Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

In the three days Marwan spent in hospital, the policeman told him what had happened: ‘On the patrol we were telling each other jokes, my colleagues and me. We heard the explosion and headed straight to the Puzzles building. My colleagues moved people away from the scene of the incident and I tried to put out the fire in a car in which a woman and her daughter were burning. Then the second explosion went off.

‘My body caught fire. I started to run and scream, then I collapsed in the lobby. I found myself sitting on the ground, a few paces away from my own burning body! I had split in two: one a lifeless corpse, the other shivering from the cold. I ran down the corridors of the magazine building. I saw a woman crawling on her stomach and screaming, but she died before I could do anything. I saw you under the rubble, so I went inside you and I felt warm again. And here I am, smelling what you can smell, tasting what you taste, hearing what you hear, and aware of you as a living being, but I can’t see anything. I’m in total darkness. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ Marwan had said.

Okay, this is what you wrote down… tell me how you reacted to that.

Marwan was angry when I suggested he visit a man of religion. I was bewildered by what he told me and it had made me say stupid things. He told me I was mad and that I was still behaving like we were childhood soulmates. (‘It was just a trivial, childish game, you idiot!’ he yelled.) Then he started talking to me as calm as a madman: ‘Do you understand me? Okay, he can share a bed with me, a grave, a window, a seat on the bus, but he’s not going to share my body! That’s too much, in fact it’s complete madness! He grumbles and cries and tells me off as though I’m the thief and it’s not him who’s stolen my life.’

If Marwan went to sleep with only a thin blanket around him, the policeman would wake him up in the middle of the night and say, ‘I’m cold, Mr Marwan, please!’

If Marwan drank whiskey, the other guy would complain, ‘Please, Mr Marwan, that’s wrong. You’re burning your soul with that poison! Stop drinking!’

Or: ‘Why don’t you go to the toilet, Mr Marwan? The gas in your stomach is annoying.’

Why couldn’t it have been the policeman who incited Marwan to swallow the razor blade?!

Marwan’s eyes turned bloodshot from staying up late and drinking too much, and the others got used to his behaviour. They treated him as a victim of the explosion. Just another madman. His nerves would flare up for the slightest reason. His colleagues at work didn’t abandon him, and he went on devising crosswords, though he stopped writing the horoscopes. He was given a warning when he started writing very difficult crosswords, using words he found in the encyclopaedia or when he wrote, for example, ‘7 Across: a purple scorpion, 5 Down: a broken womb (six letters, inverted).’

‘This meat tastes salty. What’s that horrible smell? Don’t you read the Quran? Why don’t you pray? The water’s hot in the shower.’ Marwan started to take revenge, taking pleasure in tormenting the policeman. He would eat and drink and do things the policeman didn’t like, like drink gallons of whiskey, which the policeman couldn’t bear.

Marwan complained to you about the things that troubled him most. He hadn’t gone near his wife’s body, except once, three months ago. He had the impression that he was sleeping with her along with another man, and the policeman groaned and wailed like a crazed cat.

The policeman didn’t submit to his fate readily. He also knew how much authority he had. Sometimes he would keep jabbering deliriously in Marwan’s head until his skull throbbed. The last time Marwan told me about the policeman was while they had a truce.

The policeman wanted Marwan to visit his family. He told him some intimate details of his life so that Marwan would seem like an old friend. Yes, yes, yes. I’m not interested in all those details. When you write, you can choose the limits and call the rest our ignorance.

Marwan sat on the sofa and the policeman’s wife brought him some tea, while his mother wiped her tears with the hem of her hijab. Marwan hugged the policeman’s little girl as if she were the daughter of a late dear friend.

It was the same scene whenever he visited. He started buying presents for the family on instructions from the policeman, and Marwan even went to visit the policeman’s grave with the family.

The policeman went into a deep silence when he heard his wife and mother weeping at his grave. He remained silent for several days. Marwan breathed a sigh of relief each time, assuming the policeman had disappeared.

He punched you on the nose when you were driving the car. I know… good… details… everything in this story is boring and disgusting.

Then one day I visited him at his magazine. He was taking swigs from a bottle of arak that he hid in the drawer of his desk and smoking furiously. I started talking about our problems working at Boutique and the state of the country, in the hope of calming his nerves. He stopped writing as I spoke.

When I stopped speaking, he stood up and asked if I’d go with him to visit the ‘drunken boat’ in prison.

I wasn’t even sure she was still alive. I rang the department in charge of women’s prisons from his office and asked after her. They told me she was a patient in the city’s central hospital.

I was extremely uneasy all the way to the hospital. Marwan smoked a lot and rocked back and forth in his seat. He began pressing me to take good care of his family, his voice full of emotion.

I told him, ‘What are you talking about? Marwan, what do you mean, “going to die”? Hey, you’re like a cat with seven good lives left.’

He punched me on the nose. Then he lit me a cigarette with his one and put it in my mouth. I had an urge to stop the car and give him a thorough beating.

The ‘drunken boat’ was lying in the intensive care ward. Just a skeleton. She’d been unconscious for a fortnight. We sat close to her on the edge of the bed. Marwan took a small knife shaped like a fish out of his trouser pocket and put it close to her pillow.

He held her hand and tears flowed down his cheeks.

And after that you came to visit me!

Yes, we bought a range of mezes, two bottles of arak and twenty cans of beer, and we drove to your farm.

I was so happy to see the two of you! Time had flown, you guys! We had a wild time that night raising a toast to our memories of secondary school. We put a table out, under the lemon tree and cracked open the drink. Marwan seemed cheerful and relaxed, without any obvious worries. He was laughing and joking, not to mention drinking frantically. Somebody brought up that boy at school called ‘the Genius’. He was an eccentric student who memorised all the text books by heart within months. The teachers were convinced he was a genius, and they were shocked when he got poor grades in the end of year exams, barely enough to qualify to study in the oil institute. In his first year of college, he sneaked in at night and set fire to the lecture hall, then shot himself with a revolver. It was all a bit of a tragedy!

You told us at length about your days of isolation on your farm, where you wanted to be free to write a book on the history of decapitation in Mesopotamia.

The conversation eventually flagged and we started to slur our words. We were drunk and Marwan fell back into a deep silence. We got up to go into the house. Marwan asked me to recite whatever I could remember by Pessoa, his favourite writer.

I’m not me, I don’t know anything,

I don’t own anything, I’m not going anywhere,

I put my life to sleep

In the heart of what I don’t know.