The Colonel Read Online Free PDF Page A

you. I congratulate you.”
    â€œ Sir, I…”
    â€œGood luck, colonel!”
    â€œIt’s just that I still have to sort out a family problem, sir, as you are aware.”
    â€œPut it from your mind, colonel. There is no getting out of it. That’s that.”
    â€œBut, General, it’s my wife…”
    â€œYou must consider the consequences, colonel, since she shares your name. Don’t forget that your wife comes from a very prominent family…”
    â€œBut, Sir, I am just a simple soldier…”
    â€œWe are all soldiers, colonel. Haven’t I made myself clear?”
    It was night when they summoned the colonel to headquarters. Night is when crimes are committed, he thought, and night is also when they are planned and the evidence is buried. Criminals fear the light of day and try to wash the evidence off their hands before dawn and hide their guilty consciences from their fellow men. And so it was, that night, that the colonel decided on crime. He would absolutely not obey the order of posting. As he took the written order from the general’s puffy white fingers, he decided to kill his wife. He could not bring himself to fly to Dhofar to slaughter a bunch of hungry rebels on the grounds that they were ‘a
Soviet threat.’ He could no longer go on living the lie that he had been forced to live.
    It was a pimp of a lie! I tucked the folder with the order in it under my arm, about-turned, marched out of headquarters and told my driver to get out of town and take me straight home. Maybe I’d lost my senses, or was it that I’d finally come to them at last? What are one’s senses, anyway?”
    â€œThis way, colonel.”
    â€œYes, yes, of course…”
    He knew everything was ready. He had hung about too long and it was time to go. He had to go the length of the snooker hall to the door, through the door and down the steps that he had come in by. Outside, waiting in the rain beside the ambulance, he could just make out the two young men who had come to his house. The barrels of their machine guns were shining in the light from the martyrs’ shrines as they pulled the hoods of their parkas over their heads. Their trouser bottoms and boots were soaked and spattered with mud. He remembered that the younger one had rubbed at the sparse hair on his face, while the cheeks of the more grown-up one were already endowed with a decent black beard. And now the colonel was watching the ambulance, as it was being washed by the rain, to see how the next stage of the proceedings would begin.
    â€œYou sit in the back, colonel.”
    The driver, whom the colonel had not noticed – though this was nothing to do with his short-sightedness – was raring to go. Young drivers these days generally drove fast and nipped through the traffic, not at all like the old lorry drivers after the war, who made a point of driving in a very dignified and ostentatiously sedate manner. For instance, whenever they stopped off at a roadside teahouse, they seemed to shed a huge load
of responsibility from their shoulders as they got down from their cabs. They always wore a silk neckerchief and, as they got down, they always had one hand hooked onto it as, with great dignity, they took a leisurely turn round the lorry and, after giving orders to their driver’s mate, lumbered off to the little stream beside the teahouse, where they squatted down to wash their oily hands and faces, never taking their eyes off the lad who was seeing to the lorry.
    But today’s young drivers had different ideas about life. Most of them seemed to be rude and flippant, even those who drove ambulances. They were as arrogant as cats that had been told their shit had some use. They didn’t give a damn about their passengers and just kept their foot on the floor. It didn’t matter if it had been raining and the potholes were full of water; they couldn’t be bothered to