Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

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.