Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

OUR BED IS NEAR THE BALCONY DOOR, AND THE balcony door has a curtain. My wife likes to leave the door open and pull the curtain closed when we have sex. Our flat is on the seventh floor and it can be windy up here. The wind comes in through the window and goes out through the door. It moves the curtain a little. Our neighbour, an elderly dwarf, watches us from the building opposite and shouts, ‘There’s someone fucking on the seventh floor.’ All the people come out of their flats and stand on their balconies. Our neighbour says it in a loud voice but in a solemn tone, as if he’s in a literary salon. He doesn’t even look in our direction when he announces his discovery.

Nothing stops me when I’m fucking. I can’t. If I stopped, it would put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. It would also have a negative effect on my wife, who’s so sensitive she says she wants a divorce whenever I say anything that offends her. So what I do is I ask her to hold the curtain and pull it down when we’re having sex. That way we make sure the wind won’t lift the curtain up. But when my wife reaches orgasm, she clenches her thighs and her fists as tight as she can, and her body becomes twice as heavy. On one occasion she pulled the curtain down when she reached orgasm and it came off the rail. This was seen by the old dwarf, who apparently has nothing to do all day but spy on us. He shouted out, ‘The woman’s having an orgasm!’ and people flocked to their balconies like maniacs and started looking in our direction and making comments. Some of them even said, ‘Wow! What a stud!’ One of them clapped and another one whistled.

I suggested to my wife that we simply keep the balcony door closed but she refused. She has a good reason. ‘When it gets hot, my husband, you can’t keep going for long, can you?’ she said. This is true. And there’s no electricity in the neighbourhood most of the time, so there’s no solution other than to change the curtain or change the neighbours.

I’ve thought about threatening the dwarf, or getting revenge on him. He’s ruined the moments that are dearest to my heart, the moments when I am having sex with my wife. Anyway, we decided to change the curtain for a thicker one. At the same time I made up my mind to visit the dwarf and speak to him calmly about the problem.

The man has never married. That may be why he’s so interested in other people’s business. He doesn’t have a job either. At the end of every month he receives some money from one of his brothers in the United States. His brothers have suggested that he move there, but he refuses. He says he really loves this city, and since he discovered that the young couple who recently moved into the area have sex two or sometimes three times a day, he never leaves the balcony. He carries a walking stick and the doctor has advised him to walk. You can see him walking up and down the balcony instead of going downstairs to walk along the seafront, because he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of the sex show, which is much more important as far as he’s concerned. But the balcony is small and he misjudged the distance, walking much further than he would have walked on the seafront. After two weeks, his legs felt tired, very tired. They did an operation on him but it didn’t work and now he can’t walk without the aid of a Zimmer frame. He no longer carries a stick and he’s slower.

Two or three weeks ago a fire broke out in the big house where he lives alone and it destroyed all his furniture and possessions. The little man only just managed to escape. But he did survive and he thanked the Lord. Then he sent a message to his brothers, who quickly sent him some money. Since the fire, he hasn’t appeared on the balcony and I heard that he was accusing me of laying a curse on him, saying that the whole fire was to take revenge on him for spying on us and trying to cause scandals for me and my wife.

In fact I was worried about him, and so was my wife. When we had sex, we would pull the thick curtain open a little (the wind could no longer move it), to see whether the dwarf was on the balcony or not. Maybe we had grown accustomed to his voice, or his voice had become a catalyst for sex between us. But we started talking about the dwarf when we were in bed, instead of cuddling and playing around. We started asking each other what might have happened to him, and after a while we were no longer able to have sex.

My wife insisted we go and visit him, so we went and knocked on the door of his house. He was surprised to see us and asked us in. The walls of the house still showed signs of the fire. He offered us some fruit juice and started apologizing and crying. ‘Forgive me. See what God has done to me,’ he said. We told him we weren’t angry with him. But he wasn’t convinced until, when we were leaving the house, I whispered in his ear, ‘Do you want me to show you proof that we aren’t angry with you?’ His eyes lit up and he nodded, saying, ‘As you wish, but it’s your own responsibility. I’m not responsible.’

I smiled.

The next day we waited till he came out on the balcony and then we started to have sex. We had put back the old curtain, the thin one, and sure enough, as soon as the first breeze blew, we heard the dwarf shouting, ‘There’s someone fucking on the seventh floor. They’re fucking just for me. Don’t go out on your balconies, you sons of bitches.’

IF I HADN’T MET JUAN I WOULD HAVE MISSED THE most pleasant experiences I’ve ever had. He is married to Ausa and this is how they met:

Ausa was living at the time in a town in Spain, in a small ground-floor flat on a narrow street called Pablo Gargallo. Its only window looked directly onto the street. Ausa didn’t know that they held a bull run in the street once a year – you know, one of those fiestas where they goad a bull and it charges at everyone it sees in front of it. Juan was a young man who was eager to take part in the fiesta. You don’t have to pay to run with the bull. All you have to do is challenge the bull and then try your hardest to get out of the way when it tries to dig its horns into your chest.

Juan was no expert, as he had never taken part in such an event before. That morning Juan had had sex with his neighbours’ daughter. He hadn’t washed his hands so the smell of her vagina clung to his fingers. Juan spent the morning walking through the crowded streets, putting his hands to his face and smelling his fingers. It was the first time he had had sex. ‘That day I achieved three objectives all at once,’ he told me. It was the first time he had had sex, it was the first time he had run with a bull in Pablo Gargallo Street, and he was about to meet Ausa. What happened was that the bull singled him out from all the others, not because of his virility but because of the smell that lingered under his fingernails. Juan turned his back on the bull and started to run, as he was meant to. He was enthusiastic, but also frightened. This competition wasn’t like previous competitions: the person the bull was chasing had to wrap some sticky tape around the bull’s horns. If he failed, he lost and his reputation as a real man would be damaged.

The organizers had given out rolls of sticky tape to the public and asked them to throw the rolls to the person that the bull chose to chase. The man (in this case Juan) was meant to catch one of these rolls, undo the tape and wrap it around the bull’s horns, which meant he had to stop running every now and then and turn around to see the bull.

What happened was that the smell of sex made the bull angry and it didn’t give Juan a chance to catch his breath. Juan started running as fast as he could, clutching the sticky tape nervously in his hand. Even the people felt sorry for him because the enraged animal, which weighed about eight hundred kilos, pursued him relentlessly. He jumped off a little ledge, climbed on top of a pile of rubbish and ran along a wall, but the bull wouldn’t leave him alone. All Juan could do was throw himself through Ausa’s open window, from where she was watching the fiesta. It’s a good omen, of course, to have a handsome man jump through your window, but you may well panic when you see a bull coming in behind him. Ausa told me that she hid in the small cupboard under the sink, leaving Juan and the bull to fight it out in the flat. The cupboard was smashed, the bed was broken and when the bull snagged the chandelier with its horns it fell to the floor and shattered, along with a valuable collection of ceramics that Ausa had put together from various places in Spain. Incandescent with rage, she came out of her hiding place in the kitchen and grabbed a large knife. She made straight for the bull, head to head, and sank the knife into its shoulder with a sideways thrust. The animal fell to the floor. Seizing his opportunity, Juan pounced on the wounded bull and wrapped the sticky tape around its horns.