But Khezr was no fool; Amir knew from experience that he was always suspicious of his own shadow. As he lifted his glass to his lips he looked at Amir and, for as long as it took him to drink half of it down, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on Amir, piercing his very soul, so that he felt all the hairs on his body stand up on end like kebab skewers. He felt dried out. He could not move. It felt like being back in the interrogation room. His heart was thumping. He looked around for the card on the wall with the verse from the Qur’an that read, ‘Salvation comes to the honest.’ He stood waiting, like a scarecrow, for Khezr to give him permission to sit down.
“Sit down!”
Amir sat down. I sat down. I did just as I was told. Sitting down is a perfectly normal thing for a human being to do; if one hears of someone that he has sat down, one can have only one thing in mind. But in that instant it struck Amir that there were as many ways of sitting down as there were people in the world, in all their diversity. On the face of it, Amir sat down politely, but he was aware that, beneath the surface, his mind was seething with that sense of subjugation and fear which occasionally shows itself as ‘good manners,’ and that there is not a clear line between the two… It suddenly seemed vitally important to him to prove his utter obedience to Khezr Javid. His bearing, his expression and everything about him had to signal to Khezr that he was prepared to meet his every wish and do whatever he wanted. Meanwhile, as if to underline Amir’s utter humiliation, Khezr Javid was not even deigning to look at him, but was glaring round every corner of the room instead. Amir hoped that Khezr would accept with magnanimity his signs of humility and surrender. Observe my subservience, Your Excellency Dr Javid!
Nobody had told Amir how to behave under interrogation. He assumed from the layout of the place and his general position that he was required to keep looking straight ahead, even though right next to him the screams of Nur-Aqdas Khamami were rending the air, as she was being savagely beaten by one of Khezr’s lieutenants. A braver soul than him might have dared to lift his eyes up a little, as far as the portrait on the wall of the Shah with his medal-bedecked chest, but even that would have been to break the unwritten rules of the interrogation room. Rules which, like minute airborne particles, from the first moment of your arrest, work their way out of the air into your very soul. When they made you change out of your clothes in the guardhouse and put on a pair of scruffy grey overalls, which made you look like a scarecrow, you felt those unwritten rules becoming engraved on your heart.
“Hand him the form!”
It was the charge sheet.
“Sign here.”
Both the basic principles of human rights and the written law require that a suspect must be informed of the nature of the charges against him within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Within that time he must be formally charged and he has to sign the charge sheet. If sufficient evidence is not produced within twenty-four hours, the prosecution is not entitled to pursue the case against the accused. Amir only found this all out later. He had never felt the need to think about the whys and wherefores of having such a clearly spelt out law. What earthly reason would any Iranian have to trouble himself about the law or try to keep to it? Here, the law had always been delivered at the blunt end of a cosh, hadn’t it? All Amir wanted to find out, law or no law, was why he had been arrested, for he still had no idea. Desperate to know what I was accused of, I had high hopes of Khezr Javid, who was now standing by his desk.
“We beat people’s feet till they’re black as boots here!”
With the end of his cable whip he forced Amir’s head round to the left, to face the two blindfolded women who had collapsed onto old chairs and, before Amir could fix in his mind the lines on the face of the woman he thought might be Nur-Aqdas, Khezr took a step towards her. Amir looked away. As the sharp toe of Khezr’s shiny shoe connected with the bruised and bandaged legs of the nearest woman on the bloodstained couch, she let out a terrible scream and then fell silent. Khezr Javid now returned to the desk. He waved his whip at five of the prisoners in the room to indicate that they should be led back to the cells, then pointed at the sixth:
“The one with a moustache goes to administration.”
He looked round at the woman on the couch: “You… pissy old woman, have a think about it tonight. Tomorrow you either talk, or I send you off to join your two boys in Behesht-e Zahra.37 Take her to her cell, soldier!”
As the soldier led her away, leaving only the echo of her feeble whimpers in that dark and sinister room, the old woman looked as fragile as a blade of straw. Khezr sat down at his desk without looking at Amir or saying a word to him, lit himself a cigarette and began smoking it. After a long, frightening silence, Amir heard the sound of dragging footsteps coming to the interrogation room. He had no idea how much time had passed, or even what time of night it was. Khezr got up, came forward and twisted Amir’s head round, forcing him to look at his wife, who had been made to sit on the blood-soaked old couch by the door. A black blindfold covered her eyes and they had made ‘black boots’ of her feet. Khezr turned Amir’s head back again and moved back into the light. All of a sudden, Amir seemed to hear the screaming and wailing of all the women of the world spinning round the prison and reverberating in his skull until, as abruptly as if his spinal cord had been severed, he passed out. He remembered nothing until he came to on the wire bed and saw, on the lead-coloured steel table, a bloodstained knife in the pool of light under the anglepoise lamp.
“Here, have one of these cigarettes.”
Khezr’s eyes were bloodshot. Amir saw this, not in the feeble light of the ceiling lamp, but in his mind, which was still filled with the thought of those long, endless nights of interrogation. He could even remember every detail of Khezr Javid’s yawns. Tired and exhausted after a long day’s interrogation and getting over his drunkenness, Khezr would read through the response to the final question once more, and Amir would see him yawn and hear the gurgling noise in his throat. The Immortal Khezr did not seem to the colonel’s son Amir to be the same man as the one who was now sitting on the bed, spitting out olive stones and putting them on the edge of the plate. For that Khezr, the one in prison, had long since etched himself indelibly on Amir’s memory. Amir knew all his habits and foibles inside out. He knew that when he wanted to sleep, his drunken snores would not last more than an hour. There had been many occasions when he had set him a question and, stretching out on the camp-bed in a nook against the wall, had promptly had forty winks while Amir wrote down his answer. He would then get up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and sit on the bedside, without even needing to splash water on his face to wake himself up. So now Amir was certain that Khezr was going to lie down on his bed for a short nap, but he could not be sure that he would sleep until morning. He did not dare ask him again about where he planned to sleep because, in all likelihood, he must have heard his conversation with Mohammad-Taqi and may have got the wrong idea about him. When Amir had come back down to the basement, he had seen a brief flash of suspicion cross Khezr’s beady eyes. That naked, ruthless look, which contained the whole burden of Khezr’s past, had stopped Amir dead in his tracks. His real personality — his brutal, overbearing nature — came flooding back. Khezr hasn’t changed; behind the friendly mask, he’s just the same as he always was, however much he tries to hide it. Amir would have to wait before Khezr would tell him what he wanted to know.