Sardonic laughter greets the leader’s sarcasm, followed by a whole squad of men lunging at me. I feel as if I am coming apart.
They push and drag me out of the pipe. Armed men encircle me in a cosmic silence. They are stock-still, transfixed with incredulity. For a good many of them it must be the first time they have seen me so close to. They think they are seeing things. If I happened to clear my throat, I am almost convinced they would run away without a backward glance. The majority of my captors are boys not much taller than their guns; they look utterly ridiculous in their would-be fighters’ uniforms. Some of them look away, unable to hold my gaze; others find it difficult to control their facial expressions.
Alerted to my capture, groups of rebels start running up and firing in the air to get the party started. Allāhu Akbar … death to the taghut … Oussoud Misrata, lions of Misrata … Within minutes more than a hundred of them are crowding around me, elbowing each other hard to get closer to the strange creature in their midst.
They jostle me across the fields, they spit on me, they promise me the most violent treatment. I lose a shoe, stumble on stones, keep going under the battering of rifle butts …
One hairy weirdo surges up in front of me, slapping my face as he does so.
I smile at him.
‘I forgive you.’
‘I don’t, fucking madman. No one here forgives you.’
‘What did he say?’ someone asks behind me.
‘He forgives us.’
‘He’s got a nerve. He still thinks he’s The Exceedingly Merciful.’
Tongues loosen, jeering and gibes pour out of them, and like a bush fire the uproar spreads and multiplies into shouting, demands for my death, turning into bedlam and booming pandemonium. A thousand howler monkeys swarm at me in a spate of saliva. All I can see are foaming mouths bellowing at me, bloodshot eyes, hands trying to tear me limb from limb. The men escorting me are overwhelmed. They punch out with flailing fists at their comrades to keep them away from me, but to no avail. The commander vainly orders his troops to keep back; he has no control over them. In the general frenzy, woe to anyone who stumbles. I try to walk upright, with my head high, as my rank and quality demand, but the brambles have set my shoeless foot on fire, forcing me to hop. That’s right, you son of a bitch, jump like you’re playing hopscotch … What’s the matter with him? Have his plush carpets made him forget the softness of our nourishing earth? … I want to tear his balls off and keep them in formalin … Why don’t we hang him? What are we waiting for? … He deserves to have his throat cut in a drain … We should douse him in petrol and set him on fire … Dog … fucker … filthy bastard … In the frenzy swarming around me, I see only hatred and curses. Faces blend into each other in a chaotic swell topped with the poisonous foam of the whites of their eyes. My turban is torn off and a thousand hands rain down on my skull; a leg of my trousers is torn off and a thousand hands pinch my backside and defile my private parts; my hair is torn out, I am bespattered with spit continuously, a thousand foul throats demand my death.
I refuse to acknowledge what is happening to me; it is a bad dream. Everything about it is absurd, exaggerated, incongruous; it seems the work of surrealists. Are these hideous faces yelling their filth at me really human? And how are these tentacle-like arms, which seem to be surging towards me out of the darkness, able to reach me in the tangled forest that binds me? … Show yourself, van Gogh. For the love of your art, show yourself, so I can wake up with a start, and go back to the cosy splendour of my palaces, my obsequious servants and my enchanted harems … Van Gogh is nowhere to be seen. I am not dreaming. My nightmare is as real as the blood on my forehead. I did not feel the rifle butt that split my skull. In fact I feel nothing any more. I have a confused sensation of what is taking place, a bizarre feeling of detaching myself from one reality and emerging into another where I have no point of reference. I feel as if the shot of heroin I was given last night is finally starting to have an effect. I am levitating, borne upwards by the savagery of a people I so cherished and who are getting ready to tear me apart with their bare hands.
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.