The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

A Thousand and One Knives

1

At noon Jaafar the referee was waiting at the end of the lane, his army binoculars around his neck and a soccer ball in his lap. The boys arrived one after another and surrounded him, joking with him and talking excitedly about the striker on the Sector 32 team. Jaafar reassured them. “We have Allawi al-Saba. He’s the Messi of Sector Twenty-nine,” he said.

The boys took turns pushing Jaafar’s wheelchair. One of them said, “The Sector Thirty-two team might bring a referee of their own.”

Jaafar wasn’t bothered. He told them he knew how to handle that. They reached the field, Jaafar threw the ball, and the boys ran after it.

Jaafar was forty-five years old, but he was still young at heart. With his passion for sports, his dynamism, and his determination, he amazed his friends and his few enemies. He had been the most famous pool player in Sector 29, and when he was an army deserter the military police couldn’t catch him. He was like a fox, but his addiction to pool halls was his downfall. One evening the military police surrounded him at the Khorasan pool hall in Karada, where he used to take on the most famous players in the area. They sent him off to the Kuwait war, and when he came back both his legs had been amputated. Jaafar was a good lad, one of the boys — that’s how the people of the sector saw him. But some of them found fault with his passion for soccer and the way he hung out with the local youth at his age. Jaafar didn’t take much notice of such talk, because the young had to learn the basics of the game. He would organize matches for them and act as referee. He would remind his critics of the famous national squad player who came from Sector 29 and whom he claimed to have trained, adding each time, “A miracle that will save the whole country will be my doing too!”

On the edge of the soccer field there was a large Dumpster that gave off white smoke with a putrid stench that drifted over the playing area. Women, some in abayas and some without, came out of the houses around the field with bags of trash. Jaafar watched them through his binoculars while the boys ran after the ball, shouting. With his binoculars Jaafar also watched the boys playing.

The Sector 32 team arrived, accompanied by a young man with a beard, and he and Jaafar agreed that Jaafar would referee the first half and the other man the second half. The match began. Jaafar pushed his wheelchair up and down the field at high speed in a frenzied passion. He shouted at the boys, either to encourage them or to reprimand them, and when they were too far off he would follow them with his binoculars. “Goooooooooaaaaaal!” shouted Jaafar. The Sector 32 referee objected that Jaafar was supporting his own team and wasn’t impartial. Jaafar ignored his objections. He worried about his players as if they were his own children, and when they fell down he would check their knees and legs for any damage. Sometimes his mind would wander and for a few moments he would see them as ghosts in battle and recall the boom of artillery on the front. But then he would go back to the match and blow his whistle to award a penalty kick, as cheerful and enthusiastic as ever. He dripped with sweat as he pushed the wheelchair around with all his strength to keep up with the boys running after the ball like antelopes.

Jaafar blew the whistle. “Foul!”

“I swear it wasn’t a foul, Jaafar,” objected one of the boys.

“I tell you it’s a foul. Don’t argue, you idiot.”

“But Jaafar, you were far away.”

“What are these, then? Do you think I’m blind?” said Jaafar, holding up his binoculars.

The match ended in a 2–2 draw, and the boys pushed Jaafar’s wheelchair to the coffee shop. He said good-bye to them and advised them to prepare for next week’s match with the Sector 52 team.

Jaafar played dominoes in the Shaab coffee shop and gave the others his analysis of the quality of the various Spanish clubs. His laugh echoed through the coffee shop and shook the big picture of the imam Ali hanging on the wall. The coffee shop owner said the Americans were going to search the sector that night for weapons.

“What does that bunch of cowboys want? It’s because of them I lost my legs in the Kuwait war. What do they want next? Fuck them. One day America’s going to go to shit,” Jaafar said indignantly, then changed the subject back to soccer. He and the Real Madrid supporters started arguing and joking. Jaafar was an avid supporter of Barcelona and sometimes Liverpool.

I was waiting for him at the coffee shop door. He came out laughing loudly and gave me a friendly punch in the guts. I pushed his wheelchair and we crossed the street. He asked after his sister, who is my wife, and I said, “She’s well.”

“Are you going to do the disappearing knife trick today?” he asked, coughing. He was a chronic smoker.

“No, but I may talk a little about the interpretation of dreams.”

I knocked on the door and Souad opened it. “Ah, both of you,” she said as she kissed Jaafar on the head. She helped me get his wheelchair through the narrow doorway. I pinched her bottom and she slapped my hand discreetly, but Jaafar didn’t notice.

In the room there was a bare wooden bench, and Salih the butcher was sitting on it. Allawi was sitting cross-legged on the ground with a set of green prayer beads in his hand — the same way he sat when he was making a knife disappear.

Jaafar shook Salih’s hand and said, “Hey, Allawi, come and sit on the bench.”

Allawi answered proudly, “I’ve never sat on a chair or a bench.”

“You mean in all your life?”

“Of course.”

“But you’re only fifteen, damn it. Anyone who heard you would say you were as old as the dinosaurs.”

Jaafar laughed his booming laugh as he adjusted the photograph of his father on the wall.

Souad disappeared into the kitchen, and I sat next to the butcher. Jaafar turned his wheelchair to face us. Souad came back with a tray of tea, sat on the carpet close to Allawi, and poured the tea, smiling amiably at everyone and winking at me several times. I blew her a kiss. Jaafar turned to me and said, “Hey, lovebirds, we’ve got work to do. When the meeting’s over you can throw each other as many kisses as you want.”

In his weird woman’s voice, the butcher said, “Now, Jaafar. Anyone who heard you would say this was a meeting of some underground party that was going to change the world. We’ve made so many knives disappear, and Souad always brings them back again…. And it’s been going on like this for ten years.”

Allawi laughed and said, “I’ve been making knives disappear all my life. But I want to go on making them disappear again and again, and I don’t know why.” Jaafar changed the subject and asked Allawi whether Umm Ibtisam would be coming today. He replied that he was certain this time, because she had sworn to him three times by Ali’s son Abbas that she would come. “She must be on her way now. You know the shitty Americans have closed half the roads.”

2

We were like one family. Our knife-handling skills weren’t the only thing we had in common. We also shared our problems in life, our joys, and our ignorance. We were buffeted by all forms of misfortune, and several times we grew disappointed with the knives. There were other concerns in life. We almost split up on several occasions, but we were drawn back together by the strangeness and pleasure of our gift, by the feeling among all of us — except, perhaps, Salih the butcher — that knives could be a solace and give our lives the thrill of uncertainty.

Ten years have passed since we became a team in the knife trick. Allawi joined us three years ago. I continued my studies and went to the School of Education. Souad went into the sixth year of high school, specializing in the sciences, and dreamed of going to the School of Medicine. Salih the butcher has extended his shop, divorced the mother of his children, and married a young woman who had a bad reputation in the neighborhood. Jaafar found Allawi a job in the factory that makes women’s shoes. He didn’t want Allawi to stay in the market playing with knives. Jaafar himself was the same as always — busy with soccer, refereeing, dominoes, the coffee shop; always anxious to ensure that our group didn’t fall apart and constantly seeking out new talent in soccer and also in the knife trick. He believed that our knife skills were a secret vocation that would change the world. As to how and why and when, these were all unanswered questions; he had nothing to do with them. “I’ve never even read a newspaper in my life. How could I understand the secret of the knives?” he said.

The butcher, Allawi, Jaafar, and I had the ability to make knives disappear. Souad was the only person who could make them reappear, but she couldn’t make them disappear. Souad’s difference compounded the mystery of our talents, which did not progress one step despite the passage of all those years.

Two years ago I was assigned to read books in order to find out what the knives meant, and I soon came to the idea that the knives were just a metaphor for all the terror, the killing, and the brutality in the country. It’s a realistic phenomenon that is unfamiliar, an extraordinary game that has no value, because it is hemmed in by definite laws.

I married Souad a year and a half ago. It was Jaafar who arranged this early marriage with my father. Souad’s cousin had approached Jaafar with a proposal to marry her. Jaafar didn’t want Souad to move away from us and go to live in the village. He wasn’t unaware of the tentative affection we felt for each other. My father was persuaded straightaway, especially as Jaafar made my father an attractive offer. He said he would buy Souad and me a small house. My father agreed at once because he wanted to relieve the strain in his own house. We were nine brothers and three sisters all living in two rooms, and my father was struggling to keep the family afloat. He worked as a baker and my mother gave injections to sick people in the neighborhood, though she didn’t have a nursing certificate. In fact she was illiterate, and because she was so kind, people called her the angel of mercy.

When I was a youngster I played on Jaafar’s soccer team. He discovered my talent by chance. He was watching me as I made a knife that some boy was holding disappear. He was ecstatic and started to hug me. He cheerfully took me to their house and introduced me to young Souad, whose eyes projected the force of life like a strong and beautiful flower. The next day Jaafar took me to Salih the butcher’s shop and introduced me to him.

In those days we used to meet in Jaafar’s house, but his mother and his five brothers would disturb us, so then we moved to Salih’s house. He had a room on the roof of the house, where he raised birds. We would put the knives on top of a round wooden table and make them disappear one by one, then Souad would make them reappear. We would exchange views and try to analyze the trick. But the conversation soon moved away from knives and turned to jokes and stories about the people in the sector. We continued to meet in the pigeon loft until I got married and Jaafar bought us that small house. Jaafar had considerable wealth from a business he’d been in since he was young. He used to deal in pornographic magazines, which were banned, but he was careful to cover his tracks, selling them only in wealthy neighborhoods.

It was I who discovered Allawi and brought him into the group. I was in the street market buying rat poison when I saw a group of children and adults in a corner of the market, gathered in a circle, full of curiosity. Allawi was sitting cross-legged as usual, with a number of small knives of various types next to him. He didn’t make knives disappear for free. People would give him a pack of cigarettes or enough money for a sandwich or to buy a grape juice or pomegranate juice, and as soon as he felt it was worth his while he would throw one of the knives onto the ground in front of the spectators and ask them to touch it to make sure it was a real knife. Then he would ask them to stand back in a slightly larger circle so that he could breathe and concentrate. Allawi stared at the knife for thirty seconds, as we all did, and as soon as tears started to glisten in his eyes the knife would disappear. The audience would applaud in amazement and admiration, and Allawi would then wait for the spectators to come up with enough money for him to repeat the trick with another knife. His main problem was that he depended on stealing knives to replace the ones he made disappear. That put him in many tricky situations.

The tears and the thirty seconds were the common denominator between us all when it came to making knives disappear and reappear. As I said, were it not for Souad, the knives would have disappeared forever and we would all have been like Allawi before he joined us — just knife thieves. Salih the butcher faced the same problem before he met Jaafar and Souad. Salih loved the trick; in his shop he would stare at knives at length until they disappeared. But after the trick he had to buy new knives. Allawi made money in the market from his gift, while Salih would lose out. If it wasn’t for Souad, he said, he would have died of hunger. Every day Souad brought back the knives he had made disappear, and we were sure this was the only reason the butcher stayed with us all those years.

We were constantly on the lookout for a new member of the group, with powers like those of Souad. We would meet every Thursday and make a set of knives disappear, and Souad would make them reappear in the same way: tears and a few seconds!

I could make knives disappear easily. I began by making my mother’s knives disappear in the kitchen when I was a child. In the beginning my mother would almost go crazy, but when she discovered my secret she and my father took me to a cleric to consult him on the subject. The man with the turban told them in all confidence, “Your son is in league with the jinn.” He advised my father and mother to pray and wash the courtyard of the house twice — once at dawn and again at sunset. When I got interested in soccer and met Jaafar I stopped making knives disappear at home or at the homes of friends and relatives.

The knife trick didn’t have a particular purpose. Maybe Salih the butcher saw his gift as a disease and as far as he was concerned Souad was the only cure. The feelings and ideas that Souad, Jaafar, Allawi, and I had were different to some extent. Jaafar thought it was a secret and sacred vocation and believed that what we did, despite the absurdity of it, was a source of great pleasure, especially as he saw himself as the spiritual father and the leader of the group.

Allawi was addicted to the game. It was like a drug that erased his memory of the painful loss of both his parents at an early age. His father had been a drunkard who argued with the neighbors and who killed a man with his pistol. Before the police arrived one of the dead man’s sons, who had seen his own father drowning in blood, came to the door of Allawi’s father’s house with a Kalashnikov in his hand. Allawi’s father was standing behind the closed door with the pistol in his hand, and his mother was trying to stop him from going out. The son emptied a whole magazine of bullets into the door. The door fell in and Allawi’s mother and father were killed.

Knives were my pastime and part of my life. Seeking the mystery of the game, I felt like someone looking for a single rare flower in a high mountain range. Often it felt like an adventure in a fable. Many a time I felt as though I was doing a spiritual exercise with the knife trick. The reality didn’t interest me as much as the beauty of the mystery attracted me. Maybe this is what drove me to write poetry after I gave up looking for the meaning of the knives.

Illiteracy was one of the obstacles that compounded our failure to understand the trick or even to develop our skills throughout the years. Salih the butcher, Allawi, and Jaafar couldn’t read or write. It’s true that Souad was educated, but she practiced the knife trick with a childish attitude. She would always remind me, saying, “Why complicate things, my love? Life is short and we are alive. Treat the knives as a game to entertain us and leave it at that.” Souad repeatedly suggested we open a little theater in the neighborhood to amuse the local people by making knives disappear and then reappear, in hopes that this might relieve the gloom of war and the endless killing. But Jaafar was worried about the clerics, because they were acting like militias at the time. I thought he was right to worry; at any moment they could have denounced us as infidels, maybe even accused us of undermining society with alien superstitions imported from abroad. Their superstitions had become the law, and God had become a sword for cutting off people’s heads and declaring them infidels.

My ignorance increased when I embarked on the task of researching the knife trick through reading. My education didn’t help me much. It was religious books that I first examined to find references to the trick. Most of the houses in and around our sector had a handful of books and other publications, primarily the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet, stories about heaven and hell, and texts about prophets and infidels. It’s true I found many references to knives in these books, but they struck me as just laughable. They only had knives for jihad, for treachery, for torture and terror. Swords and blood. Symbols of desert battles and the battles of the future. Victory banners stamped with the name of God, and knives of war.

After that I moved into works of literature. That was by chance. A single sentence had stirred up a whirlwind of excitement inside me. Then one day, in a coffee shop, I came across an article in a local newspaper about a massacre by sectarian fighters in a village south of the capital. They had set fire to the houses of people sleeping at night. The only survivor of the conflagration was a young boy. The boy was purple, and in his hand he held a purple rat. They found him asleep in a wheat field. His story went unnoticed in the relentless daily cycle of bloody violence in the country. In the culture section of the newspaper there was an interview with an Iraqi poet in exile who said, “A closed door: That’s the definition of existence.”

The next day I went to Mutanabbi Street, where books are sold. I wasn’t a regular visitor. I was terrified by the sight of the stacks of books there, in the bookshop windows, in the stalls in the street, and on the wooden carts. Hundreds of titles and covers. I couldn’t buy a single book that day. I didn’t know what to choose or where to begin. I went back to Mutanabbi Street every Friday and gradually regained my confidence. I started to buy books of poetry, novels, and short stories, local and translated. Then our group decided to contribute some money to help me buy more books, in hopes that I would come across the key to the mystery of the knives, and soon the house was full of books. We made shelves in the pigeon loft, the kitchen, and even in the bathroom. After a year of voracious reading I was no longer drawn to research into the mystery of the knives, but to the pleasures of knowledge and reading generally. The magic of words was like rain that quenched the thirst in my soul, and for me life became an idea and a dream: The idea was a ball and the dream was two tennis rackets. I didn’t understand many of the books on classical philosophy. But enjoyable and interesting intellectual books on dreams, the universe, and time began to attract my attention. I felt this created a problem with the group. They would shower me with questions on what I was reading and whether I had come across any clues to the mystery of the knives in my books. I didn’t know how to explain things to them. I was like a small animal that had entered the den of an enormous animal. I felt both pleasure and excitement. Perhaps I was lost, and my only compass was my passion and my fear of the diversity of life. One idea invalidated another, and one concept disguised another. One theory made another theory more mysterious. One feeling contested another. One book mocked another book. One poem overshadowed another poem. One ladder went up and another went down. Often knowledge struck me as similar to the knife trick: just a mysterious absurdity or merely a pleasant game.

I tried to explain to the group that research into knives through books wasn’t easy. It was a complicated process, and certain things might take me many more years to understand. On the other hand I didn’t want to disappoint the group, especially Jaafar, who was enthusiastic about the books. So I started telling them stories about other extraordinary things that happen in this world and about man’s hidden powers. I tried to simplify for them my modest knowledge of parapsychology, dreams, and the mysteries of the universe and nature. I felt that we were getting lost together, further and further, in the labyrinths of this world, without sails and without a compass.

3

Souad opened the door and a stout woman in her fifties, dressed in black, came in. She greeted us shyly. Salih the butcher made room for her on the bench and went to stand by the door. Jaafar asked him to sit down, but he said he was fine.

Souad asked the woman, Umm Ibtisam, if she would like something to drink.

“Thank you; coffee please,” she said.

Jaafar tried to dispel the woman’s sense that she was unwelcome. He started talking about the high price of vegetables, deploring the fact that the country was importing vegetables from neighboring countries when it had two great rivers and plenty of fertile land. Then he jumped to the subject of the high price of propane and gasoline when we had the largest reserves of black shit in the world. Souad brought Umm Ibtisam the coffee and went back to her place. She sipped the coffee and told Allawi she was in a hurry and had to get back to her children. It was Allawi who had found Umm Ibtisam. He said he was wandering around the old lanes in the center of Baghdad when he noticed a shop that sold only knives of various shapes and sizes. He went into the shop and started to browse through the knives. A woman in her fifties came up to him and offered to help. He told her he was looking for a small knife he had lost years before, with a handle in the shape of a shark. The woman gave him a puzzled look and said her knife shop was not a lost property office. Allawi preempted her, as he put it, by asking if she knew about making knives disappear. She said she didn’t know what he meant and offered him a small knife with a snake wrapped around the handle. Allawi examined it and told the woman he knew how to make it disappear. He sat in the middle of the shop, and after thirty seconds of concentration and two tears, the knife disappeared. The woman was upset and asked him to leave at once.

Allawi left and went back the next day. He said he only wanted to talk to her, but she didn’t want to listen. Maliciously and threateningly, Allawi told her that he could make all the knives in the shop disappear at once.

The woman pulled a large meat cleaver off one of the shelves and brandished it in Allawi’s face.

“What do you want, you evil boy?” she cried.

“Nothing. Just to talk.”

Allawi sat cross-legged on the floor and asked her if she would like to see another demonstration of making knives disappear. She didn’t reply, just stared at him suspiciously and held the cleaver in her hand. Straight off, Allawi started telling her about the gift of making knives disappear and reappear and about our group. This was very stupid of him, because we were wary of talking about the group to outsiders, but Allawi had spent a long time in the market and thought nothing of showing off in front of others.

Allawi said, “The woman’s face turned the color of tomato when I talked about the knife trick. She sat on a chair in front of me and put the cleaver on her lap. Then she started to weep in anguish.” Then she suddenly stood up, closed the shop door, wiped away her tears, and told him the story of the knife shop, after making him promise never to reveal her secret.

The woman had five daughters, and her husband had been killed when a car bomb exploded in front of the Ministry of the Interior, cutting his body in half. It was a disaster. The woman had no idea how she could support her daughters. Her grief for her husband broke her heart and disrupted her sleep. She had nightmares in which she saw an enormous man slaughtering her husband with a knife. The nightmare recurred often, and every time the man would slaughter her husband with a different knife. Umm Ibtisam told Allawi she couldn’t understand why the knives appeared in her dream.

A month after the nightmares started, Umm Ibtisam came across a knife in the backyard of her house. It was an old knife. She contacted her brother because she was alarmed by its sudden appearance. Her brother started to ask the neighbors about it, but they denied it was theirs. The knife aroused his interest. He said it looked like an antique. He calmed his sister down and told her he would ask his oldest son to stay a few nights with her and her daughters. The man came back a week later with a large sum of money, after selling the knife in the antique market. He told her the knife was valuable and dated from the Ottoman period. The brother joked with the woman, saying, “Let’s hope you find other knives and make us really rich.”

Umm Ibtisam said the nightmares then stopped. But in the same place in the yard six knives appeared, in this case kitchen knives. Umm Ibtisam kept the knives, and this time she didn’t tell her brother. The knives continued to appear, and in the end she told him. He didn’t tell anyone the secret of the knives, because they were waiting to see how long they would continue to appear in the yard. They kept on appearing, but it was rare for an old one to turn up. Once, a knife dating from the Abbasid period turned up; her brother sold it on the black market for a large amount. He told his sister that God was providing a livelihood for her and her daughters because her husband had been killed without good cause. He suggested opening a shop to sell the knives. The brother rented a small shop close to her house, and so Umm Ibtisam started selling knives.

Umm Ibtisam asked Jaafar to swear to keep her secret, because this was her livelihood. She added nothing to what she had told Allawi, who had invited her to attend our meeting. Jaafar swore to God and on his honor that he would keep her secret, and invited her to join the group. But she didn’t take up the offer, because all she wanted was for us to leave her alone. Souad embraced Umm Ibtisam, with tears in her eyes, perhaps for the strangeness of life’s agonies.

Souad took her to the door and handed her a bag full of cake, saying, “A simple present for the girls.”

None of us said anything. So there were knives appearing in other places. That meant the plot had thickened.

We were all smoking — Jaafar, Salih, Allawi, and I, and even Souad, who had slipped a cigarette out of my pack, although she didn’t normally smoke. We noticed the thick cloud of smoke in the room and burst out laughing together. Jaafar began to cough like a decrepit old man. We took out our knives and started to play. I told them about the earliest book on the interpretation of dreams, which appears on a tablet from the Sumerian city of Lagash. The story goes that Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, was praying in the temple when he suddenly fell asleep.

“I’m off to work,” Salih said in his effeminate voice, and left.

4

A year after I graduated from the School of Education, Jaafar the referee suddenly disappeared. We didn’t leave a hospital or police station unsearched. We contacted people who had ties with some of the armed groups and kidnap gangs. But to no avail. The ground seemed to have swallowed him up, along with thousands of others in the country. Souad was in her second month of pregnancy and had postponed her studies at the School of Medicine. I was very worried about her. She was frustrated and sad, like a bird whose wings have been broken in a storm.

The kids in Sector 29 were also sad that Jaafar had disappeared. They organized a soccer tournament by themselves for teams from the other sectors and called it the Referee Jaafar Tournament. They sent me an invitation to referee in the final.

——

The days passed slowly and sadly, like the miserable face of the country. The wars and the violence were like a photocopier churning out copies, and we all wore the same face, a face shaped by pain and torment. We fought for every morsel we ate, weighed down by the sadness and the fears generated by the unknown and the known. Our knife trick was no longer a source of pleasure, because time had dispersed those mysterious talents of ours. We had been broken one after the other, like discarded mannequins. Our group had fallen apart. There were no more meetings or discussions. Hatred had crushed our childish fingers, crushed our bones.

It wasn’t easy for a recent graduate like me to find work. The religious groups had opened schools that taught children to memorize the Quran. They offered me work in their schools until I could get a government job, so I got involved in teaching children the Quran and gave up the knife business. From time to time I wrote angry, aggressive, and meaningless poems.

Allawi moved out of the capital and wandered around the towns in the south. He toured the markets showing off his skill at making knives disappear, but earned a pittance. Then we heard fresh news about him: He had broken into a restaurant and was arrested for stealing knives from the kitchen. He was sent to prison and we heard no more of him. Souad, friendly and loving, continued to visit Salih the butcher to bring his knives back, and in return Salih would give us the best cuts of meat he had.

One winter morning I was at school teaching the children the Iron Chapter of the Quran when the principal came in and told me that a strange young man wanted to talk to me about something important.

He was a tall man in his midtwenties, and his name was Hassan. He said he wanted to talk to me about Jaafar the referee. I asked the principal for permission to take a break and went to the nearby coffee shop with the man. We ordered tea and he told me what had happened to Jaafar:

The security forces had set free some hostages from a terrorist hideout; Hassan was one of the people freed. He said he had met Jaafar in the place where they were holding the hostages, a house on a farm on the outskirts of the capital. They had abducted Jaafar because he was trading in pornographic magazines in a wealthy neighborhood where policemen lived. Hassan said they had brutally tortured him. The terrorists told Jaafar that God had punished him when his legs were amputated during the war, but Jaafar hadn’t repented and had gone on selling pictures of obscenities and debauchery. So the terrorists had decided to cut off Jaafar’s arms as a lesson to any unbelieving profligate. The terrorists assembled all the hostages to witness the process of amputating Jaafar’s arms. They couldn’t believe what happened next. Hassan said that whenever the terrorists approached Jaafar, the swords they were holding disappeared, and tears were streaming from his eyes. The terrorists didn’t have a single sword or knife left. They were terrified of Jaafar and said he was a devil. They stripped him naked in front of us and crucified him against the wall. They hammered nails into the palms of his hands, and he started writhing in pain, naked, with no legs. They decided to amputate his arms with bullets. Two men stood in front of him and sprayed bullets into his arms. One of the bullets hit his heart, and he died instantly. They dragged his body to the river, collected some dry branches, and poured some gas on him. They set fire to him and chanted, “God is most great.”

Souad and I had a beautiful boy, and we called him Jaafar. I continued working in the religious school. I never managed to tell Souad what had happened to her brother. I suppressed the horror that his death caused, and I loved Souad even more. She was my only hope in life. She went back to the School of Medicine, and time began to heal the wounds, slowly and cautiously.

Umm Ibtisam came to see us. Her financial situation had greatly improved. She said we were good people and she hadn’t forgotten us. She offered to open a large shop in the neighborhood for us to sell knives.

Our business was profitable, though sometimes I would unwittingly make one knife or another disappear. At night I would start by kissing Souad’s toes, then creep up to her thighs, then to her navel, her breasts, her armpits and neck, until I reached her ear, and then I would whisper, “My love, I need help!”

She would pinch me on the bottom, then climb on top of my chest, strangle me with her hands, and say, “Ha, you wretch, how many knives have you made disappear? I’m not going to get them back until you kiss me a thousand and one times.”

I kissed every pore on her body with passion and reverence, as if she were a life that would soon disappear.

When young Jaafar was five years old, his gift emerged: Like his mother, he could make knives reappear.