The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

That Inauspicious Smile

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 restroom 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 teacup, and it turned green.

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, murderers, 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 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 disappeared? What eternal naïveté 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 suddenly I felt intensely hot, although the season was winter. I put on a light sports shirt printed on the back with a 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 opposite direction. I wanted to return his smile. I passed my fingers along my lips. So I didn’t need a new smile. I made do with turning toward him quickly to offer him in return that dream smile of mine.

“I went into the Chinese restaurant to have some tea and check up on the smile in the mirror. I saw two old lesbians doing the crossword puzzle. I sent my wife a second 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 smile is just an alarm bell. But instead of that I found myself going into a cinema and buying a ticket. I felt a nasty fever spreading through my body. There were some 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 features 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 children 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 revolted and wanted to slap me because of my smile. I wanted to explain to her, ‘I’m not smiling at what happened 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 woman in the film, who took a revolver out of her belt and fired a bullet into her head amid a crowd of people, who quickly dispersed when the fire engines arrived.

“When the lights came on in the cinema, the elegant lady stood up and insulted me, this time out loud. ‘Animal, son of a bitch!’ she shouted.

“The audience turned toward me, but all they did was smile as they looked at my face. Were they smiling at the insult, or at the crow on the ball, or because I answered the woman’s insult with my cold smile? I have to get rid of this smile as soon as possible. My wife called me; I lied and said I was still looking for a suitable vacuum cleaner.

“The snow kept falling, and it sparkled even more when a light wind rose and made it fall at a slant. I was frightened and confused, thinking that this smile might appear when some disaster happens. What if a bus runs over someone now and his guts come out of his ass? Surely there would be a panicky crowd. What if they noticed my smile as I joined them in watching this free spectacle? Without doubt they would give me a thorough beating. How would I explain to them that my smile had nothing 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, which produced this child without reason and then took 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 communal 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 intermittent 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 problems. Of course, I was delighted with this expulsion. And so I left the Nazis’ bar like a frightened mouse.

“It was Sunday and I had thought it was Monday. At least I remembered that, and then I thought my wife 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 wife. The smile would be proof I was telling the truth. But my feelings were contradictory. Then I entered a small shop, bought six bottles of beer, and went to the park. Do I really have bad luck? Or was I born by mistake?

“The streets were empty, and the wind was playing havoc and making a racket when it tried to shift things from their place. The wind blew over a price list parked outside a closed restaurant, then it brought along a large cardboard box, which flew around like half of a dismembered body. There were empty cigarette packs racing each other about. Unconsciously I hummed a tune. I wanted to sing, but I did not know which song to choose. I didn’t have the words to any song in my head. A slight anxiety came over me. Had the words to songs been sucked out of my memory to this extent? All I could do was make up some little songs. I kept humming in hopes that I would come across some words in a while, but stupid tears came instead of words. The wind blew an empty white bag, which passed close to my ear and made me forget the tune. It had frightened me. The bag did a somersault at the junction as though it was deciding which way to go. It rose uncertainly for a moment, then fell in a lurch to the asphalt. This time the wind dragged it along the 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 darkness. 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 bleeding from my ear, my nose, my teeth, and my eye, and from the blocked nostrils of my soul as well. I tried to get up. I wished that this wind, a slave to the sky in blind obedience and allegiance, would pick me up too, but it didn’t. It was sweeping up everything but my empty body, which 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 blowing 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. My old notebooks passed by, clapping their covers. Scorpions in a bottle went past, my summer shirts, medicines that had expired, and cartons of baby milk. Bread went by on wings of shit. Poems passed, pissing on themselves 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 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 hospital, 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.