The Colonel

by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Khezr put down his empty glass, crossed his right leg over his left, undid his shoelaces and took off one of his shoes. Amir took it from him and put it in a corner, leaving Khezr’s hands free to undo the other one. As Amir placed it beside the other, he realised that Khezr was intending to stay the night. His heart sank, not least at the thought of Mohammad-Taqi’s pistol in the sitting room. The pistol on its own was cause enough for horror but, added to it, was Mohammad-Taqi’s alarming curiosity about Khezr, a curiosity blended with a suspicion that had turned into a certainty. Given what Amir knew about his brother’s state of mind, and in particular his belief that the revolution had to be brought about through violence, he was worried that Mohammad-Taqi would take out his pent-up feelings of hatred on an enemy who, in his view, was a well known agent of the destruction of a whole generation of his countrymen. There was bound to be a bloody outcome. Nowadays, there were any number of people, ordinary people on the street or bazaar folk, all looking for revenge, either on personal grounds or simply because it had become a national pastime. From every other tree lining the streets they were busy stringing up dozens of known police informers like Khezr the Immortal. To a hotheaded, vengeful young man like Mohammad-Taqi, who had lost so many of his comrades over the years, it would seem only natural, after more than half a century of oppression, to drag a police torturer out of his house and sacrifice him to the mad juggernaut of the revolution.

  … But what am I supposed to do in this situation? The ancient tribal customs of our country still more or less obtain, albeit they may have faded somewhat, and one of them is the sacrosanct duty of a host to protect his guest – even if he is a sworn enemy. The pressures of city life may have made it harder to observe these customs, but one does not forget them.

  Why was I inclined to take these laws of hospitality so seriously, as if it were some sacred duty to look after Khezr Javid? Didn’t I have every right to throw him out? Not one hair of my body is happy to have him in the house. I’m terrified of the consequences of having him here, but just as terrified of driving him away. If I have invoked custom and tradition, it is only because I was afraid. I have no doubt that if I saw Khezr in the street, I would just cross over to the other side. But now it is a different situation and I am trapped in a corner and I can’t see a way out of this fix.

  “Penny for your thoughts, comrade?”

  He had used the word ‘comrade’ ironically, of course. Amir had no idea where on earth his mind was wandering to. He turned round to look at Khezr. He was lying on the bed, half leaning on the pillows and half propped up on his right elbow. He was looking at the tumbler in his hand, which he had filled without offering any to Amir. He was swirling the arack gently round in the glass as Amir stammered back that he had not been thinking about anything.

  “I’ll be sleeping here tonight.”

  Khezr said this in a bullying, aggressive tone, boasting his self-confidence. With a smile dripping with artifice, Amir replied that there was a bed and that he would change the sheets.

  Khezr said nothing and Amir realised that he was pretending that it did not matter. Khezr seemed to be feeling hot, for he got up to take off his jacket. When he reached up to hang it on the coat rack, Amir saw his shoulder holster with his side arm in it. Just as in the interrogation room, it hung off his left shoulder and was slightly angled so that he could easily reach the butt with his right hand and draw it. As Khezr sat down again, Amir could see the holster more clearly, with the black pistol butt sticking out of it. Khezr picked up the glass and, raising it to his lips, he grinned:

  “Would you believe that in all the mayhem of the revolution I still walked right through the middle of town, just like that? Would you believe that?”

  Amir said that he believed it. He knew that the arack had gone to Khezr’s head, but had not made him drunk. He remembered that, some nights when things were not busy in the interrogation block, Khezr would sit in his room after a glass or two and talk about himself and brag about his deeds of derring-do, how he had been in Dhofar and been on dangerous missions in the marshes along the Iraqi border, which had all ended in success. And indeed, his swift rise in the security services did seem to indicate that there was some substance to his boasts.

  “It must have been towards the end of February, in fact ten days after February 11th, the day the Shah left, that I saw three of your comrades. Two of them had been my prisoners and I knew the other one. What do you think happened? They went white as chalk. They knew very well that, one squeak out of any one of them, they were all dead meat. So what do you think happened then? Everything went off nice and peacefully, as it turned out. Except that, the very next morning, on the front page of your newspaper, there was a lead article asking what sort of revolution this was that allowed former executioners to walk freely in the streets. And this, of course, was under a big headline announcing that you were publishing a list of all SAVAK informers. The comrades had pointed out the lion tracks. So what was your politbureau up to, then? Why aren’t you drinking?”

  There was no doubt in Amir’s mind that Khezr was telling this story because of Mohammad-Taqi. Khezr was clearly both suspicious and afraid of Amir’s wild and hot-headed brother, but he wanted to give the impression that he was not in the least worried by what he might do. Perhaps he had decided to spend the night here precisely in order to dispel any impression that he was going to creep around in fear of Mohammad-Taqi. As it happened, his reasons for doing so were quite different, but Amir would only learn about this later.

  “You said you don’t want a drink. Why not?”

  Amir said he didn’t like it; it damaged his brain. Khezr had already asked him this question. Now he was asking again. This showed that he liked repeating himself. Amir knew Khezr well enough to know that this was not a sign that he was unexpectedly drunk. Khezr drained his glass and told Amir he could put the stopper back on the can, and keep it for tomorrow evening. Then, not fussing about creasing his trousers, he stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes.

  Amir knew that Khezr always slept with one eye open and never went into a deep sleep. But at least he was in bed now, and the evening was at an end, which meant that Amir, too, could think about sleeping at last. He could have gone upstairs to get a mattress and blanket for himself, but decided against it, firstly because he didn’t want to run into Mohammad-Taqi and, secondly because he did not want to stoke up Khezr’s suspicions any more. Instead, he made a makeshift bed on the rush mat on the floor, but he entertained no hopes of sleeping. He got up once to collect the glasses and other bits and pieces on a tray, which he did not want to take upstairs, then again to turn off the light and switch it back on again. Then he lay awake for a long time wondering whether Khezr wanted the basement door shut or left half-open. Every time he got up he noticed that Khezr’s right eye was half open. He also took in that Khezr was lying so as to face into the room. Amir usually slept with his face glued to the wall. Finally, leaving the light on and the door half-open, he lit a cigarette and lay back. With one arm flung over his forehead, he tried to calm himself down by watching the smoke curling upwards between his fingers. Sleep was out of the question, not because he had been sleeping all afternoon, but because he kept turning over in his mind what to do about Khezr – the enemy within – as Mohammad-Taqi would have put it. He wanted to treat it as a perfectly ordinary matter, but even that was impossible. He could only hope that Mohammad-Taqi had got off his high horse and had gone to bed. It was even more important that Masoud should spend at least tonight either in the mosque or at the neighbourhood Komité38 and not show his face at home. He also hoped that Parvaneh would not get to hear of his little problem. For it was quite possible that she, the last person one would expect to do such a thing, would let the cat out of the bag and bring disaster down on the family. Amir felt as if the evil eye had struck him through his brothers and sister, with all their crazy carryings-on in the revolution, and he was frightened by it. They were all in it, up to their necks, for heaven’s sake!r />
  “I think I’ll go and get a nose job!”

  There was a change in tone from Khezr now, from his previous sickly-sweet, drunken and sleepy utterings. Thinking he ought to show that he was listening, Amir propped himself up and turned towards Khezr to face him. There, standing in the doorway, was his brother Mohammad-Taqi holding a mattress and quilt under his arm:

  “I thought the floor might be damp, bro. I’ll take the tray up as well.”

  Amir sprang awkwardly to his feet. He did not know which to do first, take the quilt and mattress, or pass his brother the tray. To his utter bafflement Khezr who, through his half-open eye must have seen Mohammad-Taqi standing there in the doorway, began to speak, in a perfectly flat, even voice:

  “My father said… my father wished to be buried… in the highest part out in the country… on the highest hill outside the town… he had seen a little place and bought it.”

  “Er… yes… er… God rest his s…”

  “Brother!” Mohammad-Taqi’s shout drew Amir up sharp and made up his mind to take the mattress first and then pass over the tray. His brother had already spread out the bedding on the mat and was waiting with arms outstretched to take the tray. This helped him. Like a sleep-walker, he picked up the tray of dirty plates and handed it to his brother. “I’ll get you some water.”

  “My father wanted to be buried in the open air, he wanted a cool breeze coming down the mountain to blow over him. You know, he believed that fresh air was good for the soul… I don’t know why I’m thinking about your father’s death, the colonel’s death… damn it!”

  “Mr Javid, would you like me to make you up some lemonade?”

  “I’m going for a nose job… And, when I get back, you will see that this lumpy monstrosity on my face will have gone… My father was always saying that a man needs fresh air for the good of his soul… Damn you… Damn all of you!

  Damn you all, you useless bunch! Couldn’t you have blown him sky high? Didn’t you have even a Kalashnikov or an RPG-7?39 Did none of you have any balls between your legs? Oh no, you stupid airheads went out waving silk handkerchiefs to welcome him, waiting for him to come and stick a hot poker up your arses, and forced me to submit my honourable nose to the indignity of the surgeon’s knife… and to glue a fuzz of beard onto my immaculate face, which I have been shaving religiously every morning for the last thirty years… and made me drink this revolting hooch out of an old petrol can, instead of the sublime Johnnie Walker, and wake up half-blind from it in the morning… couldn’t you, couldn’t you have just blown him out of the bloody sky?40 No, you couldn’t… Damn the lot of you! And now you want to go and start a revolution in Turkmen country, do you! I’ll kill the lot you, you whoresons!”41

  “Would you like me to light you a cigarette?”

  The only response was Khezr’s snoring. Amir calmed down a little and, hoping that his guest would fall into a deep sleep, he rested his head on his arm once more and stared up at the damp, bulging ceiling of the basement. But he was far from certain that Khezr would fall into a deep sleep, or even a drunken slumber. In prison, they had called Khezr ‘The Dog,’ because dogs are both awake and asleep at the same time.

  From near and far came the sound of occasional shots, as if to remind Amir what a risk he was taking by sheltering Khezr Javid. It was precisely the likes of Khezr they were shooting. The odd thing was that Khezr remained completely oblivious to all the goings-on outside, or at least pretended to be. To all outward appearances, he seemed to regard everything that was taking place as completely normal and natural. Amir, however, knew that Khezr was no slouch and that this detached and carefree attitude of his, even if he had nerves of steel, could not be real. He must have been driven by some inner sense of security and self-confidence that underlay all this show of coolness. After all, he was not some unknown, nameless policeman. It was a sign of his thrusting ambition but also of his raging inferiority complex that he had once declared, ‘Did you know that I was the only one in the office not to have a cover name?’ Amir saw no reason not to believe his story about the three ex-prisoners of his, presumably revolutionaries, whom he had come across in the street. Amir knew Khezr well enough to suspect that, aside from his sheer bravado, he must have some other trump card up his sleeve. Had he not once said himself that he had been one of the organisers of the demonstration of jobless security policemen protesting outside the prime minister’s office in the Revolutionary Government? During his time in prison, Amir had come to the conclusion that SAVAK was the most solid and tightly structured of all the secret services. But did its members really believe in what they were doing? It was fair to assume that the people’s revolutionary uprising must have had some effect even on people like Khezr, and made them reflect, if only briefly, on the lives that they had led. For sure, with all the courage of his profession, Khezr was not going to admit to his own fear of the revolution. Otherwise, why was it that his incoherent mutterings when he was in his cups, whether uttered consciously or sub-consciously, all had to do with the revolution?

  “Couldn’t you – or weren’t you allowed – to do anything without permission? It could have been done, I know it could have been done, because even we had had a plan to shoot Khomeini, but we weren’t allowed to do it. What about you? You had orders from on high not to do anything! Oh yes… you lot assassinate people when you are supposed not to be terrorists, and when you are supposed not to be democratic, you become democrats all of a sudden. You’re nothing but hired mercenaries, traitors to your country!”42

  I was looking up at the bulging basement ceiling, with half a smile on my face and thinking how interesting this all was. Because there was no doubt that, no matter what we did, we were traitors and were to blame. The men who ran State Security held the whip hand over the country’s oil, the police, the SAM-7 anti-aircraft missiles and the army. All we needed was a nod and a wink to blast the Leader of the Revolution out of the sky and into eternity! No, it’s our fault, whatever we did or didn’t do. The worst of it is that, whatever we might or might not have done, the end result is that we are to blame, and we are traitors to our country as well.

  “It’s you who claim to be carrying history forward, not me, not us!”

  “But, even if we could have done it, we couldn’t have blown up someone who was supposed to be the saviour of the nation.”

  “Was supposed to be, or you supposed him to be?”

  Khezr was sitting up now, confused, looking at Amir. Out of respect for him, Amir was obliged to reciprocate and prop himself up on his elbow so that he could look back at him. He was expecting Khezr to lay into him with renewed vigour, but instead, he pulled the can of arack towards him, poured himself half a glass, downed it in one and settled back on two pillows without a word. This silence may have prompted Amir to ask him, out of sheer curiosity:

  “What difference, just what difference would it have made to you if the revolution had turned out differently?”

  This time, without blinking an eye, Khezr answered him: “In that case I would have worked for you lot, I’d have been able to have my whisky again, I’d have carried on investigating people and I wouldn’t have had to get a nose job, or stick a floor-brush of a beard on my face in order to work for this bloody bunch.”

  “What makes you think we’d have given people like you a job? How come you’re so sure we wouldn’t have just rubbed you out?”

  With a quiet smile, Khezr puffed on the cigarette that Amir had lit for him and, with disconcerting certainty, replied: “Listen, boy. Political police are like a religion. Has anyone ever heard of a religion being overthrown?” He paused and went on: “A new gang may take over, but they don’t go and overthrow the very basis of the old régime. I grant you that some of us were strung up by a few of your hot-headed brethren, but that’s not the end of the story. Not by any means. We’re the very base and foundation of everything, we are the underpinning of the state, my engineer friend!”

  The cigarette ash was dropping i
nto Amir’s hand, so he fetched an ashtray, and held it under Khezr’s waving hand, catching the ash as it dropped. As Khezr started talking, it was not clear whether he was awake or asleep; he sounded drowsy and he appeared not to be talking to anyone in particular; he was rambling to himself, going over his old life:

  “…so I said that I’d come to serve the Shah and my country. I thought that the colonel was staring at my nose. I looked down, so that he couldn’t see my nose, and I asked him to put in a good word for me. I had been recommended to him before. I was fed up with the Thursday evening local teachers’ book club meetings.43 I’d only joined it out of boredom; in fact I had set it up, and I was fed up with it. Fed up with those evenings, and fed up with the teachers who only went along so as not to become opium addicts. And I was fed up with my rickety old bicycle, which always got a puncture on the rocky tracks, and I always had to hump it on my back all the way home to mend the puncture and then go back to the village in the morning to give lessons to those shaven headed, lice-ridden, snotty-faced children about the battles of Xerxes the Great… You were a history teacher, too, weren’t you?

  “Yes.”

  “Then there was the bloody heat. I was sweating non-stop out of all my seven orifices. Everything was dust, date palms and despair. There was an occasional tall, gangly Arab and some water buffaloes… So I told the colonel that I was tired of teaching, of the bicycle, the humidity, the dust and the children… the filth on their faces would feed seven hungry dogs. I said that I wanted to serve my country. the colonel said he was always delighted to hear from ambitious young men wanting to serve their country. He said that a young man should advance himself and secure himself a bright future, and he said that I appeared to be a deserving young chap. And I was; I was capable and deserving, and this was the first time that anyone had acknowledged me. I was sick of nobody paying any attention to me. I was suffocating from being ignored. If anyone did look at me, all they saw was that I was short and had a big nose. Was that all there was to me – just a shortarse with a big nose, eh? Oh no, I knew I was more than that, I knew I was worth something, not like those teachers who got together on Thursday nights and poked fun at me, in front of me and behind my back, because I didn’t understand the poetry of Nima Yushij44 as well as they did. But I proved, in those first six months, I proved to the colonel that he had not got me wrong.”