This time, without blinking an eye, Khezr answered him: “In that case I would have worked for you lot, I’d have been able to have my whisky again, I’d have carried on investigating people and I wouldn’t have had to get a nose job, or stick a floor-brush of a beard on my face in order to work for this bloody bunch.”
“What makes you think we’d have given people like you a job? How come you’re so sure we wouldn’t have just rubbed you out?”
With a quiet smile, Khezr puffed on the cigarette that Amir had lit for him and, with disconcerting certainty, replied: “Listen, boy. Political police are like a religion. Has anyone ever heard of a religion being overthrown?” He paused and went on: “A new gang may take over, but they don’t go and overthrow the very basis of the old régime. I grant you that some of us were strung up by a few of your hot-headed brethren, but that’s not the end of the story. Not by any means. We’re the very base and foundation of everything, we are the underpinning of the state, my engineer friend!”
The cigarette ash was dropping into Amir’s hand, so he fetched an ashtray, and held it under Khezr’s waving hand, catching the ash as it dropped. As Khezr started talking, it was not clear whether he was awake or asleep; he sounded drowsy and he appeared not to be talking to anyone in particular; he was rambling to himself, going over his old life:
“…so I said that I’d come to serve the Shah and my country. I thought that the colonel was staring at my nose. I looked down, so that he couldn’t see my nose, and I asked him to put in a good word for me. I had been recommended to him before. I was fed up with the Thursday evening local teachers’ book club meetings.43 I’d only joined it out of boredom; in fact I had set it up, and I was fed up with it. Fed up with those evenings, and fed up with the teachers who only went along so as not to become opium addicts. And I was fed up with my rickety old bicycle, which always got a puncture on the rocky tracks, and I always had to hump it on my back all the way home to mend the puncture and then go back to the village in the morning to give lessons to those shaven headed, lice-ridden, snotty-faced children about the battles of Xerxes the Great… You were a history teacher, too, weren’t you?
“Yes.”
“Then there was the bloody heat. I was sweating non-stop out of all my seven orifices. Everything was dust, date palms and despair. There was an occasional tall, gangly Arab and some water buffaloes… So I told the colonel that I was tired of teaching, of the bicycle, the humidity, the dust and the children… the filth on their faces would feed seven hungry dogs. I said that I wanted to serve my country. the colonel said he was always delighted to hear from ambitious young men wanting to serve their country. He said that a young man should advance himself and secure himself a bright future, and he said that I appeared to be a deserving young chap. And I was; I was capable and deserving, and this was the first time that anyone had acknowledged me. I was sick of nobody paying any attention to me. I was suffocating from being ignored. If anyone did look at me, all they saw was that I was short and had a big nose. Was that all there was to me — just a shortarse with a big nose, eh? Oh no, I knew I was more than that, I knew I was worth something, not like those teachers who got together on Thursday nights and poked fun at me, in front of me and behind my back, because I didn’t understand the poetry of Nima Yushij44 as well as they did. But I proved, in those first six months, I proved to the colonel that he had not got me wrong.”
“Are you awake?”
“Yes, and I’m listening to you.”
“Don’t imagine I had some sort of illness. No, I was fed up with being humiliated. I wanted recognition. I wanted a sniff of power, because there was nobody who knew how good I was, how deserving I was and how strong I was. I was going to prove this, at any price. So I went and knocked on the colonel’s front door and I told him that I wanted to serve my country, because I had had enough of all the flies buzzing round the filthy heads of my children and I was fed up with the classroom that stank of goodness knows what. But power… real power… that was what I wanted.
“the colonel told me to show him how deserving I was. I said to him, ‘give me forty-eight hours, colonel,’ and he gave me till the end of the week. On the Saturday morning I produced full reports on all the six teachers who were doing commentaries on Nima Yushij and George Politzer45 and put them on his desk, to show him what sort of man I was. Six months later they were behind bars. That showed them. I wanted to get their attention, and I certainly did. I wanted to show them that they shouldn’t judge people by their lack of inches and excess of nose, and I did. Then I ordered a pair of shoes with built-up heels and decided to get a nose job. But the office wouldn’t let me have one. They said that if I had one, I wouldn’t look intimidating enough. Then I realised that everything in this
a Catholic school in Tehran, which may be why there is such a biblical flavour to Dowlatabadi’s writing. world has a place and that I had the most perfect nose for my chosen job. But this revolution has made me worry about it now, and I need to get it done. So, if I live long enough, the next time I come back here you won’t see this surplus lump of meat and cartilage squatting on my face, because I’m thinking of having more than half of it cut off.”
“Your cigarette butt, Khezr Javid, let me take it.”
“I’ve made myself pretty clear, haven’t I? Here, put it out.”
“Yes, crystal clear. When you used to interrogate me, I always thought you were very straight, and even very courageous. But why did you turn those qualities of yours against the people? You must be afraid now, surely?”
“You’re a bloody fool.” Getting no answer from Amir, he went on: “I’ve killed a lot of people.”
He was silent for a while, staring obliquely into Amir’s face, waiting for his words to flow like toxin through his veins. He continued:
“…But a coward cannot kill in cold blood. A coward usually talks about humanity and morals, to hide his fear behind such waffle. Such people are just chicken. But me… I’ve got courage. I’ve only been frightened once in my life, when I began to worry that those teachers’ fear might take root in me and suck me in. That’s when I went to see the colonel. So, I overcame my fear of the secret police by becoming one myself. You see, by surrendering to my fear before it got the better of me, I ended up beating it. After that I was never afraid again, only excited. When I knocked on the colonel’s door I knew what I was doing; I was giving myself up to the vocation of torture and death, so I had to be brave.
“Are you asking me why I’m still carrying on? You’re so naïve, you’ve got no idea. What should I do, then: give myself up? Make a public confession and repent of my sins? Where, who to, and when exactly? And you expect me not to be brave? If I’m not brave, I’ll be killed all the sooner. If I’m afraid, I’ll die a hundred deaths before they kill me! Quite a few of the lads lost their nerve when they heard the first clarion call of the revolution and then cocked everything up for themselves for lack of balls. Chickenshit cowards! So I have to be brave, because I want to stay alive and I don’t want to get my throat cut. No, if you were me you wouldn’t want to get killed and you — as I well know — would definitely not want to be in my shoes! Do you hear all that racket outside?”
Yes, he could hear it all right. Had Masoud come back home? Or had Mohammad-Taqi gone out into the street? Would he smell blood, lose his nerve and charge down into the basement and shoot Khezr?
He could not help looking at Khezr’s holster resting on the left side of his stomach, and then he looked at the revolver. At that very moment, Khezr’s right eyelid twitched open and shut in his mask-like face, and his hand moved to grip the butt of his revolver. Amir decided to lie down, have a cigarette and stare up again at the bulging ceiling, so as not to have to look at the revolver.