The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

The Hole

1

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

“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 opposition?”

“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 language, 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 lit another candle. I could see the place more clearly now. There was a dead body. I examined it in the candlelight, a bitter taste in my mouth. It was the body of a soldier, 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 working 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 disgusting voice.

“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, “O 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 centimeters tall! Make something other than a human fall in 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, pointing 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.

2

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 government 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 supporters of the fugitive government were convinced that the new faith-based groups would come to power and impose their obscurantist ideology. That’s what the spokesman 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 country’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 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 tattooed 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 his mouth with a dirty towel, pulled out a book, and began to read. I took out a bar of chocolate and devoured it nervously. 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 playing 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 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 explanations of the secret energy extracted from insects to create additional organs to reinforce the liver, the pancreas, the heart, and all the body’s other organs.

3

Before leaving the hole, the old man told me he was from Baghdad and had lived in the time of the Abbasid caliphate. He had been a teacher, a writer, and an inventor. He 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 coincidence. 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; otherwise 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 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 clusters. 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.