The other children on my back soon join in and throw cake at me, trying to hit my face. And then the party’s over.
This has happened at more than four parties, which was enough to persuade me to change my job. I remember that on one occasion I told the children, ‘If I smile, my back will shake and the whole lot of you will fall off.’ Their reaction was to cling onto my back, using their horribly sharp little fingernails, and ask me to smile. That hurt. One of the children said, ‘Smile and we won’t fall off.’ But I didn’t smile of course. Even if there hadn’t been the misunderstanding with the children, I would have had to stop carrying them at birthday parties anyway. That was because my back bent further and further forwards, until it was no longer horizontal. On several occasions pigeons would try to shelter from the rain underneath me and I had to run and hide from them. And then some homeless old people gathered around me while I was urinating in an alley and started to examine me – they thought that I was a slide. Some of them even tried to slide down me. I didn’t move an inch until I’d finished urinating. I picked myself up slowly and left. And what did those vagrants do? They burst out laughing of course. I’ve no idea why an old man would think of sliding down a slide. The very thought troubles me. I felt humiliated, and the next day I found myself stalking an old vagrant and pouncing on him.
The poor man freaked out. He pissed in his pants. All he had to defend himself with was a half-litre can of beer – he started spraying me with it and screaming. He was frightened by the idea that a slide was attacking him. I dragged him bodily to the garage and washed the urine off him with the hose the neighbours use to wash me. The same hose. My neighbours are bastards, I know that. That’s my final judgment on them. I withdraw what I said about them before. I didn’t tell you that they place bets on who can make me giggle when they’re washing me. They poke me in the ribs, as if I were their dumb whore. They want me to laugh without me noticing that they’re tickling me.
One of the neighbours came out of his bedroom and stood on the balcony while I was washing the homeless man and said, ‘Tickle him until he laughs.’ I didn’t know how to answer him. But any response from me would have seemed rude. The bastard just stood on the balcony, laughing, before turning back into his house. Meanwhile the old man I was hosing down was shivering as I washed him. He was one of a group of men who lived under a bridge that had acquired a bad reputation in the war. ‘Are you the angel of death?’ he asked me, trembling.
‘Do you think the angel of death will wash you with a hosepipe in a garage before he seizes your soul?’ I said, and he started to laugh. I didn’t like him laughing, since I hadn’t intended to make a joke. For a start, I don’t have a sense of humour, I’m not trying to develop one, and I don’t want to be good at making up jokes. So I told him, ‘I am in fact the angel of death, but before I seize your soul you have to tell me what makes an old man think of sliding down a slide.’ Then I pointed the hose up in the air, blocked the end with my thumb, and asked him to give me an answer before the jet of water I was about to release came back down and hit the floor. But the old man didn’t give me an answer. Why? Because his heart had stopped. Before the jet of water hit the floor, he had breathed his last in the garage. That must have been because the real angel of death was in the neighbourhood. I won’t deny that I freaked out. I’d never had a chance to kill anyone before, so I didn’t know how to behave when I did. I immediately tried to drag the old man’s body back to the bridge, but the police surrounded me. Of course! When you get in a state, your bastard neighbours take the chance to denounce you. But the old man didn’t have any identity papers on him, so they released me. That’s all. I want to add one observation, and that is that my life has totally changed. I now live in a completely different way. I enjoy everyone’s respect, including that of my bastard neighbours. Even if they send me to prison, I’ll be able to survive among the most hardened and infamous criminals. Because, although I’ve spent most of my life unable to smile, I now know that I’m a man who can kill people with a joke.
Other-People’s-Dreams Syndrome
WHEN HOSSAM DREAMS, HE ISN’T THE MAIN character in the dream. In fact he may not even be a character at all. Every time he’s in a dream it feels like he’s been given a new soul and a new life, but it’s always in a context of marginal importance. ‘Why does this happen to me?’ he asked me one day, while I was paying bail to get him out of detention.
As soon as he shuts his eyes, he imagines himself in a changing room in someone else’s dream. He takes off his old personality and puts on a new one, and then he’s summoned to take his place in the dream. His name changes from one dream to the next. It depends on what he’s going to do. Very often he doesn’t have a name at all. And because he’s so insignificant in the dreams he finds himself in, it may be that no one addresses him directly. As soon as Hossam hears one of the cast members in the dream shouting something like, ‘Bring the pencil sharpener,’ or, ‘Where’s the dog?’ or, ‘Give the hero the ashtray,’ he gets himself ready, because that’s what Hossam’s going to be – the pencil sharpener, the dog or the ashtray. He’s never been the hero – unless a pencil sharpener, a dog or an ashtray can play the star role in some dream.
His dreams usually start in the same way, in a changing room. ‘It’s a noisy place. It’s like they’re filming the dream, as in the movies,’ he says. ‘Every dream has someone in charge, like the director of a film.’ His function is to manage the dream; he has the exclusive right to do so – because he’s the man who dreams. You’ll find him stroking his dog, scratching his balls, or lecherously kissing a girl who wants to be someone else. In his other hand he holds a pair of binoculars to monitor the progress of the dream. Hossam has even seen himself as the girl the director is kissing. He said he was annoyed, but he kissed the man and even let the director fondle his bottom. In a whisper, after I promised on my honour I wouldn’t tell anyone, he said, ‘I was a girl in the dream. Imagine. Have you ever dreamt you’re a girl? I have. Another annoying thing about it was that I was a girl who would do anything to be a star, a wannabe girl. That was bad enough, but the kissing made it worse.’ Then there are the mistakes that the characters in the dream sometimes make, which means they have to redo the whole dream. It doesn’t happen on the same night but on the following night, and without Hossam knowing about it. ‘That’s cheating, don’t you think? To go to sleep and find you’re repeating the same dream,’ he tells me.
In one six-dream sequence he saw himself laid out on a trolley in hospital. ‘That was frightening. There were nurses pushing me along the corridor but I didn’t know where I was going. I might have been going down to the mortuary or heading for intensive care. From the number of nurses around me, I gathered I was in a critical condition.’ Even so, Hossam wasn’t the main character in this dream. In every version of the dream his trolley went past a man shouting, ‘No, no, no,’ and this man was the main character in the dream, although all he said was ‘no’.
‘His shouting was annoying and unpleasant. I even tried to give him the finger, regardless of whatever tragedy he was going through, but apparently that wasn’t allowed. I tried to wake up but I couldn’t. He was the focal point of the dream, and I was just part of the décor. You know how in a dream you see people in the distance – in the background? I’m always in the background of other people’s dreams.’ It seems the dreamer wasn’t satisfied with his dream. He wanted his dream to be perfect from a dramatic point of view. So he kept revising it in his head for six days straight.