Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - The Colonel

Khezr’s answer was curt, dry, without remorse:

“We let her go. It was afterwards that she killed herself. She had done a deal with us, it seems, but couldn’t come to terms with herself. The first night after she was let out, she did herself in. It was quite some time before we found her. The only recognisable bit of her was her hair. Everything else was swollen, black and putrid.”

Amir had got home late, after midnight. He had a key. He opened the door and went silently up the stairs into his room. Nur-Aqdas recognised his footsteps, so she was not frightened, but she stared in amazement at the bloodstained knife. Amir stood by the door for a moment, and then looked at the table. His heart was pumping hard, but he saw that he had to come out with it. He sat down opposite his wife and looked at her, with her lecture notes spread all over the dining table. This was the image which reminded him most of her. She looked at him sternly, as if he were not her husband. She had decided to treat him like a complete stranger.

A minute later Mansour Salaami came in from the kitchen. He had been washing his hands and face and he went to get a towel from the hook on the wall. His eyebrows and moustache were wet and his sleeves were rolled up. He dried his face and hands, sat down on the nearest chair and pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He took a match from a box on the table and lit it. Amir noticed how the wet hairs on his arms were lying flat. Mansour puffed at his cigarette, and Amir registered the pleasure with which he blew a smoke ring, as if he was exhaling all the tiredness from his body. The oppressive, pregnant stillness in the room reduced Amir to silence. He began to wish he had never come to Tehran that night. But it was too late. He had got himself into a bad fix, and had been a witness to certain events that pointed to a crime. In any event, his mere presence would mark him down as an accessary after the fact.

“I had nothing to do with that business, Mr Javid. You were torturing me for nothing.”

Amir was knocked out. Knocked out and hollowed out, with nothing more to live for. He was sitting on the floor leaning against the damp basement wall with his head down. He felt as if Khezr Javid had taken over his home, his bed, his life and his loneliness. At every snore from Khezr, he felt his own breath becoming shorter. Even more paralysing was the feeling that he had lost the strength to do anything, that all the vigour had been knocked out of him, even the ability to feel any hatred against the killer of his wife.

“You and your kind were dangerous, and you were getting more dangerous. With the Shah behind you, you were untouchable, but then God saw fit to save the country.”

Khezr got up to look for his cigarettes and lighter. He went on:

“For thirty years, pressure had been building up in the country, but the lid was firmly screwed down on top of it. It was like a swelling abscess that sooner or later would burst and shower blood and pus everywhere. When the muck is squeezed out of a boil, the pain goes away and the body is soothed. Which is why this boil had to be lanced to make our beloved people calm down. Then you get a deluge of blood and guts, and only idiots and sheep stand in its way. Forty-seven percent of the population of this country were young and wriggling about inside this abscess, my friend, so it needed the lancet of God to burst it.”

Amir was staring, glassy-eyed, seeing nothing, silent. All he could think about was what he had gone through with Khezr Javid. As for the colonel, he was still thinking about the mystery of his own voice over the loudspeakers, and was worried about who might have heard him — Amir for instance.

No, he couldn’t have heard. He hasn’t set foot outside the house. But why is he staring at me, then?

Why are you looking at me like that? What have I done wrong? Why don’t you say anything? Me… I’ve dealt with Kuchik’s funeral and when my clothes are dry, they’ll probably come and take me to the mosque to welcome the mourners. You probably don’t feel like coming with me, do you? Well, never mind. I’ll go by myself. As soon as my clothes are dry I’ll put them on and go to the mosque.

Ah, those mosques! The people living in the slums on the outskirts of the Ahmed Abad district had hoped that, if they had a mosque, the new government might provide them with running water and electricity and put tarmac on the road at long last. 54The bazaar traders needed a decent place to celebrate the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein, so the faithful got together and bought old cinemas here and there and turned them into mosques and… It’s always like that; things just happen and people only notice after the event. Of course, if people were to notice things earlier on, nothing would ever change.

It was after that when the first woman was executed in Qasr prison, under the Shah’s regime, so I shouldn’t be surprised that my daughter, who was not even fourteen, has been put to death now.

“You… Amir, do you remember any of that? I don’t suppose you do… Can’t you remember what I told you? What they said about your sister? You don’t understand me? Well, I don’t understand why you don’t understand what your father is talking about. What’s up with you? Am I speaking in some alien tongue, or what?”

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”

“Say it again, go on!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, papa.”

“That’s extraordinary, truly extraordinary, why don’t I get it? Talk to me in words I can understand.” How is it that I don’t recognize my son’s voice or even understand what he’s saying?

“Papa, you seem to have a fever. You’re becoming delirious. Lie down and rest for a while. These voices are getting on your nerves. Why upset yourself? You’re just making it worse.”

“Amir… Amir… Just try not to torture your father so much. Just talk to me like you used to, Amir. Why can’t I understand what it is you’re saying?”

“Papa, go and lie down for a couple of hours, and then I’ll talk to you. I’ve decided to have a long chat with you before I die. But now… it’s impossible to talk to you right now. Because, in your present state, I’m not sure you’d be able to grasp what I’m trying to say.”

“Amir… Amir… I never expected that you’d go so disastrously dumb at this stage in your life. Your jaw opens and shuts, your lips move, but there’s no sound. I can’t hear anything. What’s happened?”

“Don’t get in a fuss, papa… But what am I to do? I need to talk to you before I die. There isn’t anybody else. I’ve only got you, papa. If I want to die, I just want to tell you this; it’s because I feel I have lost faith in everything I ever believed in. I can’t bear my past any longer, I can’t go on living just hating myself. After all, how long do you imagine a person can go on living just filled with nothing but hate? So why should I go on living? What I am trying to tell you is this, that Farzaneh brought a can of paraffin round today and I tried telling her how I felt, but however hard I tried, I couldn’t get through to her, I just couldn’t, and she ran out of the house, crying. What I was trying to say was perfectly simple; I just wanted to tell my sister that I had had just as much to do with the deaths of my brothers and sisters as Qorbani had. But I couldn’t get through to her, papa.”

the colonel said nothing. He thought Amir could not grasp that he did not understand what he was saying; he did not recognise his language. And he thought that his son was not ready to pay attention to why his father might want to explain things to him before his death, and therefore ‘will’ him to understand why he wanted to die. He wanted to tell Amir not to think about the tragedy that had befallen his father, and to know that he himself had brought all their problems on the family, and was still doing so. He had decided to die and his conscience was now at ease, for he had never shirked his duty. I was a soldier, and I always will be, and I’ll prove it in the manner of my going . If he had decided to die, it was because he could not bear to be seen in the street in this state. Nor could he stand idle children throwing stones and hurling abuse at him any more.