‘I have never lied to you, Brotherly Guide.’
‘Show me your tongue.’
He gulps again and again, his face slightly turned away. His lips part to reveal a tongue as white as chalk.
‘How many days have you been fasting, Mustafa?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your tongue is the colour of milk. It proves that you have not eaten for a considerable time.’
‘Brotherly—’
‘I know that my meals are made from your rations and that many of my guards are fasting so that I can go on eating.’
He lowers his head.
‘Eat,’ I tell him.
‘I could not possibly do that.’
‘Eat! I need my faithful servants to stay on their feet.’
‘Strength comes from the heart, not the stomach, Brotherly Guide. If I was starving or dying of thirst or had my legs cut off, I would still find the strength to defend you. I am capable of going to hell and back to fetch the flame that would reduce to ashes any hand daring to touch you.’
‘Eat.’
The orderly attempts to protest, but my expression stops him.
‘I am waiting,’ I say.
He sniffs noisily to work up his courage, clenches his jaws, and a feverish hand comes to rest on a hard biscuit. I sense him digging deep into his soul to find the courage to close his fingers around the biscuit. I hear him breathing shallow staccato breaths.
‘What happened, Mustafa?’
He is choking on the biscuit and still trying to chew it. He does not understand my question.
‘Why are they doing this?’
He grasps the meaning of my words and puts down the biscuit.
‘They have lost their senses, sir.’
‘That is not an answer.’
‘I don’t have any others, sir.’
‘Have I been unjust to my people?’
‘No!’ he exclaims. ‘Never, never in a thousand years will our country have a more enlightened guide or a gentler father than you. We were dusty nomads that a good-for-nothing king treated like a doormat, and then you came and made us a free people that the world envied.’
‘Should I imagine, then, that those rockets exploding outside are no more than firecrackers from a party I cannot quite locate?’
The orderly hunches his neck into his shoulders as if, all at once, he finds himself having to carry all of the traitors’ shame.
‘Surely they must have a reason, do you not think?’
‘I can’t see what it is, sir.’
‘You must have gone home when you had leave. To Benghazi, right where the rebellion started. You went to the café, to the mosque, to the parks. You must have heard people criticising me.’
‘People weren’t criticising you in public, Brotherly Guide. Our security services were listening in everywhere. I only heard people say good things about you. In any case I wouldn’t have let anyone show you a lack of respect.’
‘My security services were deaf and blind. They failed to see anything coming.’
Confused, he starts wringing his hands.
‘Very well,’ I concede. ‘People say nothing in public. That is normal. But tongues loosen in private. You must have been completely detached from reality if you did not hear, at least once, someone in your family, a cousin or an uncle, saying something bad about me.’
‘We all love you deeply in our family.’
‘I love my sons deeply. It does not stop me disapproving of them sometimes. I do not dispute that I am loved by your family. But some of your family members must have criticised me for small things, hasty decisions, ordinary mistakes.’
‘I’ve never heard anyone in my family challenge anything at all that you’ve done or said, sir.’
‘I do not believe you.’
‘I swear to you, sir. Nobody in my family criticises you.’
‘It’s not possible. The prophet Muhammad himself has his critics.’
‘Not you … not in my family anyway.’
I fold my arms and study him in silence for a long moment.
I return to the charge.
‘Why are people rebelling against me?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Are you a complete idiot?’
‘I’m just the person who looks after the car park, sir.’
‘That does not exempt you from having an opinion.’
He is sweating now, and short of breath.
‘Answer me. Why are people rebelling against me?’
He is desperately looking for the right words, the way people look for shelter in a bombing raid. His fingers are nearly knotted together and his Adam’s apple is bouncing wildly. He feels that he is caught in a trap and his destiny depends on his response.
He ventures, ‘Sometimes, when things are too quiet, people get bored, and some of them try to stir things up to make their lives more interesting.’
‘By attacking me?’
‘They think the only way to grow up is to kill their father.’
‘Go on.’
‘They challenge his birthright in order to—’
‘No, go back to the father … You said “kill their father”. I would like you to develop that idea further.’
‘I don’t really know enough to do that.’
‘You do not need to be a genius to understand that you do not kill your father, whatever he does, whatever he says,’ I shout, outraged. ‘To us the father is as sacred as the prophet.’
An explosion rattles the few panes of glass still left in the windows. Another bomb. In the distance there is the sound of a fighter plane climbing away. The hush that follows is like the silence of ruins, as deep as the tomb.
In the adjoining rooms life starts up again. I hear an officer giving orders, a door creaking, footsteps back and forth …
‘Eat,’ I say to the orderly.
This time he leaves the biscuit, shaking his head.
‘I can’t swallow anything, Brotherly Guide.’
‘Then go home. Go back to your daughters. I do not want to see you around here any more.’
‘Have I said something to displease you?’
‘Go. I need to pray.’
The orderly stands up.
‘Clear away first,’ I tell him. ‘Collect this miserable meal and share it with those who think that they have to kill their father in order to grow up.’
‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘Out of my sight.’
‘I—’
‘Get out!’
His expression changes from that of a serving soldier to a death mask. He is finished. He has no life left to give me. He knows that his existence, his being, faith, courage, everything good that he believed he embodied, is worthless now that my anger has banished him from my confidence.
I hate him.
He has wounded me.
He does not deserve to follow in my footsteps. My shadow will for ever be for him an unfathomable valley of darkness.
2
I rejoin my loyal servants on the ground floor. General Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, my defence minister, has a face that makes me think of a flag at half-mast. A week ago he was thumping the table and swearing that we were going to turn the situation to our advantage, that the rebel hordes would be swept aside in no time at all. Using staff maps to back up his argument, he identified the weak points in the traitors’ strategy, placing heavy emphasis on internal conflicts that would eventually undermine their alliance, lauding the thousands of patriots joining us in droves, engaging with the enemy relentlessly to strengthen the battlements of our final bastion.
My son Mutassim nodded as he listened, a fierce look on his face.
I listened with one ear, keeping the other one open for the commotion I could hear in the city.
The general’s enthusiasm was short-lived, and has been replaced by mounting doubts. A number of my officers have deserted from our ranks; others have been captured, lynched there and then, their heads put on spikes and their bodies tied to the backs of pickups and dragged through the streets. I have seen some of the heads myself, displayed like macabre trophies on the tops of walls.