Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - Thirst

Moreover, in his youth, when he was taking evening classes to study for his high-school exams — the exams for mature students — he would often see a man of about fifty in the exam hall, and the nervous twitching of his thick eyebrows, whether intentionally or not, kept shifting his round-brimmed hat back and forth on his forehead. This man, who always wore a three-piece suit with a waistcoat even in the height of summer, had a pistol strapped to his waist, a pistol that presumably should have remained concealed by the flap of his coat, especially in an educational environment. But that short-legged, burly man not only made no attempt to hide his gun, but every now and then, in a dramatic gesture, would move his hand and push back his jacket in order to deliberately expose the gun he wore strapped round his waist. Perhaps his intention was to instil fear in the teachers who held and supervised the exams. And perhaps the students of the night school as well, to intimidate them into not breathing a word or giving evidence about his blatant attempts to cheat!

In his youth, this author realised that this short-legged man was an employee of the defence ministry and that after his service in the armed forces, he was trying to obtain a high-school degree in order to increase his basic salary. But he didn’t appear to have learnt any of the course he was being examined on. And let us suppose that, about twenty years later, the author saw another so-called firearm clearly with his own eyes. Not one, but two or three examples of the same gun. It was an automatic firearm, too. A machine gun! He was sitting on the back seat of a Paykan ‡between two young men, and as his eyes fell on the foot well in front of the front seat, he blurted out: ‘Have you come to arrest Seyed Rashid then? §You should have telephoned; I would have come on my own!’ They were young. The driver was young too. They didn’t answer his question, so we can assume they weren’t permitted to engage in conversation. They had their orders and they had to complete the task assigned to them. When he had come down the stairs to his office, he had taken them for clients or guests and extended his hand in greeting, and one of the young men had said: ‘It will only take two minutes, sir!’ and the other repeated: ‘Yes, just two minutes!’ I don’t want to waste any time recounting what happened in those two minutes, as it will distract us from the main story — so, this author looked under the dashboard and saw another firearm propped up on two or three volumes of high school books. The weapon’s butt was black. Like the books. ‘Are you studying too? At evening classes, right?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ The only response he got was a ‘yes’, nothing more. At the junction, before the car could turn left towards the police station and, of course, that blind spot known as the Anti-Terror Joint Committee, the author enquired: ‘In that case, will you let me buy a pack of cigarettes?’ ‘Yes, be our guest,’ came the reply. None of them even bothered escorting him to the shop. One of them just stood by the open door of the car, and after that no more than two words were spoken during the journey, and not by the man, but by them.

‘Beg your pardon. Please lower your head and blindfold yourself, sorry … yes, that’s it, use your own scarf, tie it over your eyes …’

And then after getting out of the car, going through some metal doors and being led along by one of the two young guards, the same man whispered to him: ‘Don’t worry, sir, an innocent man has nothing to fear.’ A genuine consolation. For this man was certain now that the matter was a serious one and that he had entered — or rather, was being led — into a labyrinth that it would take much longer than a matter of minutes to find his way out of. And so it turned out. It transpired that, later that same day, at sundown, the interrogator came in and slammed the evening newspaper down on the table, yelling: ‘A peace treaty has been signed with Iraq. Now you’re really up shit creek!’ But that story is best left for another occasion. Our intention is to relate in detail a sequence of observations of firearms. In that blind spot, an interrogator was seen, who came to meet this author. He twirled his sidearm around his finger, like a movie star in a Western playing with or practising with his gun, no doubt parading himself and his weapon in front of this man, who had just that minute stepped into a concrete room, in a warehouse perhaps. As he entered, the young men accompanying him had untied the scarf from his eyes. The guards delivered their charge and then asked the interrogator: ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’ ‘No’, was the answer. The interrogator was a tall man, with an elongated and slightly crooked nose, and his face, as one might expect, was nervous and gaunt, ending in a sharp chin. Only later did this author find out what he was called.

Anyway … those two minutes lasted for two years, and during those two years, pistols, revolvers, machine guns, grenades, gunpowder and so on, were not mentioned by name but implied, and the accused, who had been apprehended in possession of a gun, was referred to as ‘metallic, the guy’s metallic’, except on a special occasion, after the case had become public: ‘I had my weapon at my waist and a cyanide capsule under my teeth. After drifting around for ages, finally I went back home. I ate food at coffee-houses with the capsule between my teeth. The capsule was there that morning too. Before I arrived at the front door of the house, I paused for a moment to tie my shoelaces. Checked both sides of the alley. Saw no suspicious signs. Didn’t sense anything wrong. The alley was quiet. Too quiet. It was morning, just before sunrise. Quiet, empty and quiet. Suddenly a strange sense of unease came over me. I wanted to turn back, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was right outside the front door by then. An old house … it had a courtyard. A small shallow pool stood in the middle of the yard. I pretended to be tying my shoelaces, placed my hand on my gun again and the capsule … I lodged it between two molars and … eventually inserted the key into the keyhole and opened the door, stepped into the corridor … didn’t close the door behind me. Left it slightly ajar. My knees … my knees trembled involuntarily. The trembling came from inside, from hunger and a lack of proper food … yes … I’d become weak. But the trembling of my knees … no, it wasn’t really from weakness. I tried to steel myself by walking straight from the mouth of the corridor to the pool. Although I was exhausted, I didn’t go straight to my own room, open the door and drop on my bed. Instead, I went to the pool. Thought I’d splash some water on my hands and face and try and stay awake. Remain conscious, so to speak. I grabbed the knees of my trousers and pulled them up so that the water in the footbath wouldn’t make them wet, and sat down. I dipped my hand into the water, dabbled my fingers in it and then with both hands scooped some up and splashed it on my face — when all of a sudden … I don’t know whose hands and fingers clasped my jaws and mouth like a vice and wrenched them open, wide open! I felt like my upper and lower jaws were being torn apart all the way up to my ears. My ears … I thought I’d gone deaf and there was a searing pain in my brain. I noticed then that a different hand had grabbed my tongue and was poking its fingers around my mouth in search of the capsule, and I heard him say ‘He’s swallowed it, Mother …’ and then I heard the sound of my sidearm falling on the floor of the courtyard as they held my legs and dangled me upside down. Someone kicked my stomach to make me throw up. My hands couldn’t reach the ground and I don’t know how many they were, but they had quite deliberately not grabbed hold of my hands, so that I was free to thrash about all the more violently, and try and touch the ground with my fingertips, which I couldn’t, and all the time the kicking continued … I didn’t understand, I couldn’t comprehend anything, and in that moment — I couldn’t tell you whether it was a moment or a century — all I had time to do was to beg God just once, beg God fervently from the bottom of my heart to please let the capsule dissolve. But it wouldn’t dissolve that easily, it wasn’t designed to do so. It was manufactured in such a way as to prevent it from dissolving quickly. So it could stay under the tongue and last for fifteen or twenty days. It was designed to be crushed between the teeth, and I still wonder how they managed to pounce on me so quickly, how many they were and how they managed to deprive me of an opportunity to close my mouth! I’d practised it at least a thousand times beforehand. Practised so that it had become a habit. But in that instant, perhaps just before my upper jaw could move and bite down, their claws … blood pressured my head and my eyes, so that I thought they would explode then and there, when I heard a voice saying: ‘It’s here! Intact!’ They threw me on the ground — like a corpse — and bent over the hand that had wiped the bile and the contents of my stomach off the capsule with a tissue. I could feel the sole of someone’s shoe on my chest and hear voices ringing inside the bowl of my head and at the very bottom of my mind a thought flickered, of torture, of how long I would last under torture. Days or hours? And one of them had definitely seen my sidearm earlier and grabbed it!’