Free The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim

mother would always reply, ‘Go and wash your face,’ or ‘Go to Umm Ali next door and ask her if she has a little spice mixture to spare.’ And in the evening my mother would go and mourn with the local women in the dead man’s house, slapping her face and weeping.
    Once I was sitting with Marwan waiting for a coffin to arrive. We were eating sunflower seeds. We had waited a long time and were about to give up hope and go back home disappointed. But then the death car loomed on the horizon. We ran after it like happy dogs and were betting on who could beat the car, when it finally stopped in front of Marwan’s house. His mother came out screaming hysterically. She ripped her clothes and threw herself in the pool of mud. Bassem, who was standing next to me, stood stock still and stared in a trance. His big brother noticed him and pulled him into the house. I ran back home, into my mother’s arms, crying in torment. ‘Mummy, my friend Marwan’s dad’s died,’ I sobbed. She said, ‘Wash your face and go to the shop and fetch me half a kilo of onions.’

    I heard what you wrote yesterday. How the first explosion shredded Marwan’s face. The windows shattered and the cupboards fell on top of him. His mouth filled with blood. He spat out teeth and indistinctly heard the screams of his colleague, the editor of the New Woman section. The dust made it impossible to see. She crawled over the rubble screaming, ‘I’m going to die… I’m going to die.’ Then she fell silent suddenly and forever. Marwan bled a long time and only recovered consciousness in hospital.
    Okay.
    Marwan had cute and interesting ideas when we were kids. Once he asked me to help him collect time. We went down towards the valley, stretched out on our stomachs and proceeded to stare at a weed without moving for more than an hour. We were as silent as stone statues. It was Marwan’s belief that if we stared at anything in nature for an hour we would store that hour in our brains. While other people lost time, we would collect it.  
    It was a double explosion. First they detonated a taxi in front of the magazine’s offices. If it hadn’t been for the concrete barriers the building would have collapsed. The second vehicle was a watermelon truck, packed with explosives. The first police patrol to arrive after the first explosion brought three policemen. The murderers waited for people to gather and then detonated the second vehicle. That killed twenty-five people. Two of the policemen were killed on the spot and their colleague caught fire and began running in every direction. Finally he staggered through the door of the magazine building and collapsed, a lifeless corpse.  

    In an old text of yours you say:

    A pulp of blood and shit
    a monster
    a defiled planet
    a god-viper
    time spilled in that time.

    When we were in secondary school we used to fuck a prostitute who would give us her customers’ shoes. She loved us like a mother. She bought us lots of chocolate and laughed when she slept with us. Marwan used to steal spoons and knives from his house and offer them to her as presents. She was crazy about little knives and addicted to crossword puzzles. We called her ‘the drunken boat’ after the poem by Rimbaud. Before the school year ended, we went on a school trip to explore the mountains. Marwan tried to bring ‘the drunken boat’ along with us, but the headmaster threatened to expel us from school. On top of a rock shaped like the head of an angry bull, overlooking the valley, we sat down to smoke and read the newspaper. The others went off to explore a cave where prehistoric man had once lived. It was small, like an animal’s burrow, and full of spiders’ webs, they told us later. I read the paper while Marwan smoked and then we would switch roles. It was a government newspaper and it was pathetic, from the political news on the front page to the back page devoted to the mysteries of the other world, as if our own world weren’t