The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim

Author:Hassan Blasim [Blasim, Hassan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 0143123262
Amazon: B00DMCPHRO
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

A Thousand and One Knives

1

At noon Jaafar the referee was waiting at the end of the lane, his army binoculars around his neck and a soccer ball in his lap. The boys arrived one after another and surrounded him, joking with him and talking excitedly about the striker on the Sector 32 team. Jaafar reassured them. “We have Allawi al-Saba. He’s the Messi of Sector Twenty-nine,” he said.

The boys took turns pushing Jaafar’s wheelchair. One of them said, “The Sector Thirty-two team might bring a referee of their own.”

Jaafar wasn’t bothered. He told them he knew how to handle that. They reached the field, Jaafar threw the ball, and the boys ran after it.

Jaafar was forty-five years old, but he was still young at heart. With his passion for sports, his dynamism, and his determination, he amazed his friends and his few enemies. He had been the most famous pool player in Sector 29, and when he was an army deserter the military police couldn’t catch him. He was like a fox, but his addiction to pool halls was his downfall. One evening the military police surrounded him at the Khorasan pool hall in Karada, where he used to take on the most famous players in the area. They sent him off to the Kuwait war, and when he came back both his legs had been amputated. Jaafar was a good lad, one of the boys—that’s how the people of the sector saw him. But some of them found fault with his passion for soccer and the way he hung out with the local youth at his age. Jaafar didn’t take much notice of such talk, because the young had to learn the basics of the game. He would organize matches for them and act as referee. He would remind his critics of the famous national squad player who came from Sector 29 and whom he claimed to have trained, adding each time, “A miracle that will save the whole country will be my doing too!”

On the edge of the soccer field there was a large Dumpster that gave off white smoke with a putrid stench that drifted over the playing area. Women, some in abayas and some without, came out of the houses around the field with bags of trash. Jaafar watched them through his binoculars while the boys ran after the ball, shouting. With his binoculars Jaafar also watched the boys playing.

The Sector 32 team arrived, accompanied by a young man with a beard, and he and Jaafar agreed that Jaafar would referee the first half and the other man the second half. The match began. Jaafar pushed his wheelchair up and down the field at high speed in a frenzied passion. He shouted at the boys, either to encourage them or to reprimand them, and when they were too far off he would follow them with his binoculars. “Goooooooooaaaaaal!” shouted Jaafar. The Sector 32 referee objected that Jaafar was supporting his own team and wasn’t impartial. Jaafar ignored his objections.

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