Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

‘It was a cold and frightening darkness. Solid darkness. The only thing that helped me in the emptiness was remembering what happened in those last moments, although the horror of having my body disappear paralyzed my attempt to be patient and to await the mercy of God in that darkness. What I had thought is that, when you die, no thread of memory survives, no awareness of the life you lived; quite the opposite of what happened in my case. Although death, as absolute nothingness, is no more than an assumption. I wanted to shout out to ask for help but I didn’t know where my mouth was or even how I could shout. What was the mechanism or the motions I had to perform in order to shout? How could I work out where my foot was, or how could I find my hair to touch it? Was I dead? The problem with that darkness was not that you couldn’t remember what it was like to perform some action or other. The trouble was that, in the sea of darkness, you lose the means to perform it. You remember how to look, for example, but you no longer have the tools that make it possible to look. At the same time, I felt that I still existed as a small point of consciousness somewhere in the world. I don’t know how long this lasted. The small point expanded. The breathing, and a sense that my skin was somehow warm, began to come back, slowly at first but at a rate that gradually accelerated.

‘Apparently I had hit my head on the edge of the small nightstand and lost consciousness. I bled a little. There wasn’t any wolf in the flat. It had vanished as if into thin air. The flat door was closed and only the bathroom door was open. I put on a shirt and took my mobile phone from the pocket of my trousers, which lay on the floor close to where the wolf had been before it disappeared. Rather warily, I wandered around the rooms. There was no one at home but me. I sat down on the edge of the sofa and turned on the television. There was a repeat of the Oscars award ceremony. Brad Pitt had his arm round Angelina Jolie’s waist and was talking about his chances of winning an award. I decided to go back to the forest and try to stand up to the mosquitoes, instead of seeing them as crocodiles. Fuck that. This is the last glass I’ll drink with you. You really are a strange man — perhaps you’re rather like me. You have a suspicious capacity for listening. I think you are… Okay. Perhaps another glass before I go. Fuck that. I didn’t catch your name… I’m Salman.’

‘Hassan Blasim, pleased to meet you.’

In memory of my friends:

Dawoud the engineer, 2003

Kouresh the poet and doctor, 2006

Bassem the sculptor and photographer, 2007

He wakes up.

It’s a mess of a morning.

He hears the words: ‘For God’s sake, I’m going to die of thirst!’

He sits on the edge of the bed. He feels a numbness in his limbs. He pours himself a glass of water. He looks around the ward in a daze. He sees a bird hitting the window pane. A plump nurse is giving an injection to a man with an arm missing.

‘Aha! Cold water! Thank you,’ says the policeman somewhere deep inside him…

My lifelong friend Marwan used to say, ‘Across: mankind; down: the sea. The highest mountain peak in the world. A three-letter word. An unfamiliar reality.’

They published a picture of him smiling on the cover of the magazine!

It was a picture taken two years ago during the ceremony at which he received the prize for being the best crossword writer. The prize was funded by a billionaire member of parliament who came back to the country after the change in regime. They say the great passion he acquired for crosswords during his long exile was behind his decision to finance the prize. It was worth 15,000 dollars. The prize aroused much envy among certain journalists and writers who criticized it severely and at length. Marwan won it on merit; I think Marwan could be awarded the title ‘Poet Laureate of Crosswords’.

I found some of his old crossword puzzles at the farm once. They contained strange expressions such as ‘half a moon’, ‘a semi-mythical animal’, ‘a vertical tunnel’, ‘a poisonous grass’, and ‘a half-truth’.

In the olden days, when our eyes were like magnifying glasses, the moon was a giant that rose above the rooftops, and we wanted to break it with a stone. In those days Marwan and I were like a single spirit. One autumn evening we lit a fire in a barrel of rubbish and swore an oath to be forever loyal to each other. We played often, and invented our own secrets, built our own world out of the strangeness of the world around us. We watched the adults’ wars on television and saw how the front ate up our elders. Our mothers baked bread in clay ovens and sat down in the sunset hour, afraid and with tears in their eyes. We would steal sweets from shops, climb trees and break our legs and arms. Life and death was a game of running, climbing and jumping, of watching, of secret dirty words, of sleep and nightmares.

I remember you both well. I felt like a third wheel when we all started secondary school. I was jealous of you!

Marwan and I would chase the coffins. We would wait for them to reach the turning off the main road. The war was in its fourth year by this point. The coffins were wrapped in the flag and tied firmly to the tops of cars that came from the front. We wanted to be like grown-ups who, when a coffin passed by, would stand and raise their hands solemnly and sadly. We would salute the dead like them. But when the death car turned a corner, we would race after it down the muddy lanes. The driver would have to slow down so that the coffin didn’t fall off. Then the car would choose the door of a sleeping house, and stop in front of it. When the women of the house came out they would scream and throw themselves in the pools of mud and spatter their hair with it. We would hurry to tell our mothers whose house the death car had stopped outside. My mother would always reply, ‘Go and wash your face,’ or ‘Go to Umm Ali next door and ask her if she has a little spice mixture to spare.’ And in the evening my mother would go and mourn with the local women in the dead man’s house, slapping her face and weeping.

Once I was sitting with Marwan waiting for a coffin to arrive. We were eating sunflower seeds. We had waited a long time and were about to give up hope and go back home disappointed. But then the death car loomed on the horizon. We ran after it like happy dogs and were betting on who could beat the car, when it finally stopped in front of Marwan’s house. His mother came out screaming hysterically. She ripped her clothes and threw herself in the pool of mud. Bassem, who was standing next to me, stood stock still and stared in a trance. His big brother noticed him and pulled him into the house. I ran back home, into my mother’s arms, crying in torment. ‘Mummy, my friend Marwan’s dad’s died,’ I sobbed. She said, ‘Wash your face and go to the shop and fetch me half a kilo of onions.’

I heard what you wrote yesterday. How the first explosion shredded Marwan’s face. The windows shattered and the cupboards fell on top of him. His mouth filled with blood. He spat out teeth and indistinctly heard the screams of his colleague, the editor of the New Woman section. The dust made it impossible to see. She crawled over the rubble screaming, ‘I’m going to die… I’m going to die.’ Then she fell silent suddenly and forever. Marwan bled a long time and only recovered consciousness in hospital.

Okay.

Marwan had cute and interesting ideas when we were kids. Once he asked me to help him collect time. We went down towards the valley, stretched out on our stomachs and proceeded to stare at a weed without moving for more than an hour. We were as silent as stone statues. It was Marwan’s belief that if we stared at anything in nature for an hour we would store that hour in our brains. While other people lost time, we would collect it.