Yasmina Khadra - The Dictator's Last Night

The uproar of voices swirls around me. I feel woozy. A wreck tossed by angry waves. Let’s tie him to the pickup and drag him behind it till his flesh and the road become one. Blows and insults beat down on me relentlessly. I do not defend myself. Muffled inside my stupor, I let myself drift towards my fate, my head crowned with thorns, my face covered in blood like Isa Ibn Maryam, bowed under his cross on the path to Golgotha.

I am not afraid.

My feelings are dulled.

I have a vague sensation that I am gravitating to the edge of things, that all my senses have deserted me.

They throw me in the back of a pickup, which has trouble forcing its way through the tumult. Its horn reverberates inside me like the trumpets of the Revelation. I am no longer of flesh and blood, I am tragedy, I am the putting to death itself. I do not even pity this people any longer, running to their doom while they imagine they are catching up with the pickup transporting me to further furies.

The vehicle halts. Wild hordes block its path, overwhelm it. I am grabbed, torn apart and then served up to dogs and villains. Talons tear off my clothes and the skin with it. Someone thrusts a bayonet into my anus. The lynching begins; this time it is the real thing. They strip me, they skin me alive, they eat me raw. I do not resist, I let myself be cut to pieces without a groan or entreaty to anyone, stoical and dignified, just as the old lion accepts his fate as the hyenas tear him apart. The stampede reaches its peak. Flocks of vultures fight over my body. Take it, I give it to you willingly; tear it to pieces, dissect it; you have a right to my limbs, to my organs, to my sinews, but my spirit will outlive you. Your howls glorify me; my torment is my salvation. Only exceptional beings finish this way, merging with the crowd. The intensity of the blows redoubles; now that I am completely naked, hands rummage in my genitals, tear out the hair in handfuls, fiddle with my penis, pluck at my testicles, claw at my back, penetrate my rectum; I feel nothing, I am beyond the reach of the lynch mob and their cannibalistic desires. Purged of all toxins, I no longer feel anger or hate. I belong to the Spirit that doubts not, that nothing can surprise and that cannot feel anger, for anger is an admission of weakness, and which is the god that would falter before human foolishness? I have passed beyond the state of humankind, of those perishable beings shaped by pride and error. I bequeath them my mortal remains to act as a reminder of their own woes and, purged of all fears and restraints, I prepare to fly to that eternal heaven, my sins washed away with my blood, expiated with my final breath, for I die as a martyr to be reborn in legend. I am no longer a rais, I am a prophet; my downfall is my fertiliser, for in the future to come I shall grow higher than the mountains.

Suddenly, in the midst of the storm, looking up, I see the sky above the repulsive masks salivating over me. For a fraction of a second it seems to me that the full moon has taken the place of the sun. In a final momentary revival, I offer a prayer at random: Lord, forgive them their sins as I forgive them, for they do not know what they do … A gunshot goes off. Point blank. It is for me. My coup de grâce . The Lord has decided to cut short my agony. I knew He would not abandon me. God does not desert His elected; He makes of their end the beginning of a new faith, of their suffering a proof of transcendence … I fall in slow motion to the ground, freed of my ties, relieved of my wrongdoings, delivered from my remorse; I am born again from my wounds, new like a soul who has just emerged from his mother’s womb. Slowly the cries fade one after another, then the faces, then the daylight. I am dying, but my stamp will remain. For having left my imprint on their consciousness, my reward is to live on in the memory of peoples, to surf the ages that will race at top speed towards the infinite, to bombard them with remembrance of me until History becomes my pyramid. I shall be missed; I shall be sung in schools; my name shall be engraved on the marble of stelae and sanctified in the mosques; the epic of my life shall inspire poets and playwrights; painters shall devote frescoes to me wider than the horizon; I shall be venerated, wept over at the moment of repentance, and I shall have as many saints as accomplices, as is fitting for exceptional guides.

I make my bow; I am already on the other side of things and living beings, there where no sacrilege is to be found, where no mistake or misunderstanding can make me believe that the love of a people is an unfailing oath that cannot be broken …

My soul is leaving my body.

I float above the dust, see the ambulance forcing its way through the mob to take me to who knows what horror show, see the rebels revelling in their ignoble ritual, others brandishing pieces of my bloody clothing; I see tyre marks on the tarmac, the breeches of weapons glinting in the sun, the rebel banners flapping in the wind, but I do not hear the din of their jubilation or the noise of the volleys as they fire into the air in exultation.

I see everything: the sweat on faces as tense as if they have cramp, the eyes rolling upwards, the thick foam at the corners of their mouths, the crowd congratulating itself non-stop, the voyeurs immortalising with their mobiles the moment of their spiralling descent, but I cannot hear anything, not even the cosmic breath that is breathing me in.

It is now that my mother summons me, from across all these mirages. Her voice reaches me from the depths of a Fezzan eaten away by the desert. I see her again, her head in her hands, angry at my wild, boyish mischievousness: You only listen with one ear, the one you willingly lend to your devils, while the other is deaf to all reason … And it is at that precise moment, just before I dissolve among the swirls of nothingness, that I understand why that diabolical van Gogh, with his mutilated ear, broke in on my nights and on my madness.

But it is too late.

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of award-winning Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul. His novels include The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack , and The Sirens of Baghdad . In 2011 Yasmina Khadra was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de la littérature Henri Gal by the Académie Française.

Julian Evans is a writer and translator from French and German. His most recent translations are Michel Déon’s The Foundling Boy and The Foundling’s War .