The Colonel

Author:Mahmoud Dowlatabadi [Dowlatabadi, Mahmoud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906598891
Publisher: hauspublishing
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

It is as though time and existence have been compressed and that it was only last night when that stranger came to the house for the first time. the colonel was standing smoking behind the cracked window, listening to the rain falling heavily on the pool in the yard, when there was a knock at the courtyard gate. the colonel waited to see which of his sons would go to open it, and who it was that had turned up at that hour of the night. At the second knock, the colonel saw Mohammad-Taqi with his jacket over his head running down the verandah steps. He opened one half of the gate. At the sight of the new arrival he seemed to start for a moment, but then he stepped aside to let the visitor in. The newcomer had the air of someone who would have come in anyway, even without permission.

He was short, sporting a fedora and an overcoat, with a briefcase in one hand and a walking-stick in the other. The pince-nez spectacles he was wearing made it hard for the colonel to make out his face. The man paused for a moment and seemed to be asking Mohammad-Taqi a question. Mohammad-Taqi shut the courtyard gate and showed his guest the way to the basement. As if he already knew the way, the little fellow made straight for the basement steps and began to go down. Assuming he was one of Amir’s comrades from the party, Mohammad-Taqi called down from the top of the steps: “There’s someone here to see you, brother!” Then he came back up on to the verandah, without noticing that his father was watching him and observing the change that had come over him.

Amir’s untimely afternoon sleep, the sleep of one permanently exhausted by the struggle, the mayhem, the speeches and arguments and the endless to-ing and fro-ing, might have lasted until the following morning if the knocking on the door had not shaken him out of bed, with an even grumpier face than usual. Now, shattered and only half-awake, he thought how much better it would have been if nobody had knocked at the door and Mohammad-Taqi had not called him and… But it was too late and things had gone too far. He had to get up, switch on the light and wait for his visitor to come in. The switch was on the pillar beside the door. All he had to do to turn on the light was to reach out his hand for it.

“Brother, there’s someone here to see you!”

The light was now on. Amir’s gaze fell on the stairs, on a pair of shiny, pointed shoes, spattered with mud, and a pair of trouser legs with knife-like creases above them. “Please come on down,” he called, as if his visitor would not have come down if he had not said it and, as the legs came down the stairs, Amir recognised the tails of Khezr Javid’s dark overcoat. His heart missed a beat.

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