I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, and it didn’t occur to me that the gunman was making fun of me. I walked off, thinking that if the deal went through, I would also get revenge for my father on the gunmen who had beaten him up. With the money I got from them, I would have him fitted with a glass eye that would give them the fright of their lives. Instead of going back home, I waited till it was time for the kids to come out of school. I was very happy and when I went in I found my brother and my mother as usual. He smiled at me. I took him to the bathroom, washed his face and asked him to open his mouth so that I could check his teeth. I also checked his ears and made sure they were clean. I heard my mother praying to God to preserve me. My brother didn’t understand anything. I signed to him to say, ‘We’re off,’ and then, ‘Don’t tell Mother.’ He smiled, in that way that would make you think that he really did have two hearts.
I took my deaf twin brother along to the gunmen. Because he was deaf, my mother wouldn’t let him out of the house, not even to let him play in front of the building. If clashes suddenly broke out, he wouldn’t hear the noise and he would be an easy target for a sniper. ‘I’m going to buy him something from the shop,’ I said to my mother. She was happy, because I hadn’t bought my brother a treat before. When we reached the gunmen’s checkpoint, I said, ‘Here he is!’ and I pushed him forward a little. ‘He looks just like me but he can’t hear and he has two hearts, as I told you,’ I said. But my brother had a feeling that something was up. He turned round and grabbed my shirt pleadingly. I could feel his grip, his fingers clamped tight. I realized he was frightened. He dug his heels into the ground like a little goat and looked at me. ‘This is for Dad’s sake,’ I told him with signs.
‘So you’re here to sell your brother,’ said the gunman.
‘Yes, I’ll sell him to someone else if we can’t agree the terms,’ I answered confidently.
‘Since you’re so serious, come and let’s make a deal upstairs,’ he said, gesturing to my brother to wait. When my brother saw me go into the building with the gunman, he burst into tears, but I waved to reassure him.
6 My Deaf Brother
THIS WAS THE ONLY TIME I WAS BEATEN UP BY THE gunmen. They weren’t the same gunmen who left their footprints on my father’s shirt, but I found out what it feels like to be trodden underfoot. On the way home, my brother felt sad for my sake. Halfway home he stopped me to touch my cheeks, as I had done with my father – my neck and cheeks had livid bruises. When he touched me, I dropped to the ground and turned my face away, pretending to be asleep. Then I let him help me stand up. When I got home, my mother freaked out as soon as she saw me. She started screaming and asked me what had happened. But I wasn’t paying attention and, instead of going into the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and drooling, I stood in front of the pepper plant and started to examine it. One of the little peppers had withered and shrivelled up. The sight greatly disheartened me. I told myself that the little pepper must be my little soul, which had been humiliated. The next day I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t pretend to go to school. I spent the day spraying water on the shrivelled pepper and blowing on it to revive it. But my attempts were in vain. In the middle of the day the little pepper dropped off and landed on the soil. My heart began to beat violently, like trampling feet. I didn’t realize that the withered pepper didn’t represent my soul but rather my brother’s. That afternoon my brother’s bus didn’t come back from school. We found out later that a shell had hit it. My brother and all the other children in the bus were incinerated and their bodies fused with each other. They were buried together in a small, remote terraced field near the school.
My brother had been going to a special school for the deaf and dumb and the blind. His bus was something all the kids in the street liked to stare at, because, as far as they were concerned, the passengers were weird. The bus smelt of dough, bananas and milk, and it was my job to wait for it with my brother every morning. I hated that. As soon as my brother got on the bus, some of the kids would start pointing at me in amazement and laughing at the fact that I was an exact copy of him. My brother liked that. He was proud of the close resemblance between us. But I looked away, so that I wouldn’t meet his eyes after he had boarded the bus. Then he would press his face against the windowpane and wave to me with a broad, stupid smile that I felt might become detached from his face and turn into a slimy toad that would jump on my nose.
7 Jokes for the Gunmen
AFTER MY BROTHER DIED, MY MOTHER STOPPED eating. She started smoking heavily and arguing noisily with my father, who continued to go to work in the laundry and kept getting beaten up by the gunmen. When he came back from work, he went into the bathroom, sat on the rim of the bathtub and drooled, even more than previously, but he never cried. In the meantime I looked at him and gritted my teeth. The reality is that I wasn’t much affected by the loss of my brother, because the idea that there were two of him – him and me – and that only one of them was gone prevented me from feeling the shock. For me it was a half loss, or even a quarter loss, if we take into account the fact that I still had my brother’s sense of hearing. I was still determined to press on with my project – buying a glass eye for my father. But I did resume going to school. My brother’s death had restored my standing among the schoolkids. They stopped making fun of me, because it would have been improper to laugh at a classmate whose deaf brother had been blown up by a shell.
But things didn’t improve for my father in the same way. The fact that he had lost his child made the gunmen realize that he was not only weak but also sad. Now, after giving him a thorough thrashing, instead of saying as usual, ‘We’re here to protect you,’ they started asking him to tell them jokes. ‘Come on, tell us a joke before you go. Take your time,’ they would say. So my father would have to think of a joke. Of course, in front of a bunch of gunmen you have to be a good storyteller to win your freedom. Your story has to be convincing, enjoyable and very short, and it has to make people laugh. Not like this story, for example.
We started spending more time together, me and my father. Although it was still the period of mourning for my deaf brother, my father and I had to make up jokes together. Jokes for the week. A joke a day. Just for the gunmen. And every joke had to be sharp. And sometimes rude. My father said, ‘Never mind. You can use rude words. What matters is the joke.’ My mother couldn’t take part in these evening sessions. Because she was the mother of the deceased boy, she was in the depths of despair, totally pale, silent and thin. My brother’s death seemed to have hollowed her out.
I must admit that the jokes were not good. At least, they didn’t make me laugh. Although I helped make them up, I didn’t get most of them. My father, on the other hand, thought they fitted the bill. He would smile with relief whenever we finished making up a joke. It was as if the day was done and he could rip that page off the wall calendar. Sometimes we’d spend the whole night making up a funny story, and sometimes we’d have to wake up early, sit together at the kitchen table and confer in whispers as we tried to work out the punchline to a joke that needed one. Sometimes I’d turn to the older schoolkids for help. I’d ask them to tell me a joke that would make people laugh, make them laugh big-time, and they would come up with one, out of sympathy, believing that I urgently needed cheering up because I had lost my twin brother. They would tell me the latest jokes they had heard and I would pass them on to my father in the evening. Then we’d start adjusting them to make sure they were quite new and had never been heard before. But whenever we finished making up a joke, I noticed that my father looked older.
My father said that sometimes he had to tell the joke while the gunmen had the radio on, and when the news came on they would say, ‘Shhh,’ and my father would stop, wait till the end of the bulletin and then tell the joke again from the beginning. As soon as he got a detail of the joke wrong, he’d get a slap on his face and one of them would say, ‘That’s not exactly what you said the first time.’ When the joke was over, th
ey’d remind him that they were like brothers to him and if he needed anything he could come to see them, since they were there to protect us and help us. But I knew they were lying. If they really wanted to protect him, why hadn’t they poked his eye out yet, I wondered. They must have realized that if my father had a glass eye fitted, he would frighten them.
8 The Hippopotamuses
I HAD TO ACT. MAKE A MOVE. IT WAS OBVIOUS MY father would never get a glass eye if he went on like this. I had to increase his chances by provoking the gunmen to poke out one of his eyes, even if they came to regret it later. Meanwhile my plan was to hire a bodyguard for my father.
My brother and I used to save large banknotes in our joint money box on a fifty-fifty basis. Sometimes I would cheat, but not my brother. He didn’t have any opportunity, since I kept a close eye on him. Sometimes I would search his trousers while he was asleep and, if I came across a large banknote, I would keep it for myself. My brother was sometimes given extra pocket money because he was deaf, as if he could use the money to buy a new sense of hearing. So as not to hurt my feelings, he would hide it from me. But in the end I would find it. When my brother couldn’t find it, he didn’t ask me about it, and he didn’t snitch on me to Mother or Father. He just smiled and pointed at me as if to say, ‘I know.’ I had forgotten about the money box since his death, but now I decided to use it. For the benefit of the family, of course. I was now going to school regularly. To study and to bring jokes for my father. I thought I could put off the matter of the glass eye for a short while.
There was always a group of young men standing near the school. Five or six of them. We used to call them the ‘hippopotamuses’. They were brothers. All of them were tall, about the same height, and they were all equally massive. They were always well turned-out and walked in single file. They showered regularly, their hair was trimmed, their clothes were clean and they had gold chains around their necks. They were known to be quiet but also vicious, and they worked by the hour. I heard from the kids at school that they carried out difficult assignments, such as saving gunmen from certain tricky situations. Once they saved a sniper after the building where he was stationed on the roof was surrounded by hostile gunmen. So I wanted to make an agreement with the hippopotamuses. Not all of them, since one hippopotamus would be more than enough to protect my father.
I took the money box to school. After lessons were over and everyone had left, I walked towards the hippopotamuses, taking the green plastic money box out of my satchel. I didn’t look at any of them – I just kept walking until I ended up standing in front of them. Or rather, in front of one of them. I had to speak rapidly and say everything without stopping. Without looking up at the face of the person I was speaking to, I said, ‘Do you want a job I need a bodyguard for just one hour a day half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening and the money’s in the box what do you say?’ As I spoke I pushed my money box towards his stomach.
‘Bodyguard? Who for? For you?’
‘No, for my father.’
‘And what does your father do?’
‘He has a laundry.’
‘And how much is there in the money box?’
‘I don’t know. Open it up at your place and tell me tomorrow how many hours you can work for the money inside it,’ I said. My heart was pounding, because everything seemed to be going so well.
The next day the hippopotamuses came into school. That was during Maths. They knocked on the door, came in and asked me to come out to talk to them. Of course the teacher couldn’t do anything, nor could the headmistress. In fact, because the hippopotamuses asked to speak to me personally, that earned me double respect among both the kids and the staff. Outside the classroom one of the hippopotamuses said to me, ‘For the money in the money box, I can work seven hours. That means a week.’
‘Seven hours? That’s all?’ I said confidently.
‘Yes, and whether you agree or refuse now won’t make any difference, because we take our fees in advance, whether I complete the job or not.’
‘A week’s fine, just fine. You’ll escort my father for half an hour in the morning on his way to work and half an hour in the evening when he goes back home. You don’t have to escort him literally. Just walk behind him. Keep a short distance between the two of you, and let other people know that you’re his bodyguard, but don’t speak to him.’ Now I was talking like a gangster.
The man answered sharply, as if he’d been insulted, ‘You do realize you’re dealing with a professional here?’
It was Wednesday and we agreed that the man would start work the coming Monday, in five days’ time, that is, because he was tied up with certain other operations.
9 Father Abducted
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS WAS A TRUE PROFESSIONAL and a man of his word, like any ambitious gangster. On the agreed Monday morning, my father found a man waiting for him at the entrance to the building. The man walked behind my father without uttering a word. Just as a bodyguard does. The hippopotamus had several pistols and several bullet belts draped over his shoulders. Despite my young age, he carried out the mission I had assigned him to the letter. I could see that for myself. I was peeking from behind the curtain. The distance between him and my father was very small. My father was terrified and didn’t dare speak to this enormous stranger. In fact, he was so frightened that he stopped halfway and threw up his breakfast on the pavement. As a professional, the hippopotamus stopped too and, while waiting for my father to finish vomiting, looked around in all directions, checking the pavements, the buildings and the roadway.
When my father reached the laundry, the bodyguard disappeared from sight. But my father remained apprehensive and tense all day long and had pains in his stomach. When he set about closing up the laundry at a quarter to nine in the evening, when the television news ended, the nightmare began again and the man walked behind my father to the entrance of our building. The gunmen didn’t accost my father that day, maybe because they didn’t want any trouble with the hippopotamuses. The next day my father didn’t leave the house. He didn’t even leave his room. He didn’t look out of the window till noon, and the hippopotamus wasn’t there then, which reassured him.
But the process was repeated on the third day and, halfway to the laundry, my father could no longer keep walking. He stopped and hailed a taxi. But then he found the hippopotamus sitting beside him in the back seat. ‘Have I done anything bad?’ my father asked him in a trembling voice.
‘I don’t know. I’ve been hired to escort you,’ answered the bodyguard.
‘Hired? Who hired you?’
‘Do you have a son in the first grade of middle school?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was the one who hired me.’
My father didn’t come home that day. When the hippopotamus bodyguard got to the laundry a little before 8.45 p.m., he found it shut. My mother stayed up all night waiting for my father, but there was no trace of him. I had to stay awake next to my poor mother. My eye was hurting badly and I took a tablet. But there was one idea jumping around in my head like a squirrel: was it possible my father had been kidnapped? Early in the morning, we heard knocking on the door. We thought it was Father, but when my mother opened the door she found the hippopotamus standing in front of her. He was upset that an ordinary man had managed to elude him. He asked to speak to me. ‘Listen, kid,’ he said. ‘I consider this to be breach of contract. Tell that to your father.’ Then he left.
I knew the hippopotamuses could find my father if I asked them to. It would cost a lot of money, of course. But my mother was willing to pay as much as the laundry was worth in order to get him back. I preferred to have my father out of the way for a while, because I had always wanted him to be famous for his role in the war – and this was his chance. Given that my father was out of sight, he must have been kidnapped. That was the story I would put about. That would give the impression that his kidnappers saw my father as a man of consequence, the opposite of what my mother kept sayi
ng for the neighbours to hear – that Father was innocent, that he had never even bought a newspaper, and that he had no opinion on what was happening in the country. In fact, she swore repeatedly that the gunmen were constantly beating him up and that he was a completely willing victim.
My mother wanted my father back whatever it might cost, but I never made it clear to her that we could get him back whenever we wanted by employing the hippopotamuses. At school I noticed that the kids had become more sympathetic towards me. I was now the kid who had lost his deaf brother and whose father had been kidnapped. Maybe there was another reason for their sympathy too, but I did feel relieved. I smiled all the time and was boastful, because at last my father had won recognition in the annals of the war as someone who’d been kidnapped. His picture had even been published in the newspaper, which annoyed the gunmen, who were jealous because their pictures had never appeared in any newspaper. Then his name was mentioned on television, among the names of people who had gone missing that month. Meanwhile at school, I wrote in my essays about the military plans he drew up at home, his orders to gunmen who came around to our house, and his deep and secret friendship with the hippopotamuses.
But two months after he disappeared we received a legal notification from a lawyer, informing us that my father had bequeathed me the laundry and all its equipment and coat hangers. Obviously it would have been impossible for someone who’d been kidnapped to hire a lawyer from his place of captivity, so my mother and I realized that Father was alive and well, that he hadn’t been kidnapped and hadn’t come to any harm. He had just left home of his own free will. The news hit me like a thunderbolt, but my mother’s mood took a turn for the better. The next day I didn’t go to school. I was too embarrassed. I never went back. A short while later I decided to devote my time to washing and ironing people’s clothes in the little laundry.
Jokes for the Gunmen Page 2