Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

I shouted, ‘You’re eating a corpse, you disgusting old man!’

‘Ha! You’ll eat me too, and they’ll eat you or use you as material for their batteries or for drinking .’

I punched him in the face and shouted again, ‘If you weren’t an old man, I’d smash your skull in, you bastard!’

He paid no attention to what I said. All he said was that there was no need for me to be upset, because he would leave the hole soon and I would fall into another hole from another time. He said his book would stay with me. It’s a book full of hallucinations. It had detailed explanations of the secret energy extracted from insects to create additional organs to reinforce the liver, the pancreas, the heart and all the body’s other organs.

3

Before leaving the hole, the old man told me he was from Baghdad and had lived in the time of the Abbasid Caliphate. He had been a teacher, a writer and an inventor. He suggested to the caliph that they light the city streets with lanterns. He had already supervised the lighting of the mosques and was now busy on his plan to expand the house lighting system by more contemporary methods. The Baghdad thieves were upset by his lanterns, and one day they chased after him after dawn prayers. Close to his home the lantern man tripped on his cloak and fell down the hole.

One of the things this Baghdadi told me was that everyone who visits the hole soon learns how to find out about events of the past, the present and the future, and that the inventors of the game had based it on a series of experiments they had conducted to understand coincidence. There were rumours that they couldn’t control the game, which rolls ceaselessly on and on through the curves of time. He also said: ‘Anyone who’s looking for a way out of here also has to develop the art of playing, otherwise they’ll remain a ghost like me, happy with the game… Ha, ha, ha. I’m fed up with trying to decipher symbols. There are two opponents in every game. Each one has his own private code. It’s a bloody fight, repetitive and disgusting. The rest is memory, which they can’t erase easily. In your day, experiments with memory were in their infancy. The scientists went on working for more than a century and a half after those first attempts — the purpose of which was to discover the memory centres in rats’ brains. It turned out that the rats remembered what they learned even if their brains had been completely destroyed in the laboratory. Those would be amazing experiments if they were applied to humans. Is memory a winning card in this game that we play so seriously till it’s all over, or should we merely have fun? Everyone that falls down here becomes a meal or a source to satisfy the instincts, or energy for other systems. We who…. damn, who are we? No one knows!’

The old man died and left me really helpless. Day had broken and snowflakes fell from the mouth of the hole. The Russian’s body looked ghostly. I wanted to reach back to other times I might have lived in, the traces of which are scattered to places I previously thought imaginary. My consciousness was moving like a rollercoaster at a funfair. I watched the snowflakes swirling. The vision of the soldier had disappeared. My eyes were open and my mind was asleep. I may have been sleeping for hundreds of years. I imagined a dead cell. Am I really just in my mind or in every cell in my body? A strong smell of flowers filled the hole. I closed my eyes but then a young girl fell into the hole. She was carrying on her back an electronic bag tied around her chest with many straps, and to her thighs were tied metallic phosphorous clusters. In her hand she was holding something that looked like an electronic gauge.

‘Who are you?’ she asked me, panting. There were wounds disfiguring her pretty face.

‘I’m a djinni. What happened to you?’

I felt as if my voice went back to ancient times.

‘A blood analysis robot was chasing me,’ she said.

She was sucking her finger, which was swollen like a mushroom.

‘That’s normal,’ I said apathetically, then crawled towards the corpse of the old man.

They were both in their forties. They had colon cancer, while I had lung cancer. We were in the Medical City hospital in central Baghdad. The day before, they had taken Hajj Saber away. Poor guy. He died and escaped his torment. The cleaning woman came and changed the sheets on his bed. Salwan and I watched her as she arranged the bed carefully. She went through his little cupboard. She took out some towels and a bag of oranges his daughter Fatma had brought him the day before he died. The cleaning lady offered them to us. Salwan told her he wouldn’t eat a dead man’s oranges. Then he asked her irritably about the doctor and whether he would come by the ward any time soon.

‘There isn’t a single doctor available,’ she answered, severe as usual. ‘They’re all in the emergency department. Haven’t you seen the massacre from the window of your palace?’

Salwan had his very own rocking chair that he’d brought from home. He would put it close to the window and watch the courtyard outside the emergency department day and night. We were on the fifth floor. The courtyard never rested. Ambulances and cars would rush in and out like crazy. Sometimes carts would come, drawn by donkeys or horses, loaded with mangled bodies. It was hard to tell the dead from the living. It was a bleak year. Civil war. Infiltrators from abroad. Secret agents from all over the world. Adventurers. They were all making their way together down the river of hell that was Baghdad.

The doctors checked us with their white coats spattered with blood. The hospital was vast, with hundreds of patients lying in bed after bed. Salwan accused the doctors of negligence in the way they cared for the patients. They told him they couldn’t even handle the emergency department because there weren’t enough paramedics there. It was an exceptional situation. The country was being torn apart. But Salwan wasn’t convinced. He held them responsible for the declining health of his fellow colon cancer victim — this was a retired pilot in a nearby bed who wouldn’t stop groaning. On several occasions he had begged them to end his life. Salwan was frightened of his colon because it would soon get to the same stage as the pilot’s, with the same excruciating pain. We were stuck between the pilot’s groans and the bloody scenes outside the window. It was closed. We couldn’t hear the screams of the injured and the lamentations of the bereaved in the courtyard of the emergency department. All we could hear were the pilot’s groans, which sounded like cemetery music composed to accompany the drama we could see through the window.

Salwan’s psychological state was constantly deteriorating. He was speaking but he was deaf to what anyone else said. All he could hear was the Angel of Death shuffling towards him. I learned that he’d been a carpenter all his life. His wife was barren. In his late forties, he took a second wife who was young. She made him happy with a handsome boy. The two wives would visit him regularly. They would sit on the end of the bed like squabbling crows. Salwan shared his insults equally between them, all without understanding a word of what they said. He was drowning in the depths of despair, like the wreckage of a ship.

That day Salwan was extremely tense. He woke up at dawn. A batch of human offerings had arrived when the first ray of sunlight touched the world of man: someone had blown himself up in the mosque during dawn prayers. Salwan lit a cigarette and walked up and down the ward muttering to himself. The nurse came in and asked him to put out his cigarette. He kicked up a ruckus, cursed the doctors, the suicide bombers and the cancer, and repeatedly damned the pilot for moaning, which gave him insomnia, he said. He didn’t put out his cigarette until his shouting had woken everyone up. I got out of bed and fetched the teapot from the kitchen. We sat down together near the window drinking tea with biscuits. There hadn’t been many people praying. The courtyard fell pretty quiet, except for the rain that was pelting down. I wanted to soothe his fears but I couldn’t get the words straight in my mouth. Meanwhile he went on insulting Saddam Hussein and in my turn I cursed the Occupation. He asked me about the scorpion tattoo on the back of my hand and I told him it was a relic of my adolescence. I was in this gang at the time and we got together one drunken night on a piece of wasteland and decided that each of us would get a scorpion tattoo and we would be the Scorpion Crew. Salwan smiled. Suddenly his bad mood lifted and he too started to share memories of scorpions. He said that in his childhood he lived in a village that was full of poisonous snakes and scorpions. He talked about a girl called Parveen, and how they went hunting scorpions together: