‘Your cousin’s seen too many slasher movies,’ Mansour says sceptically.
‘He recorded it on his mobile and he showed me how the general was killed. I spent three days throwing up and three nights screaming in my sleep. I’m still shaking …’ Suddenly raising his head, he goes on, white-faced, ‘These people aren’t human, Rais. Just coming across them in the street gave me the shivers. They call themselves Muslims but they hardly leave any work for the Devil to do. They kill kids as if they were squashing flies. I’ve never seen anything more horrible than their expression. It’s like they’re looking at you with the eyes of death itself. When my cousin suggested I join his squad, I said yes on the spot. He’d have slashed my belly open, like the general, in front of our aunt and without a qualm, if I’d hesitated for a second. But I couldn’t live with those barbarians. I was scared to death just at the thought of sitting down to a meal with them. That night, after my cousin had gone to sleep, I ran away without looking back, as fast as my legs could carry me. I intended to get back to Sirte to rejoin your troops, Rais, but the town was swarming with rebels who were shooting up anything that moved. I wandered for days and nights, hiding in cellars. When I recognised the lieutenant-colonel on the ring road, it felt like I was waking up from a nightmare.’
‘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).
10
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.