The Colonel (25 page)

When Amir got off the bus after being let out of prison, he saw the colonel leaning against the brick wall of the bus station in his overcoat and fedora. It was dawn and drizzling. He was stooped over and studying Amir from under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and he was hiding a smile under his moustaches. Amir walked up to his father and held out his arms to embrace him, but the colonel's face showed no sign of pleasure.
No tears of joy; his eyes were dry.
Amir, too, was out of sorts and could not be bothered to put on a show of happiness. Just when everyone else was fired up with hope, he was plagued by doubt. And yet, alongside the self-doubting, despairing Amir, who wanted to do away with himself, there was another Amir, who wanted more than anything else to play at being happy and reveal his real self.

They were not far from home. Mohammad-Taqi, who had also come along to the bus station to welcome Amir back, took his bag and bundle and led the way, and the three of them set off in the silence of the dawn. There was nobody about and, in the emptiness of the morning, the town square seemed larger. Along the way the colonel began to talk to himself:

“Right, at least that's all over and done with, then.”

“Yes… it's all over. Fifty years of it.”
⁵³

“More like six thousand years…”

There was no sorrow or regret in the colonel's words, but no joy either. He sounded indifferent. Amir knew of his father's conviction that Iran had a six-thousand-year history of government.

But no! I have become a fisherman, with long rubber waders,
a beret, a big nose and a bushy moustache, lugging nets on my back, and with an Oshnu Special cigarette in my hand as I splash along beside the colonel in the heavy silence that he carries with him. I am beginning to speak:
‘There is no place for doubt on the battlefield of history and revolution, papa! The glorious history of the forty year struggle of the workers is a shining example of…'
and I hate myself for such ridiculous, meaningless jargon. I shudder to hear that oaf inside me uttering such rubbish, but I carry on:
‘We must continue to hope, papa, hope… A man without hope is nothing but an insect, a mindless creature with no future. And a man without a future can only go backwards. In prison we spat at the fence-sitters for being men with no honour.'

the colonel had turned round and was glaring at his son from beneath his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Amir felt trapped. The nets on his back had gone, his Oshnu cigarette had disappeared, there were no rubber boots to give him the air of a mature man of experience, and his top lip was no longer covered with a bushy moustache. He was a little boy again, being smelted by the glare of his father's wise old gaze. In vain, he tried to break the threatening silence of the morning with a pretend cough, but then he had to meet his father's withering stare. He tried to continue:

“Yes, in prison…”

This behaviour really came to a head when he was sitting in the living room, surrounded by friends and relations. The one thought burning in his brain was “where is Nur Aqdas, my wife?” but he couldn't bring himself to say it. Instead, he was banging on in the same vein: “The incontrovertible truth is that we are living in a century of radical change, and there's no place for intellectual vacillation in a revolution, my friends!” His other self did not appear to him in the guise of a fisherman this time; this time he saw a man with a grey beard, a drooping moustache, and wearing a beret as he smoked his first pipe of the morning. Every now and then he gave a little cough.

That was when people started talking: it was the duty of any respectable family to repudiate a girl like that and send her packing. She was now
mahdour ud-dam
, fair Islamic game. It would be an honour killing.

In the warmth of the stove, the colonel's back and shoulders, wrapped in the steaming blanket, were now thawing out. Even his left foot was warming up. He was feeling lethargic and hardly able to keep awake for so much lack of sleep. The only thing that gave him any comfort, and moved him from time to time, was the memory of what he had said about Parvaneh over the unseen, echoing loudspeakers at Masoud's funeral.
He could not believe that he would ever have been capable of uttering those words against a child who was not even fourteen, a girl to whom he was both a mother and a father. Had it really been his own voice that had yelled: ‘This girl is
mahdour ud-dam
… She must be killed. She is impure, possessed by the devil and now lost to us all…' It was as if he had been talking about Forouz.

How could I have said that? Perhaps there's been someone else lurking inside me for my entire life, just waiting for a chance to say it? Was it really my voice that I heard coming out of the loudspeakers? How could such a thing be possible?

“Well, Amir, what do you think?”

But Amir was not there. He was lost in thoughts of Parvaneh, who was not there either. A sick curiosity gripped him as to how Parvaneh had been killed. He wondered what level of torture she had been subjected to before dying, and what she had said about her heroic brother to her fellow prisoners. A brother who had a good name and reputation, who was loved by so many young men who had been to school with him, a noble brother who had been released from the chains of ‘the murderous régime.'

But how silent this brother had now become, his mind filled only with isolated scraps of the past. And whenever a voice did begin to speak inside him, all it did was settle accounts, pronouncing a death sentence on a catamitic life that would shortly be at an end. In his tormented self-analysis, he became aware of a tendency to speculate on his own complicity in the crimes perpetrated against his brother and sister. And the only
way out he could see was to see Khezr again, to hear from him what had happened to his little sister, just as he had finally found out about his wife Nur-Aqdas.

“If you executed her, then you should have given me some clue as to where she was buried. She was my wife, after all, Khezr Javid. My wife, and your prisoner.”

This was possibly the first time that he had looked properly at Khezr. This time he stared intently into his eyes, begging him to answer

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.”