The Colonel Read online

  It was only in the final year, before all the prisons were opened anyway and the inmates released, that Amir and the colonel found themselves thrown together. Amir was a political prisoner, accused of ‘endangering national security,’ while the colonel had been found guilty of a string of offences, both political and criminal. His case had been investigated by military counter-intelligence. Only after he had been stripped of his rank, sentenced and automatically cashiered from the army did they transfer him to a political prison. It was there that the colonel found himself next to Amir and got to know his son in a new way, in which Amir was not merely his son, but first and foremost an independent man in his own right, with his own future in front of him.

  the colonel had always let his children find their own way in life. He had not even prevented Parvaneh, the youngest of his children, from ploughing her own furrow. But now he could not help but wonder whether the dreadful fate that had overtaken every one of his children was in fact due to his laissez-faire approach. But no, this did not really provide the old man with an easy answer, either. He firmly believed that he had bequeathed to his children only the most natural of rights, namely the right to determine what they wanted to do with their lives. But that did not mean by a long chalk that he had been guilty of teaching them to be irresponsible – none of them could ever be accused of being irresponsible. No, he had done his best to bring up his children and had, perhaps, at times even gone to extremes to control them.

  In the end, perhaps the colonel’s wish that his children lead independent lives was a reaction on his part against a life which he felt had been imposed upon him. He felt that he had been short-changed by never having had the freedom to live his own life. This made him feel like some sort of cripple. He felt himself a lesser man for having being forced to live a life under duress and that, until a man takes charge of his own life, he cannot truly know himself. Such a half-baked creature, whether in life or in death, cannot be judged for what he is or was, for he might have become something that he could never even have imagined. the colonel’s firm views on this score made him convinced that he was not the person whom others thought him to be, whom others presumed to pass judgement on. Given this verdict on himself, he certainly was not about to accept other people’s judgements of him without demur. And he would probably never discover who he really was, now that he had burdened himself with a weight of guilt that it would take him thousands of years to wash away.

  At least one of you should look out for himself. It’s not as though you were carrying the weight of all history on your shoulders! I’m not as strong as you think I am. That’s what he really wanted to tell his children.

  They came and told him that Amir was in prison as well, and showed him a file containing a bloodstained knife.

  “A knife? With blood on it? Do you mean Amir has killed someone with it?”

  “Yes, colonel. Do you find that hard to believe?”

  “Do you recognise this knife?”

  Yes, Amir did recognise it. The knife still had blood on it and it had been put right under his nose on a grey metal table. On the opposite side of the table stood not Khezr Javid, but another man, twice the size of a normal man, who kept playing with his false teeth and swaying back and forth. He was tall and square-shouldered, with a slight stoop. He had a big, block head and short grey hair. His eyes were narrow, lifeless and glassy. To Amir, in his fever, he looked like a monster.

  Maybe the monster did not intend to frighten Amir but, with his rolled up sleeves, massive scarred and filthy hands, low brow and glassy eyes, and his colossal frame, which almost scraped the ceiling, and the way he kept pushing his false teeth in and out, he was threatening enough. His shoulders were so broad that they seemed to fill the whole room. His whole appearance was quite fearsome enough, to the point of being a joke. Amir felt the man was playing with him. There was no cable whip in his hand; he didn’t need one. But Amir could see one hanging coiled, serpent-like, on the wall. He could hardly breathe and his stomach, swollen and heavy, was pressing up on his chest. He wanted to get a look out of a window or even a skylight, just to get a breath of air and see what time of day it was. But there was no window; the room didn’t seem to have a door, either. It must have had one, but Amir could not make it out. There was just a small shaded lamp, which lit the bench that he had collapsed onto. The monster was in shadow, while the lamp was trained on the bloodstained knife on the metal table, so that Amir could see every detail of it. He thought he could see Mansour Salaami’s fingerprints on its bone handle, but that was probably a figment of his fevered imagination, brought on by torture and terror.

  “The knife… I’m asking you, do you recognise it?”

  “Yes… I’ve seen it before.”

  “When? Was it night-time or daytime? What time was it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just remember seeing it… That’s all.”

  “Where did you see it? Who had it?”

  “One of the people working with me. Just a boy.”

  “What’s the name of this person working with you?”

  The monster seemed to want to give Amir some respite, for he took out a pack of long Winston Golds, lit one, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, sat down on the metal chair next to the table and began to puff away at it. Between each drag, he clicked his false teeth in and out, without averting his obscene, glassy gaze from Amir’s face for even an instant. Amir longed for him to offer him a cigarette. It would have been the best smoke of his life. But it didn’t happen. Amir later understood that an interrogator only offers his victim a cigarette when his subject has cracked and starts talking, and he can start a file. Amir had been broken long since, of course, but he had not had any information to give. The man, that horrifying monster, had smoked his cigarette only halfway down and could easily have offered the rest of it to Amir, to satisfy his killing need for a smoke, but instead he crushed it under his massive foot and started again:

  “What’s the name of this person working with you? Give me his name.”

  “Mansour Salaami.”

  Amir had told him. Without stopping, he went on: “Khamami, Nur-Aqdas Khamami… my wife… why did you arrest her? Just tell me that.”

  The monster gave no reply. Amir had thought that if he gave Mansour Salaami away they would reward him by telling him what had happened to his wife, but he got no answer and the man showed no anger. He found out later that the accused is not supposed to ask questions; he is just required to give answers. The reason why the man had not got angry was that he could not make up his mind as to what to do about what he had just heard. He was worried about the person who would see his report on the interrogation, and the executive decision that would follow it. Amir could see the man thinking. The furrows on his low forehead grew deeper and his eyes narrowed so far that they almost disappeared. Clearly, thinking was quite an effort for him and Amir, in spite of his fever, his weakness, his pain and exhaustion, had a shrewd idea what this sluggish brain was struggling to grasp: Why, after claiming to be unable to recall anything for so long, was the accused now suddenly singing? The answer clearly eluded him. He took another cigarette out of the pack, turned on his heel and left the room without a word.

  If I hadn’t heard the door shut, I’d probably have assumed that he’d just gone into some dark corner to watch me as I lay like a paraplegic on that wire bed. I’d lost all sense of direction, you see. But when I heard the same noise again a few minutes later, I knew that this room wasn’t some hermetically sealed chamber, but was connected by a door with the world outside. It was nothing but madness, sheer madness, it was like living in a bubble of insanity. How else could I have imagined a room without a door?

  Now the two of them, Khezr Javid and the monster whom Amir had so disconcerted, were standing there in the pool of light near the wire bed, facing Amir. It turned out that the monster did have a name after all. The two of them were very different in appearance and stature. They were both in the light, but K
hezr’s face showed up more than ex-sergeant Ramazani’s, as he towered high above the lampshade. To Amir’s unsteady vision, their bodies appeared to be warping and twisting and turning. Amir now understood why Ramazani had gone out to fetch Khezr the Immortal, and that Khezr was very angry with him, for he picked up the bloodstained knife from the metal table and thrust the point at his throat:

  “I’m going to kill you right here and now, you little son of a bitch. You’ve given me the name of a corpse, you creep, you son of a whore.”

  It wasn’t my fault that they had murdered Mansour Salaami, or someone else of that name, eleven months before. I just told them everything I knew. But what Amir knew clearly did not satisfy the Immortal Prophet Khezr, who responded with a stream of oaths before handing him back to Ramazani to get him to talk. He then stormed out, in a foul mood.

  How naïve I must have been to think that I could get them to tell me about my wife’s arrest by giving Salaami away. Ramazani was getting to work once more; I saw that he had rolled his sleeves a fold higher and, much more agilely than you’d expect from such a giant, walloped me in the face with his great big ham fist. My eyes closed and I just had time to think ‘here we go again, ’when he shouted to two others torturers standing outside to come in. Over the noise of Ramazani’s oaths I heard them rush in. Then I heard him tell them: ‘Put the son of a whore in the clamp. ’

  Amir had no chance to think what else he could tell them, as they hauled him off the wire bed like a piece of meat and put him in the clamp, which he had heard vaguely about from the other prisoners who had been through it. Now he saw that it was quite a sophisticated apparatus, brand new, designed to bring concentrated pressure to bear on different parts of the body. It gripped you so tightly that you could not move.

  Before they clamped on the steel helmet, which came right down to my chin, I heard the monster once more: “The knife, the knife…” Then silence. I could just see from the movement of his lips that he was still talking about the bloody knife, while beating the soles of my feet with a length of wire cable. I was screaming… screaming. My screams went round and round inside my head, getting louder and louder, deafening me. And the worst of it was that, apart from screaming until my eardrums burst, I couldn’t react in any way to those savage blows from the cable. Both my forearms were fixed immovably to the clamp and both legs were screwed down to two metal bars, so that the slightest movement increased the pressure on my shin or funny bone. Leather straps held my arms and chest tightly against the back of the clamp and I could hardly budge an inch. Every blow from the cable made me jump and all I could do was scream. What else could I do?

  “The knife… the knife… this bloody knife!”

  The words echoed in the pit of Amir’s mind. He was incapable of thought, as every cell in his brain was focused on enduring the blows to the soles of his feet and the rest of his body. He was thirsty and his mouth was dry. He had no idea what time of day or night it was, what day it was, or where on earth he could be, so totally isolated, alone and exposed. He was giddy, dizzy, as if he had had a shot of morphine against this never-ending pain. His whole brain felt paralysed. Then suddenly, as if in his death agony, he heard a different sound, one that didn’t seem to come from him, like the dull thud of a stick on a bale of wool.

  It was like the end of a party, or a wedding or a wake, I don’t know which. I didn’t have a watch on. Or did I? Maybe I did, but if so it had stopped, and I can only guess that it was around midnight. I was taking good care of my new blue suit, which I was wearing for the first time. This may have been why I had come to Tehran, to see my wife Nur-Aqdas – or were we still just engaged? She was still at university, renting a room with a tiny kitchen in an aunt’s house. As usual, I was a bit confused, and I was standing at the top step of the hallway in an old house. There was a cheap carpet runner on the floor and I saw Mansour Salaami who had, apparently, just come into the hall. He had the bloody knife in his hand and he was pointing it at my throat. It didn’t strike me then how odd it was that he still managed to stab me, right in the throat, even though I was standing with my back glued to the wall in terror, and he was on the bottom step. The distorted perspective seemed perfectly normal to me. Nor was I surprised when I saw not one but two Salaamis. One of them grabbed the other’s hand and forced him to drop the bloodstained knife at my feet, right on the top step. Mansour Salaami seemed drunk. With his jacket slung casually over his shoulder like any Jack the Lad, he went past me. My face must have been as white as the whitewash on the wall. The other Mansour Salaami was right behind him, as if he were controlling him. As he brushed past my chest he looked at me. There was a complicit expression on his face as he pointed at the other one, who was just about to hide behind an old folding screen:

  “Anyway, it was a good thing. He nailed the bastard right in the heart and got his sister, too.”

  “Whose sister?”

  “The chief of police’s.”

  Rooted to the spot, Amir watched Mansour Salaami disappear behind the screen. In a blind panic, he ran down the stairs two at a time to get away from the scene and get to Nur-Aqdas’s house. He was worried that he would not find transport. He knew that the buses stopped running at eleven and he might not find a taxi at that hour either. He came out of the narrow alley in Amirieh, got to the end of the pavement, crossed the gutter and the kerb into the main road and kept running up it to the bus station in Sepah Square, looking back all the time to see if he could catch a taxi coming up. I was going uphill with my feet and looking back with my eyes. You could say I was going to a bus that wasn’t there and looking for a taxi that wasn’t coming. The car that Amir eventually flagged down turned out not to be a taxi. He realised his mistake as it came to a halt just behind him; it was an old banger, painted a strange mix of green and rusty blue, a combination of colours that Amir had never seen in his life. The back door opened. The interior light went on and Amir could make out a woman. She got out and he saw her go down the same alley he had just come out of. There were four young men in the car, tittering lasciviously. Amir didn’t want to miss his chance. He went up to the car to give them the address of where he wanted to go – he didn’t know where it was – to see if they could take him there. But just as he was about to open his mouth, there was another burst of raucous laughter from the rowdy young men. As if trying to take the piss, they started driving past him really slowly and made off. Amir looked round to see where the woman had gone. She was just turning into the alleyway. Not young, she was plumpish and was wearing a cream-coloured scarf on her head and carrying a blue bag in her hand. She seemed to be heading for the house that he had come out of. She didn’t look anything like Nur-Aqdas.

  Anyone else would have thought that those four lads had picked the woman up for a gang bang and were now dropping her off near her home. But, in spite of their dirty laughs, such a thought never crossed my mind for a fraction of a second. Yes, a fraction of a second, that’s all it takes for the brain to cover a lot of ground and process a whole load of random impressions. But believe me, when I say that not for an instant did I entertain a single dirty thought about that woman. I was completely distraught and paranoid and, for some stupid reason, all I could think of – though it was nothing to do with me – was how the taxi system could be better organised, so that one could get one at any time of day or night. At the same time I knew Nur-Aqdas must be worrying about how late I was.

  Amir had only had one brush with the security police before, and he had got off with a warning that time. It was the stories he kept on hearing about them from other people that made him permanently afraid of them. The empty streets that night, the strange goings-on at that party, and that inexplicable bloodstained knife – it all conspired to reawaken his dread of the police. He began to feel guilty for a crime that he had not committed.

  A police motorcyclist suddenly appeared out of the darkness. In a show of innocence, Amir flagged him down and asked him the way to the bus station, even though he knew
it was just a short way up the road. He grumbled about the lack of taxis, which seemed to pack up early for a big city. Then he saw that the policeman was just a traffic cop. No matter – the police were the police and fright was fright. The young policeman, who clearly came from the sticks himself, told the small-town lad, lost late at night in the big city, that he had better get a move on if he wanted to catch the last bus, which was leaving from the stop outside the National Park in a few minutes, as he would have trouble finding a taxi at that hour. Amir realised that he didn’t have a bus ticket on him. The policeman pulled a sheaf of tickets out of his pocket, and the small-town lad bought half a dozen off him and raced off.

  From a distance he could see the bus, just under the archway into the National Park, with the last few passengers getting on. Then he lost all sense of direction. The archway faced north-south, but now in his mind it seemed to face east-west. He was pretty sure the bus was going in the direction he wanted, towards Sepah Avenue, Salsabil and Jey.19 I didn’t care where it was going, but it was bound to be somewhere beautiful and heavenly. Even if it was the wrong bus, he would run for it anyway. He just had to get away from there as fast as he could. But before he could reach the step and swing himself on board, the bus pulled away and left him standing. For the first time in his life, he was overcome by a feeling of utter despair.

  He stood there, stiff now and confused, until he pulled himself together. Wandering off, he found himself going up the steps of the central post office, with its pre-war German architecture. He leant against the wall; all of a sudden, as though they had simply boiled up out of the ground, a great flood of people came spilling out. Amir realised that some sort of celebration was going on in the main hall of the post office and that there was no room for them all inside.

  They were all bazaar folk, and some of them seemed to know me and came up to shake my hand, or gave me a nod. They were such ordinary folk that my clothes looked very new against theirs and I felt embarrassed. They were all dressed alike, in a forties or fifties style. Later, I saw television footage of street demonstrations from that period where people were dressed like that, with double-breasted jackets, hair parted on the left and pencil moustaches.20