The Iraqi Christ

by Hassan Blasim

  ‘A rabbit’s egg. Ha, duckling. You’re a real joker now,’ Salman whispered to me before he left.

  On the last night I stayed up late with Salsal. I was worried about the rabbit, because it looked like Umm Dala would be on a long holiday. The rabbit would die of hunger and thirst. Salsal was busy with Facebook as usual. I stayed close to the window, watching the garden. He said he was having a discussion with the Deputy Minister of Culture on sectarian violence and its roots. I gathered from Salsal that this minister had been a novelist in Saddam Hussein’s time and had written three novels about Sufism. One day he and his wife were at a party at the home of a wealthy architect overlooking the Tigris. His wife was attractive, stunningly so, and cultured like her husband. She had a particular interest in old Islamic manuscripts. The Director of Security, a relative of the president, was a guest at the party. After the party was over, the security chief gave his surveillance section orders to read our friend’s novels. A few days later they threw him in jail on charges of incitement against the State and the Party. The Director of Security bargained with the novelist’s wife in exchange for her husband’s freedom. When she rejected his demands, the security chief had one of his men rape the woman in front of her husband. After that the woman moved to France and disappeared. They released the novelist in the middle of the nineties and he went off to look for his wife in France, but could find no trace of her. When the dictator’s regime fell, he went home and was appointed Deputy Minister of Culture. The story of the novelist’s life was like the plot of a Bollywood film, but I was surprised how many details of the man’s life Salsal knew. I felt that he admired the man’s personality and sophistication. I asked him what sect the man was. He ignored my question. Then I tried to draw him out on the identity of our target, but Salsal replied that a novice duckling like me wasn’t allowed to know such things. My only task was to drive the car and it was Salsal who would fire the shot with his silenced revolver.

  The next morning we were waiting in front of the car park in the city centre. The target was meant to arrive in a red Toyota Crown and as soon as the car went into the car park Salsal would get out of our car, follow him inside on foot and shoot him. Then we would drive off to our new place on the edge of the capital. That’s why I had brought the rabbit along with me and put it in the boot of the car.

  Salsal received a text on his mobile and his face turned pale. We shouldn’t have had to wait for the target more than ten minutes. I asked him if all was well. He shouted out a curse and slapped his thigh. I was worried. After some hesitation he held out his mobile phone and showed me a picture of a rabbit sitting on an egg. It was a silly Photoshop job. ‘Do you know who sent the picture?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘The Deputy Minister of Culture,’ he said.

  ‘What!!?’

  ‘The deputy’s the target, Hajjar.’

  I got out of the car, my blood boiling at Salsal’s stupidity and all the craziness of this pathetic operation. More than a quarter of an hour passed and the target didn’t appear. I told Salsal I was pulling out of the operation. He got out of the car too and asked me to be patient and wait a while longer, because both of us were in danger. He got back in the car and tried to contact Salman. I walked to a shop nearby to buy a packet of cigarettes. My heart was pounding like crazy from the anger. As soon as I reached the shop the car blew up behind me and caught fire, burning the rabbit and Salsal to cinders.

  A Wolf

  Fear also has a smell, as you know.

  The man smelled of smoked fish as he spoke, spraying saliva from his mouth.

  ‘That was last winter. I was coming back from one of my routine jaunts around the city centre. Jaunts intended to “pick up a living”, as we say in the home country. I was gathering what I could from various, out-of-the-way bars: casual conversation, a fuck, a free beer, a joint, anarchic talk about political matters, an argument with another drunk, or a chance to annoy others on the pretext of being drunk, just for fun. The important thing was that the day should include a human touch, however small. You know. And on the day the wolf appeared, I met a strange young woman. An owl of ill omen, as we would say. Do you believe there are faces that bring bad luck? There are faces you meet that are like the symbols in dreams. You’re an artist and your imagination makes it easy for you to understand what I mean, doesn’t it? You artists are farmers tilling the fields of dreams. Do you like that? Yes, I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert. Imagine there’s an Indian painter in Delhi working on some subject that’s also taking shape in the dream of a man who’s asleep in Texas. Okay, fuck that. But would you agree with me that all art comes together in this way? Perhaps love and unhappiness too. If, for example, a poet wrote about loneliness in Finland, then his poem could be the dream of someone asleep in some other part of the world. If there was a special search engine for dreams, like Google, all dreamers would find their dreams in works of art. The dreamer would put a word, or several words, from his dream into the Dream Search Engine, and thousands of results would appear. The more the search is narrowed down, the closer he gets to his dream and eventually he finds out it’s a painting or a piece of music or a sentence in a play. He would also find out which country his dream was in. Yes, you know. Maybe life... okay, fuck that.

  ‘The young woman had a surprising face. It looked like the needle of an electric sewing machine had pricked it for many hours. Her complexion was peppered with dozens of little holes. She told me she was Spanish. Then, five minutes later, she told me her mother was Egyptian and her father Finnish. She only knew three words of Arabic, all of them related to sexual organs or blasphemous phrases including the word “shit”. The whore drank three glasses of beer on my account and went to wait in a dark corner. What do you think she’s waiting for? Definitely another prick who’ll spend more on her. I lost twenty euros in the slot machine. I felt exhausted and hungry. Then I waved at the woman with the ill-omened face, a sarcastic theatrical wave, and before leaving, as if addressing vast throngs, I shouted: “Long live life!”

  ‘On the way home, I couldn’t get the woman’s face out of my mind. I had the impression I had met her in some street market in the country. I don’t know why, but I imagined her sitting wrapped in a black cloak selling green and red peppers. I’m certain that three or four signs of bad luck had conspired to put me in this mess. But anyway, listen, you won’t believe what happened next. As usual, as soon as I got back to my flat, I took off all my clothes. I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the thing running towards me from the sitting room. I jumped into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I was like someone who’d seen the Angel of Death. It was a wolf. A wolf, I swear. But you’ll say that maybe it was a dog. After looking through the keyhole several times, I spotted it again and I knew very well what it was. I was really shaking. There was a terrifying silence for some minutes. After looking through the keyhole several times, I could see it – I was sure it was a wolf. I could hear it panting, then I saw it sniffing my trousers and underpants at the front door. After that it sat down and started to stare sadly at the bathroom door.

  ‘A wolf in the city centre, in a block of flats, and in my bloody flat! I sat on the toilet seat and began to think: no one but me had a key to this flat, I live on the fourth floor, and even if we assume, okay, that it could fly and had come in through the balcony, the door between the sitting room and the balcony was always closed. I pissed without noticing I was doing it. I sat there as if paralysed, naked on the toilet seat with a wolf in my flat. How absurd! I began to blame and curse myself. Why did I strip off like a whore whenever I came into the flat? If I’d had my mobile with me, I would have called the police and it would all be over. What kind of shitbag am I? An unemployed drunk, cruising the bars to pick up a living. And from whom? From wrecks no less rotten than me; people from under whose feet the new world of glitter has pulled the car
pet, like, for example, that fat woman in her late thirties looking for a casual fuck with an immigrant refugee who doesn’t have a screw left that’s not loose. We’re the ones who don’t have delicious tight arses. We just have arseholes to shit from. But fuck that.

  ‘Even the woman I met that day, the one with the face punctured with needle holes, didn’t take up my invitation. She moved to another table and waited for better rubbish to come along. If she’d accepted my invitation to fuck and come back to the flat with me, she would have run off and called the police or the neighbours. Perhaps the wolf would have eaten her. What wolf? Impossible. There must be some mistake in the facts of this case, or some hallucination. I was speaking like this to my image in the mirror.

  ‘I looked through the keyhole again. It was crouched in the same place. There were only a few hours left till morning. I thought that tomorrow someone would be worried I was missing. Of course it was a ridiculous idea, and my only aim was to give myself some false consolation. Because I’ve been living alone for years, and I only know freaks that haunt the most secluded bars, and they’re like me – loners who scrape together a livelihood where they can, or else slope back to their dirty beds to be consumed by sadness the long night through. The only ones who might knock on my door are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they stopped coming a while back. Perhaps they’ve had enough of my constant mockery of their Lord. There was a time when they would swamp me with their books and magazines. One thing I liked in those magazines was that desperate attempt to link the discoveries of science to the stories in the Bible. Two beautiful women from the Jehovah’s Witnesses used to visit me regularly. My sick imagination made me welcome them warmly. I thought that establishing a serious relationship with them would lead to passionate lovemaking. Imagine. The two Jehovah’s Witness women, naked in my bed. One of them sucking my cock and the other giving her clitoris to my tongue while reading a passage from the Bible. We used to talk about lots of things. The subject that interested me most was the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood transfusions. I used to joke with them and say that blood is delicious and it’s what vampires drink. I used to talk to them about the importance of blood.

  ‘“The Director of the Bio-Ethics Centre at the University of Pennsylvania says in complete scientific coldness, ‘The importance of blood in healthcare is comparable to the importance of oil in the transport sector. Just as billions of barrels of oil are extracted every year to satisfy the human demand for fuel, about ninety million units of blood are drawn from volunteers to save mankind. That vast amount of blood is equivalent to all the blood in the veins of eight million people.’ Nonetheless, blood stocks seem to be insufficient. Just like oil. There are constant warnings about this shortage.”

  ‘This cocktail of scientific information or, to be more precise, pretentious waffle, was so that the Jehovah’s Witnesses would know I really was an important person before I came to Finland and began to stagnate. I told them I was an expert on Hebrew and that I translated secret reports for the Ministry of Defence and the Intelligence Agency. To make my professional life sound more exciting, I added some adventures, detective book stuff. With them I would prattle on at length, making up stories and mixing serious talk with nonsense. I would pose questions too, and answer them myself while the women sat there like doves of peace. They would smile as if they had just arrived from heaven.

  ‘“But what if a deadly plague broke out across the world and everyone needed new blood?” Before the older woman could guess the answer, I would say, like an expert explaining genetic science, “Without a doubt, a new global war would break out. But even so, there’s no need to worry because, if a war for blood did break out, I think it would be a clean war in which they would ban the use of traditional weapons, or modern weapons, or even paring knives. So the war would be like a game of American Football and the soldiers would wear padded sports clothes. Of course there would be no point fighting a war in which blood flowed for no purpose, at a time when the world was in dire need of it, so there would be no toleration or mercy towards soldiers who used weapons of any kind. But what kind of war would that be? Fuck that. The aim of the fighting would be to capture as many of the enemy troops as possible. The troops would clash, and each side would try to capture the other’s troops and then move them away in trucks that would wait in the rear lines. It would be the last war and it would come to an end when the last person gave blood. The trucks would take the captive soldiers to blood donation centres and the blood would then be distributed fairly among the population…”

  ‘But we’ve strayed from the subject. Is my chatter making you dizzy? Fuck that. Okay. Anyway, there I was, talking to myself and shaking. “The wolf, my god, the wolf! Why doesn’t it move from its place?” I wimpered. Why doesn’t it at least go to the kitchen to look for something to eat? All it did while posted in front of the bathroom door was sniff my underwear, then stare at the door with murderous eyes. Of course, it was a shitty idea for me to leave the forest and come back to live in the city. Damn those blood-sucking mosquitoes. Did you know it’s the female mosquitoes that feed on human blood, while the male drinks only the sap of plants and the nectar of flowers? I spent more than five months in the forest, catching fish every day in the nearby lake and in the evening translating an interesting book on the grammar of the Hebrew language. I was happy in my seclusion, with the gifts of the forest, oblivious to the world of humans. I would drink red wine, in moderation. But the disaster was that none of the creams with which I covered my face and body deterred the mosquito attacks. And how could I relax when a swarm of them was hovering over my head all day long like Christ’s halo in those old paintings? At night the female ones got through the sheets like armoured vehicles and sucked my blood greedily. The landlord made fun of me when I told him about the mosquitoes. He said they must like me a lot. And finally my sufferings from the mosquitoes were topped by a severe stomach ache. The doctor told me it was just my irregular diet and I should eat more vegetables. He also said it would be best if I went back to the city and mixed with people. The stomach clearly suffers when you live in isolation. I also gathered from him that I had started to talk about myself in a peculiar way. In short, he believed I needed a psychiatrist. Okay. I’m a good listener most of the time and I appreciate advice. But I only stuck to the first half of the doctor’s advice. I came back to the city and went back to mixing with the dregs of secluded bars. Without a drink, the world needs a bull-fighter. With a drink, the world is a farce that only needs more clowns. Fuck that.

  ‘Inside the bathroom there was only the towel and piles of dirty socks and underwear. I was exhausted and cold. I checked that my guest was still in his place. I took a hot shower and went back to thinking about the matter. If I had any enemies, it might be logical to think that the supposed enemy had brought the wolf to my flat. But how would you take a wolf to another man’s flat without help from someone who works in a zoo and without a special vehicle for carrying wolves? Perhaps it’s a tame wolf, like a dog. Or maybe I’ve gone mad and I’m simply imagining all this. Could a sensible man believe what I’m telling you? Don’t say you believe me, but it is, by Jehovah and all his witnesses and angels, a real wolf. Perhaps the doctor was right.

  ‘I covered myself with the towel and fell into a deep sleep on top of the socks and underwear. When I woke up, I had a severe headache ploughing through my skull like an angry bulldozer. It might have been midday. The other mad thing that’s hard to believe is that the wolf was still in its place. Shit. Doesn’t it feel hungry, and why’s it as still as the Sphinx? The idea of hunger seeped into my mind like a quicksilver snake. I panicked and let out a loud scream. Was I to stay trapped in the bathroom till I died of hunger, if the wolf didn’t die of hunger first? Of course, wolves can put up with hunger better than humans. But I have the water in the bathroom, whereas the kitchen tap won’t do him any good. But then he might die of thirst while I die of hunger. No, no. In the kitchen there’s a pan of soup
on the table. I don’t know if he’d like last night’s soup, and besides, there’s bread on the table too if he wants it...

  ‘I suddenly had a horrendous attack of hysteria and started pounding on the door and screaming for help. Every now and then I would check the reaction of the damned wolf through the hole. Where are the neighbours? Have they had wolves as well? No, no, I can’t possibly die here in the bathroom. I thought it would be better to be eaten by the wolf than to die in this horrible way and not be eaten! I was looking in the mirror and going over my fears to myself. Perhaps I could wrestle with the wolf and make good my escape. Perhaps he would just wound me. And even if he bit an entire arm off that would be better than rotting to death in the bathroom. I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth and examined my reflection for more than a quarter of an hour. I kicked the wall, raving and cursing. Then I had an idea: why not open the door, throw the towel at it and see how far I get? But, brave guy, what if the wolf pounces instantly and you can’t escape? I did another round of shouting and banging on the walls, hammering on them with the shampoo bottles until they broke. Then I collapsed on top of the toilet seat again. I cupped my hands and drank water from the sink, then burst out crying. I threw myself on the cold tile floor and curled up like someone with a religious zeal to disappear from this world.

  ‘Late on the second night, I decided to put an end to this nonsense. Either he ate me or I would eat him myself. I felt an amazing energy, driven by my thirst for revenge. I would tear apart this worthless, cowardly wolf. I would cut him up and roast his flesh, and his head too. Fuck that! I opened the bathroom door ever so slowly. The wolf jumped to its feet. I ran with all my strength and leapt towards it. The last thing I remember was when the wolf leapt towards me.