I can honestly say that, in the face of all that adulation, with all the hands stretching out trying to reach the coffin, I felt truly small and humbled. Before long I was feeling completely out of place, a stranger utterly divorced from the hands that were bearing my son to the cemetery. The masses had commandeered my son from me and were carrying him off where they wanted and how they wanted and were shouting out whatever they wanted about ‘the killing of my son’and chanting a slogan which my hearing was too weak to make out. I was just an onlooker. It now seemed to me that the corpse that was being carried off in procession had nothing to do with me and that I didn’t even know him!
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. Taking his time, Khezr descended and, as he did so, more of him became visible to Amir: his coat buttons, chest and shoulders, and finally his face, his glasses and the fedora on his head. This was something new for Amir.
Amir stood up quickly from where he had been sitting on the edge of the bed, not out of respect for his visitor but driven involuntarily by some innate fear. He found himself standing respectfully before Khezr Javid, with a greeting on his lips. Khezr took his glasses off his nose, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, smiled and propped his stick in the corner against the wall as if it were a nuisance. It suddenly dawned on Amir that the walking-stick and glasses were a disguise. In all the time that Khezr had interrogated him, he had never seen him with a fedora, or a walking-stick or spectacles for that matter.
The smile on Khezr’s face was odder than ever, so odd that it forced Amir to offer him his hand and show him a place to sit. The best place he could find for him was the edge of the bed. Before sitting down, Khezr Javid unbuttoned his coat and took off his hat. Not sure what to do next, Amir pulled up the stool he used for sculpting and sat down in front of him. Then he thought he should get him some tea.
“Brother… can I bring you anything down to drink?”
Amir shouted up to Mohammed-Taqi to bring some tea and then thought he ought to offer to take Khezr’s hat. As he was hanging it on the hook, Khezr got up and took off his elegant dark brown overcoat. Amir took that as well and hung it on the coat rack.
Now, apart from the long moustache drooping over his lips, Khezr Javid was the same person that Amir had first encountered. Khezr put his briefcase down on the bed, dipped into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering one to Amir. With his gold-plated lighter he lit Amir’s cigarette first, and then his own. He studied the flame over the end of his cigarette:
“You’ve made this place into a studio, then?”
Amir was about to say that he had not yet started seriously, but that he was thinking of taking up sculpture, when he was suddenly reminded of Khezr coming down the prison wing in the middle of the night, pushing a cigarette or two through the cell hatches and saying: “Golds… only an ass smokes Golds.”
“Sculpture… that’s a good idea.”
“Yes, if I can manage it,” Amir replied, far away.
“I gather you’ve been having some exciting meetings?”
“I expect they’ve entertained you.”
“No, why?”
Amir shut up. He had realised that he had forgotten who Khezr was and what he did for a living. He had started talking to Khezr as a friend, sounding like someone worried about what others thought of him, and wanting their approval. If he had not quickly stopped himself, Khezr would have stopped him anyway. Khezr — ever the professional — quickly changed the subject:
“Haven’t you got a telephone here?”
This could have been taken any number of ways, for it was not hard to find out whether the colonel had a telephone in his house or not. Even so, Amir’s first thought was that Khezr just wanted to make a call, but then he thought that perhaps he wanted to be absolutely sure whether there was a telephone in the house or not. Faced with Amir’s silence, Khezr turned to sarcasm:
“What, not even a cordless phone? You’d be amazed at the things people have in their houses these days!”
Amir laughed. “No.” He was sure that, before he had come to the house, Khezr had investigated all the security angles and already knew most of the answers to his questions.
Mohammad-Taqi was now outside his room with a tray of tea; following Khezr’s glance, Amir could see a sliver of Mohammad-Taqi through the half-open door. He got up, went to the door and took the tray off him. Once Mohammad-Taqi had gone, he offered Khezr a glass.
“Was he listening at the door?”
Amir said he did not think Mohammad-Taqi did such things, but without thinking he got up and pushed the basement door to, feeling Khezr’s eyes on him all the way. Khezr turned almost bashfuclass="underline"
“I’d heard Mohammad-Taqi was in Tehran. I’d rather it hadn’t been him that opened the door to me. He’s the only one here I’m worried about.”