The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

The Composer

JAAFAR AL-MUTALLIBI WAS BORN IN THE TOWN OF al-Amara. In 1973 he resigned from the Communist party and joined the ruling Baath party. In the same year his wife gave birth to their second son. Jaafar was a professional lute player and a renowned composer of patriotic songs. He was killed in the uprising in the city of Kirkuk in 1991.

——

Today I can tell you about how he died. Do you see this old woman shouting out the price of fish? She’s my mother. We’ve been selling fish since we came back to Baghdad. Let me help her empty the crate of fish, then let’s go to a nearby coffee shop and talk.

——

After the end of the war between Iraq and Iran my father started to proclaim his atheism blatantly and caused us many problems. One evening he came home with his shirt stained with blood. It seems he’d had a nosebleed after one of his friends punched him. They were playing dominoes in the coffee shop when my father launched into a tirade of obscene insults to God and the Prophet. He made them up and set them to music during the game. As you know, he was a well-known composer. At first my father whistled a tune composed in the military style, then he added a new insult: a nail in the testicle of your imam’s sister.

Many people burst out laughing when they heard the insults my father’s imagination came up with, but they soon began to keep away from him and ask God for forgiveness. Some of them avoided meeting him in the street. One of them told him in jest one day that he hoped a truck loaded with steel would run him over, but everyone was frightened of his connection with the government. The day after he was punched he wrote a report for party headquarters about Abu Alaa, the man who hit him, and two days later Abu Alaa disappeared. We were living in a neighborhood called the Second Qadissiya, which consisted of houses the government had assigned to junior army officers, other people who had moved from cities in the south and center of the country, and the families of Kurds who worked for the regime. We were the only family in the neighborhood that earned its living differently. All the families except ours lived off salaries from the army, the party, and the security services, while we lived off the patriotic songs that my father composed. My father had a status higher than that of the mayor and members of the local hierarchy of the party, because the President himself had more than once awarded him military medals for his songs about the war, songs people remember to this day.

Listen, brother, I’ll sum up the story for you. One year after the war ended, my father suffered what the newspapers call writer’s block, and he was unable to compose new music for the many poems celebrating the greatness of the President that famous poets would send him. Months passed, then a year, and he still could not write a single new tune. Do you know what he did in the meantime? He took it upon himself to write and set to music short depraved poems making fun of religion. One warm winter evening we were watching television when we heard my father singing a new song of his about the Prophet’s wives and how loose they were. Suddenly my elder brother sprang up, took my father’s pistol from the wardrobe, jumped on top of my father, and put the pistol in his mouth. He would have killed him were it not for my mother, who tore open her dress, baring her breasts and screaming. My brother was transfixed for a moment as he looked at my mother’s enormous breasts, which hung down over her stomach like an animal whose guts had spilled out. This was the first time we had ever seen my mother’s breasts, except as babies. I went into the bathroom, and my brother fled the sight of my mother by leaving the house. She was illiterate, but she was smarter than my father, whom she looked after in a curious way. She spoiled him as if he were a son. She was the licensed midwife in the Qadissiya district, and people were very fond of her. My father decided to submit a report on my brother to the local party headquarters, but they did not react to it.

My father’s name had started to stink in the neighborhood and in artistic circles. They said that Jaafar al-Mutallibi had gone mad, and his old friends avoided him. He traveled to Baghdad and submitted a request to the radio and television station asking them to rebroadcast the war songs he had composed, or at least one song a week. They rejected his request and told him his songs were now inappropriate. They were only broadcasting patriotic songs twice a year: on the anniversary of the outbreak of the war and the anniversary of when it had ended. My father wanted to restore his past and his fame by any means possible. He tried but failed to meet the President. He submitted an application to the film and theater department, proposing a documentary film about his songs and his music, but that request was also ignored.

While he was making all these attempts he finished composing the music to ten songs insulting God and existence, as well as a beautiful song about the first four caliphs. We realized he had gone completely mad when he started frequenting the studios and trying to persuade them to record him singing his songs making fun of religion. Of course, his requests were rejected categorically, and some people threw him out and threatened to kill him. In the end my father decided to record his songs on tape at home. He sat in front of a tape recorder and started to sing and play the lute. Of course, it was a poor recording, but it was intelligible. He played it to us at breakfast; we were worried that people would find out about this tape. We tried to get hold of it and destroy it, but he would never let it leave his coat pocket, and when he went to sleep he would slip it into a special pocket he had made in the pillow.

Today there’s no need to hide this copy, because others need it, and religion has made more progress than necessary, along with the murderers and thieves. The reaction of the street might be hysterical, but let’s fire a bullet in the air. Go ahead, you’re a journalist; it will be good for you and good for everyone. A young singer offered to sing it and record it again in a modern studio, but I refused. These songs must remain as my father himself recorded them, as evidence of his story. They can only be copied. People soon forget the stories of this event. When you tell them these stories, after a time they think the stories are figments of imagination. Take our neighbor in the market, for example: Abu Sadiq, who sells onions. When he now tells his story about the battle with the Iranians at the river Jassim, it sounds like a Hollywood horror story he made up.

The government army ran away, and the Kurdish Peshmerga militias entered Kirkuk. The people of the city welcomed the uprising with great joy. There was overwhelming chaos, gunfire, dead bodies, Kurdish dancing, and songs everywhere. We were unable to escape. The insurgents set fire to houses in all the government districts and where party members lived. They killed and strung up the bodies of the Baathists, police, and security people.

We were holed up at home, and a group of young men broke down the reinforced door to my father’s office. They took us out on the street to carry out the death sentence on us. My mother was on her knees pleading with them, but she did not rip her clothes this time. What? My father? No, no, my father wasn’t with us. Months before the uprising, he had become the madman of the city, wandering the streets singing against God and carrying his lute, which no longer had a single string. A fire broke out in our house, and my mother collapsed unconscious as the rest of us leaned against the outer wall of the house. Umm Tariq, our Kurdish neighbor, turned up at the last moment, screaming at the young men and speaking to them in their language. Then she started imploring them to set us free. She told them how kind and generous my mother was and how she helped the Kurdish women give birth and looked after pregnant women. She told them how my mother would give away bread to the neighbors in honor of Abbas, the son of the Imam Ali, at feast time, and how brave my elder brother was and how he’d been best friends with her son who’d been killed fighting with the Peshmerga forces during the Anfal campaign, and that it was he who helped her late son escape from Kirkuk (here she lied), and that I was a good, peaceful boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She ended her defense of us on an angry note. “They’re not responsible for what that pimp Jaafar al-Mutallibi has been doing,” she said. Then she spat on the ground. We went into Umm Tariq’s house and we didn’t leave until the Republican Guard forces entered the city and the Peshmerga militias withdrew. Most of the insurgents ran away with the militias.

In the end we found my father without a head, tied to a farm tractor with a thick rope. He had been dragged around the city streets for a whole day, and his corpse had been put on display in a manner that is impossible to imagine. At the time they were about to execute us my father was close to the local party headquarters, where the bodies of the party members filled the courtyard. My father went into the empty building and headed for the information room. He knew this room well because it was from this room that his patriotic songs used to be broadcast from loudspeakers on the roof during the first war. From the same loudspeakers the party members would also speak to the public when someone was being executed for deserting the army or for helping the Peshmerga militias. My father put the tape into the tape player and the loudspeakers started broadcasting to the insurgents his songs attacking God and existence. My father was hugging his lute and smiling when the insurgents arrived. They took him outside—

Excuse me, my friend. There’s a fish dealer who’s bringing some sacks of carp, so I have to go now. Tomorrow I’ll tell you the secret of my father’s relationship with Umm Tariq, the Kurdish woman.