Jokes for the Gunmen Read online

  Jokes for the

  Gunmen

  Mazen Maarouf

  Translated from the Arabic

  by Jonathan Wright

  Contents

  Title Page

  Jokes for the Gunmen

  Matador

  Gramophone

  Cinema

  Biscuits

  A Joke

  The Angel of Death

  Other-People’s-Dreams Syndrome

  Aquarium

  Portion of Jam

  Curtain

  Juan and Ausa

  Copyright

  Jokes for the Gunmen

  1 The Pepper Plant

  I DREAMED THAT MY FATHER HAD A GLASS EYE. When I woke up my heart was pounding like the heart of a frightened cow, but I was smiling and happy. For a moment I thought my dream had finally come true and my father really did have a glass eye.

  When I was young, my father gave me a pepper plant for my birthday. It was a strange present. I didn’t understand what it meant at the time. We could hear gunfire from time to time, but we grew used to it, as one grows used to the honking of passing cars. Just as I didn’t understand what was happening in the neighbourhood, I didn’t understand why my father had chosen a pepper plant or why the plant stayed with us. But the plant had two tiny peppers just forming, and I felt intuitively that they represented me and my twin brother. The gunmen fought around our street for months, because of its location between the sea and the city centre. But my mother still sent us to school – me and my twin brother, who was deaf, and on the way he would get frightened and stick close to me for protection.

  I didn’t like my father’s present at the time. I found it odd and ugly. I didn’t tell any of the other children at school about it. But I looked after it, as my father had asked me to. My father owned a laundry that did ironing and dry cleaning, and he taught me to wipe the little budding peppers with a piece of cotton and to light a candle over them so they would get vitamins and grow. He would wipe them very gently. ‘You have to take care of them so that they produce more buds,’ he told me. ‘This pepper plant must become your friend.’ My father’s behaviour led me to believe that in every tiny pepper there was a soul that I had to protect at any cost. That was my little mission in the war, and sometimes, when the fighting was intense and the gunmen were using heavy weapons such as mortars and RPGs, my terrified mother and brother would lie flat on the floor in the corridor, between the sitting room and the kitchen and the bathroom, while I stood near the television, the part of the house most exposed to snipers, holding a candle to cast light over the pepper plant, in the belief that our souls – my soul, my brother’s, my father’s and my mother’s – were also inside the tiny peppers, and that if I did this none of us would be in danger of being killed, especially my father, who didn’t come home until the evening. That’s how the close association between me and the pepper plant began, and I became more affectionate towards it, although at one stage I did stop giving it water, but spat on it instead. I would drink the water instead of giving it to the plant, because my mother said there was a water shortage and people were dying of thirst. I was frightened and started drinking that water, imagining that it would stop me getting thirsty in the future. I also felt that watering the pepper plant with my own saliva made me closer to it. But then my mother saw me doing it one day and told my father when he came home from work.

  That was the first time my father whipped me with his belt. He was so angry I couldn’t believe it. Did spitting on the pepper plant really call for all this anger, I wondered. I saw my deaf brother screwing up his eyes and trembling each time the belt landed on me. When my father went away, I went up to the pepper plant, sobbing, my eyes drowned in tears, and tried to work out which of the peppers held my father’s soul. It was easy. I chose the biggest pepper, broke it off spitefully and crushed it under my foot.

  2 A Grasshopper

  AT SCHOOL THE KIDS COMPETED WITH EACH other by telling stories about how their fathers beat them. These stories illustrated the power each father had in his household. Power was the most important subject, as far as we were concerned, during the war. My father wasn’t at the top of the hierarchy of fathers, of course, because he hadn’t invented the cruellest punishment. But I told the other kids boastfully that he had whipped me with a leather belt. When I was asked why, I lied. I didn’t say it was because I had spat on the pepper plant. Instead I made up a story that showed me doing something really daring, that showed I was made of heroic stuff. ‘I swallowed my mother’s bottle of Valium pills,’ I said. ‘And my father whipped me till I threw up the pills all in one go.’

  Some days after I told my heroic story, a friend of mine came up to me and told me he’d seen my father being beaten up in the street. ‘He was wearing a brown belt,’ he said, ‘but he didn’t use it. Isn’t that the belt he whipped you with?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied with a nod. Because my father only had one brown belt. My friend, who saw the whole scene, described it to me as if it were happening in a peep show he was watching. When my father came home, I noticed that the marks on his face were not scalds from the steam in the laundry; in order to find out how painful they were, I prodded the largest mark on his face with my finger. He was asleep, but he started from the pain and turned his face away without opening his eyes, pretending he was still asleep.

  It was then that I realized that my father’s soul had left the pepper plant for ever. I blamed myself, because if I hadn’t broken off the largest pepper and trodden it underfoot, my father wouldn’t have become so weak, or so cowardly either. That’s what hurt me most.

  My father didn’t beat me after that, despite my repeated attempts to provoke him. I spat on the pepper plant several times in front of him, but he didn’t react at all, no matter how big the glob of spit was or how noisily I did it.

  My father stopped speaking to me so often. He started spending most of his time in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I would snoop on him through the keyhole and he looked absent-minded. He even started drooling at the mouth without realizing it. From behind the door – like a friend offering him advice as they fished, sitting side by side by the sea – I whispered through gritted teeth, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ And my father never did cry, which convinced me that he hadn’t completely lost his grip.

  A short while later, after he got back from work with footprints on his clothes, he picked up the television and put it under the tree in front of our building. There was nothing wrong with the television; my father just wanted everyone to see that that he wasn’t watching anything political. My father never stopped going to work, because his laundry was responsible for washing and ironing clothes for the guests at a large hotel, most of them foreign journalists who had come from far away to write about the war that was going on in our street and in other nearby streets.

  The story of my father being beaten up spread among the kids at school and, because of it, I was known as ‘the grasshopper’, on the grounds that my father was also a grasshopper, since grasshoppers always jump and never attack. I tried to defend myself against this slur by inventing stories about how my father beat me violently. On my way to school early in the morning, for example, I took to burning my arm or my stomach with cigarettes, or ripping my school uniform or scratching my own throat or eyes. I would go down some deserted alley and give myself a dose of self-inflicted morning torture. The pain was sometimes severe. And when I went into school like this, the kids would gather round me. Leaning on the gate and pretending to be a wreck, I would volunteer, ‘It’s my father. He beat me this morning. He’s no grasshopper, like you think he is.’ But the headmistress soon called me in. After examining me, she said, ‘I have a feeling that you’ve done this to yo
urself,’ on the grounds that no father would scratch his young son’s neck while beating him or burn him with cigarettes and then send him to school. She summoned my mother, who came at once and laid into me with her fists as we were leaving school, within sight of the other kids, who were still in class; they crowded around the windows to watch and snicker like rats.

  That was the first time I experienced failure. It made me willing to give up anything, even my little treasure trove of Matchbox cars, so that my father would become someone frightening. I was even willing to break open my money box, into which I had long whispered my dreams. I thought that whispering into the slot for the coins would make the money box fulfil all my wishes, because when you tell it your secret desires, it adjusts the amount of money inside – upwards, of course – so that it matches the cost of those dreams. My dream had been to buy one of those silver 6-mm pistols that at least three of the boys in the building possessed.

  But now my dream was to get hold of a glass eye for my father.

  3 The Sahlab Seller

  THE IDEA OF THE GLASS EYE CAME FROM THE MAN who sold hot sahlab drinks at our school. I’d known from the start that I had to make a change to my father’s face – sacrificing a part of his head to save the whole. But I didn’t know how, or which part I should sacrifice. I would watch him at night when he was sleeping, examining his features and trying to work out what I could remove, or at least disfigure, to make him look frightening. But I didn’t come to any conclusion. For a start, my father had a small face, and then it didn’t help that he was such a light sleeper. My father was the kind of person who suddenly opens his eyes, looks at you in alarm, and then asks, ‘Why haven’t you gone to bed yet? Are you frightened?’ So what could I possibly do? Whenever I saw him suddenly open his eyes, this was exactly the question that came into my head: ‘Dad, are you frightened?’ But, to smooth things over between us, I would say, ‘No, Dad, we’re not frightened, are we?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he would say in a low, hesitant voice. Then he’d walk me to my room so I could go back to sleep. He’d sit on the edge of the bed that my brother and I shared. He’d sit there, completely absent-minded, just as he sat on the edge of the bathtub. As soon as drool started dribbling from his mouth, I would shut my eyes, keeping the lids tightly closed and pretending I had nodded off. He would get up, go into the kitchen, drink some water and then get back into bed next to my mother, who always slept like a log.

  The sahlab seller was a spy. He came to school twice a day. Completely bald, short and chinless, with just a thin moustache, he wore rubbish shoes, which made many of the children avoid buying sahlab from him. But apparently he didn’t care. He kept coming to school, never saying anything. We never saw him speak. We also never saw him worked up. He would listen to your order, take the money from you and then give you your change if necessary. His right eye was missing, but that didn’t put the children off. The rubbish shoes he wore made more of an impression – more than his eye. Disfigured bodies were a common sight in the war – as were adverts for imported cheese, which made you feel familiar with a cheese you would never taste – and it was also normal to see at least a dead body or two on television every day. Or one of the schoolkids would come and tell you in detail how one of his relatives had been killed by a shell. But to see a dead body wearing rubbish shoes? That was impossible. The sahlab seller was so shabby that he looked like a corpse, but none of the gunmen beat him up. Once, as I was buying a glass of sahlab from him outside the main school gate, I asked him, ‘Have the gunmen ever beaten you up?’ He didn’t answer, so I raised my voice and said, ‘Tell me, the gunmen – the gunmen who stand at the end of the street – have they ever beaten you up?’ He shook his head without looking at me. When I saw his response, I felt a great happiness. ‘Thank you,’ I told him, assuming that this was definitely something to do with his missing eye.

  4 A Cardboard Box

  AFTER A WHILE I STOPPED GOING TO SCHOOL. IT was as if I had become a public toilet, where everyone deposited their shitty jokes. Especially after my mother slapped me in front of the other kids. I didn’t feel guilty, and I didn’t think about the consequences of staying away from school. In fact, I justified it to myself by saying I needed to have a rest and think about what could be done to help my father. I had to build up my relationship with the gunmen by any means possible – to become one of their associates. And in order to do that, I had to win their attention. Strike a blow. Boooom. Something to make them interrogate me. The very next day, I took my chance. I stole a cardboard box one of them had left on a ledge outside the building they had taken over. Inside the cardboard box there was a bag of lentils, some packets of pills and some doctor’s prescriptions, a Peugeot car mirror and a piece of plastic whose function I couldn’t work out. The pills belonged to the mother of a low-level gunman. I picked up the cardboard box and ran off with it. The gunmen caught up with me. They didn’t shoot at me because they managed to surround me near a parked car before they even had time to think about opening fire. I soon found myself in a room on the second floor of the gunmen’s building. When the ‘interrogation’ (that’s what I like to call it) began, I asked for a chair to sit on. A hand as heavy as a pigeon, or one and a half pigeons, came down on my neck. I coughed, as if to clear my throat, so that I wouldn’t shed any tears. I hadn’t brought myself to this place to be beaten up. Besides, slapping someone on the back of the neck, at least at school, meant the person was of no importance. If he was important, you would slap his face or punch him on the jaw or in the stomach. It was humiliating, but I stood up as straight as a glass, in an attempt to show my powers of endurance in the face of adversity. I wanted to win their admiration, but the only thing the gunmen’s leader asked me, as he examined my school uniform and my satchel, was ‘Are the schools closed today?’ Before I could answer, the gunmen started asking each other the same question. Because if the schools were suddenly closed, it meant there had been some security development and they had to be on the alert. They hadn’t heard this on the radio. Besides, the owner of the cardboard box I had stolen was just a wretched gunman whose job was to bring them coffee, tea and sandwiches. His mother was very ill and he had to go home to make her some lentil soup and give her her medicine, but my interrogation forced him to stay, and that’s what upset him. He was the one who’d slapped me on the back of the neck.

  I was thrown out of the building. My plan had been thwarted. I hadn’t even been asked why I’d stolen the cardboard box. But I didn’t go away. I didn’t go home or go back to school. No, I stayed. I was there to make a deal with them. I was going to sell them my twin brother. At school I’d heard the bus driver talking to the woman who teaches science about these gunmen trafficking in human organs. Children’s organs, to be precise. The problem for me was how to tell the gunmen who traffic in organs from those who don’t. The bus driver didn’t say anything about that to the teacher. When I went up to him and asked him, he said sarcastically, ‘You can tell by asking them if they’re organ fans.’ But maybe he just wanted to impress the pretty teacher, so I had to ask the gunmen about it.

  5 The Deal

  I WAS HOLDING OUT HOPE THAT THE GUNMEN would be organ fans, because my deaf brother struck me as a hot commodity. Well, not one that was top-notch, I admit. The fact that his ears didn’t work meant that part of him was missing. And that’s because, apparently, my brother had used his ears so much when he had a fever that he no longer had any hearing. Besides, there were two of him – him and me. That would definitely bring the price down. But the price he would fetch, plus what was in the money box, would mean I could buy a glass eye for my father. And there was another reason that would definitely persuade the gunmen to buy him – my brother had two hearts.

  Yes, that’s what my mother said. She repeatedly said that children who have a disability, such as deafness, blindness, inability to speak or whatever, have a second heart. God takes one sense from them, but in its place He gives them another heart on the right side
of their chests, because there isn’t enough room on the left-hand side. When we were little boys, we both had a fever, like any twins. When we got over it, I discovered that the fever had taken his hearing from my brother and given it to me. But I didn’t tell him this. My ability to hear really did double, whereas he could no longer hear at all, and he no longer spoke to me much. He just smiled. That was because he had two hearts, and that’s what I was betting on when I spoke to the gunmen. But I left the matter of the two hearts till the end. For the shock value. Like a shell that hits a bus full of disabled children. I said everything all in a rush.

  I went up to the gunman and asked him, ‘Are you organ fans?’ In case he didn’t say, ‘Yes,’ or in case he threw me out, I quickly added, ‘I have a brother, and he wants to sell himself. My brother and I are one. He’s the one who’ll sell himself to you, but I’m the one who’ll get the money. I don’t want to cheat you. He can’t hear and there are two of him – me and him – but my brother does have two hearts.’

  The gunman looked at me and said, ‘Two hearts? And you want us to traffic in organs? What do you know about human organs, you piece of shit?’

  ‘Everything,’ I lied.

  ‘Everything? Then show me where your phallus is.’

  ‘It’s inside my body here,’ I said, putting my hand on my hip, to the left of my belly button.

  The gunman burst out laughing. In fact, I had long had a feeling that a person’s phallus had something to do with their kidney, but I didn’t know where exactly it would be. No one had told me that a phallus was the willy, as my father called it, that I piss through.

  When he stopped laughing and could see how embarrassed I was – my face was as red as a beetroot – he said, ‘Of course. Go and fetch your brother.’