Jokes for the Gunmen

by Mazen Maarouf

  I don’t remember being fascinated by a clot of blood before. Not before Munir. One rarely finds coagulated blood magical or enchanting. The globs of blood that we see on television have usually congealed under particularly wretched circumstances. If I were to be one hundred per cent objective, even Munir was ugly to look at. His structure was no different from that of any other blood clot taken from someone’s leg or intestines or the phlegm in their throat. In the heaven where dried lumps of blood go, you’d find Munir wandering around aimlessly. There was nothing distinctive about him. If he held up a sign saying, ‘I was extracted from a womb,’ none of his fellow clots of blood would believe him. But what fascinated me about him was that he was pure. I don’t know how to explain it.

  Munir had panache. Charisma. Whenever I looked at him in the test tube, I’d find him cheerful. Like a small piece of liver, a fresh black piece, ready for grilling at a barbeque. He was dark red in colour and clear, as if he’d never been exposed to the air or to the bacteria in the womb.

  Now he’s lying low in formaldehyde. He spent some time in the small test tube in our sitting room. No one noticed that he was a clot of blood or that he was called Munir, unless we drew attention to it, because you don’t find anyone displaying a lump of dry blood in his sitting room as if it were a brass or ceramic vase, or a bowl bought at a tourist shop. Some of our friends said they wished they could have kept something from their relatives who had died in explosions or traffic accidents or had disappeared in the war. A piece of flesh from their calf, perhaps, or a fingertip, or even a fingernail or an anklebone. In the living room we camouflaged Munir by surrounding his test tube with similar test tubes containing water and worthless pieces of blue, red and green plastic. Every week we changed the solution in Munir’s test tube. It was a delicate and exhausting process, like changing his nappy or his clothes.

  We later decided that the test tube no longer suited him, so we moved him to a larger container: an aquarium. It was a big aquarium, one designed to hold salmon. We set up the aquarium as the centrepiece in the living room instead of the forty-five-inch plasma television we had bought several years earlier, to watch football matches, and sometimes films, including porn. I have to say that the place did smell of formaldehyde, the solution preserving Munir, although we closed the aquarium tight. That meant that our friends and relatives rarely visited us. Sometimes we had to put masks on or leave the windows open, no matter whether it was sunny or rainy, or if there was shooting going on outside.

  On 28 August Munir will be a year older, so we’ll have a party. We’ve been doing this ever since Munir was eight, specifically since we found out that my wife’s womb was irreparably damaged in the operation and will never be able to carry a foetus again.

  Every year we invite children who share Munir’s birthday to the party. We post this notice on the Internet: ‘If you were born on 28 August, you are invited to celebrate your birthday at our house for free. Don’t forget to invite your friends and relatives. The address is …’ All the children we’ve invited gather at our house, together with their friends and relatives. We give them token presents, cut a cake for them and sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’. All within sight of Munir, who’s stuck to the glass at the front of the aquarium, as if watching sadly. Whenever one of the children asks us in disgust about this smudge on the glass – and we can’t blame them for that, of course – we tell them the truth. We hear some of their relatives whispering things like, ‘They must be mentally retarded. They’re keeping a lump of blood in an aquarium.’ But my wife and I have agreed that in reply we say, ‘That’s our son Munir. We invited you to our house because today is his birthday too.’ Then we ask everyone to sing for Munir, as he sang for them from inside the aquarium. ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Munir, happy birthday to you,’ we sing along with the children, who are puzzled that there is a lump of blood in an aquarium meant for salmon.

  This used to happen on 28 August every year, when the guests could still see Munir in the aquarium. But now they can’t. That’s because Munir ran into a problem. He’s no longer visible. At first we thought it was just a temporary indisposition. If Munir had been a fully grown child, we could definitely have found treatment for him. But because he was just a lump of dried blood, that was difficult. How can you save a lump of dried blood from shrinking? That’s what happened. Munir started to shrink.

  It began a few years ago. Every day he lost a bit of himself. A few cells. At first we didn’t notice anything. But we were shocked when one of the children at the party said, ‘Munir was bigger last year,’ and showed us an old picture of Munir on his mobile phone.

  Our boy went on like this until there wasn’t a single blood cell left. My wife and I couldn’t do anything. We called in doctors and experts to examine him. But they made it clear that they were helpless. Their answer was always the same: ‘This isn’t a child. This is a lump of clotted blood. Do you really want treatment for a lump of clotted blood?’ So we gave in. All we could do was try psychiatry. We brought a famous psychiatrist to our house and explained the situation to him. ‘Do you really think that psychiatry can treat a frustrated lump of clotted blood?’ he said scornfully, looking at the aquarium in disgust. Then we decided to take Munir out into the wilderness, because we thought that in the aquarium Munir must have acquired animal characteristics.

  My wife and I resigned from our jobs. We sold our little flat and the furniture, packed the pots and pans we needed into our car, plus some basic foodstuffs and tinned goods, and hired a pickup truck designed for carrying sheets of glass. The truck carried the aquarium with Munir, who was now invisible. When we arrived, we were exhausted. We put the aquarium in the open in the sunlight and lay down in front of it on a blanket that we spread on the grass.

  The weather was beautiful and all we could hear around us were the soft sounds of that well-known conflict between the insects and the birds, to which no one pays any attention. But as we looked at the aquarium in the hope that Munir would start to take shape again, we dozed off. In my sleep I dreamed that wild animals arrived, surrounded the aquarium, and started to drink the formaldehyde in which Munir had spent the recent years of his life. I tried to fend them off by throwing unopened tins of food at them, while my wife started spraying them with water from the bottles we had brought with us. The strange thing was that my wife had the same dream. We discussed the colours and the details and even the sounds that the animals made and we found they were identical. There wasn’t a single difference between the two dreams. ‘It can’t possibly be just a dream,’ she said. ‘It’s a vision.’ Shivers ran down our spines. We tried to pick up the aquarium and move it, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t budge it. How had the aquarium suddenly become so heavy? The only answer we could think of was that Munir didn’t want to move out of the wilderness. That’s what made us stay. For the rest of our lives all we have to look forward to is taking turns to guard the aquarium night and day and protect Munir. We no longer hope that he will grow to become a child one day, but just that he will go back to how we always knew him. We don’t want more than that.

  Portion of Jam

  DAD COMES HOME HOLDING A LITTLE PLASTIC portion of jam like the ones they give the patients in the hospital where he works. He holds it up in the air and says, ‘See the jam?’

  ‘No,’ I reply.

  He puts his hand a little closer to the only lightbulb in the ceiling. ‘And now?’

  ‘No, I can’t see anything,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe the lightbulb’s too weak.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  With a flourish that one has to admire, he makes the portion of jam roll down from between his fingers and settle in the palm of his hand. His closes his fist so that it looks like an envelope – an old trick he invented at nursing school. Now his hand is an envelope with the little portion of jam inside it. He presses the light switch with the edge of the envelope and the light goes out. Then he presses the switch ag
ain and the light comes on.

  Dad holds the jam up in the air again. ‘Is this better?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I can’t see any jam from where I am,’ I say.

  ‘Come a little closer. You’re in the furthest possible spot in the room.’

  He puts his hand closer to the light as if he’s going to do another trick – making the portion of jam go right inside the lightbulb.

  I am in fact a long way from Dad. I’m sitting on a chair next to the window. The chair is high and when I sit on it my feet don’t touch the floor.

  I get off the chair and move towards my father. ‘Dad, can you put the jam inside the lightbulb?’ I ask. ‘If you put it inside the lightbulb, I could see it.’

  He lifts his hand higher but before I reach him the power goes off. The darkness swallows Dad. It swallows his hand and the jam.

  ‘See what happens when we put jam in the lightbulb?’ he jokes. ‘The packaging explodes, the jam burns and turns the whole room black.’

  Transfixed, I say nothing.

  Dad says nothing for a while either. Then he says, ‘Go and flip the trip switch.’

  ‘OK, I’ll go and flip the trip switch,’ I say, repeating his own words to reassure him.

  I move forward with heavy steps, as if I have a tortoise clinging to each foot. I poke the darkness with my finger. It’s like an animal that I’ll tickle so that it shows me its stomach. I lift up one foot and bring the tortoise down on the animal’s stomach. I lift up my other foot and bring down the other tortoise, and make my escape.

  But then my finger hits Dad. He jumps and drops the portion of jam. ‘Did you hear that? That’s the sound of the jam!’ he says excitedly, disguising his fear. But in fact I can’t hear the sound of the jam, which rolls along the floor until it comes to a stop.

  Dad doesn’t move from where he is. He doesn’t want to lose the jam, although our house is small – just one room plus a kitchen and a bathroom. But between our little room and the kitchen and the bathroom, there’s another room, the biggest room in the house. Dad has rented that room to one of his relatives, who we found out was an arms dealer. Dad’s relative brings home loads of weapons and ammunition. Sometimes he stands by the door of his room and, instead of saying ‘good morning’ to Dad, he says, ‘What do you think of this piece? It’s just a sample. It’s a piece that’s easy to use. It’s from Romania. It has excellent sights. Why don’t you borrow it for a day or two? Don’t you have any disputes with anyone?’ Dad has never owned a gun, and the only dispute he has is with this relative of his, who has stopped paying the rent. But Dad doesn’t dare ask him for it. Dad thinks that the relative should not only pay him rent but also take out a mortgage.

  In his other hand, the hand that wasn’t holding up the portion of jam, Dad’s holding a bag. A bag with lots of tissues inside. His passport too. And a party official’s card. Dad sees the card as a weapon, his only weapon. Sometimes he leaves the card on a stool near the door so that his relative can see it clearly.

  ‘When you’ve flipped the trip switch, come back through this door,’ Dad whispers. He puts his hand into the bag and picks out the card. He does a turn of about 270 degrees towards the door of his relative’s room, from where one can hear the sound of weapons being loaded and unloaded. Dad doesn’t trust his relative. ‘Do you think he’s inside?’ he asks me.

  The jam has come to rest at the relative’s door.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, though the words hardly make it out of my throat. I conclude that I’m also frightened.

  Dad and I both know that the relative is in his room. Dad could have turned ninety degrees instead of 270 degrees. It occurs to me that he wanted to come with me to flip the trip switch, but then he remembered the jam.

  The fuse box is in the kitchen, so in order to reach it I have to leave our room through a side door – a door that leads to the corridor on the ground floor where we live, and from that corridor I have to come into the house through the front door, where you find the kitchen and the bathroom. ‘Shut the door quietly and don’t be long,’ Dad says.

  There are rats in the building, and they like to sneak into houses in the dark. I open the door a fraction and sidle out, kicking the air at ground level to frighten off the rats if there are any there. I shut the door quietly, as Dad requested, so as not to annoy the relative, though we don’t know if he’s alone in his room or has someone with him.

  I feel my way along the wall of the corridor and come to the front door of our house. I take out the key that I always keep in my pocket. I open the door and sidle into the house, aiming several swift kicks at the air near the floor, but behind me this time. I approach the fuse box, touch the switch and push it down, but the power from the generator doesn’t come back on. Now I’m in the kitchen, while Dad remains immobile in our room. Between him and me lies the relative’s room, which Dad and I are banned from entering, and the relative can come into the kitchen directly through a door from his room.

  I can’t speak to Dad from here because I’d have to raise my voice and that might upset our relative, who might be doing business with one of his clients. So I can either go back to our room and wait with Dad for the power from the generator to come back on, or I can stay in the kitchen, switching back and forth between the mains and the generator, or I can go and pay the bill for the generator, because the owner of the generator might have cut us off for not paying it. Of course it’s not a good time to pay the bill because it’s 11 o’clock in the evening. I can’t see Dad from where I am in the kitchen and he can’t see me either. After I don’t know how many minutes, the relative comes out of his room, with a gun in his hand, because he feels hot. That’s what he does when he feels hot – he picks up his gun and comes out. He’s about to say angrily, ‘This piece is smuggled, smuggled from Israel,’ but he treads on the jam. The portion of jam splits open and splatters his foot with sticky apricot jam, so he opens fire.

  My father no longer goes to the hospital to work, because you don’t find nurses in wheelchairs working in hospitals. But he’s made a deal with a colleague, who brings him little portions of jam twice a week. He can’t stand up, and he can’t even push his wheelchair with his hands. But he looks up towards the lightbulb whenever he sees me coming into the room. I’m no longer a child, though. Inside the lightbulb I find a portion of jam. ‘How did you do that?’ I ask him. But Dad doesn’t answer because, just as he can’t walk or move his hands, he can’t speak either. He smiles. I try to reach the jam but I realize it’s impossible, because the lightbulb’s too high and the only person in the house who can bring it down is our relative, with a bullet from his revolver.

  Curtain

  OUR BED IS NEAR THE BALCONY DOOR, AND THE balcony door has a curtain. My wife likes to leave the door open and pull the curtain closed when we have sex. Our flat is on the seventh floor and it can be windy up here. The wind comes in through the window and goes out through the door. It moves the curtain a little. Our neighbour, an elderly dwarf, watches us from the building opposite and shouts, ‘There’s someone fucking on the seventh floor.’ All the people come out of their flats and stand on their balconies. Our neighbour says it in a loud voice but in a solemn tone, as if he’s in a literary salon. He doesn’t even look in our direction when he announces his discovery.

  Nothing stops me when I’m fucking. I can’t. If I stopped, it would put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. It would also have a negative effect on my wife, who’s so sensitive she says she wants a divorce whenever I say anything that offends her. So what I do is I ask her to hold the curtain and pull it down when we’re having sex. That way we make sure the wind won’t lift the curtain up. But when my wife reaches orgasm, she clenches her thighs and her fists as tight as she can, and her body becomes twice as heavy. On one occasion she pulled the curtain down when she reached orgasm and it came off the rail. This was seen by the old dwarf, who apparently has nothing to do all day but spy on us. He shouted out, ‘The woman’s having an orgasm!’ and
people flocked to their balconies like maniacs and started looking in our direction and making comments. Some of them even said, ‘Wow! What a stud!’ One of them clapped and another one whistled.

  I suggested to my wife that we simply keep the balcony door closed but she refused. She has a good reason. ‘When it gets hot, my husband, you can’t keep going for long, can you?’ she said. This is true. And there’s no electricity in the neighbourhood most of the time, so there’s no solution other than to change the curtain or change the neighbours.

  I’ve thought about threatening the dwarf, or getting revenge on him. He’s ruined the moments that are dearest to my heart, the moments when I am having sex with my wife. Anyway, we decided to change the curtain for a thicker one. At the same time I made up my mind to visit the dwarf and speak to him calmly about the problem.

  The man has never married. That may be why he’s so interested in other people’s business. He doesn’t have a job either. At the end of every month he receives some money from one of his brothers in the United States. His brothers have suggested that he move there, but he refuses. He says he really loves this city, and since he discovered that the young couple who recently moved into the area have sex two or sometimes three times a day, he never leaves the balcony. He carries a walking stick and the doctor has advised him to walk. You can see him walking up and down the balcony instead of going downstairs to walk along the seafront, because he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of the sex show, which is much more important as far as he’s concerned. But the balcony is small and he misjudged the distance, walking much further than he would have walked on the seafront. After two weeks, his legs felt tired, very tired. They did an operation on him but it didn’t work and now he can’t walk without the aid of a Zimmer frame. He no longer carries a stick and he’s slower.