Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

I was waiting for him at the coffee shop door. He came out laughing loudly and gave me a friendly punch in the guts. I pushed his wheelchair and we crossed the street. He asked after his sister, who is my wife, and I said, ‘She’s well.’

‘Are you going to do the disappearing knife trick today?’ he asked, coughing. He was a chronic smoker.

‘No, but I may talk a little about the interpretation of dreams.’

I knocked on the door and Souad opened it. ‘Ah, both of you,’ she said as she kissed Jaafar on the head. She helped me get his wheelchair through the narrow doorway. I pinched her bottom and she slapped my hand discreetly, but Jaafar didn’t notice.

In the room there was a bare wooden bench and Salih the butcher was sitting on it. Allawi was sitting cross-legged on the ground with a set of green prayer beads in his hand — the same way he sat when he was making a knife disappear.

Jaafar shook Salih’s hand and said, ‘Hey, Allawi, come and sit on the bench.’

Allawi answered proudly, ‘I’ve never sat on a chair or a bench.’

‘You mean in all your life?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’re only fifteen, damn it. Anyone who heard you would say you were as old as the dinosaurs.’

Jaafar laughed his booming laugh as he adjusted the photograph of his father on the wall.

Souad disappeared into the kitchen and I sat next to the butcher. Jaafar turned his wheelchair to face us. Souad came back with a tray of tea, sat on the carpet close to Allawi and poured the tea, smiling amiably at everyone and winking at me several times. I blew her a kiss. Jaafar turned to me and said, ‘Hey, love birds, we’ve got work to do. When the meeting’s over you can throw each other as many kisses as you want.’

In his weird woman’s voice, the butcher said, ‘Now, Jaafar. Anyone who heard you would say this was a meeting of some underground party that was going to change the world. We’ve made so many knives disappear, and Souad always brings them back again… And it’s been going on like this for ten years.’

Allawi laughed and said, ‘I’ve been making knives disappear all my life. But I want to go on making them disappear again and again and I don’t know why.’ Jaafar changed the subject and asked Allawi whether Umm Ibtisam would be coming today. He replied that he was certain this time, because she had sworn to him three times by Ali’s son Abbas that she would come. ‘She must be on her way now. You know the shitty Americans have closed half the roads.’

2

We were like one family. Our knife-handling skills weren’t the only thing we had in common. We also shared our problems in life, our joys and our ignorance. We were buffeted by all forms of misfortune and several times we grew disappointed with the knives. There were other concerns in life. We almost split up on several occasions but we were drawn back together by the strangeness and pleasure of our gift, by the feeling among all of us — except, perhaps, Salih the butcher — that knives could be a solace and give our lives the thrill of uncertainty.

Ten years have passed since we became a team in the knife trick. Allawi joined us three years ago. I continued my studies and went to the Faculty of Education. Souad went into the sixth year of secondary school, specializing in sciences, and dreamed of going to the Faculty of Medicine. Salih the butcher has extended his shop, divorced the mother of his children and married a young woman who had a bad reputation in the neighbourhood. Jaafar found Allawi a job in the factory that makes women’s shoes. He didn’t want Allawi to stay in the market playing with knives. Jaafar himself was the same as always — busy with football, refereeing, dominoes, the coffee shop, always anxious to ensure that our group didn’t fall apart and constantly seeking out new talent in football and also in the knife trick. He believed that our knife skills were a secret vocation that would change the world. As to how and why and when, these were all unanswered questions but he had nothing to do with them. ‘I’ve never even read a newspaper in my life. How could I understand the secret of the knives?’ he said.

The butcher, Allawi, Jaafar and I had the ability to make knives disappear. Souad was the only person who could make them reappear but she couldn’t make them disappear. Souad’s difference compounded the mystery of our talents, which did not progress one step despite the passage of all those years.

Two years ago I was assigned to read books in order to find out what the knives meant, and I soon came to the idea that the knives were just a metaphor for all the terror, the killing and the brutality in the country. It’s a realistic phenomenon that is unfamiliar, an extraordinary game that has no value, because it is hemmed in by definite laws.

I married Souad a year and a half ago. It was Jaafar who arranged this early marriage with my father. Souad’s cousin had approached Jaafar with a proposal to marry her. Jaafar didn’t want Souad to move away from us and go to live in the village. He wasn’t unaware of the tentative affection we felt for each other. My father was persuaded straight away, especially as Jaafar made my father an attractive offer. He said he would buy Souad and me a small house. My father agreed at once because he wanted to relieve the strain in his own house. We were nine brothers and three sisters all living in two rooms and my father was struggling to keep the family afloat. He worked as a baker and my mother gave injections to sick people in the neighbourhood, though she didn’t have a nursing certificate. In fact she was illiterate and because she was so kind, people called her the angel of mercy.

When I was a youngster I played on Jaafar’s football team. He discovered my talent by chance. He was watching me as I made a knife that some boy was holding disappear. He was ecstatic and started to hug me. He cheerfully took me to their house and introduced me to young Souad, whose eyes projected the force of life like a strong and beautiful flower. The next day Jaafar took me to Salih the butcher’s shop and introduced me to him.

In those days we used to meet in Jaafar’s house, but his mother and his five brothers would disturb us so then we moved to Salih’s house. He had a room on the roof of the house where he raised birds. We would put the knives on top of a round wooden table and make them disappear one by one, then Souad would make them reappear. We would exchange views and try to analyse the trick. But the conversation soon moved away from knives and turned to jokes and stories about the people in the sector. We continued to meet in the pigeon loft until I got married and Jaafar bought us that small house. Jaafar had considerable wealth from a business he’d been in since he was young. He used to deal in pornographic magazines that were banned, but he was careful to cover his tracks, selling them only in wealthy neighbourhoods.

It was I who discovered Allawi and brought him into the group. I was in the street market buying rat poison when I saw a group of children and adults in a corner of the market, gathered in a circle full of curiosity. Allawi was sitting cross-legged as usual, with a number of small knives of various types next to him. He didn’t make knives disappear for free. People would give him a packet of cigarettes or enough money for a sandwich or to buy a grape juice or pomegranate juice, and as soon as he felt it was worth his while he would throw one of the knives onto the ground in front of the spectators and ask them to touch it to make sure it was a real knife. Then he would ask them to stand back in a slightly larger circle so that he could breathe and concentrate. Allawi stared at the knife for thirty seconds, as we all did, and as soon as tears started to glisten in his eyes the knife would disappear. The audience would applaud in amazement and admiration, and Allawi would then wait for the spectators to come up with enough money for him to repeat the trick with another knife. His main problem was that he depended on stealing knives to replace the ones he made disappear. That put him in many tricky situations.