Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

In the hospital Hossam became good friends with the other inmates. They were always hovering around him and he no longer complained about the dreams. In fact he liked the mental patients’ dreams. Then he asked me to smuggle in the Colt revolver for him. ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Are you planning to commit a crime?’

‘No. For days I’ve been dreaming about myself. About me. I found myself as a child, a little child dreaming about me. Do you get what I mean? I’m two people in the dream – the child I was in the past and the grown-up man you’re talking to now. I don’t know which of the two is the extra in the life of the other, the adult or the child. But what’s certain is that it’s the child that’s dreaming, and not me.’

‘And what do you plan to do with the revolver?’ I asked him.

‘I’m going to shoot the boy dead. Just as I did with the son of the old couple. And since the boy will die, he won’t wake up, which means that I won’t leave the dream. I’ll supervise his funeral in the dream.’

‘That’s enough, Hossam. Enough. You have to get out of this vicious circle, or whatever you call it. Do you think I believe you? I’m fed up.’ That was the last thing I said to him. Hossam looked relieved. As I left the hospital I heard him laughing. He had understood.

Hossam kept dreaming about both himself and the boy he had been. And I didn’t smuggle in the Colt revolver for him. So he didn’t use a revolver in the dream – he used a knife. A fellow patient had provided him with it. Hossam took the knife and slowly advanced towards Hossam the child, who was sitting in the dream director’s chair, saying, ‘I don’t like this.’ He was holding a bag of tangerines but he hadn’t yet had a chance to taste one. Hossam came up to him, stuck his hand in the bag and took out a tangerine. With his other hand he planted the knife in the boy’s neck. The boy shuddered like a hen that’s had hot water poured on it, then fell off the chair, dead, without having a chance to wake up from the dream. Meanwhile everyone else in the dream took flight and they probably all woke up from their dreams at that moment. This is exactly what happened. Literally. I assure you. I know all the details: the lighting, how the child gasped for breath and gave up the ghost, even the colour of the knife handle. I know everything. Everything. Even the taste of the tangerines in the bag – I know it well. Because I was there.

WE CALLED HIM MUNIR, BUT HE WAS NO MORE than a lump of clotted blood in her womb. The doctor decided that it was a pregnancy. This was supported by the fact that my fiancée’s stomach was swollen, she hadn’t had her period, and she had pains in her ovaries. The swelling in her stomach wasn’t really the result of a pregnancy, however. It was an inflammation caused by the interaction of several birth-control pills. Three times in succession, for example, she had taken ‘morning after’ pills, each of which cost thirty dollars.

We hadn’t known each other long and we hadn’t intended to have sex so soon. But sex saved our relationship. My fiancée insisted I show her my penis. She loved me very much but she was worried my penis might not be thick enough. She wasn’t interested in the length, only in the girth. ‘If it’s thin, I won’t be able to marry you,’ she said. So my penis, and not my feelings, had the final say in our relationship. We were in the car and we stopped on the motorway. The street lamps were either burned out or turned off. In the car it wasn’t possible to turn on the little ceiling light, and since my fiancée couldn’t see my penis, she started groping it with her hand. Then she said, ‘I think it’s shaped like a kind of mushroom.’ For a moment I didn’t know whether this was a criticism of my penis, or praise. But she didn’t give me a chance to ask. She pounced on it with her mouth, which took me by surprise and made me ejaculate. So we argued. My fiancée got out of the car, hailed a taxi and drove off. Then she sent me a text message saying, ‘It’s all over between us. Our relationship ended as quickly as you ejaculated.’ I had to persuade her to try again. ‘In bed things will be different,’ I wrote to her, and so they were.

We had sex to save our emotional relationship. Daily for ten days. On each of the first three days my fiancée took a ‘morning after’ pill. Later she told me about a British lover of hers who had a very thin penis. ‘It was as thin as a Bic biro,’ she said. He used two of his fingers to supplement his penis. He wrapped them around his penis and put them in with it. My wife thought he had inserted a screw made of flesh and blood between her thighs. Every time he’d change the two fingers. He was well-practised at that. Sometimes he would cry. He’d stop having sex suddenly and go into a long monologue about how he wished he could have a thicker penis, so he wouldn’t need to use his fingers. She told me he had volunteered to work with some humanitarian organization in Iraq and she no longer knew anything about him.

Munir wasn’t a modern name. My fiancée and I knew that. We chose it initially as a joke, in the hope that the foetus was male. Then we believed it was male. The personality of the lump of gooey blood was male – that’s what we decided. Then our relationship with him developed, so much so that sometimes I would wake up in the night to massage my fiancée’s stomach with circular clockwise movements. Just to make sure that Munir was settled peacefully. But I wasn’t aware I was doing this. In the morning, as soon as she woke up, my fiancée would hug me and say, ‘Thank you, my dear.’ And I would ask, ‘For what?’ ‘For being such a good father,’ she replied. Then I realized I had been sleepwalking. It didn’t happen just the once – it recurred five or six times, until I started taking half a tablet of Lexotanil so that I didn’t wake up during the night to touch Munir.

My fiancée concluded that I wouldn’t be a good husband unless I sleepwalked. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you raised the children – all our children – when you’re sleepwalking,’ she joked. I didn’t like the joke at the time. But now that some years have passed, I’d be more than willing to look after all our children while sleepwalking – I mean our children that have never come, and will never come.

Munir, that lump of clotted blood, wasn’t destined to survive. We had to get him out of my fiancée’s womb one day before the wedding. That was because his presence had caused her stomach to swell, which would have been seen as a scandal. But we hesitated. We argued often. The doctor herself wasn’t sure whether the mysterious lump was a foetus or just clotted blood. My fiancée thought we had no right to remove a child from its place of residence. ‘A child?’ I said scornfully. ‘At the moment it’s no more important than the blood in a nosebleed or the blood that comes with piles.’

We sought the advice of a group of married friends, but none of them had experience of such a mystery in a womb. But the doctor settled the matter with a phone call, at eleven o’clock in the evening. ‘I won’t take responsibility,’ she said angrily. ‘If it sticks to the wall of the womb it might cause cancer.’ Then she hung up.

That night I didn’t take any Lexotanil, and indeed the next morning my fiancée told me, as we were getting dressed to go to the hospital, that I had got up during the night, sleepwalking of course, and had started massaging her stomach with circular movements. ‘You even cried,’ she added. I argued with her, saying, ‘I’m going to ask you one question: do you enjoy having sex with me?’ I interrupted her as she nodded her head: ‘I enjoy it too – I love it. There’ll definitely be another Munir, and we’ll call him Munir, and I say that quite seriously.’