The Colonel Read online

  Where is he? I can’t believe I am here. No, I am not imagining things! Here is the kettle and… and here is the teapot, these are the table and chairs, and there is The Colonel’s portrait on the mantelpiece by the stove, and that’s me, wrapped up in a sheet and shivering, and that’s the noise of the same rain as always, battering on the tin roof… My God, what time is it now? What time is it? And these old clothes of mine aren’t dry yet. Haven’t I got to go to a funeral? And the canary, why isn’t it singing?

  There was no sound from the canary, but the colonel was in such an abject state that he found himself searching for an excuse to forget whether the bird existed or not. He was shivering so violently from the cold that he could not bring himself to go out onto the verandah and down the corridor to take a look at the bird. His putting off going to see the canary had nothing to do with the fact that the canary was called ‘Parvaneh’ and that, having buried his daughter, he did not want to be reminded of her. No, it was just that he was cold. But the fact that he could not hear it singing made him aware that time had cracked on, since the canary always started singing at dawn, and continued warbling until the sun was well up. Then it stopped for an hour or so, and started again at about nine. So, if the canary had not retreated into its shell, it must now be about nine in the morning, the interval between its two performances. But why should the colonel have imagined that the canary had not withdrawn into its shell as of today?

  “Amir… what are you doing? Are you coming with me to your brother’s funeral?”

  “No, I haven’t got a brother to get up and go to a funeral for.”

  Amir did not need to be in the room for the colonel to put such a question to him and to get such an answer. No, absolutely not. the colonel was sure that even if Amir had been in the room, he would have got the same reply. There was no need for this kind of conversation between them any longer. The day that Amir came out to escort Mohammad-Taqi’s body home was, in the colonel’s view, unlikely to be repeated again in his lifetime, any more than was the atmosphere that prevailed on that day. In those days of easily won victories, people were happy to make the most precious sacrifice of all, the blood of youth, in the cause of supposed freedom. The blood of the masses flowed so freely that there seemed to be no end to it. Even the donating of blood seemed to serve the people’s lust for ecstasy.

  To share in this collective ecstasy, even I, who had long since lost the courage to face up to bullets, went to the hospital, rolled up my sleeve and told the nurse: ‘Take my blood, as much as you need!’ In truth, in such circumstances, if you hadn’t done your bit, you would have felt so guilty that you could not have slept at night. So it was when one of our boys was killed in battle; soul-destroyingly painful as it was for us, we were given no chance to grieve. After all, you told yourself, there was a revolution going on, and our country was on the threshold of momentous historic change, and this change could only come about through the sacrifice of the blood of the people, of which we were a part. In such circumstances, how could we complain about the loss of one of our sons? But, in the upheavals of the revolution, families who had sacrificed their children were caught in the grip of conflicting feelings. On the one hand were internal and deeply personal feelings, which overcame you in quiet corners at home, while on the other hand you were required to put on a public face and show other feelings, feelings for which you had to search deep inside yourself to give them legitimacy. This led to a soul-destroying conflict between the outward and the inward, the private and the public.

  Bent under the weight of grief and misfortune in the privacy of your own home, you are like a broken-winged bird, but in front of other people, who are shouting for joy, you become another person entirely – an invincible hero! But the fact is that this conflict is exhausting. You can take refuge from yourself in the company of others, or you can avoid others and withdraw into your shell. This unrelentingly schizophrenic existence sometimes becomes so exhausting that it makes you ill. That is exactly what happened to me, but what could I do? At that time, I never found a chance to be by myself. They never gave me the time to stop and taste the pure pleasure of grief and misery…

  The feverish, frenzied atmosphere of those days swept us all up like a fire. When they laid Mohammad-Taqi’s blood-soaked body down in our courtyard, it was as if a haystack had been set alight. When Mohammad-Taqi was killed, it was not just ourselves and our immediate neighbours, but the whole city that went up in flames. Even Amir was caught up in the blaze. He knelt down beside his brother’s corpse and kissed his bloody shirt. When he got up I saw that tongues of fire were licking out of my son’s eyes and his cheeks were aflame. I wasted no time thinking about Khezr Javid or reproaching my son, as I could see how the fire had taken hold of all of my children.

  Farzaneh was aflame and her wailing melted everyone’s hearts. Parvaneh had lost control of herself and was flapping madly around her brother, while Masoud got up off his knees beside his brother, clenched his fists, like two balls of fire, to his head and screamed: “I’ll kill them, I’ll kill the bastards who killed my brother…” His rallying cry was taken up by the crowd, and from that point on Mohammad-Taqi’s corpse was no longer ours – it had become public property.

  And what a crowd of people there was. They seemed to have boiled up out of the ground to gather round the coffin, which they were now holding high up above their heads. Their hands formed circles that opened and closed, as they tried to touch the coffin, but it was too high, far up above all the hands, and getting higher all the time. the colonel did not notice when or how the coffin had become bedecked with flowers or when he and his family had got swallowed up by the throng, nor did anyone know what his children were really feeling inside.

  I can honestly say that, in the face of all that adulation, with all the hands stretching out trying to reach the coffin, I felt truly small and humbled. Before long I was feeling completely out of place, a stranger utterly divorced from the hands that were bearing my son to the cemetery. The masses had commandeered my son from me and were carrying him off where they wanted and how they wanted and were shouting out whatever they wanted about ‘the killing of my son’and chanting a slogan which my hearing was too weak to make out. I was just an onlooker. It now seemed to me that the corpse that was being carried off in procession had nothing to do with me and that I didn’t even know him!

  It is as though time and existence have been compressed and that it was only last night when that stranger came to the house for the first time. the colonel was standing smoking behind the cracked window, listening to the rain falling heavily on the pool in the yard, when there was a knock at the courtyard gate. the colonel waited to see which of his sons would go to open it, and who it was that had turned up at that hour of the night. At the second knock, the colonel saw Mohammad-Taqi with his jacket over his head running down the verandah steps. He opened one half of the gate. At the sight of the new arrival he seemed to start for a moment, but then he stepped aside to let the visitor in. The newcomer had the air of someone who would have come in anyway, even without permission.

  He was short, sporting a fedora and an overcoat, with a briefcase in one hand and a walking-stick in the other. The pince-nez spectacles he was wearing made it hard for the colonel to make out his face. The man paused for a moment and seemed to be asking Mohammad-Taqi a question. Mohammad-Taqi shut the courtyard gate and showed his guest the way to the basement. As if he already knew the way, the little fellow made straight for the basement steps and began to go down. Assuming he was one of Amir’s comrades from the party, Mohammad-Taqi called down from the top of the steps: “There’s someone here to see you, brother!” Then he came back up on to the verandah, without noticing that his father was watching him and observing the change that had come over him.

  Amir’s untimely afternoon sleep, the sleep of one permanently exhausted by the struggle, the mayhem, the speeches and arguments and the endless to-ing and fro-ing, might have lasted until the following morning if
the knocking on the door had not shaken him out of bed, with an even grumpier face than usual. Now, shattered and only half-awake, he thought how much better it would have been if nobody had knocked at the door and Mohammad-Taqi had not called him and… But it was too late and things had gone too far. He had to get up, switch on the light and wait for his visitor to come in. The switch was on the pillar beside the door. All he had to do to turn on the light was to reach out his hand for it.

  “Brother, there’s someone here to see you!”

  The light was now on. Amir’s gaze fell on the stairs, on a pair of shiny, pointed shoes, spattered with mud, and a pair of trouser legs with knife-like creases above them. “Please come on down,” he called, as if his visitor would not have come down if he had not said it and, as the legs came down the stairs, Amir recognised the tails of Khezr Javid’s dark overcoat. His heart missed a beat. Taking his time, Khezr descended and, as he did so, more of him became visible to Amir: his coat buttons, chest and shoulders, and finally his face, his glasses and the fedora on his head. This was something new for Amir.

  Amir stood up quickly from where he had been sitting on the edge of the bed, not out of respect for his visitor but driven involuntarily by some innate fear. He found himself standing respectfully before Khezr Javid, with a greeting on his lips. Khezr took his glasses off his nose, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, smiled and propped his stick in the corner against the wall as if it were a nuisance. It suddenly dawned on Amir that the walking-stick and glasses were a disguise. In all the time that Khezr had interrogated him, he had never seen him with a fedora, or a walking-stick or spectacles for that matter.

  The smile on Khezr’s face was odder than ever, so odd that it forced Amir to offer him his hand and show him a place to sit. The best place he could find for him was the edge of the bed. Before sitting down, Khezr Javid unbuttoned his coat and took off his hat. Not sure what to do next, Amir pulled up the stool he used for sculpting and sat down in front of him. Then he thought he should get him some tea.

  “Brother… can I bring you anything down to drink?”

  Amir shouted up to Mohammed-Taqi to bring some tea and then thought he ought to offer to take Khezr’s hat. As he was hanging it on the hook, Khezr got up and took off his elegant dark brown overcoat. Amir took that as well and hung it on the coat rack.

  Now, apart from the long moustache drooping over his lips, Khezr Javid was the same person that Amir had first encountered. Khezr put his briefcase down on the bed, dipped into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering one to Amir. With his gold-plated lighter he lit Amir’s cigarette first, and then his own. He studied the flame over the end of his cigarette:

  “You’ve made this place into a studio, then?”

  Amir was about to say that he had not yet started seriously, but that he was thinking of taking up sculpture, when he was suddenly reminded of Khezr coming down the prison wing in the middle of the night, pushing a cigarette or two through the cell hatches and saying: “Golds… only an ass smokes Golds.”

  “Sculpture… that’s a good idea.”

  “Yes, if I can manage it,” Amir replied, far away.

  “I gather you’ve been having some exciting meetings?”

  “I expect they’ve entertained you.”

  “No, why?”

  Amir shut up. He had realised that he had forgotten who Khezr was and what he did for a living. He had started talking to Khezr as a friend, sounding like someone worried about what others thought of him, and wanting their approval. If he had not quickly stopped himself, Khezr would have stopped him anyway. Khezr – ever the professional – quickly changed the subject:

  “Haven’t you got a telephone here?”

  This could have been taken any number of ways, for it was not hard to find out whether the colonel had a telephone in his house or not. Even so, Amir’s first thought was that Khezr just wanted to make a call, but then he thought that perhaps he wanted to be absolutely sure whether there was a telephone in the house or not. Faced with Amir’s silence, Khezr turned to sarcasm:

  “What, not even a cordless phone? You’d be amazed at the things people have in their houses these days!”

  Amir laughed. “No.” He was sure that, before he had come to the house, Khezr had investigated all the security angles and already knew most of the answers to his questions.

  Mohammad-Taqi was now outside his room with a tray of tea; following Khezr’s glance, Amir could see a sliver of Mohammad-Taqi through the half-open door. He got up, went to the door and took the tray off him. Once Mohammad-Taqi had gone, he offered Khezr a glass.

  “Was he listening at the door?”

  Amir said he did not think Mohammad-Taqi did such things, but without thinking he got up and pushed the basement door to, feeling Khezr’s eyes on him all the way. Khezr turned almost bashful:

  “I’d heard Mohammad-Taqi was in Tehran. I’d rather it hadn’t been him that opened the door to me. He’s the only one here I’m worried about.”

  Amir was silent, probably preoccupied despite himself with the difference between himself and his brother. He put a lump of sugar in his tea and listened as Khezr went on:

  “It’s true that he escaped arrest, but I had seen reports about him and I recognised him. It was because of Mohammad-Taqi that I was in two minds about coming here. Now I don’t want him to know who I am, although I am sure he could find out through his friends, if he really wanted to. But I don’t want him or anyone else to know. Got that?”

  Amir kept his eyes glued to the floor, but Khezr Javid was clever enough to know what he was thinking. He had no doubt prepared himself before the meeting for all possible reactions on Amir’s part. He knew all too well what a bind he had put Amir in. Even so, he probably did not expect Amir to start singing like a canary there and then. After all, Amir’s situation was now quite different to when he had been under arrest and was being interrogated.

  Khezr took a sip of his tea. Amir had his head down, but he was sure that Khezr was looking at him all the time, drilling into his forehead with his gimlet eyes. His being sunk in silent thought was presumably annoying Khezr. Amir did not want to be brooding like this, either. He might lose control of himself and start kicking up a fuss about this security policeman being in his house. Who knows what consequences that might have? There were still plenty of people out there who were baying for the blood of hundreds of the likes of Khezr. Khezr, who imagined Amir might be thinking along these lines as well, broke the silence:

  “I remembered your address from your file.”

  Amir just nodded. But Khezr, trying to break his concentration, went on: “So I came straight here. I thought you’d be surprised to see me, but you haven’t reacted at all. Why not?”

  Still with his head down, Amir seemed to be talking to himself: “It’s amazing, really bizarre. After I was freed I always imagined we might meet again some time, and in a situation just like this. Bizarre, isn’t it?”

  “You mean right here, in your house, in this basement?”

  “Not here particularly, but in circumstances like this. I always thought so. Isn’t it odd?”

  “It’s interesting, not odd. And it’s interesting that I chose your house… Why you? It’s not as though I haven’t got friends in this country. I had over a thousand prisoners to interrogate, and quite a few of them turned. But we didn’t ask you to come over. So why did I choose here, why did I choose you?”

  “Maybe because of my weakness, my weakness and vacillation and my lack of certainty about anything.”

  “No, I don’t think so. No. My decision was in response to my need, and what I need now is to be rescued by my enemies. There has been a revolution, you see. So far, they have strung up seven of our people from the trees along the street, more than seven of our local officers… It’s just my good luck that nobody knows me here. But maybe that’s precisely why I came to this town, to your house.”

  Perhaps hoping to stop the conversati
on right there, Amir simply nodded again and said, “Right.” He still couldn’t look Khezr in the eye. With his professional agility, Khezr now adopted a practised conciliatory tone:

  “But some of our people were real bastards, it’s true… particularly the high-ranking ones, who were just looking out for themselves and trying to save their own skins. Lots of them got the hell out of here while there was still time. Then I was arrested. I learned later that some of them had packed their families off abroad a full six months before the prison doors were thrown open. Then they followed them, and hung the rest of us out to dry, leaving us behind as scapegoats for everything that had happened. They sacrificed us to a people who all seemed to have gone mad. It’s obvious now that the higher-ups knew a full year ahead that the game was up, maybe even longer than that!”

  Amir was now able to look at Khezr: “Have you resigned?”

  It was not in Khezr’s nature to answer questions, and his response was silence. His silence may have emboldened Amir to press him: “Why? Do you still imagine you are protecting something?”

  Khezr did not look at Amir: “I don’t know… perhaps I just don’t know any other life. Perhaps because I’ve spent all my life doing this; it’s what I believe in. Perhaps I am just saving myself.”

  He looked up, looked Amir straight in the eye. There was an implicit threat in his voice: “Are you certain no one is listening to us?”

  Amir nodded, though he was not at all certain: “Apart from Mohammad-Taqi, the only other people living here are Masoud, the colonel and Parvaneh, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Farzaneh lives with her husband Qorbani, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know Qorbani well. He knew quite a lot of our informers here. But I don’t trust him. He just waits to see which way the wind is blowing. He’s a pompous idiot. At the beginning, he probably hung around you quite a lot, didn’t he? Yeah… and he thought that your lot would end up on top. As if our lot were already dead and buried!”