The Colonel

by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

  What possible reason can there be for thinking that I have sinned in the past and that I am now being punished for it? How can anyone else possibly understand how, with every breath and with every step, I am drowned and suffocated by a feeling of guilt? It has got such a grip on me that I feel that my entire existence is under question. It’s so powerful that I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s got to the point where I imagine I am being followed around by a pair of invisible policemen who watch everything I do. I suppose I can be thankful that, since my stomach ulcers, I’ve given up drinking. And after killing my wife, I’ve lost all interest in women. So there’s no danger of me even looking at one or, God forbid, disgracing myself by falling for her charms. I’m not involved in any business or wheeler dealing, so I’m not mixed up in any thieving or swindling. As to what I live on, I’m drawing on a little nest-egg that my sons and I put aside. If anyone wants to investigate me, they’ll find that I’ve not taken even so much as a packet of cigarettes off my daughter, now the wife of Qorbani Hajjaj. Nor have I ever left Yousef Noqli’s teahouse without paying for my glass of tea. I don’t believe in living on tick. And don’t even get me started on my setar-playing. I used to play all the time and I still want to play, but my hands are now so unsteady that I can’t control the thing. I haven’t touched it for years now, and it just sits there in its old case on the wall, with dust as thick as your finger on it. Even the policemen didn’t react when they saw it. What else? Two important things: I have committed two mortal sins in my life. One was killing my wife and the other was disobeying the order to join the Dhofar campaign.9 I killed my wife, that’s true, and I didn’t go to Dhofar, that’s also true.

  Why should I have cared that the British didn’t want to leave the Sultan at the mercy of some rabble of barefooted peasants? Why should I care that they wanted to give us the honour of being their comrades-in-arms and saddle the Shah with the costs of the campaign? I just knew that I had to say no, and I did exactly that.

  The man behind the green baize table suddenly got up. Holding his stomach in, he stood bolt upright. His new tone showed that he was beginning to get irritated: “Well, what are you waiting for, it’s nearly morning?”

  The young men sprang into action. One of them took the colonel by a scrawny elbow and spun him round, while another shoved the receipt for the money into the colonel’s coat pocket:

  “All ready, colonel.”

  “I know, Sir. I know.”

  “Dhofar is an important and prestigious posting, colonel! It is a mark of the esteem in which His Imperial Majesty holds patriotic officers like you. I congratulate you.”

  “ Sir, I…”

  “Good luck, colonel!”

  “It’s just that I still have to sort out a family problem, sir, as you are aware.”

  “Put it from your mind, colonel. There is no getting out of it. That’s that.”

  “But, General, it’s my wife…”

  “You must consider the consequences, colonel, since she shares your name. Don’t forget that your wife comes from a very prominent family…”

  “But, Sir, I am just a simple soldier…”

  “We are all soldiers, colonel. Haven’t I made myself clear?”

  It was night when they summoned the colonel to headquarters. Night is when crimes are committed, he thought, and night is also when they are planned and the evidence is buried. Criminals fear the light of day and try to wash the evidence off their hands before dawn and hide their guilty consciences from their fellow men. And so it was, that night, that the colonel decided on crime. He would absolutely not obey the order of posting. As he took the written order from the general’s puffy white fingers, he decided to kill his wife. He could not bring himself to fly to Dhofar to slaughter a bunch of hungry rebels on the grounds that they were ‘a Soviet threat.’ He could no longer go on living the lie that he had been forced to live.

  It was a pimp of a lie! I tucked the folder with the order in it under my arm, about-turned, marched out of headquarters and told my driver to get out of town and take me straight home. Maybe I’d lost my senses, or was it that I’d finally come to them at last? What are one’s senses, anyway?”

  “This way, colonel.”

  “Yes, yes, of course…”

  He knew everything was ready. He had hung about too long and it was time to go. He had to go the length of the snooker hall to the door, through the door and down the steps that he had come in by. Outside, waiting in the rain beside the ambulance, he could just make out the two young men who had come to his house. The barrels of their machine guns were shining in the light from the martyrs’ shrines as they pulled the hoods of their parkas over their heads. Their trouser bottoms and boots were soaked and spattered with mud. He remembered that the younger one had rubbed at the sparse hair on his face, while the cheeks of the more grown-up one were already endowed with a decent black beard. And now the colonel was watching the ambulance, as it was being washed by the rain, to see how the next stage of the proceedings would begin.

  “You sit in the back, colonel.”

  The driver, whom the colonel had not noticed – though this was nothing to do with his short-sightedness – was raring to go. Young drivers these days generally drove fast and nipped through the traffic, not at all like the old lorry drivers after the war, who made a point of driving in a very dignified and ostentatiously sedate manner. For instance, whenever they stopped off at a roadside teahouse, they seemed to shed a huge load of responsibility from their shoulders as they got down from their cabs. They always wore a silk neckerchief and, as they got down, they always had one hand hooked onto it as, with great dignity, they took a leisurely turn round the lorry and, after giving orders to their driver’s mate, lumbered off to the little stream beside the teahouse, where they squatted down to wash their oily hands and faces, never taking their eyes off the lad who was seeing to the lorry.

  But today’s young drivers had different ideas about life. Most of them seemed to be rude and flippant, even those who drove ambulances. They were as arrogant as cats that had been told their shit had some use. They didn’t give a damn about their passengers and just kept their foot on the floor. It didn’t matter if it had been raining and the potholes were full of water; they couldn’t be bothered to avoid the bumps or think about an old man perched on the narrow bench in the back, clinging on to his daughter’s coffin. the colonel was aware that, by giving his daughter a coffin and an ambulance, they had shown him some respect, but he also noticed that the driver could not care less, and was driving as if he was delivering meat to the butcher’s. No question about it – quite unwittingly on his part, he had got this chap out of bed, even though he was supposed to be on nightshift, and now he would be cursing the colonel under his breath all the way to the cemetery.

  And again he fell to thinking that, if he had not killed his wife, his daughter would not be lying there in her coffin now. But he knew perfectly well that persisting in this line would get him nowhere and that nothing was going to change. The truth that was now staring him in the face was that Parvaneh was lying in a coffin that smelt of blood and guts and, with every bump in the road, her skinny little body was flapping around in it like a half-dead fish. Parvaneh had been young and the colonel could not imagine her without her grey school smock. He could even picture the outline of her bony shoulders through it. So much about Parvaneh reminded the colonel of the little canary which, from the first day, he had named after her. Perhaps he had become so attached to his motherless daughter through having had to bring her up on his own, loving her both as father and as a mother. He saw her as a fledgling that he was teaching how to fly. He had once heard that young birds lose their way in storms, especially at dusk, and get blown off course into unfamiliar country. He saw all her comings and goings in this light and, when she disappeared, he imagined that the wind had carried her off and lost her.

  The wind confuses them, makes them giddy. I am no professional pigeon fancier, but I know th
is much, that young birds get lost in the wind, particularly in a west wind.10 It confuses them and makes them giddy, it ties them up in knots and they lose their sense of direction and, in their struggle to find their way, they break their wings. And in a storm there is no shortage of hawks and vultures looking for prey.

  The night that Parvaneh failed to come home, the colonel had a premonition that the wind had taken her, and he could not help thinking how many pigeons with bloodied wings he had seen over the years. So he waited, which was all he could do. Which in fact was not doing anything, but just a state of mind. A state of mind that our fathers and forefathers have passed down to us like some painful legacy. Waiting, endlessly waiting… And now he was waiting to get to the graveyard, in the hope that, as she was being consigned to the earth, he could pull aside Parvaneh’s blood-stained shroud and see her face one last time.11 Of course, he could uncover her right here in the ambulance, but he was worried that this breach of the rules might have unpleasant consequences, both for him and for the others. He could imagine her face and he could even feel how she had become almost weightless in her innocence, more so than she had ever been in her life. This feeling only served to heighten the pain, making it so acute as to almost tip the old man over into madness. But because he knew he had to remain calm and composed, he forced himself to suppress all thoughts – impossible thoughts – that his daughter was alive, as it was obviously out of the question. Experience had taught him that outpourings of grief at the death of a loved one come from remembering moments in their life. So, the only way for him to hold back his grief would be to resist thinking of her as alive. This was anything but easy, and required complete control over his nerves and over his mind. He was determined to shut out any thoughts of his daughter when she was alive until after the funeral, when everyone had gone away. And so he tried to imagine Parvaneh as a dead fish on a river bank, wrapped in a dirty cloth, which flapped this way and that every time the ambulance hit a bump in the road.

  But… was it really because I disobeyed orders, was arrested and went to prison, that I could not do my duty by Parvaneh, my youngest child? After all, Farzaneh, her elder sister, was busy looking after her husband, and my boys had all gone their own ways. Amir was in prison, Mohammad-Taqi was trying to get into university and Masoud was a complete loner. Oh my poor children… at least one of you might have taken better care of yourselves. It’s not as if you had to bear the whole weight of the world on your shoulders! I am not as strong as you may think I am. Do you want to take on the whole world? Life is not about winning, you know… But whenever I tackled them about this, they always had an answer up their sleeves.

  “But we get it all from you, papa, you are one of the few officers of the Shah who refused to go to Dhofar. You were the only person who told us all about Mossadeq and how he nationalised the oil industry.”12

  I walked a very straight line, my dear children. But none of you cared about the others and you all went charging off in different directions. What’s the matter with you all? You’re all one family, but you bark up different trees! What is it that you are all after, that keeps you so much at each other’s throats? Are you all living on different planets?

  No, in fact they were living on the same planet. But each of them reckoned to have found their own answers to life. They showed me respect but, at bottom, they did not believe in me. When it came down to it, they saw me as an officer of the Shah, although they granted that I’d had no part in the crime that was Dhofar. But even that couldn’t prevent them from regarding me as a creature of the old regime.

  They knew all about the pyramid structure of the Shah’s army, but I could never get them to accept the truth. My children did not despise me, but I felt their contempt deep within me. Maybe they were brighter than me and were simply foreseeing the day when their father, the great patriotic military man, would end up as an old pigeon fancier and a setar player who couldn’t even play any more. And if I hadn’t killed their mother, would they even pay me the slightest attention nowadays? Who knows? But I did kill my wife, and it wasn’t difficult. Which was how I ended up going to the detention barracks without a care in the world.

  “Did you really kill your wife, colonel?”

  “Yes, I did. Does that surprise you?”

  “And you didn’t go to Dhofar?”

  “As you can see, no.”

  “We’re here, colonel. Please step down.”

  “Yes, all right, just a minute.”

  The back doors of the ambulance opened and practised hands pulled the coffin out. The coffin was light, very light, feather-light. They put it down in the mud next to one of the graves and stood aimlessly around it. In the darkness, one could not make out which prominent family the grave belonged to. It was still raining, which was probably why the driver hauled himself over to the passenger side, stuck his head out of the window and told one of the policemen, whom he addressed as Ali Seif, that it was time to get back. This was when the colonel learned the policeman’s name, and he made an effort to keep it in his head. He thought that it was perfectly natural for the driver to want to get back, as he had done his job. He had taken a lot of trouble, coming out of his way over the muddy, bumpy track up the hill to the graveyard. Ali Seif said nothing to the driver, or perhaps he did and the colonel did not hear him above the hissing of the rain. The driver started to move off and they all knew that he would have to reverse first to find a wider space to turn round in. They kept staring at the ambulance as it went off, clearly worried that one of its back wheels would slide off the track and get stuck in the mud. Only when it had got to a clear space, turned round, accelerated down the hill and disappeared did they breathe a sigh of relief. They looked at each other and then realised that they were still some way from the mortuary, where they needed to wash the body before burying it. the colonel, in some puzzlement, supposed that the driver had made a mistake and taken them to the graveyard first, instead of to the mortuary.

  Of course, it was nothing to do with me. I had never felt the need to commit to memory the geometrical position of the cemetery. I was under arrest when my wife was buried, and at Mohammad-Taqi’s funeral I had my head buried in my shoulders and, apart from sun and dust, I couldn’t see anyone or anything in front of me. I had lost all sense of direction. That day was the first time that I felt no wish to look the world in the face.

  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.13 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 t
he 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.