David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

Since the snicker failed, he dispatches his infectious belly laugh to the front lines and resumes scurrying across the stage, trying to reelectrify his movements. “So what did you do, Dovaleh? That’s what you’re probably asking yourself now, I know you’re worried: What did little Dovaleh do? I went back to walking on my feet, that’s what I did. Like I had a choice? You don’t mess with my dad, and in our house, if you haven’t yet figured this out, there was monotheism: no God but him. Only his will held, and if you dared make a peep, out came the belt— whack !” He whips the air and the tendons on his neck protrude and his face twists in a flash of terror and hatred, but his lips form a smile, or a glower, and for a moment I see a little boy, the little boy I knew, who apparently I didn’t know—increasingly I realize how little I knew; what an actor he was, good Lord, what an actor, even then, and what an enormous effort of playacting our friendship was for him—a little boy trapped between the table and the wall as his father lashes him with a belt.

He never told me, never even hinted, that his father beat him. Or that he got beat up at school. Or that anyone was capable of hurting him at all. On the contrary: he looked like a happy, well-liked boy, and his light, optimistic warmth was what drew me to him, with magical threads, out of my own childhood and my own home, where there was always something cold and murky and somewhat secretive.

He keeps stretching out his stage smile, but the little woman flinches at the whipping hand, as though she were the one hit with the belt. When she lets out a barely audible sigh, he quickly spins around at her with furious dark eyes like a snake about to bite. And suddenly she looks larger, this stubborn, odd little woman, a self-appointed warrior battling for the soul of a boy she knew decades ago and of whom almost no trace remains.

“Okay, Dad says no walking on hands, so I don’t. But then I start thinking, What now? How do I save myself? You know what I mean? How do I not die from all this uprightness? How do I be ? That’s how my mind worked back then; I always had this restlessness. Okay, so he wants to see me walk like everyone does? Fantastic, I’ll walk like he wants me to, I’ll stay on my feet, I’ll be a good little boy, but I’m going to follow the rules of chess when I walk, okay?”

The audience stares at him, trying to figure out where he’s going.

“For example”—he giggles, employing a complex mimicry of his own face to cajole us to laugh with him—“one day I’d walk only diagonally, like the bishop. The next day only straight, like the rook. Then like the knight, one-step-two-step. And I saw people like they were playing chess with me. Not that they knew it, of course, how would they? But they each had their role, the whole street was my board, the whole school yard at recess…”

Again I see the two of us walking and talking. He circles around me, making me dizzy, popping out here, emerging from there. Who knows what game of his I was taking part in?

“I’d come up to my dad like a knight, say, while he was sawing the rags in the jeans room—never mind, trust me, there’s a universe somewhere where that sentence makes sense—and I’d position myself right on the floor tile where I could defend my mother, the queen, and I’d stand there between him and Mom, and I’d say to him silently: Check. And I’d wait a few seconds, give him time to make his move, and if he didn’t step onto another tile in time, it was checkmate. Isn’t that loopy? Wouldn’t you laugh at that kid if you knew what was going on in his head? Wouldn’t you wonder what this fuckup wasted his childhood on?”

He slams these last words at the little woman. He doesn’t even look at her, but it’s the voice meant for her, and she straightens up and shouts out in a desperate, horrible voice: “Stop it! You were the best one! You didn’t say ‘midget’ and you didn’t take me to the warehouse, and you called me ‘Pitz,’ and ‘Pitz’ was good, don’t you remember?”

“No.” He stands before her, arms hanging limply at his sides.

“And the second time we talked you brought me in your mouth a picture of Isadora Duncan from the paper, and I still have it in my room. How can you not remember?”

“I don’t remember, lady,” he murmurs, embarrassed.

“Why do you call me lady?” she whispers.

He sighs. Scrubs the sparse islands of hair on his temples. He senses, of course, that the whole show is starting to tilt again. He is out on a limb that is getting heavier than the whole tree. The crowd can feel it, too. People look at one another and shift restlessly. They understand less and less what it is that they have unwillingly become partners to. I have no doubt they would have gotten up and left long ago, or even booed him off the stage, if not for the temptation that is so hard to resist—the temptation to look into another man’s hell.

“I’m all good! Dovaleh rides again!” he booms, and widens his mouth into that false, seductive smile. “Just picture our little Dovi, with his rainbow of zits, a fireworks show, his voice still hasn’t changed, he still hasn’t touched the tip of a nipple, but his left hand is suspiciously muscular ’cause what he lacks in size he makes up for with horniness…”

He prattles on, juggling words. For a few minutes now I’ve felt a hole in my stomach. A pit. A sudden gnawing hunger that I have to cork immediately. I order some tapas and ask the waitress to bring them out as soon as possible.

“Remember that age when you’re an adolescent and everything in the world makes you wicked horny? Like you’re sitting in geometry class and the teacher says, Look at the two legs of this isosceles triangle… And all the guys in class start breathing heavily and drooling…Ahhh…Or she goes, Now put a vertical line into the center of the circle …” He shuts his eyes and makes sucking, licking moves with his lips and tongue. The audience titters, but the tiny woman glares at him, and her look is so pained that I can’t decide whether the sight is heart-wrenching or ridiculous.

“Long story short, my class goes down south to this place called Be’er Ora, near Eilat, for Gadna camp—remember those? Where they prepared the future soldiers of Israel?”

Here it comes. Almost parenthetically. For two weeks, since our phone conversation, I’ve been waiting for him to get here. To drag me with him into that abyss.

“Remember the Gadna days, my good friends? Anyone know if they still make high schoolers do those camps? Yes? No? Yes?”

The emptiness of a long fall.

Five steps between me and the door.

The sweetness of the revenge I am about to be subjected to.

Just deserts.

“I’ll bet you a million dollars those lefties did away with Gadna, right? I don’t know, I’m just guessing, I know they can’t stand it when anyone has any fun, especially when it’s like military education for kids—yuck! Are we in Sparta or are we in Israel?!”

He keeps turning up the flames beneath himself. I know it already, I recognize it. I straighten up in my chair. He won’t catch me unprepared.

He continues in an excited whisper: “We set off on the road! Five a.m., still dark, our parents drop us off half asleep at the Umschlagplatz—just kiddiiiiing!” He slaps his wrist. “I don’t know how that slipped out, it must be the Tourette’s. Each kid is allowed one backpack. They call our names out, load us on the trucks, we say goodbye to our parents, then we sit there for ten hours on backbreaking wooden benches. We sit facing each other so no one misses when they puke, each kid’s knees touching someone else’s—I got Shimshon Katzover’s, which were nothing special. We sing our imbecilic hymns and youth movement anthems. You know, all the good ones, like She screws her leg out every night, she drops her teeth into a glass …” A few women start singing along enthusiastically, and he gives them a chilling look. “Hey, medium,” he inquires without looking at her, “could you maybe put me in touch with myself at that age?”