There was a fusillade of laughter at this and Amir, mortified, dissolved into floods of tears. His sobs grew ever more violent until they reached a crescendo of loud and uncontrollable wailing. Suddenly a bullet whizzed through the air. The policemen immediately reached to their shoulder holsters for their guns, pushed Amir out of the way and ran out. He followed them out into the hall and looked out onto the street, where a pitched battle had broken out. The south side of the building, which gave onto the street, had turned into a single panel of glass. Through it he could follow the battle outside. The people who had been at the party in the post office building were now out on the street. Amir found himself in a scene from the late 1940s, watching the railway workers at Abbasi Square laying into a crowd in smart black suits.
As the august gathering in the hall dissolved into chaos, Amir saw a chance to get away. He forgot his tears and began running from column to column of the prayer hall. He did not know where he was going or what he could do, except use the general confusion to find his way out of that horrible place unnoticed. He found himself in a place where there was no sign of the monstrous creatures, facing a wide staircase that seemed to lead down to a basement; he ran down it. But as he went down, he heard a din of clashing swords and knives. His way was blocked by a thicket of flailing weapons. As he rushed back and forth looking for a way through, he ran up against two sword blades thrust directly at him. They were wielded by two young lads wearing the black shirts worn by flagellants, with Arab keffiyahs wound round their heads.24 With a forthrightness that belied their age, they glared at Amir as if about to lynch him:
“Where do you think you’re running off to, then?”
I was tongue-tied. I wanted to say that I wasn’t running anywhere, and what was this all about, anyway? But not a word came out.
But the young men were not looking for an answer. They seized hold of him and marched him down the broad staircase, into a dark basement containing a small cistern. There they handed him over to two innocent-faced, virginal boys of about fifteen or sixteen with newly sprouting beards and scrubbed faces, dressed in olive camouflage jackets. They in turn escorted him to a dingy side-room to hand him over to their supervisor. It was there that Amir caught sight of Khezr Javid once more, who was looking on as a sergeant strapped someone to a clamp. There were more people lined up along the basement wall, shrouded in darkness, for the only light in the room was positioned so that it shone only onto the rack and the sweat-soaked face of the prisoner strapped into it. Beaming as if they had just solved some complicated riddle, the two fresh-faced youths now dragged Amir towards the clamp. One of them, who appeared to be the son of Ramazan Kolahi, began: “So, you use whistles to signal to each other in the streets at night!” and, expertly releasing the prisoner from the clamp, strapped Amir onto it in his place. Then he attached two wires to Amir’s knees and switched the current on and off, inducing a terrifying shuddering all over his body. Although he remained conscious, Amir was unable to speak. He remembered that one of the effects of an electric shock is loss of speech. He wanted to say something or scream, but he could not produce a sound of any kind. His throat, tongue and chest had all seized up. The only sound that emerged from his throat was a pathetic croak, a mousey squeak. Khezr Javid and his minions were unmoved. Perhaps they could not even hear him. Every time Amir blinked, he saw a hand in the darkness holding the bloodied knife under his nose. He was suffocating and could not speak. At one point, he thought that he had gone deaf as well, for he could not hear a thing, not even his own squeaks. Things got to such a pitch that his torturers decided that their victim was resisting and refusing to talk. It never occurred to them that he simply could not speak.
The man standing in front of him, that terrifying giant, kept waving the knife under his nose and screaming: “This knife, so what’s this bloody knife, then? So whose are the fingerprints on it? Are you going to talk or not?”
He could not tell them that he could not speak. He could not tell them that he was thirsty. He could not even produce the word ‘water.’
Khezr Javid was standing over Amir on the wooden bed where they had left him, holding a glass of water in his hand and smiling. In the course of his nightmares, Amir had undergone such comical convulsions that Khezr had been popping in and out to watch him, with a big grin all over his snout. Amir’s head ached and his mouth was as dry as a mud brick. The glass of water was like the offer of a new hope of life. Half sitting up, he reached out, took it from Khezr Javid’s hand and gulped it down in one before lapsing into a sort of trance, staring blankly into space. The nightmare had left him utterly drained, but at the same time he wanted it to continue, to see how it would end. For, little by little, these dreams had come to occupy all of his thoughts. And so he waited until he could sense Khezr Javid’s presence in the gloomy cellar once again. Amir lifted his head up to look at him.
Khezr was sitting on a stool, looking at Amir. His nose was as big as ever; he evidently had not pursued the idea of having a job done on it, then. He looked no happier than when they had last met. If anything, he had got thinner, but his eyes shone with a new confidence. He seemed to have got less talkative, and now measured his words with care. Amir found it all the more surprising, then, when Khezr, without any preamble, took a puff at his cigarette and said:
“They put me in prison.”
“Prison, you?”
He laughed. “Does that surprise you?” Amir said nothing, since there was an alarmingly triumphant tone to Khezr’s words. It reminded him of those nights when Khezr came into the prison wing, drunk and swaggering. The clang of the bolt and chain on the steel door made everyone, even those who had gone to sleep, immediately adopt the required position, squatting on their heels, as they waited to see which cell Khezr would go into and what he would say. Depending on what he was up to that evening, or whose ear he was going to whisper a sly word into, he would unlock a cell door and step inside. With his hands on his hips, or leaning against the wall, he would say whatever he had to say, in whatever tone of voice suited his mood, and then throw a couple of cigarettes at the prisoner’s feet. He would then leave and make his way down the wing, chucking a cigarette or two through the inspection hatch of each cell and chanting, in his adenoidal voice, “Zar… zar… khar… zar-ra khar mikesheh! — Golds, Golds, only an ass smokes Golds!” When he had finished, he would crush the empty pack in his fist and go back to the steel door, swearing drunkenly and making snide remarks at the prisoners on the wing until his voice faded away and he left. His exit was followed by the drumming of knuckles on the hatch covers, demanding matches, which roused the sleepy guard, who grumbled and cursed at them to shut up. The warder went down the line of cells, lighting each cigarette in turn as the prisoners poked them through the hatches and drew on them until they lit. No one ever wondered why Khezr chose that time of night to wander down the cells dishing out cigarettes. Was it just a show of power? Or was he fearful of the future? Or wracked by a sense of contrition and guilt? Might it even be that Khezr, in the dead of night, suddenly felt the urge to make pets of his sacrificial lambs, some of whom he had tortured to the point of death, if only by giving them some fags and visiting them without hitting them for once. No, none of this occurred to any of them, for such thoughts were too much of a luxury.
“You tortured me for no reason. I had nothing whatever to do with that business.”
Khezr Javid just looked at Amir and calmly drank the water in the glass that he had just poured for himself. He took out his cigarette case and held it out to Amir. Hardly daring to refuse, Amir took one, and Khezr lit it for him. Amir exhaled the smoke and asked: