Fish

I was recently at one of those sea food restaurants located at a pier in a harbour - I think it was in Monterrey, California. Or was it in Marrakech? Well, a place beginning with an M anyhow.

Who came in there, if not Umay Faliff, the famous actor! Faliff was most famous for Doctor Smertyago, of course, a movie about a young loving couple who were completely unaffected by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Umay Faliff's interpretation of the title role, The Doctor (Доктор), is widely regarded as one of those things you cannot forget, no matter how much you desperately try.

The now elderly mr. Faliff sat down and studied the menu as meticulously as members of his religion always do. As the waiter passed him with a lobster, mr. Faliff suddenly shouted:
"Jean-Jacques! Is that really you!"
He grabbed the waiter's sleeve and begged him:
"Please, don't kill him. This is my childhood friend, Jean-Jacques. He got killed in his previous life as he disobeyed his mother and ran with a pair of scissors. Who dies when one is a bad boy will inevitably be reborn as a lower creature."

The waiter first tried to laugh the thing away, but mr. Faliff did not let go of his sleeve. The waiter then tried to reason with him, questioning how he could recognise Jean-Pierre at all. Besides, the customers at another table had already chosen this lobster... In the end the waiter gave up and served another lobster to the other customers. They probably could not tell the difference anyhow. I personally do not think the lobster could tell the difference either. He was eaten by a couple from Liège a few hours later, just after Umay Faliff had left.

When it was Faliff's turn to order, he chose trout. There were tasty looking trouts swimming in a big fish tank and he pointed at one, seemingly randomly. The waiter put down a net to pick the trout up, when Faliff pulled him in the sleeve again.
"Could I do it, please?"
"Do what?"
"Kill it!"
"Well, I guess so..."
"Great. Now, Pierre-Patrick," Bob turned to the fish, "the time has come to settle counts."

He gave a manic laugh as his claw like hand dashed like an arrow through the water and grabbed around the fish's neck.

What followed was too atrocious to be written down in detail. Umay Faliff treated the fish with utmost cruelty and fervour, and in spite of all the waiters' coming to separate them, the trout and the man were like one. The waiters did manage to pull Faliff and the poor fish into the kitchen, so their struggle would not disturb the other guests more than it already had done. I was sitting next to the kitchen door and had a fairly good view of the events.

As Faliff saw the kitchen utensils, he got one evil idea after the other to torture the trout. In the end the poor fish was so much in pain that it did what no fish had done before: it managed to jump up to one of the windows, bit the handle and rotated its entire body so the window got unlocked. As it swung out over the port basin, the fish let go and swiftly swam away.

It promptly started a society for the protection of animals against cruelty. The society's motto is: Eat us with respect.