The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

An Army Newspaper

TO THE DEAD OF THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR (1980–88)

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. 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 diligent and ambitious man who dreamt of becoming Minister 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 perfected my cultural page like a patient baker. No, Your Honor, I was not a censor, as you imagine, because the soldiers 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 poetical 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 structure 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 bombardment 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 example 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 novels, before these stories that I read, were mere drivel, vacuous stories eclipsed by the grandeur of what this soldier had written. The stories did not speak of the war, though the heroes of them were all reluctant soldiers. They were a transparent and cruel exploration of sexual beings from 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 of lissome 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 deliberate 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 renounce these stories or apologize to me and beg me bitterly to destroy what he had written, or to forgive him his atrocious act, which he would never repeat. Only then would I know what to do with these sublime stories of humanity. I doubt any great novelist could dream of writing more than five stories displaying such a high level of inventiveness, combining reality and the language of dreams to attain the tenth rank of language, 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 lightning speed. One week after my letter to the soldier I received a message from his army corps to say that the soldier 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, indescribably 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 newspapers 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 doctoral 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, between the kiss and the piece of shrapnel, between the smell of gunpowder and the smell of a woman’s vulva, 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 gratitude for the bounty and the priceless gifts. I was confident 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 ministry, 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 continued to flood in at an amazing rate, and looking for the 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. Invitations 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 circumstances. 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 stories, 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 three workers in the ministry to help dig up the soldier’s grave. There he was with his decayed body and a hole in 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 creative. 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 psychiatrist 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 warehouses 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 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 terrifying 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?