The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim

apartment. He told me he was reluctant to go to the policeman’s house and find out who he was.
    He soon got drunk and started shouting and cursing, addressing thin air, saying, “Eat shit,” and “Shut up, pimp.”
    Then he opened his eyes like an owl and threatened to break off our friendship if I didn’t believe everything he told me. I took the policeman’s address from him and drove him home. Salwa was waiting for us at the window, downcast. Marwan hadn’t told her what had happened to him. He was struggling to deal with the disaster himself and was on the verge of madness.
    I knocked on the door, and an attractive woman in the spring of her life came out. She was dressed in black, and her eyes were swollen. Standing in the doorway, I saw a little girl playing with a rabbit the same size as she was. I said I was a journalist and I wanted to write an article about the victims of the explosion at
Puzzles
magazine. She said her husband had been killed because of the ignorance that prevailed in this wretched country and she didn’t want to speak to anyone. She shut the door. I made discreet inquiries about the young woman’s circumstances at a nearby shop. The shopkeeper told me about her husband, the policeman, and how kind he had been and how much he had loved his family. The policeman used to say, “God has blessed me with the three most beautiful women in the world—my mother, my daughter, and my wife. I’m thankful to be alive, however tough it is in this country.”
    In the three days Marwan spent in the hospital, the policeman told him what had happened: “On the patrol we were telling each other jokes, my colleagues and me. We heard the explosion and headed straight to the
Puzzles
building. My colleagues moved people away from the scene of the incident, and I tried to put out the fire in a car in which a woman and her daughter were burning. Then the second explosion went off.
    â€œMy body caught fire. I started to run and scream, then I collapsed in the lobby. I found myself sitting on the ground, a few paces away from my own burning body! I had split in two: one a lifeless corpse, the other shivering from the cold. I ran down the corridors of the magazine building. I saw a woman crawling on her stomach and screaming, but she died before I could do anything. I saw you under the rubble, so I went inside you and I felt warm again. And here I am, smelling what you can smell, tasting what you taste, hearing what you hear, and aware of you as a living being, but I can’t see anything. I’m in total darkness. Can you hear me?”
    â€œYes,” Marwan had said.
    Okay, this is what you wrote down. 
. . . Tell me how you reacted to that.
    Marwan was angry when I suggested he visit a man of religion. I was bewildered by what he had told me, and it had made me say stupid things. He told me I was crazy and that I was behaving like we were still childhood soul mates
.
(“It was just a trivial, childish game, you idiot!” he yelled.) Then he started talking to me as calm as a madman: “Do you understand me? Okay, he can share a bed with me, a grave, a window, a seat on the bus, but he’s not going to share my body! That’s too much; in fact it’s complete madness! He grumbles and cries and tells me off as though I’m the thief and it’s not him who’s stolen my life.”
    If Marwan went to sleep with only a thin blanket around him, the policeman would wake him up in the middle of the night and say, “I’m cold, Mr. Marwan, please!”
    If Marwan drank whiskey, the other guy would complain, “Please, Mr. Marwan, that’s wrong. You’re burning your soul with that poison! Stop drinking!”
    Or, “Why don’t you go to the toilet, Mr. Marwan? The gas in your stomach is annoying.”
    Why couldn’t it have been the policeman who incited Marwan to swallow the razor