A month after the nightmares started, Umm Ibtisam came across a knife in the backyard of her house. It was an old knife. She contacted her brother because she was alarmed by its sudden appearance. Her brother started to ask the neighbors about it, but they denied it was theirs. The knife aroused his interest. He said it looked like an antique. He calmed his sister down and told her he would ask his oldest son to stay a few nights with her and her daughters. The man came back a week later with a large sum of money, after selling the knife in the antique market. He told her the knife was valuable and dated from the Ottoman period. The brother joked with the woman, saying, “Let’s hope you find other knives and make us really rich.”
Umm Ibtisam said the nightmares then stopped. But in the same place in the yard six knives appeared, in this case kitchen knives. Umm Ibtisam kept the knives, and this time she didn’t tell her brother. The knives continued to appear, and in the end she told him. He didn’t tell anyone the secret of the knives, because they were waiting to see how long they would continue to appear in the yard. They kept on appearing, but it was rare for an old one to turn up. Once, a knife dating from the Abbasid period turned up; her brother sold it on the black market for a large amount. He told his sister that God was providing a livelihood for her and her daughters because her husband had been killed without good cause. He suggested opening a shop to sell the knives. The brother rented a small shop close to her house, and so Umm Ibtisam started selling knives.
Umm Ibtisam asked Jaafar to swear to keep her secret, because this was her livelihood. She added nothing to what she had told Allawi, who had invited her to attend our meeting. Jaafar swore to God and on his honor that he would keep her secret, and invited her to join the group. But she didn’t take up the offer, because all she wanted was for us to leave her alone. Souad embraced Umm Ibtisam, with tears in her eyes, perhaps for the strangeness of life’s agonies.
Souad took her to the door and handed her a bag full of cake, saying, “A simple present for the girls.”
None of us said anything. So there were knives appearing in other places. That meant the plot had thickened.
We were all smoking—Jaafar, Salih, Allawi, and I, and even Souad, who had slipped a cigarette out of my pack, although she didn’t normally smoke. We noticed the thick cloud of smoke in the room and burst out laughing together. Jaafar began to cough like a decrepit old man. We took out our knives and started to play. I told them about the earliest book on the interpretation of dreams, which appears on a tablet from the Sumerian city of Lagash. The story goes that Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, was praying in the temple when he suddenly fell asleep.
“I’m off to work,” Salih said in his effeminate voice, and left.
4
A year after I graduated from the School of Education, Jaafar the referee suddenly disappeared. We didn’t leave a hospital or police station unsearched. We contacted people who had ties with some of the armed groups and kidnap gangs. But to no avail. The ground seemed to have swallowed him up, along with thousands of others in the country. Souad was in her second month of pregnancy and had postponed her studies at the School of Medicine. I was very worried about her. She was frustrated and sad, like a bird whose wings have been broken in a storm.
The kids in Sector 29 were also sad that Jaafar had disappeared. They organized a soccer tournament by themselves for teams from the other sectors and called it the Referee Jaafar Tournament. They sent me an invitation to referee in the final.
———
The days passed slowly and sadly, like the miserable face of the country. The wars and the violence were like a photocopier churning out copies, and we all wore the same face, a face shaped by pain and torment. We fought for every morsel we ate, weighed down by the sadness and the fears generated by the unknown and the known. Our knife trick was no longer a source of pleasure, because time had dispersed those mysterious talents of ours. We had been broken one after the other, like discarded mannequins. Our group had fallen apart. There were no more meetings or discussions. Hatred had crushed our childish fingers, crushed our bones.
It wasn’t easy for a recent graduate like me to find work. The religious groups had opened schools that taught children to memorize the Quran. They offered me work in their schools until I could get a government job, so I got involved in teaching children the Quran and gave up the knife business. From time to time I wrote angry, aggressive, and meaningless poems.
Allawi moved out of the capital and wandered around the towns in the south. He toured the markets showing off his skill at making knives disappear, but earned a pittance. Then we heard fresh news about him: He had broken into a restaurant and was arrested for stealing knives from the kitchen. He was sent to prison and we heard no more of him. Souad, friendly and loving, continued to visit Salih the butcher to bring his knives back, and in return Salih would give us the best cuts of meat he had.
One winter morning I was at school teaching the children the Iron Chapter of the Quran when the principal came in and told me that a strange young man wanted to talk to me about something important.
He was a tall man in his midtwenties, and his name was Hassan. He said he wanted to talk to me about Jaafar the referee. I asked the principal for permission to take a break and went to the nearby coffee shop with the man. We ordered tea and he told me what had happened to Jaafar:
The security forces had set free some hostages from a terrorist hideout; Hassan was one of the people freed. He said he had met Jaafar in the place where they were holding the hostages, a house on a farm on the outskirts of the capital. They had abducted Jaafar because he was trading in pornographic magazines in a wealthy neighborhood where policemen lived. Hassan said they had brutally tortured him. The terrorists told Jaafar that God had punished him when his legs were amputated during the war, but Jaafar hadn’t repented and had gone on selling pictures of obscenities and debauchery. So the terrorists had decided to cut off Jaafar’s arms as a lesson to any unbelieving profligate. The terrorists assembled all the hostages to witness the process of amputating Jaafar’s arms. They couldn’t believe what happened next. Hassan said that whenever the terrorists approached Jaafar, the swords they were holding disappeared, and tears were streaming from his eyes. The terrorists didn’t have a single sword or knife left. They were terrified of Jaafar and said he was a devil. They stripped him naked in front of us and crucified him against the wall. They hammered nails into the palms of his hands, and he started writhing in pain, naked, with no legs. They decided to amputate his arms with bullets. Two men stood in front of him and sprayed bullets into his arms. One of the bullets hit his heart, and he died instantly. They dragged his body to the river, collected some dry branches, and poured some gas on him. They set fire to him and chanted, “God is most great.”
Souad and I had a beautiful boy, and we called him Jaafar. I continued working in the religious school. I never managed to tell Souad what had happened to her brother. I suppressed the horror that his death caused, and I loved Souad even more. She was my only hope in life. She went back to the School of Medicine, and time began to heal the wounds, slowly and cautiously.
Umm Ibtisam came to see us. Her financial situation had greatly improved. She said we were good people and she hadn’t forgotten us. She offered to open a large shop in the neighborhood for us to sell knives.
Our business was profitable, though sometimes I would unwittingly make one knife or another disappear. At night I would start by kissing Souad’s toes, then creep up to her thighs, then to her navel, her breasts, her armpits and neck, until I reached her ear, and then I would whisper, “My love, I need help!”
She would pinch me on the bottom, then climb on top of my chest, strangle me with her hands, and say, “Ha, you wretch, how many knives have you made disappear? I’m not going to get them back until you kiss me a thousand and one times.”
I kissed every pore on her body with passion and reverence, as if
she were a life that would soon disappear.
When young Jaafar was five years old, his gift emerged: Like his mother, he could make knives reappear.
The Composer
JAAFAR AL-MUTALLIBI WAS BORN IN THE TOWN OF al-Amara. In 1973 he resigned from the Communist party and joined the ruling Baath party. In the same year his wife gave birth to their second son. Jaafar was a professional lute player and a renowned composer of patriotic songs. He was killed in the uprising in the city of Kirkuk in 1991.
———
Today I can tell you about how he died. Do you see this old woman shouting out the price of fish? She’s my mother. We’ve been selling fish since we came back to Baghdad. Let me help her empty the crate of fish, then let’s go to a nearby coffee shop and talk.
———
After the end of the war between Iraq and Iran my father started to proclaim his atheism blatantly and caused us many problems. One evening he came home with his shirt stained with blood. It seems he’d had a nosebleed after one of his friends punched him. They were playing dominoes in the coffee shop when my father launched into a tirade of obscene insults to God and the Prophet. He made them up and set them to music during the game. As you know, he was a well-known composer. At first my father whistled a tune composed in the military style, then he added a new insult: a nail in the testicle of your imam’s sister.
Many people burst out laughing when they heard the insults my father’s imagination came up with, but they soon began to keep away from him and ask God for forgiveness. Some of them avoided meeting him in the street. One of them told him in jest one day that he hoped a truck loaded with steel would run him over, but everyone was frightened of his connection with the government. The day after he was punched he wrote a report for party headquarters about Abu Alaa, the man who hit him, and two days later Abu Alaa disappeared. We were living in a neighborhood called the Second Qadissiya, which consisted of houses the government had assigned to junior army officers, other people who had moved from cities in the south and center of the country, and the families of Kurds who worked for the regime. We were the only family in the neighborhood that earned its living differently. All the families except ours lived off salaries from the army, the party, and the security services, while we lived off the patriotic songs that my father composed. My father had a status higher than that of the mayor and members of the local hierarchy of the party, because the President himself had more than once awarded him military medals for his songs about the war, songs people remember to this day.
Listen, brother, I’ll sum up the story for you. One year after the war ended, my father suffered what the newspapers call writer’s block, and he was unable to compose new music for the many poems celebrating the greatness of the President that famous poets would send him. Months passed, then a year, and he still could not write a single new tune. Do you know what he did in the meantime? He took it upon himself to write and set to music short depraved poems making fun of religion. One warm winter evening we were watching television when we heard my father singing a new song of his about the Prophet’s wives and how loose they were. Suddenly my elder brother sprang up, took my father’s pistol from the wardrobe, jumped on top of my father, and put the pistol in his mouth. He would have killed him were it not for my mother, who tore open her dress, baring her breasts and screaming. My brother was transfixed for a moment as he looked at my mother’s enormous breasts, which hung down over her stomach like an animal whose guts had spilled out. This was the first time we had ever seen my mother’s breasts, except as babies. I went into the bathroom, and my brother fled the sight of my mother by leaving the house. She was illiterate, but she was smarter than my father, whom she looked after in a curious way. She spoiled him as if he were a son. She was the licensed midwife in the Qadissiya district, and people were very fond of her. My father decided to submit a report on my brother to the local party headquarters, but they did not react to it.
My father’s name had started to stink in the neighborhood and in artistic circles. They said that Jaafar al-Mutallibi had gone mad, and his old friends avoided him. He traveled to Baghdad and submitted a request to the radio and television station asking them to rebroadcast the war songs he had composed, or at least one song a week. They rejected his request and told him his songs were now inappropriate. They were only broadcasting patriotic songs twice a year: on the anniversary of the outbreak of the war and the anniversary of when it had ended. My father wanted to restore his past and his fame by any means possible. He tried but failed to meet the President. He submitted an application to the film and theater department, proposing a documentary film about his songs and his music, but that request was also ignored.
While he was making all these attempts he finished composing the music to ten songs insulting God and existence, as well as a beautiful song about the first four caliphs. We realized he had gone completely mad when he started frequenting the studios and trying to persuade them to record him singing his songs making fun of religion. Of course, his requests were rejected categorically, and some people threw him out and threatened to kill him. In the end my father decided to record his songs on tape at home. He sat in front of a tape recorder and started to sing and play the lute. Of course, it was a poor recording, but it was intelligible. He played it to us at breakfast; we were worried that people would find out about this tape. We tried to get hold of it and destroy it, but he would never let it leave his coat pocket, and when he went to sleep he would slip it into a special pocket he had made in the pillow.
Today there’s no need to hide this copy, because others need it, and religion has made more progress than necessary, along with the murderers and thieves. The reaction of the street might be hysterical, but let’s fire a bullet in the air. Go ahead, you’re a journalist; it will be good for you and good for everyone. A young singer offered to sing it and record it again in a modern studio, but I refused. These songs must remain as my father himself recorded them, as evidence of his story. They can only be copied. People soon forget the stories of this event. When you tell them these stories, after a time they think the stories are figments of imagination. Take our neighbor in the market, for example: Abu Sadiq, who sells onions. When he now tells his story about the battle with the Iranians at the river Jassim, it sounds like a Hollywood horror story he made up.
The government army ran away, and the Kurdish Peshmerga militias entered Kirkuk. The people of the city welcomed the uprising with great joy. There was overwhelming chaos, gunfire, dead bodies, Kurdish dancing, and songs everywhere. We were unable to escape. The insurgents set fire to houses in all the government districts and where party members lived. They killed and strung up the bodies of the Baathists, police, and security people.
We were holed up at home, and a group of young men broke down the reinforced door to my father’s office. They took us out on the street to carry out the death sentence on us. My mother was on her knees pleading with them, but she did not rip her clothes this time. What? My father? No, no, my father wasn’t with us. Months before the uprising, he had become the madman of the city, wandering the streets singing against God and carrying his lute, which no longer had a single string. A fire broke out in our house, and my mother collapsed unconscious as the rest of us leaned against the outer wall of the house. Umm Tariq, our Kurdish neighbor, turned up at the last moment, screaming at the young men and speaking to them in their language. Then she started imploring them to set us free. She told them how kind and generous my mother was and how she helped the Kurdish women give birth and looked after pregnant women. She told them how my mother would give away bread to the neighbors in honor of Abbas, the son of the Imam Ali, at feast time, and how brave my elder brother was and how he’d been best friends with her son who’d been killed fighting with the Peshmerga forces during the Anfal campaign, and that it was he who helped her late son escape from Kirkuk (here she lied), and that I was a good, peaceful boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
She ended her defense of us on an angry note. “They’re not responsible for what that pimp Jaafar al-Mutallibi has been doing,” she said. Then she spat on the ground. We went into Umm Tariq’s house and we didn’t leave until the Republican Guard forces entered the city and the Peshmerga militias withdrew. Most of the insurgents ran away with the militias.
In the end we found my father without a head, tied to a farm tractor with a thick rope. He had been dragged around the city streets for a whole day, and his corpse had been put on display in a manner that is impossible to imagine. At the time they were about to execute us my father was close to the local party headquarters, where the bodies of the party members filled the courtyard. My father went into the empty building and headed for the information room. He knew this room well because it was from this room that his patriotic songs used to be broadcast from loudspeakers on the roof during the first war. From the same loudspeakers the party members would also speak to the public when someone was being executed for deserting the army or for helping the Peshmerga militias. My father put the tape into the tape player and the loudspeakers started broadcasting to the insurgents his songs attacking God and existence. My father was hugging his lute and smiling when the insurgents arrived. They took him outside—
Excuse me, my friend. There’s a fish dealer who’s bringing some sacks of carp, so I have to go now. Tomorrow I’ll tell you the secret of my father’s relationship with Umm Tariq, the Kurdish woman.
The Song of the Goats
PEOPLE WERE WAITING IN LINE TO TELL THEIR STORIES. The police intervened to marshal the crowd, and the main street opposite the radio station was closed to traffic. Pickpockets and itinerant cigarette vendors circulated among them. People were terrified a terrorist would infiltrate the crowd and turn all these stories into a pulp of flesh and fire.
The Corpse Exhibition Page 9