The Corpse Exhibition

by Hassan Blasim

  He soon got drunk and started shouting and cursing, addressing thin air, saying, “Eat shit,” and “Shut up, pimp.”

  Then he opened his eyes like an owl and threatened to break off our friendship if I didn’t believe everything he told me. I took the policeman’s address from him and drove him home. Salwa was waiting for us at the window, downcast. Marwan hadn’t told her what had happened to him. He was struggling to deal with the disaster himself and was on the verge of madness.

  I knocked on the door, and an attractive woman in the spring of her life came out. She was dressed in black, and her eyes were swollen. Standing in the doorway, I saw a little girl playing with a rabbit the same size as she was. I said I was a journalist and I wanted to write an article about the victims of the explosion at Puzzles magazine. She said her husband had been killed because of the ignorance that prevailed in this wretched country and she didn’t want to speak to anyone. She shut the door. I made discreet inquiries about the young woman’s circumstances at a nearby shop. The shopkeeper told me about her husband, the policeman, and how kind he had been and how much he had loved his family. The policeman used to say, “God has blessed me with the three most beautiful women in the world—my mother, my daughter, and my wife. I’m thankful to be alive, however tough it is in this country.”

  In the three days Marwan spent in the hospital, the policeman told him what had happened: “On the patrol we were telling each other jokes, my colleagues and me. We heard the explosion and headed straight to the Puzzles building. My colleagues moved people away from the scene of the incident, and I tried to put out the fire in a car in which a woman and her daughter were burning. Then the second explosion went off.

  “My body caught fire. I started to run and scream, then I collapsed in the lobby. I found myself sitting on the ground, a few paces away from my own burning body! I had split in two: one a lifeless corpse, the other shivering from the cold. I ran down the corridors of the magazine building. I saw a woman crawling on her stomach and screaming, but she died before I could do anything. I saw you under the rubble, so I went inside you and I felt warm again. And here I am, smelling what you can smell, tasting what you taste, hearing what you hear, and aware of you as a living being, but I can’t see anything. I’m in total darkness. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Marwan had said.

  Okay, this is what you wrote down. . . . Tell me how you reacted to that.

  Marwan was angry when I suggested he visit a man of religion. I was bewildered by what he had told me, and it had made me say stupid things. He told me I was crazy and that I was behaving like we were still childhood soul mates. (“It was just a trivial, childish game, you idiot!” he yelled.) Then he started talking to me as calm as a madman: “Do you understand me? Okay, he can share a bed with me, a grave, a window, a seat on the bus, but he’s not going to share my body! That’s too much; in fact it’s complete madness! He grumbles and cries and tells me off as though I’m the thief and it’s not him who’s stolen my life.”

  If Marwan went to sleep with only a thin blanket around him, the policeman would wake him up in the middle of the night and say, “I’m cold, Mr. Marwan, please!”

  If Marwan drank whiskey, the other guy would complain, “Please, Mr. Marwan, that’s wrong. You’re burning your soul with that poison! Stop drinking!”

  Or, “Why don’t you go to the toilet, Mr. Marwan? The gas in your stomach is annoying.”

  Why couldn’t it have been the policeman who incited Marwan to swallow the razor blade?!

  Marwan’s eyes turned bloodshot from staying up late and drinking too much, and the others got used to his behavior. They treated him as a victim of the explosion. Just another madman. His nerves would flare up for the slightest reason. His colleagues at work didn’t abandon him, and he went on devising crosswords, though he stopped writing the horoscopes. He was given a warning when he started writing very difficult crosswords, using words he found in the encyclopedia, or when he wrote, for example, “7 Across: a purple scorpion, 5 Down: a broken womb (six letters, inverted).”

  “This meat tastes salty. What’s that horrible smell? Don’t you read the Quran? Why don’t you pray? The water’s hot in the shower.” Marwan started to take revenge, taking pleasure in tormenting the policeman. He would eat and drink and do things the policeman didn’t like, like drink gallons of whiskey, which the policeman couldn’t bear.

  Marwan complained to you about the things that troubled him most. He hadn’t gone near his wife’s body, except once, three months ago. He had the impression that he was sleeping with her along with another man, and the policeman groaned and wailed like a crazed cat.

  The policeman didn’t submit to his fate readily. He also knew how much authority he had. Sometimes he would keep jabbering deliriously in Marwan’s head until his skull throbbed. The last time Marwan told me about the policeman was while they had a truce.

  The policeman wanted Marwan to visit his family. He told him some intimate details of his life so that Marwan would seem like an old friend. Yes, yes, yes. I’m not interested in all those details. When you write, you can choose the limits and call the rest our ignorance.

  Marwan sat on the sofa and the policeman’s wife brought him some tea, while his mother wiped her tears with the hem of her hijab. Marwan hugged the policeman’s little girl as if she were the daughter of a late dear friend.

  It was the same scene whenever he visited. He started buying presents for the family on instructions from the policeman, and Marwan even went to visit the policeman’s grave with the family.

  The policeman went into a deep silence when he heard his wife and mother weeping at his grave. He remained silent for several days. Marwan breathed a sigh of relief each time, assuming the policeman had disappeared.

  He punched you on the nose when you were driving the car. I know . . . good . . . details . . . everything in this story is boring and disgusting.

  Then one day I visited him at his magazine. He was taking swigs from a bottle of arak that he hid in the drawer of his desk and smoking furiously. I started talking about our problems working at Boutique and the state of the country, in hopes of calming his nerves. He stopped writing as I spoke.

  When I stopped speaking, he stood up and asked if I’d go with him to visit the drunken boat in prison.

  I wasn’t even sure she was still alive. I rang the department in charge of women’s prisons from his office and asked after her. They told me she was a patient in the city’s central hospital.

  I was extremely uneasy all the way to the hospital. Marwan smoked a lot and rocked back and forth in his seat. He began pressing me to take good care of his family, his voice full of emotion.

  I told him, “What are you talking about? Marwan, what do you mean, ‘going to die’? Hey, you’re like a cat with seven good lives left.”

  He punched me in the nose. Then he lit me a cigarette with his and put it in my mouth. I had an urge to stop the car and give him a thorough beating.

  The drunken boat was lying in the intensive care ward. Just a skeleton. She’d been unconscious for a fortnight. We sat close to her on the edge of the bed. Marwan took a small knife shaped like a fish out of his trouser pocket and put it close to her pillow.

  He held her hand, and tears flowed down his cheeks.

  And after that you came to visit me!

  Yes, we bought a range of mezes, two bottles of arak, and twenty cans of beer, and we drove to your farm.

  I was so happy to see the two of you! Time had flown, you guys! We had a wild time that night raising a toast to our memories of high school. We put a table out under the lemon tree and cracked open the drinks. Marwan seemed cheerful and relaxed, without any obvious worries. He was laughing and joking, not to mention drinking frantically. Somebody brought up that boy at school called “the genius.” He was an eccentric student who had memorized all the textbooks within mo
nths. The teachers were convinced he was a genius, and they were shocked when he got poor grades on the final exams, barely enough to qualify to study at the oil institute. In his first year of college, he sneaked in at night and set fire to the lecture hall, then shot himself with a revolver. It was all a bit of a tragedy!

  You told us at length about your days of isolation on your farm, where you wanted to be free to write a book on the history of decapitation in Mesopotamia.

  The conversation eventually flagged, and we started to slur our words. We were drunk, and Marwan fell back into a deep silence. We got up to go into the house. Marwan asked me to recite whatever I could remember by Pessoa, his favorite writer.

  I’m not me, I don’t know anything,

  I don’t own anything, I’m not going anywhere,

  I put my life to sleep

  In the heart of what I don’t know.

  It was a wonderful summer night. Three best friends from school reunited. I lay on the grass, looked up at the clear sky, and began to imagine God as a mass of shadows. We heard Marwan’s screams coming from the bathroom. We couldn’t save him. He died in the pool of blood he had vomited.

  You phoned me a week later, and we went to an art exhibition in my car. We were going along the highway when, by mistake, I overtook a truck loaded with rocks.

  Enough, God keep you.

  What, you’re tired!

  I want to sleep awhile.

  Okay, let’s sleep.

  I hope that when I wake up I can’t hear you anymore and you’re completely out of my life.

  Me too, you fuck.

  The Hole

  1

  I was stuffing the last pieces of chocolate into the bag. I had already filled my pockets with them. I took some bottles of water from the storeroom. I had enough canned salmon, so I hid the remaining cans under the pile of toilet paper. Then, just as I was heading for the door, three masked gunmen broke in. I opened fire and one of them fell to the ground. I ran out the back door into the street, but the other two started to chase me. I jumped over the fence of the local soccer field and ran toward the park. When I reached the far end of the park, down by the side of the Natural History Museum, I fell into a hole.

  ———

  “Listen, don’t be frightened.”

  His hoarse voice scared me.

  “Who are you?” I asked him, paralyzed by fear.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No.”

  “That’s normal. It’s part of the chain.”

  The darkness receded when he lit a candle.

  “Take a deep breath! Don’t worry!”

  He gave an unpleasant laugh, full of arrogance and disdain.

  His face was dark and rough, like a loaf of barley bread. A decrepit old man. His torso was naked. He was sitting on a small bench, with a dirty sheet on his thighs. Next to him there were some sacks and some old junk. If he hadn’t moved his head like a cartoon character, he would have looked like an ordinary beggar. He was tilting his head left and right like a tortoise in some legend.

  “Who are you? Did I fall down a hole?”

  “Yes, of course you fell. I live here.”

  “Do you have any water?”

  “The water’s cut off. It’ll come back soon. I have some marijuana.”

  “Marijuana? Are you with the government or the opposition?”

  “I’m with your mother’s cunt.”

  “Please! Is the place safe?”

  He lit a joint and offered it to me. I took a drag and examined him. He looked suspicious. He smoked the rest of the joint and tuned a radio beside him to a station that was playing a song in a strange language. It sounded like some African religious beat.

  “Are you foreign?”

  “Can’t you tell by my accent? I’m speaking your language, man! But you can’t speak my language, because I was in the hole before you. But you’ll speak the language of the next person who falls in.”

  “Ah, man. I hate the way you talk.”

  He looked away, leaned his tortoise-like neck forward, and lit another candle. I could see the place more clearly now. There was a dead body. I examined it in the candlelight, a bitter taste in my mouth. It was the body of a soldier, and there was an old rifle nearby. His legs were lacerated, possibly by some sharp piece of shrapnel. He looked like a soldier from ancient times.

  “It’s true, it’s a Russian soldier.”

  He’d read my thoughts, and on his face there was an artificial smile.

  “And what was he doing in our country? Was he working at the embassy?”

  “He fell in the forest during the winter war between Russia and Finland.”

  “You really are mad.”

  “Listen, I don’t have time for the likes of you. I wanted to be polite with you, but now you’re starting to get on my nerves. I’m in a shitty mood today.”

  I began to examine the hole. It was like a well. Its walls were of damp mud, but the pores in the mud gave off a sharp, acrid smell. Maybe the smell of flowers! I lifted up the candle to try to see how deep the hole was. At the mouth, the lights in the park were visible.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked me in his disgusting voice.

  “We’re always in his care. Pray to him, man, to spare us the disasters of life.”

  He rounded his hands into the shape of a megaphone and started to shout hysterically, “O Lord of Miracles, Almighty One, Omniscient One, God, Great One, send down a giraffe or a monkey as long as it’s a hundred eighty centimeters tall! Make something other than a human fall in the hole! Make a dry tree fall in the hole! Throw us four snakes so we can make a rope out of them!”

  As if the craziness of this tortoise-like old man was what I needed! I humored him with his sarcastic prayer and said that if another man fell down the hole it would be easy to get out of it, because it wasn’t deep.

  “You’re right, and here’s a third man!” he said, pointing at the Russian soldier.

  “But he’s dead.”

  “Dead here, but not in another hole.”

  The old man suddenly pulled out a knife. I watched him warily, in case he attacked me. He crawled on his knees toward the body of the soldier and started cutting out chunks of flesh and eating them. He paid no attention to me, as if I didn’t exist.

  2

  That night I had picked up my revolver before heading out to the shop. I’d closed the place down months before, when the killing and looting started to spread across the capital. I would drop by the shop now and then when it was hard to get food or water from any of the shops near our house. The economy had quickly collapsed, and things had grown even worse due to the strikes. There were signs of an uprising, and chaos spread in the wake of the government’s resignation. The first protests began in the capital, and within a few days panic and violence swept the country. Bands of people occupied all the government buildings. They formed interim committees and attempted to govern. However, things suddenly turned sour again. People said that it was businessmen who backed the organized gangs that managed to take control of the northern part of the country. The rich and the supporters of the fugitive government were convinced that the new faith-based groups would come to power and impose their obscurantist ideology. That’s what the spokesman for the northern region said, and he also threatened that the region would secede. The extremists in the faith-based groups took no interest in speeches by politicians or revolutionaries. They were working silently behind the scenes, and in one shock assault they seized control of the country’s nuclear missile base. “Mankind has led us into ruination, so let’s go back to the wisdom of the Creator.” That was their motto.

  As for the army, it fought on several fronts. In the country’s main port, soldiers with machine guns killed more than fifty people who were trying to rob the main bank. People started to confront the
army, which they began to see as the enemy of change. There was plenty of weaponry. Our southern neighbors were said to have given weapons to civilians. In the capital some sensible people called for calm and for a way out of the storm that was sweeping the country. The army surrounded the missile base and began negotiating with the extremist leader, who was living among armed tribes in another country. He was a colonel who had been expelled from the army because of his extremist ideas. It was also said that he had a slogan tattooed on his forehead: PURGE THE EARTH OF DEVILS.

  The old man chewed the meat and went back to his place as if he’d just finished eating a sandwich. He wiped his mouth with a dirty towel, pulled out a book, and began to read. I took out a bar of chocolate and devoured it nervously. The old man was quite loathsome and disgusting.

  He looked up from his book and said, “Listen, I’ll get straight to the point. I’m a jinni.” He put out his hand for me to shake.

  I looked at him inquisitively.

  What was it my grandfather had said in his last few weeks? He kept raving in front of the pomegranate tree (all he could do in this world was suck pomegranates and stare at the tree).

  How I wanted to get up and kick the old man. I noticed he was looking at me spitefully and smiling in a way that suggested contempt. Then he said, “You seem to be braver and less disgusting than this Russian. Listen, I’m not interested in you and the people who visit the hole. All I’m looking for in your stories is amusement. When you spend your life in this endless chain, the pleasure of playing is the only thing that keeps you going. Wretches like this Russian remind me of the absurdity of the game. The romance of fear transforms the chain into a gallows. As soon as our friend the Russian fell in the hole, it terrified him that I was in it. He aimed his rifle at my head. And when I told him I was a jinni, he almost went crazy. He had one bullet. If it didn’t kill me, he would die of fright, and if he didn’t fire it he would remain hostage to his own paranoia.”

  “Very well, and what happened?”

  “Ha! I told him I knew all the secrets of his life, and to make him more frightened I said I knew Nikolai, his aunt’s youngest son. The soldier was disturbed when he heard the name. I talked about how he and Nikolai raped a girl in his village. He broke down and fired a bullet at my head. It’s a silly chain, full of your human stories. Would you believe sayings such as this?” He read from his book: “‘We are merely exotic shadows in this world.’ Trite talk, isn’t it? Life is beautiful, my friend. Enjoy it and don’t worry. I used to teach poetry in Baghdad. I think it’s going to rain. One day we might know one of the secrets or how to get out. There’s no difference here. What matters is the music of the chain.”