The lieutenant-colonel asks me not to leave my room and dashes into the corridor. There is another gunshot and then silence …
I walk over to the window and pull back a piece of tarpaulin, but it does not look out onto the playground. I step into the corridor, listening. Muffled shouts reach me. There is no sound coming from the ground floor, nothing moving. I hear running feet crunching on the gravel of the playground and I wonder if we are being attacked or if there is a mutiny taking place.
‘What’s going on?’ I shout out, in the hope that someone will show themselves on the ground floor.
No one answers me.
Holding firmly on to the banister, I go downstairs one step at a time, keeping a lookout.
Outside the shouts have stopped.
I do not dare venture any further and stay standing halfway down the stairs, ready to go back up to my room and collect my gun at the first sign of danger.
‘Who was shooting? Who was shooting?’
The general’s voice.
Soldiers burst into the sitting room downstairs. They are carrying two wounded men. Lieutenant-Colonel Trid shows them where to put them.
‘Lay them over there. On the floor, there.’
Mansour and the general appear, looking bewildered. They stand over the two bloodied bodies. I join them. Both wounded men are in a critical state. One has been hit in the neck, the other in the chest: he stares at the ceiling, shocked, a gurgling noise coming from his mouth.
‘An auxiliary flipped out,’ the lieutenant-colonel explains. ‘He shot his comrades then turned his weapon on himself. He’s lying outside in the yard.’
‘What do you mean, flipped out? He might have been trying to kill me.’
‘He wanted to go and fight,’ another officer says. ‘I think it was the shelling that got to him. He’d been in a bad way for several hours. He’d refused to take cover. Then he cracked. He got hold of a weapon and said he couldn’t bear to wait any longer and he wanted to fight to the finish. These two tried to disarm him. He shot them, then killed himself.’
He takes me into the courtyard, showing the way with a torch.
A man is lying awkwardly on the ground, a few steps inside the school gate, arms and legs outspread. Half his skull has been blown away. I know who he is from the bracelet around his wrist: it is Mustafa, the orderly who brought me dinner.
13
I order the general and the commander of the People’s Guard to ready the troops to withdraw from District Two at the earliest possible opportunity and I invite the lieutenant-colonel to accompany me to my room.
I find it unbearable to be alone, sealed up inside four bare walls that radiate bad luck, telling my beads the way a tortured man counts the final moments of his ordeal.
I pick up my Koran again and attempt to read, but I cannot concentrate. My fasting is starting to fog my vision and to stiffen my muscles. My fingers have become so numb I find it hard to hold the holy book. Waves of dizziness wash over me and I feel like closing my eyes and never opening them again.
The lieutenant-colonel takes a seat on the chair opposite me. His features are creased with fatigue, but his eyes are bright.
I think about Mustafa, the orderly. What did he think he was proving by blowing his brains out? That he was worthy of my respect? Did he have any idea of what he was trying to do? It is strange how men aspire in death to what they have not achieved in life. I try to understand the workings of their minds, and wherever I put my finger on it my understanding is absorbed by the jelly-like surface of their mentalities. Long after thinking I have touched on a definite truth, I realise that I was reading Braille back to front and that the mysteries I was convinced I had unravelled have instead swallowed me whole.
Just now, on the roof, I too wanted death to give me what life is threatening to take away from me: my honour, my legitimacy as sovereign, my courage as a free man. I was ready to die a hero to keep my legend safe. There was no play-acting. By exposing myself on the parapet I wanted to be my own trophy, to claim all of my prestige. There is no shame in being beaten. Defeat has a merit of its own: it is proof that you fought. Only those who desert deserve no consideration, even less so if there are attenuating circumstances … What did my subordinates think when they saw me ‘making a spectacle of myself’? Did they think I had gone mad? I admit that I was being ridiculous — I can only see the inappropriateness of my fury now that a man who feared losing my trust has chosen to lose everything else with it — but I do not regret having bawled out my resolve loud and long.
Life is so complicated. And crazy. It is only a matter of months since the West, having cast aside all sense of shame, was rolling out the red carpet, showering me with honours, garlanding my colonel’s epaulettes with laurels. They let me pitch my tent next to the Champs-Élysées, excusing my boorishness, closing their eyes to my ‘outrages’. And today they are hunting me down on my own territory like an ordinary convict on the run. Strange the way time deals out these sudden reversals. One day you are idolised, the next an object of revulsion; one day the predator, the next the prey. You trust the Voice that deifies you in your heart of hearts and then one fine day, without warning, you find yourself hiding in a corner, naked and defenceless, without a friend in the world. In the immense solitude of my status as sovereign, where no one could keep me company, I never dismissed the possibility of being assassinated or overthrown. That is the price of absolute sovereignty, particularly the sort that one has usurped by force. The spectre of sin and the dread of treason are hardly a millimetre apart. You live with an alarm bell implanted inside your brain. Asleep or awake, whether you are engaged in private reflection or out making your presence felt, you are always on your guard. A fraction of a second’s inattention, and everything that once was is no more. There is no more extreme stress than that of being a sovereign — it is an intensified, obsessional, permanent stress, close to that of those beasts that you see in nature documentaries gasping for water, unable to quench their thirst at a watering hole without looking around them a dozen times, their ears pricked, their sense of smell filtering the air the way one sniffs for signs of a deadly gas. Yet never did I envisage a fall from grace as crude as this. To end up in a disused school, surrounded by mobs of rebel troops, in a town as third-rate as they come? How can I come to terms with falling so low, me, the leader whose very moon felt cramped in the infinite heavens! Even if I were to kill thousands of insurgents with my bare hands, it would not alleviate the sorrow that gnaws at my heart like a cancer. I feel absolutely swindled and betrayed; even the Voice that once sang inside me has fallen silent. The silence that now fills my being frightens me as much as a ghost in the night.
My watch says five o’clock.
Engines are revving up in the school precinct.
With a finger I pull back the tarpaulin covering the window to look outside.
‘You can pull it down, sir,’ Lieutenant-Colonel Trid says. ‘We haven’t got anything to hide any more.’
‘Really?’
‘Let me do it. You might get dirty.’
He asks me to step away before tugging at the tarpaulin, which falls in a cloud of dust.
Outside, day has no need to break. District Two, with its smoking ruins and burning buildings, is a step ahead of it.
Sirte’s pyres might be mistaken for spears of sunlight, but it will not stop night from following day.
Here and there sub-machine guns start chattering at each other again. Men are reawakening to their drama. Night has brought them no wiser counsel.
In the sky, a harbinger still of deadly storms, drones are drifting in lazy circles, vultures in search of the dying.