We had sex to save our emotional relationship. Daily for ten days. On each of the first three days my fiancée took a ‘morning after’ pill. Later she told me about a British lover of hers who had a very thin penis. ‘It was as thin as a Bic biro,’ she said. He used two of his fingers to supplement his penis. He wrapped them around his penis and put them in with it. My wife thought he had inserted a screw made of flesh and blood between her thighs. Every time he’d change the two fingers. He was well-practised at that. Sometimes he would cry. He’d stop having sex suddenly and go into a long monologue about how he wished he could have a thicker penis, so he wouldn’t need to use his fingers. She told me he had volunteered to work with some humanitarian organization in Iraq and she no longer knew anything about him.
Munir wasn’t a modern name. My fiancée and I knew that. We chose it initially as a joke, in the hope that the foetus was male. Then we believed it was male. The personality of the lump of gooey blood was male – that’s what we decided. Then our relationship with him developed, so much so that sometimes I would wake up in the night to massage my fiancée’s stomach with circular clockwise movements. Just to make sure that Munir was settled peacefully. But I wasn’t aware I was doing this. In the morning, as soon as she woke up, my fiancée would hug me and say, ‘Thank you, my dear.’ And I would ask, ‘For what?’ ‘For being such a good father,’ she replied. Then I realized I had been sleepwalking. It didn’t happen just the once – it recurred five or six times, until I started taking half a tablet of Lexotanil so that I didn’t wake up during the night to touch Munir.
My fiancée concluded that I wouldn’t be a good husband unless I sleepwalked. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you raised the children – all our children – when you’re sleepwalking,’ she joked. I didn’t like the joke at the time. But now that some years have passed, I’d be more than willing to look after all our children while sleepwalking – I mean our children that have never come, and will never come.
Munir, that lump of clotted blood, wasn’t destined to survive. We had to get him out of my fiancée’s womb one day before the wedding. That was because his presence had caused her stomach to swell, which would have been seen as a scandal. But we hesitated. We argued often. The doctor herself wasn’t sure whether the mysterious lump was a foetus or just clotted blood. My fiancée thought we had no right to remove a child from its place of residence. ‘A child?’ I said scornfully. ‘At the moment it’s no more important than the blood in a nosebleed or the blood that comes with piles.’
We sought the advice of a group of married friends, but none of them had experience of such a mystery in a womb. But the doctor settled the matter with a phone call, at eleven o’clock in the evening. ‘I won’t take responsibility,’ she said angrily. ‘If it sticks to the wall of the womb it might cause cancer.’ Then she hung up.
That night I didn’t take any Lexotanil, and indeed the next morning my fiancée told me, as we were getting dressed to go to the hospital, that I had got up during the night, sleepwalking of course, and had started massaging her stomach with circular movements. ‘You even cried,’ she added. I argued with her, saying, ‘I’m going to ask you one question: do you enjoy having sex with me?’ I interrupted her as she nodded her head: ‘I enjoy it too – I love it. There’ll definitely be another Munir, and we’ll call him Munir, and I say that quite seriously.’
We kept Munir in a test tube. When I looked at him in the test tube the first time, I had a feeling he was exhausted. That was straight after the operation. During the operation the doctor couldn’t contain her emotion when she scraped the clot of blood out of my fiancée’s womb. She said a little ‘yes’ and her eyes filled with tears, confident that what lay on the scalpel in front of her was not a foetus. As she handed the test tube to us, she said, ‘It’s just a clot of blood. You can get rid of it however you see fit. Have a good look at it, just to be sure.’ To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference. In the very earliest stages of its development you can tell a foetus from a blood clot only by feeling, and my feeling was that this solid clot of blood in the test tube was Munir. But I didn’t say anything to my fiancée. I was bitterly disappointed. She, on the other hand, closed her eyes, fell asleep in the front seat of the car and didn’t utter a word. I tucked the test tube into the glovebox where we keep CDs, turned the key in the ignition, and off we drove.
I don’t remember being fascinated by a clot of blood before. Not before Munir. One rarely finds coagulated blood magical or enchanting. The globs of blood that we see on television have usually congealed under particularly wretched circumstances. If I were to be one hundred per cent objective, even Munir was ugly to look at. His structure was no different from that of any other blood clot taken from someone’s leg or intestines or the phlegm in their throat. In the heaven where dried lumps of blood go, you’d find Munir wandering around aimlessly. There was nothing distinctive about him. If he held up a sign saying, ‘I was extracted from a womb,’ none of his fellow clots of blood would believe him. But what fascinated me about him was that he was pure. I don’t know how to explain it.
Munir had panache. Charisma. Whenever I looked at him in the test tube, I’d find him cheerful. Like a small piece of liver, a fresh black piece, ready for grilling at a barbeque. He was dark red in colour and clear, as if he’d never been exposed to the air or to the bacteria in the womb.
Now he’s lying low in formaldehyde. He spent some time in the small test tube in our sitting room. No one noticed that he was a clot of blood or that he was called Munir, unless we drew attention to it, because you don’t find anyone displaying a lump of dry blood in his sitting room as if it were a brass or ceramic vase, or a bowl bought at a tourist shop. Some of our friends said they wished they could have kept something from their relatives who had died in explosions or traffic accidents or had disappeared in the war. A piece of flesh from their calf, perhaps, or a fingertip, or even a fingernail or an anklebone. In the living room we camouflaged Munir by surrounding his test tube with similar test tubes containing water and worthless pieces of blue, red and green plastic. Every week we changed the solution in Munir’s test tube. It was a delicate and exhausting process, like changing his nappy or his clothes.
We later decided that the test tube no longer suited him, so we moved him to a larger container: an aquarium. It was a big aquarium, one designed to hold salmon. We set up the aquarium as the centrepiece in the living room instead of the forty-five-inch plasma television we had bought several years earlier, to watch football matches, and sometimes films, including porn. I have to say that the place did smell of formaldehyde, the solution preserving Munir, although we closed the aquarium tight. That meant that our friends and relatives rarely visited us. Sometimes we had to put masks on or leave the windows open, no matter whether it was sunny or rainy, or if there was shooting going on outside.
On 28 August Munir will be a year older, so we’ll have a party. We’ve been doing this ever since Munir was eight, specifically since we found out that my wife’s womb was irreparably damaged in the operation and will never be able to carry a foetus again.
Every year we invite children who share Munir’s birthday to the party. We post this notice on the Internet: ‘If you were born on 28 August, you are invited to celebrate your birthday at our house for free. Don’t forget to invite your friends and relatives. The address is …’ All the children we’ve invited gather at our house, together with their friends and relatives. We give them token presents, cut a cake for them and sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’. All within sight of Munir, who’s stuck to the glass at the front of the aquarium, as if watching sadly. Whenever one of the children asks us in disgust about this smudge on the glass – and we can’t blame them for that, of course – we tell them the truth. We hear some of their relatives whispering things like, ‘They must be mentally retarded. They’re keeping a lump of blood in an aquarium.’ But my wife and I have agreed that in reply we say, ‘That’s our son Munir. We invited you to our house because today is his birthday too.’ Then we ask everyone to sing for Munir, as he sang for them from inside the aquarium. ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Munir, happy birthday to you,’ we sing along with the children, who are puzzled that there is a lump of blood in an aquarium meant for salmon.