The Colonel Read online

  “You say what you think, don’t you, Khezr Javid? I noticed that about you when I was your prisoner. Don’t think I’m flattering you, but I have to say that you’ve got some nerve. You’re a brave man. But what I still don’t understand is how anyone could put such qualities at the service of a hellish system like that. What made you do it? What was it all for?”

  Javid finished the rest of his tea and reflected for a moment: “My face didn’t fit. My nose was too big.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “And I gave you a serious answer. My nose was too big. It made me want to worship something, so I worshipped the Shah, so my nose made me enter the service of the Shah.”34 But as for a ‘hellish system,’ I have to say that you intellectuals really do exaggerate. You use the most overworked terms for everything, don’t you? Hellish system, indeed. No, if you ask me, that was only purgatory. The real hell is yet to come.”

  There was nothing more to be said. They both fell silent. Khezr tucked a cushion under his elbow and leaned back on it. He lit another cigarette and, so that Amir could not see what he was thinking, closed his eyes as if he were having a nap. Amir felt the air around him becoming suddenly heavy, and the dead end to their conversation felt unbearably oppressive. He decided now was the time to confront Khezr, and ask him why he, a security policeman and his former interrogator, had come to his home – when the whole city was alive with rumours, counter-rumours and misunderstandings, which could destroy not just individuals but whole families as well? Did he not think that that might be asking too much? Amir was still weighing his words when Khezr spoke, without parting one eyelid from the other:

  “Not all revolutions get off the ground these days, you know. The fate of small nations is in the hands of the superpowers, comrade. So I haven’t given up all hope. You don’t remember the days between 15th and 18th August of ’53, but I do. I was a young man then, counting the minutes for the order to come out into the streets. But then the tables were turned and we saw with our own eyes that Sha’ban the Brainless was sitting there instead of Mossadeq and Khosrow Rouzbeh!”35 With his eyes still closed, he continued:

  “Tell them to bring us something to eat, anything. And find a way to tell your family I’m here, without letting on who I am.”

  “Where will you sleep? Do you want to spend the night here?”

  Khezr did not answer, but just stared back at him. Amir looked down, just as he did when he was being interrogated and had dared to ask a question, only to have Khezr bark back at him: ‘I ask the questions here. You just answer them.’ To escape Khezr’s vice-like hold over him, Amir got up, stuck his head out into the stairway and called up for someone to make them some supper and bring it down. He hoped that Mohammad-Taqi would answer. He guessed that Parvaneh had not yet come home and he knew that, as usual, Masoud would be late back from the mosque because after the mourning ceremonies and prayers he would stay behind to sweep the prayer hall and clean up the pantry and only come home if there was nothing else to do. It was not unusual for Masoud to sleep in the mosque. Which was why, whatever Mr Immortal Prophet Khezr might have preferred, there was nobody except Mohammad-Taqi in the house to serve them. All that Amir could do was to go back and talk to Khezr and distract him from thoughts of Mohammad-Taqi.

  I had never got over my wife being taken away by the police and, although I was still in a state of shock at seeing Khezr in the house, I was strangely tempted to take it up with him. I was sure that he must know what her file said about her arrest and interrogation; he must know all about what had happened to Nur-Aqdas Khamami. It seemed perfectly natural that, now that Khezr had taken refuge with me, I should ask him to tell me what had happened to my wife, who had disappeared without trace. But what was it that held me back from mentioning her? I don’t know, but a powerful force was preventing me from uttering my wife’s name. Maybe it was my oriental mentality that made me want to draw a veil over anything that reflected on my honour. All the dreadful images that I had had of what might be happening to Nur-Aqdas had destroyed my mind and left me in a state of terror. I wanted to shut her, and anything that was to do with her, out of my mind. I did not want to see or hear of her again. Nevertheless, my curiosity would not let go of me. It was impelling me to keep digging to find out what had happened to my wife. If the security police had executed her, there had to be some trace of her grave, or of the common pit they had thrown her into. But there wasn’t. So what had happened to Nur-Aqdas? I don’t know. So I don’t see why I shouldn’t put Mr Immortal Javid on the spot and get him to answer me. Wasn’t he now a criminal hiding in my house? So why didn’t I quiz him? Was it that I didn’t dare? That was it. I didn’t have the courage to ask the policeman personally responsible for her file what had become of Nur-Aqdas. I was hesitant, and maybe this shyness came from a sense of shame. This was nothing new; when other people behaved totally disgracefully, it was me that went red with embarrassment. What was holding me back was perhaps this overweening sense of shame. I just sat there on the stool, staring at the floor, and started thinking about Nur-Aqdas. I remembered the first time I saw her, with her eyes blindfolded, her feet swollen and bandaged, sitting on an old blood-soaked chair in one of those deformed, twisted prison cells. She was leaning backwards and I wanted to be able to see her eyes under the black blindfold once more. They had probably lost all their brightness, and I wanted to be able to look out through the half-closed door of that warped interrogation room, to see what hour it was of that night that seemed to have had no beginning. Then suddenly, I don’t know how, I was no longer tongue-tied but, instead of asking Khezr what had happened to Nur-Aqdas, all I could manage to say to him was, ‘What’s the time?’

  “Supper’s ready, bro!”

  At the sound of Mohammad-Taqi’s voice, Khezr blinked and sat up on the edge of the bed. Before his brother could come down, Amir shot up and grabbed the tray from him and was about to turn round and come down with it when Mohammad-Taqi said, rather louder than he should have:

  “Father wants to see you, bro!”

  Amir went weak at the knees, but, toughing it out and giving no sign of his alarm, he went back down into the cellar, set the tray down on the rush mat and made a place for Khezr to sit down next to it, while watching for Khezr’s reaction to what Mohammad-Taqi had said. Khezr gave no sign that he had heard anything and began to chew quietly on his food. Amir now seemed to have lost interest in inquiring about Nur-Aqdas. He was more interested in where Khezr was going to sleep after his supper, and why Mohammad-Taqi had used their father as an excuse to get him away from Khezr. How was he going to find an excuse for leaving his guest alone?

  “Is there any hooch around the place?”

  There was. He put the plastic petrol can of arack down in front of Khezr, with a glass and a bowl of olives. When he got stuck in, Amir had an excuse to leave the room. He put on his slippers and went upstairs to the sitting-room, where his father was waiting for him. He was sitting on a chair next to the stove, beneath the portrait of The Colonel, reading the Shahnameh, the story of Manuchehr, most likely.36

  Mohammad-Taqi was sitting on the bentwood chair, oiling his pistol in the light of the lamp hanging from the ceiling. When he caught sight of Amir, he looked up from his task for a moment. Amir waited patiently to find out what the colonel wanted, but the old man’s head was buried in the Shahnameh and showed not the slightest interest in his son, even though he had heard Mohammad-Taqi calling him up from the basement. Amir was worried that he should not have left Khezr alone. The long silence forced on him by his father and brother made him feel small. Finally, he broke it himself.

  “Father, what was it you wanted to see me about?”

  the colonel peered at Amir over the top of his glasses, shook his head in irritation and buried himself once more in the Shahnameh, handing Amir over to his brother. Mohammad-Taqi did not give Amir a chance to speak. As he finished reassembling his weapon he adopted an abrupt tone that Amir had never heard him use before:


  “Who is he, bro?”

  Amir did not answer. He decided to stand on his dignity as the elder brother and shut Mohammad-Taqi up. Without a word, he turned round and headed for the door. But, before he reached the verandah, he was brought up short by a bark from Mohammad-Taqi. He stopped, then turned to face his brother, who was casually examining the weapon in his hand.

  “What does it matter to you who he is?”

  Mohammad-Taqi looked him straight in the face: “I know what sort of person he is.”

  “What sort of person is he, then?”

  “Police.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen him, I recognise him.”

  “Where from?”

  “Around the prison, before they stopped visits from brothers and sisters.”

  Mohammad-Taqi did not need to add that he had actually seen Khezr Javid face to face, on one of his visits to Amir. Amir was shocked into silence and his knees began to shake. It seemed that they now took him for an accomplice of Khezr. Struck dumb by this realisation, he stood awkwardly in front of his brother. His tongue felt as dry as a brick and he could not swallow his saliva. the colonel had looked up from his Shahnameh and was peering at him in astonishment over his spectacles. There was nothing for it; he had to come clean, before things got out of hand. And so, steadying himself on the table with his hands, he leaned over to Mohammad-Taqi and said:

  “He’s a guest. He’s staying with us tonight. He didn’t treat me so badly when he was interrogating me. Anyway, I want to get something out of him about the disappearance of my wife. So don’t go kicking up a fuss about this – understood? I’m being completely above board with you.”

  the colonel had sunk back into his book. Amir had not noticed that, while he had been talking to Mohammad-Taqi, his father had lit a cigarette. He saw that he had put his half-empty tea glass down in front of him. Amir turned round and looked at his brother once more. Mohammad-Taqi avoided his glance, got up and went over to the far end of the room, where there was an old wooden bed. Amir watched him go in silence. Not wanting to dilute the force of his words by saying anything else, he slipped out of the room, went out onto the verandah and crept down the stairs to the basement, making an effort not to let on to Khezr that anything to do with him had been going on upstairs.

  But Khezr was no fool; Amir knew from experience that he was always suspicious of his own shadow. As he lifted his glass to his lips he looked at Amir and, for as long as it took him to drink half of it down, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on Amir, piercing his very soul, so that he felt all the hairs on his body stand up on end like kebab skewers. He felt dried out. He could not move. It felt like being back in the interrogation room. His heart was thumping. He looked around for the card on the wall with the verse from the Qur’an that read, ‘Salvation comes to the honest.’ He stood waiting, like a scarecrow, for Khezr to give him permission to sit down.

  “Sit down!”

  Amir sat down. I sat down. I did just as I was told. Sitting down is a perfectly normal thing for a human being to do; if one hears of someone that he has sat down, one can have only one thing in mind. But in that instant it struck Amir that there were as many ways of sitting down as there were people in the world, in all their diversity. On the face of it, Amir sat down politely, but he was aware that, beneath the surface, his mind was seething with that sense of subjugation and fear which occasionally shows itself as ‘good manners,’ and that there is not a clear line between the two… It suddenly seemed vitally important to him to prove his utter obedience to Khezr Javid. His bearing, his expression and everything about him had to signal to Khezr that he was prepared to meet his every wish and do whatever he wanted. Meanwhile, as if to underline Amir’s utter humiliation, Khezr Javid was not even deigning to look at him, but was glaring round every corner of the room instead. Amir hoped that Khezr would accept with magnanimity his signs of humility and surrender. Observe my subservience, Your Excellency Dr Javid!

  Nobody had told Amir how to behave under interrogation. He assumed from the layout of the place and his general position that he was required to keep looking straight ahead, even though right next to him the screams of Nur-Aqdas Khamami were rending the air, as she was being savagely beaten by one of Khezr’s lieutenants. A braver soul than him might have dared to lift his eyes up a little, as far as the portrait on the wall of the Shah with his medal-bedecked chest, but even that would have been to break the unwritten rules of the interrogation room. Rules which, like minute airborne particles, from the first moment of your arrest, work their way out of the air into your very soul. When they made you change out of your clothes in the guardhouse and put on a pair of scruffy grey overalls, which made you look like a scarecrow, you felt those unwritten rules becoming engraved on your heart.

  “Hand him the form!”

  It was the charge sheet.

  “Sign here.”

  Both the basic principles of human rights and the written law require that a suspect must be informed of the nature of the charges against him within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Within that time he must be formally charged and he has to sign the charge sheet. If sufficient evidence is not produced within twenty-four hours, the prosecution is not entitled to pursue the case against the accused. Amir only found this all out later. He had never felt the need to think about the whys and wherefores of having such a clearly spelt out law. What earthly reason would any Iranian have to trouble himself about the law or try to keep to it? Here, the law had always been delivered at the blunt end of a cosh, hadn’t it? All Amir wanted to find out, law or no law, was why he had been arrested, for he still had no idea. Desperate to know what I was accused of, I had high hopes of Khezr Javid, who was now standing by his desk.

  “We beat people’s feet till they’re black as boots here!”

  With the end of his cable whip he forced Amir’s head round to the left, to face the two blindfolded women who had collapsed onto old chairs and, before Amir could fix in his mind the lines on the face of the woman he thought might be Nur-Aqdas, Khezr took a step towards her. Amir looked away. As the sharp toe of Khezr’s shiny shoe connected with the bruised and bandaged legs of the nearest woman on the bloodstained couch, she let out a terrible scream and then fell silent. Khezr Javid now returned to the desk. He waved his whip at five of the prisoners in the room to indicate that they should be led back to the cells, then pointed at the sixth:

  “The one with a moustache goes to administration.”

  He looked round at the woman on the couch: “You… pissy old woman, have a think about it tonight. Tomorrow you either talk, or I send you off to join your two boys in Behesht-e Zahra.37 Take her to her cell, soldier!”

  As the soldier led her away, leaving only the echo of her feeble whimpers in that dark and sinister room, the old woman looked as fragile as a blade of straw. Khezr sat down at his desk without looking at Amir or saying a word to him, lit himself a cigarette and began smoking it. After a long, frightening silence, Amir heard the sound of dragging footsteps coming to the interrogation room. He had no idea how much time had passed, or even what time of night it was. Khezr got up, came forward and twisted Amir’s head round, forcing him to look at his wife, who had been made to sit on the blood-soaked old couch by the door. A black blindfold covered her eyes and they had made ‘black boots’ of her feet. Khezr turned Amir’s head back again and moved back into the light. All of a sudden, Amir seemed to hear the screaming and wailing of all the women of the world spinning round the prison and reverberating in his skull until, as abruptly as if his spinal cord had been severed, he passed out. He remembered nothing until he came to on the wire bed and saw, on the lead-coloured steel table, a bloodstained knife in the pool of light under the anglepoise lamp.

  “Here, have one of these cigarettes.”

  Khezr’s eyes were bloodshot. Amir saw this, not in the feeble light of the ceiling lamp, but in his mind, which was still filled with the thought of those long, endless
nights of interrogation. He could even remember every detail of Khezr Javid’s yawns. Tired and exhausted after a long day’s interrogation and getting over his drunkenness, Khezr would read through the response to the final question once more, and Amir would see him yawn and hear the gurgling noise in his throat. The Immortal Khezr did not seem to the colonel’s son Amir to be the same man as the one who was now sitting on the bed, spitting out olive stones and putting them on the edge of the plate. For that Khezr, the one in prison, had long since etched himself indelibly on Amir’s memory. Amir knew all his habits and foibles inside out. He knew that when he wanted to sleep, his drunken snores would not last more than an hour. There had been many occasions when he had set him a question and, stretching out on the camp-bed in a nook against the wall, had promptly had forty winks while Amir wrote down his answer. He would then get up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and sit on the bedside, without even needing to splash water on his face to wake himself up. So now Amir was certain that Khezr was going to lie down on his bed for a short nap, but he could not be sure that he would sleep until morning. He did not dare ask him again about where he planned to sleep because, in all likelihood, he must have heard his conversation with Mohammad-Taqi and may have got the wrong idea about him. When Amir had come back down to the basement, he had seen a brief flash of suspicion cross Khezr’s beady eyes. That naked, ruthless look, which contained the whole burden of Khezr’s past, had stopped Amir dead in his tracks. His real personality – his brutal, overbearing nature – came flooding back. Khezr hasn’t changed; behind the friendly mask, he’s just the same as he always was, however much he tries to hide it. Amir would have to wait before Khezr would tell him what he wanted to know.