‘Better than being torn to pieces, though.’
I am a hair’s breadth from leaping on the commander of the People’s Guard and stamping on him till his body is ground into the floor. But I am tired.
‘Mansour,’ I say to him, ‘when a man has nothing to say, he shuts up.’
‘The general is being overtaken—’
‘Mansour,’ I repeat in a hollow voice that betrays the fury beginning to well up inside me, ‘yazik moï vrag moï,1 as the Russian proverb says. Do not make me rip yours out with pincers.’
Suddenly a powerful explosion reaches us from a long way away.
The general wheels round, white as a sheet.
‘The NATO strikes are starting!’
Mansour gives a short snigger.
‘Calm down, my friend. You’re getting ahead of yourself.’
‘Who says?’ the general snaps crossly.
‘Even so,’ the Guard’s commander persists, ‘not to be able to tell the difference between a bomb exploding and a shell bursting is a bit tragic for a general.’
I am itching to draw my pistol and shoot the insolent Mansour at point-blank range. His impassiveness dissuades me.
‘What is it then, in your view?’ I ask him.
Mansour answers with an offhandedness that makes me regret that I left my weapon in my room.
‘It’s just Mutassim. He’s blowing up the local ammunition dump so that it doesn’t fall into the rebels’ hands.’
‘How do you know?’ the minister grunts.
‘It was you who tasked him with the operation yourself, General,’ Mansour says with disdain. ‘I suppose in the panic you can’t remember the orders you’re handing out right, left and centre.’
‘Shut up,’ I order the Guard’s commander, simultaneously maddened by his attitude and relieved to discover that it is a false alert. ‘I forbid you to show such a lack of respect to my minister. If he is being overtaken by events, he is nevertheless straining every sinew to keep up with them, while you continue to wind us up with your mood swings.’
‘At least I’m looking at things soberly. The rebels have turned themselves into arms dealers. They’re flogging our arsenals to AQIM2 and company. According to the latest information, the squads of revolutionaries whom we instructed, gave shelter to, financed and equipped for years on our home soil are now joining forces with the Islamists.’
‘Propaganda! Those revolutionaries are my children. They are being hunted down by the renegades. Saif al-Islam is striving to bring them together to launch a gigantic counter-offensive that in less than a week will sweep aside this puppet army being manipulated by the Crusaders as they please.’
Mansour flaps his hand as he gets to his feet and leaves the room, scowling.
‘We shouldn’t blame him,’ Abu-Bakr says to me. ‘He’s depressed.’
‘I do not like people being depressed in front of me. Fifteen minutes with that defeatist is as bad as a year’s hard labour. He simultaneously bores and maddens me.’
‘I know what you mean. But he’ll get a grip on himself. It’s just a bad day.’
‘I shall have him shot as soon as we stabilise the situation …’ I promise Abu-Bakr. ‘All right, I am going to my room. Send Amira to me.’
As I leave I place my finger on the general’s chest.
‘Watch Mansour like a hawk and do not hesitate to kill him if he attempts to make a run for it.’
The general nods, staring at the floor.
1 ‘My tongue is my enemy.’
2 Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
5
When Amira finds me I am lying stretched out on the couch with my turban over my face. She is a solid, brisk woman, almost black, with a thick head of hair and curvaceous bust. She was one of my first bodyguards: a fearless and indefatigable Amazon who has never left my side since she was recruited. There is something arrogant about her but her loyalty is unswerving, and when she was younger I sometimes appointed her to share my bed and table with me.
She clicks her heels and salutes. Strapped into a commando battledress, she looks bigger than ever.
‘Take my blood pressure,’ I order her.
She unbuckles a side-pack and takes out the monitor.
My personal physician vanished from Tripoli the day after the air strikes started, so I appointed Amira as my nurse. We have two or three doctors in the headquarters but for reasons of caution I have decided to dispense with their services. They are the same age as the rebels and too unproven to deserve my confidence.
‘Your pressure is normal, sir.’
‘All right. Now give me an injection.’
She pulls a small packet of heroin out of her side-pack, pours its contents into a soup spoon, flicks a lighter.
I close my eyes, my bare arm lying at my side. I hate syringes; I have hated them ever since I was thirteen and a nurse nearly left me disabled by breaking a needle in my backside. The infection that followed kept me in bed for weeks.
Amira fastens the tourniquet and flicks her finger two or three times on my forearm to find a vein.
‘How many syringes have I got left?’
‘Half a dozen, sir.’
‘And heroin?’
‘Three doses.’
‘Are you sure no one is going into my stock?’
‘The bag never leaves my side, sir. It’s with me when I wake up and when I go to sleep.’
She tidies the equipment away and waits for my orders. As I remain silent, she starts to undress.
‘No, not tonight,’ I stop her, ‘I am not in the mood. Just massage my feet.’
She buttons up the top of her jacket and begins to unlace my shoes.
Women.
I have known hundreds of them.
Of every background.
Artists, intellectuals, virgins, maids, wives of compliant apparatchiks and conspirators, I had them one after another.
The ritual was simple: I placed my hand on the shoulder of my chosen one, my agents brought her to me that evening on a beribboned platter, and my bed unpeeled its silken sheets for our bodies to revel in the intoxication of the flesh.
There were some who resisted. I loved to conquer them, like rebel territories. When they surrendered, inert at my feet, I knew the extent of my sovereignty and my climax was greater than paradise.
Nothing is more beautiful than a woman, and nothing is more precious. The heavens may twinkle with their millions of stars, but they will never make me dream as much as the figure of a concubine. Poetry, glory, pride, faith are but empty vessels unless they help to make a man worthy of a kiss, an embrace, an instant of grace in the arms of that night’s muse … I might possess every one of the earth’s riches, but it would only take a woman to refuse me to turn me into the poorest of men.
I contracted the sublime illness called love at school in Sabha, in Fezzan. I was fifteen and had spots and a few unruly hairs trying to be a moustache. Faten was the headmaster’s daughter. She sometimes came to watch us boys roughhousing in the playground. With her eyes that were bigger than the horizon, her black hair hanging down to her backside and her translucent skin, she seemed like a creature from a midsummer dream. I loved her from the moment I set eyes on her. My sleepless nights were full of the smell of her. I closed my eyes only to be with her in a thousand fantasies.
I wrote her letters inflamed with my passion, without managing to pass a single one to her. She lived inside the school complex in a house with a heavy door and curtained windows. The bars that separated Faten and me were as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China.
After that I had to go to another school at Misrata and I lost sight of her.
But a few years later I came across her again, in Tripoli, where her family had moved to. It was as though chance had restored to me what my failures as a wild schoolboy had taken away: Faten was destined to be mine!