The Colonel (5 page)

They had brought Mohammad-Taqi back from Tehran – it was late January or early February 1979, in the throes of the revolution. At that stage, Amir was still a strong and upstanding young man, not the resigned, one might almost say the confused old man that he later turned into. Without breaking down or letting his grief get the better of him, he knelt down beside his brother, bending right down as if to sniff his
brother's bloodied shirt. Then he stood up again in manly fashion, straight and proud, turned away and took his place alongside the others. the colonel would have expected no less of him. Farzaneh looked as if she were walking on coals and Parvaneh circled round her brother, like a moth flying into a guttering candle flame.
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It was there that the colonel felt that his little daughter's heart was broken. He asked himself why it is that love and affection are like an abscess that is only lanced by the death of one's nearest and dearest, then wondered what on earth had made him come up with such a horrible analogy of love. He had had no time to dwell on this, though, as little Masoud had gone mad at his brother's martyrdom. He had thrown himself on the bier, weeping and wailing, and had then stood up, held up his clenched fists in the air and, with the veins in his neck bulging, bellowed out, ‘Oh my God!' the colonel heard Masoud's screams but, over the angry shouts of the crowd, he could not make out what he was yelling. At that moment, it dawned on the colonel how many people had prior claims on the blood of his children. Something within him snapped and he was overcome by a feeling of bitterness and alienation from the proper emotions of a father whose son has just been killed. He cracked up, turned away from the world and became a hermit in a corner, far from the madding crowd, there to end his days. He felt as if his spine had broken and he could not walk upright; then all of a sudden, he felt Parvaneh throwing herself into her father's arms. For a moment, the colonel had to forget his own misery and he took hold of his daughter's little shoulders to try and still the alarming, sobbing convulsions that shook her whole body from head to foot.

“We should have taken her to the mortuary first, colonel.”

“Yes, I thought so too. We should have. Let's take her there now… You lead the way.”

The bier weighed no more than a pigeon's wing. Even so, the colonel wished that he had brought Amir to hold one of its feet. It might not weigh much, but the done thing was for four people to carry it on their shoulders. Ali Seif solved the problem. He got the colonel and the other fellow to carry one end on their shoulders, while he supported the other end on his fists, balanced on his barrel chest. And so they trudged off through the graves in the mud and slush. When they found the mortuary and had set the coffin down, the colonel felt his sweat pouring out of his ears. He was soaked through, as much by sweat on the inside as by rain on the outside. He looked as though he had just been fished out of a river.

Once more, the three of them found themselves standing aimlessly beside the coffin. It was dark as a tomb inside the mortuary and they could scarcely make one another out. As they hung about, uncertain what to do, it struck the colonel that the policemen must be exhausted, and possibly even a little spooked, by all this miserable portering, even though they probably would not admit it. They were all tired, each in their own way. They were all waiting for someone to break the silence of this deathly blackness. The only sign of life was the sound of their heavy breathing, like criminals about to embark on a job. The chilly, airless atmosphere in the anteroom, with the rain battering down on the mortuary's rusty tin roof, made his skin creep. The bulging walls were wet and clammy. Reeking of a mixture of damp, decay, camphor and
cedar-leaf oil, they felt swollen by the remembrance of endless hideous deaths. This was not like the rain and mud outside. The dampness on the floor here seeped through the soles of their shoes into their feet, worked its way into the flesh and up into the guts and sent a shiver of nausea right to the marrow of their bones. And the silence, the silence of the ghosts… The colonel imagined himself and the two policemen as coagulated and frozen solid, like exclamation marks, beside the coffin. His sight seemed to have mildewed over, his breath stank of decay and his body felt as if it was decomposing into cold slippery sweat and was about to freeze solid.

“You need someone who's next of kin, Colonel; the body has to be washed by someone next of kin, like a mother or a sister.”

Ali Seif 's voice hit the colonel like a slap in the face and hung there for a moment until the echo died away. Of course, he knew perfectly well that the laying out had to be done by a close relative, but it vexed him that nobody had thought about it earlier. What could be done about it now that the ambulance had gone back? Why had they not told him before? How could nobody have thought about a body washer when they had sat him down in the ambulance, with no idea where he was going, next to his dead daughter?
Isn't body washing the most basic part of their job? What are they bloody paid for? They shouldn't break things to people so suddenly and with such bad timing, when they should have thought about it beforehand. But it's no good worrying about that now; I need to get on with it.

“Yes, colonel, you need to sort this out. We'll stay here until you get back. Go and fetch her sister. Have a think, and bring whatever else you need. But we haven't got all night, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”
I know that we have to get this thing over with by daylight.
“But where can I get a gravedigger from? Some out-of-work fellow off the street, maybe?”

“No.”

“Oh, are there graves ready dug, then?”

“That's a thought, but no. We'll help you dig. But we need a pick and shovel. Where are we going to get them from?”

“I wish you'd thought about that before the ambulance went off. I wish I had had my wits about me at the time, but then my wits aren't what they used to be…”

The colonel's problem with his wits was that he had got used to living in the past and thinking about nothing else. The past had such a hold on him that he had grown afraid of dealing with what was happening under his nose. This fear of the present and living in the past had become a habit. Perhaps it was just an instinctive retreat, a defence against events.

In occasional idle moments, his thoughts wandered back to the story of Rostam and Ashkabus, those ancient enemies of the Shahnameh, and he would lose himself in the story of their battle, which he never tired of… Really, he ought to have given his children names like Paridokht and Ashkabus.
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He was fully aware of this involuntary tendency of his to dwell on the past, and it bothered him that even now it might make him forget what it was that he had to fetch. And so, as he walked back home, he kept repeating aloud to himself, ‘pick and shovel; Farzaneh, shroud, pick and shovel; Farzaneh, shroud…'

“Right, gentlemen… I'll leave you in charge of my daughter until I get back.”

The colonel left the mortuary without bothering to wait for an answer. He knew perfectly well that there could be no answer to what he had just said and, when he thought about it, he realised that there was no need to have said it. But then, is anything we say ever really necessary, and are all words to be weighed in the balance of reason? No, most things we say are to stop ourselves worrying and to keep a lid on our own fears, so that, in time, they become just a habit.
It's like when, without thinking, we tell one of our boys – let's say my Kuchik – who is heading off to war, to take care. Well, really, as if he wouldn't take care if we didn't say it!
In effect, aren't we just trying to say that the war should look after him? No, since the war has not undertaken to take care of anyone. So, even though we know that what we say means nothing, we still say it, just out of a wish to stop our loved ones from worrying. Otherwise, could there be anything more moronic than a man of the colonel's age asking two young warriors to look after his daughter, a girl who was asleep for all eternity in her coffin? After all, they had not looked after her very well when she'd been alive, had they?

When young Masoud had been about to set off for the front, the colonel, without thinking, had said to him, “Take care of yourself, my boy.” The instant he said it, he was all too conscious of the fact that war was some kind of poisonous, carnivorous plant. You could make it responsible for anything, except for the lives of the people caught up in it. Apart from anything else, anyone could tell that, if war was going to be
answerable for people's welfare, then war would not be war. It would be something else.
What else could I have said? Any fool can see that if someone's worried about his own welfare, he is hardly going to go to war!
So, if he had really wanted to dissuade little Masoud, he should have said something quite different to him before he had set off, and come up with some far more persuasive arguments.

Yes, he could see the city lights in front of him. It was lucky that the city was out of range of Iraqi missiles, otherwise there would have been blackouts and the colonel would not have been able to find his way. By now, though, he was sure he was on the right track, heading towards the entrance to the narrow street which, after several twists and turns past a number of cul-de-sacs, eventually emerged into the square in front of the town hall and carried on to the little alley where his house was. He did not have to go through the square, though. Another way was to climb a grassy slope, taking care not to slip on the wet, rotting grass and then go down to a big hollow, which was not very deep but was always full of mud and rainwater, where he had to watch his step. After going round the hollow, he reached his alleyway, a little alleyway that was just made for a fine spring day when a man could take his stick and go out for a walk. For no sooner had you emerged from it than you could
see in front of you the meadows on the foothills ablaze with flowers, and inhale the breeze that came down the mountains to fill the lungs, blowing away the accumulation of cheap cigarette smoke, and sucking in the delight of being alive. These were moments to be savoured, when no black clouds hung over the sky, and the sun did not seem to have swallowed itself in grief. Not like these days, when the sun seemed to have been buried for ever and there was nothing but the irritating drip of incessant, soul-destroying rain.

As the colonel turned into his street he knew that he had to be careful how he went at this late hour, and have some answers ready for the young men who hung around on every street corner like goats, seeing conspiracies and plots in the most everyday comings and goings. It was as if they were training to be detectives, practising on the passers-by. To lend weight to their dangerous game, they had to imagine that each of the passers-by had committed some criminal act. At the very least, they were involved in adultery or drug smuggling, or visiting a cache of weapons, or were linked to people who were plotting to overthrow the regime. Perhaps the colonel was getting carried away, but the fact was that he had no wish to make his problems any worse and, if he was letting his imagination get the better of him, he chose to see it as some passing compulsion that was not natural to him. It grew out of the atmosphere that pervaded the streets and alleyways where he lived. He regarded the fear and insecurity that this atmosphere provoked in him as a kind of necessary training for life which, like it or not, everyone was forced to be inoculated with. Take the sensation of fear, for instance. You can be frightened of something without knowing what it is. Looming over your head, you fancy you see a sword held in an invisible hand, and
you have long felt its steel in your bowels. This feeling is irrational, and you cannot shake it off.
Because you fear being spied upon, you end up believing that you really are being spied upon. But if this turns out not to be so, you still have to ask yourself why you can't stop imagining that it's happening. Where does this corrosive and exhausting feeling that constantly tells you that every eye is watching you come from?