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

Umm Ibtisam asked Jaafar to swear to keep her secret, because this was her livelihood. She added nothing to what she had told Allawi, who had invited her to attend our meeting. Jaafar swore to God and on his honor that he would keep her secret, and invited her to join the group. But she didn’t take up the offer, because all she wanted was for us to leave her alone. Souad embraced Umm Ibtisam, with tears in her eyes, perhaps for the strangeness of life’s agonies.

Souad took her to the door and handed her a bag full of cake, saying, “A simple present for the girls.”

None of us said anything. So there were knives appearing in other places. That meant the plot had thickened.

We were all smoking — Jaafar, Salih, Allawi, and I, and even Souad, who had slipped a cigarette out of my pack, although she didn’t normally smoke. We noticed the thick cloud of smoke in the room and burst out laughing together. Jaafar began to cough like a decrepit old man. We took out our knives and started to play. I told them about the earliest book on the interpretation of dreams, which appears on a tablet from the Sumerian city of Lagash. The story goes that Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, was praying in the temple when he suddenly fell asleep.

“I’m off to work,” Salih said in his effeminate voice, and left.

4

A year after I graduated from the School of Education, Jaafar the referee suddenly disappeared. We didn’t leave a hospital or police station unsearched. We contacted people who had ties with some of the armed groups and kidnap gangs. But to no avail. The ground seemed to have swallowed him up, along with thousands of others in the country. Souad was in her second month of pregnancy and had postponed her studies at the School of Medicine. I was very worried about her. She was frustrated and sad, like a bird whose wings have been broken in a storm.

The kids in Sector 29 were also sad that Jaafar had disappeared. They organized a soccer tournament by themselves for teams from the other sectors and called it the Referee Jaafar Tournament. They sent me an invitation to referee in the final.

——

The days passed slowly and sadly, like the miserable face of the country. The wars and the violence were like a photocopier churning out copies, and we all wore the same face, a face shaped by pain and torment. We fought for every morsel we ate, weighed down by the sadness and the fears generated by the unknown and the known. Our knife trick was no longer a source of pleasure, because time had dispersed those mysterious talents of ours. We had been broken one after the other, like discarded mannequins. Our group had fallen apart. There were no more meetings or discussions. Hatred had crushed our childish fingers, crushed our bones.

It wasn’t easy for a recent graduate like me to find work. The religious groups had opened schools that taught children to memorize the Quran. They offered me work in their schools until I could get a government job, so I got involved in teaching children the Quran and gave up the knife business. From time to time I wrote angry, aggressive, and meaningless poems.

Allawi moved out of the capital and wandered around the towns in the south. He toured the markets showing off his skill at making knives disappear, but earned a pittance. Then we heard fresh news about him: He had broken into a restaurant and was arrested for stealing knives from the kitchen. He was sent to prison and we heard no more of him. Souad, friendly and loving, continued to visit Salih the butcher to bring his knives back, and in return Salih would give us the best cuts of meat he had.

One winter morning I was at school teaching the children the Iron Chapter of the Quran when the principal came in and told me that a strange young man wanted to talk to me about something important.

He was a tall man in his midtwenties, and his name was Hassan. He said he wanted to talk to me about Jaafar the referee. I asked the principal for permission to take a break and went to the nearby coffee shop with the man. We ordered tea and he told me what had happened to Jaafar:

The security forces had set free some hostages from a terrorist hideout; Hassan was one of the people freed. He said he had met Jaafar in the place where they were holding the hostages, a house on a farm on the outskirts of the capital. They had abducted Jaafar because he was trading in pornographic magazines in a wealthy neighborhood where policemen lived. Hassan said they had brutally tortured him. The terrorists told Jaafar that God had punished him when his legs were amputated during the war, but Jaafar hadn’t repented and had gone on selling pictures of obscenities and debauchery. So the terrorists had decided to cut off Jaafar’s arms as a lesson to any unbelieving profligate. The terrorists assembled all the hostages to witness the process of amputating Jaafar’s arms. They couldn’t believe what happened next. Hassan said that whenever the terrorists approached Jaafar, the swords they were holding disappeared, and tears were streaming from his eyes. The terrorists didn’t have a single sword or knife left. They were terrified of Jaafar and said he was a devil. They stripped him naked in front of us and crucified him against the wall. They hammered nails into the palms of his hands, and he started writhing in pain, naked, with no legs. They decided to amputate his arms with bullets. Two men stood in front of him and sprayed bullets into his arms. One of the bullets hit his heart, and he died instantly. They dragged his body to the river, collected some dry branches, and poured some gas on him. They set fire to him and chanted, “God is most great.”

Souad and I had a beautiful boy, and we called him Jaafar. I continued working in the religious school. I never managed to tell Souad what had happened to her brother. I suppressed the horror that his death caused, and I loved Souad even more. She was my only hope in life. She went back to the School of Medicine, and time began to heal the wounds, slowly and cautiously.

Umm Ibtisam came to see us. Her financial situation had greatly improved. She said we were good people and she hadn’t forgotten us. She offered to open a large shop in the neighborhood for us to sell knives.

Our business was profitable, though sometimes I would unwittingly make one knife or another disappear. At night I would start by kissing Souad’s toes, then creep up to her thighs, then to her navel, her breasts, her armpits and neck, until I reached her ear, and then I would whisper, “My love, I need help!”

She would pinch me on the bottom, then climb on top of my chest, strangle me with her hands, and say, “Ha, you wretch, how many knives have you made disappear? I’m not going to get them back until you kiss me a thousand and one times.”

I kissed every pore on her body with passion and reverence, as if she were a life that would soon disappear.

When young Jaafar was five years old, his gift emerged: Like his mother, he could make knives reappear.

JAAFAR AL-MUTALLIBI WAS BORN IN THE TOWN OF al-Amara. In 1973 he resigned from the Communist party and joined the ruling Baath party. In the same year his wife gave birth to their second son. Jaafar was a professional lute player and a renowned composer of patriotic songs. He was killed in the uprising in the city of Kirkuk in 1991.

——

Today I can tell you about how he died. Do you see this old woman shouting out the price of fish? She’s my mother. We’ve been selling fish since we came back to Baghdad. Let me help her empty the crate of fish, then let’s go to a nearby coffee shop and talk.

——

After the end of the war between Iraq and Iran my father started to proclaim his atheism blatantly and caused us many problems. One evening he came home with his shirt stained with blood. It seems he’d had a nosebleed after one of his friends punched him. They were playing dominoes in the coffee shop when my father launched into a tirade of obscene insults to God and the Prophet. He made them up and set them to music during the game. As you know, he was a well-known composer. At first my father whistled a tune composed in the military style, then he added a new insult: a nail in the testicle of your imam’s sister.