BEFORE TAKING OUT HIS KNIFE HE SAID, “After studying the client’s file you must submit a brief note on how you propose to kill your first client and how you will display his body in the city. But that doesn’t mean that what you propose in your note will be approved. One of our specialists will review the proposed method and either approve it or propose a different method. This system applies to professionals in all phases of their work—even after the training phase has ended and you have taken the test. In all phases you will receive your salary in full. I don’t want to go into all the details now. I’ll brief you on things gradually. After you receive the client’s file you cannot ask questions as you could before. You have to submit your questions in writing. All your questions, proposals, and written submissions will be documented in your personal file. You absolutely may not write to me about work matters by e-mail or call me on the phone. You will write your questions on a special form that I will provide you with later. The important thing is that you now devote your time to studying the client’s file carefully and patiently.

“I want to reassure you that we won’t stop dealing with you even if you fail in your first assignment. If you fail you’ll be transferred to work in another department at the same salary. But I must remind you once again: Giving up the job after you receive your first salary payment would be unacceptable and would not succeed. There are strict conditions for that, and if the management agrees to sever relations with you, you would have to undergo many tests, which could last a long time. In the archives we have files we preserve about volunteers and other agents who decided to terminate their contracts on their own initiative. If you’re thinking of doing that, we’ll show you some examples of the experiences of others. I’m confident you’ll be able to persevere with the work and enjoy it. You’ll see how your whole life will change.

“This is your first present; don’t open it now. It’s your pay in full. As for the documentaries about the lives of predatory animals, you can buy them and we’ll cover the expenses later. Pay particular attention to the images of the victims’ bones.

“Always remember, dear friend, that we are not terrorists whose aim is to bring down as many victims as possible in order to intimidate others, nor even crazy killers working for the sake of money. We have nothing to do with the fanatical Islamist groups or the intelligence agency of some nefarious government or any of that kind of nonsense.

“I know you now have some questions that are nagging you, but you will gradually discover that the world is built to have more than one level, and it’s unrealistic for everyone to reach all the levels and all the basements with ease. Don’t forget the senior positions that await you in the hierarchy of the institution if you have an imagination that is fresh, fierce, and striking.

“Every body you finish off is a work of art waiting for you to add the final touch, so that you can shine like a precious jewel amid the wreckage of this country. To display a corpse for others to see is the ultimate in the creativity we are seeking and that we are trying to study and benefit from. Personally I can’t stand the agents who are unimaginative. We have, for example, an agent whose code name is Satan’s Knife, that I wish those in charge would get rid of as soon as possible. This guy thinks that cutting off the client’s limbs and hanging them from the electrical wires in the slum neighborhoods is the height of creativity and inventiveness. He’s just a conceited fool. I hate his classical methods, although he talks about a new classicism. All this lightweight does is paint the client’s body parts and hang them from invisible threads, the heart in dark blue, the intestines green, the liver and testicles yellow. He does this without understanding the poetry of simplicity.

“When I tell you some of the details I see that puzzled look in your eyes. Calm down, breathe deep, listen to the rhythm of your secret spirit calmly and patiently. Let me explain some points to you more clearly to dispel some of the misapprehensions you may have. Let me waste some time with you. What I tell you may be just personal impressions, and another member of the group may have a quite different opinion.

“I like concision, simplicity, and the striking image. Take Agent Deaf, for example. He’s calm, and he has a smart, lucid eye, and my favorite work of his was that woman who was breast-feeding. One rainy winter’s morning a crowd of passersby and drivers stopped to look at that woman. She was naked and fat, and her child, also naked, was suckling at her left breast. He put the woman under a dead palm tree in the central reservation of a busy street. There was no trace of a wound or a bullet on the woman’s body or on the baby’s. She and her baby looked as alive as a brook of pure water. That’s a genius we lack in this century. You should have seen the woman’s enormous tits and how thin the baby was, like a pile of bones painted the color of bright white baby skin. No one could work out how the mother and her child were killed. Most people speculated that he used some mysterious poison that has not yet been classified. But you should read in the archives in our library the brief, poetic report that Deaf wrote on this extraordinary work of art. He now holds an important position in the group. He deserves much more than that.

“You must understand properly that this country presents one of the century’s rare opportunities. Our work may not last long. As soon as the situation stabilizes we’ll have to move on to another country. Don’t worry, there are many candidates. Listen, in the past we offered new students like you classical lessons, but now things are much changed. We’ve started to rely on the democracy and spontaneity of the imagination, and not on instruction. I studied a long time and read many boring books justifying what we do before I was able to work professionally. We used to read studies that spoke about peace, studies written with really disgusting eloquence. There were many naive and unnecessary analogies to justify everything. One of them was about how all the medicines at the pharmacy, even plain old toothpaste, were produced after laboratory tests on rats and other animals, so it would not be possible to bring about peace on this earth without sacrificing laboratory humans as well. Old lessons like these were boring and frustrating. Your generation is very lucky in this age of golden opportunities. A film actress licking an ice cream might give rise to dozens of photographs and news reports that reach the most remote village ravished by famine in this world, this grindstone of screaming and dancing. This at least achieves what I call ‘the justice of discovering the insignificance and equivocal essence of the world.’ How much more so a corpse displayed creatively in the city center!

“Perhaps I’ve told you too much, but let me tell you frankly that I’m worried about you, because you’re either an idiot or a genius, and agents like that excite my curiosity. If you’re a genius, that would be gratifying. I still believe in genius, although most members of the group talk about experience and practice. And if you’re an idiot, let me tell you before I go a short and useful story about one idiot who naively tried to mess with us. I didn’t even like his nickname—‘the Nail.’ After the committee had approved the way the Nail proposed to kill his client and display his body in a large restaurant, we waited for results. But this guy was very slow about finishing off his work. I met him several times and asked him what was causing the delay. He would say that he didn’t want to repeat the methods of his predecessors and was thinking of bringing about a creative quantum leap in our work. But the truth was different. The Nail was a coward who had been infected with banal humanitarian feelings and, like any sick man, had started to question the benefit of killing others and to wonder whether there was some creator monitoring all our deeds, and that was the beginning of the abyss. Because every child born in this world is simply a possibility, either to be good or evil, according to the classification set by schools of religious education in this stupid world. But it’s a completely different matter for us. Every child that’s born is just an extra burden on the ship that’s about to sink. Anyway, let me tell you what happened to the Nail. He had a relative who worked as a guard in the hospital in the city center, and the Nail was thinking of slipping into the hospital mortuary and choosing a corpse instead of making a corpse himself. It was easy to carry that off after he’d given his relative half the pay he’d received from the group. The mortuary was full of corpses from those stupid acts of terrorism, corpses ripped apart by car bombs, others that had their heads cut off in sectarian feuds, bloated bodies from the riverbed, and many other stupid ones that had been finished off in random murders that had nothing to do with art. The Nail slipped into the mortuary that night and started looking for the right corpse to display to the public. The Nail was looking for the children’s corpses, because in his first report he had proposed an idea that involved killing a five-year-old child.

“In the mortuary there were specimens of the corpses of schoolchildren who had been mutilated by car bombs or incinerated in some street market or broken into pieces after planes bombed houses. Finally the Nail chose a child who had been beheaded along with the rest of his family for sectarian reasons. The body was clean, and the cut at the neck was as neat as a piece of torn paper. The Nail thought of exhibiting this body in a restaurant and putting the eyes of the other family members on the table, served in bowls of blood, like a soup. Maybe it was a beautiful idea, but before all else his work would have been a cheat and a betrayal. If he had beheaded the child himself it would have been an authentic work of art, but to steal it from the mortuary and act in this despicable manner would be a disgrace and cowardice at the same time. But he did not understand that the world today is linked together by more than a tunnel and a corridor.

“It was the mortician who caught the Nail before he was able to deceive the poor public. The mortician was in his early sixties, an enormous man. His work in the mortuary had flourished after the increase in the number of mutilated bodies in the country. People sought him out to patch together the bodies of their children and other relatives who were torn apart in explosions and random killings. They would pay handsomely to have him restore their children to the appearance by which they originally knew them. The mortician was truly a great artist. He worked with patience and with great love. That night he guided the Nail into a side room in the mortuary and locked the door on him. He injected him with some drug that paralyzed him without making him unconscious. He laid him out on the mortuary table, strapped his hands and legs down, and gagged his mouth. He was humming a pretty children’s song in his strange woman’s voice as he prepared his worktable. It was a song about a child fishing for a frog in a small puddle of blood, and every now and then he would stroke the Nail’s hair tenderly and whisper in his ear, ‘Ooh, my dear, ooh, my friend, there is something stranger than death—to look at the world, which is looking at you, but without any gesture or understanding or even purpose, as though you and the world are united in blindness, like silence and loneliness. And there is something a little stranger than death: a man and a woman playing in bed, and then you come, just you, you who always miswrite the story of your life.’

“The mortician finished his work in the early morning.

“In front of the gate of the Ministry of Justice there was a platform like the platforms on which the city’s statues stand, but made of a pulp of flesh and bones. On top of the platform stood a pillar of bronze, and from the pillar hung the Nail’s skin, complete and detached from his flesh with great skill, waving like a flag of victory. In the front part of the platform you could clearly see the Nail’s right eye, set in the pulp of his flesh. It had a look rather like the insipid look your eyes have now. Do you know who the mortician was? He’s the man in charge of the most important department in the institution. He’s the man in charge of the truth and creativity department.”

Then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said, “You’re shaking.”