The Corpse Exhibition Read Free Page A

brother slept with Umm Hanan. Then he fucked her youngest daughter twice. After that he told Umm Hanan to fuck me. I was surprised he didn’t ask that of the girl who was my age. Then Abu Hadid took some money and three packs of cigarettes from Umm Hanan, and gave me one of the packs.
    We set off again, walking along the muddy lanes. Abu Hadid slowed down, then retraced his steps and stopped at the door of Abu Mohammed, the car mechanic. He knocked on the door with his foot. The man came out in his white dishdasha with his paunch sticking out. His eyes popped out of his head when Abu Hadid greeted him. Me and the other kids used to call him “the gerbil who swallowed the watermelon.” He used to give me and the gang pills in return for puncturing the tires of cars in the neighborhood, so that his business would flourish. We would bargain with him over how many pills for how many tires. My brother ordered me to take off my bloodied shirt and told the mechanic to fetch me a clean one. The gerbil obeyed at once and came back with a blue shirt that smelled of soap. It was the shirt his son, a student at medical college, had just been wearing. I was surprised that the size fit me exactly. My brother leaned over and whispered a few words in the mechanic’s ear, and the mechanic’s face turned even darker than usual.
    We crossed the main street toward the other neighborhood. All along the way I was wondering what Abu Hadid had whispered in the gerbil’s ear. Abu Hadid coughed loudly, and his chest wheezed like my uncle’s old tractor. He didn’t say a single word on the way. He lit two cigarettes at the same time and offered one to me. It was after midnight. I don’t know anyone who lives in this neighborhood, other than an obnoxious boy who was at school with us. He once punched me, and I never did manage to stick a finger up his ass in return. When he found out I was Abu Hadid’s brother, his father came to school and asked me to beat up his son.
    People were scared senseless of my brother’s brutality. His reputation for ruthless delinquency spread throughout the city. He would baffle the police and other security agencies for many years—until, that is, the day he was executed in public. Even his enemies mourned him when the inevitable happened. Occasionally in life he had defended people—against the cruelty of the ruling party, for example. Abu Hadid didn’t distinguish between good and evil. He had his own private demons. Once he threw a hand grenade at the party office when “the comrades” executed someone who had evaded military conscription. Another time he mutilated the face of some wretched vegetable seller, simply because he was drunk and he felt like it. Abu Hadid would go on the rampage like that for eight years, until Johnny the barber gave him away. The night it happened Abu Hadid was fucking Johnny’s pretty brown daughter on the roof of the house. The police surrounded him and shot him in the leg. They executed him a week later. My mother and my seven sisters would beat their breasts for a whole year, but my father was relieved to be rid of the antics of his wayward son.
    Abu Hadid knocked on a rusty door that still had a few spots of green paint, shaped like frogs, on it. We were received by a man in his forties with a thick mustache that covered his teeth when he spoke. We sat down in the guest room in front of the television. I gathered that the man lived alone. He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of arak. He opened it and poured a glass. My brother told him to pour one for me too. We sat in silence, and the man and I watched a soccer match between two local teams, while my brother stared into a small fish tank.
    â€œDo you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious.
    â€œAs long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the