Hassan Blasim - The Corpse Exhibition - And Other Stories of Iraq

When I was a youngster I played on Jaafar’s soccer 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 analyze 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, which were banned, but he was careful to cover his tracks, selling them only in wealthy neighborhoods.

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 pack 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.

The tears and the thirty seconds were the common denominator between us all when it came to making knives disappear and reappear. As I said, were it not for Souad, the knives would have disappeared forever and we would all have been like Allawi before he joined us — just knife thieves. Salih the butcher faced the same problem before he met Jaafar and Souad. Salih loved the trick; in his shop he would stare at knives at length until they disappeared. But after the trick he had to buy new knives. Allawi made money in the market from his gift, while Salih would lose out. If it wasn’t for Souad, he said, he would have died of hunger. Every day Souad brought back the knives he had made disappear, and we were sure this was the only reason the butcher stayed with us all those years.

We were constantly on the lookout for a new member of the group, with powers like those of Souad. We would meet every Thursday and make a set of knives disappear, and Souad would make them reappear in the same way: tears and a few seconds!

I could make knives disappear easily. I began by making my mother’s knives disappear in the kitchen when I was a child. In the beginning my mother would almost go crazy, but when she discovered my secret she and my father took me to a cleric to consult him on the subject. The man with the turban told them in all confidence, “Your son is in league with the jinn.” He advised my father and mother to pray and wash the courtyard of the house twice — once at dawn and again at sunset. When I got interested in soccer and met Jaafar I stopped making knives disappear at home or at the homes of friends and relatives.

The knife trick didn’t have a particular purpose. Maybe Salih the butcher saw his gift as a disease and as far as he was concerned Souad was the only cure. The feelings and ideas that Souad, Jaafar, Allawi, and I had were different to some extent. Jaafar thought it was a secret and sacred vocation and believed that what we did, despite the absurdity of it, was a source of great pleasure, especially as he saw himself as the spiritual father and the leader of the group.

Allawi was addicted to the game. It was like a drug that erased his memory of the painful loss of both his parents at an early age. His father had been a drunkard who argued with the neighbors and who killed a man with his pistol. Before the police arrived one of the dead man’s sons, who had seen his own father drowning in blood, came to the door of Allawi’s father’s house with a Kalashnikov in his hand. Allawi’s father was standing behind the closed door with the pistol in his hand, and his mother was trying to stop him from going out. The son emptied a whole magazine of bullets into the door. The door fell in and Allawi’s mother and father were killed.

Knives were my pastime and part of my life. Seeking the mystery of the game, I felt like someone looking for a single rare flower in a high mountain range. Often it felt like an adventure in a fable. Many a time I felt as though I was doing a spiritual exercise with the knife trick. The reality didn’t interest me as much as the beauty of the mystery attracted me. Maybe this is what drove me to write poetry after I gave up looking for the meaning of the knives.

Illiteracy was one of the obstacles that compounded our failure to understand the trick or even to develop our skills throughout the years. Salih the butcher, Allawi, and Jaafar couldn’t read or write. It’s true that Souad was educated, but she practiced the knife trick with a childish attitude. She would always remind me, saying, “Why complicate things, my love? Life is short and we are alive. Treat the knives as a game to entertain us and leave it at that.” Souad repeatedly suggested we open a little theater in the neighborhood to amuse the local people by making knives disappear and then reappear, in hopes that this might relieve the gloom of war and the endless killing. But Jaafar was worried about the clerics, because they were acting like militias at the time. I thought he was right to worry; at any moment they could have denounced us as infidels, maybe even accused us of undermining society with alien superstitions imported from abroad. Their superstitions had become the law, and God had become a sword for cutting off people’s heads and declaring them infidels.

My ignorance increased when I embarked on the task of researching the knife trick through reading. My education didn’t help me much. It was religious books that I first examined to find references to the trick. Most of the houses in and around our sector had a handful of books and other publications, primarily the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet, stories about heaven and hell, and texts about prophets and infidels. It’s true I found many references to knives in these books, but they struck me as just laughable. They only had knives for jihad, for treachery, for torture and terror. Swords and blood. Symbols of desert battles and the battles of the future. Victory banners stamped with the name of God, and knives of war.

After that I moved into works of literature. That was by chance. A single sentence had stirred up a whirlwind of excitement inside me. Then one day, in a coffee shop, I came across an article in a local newspaper about a massacre by sectarian fighters in a village south of the capital. They had set fire to the houses of people sleeping at night. The only survivor of the conflagration was a young boy. The boy was purple, and in his hand he held a purple rat. They found him asleep in a wheat field. His story went unnoticed in the relentless daily cycle of bloody violence in the country. In the culture section of the newspaper there was an interview with an Iraqi poet in exile who said, “A closed door: That’s the definition of existence.”