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 gal
lows. 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.
The Killers and the Compass
Abu Hadid knocked back what remained of the bottle of arak. He put his face close to mine and, with the calm of someone high on hashish, gave me this advice: ‘Listen, Mahdi. I’ve seen all kinds of problems in my life and I know that one day I’ll run out of luck. You’re sixteen, and today I’m going to teach you how to be a lion. In this world you need to be street-smart. Whether you die today or in thirty years, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s today that matters and whether you can see the fear in people’s eyes. People who are frightened will give you everything. If someone tells you “God forbids it” or “That’s wrong”, for example, give him a kick up the arse, because that god’s full of shit. That’s their god, not your god. You are your own god and this is your day. There’s no god without followers or cry-babies willing to die of hunger or suffer in his name. You have to learn how to make yourself God in this world, so that people lick your arse while you shit down their throats. Don’t open your mouth today, not a word. You come with me, dumb as a lamb. Understand, dickhead?’
He thumped the arak bottle against the wall and aimed a friendly punch hard into my nose.
We walked through the darkness of the muddy lanes. The wretched houses were catching their breath after receiving a whipping from the storm. Inside them the people were sleeping and dreaming. Everything was soaked and knocked out of place. The wind that had toyed with the labyrinth of lanes all evening, picked up strength, then finally left with a bitter chill hanging over the place – this sodden neighbourhood where I would live and die. Many times I imagined the neighbourhood as if it were some offspring of my mother’s. It smelled that way and was just as miserable. I don’t recall ever seeing my mother as a human being. She would always be weeping and wailing in the corner of the kitchen like a dog tied up to be tormented. My father would assail her with a hail of insults and when her endurance broke, she would whine aloud: ‘Why, good Lord? Why? Take me and save me.’
Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress and whip her non-stop 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 towards 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 neighbourhood 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 neighbourhood made fun of her morals by calling her Hanan Aleena, which means something like ‘easy favours’. 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 packets of cigarettes from Umm Hanan, and gave me one of the packets. 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 tyres of cars in the neighbourhood, so that his business would flourish. We would bargain with him over how many pills for how many tyres. 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 towards the other neighbourhood. 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 neighbourhood, 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 arse in return. When he found out I was Abu Hadid’s brother, his father came to school and asked me to beat his son up. 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 wo
uld 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 moustache which 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 football 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 saltwater?’
‘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 saltwater? Answer, you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don’t they? Answer, shit-for-brains!’
The Iraqi Christ Page 8
