Jokes for the Gunmen

by Mazen Maarouf

  I recognized my father’s body from the arm I used to massage. The fingers were still clenched around the small handle of the gramophone. That made me smile. My father was as obstinate as a mule, although he was usually good-natured. I pointed out my father to the ambulance man and we pulled his body out together. It was easy to free it, despite the massive amount of rubble. The ambulance man, who was wearing a white mask, said, ‘Boy, you’re lucky. We won’t be able to recover some of the bodies until the bulldozers arrive this evening.’ I left my father’s body in the ambulance. The ambulance man refused to let me take the gramophone handle. My father’s arms were completely caked in blood and were like punctured tubes. I went to tell my mother. I was sixteen years old.

  On the way home I swallowed my own vomit twice and when I arrived I had wrenching pains in my guts. I went into the bathroom and vomited. The vomit tasted very acidic and the acidity seemed to have damaged my throat or my oesophagus, because some blood came out too. That made me think of the pain my father must have felt when his arms lost all that blood I had seen.

  In the hospital we were told that my father hadn’t died, but he had lost both his arms. He was in bed, with those broad shoulders of his, rather like a robot superhero whose arms had been cut off after a brutal battle with villains. But as soon as he came around from the anaesthetic he asked me in a frail voice, ‘Where’s the gramophone?’

  ‘It got smashed, papa. There’s nothing left of it,’ I said.

  He looked at his amputated arms, as if the loss of the gramophone had reminded him that disaster had also struck his own body. ‘So I don’t need my arms anyway,’ he joked.

  While my mother was wiping away her tears, I was summoned to the hospital reception desk, where I was given the gramophone handle and signed my name on a piece of paper. That was all that was left of the old machine. But my father changed shortly after he came back home. He had suffered some psychological damage. I hid the gramophone handle from him and didn’t mention it to him. He just stared at my arms and my mother’s arms, without looking at our eyes or faces. He spoke to us only through our arms. He focused his gaze on them so much that you felt that your hand was smeared with shit or that there was something wrong with it, and you had to put your hands in your pockets immediately, or hide your arms completely inside your sweater, leaving the sleeves hanging empty, like when we played at being beggars on the stairs as kids.

  He would sometimes ask us questions such as: ‘How do you feel when you look at me? Tell me honestly. How do you feel? Isn’t it a privilege to have two arms? And your mother? She must feel the same way, mustn’t she?’ Sometimes he would ask me to move my arms in a particular way. ‘Lift your arm up high, and then drop it down as if it’s dead,’ he would say. And I would reply, ‘Stop that, Dad.’ Or he would ask me to stand behind him and let my arms hang down so that my arms looked like they were his arms. Standing like this, we would move together to the mirror and he would take a long look at his own reflection, which now had my arms. ‘Your arms fit my body perfectly, don’t they? No wonder we’re father and son,’ he would say. This was painful to me. I had to obey him, as if I were still a child. My father started to become very irritable. As for my mother, she felt she was being punished, because my father had stopped sleeping with her but she couldn’t abandon him. ‘People would start talking, gossiping. They would see me as a bad woman,’ she said.

  My father also made a point of shitting and pissing in bed, so my mother started buying nappies for him and making him wear them. She washed his balls and ass, and shaved his beard with an electric razor because he didn’t trust her with a razor blade in her hand. My attempts to convince him that he should trust her didn’t succeed. ‘Your mother used to have a lover when I worked in the bar,’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything.’

  In the end my father and I fell out, and since then we haven’t exchanged a single word. My father had seen a medical programme on television about limb transplants, for arms and hands, for example. He called me into his room, which he never left. When I came in, he said meekly, ‘I’m going to make a request that no father has ever asked of his son. If you agree, you’ll gain everyone’s respect – relatives, your friends and the neighbours. Everyone in the neighbourhood will respect you if you do this for me.’

  ‘Of course, Dad,’ I replied. ‘You know I’d be willing to do anything.’

  I had left school after my father had the accident and I’d worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. Now I was a partner with two friends in a furniture factory, and I was ready to do everything in my power to fulfil my father’s wishes.

  ‘I want you to donate one of your arms to me,’ he said. ‘They said on television that it’s medically possible.’

  I couldn’t believe that my father was asking me for an arm. I said nothing. I was thinking of that vacuum bomb and the gramophone. I wished I had lost my arms instead of him, and at that very moment, as if he could read my thoughts, my father said, ‘If you had lost your arms, I would donate one of my arms to you without hesitation. What’s an arm worth compared to me seeing you happy, or you seeing me happy?’

  ‘I agree with you that this is a request no father has ever asked of his son,’ I said. ‘It’s totally original,’ I added, pronouncing the last word in the French style in a tone that was both sarcastic and sad. I tried to convince him that it was impossible: ‘What if the operation was a failure? Then I would have lost my arm.’

  He exploded with rage in my face. He said I was selfish and that even if the worst came to the worst, I would still have one arm. ‘One arm is better than absolutely nothing,’ he said.

  I left the room and thought it over. I felt sad for my father. I didn’t feel angry or disappointed. I was just sad and I told my mother. I was about to accept, because I no longer needed to use my arms in the furniture factory. I only supervised the designs and sometimes suggested some modifications. I could even employ an assistant. My partners wouldn’t object. But my mother implored me, ‘Don’t listen to him. Please don’t listen to him. I’m willing to spend the rest of my life putting nappies on him, cleaning up his shit, shaving him and putting up with every indignity from him, but I will not see you losing one of your arms.’

  After that my father refused to speak to me. He was resentful, but he continued to hope, very arrogantly, that one day I would change my mind, burst into his room and say, ‘OK, Dad. I agree. Off we go to France together to have the operation.’

  By now I was travelling to Paris often to visit my girlfriend. My visits were brief but relaxing, because I was far from home, where the atmosphere was poisoned by my father’s deteriorating state of mind and the sadness of my mother, who was now prey to diabetes, high blood pressure and an irregular heartbeat.

  Once my girlfriend gave me a music box with a little crank handle. When you turned it with two fingers it played ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ by Edith Piaf. I still had the gramophone handle in Beirut and when I came home from my trip, it occurred to me to connect the handle to the crank of the little music box. That’s what I did. I thought of giving my father the music box with the handle of the gramophone player as a birthday present, in the hope that he might forgive me. But I changed my mind. It would probably irritate him. But my father found the music box and managed to take it into his room. Somehow he put it on the bedside table among the packets of pills that he took. He didn’t say anything. He just put the music box with the gramophone handle on the bedside table. Of course he couldn’t operate it and he didn’t ask my mother to operate it for him. Maybe he was only interested in the handle, and maybe he kept the box and the handle together because he couldn’t disconnect the handle from the box.

  The whole thing was embarrassing. For the first time I felt guilty. Firstly, for keeping the handle for the twenty-three years since the accident without telling him, and then for deciding to connect the handle to the music box from France, the country where my father had long wanted to have one of my arms transplanted. I th
ink it hurt him. My father didn’t eat for days and fell into a decline. He was seventy-two years old by then. I went into his room. He had turned quite yellow. We called a doctor, who examined him quickly and told us his pulse was weak and he only had hours to live. He put him on a drip and said, ‘It’s for the best. Who knows what might happen?’ Then he left.

  There was nothing I could do. I sat next to him on the edge of the bed and picked up the music box with the gramophone handle, which was the last thing my father’s hand had touched before his arm was cut off. I started to turn it. I wanted him to hear the music in the box before he passed away. I saw his lips move to make a feeble smile.

  But he didn’t revive. He just smiled. As he did so, I had the impression that his arms were growing slowly from their stumps, like mushrooms, their stalks pushing up from the ground after a heavy weight, such as a hat full of padlocks, has been removed. That encouraged me and I started turning the handle faster and faster. My heart was pounding. I wanted his arms to grow, to be fully grown, as if the vacuum bomb had never fallen and my mother had not spent her whole life putting nappies on him, and he was no longer lying beside this little music box, waiting for something to happen, something unique.

  Cinema

  IT ALL HAPPENED ON THE FIFTH DAY AFTER WE took shelter in the cinema. The food had almost run out and we were reduced to eating yellow triangles of processed cheese. At one o’clock in the afternoon Mother would take a wedge of cheese out of our teddy bear’s tummy and divide it in half. I would eat one half and my sister would eat the other half, our heads hidden under the velvet cinema seats so that the other children, who were just as hungry as us, wouldn’t see us. We didn’t tell anyone there were seven wedges of cheese in the teddy bear’s tummy.

  At eight in the evening Mother would take another wedge of cheese out of the bear’s tummy, and my sister and I would eat it in the same way and then go to sleep. Dozens of families had taken shelter in the cinema because it was three floors below ground level.

  On the first day the families spread themselves out over all the seats but the shelling grew more intense every day and every now and then people would move a little further down, away from the higher seats towards the lower ones. When one of the occupying army’s tanks shelled the projection room at the top end of the auditorium, most of the families gathered on the stage and hid behind the curtain. The dividing line between us and the outside world was then the small wall that separated the projection room from the auditorium. The children could see daylight through the rectangular opening through which the film was usually projected.

  Sometimes we would see Crazy Kimo go past outside. Kimo never took refuge anywhere throughout the war. He wasn’t welcome in any of the shelters. It was said that he’d gone mad because he still had a piece of shrapnel in his body – no one knew exactly where. From the stage in the cinema you could see the empty street. If you stood at the edge of the curtain, a very small piece of the big wheel at the fairground was visible. The bottom corner of the curtain was the favourite place for children and they hung out there all day long.

  On the fifth day a shell fell on the cinema, among the seats. I don’t remember all the details. The blast threw me off the stage onto one of the seats in the auditorium. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t move and the seat was back to front, facing the road instead of the screen. The other strange thing was that the wall between the projection room and the auditorium had not been knocked down. When I tried to see where the shell that landed in the cinema had come from, I couldn’t work it out. There wasn’t a hole anywhere. My sister’s teddy bear was now in my arms, but my sister was nowhere to be seen. Nor was my mother, nor any of the other children or their families. The teddy bear was full of pieces of yellow cheese, but now there were also pieces of cheese of another brand that I had never seen before.

  I called out for my sister: ‘Sister, come on, let’s share a wedge of cheese, or let’s have two – a whole one for you and a whole one for me, because Mum’s not here.’ But she didn’t appear. I didn’t get up from the seat. I didn’t have any reason to get up. The cinema seat was nice and warm. It smelt as if it was stuffed with millions of grains of soft sand, all connected to each other by threads. Very fine threads. I even thought about taking the seat with me to the grave and, instead of being buried lying down, being buried sitting in the cinema seat. I don’t know why this idea occurred to me. I felt very much at ease. There was peace and quiet in the cinema.

  On the morning of the next day I saw the cow. I was still sitting in the seat and the cow walked through the projection room. It stopped for a few moments. It lowered its head and looked at me through the rectangular hole and then continued on its way. The cow was big and beautiful. I looked around for my sister or one of the other children so that I could draw their attention to the cow, but the cinema was empty. I tried to get up from the seat but I couldn’t. The teddy bear was weighing on my stomach and I couldn’t budge it. It was heavy. I wondered whether that was because of the triangles of yellow cheese in its belly. I unzipped the teddy bear and took out a piece of cheese. I divided it in half. I ate one half in a single bite and held the other half in the air. I was hoping my sister would see it and would emerge from her hiding place and come over to me. She might be sitting in one of the seats behind me, and she might be hungry like me. My sister didn’t appear, so I ate the other half of the piece of cheese. It didn’t fill me up. I took another wedge out of the teddy bear’s tummy and ate it, then a third and a fourth. I couldn’t stop eating. I was hungry and the pieces of cheese were really delicious, even the kind I had never tasted before. I ate several triangles all in one go but I still wasn’t full.

  I tired of eating pieces of cheese and I dozed off, sitting in the cinema seat. The strange thing was that all the seats were still facing in the right direction except for the seat I was sitting on, which had its back to the screen and faced the projection room high up at the back.

  The same thing happened again the next morning. The cow appeared and looked at me through the rectangular hole in the projection room, then it went on its way. I must admit that I was curious about the cow. What would a cow be doing in the projection room, I wondered. It occurred to me that the army had let it loose to spy on the people staying in the cinema. I didn’t know anything about cow behaviour. But I found I wanted to follow it, because it was the first cow I had ever seen in real life.

  The teddy bear was lighter now, because I had eaten several of the wedges of cheese in its tummy. I quickly unwrapped three more wedges and stuffed them into my mouth one after another. They tasted different now – less tasty than before. The cheese was sticky and upset my stomach. Now they tickled the roof of my mouth and I felt I was going to be sick, but I swallowed them like medicine. I tried to get up from the seat and only managed it with a great effort, in order to follow the cow. I left the auditorium and walked behind it. The cow wasn’t in any great hurry; it was walking at a very leisurely pace, picking its way with difficulty because of the debris scattered everywhere. Despite that, it seemed completely at ease, as if it knew where it was going. I was struck by how clean it was, as if it were a house cat rather than a cow. But every now and then it would stop, bend its head and eat something that had just fallen from up above. I couldn’t see what the cow was eating, but I could tell that it was hungry. The teddy was in my hands – I thought I had left it on the cinema seat – and once again it was full of wedges of cheese, as it had been ever since the cinema had been shelled. I took out a piece and threw it as hard as I could towards the hungry cow, in case it wanted to eat it. I hadn’t unwrapped it and I wasn’t sure that the cow would be able to unwrap it with its teeth, but I threw it anyway. Although the wedge of cheese was small, it didn’t go very far. It landed one or two paces away from me. The cow paid it no attention at all. I took out another piece, unwrapped it this time, and threw it. It also landed only a metre or two away from me. It was as if I’d thrown a heavy sack.

  I don�
��t know why the wedges of cheese wouldn’t go any further. I zipped up the teddy bear and followed the cow. It was walking slowly, because of the debris, and also because the street was too narrow for it. The cow was really fat, but it kept on walking. As it moved its fat body brushed against the walls of the buildings on either side. Sometimes a plant would fall down and get trampled on the ground and the cow would stop, lower its head and eat it. There were other plants that had been trampled and buried under the rubble but the cow didn’t notice those ones. It only ate the plants that fell as a result of its body rubbing along the walls of the buildings.

  I wanted to follow the cow to find out where it would go, but I was worried about losing track of the cinema, so I retraced my steps. Along the way I tried to get some of the plants out from under the rubble but the stones were heavy and I could shift them only a fraction of an inch. I really wanted to feed the dead plants to the cow, because I thought the cow might be frightened. Perhaps she only ate the plants that fell because it was easier and it meant she didn’t have to stop for long.