Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

That was the first time I experienced failure. It made me willing to give up anything, even my little treasure trove of Matchbox cars, so that my father would become someone frightening. I was even willing to break open my money box, into which I had long whispered my dreams. I thought that whispering into the slot for the coins would make the money box fulfil all my wishes, because when you tell it your secret desires, it adjusts the amount of money inside – upwards, of course – so that it matches the cost of those dreams. My dream had been to buy one of those silver 6-mm pistols that at least three of the boys in the building possessed.

But now my dream was to get hold of a glass eye for my father.

THE IDEA OF THE GLASS EYE CAME FROM THE MAN who sold hot sahlab drinks at our school. I’d known from the start that I had to make a change to my father’s face – sacrificing a part of his head to save the whole. But I didn’t know how, or which part I should sacrifice. I would watch him at night when he was sleeping, examining his features and trying to work out what I could remove, or at least disfigure, to make him look frightening. But I didn’t come to any conclusion. For a start, my father had a small face, and then it didn’t help that he was such a light sleeper. My father was the kind of person who suddenly opens his eyes, looks at you in alarm, and then asks, ‘Why haven’t you gone to bed yet? Are you frightened?’ So what could I possibly do? Whenever I saw him suddenly open his eyes, this was exactly the question that came into my head: ‘Dad, are you frightened?’ But, to smooth things over between us, I would say, ‘No, Dad, we’re not frightened, are we?’

‘Of course not,’ he would say in a low, hesitant voice. Then he’d walk me to my room so I could go back to sleep. He’d sit on the edge of the bed that my brother and I shared. He’d sit there, completely absent-minded, just as he sat on the edge of the bathtub. As soon as drool started dribbling from his mouth, I would shut my eyes, keeping the lids tightly closed and pretending I had nodded off. He would get up, go into the kitchen, drink some water and then get back into bed next to my mother, who always slept like a log.

The sahlab seller was a spy. He came to school twice a day. Completely bald, short and chinless, with just a thin moustache, he wore rubbish shoes, which made many of the children avoid buying sahlab from him. But apparently he didn’t care. He kept coming to school, never saying anything. We never saw him speak. We also never saw him worked up. He would listen to your order, take the money from you and then give you your change if necessary. His right eye was missing, but that didn’t put the children off. The rubbish shoes he wore made more of an impression – more than his eye. Disfigured bodies were a common sight in the war – as were adverts for imported cheese, which made you feel familiar with a cheese you would never taste – and it was also normal to see at least a dead body or two on television every day. Or one of the schoolkids would come and tell you in detail how one of his relatives had been killed by a shell. But to see a dead body wearing rubbish shoes? That was impossible. The sahlab seller was so shabby that he looked like a corpse, but none of the gunmen beat him up. Once, as I was buying a glass of sahlab from him outside the main school gate, I asked him, ‘Have the gunmen ever beaten you up?’ He didn’t answer, so I raised my voice and said, ‘Tell me, the gunmen – the gunmen who stand at the end of the street – have they ever beaten you up?’ He shook his head without looking at me. When I saw his response, I felt a great happiness. ‘Thank you,’ I told him, assuming that this was definitely something to do with his missing eye.

AFTER A WHILE I STOPPED GOING TO SCHOOL. IT was as if I had become a public toilet, where everyone deposited their shitty jokes. Especially after my mother slapped me in front of the other kids. I didn’t feel guilty, and I didn’t think about the consequences of staying away from school. In fact, I justified it to myself by saying I needed to have a rest and think about what could be done to help my father. I had to build up my relationship with the gunmen by any means possible – to become one of their associates. And in order to do that, I had to win their attention. Strike a blow. Boooom. Something to make them interrogate me. The very next day, I took my chance. I stole a cardboard box one of them had left on a ledge outside the building they had taken over. Inside the cardboard box there was a bag of lentils, some packets of pills and some doctor’s prescriptions, a Peugeot car mirror and a piece of plastic whose function I couldn’t work out. The pills belonged to the mother of a low-level gunman. I picked up the cardboard box and ran off with it. The gunmen caught up with me. They didn’t shoot at me because they managed to surround me near a parked car before they even had time to think about opening fire. I soon found myself in a room on the second floor of the gunmen’s building. When the ‘interrogation’ (that’s what I like to call it) began, I asked for a chair to sit on. A hand as heavy as a pigeon, or one and a half pigeons, came down on my neck. I coughed, as if to clear my throat, so that I wouldn’t shed any tears. I hadn’t brought myself to this place to be beaten up. Besides, slapping someone on the back of the neck, at least at school, meant the person was of no importance. If he was important, you would slap his face or punch him on the jaw or in the stomach. It was humiliating, but I stood up as straight as a glass, in an attempt to show my powers of endurance in the face of adversity. I wanted to win their admiration, but the only thing the gunmen’s leader asked me, as he examined my school uniform and my satchel, was ‘Are the schools closed today?’ Before I could answer, the gunmen started asking each other the same question. Because if the schools were suddenly closed, it meant there had been some security development and they had to be on the alert. They hadn’t heard this on the radio. Besides, the owner of the cardboard box I had stolen was just a wretched gunman whose job was to bring them coffee, tea and sandwiches. His mother was very ill and he had to go home to make her some lentil soup and give her her medicine, but my interrogation forced him to stay, and that’s what upset him. He was the one who’d slapped me on the back of the neck.

I was thrown out of the building. My plan had been thwarted. I hadn’t even been asked why I’d stolen the cardboard box. But I didn’t go away. I didn’t go home or go back to school. No, I stayed. I was there to make a deal with them. I was going to sell them my twin brother. At school I’d heard the bus driver talking to the woman who teaches science about these gunmen trafficking in human organs. Children’s organs, to be precise. The problem for me was how to tell the gunmen who traffic in organs from those who don’t. The bus driver didn’t say anything about that to the teacher. When I went up to him and asked him, he said sarcastically, ‘You can tell by asking them if they’re organ fans.’ But maybe he just wanted to impress the pretty teacher, so I had to ask the gunmen about it.

I WAS HOLDING OUT HOPE THAT THE GUNMEN would be organ fans, because my deaf brother struck me as a hot commodity. Well, not one that was top-notch, I admit. The fact that his ears didn’t work meant that part of him was missing. And that’s because, apparently, my brother had used his ears so much when he had a fever that he no longer had any hearing. Besides, there were two of him – him and me. That would definitely bring the price down. But the price he would fetch, plus what was in the money box, would mean I could buy a glass eye for my father. And there was another reason that would definitely persuade the gunmen to buy him – my brother had two hearts.