My mother hides the nappies that are left and throws the mop at me, and I have to clean up my urine, which has soaked my clothes, the toilet seat, the floor, the bed, and the courtyard. Sometimes I slip, and sometimes I wet myself while cleaning up the previous round, while my brother laughs, slapping his forehead with the muscles of his one arm and saying with difficulty, ‘It’s no use, man, no use.’
The Angel of Death
I DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOUR, TO BE HONEST, and I don’t understand why people smile. You’ll usually find me scowling. I don’t look at faces when I’m walking along and I don’t say hello to anyone. That’s because people don’t let me say hello to them when I’m scowling. You’re supposed to smile whenever you raise your hand or nod your head to greet someone, whether in the morning or the afternoon, even if you meet someone in a dark alley. This is exhausting in itself. But if you greet someone without smiling, they’ll be hostile and, I assure you, they’ll look in the other direction the next time. I’ve thought about this subject at length, and because every time I greet someone, it costs me a smile that I’m not really able to produce, I prefer not to greet them in the first place. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to greet people. Not at all. I just can’t smile. Find me a solution. If I said hello to someone with my head bowed, they’d think I wasn’t paying enough attention or there was something wrong with me, that I had something to be ashamed of, or that I’d suffered some setback or was the victim of some serious mishap. And so, in order to avoid all the confusion I might cause to others, I’ve decided not to look at anyone when I’m walking along. Not to look up at all.
I’ve been doing this for forty-four years, ever since my ninth birthday. I stood in front of my father and said, ‘From now on I’m not going to smile at anyone.’ My father laughed and didn’t take me seriously. When a boy of nine tells you he’s not going to smile from now on, you don’t believe him, of course. No one in this world can stop themselves from smiling altogether. You’d think it was just something the child said on the spur of the moment. But that wasn’t the case with me.
My father told my mother, who gave me a big hug and said some playful words of the kind that make children laugh. But I didn’t smile. That was the first time I acted on my decision not to smile. ‘Decision’ isn’t really the right word, though. It would be better to call it a ‘theme’. So that was the first time I put into effect my no-smiling theme: in my mother’s arms.
I now have the courage to say it was a good start. When you’re in your mother’s tender arms and you refuse to smile, it means you have the self-confidence not to smile at the whole world. I didn’t mean to offend my mother, or my father. But they were crestfallen and they started to argue. My first thought was that if I smiled, an ambulance would come and take me away. This was just a feeling and I couldn’t really explain it. I had decided not to smile and that was that. When some child asked me, I would say, ‘If I smile, an ambulance will come and take me away,’ and they would burst out laughing. Then my father died. And then it wasn’t long before my mother also joined the ranks of the dead.
My parents died without seeing me smile. I was a teenager by then. I remember that on her deathbed my mother begged me to smile. As she was breathing her last, she said, ‘Let me see you smile.’ But that was the last thing that was going to happen. At that moment, more than ever, I couldn’t smile. It’s true that I didn’t try, because I simply couldn’t in those circumstances; deep down, I knew it was impossible. I would have liked to borrow a smile from the face of some neighbour. I imagined knocking on their door; they would open it with a smile and I would snatch the smile off their face, slap it on my face and rush back to my mother. What could I say to her? I felt powerless and I started to sob. The neighbours hurried over and gathered in the room. There were about twenty people around the bed. They started mumbling prayers meant to help my mother’s soul on its way as it left her body. But my mother paid no attention to any of them. She mustered the last of her strength and managed to say, ‘Please, just one smile.’ But I couldn’t do it. My face was as rigid as a jam sandwich left over from yesterday. Since my problem was well known to everyone, the neighbours set their minds to helping me. They immediately stopped reciting prayers and started telling jokes they remembered. I was bombarded with dozens of jokes, one after the other, including some dirty ones. That was how the well-intentioned neighbours tried to bring a smile to my face. I leave you to imagine the scene – my mother about to die, asking me for a smile, the neighbours telling jokes around the bed, and me unable to smile. A few minutes later my mother did die and I got into an argument with the neighbours and threw them out of the room. I couldn’t control myself. I behaved like a maniac.
Days later I visited a psychiatrist, who took extensive notes and wrote me a prescription. After a few sessions he sent me away and said he would contact me, and I went home. The doctor still hasn’t contacted me and I haven’t heard anything from him. This happened a long time ago. There are plenty of details but I no longer remember them. Now I feel that I owe my mother a smile but I will never be able to repay the debt.
Long after my mother died I was still living in the same house. I didn’t feel I was any different from other people. My neighbours had grown used to me as a man who didn’t smile or say hello to anyone. And by now I walked with a pronounced stoop that even animals noticed.
I didn’t tell you what drove the psychiatrist to throw me out of his clinic. When he put his stethoscope to my chest, he didn’t hear a heartbeart. He heard, ‘Ha, ha, ha.’
‘What the fuck kind of game are you playing with me?’ he said angrily. That led to an argument, I ended up at home thinking about it, and he never called.
As time passed and I grew old, my back became as solid as the back of an old rhinoceros. My head was now level with my waist, so that I looked like this: . I looked as if I was staring at the ground as I walked, as if someone had told me off. But that’s not how it was in fact. You won’t believe what I’m going to say. My back had become as strong as a plank of wood and it had grown broad and flat, so I found myself a job, as a birthday porter. I would stand rooted to the spot and carry children’s birthday parties on my back. A session would sometimes last three hours and sometimes four. It would be wrong to call it a session. More properly it was a ‘standing’ or a ‘station’. I made sure I arrived on time and soon my back would be covered in children. They would climb up, shouting excitedly. The child, the friends he or she’d invited, his mother and father and siblings would gather together to celebrate the child’s birthday, but I couldn’t see anything. I could just hear the children’s voices coming from above. And their giggles. While I was staring at the floor. Pretty much like a portable shelf. Or a podium. If I were asked, I’d prefer the term shelf. Podium would be an exaggeration. And wherever the child’s parents chose to hold a birthday party, I would go.
You might see me standing in a park, on the beach, or even in a school playground. My appearance did provoke some strange looks. Sometimes people would flock to see me, stare and take pictures. But I didn’t care. I earned a reasonable fee. Then, when everyone had left, I went back home. I did face one problem, and that was how to wash my back, which was as solid as a piece of concrete, and which was bare when the kids climbed up. You know how children’s birthday parties can get very messy. So I had to sluice my back well. But the neighbours helped me. They took me to the garage and washed me with the fine spray from a hose. My massive body didn’t bother them. They were nice – they cared about my feelings and didn’t smile, share jokes or tell funny stories while they were washing me. But from my house later I could hear them roaring with laughter. Maybe they were making fun of me.
The joyful voices of the children should cheer me up and make me want to smile. But that doesn’t happen in my case. Even when a child hands me a sweet before climbing up onto my back, I don’t smile. I say, ‘Thank you,’ but the child thinks I’m not excited about their birthday, because I seem to
be scowling.
I would like to say that there’s a difference between scowling and not smiling. But how can you convince a child of that? If you don’t smile at a child on their birthday, they’ll be confused. And then the child’s mother steps in to tell me off. And then I have to make an effort to convince the child that I’m not scowling and that it’s nothing personal. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t get my fee. ‘I’m not frowning,’ I tell the child. And from on top of me, the child replies, ‘Well if you’re not frowning, why aren’t you smiling?’
‘I just don’t know how to smile,’ I reply.
The other children on my back soon join in and throw cake at me, trying to hit my face. And then the party’s over.
This has happened at more than four parties, which was enough to persuade me to change my job. I remember that on one occasion I told the children, ‘If I smile, my back will shake and the whole lot of you will fall off.’ Their reaction was to cling onto my back, using their horribly sharp little fingernails, and ask me to smile. That hurt. One of the children said, ‘Smile and we won’t fall off.’ But I didn’t smile of course. Even if there hadn’t been the misunderstanding with the children, I would have had to stop carrying them at birthday parties anyway. That was because my back bent further and further forwards, until it was no longer horizontal. On several occasions pigeons would try to shelter from the rain underneath me and I had to run and hide from them. And then some homeless old people gathered around me while I was urinating in an alley and started to examine me – they thought that I was a slide. Some of them even tried to slide down me. I didn’t move an inch until I’d finished urinating. I picked myself up slowly and left. And what did those vagrants do? They burst out laughing of course. I’ve no idea why an old man would think of sliding down a slide. The very thought troubles me. I felt humiliated, and the next day I found myself stalking an old vagrant and pouncing on him.
The poor man freaked out. He pissed in his pants. All he had to defend himself with was a half-litre can of beer – he started spraying me with it and screaming. He was frightened by the idea that a slide was attacking him. I dragged him bodily to the garage and washed the urine off him with the hose the neighbours use to wash me. The same hose. My neighbours are bastards, I know that. That’s my final judgment on them. I withdraw what I said about them before. I didn’t tell you that they place bets on who can make me giggle when they’re washing me. They poke me in the ribs, as if I were their dumb whore. They want me to laugh without me noticing that they’re tickling me.
One of the neighbours came out of his bedroom and stood on the balcony while I was washing the homeless man and said, ‘Tickle him until he laughs.’ I didn’t know how to answer him. But any response from me would have seemed rude. The bastard just stood on the balcony, laughing, before turning back into his house. Meanwhile the old man I was hosing down was shivering as I washed him. He was one of a group of men who lived under a bridge that had acquired a bad reputation in the war. ‘Are you the angel of death?’ he asked me, trembling.
‘Do you think the angel of death will wash you with a hosepipe in a garage before he seizes your soul?’ I said, and he started to laugh. I didn’t like him laughing, since I hadn’t intended to make a joke. For a start, I don’t have a sense of humour, I’m not trying to develop one, and I don’t want to be good at making up jokes. So I told him, ‘I am in fact the angel of death, but before I seize your soul you have to tell me what makes an old man think of sliding down a slide.’ Then I pointed the hose up in the air, blocked the end with my thumb, and asked him to give me an answer before the jet of water I was about to release came back down and hit the floor. But the old man didn’t give me an answer. Why? Because his heart had stopped. Before the jet of water hit the floor, he had breathed his last in the garage. That must have been because the real angel of death was in the neighbourhood. I won’t deny that I freaked out. I’d never had a chance to kill anyone before, so I didn’t know how to behave when I did. I immediately tried to drag the old man’s body back to the bridge, but the police surrounded me. Of course! When you get in a state, your bastard neighbours take the chance to denounce you. But the old man didn’t have any identity papers on him, so they released me. That’s all. I want to add one observation, and that is that my life has totally changed. I now live in a completely different way. I enjoy everyone’s respect, including that of my bastard neighbours. Even if they send me to prison, I’ll be able to survive among the most hardened and infamous criminals. Because, although I’ve spent most of my life unable to smile, I now know that I’m a man who can kill people with a joke.
Other-People’s-Dreams Syndrome
WHEN HOSSAM DREAMS, HE ISN’T THE MAIN character in the dream. In fact he may not even be a character at all. Every time he’s in a dream it feels like he’s been given a new soul and a new life, but it’s always in a context of marginal importance. ‘Why does this happen to me?’ he asked me one day, while I was paying bail to get him out of detention.
As soon as he shuts his eyes, he imagines himself in a changing room in someone else’s dream. He takes off his old personality and puts on a new one, and then he’s summoned to take his place in the dream. His name changes from one dream to the next. It depends on what he’s going to do. Very often he doesn’t have a name at all. And because he’s so insignificant in the dreams he finds himself in, it may be that no one addresses him directly. As soon as Hossam hears one of the cast members in the dream shouting something like, ‘Bring the pencil sharpener,’ or, ‘Where’s the dog?’ or, ‘Give the hero the ashtray,’ he gets himself ready, because that’s what Hossam’s going to be – the pencil sharpener, the dog or the ashtray. He’s never been the hero – unless a pencil sharpener, a dog or an ashtray can play the star role in some dream.
His dreams usually start in the same way, in a changing room. ‘It’s a noisy place. It’s like they’re filming the dream, as in the movies,’ he says. ‘Every dream has someone in charge, like the director of a film.’ His function is to manage the dream; he has the exclusive right to do so – because he’s the man who dreams. You’ll find him stroking his dog, scratching his balls, or lecherously kissing a girl who wants to be someone else. In his other hand he holds a pair of binoculars to monitor the progress of the dream. Hossam has even seen himself as the girl the director is kissing. He said he was annoyed, but he kissed the man and even let the director fondle his bottom. In a whisper, after I promised on my honour I wouldn’t tell anyone, he said, ‘I was a girl in the dream. Imagine. Have you ever dreamt you’re a girl? I have. Another annoying thing about it was that I was a girl who would do anything to be a star, a wannabe girl. That was bad enough, but the kissing made it worse.’ Then there are the mistakes that the characters in the dream sometimes make, which means they have to redo the whole dream. It doesn’t happen on the same night but on the following night, and without Hossam knowing about it. ‘That’s cheating, don’t you think? To go to sleep and find you’re repeating the same dream,’ he tells me.
In one six-dream sequence he saw himself laid out on a trolley in hospital. ‘That was frightening. There were nurses pushing me along the corridor but I didn’t know where I was going. I might have been going down to the mortuary or heading for intensive care. From the number of nurses around me, I gathered I was in a critical condition.’ Even so, Hossam wasn’t the main character in this dream. In every version of the dream his trolley went past a man shouting, ‘No, no, no,’ and this man was the main character in the dream, although all he said was ‘no’.
‘His shouting was annoying and unpleasant. I even tried to give him the finger, regardless of whatever tragedy he was going through, but apparently that wasn’t allowed. I tried to wake up but I couldn’t. He was the focal point of the dream, and I was just part of the décor. You know how in a dream you see people in the distance – in the background? I’m always in the background of other people’s dreams.’ It seems the dreamer wasn’t satisfied with his
dream. He wanted his dream to be perfect from a dramatic point of view. So he kept revising it in his head for six days straight.
‘My God! That’s like having to sit through a trial,’ I joked. He said he didn’t care, trial or no trial, but he had to put a stop to it. ‘Why all these tricks? I’ve never done anyone any harm.’
‘Sure, not until you started seeing yourself in other people’s dreams,’ I said.
Hossam is right to object. Usually he’s extremely polite. For him, politeness is a choice, a defence, like the shell of a snail. It’s the most effective way to avoid people and keep your interactions superficial. ‘Then you can peel yourself away from them whenever you want, without them feeling any pain’ – that’s his philosophy.
Hossam lived in a small room, by himself. He shared the shower with neighbours. The shower was outside his room. He only took a shower after checking that everyone else had had a shower before him. Sometime he waited till late at night. And he had only one friend, which was me. And I loved his politeness.
In one of the dreams, he found himself in a romantic relationship with a girl. I don’t know if his politeness had anything to do with it. ‘We started the relationship quickly. Faster than you can imagine. Within minutes we were lovers. I ended up kissing her in her car. On the motorway. She was the one driving. But an old man came up alongside us and started cursing and making obscene gestures with his hands. Then he gave up and overtook us. A few minutes later we found ourselves stuck in a traffic jam, and we started kissing like crazy and the other drivers were looking at us. We took no notice. I even squeezed her left breast. But the dirty old man reappeared, parked close to a traffic policeman. He had reported us, and we were wanted for offending public morals. As soon as we approached, he pointed at us and started cursing. The policeman stopped us and started preaching a sermon, more like a priest than a policeman. I bowed my head in embarrassment and the girl started crying.’ The next morning, when Hossam woke up, he still felt guilty. He got dressed and headed straight to a flower shop. He bought a bunch of flowers and started to draft a message apologizing to the girl, whom he saw every day. She lived near the travel agency where he worked. The thing about her that had caught his attention was the fact that she wore white rubber boots.
Jokes for the Gunmen Page 6