The Colonel

Table of Contents

 

 

 

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN's Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers' freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

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In the original Persian, the title of the book is
Kolonel
, from the French. There are two colonels confronting the reader in this book: the nameless colonel of the title and his
alter ego
in the photograph. Both are referred to as
Kolonel.
The Persian for ‘colonel' is
sarhang
, but there was one colonel who was always known as
Kolonel
. This was Mohammad-Taqi Khan Pesyan who, in recognition for his training in Europe, was given the nickname
Kolonel
. Any educated Iranian would know who this was. His story is in the Glossary. To help the reader distinguish between the two colonels, I have referred to Pesyan as ‘The Colonel', while the protagonist remains in lower case.

Dowlatabadi's language shatters the Persian literary conventions. It is rough and ready, the language of the street and the barrack room. Like the great 11th century Persian epic
Shahnameh
, it avoids the use of Arabic words imported into Persian. In an effort to reproduce this in English I have tried to use Anglo-Saxon words in preference to Latin.

 

Tom Patterdale

This was perhaps the twentieth butt that he had stubbed out since nightfall. He was feeling suffocated and he had smoked so much that he had lost all sense of taste. The cracked pane in front of him had steamed up. It was unusually quiet.

Every knock at the door broke the caressing silence of the rain. There was nothing but the sound of unremitting rain drumming on the rusty tin roof, so unceasing that it amounted to silence.

In the evening after the rain, just after sunset, the ochre of the rooftops glowed with melancholy beauty, in those days when the first grey hairs had started to appear on his temples. In those days he still walked upright, with his head held high, and he could feel the earth under his feet. He had not been old and worn out then, his cheeks had not yet sunk in and the worry lines had yet to furrow their way across his brow.

“Yes, yes, I'm coming… Just a minute…”

Why should he need to ask who it was, banging on his door at this ungodly hour? It's not that he didn't dare ask the question. No. It wasn't like that at all. It was just that he knew that, in the end, it made no difference. He knew full well that nobody knocked on a locked door in the middle of the night without a reason.

“colonel?”

“Yes, yes…”

“Is that you, colonel?”

“Who else did you think it would be?”

“Well, why don't you open the door?”

“All right, all right, I'll open it. I'm trying to find the key. Ah, I've got it. Oh, no, that's the key to the safe. I'll have to go and look for the right one. Sorry, just give me a minute…”

There it was, right beneath The Colonel's shiny black field boots, next to the passport photo of Mohammad-Taqi, which he had had taken for his driving licence. He had placed the photo there two, maybe three, years ago, next to The Colonel's shiny black boots so that he could get used to looking at his son.

In truth the colonel had made this decision for his own self-preservation. By positioning his son's photograph at eye level he would force himself to ride out the great wave of emotion that welled up from the depths of his heart to invade his mind. He believed that as long as Mohammad-Taqi's photo was where he could see it, he wouldn't run the risk of forgetting the boy. He tried to persuade himself that by always facing his son, he was facing the barrage of emotion that wanted to destroy him. It was just like ‘engage and confront' in army exercises.
Or like war. A decisive blow has to be delivered where the enemy least expects it. You can only parry an attack if you are prepared.

He had kept the full-length portrait of The Colonel before his eyes for half a century. He had also felt an urge – yes, even a longing – to push his wife's photograph into the left-hand corner of the frame, right beneath the point of The Colonel's sabre, so that he could look at her as well.
But I couldn't… I still can't.
But he had managed to position Parvaneh's photo right
beneath The Colonel's boot. That was different. Three days and three nights after she had left the house and never returned, he had placed Parvaneh's photo next to Mohammad-Taqi in the right-hand corner of the frame. For almost two months now, he had been trying to get used to seeing the little photo of his daughter – and the one of Masoud, whom they called Little Kuchik at home:
Ah yes, Kuchik. Maybe it was because of his bushy black eyebrows and low forehead that the children had nicknamed him Kuchik Jangali…
'
¹

“I've got the key, I've just found it. I'll open the door now. I'll be with you in a second. Come in. Good evening!”

The pale reflection from the neon light in the shrine to the young martyr
²
on the street corner opposite lit up the colonel's face like a moonbeam and fell on the olive green parkas of his visitors. Merging with the drizzle, it formed a white mist, which glinted off the men's epaulettes and the peaks of their caps. From their silhouettes, the colonel could see that both men were young and carried rifles slung over their shoulders, which was probably why the colonel did not even hear himself wish them a good evening. He found himself doing it again. He gave himself up and waited for these two youths to say something, anything, and to do with him whatever they pleased.

They did not take long. One of them took a torch from a deep pocket in his parka and, even though he could see the
colonel's face perfectly well by the cold light from the shrine, he pointed the sharp beam at him, flashed it round the rain-soaked yard and, before it could reflect off the water in the pond, shone it down on the colonel's wet galoshes and then switched it off, as if waiting for his companion to make a move.

The colonel was full of questions. As he stood there in the rain, hunched and stooping, with his rigid, frightened gaze, he looked just like a question mark written by a child with bad handwriting. But no question came to his lips: not a single word could he utter. He could not even remember the simplest of greetings. He just stared at the two young men, still standing outside, who seemed to be inspecting something somewhere in the rainy reflections from the shrine.

They could think whatever they wanted, but what was preoccupying the colonel, quite apart from the fear flowing through him like a river, was that these two were the same age as Mohammad-Taqi and Kuchik. All he could think was that if Mohammad-Taqi had lived, he would have been twenty-one in March, on 3rd March 1983 to be exact, and that Kuchik Masoud, if he were still alive, would now be about twenty-six.

“Now then, lads, don't stand outside in the rain, come inside.”

What else could he have said? Even though they had not shown the colonel their identity cards, he could hardly object to their coming in.