The Iraqi Christ

Dear Beto

I got rid of him. A few days ago, as I was roaming in the forest. But now I feel tired. I haven’t slept for three nights. I can smell a wolf approaching!! Please, Beto, go to my aunt’s place, take my stuff and look after all my memories.

You can’t understand beauty without peace of mind and you can’t get close to the truth without fear. Do you remember the guy who used to teach us smells? He used to make us dizzy with his wild philosophical speculations. He used to call himself the faithful companion of knowledge. He was proud of you and greatly admired you, so much so that I thought Professor Azmeh was in love with you. Those days of studying are still engraved in my memory, before we had to hit the mean streets and our dreams went up in smoke. Do you remember when that fourth year student brought in a cat one weekend? It was a farce. Everyone smelled its rear-end and there was such an uproar. Those were really romantic days. If our friend Sancho had been here, he would have said in his flippant tone: ‘The world is swimming in a sea of shit.’ They say he’s become a philosopher. Three epic tracts — long theses exploring the rationale for living with humans.

You too, Beto, you used to turn everything into philosophy. At the time, I thought you would get involved in the world of thinkers yourself. But you’re lazy and you’ve always said that language is deceptive. I still remember every word you told me when we were going round the back lanes looking for a safe place. I still remember the beautiful morning we spent on that river bank. The sun was shining like a giant pomegranate. We went up to a woman in her late forties who was crying and swearing at everything around her. She looked at us with tears in her eyes and started telling us her sorrows. She said she had failed in love, and failed in hatred, too! We chased her and then went back under the bridge. You licked my neck, then gave a sigh and sounds started to come out of you, quiet and frightened. (When you suddenly lose everything and snap like a bone, a door in your soul flickers open and closed as quick as an eyelash, a door that opens into the hidden self, the self that lies beyond pain. But not all humans are cruel enough to grasp the secrets of such a magic door, because humans are soon broken, like brittle bones. They fall into the abyss of pain and become blind.) Perhaps we’re like them too. I don’t know, Beto. I just want to disappear I’m so lonely.

We jumped into the lake together. He was drunk as usual. I dived underneath him, grabbed the end of his trouser leg and dragged him under until he stopped breathing.

Marko had brought me on a trip with some artist friends to the outskirts of a beautiful town in the centre of Finland. At first I didn’t believe he would ever free the two of us from the cruel seclusion he had imposed on us. For a year and a half I had been living in the prison of his sad life. He had torn my soul with his loneliness and opened old wounds with his rude behaviour. He violated my body and destroyed the fragile peace of mind where I hoped I might take refuge in this land of snow and ice.

There was a large isolated house in the forest, a house that was far from electricity, the internet and gas cookers. When they cooked, he and his friends made a wood fire in an old stove. They chopped the wood themselves. At night they lit a fire, drank and sang and chatted. There was a lake where they went fishing. It’s a real life there. They write poems, draw and plan theatre and film projects. Yes, the place was like a little paradise and as my owner put it, the ideal place to die. If we could look inside his mind, we’d find him imagining a grave in the middle of the forest, in a place where the sound of the forest stirs the vegetation into forms of great beauty. Indeed! Because the sound of insects and birds, the wind playing in the branches and the crackle of burning wood in the fire pit all combined to create a symphony of sounds; perhaps the voice of God reaches us in that sound, directly, without the mediation of prophets. God exists in the forest. God is the forest. But the burial ground must also be in the forest, so that the trees can draw their life from our decomposing bodies. I’m still a romantic, Beto, but yes, now I’ve fallen into the trap of hatred.

There were four of them and I was the fifth. They were trying to draw up a schedule for the next day, if there was anything worth doing communally, such as fishing, riding bicycles through the forest, or walking to the lake and coming home at sunset. There was a tall young man called Miko Lahm, a hunter who had come with his dog to catch birds. I spent some time with his dog. He was full of himself, like most hunting dogs. He was one of those creatures in whom the delusion of intelligence casts a shadow over their thoughts. He was proud of his muscles and of his ability to track down and retrieve wounded birds, and his master, Miko, was a real expert in all kinds of hunting and fishing, including rabbits; he cooked all kinds of meat in a way that everyone said was amazingly professional. Although most of the friends were vegetarians, and others only ate fish. So you might say that Miko Lahm was hunting for himself. Sometimes he was happy that I would share the meat with him. Of course he didn’t let his own dog eat the meat he hunted. He gave him dog food from cans.

Paulina spent the time lying in the sun on an orange towel. She was reading a book about plants. Timo, her partner, was sitting nearby, just smoking and gazing at the trees. He would dig into the soil with his feet, then examine the soil carefully as if it were a human corpse, then smoke another joint and stare at the sky. When he’d put out his fourth joint he would go back to the trees, then start the cycle again by scratching at the soil once more, like a dog but this time more slowly. He would light another joint, and never once speak to Paulina. The staring and smoking and all that deliberate idleness continued for four hours, broken only when he stood up and fetched a bottle of beer from the house. My master, Marko, would draw occasionally, while Miko Lahm played with his dog. At first sight I must have looked like I was the happiest of them all, because the slow pace of life in the forest really cheered me up. I had almost forgotten my recent sufferings with Marko. Time there passes at an amazingly glacial pace. You would laugh, Beto, and show your terrible teeth, if I told you that the first task I undertook there was to practise emptying out my mind and spreading its contents out in the sun to dry. I wanted to be alone with myself with a mind that wasn’t soaked in doubts. I would hide away by myself among the trees, stand there like a dwarf with a broken heart among the giants of the forest. How can I describe to you the taste of the light wind as it makes the leaves ripple like the flags of happy nations? Just as they would sit in the sauna to make their bodies sweat and reinvigorate themselves, I would sit there alone for hours so that the salt of my body would find its way out and dissolve, so that I could say to the creatures of the forest: ‘I am your sister in this existence’, so that I might plant my kisses upon it. I leaped around the trees shouting and addressing the green silence around me, but I felt that my words were vanishing like smoke, and neither the trees nor even the birds were listening to me. There was a husky sadness in my voice, a scratch in the innocence of what I wanted to express, because my voice was not in tune with the sounds of the forest. Perhaps my years of hanging around in the city had tainted the purity of my powers of expression. My voice was reminiscent of the city’s own symphony of mediocrity, the soulless, broken music produced by the machine of life: those sounds they have spattered us with shamelessly since childhood; their symphony that starts squeaking in the early morning, in shopping centres, banks, universities, hospitals, parliament buildings, bars and restaurants. The sounds of human ignominy. They’re incapable of loving each other so how can they understand our love for them? I felt that my mind was packed with sounds — the voices on buses and trains, the noises in planes and ships, the sound of domestic disputes, insults, abuse, the whistle of bullets, shouting, screaming, weeping, the chants of environmental protesters. Applause at the Peace Prize award ceremony at a time when new wars are breaking out in new hotspots, the sound of cars crashing, car bombs exploding, the cars of thieves, an ambulance, a bank truck loaded with bundles of banknotes, a fire engine. The sounds of mosques and churches, of Friday sermons and homilies, of group sex and glass breaking, sounds coming in the right ear and sounds going out the left ear. If we were deaf creatures — us and those humans — perhaps the world would be less painful. There are only two kinds of sound that are good for bringing about peace: the songs of the forest and music. Yes, Beto, the forest is a sound. An ancient sound that renews itself like a river that never stops flowing. They have polluted the river. They have cut down the trees. They have flown into space looking for more sounds and sources of energy. They have destroyed their own humanity. They have cooked and baked and killed like mass murderers. They have given prizes and bravery awards to madmen and killers. They really are heroes. Don’t they deserve hanging at the end of the film, like heroes? The audience will cry because they can’t save the hero who’s being hanged in the middle of the square. They have cut their humanity’s throat from ear to ear and sat down weeping at its feet. They have created poems for the dignity of humanity, while others created long wars that have yet to end, and perhaps never will. Their poems are awash with shame and loss, and they still smile like clowns. Pessimistic as usual, you’ll say, ‘I know that’. I want to borrow your tone of wisdom, which is comical much of the time, and say, ‘Humanity is in two parts, humanity has two voices. The majority talk incessantly and the minority are silent and plant-like, communicating with gestures. Every painting, Beto, is a voice. Every novel, every story, every work of art is a voice that communicates by gestures.’ They are creative innovators, but they are corrupt to the core. You know, in the forest, thoughts of suicide recurred. I imagined the sharp blade of a knife against my throat. Only the forest stood between me and what I was thinking. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. I imagine you nosing up to me as usual and whispering, ‘There you are, jumping from one subject to another like a kangaroo.’

You’re quite right. I love you and miss you, Beto.

The next day they chose to go to the lake and fish, under the supervision of Miko Lahm of course, because he was the expert and we could learn from him. But Marko, my owner, didn’t like his friends’ plan and decided to stay at home. He spoke sharply to Paulina, then went to his room. I don’t know why he hates her. Perhaps he wanted to sleep with her. I decided to stay with him in the house. We probably felt like customers at a cafe — we would sit together but each of us would live in his own labyrinthine world, with his own concerns. When they left, nobody paid any attention to Marko. I wanted to share my sense that something was troubling him and tell them all why he was depressed. But I swallowed the idea, because being obtrusive makes some of them more depressed. The Finns don’t speak much or ask many questions. I tell you, this country, with the cold, the snow and the silence, suits me more than anywhere else. It’s as if the environment and the introverted people here were made to measure for my temperament. I so much wanted to tell Marko that Finland was a big icy shirt that fit me well. All I needed was a glimmer of light. A slight human touch would have been enough to dress my wounds. But Marko didn’t need me or anything other than himself. He humiliated me from the moment I arrived here till the end. In his company I suffered from very strange nightmares. I had no choice. I imagined life on the mean streets again, and the loss of face, in your eyes and the eyes of others, if I decided to go back.

I lived with him for a year and a half like a pampered slave. From the start he paid lots of money to put me up. He got me a passport and spent lavishly on my food and other needs, but he was damned miserly when it came to interacting with me. He wasn’t interested in me. I was like any of the hundreds of old things that packed the dirty studio where we lived. I already told you he was an artist. His beard almost reached his waist. He had shaved his head and wore red trousers and shabby sports shoes. He had two shirts — one black and one blue. The only valuable thing he owned was an Italian bicycle, which was old but rare. He was crazy about buying things from secondhand shops. His studio was like a rubbish dump. We could hardly move inside it. I didn’t even understand his bohemianism — it struck me as contradictory. At first I felt he had brought me to his town in order to relieve his bitter loneliness, but my presence alongside him was just a message, or a wall he set up between himself and others. He would take me along to bars, out in the streets and to the shops, just to prove that he was different from others or perhaps to challenge their fears of anything strange or different. We would often sit in the park for hours, and all he would do was watch people as they looked at us, or answer with a few brief words when one of them came up and asked what country I came from. I was like a totemic mask a tourist brought out for small children. We didn’t play or have fun in those beautiful gardens. The conversation between us was sparse. Sometimes he would say a few words about how dark the winter is in Finland and sometimes he would remind me of the difference between the heat of the sun in Finland and the heat of the sun in my city. His silence, or the way he spoke so rarely, it reminded me of myself when I was very young. At that age I wouldn’t speak for days on end. I had had trouble pronouncing some sounds, and when I opened my mouth, I sounded like a foreigner learning Spanish.

Marko was just a scratch on one of his mysterious paintings. That’s how I started to imagine him: a scratch on a canvas painted white. Perhaps a grey scratch, like the trace of a cat’s claw or the fingernail of a man smothered with a pillow. Believe me, Beto, as long as there’s imagination, there’s crime.

When I started imagining Marko as a scratch on a painting, I wanted to get inside his mind. One’s imagination, if constantly enriched, can reach many secret places, including the imaginations and minds of others. Isn’t that what we were taught in the Wise Tails school? I spent more than half an hour, that day, wandering around that house in the forest. Eventually I sloped up to the second floor, pushed the door open and went into his room. Marko was drinking alcohol straight from the bottle and didn’t pay me any attention. I went downstairs again and had a snooze at the front door. I dreamt I was writing on the blackboard, then I started wiping white chalk all over the black surface. Then a beautiful female came in, with a tube of lipstick in her hand. She looked like the geography teacher in our first academy. She planted a kiss on my cheek and drew a thick red line on the board, then went out crying. When I opened my eyes I heard hurried footsteps on the stairs. It must be Marko. It seemed to me that this dream of mine was pure pain. He stroked my neck and staggered off to piss against the trunk of the tree. Perhaps Marko had been drawing while I was dreaming. I quickly sneaked back into his room. There was a painting on which the oil hadn’t dried yet, a painting just in red. In it there was something like the eye of a wolf. It wasn’t coloured differently but, instead of a brush, he had used a small knife to scrape off the red, exposing the black beneath. The scrapings were those wolf’s eyes. They looked distorted, as if a shaky hand had done them.

Through the window I caught sight of Marko going into the sauna. He filled his bag with bottles of beer, took his Italian bike and a rifle from the sauna, and started whistling. I joined him and we set off into the depths of the forest. We sat down close to a giant tree and he started to clean the rifle. I was sitting close to him and thinking about the resemblance between us. We are both pessimistic and dreamy, and perhaps frightened of symbols. For sure he wouldn’t pay much attention to the mind of someone like me. Perhaps he felt superior deep down, because I’m just a tramp he adopted from the streets of Ciudad del Sol. Perhaps he even sees my bohemianism as a worthless bohemianism. He’s a civilized bohemian and I’m a savage bohemian. I might be wrong. Perhaps he hated my mind and perhaps he thought I was making fun of his silence and his worries. Did my being in his company expose the fragility of his life? Once he took me to a bar. It was a snowy night and a biting cold had the city in its grip. As we were going back to the studio, he slipped and fell flat on his face. I thought he had died. He was still holding my leash and I was worried I might freeze out there. I tried to revive him but he started cursing me and my past life, and making fun of the culture of Ciudad del Sol. I managed to get away from him and raced back to the bar to seek help. They carried him to the studio and I spent the night scrutinising his face. Why did he bring me into his life if it had to be walled off by all this sadness, loneliness and suspicion?

He rolled a joint and poured more beer into his belly. I examined the place around us. There were numerous trees that were quite wonderful. I was struck by a strange tree that looked like a woman on fire. I was drooling as I went around the trunk of the tree. Maybe that tree was related to the tree in the story that our friend Sancho tells. If only! I’d always wished that tree would swallow all my apprehensions, there on that mysterious island in the Pacific.

It’s said to be the same island that Sindbad reached and told amazing stories about. That tree, they say, feeds on humans and other animals. The inhabitants of the island believe that the spirits of their ancestors and their gods sleep in the leaves of the tree. The tree wraps its branches around its prey and the leaves stick to their body, then suck ravenously until the prey is just a dry skeleton without a single drop of life. The inhabitants worship it and offer sacrifices to it. Every year they give it a body. The victim is chosen by means of dreams. If any of the local people dream about standing under the tree, they have to admit it to the island’s priests. If anyone fails to report such a dream, a curse will pursue them for the rest of their life. So the dreamers would come forward voluntarily and give their bodies to satisfy the hunger of their ancestors and the gods.

Marko put the rifle aside. He whistled to me and I approached cautiously. He stretched out close to me and started to stroke me gently at first. His fingers were creeping between my legs. He had done it to me more than once. All my childhood came back to me as soon as his fingers touched my body. I was always on the alert and I was thinking I would bite off his penis with my teeth if he did it. But it was my cowardice that prevailed. As soon as he tried to hold me between his legs, I slipped out of his grip and ran away as fast as I could. He started shouting and threatening me, then he started firing his gun at me. He was drunk and I was terrified. I hid in the bushes, held my breath and listened to his shouts behind me. He suddenly stopped shouting and, muttering to himself, retraced his steps to where he had left his bicycle, then calm reigned around us.

I lay on my back and let out a sigh from deep inside me towards the sky. Life, life, life. Do you remember, Beto, the difference between barking and language? Their language has poisoned us. We should stick to barking, stop understanding what they say. All those metaphors and silly figures of speech. Professor Azmeh was right: mankind can put any word next to the word ‘life’, but when they do so the results suggest intellectual laziness. That’s how they fall in love, and sing, write books and die — prisoners of their metaphors since ancient times. They repeat the same old songs: life is a journey, life is a stairway, life is a mill, a ship, a garden, a grave. Life is a book. Life is a galaxy. Life is a cage, insomnia, a cross, a disease, smoke. Life is a river, an ocean, an island. Life is a valley. Life is a mountain. Life is a hospital, a bed, a disease. Life is a womb. Life is a gramophone record. Life is a hole, a trap, life is a trench. Life is a dictionary. Life is a gospel. Life is a poem. Life is a comedy, a painting, music. Life is a dream. Life is an itch. Life is a swing. Life is a gallows. There’s no word that can’t be coupled with the word ‘life’. Life is shit. Life is a prison. Life is cinema. There’s no word, whatever form it may take and whatever it may mean, that can’t go with the word ‘life’ without meaning something, without leading to the essence of life. Because life is garbage and a flower at the same time. If there was one word that didn’t go with ‘life’, that word would be the key to the secret of these humans. Just one word. O Lord of Shit, there isn’t one word that can’t be added mathematically without leading to a similar result: life is a street, life is poison, life is a cloud, life is a tunnel, life is a toilet…

I jumped out of the bushes as if driven by some wild animal energy. I tracked his scent. I kept barking all the way, running like mad. I reached the edge of the lake. His friends had left the place. He was floating in the lake, drunk and singing. I kept barking at him for more than five minutes. He started waving his hand at me. I wanted to grab him by the neck. I jumped into the water and started swimming around him. He was shouting out ecstatically and his voice echoed from every direction. I dived down under him, grabbed the end of his trouser leg and pulled him down until he stopped breathing.

These humans, Beto.

We who bark.

You and I, and this world, I wish everything would disappear, except my memories. I want the memories to remain dead in some place and forever, like the smell of piss on the trunk of a tree.

Please, Beto.

Forgive me.