The Colonel Read online

  Parvaneh had come into her father’s room and was drying her face and hair with a towel that she had brought in with her. the colonel stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray without looking at his daughter. She stood by the stove and lifted the lid off the teapot to smell the tea, to make sure that it had not stewed. She checked the kettle and poured two glasses, one for her father and one for herself, put them on the table and sat down.

  “Papa, would you like some tea?”

  Why didn’t I have some? Life for an old man is made up of small kindnesses like this. Didn’t she know that? … but of course she did.

  “I’ll put some more paraffin in the stove for you presently.”

  I knew it. Parvaneh did this for me every night. The kindness in my daughter’s voice breathed new life into that simple act of topping up the paraffin stove. I wanted to show willing, so I said if she was busy I could do it myself, but she ignored me and asked if she could take some tea down to her brother and his visitor and give Amir his night-time pills before she got her hands all paraffiny.

  “Should I give them some tea?”

  “Yes… do you know how many pills your brother is meant to take, and when?”

  She knew. She put the teapot, sugar bowl and two glasses on a tray and, before leaving the room, pulled her scarf over her head and put a towel over the teapot to keep it warm. When she got to the basement, Khezr Javid was just taking off his parka and hanging it on a clothes hook. Parvaneh could see his shoulder holster, which more than satisfied her curiosity. Khezr was evidently taken by surprise for, as the door opened and he saw the girl putting the tray down on the stool, he started, then quickly composed himself and shot a sideways glance at Parvaneh. She could see from her brother’s face that she should not have come in without asking. Mortified, she had to get away from her brother and his strange visitor as fast as she could. She fled up the stairs but, before she reached the yard, she heard Khezr Javid’s voice, as if for the first time:

  “She’s still very young and weak. You really shouldn’t have got her involved in the revolution and all this activism. It’s dangerous for her, very dangerous.”

  Parvaneh realised she was standing on one leg. Khezr’s voice had made her stop stock still, balancing herself with her other foot on the top step. She only noticed it when Khezr stopped speaking. She had been holding her breath while they had been talking about her and, when she realised that Khezr had finished, she breathed again. Putting her weight on both feet she stood, listening, with her ear to the wall, trying to make out her brother’s reply to Khezr over the sound of the rain. Amir said something along the lines that Parvaneh just had a youthful zeal for revolution, and that she had only been selling a few newspapers on the street. Besides, no-one in particular had forced her to get involved. His voice was pleading, as if he was begging Khezr to cut him some slack and not be too harsh on his little sister:

  “…But she’s very fragile. She’s really just the colonel’s nurse and carer. You know very well that there is the world of difference between her and Mohammad-Taqi, and you’ve already beaten him up. Frankly… I beg of you…”

  You would have thought there was nobody in the basement with Amir, since Khezr Javid made no reply. Amir could just as well have been talking to himself. A few moments later he fell silent and Parvaneh heard loud, irregular snoring from Khezr. He must have fallen asleep. She didn’t like the idea of her brother’s companion dropping off like that in the middle of his sentence – wasn’t that deeply insulting both to her and her brother? When she went into the colonel’s room, she felt as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over her. She realised immediately that, instead of going to her father, she should have gone straight to her room, buried her face in a pillow and cried herself to sleep.

  Parvaneh had even forgotten she’d said she’d fill up the stove. Clean forgotten! As if she’d never said it in the first place and as if she never used to do my stove for me every night and plump up my pillows as I like them. All that I could see on her face that night was death and dishonour. Her cheeks were scarlet with shame and her lips were grey with the fear of death and her eyes – well, I never saw her eyes that night, as she never looked at me.

  The next morning, at about the time of the call to prayer, Khezr Javid got up and got ready to go. From the expression on his face, he did not want to hear another peep out of Amir. And when Amir did try to speak to him, Khezr ignored him and went upstairs to wash, leaving him there, sitting on a mattress on the floor. It was as if Immortal Khezr had cast a spell on him and struck him dumb. Speechless and filled with a terrible sense of foreboding, he guessed that Parvaneh had already got up to say her morning prayers. He knew that she always came down to see him before going out in the morning, but he could not summon up the strength to go upstairs and warn her that, just for today, just this once, she should stay at home. It was all he could do to haul himself up, sit on the edge of the bed and, ignoring the acid taste in his mouth, light the first cigarette of the day and clutch his head which, from long lack of sleep, weighed half a ton. And there he sat.

  Watched by her father, who was sitting watching the rain through the window, Parvaneh ran down the steps into the yard. Crossing to the steps, she went down to the basement, just in time to snatch out of Amir’s hand his second cigarette, which he was about to light, and stub it out. She was wearing a grey school smock, with a dark blue satchel slung over her shoulder. Amir could guess what sort of pamphlets and newspapers she had stuffed into it, and Khezr Javid would obviously soon find out.

  Why on earth had Parvaneh come down to the basement again after the night she had just gone through? This question really bothered the colonel. The fact was that the girl, after a night of agonising, had got a grip on herself and conquered her fear of death. She had got it into her head to confront her brother and this scowling, arrogant guest, who had never been accepted into this house anyway, and try to correct the false impression that her brother had formed of her. She especially wanted to face down Khezr Javid, and so she waited in the basement until he came down. Not deigning to glance at him, she looked at her brother:

  “Isn’t your friend going to have breakfast?”

  “No, and I don’t want any either.”

  Without looking at her, Khezr went straight to get his parka off the coat hook while Parvaneh, boldly curious, stared pointedly at his shoulder holster. But Amir was looking down, too weak to watch his sister’s self-possessed performance. He was turning over in his mind what Khezr had said the night before: “It’s dangerous for her, very dangerous.”

  Khezr’s voice was still ringing in Amir’s skull as Parvaneh stepped lightly up the stairs. He heard the swish of her blue plastic satchel as it rubbed against her coat. He could also hear that Khezr was ready to go and, hard as it was, he lifted his head to see the Immortal One doing up his shoelaces on the step.

  The sound of the front door slamming told Amir that Parvaneh had left. Propping both hands against the side of the bed, he got up. Khezr zipped up his parka and went upstairs. Amir slipped his raincoat over his shoulders and followed him into the yard to hold the gate open for him. Khezr went out and Amir peered out into the alleyway. He imagined Parvaneh’s quick, light footsteps. Amir put the chain back on the door and was about to go back to the basement when he was seized by a strange spasm of fear, of a fear that he had been struck dumb. The rain, which he thought might have stopped for a while, had started again and he stood there, hunched up, mortified and soaking wet. He had no idea how long for. He could sense the colonel standing by the window of his room, looking at him and following the receding footsteps of his daughter. The window had steamed up, blurring the colonel, just in the same way that Amir had been in a blur as he watched the colonel, after he had killed his mother, standing out there in the rain with blood dripping from his sabre. But the difference was that the colonel had not been hunched up like his pathetic son. He was ashamed of nothing and was not going to hide his crime from anyone. Amir
was not ashamed either, for he knew that only a healthy mind could feel shame, and he felt no shame. No, the reason why he could not lift his head was fear of meeting the colonel’s gaze. For he would have found reflected in those eyes the thousand nightmares that were whirling round in his own head. He was terrified that Parvaneh would not come home again.

  Nor did she.

  I could have done something, could have put my foot down… I had not just the right, but a duty to put my foot down. After all, they were my own flesh and blood. Granted, they were all grown up, but so what? Now, let me check again… Shroud, shovel, pick, shroud… On my way now. Yes, this is the way to the cemetery. How are we doing for time? Not to worry, there’s still been no morning call to prayer from the minaret yet. But this rain, this never-ending rain…

  It was still pouring and the colonel had to watch his step at the end of the alleyway. He had to pick his way carefully down the slope at the end, round a big muddy puddle, and then up a steep bit. He stopped for a breather before carrying on towards the cemetery and mortuary, where the two policemen were still waiting for him, probably fed up by now. He rehearsed what he would say in case Ali Seif and his colleague had a go at him for taking so long: “Look, my friend, my dear young friend, I’m so sorry. I’m an old man now, it’s a long way and it’s a rough track and…” He would impress on them how much effort it had been for an old man like him to get all his bits and pieces together, but I won’t breathe a word to them about Amir, not a word! Though, it’s not actually risky talking about him nowadays, now that he’s inactive politically and a complete irrelevance. But fear is now invading my soul – has invaded my soul – fear and a wish to hide myself away from wagging tongues and knowing looks.

  Repressed, hidden fear: the image of Amir. Fear eats away at the soul worse than leprosy; it hollows a man out and takes him over. The mere fact that he was alive and breathing was enough to convince him that he stood accused, guilty and condemned. Even though he had withdrawn from life and become completely passive, the colonel considered him to be inherently guilty. Amir himself felt guilty of the crime that must have been committed because of him. After all, he had never set foot on any of those conveyor belts that had been set up to take the likes of him to their deaths or, if he had, he had quickly jumped off. Albeit at the cost of his own gradual self-destruction in his father’s damp and mouldy basement. In any case, he was guilty and a ‘corrupting influence on the people’ and, at some point in the future, he would have to give palpable shape and form to his unmentioned crime, if only by killing himself.

  the colonel felt guilty, too – guilty for the very existence of his children, or lack of it, as the case may be. He bore the burden of the offences of each one of his offspring on his shoulders. As for Amir, apart from having fathered him, he was guilty of harbouring him and allowing him to just sit there in a corner. Although he had done his duty as a father, he could not rid himself of the leprotic grip of a feeling that he was somehow his accomplice, and he passively awaited the day of his punishment. He did not hide from himself that maybe one day, out of sheer exhaustion and confusion, he would lose his grip and would bring this day forward, perhaps by strangling his son and rushing out naked into the street and running to the only hospital in town – the one which had just been opened, and the only psychiatrist had been accused of treason and committed to the central madhouse in Tehran for ‘treatment and re-education.’

  Up to now he had managed to live with Amir and his problems. Whenever he ran into other people, however unimportant, he behaved as if Amir did not exist, and tried to pretend that he was estranged from his son. He would sometimes even go so far as to believe it himself. But on the other hand, after such encounters he would always reproach himself, telling himself that what he had done had been sheer egotism and selfishness. He asked himself what he was hoping to achieve by such egotism. And in response he came up with the following dictum: people who are drowning in a sea of problems and have lost all sense of self-worth often grasp at egotism and alienation from everything outside themselves as their only point of fixity, and this can help anchor and fortify them – if only to the point of madness. This is what it can come to, then, if you live in a hostile environment and have lost all your dignity.

  I’m capable of anything when the world treats me as nothing. If the world throws me out, then I’ll become my own world. I’ll become like the ant which fell in the water and, thrashing about wildly, shouted: ‘The whole world has been washed away!’ And, insofar as I have become nothing, all things are therefore permitted unto me, even unto strangling my son and running about naked in the street all the way to the madhouse… No, I’ll never, ever lose my nerve. I’ll stand by my children through thick or thin. I’ll keep a stiff upper lip and never forget that I’m a soldier…

  “But, Sir, I am just a simple soldier…”

  “We are all soldiers, colonel. Haven’t I made myself clear?”

  Amir was still awake when the colonel got home. His wife was still out. They were all well used to Forouz’s late-night absences by now. As he had got older, even the colonel had got used to them. Perhaps the sense that he was in danger of eventually just taking everything in his stride played a part in his next decision. So he sat up and waited for her. When Forouz turned up well after midnight, drunk as usual, she flopped like a corpse into bed without more ado. She knew very well that her husband knew exactly what she got up to at night. Sometimes the colonel was aware of her hand sliding under her pillow to pull out a small bottle of sleeping pills.

  That rainy night was the last time that the colonel had drunk himself senseless. Amir was sitting at a little table doing his homework and the colonel was sitting on the edge of his single bed, knocking back glass after glass of vodka, not knowing what he was doing or, rather, he knew exactly what he was doing and was drinking to forget. He persuaded himself that he didn’t know what he was doing, using a thousand and one tricks to convince himself that he had lost all power of rational choice. And that was the state of mind he was in when he put the final touch to the plan that he had been toying with for some time.

  the colonel was weeping. He did not know how long ago it had started. All he could feel was that his eyes were burning with alcohol and – probably – red with his tears. Everything round him was swimming and he could not make out whether it was his own Amir sitting at his little table by the window, or someone else. Nor could he make out whether Amir was looking at him or was staring at the pages in front of him with his ears pricked up to listen to what his father was saying, to the incoherent, crazed ramblings, welling up from deep inside him, as if from some other person. He thought, he hoped that Amir could see what a state he was in. He was sure that Amir had recognised his mother for what she was and could see the fix that his father was in, and that he had no choice but to do what he was about to do. For it seemed only natural to the colonel that the convulsions and spasms that were shaking his whole being should be transmitted to the closest person to him, to his son, who was right there in front of him. And why shouldn’t Amir be part of the tragedy?

  the colonel sensed that the hairs on his son’s neck were standing on end with horror, but his instinct also told him that Amir was at one with his father in what he intended to do, and would help him, for he saw that all the powers of the earth, visible and invisible, were behind him in the crime that he was about to commit. Without allowing himself a second’s doubt as to Amir’s ideas on the matter, his one thought was to make him his accomplice in the deed.

  Yet at the same time he could not involve Amir in the crime. the colonel thought himself a fair man and, however much Amir might sympathise with him, he could not be so selfish as to expect his boy to turn his hand to murdering his mother. After all, he knew that to kill someone, let alone kill one’s own mother, was not an easy thing to do and even to think about it was upsetting. It was unthinkable. So the colonel thought it best to leave his son sitting awkwardly on his chair while matters took their cours
e. Amir’s silence could mean only one thing: that he wished to stand aside from what was about to happen and let his father sort his problem out by himself.

  Eventually, when he staggered up from the bed, he was barely able to keep his balance. Something – probably an empty glass – dropped on the floor and smashed. the colonel stamped on it. He swayed back and forth and everything seemed to go black in front of him. He wiped the sweat off his brow and, in one stride, hauled himself over to the stove, steadied himself on the mantelpiece and began bawling like a stubborn and angry baby. He felt that he did not even have the courage to look The Colonel in the eye. For the black eyes of The Colonel in the photograph were staring at him from under his bushy black eyebrows, behind the glass on which dust never settled and, from the reproach in that look, he felt not just shame, but terror. All he could do was lean his forehead against The Colonel’s field boots and, weeping, call out his name over and over again. Colonel… Colonel…

  Later – he did not know how much later – he pulled himself together, picked his officer’s cap off the bed and set it squarely on his head, drew his sabre from its scabbard, took one step back and looked The Colonel straight and firm in his unyielding eyes:

  “I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her tonight!”

  I can’t remember, but in all likelihood that was the night when Amir began to change into a completely different person. It was that night that opened the wound that never healed. It must have been after that that Amir went off, got engaged, joined some revolutionary groups, lost his wife, went to prison and put himself through ordeals of fire and water18 in order to be born again and get his life back on track. But it didn’t happen, in fact things got even worse – he lost his wife first and then himself. A man can cope with only so much in this life. It must have been after this that my son and I came across each other in prison.