The Colonel Read Online Free PDF

avoid the bumps or think about an old man perched on the narrow bench in the back, clinging on to his daughter’s coffin. the colonel was aware that, by giving his daughter a coffin and an ambulance, they had shown him some respect, but he also noticed that the driver could not care less, and was driving as if he was delivering meat to the butcher’s. No question about it – quite unwittingly on his part, he had got this chap out of bed, even though he was supposed to be on nightshift, and now he would be cursing the colonel under his breath all the way to the cemetery.
    And again he fell to thinking that, if he had not killed his wife, his daughter would not be lying there in her coffin now. But he knew perfectly well that persisting in this line would get him nowhere and that nothing was going to change. The truth that was now staring him in the face was that Parvaneh was lying in a coffin that smelt of blood and guts and, with every bump in the road, her skinny little body was flapping
around in it like a half-dead fish. Parvaneh had been young and the colonel could not imagine her without her grey school smock. He could even picture the outline of her bony shoulders through it. So much about Parvaneh reminded the colonel of the little canary which, from the first day, he had named after her. Perhaps he had become so attached to his motherless daughter through having had to bring her up on his own, loving her both as father and as a mother. He saw her as a fledgling that he was teaching how to fly. He had once heard that young birds lose their way in storms, especially at dusk, and get blown off course into unfamiliar country. He saw all her comings and goings in this light and, when she disappeared, he imagined that the wind had carried her off and lost her.
    The wind confuses them, makes them giddy. I am no professional pigeon fancier, but I know this much, that young birds get lost in the wind, particularly in a west wind. 10 It confuses them and makes them giddy, it ties them up in knots and they lose their sense of direction and, in their struggle to find their way, they break their wings. And in a storm there is no shortage of hawks and vultures looking for prey.
    The night that Parvaneh failed to come home, the colonel had a premonition that the wind had taken her, and he could not help thinking how many pigeons with bloodied wings he had seen over the years. So he waited, which was all he could do. Which in fact was not doing anything, but just a state of mind. A state of mind that our fathers and forefathers have passed down to us like some painful legacy. Waiting, endlessly
waiting… And now he was waiting to get to the graveyard, in the hope that, as she was being consigned to the earth, he could pull aside Parvaneh’s blood-stained shroud and see her face one last time. 11 Of course, he could uncover her right here in the ambulance, but he was worried that this breach of the rules might have unpleasant consequences, both for him and for the others. He could imagine her face and he could even feel how she had become almost weightless in her innocence, more so than she had ever been in her life. This feeling only served to heighten the pain, making it so acute as to almost tip the old man over into madness. But because he knew he had to remain calm and composed, he forced himself to suppress all thoughts – impossible thoughts – that his daughter was alive, as it was obviously out of the question. Experience had taught him that outpourings of grief at the death of a loved one come from remembering moments in their life. So, the only way for him to hold back his grief would be to resist thinking of her as alive. This was anything but easy, and required complete control over his nerves and over his mind. He was determined to shut out any thoughts of his daughter when she was alive until after the funeral, when everyone had gone away. And so he tried to imagine Parvaneh as a dead fish on