My acquaintance with Abbas goes back to our commander’s tea to which we decided to add a new color with our piss. He was recently settled in the kitchenette and was a new recruit. He was not satisfied and impertinent to anyone who wanted to bother him, so he was punished more than the rest of us, either by the veterans or by the cadre forces and commanders. The kitchenette was exactly in front of the secretariat in which I was working, so we communicated a lot, but we were not buddies.
Military base had a cold atmosphere and you couldn’t trust everyone, no matter about what. The important thing was to mind your own business and not meddle. It was enough to make a mistake to lose your daily leave to someone else. Since he was a new recruit and didn’t know about the strict and unwritten rules of the military base, Abbas was punished repeatedly. It took him a long time to adapt.
The craziest image I have of him is of a war game for which a couple of other military bases had come to fight in our base. The war game was about urban riots. A group of soldiers was given the role of demonstrators and another group was supposed to oppress the demonstration under the commandership of the cadre forces. We were the spectators of the war game. Near its end, the demonstrators were besieged by the Special Forces in a pincer movement. A tear gas was shot toward the demonstrators, but before finding time to act, one of the demonstrating soldiers kicked it toward the shooter and his commander. The Special Forces didn’t have gas masks. They were all trapped in the smoke. At this time Abbas held a wet cloth over his mouth and ran from the spectators’ seating area toward the smoke which was escalating each second. He stole the pistol of the Special Forces’ commander, who was caught amid the gas, from his belt and went straight to the military base’s major general who was watching like us. Impertinently he said: “This doesn’t work sir” and gave the pistol to the general. Abbas was detained for one week and had to carry out one more extra month for his military service.
The night before that morning in which we mixed our piss with the commander’s tea, Abbas poured Aragh Sagi1 from a freezer paper in our cups. He had hid the freezer paper under the car seat of our unit so that no one would find out. We never understood how he did it and what secret deal he had with our driver. At midnight we went to one of our unit rooms which was dark and cold and drank a couple of cups without making any noise. The silence and blackness together with the fear which had got hold of me added an excitement to this event. In the morning he suggested to pour this excitement, which was now in our bladders, into the commander’s tea so that he would also take part in our drinking. Our eyes twinkled and we did it.
He called me a year after military service and said he missed me and liked to gather the gang somewhere to meet. I dodged the request at first, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. A couple of the boys came and we gathered in a park. Abbas said he had got married and worked in a taxi firm. He was airing his grievances, just like the military service days. I was listening to his words until I realized the point of all these words and complaints was just one thing: asking me to participate in a work with which we could go from rags to riches just with a little capital. It was one of those pyramid schemes in which you just recruit members and make your own hand and then swindle the money of the people under your hand. Little by little as I understood the story, my hand and foot got numb. His voice was not planning to stop and it went on and on and on to reach that moment when your eyes would twinkle from the paradise he was portraying for you. Inevitably I said something so that I could escape from that dilemma.
Now a few years have passed from than night and I have neither seen Abbas nor heard his voice. But I have kept his number, before for if he called I wouldn’t answer, and later because he was a comrade from the passed times and memories.
- Aragh Sagi literally means “Dog alcohol”; it is a type of distilled alcoholic beverage in Iran which contains usually at least 65% pure ethanol. The closest equivalent to Aragh Sagi in English is hooch.↩