The Colonel Read online

  But this new dread of the crowd did not fit into any of the old familiar categories. It had laid claim to a new place in his head and he had to get it out of there. He had to get away from them all and go home.

  Home… but where is home, now?

  It was night before they finally buried Mohammad-Taqi. the colonel could not remember what had happened in the cemetery, or how the funeral had ended. When he got home his mind was full of the maddened, roaring tumult of the strange and unfamiliar faces. His lungs felt weighed down by a tombstone and he searched for enough fire in his belly to start a fight.

  My children!

  They had brought Mohammad-Taqi in, still in his bloody clothes, dumped him in the middle of the room, then sat round and waited.50 This gave the colonel a chance to take a breather and unloose the knot in his chest. The family were allowed to have him for the night and, after mourning him together, they each had a chance to sit in the corner and commune alone with him.

  The next morning – the air was full of dust – I took an old photograph of Mohammad- Taqi out of my pocket and tucked it into the frame of The Colonel’s portrait, right under his polished field boots. I looked up into The Colonel’s all-seeing eyes and saw that he had closed them. Now all that was left for me to do was organise the funeral and the seventh-day memorial service for my son, you would have thought.

  He did not know where he was, or even what time of day or night it was. He could hardly keep his eyes open and his hands were shaking. He felt he had shrunk to the size of a partridge and he craved a cigarette. But he was happy to have got away. Not caring about the mud, the potholes or his frozen shoeless foot, he kept on running, not looking where he was going, intent on putting distance between himself and the funeral crowd. He just wanted to be anywhere, it didn’t matter where, so long as it was far away from those voices belching out of the massed skulls and pursuing him through the streets. As he ran from the madding throng, the noise of the speakers steadily faded behind him. The voices became more and more unrecognisable as he went, until, to his horror, he heard them now as his own voice, cursing his own children.

  No, this cannot be… I want to hear my own voice again: my own voice, The Colonel’s voice!

  He was like a drowned rat again and his eyeballs were bursting with pain. The brim of his hat had curled up in the rain, he still had one shoe missing and his trouser legs were soaked and muddy right up to the knees. His coat tails had sagged even further with the weight of water they had taken up, and he stumbled as he sloshed his way through the mud. His mouth had dried up and his tongue tasted of snake venom. He had not eaten for the last day or two. He retched, but brought nothing up. What must he look like? The fear, confusion and exhaustion that filled the space between his hat and his coat made him think of a picture he had once seen somewhere of an old Jew who had just been let out of a concentration camp, with no idea of where he should go.

  “This is the main square, colonel, the courthouse square.”

  “But where’s my home… and my son?”

  “It was over there, colonel.”

  Were his eyes deceiving him? In that wide and empty square, in between rows of shrines to young martyrs of the revolution, stood serried ranks of constables, sheriffs and executioners from the old days, all lined up as if for his inspection. Yes, strange though it may seem, they really were there. In any case, his way home took him past a row of these shrines. The last and newest of them, presumably provided by Qorbani, was for his own Kuchik. the colonel felt sure that Mr Qorbani Hajjaj-the-Tyrant had also erected an even more lavish shrine to Kuchik in front of his house. Now he understood why Qorbani had made such a fuss about getting an enlargement of Kuchik’s photograph made, and why he had had a gilt frame made for it and had set it on the mantelpiece in his new living room. the colonel was beginning to suspect that maybe everything, down to the last detail, had been arranged beforehand. This worried him.

  How can they even think like that?

  As the old man entered the courtyard of his house, he stopped dead in his tracks. He could not believe his eyes. There, ghostlike, set up on boards over the pond,51 stood the headless torso of Amir Kabir. So, thought the colonel, Amir has finally managed to finish something. The statue was over six feet tall. Amir must have brought it up from the poky little basement in sections, to assemble and finish off outside. But he had not yet mounted the head on the torso. The Colonel was on the verandah, holding it in his hands and inspecting it. Warm blood, that warm glistening blood of old, was seeping slowly from The Colonel’s neck. Every now and then, with his customary dignity, he dabbed at it with a clean white handkerchief, never taking his eyes off the face of the great Amir Kabir.

  Standing on the verandah steps, right in front of The Colonel, Amir did not notice that his father had returned. He squinted back and forth, at The Colonel and at his creation, as if seeking approval, even praise, for his work. It was a naïve expectation to have of The Colonel, thought his father, even though The Colonel had the most refined artistic taste. Amir clearly did not know him very well for, as far as The Colonel was concerned, if a man had done something well, he had done no more than was his duty.

  Nobody should expect a reward for just doing his duty. No, Amir had not yet understood what The Colonel was all about.

  Even so, as The Colonel gave Amir back his head, he smiled at him as if to show that he was pleased with him. Amir, pleased by this, carefully took his head back from him. The Colonel folded his arms across his chest and stood rigidly at ease in his black polished boots, clutching his white, but slightly pink handkerchief, as if watching to see how work on his statue progressed.

  Standing on his stool, and without taking his eyes off his creation, Amir placed the head on Amir Kabir’s sturdy shoulders, ran his hand over his beard and moustaches, arranged the tall black hat on top of his curly hair, and then stepped down.

  On that sunny day, the colonel saw in Amir’s eyes a glow such as he had never seen in a man’s eyes before. Amir’s eyes now sparkled with life. As if in a trance, Amir walked backwards to the bottom of the verandah steps, unable to take his eyes off his splendid statue. He halted in front of The Colonel’s boots and, folding his arms across his chest like him, stood there for a time that seemed would never end and inspected his creation.

  I don’t mind about my poor feet. I just don’t want to let a sudden movement of mine shake Amir out of his trance. I’ll just wait here until Amir looks my way and see if he notices me.

  He did not have to wait long for Amir to notice him standing there in the rain, with water dripping from the brim of his hat, soaking into his collar. Stirred to take pity on the old man, he came up, took him gently by the arm and led him from the pond up the steps onto the verandah. To show his father and The Colonel due respect, Amir stood by the doorway and waited for them to go through ahead of him. But The Colonel had vanished, right from where he had been standing. Amir led his father inside and sat him down by a table next to the stove. The stove was warm and the colonel could see from Amir’s behaviour that a complete change had come over him, for his son was now treating him like a hospital patient. First he took from him his hat, heavy and wet from the rain, took it outside to wring it out, and put it by the stove to dry. Then he took from him his overcoat and hung it over a chair by the stove. Then it was the turn of the old man’s jacket, waistcoat, trousers and long-johns. Finally he brought him a blanket to get warm, something that had never occurred to me all the time I’d been wrapped up shivering in that old sheet, and held it round him so that he could strip down to the buff and hang all his clothes out by the stove to dry.

  There was no doubt as to how the stove had been kept going. It must have been Farzaneh who had brought over a drum of paraffin for us while Qorbani wasn’t looking.

  Amir poured a glass of tea and put it on the table in front of his father. He then brought the sugar bowl and put it within reach, so that his father could help himself without having to unwrap the blanket.


  That’s all very well, but Amir hasn’t noticed that my mind is on something else. I want to find one of the old photographs of Masoud and put it next to the ones of Parvaneh and Mohammad-Taqi, beneath The Colonel’s toecaps. I know where to look for it. Under the bed in the side pocket of a suitcase. I’ve even got the key on me…

  Amir was sitting opposite his father with his elbows on the table, his chin resting on his fists and squinting intently at him as if to convey to him that the important part of his life’s work was now done and that he now wanted to embark on something new. the colonel could hardly believe that he had chosen this juncture to undergo this sudden change, and was now looking life in the face again, but neither did he want to dismiss it out of hand. Nothing ever surprised him, and he was well aware that nobody could remain totally quiet and passive for ever, for no-one could ever survive like that.

  Experience, sir, experience.

  He and his whole generation were scarred by the events that had followed 1953.52 After that disaster, they were all paralysed by a pervading sense of pessimism, which had lasted for about twenty years. It only lifted when the generation responsible for the catastrophe had been worn out by defeat and had given way to a new one. In the second half of that period, the fight between the two generations had been quite something to behold.

  Not that the new generation that emerged after that fight were any more sensible or realistic. The next generation had been founded on rejection as well, rejection of everything. Out of this decay had been born revolt. The fathers had rejected everything except their nostalgia, while the conduct of their sons made everyone repudiate them; they even repudiated themselves. The fathers were crippled, while their sons were apathetic and rootless. Neither generation wanted to know anything about the other, and the result was that they blinded one another to both the future and the past. One lot were passive rejectionists, while the other lot were catastrophic in their activity. The parents no longer had the energy or ability to explain things or pass on their experience, while the children did not have the faith or the patience to take such lessons on board. It was like the game when children bet on an uncut watermelon being ripe or not. Some bet it would turn out to be ‘as green as soap,’ while others reckoned it would be ‘ripe and red as blood.’ Neither party had a reliable knife to cut it open and see, or sufficient courage or even permission to do so. So history remained unopened and unknown, until it rotted.

  And now Amir’s face was a mirror, reflecting that rottenness, and it reminded the colonel of many people in his distant past. Both the colonel and Amir could think of many fathers and sons, all at loggerheads with one another, not quiet and perplexed, like so many now. Every time they met, an argument ensued. They would attack and abuse one another and then go their separate ways. They knew each other’s sore points and were expert in finding precisely the insult that would cause the maximum hurt. But now Amir and the colonel were faced with a quite different problem: for a long time now, there had been no quarrel between them. Present circumstances had levelled all their differences – like a modern plough that, when driven across any kind of land – be it fallow land, irrigated, dry land or barren ground, or just a vegetable plot – turns it all over the same. The two generations were going over the most important points of a debate about the period of ‘decay’ without there being any differences between them. What was left out of the debate however, was the matter of how each one faced up to this rottenness, for there was no argument between them as to the existence or not of this rottenness, or of its massive scale. The only question now was how each of them would deal with it.

  What I see with my own eyes, Amir sees just as clearly in his worst nightmares, even though he can’t express it out loud.

  “I’m afraid the old man might not find the strength to kill himself. It is the one act that requires careful planning. He’s falling apart, you can see it in his face. I think I am only now beginning to realize how much I loved my father…”

  When Amir got off the bus after being let out of prison, he saw the colonel leaning against the brick wall of the bus station in his overcoat and fedora. It was dawn and drizzling. He was stooped over and studying Amir from under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and he was hiding a smile under his moustaches. Amir walked up to his father and held out his arms to embrace him, but the colonel’s face showed no sign of pleasure. No tears of joy; his eyes were dry. Amir, too, was out of sorts and could not be bothered to put on a show of happiness. Just when everyone else was fired up with hope, he was plagued by doubt. And yet, alongside the self-doubting, despairing Amir, who wanted to do away with himself, there was another Amir, who wanted more than anything else to play at being happy and reveal his real self.

  They were not far from home. Mohammad-Taqi, who had also come along to the bus station to welcome Amir back, took his bag and bundle and led the way, and the three of them set off in the silence of the dawn. There was nobody about and, in the emptiness of the morning, the town square seemed larger. Along the way the colonel began to talk to himself:

  “Right, at least that’s all over and done with, then.”

  “Yes… it’s all over. Fifty years of it.”53

  “More like six thousand years…”

  There was no sorrow or regret in the colonel’s words, but no joy either. He sounded indifferent. Amir knew of his father’s conviction that Iran had a six-thousand-year history of government.

  I can understand what my father felt.

  But no! I have become a fisherman, with long rubber waders, a beret, a big nose and a bushy moustache, lugging nets on my back, and with an Oshnu Special cigarette in my hand as I splash along beside the colonel in the heavy silence that he carries with him. I am beginning to speak: ‘There is no place for doubt on the battlefield of history and revolution, papa! The glorious history of the forty year struggle of the workers is a shining example of…’ and I hate myself for such ridiculous, meaningless jargon. I shudder to hear that oaf inside me uttering such rubbish, but I carry on: ‘We must continue to hope, papa, hope… A man without hope is nothing but an insect, a mindless creature with no future. And a man without a future can only go backwards. In prison we spat at the fence-sitters for being men with no honour.’

  the colonel had turned round and was glaring at his son from beneath his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Amir felt trapped. The nets on his back had gone, his Oshnu cigarette had disappeared, there were no rubber boots to give him the air of a mature man of experience, and his top lip was no longer covered with a bushy moustache. He was a little boy again, being smelted by the glare of his father’s wise old gaze. In vain, he tried to break the threatening silence of the morning with a pretend cough, but then he had to meet his father’s withering stare. He tried to continue:

  “Yes, in prison…”

  One look from my father was all it took and there I was once more – back to feeling humiliated, beset by doubt and, worse still, even by despair. All my soaring hopes had vanished into thin air: Why do I prattle away like that without thinking? Why am I always preaching at others to try and win them over, or provoking people, or haranguing them? Don’t I just end up hurting myself? And to speak like that to my father, of all people! Am I the only person in the world who doesn’t just lack the courage to admit his own doubt but who is also so despicable as to impute it to other people – even my own father – and then attack him for it?

  This behaviour really came to a head when he was sitting in the living room, surrounded by friends and relations. The one thought burning in his brain was “where is Nur Aqdas, my wife?” but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Instead, he was banging on in the same vein: “The incontrovertible truth is that we are living in a century of radical change, and there’s no place for intellectual vacillation in a revolution, my friends!” His other self did not appear to him in the guise of a fisherman this time; this time he saw a man with a grey beard, a drooping moustache, and wearing a beret as he smoked his first pipe of the morn
ing. Every now and then he gave a little cough.

  Looking back on it, the person most attracted to that man smoking his pipe after breakfast was the lovely little Parvaneh. It was just bad luck that it was me, her brother!

  That was when people started talking: it was the duty of any respectable family to repudiate a girl like that and send her packing. She was now mahdour ud-dam, fair Islamic game. It would be an honour killing.

  In the warmth of the stove, the colonel’s back and shoulders, wrapped in the steaming blanket, were now thawing out. Even his left foot was warming up. He was feeling lethargic and hardly able to keep awake for so much lack of sleep. The only thing that gave him any comfort, and moved him from time to time, was the memory of what he had said about Parvaneh over the unseen, echoing loudspeakers at Masoud’s funeral. He could not believe that he would ever have been capable of uttering those words against a child who was not even fourteen, a girl to whom he was both a mother and a father. Had it really been his own voice that had yelled: ‘This girl is mahdour ud-dam… She must be killed. She is impure, possessed by the devil and now lost to us all…’ It was as if he had been talking about Forouz.

  How could I have said that? Perhaps there’s been someone else lurking inside me for my entire life, just waiting for a chance to say it? Was it really my voice that I heard coming out of the loudspeakers? How could such a thing be possible?

  “Well, Amir, what do you think?”

  But Amir was not there. He was lost in thoughts of Parvaneh, who was not there either. A sick curiosity gripped him as to how Parvaneh had been killed. He wondered what level of torture she had been subjected to before dying, and what she had said about her heroic brother to her fellow prisoners. A brother who had a good name and reputation, who was loved by so many young men who had been to school with him, a noble brother who had been released from the chains of ‘the murderous régime.’