The Dictator's Last Night

14

On the ground floor there is general mobilisation. Soldiers are running in all directions. Officers are shouting to gee themselves up and manhandling the slower men, caught off guard by the turn of events.

I detest messes. One breeds another; they make my nervous tension worse.

I suspect the general of not having briefed his subordinates. I look for him in the mêlée but cannot see him anywhere.

Mansour brings over to me the officer whose return has sparked everything off. He is young, probably only just out of the Academy. He salutes me and practically falls over, unnerved by the expression I must have on my face.

‘Where is my son?’

‘He is on his way, sir.’

‘You have seen him?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Personally?’

‘Absolutely, sir. He handed over to me the twenty vehicles I’ve brought back with me and ordered me to tell you that we must leave at once.’

‘Why did he not come with you?’

‘He is commanding the third — the last — section of the convoy. At least thirty vehicles. It’s being slowed down by the two Shilka batteries.’

‘Is he safe and sound?’

‘Yes, sir. He says he’ll catch us up en route, after we’re clear of District Two.’

My armoured 4×4 is lined up in the courtyard. Lieutenant-Colonel Trid is organising the column, summoning the drivers and issuing orders about the procedure to follow.

‘There will be four cars in front for reconnaissance. I’ll be in the fifth vehicle, which will travel two hundred metres back. The rais will be in the sixth. On no account are you to stop if you are attacked. If I leave the convoy, you will follow me. Do not let me out of your sight for a second. You are there to ensure the rais’s safety at all times.’

The drivers click their heels and return to their vehicles.

Mansour and I take our seats in the armoured 4×4.

‘Where is the general?’

‘He went to see if his two sons had arrived,’ the Guard commander informs me.

‘Get him. I want him to travel with us.’

Someone runs to find the general. The minutes drag on. I swear in the back of the 4×4, thump the back of the driver’s seat.

Abu-Bakr finally arrives, panting and sweating.

‘Where did you get to, damn you?’

‘I was looking for my sons.’

‘Now is not the time. Get in the front; everyone is waiting for you.’

As soon as the general climbs into the 4×4, the convoy sets off.

We drive out of the school in an almighty roar. In their haste vehicles drive into each other, some scrambling onto the pavement to get to their place in the column as fast as they can.

The convoy sorts itself into a disciplined file as it turns onto the ring road that leads to the coast. As we reach the first junction, I realise I have left my Koran and my prayer beads in my room.

We drive, exposed, along the coast road, at the mercy of ambushes and air raids.

Rarely has the day been so radiant. Despite the pall of smoke from the fires, it has a dazzling clarity. It feels as though the sun has chosen the traitors’ side — it illuminates me like a target.

I am not calm, but I am not excessively concerned. I have no idea where they are taking me or what is waiting for me around the next bend, yet I do not have the feeling that it is essential to know either of these things. What would it change?

Mansour, on my right, is tense. He hugs his gun as though clinging to a rope that will pull him out of the chasm his silence has become. His fingers are white at the joints. Immense olive-coloured bags darken the skin under his eyes. I suspect he is praying as profoundly as he has ever prayed.

Inside the cabin the burbling of the engine is a gloomy sound.

The general looks in the rear-view mirror to see if there is any sign of the third section of the convoy, the one commanded by my son, in which he hopes he will see his two sons again.

‘Can you see anything?’

‘Not yet, Rais.’

‘Why did Mutassim want to overload himself with the Shilkas?’ Mansour grumbles. ‘They’re tracked and too heavy: they’re going to slow us down. In any case, what can 37s do against the coalition’s planes? Their range is nowhere near great enough. You could use them for hunting bustards, and that’s all.’

‘They’re better than nothing,’ the general says.

‘They’re not even credible as decoration,’ Mansour persists. ‘Those vultures carrying out the air strikes are using long-range weapons. They don’t have to come anywhere near our coastline.’

I prefer not to listen to them.

I try to think of nothing; I dive deep inside myself in search of that Voice that promised me mountains and marvels when I was a disillusioned lieutenant and beginning to stink in the shadow of my own bitterness, the Voice that soothed and graced my solitude with its promises and challenges. Where has it gone? Why has it fallen silent? I visualise it curled up somewhere in the blackness that is slowly overtaking me, but I find only the echo of my prayers. The Voice has left the ship, and there is no one at the helm.

I am alone with destiny, and destiny is looking elsewhere.

Even Sirte, the city of my adolescence — the cradle of my revolution — has turned its back on me.

There was a time when its squares and stadiums teemed with people come to acclaim me. Pavements and platforms overflowed with fervour and pennants. People held up portraits of me and sang my praises until they were hoarse. It was here, in this city where memories are already being rewritten, that I took an oath to bring fate to her knees. Then it was just a quiet little medina that did not know how to sell itself or make itself desirable. Along its corniche the wealthy dreamt of the casinos that glittered on the Mediterranean’s northern shore; at its roadsides the poor dreamt of nothing, having been stripped of everything. A gulf as deep as an abyss kept the two classes so far apart that when they happened to pass each other in the street they did not even see one another; they went on their respective ways like ghosts, each in their parallel world. I remember the low-class cafés that stank of piss and privation, the souks infested with beggars and scrawny pickpockets, the kids with heads swollen with ulcers who rolled in the dust giggling as if they were possessed, their noses streaming and their pus-clogged eyes swarming with flies; I can still smell the sickening stenches that rose from the open sewers, see the women in rags chanting in doorways in voices more tragic than any funeral dirge, the stray dogs roaming the rubbish tips with their fangs bared, trying to assuage their hunger, the old people pinned to the walls like scarecrows nobody wanted, the alleys that were as narrow and dark as twisted minds. It was here, in this town, that I grabbed a police officer by the throat when I saw him slap a man in front of his children just because he asked for directions. I have never forgotten the expression on those children’s faces; nothing has ever infuriated me more. It was boom time for feudalists, for middle-class Muslims who spoke Italian, from their grand cars that did not stop when they ran pedestrians over.

And I said, ‘Enough!’

And I raised my voice and said, ‘Death to the king!’

And I founded a republic and brought justice back.

It was right here, in this city that is turning its back on its values, that I knocked down those stinking cafés, demolished the slums, put up buildings taller than towers, built hospitals equipped with ultra-modern facilities, attractive sparkling shops like aquariums, handsome esplanades and mosaic fountains; I laid out boulevards as wide as parade grounds and turned empty lots into municipal gardens where dreams and everyday joys merged.

Thanks to who?

Thanks to me, and me alone, father of the revolution, the Ghous clan’s chosen one, come from the desert to sow tranquillity in the hearts and minds of the people.

I was Moses, come down from the mountain with a green book as my tablet.

Everything I did worked.

The champions of Arab nationalism glorified me at the tops of their voices, the leaders of the Third World ate out of my hand, African presidents quenched their thirst from my lips, apprentice revolutionaries kissed my brow and were transported into ecstasy; all the children of the free world took pride in being associated with me.

Was there anyone who did not praise Muammar to the skies, scourge of kings and hunter of eagles, the Bedouin of Fezzan crowned rais at the age of twenty-seven?

I was young, handsome, proud, and such a phenomenon that I only had to pick up any old pebble for it to become the philosopher’s stone.

And what do I see today? I, the miracle-maker whose charisma bewitched women? What do I see after all my Pharaonic creations, all my crowning achievements? A town handed over to the pillage and vandalism of an army of jinn, villas with their shutters blown off, devastated squares, desecrated buildings and burnt-out cars — a city despoiled as far as the eye can see.

They have crossed out my slogans, disfigured the portraits of me that decorated the façades of buildings: I can see one on a billboard, slashed with a bayonet and smeared with excrement.

Is that how people show love for their guide? Did this people love me sincerely, or was it merely a mirror reflecting back to me my own exaggerated narcissism?

No, they could not identify with me; it was I who saw myself in them, taking their clamour at face value. Now I know: the people of Libya do not know very much about love. They lied to me, just as the profiteers and my mistresses mocked me. I was their open sesame: they sweet-talked me into holding the candle for them while they stuffed their pockets at my expense. From a pathetic rabble I made a happy and prosperous nation, and look at the thanks I get. I feared treachery inside my palaces, but it was creeping up on me unsuspected in the towns and villages. Lieutenant-Colonel Trid was not wrong: my people are a gang. Unlike me, who lived entrenched in my bunkers, Trid is a field soldier. He evolved among the people, got to know them inside out. I should have dealt with them the way I dealt with dissidents, been more severe with them, distrusted them more. Dissidents betray themselves; the people betrayed me instead. If I had my time again, I would exterminate half the nation. Lock them up in camps to show them what real work is, and watch them die in the attempt; hang the rest at the roadside to encourage the others. Stalin haunted the dreams of good and bad alike, great and small, did he not? He died in his bed, showered with laurels, and was so mourned by his people they drowned in their own tears. Stockholm syndrome is the only remedy for nations full of cheats.

How dare they knife me in the back?

Libya owes me everything. The reason it is going up in smoke today is because it is unworthy of my goodness. Go on, go up in smoke, accursed country. Your belly is barren, there will be no phoenix rising from your ashes.

If a forest is to regrow, it first has to burn, that is what fools say.

Drivel!

There are forests that never recover from their destruction. They go up in flames like those monks who set themselves alight, and no shoot ever grows from their ashes.

One day mythology will say of Libya that it was a forest born from the hairs on the head of a providential figure, himself the product of a divine dream, beneath a carnival sky, bearing a green standard that flutters in the wind and a book the same colour that contains, like holy verses, both the prayers I offered and those I granted so that my homeland, which became my child, should not suffer either the thunderbolts of demons or the flames of incendiaries.

Libya is my magic trick, my own Olympus. Here in my realm, where I have been the humblest of sovereigns, the trees have grown straight since they stood to attention at the sound of my trumpets. Here, in the land of poets and of scimitars, every flower that blooms blooms because it trusts me, every stream that bubbles up between the pebbles tries to flow to me, every baby bird that cheeps in its nest praises me.

What happened, so suddenly, to turn the ayah on its head, to make my subjects drown out my words with their own?

The sorrow of it!

I am like God. The world I made has turned against me.