Yasmina Khadra - The Dictator's Last Night

‘And you left him there?’

‘We couldn’t do anything, sir. We lost six men trying to bring him back, but the rebels took him alive.’

I no longer feel like waiting for anything. Everything seems unnatural, perverse and pointless to me. Life or death, what’s the difference? My son’s in the hands of barbarians. I don’t dare imagine the fate that awaits him. A fathomless rage grips me. The general realises that I’m about to give up on everything, combat, resistance, escape. He clutches me by the arm and drags me behind him to the service door. I run, unaware of what I’m doing; I don’t care what might happen to me. I’m not even conscious of the shots that follow us. I can vaguely see fields ahead of me. My helmet comes unfastened and falls off; I don’t pick it up. I only know that I’m running, that my chest is burning, that my heart’s about to burst.

Rebels intercept us on some open ground. My guards shelter me behind a pile of earth. The gunfire is continuous. One of my men falls backwards, his hand torn off. The grenade he tried to throw at our opponents clipped the parapet and bounced back to explode in the middle of our group. The general was hit worst: he lies next to me with his stomach open and his guts spilling out. He wants to say something to me but cannot speak. His face turns ashen, his mouth stops moving; I think he has just died.

Everything that begins on earth must come to an end one day. That is the law.

Life is only a dream to which our death sounds the reveille, my uncle used to say to comfort himself. What matters is not what you take with you, but what you leave behind.

I stand up, pull off my body armour, throw it down, leave my gun where it is and start running across the fields, praying for a burst of gunfire to mow me down and catapult me far, far away from this debauched world.

A large agricultural drainage pipe appears in front of me. I cannot say why I decided to hide myself in it.

Running feet approach, pass close by my hiding place, fade away. My hands are trembling, my knees threatening to give way; the mad dash has exhausted me. I crouch in the half-darkness, overcome with dizziness and nausea; the thumping of my heart sounds so loud I am afraid it will be heard by my pursuers.

I feel ashamed at having turned into a target, a piece of game, I, Muammar Gaddafi, thorn in the side of the all-powerful; I am ashamed at having fled from a bunch of brats and run like a maniac across the fields; I am ashamed at having been reduced to hiding in a drainage pipe, I who jabbed my finger at the lectern at the UN to warn presidents and kings.

I feel like crying but the tears refuse to come; I feel like stepping into the open and shouting, ‘I am here,’ but I do not dare move a muscle. My one-time courage has deserted me, my suicidally reckless charisma is a thing of the ancient past.

I believed myself predestined to a sumptuous end. When I happened to think about death, I used to visualise myself lying in my patriarchal bed, surrounded by my family and most loyal subjects. I imagined my body laid out in the presidential palace, hung with wreaths and flags, with leaders and representatives come from the four corners of the planet to observe long minutes of silence before my garlanded remains, and my coffin on a tank draped with banners processing down Tripoli’s boulevards followed by millions of inconsolable Libyans. At the cemetery, full to overflowing, I heard the imams declaiming the most impossibly moving suras for my soul’s repose and, to the spadefuls of earth bearing me away from my people’s affection, the salute in reply of hundreds of cannon announcing to the whole world that the unforgettable Muammar was no more.

I was wrong.

If only I had listened to Hugo Chávez when he offered me his protection: at this moment I would be somewhere in Venezuela, arranging my declining years to perfection and in utter peace and tranquillity, instead of awaiting my executioners at the bottom of a drain. How could I have been so stupid?

Pride is invulnerable to reason. When you have ruled over peoples, you sit on your cloud and forget reality. But what exactly have you ruled over? To what purpose? In the final analysis, power is a misunderstanding: you think you know, then you realise you have made a thumping mistake. Instead of going back and redoing it properly, you dig your heels in and see things the way you would like them to be. You deal with the unthinkable as best you can and cling to your fancies, convinced that if you were to let go all hell would break loose.

And now, paradoxically, all hell has broken loose because I did not let go.

I stare at the light at the end of the tunnel, unable to breathe.

I refuse to think about my son, about what I myself will go through; I empty my head; I must not torment myself.

The minutes pass.

I hear bursts of gunfire that intensify, rockets replying to grenades, vehicles coming and going in a screech of tyres.

I am alone.

Alone in the world.

Left high and dry by my guardian angels and the marabouts who predicted a thousand victories for me in return for a few extra noughts on their cheques.

Where have my servants gone, my Amazons and my supporters who were so ardent they would whip themselves in public to show their devotion to the world? … Vanished into thin air! Puff! Melted into the background. Did they really exist? And my people, once loyal to my cause, standing behind me for better or worse, who took an oath to follow me wherever the Voice led me, what do they hope to raise over my bones?

My people have lied to me from the start, since that morning when on the radio from Benghazi I broke their chains and gave them back their dignity. My people have never loved me, they have just flattered me to receive my gifts, following the example of my courtesans, my kin and my whores.

I should have known: a sovereign can never have friends, he just has enemies who plot behind his back and opportunists he keeps close to his heart the way you nourish a viper in your bosom.

I should have listened to Bassem Tanout, a Libyan poet I knew a very long time ago, in London, during my training with the British Army Staff. He was a maverick, a lovely man as frank and open as a child’s laughter. He lived in exile: his country was his dog-eared library of books and a wad of paper that he covered with lines of rebellious verse. He came back to Libya the day after the coup and we continued to meet. In the early years of my rule he regularly came to my house. Then the intervals between his visits started to get longer. I did not see him any more. He declined my official invitations, did not respond to my letters. I decided that some harm must have come to him and I launched a search to find him. One night my agents brought him to me. As poets go, he did not look like much. He was as crumpled as his clothes; you could smell the alcohol on him a mile away and he was shivering like a junkie in withdrawal. When I asked him if he had problems, he retorted that I was his problem. ‘You disappoint me, Muammar,’ he announced from the heights of his inebriation. ‘You’re in the process of destroying with your left hand what you have built with your right. Don’t rely on the people’s clamour. The people are a siren song. Their fervour is a pernicious addiction. It is the vice of choice for exalted egos, their nirvana for a night and then their certain downfall.’ I was so wounded by his words that I banished him from my sight. For weeks afterwards his reproaches obsessed me. To ward them off I locked their author up in a dungeon. Three days after his arrest his gaolers found him hanged in his cell, a verse from Omar Khayyam carved on the wall as his legacy.

Thinking back to that time, as yesterday’s ovations turn into the baying of the arena, Bassem Tanout is the one and only friend I have ever had.