Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

The next morning we were waiting in front of the car park in the city centre. The target was meant to arrive in a red Toyota Crown and as soon as the car went into the car park Salsal would get out of our car, follow him inside on foot and shoot him. Then we would drive off to our new place on the edge of the capital. That’s why I had brought the rabbit along with me and put it in the boot of the car.

Salsal received a text on his mobile and his face turned pale. We shouldn’t have had to wait for the target more than ten minutes. I asked him if all was well. He shouted out a curse and slapped his thigh. I was worried. After some hesitation he held out his mobile phone and showed me a picture of a rabbit sitting on an egg. It was a silly Photoshop job. ‘Do you know who sent the picture?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘The Deputy Minister of Culture,’ he said.

‘What!!?’

‘The deputy’s the target, Hajjar.’

I got out of the car, my blood boiling at Salsal’s stupidity and all the craziness of this pathetic operation. More than a quarter of an hour passed and the target didn’t appear. I told Salsal I was pulling out of the operation. He got out of the car too and asked me to be patient and wait a while longer, because both of us were in danger. He got back in the car and tried to contact Salman. I walked to a shop nearby to buy a packet of cigarettes. My heart was pounding like crazy from the anger. As soon as I reached the shop the car blew up behind me and caught fire, burning the rabbit and Salsal to cinders.

Fear also has a smell, as you know.

The man smelled of smoked fish as he spoke, spraying saliva from his mouth.

‘That was last winter. I was coming back from one of my routine jaunts around the city centre. Jaunts intended to “pick up a living”, as we say in the home country. I was gathering what I could from various, out-of-the-way bars: casual conversation, a fuck, a free beer, a joint, anarchic talk about political matters, an argument with another drunk, or a chance to annoy others on the pretext of being drunk, just for fun. The important thing was that the day should include a human touch, however small. You know. And on the day the wolf appeared, I met a strange young woman. An owl of ill omen, as we would say. Do you believe there are faces that bring bad luck? There are faces you meet that are like the symbols in dreams. You’re an artist and your imagination makes it easy for you to understand what I mean, doesn’t it? You artists are farmers tilling the fields of dreams. Do you like that? Yes, I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert. Imagine there’s an Indian painter in Delhi working on some subject that’s also taking shape in the dream of a man who’s asleep in Texas. Okay, fuck that. But would you agree with me that all art comes together in this way? Perhaps love and unhappiness too. If, for example, a poet wrote about loneliness in Finland, then his poem could be the dream of someone asleep in some other part of the world. If there was a special search engine for dreams, like Google, all dreamers would find their dreams in works of art. The dreamer would put a word, or several words, from his dream into the Dream Search Engine, and thousands of results would appear. The more the search is narrowed down, the closer he gets to his dream and eventually he finds out it’s a painting or a piece of music or a sentence in a play. He would also find out which country his dream was in. Yes, you know. Maybe life… okay, fuck that.

‘The young woman had a surprising face. It looked like the needle of an electric sewing machine had pricked it for many hours. Her complexion was peppered with dozens of little holes. She told me she was Spanish. Then, five minutes later, she told me her mother was Egyptian and her father Finnish. She only knew three words of Arabic, all of them related to sexual organs or blasphemous phrases including the word “shit”. The whore drank three glasses of beer on my account and went to wait in a dark corner. What do you think she’s waiting for? Definitely another prick who’ll spend more on her. I lost twenty euros in the slot machine. I felt exhausted and hungry. Then I waved at the woman with the ill-omened face, a sarcastic theatrical wave, and before leaving, as if addressing vast throngs, I shouted: “Long live life!”

‘On the way home, I couldn’t get the woman’s face out of my mind. I had the impression I had met her in some street market in the country. I don’t know why, but I imagined her sitting wrapped in a black cloak selling green and red peppers. I’m certain that three or four signs of bad luck had conspired to put me in this mess. But anyway, listen, you won’t believe what happened next. As usual, as soon as I got back to my flat, I took off all my clothes. I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the thing running towards me from the sitting room. I jumped into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I was like someone who’d seen the Angel of Death. It was a wolf. A wolf, I swear. But you’ll say that maybe it was a dog. After looking through the keyhole several times, I spotted it again and I knew very well what it was. I was really shaking. There was a terrifying silence for some minutes. After looking through the keyhole several times, I could see it — I was sure it was a wolf. I could hear it panting, then I saw it sniffing my trousers and underpants at the front door. After that it sat down and started to stare sadly at the bathroom door.

‘A wolf in the city centre, in a block of flats, and in my bloody flat! I sat on the toilet seat and began to think: no one but me had a key to this flat, I live on the fourth floor, and even if we assume, okay, that it could fly and had come in through the balcony, the door between the sitting room and the balcony was always closed. I pissed without noticing I was doing it. I sat there as if paralysed, naked on the toilet seat with a wolf in my flat. How absurd! I began to blame and curse myself. Why did I strip off like a whore whenever I came into the flat? If I’d had my mobile with me, I would have called the police and it would all be over. What kind of shitbag am I? An unemployed drunk, cruising the bars to pick up a living. And from whom? From wrecks no less rotten than me; people from under whose feet the new world of glitter has pulled the carpet, like, for example, that fat woman in her late thirties looking for a casual fuck with an immigrant refugee who doesn’t have a screw left that’s not loose. We’re the ones who don’t have delicious tight arses. We just have arseholes to shit from. But fuck that.

‘Even the woman I met that day, the one with the face punctured with needle holes, didn’t take up my invitation. She moved to another table and waited for better rubbish to come along. If she’d accepted my invitation to fuck and come back to the flat with me, she would have run off and called the police or the neighbours. Perhaps the wolf would have eaten her. What wolf? Impossible. There must be some mistake in the facts of this case, or some hallucination. I was speaking like this to my image in the mirror.

‘I looked through the keyhole again. It was crouched in the same place. There were only a few hours left till morning. I thought that tomorrow someone would be worried I was missing. Of course it was a ridiculous idea, and my only aim was to give myself some false consolation. Because I’ve been living alone for years, and I only know freaks that haunt the most secluded bars, and they’re like me — loners who scrape together a livelihood where they can, or else slope back to their dirty beds to be consumed by sadness the long night through. The only ones who might knock on my door are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they stopped coming a while back. Perhaps they’ve had enough of my constant mockery of their Lord. There was a time when they would swamp me with their books and magazines. One thing I liked in those magazines was that desperate attempt to link the discoveries of science to the stories in the Bible. Two beautiful women from the Jehovah’s Witnesses used to visit me regularly. My sick imagination made me welcome them warmly. I thought that establishing a serious relationship with them would lead to passionate lovemaking. Imagine. The two Jehovah’s Witness women, naked in my bed. One of them sucking my cock and the other giving her clitoris to my tongue while reading a passage from the Bible. We used to talk about lots of things. The subject that interested me most was the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood transfusions. I used to joke with them and say that blood is delicious and it’s what vampires drink. I used to talk to them about the importance of blood.