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

“In the summer, my mother would go off into a dream world. She wouldn’t listen, or talk, or even look. The midday heat would wipe her out. At noon she would take a bath and then sleep naked in her room like a dead houri.* When night fell she would recover some of her vitality, as if she had come out of a coma. She would watch her favorite soap opera and news programs in which the President awarded medals for bravery to heroic soldiers, thinking that my father might appear among them.

“At noon one day, my mother dozed off with her arms and legs splayed open under the ceiling fan. My brother and I — he was a year younger — slipped off into the courtyard. There was nothing out there but a solitary fig tree and the cover of the septic tank. I remember my mother used to cry under the fig tree whenever one of our relatives died or some disaster struck us. The mouth of the tank was covered with an old kitchen tray held down by a large stone. We, my brother and I, had trouble moving the stone. Then we started throwing pebbles into the tank. It was our favorite game. Umm Alaa, our neighbor, used to make us paper boats, which we would sail on the surface of the pool of shit.

“They say I pushed my brother into the tank and ran off to the roof of the house to hide in the chicken coop. When I grew up, I asked them, ‘Might he have fallen in, and I run away out of fear?’ They said, ‘You confessed yourself.’ Perhaps they questioned me like the dictator’s police. I don’t remember anything. But they would tell their stories about it as if they were describing the plot of a film they’d enjoyed. All the neighbors took part in the rescue attempt. They couldn’t find the truck that used to come once a month to empty out the septic tanks in the neighborhood. They used everything they could find to get the shit out of the tank: pots and pans, a large bucket, and other vessels. It was an arduous and disgusting task, like torture in slow motion. It was the height of summer, and the foul odors added to the horror and the shock. Before the sun went down, they brought him out — a dead child shrouded in shit.

“My father was late coming back from the front. My uncle wrote him a letter and then took care of arrangements for the burial of my brother. We buried him in the children’s cemetery on the hill. It may have been the most beautiful cemetery in the world. In the spring, wildflowers of every color and variety would grow there. From a distance, the graveyard looked like the crown of an enormous, colored tree: a cemetery whose powerful fragrance spread for miles around. A week later our neighbor Umm Alaa opened the door and saw my mother. The intensity of the grief had driven her to distraction. She had put shit in a small bowl, and was mixing it into my food very slowly with a plastic spoon, then filling my mouth with it as she wept.

“My father sent me to live with my uncle, and I became a refugee of sorts. I would visit our house as a guest every Friday, escorted by my aunt, who kept an eye on my mother. I felt like a ball that people kicked around. That’s how I spent six years, trying to understand what was happening around me. I had to learn what their feelings and their words meant, all the while wearing a chain of thorns around my neck. It was like crawling across a bed of nails. The septic tank was the bane of my childhood. On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently advances, moves on, sets sail, or, at worst, crawls slowly forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like a firecracker in the sky of God, a small flare in his mighty firmament of bombardment. I spent the remaining years of my childhood and adolescence watching everyone carefully, like a sniper hidden in the darkness. Watching and shooting. Against the horrors of my life I unleashed other nightmares, imaginary ones. I invented mental images of my mother and others being tortured, and in my schoolbook I drew pictures of enormous trucks crushing the heads of children. I still remember the picture of the President printed on the cover of our workbooks. He was in military uniform, smiling, and under his picture were written the words, ‘The pen can shoot bullets as deadly as the rifle.’

“There was a cart that brought kerosene, drawn by a donkey. It came through the lanes in the neighborhood in winter. The children would follow behind, waiting for the donkey’s awesome penis to grow erect. I used to shut my eyes and imagine the donkey’s penis, gross and black, going into my mother’s right ear and coming out of the left. She would scream for help because of the pain.

“A year before the war ended my father lost his left leg and his testicles. This forced my mother to take me back. My father decided to go back to the trade practiced by his father and his forefathers: making pickles. They say my grandfather was the most famous pickle seller in the city of Najaf. The King himself visited him three times. I went back home and acted as my father’s drudge and obedient servant. I was happy, because my father was a miracle of goodness. Despite everything he had suffered in his life he remained faithful to his inner self, which had somehow not been warped by the pain. He had an artificial leg fitted, and his capacity for love seemed to grow. He pampered my mother and showered her with gifts — gold necklaces, rings, and lingerie embroidered with flowers.

“My father tiled the courtyard and made a concrete cover for the septic tank. He left some space for the fig tree, but it died from the brine he used in the pickles. My mother wept beneath it for the last time when I was sixteen. The government in Baghdad had built a road for the highway and removed the old cemetery. Her father’s grave had been there. For a long time we were sad about the loss of my grandfather’s bones.

“The courtyard was full of plastic barrels for pickling; piles of sacks full of cucumbers, eggplants, green and red peppers, cabbages, and cauliflowers; bags of salt, sugar, and spices; bottles of vinegar; and tins of molasses. There were also large cooking pots, which were always full of boiling water, to which we would add spices, then all the vegetables one by one. My father wasn’t as proficient as his father, let alone his grandfather. He started trying out new methods. He had spent a large part of his life in tanks and had forgotten many of the family recipes for making pickles. The tank had cost him his balls, his leg, and the trade of his forefathers.

“I would sit opposite my mother for hours, cutting up eggplants or stuffing cucumbers with garlic or celery. Her tongue was as poisonous as a viper. The summer no longer bothered her. She had turned into a fat cow, burned by the sun, with a loose tongue, and she smoked to excess. Noxious weeds had sprouted in her heart. People took pity on her, with words as poisonous as hers. ‘Poor woman,’ they said. ‘An impotent husband and no children, just the bird of ill omen.’ The bird — that was me, and I showed all the signs of ill omen. My father was busy all the time with the accounts and dealing with the shops in the market and moving barrels in the old pickup. After sunset he would collapse from fatigue. He would have dinner, pray, and tell us about his pickle problems, then take off his artificial leg and go to bed to tickle his gray-haired wife with his fingers.

“When the war over Kuwait broke out, I was meant to join the army. My father and my uncle sat down to discuss the question of my military service. My uncle had never seen the horrors of the front in the Iran War. He was working in the security department in the city center. My father made up his mind: He would not give me up to die. ‘How can I let them kill my only son?’ My uncle argued with him, trying to explain how it would affect him in his branch of security if his nephew avoided serving the flag (‘Do you want them to execute us all — us and the women?’). My father stuck to his position. My uncle threatened to arrest me in person if I didn’t join the army, but my father threw him out of the house. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s true I’m a peaceful man, but this is my son, a piece of my flesh. If you persist in this, I’ll slit your throat.’ My uncle had been drunk that night and raging like a bull. He left shouting further insults. My father stood up, performed his prayers, and quickly calmed down. ‘God save me from the accursed devil,’ he said. ‘He’s my brother. It was just drunken talk. I know him. He has a good heart.’