Iraq + 100

by Hassan Blasim

  Such gangs prowl the city at night, like vampires from old-time horror films. Many of their members were the product of government commissions, cloning technology investments made some twenty years prior. Now they lived out a wretched existence, long after their designer physical attributes had deserted them. Suicide spiked among them, until the only ones left were those whose skills made them good at looting.

  During my walks through these ruins—either after my work or after a feast—I would often see the young men and women being sold, in cattle markets, to foreign buyers who’d pay with things worth next to nothing—enough to slake a bit of thirst, or quiet the rumblings of an empty belly. On one occasion, I visited the covered market in Jamlun, which was lined, on all sides, by doors leading to cells where slaves spent their nights.

  There, I saw one of the traders hawking his wares—a group of muscular slaves sitting on wooden benches. Their necks were chained together, and they wore thin, sleeveless shirts that exposed all the brawn they could flex.

  At the same time, there were young women, all made up, sitting on the other side of the market hall. Some of them held children that were still nursing, while other children were old enough to play nearby without thinking to run away. It was as though they had already adapted to a life of slavery.

  Not far from where I was watching, there was a buyer examining a beautiful girl, peering into her eyes and sniffing her mouth. Another girl next to her was holding off a different buyer, refusing to let him examine under her clothes. In the end the seller forced her to strip off her dress, and she stood there, mute, with tears in her eyes.

  I would hear about cannibalism all too often, people who snatched up children and women in the dark alleys or who trapped them in the labyrinthine ruins or the deserted skyscrapers. I remember they tried it on me once, as I returned from one of my tasks. None of the kidnappers could kill me, though. Even when they tried to bite me, they were surprised at how thick my skin was, how strong my bones were, how solid my flesh was.

  Their teeth broke, you see, and they cursed the hunger that had driven them to me.

  Not long after the Governor turned his vitriol on the statues of the city, I was surprised one morning by somebody attempting to loop a cable around my neck. The cable was tethered to one of the Authority’s giant cranes, and started to lift me up, along with my concrete plinth, high into the air above Umm al-Burum Square, then setting me down on the back of a truck.6

  The truck drove me toward one of the great warehouses on the margins of the city. There, I found other statues in storage: one-time inhabitants of Basra, like Al-Farahidi the grammarian, the Companion Utbah bin Ghazwan, the poet al-Sayyab, Abd al-Karim Qassim and the white horse he used to ride, a copy of the Lion of Babylon with that unknown victim still beneath its paws.

  I would have been cut up and sold for scrap were it not for the fact I was made of concrete—no use in that. Instead, I was shoved into a wooden box filled with straw and carried in the hold of a ship over the seas. Finally, I reached a museum that resembled a massive dumpster, where they put me on a granite pedestal next to statues of various dictators—presidents and military commanders—thinking I must be one of them. I assumed it was due to the hammer I carried.

  The place was grim at night, like a cavernous prison. Nobody moved aside from the elderly janitor, whose footfalls could be heard as he cleaned the tiled floor of tissues and grime. He grumbled about this tedious work, which he could only carry out at night—by day, the place was crowded with visitors from nine in the morning until eight in the evening.

  The janitor gave most care to shining the shoes of presidents and famous leaders, or to buffing the decorations on the military uniforms. He must have been the only person in the world to do so without asking for baksheesh. Every time he wrapped up shining a pair of shoes, he would stand up like a soldier at attention, extending a military salute and offering his name and rank during the Third World War (some twenty years prior).

  The penultimate statue he stood before was always Stalin. After he cleaned the man’s shoes of all the gum and candy that the young boys stuck to them during their daytime visits, he’d turn and mimic a goose-step march down to the Hitler statue, stand before him at the ready, and give him a Nazi salute. He’d ask him about his lover Eva Braun and tell him that he was once in a relationship with a woman that resembled her.

  That was before he was called up to his far-away army barracks, where he fought some other great power for control of the uranium mines—the main source of energy after the oil ran out. When he returned on home leave, he had found her in the arms of a sailor.

  The young boys in the tour groups always annoy me whenever they visit—the last one was a group of children younger than ten, overseen by an olive-skinned guide who led them among the statues:

  ‘This is Ceausescu. Look,’ she said, smiling at her troupe as she lectured. ‘The dictator of Romania, who was executed along with his wife Elena by secret military tribunal in 1989.’

  ‘And this is … Hitler!’ cried out one of the children. The guide turned to him excitedly, ‘Yes, this is Adolf Hitler, Emperor of Nazi Germany. He waged numerous wars, and fell after he lost to the Allied Forces in 1945.’

  ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘He committed suicide along with his lover, then their bodies were burned according to his orders.’

  Afterwards, the students moved to another leader.

  ‘This is Franco,’ said the guide, in the same schoolteacher tone. ‘Francisco Franco Bahamonde, born in 1892 and died on the twentieth of November, 1975. He ruled Spain from 1939 onwards, and committed a large number of crimes in the Civil War.’

  ‘Did he commit suicide?’

  ‘No…’

  The guide had not finished speaking about Franco before some of the students hurried to another president and stood looking at him as he spoke to his friends. ‘It’s Saddam!’

  The guide extended her approval in the same clipped tone of voice. ‘Yes. He was the dictator of Iraq, ruling for more than thirty years. He led three wars, the last of which was with the United States of America, which defeated him nearly a hundred years ago. But how did you know who he was, my dear?’

  The guide looked astonished when she heard the boy’s reply.

  ‘We have some pictures my great-grandfather left in our house, from when he was examining Saddam’s mouth after they captured him!’

  ‘That is … correct,’ the guide followed. ‘They found him hiding in a hole, ninety-nine years ago.’

  ‘Did they find a nuclear bomb in his mouth?’

  The guide pursed her thick lips and blinked her eyes murmuring ‘I have no idea! Maybe you should ask your great-grandfather.’

  THE DAY BY DAY MOSQUE

  MORTADA GZAR

  TRANSLATED BY KATHARINE HALLS

  This vinegar is exactly ninety-nine years old, if the calculations I jotted down on my calendar of motivational quotes are correct, because the perfume was produced exactly a week before the enormous concrete head of Saddam Hussein hit the ground. The proverb of the day was: The kangaroo keeps her young in her pouch, the perfumer keeps his in his nose. The city was in chaos. The syrup-factory workers were rushing home on their motorbikes, carrying empty tins that were no use to anyone and would be sold a few days later to a nursery as containers for growing carnations; as for the syrup, they’d left it oozing in the press. All of Basra was being pressed, and the syrup of agitation and anxiety was dribbling out of it; number one on the list of the top ten things being squeezed just then was the president’s head under the feet of the citizenry, while the factory’s syrup came in last. Numbers two to nine were large noses under angry feet.

  I was sold it by one of the employees of the National Snot Bank, a rotund young man who has a nervous habit of fiddling with his collar and twitching his neck when he speaks to you. We’ve developed a close relationship, and he’s become my agent, so I no longer need to review the bank’s biannual report. He vi
sits us and collects our snot reserves in insulated containers; the snot-extraction process being highly delicate, and governed by strict legal terms and conditions, Salman Day By spends three hours with us each time—for that is indeed his name: Salman Day By. It’s said that his great-grandfather was deaf and mute as a child, and spent the hot afternoons on the banks of the Tigris (the Tigris was a small river which some theologians have speculated never existed and was in fact dreamed up by sinners, rakes and watermelon-juice drinkers). Day By Day, to use his full name, always clutched a lighter in each hand, the pockets of his dishdasha full of other broken lighters and his fingers ragged and torn from constantly flicking them alight. Between you and me, this great-grandfather was a simpleton nobody paid any attention to—but then he became famous in a matter of weeks when a short video of him speaking for the first time, to two American soldiers accompanied by an Iraqi interpreter, went viral.

  The Day By Day clan went on to produce some of the most well-known businesspeople in the country, and amongst their descendants they count a TV presenter famous for his acerbic interviews of politicians, a gynaecologist, a pop producer, and a diminutive actor who appeared in one of Peter Spike’s films (in a five-second scene showing a confrontation between two great armies in the third century B.C.). And here, in the heart of Basra, we have the famous Day By Day mosque, now around seventy years old. I can’t imagine it will ever disappear, or its name change: the Day By Day mosque is a weighty icon in the citizenry’s collective memory, and you often see it on TV as a backdrop for whichever local media personality is appearing as a guest on the BBC. It was designed by a prizewinning British architect of Iraqi origin and is shaped like a rectangle; sprouting from the top by way of minarets are two palm trees, which incline slightly toward each other such that the azan comes out in stereo—the architect of the noble Day By Day clearly wanted to play with the symbolism of unity, harmony and longevity—and now, Salman’s family name no longer refers to the kid with the lighters but to these twin minarets. If he ever boasts to us, while draining our noses, of his remarkable professionalism or the bourgeois elegance and tact he brings to bear on the process of mucus extraction and storage, we don’t interrupt and give him the pleasure of listening to a human with a blocked nose, we just defy him by mocking the slogan of the National Snot Bank: ‘Ever tried singing with a blocked nose? It’ll make you happy, lucky and rich!’

  Salman is in love with his boss at the bank, a woman in her fifties responsible for drawing everyone’s attention to the crook in his neck and his habit of fiddling with his collar and the second button of his shirt whenever he wants to speak: she rebuked him for it once, and kicked him out of her office, standing in the doorway as she spoke so as to be sure all the employees could hear her. After that, Salman’s tic became chronic; he’d do it unconsciously once, then on purpose dozens of times, to the point he became renowned for it. And not only did his boss reject him, she also insulted him and made fun of his face and his appearance, and even his family, mocking the fact they used to sell honey, vinegar and homemade hot sauce, leaving out the great mosque and the other more illustrious facets of their history.

  This is the sort of thing Salman confides to me when we sit alone in the garden. I don’t like my children to hear when I’m evacuating my nose, and prefer the neighbours to listen instead: I actually want my neighbour to hear, as I’ve been trying to convince him for a long time that the sound of a man’s nose is a good indicator of his health and virility. Once, Salman got so annoyed at the sight of the neighbours’ heads popping up and disappearing again behind the wall that he packed up his metal containers and left, while I myself was pleasantly surprised.

  Today I took out the vinegar I bought from him. The last of the children left earlier on the Euphrates train, with a warning that I mustn’t go back to licking the vinegar jar, and I swore I wouldn’t, knowing full well I’d slurp up a whole tablespoonful the moment he left the house, which is indeed what I did. And what a long and tedious farewell! He kept telling me I really ought to try the Euphrates train for myself, that it was so fast it would catapult him to the Gulf of Oman in just fourteen minutes, convincing passengers that the government’s decision to convert the dry riverbed into a tunnel hadn’t been so pointless after all. Once he’d said that, one eye on my index finger which was twirling in the air and dipping itself in imaginary vinegar, he left.

  The snot is transferred from small vessels to large aluminium containers and transported north to the Gulf of Basra—the Inversion Project, which will convert south to north, is still in progress, by the way; I heard recently that workers are finding large snot reserves there, and that the project is running behind schedule: all that’s been achieved on the ground is the upending of the ground, while the hardest task of all still remains, namely to work out how people will be able to walk one way when they think they’re walking the other, or turn right when they’re turning left, by which I mean to say that the holdup is in the psychological preparations. They’re having to run opposite-direction induction workshops to train people in the new schema. Next comes the biological stage, which is slightly easier: take your stomach and your reproductive organs to your family doctor and have them perform a topical ointment massage and irrigation, and you’ll soon notice your body rotating to adapt to the new orientation—or at least that’s what the brochures and billboards and the posters in public toilets are promising.

  Once that’s all over, I’ll be able to relax, and I’ll stop complaining to people, and everyone will understand that I’m just a regular guy who loves the inspirational sayings written in calendars. I’m just one in a long line of employees whose responsibility over many decades has been to draw the direction of the qibla in the Day By Day Mosque (should I have mentioned that sooner?), though I know my appearance might not be that of a lowly employee of the Day By Day family—and in fact my salary comes from the government, because the mosque belongs to the Ministry of Endowments. But first, a week of intense work lies before me, because it’s me who’ll be responsible for reversing the arrows which mark the qibla after the enormous earthen prayer mat on which I and two hundred million other citizens reside has been flipped back to front. That said, compared to the fish in their marble pools, who will suffer immensely as the respiratory functions of their gills are inverted, my task should be quite fun; I used to do something similar as a child, when I’d scour the walls of streets frequented by lovers, and scrutinise tree trunks in search of their arrows, the kind they draw when no one’s looking, and when I found them, scrape off their tips and make them point the other way. The fish and donkeys, with their innate sense of direction (not to mention their owners), will have a much harder time of it when their turn comes.

  Salman Day By’s not scheduled to come tonight, so I won’t have the chance to show him I can drink an entire bottle of aged eau de toilette vinegar. Nor will I get to make fun of him for the fact his great-grandfather heard George Dubya’s first speech (‘Day by day, the Iraqi people are closer to freedom!’) and uttered his first words—‘day by day,’ straight from the President’s lips—for two soldiers who got a kick out of poking fun at fat little boys, and in so doing became instantly famous. But all that’s become a fatuous refrain I repeat to irritate him and shut him up; I ought to summon up the spirit of the retired arrow-tip chopper instead and give him a free session on how to tie his shoelaces when the new orientational system comes into force.

  BAGHDAD SYNDROME

  ZHRAA ALHABOBY

  TRANSLATED BY EMRE BENNETT

  I am wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city. At first I can’t place the ancient-looking buildings—the curved city walls with their high, mullioned windows, the white slabs of a palace—but when I reach the bank of the river, the slow curving water beneath me is unmistakable. I know this city. This is the Tigris. This is Baghdad!

  At that moment, a high-pitched sound rings out; I spin round but can’t see where it’s coming from. It calls out for me once more.
It’s a woman’s voice, I realise: ‘I can’t bear the separation,’ it says. ‘Come and find me.’

  * * *

  As always, the dream didn’t last and I woke with my heart racing and the sound of a pigeon singing at my window: ‘Cokookty … Cokookty…’ I rubbed my eyes and slowly got to my feet, walking towards the window in order to salute this brave creature that had made it all the way up to the twenty-seventh floor. The closest my heart got to it, however, was as I reached the edge of the window, triggering a sensor that set the blinds in motion, unfolding bit by bit, at which point the pigeon saw me and took flight.

  I did this every morning: moved around the flat, as I slowly woke up, observing the whole city in a single panorama, peeking round the skyscrapers with the eyes of a child coveting what doesn’t belong to him, committing to memory everything I saw, before it was too late … Baghdad.

  This is why I lived in the centre of this bustling city, in this modest tower, among much taller ones. I was happy to get a place from which I could view the whole city, district by district; I lived in Karkh and could see Resafa on the opposite bank of the Tigris. My parents were appalled at the rent I was paying, called it extortionate, but for me it was more than just rent I was paying.

  * * *

  The dream that kept returning each night was trying to tell me something, I knew: a countdown had begun, ticking off the days until my life would change. Despite learning to expect this dream, each night, the experience of having it was always shocking. I’d wake up wanting to contact the special helpline, but what could I tell them about the dream that I hadn’t already? What could the robot on the other end know about how I felt? In the past they’d committed me to a special care unit for mental-health patients suffering from textbook symptoms of ‘Baghdad Syndrome’. But I’d escaped knowing that in my heart, despite everything, I was what they called ‘a smiley person’!