Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - Thirst

‘God keep you too, sir. God keep you!.. But I can’t even hold a pen with these weary fingers and withered wrist, Major, let alone a gun!’

‘So just keep hold of it for self-defence!’

‘I can’t do it. I’ve never done military service. And even if I could hold a weapon, I wouldn’t anyhow. How could I shoot another person? Even in self-defence! I just can’t conceive of such an act!’

‘Well, that’s all we can do for you! You might find it comes in useful. Once again, may God keep you!’

EVERYTHING IS CLEAR until clouds suddenly blot out the sky. Surely not in this season? Dark, roaring clouds, growling. Under a duvet of dark grey and black clouds, Jamoo turns on his side and spontaneously presses the palms of his hands to his ears, as if he is unaware that he has rolled over and is not lying on his front anymore, but on his back, looking at the sky from the base of his machine gun. Not looking … rather staring at the low ceiling of the sky. No, not staring, but drowning in the rumbling duvet of the sky. A sky that growls and roars in whichever direction you turn. Sometimes the roaring is fleeting and sporadic, while at other times it seems to reverberate all around; worse still, it has no specific origin. From all the points of the compass, these sounds, the roaring and the explosions, course and flow. The last time he had the lieutenant, the soldier and the captured man in sight, they were ascending the slope of the hill with tired and heavy footsteps. But then the sky had suddenly exploded and instantly turned black. Now he realized it was clouds of smoke that had sullied what had been a clear sky. From the lowest possible altitude at which aircraft could fly, a huge plume of smoke had billowed up, which grew so dense so quickly that it seemed as though it might darken and befoul the whole world. They were military aircraft, no question. Aircraft that were capable of bringing down a black rain, and that’s exactly what they were doing. They rained down an infernal shower upon the entire valley of hell, setting off explosions. One after the other, a series of explosions, intermittent, near and far! What was it that was buried in the heart and shoulders of that valley of hell from whose depths smoke and black flames now belched, rising up to touch the remainder of the tattered duvet spread across the low dome of the sky? Up they billowed, obscuring the rocks on the flanks of the slopes, blackening everything as they went; and as they licked up, it seemed as though the tongues of fire were turning the hillsides into a furnace, whose intense heat could be felt as it reflected down upon the heart of the earth and on the stones and the trench, that same hand-dug ditch in which Jamoo had by chance ended up. And now that he had recovered his power of speech, he was screaming. With each scream, his mouth filled with acrid smoke, but he kept on screaming anyway, not knowing whether he was alive or dead. He didn’t have a clue what had happened all of a sudden, and what was happening now. Round and round and round his head and his eyes swivelled … as if the world were spinning around the head of this young man who had fallen into the depths of that ditch and who knew nothing, who could only scream; and the only way he could stifle his screaming was by grinding his face into the dirt and yelling into the earth … until all his breath was exhausted and all he could do was wait for time to pass, for the earth to spin round, and for this unknown something, which was unlike anything he had ever known, to come to an end. Maybe it will resound in the ears and heart of the earth, that blood and ash-drenched scream of a teenager who from the bottom of his being yelled his anguish into the ground: Oh Gooodddd …

Yes … somewhere, at some spot here on planet Earth, a shell is propelled out of the muzzle of a heavy weapon. A leaden shell, heavy and destructive. We don’t know the exact circumstances, and perhaps the person who orders a firing button to be pressed doesn’t know either. Maybe a switch is flicked up or down instead. How can we know? All we are interested in is what happened afterwards and who was responsible for causing these clouds of smoke and fire to rise up above a pass, a ravine, a chasm — in any event, a target that did not appear to be an ammunition dump. What was this disaster that was unfolding before the eyes of a young man who had forgotten his own name, and his birthplace as well — who had just a random name, a meaningless word on his tongue, but who otherwise was completely mute, or rather dumb? Dumb and afflicted with instant loss of memory. Now his body felt racked with fatigue and aches, and his eyelids were heavy, weighed down by a thick layer of something whose colour he did not recognize, but which he imagined must be that of tar or — less dark — of smoke. He had been hurled into the depths of the trench, and each explosion had reverberated against an earthen wall whose surface was studded with stones and pebbles. He understands nothing now except that the world has been engulfed in such a ghastly silence that when he reflects upon it for a while, it appears to him more dreadful than the hell that went before. How much time had elapsed since it happened? Thousands of years or just a fleeting moment?

He lifted his head with difficulty, and with his handkerchief, now as black as tar, tried to wipe the thick layer of dirt off his eyelids; eventually he succeeded to the extent that he was able to open his eyes and look at the sky. Yes … it was completely blue — but strange! For no noise was coming from it. Beforehand he could hear the noise of the air, before this, some sounds could be picked up, the sound of the breeze or even the sound of silence, but now there was no sound at all. He tried to stand up. Bracing himself against the wall with his hands, he straightened his body. Once upright, he gazed around. There was silence and nothing else. He put his foot on the step of the trench, and the sun came into view, the wide dome of the sky and the earth. He climbed out. Not a single soul was visible, nothing! He walked towards the top of the hill. They were missing, the bodies were missing. He looked into the chasm. It was black like the belly of a furnace, silent and dark, and there was no sign of anyone or anything. The machine gun whose tripod he himself had secured in the ground was gone too. Everything had vanished! He looked at the sun. It had passed its peak and was declining towards sunset. He remembered that the fangs of the sun had sprouted when the lieutenant and the other two had climbed up and laid the bodies on a piece of ground and swiftly gone back down again. Yes, earlier on he had been able to make out someone’s arms and shoulders, naked and bruised, and recalled that he had chucked two flasks full of water behind the machine gun, shouting: ‘Catch!’ Yes … he had heard a voice. He had heard the sound of a command from his own superior. He remembered that he had picked up the flasks, drunk half the water from one of them, and given the remainder to that handcuffed young man … a prisoner? But … where was he now? Before this all happened, he recalled that the prisoner had been lying on his front behind a pile of earth next to the trench. He walked over to where he had been lying, but there was no sign of him! The flask was gone too. What had happened? He climbed back down into the trench; the radio telephone was buried. Why was he bothering to dig it out? It wasn’t working anyhow. Or maybe it was working and he couldn’t hear anything! He tried to operate it. He couldn’t hear the sound of his fingers working. He picked up the receiver and pressed it to his ear. Not a sound! When he replaced the receiver he saw it was soaked with blood … what had happened? What had happened to the head that remained attached to his body? … Fear gripped him. He put his hand on the trench step and stood stock still. Petrified. A dove? Yes … there stood a dove on the lip of the trench, perched on a clod of earth, looking at him and shifting around on its feet in a semi-circular motion. A second appeared, and then a third and a fourth, then a fifth — and in the same order they flapped their wings and soared upwards. And what about those drops of blood? How to explain them? In that darkness the doves were hard to see, but gradually more doves joined them, and forming a circle they flew, up and up against the background of a blue sky that stretched far, far away to the sea, that ancient gulf; the same place where the sea and the sky became one. All one single, smooth surface, the colour of Neishabur turquoise.