Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - The Colonel

“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 door 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:

“Nur-Aqdas. Nur-Aqdas Khamami. I want to know what happened to her.”

It just came out. A fleeting smile crossed Khezr’s face as he half closed his eyes and stared into the bottom of his glass. Amir thought he was trying to find a way to change the subject. Khezr carried on looking into the glass for a while, then looked up and stared so intently, as he often did, into Amir’s eyes that Amir was forced to take a drag on his cigarette to avoid his gaze. He realised that Khezr would not be drawn on the subject of his wife. He was far more concerned about his own future and had no wish to stir up the past; the man had never felt regret for his past.

Even on that last occasion when Khezr had visited Amir in the cellar, he had displayed remarkable self-confidence. Despite the fact that wounded people were still lying on the streets, Khezr, whether on purpose or just through habit, still walked with his old swagger, showing not a flicker of apprehension; his only concern was how to adapt to the new order. It was then, through one or two things that he let slip, that Amir realised that Khezr had been one of the organisers of the demonstration by the security police in front of the office of the Prime Minister in the revolutionary government. 25This shocked him, and he began to think that Khezr Javid, ‘the immortal one,’ might have good reason for feeling so confident about the future. So he gave up asking him direct questions, even about the fate of his wife, and settled instead for slipping him the odd surreptitious, seemingly casual question. So during that last visit, as he always did, he got out the open drum of home brew and put it down beside Khezr with a dish of olives, emptied the ashtray into the waste bin and put it back next to the tray that was perched on his bedside table. As usual, Khezr poured himself a glass but, before downing it, he felt in his pocket and took out a leaflet. Passing it to Amir, he sneered: