Yasmina Khadra - The Dictator's Last Night

‘What do you mean, flipped out? He might have been trying to kill me.’

‘He wanted to go and fight,’ another officer says. ‘I think it was the shelling that got to him. He’d been in a bad way for several hours. He’d refused to take cover. Then he cracked. He got hold of a weapon and said he couldn’t bear to wait any longer and he wanted to fight to the finish. These two tried to disarm him. He shot them, then killed himself.’

He takes me into the courtyard, showing the way with a torch.

A man is lying awkwardly on the ground, a few steps inside the school gate, arms and legs outspread. Half his skull has been blown away. I know who he is from the bracelet around his wrist: it is Mustafa, the orderly who brought me dinner.

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.’