Hassan Blasim - The Iraqi Christ

‘It’s an explosive belt. One word from you and I’ll blow myself up,’ the young man said, with a threatening glance towards the old woman.

I was killed by friendly fire, myself. We were on a joint patrol with the American forces after the invasion. Someone opened fire on us from a house in the village. The Americans responded hysterically, thinking we had opened fire on them. I was shot three times in the head. I met Christ in our next world, and we were overjoyed. He told me how he was inexplicably drawn to that young man in the kebab restaurant. It wasn’t just terror that had paralysed him, but also some mysterious desire for salvation. For some moments he stared into the young man’s face. The man leaned towards him and asked him to stand up and go to the bathroom with him. At first he didn’t budge from his place, as if turned to stone. Then he kissed his mother’s head and stood up.

The young man led the way to the toilets. He closed the door and kept the tip of his finger on the button on the explosive belt. With his other hand he pulled a pistol out of his belt and pointed it at Daniel’s head. The young man was practically hugging Christ by this point, wrapping his arms around him because the space was so tight. He summed up what he wanted — Daniel should wear the explosive belt in his place, in exchange for him saving the old woman’s life.

The young man was in a hysterical state and could hardly control himself. He said there would be someone filming the explosion from outside the restaurant and that if he didn’t blow himself up they would kill him. Daniel said nothing in response. They started to sweat. One of the customers tried to push the toilet door. The young man cleared his throat. Then he again promised Christ he would take the old woman safely out of the restaurant, but if Daniel didn’t blow himself up he would kill her. Half a minute of silence passed, then he agreed with a nod of his head and stared blankly into the young man’s eyes. The young man asked him to undo the belt and wrap it around his own waist. It was a difficult process because the room was so narrow. The young man withdrew cautiously, leaving Christ in the toilet with the explosive belt on. Then he rushed towards the old woman in the corner of the restaurant. He tapped her gently on the shoulder and took hold of her hand. She stood up and followed him like a child. The restaurant had started to fill up and the noise level was rising, as people laughed and the cutlery clattered like a sword fight.

Christ fell to his knees. He could hardly breathe and he pissed in his trousers. He opened the bathroom door and crawled into the restaurant. Someone met him at the door and ran back shouting, ‘A suicide bomber, a suicide bomber!’

Amidst the panic, as men, women and children trampled on each other to escape, Christ saw that his mother’s chair was empty and he pressed the button.

3As Ingmar Bergman once asked in an interview.

4Ayran — a cold beverage of yoghurt mixed with iced water and sometimes salt.

Before the egg appeared, I would read a book about law or religion every night before going to sleep. Like my rabbit, I would be most active in the hours around dawn and sunset. Salsal, on the other hand, would stay up late at night and wake up at midday. And before he even got out of bed he would open his laptop and log on to Facebook to check the latest comments on the previous night’s discussion, then eventually go and have a bath. After that he would go into the kitchen, turn on the radio and listen to the news while he fried an egg and made some coffee. He would carry his breakfast into the garden and sit at the table under the umbrella, eating and drinking and smoking as he watched me.

‘Good morning, Hajjar. What news of the flowers?’

‘It’s been a hot year, so they won’t grow strong,’ I told him, as I pruned the rose bushes.

Salsal lit another cigarette and gave my rabbit an ironic smile. I never understood why he was annoyed by the rabbit. The old woman Umm Dala had brought it. She said she found it in the park. We decided to keep it while Umm Dala looked for its owner. The rabbit had been with us for a month and I had already spent two months with Salsal in this fancy villa in the north of the Green Zone. The villa was detached, surrounded by a high wall and with a gate fitted with a sophisticated electronic security system. We didn’t know when zero hour would come. Salsal was a professional, whereas they called me duckling because this was my first operation.

Mr Salman would visit us once a week to check how we were and reassure us about things. Mr Salman would bring some bottles of booze and some hashish. He would always tell us a silly joke about politics and remind us how secret and important the operation was. This Salman was in league with Salsal and didn’t reveal many secrets to me. Both of them made much of my weakness and lack of experience. I didn’t pay them much attention. I was sunk in the bitterness of my life, and I wanted the world to be destroyed in one fell swoop.

Umm Dala would come two days a week. She would bring us cigarettes and clean the house. On one occasion Salsal harassed her. He touched her bottom while she was cooking dolma. She hit him on the nose with her spoon and made it bleed. Salsal laid off her and didn’t speak to her after that. She was an energetic woman in her fifties with nine children. She claimed she hated men, saying they were despicable, selfish pricks. Her husband had worked in the national electricity company, but he fell from the top of a lamp post and died. He was a drunkard and she used to call him the arak gerbil.

I built the rabbit a hutch in the corner of the garden and took good care of him. I know rabbits are sensitive creatures and need to be kept clean and well-fed. I read about that when I was at secondary school. I developed a passion for reading when I was thirteen. In the beginning I read classical Arabic poetry and lots of stories translated from the Russian. But I soon grew bored. Our neighbour worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and one day I was playing with his son Salam on the roof of their house, when we came across a large wooden trunk up there with assorted junk piled up on top of it. Salam shared a secret with me. The trunk was crammed with books about crops and irrigation methods and countless encyclopaedias about plants and insects. Under the books there were lots of sex magazines with pictures of Turkish actresses. Salam gave me a magazine but I also took a book about the various types of palm tree that grow in the country. I didn’t need Salam after that. I would sneak from our house to the roof of theirs to visit the library in the trunk. I would take one book and one magazine and put back the ones I had borrowed. After that I fell in love with books about animals and plants and would hunt down every new book that reached the bookshops, until I was forced to join the army.

The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting, however. I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start looking for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten some psychotropic fruit. Experiments have shown that chimpanzees resort to kissing as a way to reduce tension, fatigue and fear among the group. It’s been proven that female chimpanzees, when they feel that strangers have entered their territory, hurry to their mates, hug them and start kissing them. And after long research, I came across another kiss, a long tropical kiss. A kiss by a type of tropical fish that kiss each other for half an hour or more without any kind of break. My memory of those years of darkness under sanctions is of devouring books. The electricity would go off for up to twenty hours a day, especially after that series of U.S. air strikes on the presidential palaces. I would snuggle into bed at midnight and by the light of a candle I would stumble upon another species of kiss: by insects called reduvius, though they don’t actually kiss each other. These only like the mouths of sleeping humans. They crawl across the face till they reach the corner of the mouth, where they settle down and start kissing. When they kiss they secrete poison in microscopic drops, and if the person sleeping is in good health and sleeping normally, he’ll wake up with a poisonous kiss on his mouth the size of four large raindrops put together.