one could keep me company, I never dismissed the possibility of being assassinated or overthrown. That is the price of absolute sovereignty, particularly the sort that one has usurped by force. The spectre of sin and the dread of treason are hardly a millimetre apart. You live with an alarm bell implanted inside your brain. Asleep or awake, whether you are engaged in private reflection or out making your presence felt, you are always on your guard. A fraction of a second’s inattention, and everything that once was is no more. There is no more extreme stress than that of being a sovereign — it is an intensified, obsessional, permanent stress, close to that of those beasts that you see in nature documentaries gasping for water, unable to quench their thirst at a watering hole without looking around them a dozen times, their ears pricked, their sense of smell filtering the air the way one sniffs for signs of a deadly gas. Yet never did I envisage a fall from grace as crude as this. To end up in a disused school, surrounded by mobs of rebel troops, in a town as third-rate as they come? How can I come to terms with falling so low, me, the leader whose very moon felt cramped in the infinite heavens! Even if I were to kill thousands of insurgents with my bare hands, it would not alleviate the sorrow that gnaws at my heart like a cancer. I feel absolutely swindled and betrayed; even the Voice that once sang inside me has fallen silent. The silence that now fills my being frightens me as much as a ghost in the night.

My watch says five o’clock.

Engines are revving up in the school precinct.

With a finger I pull back the tarpaulin covering the window to look outside.

‘You can pull it down, sir,’ Lieutenant-Colonel Trid says. ‘We haven’t got anything to hide any more.’

‘Really?’

‘Let me do it. You might get dirty.’

He asks me to step away before tugging at the tarpaulin, which falls in a cloud of dust.

Outside, day has no need to break. District Two, with its smoking ruins and burning buildings, is a step ahead of it.

Sirte’s pyres might be mistaken for spears of sunlight, but it will not stop night from following day.

Here and there sub-machine guns start chattering at each other again. Men are reawakening to their drama. Night has brought them no wiser counsel.

In the sky, a harbinger still of deadly storms, drones are drifting in lazy circles, vultures in search of the dying.

Everything gives the impression that the town is merely picking itself out of its rubble in order to fall back into it any minute now. Dawn, bled white this morning, only exposes a filthy, festering wound.

‘We are not going to make it out this time, Colonel.’

‘Why do you say that, sir?’

‘My instinct has gone dead. There is a strange silence inside me, and it is a bad sign. I shall not surrender, but I shall not see another day break.’

‘I’ve often been trapped, sir. Thought it was all over. In Mali, once, near Aguelhok, the army had surrounded us. I was with the leader of the Azawad rebels and three of his lieutenants in a hut, without food or water, with a handful of ammunition and our prayers, convinced that these were our last hours on earth. Then a sandstorm blew up. We got out of the hut and slipped straight through the enemy lines.’

‘There will be no sandstorm today.’

I walk back to the couch and slump onto it.

‘We are going to lose the war, Colonel.’

‘It’s Libya that will have lost you, Brotherly Guide.’

‘It amounts to the same thing.’

‘In one sense.’

‘And the other?’

He does not answer.

‘There is only one sense, Colonel. The one that describes our destiny. We are merely actors; we play roles that we have not necessarily chosen and we are not allowed to consult the script.’

‘You have made history, Rais.’

‘False. It is history that has made me. When I glance over my shoulder, to take stock of my life, I realise that nothing is the result of my will, or of my military accomplishments, or the strokes of luck that have got me out of trouble. I tell myself, why complicate life if everything is preordained? There is someone up there who knows what He is doing … But in the last few days I have begun to wonder whether He has already turned the page. Perhaps He has chosen another pawn to play with.’

I pick up the Koran and replace it immediately.

‘You see, Colonel? Even the most wonderful fairy tales, when they are reinvented as soap opera, end up being boring. That must be what has happened to the One up there. He has lost His train of thought where I am concerned. He does not even feel like knowing the end of the story any more.’

The lieutenant-colonel holds out the bar of chocolate.

‘There’s magnesium in it, sir. You need to keep your strength up.’

‘I am not hungry.’

‘Please …’

‘I am a mystic. Fasting suits me perfectly. It helps keep my mind clear when things refuse to go right.’

He does not press the point and goes back to sit on his chair.

This lad is outstanding. He has class, depth, an Olympian calm that keeps increasing his stature in my eyes, and — the rarest of virtues — he is entirely natural. He is aware of the great esteem in which I hold him, but that special favour has not spoilt him. Others would have taken endless advantage of it; he tucks it away in his heart like something precious, a holy gift that he could not expose to the air without damaging it.

‘What would you like to have accomplished that you have not had the opportunity to achieve yet, Colonel?’

He reflects for a moment or two, then, in a barely audible voice, he says, ‘To be loved madly.’

‘Are you not loved enough?’

‘My wife complains that she has married a ghost because of my continual absences, and my comrades are all wildly jealous of me. Every time I go on a mission they pray I won’t come back.’

‘That is normal with your comrades. They are cross with you for overtaking them and detest you because they know they will never be half the man you are. But that cannot be the case with your wife. If she is jealous, unlike your colleagues she is also praying day and night for you to come home to her.’

‘She knows I’m faithful to her.’

‘No one knows that kind of thing. However much we trust the one we love, when they are not there doubt stalks us everywhere, like our shadow.’

‘I haven’t been unfaithful to her once in eight years of marriage.’

‘It will come. You are handsome, as brilliant as it is possible to be, and ahead of all your intake. Any woman would fall for you. Women are more dazzled by rank than muscles.’

‘Not all, Brotherly Guide.’

‘How do you know? There are bedroom secrets that faithful husbands can never dream of.’

He raises his hands in surrender.

‘I hope there’s nothing for me to dream of.’

‘That does not depend on you.’

He has run out of arguments and laughs.

His good mood calms me a little.

‘Apart from being loved, what else would be your dearest accomplishment?’

He places his hands over his nose and reflects. His eyes are bright as he says, ‘My grandfather was a shepherd. He had no education, but he had a very good philosophy of life. I’ve never known anyone so comfortable with their poverty. The smallest thing could make him happy. When luck was on his side, for my grandfather everything was good. You had to see things as they were, not as you wanted them to be. In his eyes, just being alive was an extraordinary stroke of luck and no hardship could take that away. I remember he did nothing apart from look after his sheep, just vegetated and wore the same rags summer and winter. When I went to find him to suggest that he came and lived with my little family at Ajdabiya, in a nice villa that overlooked the sea, he just shook his head. Nothing in the world could have made him want to leave his tent that he’d pitched in the middle of nowhere.’

‘He was wrong.’

‘Maybe, but he was like that, my grandfather. He had decided to feel good the way he was, never going to much trouble. He was happy and rich in the joys he shared with the people he loved. Every morning he was up at first light to watch the sky catch fire. He said he didn’t need anything else … That’s the feat I’d like to have accomplished, sir. To be like my grandfather: a man never annoyed by anything, who possessed just the modest happiness that came from feeling comfortable with a life of complete frugality.’

‘I shall never understand how some people can pretend that resignation is the same as humility.’

I find the lieutenant-colonel touching in his naivety and wonder what will become of him. I would like him to survive this. He is so young, so handsome and authentic. He embodies the Libyan army I dreamt of, the officer who would outlive me, to carry on my teachings and deliver eulogies to my glory at every commemoration.

‘Do you know van Gogh, Colonel?’

‘Of course. He sliced off his ear so that the red on his canvas would be as vivid as his pain.’

‘Someone once told me that he mutilated himself because of a romance that went wrong.’

He opens his arms.

‘Every genius has his own fantasies, sir. You said yourself that there is no truth except death, and that it is lies that shape life.’

‘I do not remember having said such a thing.’

‘Many other quotations will be attributed to you in the future, Brotherly Guide. Just as we attribute anonymous poems to Al-Mutanabbi. It is part and parcel of mythology.’

‘Do you believe that people will remember me?’

‘For as long as this country is called Libya.’

‘And what will they remember about me?’

‘You will have followers, and a mass of detractors. The former will revere you, the latter reproach you for everything you have accomplished, because they have done so little with their lives. One thing is certain, that you will be missed by the majority of our people.’

‘I do not think so, Colonel. That people you speak of has no more memory than any hothead — how otherwise do you explain that it seeks my downfall after what I have done for it?’

The colonel runs his hand through his hair. A lock of hair flops onto his brow, emphasising a little more his young centurion’s charm. He contemplates his spotless white hands before speaking.

‘When I was doing a course at Vystrel Academy, near Moscow, I made friends with some of the Russians there. They were young officers or young cadres, straight out of university. They went around with the latest mobile phones, drove the most fashionable 4×4s, wore perfume from Dior and designer clothes and had dinner in chic restaurants that they’d booked online with their sophisticated laptops. They were today’s people, rich and in a hurry. They hadn’t known the period of scarcity, the chorni khleb, the endless queues outside shops whose shelves were practically empty, the institutionalised spying at post offices and prison sentences for wearing a pair of jeans you’d bought on the black market. Yet when they drank so much vodka that they couldn’t tell a fork from a rake, they went on and on about how bad everything was, how the country was going to the dogs, how the state structures were pathetic and the oligarchs’ corruption intolerable, and how much they missed Stalin’s iron hand … It’s the same everywhere, Brotherly Guide. In Chile they miss Pinochet, in Spain they miss Franco, in Iraq Saddam, in China Mao, the same way they miss Mubarak in Egypt and Genghis Khan in Mongolia.’

‘What image will they have of me? Will I be their guide or their tyrant?’

‘You’re not a tyrant. You did exactly what needed to be done. There are two sorts of people. People who work with their heads and people who need a big stick. Our people needed a big stick.’

I cannot agree with him.

I acknowledge that I treated those who became dissidents without mercy. How else could I have responded? To rule over people requires a culture that is compatible with a single medium: blood. Without blood, a throne is a potential gallows. To protect mine, I took a leaf out of the chameleon’s book: I walked with one eye looking ahead, the other behind, my step calibrated to the millimetre, my speech moralistic and as unhesitating as lightning. The moment I melted into the background, I became part of the background …

‘The only people I clamped down on were traitors, Colonel. I loved and protected my people.’

‘You shouldn’t have, Rais. You cosseted them too much and it made them lazy and cunning. They wallowed in their sense of entitlement to the point where they couldn’t be bothered to shoo a fly off a cake any more. They thought work, knowledge, ambition were a waste of time. Why worry about anything when the Brotherly Guide is there to think for everyone? The average Libyan has no idea of how generous you’ve been to him. He’s just taken advantage of you. He thought he was a little prince and expected it to last for ever. From the moment he sees that people are working so he doesn’t have to, operating his machines so he can knock off, why should he wait for a lunch break? He gets tired just looking at his Africans working like dogs for him. Now he’s trying to prove he’s worth more than he was originally valued at, and so how does he do it? By biting the hand that fed him. If you’ll allow me, sir, I think you should have treated your people the same way you treated your dissidents. They are not worth the time and concern you have lavished on them, sir. They’re a nation of shopkeepers and smugglers who only know how to do dodgy deals and doss around. Tomorrow’s Libyans will miss you the way that they miss Stalin in Russia, because with the gang we’ve got here, knocking our cities flat and lynching its heroes in public, our grandchildren are going to inherit a country that’s been handed over to puppets and incompetents.’

I feel both hurt and relieved by the lieutenant-colonel’s words.

‘What I like about you, my boy, even more than your courage, is your frankness. Not one of my ministers or concubines has ever opened my eyes to the reality you have just described. Every one of them flattered me that I had made, out of a rabble of Bedouins, the proudest people on earth.’

‘They weren’t lying to you. From a ragtag of tribes who were all hostile to each other you made a single body and a single spirit. But the real truth was more than that.’

‘Why was it hidden from me?’

‘Because it wasn’t nice, sir.’

At that moment the bedroom door opens with a crash. It is Mansour who has come to brief us, breathless and feverish, his face flushed. He informs us that the officer ordered to contact Mutassim has returned and that it is time for us to set out.

I turn to the colonel.

‘It is the moment of truth.’