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

Quickly and with fascination I made inquiries to find out on which front and with which military unit the author of these stories was fighting. I discovered that a few days before the stories were sent, the enemy had made a devastating attack on the army corps with which he was fighting, and the corps had suffered appalling losses in lives and equipment. I had a colleague who worked as an editor on the bravery and medals page in our newspaper, who would shout out whenever he saw me, “You have the brain of a tank, comrade!” I remembered this description of his when I felt the idea flash fully formed in the golden wires of my brain, as I skimmed through these miraculous workbooks. I decided to write the soldier a threatening letter, telling him firmly and frankly that he was liable to interrogation by the Baath party, and perhaps would soon be tried and executed, because his stories were a deliberate and manifest deviation from the party’s program in the just war. I relied on the perpetual fear of a soldier, which is widely acknowledged, to persuade him to renounce these stories or apologize to me and beg me bitterly to destroy what he had written, or to forgive him his atrocious act, which he would never repeat. Only then would I know what to do with these sublime stories of humanity. I doubt any great novelist could dream of writing more than five stories displaying such a high level of inventiveness, combining reality and the language of dreams to attain the tenth rank of language, the rank from which fire is created, and from which, in turn, devils are spawned.

Heaven was not far off. It came to my side with lightning speed. One week after my letter to the soldier I received a message from his army corps to say that the soldier had been killed in the latest attack and that no one in his detachment had come out alive. I almost wept for joy at the bounteous gift that destiny had brought as, indescribably elated, I read again the name of the dead soldier.

Your Honor, five months after publishing the first story in my own name (after inventing a distinctive title), I was traveling the countries of the world to present my new story at seminars, where the most famous critics and intellectuals would introduce me. The biggest newspapers and international literary magazines wrote about me. I could not even find enough time to give television and radio interviews. The local critics wrote long studies on how our just war could inspire in man such artistic largesse, such love, such poetry. Many master’s and doctoral theses were written in the nation’s universities, and in them the researchers endeavored to explore all the insights into poetry and humanity in my story. They wrote about the harmonies between bullets and fate, between the sound of planes and the rocking of a bed, between the kiss and the piece of shrapnel, between the smell of gunpowder and the smell of a woman’s vulva, although the story did not make the slightest mention of war, directly or indirectly. When I came home, at a lavish ceremony I was awarded the post of Minister of Culture with no trouble at all. I was in no hurry to publish the four remaining stories, because the first story still had more to yield. I exchanged my wife, my house, my clothes, and my car for new things that I coveted. I can say that I paid homage to the war and raised my hands to heaven in gratitude for the bounty and the priceless gifts. I was confident that the Nobel Prize in Literature would be here on my desk in the ministry after the fifth story. The gates of happiness had opened, as they say.

Then one day three large parcels from the front arrived at my address at the ministry, containing twenty stories sent, it seemed, by the same soldier in the same manner: elementary school books bearing the names of soldiers, containing tales of love and destiny. At first I felt tremendous confusion, which soon turned into icy panic. I quickly picked up the stories and asked the man in charge of the ministry stores to give me the keys to one of the storerooms. I hid them in complete secrecy and made many and intensive contacts to find the soldier. All the messages would come directly to my office in the ministry, and all of them confirmed that the soldier had been killed. They were frightening days. On the following day other parcels arrived, with double the number of stories this time, from the same soldier and in the same manner. Again I carried the stories to the storeroom and put extra padlocks on the door. Cruel months passed, Your Honor, with me torn between hiding the stories, which continued to flood in at an amazing rate, and looking for the soldier, of whom there was no trace the length and breadth of the front. In the meantime the second story had been printed and released. I received phone calls from the President, the Minister of Defense, and other state officials, lauding my loyalty and my genius. Invitations from abroad began to flood into the ministry, but this time I turned them all down on the grounds that the country was more precious and more important than all the prizes and conferences in the world, and the country needed all its righteous citizens in such trying circumstances. In fact I wanted to find a solution to the problem of the stories, which kept arriving every morning in vast numbers, like a storm of locusts: today a hundred stories, tomorrow two hundred, and so on.

Your Honor, I almost lost my “tank brain.” At last I obtained the address of the soldier’s house and went to visit his family to make sure he was dead. His mother told me she did not believe he was dead. There was only a small hole in his forehead. It was a sniper’s bullet. I took the address of his grave from his wife and left them some money. The other storerooms at the ministry were crammed with workbooks. How would I explain to the party and the government that I had written all these stories, and why was I writing them in workbooks, and why the names of the soldiers, seemingly in elementary school? And why was I storing them this way? There were dozens of questions, none of which had a logical answer.

I bought some old flour warehouses on the edge of the city in case more stories poured in. I paid vast amounts to three workers in the ministry to help dig up the soldier’s grave. There he was with his decayed body and a hole in his forehead. I shook his body several times to make sure he was dead. I whispered in his ear, then shouted and insulted him. I challenged him, if he could, to open his mouth or move his little finger. But he was dead enough. A worm came out of his neck, chasing another worm, then the two of them disappeared inside again somewhere near his shoulder.

Your Honor, you may not believe this story, but I swear by your omnipotence that within a year the flour warehouses and the ministry storerooms were crammed with the soldier’s stories. Of course, I didn’t have a chance to read all the stories, but I would take a sample of each batch, and I swear to you that they did not increase only in number, they also became increasingly brilliant and creative. But at the time I trembled and felt that my end would come soon if this flood of stories did not cease. Certainly I left no stone unturned in my inquiries and research. I looked into the addresses from which the parcels were coming. They were being sent in the name of the soldier from various parts of the front, but there was no trace of him. Nevertheless I could not go too far in asking about the parcels, for fear of being exposed.

I went back to the grave and burned the soldier’s body. I divorced my second wife and left my job after a psychiatrist helped me by submitting a report saying that my health was deteriorating. I collected all the workbooks from the ministry storerooms and the old flour warehouses and bought some isolated agricultural land, where I built a special incinerator, a large storeroom, a bedroom, and a bathroom, and surrounded it with a high wall. I was sure that the stories would keep pouring in at this new address, but I was prepared for them this time. As I expected, from the morning of the first day at the farm I was working hard day and night, burning the colored workbooks — all the stories, and all the soldier’s names — in hopes that the war would end and that this madness of khaki sperm would also stop.