Yasmina Khadra - The Dictator's Last Night

Other people come back to me. Each more crippled than the next. They drag themselves over the flagstones that pave the prison yards I consigned them to. All have the same look about them, the look that says one-way ticket, that says they will never be seen again. That one was a minister, he finished up at the end of a rope. This one is a dissident, he succumbed under torture. There were legions of them rotting in my dungeons, there for not having been worthy of my trust or my charity. They were my enemies. They only got what they deserved. But the people, my people, that mass I made with my own hands, that I gave birth to with forceps as I bit my lips, that I boosted in every one of my speeches and raised in the community of nations, what malignancy possessed it so that from one day to the next, without warning, it discarded what I had built for it and decided to crucify me on my own pedestal?

I have no regrets about clamping down.

It was legitimate and necessary.

A guide, though entrusted with a messianic mission, when he has official responsibility for a country, does not turn the other cheek. Quite the opposite: if he wants to fulfil his function properly, he must cut off the hand that was raised against him, even if the slap came from his father. From that perspective my conscience is clear, I am satisfied that I carried out my duty. I have killed, tortured, terrorised, hunted down, decimated families — because I had no alternative. But I did no wrong to the innocent. I only punished the guilty, the traitors and spies. I am ready to confront them on the day of reckoning and I shall make them bow their heads because they were at fault … Will the people have the audacity to look me in the face in God’s house? What will they have to say when they are asked, ‘What have you done with our elected one?’ … Words will fail them, just as the courage to look me in the eyes will fail them. The Devil take repentance when it produces damnation. He who burns his bridges burns every chance of forgiveness. Libya will never see the day light its way again; nowhere will it bask in sunshine, because darkness is its destiny.

Suddenly, a cracking noise … some pebbles clatter into the ditch, then a shadow falls across the circle of light at the end of the tunnel. I make out a weapon first, then a head leaning in … He’s here! I’ve found him! He’s here, sir … Running steps return. Rebels spring into the ditch, their weapons aimed at me. They do not dare come any nearer and remain some distance away, startled and indecisive.

An individual in paramilitary uniform jumps down.

‘Where is he?’

‘In there, sir. He’s crouched down at the end, on the left.’

The commander takes off his helmet and looks at me in silence.

‘I can’t believe my eyes,’ he exclaims. ‘Is it really you or is it your twin?’

He takes a step forward, then another, with all the caution of a mine clearance expert. He is afraid to come closer, and lowers his head as if he cannot believe his eyes. It takes him some time to be certain that he is not hallucinating.

‘No, it’s really him,’ he shouts. ‘It’s really Muammar Gaddafi. Only he could end up like this: making like a rat … like a sewer rat at the bottom of a drain.’

Behind him men pass the word back: It’s Gaddafi … it’s Gaddafi …

The commander opens his arms.

‘I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. What a picture! What a moral! The man who thought he could ride the clouds is trapped in an old drainpipe … You’ve gone back to your roots, Brotherly Guide. You were born out of camel dung and you’re going to die in your own shit … Amr,’ he yells at one of his companions, ‘get your mobile out and film this exceptional curtain call for me.’

Shadows start to mill around the mouth of the tunnel. Mobile phones are held up to immortalise the scene.

The commander allows several flashes to streak the tunnel before raising his hand to put an end to the ritual. He crooks his finger to order me to join him.

‘Get your carcass over here, Brotherly Guide. I can’t wait to squeeze you in my arms so tight I’ll have you pissing out of your arse.’

His crudity shocks me, more than my capture.

‘Come and get me,’ I challenge him.

‘Just watch me.’

‘He might be armed,’ a rebel warns, taking aim at me.

‘The Brotherly Guide doesn’t need to burden himself with weapons,’ the commander says. ‘The Force is with him.’

Sardonic laughter greets the leader’s sarcasm, followed by a whole squad of men lunging at me. I feel as if I am coming apart.

They push and drag me out of the pipe. Armed men encircle me in a cosmic silence. They are stock-still, transfixed with incredulity. For a good many of them it must be the first time they have seen me so close to. They think they are seeing things. If I happened to clear my throat, I am almost convinced they would run away without a backward glance. The majority of my captors are boys not much taller than their guns; they look utterly ridiculous in their would-be fighters’ uniforms. Some of them look away, unable to hold my gaze; others find it difficult to control their facial expressions.

Alerted to my capture, groups of rebels start running up and firing in the air to get the party started. Allāhu Akbar … death to the taghut … Oussoud Misrata, lions of Misrata … Within minutes more than a hundred of them are crowding around me, elbowing each other hard to get closer to the strange creature in their midst.

They jostle me across the fields, they spit on me, they promise me the most violent treatment. I lose a shoe, stumble on stones, keep going under the battering of rifle butts …

One hairy weirdo surges up in front of me, slapping my face as he does so.

I smile at him.

‘I forgive you.’

‘I don’t, fucking madman. No one here forgives you.’

‘What did he say?’ someone asks behind me.

‘He forgives us.’

‘He’s got a nerve. He still thinks he’s The Exceedingly Merciful.’

Tongues loosen, jeering and gibes pour out of them, and like a bush fire the uproar spreads and multiplies into shouting, demands for my death, turning into bedlam and booming pandemonium. A thousand howler monkeys swarm at me in a spate of saliva. All I can see are foaming mouths bellowing at me, bloodshot eyes, hands trying to tear me limb from limb. The men escorting me are overwhelmed. They punch out with flailing fists at their comrades to keep them away from me, but to no avail. The commander vainly orders his troops to keep back; he has no control over them. In the general frenzy, woe to anyone who stumbles. I try to walk upright, with my head high, as my rank and quality demand, but the brambles have set my shoeless foot on fire, forcing me to hop. That’s right, you son of a bitch, jump like you’re playing hopscotch … What’s the matter with him? Have his plush carpets made him forget the softness of our nourishing earth? … I want to tear his balls off and keep them in formalin … Why don’t we hang him? What are we waiting for? … He deserves to have his throat cut in a drain … We should douse him in petrol and set him on fire … Dog … fucker … filthy bastard … In the frenzy swarming around me, I see only hatred and curses. Faces blend into each other in a chaotic swell topped with the poisonous foam of the whites of their eyes. My turban is torn off and a thousand hands rain down on my skull; a leg of my trousers is torn off and a thousand hands pinch my backside and defile my private parts; my hair is torn out, I am bespattered with spit continuously, a thousand foul throats demand my death.

I refuse to acknowledge what is happening to me; it is a bad dream. Everything about it is absurd, exaggerated, incongruous; it seems the work of surrealists. Are these hideous faces yelling their filth at me really human? And how are these tentacle-like arms, which seem to be surging towards me out of the darkness, able to reach me in the tangled forest that binds me? … Show yourself, van Gogh. For the love of your art, show yourself, so I can wake up with a start, and go back to the cosy splendour of my palaces, my obsequious servants and my enchanted harems … Van Gogh is nowhere to be seen. I am not dreaming. My nightmare is as real as the blood on my forehead. I did not feel the rifle butt that split my skull. In fact I feel nothing any more. I have a confused sensation of what is taking place, a bizarre feeling of detaching myself from one reality and emerging into another where I have no point of reference. I feel as if the shot of heroin I was given last night is finally starting to have an effect. I am levitating, borne upwards by the savagery of a people I so cherished and who are getting ready to tear me apart with their bare hands.