The Corpse Exhibition Read Free Page B

television screen.
    â€œDo fish drink water?”
    â€œSure they drink; of course.”
    â€œHow can fish drink salt water?”
    â€œSure they have a way. How could they be in water and not drink?”
    â€œIf they’re in water, perhaps they don’t need to drink.”
    â€œWhy don’t you ask the fish in the tank?”
    Before the bald man could turn to look at him, my brother had jumped on top of him like a hungry tiger. He threw him to the ground, squatted on his chest, and pinned his arms down under his knees. In a flash he took a small knife out of his pocket, put it close to the man’s eye, and started shouting hysterically in his face, “Answer, you cocksucker! How can fish drink salt water? Answer, you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don’t they? Answer, shit-for-brains!”
    Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man’s ass and we left the house. I never would understand what the man had to do with my brother. We headed toward the parking lot. A thin young man, a year younger than my brother, was leaning against a red Chevrolet Malibu dating from the seventies. He embraced my brother warmly, and I felt that Abu Hadid and he were genuine friends. We set off in the car, smoking and listening to a popular song about lovers parting. We took the highway toward the outskirts of the city. Abu Hadid turned off the tape player, lay back in his seat, and said, “Murad, tell my brother the story about the Pakistani kid.”
    â€œSure, no problem,” replied Murad Harba.
    â€œListen, Mahdi. Some years back I took the plunge and escaped to Iran. I was thinking of going from there into Turkey and putting this fucked-up country behind me. I lived in a filthy house in the north of Iran, with people coming from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq and everywhere on God’s pimping earth. We waited for them to hand us over to the Iranian trafficker who was going to take us across the mountainous border. That’s where I met the Pakistani kid. He was about your age, nice guy, young and very handsome. He spoke little Arabic, but he had memorized the Quran. He was always scared. And he had a strange object in his possession: a compass. He would hold it in the palm of his hand like a butterfly and stare at it. Then he would hide it in a special pouch that hung around his neck like a golden pendant. He hanged himself in the bathroom the day before Iranian security raided the house. They shoved us in jail and beat us up plenty. When they’d finished humiliating us, we got our breath back and started to get to know the other prisoners. One of the people we chatted with was a young Iraqi who’d been jailed for selling hashish. He was born in Iran. The government had deported his family from Baghdad after the war broke out on the grounds that he had Iranian nationality. I told him about the Pakistani kid who had hanged himself. The man was really upset about the poor boy, said he had met him before, that he was a good kid, and that he knew the whole story of the compass.
    â€œIn 1989 in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the spiritual father of the jihad in Afghanistan, was in a car on his way to pray in a mosque frequented by the Afghan Arabs—the Arabs who went to fight in Afghanistan. The car was blown up as it crossed a bridge over a storm drain. His two sons were with him and were torn to pieces. According to the muezzin * of the mosque, who rushed to the scene of the explosion as soon as it happened, Azzam’s body was seemingly untouched. Not a single scratch. There was just a thin line of blood running from the corner of the dead sheikh’s mouth. It was a dreadful disaster—al Qaeda was accused of assassinating the sheikh who had stood up to the might of the Soviet Union, perhaps to give them greater impunity as an organization.
    â€œBefore many others had gathered, Malik the muezzin spotted the compass close to the