Once he said to me: ‘Spilt blood and superstition are the basis of the world. But I retained much respect and affection for him because of the beautiful and fascinating things he said. I know why they hated him, because the enigmatic and aggressive way he spoke made him seem screwed up in the eyes of others. We called him the Professor and my other colleagues hated him and called him mad. He took his work seriously nonetheless and considered it a sacred duty, because to him running the ambulance section of the Emergency Department meant managing the dividing line between life and death. But when you are carrying severed heads in an ambulance, you needn’t go faster than a hearse drawn by mules in a dark mediaeval forest.’ The director saw himself as a philosopher and an artist, but ‘born in the wrong country,’ as he would say. I remembered the words the director of the Emergency Department in the hospital often used to say: ‘When you’re carrying an injured person or a patient close to death, the speed of the ambulance shows how humane and responsible you are. We set off along Abu Nawas Street towards Rashid Street, driving at medium speed because of the rain. The streets were empty and the only sounds to break the forlorn silence of the Baghdad night were some gunshots in the distance and the noise of an American helicopter patrolling over the Green Zone. The police piled the bodies onto the ambulance driven by my colleague Abu Salim and I carried the sack of heads to my ambulance. We had arrived late because of the heavy rain. The police guessed they were the bodies of some clerics. The heads had been put in an empty flour sack in front of the bodies. At the bank of the river the policemen were standing around six headless bodies. We had orders to go to the Tigris and it was the first time we had received instructions directly from the head of the Emergency Department in the hospital. They had kidnapped me on that cold accursed night. I think I stayed with the first group just three months. I wish you all the best, and good luck in your life,’ said the man with one eye. The leader of the group even shed real tears when he said goodbye. They bought me new clothes, and that night they cooked me a chicken and served me fruit and sweets. They even invited me to join them in a drink but I declined and told them I was a religious man. They stayed up all night drinking whiskey and laughing. They told me they had sold me to another group and they were very cheerful. Today the man is sitting in front of the immigration officer telling his story at amazing speed, while the immigration officer asks him to slow down as much as possible. Then they gave him a room, a bed, a towel, a bedsheet, a bar of soap, a knife, fork and spoon, and a cooking pot. They took him to the reception centre and did some medical tests on him. Two days ago a new Iraqi refugee arrived in Malmö in southern Sweden. They merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell the two stories apart. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum, written down in the immigration department and preserved in their private files. The deceptive distance between art and history demands its rightful place here, and reminds us that both are ultimately the creation of people attempting to rule their own destiny, and not of law.Įveryone staying in the refugee reception centre has two stories – the real one and the one for the record. Blasim chooses the moment in which the story is a matter of life and death, and in that moment the narrator sets sail on the powerful waves of literature-in which reality and imagination “merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them.” Everything that can soar in the human spirit comes to life in the story told by the narrator-imagination and humor, dread and anxiety, longing and hope, wisdom and belief, violence. Once his world comes crashing down, perhaps in the most chaotic moment in which we can imagine a human being, the refugee stands before the law, and must once again tie together the facts of reality - in order to obtain asylum he must tell a story to the immigration officer at the gates of the West. The narrator of the story presented here is also an Iraqi refugee. He found asylum in Finland approximately a decade ago, having to flee his homeland after stirring the anger of the regime by shooting a film in the Kurdish area of Iraq. The Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim is a refugee.
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