‘Water … water … I want some water … I’m thirsty, Katib. A sip of water!’
‘Water, water here too!’
‘And my pistol … pistol!’
‘Pistol … pistol … pistol!’
* Reference to a line from a poem by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez: ‘My master said there were no errors in the act of creation / Praise be to his pure fault-concealing regard’. This is a philosopher’s response to his master’s optimistic view of the world and its creation.
† The Barmakids were an influential family from Balkh in Bactria who attained positions of great power under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Barmak’s son Khalid became vizier to the first Abbasid caliph, while Khalid’s son Yahya was a key confederate of Harun al-Rashid, the fifth caliph. In turn, Yahya’s son Fazl was made governor of the province of Khorasan (in modern Iran) and showed great benevolence in dealing with the people there. Yahya’s other son, Ja’far, was appointed head of the caliphal bodyguard and manager of the postal service, the mints, and the textile factory. Later Harun al-Rashid’s relationship with the Barmakids deteriorated due to unknown reasons and he had most of them arrested or killed. According to one legend Harun al-Rashid’s anger was caused by Ja’far’s secret marriage to the caliph’s sister, Abbasa (Encyclopaedia Iranica).
‡ Arabic, meaning ‘guard’. Mirharis means ‘head guard’.
8
A PISTOL, YES! A pistol.
On this side of the border, on the lower slopes of the Alborz Mountains, the man who was smitten by words* had grasped the meaning of ‘pistol’ for the first time in the form of a slap, a pistol-whipping across his face. This was the first time he really came to comprehend the concept of pistol. A short time later, however, the meaning changed for him; when he read somewhere or heard it mentioned that pistol can mean a revolver, as well as an automatic handgun. The small and compact kind of gun was the one he’d seen in the hands of cinematic conquerors; whereas the larger, heavier and longer sort, strapped to the waist, directly above the right or sometimes above the left thigh, was the type used by Western conquerors in former times. A muzzle-loading rifle, a Hassan Musa rifle,† a Brno … other names of this kind then came flooding into his empty mind. And after processing this information, it gradually dawned on him that, ever since the invention of lead bullets along with a device from which they could be fired in order to kill people, human beings have become nothing but statistics and can hardly be called ‘people’ anymore. And consequently, honour, kindness and humanity are now redundant concepts. For this new invention can be aimed and fired at anonymous individuals known as ‘targets’.
Moreover, in his youth, when he was taking evening classes to study for his high-school exams — the exams for mature students — he would often see a man of about fifty in the exam hall, and the nervous twitching of his thick eyebrows, whether intentionally or not, kept shifting his round-brimmed hat back and forth on his forehead. This man, who always wore a three-piece suit with a waistcoat even in the height of summer, had a pistol strapped to his waist, a pistol that presumably should have remained concealed by the flap of his coat, especially in an educational environment. But that short-legged, burly man not only made no attempt to hide his gun, but every now and then, in a dramatic gesture, would move his hand and push back his jacket in order to deliberately expose the gun he wore strapped round his waist. Perhaps his intention was to instil fear in the teachers who held and supervised the exams. And perhaps the students of the night school as well, to intimidate them into not breathing a word or giving evidence about his blatant attempts to cheat!
In his youth, this author realised that this short-legged man was an employee of the defence ministry and that after his service in the armed forces, he was trying to obtain a high-school degree in order to increase his basic salary. But he didn’t appear to have learnt any of the course he was being examined on. And let us suppose that, about twenty years later, the author saw another so-called firearm clearly with his own eyes. Not one, but two or three examples of the same gun. It was an automatic firearm, too. A machine gun! He was sitting on the back seat of a Paykan‡ between two young men, and as his eyes fell on the foot well in front of the front seat, he blurted out: ‘Have you come to arrest Seyed Rashid then?§ You should have telephoned; I would have come on my own!’ They were young. The driver was young too. They didn’t answer his question, so we can assume they weren’t permitted to engage in conversation. They had their orders and they had to complete the task assigned to them. When he had come down the stairs to his office, he had taken them for clients or guests and extended his hand in greeting, and one of the young men had said: ‘It will only take two minutes, sir!’ and the other repeated: ‘Yes, just two minutes!’ I don’t want to waste any time recounting what happened in those two minutes, as it will distract us from the main story — so, this author looked under the dashboard and saw another firearm propped up on two or three volumes of high school books. The weapon’s butt was black. Like the books. ‘Are you studying too? At evening classes, right?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ The only response he got was a ‘yes’, nothing more. At the junction, before the car could turn left towards the police station and, of course, that blind spot known as the Anti-Terror Joint Committee, the author enquired: ‘In that case, will you let me buy a pack of cigarettes?’ ‘Yes, be our guest,’ came the reply. None of them even bothered escorting him to the shop. One of them just stood by the open door of the car, and after that no more than two words were spoken during the journey, and not by the man, but by them.