David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

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“I want you to see me,” he said on the phone that night after I’d apologized profusely for my attack. “You just have to sit there for an hour and a half, two hours tops, depends how the evening goes. We’ll get you a table on the side so no one bothers you. Drinks, food, a cab if you want one, it’s all on me, and I’ll pay whatever you ask for the job.”

“Wait, I still don’t understand what this job is.”

“I told you. If you want, you can record me, take pictures on your phone, I don’t care. As long as you see me.”

“And then what?”

“Then, if you feel like it, give me a call and tell me what you saw.”

“Look, what do you need this for?”

He thought for a good thirty seconds.

“For nothing. For me. I don’t know. Listen, I know this is coming out of nowhere, but I suddenly felt like, this is it. It’s time.”

I laughed. “Let me understand. You want me to critique your performance? Or do you just want to know how you look? Because either way, I’m not the right guy for the job.”

“No, of course not…Why would you say…” He snickered. “Believe me, I’m well aware of how I look.” He took a deep breath and let it out quickly, as though he’d been rehearsing this text for a long time. “I would like to hear, if you’ll agree, to hear from a man like you, Avishai, from someone trained to do this, I mean, someone who’s spent his whole life looking at people and reading them in an instant, down to their root—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” I interrupted, “you’re getting a little carried away.”

“No, no, I’m just trying to…I know what I’m saying. I used to read about the cases you tried when they covered them in the papers. I followed the news, and they quoted your rulings, and things you said about the defendants and about the lawyers, and your words cut like a knife. I haven’t heard much recently, but I remember you had some big cases where the whole country…And believe me, Avishai, Your Honor, not sure what to call you, I have an eye for that stuff. It was like reading a book sometimes.”

His naïveté amused me. More than amused. I thought about my rulings, which I honed and polished down to every last sentence, and in which I would occasionally—with moderation, of course, unassumingly—work in a juicy metaphor or a quote from a poem by Pessoa, or Cavafy, or Nathan Zach, or even my own poetic imagery. And suddenly I was filled with pride in those forgotten gems.

A picture flickered inside me: Tamara, about five years ago, sitting in the kitchen, one leg folded under her body, a mug of hot water with fresh mint on the table, a sharpened pencil tapping her teeth with a sound that drove me crazy, going over my pages “with a fine-tooth comb for sentimental adjectives and fiery images and other excesses to which Your Honor is prone.” (Me in the living room, pacing back and forth, waiting for her verdict.)

“So that’s what you want from me?” I laughed. I had to take a breath suddenly. “You want a personal verdict? Privatization of the justice system? House call from a judge? Not bad…”

“Verdict?” He sounded astonished. “What do you mean, verdict?”

“Oh, is that not it? I thought maybe you wanted to tell me something, so that I could—”

“But why would you say ‘verdict’?” A cool, cutting breeze blew through the phone. He swallowed. “Just come to my show, look at me for a while, really that’s all, and then tell me—but don’t take any pity on me, that’s the main thing—give me two or three sentences, I know you can do that, there’s a reason I chose you…” He snickered again, but I heard doubt in his voice now.

I knew for sure that wasn’t all. There was something hiding, perhaps even from him. I asked a few more questions, tried from this angle and that, whet my blade as much as I could, but it didn’t help. He was absolutely incapable of clarifying beyond the vague desire that I should “see” him. The conversation started getting circular. I could sense the gradual fading of his innocent, childish hope that even after forty-some years of separation we would still share that deep, instant understanding.

“Let’s say…,” he murmured when I was already formulating my refusal. “Let’s say you sit there and watch me for an hour, hour and a half, that’s it, I told you, depends how the evening rolls, and then you pick up the phone, or you could send it by mail, I don’t care, it’d be nice to get a letter from someone other than a debt collector, one page, even a few lines would be fine, maybe even one sentence. I mean, you’re capable of crushing someone in one sentence—”

“But on what? About what?”

He giggled again, embarrassed. “I guess I want you to tell me what this thing I have is…No, never mind, forget it.”

“Go on…”

“I mean, you know, what does someone get when they see me? What do people know when they look at me…at this thing that comes out of me. Are you following?”

I said I wasn’t. The dog looked up, smelling the lie.

“Okay.” He sighed. “I’ll let you go to bed. I guess this isn’t going to work.”

“Wait, go on.”

And it was then that something in him cracked open and started to flow: “Say I walk past someone on the street, he’s never seen me, doesn’t know me from Adam. First look— bam! What does he pick up? What gets recorded about me in his mind? I don’t know if I’m explaining myself…”

I stood up and began to pace around the kitchen with the phone.

“But I have seen you before,” I reminded him.

“It’s been years,” he said immediately. “I’m not me, you’re not you.”

I remembered: his blue eyes, which were too large for his face and, together with his prominent lips, gave him the appearance of a strange duckling with sharp features. A quick, pulsing particle of life.

“That thing,” he said softly, “that comes out of a person without his control? That thing that maybe only this one person in the world has?”

The radiance of personality, I thought. The inner glow. Or the inner darkness. The secret, the tremble of singularity. Everything that lies beyond the words that describe a person, beyond the things that happened to him and the things that went wrong and became warped in him. That same thing that years ago, when I was just starting out as a judge, I naïvely swore to look for in every person who stood before me, whether defendant or witness. The thing I swore I would never be indifferent to, which would be the point of departure for my judgment.

“I haven’t been a judge for almost three years,” I was suddenly driven to say. “I’ve been retired, I suppose, for three years.”

“Already? What happened?”

For a moment I seriously considered telling him. “I took early retirement.”

“So what do you do?”

“Not much. Sit around at home. Some gardening. Reading.” He said nothing. I sensed his caution, and I liked it. “What happened,” I explained, to my own surprise, “was that my verdicts were becoming a little too caustic for the system.”

“Oh.”

“Aggressive,” I scoffed. “The Supreme Court was overturning them wholesale.”

I also told him that I had a few outbursts at some bald-faced lying witnesses, and at defendants who had done horrible, despicable things to their victims, and at their lawyers who kept torturing the victims with their cross-examinations. “My mistake,” I went on, as though I were used to talking with him on a daily basis, “was when I told one particularly well-connected and well-promoted lawyer that I thought he was the scum of the earth. That really sealed the deal.”

“I didn’t know. I haven’t been following the news recently.”