The Colonel

by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

  But no-one has the right to undermine or obstruct the hopes and aspirations of the young on the basis of one’s own experience. It is quite wrong to be a doom-monger. No, one should keep one’s peace and just nod one’s head in agreement. To launch young people on their way, one should provide them with all the space and opportunities that one can and then leave the rest up to them and up to luck. That is what I did for my children.

  But when I ran into Amir in prison I saw that his views on life, on his education, on his course of studies and on his future and so forth had completely changed from what they had been a few years before. Without any logic, he had grown more embittered and yet at the same time more hopeful. Embittered by what he had had to go through in prison, yet still hopeful for the future of his country.

  This may have been some sort of realism appearing in him, but his new realism was just as embittered as his old hopefulness had been so delightfully energetic, so when they let him out I was surprised by the sudden naïve, over-hasty optimism that had seized him, as if he were starting with a clean slate. Had he been swept along by the sudden wave of unrest, which had taken everyone by surprise? Yes, that must have been it. By the time he had come to his senses, the universities had been closed down and he found himself teaching history and design in a secondary school. I remember clearly that he showed no sign of concern when they closed the universities, and I even heard him say that this was the only way to root out the opposition groups!30 I can’t remember much in particular about him getting his first job, but I remember exactly the day when he lost it, as if it were engraved on my mind.

  It was raining that day and it was exactly seventeen minutes past nine, and the colonel was sitting behind the steamed-up windows of Noqli’s teahouse, gazing out at the muddy pavement, when he saw Amir coming back from the school. Amir was walking along the pavement with his raincoat collar turned up and holding his old umbrella over his head. He slowed down in front of the teahouse and stopped. the colonel could see him, but through the steamed-up windows Amir could scarcely make out any of the customers in the smoke-filled room. ‘Perhaps he wanted to come in for tea and a cigarette,’ thought the colonel, but Amir changed his mind and carried on. the colonel decided that it was the thought of facing his father that had changed Amir’s mind, for of course Amir knew that Noqli’s teahouse was his father’s regular haunt. He even knew some of the regulars: one of the longest-standing was Kerbela’i31 Ramazan Kolahi, who was already losing his sight. He was usually to be found keeping warm beside Noqli’s big samovar, peering through his spectacles, which were as thick as the bottom of his tea glass.

  It was not only the thought of finding his father in the teahouse that had made Amir change his mind. It was more likely to have been that, in his present mistrustful and listless state, he did not want to meet anyone at all. Whatever it might have been, Amir carried on past the teahouse and went home.

  Thereafter, though, what seemed odd to the colonel was that, unlike the other teachers who had been sacked and wore their dismissal as a badge of honour and who, for a while at least, had exploited it to boost their egos, Amir cut himself off from everyone and retired to the basement. He lost all interest in life, and made no secret of it. He did not always show it in public, but he did not force it on anyone, either. Most people, including his sister Farzaneh, judged his silent introspection by normal standards, but the colonel saw it in a different light: I saw that Amir had arrived at a new certainty. He had realised that this was a way of isolating him and his ilk from society as a whole. For the colonel could not believe that being sacked, on its own, could have had such a demoralising effect on Amir. He knew his son; coming as it did after he had been prevented from continuing his university studies, his subsequent dismissal from his teaching post would have taken on far greater significance than just one of those disappointments that happens now and again at work. I could see from the way my son reacted that he felt deeply humiliated. Perhaps I can’t explain exactly what I mean, but I’ll try to find the right words. Yes, my son believed he had been rejected and ostracised by society, something that he had never envisaged for himself. Maybe this had speeded up the process of his disintegration, which was why he was now turning all his energies to shutting others out of his life. From that day on Amir never wound his watch again, and did not read a newspaper or listen to the radio. the colonel never saw him buy another book, or begin reading a new one. Amir never even left the house.

  Meanwhile, the colonel had slowly undressed and was trying to wrap his freezing bones in a tattered old sheet to keep warm. He was thinking that, if he could see himself in a mirror, he would look like a harmless little goblin. Then, forgetting all about Amir for a moment, he suddenly realised that his clothes were still wet – but he needed them today, this very day, which had followed on from yesterday and would slide into tomorrow without stopping. Today, he would have to put his suit on once more and go out into this wretched rain again, this time for the funeral of his Little Masoud. It was enough to make you weep – except that he felt no self-pity and could not cry. In this situation, where absolutely nothing seemed to be normal, and indeed nothing was normal, the colonel simply felt unclean and disgusting and that there was nothing human about him. All he wanted to do at that moment was to be able to purge himself of all the filth and misfortune, to slough his skin, his whole body, his entire being, and so free himself from the dirt, death and humiliation that surrounded him. He had to accept all these wounds, all this pain and corruption, as just a disease, a disease that he wanted to get away from and shake the filth of it off his back. He wanted to scrub off the dirt and filth; he wanted to scrape the scrofula off himself, but he was incapable of recognising the baneful truth that its cold abscesses had already invaded the stinking fabric of his being and had taken it over.

  Knowing what he did about the state Amir was in, how could he possibly demand that he come with him to Masoud’s funeral? On the other hand, if he did not tell him, it might well later come back to haunt him that he had kept quiet about his brother’s death at the front.

  He was shivering; the dwindling warmth of the stove and the tatty sheet did nothing to dispel the cold that had penetrated to the marrow of his bones. The teapot and kettle were still sitting on top of the stove and the tea glasses were on the table in their saucers, with the remains of yesterday’s tea still in them. the colonel took the sugar bowl down from the shelf above the fire, glancing as he did so at Amir’s watch on the mantelpiece, which had been sitting there, unwound, for more than a year. He did not know what time of day it was, or whether it was yesterday or tomorrow. He knew that its hands had stopped, frozen in one long, leaden moment of time. He would have to drink this tepid tea and think about getting the stove going again. He felt that all the last few days had been compressed into one, and all the past seasons into one long cold season, a season that was as cold and lifeless as lead.32

  On a whim, he asked Amir: “What do you know about the days and the seasons? Can you remember anything about spring and autumn, summer and winter?” Amir gave no answer and the colonel expected no answer to such a pointless question. He did not exactly expect Amir to burst into speech and tell him, or anyone else for that matter, what was on his mind. For some time now, he had realised that Amir had lost his past, and he had even heard him saying it: “I feel as though my past, all the lines my past is written on, have been wiped out with a rubber.” And the colonel wondered how a man without his past could live. And how could a man without a past have a future? the colonel’s son, Amir had become aware of his loss of identity, of his lack of identity, and believed in it and had accepted it. The tragedy of my eldest son’s life is that he has lost his belief, and his nightmare might be that he knows he had a hand in the killing of his sister and brothers. the colonel’s view was that such a creature, if he exerted all his hidden, innermost strength, would only destroy himself. His masterpiece would be to bury his own corpse.

  I don’t exist, I’m nobody’s
child, I belong nowhere. I exist only to deny my existence. My final trick will be to choose the manner and time of my own death, so that others will have to take to their graves their wish to kill me. This is the only way that I can take my revenge on the horror that has engulfed us. It’ll also be my revenge against myself. For I worked for the glory of the revolution, committing all kinds of crimes in its name. In fact, the only crime I had nothing to do with was the one involving that bloodstained knife!

  At first the colonel could not take Amir seriously, and he ascribed the boy’s ravings to his fragile mental condition. But in a strange way he gradually began to grasp their meaning. He would never have believed that the day would come when, as a father, he would accept his son’s judgement without demur. Revenge… Amir was always emphasising the word ‘revenge,’ a word whose proper meaning, at least from Amir’s point of view, was a long way from the colonel’s view of it.

  “Father, the tragedy is this! They say that the servants whom the Almighty loves, he kills. And I see that our country kills those who love it the most. Is this country committing suicide? They get under your skin, they use you to speak for them and, in your name, they then kill you. Crying ‘salvation and welfare’ they drive you to destruction. Your servants – people like you were once – are destroying you. First they denounce you with their eyes, then they falsify your identity with their tongues and, finally, they shred you with their teeth. And then you hear a terrible cry coming from the herd of gullible fellow-travellers, which sends a shiver down your spine, a chant that has been dinned into them: ‘Kill them! Tear them apart! Your number one enemy is the brother who shared your mother’s milk. There is a snake in your bosom, smash its head in! Your own children are snakes, your sister and your mother, your own kith and kin, the whole generation of your youth, even your friends! If anyone dares to laugh, smash his teeth in!’ Laughing is counted as treason, mourning and lamentation are now the order of the day. You are allowed to lament your own innocence, your stupidity and your perfidy and join in the general chorus of wailing. This pantomime delights the seekers after vengeance, it gives them the chance to laugh at their victims. All that remains are hollow creatures who have capitulated and who accept the most lethal sicknesses as normal. When those after us come to judge us, they will say: ‘Our forebears were people who lied to themselves, who believed their own lies and sacrificed themselves to them. And if they ever doubted their beliefs, they were lined up and it was off with their heads!’”

  the colonel listened in silence to Amir’s monologue. In his father’s presence, Amir was doing his best to speak in a measured and reasonable way. He seemed to be concentrating and trying hard not to get angry in front of the colonel. And for his part, despite the fact that Amir was not looking at him, the colonel was trying to look as though he was listening to him. He did not want to patronise his son. Whether he agreed with him or not, he was not going to allow the veil of their relationship to conceal the facts. On the face of it, he had no grounds for being proud of Amir, but inside he felt a glow of satisfaction that at least his son was at last thinking deeply about the problems of his country and his people. As a youth, like all the others of his age, Amir had been infatuated with muddled notions of changing the world.

  And had the Party had a hand in all this? While Amir was being tortured in prison, he had been forced to think about the realities of life and, when the prison gates were thrown open at the beginning of the revolution, he had tried to maintain a balance in his mind between revolutionary fervour and cool calculation. When the revolution happened, however, everything suddenly changed and, in spite of his utter sense of doubt and disbelief, he had fallen for the arguments of those willing Party fellow-travellers who had volunteered to join forces with the new Islamic regime, and had allowed himself to be sucked into their ranks, until the revolution began to take knives to his comrades’ throats. Then Amir, knowing full well that he had had some part in the sharpening of those knives, had suddenly fallen into silence and brooding, and had begun to disintegrate.

  From then on his whole being had been dominated by doubt and the wish to be allowed to think for himself – but it was a bit late for that now. There was no room in his head for all the questions whirling around in it, nor could he hope to resolve even the least of them on his own. The more he thought about it, the more he hated himself. He was disgusted at the way he had been taken in: hook, line, sinker and all. He did not know what to do. He had nowhere to go. He could not join those who had been executed, informed on, or who had become refugees, nor could he join those who had gone over to the new régime, which was only going to bring about a new era of refugees, informers and executions. No, he was one of those who chose to sit on the fence, ashamed of themselves, perpetual refugees from themselves, gradually immolating themselves. He tore himself apart, crying: ‘No, I shall not weep for the death of my friends, I shall not submit to the executioner’s sword, I shall not give myself up to lies and slavery. No, I will kill myself, for this is the only thing I can do, and I will do it.’

  What he was saying these days was radically different from what he used to say. There was a lot of sense in what he said now. But it could not last. Before long Amir had lapsed into hatred and resignation and had retreated into his shell. Rather than speak, he stayed silent and instead of thinking, he lost himself in his nightmares once more.

  His hands, which were big to start with, had grown bigger, larger than all the other parts of his body, and his fingers were even longer than his palms. When he opened his fists and showed the palms of his hands, his whole body disappeared behind them and his face looked like a battered coin. All you could see of him between his fingers were his hate-filled eyes.

  He thrust those same fists, those same long fingers, into my mother’s body, twisted his fist and forearm inside her and pulled out her womb. His fist was covered in blood and torn, slashed afterbirth and we – me and Parvaneh and Masoud and Taqi – were all left struggling like newly hatched chicks in his fist, which had turned into a vulture’s talons. With his malevolent and vengeful claw he pulled us out of the afterbirth and I saw that long scrawny, seemingly mummified arm, with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, dripping with blood, and we did not know which of us would be the first to die. We were screaming, but there was no sound. We flapped our wings, but our unfledged little wings were scrunched up in those bony fists. There was a gale blowing and we were caught up in flying branches and dead leaves and we were in the clutches of a wild eagle. There was a storm, and our screams were lost in the air and there were devils as big and black as the night sky as those claws dragged us down and down… Then I was aware of nothing until I felt his member in my throat, warm and filled with hot blood, and I heard the sharp blow of the old gravestone on my head, at the back of my neck, on my cheeks, on my shoulder blades, on my shins and arms and on my tongue, and I felt numb with pain and chewed up, like a piece of meat that has been through the mincer. He keeps beating his member – me, and all of us. He has laid his member over a lump of black stone in the hallway of that old house in Khorasan and is pissing blood, which flows down my throat and out into the street, spraying all those who pass by.

  When he had his epileptic fit in the hall, the midday summer sun was shining, it was August. It was unbearably hot.

  “Trapped between his legs, I am beginning to smell, I am rotting and flies are crawling over me. My wounds gradually turn into pus-filled scabs, which grow larger and larger and spread to him, covering first his legs, then his thighs, and stomach and chest and head and shoulders and arms and lips and teeth and mouth and his tongue so that we can stink together, and be corrupted. And then a unit arrives from the Point Four office to disinfect us all.33 But the putrescence has gone far beyond any normal bounds, so they have to use scissors and kitchen knives and a bow saw to remove the rotting flesh from our bones and, since we are rotten to the marrow, they decide to amputate our bones and they cut off our hands, that this corrupt body might be dismembere
d and then, in a manner of their own prior devising, reassembled. Once more I was lying on the concrete slab in the mortuary, and all I could hear was the rasping of the saw cutting through my leg and the roar of bulldozers outside digging a trench to bury our rottenness. I could also hear numberless graves being opened, and I imagined that they were exhuming bodies, dressing them in shining raiment and putting jewelled walking sticks in their hands. Led by a band of minstrels, the dead are to form a procession, to be honoured and glorified. And they are saying that there will soon be a big-screen showing of a sad film about the latest round of dead, a common occurrence these days. And I am still on that concrete platform, and my ligaments are being sawn through, and I hear that they are going to cremate my rottenness in the trench behind the mortuary and I shudder at the thought of the smell of burning bones and flesh and of the damp body washing house, and I am retching, but can vomit nothing up.”

  “Amir… Amir, my boy… don’t do this to your father!”

  But Amir was not there, and the colonel’s voice echoed back to him. A moment before, Amir had been sitting cross-legged on the floor the other side of the window. How had he managed to leave without the colonel noticing? Maybe he had not been there at all, and the colonel had just imagined him to be there? But no, he was sitting right there, just as he had been on that night when his mother was killed! the colonel could still hear him shouting:

  “Hate and loathing! How long can I go on living with all this hate inside me?”

  “Where are you, Amir, my boy? Speak to me, let me see you. We’re just two human beings. We used to talk to each other. I’m your father!”

  “I don’t recognise anyone. I don’t know anyone and I can’t understand anything. I can’t remember my past and I don’t want to remember. I’m afraid, afraid and disgusted, that’s all.”