The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Antoon, Sinan

  I took from my pocket the notebook in which, one summer many years ago, I had written down everything about washing bodies. Its pages had yellowed, but the cover was still intact. Sketches of my father’s face and his worry beads and Imam Ali’s face and the faces of other people filled the pages and framed the notes I’d taken. Those notes were now older than Mahdi. I read one of them. “Before washing, we say ‘I wash this corpse of this dead man as a duty and to seek God’s favor.’ During washing we must repeat: ‘Forgiveness, O Lord,’ or ‘O Lord, this is the body … etc.”’ I had written every little detail down in this notebook. Washing wasn’t difficult or complicated. I had watched my father do it hundreds of times and had helped him.

  Mahdi finished cleaning and asked what he should do next. I asked him to close the windows and doors, because it was getting cold, and to go to the women’s mghaysil and get us some lotus and camphor just in case. He came back and stored the stuff in the cupboards, then stood at the door. I invited him to sit down. He took off his jacket and put it on the back of the chair. I wanted to get to know him better and asked him about his hobbies.

  He said he loved soccer and played whenever he had a chance and that he wanted to be a professional player in the future.

  “Why not?” I said and smiled. I pointed to his Barcelona jersey and asked whether he wanted to play for them.

  “Yes,” he said excitedly.

  “What about Iraqi teams?”

  “I am a Talaba fan.”

  I had stopped following the league, but told him that I was a diehard Zawra’ fan. “What position do you like to play?”

  “Striker.”

  Before we could chat any more, death knocked on the door. Mahdi got up and went to open it. My heart raced and I stayed in the chair for a few seconds. I heard Mahdi saying, “Yes, it’s here.” I got up, went and stood by the bench, then went to the corridor. Mahdi came back, followed by three men carrying a sheet hiding the dead man. Mahdi pointed to the washing bench and they laid the body there. He then pointed to me and told them, “Ustadh Jawad is the washer.” The sentence had a strange effect on my ears. As if Mahdi had decreed what I would be doing.

  “My condolences,” I said. “What is he to you?”

  “My nephew. My sister’s son.”

  “May God have mercy on his soul. Can I see the death certificate?”

  He asked one of the younger men with him to get it from the car. Mahdi started to fill the buckets with water. The man asked about the fees. I spontaneously repeated what my father used to say: “Whatever you can manage, plus the cost of the shroud, but later. The coffin is donated by the endowment, but we will deal with this later.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  I asked them to take a seat. The third man did so, but the deceased’s uncle stood still. The young man came back and handed the death certificate to the uncle, who gave it to me with some hesitation. I looked at it. “Full Name: Jasim Muhammad ‘Alwan. Sex: Male. DOB: 8-5-1982. Cause: Poisoning. Drug overdose/pills.”

  I handed it back to him without a word. The dead man was only twenty-four and had died before his life had even started. Drugs had become rampant, especially among young men and teenagers. The young man who brought the death certificate went and sat on the visitors’ bench next to the other one.

  I approached the washing bench and remembered that I had to take off my shoes and that I hadn’t brought slippers from home. I was a bit flustered. I went to the side room and took off my shoes and socks. I put my socks inside the shoes and hid them under the chair. I could feel how cold the floor was. I rolled up my sleeves and went back to the washing room and headed to the faucet. The water was bitterly cold. I washed my hands and arms with soap and dried them with a towel Mahdi had prepared.

  I stood to the right of the bench and removed the sheet from the dead man’s face and body. He was naked except for white underpants. His skin was yellowish. He had short brown hair, a wide forehead, and a pointed nose. There was a mole on his right cheek next to his moustache. His lips were dry and looked thirsty. He had scattered patches of hair on his chest between the nipples. They narrowed to a line trailing down his belly. He was wire-thin. His bones and ribs were visible. I put my arm under his neck to lift him and pull the sheet from under his body. I got goose bumps.

  I rested his head on the bench again. Mahdi put his hands under the dead man’s knees to lift the rest of his body. I pulled away the remainder of the sheet and gave it to Mahdi, who folded it and handed it to the uncle. Mahdi brought me another white towel and handed it to me. He held a pair of scissors in his other hand. I put the towel over the man’s waist and took the scissors from Mahdi. I lifted the towel a bit without showing anything and started to cut away his underwear from the side. I went around and did the same to the other side. I removed the underwear and gave it to Mahdi, who put it in a plastic bag he had brought and gave it to the uncle. I returned the scissors to Mahdi and then placed the palms of my hands on the dead man’s belly and rubbed gently. It felt like hard plastic. I filled a bowl with water and poured some on his face. I inserted my index finger into his mouth and rubbed his teeth. Mahdi had started mixing in the ground lotus, which formed a foam and spread a pleasant smell. I poured another bowl of water over the man’s head and washed his face. I looked at Mahdi and realized it was time to turn him on his side. We did so as I repeated, “Forgiveness, O Lord.” I washed his right side from the head all the way down to the toes and repeated the same thing on his left side. Then we washed him again with water and camphor and then a third time with pure water.

  For half an hour the only sounds were the splash of water and what I muttered. We dried him and shrouded him and put two branches of palm in the coffin.

  After two years of work alongside Hammoudy, Mahdi had mastered the tasks of the assistant and the rhythms of washing. He was always ahead of me, anticipating the next step and preparing for it. This lessened my anxiety that I would do something wrong. When we went to the corner to fetch the coffin, the two young men got up. We put it on the ground next to the bench and placed the body in it. The uncle asked again about my fees and I told him that there was no set figure. He gave me ten thousand dinars. I thanked him and offered my condolences once again. They carried away the coffin and left.

  I asked Mahdi about the amount as I put the bills in my pocket. He said it was very good and that Hammoudy used to ask for twenty thousand if the deceased’s family wanted the special shroud with the fancy print and supplications. I suggested we wash the bench and rearrange the bowls. He said he would do it himself.

  I looked for the radio in the side room, but couldn’t find it. Mahdi said he didn’t know anything about a radio. I decided to bring a small one from home to keep us company. I realized that I’d forgotten to say, “I wash this corpse … ” I sensed that Imam Ali was looking at me from the painting, but I didn’t detect any censure or anger in his eyes.

  Death was kind to me on my first day and gave me a long rest. No one else came until noon. I remembered the sufurtas and the food my mother had prepared for me. Mahdi hadn’t brought any food with him. I gave him some money and asked him to get us two falafel sandwiches from Abu Karima’s and to get two cans of soda, too. He smiled and seemed eager to go on the errand.

  I sat waiting for him and leafed through my old notebook again. I found a few empty pages and decided to write down the names of the dead I was going to wash. I wrote the date and then “Jasim.”

  Names filled one notebook after the other in the days and months that followed.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I cannot wake up from this endless nightmare of wakefulness. Some people go to work behind a desk on which papers are piled. Others operate machinery all day. My desk is the bench of death. The Angel of Death is working overtime, as if hoping for a promotion, perhaps to become a god. I walk down the street and look at people’s faces and think Who among them will end up on the bench next for me to wash?

  Every day of the week wa
s difficult, but Thursday was the day al-Fartusi’s refrigerated truck arrived with the weekly harvest of death: those who were plucked from their families and lives, tossed into the garbage in Baghdad’s outskirts, thrown into the river, or rotting in the morgue. Most of them had no papers or IDs and no one knew their names. Instead of names, I wrote down the causes of death in my notebook: a bullet in the forehead, strangulation marks around the neck, knife stabs in the back, mutilation by electric drill, headless body, fragmentation caused by suicide bomb. Nothing could erase the faces. My memory became a notebook for the faces of the dead. I was on my way home one day when I realized that aside from Mahdi and my mother, I was living my days exclusively with the dead.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  On a February morning in 2006, I was getting dressed to go to work when I heard my mother wailing downstairs. I ran down barefoot and saw her sitting in front of the TV beating herself and crying, “O God, O God.”

  “What’s wrong, mother? What happened?” I asked as I held her hands and begged her to stop. On the TV were images of a destroyed mosque.

  Through her tears she said, “They bombed the Askari shrine. I wish God had blinded me so I wouldn’t see it like that.”

  I tried to calm her down. I, too, felt sad, but for different reasons. I had visited the shrine in Samarra more than once. That is where the Mahdi is said to have disappeared and gone into occultation to return at the end of time. I had felt awe and sadness when I was inside it and could still see my mother crying as she held on to the golden window surrounding the mausoleum. I was quite young back then and she had stood behind me and had kept me close so that I wouldn’t get lost in the crowds. I felt the cold window as my cheek pressed against it. I felt the warmth of my mother’s body pressing me from behind as she muttered her supplications and prayers. She cried as she mentioned Ammoury’s name and then mine and my sister’s and asked the imam to protect us. I cried along with her. All those pleas and tears did not work. Not for Ammoury. When we were in school we used to go on trips to Samarra to visit the spiral ziggurat. We would climb all the way to the top and look out at the golden dome of the shrine. It looked like a star that has fallen from the sky and now rested on earth after being dipped in golden water.

  The band at the bottom of the TV screen scrolled by with condemnations and statements from every side. I realized that matters would deteriorate even further. Corpses would pile up everywhere. My mother was afraid that other domes would be blown up. “Who can stop them if they want to blow up al-Kazim. God help us!”

  “God help us, but please take it easy and calm down. They won’t blow up al-Kazim.”

  “I don’t want to calm down. You are way too calm about this. Didn’t they fire rockets at it a few months ago? Aren’t there explosions every year during ‘Ashura? You just don’t care about Shiites.”

  I was about to tell her that she was right in a way. I had come to a point where I hated everyone equally, Shiites and Sunnis alike. All these words were suffocating me: Shiite, Sunni, Christian, Jew, Mandaean, Yazidi, infidel. If only I could erase them all or plant mines in language itself and detonate them. But here I was, slipping into the very same language of bombing and slaughter.

  “Thank you mother,” I said. I went upstairs, got dressed and made my way out of the house. When she heard my footsteps she said, “Godspeed, son,” but I didn’t answer.

  When I came home that evening she kissed my forehead and apologized.

  “What can I do, son. My heart was scorched.”

  “There is no heart in this country that isn’t crushed, mother.”

  We had tea in front of the TV. The daily harvest of news was the same stuff I had heard on the radio all day: responding to a statement by the grand cleric al-Sistani, angry demonstrations took place in Baghdad, Najaf, and Basra. There were lethal attacks on five Sunni mosques in Baghdad, and mosques in other cities were torched. I looked at my mother. “What do you expect?” she said. “Their hearts are scorched.”

  “So they go burn mosques because their hearts are scorched?”

  She probably figured that if we got into an argument I would just leave and go to the Internet café, so she retreated by saying, “You are right. Even if they drew blood first, one shouldn’t burn a place of worship.”

  The government declared three days of official mourning. As for the sectarian killings, they spread without any official announcements and lasted well beyond the three days. The satellite channels were buzzing with noise and sectarian frenzy on both sides. They hosted many turbaned men, most of whom were experienced in fanning the flames of hatred and rousing other zealots of their sects, especially masked ones, to translate what was being said with their weapons and eloquent daggers. The next day more than a hundred bodies were found all around Baghdad. The rate of corpses delivered to the mghaysil didn’t increase, but I thought of my Sunni comrades on the other side of this valley whose hours were now choked with death and water.

  My uncle sent an e-mail asking whether things were all right with us. He reminded me of what he had said three years earlier when he visited. He had said that the hell of sectarianism was inevitable and that helmets and turbans would sever heads and burn everything in sight. He reiterated his offer to help me if I still intended to emigrate or to continue my studies abroad as I had told him when he was in Baghdad. I wrote back and told him that I was thinking about it, but my mother’s fate, if I were to leave, was paralyzing me.

  THIRTY-SIX

  A deep voice says: “Remove the blindfold.”

  At a desk in front of me sits a man whose features I can’t make out in the blinding light.

  He asks, “Is your name Jawad Kazim?”

  “Yes.”

  He looks at some papers in front of him and reads: “Graduated Academy of Fine Arts. Failed sculptor. Painter. Are you a believer?”

  Bewildered by his question, I say, “Excuse me?”

  He screams: “Motherfucker. Don’t try to be a smart ass with me. You understand the question very well. Are you a believer?”

  “Yes, thank God, I am.”

  He motions to the man standing next to me. The latter punches me so hard I fear my head will fall off.

  “You piece of shit! You haven’t fasted or prayed or gone to a mosque in a hundred years and you say you are a believer? How could you desecrate the bodies of martyrs when you are a dirty apostate? Why are you meddling in this profession anyway if you are an artist?”—He says “artist” sarcastically and in a different tone—“It’s better for you to scribble away and play with your mud or shit. Go get drunk and fuck around with your faggot artist friends, but don’t touch the bodies of honorable men, you piece of shit. I’ll tear your ass apart.”

  His phone rings. “I’ll teach you,” he says, then answers his phone and starts chatting and joking with a friend, making plans for dinner.

  I woke to the ringing of my phone.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Three months after the bombing of the al-Askari mosque I went home after work and found my mother and some relatives sitting in the guest room. I was tired and wanted just to say a quick hello. The door was ajar. I saw a familiar face—a female cousin whom I had seen a few years before at a wedding. A much younger and very beautiful girl who resembled her sat between her and a boy of about ten. When I knocked at the door, the woman covered her head with a black scarf, but the girl smiled at me and kept her head uncovered. We exchanged greetings and I welcomed them.

  “Do you remember Um Ghayda’?” asked my mother.

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “And this is her lovely daughter Ghayda’ and her son Ghayth.”

  I welcomed them again, then excused myself and went to the kitchen to get some food. My mother followed me and said she wanted to discuss something. Um Ghayda’ and her children were in a tight spot. “They can’t stay at their own house in ‘Amiriyya,” she said, “because of all the threats they’re getting and all the killing over there. Her husband was kil
led five months ago, and she is alone. She wants to stay with us until things calm down, since our neighborhood is safe for Shiites.”

  I said that it was fine by me. My mother kissed me on my cheek, saying, “I was afraid you’d be upset.”

  I didn’t spend much time at home to start with, especially since getting addicted to the Internet. I knew that the house had become too empty for my mother after my father’s death. My sister rarely visited. I thought that the company of Um Ghayda’ might cheer her up. The guest room was big enough for the three of them to sleep in. It turned out later that Um Ghayda’ had back pains, so my mother invited her to sleep with her in her bed. Ghayda’ and Ghayth slept in the guest room on mattresses that Ghayda’ would spread at night and pick up in the morning.

  I wasn’t averse to solitude, but their presence restored some life to our house, especially when we gathered for dinner at night in front of the TV. I noticed also that my mother’s mood was much better than before. Her sighs and complaints decreased. She listened less often to the Shiite lamentation tapes that were popular at the market, and whose singers could sometimes be seen on the satellite channels as well. I explained to her that the death I saw every day from morning till evening was enough for me. I wanted to come home not to more mourning but merely to some peace of mind.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I am washing the corpse of a skinny old man with white hair and a wrinkly face and forehead. My mind wanders. The man opens his eyes, shakes his head, and tries to get up. The small bowl falls from my hand and I retreat from the bench in fear.

  He says in a hoarse voice, “I didn’t think that I would have to do this myself, but you can’t focus and keep thinking of silly shit.” He picks up the bowl, fills it with water, and pours it on his head. He reaches for the ground lotus. I try to give him a hand, but he refuses and tells me to go away and sit down.