Fariba Hachtroudi - The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

It beggared belief. Grotesque. He was placing his trust in me. I had the trust of the most powerful man in the country and I was going to run away. To go over to the other side. I was weeping like a mental retard when I could have killed him. Snapped his neck, just like that, in a fraction of a second. If you had been safe, you and the children, I would surely have done just that. I would have been a hero. The savior of the nation. The man who had rid the country of the vile Supreme Commander.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. It was not because of your threats that I ran away. I would never have let you get away with them. You couldn’t leave me. I would have killed you first before taking my own life. No, I ran away to hide my weakness from them, my Achilles’ heel. Maybe you don’t know Achilles? A mate from Russia, a fugitive like me, half hoodlum half poet, told me the story of Achilles. A magnificent story. I’ll tell it to you when you come. What was I saying? Yes, my weakness, my absolute love for you was going to destroy us sooner or later. Because of you I was in their sights, already in my early years in the Army, long before my meteoric rise. Our commander in chief, the terror of the subordinate officers, didn’t like women who went where they pleased. Women had to stay at home. The wives of his subordinates in particular. A wife who was at university had no business with a guy from the Army. I was the only one who had such a wife. He took every opportunity to jeer at me. This gentleman’s lady wife is studying physics, he would say ironically. Madame is a scientist. Yessiree! If she’s so clever, why doesn’t she go and work at our family firm’s Center for Nuclear Research? Why isn’t she in the service of the Supreme Commander? That’s not her specialization? Oh, yeah, she’s into astrophysics. What sort of rubbish is that? The science of galaxies, stars, and all that stuff? Oh, yeah? Maybe she’s actually a poet? A subversive? The kind of woman who is cluttering up our prisons? And he began singing, with that leering face of his, Madame beep beep physics, beep beep madame physics! Everyone burst out laughing. Me louder than anyone. I was barking. Croaking. What could I do? He had his nose in my glands. Sniffing my sweat. My love was bound to smell of fear. A poisonous odor. My fear for you poisons me. And the bastard could tell. I had to swear on all the saints that if necessary I would kill my wife and my children to safeguard the Theological Republic and the grandeur of our leader, the Supreme Commander, the representative of divine governance. So I swore. So much it was practically an overdose. The poison made me sick. Do you remember that fever that almost killed me? My temperature that wouldn’t go down. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. An evil spell has caused this fever, said my poor old mother. You can’t make it better with aspirin, only with faith. I prayed, prayed, and prayed, swearing I would never lie again. Never again would I lynch you on the altar of the Book. I was caught in a vice. You could tell, too, that disaster was imminent. You’d been badgering me for years. It was all you ever said. Resign. Over and over, Resign, relentlessly. Resign, leave the Army. It was your refrain, you served it up at breakfast, at dinner, in bed. Even when I was making love to you. And then one fine morning they offered me a new position in the High Security section. Which would require a radical change of status, said the Commander’s envoy. It’s the Commander who nominated you, but it’s top secret. Which means it calls for anonymity. I would have to resign from the Army. Unofficially, of course, the emissary reassured me. We have to make the country secure, beginning with the prisons, he said. My job would be to determine our needs in sophisticated, high-performance, reliable materiel, then acquire it and oversee the installation. A purely technical job. I would swap my cap and my military uniform for the sort of business suit the CEO of an import-export company would wear. A cover, and a dream opportunity to satisfy you, with an easy conscience. You’ve been hiding behind your little finger, is what you said, when you saw through the trick. Yes. For lack of choice. Yet again. I might not believe in a miracle, but I thought at least in the meanwhile I would have a reprieve… I will never forget your childish joy when I told you the good news. It was a time when quite a few military men were getting involved in business. Retired, disabled men, avid or disappointed soldiers… Like everything else, the businesses run by former soldiers were under state control. The Commander’s inner circle granted preferential treatment. But you were unaware of such details, my poor love. You weren’t interested. You trusted me. You took my word for it when I explained that my partner was a former officer, now retired, who had the capital required to start the business.

You were thrilled at the thought that from then on you’d be seeing me in a business suit and not a uniform. You were happy. I was over the moon. I wore the suits you picked out for me when I visited prisons in the country to determine our requirements in materiel. And the fact those prisons were filled to overflowing had nothing to do with me. The prisoners’ conditions under detention was not my problem. Nor was the fate meted out to the politicals, who were systematically tortured behind closed doors in the maximum-security sections. I don’t believe I was a coward or a bastard. Merely powerless. But I respected the limits I had set myself ever since I came back from the front. I was a soldier, a military man, and that was what I would remain. I didn’t get my hands dirty. I didn’t kill. I didn’t torture. I had never hurt a flea, and I never would. And I kept my word. That is not the case with the careerists who make the rules nowadays. Insipid little guys who’ve come back from the front and who’ve made their careers and filled their bank accounts by agreeing to do away not with the enemy on the battlefield but with our own children in the streets of the capital. Not I. That’s what I told myself deep within. And I confess I was pretty proud of myself, until you messed everything up. In short, it wasn’t your threats that made me decide to run away and leave everything behind. It was the Commander, and my imminent appointment as head of his personal bodyguards. I would be forced to flee or forced into a corner. The crap businessman would have to change his clothes and proudly display his military stripes. No more putting on acts. I was playing with fire. My terror at being unmasked, by you or someone else, was poisoning my life. In either case your safety would be compromised. You were quicker than them. There was nothing surprising about that. You are a thousand times more intelligent. But I helped you to go about it. I may have been a straw man sort of businessman, an actual agent for Security and Intelligence in the service of the country’s prisons, but that straw man had had enough of the national sport, the art of dissimulation the leaders are so good at.

Then the tsunami. A bit sooner than I had planned. 455 was the one who brought it on. You ordered me to leave you and go abroad, and you knew nothing about the Commander’s proposal. I obeyed. To keep you out of danger, my love. In those days, I didn’t care what happened to 455. In those days, I wasn’t thinking of redeeming myself. It was you who wanted it for me. But now I tell myself I can look you in the eyes again with my head held high. Ever since I arrived in this fucking country I haven’t lied a single time. Not just to honor my promise. I thought, foolishly, that I could get by without lying. I told myself, You’re in a free country. No need to wheel and deal to get by. No need to tell fibs. To embroider my life and deceive others, to lead people up the garden path. I told myself, If you tell the truth about all the shit things that have been done by you and by your superiors, you’ll earn if not their respect then at least a chance to benefit from their bullshit human rights. Yeah, right. Five years they’ve been stringing me along. Five years of asking me the same old questions. Five years they’ve been recording, copying, recopying the same answers. Then they start again. Over and over. They never get tired. There is always some point that needs clarifying. Some missing element. They have nothing better to do. Yuri was right. He told me that lies make the world go round. And have done so since the dawn of time. There’s no reason for anything to change. He said, It would have been better if you’d stayed the schizo you were, rather than become the dumbass you are now. And you’ll remain a dumbass as long as you cling to your worthless ideas. He said, The world is amoral. There is no truth or justice. There are only transactions and compromises that are more or less ingenious, more or less unfair. Secret deals that suddenly become plain to see. It’s like the story of the clown with his big red nose who wants to play the lion tamer. You get me? I said yes. But I have my own opinion on the matter. Every time I ask him if he’s lying when he claims he’s being persecuted by Putin, he dodges the issue. I insisted, Were you really an advisor to that billionaire who’s in prison? He burst out laughing. The only explanation I got was his same old theory about people being different. Poets are the rare schizos who can do without truth as easily as they can do without lies, he said. They make up stories, they transgress, they know how to change, save the world from its misery, from lies, they are the mirror of the truth. But am I an authentic poet? That’s the question! The only question worth asking, you great dumbass! I might as well confess I never really know when Yuri is lying. But I take everything he says at face value.