Fariba Hachtroudi - The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

The birth of their daughter — whom she called Urania, to her mother-in-law’s great displeasure — came at the end of Vima’s first academic cycle. She had obtained her Master’s in applied physics. Her husband and her family all thought that now at last she would begin to focus on her home and her child. While expecting the second one. Since the husband was not impotent. Any more than she was barren. The first duty of a wife was to provide her husband with an heir. A daughter didn’t count. The leaders did not take the sacred duties of a mother lightly. Were they not a woman’s purpose in life? That was what the Commander said, again and again, whenever the issue of a man’s other half came up. Later, much later, Vima might eventually teach at the female university. “And do you know what?” adds the Colonel with a laugh. Which goes on for a moment. Filling the room and making me laugh in turn. “Vima,” he says in a joyful voice, “found an accomplice who surpassed herself. My old sister. A war widow. Who had no children.” After the birth Vima stayed in bed. And entrusted the baby to her sister-in-law, who was crazy about the little girl. Naturally the old woman had every good reason to defend the young mother’s cause. The child would lack for nothing. Vima could continue her studies. She submitted her application to study for a doctorate by correspondence to one of the best universities in Europe. She was immediately accepted. Thanks to her husband, she also obtained the right to use the Army’s observatory, with the powerful telescopes she needed for her research. It was at this time that her high-ranking officer husband’s problems began; he had just been promoted Colonel. Now to me he says, “I’m not going to bore you by repeating what is contained in my file. You know all, or almost all, the ins and outs of my career. You translated my deposition. Except that I didn’t say anything about the tension in my family due to my work. Vima wanted me to resign. She was putting pressure on me. When did they start, the lies that turned me into the traitor she eventually unmasked? Was it that winter when I swore I would resign? Or in spring when I showed her my real fake letter of resignation? Or more precisely, was it the day when, proud as a peacock, I led her triumphantly into my magnificent businessman’s office? There I was, the Commander’s Army Intelligence liaison officer, in the pay of the Residence! Our son had just been born. Vima was busy with her research for her doctoral dissertation. I was living on standby. Between heaven and hell. Acutely aware of the usurper in me who sooner or later would be banished from Eden to Gehenna for good. Without passing through purgatory. I don’t know, without betraying myself, how to explain the deeper reasons for my behavior. Panic, cowardice, the lure of personal gain, or quite simply indifference? When you are not personally affected by barbarity, it becomes so banal as to anesthetize you. This is a terrible thing to acknowledge. But it is what I experienced. The system was total, absolute, unfailing. Otherwise, armed with the innocence of distance, I would never have been able to watch those filmed sessions of the torture inflicted on political prisoners. The CD of bait 455 ‘to be examined’—that is the term used by the authorities, to be exact — was not the first of its kind. As you can imagine.”

There is a slight hissing and crackling for a few seconds, then the Colonel goes on to relate the events of the night when bait 455 suddenly came into his life. He says, “For a person like me who believes in signs, Number 455’s first name was a sign. The detonator of an imminent downfall.” He spares no details. He lists all the errors he committed. Number one: he took the CD home. Number two: he watched it on his personal laptop, which he left out in plain sight on the table in the living room. Number three: he didn’t switch the computer off. Number four: he didn’t put the CD away. “You’d have to be stupid,” he admits, “not to realize that these mistakes were made deliberately. Subconsciously, but a long time in advance.” He wanted, he says, to put an end to all the lying. And to all the internalized violence, gnawing away at him from within. He then describes in detail the night Vima accused him. How his spouse rescued him from drowning, at the last minute, then sent him away from the house. And he adds this detail: “Vima, too, was going to move away. She didn’t want to live in that house anymore, the house that had belonged to the ruined doctor. She said the villa was ruined, the way the country was, and to live together with the usurpers was to approve of them. We had to leave everything behind… First me, then her.” His voice cracks, trembles. The Colonel admits that Vima did not save me out of love. My death would have been too easy, and still equally pointless. I had to undo the harm. I had to save you. Now I learn, from the lips of the man who, with a snap of his fingers, removed me from the clutches of the criminals in maximum security Section 209, every step of how I escaped. He refers to his atonement in a strange way. He says, “It was astonishing, how she recovered, that human wreck I entrusted to the doctors at the military hospital.” The human wreck was me. He says this, not the least bit embarrassed, in a neutral tone of voice. As if it were about some third person. A stranger to me. He says, “After only one week in intensive care, Number 455 looked human again. I gazed at her as she slept. She was peaceful. Incredibly relaxed. And beautiful. With a childlike beauty. So fragile, the freshness of youth regained. Nothing obtuse about her face, with its regular features and delicate lines. Nothing in her physiognomy — that of the good little girl — to suggest such an obstinate nature. Her will had been tempered by steel.” I find it difficult to withhold my tears when he describes his conversations with my mother. He says, “The old lady’s voice petrified me. Her grief was unbearable. It was intolerable, the hope she placed in me. She called me her savior. The murderer had been sanctified. According to the old lady, I was proof of God’s existence. The God her daughter did not believe in would save her, thanks to one of his angels: me.”

I listen as the Colonel recounts my mother’s confidences about my father’s death. And I hear myself screaming, Nooooo , in my cell, under my burlap bag, I hear them saying Your old man has kicked the bucket. Because of you, filthy whore. You and your bastard husband. This Nooooo pounds in my head while the Colonel’s voice, not without emotion, describes my mother’s sorrow. She said to him, My husband adored Vima. After she disappeared he went around all the prisons, the hospitals, the morgues. Hundreds of times. Months of useless searching. One fine day some strangers called us on the telephone to tell us that our daughter was imprisoned in the maximum security section, in solitary confinement, without visiting rights. My husband’s heart gave way. He collapsed. We had difficulty removing the receiver from his hand. The Colonel clears his throat. He says, “Vima’s mother thinks that her husband’s soul is finally at rest, thanks to me. The day before their escape, which came about through my good offices, she said to me, as a sort of goodbye, Until my dying day I will pray for you, for your happiness… My happiness! Tell your mother, if ever you decide to tell her about our meeting, that she was the one who gave me my last glimmers of happiness. Thank her for me.” The Colonel doesn’t say anything about his own escape, which has been recorded in his deposition at the Office. Not a word about his parting with his family. No emotional outpourings. Nothing about how torn he must have been. Or about the vertigo of exile. His hopes betrayed. He must have thought, 455 knows all this by heart.