Iraq + 100

by Hassan Blasim

  ‘Mr Translator, I’ve brought you a present,’ he says.

  ‘A present in a black bag, Lord preserve us. What is it, father? Not a Kalashnikov, I hope.’

  ‘War won’t end as long as there are people, my boy, war after war. When was the world without wars anyway? My God, to hell with it,’ Father says as he comes in.

  I get breakfast ready: tea, eggs and cheese.

  My father lights a cigarette after swallowing one bite of egg. He picks up his teacup and looks around at the pictures hanging on the wall. He stops in front of a copy of a painting by Fayeq Hassan, Horses in a Desert.

  ‘What news of your English stories?’ he asks as he looks at the picture.

  I take his present out of the black bag. It’s an explosives detection device that looks like a wand. He takes it from me and explains how it works, pretending the table is a car. My father’s worried I might be targeted by Islamist groups because of my new job. They might see translating American literature as treason and a form of cooperation with the occupier. In fact, the wand turns out to be just a plastic stick with the end connected to a mirror to check underneath cars. In recent years the killers have developed new ways of reaping people’s souls. They stick explosive devices under people’s cars. It doesn’t matter who the person targeted is. What matters is that the constant mayhem should serve their objectives. The explosive devices either kill you instantly or blow your legs off, in which case your neighbours, relatives and friends will say, ‘Well you should praise God and thank Him for ensuring you survived!’ Then you’d be a legless man who praises and thanks God. Violence sculpts you and in this case turns you into half a statue. Violence is the most brutal sculptor mankind has ever produced. A barbaric sculptor: no one wants to learn lessons from the works he has carved. I graduated from the Languages Faculty a year ago. I studied English. I was lucky to get a job in the foreign literature magazine. The magazine specialised in translating literature from various languages. While I was studying I translated one story by Hemingway and another by Margaret Atwood. I had them published on the culture page in Awraq magazine and my translations apparently caught the eye of the editor-in-chief. He contacted me when I was about to graduate and asked me to visit him at the magazine after I graduated. I had signed a contract with the foreign literature magazine within three weeks. The people at the magazine chose a Raymond Carver story for me. I hadn’t read anything by him, but I had come across the name Carver in a critical article about dirty realism and about Carver’s writer friend, Richard Ford.

  My father poured himself another cup of tea and went out to the garden.

  I watched him from the window. He sat at the table under the orange tree and stared at the table as if he were looking at himself in a mirror.

  Every ten years my father changes into another person. It’s as if he dances faithfully to every new rhythm in our shitty country, turning with each new turn. My mother’s brother, who translated Freud’s books, used to call him ‘the chameleon’. For the past few years he’s kept repeating that it was the chameleon that killed his sister. My mother died suddenly of a heart attack. We were three boys and a girl. My mother disembarked from the ship of our life and we had to battle the stormy and unpredictable waves of life with my father. Before we were born, in the 1970s, my father was obsessed with communism and playing the oud. He used to hold communist parties just for his comrades and play them revolutionary songs. There was a well-known song at the time called ‘Lenin in Baghdad.’ At the beginning of the ’80s my father abandoned communism, volunteered in the army and became a sniper. He won several awards for bravery in war. As a sniper, he was skilled at making neat little holes in the skulls of Iranian soldiers. In the ’90s my father deserted, but was caught and spent his days in one military prison after another. He treated the prisons as mosques: he started to pray and grew religious. Instead of thinking about a world full of free and happy people, he started thinking about a divine roadmap that led to Heaven or Hell. When the dictator was overthrown at the beginning of the new millennium no one understood him any longer. He would descend into strange periods of seclusion. He would disappear for a week or more, then suddenly reappear. He wouldn’t let anyone ask why he had disappeared. He became introverted and depressed. After the U.S. forces left the archaeological site in Babylon, my father got a job as a guard in the antiquities department. Some time in his first days at work, he declared, ‘The American infidels have turned the site of the oldest civilisation in the world into a camp for stupid soldiers, occupying a country in the name of democracy.’

  * * *

  I take the lift to the tenth floor. At the door to the main dome the info-bot reminds me of the security procedures for going out into the abandoned city. I pay him and borrow a facemask. The door opens and then closes behind me. Dust blocks out the sun. Sandstorms are blowing all over the city. I turn on the mask’s vision screen and walk up to a dead fountain more than a hundred years old and sit on the rim. Three drunks are messing around on the street corner. Sara’s phone is still unavailable. She must be busy with the customers at the pleasure hotel. One of the drunks goes down on his knees theatrically while the other two imitate executing him. I think they’re making fun of the country’s murderous past—Daesh and the sectarianism that was fed by oil money. This abandoned city is now just a desiccated relic of a bloody past, a past that was steeped in religious fanaticism and dominated by classical capitalism. The violence only stopped after Babylon was engulfed by the effects of climate change and the oil wells had practically run dry. How puzzling and painful is the march of man! The rivers and fields dried up. The desert advanced and obliterated the city. At the time, the federal government was struggling to mobilise modern technology to stop people abandoning the city forever. The federal government took advantage of oil exports in the final years, started some big investment projects and opened up to the world. For many third world countries the decisive factors in shifting the balance were that clean energy matured and spread all over the world, people in the West rose up against the brutal and selfish capitalist system, and the idea of one destiny and one world without hypocrisy or selfishness gained strength. People started saying, ‘This is neither your country nor my country. It is our land,’ and this was not just a slogan. People agitated and started to take the initiative to change the world through intelligence, humanity, and real justice. In the middle of the century the name ‘Iraq’ was changed to ‘Federal Mesopotamia’. First the Germans built technically advanced districts in Babylon and other cities, which made it possible for the residents to live with the desert storms. The sandstorms had made life in the city miserable by making the air unbreathable. During the time of the German districts, generations developed that were skilled at digital technology, until the Chinese appeared on the scene and stunned the world with the domes concept, which is now seen as the ideal solution for cities that are subject to desertification and environmental degradation. After the Chinese domes were built Babylon’s ‘Magical Generation’ was born—a generation that now exports the cleverest software and the most extraordinary scientific discoveries to the world. Thanks to our queen, the domes have become the new gardens of Babylon. Each dome in Babylon has its own special character. One dome is known for its fascinating cybergardens, another for its digital arts centres, and a third for its space dreams, such as the ninth district, where they are now building the world’s tenth space lift. If it wasn’t for the Water Rebels, we would be living in complete peace. I understand why the rebels object to the water allocations but violence is an emotional and primitive solution in a situation that calls for self-control and reflection. I don’t know what solutions they are proposing. Blind rage is an inhuman weapon. It’s a form of selfishness and hollow pride. I’m reminded of our city’s classical writer, who was angry at how bloody and violent life was in the city at the turn of the century. Okay, why not? That might work as the intro to his story-game. Why can’t the story-game be inspired by how the writer ende
d up? He took refuge in Finland after Islamic State took over his city. In Finland he wrote four collections of stories and a play, then he disappeared until they found he had killed himself under a tree in the forests of northern Finland. The temperature was forty below zero, and when I looked for his date of birth, it turned out he was born in summer, in the month of July. Maybe he was born when the temperature was forty above zero. Maybe he was born in the sun and the fact that he died in the snow could be written into the start of the game. There could be two options for the player: a sun icon or a snow icon. If the player clicks on the sun icon the game begins at the birth of the writer and then we move on to his story, but if they choose the snow icon the player starts with his suicide under a tree with a pistol in his hand. Or the way into the game could be just two numbers: −40 or +40 and the story would have two tunnels and the player would choose. Shit, what a dumb idea! I’ll go for a little walk and maybe get these superficial ideas out of my head, and maybe inspiration will descend on me. It’s not my day! Near the old parliament, there’s a teacher wearing a facemask and a group of children who look like primitive animals in their masks. It’s clearly an educational tour of the past. Some Nigerian tourists go warily into the ruins of the parliament building, taking photographs. I taste a bitterness in my mouth. I go back to the dome and get aboard a driverless, automated taxi and go to the pleasure hotel where Sara works. Most tourists prefer taxis with local drivers they can chat with. In the pleasure hotel I take the lift to the fantasy floor. I submit a blood sample to the analysis-bot, and he opens the door. I pay twenty e-credits and another door opens into the hall where the really sexy women are. I choose a beautiful Turkish girl and have sex with her in the zero-gravity room. I go down to the cyber-sex floor where Sara works. As soon as she sees me she rushes to hug me.

  ‘What floor were you on?’ she asks with a smile.

  I tell her about the Turkish girl and she slaps me on the ass. ‘You idiot!’ she says. ‘On the romance floor there’s a new girl from Basra that would make your head spin if you saw her.’

  I hug her again and whisper close to her lips: ‘I’ve missed the way you think.’

  She pushes me away gently and taps me on the head with her fist. ‘Let’s leave now, you story prick. What’s up with you? Are you okay?’

  I tell her in brief about my problem making a story-game out of the text by that writer who killed himself. She pulls me by the hand and says cheerfully, ‘Let’s go to the Selfish Gene bar, it’s a vintage bar and it might do your classical text some good.’

  In the bar, Sara orders a beer from the alcohol machine and I have a new arak they started making two months ago. We take a seat in the corner. From the screen on the table, Sara chooses the privacy option. A glass cocoon surrounds us. From the screen I choose a new Swedish song that Sara likes. I ask her how her mother is in India. ‘My mother’s resigned from the Mars project,’ she says. ‘She’s taken issue with the recent constitution written by the One World committee. She objects to the part that says that every citizen in space must undertake never to rebel against Martian government through violence. You know the debate—it’s been raging for more than seventy years. A simple argument: if a violent rebellion took place and any parts of the settlement were damaged, it could mean all the settlers die. Life is still fragile there and it can’t tolerate any violence. My mother objects and says it lays the basis for a space dictatorship. Anyway, you tell me now, what’s your story problem?’

  I don’t like the taste of the new arak. Sara fetches me another drink made in South Africa that I haven’t drunk before. It tastes sharp and pleasant. I look into Sara’s big eyes and say, ‘My dear friend, quite simply, I’m a short-story artist and I want to write my own story-games and novel-games. I don’t get any joy from turning classical literature into smart games. Quite honestly, their stories don’t excite me very much. Besides, there’s nothing new in the story of the writer who killed himself. I think it’s one of his weakest stories. It was the last story he wrote and then he committed suicide.’ Sara suggests I take the Games Centre by surprise by turning an almost dead classical story into an original, advanced story. Then they will trust me and give me a chance to move to the department that composes new story-games. Sara takes from her pocket a small metal box and puts it on the table. She opens the box, which looks empty. ‘Here’s the key. With this you’ll finish the story within a day!’ she says.

  ‘No, please Sara. You know I don’t like psychedelic insects. Maybe smoking something natural, okay. But I don’t approve of electronic parasites.’

  ‘Life is short. You have to try an insect at least once,’ Sara replies. ‘Believe me, it’s one of a kind. It was developed in Brazil and now it’s colonising the whole world. You can’t take it by youself. You have to take it with a partner you trust and who trusts you, so that they can keep the thing under control. It’s your partner who decides when your trip ends. Don’t worry and don’t be so serious. You trust me, right?’ Sara uses her phone as a magnifying glass and looks into the box. She wets the tip of her finger and puts it in the box, and the microscopic insect sticks to it. She puts her finger into my hair and sets the insect free. ‘Calm down, it’s not working yet,’ she says. ‘The insect needs to find the right place on your scalp first, you numbskull. And it won’t start to take effect until I activate it from my switch. I’ll send the app for neutralising it to your phone. Some people can stop the effect of the insect during the trip by themselves, like someone who’s asleep and realises they’re dreaming and they have to wake up. But not everyone manages that. The important thing is you have to relax. I’ll monitor the insect’s progress and your brain activity and stop it when the time is right.’

  * * *

  The next morning I decide to go to Dome 7. From there, I can go on to the abandoned city and then to the old site of the ruins, where the lion of Babylon used to stand—the lion that was moved to Dome 14 with other important antiquities some years ago. Together with Sara’s insect, being at the site of the lion might stimulate my imagination. I take a facemask and some food and water. I reread that old writer’s story and leave.

  It’s just desert. I locate the site of the lion through the e-map on the screen of the mask. There are lots of sandstorms and a hot wind. I send Sara a message: ‘Activate your insect.’

  ‘Have a good trip, story prick,’ she replies.

  I try to find the site of the old oil pipeline. Five minutes pass without me feeling anything. Maybe my brain is too tough for the insect to penetrate. I feel uneasy in this deserted place. I can hear children’s voices. I climb a sandy hill. I think the oil pipeline lies beyond it. At the base of the hill, on the other side, I see a group of children playing football. How can they play without facemasks? I approach them and the referee, a young man, waves at me as if we’re friends. A thin boy scores a goal after the defender tries to block him. They start arguing and the defender head-butts the boy who scored. The forward’s nose starts to bleed. The match stops. Next minute, the forward is back home and his mother is trying to stop the bleeding with cotton wool while telling him off for playing rough. She stuffs his nose with cotton wool and asks him to hold his head up high. I know this boy. It’s the writer who killed himself, but when he was a boy. I go out to the family’s back garden to check up on this. Yes. Definitely. This is the pomegranate tree he was born under in July. His mother is now screaming in front of me, and carries on screaming until the woman next door climbs over the garden wall and helps her with the delivery. Where is he now? Okay, he’s on the roof of the house. He’s sitting among dozens of red birds. He throws seeds to the birds and takes a book out of a large wooden bird tower. He has installed a small shelf of books inside this tower. He might be hiding the books from his family. What’s he reading? Ah, Demian by Hermann Hesse. Suddenly the sandstorms die down. Thick snow falls in what’s now a vast forest. I see smoke rising. I head toward it. It’s a small wooden hut with a sauna close by. The smoke is rising from t
he latter. A naked man comes to the door of the sauna smoking and drinking alcohol. Who else could it be! It’s the old writer in flesh and blood. A white beard and a bald head and a glum look on his face. Although he’s no more than forty years old, time has cruelly scarred the features of his face. I like this Finnish forest. I walk away from the sauna and go deep into the darkness of it. I spot a wolf. I’d better go back to the writer’s house. The author sits in front of the computer, writing and drinking alcohol and smoking, wearing a green hat. Suddenly he gets up and slams the computer against the edge of the table and finally kicks the wreckage of the computer like a goalkeeper kicking the ball upfield. He goes into the kitchen, takes a psychedelic mushroom out of a drawer, eats some of it and sits at the table smoking. I sit opposite him. He puts his hat on the table in front of him and in turn I take off my facemask and put it on the table. Minutes pass as we stare at each other. ‘What do you want from me?’ he asks. I’m not sure whether he’s addressing me, because maybe he’s under the influence of the mushrooms and can see someone else, or maybe he’s talking to the characters in one of his stories. In the corner of the kitchen there’s a wand for detecting explosives. He might have made it himself to re-create the ambiance in one of his stories. The wand is the father’s gift to his son, the translator. How pathetic he is. He seems to have a gloomy imagination and his creative resources are very simple. He gets up and comes over to me. He puts his hand on my shoulder. What’s happening surely isn’t for real. He’s hallucinating! He speaks to me, or rather he tells his story, which I know by heart. I don’t pay him any attention. My mind wanders to a black cat lying under a delicious sun. I can feel it breathing. I feel as though I’m settling down inside the cat. I merge with the cat, while our writer goes on telling his story:

  * * *

  After my father went out to the garden, I picked up the teapot and followed him. I asked him if he wanted any more tea. He didn’t answer, then started to talk about how wonderful orange trees are. ‘Did you know, my son, that orange trees spread across the world from ancient China, where the orange was the king of foods and medicines. What a splendid tree it is! It flowers and bears fruit at the same time.’