The Iraqi Christ

by Hassan Blasim

  Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man’s arse and we left the house. I never would understand what the man had to do with my brother. We headed towards the car park. 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 towards 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 memorised 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 muezzin5 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 organisation.

  ‘Before many others had gathered, Malik the muezzin spotted the compass close to the wreckage of the car. When he wiped the blood off it, he felt a shiver run up his spine. It was an army compass with the words Allah and Muhammad engraved on it. It was clear to the muezzin that it was the sheikh’s holy compass, blessed by God and a conduit for His miracles. Many of the mujahideen claimed the compass turned blood-red when God intended good or evil for the person carrying it. Azzam had never parted with it throughout his life in jihad. Malik hid it at home for ten years. He took it out every night, polished it and looked at it, as he shed tears of sorrow at the death of the mujahideen’s sheikh.

  ‘The muezzin placed the compass gently into the hand of his son Waheed, like someone setting down a precious jewel onto a piece of cloth. Waheed had decided to smuggle his way into England. He might strike lucky there, help his family and study to become a doctor. The muezzin told his son Waheed the secret of the compass and advised him to guard it with his life. With firm faith, he told him the compass would help him on his journey and throughout his life, and that it was the most precious thing a father could offer his son. Waheed was unaware of the compass’s powers and significance, and didn’t know much about those holy and special moments when the compass turned red to warn of good or evil, but his faith in his father made him treasure it. The compass then became inseparable from his person. Waheed reached Iran and lived in dilapidated houses run by traffickers. He had to work six months to save enough money to make the crossing to Turkey. One day he went out with six young Afghans to work on a building site. A rich Iranian man picked them up in a small truck and drove them to the outskirts of the town, where he was building an enormous house in the middle of his farm. They were working for a pittance. The man dropped them off at his farm and asked them to clear away the bricks, plaster, sacks and wood left over from the building work. The deal was that the owner would come back late that evening and take them back to town. He gave them half their wages in advance and advised them to finish the work properly. Waheed and the Afghans worked slowly and lazily all day long. When the sun set they all prayed and then sat down to relax in one of the large rooms. They poured some juice, rolled cigarettes and started to chat about trafficking routes to Europe. Every now and then the young Afghans would give Waheed sly looks of contempt. The owner was late. The Afghans decided to pass the time by playing a betting game, which was really a malicious trick. There was a group of barrels filled with water, next to some bags full of plaster. They told Waheed the game was that they would mix the plaster with water in a barrel and everyone in the group would put his hands in the mixture up to his elbow, and whoever managed to keep them in the longest would win a sum of money. They suggested Waheed go first. Full of good cheer and innocence, Waheed stood up and went through the motions, burying his arms in the plaster mixture. Within a few minutes the plaster set hard and Waheed’s arms were trapped in the barrel. The Afghans pulled down Waheed’s trousers and raped him one by one.’

  Between us we smoked nine cigarettes while listening to the story about the Pakistani. Murad Harba spat out his tale in one burst, then drank from the bottle of water next to him, cursing God. Abu Hadid took his pistol out of his belt and started to load it with bullets. The story about the Pakistani had no effect on me. I was entranced by the company of my brother Abu Hadid and by the chance to enter his various worlds. We turned off into an extensive park with bare trees like soldiers turned to stone. Murad switched off the engine. My heart was starting to pound and I was curious to find out what they would do in the darkness of the cold park. Obviously we hadn’t come all this way to listen to the story about the Pakistani. We got out of the car. Abu Hadid looked around while Murad Harba opened the boot of the car and took out a pick and shovel. Abu Hadid ordered me to help Murad dig. My blood began to race with excitement and fear. Abu Hadid, with his strong muscles, helped with the digging. We began to sweat. The ground was tough. The tangled roots of a tree and a large stone hampered our work. Before we’d had time to catch our breath, Murad and Abu Hadid headed back to the boot of the car, while I stood close to the hole, bewildered like a deaf man at a wedding party. They took a man, bound and gagged, out of the boot and dragged him along the ground to the hole. My brother told me to come close and look into the man’s eyes. The look of fear I saw is stamped in my memory as though with a branding iron. Abu Hadid kicked him in the back and the man slumped into the hole. We shovelled soil on top of him and levelled the ground well.

  Abu Hadid gave my hair a sharp tug and whispered in my ear:

  ‘Now you’re God.’

  5 Muezzin - the person who calls muslims to prayer from the minaret.

  Why Don’t You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters?

  We brought a half-naked Afghan corpse with us. Adel Salim and I dragged it for three cruel nights through a forest that appeared to be endless, with no way out. Adel had taken off the Afghan’s black shirt and I’d tied his feet together with the sleeves. It was the last forest before the Romanian-Hungarian border. After ten yards the shirt had torn and from then on we had to drag him by the arms. It had been snowing since we crossed the river, but lying there on that final night, I forgot all this and dreamt I was sleeping in
the cells of my military unit from the war days. At dawn we woke to the sight of Hungarian army dogs sniffing the Afghan’s corpse.

  Your name?

  Salem Hussein.

  Age?

  Thirty.

  The woman made a hand gesture, telling me to take off my underpants. Yesterday they took our stool samples, today they’re examining our skin. She made a note in the papers in front of her, then made a little upward gesture with her finger. I pulled up my underpants. She waved towards the door without looking up at me. I put on the rest of my clothes. Adel Salim came in after me, then a tall young Nigerian called James. He was wearing summer shorts with a smiley face printed on the backside and a thin shirt in the colours of the Jamaican flag. He protested to the escort when she told him he couldn’t go outside for a smoke. The only ones left were the Moroccan, and an old Kurdish man and his wife. We were a new group of inmates. We had reached the hospital early in the morning escorted by a pretty young woman called Anisa from the refugee reception centre. She was an Albanian who had got a job at the centre after living there as a refugee for five years and, in the meantime, had become fluent in Hungarian. We were each given a container for a stool sample and a plastic tube for urine. The Moroccan stood up and undid his trouser belt a little, tucked in his red sports shirt and then fastened the belt tight. James the Nigerian came out of the doctor’s room ecstatic, and pulled the cord of his shorts, as if he had just come out of a prostitute’s room. Anisa said the nurse would come soon to collect the urine and stool samples and she hoped the tests would go well. Out of the blue she told us what had happened to the previous group. That was a month earlier. She said they were ten young Somali men with a young boy. One of them took all the stool containers and filled them himself, while the others only filled the urine bottles. Of course in the laboratory they could easily tell that all the stool samples came from one man. When they were challenged on this, the Somalis pleaded that they couldn’t find any other way to fill the containers. They said they struggled to procure a sample from the Western-style toilets because the shit bobbed about in the water and it was hard to fish it out. So one of them took on the task. He shat on the bathroom floor and with that filled all the containers easily, including the boy’s.

  Adel Salim and I had arrived three days after the others. They gave us a quick interrogation at the army post on the border and in the morning they sent us to a refugee reception centre in a border town. I don’t know where they took the corpse of the Afghan. They told us that after the medical tests the police and the immigration department would question us again on the details of how he died. They put us in the quarantine section of the reception centre, a small building attached to the main centre where the rest of the inmates were staying. The Hungarians call it the ‘karanten’, similar to the Iraqi version of the word – ‘karantina’. It was dirty and crowded with Afghans, Arabs, Kurds, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Bangladeshis, Africans and some Albanians. The tests went on for a month. The frightening aspect of the quarantine section was the results of the medical tests, because some of the refugees had tuberculosis or scabies. Those ones were transferred from the quarantine section to the isolation hospital on the outskirts of the town. They would stay there until they were cured. That is what most of the new inmates feared most: not the disease but the time they would need to stay for treatment, which could be more than a year and a half. The Iraqis and Iranians made fun of tuberculosis and scabies because they thought they only infected Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Africans. In fact the test results seemed to confirm this, and the diseases of the Iraqis, the Iranians and the Kurds proved to be exclusively venereal, in particular gonorrhoea, which could be treated within the reception centre.

  We had crossed the Romanian-Hungarian border with a professional trafficker. At dawn he’d told us that the fog had started to thicken and we would have to stick together to reach the river and then cross the river into Hungarian territory. The trafficker said he had no obligation to wait for anyone who stopped walking and we would keep going until the fog lifted. We did our best to keep up with the trafficker. We swore to the interrogators that the Afghan died crossing the river. He had been very ill, and he soon drowned and we couldn’t save him, but the medical reports showed he had died of strangulation. I told them honestly and faithfully what had happened that foggy morning. The trafficker had lost his way (that’s what he told us), so he said we had to spend the night in the forest. We got into our sleeping bags, shivering from the cold – you can ask James the Nigerian, the Moroccan or the old Kurd, because they crossed before us and they explained what happened next when we met them in the quarantine centre. It was a shabby trick. The trafficker knew that the river was one kilometre from the forest, but the boat that one of his assistants from the Romanian border villages had left for us would only hold five people, so the trafficker would have to abandon three of us. I’m sure he was aware of the boat problem in advance, before the journey even began in Bucharest. The trafficker waited till about half an hour after we had got into our sleeping bags, then started going round the group, kicking each one gently, in the expectation that only some would wake up. This selection method of his succeeded. Adel Salim, the Afghan and I were fast asleep, while the others were dozing or couldn’t sleep at all for the cold. So they left us in the forest, dead to the world. When we woke up we realised we’d been tricked. We started looking for the river so we could cross into Hungary ourselves. God started making the fog even thicker. He seemed to be doing it deliberately. Hours later we reached the river. The cold had exhausted the Afghan and he no longer had the strength to walk. He had a raging fever. Adel very much liked the Afghan, and the two of us carried him. The poor man had stuck with us and become a companion and a brother since we met him crossing the mountains on the Iranian-Turkish border. Adel asked me to cross the river first, to try out the crossing, and then call them from the other bank to explain to them how to cross without getting lost in the fog. Adel said he would help the Afghan by himself. Shivering from the intense cold, I shouted out to Adel from the far bank. Then I heard him jump into the water with the Afghan. I shouted out to show them the way and after a while I heard them splashing around in the water. Adel shouted that the Afghan had started to drown. I shouted out again, begging him not to abandon him. The sound of them splashing in the water quickly grew louder, then suddenly everything was quiet. I was about to jump back into the water to help them when I saw Adel emerging from the fog, pulling the Afghan after him, dead. Adel burst out crying and I decided not to leave the Afghan’s body, although Adel objected at first.

  It’s been three years since this incident took place. I’m now working in the refugee camp in place of Anisa the Albanian, who has returned to her own country. I work as a translator for the immigration department, and I escort the new quarantine inmates to the hospital every morning. There’s nothing exciting in my life, the same shit and urine problems, the usual refusals to strip off in front of a woman doctor. I wanted to forget my countrymen, and match the rhythm of my life to the slow pace of this border town. I visit the Afghan’s grave from time to time, because he was buried in the town cemetery close to the refugee reception centre. His grave is the only one without a cross. People who visit the cemetery take a look at it out of curiosity, to see the Quranic verse engraved on the headstone. I drink in the bar every evening. I sleep with a woman who works in the flower shop, who loves me very much. I read the newspaper on the internet. Sometimes I cry all night. But for the last few years I haven’t dared visit the prison where Adel Salim lives in the capital, Budapest. Then one day I made up my mind to go and visit him.

  The encounter only lasted a matter of minutes.

  ‘Okay, I don’t understand, Adel,’ I said. ‘What were you thinking? Why did you strangle him? What I’m saying may be mad, but why didn’t you let him drown by himself?’

  After a short while, he answered hatefully from behind the bars. ‘You’re an arsehole and a fraud. Your name’
s Hassan Blasim and you claim to be Salem Hussein. You come here and lecture me. Go fuck yourself, you prick.’

  He blew out a lungful of cigarette smoke and went back to his cell.

  On the train back I was bewildered and there was a bitter taste in my mouth. I wanted to sleep but my mind was seething. I tried to put the events of my life in order, but many of them had faded into oblivion: my first meeting with Adel Salim in the south of the country, our plan to escape from the military lock-up, the Iranian border guards who arrested us, the electric-shock torture, meeting the Afghan, the river, Hassan Blasim, the border. The train stopped at a station. I went to the bathroom and when I came back a fat man had taken a seat in the compartment. Next to him he had a small cage with a white mouse inside. He looked up from his newspaper. I greeted him. He nodded and went back to his newspaper.

  The train set off and the man put out his hand.

  ‘My name’s Saro,’ he said. ‘My wife gave me this beautiful mouse. It’s my birthday. Fifty years old.’

  ‘Salem Hussein,’ I said and shook his hand.

  ‘That’s strange,’ said the man, examining my face. ‘I’ve read many of your stories. You’re a writer!’

  ‘That must be someone else,’ I said. ‘I don’t have anything to do with writing. I’m a translator in the immigration department. It’s true I wrote some poems in my youth, but I’ve never written anything else.’

  ‘Perhaps… perhaps you’ll write something later,’ he said.

  He folded his newspaper and added, ‘I was born in the Year of the Mouse.’ He started telling me about the Chinese Zodiac, and said that people born in the Year of the Mouse like to talk about themselves and the way they live. They are very kind but they are also very ambitious, and it’s hard for them to get on with people born in other years. They love debate and their biggest problem is their selfishness. I gathered he had chosen the Year of the Mouse for himself because he was so interested in mice, and not because of his real date of birth. He described the mouse as a gentle and fascinating creature, and we started chatting about mice and their qualities, as the man had extensive experience in all things mouse-related. The conversation led me to expound on my own life and on what had happened with Adel Salim and the Afghan. I started to humour his passion for mice and I told him what I could remember: in my childhood we lived in an area called Air Force Square, close to a military airfield. It was a dirty area teeming with mice, cockroaches and flies. Everyone tried to get rid of the mice, but in vain. My elder sister, like the rest of the women, would set small wooden traps in the kitchen. When a mouse went into the trap it would end up scalded. My sister would boil some water and pour it on top of the mouse – a special form of extermination. It was a horrible death. The smell of boiled mouse hung in the courtyard for more than a day. My grandfather had his own method. He had a long stick at the end of which he had hammered in some nails, and with a quick flick he would hit the mouse, which would start bleeding and make a horrible squealing noise. My sister never accepted this method, because the floor would get spattered with blood and, like the other women in the neighbourhood, she preferred boiled mice to bleeding mice.