‘He died honourably.’
‘That is not what I have on your form. According to the inquiry we have carried out in your clan, you are the son of an unknown father. Certain loose talk suggests that you are the natural child of a Corsican by the name of Albert Preziosi, a pilot rescued and nursed in your tribe after his plane was shot down by a German fighter in 1941.’
My fist had a mind of its own. The sergeant got it full in the face and fell backwards, his nose broken. I did not have a chance to finish him. Four men leapt on me and threw me on the floor. Major Jalal Snoussi stood sniggering in the doorway, his arms folded. He was in heaven, delighted at having outwitted me. I had fallen into his trap. The summons to his office had been merely the first stage of his plan, which had been to make me lose my composure, so that I would react as I had done to his subordinate’s provocation.
‘What did I say to you, Bedouin? That I will oppose your promotion. Do you believe me now?’
I had thought that he was just a zealous penpusher with a lot of lard where his brain should be. But the major could have shown the Devil a trick or two.9
I was brought before a disciplinary hearing. After a period of close arrest and the deferment of my promotion to captain, I travelled home to Fezzan to settle an old score with my clan.
Hostile and harsh, Fezzan is a version of hell which, because there was nowhere better or because they were damned, the Ghous had claimed for themselves the way a starving hyena claims a leftover piece of rotting carcass. There was a time when I took it for hell itself.
Ground down by thirst and dizzying heat, Fezzan was like me. I was as naked and empty as the desert expanding the circle of its desolation.
Sitting under an acacia, I daydreamed about nomads, brigands, pilgrims, deserters, caravan drivers, adventurers, travellers who had lost their way, lords and servants who had paused under this tree, bristling with thorns, wondering what roads they had taken after their rest and whether they had arrived at their destination.
I was more unhappy than it is normally possible to be, as miserable as the skeletal shadow of the acacia brushing away the sand, as frantic as the wild, spindly roots tangled around me, not knowing where to bury their sorrow.
The furnace around me was nothing to the furnace that was burning my soul.
What had I come to find in the desert? The retreat of silence or the agony of time passing? There was nothing for me here. My points of reference had as much solidity as the mirages shimmering deceptively in the distance. Had I come to listen to the Voice, or to erase the sergeant’s voice? Neither seemed capable of reaching me in the tumult of my frustration. Like a tightrope walker I wobbled in the void, sure that flying away would be as tragic for me as falling.
I sat moping all day under the acacia tree, where my uncle, tired of waiting for me, eventually came to find me.
He said, ‘Why are you sitting here, Muammar?’
‘Where else should I go?’
‘Come home. You’ve been roasting in the sun for hours. It’s not good for you. You’ll get sunstroke.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Is it true what they’re saying, that you’ve been dismissed from the army?’
‘They have suspended me.’
‘How is it possible?’
‘I punched an officer.’
‘You punched an officer?’
‘I would have punched the king himself.’
‘What has got into you, my son?’
‘I am not anyone’s son.’
I faced him.
With his spine stooped under the burden of his years and his face like a halo of dust, my uncle looked like a cloth stuck on a pole. Poverty had sucked him dry, leaving him just his old hands to reflect his fate.
I challenged him.
‘Who is Albert Preziosi?’
He put a finger to his cheek, eyelashes lowered, and thought for a long time.
‘Is it a name from among us?’
‘It is a Christian name.’
‘I have never known a Christian in my life.’
‘Try and remember. It goes back a long way, to a time when the Christians used to turn up in our houses uninvited.’
‘The colonists preferred to be near the sea. The desert was not for them.’
I got to my feet, towering over him by a full head. He looked smaller than a gnome.
‘Are you telling me that not a single infidel soldier ever ventured into our territory? There are places here that still bear the traces of the Afrika Korps’s Panzers. Relics of tanks less than three kilometres from this spot. By the 1940s you were already a father. You must have come across a Christian or two. A deserter or a wounded man whom the clan looked after, out of Muslim charity.’
He shook his head, his brow furrowed.
‘You do not remember a plane shot down in a dogfight that crashed near here in 1941?’
He shook his head again.
‘The pilot was not killed. Our people went to his aid and hid him and nursed him … It is impossible that you can have forgotten an event of that kind. He was a Frenchman, a Corsican …’
‘No plane came down here. Not during the war, or before or after.’
‘Look at me!’
He stood in front of me, shaking his chin from left to right.
My voice snapped like an explosion.
‘Is it true that I am a bastard, the piss of some dog of a Corsican who passed through here?’
The crudity of my speech made him flinch. It is not in our upbringing to utter obscenities in front of those who are older than us. But he did not protest. He saw how angry I was and did not feel capable of confronting it. What he said next, in a whisper, he did not mean to say.
‘I don’t see what you mean.’
‘Do you ever see anything apart from the end of your nose? Go on, tell me the truth. Is it true that I am the runt of some dog of a Corsican?’
‘Who has said such an outrageous thing to you?’
‘That is not an answer.’
‘Your father died in a duel. I’ve told you a thousand times.’
‘In that case, where is his tomb? Why is his body not in our cemetery with the rest of our departed?’
‘I—’
‘Be quiet. You are nothing but a liar. You have all lied to me. I have no reason to be grateful to you in the slightest. If my father is still in this world I shall find him, even if I have to turn over every stone on earth. If he is dead I shall find his tomb eventually. As for all of you, I banish you from my heart and I will spend the rest of my days cursing you until the good Lord cries out, “Enough!”’
I never spoke another word to my uncle.
After I had overthrown the king and proclaimed the republic, I went back, my head still ringing with the crowd’s acclamation, to celebrate my revolution in my tribe. I was coming back to take my revenge on my clan. They had kept a secret from me, and I had proved that I could survive it. Fezzan changed its look for me that morning. The desert was offering its nakedness to me as a blank page, ready to receive the epic of my unstoppable rise.
Sitting cross-legged in the kheïma of the most senior elder, my smile wider than the crescent on the top of a minaret, I relished the rapture I aroused among my people. They no longer looked down on me, they were prostrating themselves at my feet. The kids were running all over the place, overexcited by my presence; the women spied on me from the depths of their hiding places; the men pinched themselves until they drew blood. In my tailored uniform, like a prince in his state regalia, I had drunk tea with my nearest relations and a few comrades. The desert rang with our bursts of laughter. A full moon graced the sky, heated white-hot. In the middle of the day. My uncle stood outside the tent, not knowing if he should rejoice at my return or feel its pain. I had not acknowledged him. It was no longer very important to me to know if I was a Corsican’s bastard or a brave man’s son.