Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

‘A place you’ve forgotten to miss!’

I continued on my way, thinking of places and funny incidents in my life.

Doctor, there are stories for children and very short stories for sick people who no longer have much time. There are stories for the beach, that is to say, summer stories for women reclining in the sun topless, lazy stories about the excrement of reality, stories for the elite, for boring times, for pregnant mothers, for prisoners. I can’t write a story but I can tell a story. I crave incessant talk… I have a flock of sparrows inside me… ha!

The doctor had been driving to his mother’s house in a small town close to the capital. The road was slippery, because the previous day the sun had suddenly emerged from the great tent of gloom pitched above Helsinki and had melted the snow, which then turned to ice. The newspapers carried photographs of the smashed car after it had collided with the front of a school bus in which nine children were burned to death and others seriously injured. The doctor was also killed. His body had been cut in half, as if by a chainsaw. He was a good man of a sober disposition. He had been my psychiatrist for more than a year and a half.

The dung beetle, which lives in the deserts of Africa, makes small balls of dung, lays eggs in them and buries them underground. It takes care of them till they hatch. I’m reading about insects in a thick encyclopaedia and grieving over the state of humanity. I sometimes dream I’ve turned into a dung beetle foetus buried underground and that I’m now inside an egg. I imagine that the pain is a giant, warm-hearted beetle that has become my mother.

This morning, along with the pizza adverts and the free newspapers that come through the letter box, I received a letter from the hospital. A fine of 27 euros because I missed an appointment with the new doctor two weeks ago. Well, do I deserve such punishment? After that, something else bugged me: I realised it has been ten years since I picked up the telephone to ask after my mother and brothers, when I know very well what hell they’re going through. Other bugs of every shape and form trap the air in my head.

The man began to examine his chunky heart from every angle, and ask why from an early age he had started wrapping it in a thick layer of cement and iron. He didn’t find the answer, just mysterious feelings that didn’t help him explain why his heart was so hard and why he was constantly running away from the past. But didn’t he want to choose his life for himself and to be his own master? Here he is now, living in a beautiful flat in Helsinki, and in one year little Mariam will go off to school. His wife has savings from her work in the pizza restaurant and is now thinking of opening a restaurant that serves Iraqi dishes. She had given it serious thought: the waitresses would wear a hybrid uniform, combining elements of traditional Iraqi dress with the type of clothing worn by Oriental dancers. The décor would be traditional. If a permit could be secured, a real stuffed camel would stand or kneel in one of the corners. The food would be accompanied by interludes of oriental music. The floor would be covered with carpets with pictures of Sindbad on them. The incense would come out of an old lamp like Aladdin’s. She had thought of everything that would play into the fantasies that Finns and Western customers in general would have about the land of A Thousand and One Nights . A young Finnish novelist once asked me, with a genuine look of astonishment and curiosity, ‘How did you read Kafka? Did you read him in Arabic? How could you discover Kafka that way?’ I felt as I were a suspect in a crime and the Finnish novelist was the detective, and that Kafka was a Western treasure that Ali Baba, the Iraqi, had stolen. In the same way, I might have asked, ‘Did you read Kafka in Finnish?’

Doctor, we’ve been monitoring the planet DULL WINTER EARTH for several centuries and we’ve established that there’s no one there but the six beings that the space observation cameras have detected. What’s striking is that the six haven’t left the confines of their village on the banks of the red river. This is, in fact, a frozen river but we still don’t know what it’s made of. It looks to us like a river of frozen blood. And from the results of our observations, it seems that one of the six beings is the leader of the group. His house is set apart on the bluff and is shaped like a cup, while the other houses are glass rooms like water bubbles. The houses are close together on a curved line. For years, all we’ve observed of their way of life is the strict routine they perform every day. The five stay at home all the time, while the sixth sits motionless on the edge of the red river. Then the five come out together and head towards the sixth. They surround him and present him with something we can’t see. When they move away to go back to their rooms, the sixth one goes back to his room too. He stays there some time, then goes out and throws something into the river, then goes back to where he sits. We finally decided to wipe them out with laser beams, and we didn’t risk getting in touch with them. I think the time for adventures is over. They belonged to that time that had caused the disappearance of our old Earth. What’s laughable is that among us there’s an old eccentric astronaut who still writes poetry. As you know, our early forefathers on Earth used to engage in this retarded behaviour. The astronaut would say, ‘Those six are God!’ Can you imagine! After so many aeons of existence, after mankind has achieved complete immortality in its triumph over death, there are still people who believe in God. The astronaut must be punished and subjected to prolonged psychiatric treatment. He’s suffering from the belief disease, which is otherwise extinct in this age of ours — the age of eternal voyaging, the second eternal age that lacks any purpose or direction.

But one beautiful calm night the astronaut left his room to go for a space walk. He put on his suit, jumped into space and began to swim slowly, looking at the distant stars. A while later all the astronaut did was rearrange the letters in the planet’s name in his mind and read them as DEATH WILL RETURN.

After this minor linguistic discovery, which some of his colleagues saw as pure hocus pocus, alarm spread among the inhabitants of the galaxy and many conferences were held to look into the possible dangers.

Doctor, that’s why the stories had to be rewritten. Because the word death had stirred up sensations again.

I don’t want to look on serenely and quietly. I’m tired. I want to scream. I’m like any one of you, a mass of schizoid monkeys living in one body. I’m a fish that burns in an oven while it’s pouring with rain outside. Yet another image, and yet more poisons pouring out of my mouth. Smile, Mother, so that the dates ripen. Good, I thought the world was just a coded dream and that I was a symbol hunter who needs a hunting net and a laboratory. The books tricked me before the encyclopaedia of human insects could trick me. And finally the dream for which I had wrecked my life collapsed. I now have two wrecks: my life and the dream. I love you, Mother, and I pray that God will stop tormenting you with vulgar black sadness and that the country will be ruled by an angel with a beautiful bottom. Before he set fire to the children’s bus, the doctor was treating my depression some of the time, and at other times my aggressive and trouble-making mentality. I can’t sleep, Mother. They want to force me to sleep. And you, my brothers, I tell you I’m one of those terrified patients, one of those Kafkaesque mice, a breed that’s chased forever. We eat fast and in fear, we sleep with eyes half-closed. The characters in our nightmares are evil cats and barbed wire traps. By the way, this disease isn’t contagious, but genetic. Before Kafka appeared they used to call our ancestors the sources of evil. They sent them to the temples to exorcise the demons from their heads. As for now, how can we describe our wretched political life?