The Corpse Exhibition (11 page)

J
AAFAR AL-
M
UTALLIBI WAS BORN IN THE TOWN OF
al-Amara. In 1973 he resigned from the Communist party and joined the ruling Baath party. In the same year his wife gave birth to their second son. Jaafar was a professional lute player and a renowned composer of patriotic songs. He was killed in the uprising in the city of Kirkuk in 1991.

———

Today I can tell you about how he died. Do you see this old woman shouting out the price of fish? She's my mother. We've been selling fish since we came back to Baghdad. Let me help her empty the crate of fish, then let's go to a nearby coffee shop and talk.

———

After the end of the war between Iraq and Iran my father started to proclaim his atheism blatantly and caused us many problems. One evening he came home with his shirt stained with blood. It seems he'd had a nosebleed after one of his friends punched him. They were playing dominoes in the coffee shop when my father launched into a tirade of obscene insults to God and the Prophet. He made them up and set them to music during the game. As you know, he was a well-known composer. At first my father whistled a tune composed in the military style, then he added a new insult: a nail in the testicle of your imam's sister.

Many people burst out laughing when they heard the insults my father's imagination came up with, but they soon began to keep away from him and ask God for forgiveness. Some of them avoided meeting him in the street. One of them told him in jest one day that he hoped a truck loaded with steel would run him over, but everyone was frightened of his connection with the government. The day after he was punched he wrote a report for party headquarters about Abu Alaa, the man who hit him, and two days later Abu Alaa disappeared. We were living in a neighborhood called the Second Qadissiya, which consisted of houses the government had assigned to junior army officers, other people who had moved from cities in the south and center of the country, and the families of Kurds who worked for the regime. We were the only family in the neighborhood that earned its living differently. All the families except ours lived off salaries from the army, the party, and the security services, while we lived off the patriotic songs that my father composed. My father had a status higher than that of the mayor and members of the local hierarchy of the party, because the President himself had more than once awarded him military medals for his songs about the war, songs people remember to this day.

Listen, brother, I'll sum up the story for you. One year after the war ended, my father suffered what the newspapers call writer's block, and he was unable to compose new music for the many poems celebrating the greatness of the President that famous poets would send him. Months passed, then a year, and he still could not write a single new tune. Do you know what he did in the meantime? He took it upon himself to write and set to music short depraved poems making fun of religion. One warm winter evening we were watching television when we heard my father singing a new song of his about the Prophet's wives and how loose they were. Suddenly my elder brother sprang up, took my father's pistol from the wardrobe, jumped on top of my father, and put the pistol in his mouth. He would have killed him were it not for my mother, who tore open her dress, baring her breasts and screaming. My brother was transfixed for a moment as he looked at my mother's enormous breasts, which hung down over her stomach like an animal whose guts had spilled out. This was the first time we had ever seen my mother's breasts, except as babies. I went into the bathroom, and my brother fled the sight of my mother by leaving the house. She was illiterate, but she was smarter than my father, whom she looked after in a curious way. She spoiled him as if he were a son. She was the licensed midwife in the Qadissiya district, and people were very fond of her. My father decided to submit a report on my brother to the local party headquarters, but they did not react to it.

My father's name had started to stink in the neighborhood and in artistic circles. They said that Jaafar al-Mutallibi had gone mad, and his old friends avoided him. He traveled to Baghdad and submitted a request to the radio and television station asking them to rebroadcast the war songs he had composed, or at least one song a week. They rejected his request and told him his songs were now inappropriate. They were only broadcasting patriotic songs twice a year: on the anniversary of the outbreak of the war and the anniversary of when it had ended. My father wanted to restore his past and his fame by any means possible. He tried but failed to meet the President. He submitted an application to the film and theater department, proposing a documentary film about his songs and his music, but that request was also ignored.

While he was making all these attempts he finished composing the music to ten songs insulting God and existence, as well as a beautiful song about the first four caliphs. We realized he had gone completely mad when he started frequenting the studios and trying to persuade them to record him singing his songs making fun of religion. Of course, his requests were rejected categorically, and some people threw him out and threatened to kill him. In the end my father decided to record his songs on tape at home. He sat in front of a tape recorder and started to sing and play the lute. Of course, it was a poor recording, but it was intelligible. He played it to us at breakfast; we were worried that people would find out about this tape. We tried to get hold of it and destroy it, but he would never let it leave his coat pocket, and when he went to sleep he would slip it into a special pocket he had made in the pillow.

Today there's no need to hide this copy, because others need it, and religion has made more progress than necessary, along with the murderers and thieves. The reaction of the street might be hysterical, but let's fire a bullet in the air. Go ahead, you're a journalist; it will be good for you and good for everyone. A young singer offered to sing it and record it again in a modern studio, but I refused. These songs must remain as my father himself recorded them, as evidence of his story. They can only be copied. People soon forget the stories of this event. When you tell them these stories, after a time they think the stories are figments of imagination. Take our neighbor in the market, for example: Abu Sadiq, who sells onions. When he now tells his story about the battle with the Iranians at the river Jassim, it sounds like a Hollywood horror story he made up.

The government army ran away, and the Kurdish Peshmerga militias entered Kirkuk. The people of the city welcomed the uprising with great joy. There was overwhelming chaos, gunfire, dead bodies, Kurdish dancing, and songs everywhere. We were unable to escape. The insurgents set fire to houses in all the government districts and where party members lived. They killed and strung up the bodies of the Baathists, police, and security people.

We were holed up at home, and a group of young men broke down the reinforced door to my father's office. They took us out on the street to carry out the death sentence on us. My mother was on her knees pleading with them, but she did not rip her clothes this time. What? My father? No, no, my father wasn't with us. Months before the uprising, he had become the madman of the city, wandering the streets singing against God and carrying his lute, which no longer had a single string. A fire broke out in our house, and my mother collapsed unconscious as the rest of us leaned against the outer wall of the house. Umm Tariq, our Kurdish neighbor, turned up at the last moment, screaming at the young men and speaking to them in their language. Then she started imploring them to set us free. She told them how kind and generous my mother was and how she helped the Kurdish women give birth and looked after pregnant women. She told them how my mother would give away bread to the neighbors in honor of Abbas, the son of the Imam Ali, at feast time, and how brave my elder brother was and how he'd been best friends with her son who'd been killed fighting with the Peshmerga forces during the Anfal campaign, and that it was he who helped her late son escape from Kirkuk (here she lied), and that I was a good, peaceful boy who wouldn't hurt a fly. She ended her defense of us on an angry note. “They're not responsible for what that pimp Jaafar al-Mutallibi has been doing,” she said. Then she spat on the ground. We went into Umm Tariq's house and we didn't leave until the Republican Guard forces entered the city and the Peshmerga militias withdrew. Most of the insurgents ran away with the militias.

In the end we found my father without a head, tied to a farm tractor with a thick rope. He had been dragged around the city streets for a whole day, and his corpse had been put on display in a manner that is impossible to imagine. At the time they were about to execute us my father was close to the local party headquarters, where the bodies of the party members filled the courtyard. My father went into the empty building and headed for the information room. He knew this room well because it was from this room that his patriotic songs used to be broadcast from loudspeakers on the roof during the first war. From the same loudspeakers the party members would also speak to the public when someone was being executed for deserting the army or for helping the Peshmerga militias. My father put the tape into the tape player and the loudspeakers started broadcasting to the insurgents his songs attacking God and existence. My father was hugging his lute and smiling when the insurgents arrived. They took him outside—

Excuse me, my friend. There's a fish dealer who's bringing some sacks of carp, so I have to go now. Tomorrow I'll tell you the secret of my father's relationship with Umm Tariq, the Kurdish woman.

P
EOPLE WERE WAITING IN LINE TO TELL THEIR STORIES.
The police intervened to marshal the crowd, and the main street opposite the radio station was closed to traffic. Pickpockets and itinerant cigarette vendors circulated among them. People were terrified a terrorist would infiltrate the crowd and turn all these stories into a pulp of flesh and fire.

Memory Radio had been set up after the fall of the dictator. From the start, the radio station had adopted a documentary approach to programming, without news bulletins or songs, just documentary reports and programs that delved into the country's past. The station had become famous after announcing that it was going to record a new program titled
Their Stories in Their Own Voices
. Crowds gathered at the broadcasting center from across the country. The idea was simple: to select the best stories and record them as narrated by the people involved, but without mentioning their real names; then the listeners would choose the top three stories, which would win valuable prizes.

I succeeded in filling out the application form but made it inside the radio station only with great difficulty. More than once an argument broke out because of the crush. Old and young, adolescents, civil servants, students, and unemployed people all came to tell their stories. We waited in the rain for more than four hours. Some of us were subdued; others were bragging about their stories. I saw one man with no arms and a beard that almost reached his waist. He was deep in thought, like a decrepit Greek statue. I noticed the anxiety of the handsome young man who was with him. From a Communist who was tortured in the seventies in the Baath party's prisons, I heard that the man with the beard had a story that was tipped to win, but that he himself had not come to win. He was just a madman, but his companion, one of his relatives, coveted the prize. The man with the beard was a teacher who went to the police one day to report on a neighbor who was trading in antiquities stolen from the National Museum. The police thanked him for his cooperation. The teacher, his conscience relieved, went back to his school. The police submitted a report to the Ministry of Defense that the teacher's house was an al Qaeda hideout. The police were in partnership with the antiquities smuggler. The Ministry of Defense sent the report to the U.S. Army, who bombed the teacher's house by helicopter. His wife, his four children, and his elderly mother were killed. The teacher escaped with his life, but he suffered brain damage and lost his arms.

I personally had more than twenty stories teeming in my memory about my long years of captivity in Iran. I was confident that at least one of them would really be the clincher in the competition.

They took in the first batch of contestants and then announced to the crowds left behind us that they had stopped accepting applications for the day. There were more than seventy of us who went in. They had us sit down in a large hall similar to a university cafeteria. A man in a smart suit then told us we were first going to listen to two stories to understand the format of the program. He also spoke about legal aspects of the contracts we would have to sign with the radio station.

The lights gradually dimmed and the hall fell silent, as if it were a cinema. Most of the contestants lit up cigarettes, and we were soon enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke. We started listening to a story by a young woman, whose voice reached us clearly from the four corners of the hall. She told how her husband, a policeman, had been held by an Islamist group for a long time and how, during the sectarian killings, the killers had sent his body back decomposed and decapitated. When the lights came back on, chaos broke out. Everyone was talking at the same time, like a swarm of wasps. Many of them ridiculed the woman's story and claimed they had stories that were stranger, crueler, and more crazy. I caught sight of an old woman close to ninety waving her hand in derision and muttering, “That's a story? If I told my story to a rock, it would break its heart.”

The man in the smart suit came back on and urged the contestants to calm down. In simple words he explained that the best stories did not mean the most frightening or the saddest; what mattered was authenticity and the style of narration. He said the stories should not necessarily be about war and killing. I was upset by what he said, and I noticed that most of the contestants paid no attention. A man the size of an elephant whispered in my ear, “It's bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story's a story, whether it's beautiful or bullshit.”

The lights went down again and we started listening to the second story.

———

“They found her feeding me shit. A whole week she was mixing it with the rice, the mashed potatoes, and the soup. I was a sallow child, three years old. My father threatened to divorce her, but she took no notice. Her heart was hardened forever. She never forgave me for what I did, and I will never forget how cruel she was. By the time she died of cancer of the womb, the storms of life had carried me far away. I escaped from the country sometime after the barrel incident, abject, defeated, paralyzed by fear. On the night I said good-bye to my father, he walked with me to the graveyard. We read the first chapter of the Quran over my uncle's grave. We embraced and he slipped a bundle of cash into my hand. I kissed his hand and disappeared.

“We were living in a poor part of Kirkuk. The neighborhood didn't have mains drainage. People would have septic tanks dug in their yards for ten dollars. Nozad the Kurdish vegetable seller was the only person in the neighborhood who specialized in digging those tanks. When Nozad died his son Mustafa took on the work. They found Nozad burned to a cinder in his shop after a fire broke out one night. No one knows what Nozad was doing that night. Some people claim he was smoking hashish. My father didn't believe that. For all kinds of disasters his favorite proverb was ‘Everything we do in this ephemeral world is written, preordained.' So in my childhood I believed that ‘our life' was tucked away somewhere in schoolbooks or in the shop where they sold newspapers. My father wanted to save my childhood with all the goodwill and love he possessed. He was gracious toward others and toward life in a way that still puzzles me today. He was like a saint in a human slaughterhouse. Disaster would strike us pretty much every other year. But my father didn't want to believe that fate could bring such a mysterious curse. Perhaps he attributed it to destiny. We were vulnerable to assault from every direction—from the unknown, from reality, from God, from people, and even the dead would come back to torment us. My father tried to bury my crime through various means, or at least erase it from my mother's memory. But he failed. In the end he gave in. He left the task to the ravages of time, in hopes that this would efface the disaster.

“I may have been the youngest murderer in the world: a murderer who remembered nothing of his crime. For me, at least, it was no more than a story, just a story to entertain people at any moment. What I noticed was that everyone would write, intone, or sing the story of my crime as they fancied. At the time, my father wasn't working in the pickle business. He was a tank driver, and the war was in its first year. My mother was nagging my father for a third child, but he refused because of the war, which terrified him. We were comfortably off. Every month my father would send enough money to cover food, clothing, and the rent on the house. My mother would spend her time either asleep or visiting my aunt, with whom she'd talk all day about the price of fabric and the waywardness of men.

“In the summer, my mother would go off into a dream world. She wouldn't listen, or talk, or even look. The midday heat would wipe her out. At noon she would take a bath and then sleep naked in her room like a dead houri.
*
When night fell she would recover some of her vitality, as if she had come out of a coma. She would watch her favorite soap opera and news programs in which the President awarded medals for bravery to heroic soldiers, thinking that my father might appear among them.

“At noon one day, my mother dozed off with her arms and legs splayed open under the ceiling fan. My brother and I—he was a year younger—slipped off into the courtyard. There was nothing out there but a solitary fig tree and the cover of the septic tank. I remember my mother used to cry under the fig tree whenever one of our relatives died or some disaster struck us. The mouth of the tank was covered with an old kitchen tray held down by a large stone. We, my brother and I, had trouble moving the stone. Then we started throwing pebbles into the tank. It was our favorite game. Umm Alaa, our neighbor, used to make us paper boats, which we would sail on the surface of the pool of shit.

“They say I pushed my brother into the tank and ran off to the roof of the house to hide in the chicken coop. When I grew up, I asked them, ‘Might he have fallen in, and I run away out of fear?' They said, ‘You confessed yourself.' Perhaps they questioned me like the dictator's police. I don't remember anything. But they would tell their stories about it as if they were describing the plot of a film they'd enjoyed. All the neighbors took part in the rescue attempt. They couldn't find the truck that used to come once a month to empty out the septic tanks in the neighborhood. They used everything they could find to get the shit out of the tank: pots and pans, a large bucket, and other vessels. It was an arduous and disgusting task, like torture in slow motion. It was the height of summer, and the foul odors added to the horror and the shock. Before the sun went down, they brought him out—a dead child shrouded in shit.

“My father was late coming back from the front. My uncle wrote him a letter and then took care of arrangements for the burial of my brother. We buried him in the children's cemetery on the hill. It may have been the most beautiful cemetery in the world. In the spring, wildflowers of every color and variety would grow there. From a distance, the graveyard looked like the crown of an enormous, colored tree: a cemetery whose powerful fragrance spread for miles around. A week later our neighbor Umm Alaa opened the door and saw my mother. The intensity of the grief had driven her to distraction. She had put shit in a small bowl, and was mixing it into my food very slowly with a plastic spoon, then filling my mouth with it as she wept.

“My father sent me to live with my uncle, and I became a refugee of sorts. I would visit our house as a guest every Friday, escorted by my aunt, who kept an eye on my mother. I felt like a ball that people kicked around. That's how I spent six years, trying to understand what was happening around me. I had to learn what their feelings and their words meant, all the while wearing a chain of thorns around my neck. It was like crawling across a bed of nails. The septic tank was the bane of my childhood. On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently advances, moves on, sets sail, or, at worst, crawls slowly forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like a firecracker in the sky of God, a small flare in his mighty firmament of bombardment. I spent the remaining years of my childhood and adolescence watching everyone carefully, like a sniper hidden in the darkness. Watching and shooting. Against the horrors of my life I unleashed other nightmares, imaginary ones. I invented mental images of my mother and others being tortured, and in my schoolbook I drew pictures of enormous trucks crushing the heads of children. I still remember the picture of the President printed on the cover of our workbooks. He was in military uniform, smiling, and under his picture were written the words, ‘The pen can shoot bullets as deadly as the rifle.'

“There was a cart that brought kerosene, drawn by a donkey. It came through the lanes in the neighborhood in winter. The children would follow behind, waiting for the donkey's awesome penis to grow erect. I used to shut my eyes and imagine the donkey's penis, gross and black, going into my mother's right ear and coming out of the left. She would scream for help because of the pain.

“A year before the war ended my father lost his left leg and his testicles. This forced my mother to take me back. My father decided to go back to the trade practiced by his father and his forefathers: making pickles. They say my grandfather was the most famous pickle seller in the city of Najaf. The King himself visited him three times. I went back home and acted as my father's drudge and obedient servant. I was happy, because my father was a miracle of goodness. Despite everything he had suffered in his life he remained faithful to his inner self, which had somehow not been warped by the pain. He had an artificial leg fitted, and his capacity for love seemed to grow. He pampered my mother and showered her with gifts—gold necklaces, rings, and lingerie embroidered with flowers.

“My father tiled the courtyard and made a concrete cover for the septic tank. He left some space for the fig tree, but it died from the brine he used in the pickles. My mother wept beneath it for the last time when I was sixteen. The government in Baghdad had built a road for the highway and removed the old cemetery. Her father's grave had been there. For a long time we were sad about the loss of my grandfather's bones.

“The courtyard was full of plastic barrels for pickling; piles of sacks full of cucumbers, eggplants, green and red peppers, cabbages, and cauliflowers; bags of salt, sugar, and spices; bottles of vinegar; and tins of molasses. There were also large cooking pots, which were always full of boiling water, to which we would add spices, then all the vegetables one by one. My father wasn't as proficient as his father, let alone his grandfather. He started trying out new methods. He had spent a large part of his life in tanks and had forgotten many of the family recipes for making pickles. The tank had cost him his balls, his leg,
and
the trade of his forefathers.

“I would sit opposite my mother for hours, cutting up eggplants or stuffing cucumbers with garlic or celery. Her tongue was as poisonous as a viper. The summer no longer bothered her. She had turned into a fat cow, burned by the sun, with a loose tongue, and she smoked to excess. Noxious weeds had sprouted in her heart. People took pity on her, with words as poisonous as hers. ‘Poor woman,' they said. ‘An impotent husband and no children, just the bird of ill omen.' The bird—that was me, and I showed all the signs of ill omen. My father was busy all the time with the accounts and dealing with the shops in the market and moving barrels in the old pickup. After sunset he would collapse from fatigue. He would have dinner, pray, and tell us about his pickle problems, then take off his artificial leg and go to bed to tickle his gray-haired wife with his fingers.