Maarouf - Jokes for the Gunmen

AT SCHOOL THE KIDS COMPETED WITH EACH other by telling stories about how their fathers beat them. These stories illustrated the power each father had in his household. Power was the most important subject, as far as we were concerned, during the war. My father wasnt at the top of the hierarchy of fathers, of course, because he hadnt invented the cruellest punishment. But I told the other kids boastfully that he had whipped me with a leather belt. When I was asked why, I lied. I didnt say it was because I had spat on the pepper plant. Instead I made up a story that showed me doing something really daring, that showed I was made of heroic stuff. I swallowed my mothers bottle of Valium pills, I said. And my father whipped me till I threw up the pills all in one go.

Some days after I told my heroic story, a friend of mine came up to me and told me hed seen my father being beaten up in the street. He was wearing a brown belt, he said, but he didnt use it. Isnt that the belt he whipped you with? Yes, I replied with a nod. Because my father only had one brown belt. My friend, who saw the whole scene, described it to me as if it were happening in a peep show he was watching. When my father came home, I noticed that the marks on his face were not scalds from the steam in the laundry; in order to find out how painful they were, I prodded the largest mark on his face with my finger. He was asleep, but he started from the pain and turned his face away without opening his eyes, pretending he was still asleep.

It was then that I realized that my fathers soul had left the pepper plant for ever. I blamed myself, because if I hadnt broken off the largest pepper and trodden it underfoot, my father wouldnt have become so weak, or so cowardly either. Thats what hurt me most.

My father didnt beat me after that, despite my repeated attempts to provoke him. I spat on the pepper plant several times in front of him, but he didnt react at all, no matter how big the glob of spit was or how noisily I did it.

My father stopped speaking to me so often. He started spending most of his time in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I would snoop on him through the keyhole and he looked absent-minded. He even started drooling at the mouth without realizing it. From behind the door like a friend offering him advice as they fished, sitting side by side by the sea I whispered through gritted teeth, Dont cry, dont cry. And my father never did cry, which convinced me that he hadnt completely lost his grip.

A short while later, after he got back from work with footprints on his clothes, he picked up the television and put it under the tree in front of our building. There was nothing wrong with the television; my father just wanted everyone to see that that he wasnt watching anything political. My father never stopped going to work, because his laundry was responsible for washing and ironing clothes for the guests at a large hotel, most of them foreign journalists who had come from far away to write about the war that was going on in our street and in other nearby streets.

The story of my father being beaten up spread among the kids at school and, because of it, I was known as the grasshopper, on the grounds that my father was also a grasshopper, since grasshoppers always jump and never attack. I tried to defend myself against this slur by inventing stories about how my father beat me violently. On my way to school early in the morning, for example, I took to burning my arm or my stomach with cigarettes, or ripping my school uniform or scratching my own throat or eyes. I would go down some deserted alley and give myself a dose of self-inflicted morning torture. The pain was sometimes severe. And when I went into school like this, the kids would gather round me. Leaning on the gate and pretending to be a wreck, I would volunteer, Its my father. He beat me this morning. Hes no grasshopper, like you think he is. But the headmistress soon called me in. After examining me, she said, I have a feeling that youve done this to yourself, on the grounds that no father would scratch his young sons neck while beating him or burn him with cigarettes and then send him to school. She summoned my mother, who came at once and laid into me with her fists as we were leaving school, within sight of the other kids, who were still in class; they crowded around the windows to watch and snicker like rats.