Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

It was a double explosion. First they detonated a taxi in front of the magazine’s offices. If it hadn’t been for the concrete barriers the building would have collapsed. The second vehicle was a watermelon truck, packed with explosives. The first police patrol to arrive after the first explosion brought three policemen. The murderers waited for people to gather and then detonated the second vehicle. That killed twenty-five people. Two of the policemen were killed on the spot and their colleague caught fire and began running in every direction. Finally he staggered through the door of the magazine building and collapsed, a lifeless corpse.

In an old text of yours you say:

A pulp of blood and shit

a monster

a defiled planet

a god-viper

time spilled in that time.

When we were in secondary school we used to fuck a prostitute who would give us her customers’ shoes. She loved us like a mother. She bought us lots of chocolate and laughed when she slept with us. Marwan used to steal spoons and knives from his house and offer them to her as presents. She was crazy about little knives and addicted to crossword puzzles. We called her ‘the drunken boat’ after the poem by Rimbaud. Before the school year ended, we went on a school trip to explore the mountains. Marwan tried to bring ‘the drunken boat’ along with us, but the headmaster threatened to expel us from school. On top of a rock shaped like the head of an angry bull, overlooking the valley, we sat down to smoke and read the newspaper. The others went off to explore a cave where prehistoric man had once lived. It was small, like an animal’s burrow, and full of spiders’ webs, they told us later. I read the paper while Marwan smoked and then we would switch roles. It was a government newspaper and it was pathetic, from the political news on the front page to the back page devoted to the mysteries of the other world, as if our own world weren’t strange and incoherent enough. It was on top of the bull’s head that Marwan discovered his vocation. He solved the crossword puzzle in the newspaper in an instant. After that he got a notebook and pen out of his bag and set to work writing his own crossword. He smoked six cigarettes before he finished his first puzzle. It was made up of synonyms from nature. From the rock he stared up at the treetops and said, ‘Writing crosswords is much easier than solving them.’

‘Perhaps it’s like the real world,’ I said, blowing smoke and pretending to be a dreamy young man.

‘What a philosopher,’ he said sarcastically. Then he gave an absurd, euphoric yell that filled the valley.

That night he told you that ‘the drunken boat’ was his relative. Why did he hide this from you for so many years?

We were separated when we went to university. Marwan’s family moved to another part of the city. He went to study agriculture, with dreams of ending up with a piece of land where he could plant pomegranate trees. I went to the faculty of mass communications. We would visit each other constantly, exchange ideas, laugh, smoke and drink a lot. We would also exchange gossip about ‘the drunken boat’. We heard that some pimp had cut off her ear because she stole a ring from a customer who worked in State Security. She got her revenge on him three days later. He was lying asleep on his stomach so she sank a carving knife deep into his arse. She was given a jail sentence.

Marwan got married in his first year at university. It was passionate love at first sight. The fruit of his love with Salwa was two children, and the fruit came while they were still studying. When they graduated, Salwa stayed at home to look after the children and Marwan went looking for work. Things weren’t easy for someone who had just graduated in agriculture. Meanwhile, I started to have articles published on historical esoterica, which I had been writing since I was a student. After I graduated, I began work straight away at the magazine, Boutique . We would vent our need to rebel by writing on ideological and social themes. I got in touch with a colleague who was working in the popular magazine Puzzles and told him that Marwan was skilled at writing crosswords and astrology columns. Marwan was angry with me for lying about the astrology but he had no options other than to work at the magazine. He started writing crosswords and even began swatting up on astrology.

He sent you a text message that read: Fire Sign — You’re compatible with all the signs. Your blood group breathes disappointment and happiness. You stick your tongue in the woman’s mouth in order to cool down. The fog that burns on the ceiling is the steam of sweat. You buy pins and coloured pictures from the shop. You pin them on your flesh when you receive a guest. The firewood comes to you throughout the night, wrapped in nightmares. When you wake up you have a bath on fire. You eat on fire. You read the newspapers on fire. You smoke a cigarette on fire. In the coffee cup you come across prophecies of fire. You laugh on fire. You have your lungs checked at the hospital, and they find a spring of errors that looks like a tumour. You dream of the final act: it goes out.

I bought a stuffed scorpion from the toyshop and went to visit Marwan in hospital. The doctor told me that Marwan’s injuries weren’t serious. They had extracted some fragments of window glass from his scalp and said he would be fine. Salwa, his wife, was anxious and frightened by Marwan’s mental confusion. Like her, I asked the doctor various questions about Marwan’s mysterious condition. The doctor asked me, ‘If you’d gone through a terrorist explosion like that, would you come out laughing and joking?’

‘Maybe!’ I said, looking at his pointed nose.

He gave me a contemptuous look and took Marwan’s wife to one side.

The doctor was wrong; Marwan wasn’t just suffering from shock. The burnt policeman had got inside him and had taken control of his being. He would say he could hear the policeman’s voice in his head, clear and sharp.

Aahh! Perhaps like my voice… you frame his sarcastic words and hang them on your living room wall.

War

Peace

God’s arse

After coming out of hospital Marwan kept to himself at home and didn’t want to meet any visitors. One day he contacted me and said he wanted to come visit. We bought a bottle of whiskey and went to my apartment. He told me he was reluctant to go to the policeman’s house and find out who he was.

He soon got drunk and started shouting and cursing, addressing thin air, saying, ‘Eat shit’ and ‘Shut up, pimp.’

Then he opened his eyes like an owl and threatened to break off our friendship if I didn’t believe everything he told me. I took the policeman’s address from him and drove him home. Salwa was waiting for us at the window, downcast. Marwan hadn’t told her what had happened to him. He was struggling to deal with the disaster himself and was on the verge of madness.

I knocked on the door and an attractive woman in the spring of her life came out. She was dressed in black and her eyes were swollen. Standing in the doorway, I saw a little girl playing with a rabbit the same size as her. I said I was a journalist and I wanted to write an article about the victims of the explosion at Puzzles magazine. She said her husband had been killed because of the ignorance that prevailed in this wretched country and she didn’t want to speak to anyone. She shut the door. I made discrete enquiries about the young woman’s circumstances at a nearby shop. The shopkeeper told me about her husband, the policeman, and how kind he had been and how much he had loved his family. The policeman used to say, ‘God has blessed me with the three most beautiful women in the world — my mother, my daughter and my wife. I’m thankful to be alive, however tough it is in this country.’