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

I later realized that everyone who bought me was moving me across the same bridge. I don’t know why. One group would take me across the Martyrs Bridge toward Karkh on the west bank of the Tigris, then the next group would take me back across the same bridge to Rasafa on the east bank. If I go on like this, I think my story will never end, and I’m worried you’ll say what others have said about it. So I think it would be best if I summarize the story for you, rather than have you accuse me of making it up.

They sold me to a third group. The car sped across the Martyrs Bridge once again. I was moved to a luxurious house, and this time my prison was a bedroom with a lovely comfortable bed, the kind in which you see film stars having sex. My fear evaporated and I began to grasp the concept of the secret mission for which they had chosen me. I carried out the mission so as not to lose my head, but I also thought I would test their reaction in certain matters. After filming a new video in which I spoke about how I belonged to Sunni Islamist groups and about my work blowing up Shiite mosques and public markets, I asked them for some money as payment for making the tape. Their decisive response was a beating I will never forget.

Throughout the year and a half of my kidnapping experience, I was moved from one hiding place to another. They shot video of me talking about how I was a treacherous Kurd, an infidel Christian, a Saudi terrorist, a Syrian Baathist intelligence agent, or a Revolutionary Guard from Zoroastrian Iran. On these videotapes I murdered, raped, started fires, planted bombs, and carried out crimes that no sane person would even imagine. All these tapes were broadcast on satellite channels around the world. Experts, journalists, and politicians sat there discussing what I said and did. The only bad luck we ran into was when we made a video in which I appeared as a Spanish soldier, with a resistance fighter holding a knife to my neck, demanding Spanish forces withdraw from Iraq. All the satellite stations refused to broadcast the tape because Spanish forces had left the country a year earlier. I almost paid a heavy price for this mistake, when the group holding me wanted to kill me in revenge for what had happened, but the cameraman saved me by suggesting another wonderful idea, the last of my videotape roles. They dressed me in the costume of an Afghan fighter, trimmed my beard, and put a black turban on my head. Five men stood behind me, and they brought in six men screaming and crying out for help from God, his Prophet, and the Prophet’s family. They slaughtered the men in front of me like sheep as I announced that I was the new leader of the al Qaeda organization in Mesopotamia and made threats against everyone in creation.

Late one night the cameraman brought me my old clothes and took me to the ambulance, which was standing at the door. They put those six heads in a sack and threw it into the vehicle. At that moment I noticed the cameraman’s gestures, and I thought that surely he was the cameraman for all the groups and maybe the mastermind of this dreadful game. I sat behind the steering wheel with trembling hands. Then the cameraman gave the order from behind his mask: “You know the way. Cross the Martyrs Bridge, to the hospital.”

I am asking for asylum in your country because of everyone. They are all killers and schemers — my wife, my children, my neighbors, my colleagues, God, his Prophet, the government, the newspapers, even the Professor who I thought an angel, and now I have suspicions that the cameraman with the terrorist groups was the Professor himself. His enigmatic language was merely proof of his connivance and his vile nature. They all told me I hadn’t been away for a year and half, because I came back the morning after working that rainy night, and on that very morning the Professor said to me, “The world is just a bloody and hypothetical story, and we are all killers and heroes.” And those six heads cannot be proof of what I’m saying, just as they are not proof that the night will not spread across the sky.

——

Three days after this story was filed away in the records of the immigration department, they took the man who told it to the psychiatric hospital. Before the doctor could start asking him about his childhood memories, the ambulance driver summed up his real story in four words: “I want to sleep.”

It was a humble entreaty.

That Inauspicious Smile

THE SAYING “THE BODY MUST BE PROTECTED, NOT the thoughts”* sprang to his mind as he sat on the toilet seat in a Chinese restaurant. He speculated that his mind wanted to solve the puzzle of “Why that damned smile when I wake up in the morning?” He came out of the restroom and asked for a cup of green tea. He had left the house early that day, before his wife and daughter had gotten up. From the restaurant he sent his wife a text message saying he had gone out for a short walk and would be back in an hour. Now the hour was running out. He remembered that yesterday she had asked him to buy a new vacuum cleaner on Monday. Just then he noticed two old women sitting in a corner of the restaurant, doing a crossword in the newspaper together. One of them was holding the pen and the other was thinking, with a finger on her nose. The day before, the vacuum cleaner had stopped working when he was cleaning the little girl’s room. Now he saw the reflection of his smile in the teacup, and it turned green.

He began to think about the question of thoughts and the body as he watched the two women. Before going into the restaurant he’d witnessed a group of children standing at the traffic lights waiting for green. They stood in two lines with two teachers, one at the front and one at the back. He guessed how many children there were — twelve, of the future hope variety. His mind wagged its tail with delight. They would no doubt be doctors, engineers, murderers, poets, alcoholics, and unemployed people, twelve children being the new cover of an old story. His mind slowly moved forward, and he began to smell the stench of death. Those are our children and the ones who will visit our graves, he said. Twelve ideas crossing the street, cheerful and energetic. They are the powerhouse of the future.

He stood up and headed to the bathroom again. He washed his face for the tenth time, but the smile was still stuck there. If he had not had trouble with fantasies in the past, he would have behaved like any sensible man, looked in the mirror, and said, “Impossible.” But he was used to surprises, and his experiences had taught him not to waste time looking for reasons for his predicaments and to look for the emergency exit instead. His mind guessed that the smile had come to him from a previous dream. It was a naive, cinematic dream that had absolutely nothing to do with his past:

He kisses her on the lips and tries to climb the stairs, then sits back down at the foot of them. He smiles and leans his head against the wall. She brushes her teeth in the kitchen and shouts out to him, asking him to bring the bedsheet. She wants to wash it. But now he’s going down a well like a feather tumbling through the air. He is far from the light, a dead man who doesn’t hear her last call. Four years after this stair incident the woman dies. They find her lying on the kitchen table with the toothbrush in her hand and, on the brush, a piece of meat the size of an ant.

Shall we say that after the woman brushes her teeth, the rays of the sun stream through the window, or that the rain is beating the windowpane? The dream recurs every night. There’s a need for this ancient music, and yet how many of these timeless death stories have disappeared? What eternal naïveté there is in tales about our beautiful death! These little stories that are pointed like a toothbrush. Why did we contrive to complicate these death stories? A giant shadow poses these questions to the man in the dream.