Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

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.

But this cow wasn’t like those cows that fall off trucks or escape from their farm the night before they are due to be slaughtered and hide in a school classroom with tears in their black eyes and their hearts beating rapidly. It was very different from any cow anyone might ever have heard of. It had belonged to a soldier and he kept looking for her. On the way to the cinema he stopped me and asked me if I had seen a cow in the area. I knew from his uniform that he was one of the soldiers who were the reason we had taken shelter in the cinema. So when he started talking to me, I was frightened and I almost started crying. But he said he wouldn’t harm me if I showed him where the cow was. I told him I hadn’t seen a cow in the area. I felt I was telling the truth, the whole truth, and that I really hadn’t seen a cow anywhere. He also asked me about the teddy bear and I told him it was for food and had wedges of cheese in it. But he wasn’t interested. He didn’t ask me to unzip the teddy to make sure. There was a pistol on his hip.

The soldier told me he had brought the cow from his home far away and that when they enlisted him he couldn’t possibly part with his cow, so he had brought her along with him. He loved her very much. He said the cow sat with him in the tank. He got it into the tank without the officers knowing. But he had lost it a few days earlier. His tank had been ambushed and his arm was wounded and he lost consciousness. When he came round, he asked about the cow and they thought he was hallucinating. They gave him an injection to make him sleep. He said he spent a week being injected with tranquillizers, whether he asked about the cow or not. Then they sent him back to the army. But how the cow managed to clamber out of the tank, he didn’t know. He was talking and I was listening. He said he had been going up to the flats where people were living. He would knock on a door and when the people opened it, he would ask them, ‘Are there any terrorists here?’ But he wasn’t interested in ‘terrorists’, only in his cow. He didn’t go into the flats, but from the doorway he would take a peek inside to see if she was there or not. He knew the sound of her voice well and could tell it apart from other cows’. His cow couldn’t stand strangers, so she would definitely moo as soon as she saw her soldier friend.

When the soldier finished speaking, I left. I said, ‘I haven’t seen your cow,’ and walked away. He walked off in another direction, resuming his search for the cow. Before I got back to the cinema, I decided I would kill the cow when I next saw her; if I couldn’t kill her, I would have to hurt her, so that he couldn’t possibly put her back in the tank. I was certain for some reason that she would come through the projection room the next morning, and that’s exactly what happened.

And I ended up walking after her again.

The cow followed the same path. This time I was determined to get to the buildings before her. I ran as fast as I could, holding the teddy bear in my hand. It started swinging in the air slowly because its stomach was stuffed with wedges of cheese. I overtook the cow and stopped at the first building. I took out a piece of cheese and filled the cracks in the wall of the building with it. I did the same thing with every building I came to. When the cow’s body rubbed against the buildings, no plants now fell off, and so the cow would die of hunger. I kept up with the cow for three days, reaching the buildings first and filling the cracks with cheese. The cow often changed course and went to other buildings, but I would get there first and I would never give her a chance to rub any plants off the walls. The cow didn’t eat anything for three days straight and then it collapsed on the ground from hunger. Because it was a cow and not a cat, it wouldn’t lick the cheese off the walls as a cat might do.

The cow was half-dead and I was exhausted too. With a sense of relief I stopped to look at her. I even kicked her. But the kick didn’t hurt her at all. Over the previous few days I’d done a lot – I’d spent most of the time filling the cracks with cheese and I hadn’t eaten a single piece. I hadn’t eaten anything all the days I’d been working, because I needed to use all the wedges. My only rest was when I slept on the cinema seat facing the projection room. I didn’t sit in any other chair, because it was the only seat facing the projection room and from it I could see the cow passing in the morning.

The cow started mooing as it lay on the ground. I was frightened the soldier might hear it mooing and come and arrest me. Fortunately the mooing was faint because her body was so weak. I had to find some way to torment the cow without the soldier detecting it if he found her.

Among the rubble I found four footballs. They were all punctured. I gathered them together and went over to the cow. When she saw me approaching with the balls she tried to get up. She was frightened – very frightened. She took a few steps but she soon collapsed on the ground panting. I seized the opportunity and slipped a piece of rubber football into her mouth. The cow rejected it at first, but she was so hungry she started to chew the piece of rubber. Then she swallowed it.

In the end the cow ate all four footballs. But instead of the cow suffering and having diarrhoea, for example, or stomach cramps, her body fattened up and her health improved. I tried other things: pieces of broken china, old fruit, mouldy bread, a shoe lace, the buckle of a school satchel, a key ring – everything except photographs and cassettes. The cow ate them without complaining. She had put on weight and had recovered her vigour. But her eyes were sad. I avoided looking at her so that I wouldn’t cry. She was now strangely swollen and her coat was standing on end. She looked rather like a giant white hedgehog with black spots. She began looking for anything to eat. The next day I saw her eating some halva, some cake and some pastries full of cream.

On the final day the cow came as usual in the morning. She walked through the projection room, but slowly. She was bigger than ever before, and she weighed more than her legs could bear. She was also dirty and bruised. Maybe she had stumbled on the way or somebody had fallen on her from the ruined buildings around the cinema, the ones where I had filled the cracks with cheese. Recently flies had started eating the cheese and maybe that had affected the strength of those buildings. I was sitting on the same seat in the cinema, and everything was still around me. There was no one there but me. Neither my mother nor my sister nor the others. The cow’s eyes looked at me through the opening in the projection room, but this time she didn’t go anywhere. She couldn’t leave the projection room. Instead of taking a step forward, she sat down where she was. I got up from my seat in the cinema and went into the projection room. I wanted the cow to leave, to go walking as she did every day. But she just sat there. I aimed a few kicks at her, but she didn’t groan or moo. I tried to push her with both hands but my pushes were very feeble and ineffective. I stepped back a little and looked at her. Then I went back to the auditorium and sat in my seat watching the cow. I knew she wouldn’t leave. Now the cow was blocking the sunlight that usually came into the auditorium in the morning through the hole in the wall of the projection room. Now the auditorium was completely dark, just like it was when all the lights went out. Just like it was when the film was about to begin.