Free The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Page B

future, he would have to give palpable shape and form to his unmentioned crime, if only by killing himself.
    the colonel felt guilty, too – guilty for the very existence of his children, or lack of it, as the case may be. He bore the burden of the offences of each one of his offspring on his shoulders. As for Amir, apart from having fathered him, he was guilty of
harbouring him and allowing him to just sit there in a corner. Although he had done his duty as a father, he could not rid himself of the leprotic grip of a feeling that he was somehow his accomplice, and he passively awaited the day of his punishment. He did not hide from himself that maybe one day, out of sheer exhaustion and confusion, he would lose his grip and would bring this day forward, perhaps by strangling his son and rushing out naked into the street and running to the only hospital in town – the one which had just been opened, and the only psychiatrist had been accused of treason and committed to the central madhouse in Tehran for ‘treatment and re-education.’
    Up to now he had managed to live with Amir and his problems. Whenever he ran into other people, however unimportant, he behaved as if Amir did not exist, and tried to pretend that he was estranged from his son. He would sometimes even go so far as to believe it himself. But on the other hand, after such encounters he would always reproach himself, telling himself that what he had done had been sheer egotism and selfishness. He asked himself what he was hoping to achieve by such egotism. And in response he came up with the following dictum: people who are drowning in a sea of problems and have lost all sense of self-worth often grasp at egotism and alienation from everything outside themselves as their only point of fixity, and this can help anchor and fortify them – if only to the point of madness. This is what it can come to, then, if you live in a hostile environment and have lost all your dignity.
    I’m capable of anything when the world treats me as nothing. If the world throws me out, then I’ll become my own world. I’ll become like the ant which fell in the water and, thrashing about wildly, shouted: ‘The whole world has been washed away!’ And,
insofar as I have become nothing, all things are therefore permitted unto me, even unto strangling my son and running about naked in the street all the way to the madhouse… No, I’ll never, ever lose my nerve. I’ll stand by my children through thick or thin. I’ll keep a stiff upper lip and never forget that I’m a soldier…
    â€œBut, Sir, I am just a simple soldier…”
    â€œWe are all soldiers, colonel. Haven’t I made myself clear?”

    Amir was still awake when the colonel got home. His wife was still out. They were all well used to Forouz’s late-night absences by now. As he had got older, even the colonel had got used to them. Perhaps the sense that he was in danger of eventually just taking everything in his stride played a part in his next decision. So he sat up and waited for her. When Forouz turned up well after midnight, drunk as usual, she flopped like a corpse into bed without more ado. She knew very well that her husband knew exactly what she got up to at night. Sometimes the colonel was aware of her hand sliding under her pillow to pull out a small bottle of sleeping pills.
    That rainy night was the last time that the colonel had drunk himself senseless. Amir was sitting at a little table doing his homework and the colonel was sitting on the edge of his single bed, knocking back glass after glass of vodka, not knowing what he was doing or, rather, he knew exactly what he was doing and was drinking to forget. He persuaded himself that he didn’t know what he was doing, using a thousand and one tricks to convince himself that he had lost all power of rational choice. And that was the state of mind he was in when he put the final touch to the