The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Page B

the wooden bed with its rumpled sheets, an old army blanket over his head. He was shaking all over and staring blankly into space – his squint even more noticeable now – as if dazed. He was so wrapped up in his own misery that he had not even noticed his father coming in. the colonel stood and looked at him. Sweat was running down his forehead and his long unkempt hair was matted together. He seemed to have been fighting with his demons in a nightmare. His body twitched convulsively as if struggling against terrible forces from another world, against things that were so
unspeakable that he could not bring himself to say what they were.
    the colonel had to sit down for a minute to rest. He lit a cigarette, pulled up his stool and, sitting with his back to the half-finished bust that Amir was working on, he could see half of Amir’s face. He proffered him the cigarette. He knew that it would be better to get him a glass of water first, but it was too late and Amir snatched the cigarette from the colonel’s hand. As he dragged deeply on it, the colonel noticed that Amir’s lips were as dry and cracked as a flake of bark. Amir held the smoke in his lungs for as long as he could and, when he finally exhaled, it had mingled with his own damp breath and came out like a jet of steam. Neither of them could think of anything to say. So this, then, was his son – a broken man with grey hair sprouting on his forehead, shattered, desperate and ill.
    Amir suddenly seemed to come to, but even when awake he could not seem to escape his nightmares. His lips did not move, and neither did his face, but the colonel could hear his voice, a voice that was broken and changed, as if he were conversing with his bones:
    â€œâ€¦the madman, that same madman that I once saw in Birjand, the one they called the Caliph. 16 No-one knew where he had come from. His face, his eyes, his beard and even the hairs on his temples were dark blue and they said that he would never age and that he had never been any younger than he was now. They said that, to avoid his evil eye, you had to give him alms every time you passed him. They said that a look from him brought a curse and that his breath was
poisonous. Yes, that’s right, it was him. He was sitting in a porchway and pissing blood. He was pissing blood into my eyes and I couldn’t shut them. It had run down to the corner of my mouth and in through my clenched teeth. Clotted now, it was blocking my throat and I was choking while I was forced to look at his cock, which he had sliced up with a barber’s razor. I had seen this all with my own eyes when I was a boy. He had painted a face on the tip of his dick and now he was ripping it up with a razor. Then the police came running up. They bundled him into a droshky and carted him off to hospital and we all thought he’d bleed to death. But a week later he was back under the same porchway, sitting on the same charpoy. He’d got himself another razor and was weeping and preparing to mutilate his cock again. He was acting like a man possessed. Now and then, he wiped the snot off his nose with a handkerchief and kept maundering on in a whiny voice. I saw it all myself in my childhood, or maybe in some other childhood, perhaps in a previous incarnation several generations back. But I was seeing it now, and I couldn’t do anything about it and I couldn’t stand it. I was in agony from pain and pus and suffocation and just wanted to die, but… there was worse to come. The Caliph laid his dick on a piece of black stone from an old tomb, got another sharp stone and… ugh! My skull was bursting and I was yelling, but the Caliph kept beating me about the head with his sharp stone until it was all mashed up and I was still screaming and screaming and I pulled at a cord that was round my neck until it was tight round my throat and I couldn’t move, because I was squashed. But I could still feel the Caliph