The Corpse Exhibition (10 page)

My ignorance increased when I embarked on the task of researching the knife trick through reading. My education didn't help me much. It was religious books that I first examined to find references to the trick. Most of the houses in and around our sector had a handful of books and other publications, primarily the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet, stories about heaven and hell, and texts about prophets and infidels. It's true I found many references to knives in these books, but they struck me as just laughable. They only had knives for jihad, for treachery, for torture and terror. Swords and blood. Symbols of desert battles and the battles of the future. Victory banners stamped with the name of God, and knives of war.

After that I moved into works of literature. That was by chance. A single sentence had stirred up a whirlwind of excitement inside me. Then one day, in a coffee shop, I came across an article in a local newspaper about a massacre by sectarian fighters in a village south of the capital. They had set fire to the houses of people sleeping at night. The only survivor of the conflagration was a young boy. The boy was purple, and in his hand he held a purple rat. They found him asleep in a wheat field. His story went unnoticed in the relentless daily cycle of bloody violence in the country. In the culture section of the newspaper there was an interview with an Iraqi poet in exile who said, “A closed door: That's the definition of existence.”

The next day I went to Mutanabbi Street, where books are sold. I wasn't a regular visitor. I was terrified by the sight of the stacks of books there, in the bookshop windows, in the stalls in the street, and on the wooden carts. Hundreds of titles and covers. I couldn't buy a single book that day. I didn't know what to choose or where to begin. I went back to Mutanabbi Street every Friday and gradually regained my confidence. I started to buy books of poetry, novels, and short stories, local and translated. Then our group decided to contribute some money to help me buy more books, in hopes that I would come across the key to the mystery of the knives, and soon the house was full of books. We made shelves in the pigeon loft, the kitchen, and even in the bathroom. After a year of voracious reading I was no longer drawn to research into the mystery of the knives, but to the pleasures of knowledge and reading generally. The magic of words was like rain that quenched the thirst in my soul, and for me life became an idea and a dream: The idea was a ball and the dream was two tennis rackets. I didn't understand many of the books on classical philosophy. But enjoyable and interesting intellectual books on dreams, the universe, and time began to attract my attention. I felt this created a problem with the group. They would shower me with questions on what I was reading and whether I had come across any clues to the mystery of the knives in my books. I didn't know how to explain things to them. I was like a small animal that had entered the den of an enormous animal. I felt both pleasure and excitement. Perhaps I was lost, and my only compass was my passion and my fear of the diversity of life. One idea invalidated another, and one concept disguised another. One theory made another theory more mysterious. One feeling contested another. One book mocked another book. One poem overshadowed another poem. One ladder went up and another went down. Often knowledge struck me as similar to the knife trick: just a mysterious absurdity or merely a pleasant game.

I tried to explain to the group that research into knives through books wasn't easy. It was a complicated process, and certain things might take me many more years to understand. On the other hand I didn't want to disappoint the group, especially Jaafar, who was enthusiastic about the books. So I started telling them stories about other extraordinary things that happen in this world and about man's hidden powers. I tried to simplify for them my modest knowledge of parapsychology, dreams, and the mysteries of the universe and nature. I felt that we were getting lost together, further and further, in the labyrinths of this world, without sails and without a compass.

3

Souad opened the door and a stout woman in her fifties, dressed in black, came in. She greeted us shyly. Salih the butcher made room for her on the bench and went to stand by the door. Jaafar asked him to sit down, but he said he was fine.

Souad asked the woman, Umm Ibtisam, if she would like something to drink.

“Thank you; coffee please,” she said.

Jaafar tried to dispel the woman's sense that she was unwelcome. He started talking about the high price of vegetables, deploring the fact that the country was importing vegetables from neighboring countries when it had two great rivers and plenty of fertile land. Then he jumped to the subject of the high price of propane and gasoline when we had the largest reserves of black shit in the world. Souad brought Umm Ibtisam the coffee and went back to her place. She sipped the coffee and told Allawi she was in a hurry and had to get back to her children. It was Allawi who had found Umm Ibtisam. He said he was wandering around the old lanes in the center of Baghdad when he noticed a shop that sold only knives of various shapes and sizes. He went into the shop and started to browse through the knives. A woman in her fifties came up to him and offered to help. He told her he was looking for a small knife he had lost years before, with a handle in the shape of a shark. The woman gave him a puzzled look and said her knife shop was not a lost property office. Allawi preempted her, as he put it, by asking if she knew about making knives disappear. She said she didn't know what he meant and offered him a small knife with a snake wrapped around the handle. Allawi examined it and told the woman he knew how to make it disappear. He sat in the middle of the shop, and after thirty seconds of concentration and two tears, the knife disappeared. The woman was upset and asked him to leave at once.

Allawi left and went back the next day. He said he only wanted to talk to her, but she didn't want to listen. Maliciously and threateningly, Allawi told her that he could make all the knives in the shop disappear at once.

The woman pulled a large meat cleaver off one of the shelves and brandished it in Allawi's face.

“What do you want, you evil boy?” she cried.

“Nothing. Just to talk.”

Allawi sat cross-legged on the floor and asked her if she would like to see another demonstration of making knives disappear. She didn't reply, just stared at him suspiciously and held the cleaver in her hand. Straight off, Allawi started telling her about the gift of making knives disappear and reappear and about our group. This was very stupid of him, because we were wary of talking about the group to outsiders, but Allawi had spent a long time in the market and thought nothing of showing off in front of others.

Allawi said, “The woman's face turned the color of tomato when I talked about the knife trick. She sat on a chair in front of me and put the cleaver on her lap. Then she started to weep in anguish.” Then she suddenly stood up, closed the shop door, wiped away her tears, and told him the story of the knife shop, after making him promise never to reveal her secret.

The woman had five daughters, and her husband had been killed when a car bomb exploded in front of the Ministry of the Interior, cutting his body in half. It was a disaster. The woman had no idea how she could support her daughters. Her grief for her husband broke her heart and disrupted her sleep. She had nightmares in which she saw an enormous man slaughtering her husband with a knife. The nightmare recurred often, and every time the man would slaughter her husband with a different knife. Umm Ibtisam told Allawi she couldn't understand why the knives appeared in her dream.

A month after the nightmares started, Umm Ibtisam came across a knife in the backyard of her house. It was an old knife. She contacted her brother because she was alarmed by its sudden appearance. Her brother started to ask the neighbors about it, but they denied it was theirs. The knife aroused his interest. He said it looked like an antique. He calmed his sister down and told her he would ask his oldest son to stay a few nights with her and her daughters. The man came back a week later with a large sum of money, after selling the knife in the antique market. He told her the knife was valuable and dated from the Ottoman period. The brother joked with the woman, saying, “Let's hope you find other knives and make us really rich.”

Umm Ibtisam said the nightmares then stopped. But in the same place in the yard six knives appeared, in this case kitchen knives. Umm Ibtisam kept the knives, and this time she didn't tell her brother. The knives continued to appear, and in the end she told him. He didn't tell anyone the secret of the knives, because they were waiting to see how long they would continue to appear in the yard. They kept on appearing, but it was rare for an old one to turn up. Once, a knife dating from the Abbasid period turned up; her brother sold it on the black market for a large amount. He told his sister that God was providing a livelihood for her and her daughters because her husband had been killed without good cause. He suggested opening a shop to sell the knives. The brother rented a small shop close to her house, and so Umm Ibtisam started selling knives.

Umm Ibtisam asked Jaafar to swear to keep her secret, because this was her livelihood. She added nothing to what she had told Allawi, who had invited her to attend our meeting. Jaafar swore to God and on his honor that he would keep her secret, and invited her to join the group. But she didn't take up the offer, because all she wanted was for us to leave her alone. Souad embraced Umm Ibtisam, with tears in her eyes, perhaps for the strangeness of life's agonies.

Souad took her to the door and handed her a bag full of cake, saying, “A simple present for the girls.”

None of us said anything. So there were knives appearing in other places. That meant the plot had thickened.

We were all smoking—Jaafar, Salih, Allawi, and I, and even Souad, who had slipped a cigarette out of my pack, although she didn't normally smoke. We noticed the thick cloud of smoke in the room and burst out laughing together. Jaafar began to cough like a decrepit old man. We took out our knives and started to play. I told them about the earliest book on the interpretation of dreams, which appears on a tablet from the Sumerian city of Lagash. The story goes that Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, was praying in the temple when he suddenly fell asleep.

“I'm off to work,” Salih said in his effeminate voice, and left.

4

A year after I graduated from the School of Education, Jaafar the referee suddenly disappeared. We didn't leave a hospital or police station unsearched. We contacted people who had ties with some of the armed groups and kidnap gangs. But to no avail. The ground seemed to have swallowed him up, along with thousands of others in the country. Souad was in her second month of pregnancy and had postponed her studies at the School of Medicine. I was very worried about her. She was frustrated and sad, like a bird whose wings have been broken in a storm.

The kids in Sector 29 were also sad that Jaafar had disappeared. They organized a soccer tournament by themselves for teams from the other sectors and called it the Referee Jaafar Tournament. They sent me an invitation to referee in the final.

———

The days passed slowly and sadly, like the miserable face of the country. The wars and the violence were like a photocopier churning out copies, and we all wore the same face, a face shaped by pain and torment. We fought for every morsel we ate, weighed down by the sadness and the fears generated by the unknown and the known. Our knife trick was no longer a source of pleasure, because time had dispersed those mysterious talents of ours. We had been broken one after the other, like discarded mannequins. Our group had fallen apart. There were no more meetings or discussions. Hatred had crushed our childish fingers, crushed our bones.

It wasn't easy for a recent graduate like me to find work. The religious groups had opened schools that taught children to memorize the Quran. They offered me work in their schools until I could get a government job, so I got involved in teaching children the Quran and gave up the knife business. From time to time I wrote angry, aggressive, and meaningless poems.

Allawi moved out of the capital and wandered around the towns in the south. He toured the markets showing off his skill at making knives disappear, but earned a pittance. Then we heard fresh news about him: He had broken into a restaurant and was arrested for stealing knives from the kitchen. He was sent to prison and we heard no more of him. Souad, friendly and loving, continued to visit Salih the butcher to bring his knives back, and in return Salih would give us the best cuts of meat he had.

One winter morning I was at school teaching the children the Iron Chapter of the Quran when the principal came in and told me that a strange young man wanted to talk to me about something important.

He was a tall man in his midtwenties, and his name was Hassan. He said he wanted to talk to me about Jaafar the referee. I asked the principal for permission to take a break and went to the nearby coffee shop with the man. We ordered tea and he told me what had happened to Jaafar:

The security forces had set free some hostages from a terrorist hideout; Hassan was one of the people freed. He said he had met Jaafar in the place where they were holding the hostages, a house on a farm on the outskirts of the capital. They had abducted Jaafar because he was trading in pornographic magazines in a wealthy neighborhood where policemen lived. Hassan said they had brutally tortured him. The terrorists told Jaafar that God had punished him when his legs were amputated during the war, but Jaafar hadn't repented and had gone on selling pictures of obscenities and debauchery. So the terrorists had decided to cut off Jaafar's arms as a lesson to any unbelieving profligate. The terrorists assembled all the hostages to witness the process of amputating Jaafar's arms. They couldn't believe what happened next. Hassan said that whenever the terrorists approached Jaafar, the swords they were holding disappeared, and tears were streaming from his eyes. The terrorists didn't have a single sword or knife left. They were terrified of Jaafar and said he was a devil. They stripped him naked in front of us and crucified him against the wall. They hammered nails into the palms of his hands, and he started writhing in pain, naked, with no legs. They decided to amputate his arms with bullets. Two men stood in front of him and sprayed bullets into his arms. One of the bullets hit his heart, and he died instantly. They dragged his body to the river, collected some dry branches, and poured some gas on him. They set fire to him and chanted, “God is most great.”