‘I’ll go,’ Trid volunteers.
‘No, not you. I need you here. Find someone else to go.’
‘How can we find the colonel, Rais?’ the general says. ‘We don’t know his position. He has evacuated his garrison.’
‘“We don’t know, we don’t know” — that is all you can say. Ask the driver of the reconnaissance patrol to go.’
‘He’s wounded, sir.’
‘He is pretending. I saw no blood on him. Kick him in the arse, and if he is incapable of holding a steering wheel then put him on the dead man’s seat. All he has to do is show whichever officer you send the way to where my son is.’
The general promises to remedy the situation immediately and hastens to carry out my orders. He returns a few minutes later.
‘I’m extremely sorry, Rais. The driver has died from his wounds.’
‘Good riddance. He was quite obviously a slacker without a brain in his head. The officer can go on his own. He will manage. I wish my son to be back at headquarters before daybreak.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Mansour says.
‘I suppose you have a better one.’
‘The bombardment’s over. The rebels are going to redeploy along the line they occupied before their withdrawal. Their scouts will already be back at their forward positions. Our messenger could fall into an ambush. If he’s taken alive, they’ll torture him until he tells them our position.’
‘I asked you if you had another idea.’
The general pulls out his mobile and starts to make a call.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I shout.
‘I’m trying to get hold of my sons. They’re with the colonel.’
‘Switch it off, you fool. Our phone signals go via satellite. Do you want to tell the whole world where we are? That was how they managed to track me down at Bab al-Azizia.’
The general apologises profusely and puts his mobile away. I order him to dispatch an officer to my son and dismiss him.
Mansour is hunched in the corner. I do not understand why he stays there, adding fuel to the rage smouldering inside me rather than getting off his arse and helping the general.
‘You would be better off commanding your men,’ I say to him. ‘Leaving them to their own devices will only sap their morale. Get a grip, dammit. You are depressing me.’
He nods his head, hoists his carcass to its feet and shuffles out.
‘The laziest of men,’ I tell the lieutenant-colonel, once we are alone. ‘If you want a man to swagger at your parades you will not find his equal anywhere, but when the going gets tough he will drop you like a hot brick. War reveals so many negative sides to people. A truly sad business!’
‘You’re hard on him, sir. Mansour has discovered that his nephew was captured by the rebels at Misrata.’
‘Mansour’s nephew has been captured?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘Has it been confirmed?’
‘That’s the rumour that’s going around, which of course adds to his uncle’s despair. The nephew’s a brave lad. I know him. Mansour loves him more than his own children. He feels guilty because he was the one who sent him to Yafran to join Saif al-Islam. According to a survivor, the nephew was caught in an ambush and taken alive.’
‘Why was I not told?’
‘Bad news only complicates situations, sir. General Abu-Bakr is anxious about his sons too. Mutassim told me they have been missing since he evacuated the garrison.’
‘Does the minister know?’
‘No.’
I put the Koran down on the couch’s arm and rest my chin on my thumb and index finger to think.
‘This war has taken everything from us,’ I say with a sigh. ‘Our children, our grandchildren … but of all the families in mourning, mine is the one it has exacted the greatest price from. I no longer want to live among my ghosts. A while ago on the roof I talked about paradise and houris and crowns on my tomb. My head was clear, I was lucid and weighing my words. I truly wanted to finish with it all. I was praying for a sniper’s bullet.’
‘You were just angry.’
I look at the lieutenant-colonel. He holds my gaze, not facing me down, with just that sort of perplexed questioning look schoolboys have when they are not sure they have given their teacher the correct answer.
‘Are you afraid of dying, Colonel?’
‘Since I made the choice to take up arms I’ve been guided by one principle: you can’t be afraid of dying, because if you are you risk dying of fear. And isn’t death the final objective of existence, anyway? Whether you own half the world or live from hand to mouth, it makes no difference; one day you’ll be called on to leave everything where it is, all your treasures and your vale of tears, and vanish.’
The vibes this young man gives off are good. They revive me.
‘Are you a believer?’
He glances pointedly at the Koran.
‘You have nothing to fear,’ I reassure him. ‘I have an open mind.’
He says, ‘In that case, sir, with all the great respect I feel for the devout man I know you to be, I cannot accept the idea that there is a Last Judgement after what we have lived through here on earth. Death can have no value unless it puts a final end to what has ceased to exist.’
‘Do you not want to go to paradise?’
‘What for? I can’t really imagine enjoying, or putting up with, doing the same thing for the whole of eternity. Anything that doesn’t come to an end is exhausting or boring or both.’
‘If you have no faith, you cannot have any ideals, Colonel.’
‘I had faith once, sir. I have no ideals any more. I gave up the first so that I wouldn’t have to share it with hypocrites, and the second because I couldn’t find anyone to share them with.’
Suddenly emboldened, he adds, ‘Do you know why I became a soldier, Brotherly Guide? Because of a speech, or perhaps more of a diatribe. One of yours, sir. I forget what the occasion was or where you delivered it, but there was a phrase that marked me for life. You were furious, wherever it was. With our brothers from the Mashriq and the Maghreb, all the Muslim countries. And you came out with a phrase that should have woken the dead but had no effect on any of those it was aimed at. You said, “There are 350 million sheep out there!”’
This young man has entirely won me over. He knows my anger by heart and has made it his own.
‘We don’t even produce the spoons we stir our tea with. An army of high rollers who only care about blowing wads of cash or helping ourselves to it, that’s what we are. Our great handicap, sir, is the absence of the faculty of thought. It is a tool that’s completely foreign to us. And without thought, how can we think about tomorrow, how can we look to the future? We live from day to day, without caring about the generations to come, and one day we’re going to wake up without a dinar to our name and ask ourselves, “Where did it all go?”’
He goes on, blushing now, but determined to lance the abscess that has apparently been festering in his mind for years.
‘Whatever I’ve accomplished in the course of my career as a soldier, Rais, I did for you. At no time have I ever had the feeling of working for a national or ideological ideal — or for any sense of identity — because I have never given any credit either to Arab policy-makers who, with every step they take backwards, claim to be advancing against the tide.’
‘I’m one of those Arab policy-makers.’
‘You have nothing in common with the ones I’m referring to. You’re a guide, a real, unique guide, who cannot be replaced. That’s why you are alone today.’
‘I don’t feel my efforts are in vain, Colonel.’
‘One can always preach in the desert, sir, but one cannot sow in the sand.’
Two bursts of gunfire ring out from inside the school complex.