The Colonel (22 page)

Two shots, one after the other. Amir's heart missed a beat, and he forgot what he was going to say to Khezr. Khezr did not press him but instead, as if a great calm had come over him, began to snore loudly. As one eye was half-open, Amir assumed that he had gone to sleep, and lit himself a cigarette.

“Where's little Kuchik? Did he spend all night at the mosque? Why hasn't he come home?

“He's just fine.”

“I was worried.”

“It came off all right this time.”

And with that, Mohammad-Taqi got up and went up the verandah steps. Amir thought he might as well have a wash too. He sat down on the edge of the pool and sluiced the grime and tiredness of the night off his face. But he was still worried. He waited to see what Mohammad-Taqi was going to do. He felt in his bones that his brother was not going to stay in. And nor did he. A minute later, he came back out on the verandah with a bag slung over his shoulder. Amir wanted to ask him if he was going out by himself or with someone else, then realised there could be no more pointless a question. So he kept quiet, waiting for Mohammad-Taqi to come down the steps towards the gate. He could feel his heart beating, worrying that, in his huff, Mohammad-Taqi might leave without a word, without even saying goodbye. But Mohammad-Taqi reined in his bad temper. Stopping by the gate, he turned round and, as if not knowing why, stroked his index finger over his thin, golden moustache and looked at Amir:

“Forgive me, but I am not setting foot in this house again as long as there's a policeman in it. Parvaneh's asleep. Say goodbye for me to her, and to Father and little Kuchik.”

Amir had no answer to that, and Mohammad-Taqi did not expect one. As he went out, he braced his foot against the wall to do up the laces of one of his trainers, which must have been loose. Amir stood there until his brother had gone and then turned round to go back inside. As he did so, he caught sight of the colonel, who had been watching Mohammad-Taqi's departure through the window.

Amir could not meet his father's gaze, and carried on down the steps to the cellar. Khezr opened the door in his face before he reached it. He was astonished to see that Khezr was all ready to go out and was just bending over to do his shoe up.

“What about some breakfast?”

Khezr did not answer. Amir could hardly ask him where he was off to at this hour of the morning so, like a lizard, he darted after him into the yard, as far as the gate. As he opened it, he remembered that Khezr had left his walking-stick behind.

“Your stick, Doctor.”

Khezr did not answer, but just muttered something about being back soon. Amir shut the gate after him, but it was a while before he was conscious of having done so. As the sound penetrated to his brain, he felt as if he had been shot. Everything went black…

Amir was overwhelmed by a dreadful sense of foreboding. He felt that he was losing his mind. This was worse than any of his nightmares.

He had no idea how long he stayed there behind the gate, in the rain, endlessly turning over in his mind the last thing that Khezr had said to him: ‘I suppose I shall just have to go and sort something out with them in the morning.' The words ‘sort something out' hammered over and over again in his head, but he was unable – or maybe he just did not have the courage – to grasp the ominous meaning behind the words. Only now was it beginning to dawn on him how much he detested both himself and Khezr Javid. In his mind he saw only his own wretched, morbid self and the savage visage of Khezr Javid
during those terrifying interrogations in the small hours of the night. Grilling after grilling, and
that damned bloodstained knife
…

And he also felt ashamed at the sight of the colonel, who was still standing there by his sitting room window, just where he himself had been standing, watching the colonel crossing the courtyard having killed his mother and standing in the pouring rain with his bloodied sword, shouting: ‘I've killed her! I've killed her at last!'

He dared not look up to meet the colonel's eyes. Parvaneh's canary was going berserk: its trilling had turned into one long scream. It just would not shut up. A thousand nightmares were wheeling inside Amir's brain now, all hammering at him the same thing: that Mohammad-Taqi would not be coming home alive.

And neither did he.

“Amir… Amir… Amir… what are you up to? Are you going to come with me to your brother's funeral or not…”

“No, no! I am a brother to nobody and a son to no-one. I am nobody and I don't know anybody, anybody at all!”

Maybe the boy is right. It's not easy; dying peacefully is no easy matter. Now I'm over sixty, I've realised people don't know how lucky they are to have a quiet and peaceful death. One gets fed up with the headache of dying; the weariness of it sticks to one like a layer of grime. Just thinking about it infects one with a clammy feeling of lethargy. It even makes one feel ill. Even my most unsympathetic listeners know that I don't normally bang on about death. It's simply that here I am, drenched and rotting away under this
never ending morbid rain. If I have a fault, it is just that I am trying to give a simple, unbiased account of dying. I feel that the last trace of my own human vigour is this rather inadequate account of dying. It is the only thing I can do; I'm not banging on about dying, not at all. What else can I do? Didn't I want to spend the rest of my life sitting on my verandah in a beautiful sunset, with a bubbling samovar, the charcoal set alight by the wife sitting beside me – my companion through all the ups and downs of my life – as I work my way through a glass of vodka with a bowl of yogurt and cucumber, and I'm playing a gentle
mahur
on the setar on my knee, safe in the knowledge that my children are all doing well in good jobs in different parts of the country?

“Amir… Amir… I need your help, son…”

“No, no, no!”

The gate. There's someone at the gate. Thinking that Qorbani has come to fetch him, the colonel goes up to the window, but as Amir opens the gate, he sees that it is not Qorbani but the two young men who had helped him bury Parvaneh. Abdullah Kolahi and Ali Seif are standing by the door, looking Amir up and down. Amir does not know what to do, and is cowering in the door of the outside privy. Under the colonel's watchful eye, Abdullah walks up to the verandah steps. The colonel loses sight of him for a moment, then he sees him coming into the room.

The colonel is standing by the window and is clutching the sheet round his body. Abdullah offers a humble greeting and the colonel turns round to respond. Abdullah waits for a moment by the door with his head bowed and politely asks permission to come in. When it is given, he approaches the table timidly and respectfully, takes a small packet of sugar plums from under his parka and puts it on the table. Then he puts his hand into the pocket of his leopard camouflage trousers and pulls out a few banknotes and lays them on top of the packet of sugar plums.
⁴⁷
He stands there perfectly politely, with his hands folded deferentially over his privates. Silent under the colonel's stare, he studies his toecaps until, his hands trembling with reverence, he breaks into speech:

“Allow me to be your humble servant, colonel. I am your
servant… what am I to do? They told me to say this. But… I swear to you, I treated your daughter as a sister… But even so… I'm so ashamed, colonel, that I've decided go and join Masoud at the front in the next draft of reinforcements. To be honest, I don't intend to come back. I've told my wife. I've come to ask for your blessing. Give me your blessing, colonel.”

Abdullah disappeared, vanishing in a cloud of black smoke that washed over the colonel's eyes. His head felt as heavy as a millstone and his heart felt as if it had been uprooted and was crashing around inside his ribcage like a demented canary. When he came to, he found himself gripping the back of the chair. The old sheet had slipped off and was lying on the floor in a heap, and he was standing there, stark naked and shivering like a dog. His mind was a blank. But he could still feel, and he felt cold. He picked up the sheet under his feet and wrapped it round him, but did not know what to do next. The canary was huddled in its cage.
All I thought was that it was just a canary that had stopped singing.

Wondering whether canaries liked sugar plums, he took one out of the packet, walked down the passage, stood in front of the cage, pushed it through the bars of the cage and offered it to the canary. But the canary did not move, or even look up. the colonel looked at the rain and decided not to let the canary out.
Even if it hadn't been raining, letting the canary free would have been to pass a death sentence on it. It's not used to life outside its cage. One flap of its wings and it's on the floor, and the first cat…
That black cat skulking round the pond would go for it.

But Parvaneh's canary was already pining away, wasn't it?

He did not know, nor did he know how long he had been standing there by the cage, silently studying the bird. He walked out on to the edge of the verandah and stood there, on his usual spot, looking out at the rain. The courtyard gate was half-open, and there was no sign of the pick and shovel.

There was no certainty about anything. the colonel felt a terrible pang of loneliness. There was nothing but the rain, drumming on the rusty old tin roof. the colonel could not recall that once, at least once a long time ago, he had seen the ochre colour of the roof in the sunset after a rainstorm. His mind was a blank. Was it sunset, or wasn't it? It was night, or wasn't it? What time of day was it, anyway?