The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

Crosswords

IN MEMORY OF MY FRIENDS:

DAWOUD THE ENGINEER, 2003

KOURESH THE POET AND DOCTOR, 2006

BASSEM THE SCULPTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER, 2007

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: mankind; 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 crossword writer. The prize was funded by a billionaire member of Parliament who came back to the country after the change in regime. They say the great passion he acquired for crosswords during his long exile was behind his decision 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 rooftops, and we wanted to break it with a stone. In those days Marwan and I were like a single spirit. One autumn evening 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. I felt like a third wheel when we all started high school. I was jealous of you!

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 evening 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 on who could beat the car, when it finally stopped in front of Marwan’s house. His mother came out screaming hysterically. She ripped her clothes and threw herself in the pool of mud. Bassem, who was standing next to me, stood stock-still and stared in a trance. His big brother noticed 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 cupboards fell on top of him. His mouth filled with blood. He spat out teeth and indistinctly heard the screams of his colleague, 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.

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. That killed twenty-five people. Two of the policemen were 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 of yours 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 crossword 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 headmaster 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 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 vocation. 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 crosswords 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 relative. 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 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 looking for work. Things weren’t easy for someone who had just graduated in agriculture. Meanwhile I started to have articles published on historical esoterica, 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.

He sent you a text message that read: Fire Sign — You’re compatible with all the signs. Your blood group breathes disappointment 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 pictures from the shop. You pin them on your flesh when you receive a guest. The firewood comes to you throughout the night, wrapped in nightmares. When you wake up you have a bath on fire. You eat on fire. You read the newspapers on fire. You smoke a cigarette on fire. In the coffee cup you come across prophecies of fire. You laugh on fire. You have your lungs checked at the hospital, and they find a spring of errors that looks like a tumor. You dream of the 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 frightened 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

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 ignorance 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 circumstances 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, 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 Puzzles 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, tasting 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 mates. (“It was just a trivial, childish game, you idiot!” he yelled.) Then he started talking to me as calm as a madman: “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 complete 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 complain, “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 Marwan 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 behavior. They treated him as a victim of the explosion. Just another madman. His nerves would flare up for the slightest 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 example, “7 Across: a purple scorpion, 5 Down: a broken womb (six letters, inverted).”

“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 pleasure 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 troubled 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 policeman 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 old friend. 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 policeman, and Marwan even went to visit the policeman’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.

Then one day I visited him at his magazine. He was taking 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 writing 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 department 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.”

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 fortnight. 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 worries. 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 memorized 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!

You told us at length about your days of isolation on your farm, where you wanted to be free to write a book on the history of decapitation in Mesopotamia.

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. Marwan 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 exhibition 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.

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.