The Colonel Page 8

  He was dazed, tired and thirsty and had forgotten that he had to get to Nur-Aqdas’s house, wherever it was. He just wanted to find a quiet corner to sit down, but there wasn’t room to swing a cat in that crowd, and no way of getting a glass of tea, or even a glass of water. He felt unsafe in a crowd. His tight collar was suffocating him, and he twisted his neck this way and that to get some relief. It had not occurred to him to undo his collar button. In the middle of his contortions, he suddenly saw a police vehicle pull up by the kerb. It was a paddy wagon, with a side door that could be opened to snatch people off the street. A bunch of armed policemen jumped out, looking agitated. Some of them were talking into pocket radios. Amir could not hear what they were saying, but he guessed that all this kerfuffle had to do with something that had happened, or some ceremony that was about to take place, that he had not heard about.

  I had guessed right. In no time at all a group of men in smart new dark suits, shiny black shoes, clean-shaven and with neatly combed hair, gathered round the police van. Their numbers grew as they went up the steps in front of the building next to the post office, which led to the front of the senate house.

  The throng was now pushing its way up to the senate building, forcing Amir back down the steps. He was being pushed back towards the entrance by the crowd, which seemed intent on forcing its way in. As he struggled to keep upright, he caught sight of the old banger again, with its strange combination of green and rusty blue paint, parked at an angle on the south side of the road. It was on the kerb, tipped over onto its left side. The passenger-side doors were flung open and the roof appeared to have been blown open by a grenade or a small bomb. It was riddled with bullet holes and the dust of a hundred years of death appeared to have settled on the seats. There was no sign of the four young men who had been in it before, just a trickle of blood and engine oil dripping from the back seat onto the road.

  Water… water… just a sip of water… My tongue feels as dry as a brick. My mouth’s on fire. A sip of water, just a drop…

  He had to think hard to find a way out of this bizarre adventure, out of this story that had started with Mansour Salaami’s bloodstained knife and had led on to Nur-Aqdas’s room on the second floor of her aunt’s house, squeezing the juice out of Amir’s heart as it went on its simple way. Against his will, he was being thrown from one frying pan into one fire after another, each one hotter than the last. He was being passed from the jaws of one defeat to another, which could end only in his death. But what was killing him now was his thirst, which he could not do anything about. The crowd that kept pushing him into the building was not interested in the raging thirst of a young small-town boy.

  The senate building was a glorious architectural mish-mash of vernacular and foreign styles from unrelated periods. The ceiling was supported by thick, round pillars finely carved in the Greek, Roman and Persian styles. It was reminiscent of the Reichstag in the way it conveyed a sense of might and majesty. It had the same kind of showy opulence that Reza Shah, who had built it, had once seen, or thought he had seen, in the Christian churches he had visited in Isfahan and Rezaiyeh, but it also called to mind the proportions of the Vakil Mosque in Shiraz. The floor of the entrance hall was covered with red carpeting that was clearly not the work of Persian weavers. It was completely plain, with none of the wonderful workmanship of Kashan, Tabriz or Isfahan to be seen anywhere. Amir could not work out where it might have been made. At the end of the hall he could just make out what looked like a kind of huge prayer-niche. It looked nothing like his idea of Zoroastrian or even Buddhist architecture. He had never seen a synagogue either, not even in films, so he could not tell if it looked like one or not. With its tall, massive carved pillars, the place was unlike anything he had ever seen. It was not like a church, either, which would be all draped in purple, with dark bare benches, he thought, not like the bright and shiny furniture here. And yet, despite the fact that this hall was like nothing he had ever seen, it seemed somehow familiar to him, perhaps because it oozed power from every detail, like the winter prayer hall of a mosque, or a church, a synagogue, a fire temple, or even the Reichstag.

  Amir was intimidated by the sense of power that he felt all around him, among those grand people who had nothing in common with him. He was alone and lost, a stranger among strangers. He looked dejectedly around in the hope of finding someone he knew, a pretty futile exercise. All he saw was a procession of men dressed in black coming in through the four entrances. To escape from this dangerous and frightening isolation, all he could do was dart from one pillar to another. So as not to excite suspicion by making it seem as if he was trying to hide, he leaned casually against each one as he reached it. He felt safe there and could see what was going on.

  This was pure hell. How could he get out of it? On either side of the doors stood invisible sentries, while more and more dark-suited men streamed into the hall. They all seemed to know each other, as if they had been summoned here at this late hour for some extraordinary meeting. Was it something to do with the assassination of the police chief, which had taken place that very night, just before midnight?

  Monsters, ghouls!

  The new arrivals looked like demons, their size nigh surpassing the pillars in height and girth. Out of the four of them, three wore long cloaks, with sweatbands wound around their heads. Their faces were round and chubby, boneless, like pink balloons with eyes and noses painted onto them. Seen from below, they looked like minarets, small, medium and large. The littlest one was the size of a Scud missile and Amir could now see why the ceiling was so high. The fourth one was a Slav, the same size as the others, wearing a traditional Russian long white shirt with embroidered hem, and tight trousers tucked into a pair of tall brown boots. The Slav’s square, bony face was endowed with a bushy moustache and long curly hair that fell over his forehead. The biggest of the new arrivals acknowledged the respects of the black-suited crowd with a proud nod of his head and carried on, looking neither to his right nor his left, to the end of the hall, which looked to Amir like the prayer niche of a mosque, as the crowd parted to make way for him and his entourage. The Slav put his hand to his chest, bowing humbly to the crowd, and followed the other three monsters, half a step behind them. As they came level with Amir’s gaping eyes, he could not help looking up at them, as if at the shaking minarets of Isfahan,21 for the knot of the sweatband round the fez of the biggest one almost touched the ceiling and his painted eyes were like the eggs of a goose, staring straight ahead without expression, paying no attention to the prostrations of the rows of respectful, silent onlookers. The three of them made a smooth and practised progress through the crowd as if rolling on invisible rails, while the Slav praised and lauded them to the people.

  They said that a bereaved family was coming in. Amir looked up and saw five or six people: a couple with a young boy and a girl and a smartly dressed youth who seemed to have oiled his hair in mourning for his father. The Slav, with no glimmer of human kindness on his face, appeared carrying a tea boy’s gold-plated round tray. On it were glasses of tea, and one cup half full of tea, and he stood in front of the small-town youth. Amir remembered how thirsty he was. He tried to take a glass of tea, but the Slav turned the tray round, forcing the cup onto him.22 Amir had forgotten all about his thirst by now, but he took the cup all the same. He would use it as an excuse for finding a corner to drink it. A cup of tea in his hand would make him part of the scene and explain his presence to the crowd, who seemed to be eyeing him up and down. It allowed him to wander along the eastern end of the prayer hall.

  In the north corner he found a low door that opened into a neat little room. Amir felt that divine intervention had led him to this hiding place and he was drawn in. On the threshold he was stopped short by what he saw. The room was like the pantry of the Safi mosque in Rasht.23 Six or seven middle aged men, smartly dressed, were sitting on brown bentwood chairs. This was something that Amir did not want to see, particularly as one of them seemed to be Khezr Javid, wh
o was looking at him askance, as if they had met somewhere three generations back. There was nothing Amir could do, except stand there, just inside the ancient door. If he retreated, he thought, he would only arouse more suspicion. So I greeted him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and drank the rest of the tea.

  He ran his eye over the other men, who were busy chatting away and pretending not to be looking at him or to have even noticed him, except for the Prophet Khezr, who was now staring at him more obviously. He looked like a man whom he had seen a thousand times on the back of the Women’s Weekly magazine. Khezr Javid was sitting, staring at Amir, in the same pose that he had adopted at his interrogation, three incarnations ago, and a shiver ran down his spine at the memory of it. Why wouldn’t Khezr give some sign that he had recognised him? That way he would be sure that at least one person in the room knew him for who he really was, and who better than a secret policeman. He just wanted to find someone he knew in this bizarre place, and explain how he had come to find himself there. He had to avoid giving the wrong impression. But Khezr Javid showed no sign of acknowledging him. Amir was convinced that they were all secret policemen on high alert, which made him even more frightened. His head was whirling with all the accusations that might be levelled against him, and tears welled up in his eyes at the thought of what a dangerous mess he had got himself into. He wanted to beg the men for mercy and get them to understand that he knew nothing at all about the business of Mansour Salaami’s bloodstained knife.

  Looking silently into their unblinking eyes, he begged that they would get on with it and start asking him questions, so that he could clear the air with them, but it seemed that they were not interested in investigating anything, or perhaps were just pretending not to be interested.

  Amir began to weep openly until, one after the other, they looked up and regarded him with a mixture of suspicion and mockery. One of them pointed at him:

  “Just look at the young gentleman now!” He turned to Amir: “What are you crying for, then?”

  “For … for the late General…”

  There was a fusillade of laughter at this and Amir, mortified, dissolved into floods of tears. His sobs grew ever more violent until they reached a crescendo of loud and uncontrollable wailing. Suddenly a bullet whizzed through the air. The policemen immediately reached to their shoulder holsters for their guns, pushed Amir out of the way and ran out. He followed them out into the hall and looked out onto the street, where a pitched battle had broken out. The south side of the building, which gave onto the street, had turned into a single panel of glass. Through it he could follow the battle outside. The people who had been at the party in the post office building were now out on the street. Amir found himself in a scene from the late 1940s, watching the railway workers at Abbasi Square laying into a crowd in smart black suits.

  As the august gathering in the hall dissolved into chaos, Amir saw a chance to get away. He forgot his tears and began running from column to column of the prayer hall. He did not know where he was going or what he could do, except use the general confusion to find his way out of that horrible place unnoticed. He found himself in a place where there was no sign of the monstrous creatures, facing a wide staircase that seemed to lead down to a basement; he ran down it. But as he went down, he heard a din of clashing swords and knives. His way was blocked by a thicket of flailing weapons. As he rushed back and forth looking for a way through, he ran up against two sword blades thrust directly at him. They were wielded by two young lads wearing the black shirts worn by flagellants, with Arab keffiyahs wound round their heads.24 With a forthrightness that belied their age, they glared at Amir as if about to lynch him:

  “Where do you think you’re running off to, then?”

  I was tongue-tied. I wanted to say that I wasn’t running anywhere, and what was this all about, anyway? But not a word came out.

  But the young men were not looking for an answer. They seized hold of him and marched him down the broad staircase, into a dark basement containing a small cistern. There they handed him over to two innocent-faced, virginal boys of about fifteen or sixteen with newly sprouting beards and scrubbed faces, dressed in olive camouflage jackets. They in turn escorted him to a dingy side-room to hand him over to their supervisor. It was there that Amir caught sight of Khezr Javid once more, who was looking on as a sergeant strapped someone to a clamp. There were more people lined up along the basement wall, shrouded in darkness, for the only light in the room was positioned so that it shone only onto the rack and the sweat-soaked face of the prisoner strapped into it. Beaming as if they had just solved some complicated riddle, the two fresh-faced youths now dragged Amir towards the clamp. One of them, who appeared to be the son of Ramazan Kolahi, began: “So, you use whistles to signal to each other in the streets at night!” and, expertly releasing the prisoner from the clamp, strapped Amir onto it in his place. Then he attached two wires to Amir’s knees and switched the current on and off, inducing a terrifying shuddering all over his body. Although he remained conscious, Amir was unable to speak. He remembered that one of the effects of an electric shock is loss of speech. He wanted to say something or scream, but he could not produce a sound of any kind. His throat, tongue and chest had all seized up. The only sound that emerged from his throat was a pathetic croak, a mousey squeak. Khezr Javid and his minions were unmoved. Perhaps they could not even hear him. Every time Amir blinked, he saw a hand in the darkness holding the bloodied knife under his nose. He was suffocating and could not speak. At one point, he thought that he had gone deaf as well, for he could not hear a thing, not even his own squeaks. Things got to such a pitch that his torturers decided that their victim was resisting and refusing to talk. It never occurred to them that he simply could not speak.

  The man standing in front of him, that terrifying giant, kept waving the knife under his nose and screaming: “This knife, so what’s this bloody knife, then? So whose are the fingerprints on it? Are you going to talk or not?”

  He could not tell them that he could not speak. He could not tell them that he was thirsty. He could not even produce the word ‘water.’

  Khezr Javid was standing over Amir on the wooden bed where they had left him, holding a glass of water in his hand and smiling. In the course of his nightmares, Amir had undergone such comical convulsions that Khezr had been popping in and out to watch him, with a big grin all over his snout. Amir’s head ached and his mouth was as dry as a mud brick. The glass of water was like the offer of a new hope of life. Half sitting up, he reached out, took it from Khezr Javid’s hand and gulped it down in one before lapsing into a sort of trance, staring blankly into space. The nightmare had left him utterly drained, but at the same time he wanted it to continue, to see how it would end. For, little by little, these dreams had come to occupy all of his thoughts. And so he waited until he could sense Khezr Javid’s presence in the gloomy cellar once again. Amir lifted his head up to look at him.

  Khezr was sitting on a stool, looking at Amir. His nose was as big as ever; he evidently had not pursued the idea of having a job done on it, then. He looked no happier than when they had last met. If anything, he had got thinner, but his eyes shone with a new confidence. He seemed to have got less talkative, and now measured his words with care. Amir found it all the more surprising, then, when Khezr, without any preamble, took a puff at his cigarette and said:

  “They put me in prison.”

  “Prison, you?”

  He laughed. “Does that surprise you?” Amir said nothing, since there was an alarmingly triumphant tone to Khezr’s words. It reminded him of those nights when Khezr came into the prison wing, drunk and swaggering. The clang of the bolt and chain on the steel door made everyone, even those who had gone to sleep, immediately adopt the required position, squatting on their heels, as they waited to see which cell Khezr would go into and what he would say. Depending on what he was up to that evening, or whose ear he was going to whisper a sly word into, he would unlock a cell d
oor and step inside. With his hands on his hips, or leaning against the wall, he would say whatever he had to say, in whatever tone of voice suited his mood, and then throw a couple of cigarettes at the prisoner’s feet. He would then leave and make his way down the wing, chucking a cigarette or two through the inspection hatch of each cell and chanting, in his adenoidal voice, “Zar… zar… khar… zar-ra khar mikesheh! – Golds, Golds, only an ass smokes Golds!” When he had finished, he would crush the empty pack in his fist and go back to the steel door, swearing drunkenly and making snide remarks at the prisoners on the wing until his voice faded away and he left. His exit was followed by the drumming of knuckles on the hatch covers, demanding matches, which roused the sleepy guard, who grumbled and cursed at them to shut up. The warder went down the line of cells, lighting each cigarette in turn as the prisoners poked them through the hatches and drew on them until they lit. No one ever wondered why Khezr chose that time of night to wander down the cells dishing out cigarettes. Was it just a show of power? Or was he fearful of the future? Or wracked by a sense of contrition and guilt? Might it even be that Khezr, in the dead of night, suddenly felt the urge to make pets of his sacrificial lambs, some of whom he had tortured to the point of death, if only by giving them some fags and visiting them without hitting them for once. No, none of this occurred to any of them, for such thoughts were too much of a luxury.

  “You tortured me for no reason. I had nothing whatever to do with that business.”

  Khezr Javid just looked at Amir and calmly drank the water in the glass that he had just poured for himself. He took out his cigarette case and held it out to Amir. Hardly daring to refuse, Amir took one, and Khezr lit it for him. Amir exhaled the smoke and asked: