Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

We kept Munir in a test tube. When I looked at him in the test tube the first time, I had a feeling he was exhausted. That was straight after the operation. During the operation the doctor couldn’t contain her emotion when she scraped the clot of blood out of my fiancée’s womb. She said a little ‘yes’ and her eyes filled with tears, confident that what lay on the scalpel in front of her was not a foetus. As she handed the test tube to us, she said, ‘It’s just a clot of blood. You can get rid of it however you see fit. Have a good look at it, just to be sure.’ To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference. In the very earliest stages of its development you can tell a foetus from a blood clot only by feeling, and my feeling was that this solid clot of blood in the test tube was Munir. But I didn’t say anything to my fiancée. I was bitterly disappointed. She, on the other hand, closed her eyes, fell asleep in the front seat of the car and didn’t utter a word. I tucked the test tube into the glovebox where we keep CDs, turned the key in the ignition, and off we drove.

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.