The Colonel (31 page)

When the central government was fully stretched dealing with the
Jangali
rebellion in the north, Pesyan threatened to attack the undefended Tehran with 4,000 men, accusing Qavam of being a servant of foreign interests. Tehran would have welcomed him. He made overtures to Kuchik Khan (
see above
) and to the Bolsheviks of Central Asia for assistance, but the Soviet government of Moscow offered to assist Tehran against him. Qavam offered Pesyan amnesty, safe passage out of the country and even monetary compensation, but The Colonel refused to compromise. He accused Qavam of double dealing with the tribes against him and broke of all relations with the
British, who were trying to act as intermediaries between him and Qavam, through their consul at Mashhad. Pesyan arrested all those who had worked with or for the British.

Qavam, with Reza Khan (later Reza Shah) as minister of war, induced the local tribes to raise a force against him, which defeated him and his gendarmes at Quchan. The Colonel escaped, but was caught and killed in a subsequent skirmish. His head was sent to Tehran. Pesyan was buried in a shrine erected in memory of the great Nader Shah, the conqueror of India. Ever since, he has been a hero to Iranian nationalists, who have always resented the continuing interference of the Great Powers in the affairs of Iran. Although nationalistic, the Islamic regime has never taken this secular man to its heart.
⁶⁸

 

Oshnu cigarettes
:
a cheap brand of Iranian cigarette, mostly smoked by working people. Also
Homa
cigarettes.

 

Point Four Programme
:
development aid programme introduced by US President Harry Truman in 1949 as the fourth mainspring of American foreign policy. It was designed to provide aid – initially mainly economic and technical, but later military – to countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia as a way of countering the influence of Soviet Russia and China.

 

Qaim Maqam
:
(1779 – 1835), renowned statesman, essayist, and poet of the early Qajar period. Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir essentially adopted his outlook on politics and diplomacy. He was the architect of a ‘no war no peace' policy with Russia
which drew on religious and national sentiments to rally support behind the crown prince and his military modernisation programme, to create a credible defence against Russia. His policies facilitated funding for military reforms and guaranteed British support against Russia.

 

Qavam, Ahmad
:
see under Mohammed Taqi Khan. In addition, he incurred the wrath of the communists for getting the better of the Russians. When the Soviets failed to honour their undertaking to withdraw from their wartime occupation of Iran in 1946, Qavam offered them the ‘northern oil' deal, by which the Russians would receive a concession for oil exploration in the north in return for evacuating their troops. After the troops moved out, the Majlis (parliament) refused to ratify the arrangement and the Russians got nothing. Qavam, outwardly subservient to foreign interests – and criticised for such – was in fact a patriot, who earned the nickname of The Wily Fox.

 

Rezaiyeh
:
(modern name: Urumiah) capital of the Iranian province of West Azerbaijan. Under the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty Reza Shah, Urumiah was renamed Rezaiyeh. The original name was restored with the advent of the Islamic Republic.

 

Rouzbeh, Khosrow
:
founder-member of the
Tudeh,
the Iranian party established in 1941 as the successor to the banned Communist Party of Iran. An army officer and instructor at the country's military academy, Rouzbeh was a leading member of a secret communist fifth column within the Iranian military. He was arrested, and escaped, on numerous occasions. After the coup against Mossadeq, he was condemned to death and executed in 1958.

 

Rostam
:
principal character in the heroic epic poem, the
Shahnameh,
the great warrior who fights the enemies of Iran. His tragedy was that he unwittingly killed his son Sohrab in single combat, recognising him only as he lay dying.

 

Sattar Khan
:
(1868 – 1914) revolutionary leader from Tabriz who played a key role in Constitutional Revolution (1906 – 11). Under his guidance, a ‘High Military Council' was proclaimed in 1908. However, after revolutionary forces took Tehran, he and his followers refused to lay down their arms. In an ensuing armed clash with former comrades, Sattar was fatally wounded and died a few days later.

 

SAVAK
:
Iranian secret service. Founded in 1957, its charter committed it to ‘defending the state and preventing all conspiracies against the public interest.' The organisation was established with the help of US and Israeli security experts, and was used by the Shah's regime to stifle all forms of opposition. It was a huge organisation, with informers everywhere, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust between families and friends. Dissidents were rounded up, tortured and, in some cases, executed. In the last few years of the Shah's reign, when Carter was president of the USA, they became noticeably more tolerant of opposition.

 

Setar
:
traditional three
-
stringed instrument, similar to a small lute.

 

Sha'ban the Brainless
:
ringleader of the mob paid by the CIA to stage anti-government demonstrations during the coup against Mossadeq. He earned his popular nickname
Bimokh
(the Brainless) for his witless thuggery. After the successful coup and the restoration of the Shah, Sha'ban was handsomely rewarded for his services.

 

Shaghad
:
The half-brother of Rostam, the great hero of the Shahnameh epic. Shaghad and the king of Kabulisatan dig a pit full of swords and entice Rostam to ride into it, with his famous horse Rakhsh. Both are impaled on the swords. The dying Rostam persuades Shaghad to give him a bow and arrow. With his last breath, he shoots an arrow at Shaghad, who is hiding behind a tree. So strong was Rostam that the arrow pierced the tree and killed Shaghad behind, pinning him to the tree.

 

Shahnameh
:
see Ferdowsi

 

Shams ul-Emareh
:
palace added to the Golestan Palace compound, it was ordered by Nasir al-Din Shah, who had been impressed by the tall buildings he had seen in Europe, and finished in 1867. The first five-storey building of old Tehran, it was lavishly decorated with tiles and mirror work. It served both as royal harem and, later, as a place for official receptions.

 

Taqi Khan
: see Amir Kabir

 

Teachers
:
The teachers Khezr Javid describes his early days as a teacher, before he joined SAVAK, were part of the
Sepah-e Danesh
, the Army of Learning, which was established by the Shah in the 1960s. As an alternative to military service, young men and women with an education were sent out to remote villages to teach basic literacy and hygiene. Some of these
teachers were very energetic and idealistic and fitted in well with village life, becoming useful links between the village and outside officialdom, while others were unable to adapt to the primitive conditions in the villages of those days, and became desperately homesick and lonely.

 

Toman
:
monetary unit in Iran; 1 toman = 10 rials.

 

Yooshij, Nima
:
(1896 – 1960) Iranian poet, often considered the father of modern Persian poetry. His works, which eschew traditional verse forms, employ natural everyday speech and dialect to portray the life of ordinary Iranians. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi bears an astonishing physical resemblance to him.

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is a colossus of contemporary Iranian literature. He cut his literary teeth on the great Persian poets like Hafiz and Rumi, imbibing their rich language and blending it uniquely successfully with modern everyday speech to create his own thoroughly contemporary voice. His language is poetic, rhythmical, metaphorical, and allusive and flows like a broad, mighty river, full of eddies, side currents, quiet backwaters and whirlpools. As he puts it: ‘Words are like the strings of a guitar. You have to let their clear tones ring out and not stifle their resonance with verbs.'

Dowlatabadi began working on this novel 25 years ago, but kept filing the manuscript away in a drawer, taking it out periodically and revising it. In 2008, he finally declared the text ready for publication. He dismissed any notion that earlier publication might have changed the course of history as an unreasonable and fanciful expectation to place upon a literary work. He also feared that the novel might itself have fallen victim to the unchecked violence of the revolution.

The descriptions of torture are taken from the experiences of the author himself, or from those of his friends. It comes as no surprise to learn that
The Colonel
has never appeared in its original language in the author's native country. The manuscript remains in the hands of the censor, who has demanded a number of deletions and revisions, which the author has refused to make.

Dowlatabadi was born in 1940 into a peasant family in the small village of Dowlatabad, near the town of Sabzevar on the northern edge of the
Dasht-e Kavir
, the great Persian desert. His early childhood memories are of carrying sacks of melons by donkey for sale in the nearest market town. ‘It was a bitter struggle between the unyielding stone and the fragile glass within me, countless shards on the dry earth, people wracked by poverty and hunger…'

Aged 13, he left his native village and fended for himself, first in Mashhad and Sabzevar and later in Tehran, as a jack-of-all-trades. While keeping himself enrolled in school, he moonlighted variously as a hairdresser, checking tickets in cinemas and selling advertising space in local newspapers. He was homeless and often spent the night on the streets. In his spare time, he devoured every book he could lay his hands on, as much from the canon of Persian classical literature as from translations of the works of European political philosophers and novelists. He describes himself as self-educated. Though he never gained his high-school diploma, he was accepted for a place at drama school and wrote his first short story,
The Night's Abyss.
This launched him on his literary career.

Dowlatabadi's first collection of stories appeared in 1969, followed by a novel
Safar
(The Trip) translated into German as
Der Reise
. Eight more novels appeared before the revolution in 1979. Dowlatabadi's 1979 novel
Ja-ye Khali-ye Soluch
, translated into English as
Missing Soluch
, treated the decline of Iranian village life in the 1960s. This starkly beautiful novel looks at the trials of an impoverished woman and her children living in a remote village in Iran, after the unexplained disappearance of her husband, Soluch. Lyrical yet unsparing, the novel examines her life as she contends with the local political
corruption, authoritarianism, and the poverty of the village. This landmark novel, which pioneered the use of the everyday language of the Iranian people, revolutionised Persian literature in its beautiful and daring portrayal of the life of a marginal woman and her struggle to survive.

Dowlatabadi's most ambitious work, completed in 1984, is a 10-volume, 3,000-page epic entitled
Kelidar
, an account of life in the village of that name in north-eastern Iran in the 1940s. The village people are impoverished Kurds, who were moved there in the 17th century by Shah Abbas to guard the frontier against incursions by the Turkmen raiding from the north. Neither two years in prison under the Shah's regime, nor the upheavals of the revolution nor the death of his much-loved father could interrupt his tireless work on this
magnum opus
. Its publication was a sensation and catapulted Dowlatabadi to instant fame. He noted at the time: ‘I was totally exhausted and wanted nothing so much as to take a long rest, but I was compelled to go on writing.'
Kelidar
has been translated into German.

While he was writing
Kelidar
Dowlatabadi tried to shut himself off from events in the post-revolutionary outside world. His own politics, which evolved over time, could be loosely defined as leftward-leaning liberal nationalism. He became totally disillusioned by the outcome of the revolution that toppled the Shah: ‘I felt a great sense of unease within me, an inner compulsion that drove me to the brink of insanity.' Then came the fateful night when everything came to a head and
The Colonel
was born:

Dowlatabadi now lives in Tehran. His children live in Europe and the USA. He travelled to Europe in 1990 and visited the United States in 1991, lecturing on literature and politics. In 2009 he visited Germany for the launch of the German translation of
The Colonel.

Readers who think of Iran as a dry country may be surprised by the constant rain in the narrative. The story unfolds in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province on the Caspian, where rice grows on the coastal plain and tea is cultivated on the foothills of the Alborz mountains, which separate the coast from the high, dry central Iranian plateau. The seaward side of the range is covered by heavy rain forest, which for centuries has given cover to bandits, rebels and dissidents. In 1920 Rasht was the base of the short-lived Socialist Republic of Gilan, under Kuchik Khan. Shortly after the revolution of 1979, the mountain forests gave cover to refugee Marxists. The time of the novel is placed towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1980 – 88).