The Corpse Exhibition Read online

  Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour, spitting at her throughout.

  My nose was bleeding profusely. I was holding my head back as I tried to keep pace with Abu Hadid. The smell of spiced fish wafted from the window of Majid the traffic policeman’s house. He must have been blind drunk to be frying fish in the middle of the night. We turned down a narrow, winding lane. Abu Hadid picked up a stone and threw it toward two cats that were fighting on top of a pile of rubbish. They jumped through the window of Abu Rihab’s abandoned house. The rubbish almost reached the roof of the place. The government had executed Abu Rihab and confiscated his house. They say his family went back to the country where their clan lived. Abu Rihab had been in contact with the banned Daawa party. After a year of torture and interrogation in the vaults of the security services, he was branded a traitor and shot. It was impossible to forget the physical presence of his beautiful daughter, Rihab. She was a carbon copy of Jennifer Lopez in U Turn. I’d seen the film at the home of Abbas, the poet who lived next door. He had films that wouldn’t be shown on state television for a hundred years. Most of the young men in the neighborhood had tried to court Rihab with love letters, but she was an idiot who understood nothing but washing the courtyard and pouring water over the hands of her Daawa party father before he prayed.

  Abu Hadid, my giant brother, stopped in front of the door to Umm Hanan’s house. She was the widow of Allawi Shukr, and people in the neighborhood made fun of her morals by calling her Hanan Aleena, which means something like “easy favors.” We went inside and sat on a wooden bench with an uncomfortable back. Umm Hanan asked one of her daughters to wash my face and take care of me. The girl blocked my nose with cotton wool. Umm Hanan had three beautiful daughters, all alike as nurses in uniform. My brother slept with Umm Hanan. Then he fucked her youngest daughter twice. After that he told Umm Hanan to fuck me. I was surprised he didn’t ask that of the girl who was my age. Then Abu Hadid took some money and three packs of cigarettes from Umm Hanan, and gave me one of the packs.

  We set off again, walking along the muddy lanes. Abu Hadid slowed down, then retraced his steps and stopped at the door of Abu Mohammed, the car mechanic. He knocked on the door with his foot. The man came out in his white dishdasha with his paunch sticking out. His eyes popped out of his head when Abu Hadid greeted him. Me and the other kids used to call him “the gerbil who swallowed the watermelon.” He used to give me and the gang pills in return for puncturing the tires of cars in the neighborhood, so that his business would flourish. We would bargain with him over how many pills for how many tires. My brother ordered me to take off my bloodied shirt and told the mechanic to fetch me a clean one. The gerbil obeyed at once and came back with a blue shirt that smelled of soap. It was the shirt his son, a student at medical college, had just been wearing. I was surprised that the size fit me exactly. My brother leaned over and whispered a few words in the mechanic’s ear, and the mechanic’s face turned even darker than usual.

  We crossed the main street toward the other neighborhood. All along the way I was wondering what Abu Hadid had whispered in the gerbil’s ear. Abu Hadid coughed loudly, and his chest wheezed like my uncle’s old tractor. He didn’t say a single word on the way. He lit two cigarettes at the same time and offered one to me. It was after midnight. I don’t know anyone who lives in this neighborhood, other than an obnoxious boy who was at school with us. He once punched me, and I never did manage to stick a finger up his ass in return. When he found out I was Abu Hadid’s brother, his father came to school and asked me to beat up his son.

  People were scared senseless of my brother’s brutality. His reputation for ruthless delinquency spread throughout the city. He would baffle the police and other security agencies for many years—until, that is, the day he was executed in public. Even his enemies mourned him when the inevitable happened. Occasionally in life he had defended people—against the cruelty of the ruling party, for example. Abu Hadid didn’t distinguish between good and evil. He had his own private demons. Once he threw a hand grenade at the party office when “the comrades” executed someone who had evaded military conscription. Another time he mutilated the face of some wretched vegetable seller, simply because he was drunk and he felt like it. Abu Hadid would go on the rampage like that for eight years, until Johnny the barber gave him away. The night it happened Abu Hadid was fucking Johnny’s pretty brown daughter on the roof of the house. The police surrounded him and shot him in the leg. They executed him a week later. My mother and my seven sisters would beat their breasts for a whole year, but my father was relieved to be rid of the antics of his wayward son.

  Abu Hadid knocked on a rusty door that still had a few spots of green paint, shaped like frogs, on it. We were received by a man in his forties with a thick mustache that covered his teeth when he spoke. We sat down in the guest room in front of the television. I gathered that the man lived alone. He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of arak. He opened it and poured a glass. My brother told him to pour one for me too. We sat in silence, and the man and I watched a soccer match between two local teams, while my brother stared into a small fish tank.

  “Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious.

  “As long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the television screen.

  “Do fish drink water?”

  “Sure they drink; of course.”

  “How can fish drink salt water?”

  “Sure they have a way. How could they be in water and not drink?”

  “If they’re in water, perhaps they don’t need to drink.”

  “Why don’t you ask the fish in the tank?”

  Before the bald man could turn to look at him, my brother had jumped on top of him like a hungry tiger. He threw him to the ground, squatted on his chest, and pinned his arms down under his knees. In a flash he took a small knife out of his pocket, put it close to the man’s eye, and started shouting hysterically in his face, “Answer, you cocksucker! How can fish drink salt water? Answer, you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don’t they? Answer, shit-for-brains!”

  Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man’s ass and we left the house. I never would understand what the man had to do with my brother. We headed toward the parking lot. A thin young man, a year younger than my brother, was leaning against a red Chevrolet Malibu dating from the seventies. He embraced my brother warmly, and I felt that Abu Hadid and he were genuine friends. We set off in the car, smoking and listening to a popular song about lovers parting. We took the highway toward the outskirts of the city. Abu Hadid turned off the tape player, lay back in his seat, and said, “Murad, tell my brother the story about the Pakistani kid.”

  “Sure, no problem,” replied Murad Harba.

  “Listen, Mahdi. Some years back I took the plunge and escaped to Iran. I was thinking of going from there into Turkey and putting this fucked-up country behind me. I lived in a filthy house in the north of Iran, with people coming from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq and everywhere on God’s pimping earth. We waited for them to hand us over to the Iranian trafficker who was going to take us across the mountainous border. That’s where I met the Pakistani kid. He was about your age, nice guy, young and very handsome. He spoke little Arabic, but he had memorized the Quran. He was always scared. And he had a strange object in his possession: a compass. He would hold it in the palm of his hand like a butterfly and stare at it. Then he would hide it in a special pouch that hung around his neck like a golden pendant. He hanged himself in the bathroom the day before Iranian security raided the house. They shoved us in jail and beat us up plenty. When they’d finished humiliating us, we got our breath back and started to get to know the other prisoners. One of the people we chatted with was a young Iraqi who’d been jailed for selling hashish. He was born in Iran
. The government had deported his family from Baghdad after the war broke out on the grounds that he had Iranian nationality. I told him about the Pakistani kid who had hanged himself. The man was really upset about the poor boy, said he had met him before, that he was a good kid, and that he knew the whole story of the compass.

  “In 1989 in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the spiritual father of the jihad in Afghanistan, was in a car on his way to pray in a mosque frequented by the Afghan Arabs—the Arabs who went to fight in Afghanistan. The car was blown up as it crossed a bridge over a storm drain. His two sons were with him and were torn to pieces. According to the muezzin* of the mosque, who rushed to the scene of the explosion as soon as it happened, Azzam’s body was seemingly untouched. Not a single scratch. There was just a thin line of blood running from the corner of the dead sheikh’s mouth. It was a dreadful disaster—al Qaeda was accused of assassinating the sheikh who had stood up to the might of the Soviet Union, perhaps to give them greater impunity as an organization.

  “Before many others had gathered, Malik the muezzin spotted the compass close to the wreckage of the car. When he wiped the blood off it, he felt a shiver run up his spine. It was an army compass with the words Allah and Muhammad engraved on it. It was clear to the muezzin that it was the sheikh’s holy compass, blessed by God and a conduit for his miracles. Many of the mujahideen claimed the compass turned blood-red when God intended good or evil for the person carrying it. Azzam had never parted with it throughout his life in jihad. Malik hid it at home for ten years. He took it out every night, polished it, and looked at it, as he shed tears of sorrow at the death of the mujahideen’s sheikh.

  “The muezzin placed the compass gently into the hand of his son Waheed, like someone setting down a precious jewel onto a piece of cloth. Waheed had decided to smuggle his way into England. He might strike lucky there, help his family, and study to become a doctor. The muezzin told his son Waheed the secret of the compass and advised him to guard it with his life. With firm faith, he told him the compass would help him on his journey and throughout his life, and that it was the most precious thing a father could offer his son. Waheed was unaware of the compass’s powers and significance, and didn’t know much about those holy and special moments when the compass turned red to warn of good or evil, but his faith in his father made him treasure it. The compass then became inseparable from his person.

  Waheed reached Iran and lived in dilapidated houses run by traffickers. He had to work six months to save enough money to make the crossing to Turkey. One day he went out with six young Afghans to work on a building site. A rich Iranian man picked them up in a small truck and drove them to the outskirts of the town, where he was building an enormous house in the middle of his farm. They were working for a pittance. The man dropped them off at his farm and asked them to clear away the bricks, plaster, sacks, and wood left over from the building work. The deal was that the owner would come back late that evening and take them back to town. He gave them half their wages in advance and advised them to finish the work properly. Waheed and the Afghans worked slowly and lazily all day long. When the sun set they all prayed and then sat down to relax in one of the large rooms. They poured some juice, rolled cigarettes, and started to chat about trafficking routes to Europe. Every now and then the young Afghans would give Waheed sly looks of contempt. The owner was late. The Afghans decided to pass the time by playing a betting game, which was really a malicious trick. There was a group of barrels filled with water, next to some bags full of plaster. They told Waheed the game was that they would mix the plaster with water in a barrel and everyone in the group would put his hands in the mixture up to his elbow, and whoever managed to keep them in the longest would win a sum of money. They suggested Waheed go first. Full of good cheer and innocence, Waheed stood up and went through the motions, burying his arms in the plaster mixture. Within a few minutes the plaster set hard and Waheed’s arms were trapped in the barrel. The Afghans pulled down Waheed’s trousers and raped him one by one.”

  Between us we smoked nine cigarettes while listening to the story about the Pakistani. Murad Harba spat out his tale in one burst, then drank from the bottle of water next to him, cursing God. Abu Hadid took his pistol out of his belt and started to load it with bullets. The story about the Pakistani had no effect on me. I was entranced by the company of my brother Abu Hadid and by the chance to enter his various worlds. We turned off into an extensive park with bare trees like soldiers turned to stone. Murad switched off the engine. My heart was starting to pound, and I was curious to find out what they would do in the darkness of the cold park. Obviously we hadn’t come all this way to listen to the story about the Pakistani. We got out of the car. Abu Hadid looked around while Murad Harba opened the trunk of the car and took out a pick and shovel. Abu Hadid ordered me to help Murad dig. My blood began to race with excitement and fear. Abu Hadid, with his strong muscles, helped with the digging. We began to sweat. The ground was tough. The tangled roots of a tree and a large stone hampered our work. Before we’d had time to catch our breath, Murad and Abu Hadid headed back to the trunk of the car, while I stood close to the hole, bewildered like a deaf man at a wedding party. They took a man, bound and gagged, out of the trunk and dragged him along the ground to the hole. My brother told me to come close and look into the man’s eyes. The look of fear I saw is stamped in my memory as though with a branding iron. Abu Hadid kicked him in the back, and the man slumped into the hole. We shoveled soil on top of him and leveled the ground well.

  Abu Hadid gave my hair a sharp tug and whispered in my ear:

  “Now you’re God.”

  The Green Zone Rabbit

  BEFORE THE EGG APPEARED, I WOULD READ A BOOK about law or religion every night before going to sleep. Like my rabbit, I would be most active in the hours around dawn and sunset. Salsal, on the other hand, would stay up late at night and wake up at midday. And before he even got out of bed he would open his laptop and log on to Facebook to check the latest comments on the previous night’s discussion, then eventually go and have a bath. After that he would go into the kitchen, turn on the radio, and listen to the news while he fried an egg and made some coffee. He would carry his breakfast into the garden and sit at the table under the umbrella, eating and drinking and smoking as he watched me.

  “Good morning, Hajjar. What news of the flowers?”

  “It’s been a hot year, so they won’t grow strong,” I told him as I pruned the rosebushes.

  Salsal lit another cigarette and gave my rabbit an ironic smile. I never understood why he was annoyed by the rabbit. The old woman Umm Dala had brought it. She said she had found it in the park. We decided to keep it while Umm Dala looked for its owner. The rabbit had been with us for a month, and I had already spent two months with Salsal in this fancy villa in the north of the Green Zone. The villa was detached, surrounded by a high wall with a gate fitted with a sophisticated electronic security system. We didn’t know when zero hour would come. Salsal was a professional, whereas they called me “duckling” because this was my first operation.

  Mr. Salman would visit us once a week to check how we were and reassure us about things. Mr. Salman would bring some bottles of booze and some hashish. He would always tell us a silly joke about politics and remind us how secret and important the operation was. This Salman was in league with Salsal and didn’t reveal many secrets to me. Both of them made much of my weakness and lack of experience. I didn’t pay them much attention. I was sunk in the bitterness of my life, and I wanted the world to be destroyed in one fell swoop.

  Umm Dala would come two days a week. She would bring us cigarettes and clean the house. On one occasion Salsal harassed her. He touched her bottom while she was cooking dolma. She hit him on the nose with her spoon and made it bleed. Salsal laid off her and didn’t speak to her after that. She was an energetic woman in her fifties with nine children. She claimed she hated men, saying they were
despicable, selfish pricks. Her husband had worked for the national electric company, but he fell from the top of a lamppost and died. He was a drunkard and she used to call him the arak gerbil.

  I built the rabbit a hutch in the corner of the garden and took good care of him. I know rabbits are sensitive creatures and need to be kept clean and well fed. I read about that when I was in high school. I developed a passion for reading when I was thirteen. In the beginning I read classical Arabic poetry and lots of stories translated from Russian. But I soon grew bored. Our neighbor worked in the Ministry of Agriculture, and one day I was playing with his son Salam on the roof of their house, when we came across a large wooden trunk up there with assorted junk piled up on top of it. Salam shared a secret with me. The trunk was crammed with books about crops and irrigation methods and countless encyclopedias about plants and insects. Under the books there were lots of sex magazines with pictures of Turkish actresses. Salam gave me a magazine, but I also took a book about the various types of palm trees that grow in the country. I didn’t need Salam after that. I would sneak from our house to the roof of theirs to visit the library in the trunk. I would take one book and one magazine and put back the ones I had borrowed. After that I fell in love with books about animals and plants and would hunt down every new book that reached the bookshops, until I was forced to join the army.

  The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting, however. I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start looking for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten some psychotropic fruit. Experiments have shown that chimpanzees resort to kissing as a way to reduce tension, fatigue, and fear among the group. It’s been proven that female chimpanzees, when they feel that strangers have entered their territory, hurry to their mates, hug them, and start kissing them. And after long research, I came across another kiss, a long tropical kiss. A kiss by a type of tropical fish that kiss each other for half an hour or more without any kind of break. My memory of those years of darkness under sanctions is of devouring books. The electricity would go off for up to twenty hours a day, especially after that series of U.S. air strikes on the presidential palaces. I would snuggle into bed at midnight, and by the light of a candle I would stumble upon another species of kiss: by insects called Reduvius, though they don’t actually kiss each other. These only like the mouths of sleeping humans. They crawl across the face till they reach the corner of the mouth, where they settle down and start kissing. When they kiss they secrete poison in microscopic drops, and if the person sleeping is in good health and sleeping normally, he’ll wake up with a poisonous kiss on his mouth the size of four large raindrops put together.