David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

She answers in an utterly serious, almost reproachful tone: “I’m not texting!”

“It’s not nice to lie, sweetie, I saw you! Click-click-click! Quick little fingers! By the way, are you sitting or standing?”

“What?” She quickly hunches her head between her shoulders. “No…I was writing to myself.”

“Oh, to yourself…” He stares wide eyed at the audience, conspiring against her with them.

“I have this app for taking notes,” she murmurs.

“That really is extremely interesting to us all, sweetness. Would you like us all to leave the room for a moment so as not to disturb the delightful relationship emerging between you and yourself?”

“What?” She shakes her head in alarm. “No, no, don’t leave.”

She has a peculiar speech impediment. Her voice is childish and high pitched, but the words come out thickly.

“Then tell us what you were writing to yourself.” Bursting with glee, he doesn’t give her time to reply: “Dear myself, I fear we shall have to bid each other farewell, for this evening, my little lamb, I have met the man of my dreams, to whom I shall bind my destiny, or at least my bed restraints for a week of extreme sex…”

The woman stares at him and gapes slightly. She wears black orthopedic shoes and her feet do not touch the floor. A big red shiny handbag sits between her body and the table. I wonder if he can see all this from the stage.

“No,” she says after thinking slowly, “that’s all not true, I didn’t write that at all.”

“Then what did you write?” he yells, clutching his head in fake despair. The conversation, which at first he’d found promising, is becoming cumbersome, and he decides to break it off.

“It’s private,” she whispers.

“ Pri -vate!” As he begins his retreat, the word captures him like a lasso and pulls him back to her by the neck. He dances backward, turning to face us with a look of horror, as though a particularly dirty word has just been launched into the air. “And what, pray tell, is the vocation of our exceedingly private and intimate madam?”

A cool breeze blows through the audience.

“I’m a manicurist.”

“Well, I never!” He rolls his eyes, holds his hands out, fingers spread, and cocks his head to one side. “French manicure, please! No, wait: glitter!” He blows on his nails one by one. “Maybe a crystal pattern? How are you with minerals, sweetie? Dried flowers maybe?”

“But I’m only allowed to do it in our club at the village,” she mumbles. Then she adds: “I’m also a medium.” Startled by her own boldness, she holds her red handbag up higher, erecting it as a barrier between him and her.

“A me-di-um?” The fox in his eyes stops its chase, sits down, and licks its lips. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declares gravely, “I request your attention. We have here this evening an exclusive engagement by a manicurist who, although you may have thought her a small, is in fact a medium! Put your hands together! Put your nails together!”

The audience complies uncomfortably. It seems to me that most of them would rather he let her go and hunt a more appropriate victim.

He walks slowly across the stage, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. His entire being signals contemplation and open-mindedness. “A medium. You mean, you communicate with other worlds?”

“What? No…For now I only do it with souls.”

“Of the dead?”

She nods. Even in the dark I can detect the vein in her neck throbbing.

“Oh…” He nods with affected understanding. I can see him dive deep inside himself to bring up pearls of mockery and ridicule engendered by the encounter. “Then perhaps Madam Medium can tell us—wait, where are you from, Thumbelina?”

“You’re not allowed to call me that.”

“I’m sorry.” He retreats immediately, sensing he’s crossed a line. Not a total shit, I write on my napkin.

“Now I’m from here, near Netanya,” she says. The pain of insult still strains her face. “We have a village here…for people like…like me. But when I was little I was your neighbor.”

“You lived next door to Buckingham Palace?” he exclaims, drumming in the air, pulling out another faint trail of laughs. I caught him hesitating for a split second before deciding not to take a crack at “when I was little.” I find it amusing to track his unexpected red lines. Tiny islets of compassion and decency.

But now I realize what she’s telling him.

“No,” she asserts with that same rigidity, pacing the words out. “Buckingham Palace is in England. I know because—”

“What’s that? What did you say?”

“I do word searches. I know all the countr—”

“No, before that. Yoav?”

The manager turns a spot on her. In the twisted tapered mound of her graying hair there is a purple stripe. She’s older than I thought, but her face is smooth, ivorylike. She has a flattened nose and swollen eyelids, but still, from a certain angle, there is a vague, veiled beauty.

She freezes at the pairs of eyes turned on her. The young bikers whisper excitedly. She arouses something in them. I know the type. Flowers of evil. Exactly the kind that used to make me lose my cool on the bench. I look at her through their eyes: her party dress, the rose in her hair, the smeared lipstick. She looks like a little girl dressed up as a lady, walking the streets, and she knows that something bad is about to happen to her.

“You were my neighbor?” he asks hesitantly.

“Yes, in Romema. Right when you came in I saw it.” She lowers her head and whispers, “You haven’t changed at all.”

“I haven’t changed at all?” He snorts. “I haven’t changed at all?” He shades his eyes with his hand and examines her intently. The crowd follows, fascinated by the process unfolding before its eyes, the transformation of life material into a joke.

“Are you sure it’s me?”

“Of course.” She giggles and her face lights up. “You’re the boy who walked on his hands.”

The room goes silent. My mouth is dry. I only saw him walk on his hands once. On the day I saw him for the last time.

“Always on your hands.” She laughs and hides her mouth with her hand.

“These days I can barely make it on my feet,” he mutters.

“You used to walk behind the lady with big boots.”

He gasps softly.

“One time,” she continues, “at your dad’s barbershop, I saw you on your feet and I didn’t make out it was you.”

People glance at their neighbors, unsure what they’re supposed to feel. He gives me a blustery, annoyed look. This was not in the program, he says over our private frequency, and it’s totally unacceptable. I wanted you to see me in my primal state, without any extras. Then he moves closer to the edge of the stage and gets down on one knee. Still with his hand at his forehead, he looks at her. “What did you say your name was?”

“It doesn’t matter…” When she sinks her head between her shoulders, a little hump on the back of her neck sticks out.

“It does matter,” he says.

“Azulai. My parents were Ezri and Esther, both rest in peace.” She searches his face for a sign of recognition. “You for sure don’t remember them. We only lived there for a bit. My brothers went to your dad’s for their haircuts.” When she forgets herself, the speech impediment is more noticeable. As though something hot is stuck in her throat. “I was little, eight and a half, and you were maybe bar mitzvah, and always on your hands, you even talked to me like that, from down—”

“That was just so I could peek under your dress.” He winks at the audience.

She shakes her head vigorously and her tower of hair wobbles. “No, that’s not true! There was three times you talked, and I had a long dress, the blue-checkered one, and I talked to you, too, even though it wasn’t allowed—”