David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

You—I still have an actual physical aversion to giving the words final validity, in writing, even if it’s only on a napkin—who were fifteen years younger than me, and now eighteen, and more every day.

You, who promised, when you asked for my hand, to look at me always with kind eyes. The eyes of a loving witness, you said. And no one has ever said anything lovelier to me.

“Make babies with me, death!” he screams and jumps around like a genie out of the bottle, drenched with sweat, his face on fire. The crowd echoes him with screams and laughter, and he roars: “Death, death, you win! You’re the best! Take us, death, let us join the majority!” I roar with him in my bursting heart, and I swear I would get up and scream out loud with him, even though people know me here, even despite My Honor. I would get up and scream with him and howl like a jackal at the moon and the stars and her little soaps still in the dish in the shower, and her pink slippers under the bed, and the spaghetti Bolognese we used to make together for dinner—I would do it if I just didn’t have to look at that disconsolate midget plugging her ears up with two fingers like an impervious thorn in my side.

I slouch down, defeated.

Dovaleh bends over and rests his hands on his knees, his mouth open in that skeleton smile of his, sweat dripping from his face. “Stop, stop,” he begs the audience, laughing breathlessly. “You’re so awesome, I can’t take it.”

But now that he is dizzy and emitting hiccups of laughter, they sober up and quickly cool off, and they look at him with distaste. Silence spreads through the room, and in the silence it becomes clear to us all that this man is driving himself far beyond his own limits.

That for him, this is not a game.

They slump back in their chairs, breathing heavily. The waitresses start darting among the tables again. The kitchen door opens and shuts repeatedly. Everyone is suddenly thirsty, everyone is hungry.

He is sick. I am struck by the certain knowledge. He is a sick man. Very sick, maybe. How could I have missed it? How could I have not understood? He even said it explicitly: the prostate, the cancer, and there were other heavy-handed hints, but still I thought it was another bad joke, or a way to squeeze out sympathy and perhaps a little leniency in our artistic judgment, not to mention in my verdict. After all, I must have rationalized, he’s capable of anything. I must have thought—if I thought at all—that even if there was a kernel of truth in his words, even if he had been sick once, his condition couldn’t be serious now, because otherwise he wouldn’t do the gig, he wouldn’t be up to it, either physically or mentally, would he?

So how do I make sense of this? How do I explain the fact that I—with my twenty-five years of experience observing and listening, being attentive to every clue—was so blind to his condition, so self-absorbed? How did his frenetic chatter and nervous jokes affect me the way strobe lights affect an epileptic? How did I keep turning inward, to my own life?

And how could it be that he, in his state, ultimately gave me what all the books I read and the movies I watched and the consolations offered by friends and relatives these past three years did not do for me?

His illness was staring me in the face for the whole first hour of the show: the skeletal features, the horrific thinness. Yet I denied it, even though in some part of my brain I knew it was a fact. I ignored it, even when the pain grew sharper and sharper—the familiar pain of realization that soon this man who was dancing and dashing and constantly chattering would no longer be. Being! he shouted with a sly smile a few moments ago. What an amazing, subversive idea.

“So, my first funeral…” He laughs and stretches out his thin arms. “Have you heard the one about the guys who die and get to the induction center in the sky, and they sort them into heaven or Netan—I mean hell? No, seriously, isn’t that the greatest fear—that in the end it’ll turn out the rabbis were right? That hell is a for-real place?” The audience snickers halfheartedly and people lower their eyes, reluctant to look at him.

“Listen, guys, I’m talking all-inclusive hell, the whole shebang, with fire, and devils with horns, and those little rakes, the pitchforks, and the wheel of torture and boiling tar and all those gadgets Satan gets to use…I haven’t slept a wink just thinking about it these past few months, I swear, and at night it’s the worst, the thoughts just eat me up and I totally get what you’re thinking now: Son of a bitch, why did I have to go and eat those shrimp on that trip to Paris? And the pitas from Abu Gosh on Passover? And why didn’t we all vote for Torah Judaism?” He lowers his voice and booms: “Too late, scumbags—to the tar!”

The crowd laughs.

“Okay, so I was talking about my first funeral. And then you laughed, you shits, you heartless crowd—you’re as cold as an Ashkenazi in January. I’m talking to you about a kid barely fourteen years old. Dovik, Dovaleh, the apple of his mommy’s eye. Look at me now—see? Just like this, but without the bald head, the stubble, and the loathing of humanity.”

Almost against his will he looks at the little woman, as if seeking her approval or denial. It’s hard for me to decide which of the two he would prefer, and I also note that it’s the first time he doesn’t look at me first.

She refuses to look at him. Keeps her eyes away. And as she does every time he bad-mouths himself, she shakes her bowed head, and her lips move silently as he speaks. From my table it looks like she’s annulling everything he says with her own words. He debates whether or not to have another go at her. Something about her, I sense, makes his blood boil. His salivary glands are already releasing venom—

He lets her be.

For a split second, a fast, pale-faced, laughing boy walks on his hands down a dirt path behind an apartment block. He meets a very small girl in a checkered dress. He tries to make her laugh.

“And that Dovaleh, may I rest in peace, was peanut sized, a pip-squeak—by the way, just so you know, at fourteen I was exactly the height I am now, and that was the end of that.” He gives the predictable derisive scoff. “And I’m sure you can tell, my trusted friends, that in the realm of verticality”—he slowly runs his hands down his body, from head to knees—“I somehow failed to achieve greatness, unlike in the fields of atom cracking and the discovery of the God particle, which, as is well known, I excelled at.” His eyes glaze over and he strokes his private parts affectionately: “Ah, the God particle…But seriously, in my family, on my father’s side, there’s this phenomenon where the men peak at around bar-mitzvah age and that’s it—freeze! That’s it for life! It’s well documented, and I’m pretty sure even Mengele studied us, or parts of us, especially the thigh and forearm bones. Yes, my people aroused the curiosity of that refined and introverted man. At least twenty guys from Dad’s family went through his lab, and every one of them discovered, with the kind doctor’s assistance, that the sky’s the limit.” He flashes a grin. “But only Dad, my father himself, the sly bastard, missed out big-time on the Mengele studies, because he immigrated to Israel as a pioneer thirty seconds before it all started over there. Mom ran straight into him, though, the doctor, I mean, and her whole family did, too. You could say, in fact, that in his own special way he was like our family doctor, you know? Not so?” He flutters his eyelids at the audience, which is becoming increasingly tight-lipped. “And just think about how even though the guy was so busy, with people coming to see him from all over Europe, climbing all over each other on trains to get to him, still, he found time to meet with every person individually. Although he absolutely refused to allow second opinions. You could see only him, and only for a short consultation: right, left, left, left…”