“Amir… Amir, my boy… don’t do this to your father!”
But Amir was not there, and the colonel’s voice echoed back to him. A moment before, Amir had been sitting cross-legged on the floor the other side of the window. How had he managed to leave without the colonel noticing? Maybe he had not been there at all, and the colonel had just imagined him to be there? But no, he was sitting right there, just as he had been on that night when his mother was killed! the colonel could still hear him shouting:
“Hate and loathing! How long can I go on living with all this hate inside me?”
“Where are you, Amir, my boy? Speak to me, let me see you. We’re just two human beings. We used to talk to each other. I’m your father!”
“I don’t recognise anyone. I don’t know anyone and I can’t understand anything. I can’t remember my past and I don’t want to remember. I’m afraid, afraid and disgusted, that’s all.”
Where is he? I can’t believe I am here. No, I am not imagining things! Here is the kettle and… and here is the teapot, these are the table and chairs, and there is The Colonel’s portrait on the mantelpiece by the stove, and that’s me, wrapped up in a sheet and shivering, and that’s the noise of the same rain as always, battering on the tin roof… My God, what time is it now? What time is it? And these old clothes of mine aren’t dry yet. Haven’t I got to go to a funeral? And the canary, why isn’t it singing?
There was no sound from the canary, but the colonel was in such an abject state that he found himself searching for an excuse to forget whether the bird existed or not. He was shivering so violently from the cold that he could not bring himself to go out onto the verandah and down the corridor to take a look at the bird. His putting off going to see the canary had nothing to do with the fact that the canary was called ‘Parvaneh’ and that, having buried his daughter, he did not want to be reminded of her. No, it was just that he was cold. But the fact that he could not hear it singing made him aware that time had cracked on, since the canary always started singing at dawn, and continued warbling until the sun was well up. Then it stopped for an hour or so, and started again at about nine. So, if the canary had not retreated into its shell, it must now be about nine in the morning, the interval between its two performances. But why should the colonel have imagined that the canary had not withdrawn into its shell as of today?
“Amir… what are you doing? Are you coming with me to your brother’s funeral?”
“No, I haven’t got a brother to get up and go to a funeral for.”
Amir did not need to be in the room for the colonel to put such a question to him and to get such an answer. No, absolutely not. the colonel was sure that even if Amir had been in the room, he would have got the same reply. There was no need for this kind of conversation between them any longer. The day that Amir came out to escort Mohammad-Taqi’s body home was, in the colonel’s view, unlikely to be repeated again in his lifetime, any more than was the atmosphere that prevailed on that day. In those days of easily won victories, people were happy to make the most precious sacrifice of all, the blood of youth, in the cause of supposed freedom. The blood of the masses flowed so freely that there seemed to be no end to it. Even the donating of blood seemed to serve the people’s lust for ecstasy.
To share in this collective ecstasy, even I, who had long since lost the courage to face up to bullets, went to the hospital, rolled up my sleeve and told the nurse: ‘Take my blood, as much as you need!’ In truth, in such circumstances, if you hadn’t done your bit, you would have felt so guilty that you could not have slept at night. So it was when one of our boys was killed in battle; soul-destroyingly painful as it was for us, we were given no chance to grieve. After all, you told yourself, there was a revolution going on, and our country was on the threshold of momentous historic change, and this change could only come about through the sacrifice of the blood of the people, of which we were a part. In such circumstances, how could we complain about the loss of one of our sons? But, in the upheavals of the revolution, families who had sacrificed their children were caught in the grip of conflicting feelings. On the one hand were internal and deeply personal feelings, which overcame you in quiet corners at home, while on the other hand you were required to put on a public face and show other feelings, feelings for which you had to search deep inside yourself to give them legitimacy. This led to a soul-destroying conflict between the outward and the inward, the private and the public.
Bent under the weight of grief and misfortune in the privacy of your own home, you are like a broken-winged bird, but in front of other people, who are shouting for joy, you become another person entirely — an invincible hero! But the fact is that this conflict is exhausting. You can take refuge from yourself in the company of others, or you can avoid others and withdraw into your shell. This unrelentingly schizophrenic existence sometimes becomes so exhausting that it makes you ill. That is exactly what happened to me, but what could I do? At that time, I never found a chance to be by myself. They never gave me the time to stop and taste the pure pleasure of grief and misery…
The feverish, frenzied atmosphere of those days swept us all up like a fire. When they laid Mohammad-Taqi’s blood-soaked body down in our courtyard, it was as if a haystack had been set alight. When Mohammad-Taqi was killed, it was not just ourselves and our immediate neighbours, but the whole city that went up in flames. Even Amir was caught up in the blaze. He knelt down beside his brother’s corpse and kissed his bloody shirt. When he got up I saw that tongues of fire were licking out of my son’s eyes and his cheeks were aflame. I wasted no time thinking about Khezr Javid or reproaching my son, as I could see how the fire had taken hold of all of my children.
Farzaneh was aflame and her wailing melted everyone’s hearts. Parvaneh had lost control of herself and was flapping madly around her brother, while Masoud got up off his knees beside his brother, clenched his fists, like two balls of fire, to his head and screamed: “I’ll kill them, I’ll kill the bastards who killed my brother…” His rallying cry was taken up by the crowd, and from that point on Mohammad-Taqi’s corpse was no longer ours — it had become public property.
And what a crowd of people there was. They seemed to have boiled up out of the ground to gather round the coffin, which they were now holding high up above their heads. Their hands formed circles that opened and closed, as they tried to touch the coffin, but it was too high, far up above all the hands, and getting higher all the time. the colonel did not notice when or how the coffin had become bedecked with flowers or when he and his family had got swallowed up by the throng, nor did anyone know what his children were really feeling inside.