Jokes for the Gunmen

by Mazen Maarouf

  10 A Phone Call

  I NEVER SAW MY FATHER AGAIN. HE DOES CALL ME sometimes – he rings me on the laundry phone twice a week, to check up on me and my mother and to ask how business is. I answer him in a roundabout way: ‘Business is fine, Dad. I’m thinking of opening another branch. We miss you, Dad. Won’t you come and visit us?’ I beg him to tell me where he’s living. But he refuses, every time. Now he’s remarried and he has twin boys. He tells me about them and how they look like we looked, my brother and I, when we were their age. Although it’s fifteen years since he left, my father still feels ashamed. He says he feels embarrassed. ‘What a coward I was!’ he says. ‘It’s OK, Dad, in war not everyone can be brave,’ I reply. I look in the mirror while I’m speaking to him on the phone. Always. I don’t tell him that I always wanted him to have a glass eye, because that would be painful for both of us. Then he asks me the same old question, the question he never forgets in any phone call: ‘How’s your eye, your glass eye?’ ‘It’s fine, Dad,’ I reply. ‘It’s completely adapted to my face. I can even blink normally. You should see it.’ ‘That’s good to hear. It was a dire day, that Wednesday. Do you remember? You shouldn’t have stayed at school after class.’

  ‘Yes, Dad. I remember the day well. It really was an unlucky day. I even owe you an apology,’ I say.

  ‘An apology? Don’t be silly. I should be apologizing to you and your mother.’

  I had stayed behind at school, determined to make an agreement with the hippopotamus about a new idea that would only take a few minutes to put into effect. After the hippopotamuses visited our class, it had occurred to me that, instead of hiring one of them as a bodyguard, I should ask them to poke out my father’s eye. When the school bell rang for the end of lessons, I couldn’t find the hippopotamuses anywhere, so I stayed behind to wait for them. Some of the kids were still in the playground. They were playing dodgeball with a tennis ball. In dodgeball two boys throw a ball back and forth and try to hit a group of boys standing half way between them. I joined them, but I wasn’t concentrating fully. As I played I was thinking about the hippopotamuses and the new plan. Suddenly the ball hit me in the eye. I lost consciousness immediately and when I came round I was in hospital. I opened my right eye and my mother and father were standing near the bed. My left eye was bandaged up, my head was hurting badly and I felt slightly dizzy. My father smiled and stroked my hair, then told me what was going to happen in a while in the operating theatre. ‘You’re a big boy and from now on you won’t be just a boy. You’ll be a man.’ Then he took something wrapped in a surgical dressing out of his pocket and unwrapped it to show a small ball. It was a plastic version of the glass eye that was going to fill the hole in my face. The iris was the same colour as my own. The whiteness was also an approximate match.

  Whenever he calls me, we go over the incident together. We also remember the pepper plant. I tell him it’s grown. It only grows peppers in two places – two peppers every year. The first one always appears where it’s meant to be, representing my mother’s soul. The second one grows where the one representing my father’s soul used to be, but whenever I look at it closely I have a feeling that it carries my soul. My father tells me that he’s been dreaming about me. It’s the same dream every time, in which the doctors replace my glass eye with a natural one. They restore my real eye. Then we laugh. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the same dream again,’ I say, and he swears by his twin sons that it was the identical dream. We laugh and I wipe a tear from my good eye. I wear glasses now and they make my glass eye look bigger. It looks really frightening. Then I add in jest, ‘If war breaks out again, I’ll have a face that frightens people.’

  ‘Maybe that’s for the best. Best for both of you.’

  Matador

  MY UNCLE DIED THREE TIMES IN THE SPACE OF one week. He began his death marathon on the Tuesday, right after he came back from the slaughterhouse. ‘I’ve been cheated,’ he said, and lay down on the sofa and died. I wasn’t there when this happened, but Mother told me about it later. My uncle had been wearing his Spanish matador suit and it was spattered with white cow saliva. Apparently they had laughed at him at the slaughterhouse, so he’d taken off the suit and hung it in the wardrobe before lying down on the sofa and dying.

  That was the first time my uncle died, and of course we treated him as a corpse. We kept him in the sitting room until it was his turn to be buried. They told us that luckily we would only have to wait two days. The sitting room is the only room in the house with air conditioning. It’s also the smallest room. When you put the air conditioning on full you feel like an ant that’s swallowed a pin and can no longer move.

  Personally I like it when we put the air conditioning on, because we only do it on special occasions. Then you’ll see me in my cotton pyjamas with a hood, punching the air as if I’m boxing a giant crane. I got that idea from Rocky in the film. That’s also what I did with my uncle’s body. I started punching it. Just on the soles of his feet, mind you. But apparently the punches pumped the blood from his feet to his heart and he came round. That’s the deepest analysis I’ve managed to make but I haven’t let on to anyone. Would you expect me to tell Mother that I punched my dead uncle’s feet? Even my uncle didn’t know I’d punched him. As soon as he came round, which was on the Thursday morning, he rubbed his foot and removed a thorn. He said the thorn kept hurting his soul and that meant he couldn’t die peacefully. His body hadn’t been washed yet and he hadn’t had his fingernails trimmed. He took a shower and cut his nails.

  My uncle had long wanted to be a bullfighter, but he could never afford the airfare to Mexico or Spain. And besides, he had to get a visa. He had tried at both embassies and each time he wrote that his aim was not to immigrate but just to be a matador. But his applications were rejected three times and he was told he no longer had the right to submit visa applications. Someone suggested he buy a bullfighter’s suit. It took him four years to pay off the instalments. The suit had belonged to Luis Miguel Dominguín, the famous Spanish bullfighter. At least, that’s what he was told, but no one other than my uncle believed the story. He would sniff the suit and say, ‘This is definitely Dominguín’s suit. In it I can smell the souls of all the bulls he slew.’ Anyway, my uncle would put on the outfit and practise in the slaughterhouse, picking cows that were on their way to slaughter. He’d leave home at two o’clock in the morning and come back at dawn. The slaughterhouse would be full of traders, butchers and tough guys skilled with knives and cleavers. When their turn to be slaughtered came, the cows would wait in a small courtyard, while the men prepared to tie them in chains and hoist them up. Then my uncle would move in, smartly dressed in his golden suit, his hair, covered in gel, as shiny as his shoes. Then the betting would open.

  My uncle would choose the largest cow, pounce on it and strangle it with his bare hands – my uncle had hands as big as those old telephone receivers people used to have at home. As soon as the cow was about to breathe its last, one of the slaughtermen would come forward and finish the job by making a slit in the cow’s throat.

  It was no secret that sometimes my uncle got carried away by his own strength and strangled the cow to death. Then the cow would be no good for halal meat and he would have to pay for it. But what people didn’t know was that my uncle arranged in advance with one of the apprentices that the night before the cow was slaughtered the boy would beat its legs with a stick until the legs swelled up. That way it was easy for my uncle to knock the cow to the ground.

  My uncle was a cheat. When he was cheated in turn and a cow defeated him, he felt humiliated and died. Of course any matador who’s defeated by a cow is bound to feel very humiliated. But my uncle recovered his self-confidence and his fearlessness after he came back to life. The little thorn that had been stuck in the bottom of his foot was the reason for that. He explained to us that when he was dead he had seen himself on a matadors’ ranch in heaven. He was surrounded by all the champion bullfighters. He had even seen a bullring, he said. But
he didn’t understand anything because they were speaking Spanish. But God brought him back to life so that he could remove the thorn from his foot. ‘A matador can’t fight a bull if he has a thorn stuck in his foot,’ God told him. When he pulled it out he was overcome with joy. It was enough that God had accepted him as a matador. My uncle saw it as testimony to his talent for bullfighting, even though he had never fought a bull in his life. As a result my uncle confidently took the matador suit out of the wardrobe to wear again. He said he would never take it off: he would go into the slaughterhouse wearing it and take on the biggest cow there, this time without any cheating. If God had endorsed his dreams, why should he care about the riff-raff at the slaughterhouse? But a surprise lay in wait for him. When my uncle tried on the matador suit again, he found it was too big for him. No one could explain why that should be. It caused consternation at home, by raising the possibility that my uncle was in fact still dead. The suit was baggy, and that was very strange. Dead bodies are meant to inflate, so their clothes should be tighter, not looser. But in my uncle’s case it was the other way round.

  My uncle died on the Tuesday and came back to life on the Thursday, only to find that his suit was too baggy, although he hadn’t lost an ounce of weight. He couldn’t wear the suit or go back to the slaughterhouse to tell the ‘rabble’, as he called them, what had happened to him in the matadors’ ranch in heaven. Now he had to eat to put on weight. But our house was poor. He had an argument with Mother. He disconnected the air-conditioning unit and forced her to sell it and spend the money on food. Mother loves my uncle – he’s her brother, one year younger than her, and he’s been the man of the house since Dad died. She never denies him anything. It was then that I found out that I could no longer wear my cotton pyjamas or box with anyone. I ended up objecting to Mother, ‘What if he goes and dies again?’ My uncle was sitting opposite me. He flew into a rage and hit me about the face and neck. I didn’t cry. I stood facing him, defiant as a young bull without horns. A calf. He was half-dead as far as I was concerned. I felt a perverse pleasure in my arms and legs because I had punched my uncle’s feet when he was dead the first time.

  Now I wanted to punch him all over. I wanted to hide in the belly of the next big cow he’d choose and as soon as he put his hands on its neck I’d burst out of its throat like a jack-in-the-box and punch him in the face so hard that his nose came off and fell on the floor. But none of that came about.

  Mother sold the air-conditioning unit on the Friday and bought two fat chickens, nuts, eggs and various kinds of fruit, vegetables and grains, as well as a large bag of rice and some milk. She spent the whole day in the kitchen, and in the evening she laid out a big meal for my uncle, as if he wouldn’t have any food in heaven.

  Usually my uncle only ate a little, like any matador. But that evening he stuffed the food greedily into his mouth, like a bull tasting apples for the first time. The sight of him chewing and swallowing the food disgusted me, so I looked away. Mother kept telling him, ‘Eat up, brother.’ But suddenly my uncle choked on the food, stopped breathing and died. It’s true that I was sitting at the same table but I didn’t turn towards him. I just heard him choking and dying, with my mother saying, ‘Breathe, brother,’ and sobbing. My uncle had turned into a corpse a second time. This time we carried him to the hospital mortuary because there was no air conditioning in the sitting room. We managed to pay for one night in the mortuary with the money left over from selling the air-conditioning unit.

  The next day, the Saturday, as part of the funeral procession from the mortuary to the cemetery, some of the slaughtermen wanted to take his body into the courtyard of the slaughterhouse, where he had performed his exploits and built his reputation. Mother agreed, on the condition that we call in at the house so that she could dress him up in the matador suit.

  I thought this was silly, because the suit was too baggy for him and people would make fun of his appearance. I said this to Mother, but she whispered, ‘I’ll deal with that. Anyway, no one looks too closely at the size of the clothes dead people wear in their coffins.’

  Mother asked me to help dress my uncle in the matador suit, to preserve his dignity. It was very hard to do, because his body was heavy and the sitting room was hot without the air conditioning. We put him in a sitting position, completely naked. I was about to lift his arm when he started to come round. ‘What are you doing, you monkey?’ he said. His repeated deaths had made him bad-tempered. Grouchy. When he realized that Mother was dressing him in the matador suit and planned to lower him into his grave, he was angry. He insulted her and pushed her away, and she fell over. I didn’t like seeing my mother being mistreated, because she had good intentions. But I was worried he might lay into me, so I kept silent. ‘Do you want the matador guys in heaven to make fun of me?’ he said.

  We told the people waiting outside that my uncle had come back to life, and they dispersed. Some of them were annoyed and asked us not to tell them next time my uncle died, because they thought they had done their duty by taking part in the funeral procession already.

  My uncle stayed with us from the Friday to the Sunday and died in the slaughterhouse at dawn on the Monday morning. He had lost hope of gaining enough weight to fit in the suit. The story of the baggy suit had leaked out – I don’t know how. Probably it was Mother. Mother always had good intentions. She had spoken to a seamstress, who was her friend, asking if there was any way the suit could be taken in. The seamstress said, ‘No,’ and let out the secret. The whole slaughterhouse found out. They made fun of my uncle. He went to the slaughterhouse wearing the baggy suit. He went into the courtyard and they let out the biggest cow. My uncle couldn’t control it because he was tripping up on the suit, and the cow trampled him and he died. We buried him, crushed and bloodied, on Tuesday morning, a week after his first death. Only a few people attended the burial.

  Mother washed the matador suit and asked me to dispose of it. We needed the money, so I sold it at the Sunday market for second-hand clothes. I laid out some plastic sheeting that Mother had lent me and arranged the suit on top in three pieces – the trousers, the shirt and the jacket. My uncle had never owned matador shoes or underwear. I had no other items for sale and I had to sell the suit at any price. But I was lucky, as people soon started gathering.

  In the end a foreign man came up and started examining it. Then he asked me in broken Arabic, ‘Where you get this suit?’ I was worried. He added, ‘This is Dominguín’s suit, the famous matador’s.’ He gave me a large sum for it and with the money I was able to buy an air-conditioning unit and boxing gloves as well. I gave the rest of the money to Mother. My cotton pyjamas were waiting for me to wear them again, and I said to Mother, ‘If I die, dress me in my pyjamas, and don’t forget to put my boxing gloves on.’

  Gramophone

  ABU ELIA’S BAR WAS THE CHEAPEST IN BEIRUT during the siege. It was one level below ground. Long and narrow, it was shaped rather like a rectangular biscuit. But it was safe, or at least it was rumoured to be safe. Its walls were said to be made of reinforced concrete, not that anyone ever tried to check. Abu Elia had set up a stand with postcards in the bar and sometimes, during the evening or at the height of the shelling, some of his foreign customers would take a postcard and start writing on it blithely, as if they were at a picnic. Abu Elia would make sure it was sent to the post office the next day.

  My father was the gramophone operator in the bar. That was his job. He spent hours and hours standing behind the bar, turning the handle of a Berliner gramophone from 1900 – there was no electricity and the bar was usually lit by candles. Sometimes he turned the handle slowly, because he was tired, and if a shell landed nearby, he might lose concentration and turn it faster, which would distort the music. But none of the customers paid any attention, because the sound from the gramophone was so faint it could hardly be heard anyway. What interested them was not so much the music it played but its age and the fact that it was manual. If you wanted to listen to a song
you had to go up to the bar. The gramophone was my father’s; he had inherited it from my grandfather, and had played it when he was young. He had been friends with Abu Elia since their school days and had suggested putting it in Abu Elia’s bar. My father was like a DJ. He came home at dawn and, if I was awake, he would ask me to massage his arms. I liked that. He always fell fast asleep while I was massaging his strong arms.

  Abu Elia’s bar was only hit once, by a vacuum bomb that struck the whole building. The shell cut through three floors before exploding and crushing the building like an overripe pear. My father was one of the victims of course. Where he was, behind the gramophone player at the end of the bar, it would have been impossible to escape. The bomb sucked out all the air when it exploded but my father went on turning the handle of the gramophone for a moment, puzzled that the sound had completely disappeared. He was totally confused. He wasn’t even sure that his arm was really moving. For a moment he thought I hadn’t massaged his arm properly at dawn the day before and he cursed me. Then he started to suffocate and the walls and ceiling folded in on top of him.

  But my father didn’t die. He came out of the bombing alive. No one had expected him or any of the people who lived in the building or who happened to be in the bar at the time to survive. He was the only one, saved by the gramophone, which was crushed of course. He told me later that just before the building collapsed some of the customers were gathered around him, examining the gramophone and listening to the faint sound it made. Before they met their doom, they were drinking beer and making jokes about my father and his gramophone.

  The people in the bar died faster than they might have done, because there were no chairs in the place. Another unusual feature of Abu Elia’s bar was that five of the eight brands of beer it served were sometimes of dubious authenticity. When I reached the building, I didn’t know my father was still alive. There were four or five ambulance men there. They were volunteers. One of them asked me, ‘Can you identify your father’s body?’ ‘Definitely,’ I replied, without thinking. ‘Then make your way through the rubble and when you find it, point it out to me,’ he said. I walked in. There was a smell of dead people mixed with beer, and the bodies were soaked. Even the rats hadn’t survived. They had suffocated too and their eyes were bloodshot. The beer froth was still fresh and was seeping between the blocks of stone. These were not the best kind of dead people as far as those ambulance men were concerned. They were people who had died while drinking alcohol and it was not going to be fun digging them out.