Мазен Мааруф - Jokes for the Gunmen

People had now gathered at the window, but none of them saw what happened, because everything that Ausa and Juan did to the bull took place in the corridor. It took thirteen men to remove the bull from the flat. Its horns were covered in sticky tape and blood was running down its neck and head. People thought Juan was a hero.

Juan promised Ausa he would repair all the damage the bull had done and he did indeed spend more than two weeks fixing the cupboard and the window frame that the bull’s hooves had ruined. The work on the flat should have taken less than two weeks, but Juan worked slowly and spoke a lot. He told Ausa everything about his life, except about the girl he had had sex with on the morning of the day he jumped through Ausa’s window. Juan was thirty and Ausa was twenty-seven.

The people in Pablo Gargallo Street thought the bull must have been the brother of the girl Juan had slept with. In that town people believe that bulls and people can be brothers and sisters. If it hadn’t been related, it wouldn’t have been so angry. Now they had to find out the identity of the girl who was the bull’s sister. The men threatened to hold Juan to account, so they brought all the girls out of their houses and told them to walk past the bull, which was standing in its pen covered in a large piece of cloth. The bull was supposed to identify the girl that Juan had had sex with. In fact, as soon as the girl walked towards the animal, it went up to her and lowed in her face. Her father promised to hang Juan within sight of the bull in the pen. Juan had to find a solution. He denied the whole story to Ausa, cried and asked her to help. They spent a night thinking of a solution. Then at last they found it: Juan would marry the young girl and Ausa would marry the bull. Nominally, of course, because that was the best solution, because the people who lived in Pablo Gargallo Street asked the girl not to abandon her brother the bull and to look after it, to make up for the shame she had caused it. And so it was. A short time later, Juan, Ausa, the girl and the bull all boarded a small truck and left the neighbourhood.

On the way the bull started lowing and roaring because the swaying of the truck made its shoulder hurt. The wound hadn’t completely healed yet. This upset the driver, who told them all to get out. After waiting some time on the motorway, Juan managed to hitch a ride with a driver. Ausa and Juan got into the car and asked the girl to wait with her brother the bull until Juan came back with a small truck. But Juan and Ausa left the girl and the bull and ran off. Since then they haven’t heard anything about them. They got married and moved to live and work near me, as political activists.

My friendship with Juan only began when he saw me butting an old school blackboard with my horns. I was by myself and bored. My only aim was to have fun and show off my strength to some cats and some unemployed farm workers. That was shortly after the last war. I had stopped going to the field because the farmer who was my master had died when a large piece of shrapnel from a shell had destroyed his liver.

Anyway, I never went back to turning the waterwheel. That was because Juan bought me from the farmer’s children and moved me into the garden of his big house. Unlike other bulls, I don’t have a rope around my neck. I’m always in the garden and all I do is listen to Juan’s and Ausa’s stories and put up with being pestered by the children – Ausa tells them to feed me guavas from behind the fence while she grooms me with soap and water. My view is that Juan and Ausa are idiots. Whenever Juan sees me lying down, he comes up and whispers, ‘How’s your sister?’ I nod my head a few times, which he interprets to mean ‘She’s OK. She’s on her way here with her father.’ Ausa, on the other hand, is terrified at the prospect of the girl’s father arriving, so they argue, and as usual I hear them discussing the question of executing me soon, but they daren’t do that, of course, since I’m a bull. As for me, since I can’t take part in the conversation, I get fed up. I chew some of the fruit that’s been put beside me and go to sleep.

Published by Granta Books in 2019

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Copyright © Mazen Maarouf 2015

English translation copyright © Jonathan Wright 2019

This book was originally published in Arabic as نكات للمسلحين in 2015 by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut

The rights of Mazen Maarouf to be identified as the author of this work and of Jonathan Wright to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 1 84627 667 5

eISBN 978 1 84627 669 9

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