The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Read Free Book Online

no sooner had you emerged from it than you could
see in front of you the meadows on the foothills ablaze with flowers, and inhale the breeze that came down the mountains to fill the lungs, blowing away the accumulation of cheap cigarette smoke, and sucking in the delight of being alive. These were moments to be savoured, when no black clouds hung over the sky, and the sun did not seem to have swallowed itself in grief. Not like these days, when the sun seemed to have been buried for ever and there was nothing but the irritating drip of incessant, soul-destroying rain.
    As the colonel turned into his street he knew that he had to be careful how he went at this late hour, and have some answers ready for the young men who hung around on every street corner like goats, seeing conspiracies and plots in the most everyday comings and goings. It was as if they were training to be detectives, practising on the passers-by. To lend weight to their dangerous game, they had to imagine that each of the passers-by had committed some criminal act. At the very least, they were involved in adultery or drug smuggling, or visiting a cache of weapons, or were linked to people who were plotting to overthrow the regime. Perhaps the colonel was getting carried away, but the fact was that he had no wish to make his problems any worse and, if he was letting his imagination get the better of him, he chose to see it as some passing compulsion that was not natural to him. It grew out of the atmosphere that pervaded the streets and alleyways where he lived. He regarded the fear and insecurity that this atmosphere provoked in him as a kind of necessary training for life which, like it or not, everyone was forced to be inoculated with. Take the sensation of fear, for instance. You can be frightened of something without knowing what it is. Looming over your head, you fancy you see a sword held in an invisible hand, and
you have long felt its steel in your bowels. This feeling is irrational, and you cannot shake it off. Because you fear being spied upon, you end up believing that you really are being spied upon. But if this turns out not to be so, you still have to ask yourself why you can’t stop imagining that it’s happening. Where does this corrosive and exhausting feeling that constantly tells you that every eye is watching you come from?

    â€œYes, sir, yes, it’s me. I’m going home to get a pick and shovel. No, my mistake. I’m actually on my way to my daughter’s house first… no, sorry, that’s wrong, I mean I’m going to my son-in-law’s house to borrow his pick and shovel. I’m sure you know him, Mr Allah-Qoli Qorbani Hajjaj.”
    Another voice came from a dark corner: “Let him go, it’s only the colonel .” The mocking, sarcastic stress on the word ‘colonel’ seeped like poison into the colonel’s bone marrow.
    Yes, my friend… you must be right. I know that in this country the person who’s invariably right is the one who can fix his bayonet fastest and hardest. Right? Did I say ‘right’?
    In any small town you can always find someone who is different from the others and who, as chance would have it, also has an unusual name or a nickname. Such a creature becomes the butt of jokes and is mercilessly baited because, for whatever reason, he is on a different wavelength to everybody else. They treat him as a half-wit and a nutter. The young man who had recognised the colonel clearly saw him as just such a person. the colonel did not see himself as a nutter at all, but he was in no mood to bother about what other people thought about him. Without glancing round he carried on, trying not to
be sidetracked by stray thoughts. Any moment, if he wasn’t careful, he would trip over and sink up to his knees in a muddy pothole. So, instead of worrying about the jokes and sneers, he concentrated on every step of the way to the house of his son-in-law, Allah-Qoli