The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Page A

things got even worse – he lost his wife first and then himself. A man can cope with only so much in this life. It must have been after this that my son and I came across each other in prison.

    It was only in the final year, before all the prisons were opened anyway and the inmates released, that Amir and the colonel found themselves thrown together. Amir was a political prisoner, accused of ‘endangering national security,’ while the colonel had been found guilty of a string of offences, both political and criminal. His case had been investigated by military counter-intelligence. Only after he had been stripped of his rank, sentenced and automatically cashiered from the army did they transfer him to a political prison. It was there that the colonel found himself next to Amir and got to know his son in a new way, in which Amir was not merely his son, but first and foremost an independent man in his own right, with his own future in front of him.
    the colonel had always let his children find their own way in life. He had not even prevented Parvaneh, the youngest of his children, from ploughing her own furrow. But now he could not help but wonder whether the dreadful fate that had overtaken every one of his children was in fact due to his laissez-faire approach. But no, this did not really provide the old man with an easy answer, either. He firmly believed that
he had bequeathed to his children only the most natural of rights, namely the right to determine what they wanted to do with their lives. But that did not mean by a long chalk that he had been guilty of teaching them to be irresponsible – none of them could ever be accused of being irresponsible. No, he had done his best to bring up his children and had, perhaps, at times even gone to extremes to control them.
    In the end, perhaps the colonel’s wish that his children lead independent lives was a reaction on his part against a life which he felt had been imposed upon him. He felt that he had been short-changed by never having had the freedom to live his own life. This made him feel like some sort of cripple. He felt himself a lesser man for having being forced to live a life under duress and that, until a man takes charge of his own life, he cannot truly know himself. Such a half-baked creature, whether in life or in death, cannot be judged for what he is or was, for he might have become something that he could never even have imagined. the colonel’s firm views on this score made him convinced that he was not the person whom others thought him to be, whom others presumed to pass judgement on. Given this verdict on himself, he certainly was not about to accept other people’s judgements of him without demur. And he would probably never discover who he really was, now that he had burdened himself with a weight of guilt that it would take him thousands of years to wash away.
    At least one of you should look out for himself. It’s not as though you were carrying the weight of all history on your shoulders! I’m not as strong as you think I am . That’s what he really wanted to tell his children.

    They came and told him that Amir was in prison as well, and showed him a file containing a bloodstained knife.
    â€œA knife? With blood on it? Do you mean Amir has killed someone with it?”
    â€œYes, colonel. Do you find that hard to believe?”

    â€œDo you recognise this knife?”
    Yes, Amir did recognise it. The knife still had blood on it and it had been put right under his nose on a grey metal table. On the opposite side of the table stood not Khezr Javid, but another man, twice the size of a normal man, who kept playing with his false teeth and swaying back and forth. He was tall and square-shouldered, with a slight stoop. He had a big, block head and short grey hair. His eyes were narrow, lifeless and glassy. To Amir, in his fever, he looked like a monster.
    Maybe the monster did not intend to frighten Amir but,