The_Corpse_Exhibition


INDIANA WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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PENGUIN BOOKS

THE COR P SEE X H I BIT ION

HASSAN BLASIM was born in Baghdad in 1973 and stud­
ied at the Baghdad Academy of Cinematic Arts. A critic
of Saddam Hussein's regime, he was persecuted and in
1998 fled Baghdad to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he made
films and taught filmmaking under the pseudonym
Ouazad Osman. In 2004, a year into the war, he fled to
Finland, where he now lives. A filmmaker, poet, and fic­
tion writer, he has published in various magazines and
anthologies and is a coeditor of the Arabic literary web­
site www.iraqstory.com. His fiction has twice won the
English PEN Writers in Translation award and has been
translated into Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Italian. In
2012 a heavily edited version of his stories was finally
published in Arabic and was immediately banned in
Jordan.

JONATHAN WRIGHT (translator) studied Arabic at Oxford
University and has spent much of the past three decades
in the Arab world, mostly as a journalist with Reuters.



 



 



ISBN 978-0-14-312326-2

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

USA I Canada I UK I Ireland I Australia I New Zealand I India I South Africa I China
penguin. com

A Penguin Random House Company

First published in Penguin Books 2014

The Madman ofFreedom Square
Copyright © 2009 by Hassan Blasim

Translation copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Wright
Collection copyright © 2009 by Comma Press

The Iraqi Christ
Copyright © 2013 by Hassan Blasim

Translation copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Wright
Collection copyright © 2013 by Comma Press

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,
promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorizededition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning,or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writersand allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

The stories in The Corpse Exhibition appeared in Hassan Blasim's The Madman ofFreedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, both published in Great Britain by CommaPress. The following selections appeared in The Madman ofFreedom Square:"The Corpse Exhibition," "An Army Newspaper," "The Madman of Freedom Square,""The Composer," "The Reality and the Record," "That Inauspicious Smile," and"The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes." The following stories were published inThe Iraqi Christ: "The Killers and the Compass," "The Green Zone Rabbit,"
"Crosswords," "The Hole," "The Iraqi Christ," "A Thousand and One Knives," and"The Song of the Goats." "The Reality and the Record" was first published in Madinah:

City Stories from the Middle East, edited by Joumana Haddad (Comma Press, 2008)."The Green Zone Rabbit" was first published by Words Without Borders.

Excerpt from The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding ofDreams, Fairy Tales and Myths by Erich Fromm (New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1951).

Printed in the United States of America
13579108642

Set in Mercury Text Gl
Designed by Sabrina Bowers

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the productof the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.



China

Contents

The Corpse Exhibition
1

The Killers and the Compass
11

The Green Zone Rabbit
25

An Army Newspaper
37

Crosswords
49

The Hole
67

The Madman of Freedom Square
79



--'_ '-.Il[

The Composer
127

The Iraqi Christ
91

A Thousand and One Knives
103

The Song of the Goats
137

The Real ity and the Record
155

That Inauspicious Smile
171

The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes
185

I .....



THE CORPSE EXHIBITION



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BEFORE TAKING OUT HIS KNIFE HE SAID, uAFTER

studying the client's file you must submit a brief note on
how you propose to kill your first client and how you will

display his body in the city. But that doesn't mean that
what you propose in your note will be approved. One of
our specialists will review the proposed method and
either approve it or propose a different method. This sys­
tem applies to professionals in all phases of their work­
even after the training phase has ended and you have
taken the test. In all phases you will receive your salary in
full. I don't want to go into all the details now. I'll brief

you on things gradually. After you receive the client's file
you cannot ask questions as you could before. You have to
submit your questions in writing. All your questions, pro­
posals, and written submissions will be documented in

your personal file. You absolutely may not write to me
about work matters bye-mail or call me on the phone.
You will write your questions on a special form that I will
provide you with later. The important thing is that you
now devote your time to studying the client's file care­
fully and patiently.

3



4 HASSAN BLASIM

"I want to reassure you that we won't stop dealing
with you even if you fail in your first assignment. If you
fail you'll be transferred to work in another department
at the same salary. But I must remind you once again: Giv­
ing up the job after you receive your first salary payment
would be unacceptable and would not succeed. There are
strict conditions for that, and if the management agrees
to sever relations with you, you would have to undergo
many tests, which could last a long time. In the archives
we have files we preserve about volunteers and other
agents who decided to terminate their contracts on their
own initiative. If you're thinking of doing that, we'll show
you some examples of the experiences of others. I'm con­
fident you'll be able to persevere with the work and enjoy
it. You'll see how your whole life will change.

"This is your first present; don't open it now. It's your
pay in full. As for the documentaries about the lives of
predatory animals, you can buy them and we'll cover the
expenses later. Pay particular attention to the images of
the victims' bones.

"Always remember, dear friend, that we are not ter­
rorists whose aim is to bring down as many victims as
possible in order to intimidate others, nor even crazy kill­
ers working for the sake of money. We have nothing to do
with the fanatical Islamist groups or the intelligence
agency of some nefarious government or any of that kind
of nonsense.

"I know you now have some questions that are nag­
ging you, but you will gradually discover that the world is
built to have more than one level, and it's unrealistic for
everyone to reach all the levels and all the basements



THE CORPSE EXHIBITION 5

caling with ease. Don't forget the senior positions that await you
It you in the hierarchy of the institution if you have an imagina-
rtment tion that is fresh, fierce, and striking.
\n: Giv- "Every body you finish off is a work of art waiting for
layment you to add the final touch, so that you can shine like a pre­

cious jewel amid the wreckage of this country. To display
a corpse for others to see is the ultimate in the creativity
we are seeking and that we are trying to study and benefit
from. Personally I can't stand the agents who are unimag­
inative. We have, for example, an agent whose code name
is Satan's Knife, that I wish those in charge would get rid
of as soon as possible. This guy thinks that cutting off the
client's limbs and hanging them from the electrical wires
in the slum neighborhoods is the height of creativity and
inventiveness. He's just a conceited fool. I hate his classi­
cal methods, although he talks about a new classicism. All
this lightweight does is paint the client's body parts and
hang them from invisible threads, the heart in dark blue,
the intestines green, the liver and testicles yellow. He
does this without understanding the poetry of simplicity.

"When I tell you some of the details I see that puzzled
look in your eyes. Calm down, breathe deep, listen to the
rhythm of your secret spirit calmly and patiently. Let me
explain some points to you more clearly to dispel some of
the misapprehensions you may have. Let me waste some

Kino time with you. What I tell you may be just personal
impressions, and another member of the group may have

nag­

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a quite different opinion.
"I like concision, simplicity, and the striking image.

Take Agent Deaf, for example. He's calm, and he has a
smart, lucid eye, and my favorite work of his was that



6
HASSAN BLASIM

woman who was breast-feeding. One rainy winter's morn­
ing a crowd of passersby and drivers stopped to look atthat woman. She was naked and fat, and her child, also
naked, was suckling at her left breast. He put the woman
under a dead palm tree in the central reservation of a
busy street. There was no trace of a wound or a bullet on
the woman's body or on the baby's. She and her babylooked as alive as a brook of pure water. That's a genius
we lack in this century. You should have seen the wom­
an's enormous tits and how thin the baby was, like a pileof bones painted the color of bright white baby skin. No
one could work out how the mother and her child were
killed. Most people speculated that he used some myste­rious poison that has not yet been classified. But youshould read in the archives in our library the brief, poetic
report that Deaf wrote on this extraordinary work of art.
He now holds an important position in the group. Hedeserves much more than that.

"You must understand properly that this country
presents one of the century's rare opportunities. Ourwork may not last long. As soon as the situation stabilizes
we'll have to move on to another country. Don't worry,there are many candidates. Listen, in the past we offered
new students like you classical lessons, but now thingsare much changed. We've started to rely on the democ- d'
racy and spontaneity of the imagination, and not on reinstruction. I studied a long time and read many boringbooks justifying what we do before I was able to work
professionally. We used to read studies that spoke about
peace, studies written with really disgusting eloquence.There were many naive and unnecessary analogies to B



THE CORPSE EXHIBITION

morn- justify everything. One of them was about how all the
I look at medicines at the pharmacy, even plain old toothpaste,
lild, also were produced after laboratory tests on rats and other
e Woman animals, so it would not be possible to bring about peace
ltion of a on this earth without sacrificing laboratory humans as
bullet on well. Old lessons like these were boring and frustrating.
her baD\' Your generation is very lucky in this age of golden oppor­

tunities. A film actress licking an ice cream might give
rise to dozens of photographs and news reports that reach
the most remote village ravished by famine in this world,
this grindstone of screaming and dancing. This at least
achieves what I call 'the justice of discovering the insig­
nificance and equivocal essence of the world.' How much
more so a corpse displayed creatively in the city center!

"Perhaps I've told you too much, but let me tell you
frankly that I'm worried about you, because you're either
an idiot or a genius, and agents like that excite my curios­
ity. If you're a genius, that would be gratifying. I still
believe in genius, although most members of the group
talk about experience and practice. And if you're an idiot,
let me tell you before I go a short and useful story about
one idiot who naively tried to mess with us. I didn't even
like his nickname- 'the Nail.' After the committee had

approved the way the Nail proposed to kill his client and
display his body in a large restaurant, we waited for
results. But this guy was very slow about finishing off his
work. I met him several times and asked him what was

causing the delay. He would say that he didn't want to
repeat the methods of his predecessors and was thinking
of bringing about a creative quantum leap in our work.
But the truth was different. The Nail was a coward who

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8 HASSAN BLASIM

had been infected with banal humanitarian feelings and,
like any sick man, had started to question the benefit of
killing others and to wonder whether there was some
creator monitoring all our deeds, and that was the begin­
ning of the abyss. Because every child born in this world
is simply a possibility, either to be good or evil, according
to the classification set by schools of religious education
in this stupid world. But it's a completely different matter
for us. Every child that's born is just an extra burden on
the ship that's about to sink. Anyway, let me tell you what
happened to the Nail. He had a relative who worked as a
guard in the hospital in the city center, and the Nail was
thinking of slipping into the hospital mortuary and choos­
ing a corpse instead of making a corpse himself. It was
easy to carry that off after he'd given his relative half the
pay he'd received from the group. The mortuary was full
of corpses from those stupid acts of terrorism, corpses
ripped apart by car bombs, others that had their heads cut
off in sectarian feuds, bloated bodies from the riverbed,
and many other stupid ones that had been finished off in
random murders that had nothing to do with art. The
N ail slipped into the mortuary that night and started
looking for the right corpse to display to the public. The
Nail was looking for the children's corpses, because in his
first report he had proposed an idea that involved killing
a five-year-old child.

"In the mortuary there were specimens of the corpses
of schoolchildren who had been mutilated by car bombs
or incinerated in some street market or broken into pieces
after planes bombed houses. Finally the Nail chose a child
who had been beheaded along with the rest of his family



THE CORPSE EXHIBITION 9

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for sectarian reasons. The body was clean, and the cut at
the neck was as neat as a piece of torn paper. The Nail
thought of exhibiting this body in a restaurant and put­
ting the eyes of the other family members on the table,
served in bowls of blood, like a soup. Maybe it was a beau­
tiful idea, but before all else his work would have been a
cheat and a betrayal. If he had beheaded the child himself
it would have been an authentic work of art, but to steal it
from the mortuary and act in this despicable manner
would be a disgrace and cowardice at the same time. But
he did not understand that the world today is linked
together by more than a tunnel and a corridor.

"It was the mortician who caught the Nail before he
was able to deceive the poor public. The mortician was in
his early sixties, an enormous man. His work in the mor­
tuary had flourished after the increase in the number of
mutilated bodies in the country. People sought him out to
patch together the bodies of their children and other rela­
tives who were torn apart in explosions and random kill­
ings. They would pay handsomely to have him restore
their children to the appearance by which they originally
knew them. The mortician was truly a great artist. He
worked with patience and with great love. That night he
guided the Nail into a side room in the mortuary and
locked the door on him. He injected him with some drug
that paralyzed him without making him unconscious.
He laid him out on the mortuary table, strapped his hands
and legs down, and gagged his mouth. He was humming
a pretty children's song in his strange woman's voice as
he prepared his worktable. It was a song about a child
fishing for a frog in a small puddle of blood, and every

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10 HASSAN BLASIM

now and then he would stroke the Nail's hair tenderly and
whisper in his ear, 'Ooh, my dear, ooh, my friend, there is
something stranger than death-to look at the world,
which is looking at you, but without any gesture or under­
standing or even purpose, as though you and the world
are united in blindness, like silence and loneliness. And
there is something a little stranger than death: a man and
a woman playing in bed, and then you come, just you, you
who always miswrite the story of your life.'

"The mortician finished his work in the early
morning.

"In front of the gate of the Ministry of Justice there
was a platform like the platforms on which the city's stat­
ues stand, but made of a pulp of flesh and bones. On top of
the platform stood a pillar of bronze, and from the pillar
hung the Nail's skin, complete and detached from his
flesh with great skill, waving like a flag of victory. In the
front part of the platform you could clearly see the Nail's
right eye, set in the pulp of his flesh. It had a look rather
like the insipid look your eyes have now. Do you know
who the mortician was? He's the man in charge of the
most important department in the institution. He's the
man in charge of the truth and creativity department."

Then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said,
"You're shaking."



 



 



ABU HADID KNOCKED BACK WHAT REMAINED OF THE

bottle of arak.' He put his face close to mine and, with the
calm of someone high on hashish, gave me this advice:
"Listen, Mahdi. I've seen all kinds of problems in my life,
and I know that one day I'll run out of luck. You're six­
teen, and today I'm going to teach you how to be a lion. In
this world you need to be street-smart. Whether you die

today or in thirty years, it doesn't make any difference.
It's today that matters and whether you can see the fear in
people's eyes. People who are frightened will give you
everything. If someone tells you, 'God forbids it' or 'That's
wrong,' for example, give him a kick up the ass, because
that god's full of shit. That's their god, not your god. You
are your own god, and this is your day. There's no god
without followers or crybabies willing to die of hunger or
suffer in his name. You have to learn how to make your­
self God in this world, so that people lick your ass while
you shit down their throats. Don't open your mouth today,

* Arak: a traditional anise-flavored distilled spirit.

13



l/.� HASSAN BLASIM

not a word. You come with me, dumb as a lamb. Under­
stand, dickhead?"

He thumped the arak bottle against the wall and
aimed a friendly punch hard into my nose.

We walked through the darkness of the muddy lanes.
The wretched houses were catching their breath after re­
ceiving a whipping from the storm. Inside them the peo­
ple were sleeping and dreaming. Everything was soaked
and knocked out of place. The wind that had toyed with
the labyrinth of lanes all evening picked up strength,
then finally left with a bitter chill hanging over the place­
this sodden neighborhood where I would live and die.
Many times I imagined the neighborhood as if it were
some offspring of my mother's. It smelled that way and
was just as miserable. I don't recall ever seeing my mother
as a human being. She would always be weeping and wail­
ing in the corner of the kitchen like a dog tied up to be tor­
mented. My father would assail her with a hail of insults,
and when her endurance broke, she would whine aloud,
"Why, good Lord? Why? Take me and save me."

Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out
of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour,
spitting at her throughout.

My nose was bleeding profusely. I was holding my head
back as I tried to keep pace with Abu Hadid. The smell of
spiced fish wafted from the window of Majid the traffic
policeman's house. He must have been blind drunk to be
frying fish in the middle of the night. We turned down a
narrow, winding lane. Abu Hadid picked up a stone and
threw it toward two cats that were fighting on top of a
pile of rubbish. They jumped through the window of Abu



Inder- Rihab's abandoned house. The rubbish almost reached the
roof of the place. The government had executed Abu Rihab

III and and confiscated his house. They say his family went back to
the country where their clan lived. Abu Rihab had been in

y \ane�, contact with the banned Daawa party. After a year of tor­
ture and interrogation in the vaults of the security ser­
vices, he was branded a traitor and shot. It was impossible
to forget the physical presence of his beautiful daughter,
Rihab. She was a carbon copy of Jennifer Lopez in U Turn.
I'd seen the film at the home of Abbas, the poet who lived
next door. He had films that wouldn't be shown on state
television for a hundred years. Most of the young men in
the neighborhood had tried to court Rihab with love let­
ters, but she was an idiot who understood nothing but
washing the courtyard and pouring water over the hands
of her Daawa party father before he prayed.

Abu Hadid, my giant brother, stopped in front of the
door to Umm Hanan's house. She was the widow of Allawi

Shukr, and people in the neighborhood made fun of her
morals by calling her Hanan Aleena, which means some­
thing like "easy favors." We went inside and sat on a
wooden bench with an uncomfortable back. Umm Hanan

asked one of her daughters to wash my face and take care
of me. The girl blocked my nose with cotton wool. Umm
Hanan had three beautiful daughters, all alike as nurses
in uniform. My brother slept with Umm Hanan. Then he
fucked her youngest daughter twice. After that he told
Umm Hanan to fuck me. I was surprised he didn't ask
that of the girl who was my age. Then Abu Hadid took
some money and three packs of cigarettes from Umm

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THE KILLERS AND THE COMPASS 15

Hanan, and gave me one of the packs.



16 HASSAN BLASIM

We set off again, walking along the muddy lanes. Abu
Hadid slowed down, then retraced his steps and stopped
at the door of Abu Mohammed, the car mechanic. He
knocked on the door with his foot. The man came out in
his white dishdasha with his paunch sticking out. His
eyes popped out of his head when Abu Hadid greeted
him. Me and the other kids used to call him "the gerbil
who swallowed the watermelon." He used to give me and
the gang pills in return for puncturing the tires of cars in
the neighborhood, so that his business would flourish. We
would bargain with him over how many pills for how
many tires. My brother ordered me to take off my blood­
ied shirt and told the mechanic to fetch me a clean one.
The gerbil obeyed at once and came back with a blue shirt
that smelled of soap. It was the shirt his son, a student at
medical college, had just been wearing. I was surprised
that the size fit me exactly. My brother leaned over and
whispered a few words in the mechanic's ear, and the
mechanic's face turned even darker than usual.

We crossed the main street toward the other neigh­
borhood. All along the way I was wondering what Abu
Hadid had whispered in the gerbil's ear. Abu Hadid
coughed loudly, and his chest wheezed like my uncle's old
tractor. He didn't say a single word on the way. He lit two
cigarettes at the same time and offered one to me. It was
after midnight. I don't know anyone who lives in this
neighborhood, other than an obnoxious boy who was at
school with us. He once punched me, and I never did
manage to stick a finger up his ass in return. When he
found out I was Abu Hadid's brother, his father came to
school and asked me to beat up his son.



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THE KILLERS AND THE COMPASS 17

People were scared senseless of my brother's brutality.
His reputation for ruthless delinquency spread throughout
the city. He would baffle the police and other security
agencies for many years-until, that is, the day he was exe­
cuted in public. Even his enemies mourned him when the
inevitable happened. Occasionally in life he had defended
people-against the cruelty of the ruling party, for exam­
ple. Abu Hadid didn't distinguish between good and evil.
He had his own private demons. Once he threw a hand gre­
nade at the party office when "the comrades" executed
someone who had evaded military conscription. Another
time he mutilated the face of some wretched vegetable
seller, simply because he was drunk and he felt like it. Abu
Hadid would go on the rampage like that for eight years,
until Johnny the barber gave him away. The night it hap­
pened Abu Hadid was fucking Johnny's pretty brown
daughter on the roof of the house. The police surrounded
him and shot him in the leg. They executed him a week
later. My mother and my seven sisters would beat their
breasts for a whole year, but my father was relieved to be

rid of the antics of his wayward son.
Abu Hadid knocked on a rusty door that still had a few

spots of green paint, shaped like frogs, on it. We were
received by a man in his forties with a thick mustache that
covered his teeth when he spoke. We sat down in the guest
room in front of the television. I gathered that the man
lived alone. He went into the kitchen and came back with

a bottle of arak. He opened it and poured a glass. My
brother told him to pour one for me too. We sat in silence,
and the man and I watched a soccer match between two

local teams, while my brother stared into a small fish tank.



---.
.

.1'

HASSAN BLASIM18

"Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?" my
brother asked, calm and serious.

"As long as they eat and drink and swim, they're fine,"
the man replied, without looking away from the televi­
sion screen.

"Do fish drink water?"
"Sure they drink; of course."
"How can fish drink salt water?"
"Sure they have a way. How could they be in water

and not drink?"
"If they're in water, perhaps they don't need to drink."
"Why don't you ask the fish in the tank?"
Before the bald man could turn to look at him, my

brother had jumped on top of him like a hungry tiger. He
threw him to the ground, squatted on his chest, and
pinned his arms down under his knees. In a flash he took
a small knife out of his pocket, put it close to the man's
eye, and started shouting hysterically in his face, "Answer,
you cocksucker! How can fish drink salt water? Answer,
you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don't
they? Answer, shit-for-brains!"

Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man's ass and we
left the house. I never would understand what the man had
to do with my brother. We headed toward the parking lot.
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 toward the outskirts of the
city. Abu Hadid turned off the tape player, lay back in his



"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 peo-
ple 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,
. m!, young and very handsome. He spoke little Arabic, but he

had memorized 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 prison­
ers. One of the people we chatted with was a young Iraqi
who'd been jailed for selling hashish. He was born in Iran.

f,lraJ The government had deported his family from Baghdad
ill toe after the war broke out on the grounds that he had Ira-

ttoat nian nationality. I told him about the Pakistani kid who

n the had hanged himself. The man was really upset about the

refS poor boy, said he had met him before, that he was a good
the kid, and that he knew the whole story of the compass.

I his "In 1989 in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Sheikh

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THE KILLERS AND THE COMPASS 19

seat, and said, "Murad, tell my brother the story about the
Pakistani kid."



----.

..,

20 HASSAN BLASIM

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 muezzin' 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 assassi­
nating the sheikh who had stood up to the might of the
Soviet Union, perhaps to give them greater impunity as
an organization.

"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 ofthe 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

* Muezzin: the person who calls Muslims to prayer.



mefor

r.anJ
oftne

rn a

THE KILLERS AND THE COMPASS 21

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



--._ ._ 111

22 HASSAN BLASIM

the young Afghans would give Waheed sly looks of con­
tempt. 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 inno­
cence, 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 trunk of the car and took out a pick and
shovel. Abu Hadid ordered me to help Murad dig. My



THE KILLERS AND THE COMPASS 23

con· blood began to race with excitement and fear. Abu Hadid,
) pass with his strong muscles, helped with the digging. We
�any a began to sweat. The ground was tough. The tangled roots
d with of a tree and a large stone hampered our work. Before
i'aheeo we'd had time to catch our breath, Murad and Abu Hadid

water headed back to the trunk of the car, while I stood close to

hanOI the hole, bewildered like a deaf man at a wedding party.
They took a man, bound and gagged, out of the trunk 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 shoveled soil on
top of him and leveled the ground well.

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

"Now you're God."

'aDDU!

o!· !n�
nceta

ensi\'�

furaa

auna,
'n tne

e all

and

My



• _ .'i"
/



 



 



BEFORE THE EGG APPEARED, I WOULD READ A BOOK

about law or religion every night before going to sleep.
Like my rabbit, I would be most active in the hours around
dawn and sunset. Salsal, on the other hand, would stay up
late at night and wake up at midday. And before he even
got out of bed he would open his laptop and log on to Face­
book to check the latest comments on the previous night's
discussion, then eventually go and have a bath. After that
he would go into the kitchen, turn on the radio, and listen
to the news while he fried an egg and made some coffee.

He would carry his breakfast into the garden and sit at
the table under the umbrella, eating and drinking and
smoking as he watched me.

"Good morning, Hajjar. What news of the flowers?"
"It's been a hot year, so they won't grow strong," I told

him as I pruned the rosebushes.
Salsallit another cigarette and gave my rabbit an ironic

smile. I never understood why he was annoyed by the rab­
bit. The old woman Umm Dala had brought it. She said she
had found it in the park. We decided to keep it while Umm
Dala looked for its owner. The rabbit had been with us for

27



28 HASSAN BLASIM

a month, and I had already spent two months with Salsal
in this fancy villa in the north of the Green Zone. The villa
was detached, surrounded by a high wall with a gate fitted
with a sophisticated electronic security system. We didn't
know when zero hour would come. Salsal was a profes­
sional, whereas they called me "duckling" because this
was my first operation.

Mr. Salman would visit us once a week to check how
we were and reassure us about things. Mr. Salman would
bring some bottles of booze and some hashish. He would
always tell us a silly joke about politics and remind us how
secret and important the operation was. This Salman was
in league with Salsal and didn't reveal many secrets to
me. Both of them made much of my weakness and lack of
experience. I didn't pay them much attention. I was sunk
in the bitterness of my life, and I wanted the world to be
destroyed in one fell swoop.

Umm Dala would come two days a week. She would
bring us cigarettes and clean the house. On one occasion
Salsal harassed her. He touched her bottom while she was
cooking dolma. She hit him on the nose with her spoon
and made it bleed. Salsallaid off her and didn't speak to
her after that. She was an energetic woman in her fifties
with nine children. She claimed she hated men, saying
they were despicable, selfish pricks. Her husband had
worked for the national electric company, but he fell from
the top of a lamppost and died. He was a drunkard and
she used to call him the arak gerbil.

I built the rabbit a hutch in the corner of the garden
and took good care of him. I know rabbits are sensitive
creatures and need to be kept clean and well fed. I read



about that when I was in high school. I developed a pas­
sion for reading when I was thirteen. In the beginning I
read classical Arabic poetry and lots of stories translated
from Russian. But I soon grew bored. Our neighbor
worked in the Ministry of Agriculture, and one day I was
playing with his son Salam on the roof of their house,
when we came across a large wooden trunk up there with
assorted junk piled up on top of it. Salam shared a secret
with me. The trunk was crammed with books about crops
and irrigation methods and countless encyclopedias about
plants and insects. Under the books there were lots of sex
magazines with pictures of Turkish actresses. Salam gave
me a magazine, but I also took a book about the various
types of palm trees that grow in the country. I didn't need
Salam after that. I would sneak from our house to the roof
of theirs to visit the library in the trunk. I would take one
book and one magazine and put back the ones I had bor­
rowed. After that I fell in love with books about animals

and plants and would hunt down every new book that
reached the bookshops, until I was forced to join the army.

The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcert­
ing, however. I felt anxious about every new piece of infor­
mation. I would latch onto one particular detail and start

,s3!"i�� looking for references and other versions of it in other

nd n�J writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some

II from time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read

rd an� and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten some psy-
chotropic fruit. Experiments have shown that chimpan-

arden zees resort to kissing as a way to reduce tension, fatigue,
sitive and fear among the group. It's been proven that female

read chimpanzees, when they feel that strangers have entered

hSa\sal
the villa

atefittec
We didn't

a prob
au e tnii

heck Ji

THE GREEN ZONE RABBIT 29



-_. .

30 HASSAN BLASIM

their territory, hurry to their mates, hug them, and start
kissing them. And after long research, I came across
another kiss, a long tropical kiss. A kiss by a type of tropi­
cal fish that kiss each other for half an hour or more with­

out any kind of break. My memory of those years of
darkness under sanctions is of devouring books. The elec­
tricity would go off for up to twenty hours a day, especially
after that series of u.s. air strikes on the presidential pal­
aces. I would snuggle into bed at midnight, and by the light
of a candle I would stumble upon another species of kiss:
by insects called Reduvius, though they don't actually kiss
each other. These only like the mouths of sleeping humans.
They crawl across the face till they reach the corner of the
mouth, where they settle down and start kissing. When
they kiss they secrete poison in microscopic drops, and if
the person sleeping is in good health and sleeping nor­
mally, he'll wake up with a poisonous kiss on his mouth
the size of four large raindrops put together.

I ran away from military service. I couldn't endure the
system of humiliation there. At night I worked in a bakery.
I had to support my mother and my five brothers. I lost the

urge to read. For me the world became like an incompre­
hensible mythical animal. A year after I ran away, the
regime was overthrown and I was free of my fear of pun­
ishment for my earlier desertion. The new government
abolished conscription. When the cycle of violence and
the sectarian decapitations began, I planned to escape the
country and go to Europe, but then they massacred two of
my remaining brothers. They were coming back from
work in a local factory that made women's shoes. The taxi
driver handed them over at a fake checkpoint. The Allahu



start Akbar militias took them away to an undisclosed location.

They drilled lots of holes in their bodies with an electric
drill and then cut off their heads. We found their bodies in
a garbage dump on the edge of the city.

I was completely devastated and I left home. I couldn't
bear to see the horror on the faces of my mother and
brothers. I felt lost and no longer knew what I still wanted
from this life. I took a room in a dirty hotel until my uncle
came to visit me and suggested I work with his sect. To
exact revenge.

The summer days were long and tedious. It's true that
the villa was comfortable, with a swimming pool and a
sauna. But to me it seemed like a palatial mirage. Salsal
took a room on the second floor, while I was content with a
cover and a pillow on the sofa in the middle of the large sit­
ting room where the bookcase stood. I wanted to keep an
eye on the garden and the outer gate of the villa, in case
anything unexpected happened. I was stunned by the size
of the bookcase in the sitting room. It had many volumes
on religion and on local and international law. Along the
shelves, animals made of teak had been arranged in shapes
and poses reminiscent of African totems. The animals also

separated the religious books from the law books. As soon
as it fell dark, I would grab a bite to eat and go and surren­
der myself to the sofa, reminisce a little about the events of

my life, then take out a book and read distractedly. The
world in my head was like a spiderweb that made a faint

hum, the hum of a life about to expire, of breaths held. Deli­

cate, horrible wings flapping for the last time.
I found the egg three days before Mr. Salman's last

visit. One day I woke up at dawn, as usual. I fetched some

roof
from

taxi

rahu

THE GREEN ZONE RABBIT 31



__

o_
°

or
"

32 HASSAN BLASIM

clean water and food and went to inspect my friend the
rabbit. I opened his hutch and he hopped out into the gar­
den. There was an egg in the hutch. I picked it up and
examined it, trying to understand the absurdity of it. It
was too small to be a chicken's egg. I was anxious, so I
went straight to Salsal's room. I woke him up and told
him about it. Salsal took hold of the egg and stared at it for
a while, then laughed sneeringly.

"Hajjar, you'd better not be pulling my leg," he said,
pointing his finger toward my eye.

"What do you mean? It wasn't me who laid the egg!" I
said firmly.

Salsal rubbed his eyes, then suddenly jumped out of
bed like a madman, firing curses at me. We headed to the
villa gate and checked the security system. We inspected
the walls and searched the garden and all the rooms.
There were no signs of anything unusual. But an egg in a
rabbit hutch! Our only option was to think that someone
was playing tricks 'on us, sneaking into the villa and put­
ting the egg next to the rabbit.

"Perhaps it's a silly stunt by that whore Umm Dala.
Damn you and your rabbit," said Salsal, but then he went
quiet.

Both of us knew that Umm Dala was sick and hadn't
come to visit us for the past week. We were doubly afraid
because we didn't have any guns in the house. We weren't
allowed to have guns until the day of the mission. They
were worried about random searches because the Green
Zone was a government area and most of the politicians
lived there. We were living in the villa on the pretense
that we were bodyguards to a member of Parliament.

I I
I

II ,



THE GREEN ZONE RABBIT 33

the

gar­
I ana

it. It

1,501

tala

itfor

Salsal threw a fit and asked me to slaughter the rabbit, but
I refused and told him the rabbit had nothing to do with
what had happened.

"Wasn't it your bloody rabbit that laid the egg?" he
said angrily as he went up to his room.

I made some coffee and sat in the garden, watching
the rabbit, which was eating its own droppings. They say
the droppings contain vitamin B produced by tiny organ­
isms in its intestines. After a while Salsal came back car­

rying his laptop. He was mumbling to himself and cursing
Mr. Salman from time to time. He looked at his Facebook

page and said we had to be on alert 24-7. He asked me to

spend the night in his room on the second floor because it
was good for monitoring the gate and the walls of the villa.

We turned off all the lights, sat in Salsal's room, and
every now and then took turns making a tour of inspec­
tion around the villa.

Two nights passed without anything suspicious. The
villa was quiet, sunk in silence and calm. While I was stay­
ing in Salsal's room I learned he was registered with Face-

Daia, book under the pseudonym War and Peace and had posted
went a charcoal drawing of Tolstoy as his profile picture. He had

more than a thousand Facebook friends, most of them

Qn't

raia
en't

he)'
een

ans

nse

nr.

writers, journalists, and intellectuals. He would discuss
their ideas and pose as an intelligent admirer of other Face­
book people. He expressed his opinions and his analysis
of the violence in the country with modesty and wisdom.
He even tried it with me, rambling on about the character
of the Deputy Minister of Culture. He told me how cul­

tured and humane and uniquely intelligent he was. At
the time I wasn't interested in talking about the deputy



-_.
.

HASSAN BLASIM

minister. I told him that people who work in our line of
business ought to keep their distance from too much Inter­
net chat. He gave me his sneering professional look and
said, "You look after your egg-laying rabbit, Hajjar."

When Mr. Salman finally visited us, Salsal exploded in
anger in front of him, and told him about the rabbit's egg.
Mr. Salman ridiculed our story and dismissed our suspi­
cions ofUmm Dala. He assured us the woman was honest
and had worked with them for years. But Salsal accused
him of betrayal and they began to argue, while I sat watch­
ing them. From their argument I gathered that in the world
of sectarian and political assassinations, people were often
betrayed because of greater interests. In many cases the
parties in power would hand over hired killers to each
other for free, as part of wider deals over political positions
or to cover up some large-scale corruption. But Mr. Salman
denied all Salsal's accusations. He asked us to calm down,
because the assassination of the target would take place in
two days. We sat down in the kitchen and Salman explained
the plan to us in detail. Then he took two revolvers with
silencers out of his bag and said we would be paid right
after the operation and that we would then be moved to
somewhere else on the edge of the capital.

"A rabbit's egg. Ha, duckling. You're a real joker now,"
Salman whispered to me before he left.

On the last night I stayed up late with Salsal. I was
worried about the rabbit, because it looked like Umm
Dala would be on a long holiday. The rabbit would die of
hunger and thirst. Salsal was busy with Facebook, as
usual. I stayed close to the window, watching the garden.
He said he was having a discussion with the Deputy



THE GREEN ZONE RABBIT 35

o\\',�

Minister of Culture on sectarian violence and its roots. I

gathered from Salsal that this minister had been a novel­
ist in Saddam Hussein's time and had written three nov­
els about Sufism. One day he and his wife were at a party
at a wealthy architect's home overlooking the Tigris. His
wife was attractive, stunningly so, and cultured like her
husband. She had a particular interest in old Islamic man­
uscripts. The director of security, a relative of the presi­
dent, was a guest at the party. After the party was over,
the security chief gave his surveillance section orders to
read our friend's novels. A few days later they threw him
in jail on charges of incitement against the State and the
Party. The director of security bargained with the novel­
ist's wife in exchange for her husband's freedom. When
she rejected his demands, the security chief had one of
his men rape the woman in front of her husband. After

that the woman moved to France and disappeared. They
released the novelist in the mid-nineties and he went off

to look for his wife in France, but he could find no trace of

her. When the dictator's regime fell, he went home and
was appointed Deputy Minister of Culture. The story of
the novelist's life was like the plot of a Bollywood film, but
I was surprised how many details of the man's life Salsal
knew. I felt that he admired the man's personality and

sophistication. I asked him what sect the man was. He

ignored my question. Then I tried to draw him out on the

identity of our target, but Salsal replied that a novice

duckling like me wasn't allowed to know such things. My

only task was to drive the car, and it was Salsal who would
fire the shot, with his silenced revolver.

The next morning we were waiting in front of the

mill

'eof

en,

wty



, I

36 HASSAN BLASIM

parking garage in the city center. The target was meant to
arrive in a red Toyota Crown, and as soon as the car went
into the parking garage Salsal would get out of our car,
follow him inside on foot, and shoot him. Then we would
drive off to our new place on the edge of the capital. That's
why I had brought the rabbit along with me and put it in
the trunk of the car.

Salsal received a text on his cell phone, and his face
turned pale. We shouldn't have had to wait for the target
more than ten minutes. I asked him if all was well. He
shouted out a curse and slapped his thigh. I was worried.
After some hesitation he held out his phone and showed
me a picture of a rabbit sitting on an egg. It was a silly
Photoshop job. "Do you know who sent the picture?" he
asked.

I shook my head.

"The Deputy Minister of Culture," he said.
"What!?!"

"The deputy's the target, Hajjar."
I got out of the car, my blood boiling at Salsal's stupid­

ity and all the craziness of this pathetic operation. More
than a quarter of an hour passed, and the target didn't
appear. I told Salsal I was pulling out of the operation. He
got out of the car too and asked me to be patient and wait
a while longer, because both of us were in danger. He got
back in the car and tried to contact Salman. I walked to a
shop nearby to buy a pack of cigarettes. My heart was
pounding like crazy from the anger. As soon as I reached
the shop the car blew up behind me and caught fire, burn­
ing the rabbit and Salsal to cinders.



 



 



WE WILL GO TO THE CEMETERY, TO THE MORTUARY,

and ask the guardians of the past for permission. We'll
take the dead man out to the public garden naked and set
him on the platform under the ripe orange sun. We'll try
to hold his head in place. An insect, a fly buzzes around

him, although flies buzz equally around the living and the
dead. We'll implore him to repeat the story to us. There's
no need to kick him in the balls for him to tell the story

honestly and impartially, because the dead are usually
honest, even the bastards among them.

Thank you, dear writer, for brushing the fly from my nose
and giving me this golden opportunity. I disagree with

you only when you try to make the readers frightened of
me by describing me as a bastard. Let them judge for

themselves, I beg you, and don't you too turn into a rabid

dog. Congratulations on being alive! Just don't interfere
with the nature of the animal that you are.

Your Honor, ten years ago-that is, before I ended my
life-I was working for an army newspaper, supervising
the cultural page, which dealt with war stories and poems.

39



LtD HASSAN BLASIM

I lived a safe life. I had a young son and a faithful wife who
cooked well and had recently agreed to suck my cock
every time we had sex. From my work at the newspaper I
received many rewards and presents, worth much more
than my monthly salary. As the editor will attest, I was the
only genius able to enliven the cultural page through my
indefatigable imagination in the art of combat. So much so
that even the Minister of Culture himself commended me,
gave me his special patronage, and promised me in secret
that he would get rid of the editor and appoint me in his
place. I was not a genius to that extent, nor was I a bastard,
as the writer of this story wants to portray me. I was a dili­
gent and ambitious man who dreamt of becoming Min­
ister of Culture and nothing more. To that end I was
dedicated in those days to doing my job with honor, as
with the sweat of my brow I revised, designed, and per­
fected my cultural page like a patient baker. No, Your
Honor, I was not a censor, as you imagine, because the sol­
diers who wrote were stricter and more disciplined than
any censor I ever met in my life. They would scrutinize
every word and examine each letter with a magnifying
glass. They were not so stupid as to send in pieces that
were plaintive or full of whining and screaming. Some of
them wrote because it helped them believe that they
would not be killed and that the war was just an upbeat
story in a newspaper. Others were seeking some financial
or other benefits. There were writers who were forced to
write, but all that doesn't interest me now, because at this
stage I have no regrets and I am not even afraid. The dead,
Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not
long to be happy, as you know. If from time to time we hear



the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poet­
ical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have

nothing to do with the real circumstances of the simple
dead.

But I do admit that I would often interfere in the struc­

ture and composition of the stories and poems, and try as

far as possible to add imaginative touches to the written

images that would come to us from the front. For God's

sake, what's the point, as we are about to embark on war in

poetry, of someone saying, "I felt that the artillery bom­
bardment was as hard as rain, but we were not afraid"? I

would cross that out and rewrite it: "I felt that the artillery
fire was like a carnival of stars, as we staggered like lovers
across the soil of the homeland." This is just a small exam­

ple of my modest interventions.
But the turning point in the story, Your Honor, came

when five stories arrived at the newspaper from a soldier

who said he had written them in one month. Each story

was written in a thick workbook of the colored kind used

in schools. On the cover of each workbook the writer had

filled in the boxes for name, class, and school, and none of

the classes went beyond the elementary level, and each
book bore a different name. Each of the stories was about

a soldier with the same name as the name written on the

cover. The stories were written in a surprisingly elevated

literary style. In fact I swear that the world's finest nov­

els, before these stories that I read, were mere drivel, vac­

uous stories eclipsed by the grandeur of what this soldier
had written. The stories did not speak of the war, though

do nor the heroes
of them were all reluctant soldiers. They were

e hear
a transparent and cruel exploration of sexual beings from

ifewho
y cocK

paper!
ch mort
lwa t�

rouahm"

omucn��

AN ARMY NEWSPAPER



42 HASSAN BLASIM

a point of view that was childlike and satanic at the same
time. One would read about soldiers in full battle dress,
cavorting and laughing with their lovers in gardens and on
the banks of rivers; about soldiers who transformed the
thighs of prostitutes into marble arches entwined with
sad plants the color of milk; soldiers who described the
sky in short lascivious sentences as they rested their
heads on the breasts oflissome women-magical anthems
about bodies that secreted water lilies.

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 deliber­
ate 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 re­
nounce these stories or apologize to me and beg me bit­
terly to destroy what he had written, or to forgive him his
atrocious act, which he would never repeat. Only then



AN ARMY NEWSPAPER 43

would I know what to do with these sublime stories of

humanity. I doubt any great novelist could dream of writ­

ing more than five stories displaying such a high level of

inventiveness, combining reality and the language of
dreams to attain the tenth rank oflanguage, 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 light­

ning speed. One week after my letter to the soldier I
received a message from his army corps to say that the sol­

dier 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, indescrib­

ably 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 newspa­

pers 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 doc­

toral 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,

im his between the kiss and the piece of shrapnel, between
the

. then smell of gunpowder and the smell of a woman's vulva,



HASSAN BLASIM

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 grat­
itude for the bounty and the priceless gifts. I was confi­
dent 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 minis­
try, 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 contin­
ued to flood in at an amazing rate, and looking for the



AN ARMY NEWSPAPER 45

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. Invita­
tions 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 circum­
stances. 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 sto­

ries, 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

contino three workers in
the ministry to help dig up the soldier's

for the grave.
There he was with his decayed body and a hole in



HASSAN BLASIM

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 crea­
tive. 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 psychia­
trist 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 ware­
houses 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



hi new

AN ARMY NEWSPAPER

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.

The war did stop, Your Honor, after long and terrify­
ing years, but a new war broke out. The only option left to
me was the incinerator fire, as you are the Merciful, the

Forgiving.
Your Honor ...

So now, and before I'm put back in the mortuary, I

know you are the Omnipotent, the Wise, the Omniscient,
and the Imperious, but did you also once work for an

army newspaper? And why do you need an incinerator for

your characters?



_-_.
. /



 



 



He wakes up.

It's a mess of a morning.

He hears the words: "For God's sake, I'm going to die of thirst!"

He sits on the edge of the bed. He feels a numbness in his

limbs. He pours himself a glass of water. He looks around the ward

in a daze. He sees a bird hitting the windowpane. A plump nurse is

giving an injection to a man with an arm missing.

"Aha! Cold water! Thank you," says the policeman somewhere

deep inside him ....

My lifelong friend Marwan used to say, "Across: man­

kind; down: the sea. The highest mountain peak in the

world. A three-letter word. An unfamiliar reality."

They published a picture of him smiling on the cover of the

magazine!

It was a picture taken two years ago during the ceremony
at which he received the prize for being the best cross­

word writer. The prize was funded by a billionaire mem­

ber of Parliament who came back to the country after the

51



52 HASSAN BLASIM

change in regime. They say the great passion he acquired
for crosswords during his long exile was behind his deci­
sion to finance the prize. It was worth fifteen thousand
dollars. The prize aroused much envy among certain
journalists and writers, who criticized it severely and at
length. Marwan won it on merit; I think Marwan could
be awarded the title Poet Laureate of Crosswords.

I found some of his old crossword puzzles at the farm once.
They contained strange expressions such as "half a
moon," "a semi-mythical animal," "a vertical tunnel," "a
poisonous grass," and "a half-truth."

In the olden days, when our eyes were like magnifying
glasses, the moon was a giant that rose above the roof­
tops, and we wanted to break it with a stone. In those days
Marwan and I were like a single spirit. One autumn eve­
ning we lit a fire in a barrel of trash and swore an oath to
be forever loyal to each other. We played often, and
invented our own secrets, built our own world out of the

strangeness of the world around us. We watched the
adults' wars on television and saw how the front ate up
our elders. Our mothers baked bread in clay ovens and sat
down in the sunset hour, afraid and with tears in their
eyes. We would steal sweets from shops, climb trees and
break our legs and arms. Life and death was a game of
running, climbing, and jumping, of watching, of secret
dirty words, of sleep and nightmares.

I remember you both well. Ifelt like a third wheel when we
all started high school. I was jealous ofyou!



CROSSWORDS 53

Marwan and I would chase the coffins. We would wait

for them to reach the turn off the main road. The war was

in its fourth year by this point. The coffins were wrapped
in the flag and tied firmly to the tops of cars that came
from the front. We wanted to be like grown-ups who,
when a coffin passed by, would stand and raise their

hands solemnly and sadly. We would salute the dead like

they did. But when the death car turned a corner, we

would race after it down the muddy lanes. The driver

would have to slow down so that the coffin didn't fall off.

Then the car would choose the door of a sleeping house,
and stop in front of it. When the women of the house

came out they would scream and throw themselves in the

pools of mud and spatter their hair with it. We would

hurry to tell our mothers whose house the death car had

stopped outside. My mother would always reply, "Go and

wash your face," or "Go to Umm Ali next door and ask her

if she has a little spice mixture to spare." And in the eve­

ning my mother would go and mourn with the local

women in the dead man's house, slapping her face and

weeping.
Once I was sitting with Marwan waiting for a coffin to

arrive. We were eating sunflower seeds. We had waited a

long time and were about to give up hope and go back

home disappointed. But then the death car loomed on the

horizon. We ran after it like happy dogs and were betting

of secrd on who could
beat the car, when it finally stopped in front

of Marwan's house. His mother came out screaming hys­

terically. She ripped her clothes and threw herself in the

I'hen we pool of mud. Bassem,
who was standing next to me, stood

stock-still and stared in a trance. His big brother noticed



Okay.
Marwan had cute and interesting ideas when we were

kids. Once he asked me to help him collect time. We went
down toward the valley, stretched out on our stomachs,
and proceeded to stare at a weed without moving for
more than an hour. We were as silent as stone statues. It
was Marwan's belief that if we stared at anything in
nature for an hour we would store that hour in our brains.
While other people lost time, we would collect it.

It was a double explosion. First they detonated a taxi
in front of the magazine's offices. If it hadn't been for the
concrete barriers the building would have collapsed. The
second vehicle was a watermelon truck, packed with
explosives. The first police patrol to arrive after the first
explosion brought three policemen. The murderers waited
for people to gather and then detonated the second vehicle.

54 HASSAN BLASIM

him and pulled him into the house. I ran back home, into
my mother's arms, crying in torment. "Mummy, my friend
Marwan's dad's died," I sobbed. She said, "Wash your face
and go to the shop and fetch me half a kilo of onions."

I heard what you wrote yesterday. How the first explosion
shredded Marwan's face. The windows shattered and the
cupboardsfell on top ofhim. His mouthfilled with blood. He
spat out teeth and indistinctly heard the screams of his col­
league, the editor of the New Woman section. The dust
made it impossible to see. She crawled over the rubble
screaming, "I'm going to die ... I'm going to die." Then she
fell silent suddenly and forever. Marwan bled a long time
and only recovered consciousness in the hospital.



CROSSWORDS 55

, into That killed twenty-five people. Two of the policemen were

frieno killed on the spot, and their colleague caught fire and began

running in every direction. Finally he staggered through
the door of the magazine building and collapsed, a lifeless

corpse.

In an old text ofyours you say:
A pulp of blood and shit

a monster

a defiled planet
a god-viper
time spilled in that time.

When we were in high school we used to fuck a prostitute
who would give us her customers' shoes. She loved us like

a mother. She bought us lots of chocolate and laughed
when she slept with us. Marwan used to steal spoons and

knives from his house and offer them to her as presents.

She was crazy about little knives and addicted to cross­

word puzzles. We called her "the drunken boat," after the

poem by Rimbaud. Before the school year ended, we went

on a school trip to explore the mountains. Marwan tried

to bring the drunken boat along with us, but the head­

master threatened to expel us from school. On top of a

rock shaped like the head of an angry bull, overlooking
the valley, we sat down to smoke and read the newspaper.
The others went off to explore a cave where prehistoric
man had once lived. It was small, like an animal's burrow,

and full of spiderwebs, they told us later. I read the paper
while Marwan smoked, and then we would switch roles.

It was a government newspaper and it was pathetic, from



56 HASSAN BLASIM

the political news on the front page to the back page
devoted to the mysteries of the other world, as if our own
world weren't strange and incoherent enough. It was on
top of the bull's head that Marwan discovered his voca­
tion. He solved the crossword puzzle in the newspaper in
an instant. After that he got a notebook and pen out of
his bag and set to work writing his own crossword. He
smoked six cigarettes before he finished his first puzzle.
It was made up of synonyms from nature. From the rock
he stared up at the treetops and said, "Writing cross­
words is much easier than solving them."

"Perhaps it's like the real world," I said, blowing
smoke and pretending to be a dreamy young man.

"What a philosopher," he said sarcastically. Then he
gave an absurd, euphoric yell that filled the valley.

That night he told you that the drunken boat was his rela­
tive. Why did he hide this from you for so many years?

We were separated when we went to college. Marwan's
family moved to another part of the city. He went to study
agriculture, with dreams of ending up with a piece of
land where he could plant pomegranate trees. I went to
the school of mass communications. We would visit each
other constantly, exchange ideas, laugh, and smoke and
drink a lot. We would also exchange gossip about the
drunken boat. We heard that some pimp had cut off her
ear because she stole a ring from a customer who worked
in State Security. She got her revenge on him three days
later. He was lying asleep on his stomach, so she sank a



He sent you a text message that read: Fire Sign-You're com­

patible with all the signs. Your blood group breathes disap­
pointment and happiness. You stick your tongue in the
woman's mouth in order to cool down. The fog that burns on
the ceiling is the steam of sweat. You buy pins and colored

t otlnei pictures from the shop. You pin them on your flesh when you
\rorKeJ receive a guest. The firewood comes to you throughout the

ee dayi night, wrapped in nightmares. When you wake up you have
a

:3nk� bath onfire. You eat onfire. You read the newspapers on fire.

k pa��
Qurown

CROSSWORDS 57

carving knife deep into his ass. She was given a jail
sentence.

Marwan got married in his first year at college. It was

passionate love at first sight. The fruit of his love with
Salwa was two children, and the fruit came while they
were still studying. When they graduated, Salwa stayed at
home to look after the children, and Marwan went look­

ing for work. Things weren't easy for someone who had

just graduated in agriculture. Meanwhile I started to
have articles published on historical esoteric a, which I
had been writing since I was a student. After I graduated
I began work straightaway at a magazine, Boutique. We
would vent our need to rebel by writing on ideological
and social themes. I got in touch with a colleague who
was working at the popular magazine Puzzles and told
him that Marwan was skilled at writing crosswords and

astrology columns. Marwan was angry with me for lying
about the astrology, but he had no options other than to
work at the magazine. He started writing crosswords and
even began studying up on astrology.



, I

58 HASSAN BLASIM

You smoke a cigarette on fire. In the coffee cup you come
across prophecies offire. You laugh on fire. You have your
lungs checked at the hospital, and they find a spring oferrors
that looks like a tumor. You dream ofthe final act: It goes out.

I bought a stuffed scorpion from the toy shop and went to
visit Marwan in the hospital. The doctor told me that
Marwan's injuries weren't serious. They had extracted
some fragments of window glass from his scalp and said
he would be fine. Salwa, his wife, was anxious and fright­
ened by Marwan's mental confusion. Like her, I asked the
doctor various questions about Marwan's mysterious
condition. The doctor asked me, "If you'd gone through a
terrorist explosion like that, would you come out laughing
and joking?"

"Maybe!" I said, looking at his pointed nose.
He gave me a contemptuous look and took Marwan's

wife to one side.

The doctor was wrong; Marwan wasn't suffering just
from shock. The burned policeman had got inside him
and had taken control of his being. He would say he could
hear the policeman's voice in his head, clear and sharp.

Aahh! Perhaps like my voice ... you frame his sarcastic
words and hang them on your living room wall.

War

Peace

God's ass



CROSSWORDS 59

After coming out of the hospital Marwan kept to himself
at home and didn't want to meet any visitors. One day he
contacted me and said he wanted to come visit. We bought
a bottle of whiskey and went to my apartment. He told me
he was reluctant to go to the policeman's house and find
out who he was.

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 igno­
rance 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 circum­

stances 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,



60 HASSAN BLASIM

•

I

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 Puz­
zles 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, tast­
ing 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

IIII,
'I[1",. _



CROSSWORDS 61

mates. ("It was just a trivial, childish game, you idiot!" he

yelled.) Then he started talking to me as calm as a mad­
man: "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 com­

plete 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 com­

plain, "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 Mar­
wan 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 behav­
ior. They treated him as a victim of the explosion. Just
another madman. His nerves would flare up for the slight-

'VWJC� est 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 exam­

ple, "7 Across: a purple scorpion, 5 Down: a broken womb

manoi
. anait

IS ef8Z:'

ad Qui (six letters, inverted)."



62 HASSAN BLASIM

"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 plea­
sure 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 trou­
bled 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 police­
man 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 oldfriend. 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



Then one day I visited him at his magazine. He was tak-
e ali) ing 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 writ­

ing 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 depart­

ment 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."

on't

otin

plea­
drin�

ansaf

ftea
the

CROSSWORDS 63

policeman, and Marwan even went to visit the police­
man'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.



64 HASSAN BLASIM

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 fort­

night. 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 wor­
ries. 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 mem­
orized all the textbooks within months. 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!



CROSSWORDS 65

arette You told us at length about your days of isolation on your
top the farm, where you wanted to be free to write a book on the

history of decapitation in Mesopotamia.
\"e cart 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. Mar­
wan 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 exhibi­
tion 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.



/
--- .

. /

66 HASSAN BLASIM

I

I

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.

I

II
I

i I

i
i



 



-

---.
. /



1

I was stuffing the last pieces of chocolate into the bag. I
had already filled my pockets with them. I took some bot­
tles of water from the storeroom. I had enough canned
salmon, so I hid the remaining cans under the pile of toi­
let 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.

69



/
--- . . /

II
70 HASSAN BLASIM

"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 op-

position?"
"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 lan­

guage, 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

flan­

use I

uage

rard,

THE HOLE

and lit another candle. I could see the place more clearly
now. There was a dead body. I examined it in the candle­
light, a bitter taste in my mouth. It was the body of a sol­
dier, 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 work­

ing 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 disgust­

ingvoice.
"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, "0 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 cen­
timeters tall! Make something other than a human fall in



/
--- .

. /

2

72 HASSAN BLASIM

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, point-
ing 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.

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 gov­
ernment 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 sup­
porters of the fugitive government were convinced that
the new faith-based groups would come to power and im­

pose their obscurantist ideology. That's what the spokes­
man 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 coun­
try'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

i�goU! 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 tat­
tooed 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

four

an in

ence

gar­
I and

THE HOLE 73



/
--- . . /

HASSAN BLASIM

his mouth with a dirty towel, pulled out a book, and began
to read. I took out a bar of chocolate and devoured it ner­
vously. 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 play­
ing 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



�
-

----

-

i:OWll

THE HOLE 75

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."

I shouted, "You're eating a corpse, you disgusting old
man!"

"Ha! You'll eat me too, and they'll eat you or use you as
material for their batteries or for drinking."

I punched him in the face and shouted again: "If you
weren't an old man, I'd smash your skull in, you bastard!"

He paid no attention to what I said. All he said was
that there was no need for me to be upset, because he

would leave the hole soon and I would fall into another

hole from another time. He said his book would stay with

me. It's a book full of hallucinations. It has detailed expla­
nations of the secret energy extracted from insects to cre­

ate additional organs to reinforce the liver, the pancreas,
the heart, and all the body's other organs.

3

nato Before leaving the hole, the old man told
me he was from

unt'� Baghdad and had lived in the time of the Abbasid caliph-

leard ate. He had been a teacher,
a writer, and an inventor. He



//
--- .

. /

76 HASSAN BLASIM

suggested to the caliph that they light the city streets
with lanterns. He had already supervised the lighting of
the mosques and was now busy on his plan to expand the
house lighting system by more contemporary methods.
The Baghdad thieves were upset by his lanterns, and one
day they chased after him after dawn prayers. Close to his
home the lantern man tripped on his cloak and fell down
the hole.

One of the things this Baghdadi told me was that
everyone who visits the hole soon learns how to find out
about events of the past, the present, and the future, and
that the inventors of the game had based it on a series of

experiments they had conducted to understand coinci­
dence. There were rumors that they couldn't control the
game, which rolls ceaselessly on and on through the
curves of time. He also said, "Anyone who's looking for a
way out of here also has to develop the art of playing; oth­
erwise they'll remain a ghost like me, happy with the
game .... Ha, ha, ha. I'm fed up with trying to decipher
symbols. There are two opponents in every game. Each
one has his own private code. It's a bloody fight, repetitive
and disgusting. The rest is memory, which they can't
erase easily. In your day, experiments with memory were
in their infancy. The scientists went on working for more
than a century and a half after those first attempts, the

purpose of which was to discover the memory centers in
rats' brains. It turned out that the rats remembered what

they learned even if their brains had been completely
destroyed in the laboratory. Those would be amazing
experiments if they were applied to humans. Is memory a
winning card in this game that we play so seriously till it's



r"'"� .--_ -

eets

g of

d the

hods,
done
toni)
dOli'll

irner
Eacfl

iti\'�

can't

more

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rsin

rnat

tely
ing

rya

lit's

ITHE HOLE 77
all over, or should we merely have fun? Everyone that
falls down here becomes a meal or a source to satisfy the
instincts, or energy for other systems. We who ... damn,
who are we? No one knows!"

The old man died and left me really helpless. Day had
broken and snowflakes fell from the mouth of the hole.
The Russian's body looked ghostly. I wanted to reach back
to other times I might have lived in, the traces of which
are scattered to places I previously thought imaginary.
My consciousness was moving like a roller coaster at an
amusement park. I watched the snowflakes swirling. The
vision of the soldier had disappeared. My eyes were open
and my mind was asleep. I may have been sleeping for
hundreds of years. I imagined a dead cell. Am I really just
in my mind or in every cell in my body? A strong smell of
flowers filled the hole. I closed my eyes, but then a young

girl fell into the hole. She was carrying on her back an
electronic bag tied around her chest with many straps,
and to her thighs were tied metallic phosphorous clus­
ters. In her hand she was holding something that looked
like an electronic gauge.

"who are you?" she asked me, panting. There were
wounds disfiguring her pretty face.

"I'm a jinni. What happened to you?"
I felt as if my voice went back to ancient times.

"A blood analysis robot was chasing me," she said.
She was sucking her finger, which was swollen like a

mushroom.

"That's normal," I said apathetically, then crawled
toward the corpse of the old man.

I

,I
;rJ

I
\11'
II'



/

-

--- .



I



 



IN THOSE UNFORGETTABLE DAYS BEFORE THE MIRACLE

happened and I discovered the truth that everyone now
denies or ignores, we used to guard the platform where
the two statues stood. We had light arms, three mortars,
and seven RPG launchers. The prominent people and

opinion-makers in the neighborhood had rejected an
order from the new government to remove the statues,

and we had information that the army would storm the

neighborhood by night. While deep down I didn't con­
sider this to be my battle, it was much easier to deceive

myself than to bear the shame of running away. The bat­
tle might break out at any moment and I might lose my
life for the sake of these two young men cut from stone

who stood upright on the dais as though they were about
to fall flat on their faces. It's clear that the sculptor was

just a building worker who knew nothing of the art of

sculpture. The fanatical Islamists had a fatwa that all the
statues in the country should be removed because they
were idols and incompatible with Islamic law. As for the

government, it had decided to remove everything that

symbolized the period of the former dictatorial regime.

.i

II

81



/
--- . . /

82 HASSAN BLASIM

The notables and other people of the neighborhood held
the view that the statues had nothing to do with the for­
mer regime nor with repressive fatwas. I didn't believe in
that kind of nonsense. My father said it was a symbolic
battle of destiny for the sake of the neighborhood's future.
I don't know how my father, as a science teacher at the
high school, could believe such superstitions. Of course,
there are dozens of versions of the statues story, but per­
haps the version that my grandfather told was the one
closest to the truth. The touch of realism in my grandfa­
ther's story made the people of the neighborhood seem
even more naive, whereas his intention was to portray
them as friendly, intelligent, and generous. This is what I
was thinking at the time, before my life changed forever.

Perhaps it would be best if I first repeated to you in
brief my grandfather's version of the story, before I tell
you what happened to me on the night of the battle. With
great sadness he would say, "No one knows when exactly
the two young men appeared. They were the same age,
the same height, and as alike as twins. People in the
neighborhood thought they were from those rich dis­
tricts far away, but they could not guess where they were
going. Each of them carried a backpack, and they wore
smart clothes suggesting they were wealthy and well
bred. What struck the people of the neighborhood most
was their blond hair and their white complexions. The
Darkness district was one of the most wretched in the

city, and the inhabitants were skinny with swarthy com­
plexions they had inherited from their peasant ancestors.
It was the people in nearby parts of the city who gave the
name Darkness to the neighborhood, the only one that



:. Tne

in tne
. com·

tors.

'e the
I that

THE MADMAN OF FREEDOM SQUARE 83

did not have electricity. I imagine it was the first time the
people of the neighborhood had seen visitors of this spe­
cies of humanity.

"Every morning the two young men would walk

through the village toward the river in the distance, com­
ing from the direction of the wasteland that separates the
Darkness district from the Arbanjiya district. They would
smile tenderly and with affection at the half-naked chil­
dren of the neighborhood, and greet the elders with a

slight nod that suggested respect. They would avoid the
muddy patches in the lanes simply and unassumingly,
without showing signs of disgust or haughtiness. The

people of the neighborhood saw them as angels from
heaven. Nobody spoke to them or asked them any intru­
sive questions, or stood in their way for any reason what­
soever. The neighborhood was dazzled by the aura of

light that radiated from the young men. They would walk
with confident, measured steps, as though they had
learned to walk in a private school. Their silence added to
the mystery of them. They were well mannered and dig­
nified, but with a light touch of good humor. The people of
the neighborhood fell in love with the two young men
and grew accustomed to their radiant appearance every

morning. Day by day people became more and more
attached to the two handsome youths, and their coming
and going became like the rising and the setting of the

sun. The children were the first to grow attached to them:

They would gather early in the morning on the edge of

the quarter to wait for the young men to appear from

across the wasteland. They would bet Sinbad cards on

which lane the men would come down today. When "the

I'

i



blonds" arrived the children would be thrilled. The chil­
dren would tag along with them until they reached the
other side of the neighborhood, jumping up around them,
laughing, and touching the young men's clothes with
their fingertips, in a mixture of fear and exhilaration. The
children would be even happier when the men would gra­
ciously bend down, without stopping walking, to let the
children touch their blond hair. The girls of the neighbor­
hood fell for the blonds, and before long it was as though
a sacred and secret covenant had been concluded between
them and the local people.

"The days passed without either side daring to break
the barrier of silence or ambiguity. Before the blonds
appeared it would have been suicide for a stranger to
enter the neighborhood. But now the girls would stick
their heads out from the balconies and windows to feast
their eyes on the beauty of the two young men and sigh
with the ardent passion of youth. As soon as the men were
gone they would drift off in daydreams as they listened to
love songs on the radio. When the blonds were coming,
the girls would take their radios out on the balcony in
hopes that the radio station would playa love song at just
that moment, and if a love song was on they would turn
the volume right up as though the song were a personal
message of love from the girl with the radio. The two
young men would react to all this respectfully, modestly,
and amiably.

"The days passed." My grandfather gave a deep sigh
and prolonged the a of "passed."

"An old woman died," my grandfather said. "And fifty
children were born in the neighborhood, of skinny moth-

84 HASSAN BLASIM

I
I



ers and unemployed fathers. The summer passed and the
men who sell vegetables made more money. The local
women attributed to the baraka or spiritual power of the
blonds the fact that their husbands, who worked sweep­
ing the streets or as school janitors in the city center,
had all received pay raises. The husbands, who had been

skeptical about the baraka of the two men, soon stopped
scoffing, when the government decided to install electric­
ity at the beginning of winter. After all these signs of
baraka, the women began a campaign to plant flowers
outside their front doors so that the blonds could smell

the fragrance as they made their angelic passage through
the Darkness district. As for the men, they filled in the

puddles so the blonds would not have to walk around
them.

"There was a spark of hope in the faces of the people,
and this brought out their natural color, which in the past
had been coated with the grime of sadness and misery.
Everyone started to make sure the children were clean,
sewed new clothes for them, and told them to be more

polite when they met the blonds. They taught them a

lovely song about birds and spring to sing when they were
with the blonds.

"To reinforce all this veneration and faith, a man in

the neighborhood was suddenly appointed to an impor­
tant position in the government, and he promised to pave
the streets and extend the pipes to bring in drinking
water. The young people told the man to ask the govern­
ment to bring telephone lines to the Darkness district,
and I also remember what the people did when they found

�th. out that a group
of evildoers were planning to attack the

hU­

the

THE MADMAN OF FREEDOM SQUARE 85



/
---- .

. /

86 HASSAN BLASIM

blonds close to the river. They had a discussion in the
mayor's house and then warned the evildoers that they
and their families would be thrown out of the neighbor­
hood if they went ahead with their plans, and the bad
guys backed down.

"No more than two years after the blonds first ap­
peared, every wish had come true, just as miracles hap­
pen in myths and legends. The old maids got married, the
muddy lanes were paved, everyone with a chronic disease
was cured, most of the children passed their exams,
whereas previously their results had been embarrassing.
The biggest miracle of all was the overthrow of the mon­
archy through a coup by heroic officers who enjoyed the
support of the people. It's clear that all this good fortune
and felicity had come to the people by virtue of the blonds.
From then on harmony and love reigned among the peo­
ple of the neighborhood, and enmity and violence almost
disappeared. Another new thing was that the schools
became mixed, with boys and girls together, and the gov­
ernment built a clinic close to the neighborhood, and I
used to sell chickpeas in front of it. The government did
something very logical when it changed the name from
the Darkness district to the Flower district. It chose the
new name after a government official visited the neigh­
borhood and submitted a report in which he mentioned
how many flowers there were and also how clean the

neighborhood was. Almost every house had a telephone
line, and it was noticeable that more than a few of the
inhabitants had come to have cars. The other new thing
in the neighborhood was that the old people now took
part in the adult literacy program and were enthusiastic



'" �- � .--_ -

thing
took

iastic

ITHE MADMAN OF FREEDOM SQUARE 87
about discovering the mysteries of the alphabet and of
language in general. In short the neighborhood acquired
a new vitality and prosperity after the medicine began to
take effect. But the happiness evaporated on that ill-fated
morning, the day after the military coup, when the chil­
dren went out to the edge of the neighborhood to wait for
the blonds to come. They waited long and the blonds did
not come. Their mothers joined them and sat with them
on the wasteland. The government had built a wide road

across the middle of the wasteland and now tanks and

armored personnel carriers were driving along it. Then
the rest of the local people came along to join them, and

everyone was looking at the tanks on the main road,
belching out black smoke. They had a sense of bitterness
inside them, lumps in their throats and tears in their eyes.

"The sun had set and darkness had descended again."
My grandfather blew out the lantern flame and gave a

long sigh.

It was after midnight, and the new government's tanks
were invading the neighborhood to remove the statues of
the blonds. The men of the neighborhood had taken up
battle positions on the roofs of the houses and in the alley­
ways. A fierce battle broke out, and even the women took

part. I had slipped through, along with three friends car­

rying grenade launchers to destroy a tank that was mov­

ing down the middle of the main road, but the helicopters

firing from above restricted our movements. We hid

behind a taxi parked on the pavement. Then some of the

shops and other buildings caught fire. It looked like we

were doomed to lose the battle because of the constant

I '. �- =:



III
II

'I:
II

: II

III
II
II

I
I'
I
I
I

I

88 HASSAN BLASIM

bombardment from the helicopters. We broke one of the
windows of the taxi and hid inside, with plans to drive it
off and escape. Suddenly one of the helicopters in the sky
burst into flames and crashed onto the roofs of the houses.
Then our fighters hit a tank with their missiles, and we
saw the government troops withdrawing in panic. A
while later we saw a group of young men from the neigh­
borhood rushing forward like madmen, shouting "Allahu
akbar" and spraying bullets around at random, jubilant
and heedless of the battle. We got out of the taxi when the

young men went by, and we heard from them that God
had brought about a miracle. They told us the blonds had
come back to the neighborhood and were now fighting
ferociously against the government forces. They said it
was the blonds alone who had set fire to the tank and

brought down the helicopter. My friends cheered and
shouted "Allahu akbar" with the group as they ran toward
the government troops, firing bullets in every direction.
This neighborhood was surely just a vast mental hospital.
I felt anger and hatred as I stood by the taxi, transfixed,
watching the throngs celebrating the miraculous victory.
I lit a cigarette and thought that the best way to end my
torment would be to abandon this cave they call the Dark­
ness district. Just as I turned to walk home, a torrent of
missiles suddenly rained down right across the neighbor­
hood. One of these missiles threw me and the wreckage
of the taxi against a nearby wall. I saw flames around
me on all sides. I did not feel any pain, but the sudden
silence around me gave me a strange feeling of peace.
When the blonds pulled me from under the wreckage of
the car I saw that one of them was wearing a shirt stained



the with my blood. My father says I was unconscious when
ve it they found me in front of the door to our house, but I'm

sure the blonds carried me on a white stretcher, and all
along the way they smiled at me, and I reached out my
hand to touch their beautiful blond hair.

Some of the young men from the new generation in
the neighborhood now call me the madman of Freedom
Square. The government planted some trees and put some IIbenches where the statues of the blonds had stood. They
put up a large plaque with the new name of the neighbor-
hood: Freedom district. I know what these idiots say.

They claim that the piece of shrapnel that went into my
head damaged my brain. But they are just villagers still
living in the Dark Age. I have repeatedly asked the nota-
bles and others to contribute money to rebuild the statues

of the blonds and protect the history of the neighborhood.
This is the least I could do to repay them the favor of

saving my life. What makes me angry is that even my
father no longer believes in the story of the blonds, after
the soldiers demolished the statues and killed many 11I
young men that night. Some people now claim that the II
story of how the blonds miraculously appeared that night I
and fought on our side is just cheap propaganda, spread
by certain youngsters to raise the morale of our fighters,
and that the government army wiped out the resistance
before morning broke. But I am quite sure it was the
blonds who carried me on the white stretcher, and with
these very fingers of mine I touched their angelic hair.

ace,
A few days ago I met a stranger whom I believe to be

e of honest, not a fake like most
of the people in the neighbor-

nea hood, and he told
me he believed my story of how the

THE MADMAN OF FREEDOM SQUARE 89



90 HASSAN BLASIM

blonds appeared that night. He spoke to me at length
about how we have lost our history and heritage because
of the agents of the West and because we have neglected
our religion, and how freedom means not becoming stooges
in the hands of the infidels, but what I don't fully under­
stand is the wide belt the man wrapped around my waist
in his house this morning. I feel very hot because the belt

is so heavy. I'll sit down in the shade of the tree .... Damn,
the women and children have taken all the benches.



 



 



WE WERE MEANT TO CAMP IN AN OLD GIRLS' SCHOOL, AND

some of the soldiers decided the best place to spend the
night was the school's air-raid shelter. Daniel the Chris­
tian picked up his blanket and other bedding and headed
out into the open courtyard.

"Of course, Chewgum Christ is crazy," remarked one
of the soldiers, a man as tall as a palm tree, his mouth
stuffed with dry bread.

"Perhaps he doesn't want to sleep with us Muslims,"
suggested another soldier.

The young men were monkeys. They didn't know the
truth about Daniel. They were too busy masturbating on
the benches in the classrooms where the girls used to sit.
Just one missile and they would shortly be charred pricks.
In absurd wars such as this one, Daniel's gift was a lifesaver.
We had been together in the Kuwait war, and if it hadn't
been for his amazing powers we wouldn't have survived.
Aside from his gloomy nature, Daniel could hardly be con­
sidered ordinary flesh and blood. He was a force of nature.

I spread out my blanket close to him and lay on my
back, like him, staring into space.

93



--- .
.

/
.

/

94 HASSAN BLASIM

"Go to sleep, Ali, my friend. Go to sleep. There's no

sign tonight. Go to sleep," he said to me, and started snor­

ing straightaway.
Daniel was always chewing gum. The soldiers had

baptized him Chewgum Christ. I often imagined that
Daniel's chewing was like an energy source, recharging
the battery that powered the screen in his brain. His life's
dream was to work in the radar unit. He had completed

high school and volunteered to join the air force, but his

application was rejected, maybe because his father had
been a prominent communist in the seventies. He loved

radar the way other men love women or soccer. He col­

lected pictures of radar systems and talked about signals
and frequencies as though he was talking about a romp in
the hay with some girlfriend. During the last war, I
remember him saying, "Ali, humans are the best radar

receivers, compared with other animals. You just need to

practice making your spirit leave your body and then

bring it back, like exhaling and inhaling." He had tat­
tooed on his right arm the radar equation:

After Daniel's hopes of joining the air force were dashed,
he volunteered for the medical corps. But he did not give
up his passion for radar, and anyone who knew him would
not have been surprised by this obsession, because Chew­

gum Christ was himself the strangest radar in the world.

I remember those terrifying nights during the war over
Kuwait. The soldiers, as frightened as ducklings, would



no follow him wherever he went. The coalition planes would
or- be bombing our trenches, and we wouldn't be able to fire a

single shot back. We felt like we were fighting some ulti-
had mate, almighty force. All we could do was dig more
that trenches and scamper from place to place like rats. In the

end we camped near the desert. All we had left was our
faith in God and the powers of Daniel the Christian. One

night we were eating in the trench with the other soldiers
when Daniel started complaining of a stomachache. The
soldiers stopped eating, picked up their weapons, and
prepared to stand, all of them looking at Daniel's mouth.

"I want to lie down in the shade of the large water
tank," Christ said finally.

The soldiers joined him as he left the trench, jostling
to keep close to him as if he were a shield against missiles.
They sat around him in the shade. Just thirty-five min­
utes later three bombs fell on the trench. It wasn't the

only time. Christ's premonitions saved many soldiers. In
Daniel's company the war played out like the plot of a car­
toon. In the blink of an eye, reality lost cohesion. It fell

apart and you started to hallucinate. What could one

make, for example, of the way a constant itching in Dan­
iel's crotch foretold that an American helicopter would
crash on the headquarters building? Is it credible that
three successive sneezes from Daniel could foretell a dev­

astating rocket attack? They fired them at us from the sea.
We soldiers were like sheep, fighting comic book wars.

I heard many rumors that reports on Christ had been

submitted to the Supreme Command. But the chaos of

those days and the defeat of our army, which was crushed
like flies, prevented the authorities from paying any

ew-

veT

;uld

THE IRAQI CHRIST 95

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.

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96 HASSAN BLASIM

attention. There were many stories about the President's

interest in magicians, the occult, and people with prodi­
gious powers. They claim it was at his suggestion that so

many books on parapsychology were unexpectedly trans­
lated in Iraq in the eighties, because he had heard that the
advanced countries were developing telepathic techniques
and using them for espionage. The President thought that
science and the occult were one and the same; they just
used different methods to reveal the same secrets.

Christ was not boastful about his premonitory powers
and did not consider them unusual. He used to tell stories

from history about mankind's ability to foretell the future.
I came to the conclusion that Daniel's melancholia made

it impossible for him to take pleasure in the talent he

possessed. Even his interest in radar did not bring him

pleasure. His ideas about happiness were mysterious. I
understood from him that he was frightened by some
inner gloom. He thought his talent was just another sign
of how impotent and insignificant we are in this mysteri­
ous world. He told me that at an early age he read a story
by an Iraqi writer whose personality was simultaneously
sarcastic and fearful. The hero in the story was swal­

lowed by a shark after a fierce battle in the imaginary
river of time. The hero sits trapped in the darkness there
and thinks alone, "How can I reconcile my private life
with my awareness that a world is collapsing in front of

my eyesi''" "That's a question that has weighed on my life.
It has kept me awake like an open wound," said Christ.

When we woke up the next day the American forces

* As Ingmar Bergman once asked in an interview.



had reached the outskirts of Baghdad. A few hours later
they brought down the statue of the dictator. It was a sur­
real shock. We put on civilian clothes and went back to
our families. It was just another war of the blind in which
no one in our squadron fired a single shot.

After it was all over, I met Daniel several times. He
that had gone back to live with his elderly mother. When chaos
Ju�t

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rees

THE IRAQI CHRIST 97

broke out in the country, I visited him in their house in

Baghdad. I wanted to speak to him about going back to
the army. He said he had hated the dictator, but he would
not contribute to an army under the auspices of the occu­
pier. After that I didn't meet him again. I myself returned
to the army, and Daniel went back to looking after his
mother. He had two sisters who had migrated to Canada
years before, and his other relatives had left the country
one by one, driven away by wars and the madness of sec­
tarian fanaticism. Of his large family, only his mother
remained. I found out that Daniel spent most of his time

at home reading novels and encyclopedias, following the
news and caring for his mother, who had lost her hearing,
her sight, and her memory. Old age isolated her from the
world. The old woman was incontinent. Christ would

change her diapers every few hours. His mother's death
would sever the thread that tied him to the place. He
didn't plan to emigrate. In a long letter, his older sister

implored him to leave the country, but Christ was as stub­
born as his mother. Both of them rejected the devil's

temptation-to abandon their lost paradise.
After mass one Sunday, Christ took his mother to

a local restaurant famous for its kebabs. He liked the

cleanliness of the place and the way it set aside seats for



98 HASSAN BLASIM

children. The restaurant had changed greatly. He couldn't
remember the last time he had been there. Christ chose

an empty table in the corner and helped his mother to sit
down. The waiter's good humor cheered him up. The man
would mix up the names of the dishes with the names of

daily instruments of slaughter. The customers laughed
and loved him. He would call out orders such as "One

explosive, mind-blowing, gut-wrenching kebab. One frag­
mentation stew. Two ballistic rice and beans."

Christ asked for one and a half orders of kebab with

hot peppers, a glass of ayran,' and a cold juice. The waiter
came back with the order and made a joke about inquisi­
tive people. Christ smiled politely. He picked up his moth­
er's fingers gently and placed them down to feel the hot
kebabs and the grilled tomatoes. Then he put them back
in place on the edge of the table. He picked up a tasty mor­
sel and pressed it into her mouth, smiling at her with
extraordinary, selfless love.

A young man asked if he could sit down at Christ's

table. Stocky in build and with a hard expression on his
face, he was probably about twenty. He ordered a kebab
with extra onions. He was actually quite handsome but
was scratching his neck incessantly, like someone with
scabies. His eyes shifted from table to table. Daniel moved

the plate of salad closer to his mother's fingers and left
her to feel out the vegetables on the plate. He prepared
another mouthful for her. The young man watched them

stealthily. He seemed eccentric. He kept chewing his

)'
"

* Ayran: a cold beverage of yogurt mixed with ice water and some­
times salt.



"Iitn

aiter

piece of meat and trying to swallow it, as tears streamed
from his beautiful eyes. Daniel was wary of him. He
leaned forward and asked if he could help. He repeated
the question, but the young man kept his eyes on his plate
and did not seem to have heard Daniel. He kept chewing,
and his tears flowed. He took out a handkerchief, wiped
away his tears, and cleaned his nose. He looked around
the restaurant, then stared into Christ's eyes. His fea­
tures changed to reveal another face, as though he had
taken off a mask. He grasped the flap of his jacket and
pulled it aside like someone baring his chest.

"It's an explosive belt. One word from you and I'll
blow myself up," the young man said, with a threatening
glance toward the old woman.

THE IRAQI CHRIST 99

In't
lO e

o sit

lnan

mor·

\11tn

I was killed by friendly fire, myself. We were on a joint
patrol with the American forces after the invasion. Some­
one opened fire on us from a house in the village. The
Americans responded hysterically, thinking we had
opened fire on them. I was shot three times in the head. I
met Christ in our next world, and we were overjoyed. He
told me how he was inexplicably drawn to that young
man in the kebab restaurant. It wasn't just terror that had

paralyzed him, but also some mysterious desire for salva­
tion. For some moments he stared into the young man's

face. The man leaned toward him and asked him to stand

up and go to the bathroom with him. At first he didn't

budge from his place, as if turned to stone. Then he kissed
his mother's head and stood up.

The young man led the way to the toilets. He closed

the door and kept the tip of his finger on the button on the

oarK

n ni�

eoao

Dut

witn

area
left

area
em

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100 HASSAN BLASIM

explosive belt. With his other hand he pulled a pistol out
of his belt and pointed it at Daniel's head. The young man
was practically hugging Christ by this point, wrapping
his arms around him because the space was so tight. He
summed up what he wanted: Daniel should wear the

explosive belt in his place, in exchange for him saving the
old woman's life.

The young man was in a hysterical state and could

hardly control himself. He said there would be someone

filming the explosion from outside the restaurant and
that ifhe didn't blow himself up they would kill him. Dan­
iel said nothing in response. They started to sweat. One of
the customers tried to push open the restroom door. The

young man cleared his throat. Then he again promised
Christ he would take the old woman safely out of the res­
taurant, but if Daniel didn't blow himself up he would kill

her. Half a minute of silence passed, then he agreed with
a nod of his head and stared blankly into the young man's

eyes. The young man asked him to undo the belt and wrap
it around his own waist. It was a difficult process because

the room was so narrow. The young man withdrew cau­

tiously, leaving Christ in the bathroom with the explosive
belt on. Then he rushed toward the old woman in the cor­

ner of the restaurant. He tapped her gently on the shoul­
der and took hold of her hand. She stood up and followed

him like a child. The restaurant had started to fill up, and

the noise level was rising, as people laughed and the cut­
lery clattered like a sword fight.

Christ fell to his knees. He could hardly breathe, and
he pissed in his trousers. He opened the bathroom door
and crawled into the restaurant. Someone met him at the



THE IRAQI CHRIST

door and ran back shouting, "A suicide bomber, a suicide
bomber!"

Amid the panic, as men, women, and children tram­
pled on each other to escape, Christ saw that his mother's
chair was empty, and he pressed the button.

door

tthe

101



 



 



 



1

At noon Jaafar the referee was waiting at the end of the

lane, his army binoculars around his neck and a soccer

ball in his lap. The boys arrived one after another and

surrounded him, joking with him and talking excitedly
about the striker on the Sector 32 team. Jaafar reassured

them. "We have Allawi al-Saba. He's the Messi of Sector

Twenty-nine," he said.
The boys took turns pushing Jaafar's wheelchair. One

of them said, "The Sector Thirty-two team might bring a

referee of their own."

Jaafar wasn't bothered. He told them he knew how to

handle that. They reached the field, Jaafar threw the ball,

and the boys ran after it.
Jaafar was forty-five years old, but he was still young

at heart. With his passion for sports, his dynamism, and

his determination, he amazed his friends and his few ene­

mies. He had been the most famous pool player in Sector

29, and when he was an army deserter the military police
couldn't catch him. He was like a fox, but his addiction to

105



1I1I
il

I

,I
I

II

106 HASSAN BLASIM

pool halls was his downfall. One evening the military
police surrounded him at the Khorasan pool hall in
Karada, where he used to take on the most famous players
in the area. They sent him off to the Kuwait war, and when
he came back both his legs had been amputated. Jaafar
was a good lad, one of the boys-that's how the people of
the sector saw him. But some of them found fault with his

passion for soccer and the way he hung out with the local
youth at his age. Jaafar didn't take much notice of such
talk, because the young had to learn the basics of the game.
He would organize matches for them and act as referee.
He would remind his critics of the famous national squad
player who came from Sector 29 and whom he claimed to
have trained, adding each time, "A miracle that will save
the whole country will be my doing too!"

On the edge of the soccer field there was a large Dump­
ster that gave off white smoke with a putrid stench that
drifted over the playing area. Women, some in abayas and
some without, came out of the houses around the field
with bags of trash. Jaafar watched them through his bin­
oculars while the boys ran after the ball, shouting. With
his binoculars Jaafar also watched the boys playing.

The Sector 32 team arrived, accompanied by a young
man with a beard, and he and Jaafar agreed that Jaafar
would referee the first half and the other man the second
half. The match began. Jaafar pushed his wheelchair up
and down the field at high speed in a frenzied passion. He
shouted at the boys, either to encourage them or to repri­
mand them, and when they were too far off he would follow
them with his binoculars. "Goooooooooaaaaaal!" shouted

Jaafar. The Sector 32 referee objected that Jaafar was sup-



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 107

porting his own team and wasn't impartial. Jaafar ignored
his objections. He worried about his players as if they were
his own children, and when they fell down he would check
their knees and legs for any damage. Sometimes his mind
would wander and for a few moments he would see them as

ghosts in battle and recall the boom of artillery on the front.
But then he would go back to the match and blow his whis­

tle to award a penalty kick, as cheerful and enthusiastic as
ever. He dripped with sweat as he pushed the wheelchair
around with all his strength to keep up with the boys run­

ning after the ball like antelopes.
Jaafar blew the whistle. "Foul!"

"I swear it wasn't a foul, Jaafar," objected one of the

boys.
"I tell you it's a foul. Don't argue, you idiot."

"But Jaafar, you were far away."
"What are these, then? Do you think I'm blind?" said

Jaafar, holding up his binoculars.
The match ended in a 2-2 draw, and the boys pushed

Jaafar's wheelchair to the coffee shop. He said good-bye
to them and advised them to prepare for next week's

match with the Sector 52 team.

Jaafar played dominoes in the Shaab coffee shop and

gave the others his analysis of the quality of the various

Spanish clubs. His laugh echoed through the coffee shop
and shook the big picture of the imam Ali hanging on the
wall. The coffee shop owner said the Americans were

going to search the sector that night for weapons.
"What does that bunch of cowboys want? It's because

of them I lost my legs in the Kuwait war. What do they
want next? Fuck them. One day America's going to go to



I

II
II
Ii
II

II
II
II
il
II
I
j
I

108 HASSAN BLASIM

shit," Jaafar said indignantly, then changed the subject
back to soccer. He and the Real Madrid supporters started

arguing and joking. Jaafar was an avid supporter of Bar­
celona and sometimes Liverpool.

I was waiting for him at the coffee shop door. He came
out laughing loudly and gave me a friendly punch in the

guts. I pushed his wheelchair and we crossed the street.
He asked after his sister, who is my wife, and I said, "She's
well."

"Are you going to do the disappearing knife trick

today?" he asked, coughing. He was a chronic smoker.

"No, but I may talk a little about the interpretation of
dreams."

I knocked on the door and Souad opened it. "Ah, both
of you," she said as she kissed Jaafar on the head. She

helped me get his wheelchair through the narrow door­

way. I pinched her bottom and she slapped my hand dis­

creetly, but Jaafar didn't notice.
In the room there was a bare wooden bench, and Salih

the butcher was sitting on it. Allawi was sitting cross­

legged on the ground with a set of green prayer beads in
his hand-the same way he sat when he was making a
knife disappear.

Jaafar shook Salih's hand and said, "Hey, Allawi,
come and sit on the bench."

Allawi answered proudly, "I've never sat on a chair or
a bench."

"You mean in all your life?"

"Of course."

"But you're only fifteen, damn it. Anyone who heard

you would say you were as old as the dinosaurs."



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 109

Jaafar laughed his booming laugh as he adjusted the

photograph of his father on the wall.
Souad disappeared into the kitchen, and I sat next to

the butcher. Jaafar turned his wheelchair to face us.

Souad came back with a tray of tea, sat on the carpet close

to Allawi, and poured the tea, smiling amiably at every­
one and winking at me several times. I blew her a kiss.

Jaafar turned to me and said, "Hey, lovebirds, we've got
work to do. When the meeting's over you can throw each

other as many kisses as you want."

In his weird woman's voice, the butcher said, "Now,
Jaafar. Anyone who heard you would say this was a meet­

ing of some underground party that was going to change
the world. We've made so many knives disappear, and

Souad always brings them back again.... And it's been

going on like this for ten years."
Allawi laughed and said, "I've been making knives

disappear all my life. But I want to go on making them

disappear again and again, and I don't know why." Jaafar

changed the subject and asked Allawi whether Umm Ibti­

sam would be coming today. He replied that he was cer­

tain this time, because she had sworn to him three times

by Ali's son Abbas that she would come. "She must be on

her way now. You know the shitty Americans have closed

half the roads."

2

o hearo We
were like one family. Our knife-handling skills weren't

the only thing we had in common. We also shared our



problems in life, our joys, and our ignorance. We were
buffeted by all forms of misfortune, and several times we

grew disappointed with the knives. There were other
concerns in life. We almost split up on several occasions,
but we were drawn back together by the strangeness and

pleasure of our gift, by the feeling among all of us-except,
perhaps, Salih the butcher-that knives could be a solace
and give our lives the thrill of uncertainty.

Ten years have passed since we became a team in the
knife trick. Allawi joined us three years ago. I continued

my studies and went to the School of Education. Souad

went into the sixth year of high school, specializing in the
sciences, and dreamed of going to the School of Medicine.
Salih the butcher has extended his shop, divorced the
mother of his children, and married a young woman who
had a bad reputation in the neighborhood. Jaafar found
Allawi a job in the factory that makes women's shoes. He
didn't want Allawi to stay in the market playing with
knives. Jaafar himself was the same as always-busy with

soccer, refereeing, dominoes, the coffee shop; always anx­
ious to ensure that our group didn't fall apart and con­

stantly seeking out new talent in soccer and also in the
knife trick. He believed that our knife skills were a secret

vocation that would change the world. As to how and why
and when, these were all unanswered questions; he had

nothing to do with them. "I've never even read a newspa­
per in my life. How could I understand the secret of the

knives?" he said.

The butcher, Allawi, Jaafar, and I had the ability to
make knives disappear. Souad was the only person who
could make them reappear, but she couldn't make them

110 HASSAN BLASIM



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 11

wert disappear. Souad's difference compounded the mystery of

e:we our talents, which did not progress one step despite the

passage of all those years.

Two years ago I was assigned to read books in order to

find out what the knives meant, and I soon came to the

idea that the knives were just a metaphor for all the terror,

the killing, and the brutality in the country. It's a realistic

phenomenon that is unfamiliar, an extraordinary game

that has no value, because it is hemmed in by definite laws.

I married Souad a year and a half ago. It was Jaafar

who arranged this early marriage with my father. Souad's

cousin had approached Jaafar with a proposal to marry
her. Jaafar didn't want Souad to move away from us and

go to live in the village. He wasn't unaware of the tenta­

tive affection we felt for each other. My father was per­

suaded straightaway, especially as Jaafar made my father

an attractive offer. He said he would buy Souad and me a

small house. My father agreed at once because he wanted

to relieve the strain in his own house. We were nine

brothers and three sisters all living in two rooms, and my
father was struggling to keep the family afloat. He worked

as a baker and my mother gave injections to sick people in

the neighborhood, though she didn't have a nursing cer­

tificate. In fact she was illiterate, and because she was so

kind, people called her the angel of mercy.
When I was a youngster I played on Jaafar's soccer

team. He discovered my talent by chance. He was watch­

ing me as I made a knife that some boy was holding disap­

pear. He was ecstatic and started to hug me. He cheerfully
took me to their house and introduced me to young Souad,

whose eyes projected the force of life like a strong and



112 HASSAN BLASIM

beautiful flower. The next day Jaafar took me to Salih the
butcher's shop and introduced me to him.

In those days we used to meet in Jaafar's house, but
his mother and his five brothers would disturb us, so then

we moved to Salih's house. He had a room on the roof of

the house, where he raised birds. We would put the knives
on top of a round wooden table and make them disappear
one by one, then Souad would make them reappear. We
would exchange views and try to analyze the trick. But
the conversation soon moved away from knives and
turned to jokes and stories about the people in the sector.
We continued to meet in the pigeon loft until I got mar­
ried and Jaafar bought us that small house. Jaafar had
considerable wealth from a business he'd been in since he

was young. He used to deal in pornographic magazines,
which were banned, but he was careful to cover his tracks,
selling them only in wealthy neighborhoods.

It was I who discovered Allawi and brought him into
the group. I was in the street market buying rat poison
when I saw a group of children and adults in a corner of

the market, gathered in a circle, full of curiosity. Allawi
was sitting cross-legged as usual, with a number of small
knives of various types next to him. He didn't make knives

disappear for free. People would give him a pack of ciga­
rettes or enough money for a sandwich or to buy a grape
juice or pomegranate juice, and as soon as he felt it was
worth his while he would throw one of the knives onto the

ground in front of the spectators and ask them to touch it
to make sure it was a real knife. Then he would ask them
to stand back in a slightly larger circle so that he could
breathe and concentrate. Allawi stared at the knife for



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 113

\ih he thirty seconds, as we all did, and as soon as tears started to

glisten in his eyes the knife would disappear. The audi­

ence would applaud in amazement and admiration, and

Allawi would then wait for the spectators to come up with

enough money for him to repeat the trick with another

knife. His main problem was that he depended on stealing
knives to replace the ones he made disappear. That put
him in many tricky situations.

The tears and the thirty seconds were the common

denominator between us all when it came to making
knives disappear and reappear. As I said, were it not for

Souad, the knives would have disappeared forever and we

would all have been like Allawi before he joined us-just
knife thieves. Salih the butcher faced the same problem
before he met Jaafar and Souad. Salih loved the trick; in

his shop he would stare at knives at length until they dis­

appeared. But after the trick he had to buy new knives.

Allawi made money in the market from his gift, while

Salih would lose out. If it wasn't for Souad, he said, he

would have died of hunger. Every day Souad brought back

the knives he had made disappear, and we were sure this

was the only reason the butcher stayed with us all those

years.

We were constantly on the lookout for a new member

of the group, with powers like those of Souad. We
would

meet every Thursday and make a set of knives disappear,
and Souad would make them reappear in the same way:

tears and a few seconds!

I could make knives disappear easily. I began by mak­

ing my mother's knives disappear in the kitchen when I

was a child. In the beginning my mother would almost go



11.4 HASSAN BLASIM

crazy, but when she discovered my secret she and my

father took me to a cleric to consult him on the subject.
The man with the turban told them in all confidence,
"Your son is in league with the jinn." He advised my
father and mother to pray and wash the courtyard of the
house twice-once at dawn and again at sunset. When I

got interested in soccer and met Jaafar I stopped making
knives disappear at home or at the homes of friends and
relatives.

The knife trick didn't have a particular purpose.
Maybe Salih the butcher saw his gift as a disease and as
far as he was concerned Souad was the only cure. The

feelings and ideas that Souad, Jaafar, Allawi, and I had
were different to some extent. Jaafar thought it was a
secret and sacred vocation and believed that what we did,

despite the absurdity of it, was a source of great pleasure,
especially as he saw himself as the spiritual father and
the leader of the group.

Allawi was addicted to the game. It was like a drug
that erased his memory of the painful loss of both his par­
ents at an early age. His father had been a drunkard who

argued with the neighbors and who killed a man with his

pistol. Before the police arrived one of the dead man's

sons, who had seen his own father drowning in blood,
came to the door of Allawi's father's house with a Kalash­

nikov in his hand. Allawi's father was standing behind
the closed door with the pistol in his hand, and his mother
was trying to stop him from going out. The son emptied a
whole magazine of bullets into the door. The door fell in

and Allawi's mother and father were killed.

Knives were my pastime and part of my life. Seeking



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 115

the mystery of the game, I felt like someone looking for a

single rare flower in a high mountain range. Often it felt

like an adventure in a fable. Many a time I felt as though I

was doing a spiritual exercise with the knife trick. The

reality didn't interest me as much as the beauty of the

mystery attracted me. Maybe this is what drove me to

write poetry after I gave up looking for the meaning of

the knives.

Illiteracy was one of the obstacles that compounded
our failure to understand the trick or even to develop our

skills throughout the years. Salih the butcher, Allawi, and

Jaafar couldn't read or write. It's true that Souad was

educated, but she practiced the knife trick with a childish

attitude. She would always remind me, saying, "Why

complicate things, my love? Life is short and we are alive.

Treat the knives as a game to entertain us and leave it at

that." Souad repeatedly suggested we open a little theater

in the neighborhood to amuse the local people by making
knives disappear and then reappear, in hopes that this

might relieve the gloom of war and the endless killing.
But Jaafar was worried about the clerics, because they
were acting like militias at the time. I thought he was

right to worry; at any moment they could have denounced

us as infidels, maybe even accused us of undermining

society with alien superstitions imported from abroad.

Their superstitions had become the law, and God had

become a sword for cutting off people's heads and declar­

ing them infidels.

My ignorance increased when I embarked on the task

of researching the knife trick through reading. Myeduca­
tion didn't help me much. It was religious books that I



116 HASSAN BLASIM

first examined to find references to the trick. Most of the
houses in and around our sector had a handful of books
and other publications, primarily the Quran, the sayings
of the Prophet, stories about heaven and hell, and texts
about prophets and infidels. It's true I found many refer­
ences to knives in these books, but they struck me as just
laughable. They only had knives for jihad, for treachery,
for torture and terror. Swords and blood. Symbols of des­
ert battles and the battles of the future. Victory banners
stamped with the name of God, and knives of war.

After that I moved into works of literature. That was

by chance. A single sentence had stirred up a whirlwind
of excitement inside me. Then one day, in a coffee shop, I
came across an article in a local newspaper about a mas­

sacre by sectarian fighters in a village south of the cap­
ital. They had set fire to the houses of people sleeping at
night. The only survivor of the conflagration was a young
boy. The boy was purple, and in his hand he held a purple
rat. They found him asleep in a wheat field. His story went
unnoticed in the relentless daily cycle of bloody violence
in the country. In the culture section of the newspaper
there was an interview with an Iraqi poet in exile who
said, "A closed door: That's the definition of existence."

The next day I went to Mutanabbi Street, where books
are sold. I wasn't a regular visitor. I was terrified by the
sight of the stacks of books there, in the bookshop win­
dows, in the stalls in the street, and on the wooden carts.
Hundreds of titles and covers. I couldn't buy a single book
that day. I didn't know what to choose or where to begin.
I went back to Mutanabbi Street every Friday and gradu­
ally regained my confidence. I started to buy books of



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES

poetry, novels, and short stories, local and
translated.

Then our group decided to contribute some money
to help

me buy more books, in hopes that I would come
across

the key to the mystery of the knives, and soon the
house

was full of books. We made shelves in the pigeon loft, the

kitchen, and even in the bathroom. After a year of
vora­

cious reading I was no longer drawn to research into
the

mystery of the knives, but to the pleasures of knowledge

and reading generally. The magic of words was like
rain

that quenched the thirst in my soul, and for me
life

became an idea and a dream: The idea was a ball and the

dream was two tennis rackets. I didn't understand many

of the books on classical philosophy. But enjoyable and

interesting intellectual books on dreams, the universe,

and time began to attract my attention. I felt this created

a problem with the group. They would shower me
with

questions on what I was reading and whether I had
come

across any clues to the mystery of the
knives in my

books. I didn't know how to explain things to them. I

was like a small animal that had entered the den of an

enormous animal. I felt both pleasure and excitement.

Perhaps I was lost, and my only compass was my passion

and my fear of the diversity of life. One idea
invalidated

another, and one concept disguised another. One theory

made another theory more mysterious. One feeling con­

tested another. One book mocked another book. One poem

overshadowed another poem. One ladder went up and an­

other went down. Often knowledge struck me as similar

to the knife trick: just a mysterious absurdity or merely a

pleasant game.
I tried to explain to the group that research into knives

117



118 HASSAN BLASIM

3

through books wasn't easy. It was a complicated process,
and certain things might take me many more years to
understand. On the other hand I didn't want to disappoint
the group, especially Jaafar, who was enthusiastic about
the books. So I started telling them stories about other
extraordinary things that happen in this world and about
man's hidden powers. I tried to simplify for them my mod­
est knowledge of parapsychology, dreams, and the myster­
ies of the universe and nature. I felt that we were getting
lost together, further and further, in the labyrinths of this
world, without sails and without a compass.

Souad opened the door and a stout woman in her fifties,
dressed in black, came in. She greeted us shyly. Salih the
butcher made room for her on the bench and went to

stand by the door. Jaafar asked him to sit down, but he
said he was fine.

Souad asked the woman, Umm Ibtisam, if she would
like something to drink.

"Thank you; coffee please," she said.
Jaafar tried to dispel the woman's sense that she was

unwelcome. He started talking about the high price of
vegetables, deploring the fact that the country was im­
porting vegetables from neighboring countries when it
had two great rivers and plenty of fertile land. Then he
jumped to the subject of the high price of propane and
gasoline when we had the largest reserves of black shit in
the world. Souad brought Umm Ibtisam the coffee and



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 119

rocess. went back to her place. She sipped the coffee and told
ear to Allawi she was in a hurry and had to get back to her chil­

dren. It was Allawi who had found Umm Ibtisam. He said

he was wandering around the old lanes in the center of

Baghdad when he noticed a shop that sold only knives of

various shapes and sizes. He went into the shop and

started to browse through the knives. A woman in her fif­

ties came up to him and offered to help. He told her he

was looking for a small knife he had lost years before,

with a handle in the shape of a shark. The woman gave
him a puzzled look and said her knife shop was not a lost

property office. Allawi preempted her, as he put it, by ask­

ing if she knew about making knives disappear. She said

she didn't know what he meant and offered him a small

knife with a snake wrapped around the handle. Allawi

examined it and told the woman he knew how to make it

disappear. He sat in the middle of the shop, and after

thirty seconds of concentration and two tears, the knife

disappeared. The woman was upset and asked him to

leave at once.

Allawi left and went back the next day. He said he

only wanted to talk to her, but she didn't want to listen.

Maliciously and threateningly, Allawi told her that he

could make all the knives in the shop disappear at once.

The woman pulled a large meat cleaver off one of the

shelves and brandished it in Allawi's face.

"What do you want, you evil boy?" she cried.

"Nothing. Just to talk."
Allawi sat cross-legged on the floor and asked her if

she would like to see another demonstration of making
knives disappear. She didn't reply, just stared at him

p3ne ana

'h hirin

{fee ana



120 HASSAN BLASIM

suspiciously and held the cleaver in her hand. Straight off,
Allawi started telling her about the gift of making knives
disappear and reappear and about our group. This was

very stupid of him, because we were wary of talking about
the group to outsiders, but Allawi had spent a long time in
the market and thought nothing of showing off in front of
others.

Allawi said, "The woman's face turned the color of
tomato when I talked about the knife trick. She sat on a

chair in front of me and put the cleaver on her lap. Then
she started to weep in anguish." Then she suddenly stood
up, closed the shop door, wiped away her tears, and told
him the story of the knife shop, after making him promise
never to reveal her secret.

The woman had five daughters, and her husband had
been killed when a car bomb exploded in front of the
Ministry of the Interior, cutting his body in half. It was a
disaster. The woman had no idea how she could support
her daughters. Her grief for her husband broke her heart
and disrupted her sleep. She had nightmares in which she
saw an enormous man slaughtering her husband with a
knife. The nightmare recurred often, and every time the
man would slaughter her husband with a different knife.
Dmm Ibtisam told Allawi she couldn't understand why
the knives appeared in her dream.

A month after the nightmares started, Umrn 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



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 121

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 mar­

ket. 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 any­

one 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 open­

ing a shop to sell the knives. The brother rented a small

shop close to her house, and so Umm Ibtisam started sell­

ing 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



122 HASSAN BLASIM

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 appear­

ing 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.

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.

4



pre nan�

Medicinl

A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES 123

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 invita­
tion 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 pho­
tocopier 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 man­

nequins. 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, aggres­

sive, 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



124 HASSAN BLASIM

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, contin­
ued 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 chil­
dren 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 hold­
ing 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 tor­
tured him. The terrorists told Jaafar that God had pun­
ished him when his legs were amputated during the war,
but Jaafar hadn't repented and had gone on selling pic­
tures of obscenities and debauchery. So the terrorists had
decided to cut off Jaafar's arms as a lesson to any unbe­

lieving profligate. The terrorists assembled all the hos-

w

AI

ul
tages to witness the process of amputating Jaafar's arms. �i
They couldn't believe what happened next. Hassan said wi



A THOUSAND AND ONE KNIVES

hac 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 sin­

gle 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 arm­

pits and neck, until I reached her ear, and then I would

whisper, "My love, I need help!"

125



126 HASSAN BLASIM

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 thou­
sand and one times."

I kissed every pore on her body with passion and rev­
erence, 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.



 



 



JAAFAR AL-MuTALLIBI WAS BORN IN THE TOWN OF

aI-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 profes­
sional 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 domi­

noes in the coffee shop when my father launched into a

tirade of obscene insults to God and the Prophet. He made

129



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 for­
giveness. 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 con-
sisted 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 fam­
ily 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 no
songs about the war, songs people remember to this day. M

Listen, brother, I'll sum up the story for you. One year HI
after the war ended, my father suffered what the newspa- ra
pers call writer's block, and he was unable to compose tn

130 HASSAN BLASIM

J I
I '

I: I
�I
et

ro

ffi

ffi'

ro

Ill:



THE COMPOSER

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
mean­

time? 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 Proph­

et's wives and how loose they were. Suddenly my elder

brother sprang up, took my father's pistol from the ward­

robe, 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 bath­

room, and my brother fled the sight of my mother by leav­

ing 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
mid­

wife 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 neighbor­

hood 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

131



132 HASSAN BLASIM

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 exis­
tence, 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 reli­
gion. 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 record- �;
ing, 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 u�
need it, and religion has made more progress than neces- in
sary, along with the murderers and thieves. The reaction w
of the street might be hysterical, but let's fire a bullet in the ho
air. Go ahead, you're a journalist; it will be good for you



d for you

THE COMPOSER 133

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 danc­

ing, 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,
wander­

ing 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,



13l.� HASSAN BLASIM

our Kurdish neighbor, turned up at the last moment, fr
screaming at the young men and speaking to them in al
their language. Then she started imploring them to set us cu
free. She told them how kind and generous my mother ml
was and how she helped the Kurdish women give birth tn
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 �r
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 insur-
gents 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 broad­
cast from loudspeakers on the roof during the first war.



135THE COMPOSER

From the same loudspeakers the party members would

also speak to the public when someone was being exe­

cuted 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. Tomor­

row I'll tell you the secret of my father's relationship with

Umm Tariq, the Kurdish woman.

firJII'ar,



 



 



 



139

PEOPLE WERE WAITING IN LINES 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 circu­
Iated among them. People were terrified a terrorist would
infiltrate the crowd and turn all these stories into a pulp
of flesh and fire.

Memory Radio had been set up after the fall of the
dictator. From the start, the radio station had adopted a

documentary approach to programming, without news
bulletins or songs, just documentary reports and pro­
grams that delved into the country's past. The station had
become famous after announcing that it was going to
record a new program titled Their Stories in Their Own

Voices. Crowds gathered at the broadcasting center from
across the country. The idea was simple: to select the best
stories and record them as narrated by the people involved,
but without mentioning their real names; then the listen­
ers would choose the top three stories, which would win
valuable prizes.

I succeeded in filling out the application form but



140 HASSAN BLASIM

,I

made it inside the radio station only with great difficulty.
More than once an argument broke out because of the

crush. Old and young, adolescents, civil servants, stu­
dents, and unemployed people all came to tell their sto­
ries. We waited in the rain for more than four hours.

Some of us were subdued; others were bragging about
their stories. I saw one man with no arms and a beard that

almost reached his waist. He was deep in thought, like a
decrepit Greek statue. I noticed the anxiety of the hand­
some young man who was with him. From a Communist

who was tortured in the seventies in the Baath party's
prisons, I heard that the man with the beard had a story
that was tipped to win, but that he himself had not come
to win. He was just a madman, but his companion, one of
his relatives, coveted the prize. The man with the beard
was a teacher who went to the police one day to report on
a neighbor who was trading in antiquities stolen from the
National Museum. The police thanked him for his coop­
eration. The teacher, his conscience relieved, went back
to his school. The police submitted a report to the Minis-
try of Defense that the teacher's house was an al Qaeda
hideout. The police were in partnership with the antiqui-
ties smuggler. The Ministry of Defense sent the report to we
the U.S. Army, who bombed the teacher's house by heli- m
copter. His wife, his four children, and his elderly mother w
were killed. The teacher escaped with his life, but he suf-
fered brain damage and lost his arms. co

I personally had more than twenty stories teeming in til
my memory about my long years of captivity in Iran. I was til
confident that at least one of them would really be the of
clincher in the competition. an

I
, i



THE SONG OF THE GOATS 141

an.III'�

ly be tn1

They took in the first batch of contestants and then
announced to the crowds left behind us that they had

stopped accepting applications for the day. There were
more than seventy of us who went in. They had us sit
down in a large hall similar to a university cafeteria. A
man in a smart suit then told us we were first going to lis­
ten to two stories to understand the format of the pro­

gram. He also spoke about legal aspects of the contracts
we would have to sign with the radio station.

The lights gradually dimmed and the hall fell silent,
as if it were a cinema. Most of the contestants lit up ciga­
rettes, and we were soon enveloped in a thick cloud of
smoke. We started listening to a story by a young woman,
whose voice reached us clearly from the four corners of
the hall. She told how her husband, a policeman, had been
held by an Islamist group for a long time and how, during
the sectarian killings, the killers had sent his body back

decomposed and decapitated. When the lights came back
on, chaos broke out. Everyone was talking at the same
time, like a swarm of wasps. Many of them ridiculed the
woman's story and claimed they had stories that were

stranger, crueler, and more crazy. I caught sight of an old
woman close to ninety waving her hand in derision and

muttering, "That's a story? If I told my story to a rock, it
would break its heart."

The man in the smart suit came back on and urged the
contestants to calm down. In simple words he explained
that the best stories did not mean the most frightening or
the saddest; what mattered was authenticity and the style
of narration. He said the stories should not necessarily be
about war and killing. I was upset by what he said, and I



142 HASSAN BLASIM

la1noticed that most of the contestants paid no attention. A
man the size of an elephant whispered in my ear, "It's
bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story's a story,
whether it's beautiful or bullshit."

The lights went down again and we started listening
to the second story.

"They found her feeding me shit. A whole week she was

mixing it with the rice, the mashed potatoes, and the

soup. I was a sallow child, three years old. My father I�t
threatened to divorce her, but she took no notice. Her
heart was hardened forever. She never forgave me for
what I did, and I will never forget how cruel she was. By tn
the time she died of cancer of the womb, the storms of life 1V
had carried me far away. I escaped from the country tri
sometime after the barrel incident, abject, defeated, para-
lyzed by fear. On the night I said good-bye to my father, he 1n
walked with me to the graveyard. We read the first chap- no
ter of the Quran over my uncle's grave. We embraced and
he slipped a bundle of cash into my hand. I kissed his
hand and disappeared. me

"We were living in a poor part of Kirkuk. The neigh- 1nt
borhood didn't have mains drainage. People would have 11'e
septic tanks dug in their yards for ten dollars. Nozad the rri
Kurdish vegetable seller was the only person in the neigh­
borhood who specialized in digging those tanks. When
Nozad died his son Mustafa took on the work. They found
Nozad burned to a cinder in his shop after a fire broke out
one night. No one knows what Nozad was doing that
night. Some people claim he was smoking hashish. My
father didn't believe that. For all kinds of disasters his

ing
wa

f�t

IVil

rno

do

��e



THE SONG OF THE GOATS 143

ntion,.\ favorite proverb was 'Everything we do in this ephemeral
world is written, preordained.' So in my childhood I
believed that 'our life' was tucked away somewhere in

schoolbooks or in the shop where they sold newspapers.
My father wanted to save my childhood with all the good­
will and love he possessed. He was gracious toward oth­
ers and toward life in a way that still puzzles me today.
He was like a saint in a human slaughterhouse. Disaster
would strike us pretty much every other year. But my
father didn't want to believe that fate could bring such a

mysterious curse. Perhaps he attributed it to destiny. We
were vulnerable to assault from every direction-from

the unknown, from reality, from God, from people, and
even the dead would come back to torment us. My father

tried to bury my crime through various means, or at least
erase it from my mother's memory. But he failed. In the

end he gave in. He left the task to the ravages of time, in

hopes that this would efface the disaster.
"I may have been the youngest murderer in the world:

a murderer who remembered nothing of his crime. For

me, at least, it was no more than a story, just a story to
entertain people at any moment. What I noticed was that

everyone would write, intone, or sing the story of my
crime as they fancied. At the time, my father wasn't work­

ing in the pickle business. He was a tank driver, and the
war was in its first year. My mother was nagging my
father for a third child, but he refused because of the war,
which terrified him. We were comfortably off. Every
month my father would send enough money to cover food,
clothing, and the rent on the house. My mother would

w '(ef ni� spend her time either asleep or visiting my aunt, with

a :.0;



.144 HASSAN BLASIM

whom she'd talk all day about the price of fabric and the

waywardness of men.
"In the summer, my mother would go off into a dream

world. She wouldn't listen, or talk, or even look. The mid-

day heat would wipe her out. At noon she would take a
bath and then sleep naked in her room like a dead houri.'
When night fell she would recover some of her vitality, as
if she had come out of a coma. She would watch her favor-

ite soap opera and news programs in which the President

awarded medals for bravery to heroic soldiers, thinking
that my father might appear among them.

"At noon one day, my mother dozed off with her arms
and legs splayed open under the ceiling fan. My brother
and I-he was a year younger-slipped off into the court­

yard. There was nothing out there but a solitary fig tree
and the cover of the septic tank. I remember my mother
used to cry under the fig tree whenever one of our rela-
tives died or some disaster struck us. The mouth of the

tank was covered with an old kitchen tray held down by a

large stone. We, my brother and I, had trouble moving the
stone. Then we started throwing pebbles into the tank. It
was our favorite game. Umm Alaa, our neighbor, used to
make us paper boats, which we would sail on the surface
of the pool of shit.

"They say I pushed my brother into the tank and ran
off to the roof of the house to hide in the chicken coop.
When I grew up, I asked them, 'Might he have fallen in,
and I run away out of fear?' They said, 'You confessed

yourself.' Perhaps they questioned me like the dictator's F,
m

* Houri: one of the beautiful virgins of the Quranic paradise.



THE SONG OF THE GOATS

nd th� police. I don't remember anything. But they would tell
their stories about it as if they were describing the plot of
a film they'd enjoyed. All the neighbors took part in the
rescue attempt. They couldn't find the truck that used to
come once a month to empty out the septic tanks in the

. neighborhood. They used everything they could find to
get the shit out of the tank: pots and pans, a large bucket,
and other vessels. It was an arduous and disgusting task,
like torture in slow motion. It was the height of summer,
and the foul odors added to the horror and the shock.

Before the sun went down, they brought him out-a dead
child shrouded in shit.

"My father was late coming back from the front. My
uncle wrote him a letter and then took care of arrange­
ments for the burial of my brother. We buried him in the

children's cemetery on the hill. It may have been the most

beautiful cemetery in the world. In the spring, wildflow­
ers of every color and variety would grow there. From a

distance, the graveyard looked like the crown of an enor­
mous, colored tree: a cemetery whose powerful fragrance
spread for miles around. A week later our neighbor Umm
Alaa opened the door and saw my mother. The intensity
of the grief had driven her to distraction. She had put shit
in a small bowl, and was mixing it into my food very
slowly with a plastic spoon, then filling my mouth with it
as she wept.

"My father sent me to live with my uncle, and I became
a refugee of sorts. I would visit our house as a guest every
Friday, escorted by my aunt, who kept an eye on my
mother. I felt like a ball that people kicked around. That's
how I spent six years, trying to understand what was

se



HASSAN BLASIM

happening around me. I had to learn what their feelings
and their words meant, all the while wearing a chain of
thorns around my neck. It was like crawling across a bed
of nails. The septic tank was the bane of my childhood.
On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently
advances, moves on, sets sail, or, at worst, crawls slowly
forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like
a firecracker in the sky of God, a small flare in his mighty
firmament of bombardment. I spent the remaining years
of my childhood and adolescence watching everyone
carefully, like a sniper hidden in the darkness. Watching
and shooting. Against the horrors of my life I unleashed
other nightmares, imaginary ones. I invented mental
images of my mother and others being tortured, and in
my schoolbook I drew pictures of enormous trucks crush­
ing the heads of children. I still remember the picture of
the President printed on the cover of our workbooks. He
was in military uniform, smiling, and under his picture
were written the words, 'The pen can shoot bullets as
deadly as the rifle.'

"There was a cart that brought kerosene, drawn by a
donkey. It came through the lanes in the neighborhood in
winter. The children would follow behind, waiting for the
donkey's awesome penis to grow erect. I used to shut my
eyes and imagine the donkey's penis, gross and black,
going into my mother's right ear and coming out of the
left. She would scream for help because of the pain.

"A year before the war ended my father lost his left leg
and his testicles. This forced my mother to take me back.

My father decided to go back to the trade practiced by his
father and his forefathers: making pickles. They say my



.r fee\in� grandfather was the most famous pickle seller in the city
chain� of Najaf. The King himself visited him three times. I went

I

TO: a : back home and acted as my father's drudge and obedient
chi\ ooi servant. I was happy, because my father was a miracle of

goodness. Despite everything he had suffered in his life
he remained faithful to his inner self, which had some­
how not been warped by the pain. He had an artificial leg
fitted, and his capacity for love seemed to grow. He pam­
pered my mother and showered her with gifts-gold
necklaces, rings, and lingerie embroidered with flowers.

"My father tiled the courtyard and made a concrete
cover for the septic tank. He left some space for the fig
tree, but it died from the brine he used in the pickles. My
mother wept beneath it for the last time when I was six­

teen. The government in Baghdad had built a road for the
highway and removed the old cemetery. Her father's
grave had been there. For a long time we were sad about
the loss of my grandfather's bones.

"The courtyard was full of plastic barrels for pickling;
piles of sacks full of cucumbers, eggplants, green and red
peppers, cabbages, and cauliflowers; bags of salt, sugar,
and spices; bottles of vinegar; and tins of molasses. There
were also large cooking pots, which were always full of
boiling water, to which we would add spices, then all the
vegetables one by one. My father wasn't as proficient as
his father, let alone his grandfather. He started trying out
new methods. He had spent a large part of his life in tanks
and had forgotten many of the family recipes for making
pickles. The tank had cost him his balls, his leg, and the
trade of his forefathers.

"I would sit opposite my mother for hours, cutting up

THE SONG OF THE GOATS



148 HASSAN BLASIM

eggplants or stuffing cucumbers with garlic or celery. Her

tongue was as poisonous as a viper. The summer no longer
bothered her. She had turned into a fat cow, burned by the

sun, with a loose tongue, and she smoked to excess. Nox­

ious weeds had sprouted in her heart. People took pity on
her, with words as poisonous as hers. 'Poor woman,' they
said. 'An impotent husband and no children, just the bird
of ill omen.' The bird-that was me, and I showed all the

signs of ill omen. My father was busy all the time with the
accounts and dealing with the shops in the market and
moving barrels in the old pickup. After sunset he would

collapse from fatigue. He would have dinner, pray, and
tell us about his pickle problems, then take off his artifi­
cialleg and go to bed to tickle his gray-haired wife with
his fingers.

"When the war over Kuwait broke out, I was meant to

join the army. My father and my uncle sat down to discuss
the question of my military service. My uncle had never
seen the horrors of the front in the Iran War. He was

working in the security department in the city center. My
father made up his mind: He would not give me up to die.
'How can I let them kill my only son?' My uncle argued
with him, trying to explain how it would affect him in his
branch of security if his nephew avoided serving the flag
('Do you want them to execute us all-us and the women?').
My father stuck to his position. My uncle threatened to
arrest me in person if I didn't join the army, but my father
threw him out of the house. 'Listen,' he said, 'it's true I'm a

peaceful man, but this is my son, a piece of my flesh. If you
persist in this, I'll slit your throat.' My uncle had been
drunk that night and raging like a bull. He left shouting



further insults. My father stood up, performed his prayers,
and quickly calmed down. 'God save me from the accursed
devil,' he said. 'He's my brother. It was just drunken talk. 1
know him. He has a good heart.'

"1 was a prisoner in the house for three months. The
streets were full of military police and all the security
agencies. My father decided 1 shouldn't work by day in
case the neighbors noticed me. At night 1 would slip out
into the yard like a thief, with a lantern in my hand. 1
would sit next to the sacks of eggplants, cucumbers, and
peppers, busy with my work and thinking about my life. 1
would mix arak with water in an empty milk can so as

not to get caught by my father, then get drunk and snack
on the many varieties of pickle this tank driver had to
offer. The alcohol would flow in my blood, and 1 would
crawl like a baby toward the septic tank, press my ear

against the concrete cover, and listen. 1 could hear him

laughing. 1 would shut my eyes and imagine the feel of his
bare shoulder. His skin was hot from all the playing and
exertion. 1 no longer remembered his face. My mother
had the only photograph of him, and she wouldn't let
anyone else go near it. She hid it in the wardrobe. She

put the picture in a small wooden box decorated with a

peacock.
"At the crack of dawn my father would get up. He

would usually find me asleep in my place. He would put
his hand on my forehead and 1 would wake up to his

touch. 'Go inside, son. Perform your prayers. May God

prosper you.' He was well aware 1 was drinking arak, but

religion to him didn't mean the words of any prophet, any

'houtjn� holy law or prohibitions. Religion meant love of virtue, as

THE SONG OF THE GOATS 1 L� 9

r-
I



/
-- - . . /

150 HASSAN BLASIM

he would put it to anyone with whom he was discussing
questions of Islamic law.

"I will never forget the day he broke down in tears at
the soccer field. He frightened the children, and I was
embarrassed and disturbed that he was crying. The Baath
party members had executed three young Kurds close to
the soccer field. They tied them to wooden stakes and
shot them dead in full view of the local people. Before
they did it, they announced over loudspeakers, 'These
people are traitors and terrorists who do not deserve to
eat from the bounty of this land or drink its water or
breathe its air.' As usual, the Baathists took the bodies
and left the stakes in place to remind everyone of what
had happened. My father had come to the square to take
me to the cinema. He was crazy about Indian films. When

he saw that one goal was missing an upright he realized
we had taken the stakes to make the goals. Traces of blood
had dried on the wood. My father broke down when one
of the children said, 'We're still missing one goalpost.
Maybe they'll execute another one and we can have the
stake.'

"One summer evening we were invaded again. My
uncle knocked frantically on the door. My mother was
counting money and putting it in an empty tomato paste
jar. My father and I were playing chess. He could beat me
easily, but first he enjoyed giving me the pleasure of taking
his pawns. He would sacrifice them and his other pieces
without taking anything in return, keeping only his king
and queen. Then he would start to destroy my pieces with
his black queen until he had me in checkmate.

"My father went out to the yard to greet my uncle. My



THE SONG OF THE GOATS 151

mother threw on her shawl and followed. They all stood
near the septic tank in anxious discussion, but in low
voices. I watched them from behind the windowpane. I
was still dizzy from drinking the day before. I was wait­
ing for night to come to get drunk again. My mother
rushed to fetch something from under the stairs. My
father and my uncle worked together to empty a barrel
full of pickled cauliflower. My mother came back with a
hammer and a nail. My father laid the barrel flat on the

ground and started to punch holes in it at random with
the nail. He didn't have his artificial leg on. He was hop­
ping around the barrel on one leg as if he were playing or
dancing. My uncle parked the pickup outside the front
door and loaded it with the barrels of pickles. Then my
father came into the living room sweating.

'''Listen, son,' he said, 'there's no time. Your uncle has
information that the police and the party are going to
search all the houses at dawn. Your uncle has loyal friends
in the village of Awran. Stay there a few days till things
calm down.' I climbed into the empty barrel and my
mother closed the lid tight. My father and my uncle lifted
me onto the pickup.

"My father was right. They were brothers, after all,
and they could read each other's minds. My uncle drove

through the streets like a madman to save my life. He

managed to reach the outskirts of the city safely, but all
the roads to the provincial towns and villages had mili­

tary checkpoints. His only option was to take the back
roads. He chose a road through the wheat fields to the
east of the city. Maybe in his panic he mistook the road.

!de. Mr Even the city children knew the chain of rugged and



152 HASSAN BLASIM

rocky hills that lay beyond the wheat fields. Maybe images
of the people tortured in his department had unhinged
his brain. Maybe he imagined his colleagues dissolving
him in tanks of sulphuric acid and the headline SECURITY
OFFICER HELPS NEPHEW ESCAPE IN PICKLE BARREL. As he

drove through the wheat fields, he was barely in control
of the steering wheel. The bumps were about to break my
ribs, and only dust kicked up by the truck crept in through
the holes in the barrel. The barrel stank like the dead cats

on the neighborhood trash heap. Did my uncle pull out

fingernails, gouge out people's eyes, and singe their skin
with branding irons in the vaults of the security depart­
ment? Maybe it was the souls of his victims that drove
him into the ravine, maybe it was my own evil soul, or

maybe it was the soul that preordained everything that is

ephemeral and mysterious in this transitory world.
"Seven barrels lay in the darkness at the bottom of the

cliff like sleeping animals. The pickup had overturned
after my uncle tried to take a second rocky bend in the hill.
The barrels rolled down into the ravine with the truck. I

spent the night unconscious inside the barrel. In the first
hours of morning the rays of sunlight pierced the holes in
the barrel, like lifelines extended to a drowning man. My
mouth was full of blood and my hands were trembling. I
was in pain and frightened. I started to observe the rays of
the sun as they crisscrossed confusingly in the barrel. I
wanted to escape the chaos that had played havoc with my
consciousness. I felt as if I had smoked a ton of marijuana:
a fish coming to its senses in a sardine tin, a dead worm in
an abandoned well, a putrid fetus with crushed bones in a
womb the shape of a barrel. Then my mind fixed on



THE SONG OF THE GOATS 153

ima��\ another image: my brother sinking to the bottom of the
nbin t� septic tank and me diving after him.

"The bleating sounded faint at first, as though a choir
was practicing. One goat started and then another joined
in, then all the goats together, as if they had found the
right key. The rays of the sun moved and fell right in my
eye. I pissed in my pants inside that barrel, appalled at the
cruelty of the world to which I was returning. The goat­
herd called out to his flock, and one of the goats butted
the barrel."

\1



 



 



 



EVERYONE STAYING AT THE REFUGEE RECEPTION

center has two stories-the real one and the one for the
record. The stories for the record are the ones the new refu­
gees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum, written
down in the immigration department and preserved in their

private files. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of
the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy.
That's not to say it's easy to tell the two stories apart. They
merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish between
them. Two days ago a new Iraqi refugee arrived in Malmo,
in southern Sweden. He was in his late thirties. They took
him to the reception center and did some medical tests on
him. Then they gave him a room, a bed, a towel, a bedsheet,
a bar of soap, a knife, fork, and spoon, and a cooking pot.
Today the man is sitting in front of the immigration officer
telling his story at amazing speed, while the immigration
officer asks him to slow down as much as possible.

They told me they had sold me to another group; they
were very cheerful. They stayed up all night drinking

157



//
-- - .

.

/

II

158 HASSAN BLASIM

whiskey and laughing. They even invited me to join them Bu
in a drink, but I declined and told them I was a religious lar
man. They bought me new clothes, and that night they in:
cooked me a chicken and served me fruit and sweets. It

seems I fetched a good price. The leader of the group even i�t,
shed real tears when he said good-bye. He embraced me
like a brother.

"You're a very good man. I wish you all the best, and
good luck in your life," said the man with one eye.

I think I stayed with the first group just three months.
They had kidnapped me on that cold accursed night. That
was in the early winter of 2006. We had orders to go to
the Tigris; it was the first time we had received instruc­
tions directly from the head of the emergency depart­
ment in the hospital. At the bank of the river the policemen
were standing around six headless bodies. The heads had
been put in an empty flour sack in front of the bodies. The

police guessed they were the bodies of some clerics. We
had arrived late because of the heavy rain. The police
piled the bodies onto the ambulance driven by my col­
league Abu Salim, and I carried the sack of heads to my
ambulance. The streets were empty; the only sounds to
break the forlorn silence of the Baghdad night were some
gunshots in the distance and the noise of an American
helicopter patrolling over the Green Zone. We set off

too

��OjtlO
aii
Pro

an

on

all

neo

De

�al

ter

out
along Abu Nawas Street toward Rashid Street, driving at un
medium speed because of the rain. I remembered the m
words the director of the emergency department in the all
hospital often used to say: "When you're carrying an sal
injured person or a patient close to death, the speed of the fo
ambulance shows how humane and responsible you are.



THE REALITY AND THE RECORD 159

hem But when you are carrying severed heads in an ambu­
lance, you needn't go faster than a hearse drawn by mules
in a dark medieval forest."

The director saw himself as a philosopher and an art­
ist, but "born in the wrong country," as he would say. He
took his work seriously nonetheless and considered it a
sacred duty, because to him running the ambulance sec­
tion of the emergency department meant managing the

dividing line between life and death. We called him the
Professor; my other colleagues hated him and called him
mad. I know why they hated him, because the enigmatic
and aggressive way he spoke made him seem screwed up
in the eyes of others. But I retained much respect and

affection for him because of the beautiful and fascinating
things he said. Once he said to me, "Spilled blood and

superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only
creature who kills for bread, or love, or power, because
animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the

only creature who kills because of faith." He would usu­

ally wrap up his speeches by pointing to the sky and

declaiming theatrically, "The question of humanity can
be solved only by constant dread." My colleague Abu
Salim had a notion that the Professor had links with the

terrorist groups because of the violent language he used,
but I would loyally defend the man, because they did not
understand that he was a philosopher who refused to
make foolish jokes, as the stupid ambulance drivers did
all day. I remembered every sentence and every word he

said, for I was captivated by my affection and admiration
for him.

Let me get back to that wretched night. When weJ are.



-- - .
.

,/
� -

160 HASSAN BLASIM

ie

o�

turned toward the Martyrs Bridge I noticed that the
ambulance driven by Abu Salim had disappeared. Then in
the side mirror I caught sight of a police car gaining on us
at high speed. I pulled over to the side in the middle of the
bridge. Four young men in masks and special police uni­
forms got out of the police car. The leader of the group
pointed his pistol in my face and told me to get out of the
vehicle, while his colleagues unloaded the sack of heads
from the ambulance.

"I've been kidnapped and they are going to cut off my
head." That was my first thought when they tied me up
and stuffed me in the trunk of the police car. It took me
only ten minutes to realize what was awaiting me. I
recited the Throne Verse from the Quran three times in
the darkness of the trunk, and I felt that my skin was

starting to peel off. For some reason in those dark
moments I thought about my body weight, maybe 155
pounds. The slower the car went, or the more it turned,
the more frightened I was, and when it picked up speed
again a strange blend of tranquility and anxiety would
pulse through me. Perhaps I thought at those moments of
what the Professor had said about the correlation between

speed and the imminence of death. I didn't understand
exactly what he meant, but he would say that someone
about to die in the forest would be more afraid than some­

one about to die in a speeding ambulance, because the
first one feels that fate has singled him out, while the sec­
ond imagines there are others sticking with him. I also
remember that he once announced with a smile, "I would
like to have my death in a spaceship traveling at the speed
of light."

in

in

m

oi

to

cl

w

n

co

ra

Cl



THE REALITY AND THE RECORD 161

I imagined that all the unidentified and mutilated bod­
ies I had carried in the ambulance since the fall of Bagh­
dad lay before me, and that in the darkness surrounding
me I then saw the Professor picking my severed head from
a pile of trash, while my colleagues made dirty jokes about
my liking for the Professor. I don't think the police car
drove very far before it came to a halt. At least they did not
leave the city. I tried to remember the Rahman Verse of
the Quran, but they got me out of the car and escorted me
into a house that smelled of grilled fish. I could hear a
child crying. They undid my blindfold, and I found myself
in a cold, unfurnished room. Then three madmen laid into
me and beat me to a pulp, until a darkness again descended.

I thought I heard a cock crow at first. I shut my eyes,
but I couldn't sleep. I felt a sharp pain in my left ear. With
difficulty I turned over onto my back and pushed myself
toward the window, which had recently been blocked up.
I was very thirsty. It was easy to work out that I was in a
house in one of Baghdad's old neighborhoods. That was
clear from the build of the room and particularly the old
wooden door.

In fact I don't know exactly what details of my story
matter to you for me to get the right of asylum in your
country. I find it very hard to describe those days of ter­

ror, but I want to mention also some of the things that
matter to me. I felt that God, and behind him the Profes­

sor, would never abandon me throughout my ordeal. I felt
the presence of God intensely in my heart, nurturing my
peace of mind and calling me to patience. The Professor

kept my mind busy and alleviated the loneliness of my
captivity. He was my solace and my comfort.

j !IF_-
.. __

-_--



162 HASSAN BLASIM

I

I
I

Throughout those arduous months I would recall
what the Professor had said about his friend, Dawoud the

engineer. What did he mean by saying that the world is all
interconnected? And where do the power and the will of

God stand in such matters? We were drinking tea at the
hospital door when the Professor said, "While my friend
Dawoud was driving the family car through the streets of
Baghdad, an Iraqi poet in London was writing a fiery arti­
cle in praise of the resistance, with a bottle of whiskey on
the table in front of him to help harden his heart. Because
the world is all interconnected, through feelings, words,
nightmares, and other secret channels, out of the poet's
article jumped three masked men. They stopped the fam­
ily car and killed Dawoud, his wife, his child, and his
father. His mother was waiting for them at home.
Dawoud's mother doesn't know the Iraqi poet nor the
masked men. She knows how to cook the fish that was

awaiting them. The Iraqi poet fell asleep on the sofa in
London in a drunken stupor, while Dawoud's mother's
fish went cold and the sun set in Baghdad."

The wooden door of the room opened and a young
man, tall with a pale and haggard face, came in carrying
breakfast. He smiled at me as he put the food down in
front of me. At first I was uncertain what I could say or do.
But then I threw myself at his feet and implored him tear­
fully, "I am the father of three children.... I'm a religious
man who fears God .... I have nothing to do with politics
or religious denominations God protect you ... I'm
just an ambulance driver before the invasion, and
since the invasion.... I swear by God and his noble
Prophet." The young man put a finger to his lips and



recall rushed out. I felt that my end had come. I drank the cup of
oud tn� tea and performed my prayers in hopes that God would
r\d i all forgive my sins. At the second prostration I felt that a

layer of ice was forming across my body and I almost
cried out in fear, but the young man opened the door, car­

rying a small lighting device attached to a stand, and
accompanied by a boy carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. The

boy stood next to me, pointing the gun at my head, and
from then on he did not leave his place. A fat man in his
forties came in, taking no notice of me. On the wall he

hung a black cloth banner inscribed with a Quranic verse

urging Muslims to fight jihad. Then a masked man came
in with a video camera and a small computer. Then a boy
came in with a small wooden table. The masked man

joked with the boy, tweaked his nose, and thanked him,
then put the computer on the table and busied himself

with setting up the camera in front of the black banner.
The thin young man tried out the lighting system three
times and then left.

"Abu Jihad, Abu Jihad!" the fat man shouted.
The young man's voice came from outside the room:

"Wait a minute. Right you are, Abu Arkan."
This time the young man came back carrying the sack

of heads they had taken from the ambulance. Everyone
blocked their nose because of the stink from the sack. The

fat man asked me to sit in front of the black banner. I felt

that my legs were paralyzed, but the fat man pulled me

roughly by my shirt collar. At that point another man
came in, thick-set with one eye, and ordered the fat man

to let me be. This man had in his hand an army uniform.

The man with one eye sat close to me, with his arm across

THE REALITY AND THE RECORD 163

f ...., ..

_, __ -.__



my shoulders like a friend, and asked me to calm down.
He told me they wouldn't slaughter me if I was coopera­
tive and kindhearted. I didn't understand fully what he
meant by this "kindhearted." He told me it would only
take a few minutes. The one-eyed man took a small piece
of paper from his pocket and asked me to read it. Mean­
while the fat man was taking the decomposing heads out
of the sack and lining them up in front of me. It said on the
piece of paper that I was an officer in the Iraqi army and
these were the heads of other officers, and that accompa- )0
nied by my fellow officers I had raided houses, raped women,
and tortured innocent civilians; that we had received
orders to kill from a senior officer in the u.s. Army, in
return for large financial rewards. The man with one eye
asked me to put on the army uniform, and the cameraman
asked everyone to pull back behind the camera. Then he ill
came up to me and started adjusting my head, as a hair­
dresser does. After that he adjusted the line of heads, then
went back behind the camera and called out, "Off you go."

The cameraman's voice was very familiar. Perhaps it
resembled the voice of a famous actor, or it might have
been like the voice of the Professor when he was making
an exaggerated effort to talk softly. After they filmed the w
videotape, I didn't meet the members of the group again,
other than the young man who brought me food, and he
prevented me from asking any questions. Every time he m
brought food he would tell me a new joke about politi- a(
cians and men of religion. My only wish was that he hI
would let me contact my wife, because I had hidden some fil
money for a rainy day in a place where even the jinn would
never think of looking, but they vehemently rejected my

164 HASSAN BLASIM



ted my

THE REALITY AND THE RECORD 165

request. The one-eyed leader of the group told me that
everything depended on the success of the videotape, and
in fact the tape was such a success so quickly that every­
one was surprised. Al Jazeera broadcast the videotape.
They allowed me to watch television, and on that day they
were jumping for joy, so much so that the fat man kissed
me on the head and said I was a great actor. What made

me angry was the Al Jazeera news anchor, who assured
viewers that the channel had established through reliable
sources that the tape was authentic and that the Ministry
of Defense had admitted that the officers had gone miss­

ing. After the success of the broadcast they started treat­
ing me in a manner that was better than good. They took
trouble over my food and bedding and allowed me to take
a bath. Their kindness culminated on the night they sold
me to the second group. Then three masked men from

that group came into the room, and after the man with

one eye had given me a warm farewell, the new men laid
into me with their fists, tied me up and gagged me, then
shoved me into the trunk of a car that drove off at a terri­

fying speed.
The second group's car traveled far this time. Perhaps

we reached the outskirts of Baghdad. They took me out in'
a desolate village where dogs roamed and barked all over
the place. They held me in a cattle pen; there were two
men who took turns guarding the pen night and day. I
don't know why, but they proceeded to starve me and
humiliate me. They were completely different from the
first group. They wore their masks all the time and never

spoke a word with me. They would communicate with
each other through gestures. In fact there was not a

f ""... _

.. __
-.__



166 HASSAN BLASIM

human voice to be heard from the village, just the barking
of dogs the whole month I spent in the cow pen. re

The hours passed with oppressive tedium. I would �o
hope that anything would happen, rather than this life rl,
sentence with three cows. I gave up thinking about these tn
people, or what religious group or party they belonged to. ni�
I no longer bemoaned my fate but felt I had already lived ne
through what happened to me at some time, and that time nu
was a period that would not last long. But my sense of
this time made it seem slow and confused. It no longer
occurred to me to try to escape or to ask them what they
wanted from me. I felt that I was carrying out some mis­
sion, a binding duty that I had to perform until my last
breath. Perhaps there was a secret power working in ad
league with a human power to playa secret game for pur­
poses too grand for a simple man like me to grasp. "Every
man has both a poetic obligation and a human obliga­
tion," as the Professor used to say. But if that was true,
how could I tell the difference, and easily, between the
limits of the human obligation and those of the poetic
obligation? Because my understanding is that, for exam­
ple, looking after my wife and children is one of my
human obligations, and refusing to hate is a poetic obliga­
tion. But why did the Professor say that we confuse the
two obligations and do not recognize the diabolical ele-
ment that drives them both? Because the diabolical obli-

ta�

gations imply the capacity to stand in the face of a man
when he is pushing his own humanity toward the abyss,
and this is too much for the mind of a simple man like me,
who barely completed his intermediate education, at least
I think so.

W(

th

ne

sa



What I'm saying has nothing to do with my asylum
request. What matters to you is the horror. If the Profes­

sor were here, he would say that the horror lies in the sim­

plest of puzzles that shine in a cold star in the sky over
this city. In the end they came into the cow pen after mid­

night one night. One of the masked men spread one cor­
ner of the pen with fine carpets. Then his companion
hung a black banner inscribed, "The Islamic Jihad Group,
Iraq Branch." Then the cameraman came in with his

camera, and it struck me that he was the same camera­

man as the one with the first group. His hand gestures

were the same as those of the first cameraman. The only
difference was that he was now communicating with the

others through gestures alone. They asked me to put on a
white dishdasha and sit in front of the black banner. They
gave me a piece of paper and told me to read out loud what

was written on it: that I belonged to the Mehdi Army and
I was a famous killer, I had cut off the heads of hundreds

of Sunni men, and I had support from Iran. Before I'd fin­

ished reading, one of the cows gave a loud moo, so the
cameraman asked me to read it again. One of the men

took the three cows away so that we could finish off the

cow pen scene.

I later realized that everyone who bought me was

moving me across the same bridge. I don't know why. One

group would take me across the Martyrs Bridge toward

Karkh on the west bank of the Tigris, then the next group
would take me back across the same bridge to Rasafa on

ike me, the east bank.
If I go on like this, I think my story will

at Jeast never end, and I'm
worried you'll say what others have

said about it. So I think it would be best if I summarize

arkin

THE REALITY AND THE RECORD 167



168 HASSAN BLASIM

tape. Their decisive response was a beating I will never
forget.

Throughout the year and a half of my kidnapping
experience, I was moved from one hiding place to another.
They shot video of me talking about how I was a treacher­
ous Kurd, an infidel Christian, a Saudi terrorist, a Syrian
Baathist intelligence agent, or a Revolutionary Guard
from Zoroastrian Iran. On these videotapes I murdered,
raped, started fires, planted bombs, and carried out
crimes that no sane person would even imagine. All these
tapes were broadcast on satellite channels around the
world. Experts, journalists, and politicians sat there dis­
cussing what I said and did. The only bad luck we ran into
was when we made a video in which I appeared as a Span­
ish soldier, with a resistance fighter holding a knife to
my neck, demanding Spanish forces withdraw from Iraq.
All the satellite stations refused to broadcast the tape be-

dOl

ing
tnr

the story for you, rather than have you accuse me of mak- ca

ing it up.
They sold me to a third group. The car sped across the grl

Martyrs Bridge once again. I was moved to a luxurious na
house, and this time my prison was a bedroom with a in I

lovely comfortable bed, the kind in which you see film Tn
stars having sex. My fear evaporated and I began to grasp tri
the concept of the secret mission for which they had cho- Fiv
sen me. I carried out the mission so as not to lose my head, �cr
but I also thought I would test their reaction in certain �n
matters. After filming a new video in which I spoke about fro
how I belonged to Sunni Islamist groups and about my lea
work blowing up Shiite mosques and public markets, I mal
asked them for some money as payment for making the

ca

tne

mi

wn

tne

Cra

eve

cnl

tn

It

ca

nl�
COl

Jl



mak·

THE REALITY AND THE RECORD 169

cause Spanish forces had left the country a year earlier.
I almost paid a heavy price for this mistake, when the
group holding me wanted to kill me in revenge for what
had happened, but the cameraman saved me by suggest­
ing another wonderful idea, the last of my videotape roles.
They dressed me in the costume of an Afghan fighter,
trimmed my beard, and put a black turban on my head.
Five men stood behind me, and they brought in six men
screaming and crying out for help from God, his Prophet,
and the Prophet's family. They slaughtered the men in
front of me like sheep as I announced that I was the new
leader of the al Qaeda organization in Mesopotamia and
made threats against everyone in creation.

Late one night the cameraman brought me my old
clothes and took me to the ambulance, which was stand­

ing at the door. They put those six heads in a sack and
threw it into the vehicle. At that moment I noticed the

cameraman's gestures, and I thought that surely he was
the cameraman for all the groups and maybe the master­
mind of this dreadful game. I sat behind the steering
wheel with trembling hands. Then the cameraman gave
the order from behind his mask: "You know the way.
Cross the Martyrs Bridge, to the hospital."

I am asking for asylum in your country because of

everyone. They are all killers and schemers-my wife, my
children, my neighbors, my colleagues, God, his Prophet,
the government, the newspapers, even the Professor who

I thought an angel, and now I have suspicions that the
cameraman with the terrorist groups was the Professor

himself. His enigmatic language was merely proof of his
connivance and his vile nature. They all told me I hadn't



170 HASSAN BLASIM

been away for a year and half, because I came back the

morning after working that rainy night, and on that very
morning the Professor said to me, "The world is just a

bloody and hypothetical story, and we are all killers and
heroes." And those six heads cannot be proof of what I'm

saying, just as they are not proof that the night will not

spread across the sky.

Three days after this story was filed away in the records of
the immigration department, they took the man who told it
to the psychiatric hospital. Before the doctor could start

asking him about his childhood memories, the ambulance
driver summed up his real story in four words: "I want to

sleep."
It was a humble entreaty.



 



-

--- .
.

/



173

THE SAYING "THE BODY MUST BE PROTECTED, NOT

the thoughts'" sprang to his mind as he sat on the toilet
seat in a Chinese restaurant. He speculated that his mind
wanted to solve the puzzle of "Why that damned smile
when I wake up in the morning?" He came out of the rest­
room and asked for a cup of green tea. He had left the

house early that day, before his wife and daughter had
gotten up. From the restaurant he sent his wife a text

message saying he had gone out for a short walk and
would be back in an hour. Now the hour was running out.
He remembered that yesterday she had asked him to buy
a new vacuum cleaner on Monday. Just then he noticed
two old women sitting in a corner of the restaurant, doing
a crossword in the newspaper together. One of them was

holding the pen and the other was thinking, with a finger
on her nose. The day before, the vacuum cleaner had

stopped working when he was cleaning the little girl's
room. Now he saw the reflection of his smile in the tea­

cup, and it turned green.

* Attributed to Albert Camus.

/.
I "'�

_. __ -_



174 HASSAN BLASIM

He began to think about the question of thoughts and
the body as he watched the two women. Before going into
the restaurant he'd witnessed a group of children standing
at the traffic lights waiting for green. They stood in two
lines with two teachers, one at the front and one at the

back. He guessed how many children there were-twelve,
of the future hope variety. His mind wagged its tail with

delight. They would no doubt be doctors, engineers, mur­

derers, poets, alcoholics, and unemployed people, twelve
children being the new cover of an old story. His mind

slowly moved forward, and he began to smell the stench of
death. Those are our children and the ones who will visit

our graves, he said. Twelve ideas crossing the street,
cheerful and energetic. They are the powerhouse of the
future.

He stood up and headed to the bathroom again. He
washed his face for the tenth time, but the smile was still

stuck there. If he had not had trouble with fantasies in the

past, he would have behaved like any sensible man, looked

in the mirror, and said, "Impossible." But he was used to

surprises, and his experiences had taught him not to
waste time looking for reasons for his predicaments and
to look for the emergency exit instead. His mind guessed
that the smile had come to him from a previous dream. It
was a naive, cinematic dream that had absolutely nothing
to do with his past:

He kisses her on the lips and tries to climb the stairs,
then sits back down at the foot of them. He smiles and

leans his head against the wall. She brushes her teeth in
the kitchen and shouts out to him, asking him to bring the
bedsheet. She wants to wash it. But now he's going down a

we

the

yea
ner

nan

tne

tne

ever

now

�ear
�eau

toot

oeat'

tne

I

ni� �

toers

wito

Lue

liKe
was

were



THAT INAUSPICIOUS SMILE 175

ana well like a feather tumbling through the air. He is far from
the light, a dead man who doesn't hear her last call. Four
years after this stair incident the woman dies. They find
her lying on the kitchen table with the toothbrush in her
hand and, on the brush, a piece of meat the size of an ant.

Shall we say that after the woman brushes her teeth,
the rays of the sun stream through the window, or that
the rain is beating the windowpane? The dream recurs
every night. There's a need for this ancient music, and yet
how many of these timeless death stories have disap­
peared? What eternal naivete there is in tales about our
beautiful death! These little stories that are pointed like a
toothbrush. Why did we contrive to complicate these
death stories? A giant shadow poses these questions to
the man in the dream.

In the morning the man woke up smiling, then he saw
his smile in the mirror. It seemed to have stayed stuck
there after the dream. Once, in an unusual discussion

with a member of the Association for the Defense of the

Luckless, he said:
"I didn't want my wife and daughter to see me smiling

like an idiot for no reason. It was an insignificant smile. It
was wide, but it didn't show my damaged teeth. My lips
were sealed like the lips of a clown. I rubbed my face with

soap and water, but the smile was still stuck there. I

brushed my teeth three times, but it stayed there like
indelible ink. I thought, 'Maybe it will disappear as the

day proceeds, as the snow melts on a sunny morning.' I
don't know how such thoughts occurred to me. Then sud­

denly I felt intensely hot, although the season was winter.

)wna I put on a light sports shirt printed on the back with a

//
' .....

-. - -
-

_--



176 HASSAN BLASIM

picture of a black crow standing on a basketball. The ball
was marked like a map of the world. I put on a clean pair
of jeans and my black winter coat. I resolved to solve the

mystery of that smile. The wife and daughter have put up
with much-I worry I might drive them mad-because
I've had a succession of disasters in this world. I'm not

luckless, so stop sticking that stupid label on me.
"The snow was dancing down. It was amazing and

beautiful. For the first time the sky was so munificent,
when it yielded all these jewels to me. I had known feelings
like these before. You wake up and smell a morning, then

you think, 'Life still suits me.' There are disguised moments
of sadness that hide in various clothes and smells. You get

drunk and weep and think you have cleared away a large
rock blocking the channels of your day, which had come to
an end with a painful blow. A man I don't know passed
close by me, wearing a heavy winter coat, a woolen scarf

wrapped around his neck, and on his head a black hat, on
which the snowflakes had gathered. He kept looking and

turning toward me with a smile as he walked in the oppo- win

site direction. I wanted to return his smile. I passed my fin-

gers along my lips. So I didn't need a new smile. I made do ner
with turning toward him quickly to offer him in return ore
that dream smile of mine. Ine

ill

nal

girl
out

Ine

tni

clas

off�

�itti

oac

ana

ans

tur

I

II
�

"I went into the Chinese restaurant to have some tea mo

and check up on the smile in the mirror. I saw two old les- lao

bians doing the crossword puzzle. I sent my wife a second slov
message on my phone, telling her I would be back a little
late and would go straight to the shops to buy the vacuum
cleaner. I had to find a solution for the damned smile. I

thought of going to the hospital. Perhaps I'm ill and the



e ball smile is just an alarm bell. But instead of that I found
� pair myself going into a cinema and buying a ticket. I felt a
�e th� nasty fever spreading through my body. There were some
pu u� girls under a large poster of next week's film. What stood

out was Dracula's fangs and the blood running down from
the corners of his mouth. There was a smile on the face of
this monster. The girls sat down as though they were in
class at school. All of them gave me stiff looks, with a tinge
of fear. Then they smiled in turn, from right to left. I was
sitting in front of them. I took off my coat and turned my
back on them so that they could clearly see the basketball
and the crow. Don't ask me why I did that. Do you have an
answer to this damned smile? Then I checked on the fea­

tures of my face in the mirrors in the foyer. I confess I was
somewhat satisfied with this new smile. At least I don't

have to contract my face muscles in order to smile, as other

people do. I forgot to tell you that one of the old lesbians
told me to keep this beautiful smile because the Finns are
gloomy in winter and look depressed, which makes the
winter darker and more dreary.

"The film was a disgusting, fast-paced tearjerker. The
heroine set fire to her house with her husband and chil­

dren inside. Now she's screaming and sobbing in front of
the fire and the neighbors have their fingers on their
mouths as though they are about to vomit. The elegant
lady sitting near me was drowning in tears. She turned
slowly toward me and muttered in shock, 'The pig!' I
turned to her in disbelief. Then she looked at me again but
this time disdainfully. She began to look back and forth
like an imbecile between the disaster of the heroine in the

film and my beaming face. She looked as though she were

THAT INAUSPICIOUS SMILE 177



revolted and wanted to slap me because of my smile. I

wanted to explain to her, 'I'm not smiling at what hap­

pened to the woman and her house, lady (although she's a

bitch like you). I woke up this morning and found this

smile had been forced upon me.'

"I ignored the woman and tried to pretend I pitied the
Wh

woman in the film, who took a revolver out of her belt and mun

fired a bullet into her head amid a crowd of people, who

quickly dispersed when the fire engines arrived.
was

"When the lights came on in the cinema, the elegant intn

lady stood up and insulted me, this time out loud. 'Ani- �mil

mal, son of a bitch!' she shouted. mitt

"The audience turned toward me, but all they did was Ath

smile as they looked at my face. Were they smiling at the wne

insult, or at the crow on the ball, or because I answered rour
the woman's insult with my cold smile? I have to get rid of Lu�to

this smile as soon as possible. My wife called me; I lied Kind

and said I was still looking for a suitable vacuum cleaner. was

"The snow kept falling, and it sparkled even more notio
when a light wind rose and made it fall at a slant. I was tnan

frightened and confused, thinking that this smile might snav

appear when some disaster happens. What if a bus runs realil
over someone now and his guts come out of his ass? Surely fun
there would be a panicky crowd. What if they noticed my one
smile as I joined them in watching this free spectacle? Tne
Without doubt they would give me a thorough beating. it in
How would I explain to them that my smile had nothing Dar
to do with what had happened? Or who would put up
with you smiling in his face when, for example, his baby
was dying of hunger in front of his eyes? Could you calmly
explain to him that you are smiling in derision at life,

178 HASSAN BLASIM



,I which produced this child without reason and then took
ap· it away with a kick in the guts, also without reason?

Wouldn't the father and mother of this child stab you and
tear apart this hard-hearted animal? I hurried off to a bar

nearby. The body must be protected, not the thoughts.
What if you were to lose control over the inherited com­

munal gestures that unite us in fear and in happiness?
"I felt a stomach pain when I went into the bar, which

was suspiciously crowded. The Finns start drinking early
in the day. My arrival in the bar set off a smile-fest, but the
smiles gradually waned and turned into laughs and inter­
mittent comments that were, technically, quick insults.
At first I didn't understand why the bartender hesitated
when I ordered a beer. Then he said, 'You should drink up
your beer quickly and leave.' In turn I looked at the other
customers, angry at such an unfriendly reception. What
kind of bar is this? I said that out loud, but as you know, I
was smiling in spite of myself. Perhaps they had the
notion that I was just a tame animal that had taken more
than his fair share. There were four young men with

shaved heads in black leather jackets. Only then did I
realize that this was a neo- Nazi bar. They were making
fun of my daring or my stupidity, looking at me between
one drink and another and making ugly jokes and insults.
Then one of them stood up, took out his cock, and waved
it in my face. Everyone burst out laughing, including the
bartender. I thought I would keep myself under control,
drink the beer quickly, and escape this filthy trap. But I
was stupid. I pretended to be brave and indifferent. I sat
there like a captain smiling on his ship. But the bartender,
that son of a whore, asked me to leave at once, for fear of

re:ea

riaof

I lid

ant:,

mor�

lwai

,ruOi

racle1

atin�,
thin�

Imly
: Jife,

THAT INAUSPICIOUS SMILE 179



180 HASSAN BLASIM

problems. Of course, I was delighted with this expulsion. gn

And so I left the Nazis' bar like a frightened mouse. ha

"It was Sunday and I had thought it was Monday. At

least I remembered that, and then I thought my wife m

would be angry when she read my text messages. Which

electrical goods stores are these that open on Sunday?
Now, what other lie could I make up to cover my first lie?

I thought of going home and confessing everything to my nr�

wife. The smile would be proof I was telling the truth. But Dut

my feelings were contradictory. Then I entered a small �na

shop, bought six bottles of beer, and went to the park. Do Gan

I really have bad luck? Or was I born by mistake? For

"The streets were empty, and the wind was playing oft

havoc and making a racket when it tried to shift things left

from their place. The wind blew over a price list parked tnei
outside a closed restaurant, then it brought along a large tna
cardboard box, which flew around like half of a dismem-

bered body. There were empty cigarette packs racing wni
each other about. Unconsciously I hummed a tune. I ea��
wanted to sing, but I did not know which song to choose. out
I didn't have the words to any song in my head. A slight nes

anxiety came over me. Had the words to songs been for
sucked out of my memory to this extent? All I could do up I

was make up some little songs. I kept humming in hopes win
that I would come across some words in a while, but stu­

pid tears came instead of words. The wind blew an empty
white bag, which passed close to my ear and made me for­

get the tune. It had frightened me. The bag did a somer-
sault at the junction as though it was deciding which way Its
to go. It rose uncertainly for a moment, then fell in a lurch ha
to the asphalt. This time the wind dragged it along the In'



lion,

THAT INAUSPICIOUS SMILE 181

ground in spite of itself and left it next to the trash that
had accumulated at the mouth of the street drain.

"I reached the yard thinking about how I had lied to
my wife. Definitely she would be convinced I'd had a date
with a woman. Now she would be in a rage, stuffing my
clothes into a suitcase in readiness to throw me out.

"When I looked through the thick trees I thought at
first that the wind had blown in some other black bags,
but in reality it had brought those four young men with
shaved heads. With the instinct of an animal I sensed

danger. I caught their smell when they came close to me.
For no reason I stood up to piss behind a giant tree. Two
of them surrounded me on the right and the others on the
left. They looked like Guardian Angels. They took out
their cocks and all of them pissed with vigor, like donkeys
that had not pissed for years. As they pissed they looked
at me stiffly and contemptuously because of my cock,
which out of fear had not released a single drop. I was
easy prey, and cowardly. The noise of their piss gushing
out filled the air, like a waterfall cascading in the dark­
ness. The wind died down, or slowed down to make space
for the symphony of their pissing. The smell of it drifted
up to my brain like poisonous nerve gas, or perhaps the
wind wanted to give the sky a free look.

"Everything was over with lightning speed. In just a
few minutes they gave vent to all possible animal instincts,
giving me a thorough beating. Then they ran off, as though
the wind had picked them up, hidden them in the folds of
its solemn cloak, and gone back to work after the youths
had carried out their mission to perfection. I was bleed­
ing from my ear, my nose, my teeth, and my eye, and from

, ..,., -

.. --
-_



-

-_ 0
0

� o__

/

182 HASSAN BLASIM

the blocked nostrils of my soul as well. I tried to get up. I th

wished that this wind, a slave to the sky in blind obedi - pa�
ence and allegiance, would pick me up too, but it didn't. It

was sweeping up everything but my empty body, which In

lay bleeding by the tree, as though what had happened
was part of a humorous story full of banal scrapes. I saw

empty bags of every color and shape. They were hovering
around me at crazy speeds, as though they were making
me a special offer of leftover bones, times, and places.
They did not seem happy with me, nor did the force blow-

ing them. A torn gray bag flew past, and I realized it was

my mother's shawl. A burned brain flew by on giant
wings. A shoal of fish swam past, carrying scraps of a

young girl's flesh. The flying vipers of economic sanctions
flew by, wrapped around their food of humans and
dreams. All my wife's underwear went past, one pair
dripping blood, another semen, the next one ink, and so
on. Myoid notebooks passed by, clapping their covers.

Scorpions in a bottle went past, my summer shirts, medi-

cines that had expired, and cartons of baby milk. Bread
went by on wings of shit. Poems passed, pissing on them-
selves like disabled children. With their savage dogs the

guards on the borders I had walked across went past. My
cross-eyed brother, who wears the turban of an imam.

My severed and bloodied fingers flew by, my daughter,
Mariam, in her pram, disfigured because I loved her too
much. My wife went by, playing a trumpet that screeched
like an owl.

"My whole life passed page by page, all the jams and

scrapes I had been through, page after page. Even when I
closed my eyes it didn't stop. Pain and vertigo had me in



·up. I

�bed\·
in't.It
which

ppenea

THAT INAUSPICIOUS SMILE 183

their power. The pages went past in the darkness, white
page after page."

In the evening the man was laid out on a bed in the hospi­
tal, smiling at his wife and his daughter, who was holding
a beautiful bunch of flowers.

"Why are you smiling like that, Daddy?" Mariam
asked in surprise.

7
. �--

�

. -_
-



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- --- "-'--

II



 



 



IN IRAQ HIS NAME WAS SALIM ABDUL HUSAIN, AND

he worked for the municipality in the cleaning depart­
ment, part of a group assigned by the manager to clear up
in the aftermath of explosions. He died in Holland in
2009 under another name: Carlos Fuentes.

Bored and disgusted as on every miserable day, Salim
and his colleagues were sweeping a street market after an
oil tanker had exploded nearby, incinerating chickens,
fruit and vegetables, and some people. They were sweep­
ing the market slowly and cautiously for fear they might
sweep up with the debris any human body parts left over.
But they were always looking for an intact wallet or per­
haps a gold chain, a ring, or a watch that could still tell the
time. Salim was not as lucky as his colleagues in finding
the valuables left over from death. He needed money to

buy a visa to go to Holland and escape this hell of fire and
death. His only lucky find was a man's finger with a valu­
able silver ring of great beauty. Salim put his foot over the

finger, bent down carefully, and with disgust pulled the
silver ring off. He picked up the finger and put it in a black

bag where they collected all the body parts. The ring

187

7
'

""--_ -_ -_



ended up on Salim's finger; he would contemplate the

gemstone in surprise and wonder, and in the end he aban-
an

doned the idea of selling it. Might one say that he felt a tes

secret spiritual relationship with the ring?
When he applied for asylum in Holland he also applied

to change his name: from Salim Abdul Husain to Carlos

Fuentes. He explained his request to the official in the

immigration department on the grounds that he was

frightened of the fanatical Islamist groups, because his

request for asylum was based on his work as a translator
for the U.S. forces, and his fear that someone might assas­
sinate him as a traitor to his country. Salim had consulted

his cousin who lived in France about changing his name.

He called him on his cell phone from the immigration
department because Salim had no clear idea of a new for­

eign name that would suit him. In his apartment in France

his cousin was taking a deep drag on a joint when Salim
called. Suppressing a laugh, his cousin said, "You're quite
right. It's a hundred times better to be from Senegal or
China than it is to have an Arab name in Europe. But you
couldn't possibly have a name like Jack or Stephen - I mean,
a European name. Perhaps you should choose a brown
name-a Cuban or Argentine name would suit your com­

plexion, which is the color of burnt barley bread." His
cousin was looking through a pile of newspapers in the
kitchen as he continued the conversation on the phone,
and he remembered that two days earlier he had read a

name, perhaps a Spanish name, in a literary article of me
which he did not understand much. Salim thanked his

188 HASSAN BLASIM

anae

lifeF

tnes

tnd

woul�

ana

tnet

�new

walK

Wny

resp

tfiey'
�eac '

tfieiD

twen

ern

cousin warmly for the help he had given him and wished Eve
him a happy life in the great country of France. his



THE NIGHTMARES OF CARLOS FUENTES 189

the

�an·
fel a

Carlos Fuentes was very happy with his new name,
and the beauty of Amsterdam made him happy too. Fuen­
tes wasted no time. He joined classes to learn Dutch and
promised himself he would not speak Arabic from then
on, or mix with Arabs or Iraqis, whatever happened in life.
"Had enough of misery, backwardness, death, shit, piss,
and camels," he said to himself. In the first year of his new
life Fuentes let nothing pass without comparing it with
the state of affairs in his original country, sometimes in
the form of a question, sometimes as an exclamation. He
would walk down the street muttering to himself sulkily
and enviously, "Look how clean the streets are! Look at
the toilet seat; it's sparkling clean! Why can't we eat like
them? We gobble down our food as though it's about to
disappear. If this girl wearing a short skirt and showing
her legs were now walking across Eastern Gate Square,
she would disappear in an instant. She would only have to
walk ten yards and the ground would swallow her up.
Why are the trees so green and beautiful, as though
they're washed with water every day? Why can't we be
peaceful like them? We live in houses like pigsties while
their houses are warm, safe, and colorful. Why do they
respect dogs as much as humans? Why do we masturbate

twenty-four hours a day? How can we get a decent gov­
ernment like theirs?" Everything Carlos Fuentes saw
amazed him and humiliated him at the same time, from

reaoa the softness of the toilet paper in Holland to the parlia-

de of ment building protected only by security cameras.

d hi) Carlos Fuentes's
life went on as he had planned it.

j-heo Every day he made progress in burying his identity and
his past. He always scoffed at the immigrants and other



190 HASSAN BLASIM

foreigners who did not respect the rules of Dutch life and

who complained all the time. He called them "retarded

gerbils." They work in restaurants illegally, they don't pay
taxes, and they don't respect any law. They are Stone Age

savages. They hate the Dutch, who have fed and housed

them. He felt he was the only one who deserved to be

adopted by this compassionate and tolerant country, and

that the Dutch government should expel all those who

did not learn the language properly and anyone who com­

mitted the slightest misdemeanor, even crossing the

street in violation of the safety code. Let them go shit

there in their shitty countries.
After learning Dutch in record time, to the surprise of

everyone who knew him, Carlos Fuentes worked nonstop,

paid his taxes, and refused to live on welfare. The high­
light of his efforts to integrate his mind and spirit into

Dutch society came when he acquired a good-hearted
Dutch girlfriend who loved and respected him. She

weighed two hundred pounds and had childlike features,
like a cartoon character. Fuentes tried hard to treat her as

a sensitive and liberated man would, like a Western man,
in fact a little more so. Of course, he always introduced
himself as someone of Mexican origin whose father had

left his country and settled in Iraq to work as an engineer
with the oil companies. Carlos liked to describe the Iraqi

people as an uncivilized and backward people who did

not know what humanity means. "They are just savage
clans," he would say.

Because of his marriage to a Dutch woman, his profi­
ciency in Dutch, his enrollment in numerous courses on

Dutch culture and history, and the fact that he had no

erD� �

wears

nrsto

newa

ni� D

car

the
We



THE NIGHTMARES OF CARLOS FUENTES 191

legal problems or criminal record in his file, he was able
to obtain Dutch citizenship sooner than other immi­
grants could even dream of, and Carlos Fuentes decided
to celebrate every year the anniversary of the day he
became a Dutch national. Fuentes felt that his skin and
blood had changed forever and that his lungs were now
breathing real life. To strengthen his determination he
would always repeat, "Yes, give me a country that treats
me with respect, so that I can worship it all my life and
pray for it."

That's how things were until the dream problem
began and everything fell to pieces, or as they say: Prov­
erbs and old adages do not wear out; it's only man that
wears out. The wind did not blow fair for Fuentes. The

first of the dreams was grim and distressing. In the dream
he was unable to speak Dutch. He was standing in front of
his Dutch boss and speaking to him in an Iraqi dialect,
which caused him great concern and a horrible pain in
his head. He would wake up soaked in sweat, then burst

into tears. At first he thought they were just fleeting
dreams that would inevitably pass. But the dreams con­
tinued to assail him without mercy. In his dreams he saw

a group of children in the poor district where he was

born, running after him and making fun of his new name.

They were shouting after him and clapping: "Carlos the
coward, Carlos the sissy, Carlos the silly billy." These irri­

tating dreams evolved night after night into terrifying
nightmares. One night he dreamt that he had planted a
car bomb in the center of Amsterdam. He was standing in
the courtroom, ashamed and embarrassed. The judges

� no were strict and
would not let him speak Dutch, with the



/
-

- .

"-- - ______.__ �-----

192 HASSAN BLASIM

intent to humiliate and degrade him. They fetched him an

Iraqi translator, who asked him not to speak in his incom- havi

prehensible rustic accent, which added to his agony and Duyi
distress. his

Fuentes began to sit in the library for hours looking
through books about dreams. On his first visit he came ta a
across a book called The Forgotten Language, by Erich nasa
Fromm. He did not understand much of it, and he did not inwal

like the opinions of the writer, which he could not fully at the

grasp because he had not even graduated from middle Decau
school. "This is pure bullshit," Fuentes said as he read of nig
Fromm's book: "We are free when we are asleep, in fact examp
freer than we are when awake .... We may resemble

angels in that we are not subject to the laws of reality.
During sleep the realm of necessity recedes and gives way
to the realm of freedom. The existence of the ego becomes

the only reference point for thoughts and feelings."
Feeling a headache, Fuentes put the book back. How

can we be free when we cannot control our dreams? What

nonsense! Fuentes asked the librarian if there were any

simple books on dreams. The librarian did not under­
stand his question properly, or else she wanted to show
off how cultured and well read she was on the subject.
She told him of a book about the connection between

�o th

thea
dreams and food and how one sleeps, then she started to

give him more information and advice. She also directed
him to a library that had specialist magazines on the

mysteries of the world of dreams.
Fuentes's wife had noticed her husband's strange be­

havior, as well as the changes in his eating and sleeping
habits and in when he went into and came out of the

read

myst

appr
nak,

to

me

roo



THE NIGHTMARES OF CARLOS FUENTES 193

bathroom. Fuentes no longer, for example, ate sweet potato,
having previously liked it in all its forms. He was always
buying poultry, which was usually expensive. Of course,
his wife did not know he had read that eating any root
vegetable would probably be the cause of dreams related
to a person's past and roots. Eating the roots of plants
has an effect different from that of eating fish, which live
in water, or eating the fruits of trees. Fuentes would sit
at the table chewing each piece of food like a camel,
because he had read that chewing it well helps to get rid
of nightmares. He had read nothing about poultry, for
example, but he just guessed that eating the fowl of the
air might bring about dreams that were happier and more
liberated.

In all his attempts to better integrate his dreams with
his new life, he would veer between what he imagined
and the information he found in books. In the end he

. How came to this idea: His ambition went beyond getting rid of
\\bi troublesome dreams; he had to control the dreams, to

modify them, purge them of all their foul air, and inte­

grate them with the salubrious rules of life in Holland.

The dreams must learn the new language of the country
so that they could incorporate new images and ideas. All
the old gloomy and miserable faces had to go. So Fuentes
read more and more books and magazines about the

ectea mysteries of sleep and dreams according to a variety of

n toe approaches and philosophies. He also gave up sleeping
naked and touching his wife's naked skin. In bed he began

e De- to wear a thick woolen overcoat, which gave rise to argu-

ping ments with his wife, and so he
had to go to the sitting

f the room and sleep on the sofa. Nakedness attracts the sleeper



-

.

� "_-

to the zone of childhood; that's what he read too. Every

day at 12:05 exactly he would go and take a bath, and after

coming out of the bathroom he would sit at the kitchen

table and take some drops of jasmine oil. Before going to
bed at night he would write down on a piece of paper the
main sedative foods, which he would buy the following
day. This state of affairs went on for more than a month,

ana

and Fuentes did not achieve good results. But he was

patient and his will was invincible. As the days passed he
started to perform mysterious secret rituals: He would

dye his hair and his toenails green and sleep on his stom- \Viln�

ach repeating obscure words. One night he painted his urne
face like an American Indian, slept wearing diaphanous iijfln

orange pajamas, and put under his pillow three feathers j�nin
taken from various birds. @lne

Fuentes's dignity did not permit him to tell his wife nr)la

what was happening to him. He believed it was his prob- AOQul

lem and he could overcome it, since in the past he had

survived the most trying and miserable conditions. In

return his wife was more indulgent of his eccentric be-

havior, because she had not forgotten how kind and gen - Dule
erous he was. She decided to give him another chance frenc
before intervening and putting an end to what was hap- IneN

pening. F

III
194 HASSAN BLASIM

I
, I

On one beautiful summer night Carlos Fuentes was

sleeping in a military uniform with a toy plastic rifle by
his side. As soon as he began to dream, a wish he had long
awaited came true for the first time: He realized in his

dream that he was dreaming. This was exactly what he
had been seeking, to activate his conscious mind inside
the dream so that he could sweep out all the rubbish of

the

DeeD

Hes

Husa
and

her

pav

his



THE NIGHTMARES OF CARLOS FUENTES 195

the unconscious. In the dream he was standing in front of
the door to an old building that looked as though it had
been ravaged by fire in its previous life. The building was
in central Baghdad. What annoyed him was seeing things
through the telescopic sights of the rifle he was holding in
his hands. Fuentes broke through the door of the building
and went into one flat after another, mercilessly wiping
out everyone inside. Even the children did not survive the

bursts of bullets. There was screaming, panic, and chaos.
But Fuentes had strong nerves and picked off his victims
with skill and precision. He was worried he might wake
up before he had completed his mission, and he thought,
"If I had some hand grenades I could very soon finish the
job in this building and move on to somewhere else." But
on the sixth floor a surprise hit him when he stormed the
first apartment and found himself face-to-face with Salim

Abdul Husain! Salim was standing naked next to the win­
dow, holding a broom stained with blood. With a trem­
bling hand Fuentes aimed his rifle at Salim's head. Salim

began to smile and repeated in derision, "Salim the

Dutchman, Salim the Mexican, Salim the Iraqi, Salim the

Frenchman, Salim the Indian, Salim the Pakistani, Salim
the Nigerian ...

"

Fuentes's nerves snapped and he panicked. He let out
a resounding scream and started to spray Salim Abdul
Husain with bullets, but Salim jumped out the window
and not a single bullet hit him.

When Fuentes's wife woke up to the scream and stuck

her head out the window, Carlos Fuentes was dead on the

pavement, and a pool of blood was spreading slowly under
his head. Perhaps Fuentes would have forgiven the Dutch

ioe

;h of



196 HASSAN BLASIM

newspapers, which wrote that an Iraqi man had com­
mitted suicide at night by jumping from a sixth-floor
window, instead of writing that a Dutch national had
committed suicide. But he will never forgive his brothers,
who had his body taken back to Iraq and buried in the

cemetery in Najaf. The most beautiful part of the Carlos
Fuentes story, however, is the image captured by an ama­
teur photographer who lived close to the scene of the inci­
dent. The young man took the picture from a low angle.
The police had covered the body; the only part that pro­
truded from under the blue sheet was his outstretched

right hand. The picture was in black and white, but the
stone in the ring on Carlos Fuentes's finger glowed red in
the foreground, like a sun in hell.

8 rj 3 7



 



- - .

- ------�-



O:JL../.JI D..LU,J\."

Bal-asirn, Hasan.
The corpse"exhibition and
other stories of Iraq



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