Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

I’M TRYING TO MAKE UP A JOKE, A COMPLETELY new joke. I don’t have ready-made jokes in my head and I don’t remember any details of the few jokes I’ve heard. So I’m trying to sketch out the scenario for a joke in my head. I look around me. There’s nothing I can use in my joke except for my parents. They’re not my real parents. They’re my adoptive parents, and their son has gone out to beg. He might not be their real son – he too might be adopted. Some people say he’s my brother, but I don’t believe it, although there is a resemblance. Sometimes I feel sorry for him, because he has only one arm. But with it he can beg, whereas I can’t.

He’s the only breadwinner in the household, because my adoptive parents are old. I’m still young, they say. None the less, my health problem prevents me from begging or working. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. It might be simple for you. It might not be worth mentioning. What kind of work can a young man like me do when he has to urinate every quarter of an hour? How does that happen? I don’t know. Although I don’t drink much water, I always need to urinate, even when I’m asleep. For a time, I would wet my bed – the whole bed. Or, if I happened to be sleeping in the courtyard, where there were piles of rubbish, I would soak the paper I was sleeping on. My parents didn’t mind me sleeping there, and I don’t see anything wrong with someone sleeping in their own rubbish; what’s wrong is to sleep in the middle of other people’s rubbish. But I no longer do that, because I’m a year or two older. When you grow up, you think more and you find ways to avoid a particular problem. So now I wear nappies and I can sleep wherever I like.

Sometimes I sleep on the sofa and imagine that the television is on and that I’m watching all the channels at once. I don’t know how to do that, but there must be a way to see all the channels at the same time. Then my brother comes back from work, takes the bar of soap out of my hand and says, ‘This is not a remote control,’ slowly and in a loud voice, like this: ‘THIS … IS … NOT … A … REMOTE … CONTROL.’ Then he carries me to the bedroom. When I’m asleep, I can only walk with someone else’s legs.

We share the bedroom, him and me. During the day, we use it as a kitchen, while the old people are asleep in the next room. In the winter I used to sleep in the courtyard, between the piles of rubbish. It was warmer like that. With his one arm my brother makes me a mat out of newspapers. He collects the newspapers during the day from the nearby shops, the hairdressing salons, the coffee shops and the supermarkets. Every day my brother begs in a different street – for the novelty value. A new beggar attracts attention. And every day I try to think of a joke to tell him, because I don’t have any other way to thank him. I say, ‘One day I’m going to make up a long, beautiful joke for you that will make you laugh for two days straight – you won’t stop laughing, even for a minute.’ He shakes his head. I don’t remember seeing my brother laugh. Not since he caught sight of himself in the glass door of a large building and he saw that he had an arm and a half instead of two arms. My parents say he came out of my mother’s belly like that.

I know my new joke won’t turn my brother into a happy beggar. But I want it to be powerful enough to be included in my CV and to stand the test of time. I want my brother to laugh non-stop for two whole days so that he can’t go to work – like any beggar, he wouldn’t collect a single penny if he stood on the pavement with his one arm stretched out, chuckling with laughter. The food in the house will run out, because we won’t have money to last two days, and, besides, when you laugh a lot you get hungry.

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.’

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.