David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“These kinds of things are done quietly and quickly in our system. Three or four months and the whole thing was over.” I laughed. “You see, sometimes the wheels of justice do turn quickly.”

He didn’t respond. I was a little disappointed at my inability to make a comedian laugh.

“Every time I saw your name somewhere,” he said, “I would remember how we were, and I was interested in what you were doing, where you were. I wondered if you even remembered me. I watched you climb the ladder and I really was happy for you, honestly.”

The dog let out a soft, almost human sigh. I can’t bring myself to have her put down. So much Tamara—smell, voice, touch, look—is still embodied in her.

There was a silence between us again, but now it was different. I thought: What do people see in me on first impression? Can they still see what I was until not long ago? Is there any imprint left from the love I knew? A rebirth mark? I hadn’t been in these regions for a long time, and the thoughts confused me and starting tilling things over in me. I still had the feeling I was making a mistake, but perhaps, for a change, it was a mistake that was right for me. I said: “If I do this, and I’m still not sure that I will, you need to know that I won’t take pity on you.”

He laughed. “You forget that that was my condition, not yours.”

I said his idea sounded a bit like someone hiring an assassin to take himself out.

He laughed again. “I knew you’d be right for this. Just remember—one shot, straight to the heart.”

I laughed, too, and a faint vapor, warm and forgotten, came up from those days of ours. We said goodbye with a new sort of lightness, even an awakening of affection. And only then, perhaps because of our parting words, was I struck by an unexpected blow: I remembered what had happened to him, and to me, when we were in Be’er Ora together, at the Gadna camp. For a few seconds I simply froze in terror at my ability to forget.

And at the fact that he hadn’t reminded me, not even with a single word.

—

“But you’ll have to wait patiently, my friends, because this is a story that, honest to God, I have never told in a show. Never told it in any gig, never told it to a single person, and tonight it’s going to happen…”

The wider his grin gets, the gloomier his face. He looks at me and shrugs helplessly. His entire being conveys the sense that he is about to take a big and disastrous leap which he has no choice but to take.

“So here you go: brand-spanking-new material, still shrink-wrapped. I’m not feeling the words yet, which means that this evening, ladies and gentlemen, you are my guinea pigs. I’m crazy about you, Netanya! ”

Again the inevitable applause and cheers. Again he takes a sip from the flask, and his extremely prominent Adam’s apple bobs up and down, and every single person notices the desperate thirst, and he can feel them noticing it. The Adam’s apple stops moving. The eyes look straight over the flask at the audience. With an embarrassment that is slightly surprising and almost touching, his voice climbs up into a screech: “Netanya, the abandoned project! Are you with me? Didn’t get scared off? Awesome, good for you, I need you to be with me now, I need you to hug me like I was your long-lost brother. You, too, medium. You surprised me this evening, I’ll admit it, you came at me from a place I’d already…A place where no white man’s foot has stepped for a long time…” He pulls up his pant leg, exposing a skeletal, bald shin of parchment skin and bones, and looks at it. “All right, well, no yellowing man’s foot. But still, I’m glad you came, medium. I don’t know what made you come here tonight, but you did, and you might have a professional interest in this story, because it involves a…how should I put it…it has a kind of ghost in it. Maybe you could even communicate with it, but I’m warning you—call collect!

“Seriously now, this story is a difficult case, I’m telling you. A murder case, you might say, except it’s not clear who was murdered, if it can even be called a murder, and who got murdered for life.” He flashes a gaping, clownish grin. “And now, without further ado, I give you the wild and hilarious story of my first funeral !”

He dances around the armchair, boxing at the air, jabbing, dodging with a quick feint, and punching again. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” he intones with a cantorial melody. From the audience come a few giggles, throat clearings signifying relaxation in anticipation of delight. But I find myself disquieted again. Extremely disquieted. Only five steps lie between my table and the exit.

“My fiiiiirrst funeraaaaaal !” he proclaims again, this time with a circus ringmaster’s trumpeting. A lanky woman with straw hair at the edge of the room lets out a staccato burst of laughter, and he screeches to a stop and skewers her with his look: “For fuck’s sake, Netanya South! I say ‘funeral’ and you laugh? That’s your instinct around here?” The audience responds with more laughter, but he doesn’t smile. He circles the stage, talking to himself and gesticulating. “What is the matter with these people? What kind of a person laughs at something like that? But you saw it yourself. You killed! Seven point two magnitude on the Dovaleh Scale. I just don’t get these people…”

He stops and leans on the back of the armchair. “I said ‘funeral,’ sister,” he drills at the lanky woman. “Is it too much to ask for some commiseration, honey? A pinch of compassion—have you ever heard that word, Lady Macbeth? Compassion! I mean, we’re talking about death here, lady! Put your hands together for death! ” His voice suddenly ignites in a horrible roar and he runs across the stage with airplane arms and then claps rhythmically over his head, goading the audience to join: “Hands together for death!” People laugh awkwardly: the slogan grates on them, he grates on them as he scurries about the stage screaming. Their eyes begin to glaze over as they watch him, and by now I recognize the apparatus: he works himself up into a frenzy, and by doing so works them up, too. He inflames himself and ignites them, too. I can’t quite understand how it works, but it does. Even I can feel the vibrations in the air, in my body, and I tell myself that maybe it’s just hard to remain indifferent when faced with a man so thoroughly fused with the primal element inside him. But that doesn’t explain the roar trapped in my own gut, growing louder by the second. Here and there a few men join in—only men. Perhaps they’re doing it to silence him, to drown out his shouts with their bellows, but soon they’re yelling together with him. Something has seized them—the rhythm, the madness. “Hands together for death!” he screams, sweaty and breathless, his cheeks burning a sickly red. “Raise the roof!” he screeches, and the young people, especially the soldiers, clap their hands over their heads and roar with him, and he goads them on with mocking grins, and the two bikers screech as loud as they can, and now I can tell they’re a boy and a girl, maybe twins, and with their sharp features they look like two predatory puppies watching him, swallowing up his moves with their eyes. There’s a stirring among the couples sitting near the bar, too, and one guy is even dancing on his chair. A gaunt, sunken, gray-faced man waves his hands wildly, screaming, “Hands together for death!” The three bronzed old ladies are going wild, tossing their thin arms in the air and shouting and laughing so hard they’re in tears, and Dovaleh himself is erupting, he’s in a frenzy, barreling his hands and feet around, and the crowd is awash in laughter, swept up in the frantic lunacy, and there are sixty or seventy people around me, men and women, old and young, their mouths full of poisonous popping candy—it starts with an awkward hum, with sidelong glances, then something lights up in one person after the other, and the shouting makes their necks swell, and within a second they’re up in the air, balloons of idiocy and liberty, released from gravity, rushing to join the one and only camp that can never be defeated: Hands together for death! Almost the entire audience is screaming and clapping rhythmically now, and I am, too, at least in my heart—why not more? Why can’t I do more? Why not take a vacation from myself for once, from the cyanide face I’ve adopted these past few years, with my eyes always red from trapped tears. Why not jump up on a chair and erupt into shouts of hands together for death, the death that managed to snatch away from me, in six short fucking weeks, the one person I really and truly loved with a lust for life, with the joy of life, from the minute I saw your face, your round, light-filled face, with its beautiful, wise, pure forehead, with its roots of strong, dense hair, which I stupidly believed testified to your strong grip on life, and your broad, large, generous, dancing body—don’t you dare erase even one of those adjectives—you were such medicine for me, such medicine for the dry bachelorhood that had closed in on me, and for the “judicial temperament” that had all but replaced my personality, and for all the antibodies to life that had built up in my blood through all the years without you, until you came, everything about you came—