The Iraqi Christ (9 page)

‘This meat tastes salty. What’s that horrible smell? Don’t you read the Quran? Why don’t you pray? The water’s hot in the shower.’ Marwan started to take revenge, taking pleasure in tormenting the policeman. He would eat and drink and do things the policeman didn’t like, like drink gallons of whiskey, which the policeman couldn’t bear.

Marwan complained to you about the things that troubled him most. He hadn’t gone near his wife’s body, except once, three months ago. He had the impression that he was sleeping with her along with another man, and the policeman groaned and wailed like a crazed cat.

The policeman didn’t submit to his fate readily. He also
 
knew how much authority he had. Sometimes he would keep jabbering deliriously in Marwan’s head until his skull throbbed. The last time Marwan told me about the policeman was while they had a truce.

The policeman wanted Marwan to visit his family. He told him some intimate details of his life so that Marwan would seem like an old friend. Yes, yes, yes. I’m not interested in all those details. When you write, you can choose the limits and call the rest our ignorance.

Marwan sat on the sofa and the policeman’s wife brought him some tea, while his mother wiped her tears with the hem of her hijab. Marwan hugged the policeman’s little girl as if she were the daughter of a late dear friend.

It was the same scene whenever he visited. He started buying presents for the family on instructions from the policeman, and Marwan even went to visit the policeman’s grave with the family.

The policeman went into a deep silence when he heard his wife and mother weeping at his grave. He remained silent for several days. Marwan breathed a sigh of relief each time, assuming the policeman had disappeared.

He punched you on the nose when you were driving the car. I know… good… details… everything in this story is boring and disgusting.
 

Then one day I visited him at his magazine. He was taking swigs from a bottle of arak that he hid in the drawer of his desk and smoking furiously. I started talking about our problems working at
Boutique
and the state of the country, in the hope of calming his nerves. He stopped writing as I spoke.

When I stopped speaking, he stood up and asked if I’d go with him to visit the ‘drunken boat’ in prison.

I wasn’t even sure she was still alive. I rang the department in charge of women’s prisons from his office and asked after her. They told me she was a patient in the city’s central hospital.

I was extremely uneasy all the way to the hospital. Marwan smoked a lot and rocked back and forth in his seat. He began pressing me to take good care of his family, his voice full of emotion.

I told him, ‘What are you talking about? Marwan, what do you mean, “going to die”? Hey, you’re like a cat with seven good lives left.’

He punched me on the nose. Then he lit me a cigarette with his one and put it in my mouth. I had an urge to stop the car and give him a thorough beating.
 

The ‘drunken boat’ was lying in the intensive care ward. Just a skeleton. She’d been unconscious for a fortnight. We sat close to her on the edge of the bed. Marwan took a small knife shaped like a fish out of his trouser pocket and put it close to her pillow.

He held her hand and tears flowed down his cheeks.

And after that you came to visit me!

Yes, we bought a range of mezes, two bottles of arak and twenty cans of beer, and we drove to your farm.

I was so happy to see the two of you! Time had flown, you guys! We had a wild time that night raising a toast to our memories of secondary school. We put a table out, under the lemon tree and cracked open the drink. Marwan seemed cheerful and relaxed, without any obvious worries. He was laughing and joking, not to mention drinking frantically. Somebody brought up that boy at school called ‘the Genius’. He was an eccentric student who memorised all the text books by heart within months. The teachers were convinced he was a genius, and they were shocked when he got poor grades in the end of year exams, barely enough to qualify to study in the oil institute. In his first year of college, he sneaked in at night and set fire to the lecture hall, then shot himself with a revolver. It was all a bit of a tragedy!
 

You told us at length about your days of isolation on your farm, where you wanted to be free to write a book on the history of decapitation in Mesopotamia.

The conversation eventually flagged and we started to slur our words. We were drunk and Marwan fell back into a deep silence. We got up to go into the house. Marwan asked me to recite whatever I could remember by Pessoa, his favourite writer.

I’m not me, I don’t know anything,

I don’t own anything, I’m not going anywhere,

I put my life to sleep

In the heart of what I don’t know.

It was a wonderful summer’s night. Three best friends from school reunited. I lay on the grass, looked up at the clear sky and began to imagine God as a mass of shadows. We heard Marwan’s screams coming from the bathroom. We couldn’t save him. He died in the pool of blood he had vomited.
 

You phoned me a week later and we went to an art exhibition in my car. We were going along the highway when, by mistake, I overtook a truck loaded with rocks.

Enough, God keep you.

What, you’re tired!

I want to sleep a while.

Okay, let’s sleep.

I hope that when I wake up I can’t hear you any more and you’re completely out of my life.

Me too, you fuck.
 

I got rid of him. A few days ago, as I was roaming in the forest. But now I feel tired. I haven’t slept for three nights. I can smell a wolf approaching!! Please, Beto, go to my aunt’s place, take my stuff and look after all my memories.

You can’t understand beauty without peace of mind and you can’t get close to the truth without fear. Do you remember the guy who used to teach us smells? He used to make us dizzy with his wild philosophical speculations. He used to call himself the faithful companion of knowledge. He was proud of you and greatly admired you, so much so that I thought Professor Azmeh was in love with you. Those days of studying are still engraved in my memory, before we had to hit the mean streets and our dreams went up in smoke. Do you remember when that fourth year student brought in a cat one weekend? It was a farce. Everyone smelled its rear-end and there was such an uproar. Those were really romantic days. If our friend Sancho had been here, he would have said in his flippant tone: ‘The world is swimming in a sea of shit.’ They say he’s become a philosopher. Three epic tracts – long theses exploring the rationale for living with humans.

You too, Beto, you used to turn everything into philosophy. At the time, I thought you would get involved in the world of thinkers yourself. But you’re lazy and you’ve always said that language is deceptive. I still remember every word you told me when we were going round the back lanes looking for a safe place. I still remember the beautiful morning we spent on that river bank. The sun was shining like a giant pomegranate. We went up to a woman in her late forties who was crying and swearing at everything around her. She looked at us with tears in her eyes and started telling us her sorrows. She said she had failed in love, and failed in hatred, too! We chased her and then went back under the bridge. You licked my neck, then gave a sigh and sounds started to come out of you, quiet and frightened. (When you suddenly lose everything and snap like a bone, a door in your soul flickers open and closed as quick as an eyelash, a door that opens into the hidden self, the self that lies beyond pain. But not all humans are cruel enough to grasp the secrets of such a magic door, because humans are soon broken, like brittle bones. They fall into the abyss of pain and become blind.) Perhaps we’re like them too. I don’t know, Beto. I just want to disappear I’m so lonely.

We jumped into the lake together. He was drunk as usual. I dived underneath him, grabbed the end of his trouser leg and dragged him under until he stopped breathing.

Marko had brought me on a trip with some artist friends to the outskirts of a beautiful town in the centre of Finland. At first I didn’t believe he would ever free the two of us from the cruel seclusion he had imposed on us. For a year and a half I had been living in the prison of his sad life. He had torn my soul with his loneliness and opened old wounds with his rude behaviour. He violated my body and destroyed the fragile peace of mind where I hoped I might take refuge in this land of snow and ice.

There was a large isolated house in the forest, a house that was far from electricity, the internet and gas cookers. When they cooked, he and his friends made a wood fire in an old stove. They chopped the wood themselves. At night they lit a fire, drank and sang and chatted. There was a lake where they went fishing. It’s a real life there. They write poems, draw and plan theatre and film projects. Yes, the place was like a little paradise and as my owner put it, the ideal place to die. If we could look inside his mind, we’d find him imagining a grave in the middle of the forest, in a place where the sound of the forest stirs the vegetation into forms of great beauty. Indeed! Because the sound of insects and birds, the wind playing in the branches and the crackle of burning wood in the fire pit all combined to create a symphony of sounds; perhaps the voice of God reaches us in that sound, directly, without the mediation of prophets. God exists in the forest. God is the forest. But the burial ground must also be in the forest, so that the trees can draw their life from our decomposing bodies. I’m still a romantic, Beto, but yes, now I’ve fallen into the trap of hatred.

There were four of them and I was the fifth. They were trying to draw up a schedule for the next day, if there was anything worth doing communally, such as fishing, riding bicycles through the forest, or walking to the lake and coming home at sunset. There was a tall young man called Miko Lahm, a hunter who had come with his dog to catch birds. I spent some time with his dog. He was full of himself, like most hunting dogs. He was one of those creatures in whom the delusion of intelligence casts a shadow over their thoughts. He was proud of his muscles and of his ability to track down and retrieve wounded birds, and his master, Miko, was a real expert in all kinds of hunting and fishing, including rabbits; he cooked all kinds of meat in a way that everyone said was amazingly professional. Although most of the friends were vegetarians, and others only ate fish. So you might say that Miko Lahm was hunting for himself. Sometimes he was happy that I would share the meat with him. Of course he didn’t let his own dog eat the meat he hunted. He gave him dog food from cans.

Paulina spent the time lying in the sun on an orange towel. She was reading a book about plants. Timo, her partner, was sitting nearby, just smoking and gazing at the trees. He would dig into the soil with his feet, then examine the soil carefully as if it were a human corpse, then smoke another joint and stare at the sky. When he’d put out his fourth joint he would go back to the trees, then start the cycle again by scratching at the soil once more, like a dog
 
but this time more slowly. He would light another joint, and never once speak to Paulina. The staring and smoking and all that deliberate idleness continued for four hours, broken only when he stood up and fetched a bottle of beer from the house. My master, Marko, would draw occasionally, while Miko Lahm played with his dog. At first sight I must have looked like I was the happiest of them all, because the slow pace of life in the forest really cheered me up. I had almost forgotten my recent sufferings with Marko. Time there passes at an amazingly glacial pace. You would laugh, Beto, and show your terrible teeth, if I told you that the first task I undertook there was to practise emptying out my mind and spreading its contents out in the sun to dry. I wanted to be alone with myself with a mind that wasn’t soaked in doubts. I would hide away by myself among the trees, stand there like a dwarf with a broken heart among the giants of the forest. How can I describe to you the taste of the light wind as it makes the leaves ripple like the flags of happy nations? Just as they would sit in the sauna to make their bodies sweat and reinvigorate themselves, I would sit there alone for hours so that the salt of my body would find its way out and dissolve, so that I could say to the creatures of the forest: ‘I am your sister in this existence’, so that I might plant my kisses upon it. I leaped around the trees shouting and addressing the green silence around me, but I felt that my words were vanishing like smoke, and neither the trees nor even the birds were listening to me. There was a husky sadness in my voice, a scratch in the innocence of what I wanted to express, because my voice was not in tune with the sounds of the forest. Perhaps my years of hanging around in the city had tainted the purity of my powers of expression. My voice was reminiscent of the city’s own symphony of mediocrity, the soulless, broken music produced by the machine of life: those sounds they have spattered us with shamelessly since childhood; their symphony that starts squeaking in the early morning, in shopping centres, banks, universities, hospitals, parliament buildings, bars and restaurants. The sounds of human ignominy. They’re incapable of loving each other so how can they understand our love for them? I felt that my mind was packed with sounds – the voices on buses and trains, the noises in planes and ships, the sound of domestic disputes, insults, abuse, the whistle of bullets, shouting, screaming, weeping, the chants of environmental protesters. Applause at the Peace Prize award ceremony at a time when new wars are breaking out in new hotspots, the sound of cars crashing, car bombs exploding, the cars of thieves, an ambulance, a bank truck loaded with bundles of banknotes, a fire engine. The sounds of mosques and churches, of Friday sermons and homilies, of group sex and glass breaking, sounds coming in the right ear and sounds going out the left ear. If we were deaf creatures – us and those humans – perhaps the world would be less painful. There are only two kinds of sound that are good for bringing about peace: the songs of the forest and music. Yes, Beto, the forest is a sound. An ancient sound that renews itself like a river that never stops flowing. They have polluted the river. They have cut down the trees. They have flown into space looking for more sounds and sources of energy. They have destroyed their own humanity. They have cooked and baked and killed like mass murderers. They have given prizes and bravery awards to madmen and killers. They really are heroes. Don’t they deserve hanging at the end of the film, like heroes? The audience will cry because they can’t save the hero who’s being hanged in the middle of the square. They have cut their humanity’s throat from ear to ear and sat down weeping at its feet. They have created poems for the dignity of humanity, while others created long wars that have yet to end, and perhaps never will. Their poems are awash with shame and loss, and they still smile like clowns. Pessimistic as usual, you’ll say, ‘I know that’. I want to borrow your tone of wisdom, which is comical much of the time, and say, ‘Humanity is in two parts, humanity has two voices. The majority talk incessantly and the minority are silent and plant-like, communicating with gestures. Every painting, Beto, is a voice. Every novel, every story, every work of art is a voice that communicates by gestures.’ They are creative innovators, but they are corrupt to the core. You know, in the forest, thoughts of suicide recurred. I imagined the sharp blade of a knife against my throat. Only the forest stood between me and what I was thinking. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. I imagine you nosing up to me as usual and whispering, ‘There you are, jumping from one subject to another like a kangaroo.’