Yasmina Khadra - The Dictator's Last Night

‘Don’t worry, you’re still in it,’ the lieutenant-colonel promises him.

‘Rais,’ the prisoner begs, raising himself on his knees, ‘I didn’t betray you. From the beginning my only thought was to rejoin your forces. It’s the truth, I swear it.’

‘There’s no such thing. People believe what suits them, and your story doesn’t suit me.’

He crawls after me.

‘I worship you more than my father and my ancestors, Brotherly Guide. I’ve got four kids and a wife who’s half mad. Spare me, for the love of the prophet. I want to take my place among your soldiers again. I’ll show myself worthy of your trust—’

Trust?

That old chestnut!

I banned that poisonous word from my vocabulary before I learnt to walk. Trust is a little death. I had to be wary of everything and everyone, especially the most loyal of my loyalists, because they are the ones best informed about my faults. To guarantee my own longevity I did not confine myself to listening in on people’s thoughts or bribing their consciences — I was ready to execute my twin to keep my siblings at arm’s length.

And yet, despite the draconian measures I took, the elaborate precautions and the purges, I have been betrayed. By the most loyal of my loyalists. General Younis, whom I considered my partner in crime, whom I loved more than a brother, the man who boasted of being godfather to my son, who never forgot me in his prayers and took my lapses to be coded signs: he betrayed me. How can I not view his tragic end as a divine punishment? By rejecting my blessing, he signed his own death warrant. I do not even feel contempt for him, just a vague sadness, a kind of pity made of elusive ingredients, which simultaneously calms and comforts me.

‘I beg you, Rais,’ the renegade sobs, ‘I tried to rejoin your forces; I swear it on the head of what is most precious to me in this world.’

‘The only precious thing left to you in this world is your head, and it is not worth a radish,’ I tell him.

I turn to the two soldiers.

‘Send him straight to hell.’

The traitor attempts to resist the arms restraining him, he writhes and struggles, his face contorted. They drag him without ceremony into the courtyard. I hear him begging me and weeping. His lamenting turns to shrieks of terror as he disappears into the night, then, having exhausted every appeal, he starts to blaspheme.

‘You’re nothing but a madman, Muammar, a raving bloodthirsty madman. Cursed be the womb that bore you and the day you came into this world … You’re nothing but a bastard, Muammar, a bastard …’

Someone must have knocked him out then, because he suddenly stopped.

In the silence that follows, the word ‘bastard’ goes on ringing in my ear in a chorus of heart-rending echoes so monstrous that my cosmic Voice, which has always known how to speak to me in my moments of solitude, has curled up into itself like a frightened snail.

Around me, Mansour, the minister and the lieutenant-colonel look down, their heads bowed, paralysed by the obscene insults proffered by the supplicant.

I go back up to my room to recover from the affront.

8 Mustafa Abdul Jalil, chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC).

Bastard, bastard, bastard …

The insult ricochets around the walls, pierces me from all sides, making a million toxins explode under my skin. At every bang that rings out from the town, at every door that shuts downstairs, at every object that falls on the floor, I hear bastard. If I filled my ears with concrete or burst my eardrums, I would still hear it above the noise of the war that is raging in my country.

Yet it has always been there, that degrading word, waiting to ambush me on sleepless nights and pin me to my pillows. Whenever the roistering died down and the shutters closed on my private moments, whenever my concubines, drunk on my seed, drifted into sleep, whenever van Gogh retreated into his canvas and silence merged with darkness in my palace, that word kept me company beneath the sheets and stopped me sleeping, sometimes until morning.

It is a word with a history that has ruined mine.

I had just heard about my promotion to captain. That evening, outstretched on my bed, I could not decide whether to celebrate my new rank at home, with my wife and a few friends, or in Fezzan, among my tribe. In my sleep van Gogh appeared to me as a knight in armour, trapped at the bottom of a frozen lake … In the morning, a jeep stopped me outside my building. The driver, a young red-headed NCO in a scruffy uniform, told me he had been ordered to drive me to HQ. I thought I was being summoned to a ceremony or to some honour of that sort and climbed up next to the driver, smoothing my tunic and straightening my cap.

At HQ they directed me to Block B, a sinister-looking building belonging to His Majesty King Idris as-Senussi’s special services. Never having hidden my desire to be appointed to an embassy in a land of plenty somewhere, I climbed the stairs to the third floor with high hopes — so high, I nearly caught my foot in the carpet and went flying.

A corporal greeted me like a dog at a bowling alley. His disdain corresponded to the attitude I thought every flunkey in a repressive system had to have; I did not attach any importance to it. I was led into a waiting room, austerely furnished with a pedestal table and a row of iron chairs whose paint was flaking off. I waited there, getting more and more bored, for three hours without anyone coming to see if I was still there or even still in this world. By the time the corporal reappeared I was on the point of losing my temper completely.

Major Jalal Snoussi was waiting for me in his office. He was a pockmarked, red-faced officer with a wisp of hair and grotesque ears. His hog-like features pointed to the insatiable glutton concealed beneath his uniform, but his expression would have silenced the blackest of sheep with a glance. In my eyes he represented everything I deplored in an officer: pot-bellied, crude, traducing the essence of the martial calling that his tunic was supposed to confer on him.

There was no love lost between us. I had known him since the Academy, where I had had him as an instructor during my second year as an officer cadet. He taught topography, but was incapable of finding his way with a map and a compass. His real task at the Academy consisted in identifying the bad apples among the cadets and writing daily reports on the acts and movements of new recruits: he was the army’s official informer.

It did not surprise me in the least to find him in an office on the third floor of Block B, except that I understood immediately that my dream of a foreign posting was not on the agenda.

The major did not offer me a chair. He hitched up his belly to sit down, leafed disdainfully through a few papers that made up my file, then, after rubbing his nose, stared intensely at me.

‘Do you know why I have summoned you, Lieutenant?’

‘Captain,’ I reminded him.

‘Not yet. Your promotion will only take effect two months from now, which gives me the opportunity to oppose it.’

‘You would oppose a decree, Major?’

‘Absolutely. It’s one of my prerogatives. His Majesty’s special services have the right to annul any decision up to the highest level if it puts the kingdom in danger.’

He was exaggerating. He was just an underling mouldering in a cupboard through which soldiers who had come from the people had to pass in order to be intimidated; a bootlicker, happy to be trodden on like bird shit whenever he was faced with those stronger than him but ready to send an innocent man to the gallows to show his master how good he was at keeping an eye on things.

Because his name sounded like the king’s, Major Jalal Snoussi liked people to think that he was also from Algeria, as was His Majesty, and that he had excellent relations with the crown prince.