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

I met him several times and asked him what was causing the delay. He would say that he didn’t want to repeat the methods of his predecessors and was thinking of bringing about a creative quantum leap in our work. But the truth was different. The Nail was a coward who had been infected with banal humanitarian feelings and, like any sick man, had started to question the benefit of killing others and to wonder whether there was some creator monitoring all our deeds, and that was the beginning of the abyss. Because every child born in this world is simply a possibility, either to be good or evil, according to the classification set by schools of religious education in this stupid world. But it’s a completely different matter for us. Every child that’s born is just an extra burden on the ship that’s about to sink. Anyway, let me tell you what happened to the Nail. He had a relative who worked as a guard in the hospital in the city center, and the Nail was thinking of slipping into the hospital mortuary and choosing a corpse instead of making a corpse himself. It was easy to carry that off after he’d given his relative half the pay he’d received from the group. The mortuary was full of corpses from those stupid acts of terrorism, corpses ripped apart by car bombs, others that had their heads cut off in sectarian feuds, bloated bodies from the riverbed, and many other stupid ones that had been finished off in random murders that had nothing to do with art. The Nail slipped into the mortuary that night and started looking for the right corpse to display to the public. The Nail was looking for the children’s corpses, because in his first report he had proposed an idea that involved killing a five-year-old child.

“In the mortuary there were specimens of the corpses of schoolchildren who had been mutilated by car bombs or incinerated in some street market or broken into pieces after planes bombed houses. Finally the Nail chose a child who had been beheaded along with the rest of his family for sectarian reasons. The body was clean, and the cut at the neck was as neat as a piece of torn paper. The Nail thought of exhibiting this body in a restaurant and putting the eyes of the other family members on the table, served in bowls of blood, like a soup. Maybe it was a beautiful idea, but before all else his work would have been a cheat and a betrayal. If he had beheaded the child himself it would have been an authentic work of art, but to steal it from the mortuary and act in this despicable manner would be a disgrace and cowardice at the same time. But he did not understand that the world today is linked together by more than a tunnel and a corridor.

“It was the mortician who caught the Nail before he was able to deceive the poor public. The mortician was in his early sixties, an enormous man. His work in the mortuary had flourished after the increase in the number of mutilated bodies in the country. People sought him out to patch together the bodies of their children and other relatives who were torn apart in explosions and random killings. They would pay handsomely to have him restore their children to the appearance by which they originally knew them. The mortician was truly a great artist. He worked with patience and with great love. That night he guided the Nail into a side room in the mortuary and locked the door on him. He injected him with some drug that paralyzed him without making him unconscious. He laid him out on the mortuary table, strapped his hands and legs down, and gagged his mouth. He was humming a pretty children’s song in his strange woman’s voice as he prepared his worktable. It was a song about a child fishing for a frog in a small puddle of blood, and every now and then he would stroke the Nail’s hair tenderly and whisper in his ear, ‘Ooh, my dear, ooh, my friend, there is something stranger than death — to look at the world, which is looking at you, but without any gesture or understanding or even purpose, as though you and the world are united in blindness, like silence and loneliness. And there is something a little stranger than death: a man and a woman playing in bed, and then you come, just you, you who always miswrite the story of your life.’

“The mortician finished his work in the early morning.

“In front of the gate of the Ministry of Justice there was a platform like the platforms on which the city’s statues stand, but made of a pulp of flesh and bones. On top of the platform stood a pillar of bronze, and from the pillar hung the Nail’s skin, complete and detached from his flesh with great skill, waving like a flag of victory. In the front part of the platform you could clearly see the Nail’s right eye, set in the pulp of his flesh. It had a look rather like the insipid look your eyes have now. Do you know who the mortician was? He’s the man in charge of the most important department in the institution. He’s the man in charge of the truth and creativity department.”

Then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said, “You’re shaking.”

ABU HADID KNOCKED BACK WHAT REMAINED OF the bottle of arak.* He put his face close to mine and, with the calm of someone high on hashish, gave me this advice: “Listen, Mahdi. I’ve seen all kinds of problems in my life, and I know that one day I’ll run out of luck. You’re sixteen, and today I’m going to teach you how to be a lion. In this world you need to be street-smart. Whether you die today or in thirty years, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s today that matters and whether you can see the fear in people’s eyes. People who are frightened will give you everything. If someone tells you, ‘God forbids it’ or ‘That’s wrong,’ for example, give him a kick up the ass, because that god’s full of shit. That’s their god, not your god. You are your own god, and this is your day. There’s no god without followers or crybabies willing to die of hunger or suffer in his name. You have to learn how to make yourself God in this world, so that people lick your ass while you shit down their throats. Don’t open your mouth today, not a word. You come with me, dumb as a lamb. Understand, dickhead?”

He thumped the arak bottle against the wall and aimed a friendly punch hard into my nose.

We walked through the darkness of the muddy lanes. The wretched houses were catching their breath after receiving a whipping from the storm. Inside them the people were sleeping and dreaming. Everything was soaked and knocked out of place. The wind that had toyed with the labyrinth of lanes all evening picked up strength, then finally left with a bitter chill hanging over the place — this sodden neighborhood where I would live and die. Many times I imagined the neighborhood as if it were some offspring of my mother’s. It smelled that way and was just as miserable. I don’t recall ever seeing my mother as a human being. She would always be weeping and wailing in the corner of the kitchen like a dog tied up to be tormented. My father would assail her with a hail of insults, and when her endurance broke, she would whine aloud, “Why, good Lord? Why? Take me and save me.”

Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour, spitting at her throughout.

My nose was bleeding profusely. I was holding my head back as I tried to keep pace with Abu Hadid. The smell of spiced fish wafted from the window of Majid the traffic policeman’s house. He must have been blind drunk to be frying fish in the middle of the night. We turned down a narrow, winding lane. Abu Hadid picked up a stone and threw it toward two cats that were fighting on top of a pile of rubbish. They jumped through the window of Abu Rihab’s abandoned house. The rubbish almost reached the roof of the place. The government had executed Abu Rihab and confiscated his house. They say his family went back to the country where their clan lived. Abu Rihab had been in contact with the banned Daawa party. After a year of torture and interrogation in the vaults of the security services, he was branded a traitor and shot. It was impossible to forget the physical presence of his beautiful daughter, Rihab. She was a carbon copy of Jennifer Lopez in U Turn . I’d seen the film at the home of Abbas, the poet who lived next door. He had films that wouldn’t be shown on state television for a hundred years. Most of the young men in the neighborhood had tried to court Rihab with love letters, but she was an idiot who understood nothing but washing the courtyard and pouring water over the hands of her Daawa party father before he prayed.

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