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

Abu Hadid, my giant brother, stopped in front of the door to Umm Hanan’s house. She was the widow of Allawi Shukr, and people in the neighborhood made fun of her morals by calling her Hanan Aleena, which means something like “easy favors.” We went inside and sat on a wooden bench with an uncomfortable back. Umm Hanan asked one of her daughters to wash my face and take care of me. The girl blocked my nose with cotton wool. Umm Hanan had three beautiful daughters, all alike as nurses in uniform. My brother slept with Umm Hanan. Then he fucked her youngest daughter twice. After that he told Umm Hanan to fuck me. I was surprised he didn’t ask that of the girl who was my age. Then Abu Hadid took some money and three packs of cigarettes from Umm Hanan, and gave me one of the packs.

We set off again, walking along the muddy lanes. Abu Hadid slowed down, then retraced his steps and stopped at the door of Abu Mohammed, the car mechanic. He knocked on the door with his foot. The man came out in his white dishdasha with his paunch sticking out. His eyes popped out of his head when Abu Hadid greeted him. Me and the other kids used to call him “the gerbil who swallowed the watermelon.” He used to give me and the gang pills in return for puncturing the tires of cars in the neighborhood, so that his business would flourish. We would bargain with him over how many pills for how many tires. My brother ordered me to take off my bloodied shirt and told the mechanic to fetch me a clean one. The gerbil obeyed at once and came back with a blue shirt that smelled of soap. It was the shirt his son, a student at medical college, had just been wearing. I was surprised that the size fit me exactly. My brother leaned over and whispered a few words in the mechanic’s ear, and the mechanic’s face turned even darker than usual.

We crossed the main street toward the other neighborhood. All along the way I was wondering what Abu Hadid had whispered in the gerbil’s ear. Abu Hadid coughed loudly, and his chest wheezed like my uncle’s old tractor. He didn’t say a single word on the way. He lit two cigarettes at the same time and offered one to me. It was after midnight. I don’t know anyone who lives in this neighborhood, other than an obnoxious boy who was at school with us. He once punched me, and I never did manage to stick a finger up his ass in return. When he found out I was Abu Hadid’s brother, his father came to school and asked me to beat up his son.

People were scared senseless of my brother’s brutality. His reputation for ruthless delinquency spread throughout the city. He would baffle the police and other security agencies for many years — until, that is, the day he was executed in public. Even his enemies mourned him when the inevitable happened. Occasionally in life he had defended people — against the cruelty of the ruling party, for example. Abu Hadid didn’t distinguish between good and evil. He had his own private demons. Once he threw a hand grenade at the party office when “the comrades” executed someone who had evaded military conscription. Another time he mutilated the face of some wretched vegetable seller, simply because he was drunk and he felt like it. Abu Hadid would go on the rampage like that for eight years, until Johnny the barber gave him away. The night it happened Abu Hadid was fucking Johnny’s pretty brown daughter on the roof of the house. The police surrounded him and shot him in the leg. They executed him a week later. My mother and my seven sisters would beat their breasts for a whole year, but my father was relieved to be rid of the antics of his wayward son.

Abu Hadid knocked on a rusty door that still had a few spots of green paint, shaped like frogs, on it. We were received by a man in his forties with a thick mustache that covered his teeth when he spoke. We sat down in the guest room in front of the television. I gathered that the man lived alone. He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of arak. He opened it and poured a glass. My brother told him to pour one for me too. We sat in silence, and the man and I watched a soccer match between two local teams, while my brother stared into a small fish tank.

“Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious.

“As long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the television screen.

“Do fish drink water?”

“Sure they drink; of course.”

“How can fish drink salt water?”

“Sure they have a way. How could they be in water and not drink?”

“If they’re in water, perhaps they don’t need to drink.”

“Why don’t you ask the fish in the tank?”

Before the bald man could turn to look at him, my brother had jumped on top of him like a hungry tiger. He threw him to the ground, squatted on his chest, and pinned his arms down under his knees. In a flash he took a small knife out of his pocket, put it close to the man’s eye, and started shouting hysterically in his face, “Answer, you cocksucker! How can fish drink salt water? Answer, you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don’t they? Answer, shit-for-brains!”

Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man’s ass and we left the house. I never would understand what the man had to do with my brother. We headed toward the parking lot. A thin young man, a year younger than my brother, was leaning against a red Chevrolet Malibu dating from the seventies. He embraced my brother warmly, and I felt that Abu Hadid and he were genuine friends. We set off in the car, smoking and listening to a popular song about lovers parting. We took the highway toward the outskirts of the city. Abu Hadid turned off the tape player, lay back in his seat, and said, “Murad, tell my brother the story about the Pakistani kid.”

“Sure, no problem,” replied Murad Harba.

“Listen, Mahdi. Some years back I took the plunge and escaped to Iran. I was thinking of going from there into Turkey and putting this fucked-up country behind me. I lived in a filthy house in the north of Iran, with people coming from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq and everywhere on God’s pimping earth. We waited for them to hand us over to the Iranian trafficker who was going to take us across the mountainous border. That’s where I met the Pakistani kid. He was about your age, nice guy, young and very handsome. He spoke little Arabic, but he had memorized the Quran. He was always scared. And he had a strange object in his possession: a compass. He would hold it in the palm of his hand like a butterfly and stare at it. Then he would hide it in a special pouch that hung around his neck like a golden pendant. He hanged himself in the bathroom the day before Iranian security raided the house. They shoved us in jail and beat us up plenty. When they’d finished humiliating us, we got our breath back and started to get to know the other prisoners. One of the people we chatted with was a young Iraqi who’d been jailed for selling hashish. He was born in Iran. The government had deported his family from Baghdad after the war broke out on the grounds that he had Iranian nationality. I told him about the Pakistani kid who had hanged himself. The man was really upset about the poor boy, said he had met him before, that he was a good kid, and that he knew the whole story of the compass.

“In 1989 in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the spiritual father of the jihad in Afghanistan, was in a car on his way to pray in a mosque frequented by the Afghan Arabs — the Arabs who went to fight in Afghanistan. The car was blown up as it crossed a bridge over a storm drain. His two sons were with him and were torn to pieces. According to the muezzin* of the mosque, who rushed to the scene of the explosion as soon as it happened, Azzam’s body was seemingly untouched. Not a single scratch. There was just a thin line of blood running from the corner of the dead sheikh’s mouth. It was a dreadful disaster — al Qaeda was accused of assassinating the sheikh who had stood up to the might of the Soviet Union, perhaps to give them greater impunity as an organization.