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

“It was Sunday and I had thought it was Monday. At least I remembered that, and then I thought my wife would be angry when she read my text messages. Which electrical goods stores are these that open on Sunday? Now, what other lie could I make up to cover my first lie? I thought of going home and confessing everything to my wife. The smile would be proof I was telling the truth. But my feelings were contradictory. Then I entered a small shop, bought six bottles of beer, and went to the park. Do I really have bad luck? Or was I born by mistake?

“The streets were empty, and the wind was playing havoc and making a racket when it tried to shift things from their place. The wind blew over a price list parked outside a closed restaurant, then it brought along a large cardboard box, which flew around like half of a dismembered body. There were empty cigarette packs racing each other about. Unconsciously I hummed a tune. I wanted to sing, but I did not know which song to choose. I didn’t have the words to any song in my head. A slight anxiety came over me. Had the words to songs been sucked out of my memory to this extent? All I could do was make up some little songs. I kept humming in hopes that I would come across some words in a while, but stupid tears came instead of words. The wind blew an empty white bag, which passed close to my ear and made me forget the tune. It had frightened me. The bag did a somersault at the junction as though it was deciding which way to go. It rose uncertainly for a moment, then fell in a lurch to the asphalt. This time the wind dragged it along the ground in spite of itself and left it next to the trash that had accumulated at the mouth of the street drain.

“I reached the yard thinking about how I had lied to my wife. Definitely she would be convinced I’d had a date with a woman. Now she would be in a rage, stuffing my clothes into a suitcase in readiness to throw me out.

“When I looked through the thick trees I thought at first that the wind had blown in some other black bags, but in reality it had brought those four young men with shaved heads. With the instinct of an animal I sensed danger. I caught their smell when they came close to me. For no reason I stood up to piss behind a giant tree. Two of them surrounded me on the right and the others on the left. They looked like Guardian Angels. They took out their cocks and all of them pissed with vigor, like donkeys that had not pissed for years. As they pissed they looked at me stiffly and contemptuously because of my cock, which out of fear had not released a single drop. I was easy prey, and cowardly. The noise of their piss gushing out filled the air, like a waterfall cascading in the darkness. The wind died down, or slowed down to make space for the symphony of their pissing. The smell of it drifted up to my brain like poisonous nerve gas, or perhaps the wind wanted to give the sky a free look.

“Everything was over with lightning speed. In just a few minutes they gave vent to all possible animal instincts, giving me a thorough beating. Then they ran off, as though the wind had picked them up, hidden them in the folds of its solemn cloak, and gone back to work after the youths had carried out their mission to perfection. I was bleeding from my ear, my nose, my teeth, and my eye, and from the blocked nostrils of my soul as well. I tried to get up. I wished that this wind, a slave to the sky in blind obedience and allegiance, would pick me up too, but it didn’t. It was sweeping up everything but my empty body, which lay bleeding by the tree, as though what had happened was part of a humorous story full of banal scrapes. I saw empty bags of every color and shape. They were hovering around me at crazy speeds, as though they were making me a special offer of leftover bones, times, and places. They did not seem happy with me, nor did the force blowing them. A torn gray bag flew past, and I realized it was my mother’s shawl. A burned brain flew by on giant wings. A shoal of fish swam past, carrying scraps of a young girl’s flesh. The flying vipers of economic sanctions flew by, wrapped around their food of humans and dreams. All my wife’s underwear went past, one pair dripping blood, another semen, the next one ink, and so on. My old notebooks passed by, clapping their covers. Scorpions in a bottle went past, my summer shirts, medicines that had expired, and cartons of baby milk. Bread went by on wings of shit. Poems passed, pissing on themselves like disabled children. With their savage dogs the guards on the borders I had walked across went past. My cross-eyed brother, who wears the turban of an imam. My severed and bloodied fingers flew by, my daughter, Mariam, in her pram, disfigured because I loved her too much. My wife went by, playing a trumpet that screeched like an owl.

“My whole life passed page by page, all the jams and scrapes I had been through, page after page. Even when I closed my eyes it didn’t stop. Pain and vertigo had me in their power. The pages went past in the darkness, white page after page.”

——

In the evening the man was laid out on a bed in the hospital, smiling at his wife and his daughter, who was holding a beautiful bunch of flowers.

“Why are you smiling like that, Daddy?” Mariam asked in surprise.

IN IRAG HIS NAME WAS SALIM ABDUL HUSAIN, he worked for the municipality in the cleaning department, part of a group assigned by the manager to clear up in the aftermath of explosions. He died in Holland in 2009 under another name: Carlos Fuentes.

Bored and disgusted as on every miserable day, Salim and his colleagues were sweeping a street market after an oil tanker had exploded nearby, incinerating chickens, fruit and vegetables, and some people. They were sweeping the market slowly and cautiously for fear they might sweep up with the debris any human body parts left over. But they were always looking for an intact wallet or perhaps a gold chain, a ring, or a watch that could still tell the time. Salim was not as lucky as his colleagues in finding the valuables left over from death. He needed money to buy a visa to go to Holland and escape this hell of fire and death. His only lucky find was a man’s finger with a valuable silver ring of great beauty. Salim put his foot over the finger, bent down carefully, and with disgust pulled the silver ring off. He picked up the finger and put it in a black bag where they collected all the body parts. The ring ended up on Salim’s finger; he would contemplate the gemstone in surprise and wonder, and in the end he abandoned the idea of selling it. Might one say that he felt a secret spiritual relationship with the ring?

When he applied for asylum in Holland he also applied to change his name: from Salim Abdul Husain to Carlos Fuentes. He explained his request to the official in the immigration department on the grounds that he was frightened of the fanatical Islamist groups, because his request for asylum was based on his work as a translator for the U.S. forces, and his fear that someone might assassinate him as a traitor to his country. Salim had consulted his cousin who lived in France about changing his name. He called him on his cell phone from the immigration department because Salim had no clear idea of a new foreign name that would suit him. In his apartment in France his cousin was taking a deep drag on a joint when Salim called. Suppressing a laugh, his cousin said, “You’re quite right. It’s a hundred times better to be from Senegal or China than it is to have an Arab name in Europe. But you couldn’t possibly have a name like Jack or Stephen — I mean, a European name. Perhaps you should choose a brown name — a Cuban or Argentine name would suit your complexion, which is the color of burnt barley bread.” His cousin was looking through a pile of newspapers in the kitchen as he continued the conversation on the phone, and he remembered that two days earlier he had read a name, perhaps a Spanish name, in a literary article of which he did not understand much. Salim thanked his cousin warmly for the help he had given him and wished him a happy life in the great country of France.