David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“No, I’m only allowed to do it in the club at our village, and only with people who died.”

“That should work out perfectly, then. And by the way, I didn’t want to go to that camp at all, just so you know. I’d never left home for a week, never been apart from them for that long. There’d never been any reason to. Going abroad wasn’t done back then, definitely not by our sort. Overseas, for us, was strictly for extermination purposes. And we didn’t travel around Israel either—where would we go? Who was expecting us? It was just the three of us, mom-dad-kid, and when we stood there by the trucks that morning, honestly, I got a little spooked. I don’t know, something about the whole thing just didn’t sit well, like I had some kind of sixth sense, or maybe I was afraid, I don’t know, to leave them alone with each other—”

—

He went to Be’er Ora with his school, and I went with mine. We weren’t supposed to be in the same camp. His school was signed up for a different base (Sde Boker, I think), but the organizers had other ideas, and we found ourselves not just at the same camp but in the same platoon and the same tent.

—

“So I tell my dad I don’t feel well, he has to take me home, and he says, ‘Over my dead body.’ I swear that’s what he said, and I got even more stressed out and then the tears started, and I wanted the ground to open up…

“I mean, when I think about it now, it’s so weird that I cried in front of everyone. Picture it: I was almost fourteen, a pretty major nerd, but my dad was the red-faced one. He got annoyed at us, because when my mom saw me cry she started, too; she always did that, whenever there was any crying she would join right in. He hated to see her cry, he always teared up when it happened, he was emotional, especially with her, there’s no question about it, he really did love her, Daddy-o, in his own way, as they say, but he loved her, I admit it, he did, maybe like a squirrel or a mouse who finds a pretty piece of glass or a colorful marble and can’t stop looking at it…” He smiles. “Remember those awesome marbles they used to have? Remember that one with the butterfly inside? That’s the kind of marble she was, my mother.”

A few men in the audience remember, as do I, and one tall woman with cropped silver hair. We’re all the same age, more or less. People throw out names of other marbles: cat’s-eyes, aggies, oilies. I contribute—meaning, I draw on the green napkin—the Dutch variety with the flower inside. The younger audience members titter at our enthusiasm. Dovaleh stands there grinning, soaking up the heartfelt moment. Then he flicks an imaginary marble straight at me. The tenderness and warmth on his face confuse me.

“It was something unreal, I’m telling you. Because for him, or at least this is how it seemed, my mother was a gift from heaven. She was something really precious he’d been given to protect, but like at the same moment they also said: Watch it, mister—you’re just the caretaker, got it? You’re not going to really be with her, so keep your distance. You know what the Bible says—oh, by the way, Netanya, the Bible is awesome! Such a page-turner! I give it a big thumbs-up. If I wasn’t such a restrained individual I might even call it the book of books. And it’s full of dirty bits! So anyway, right off the bat the Bible says, ‘And the man knew Eve his wife,’ right?” A few voices answer: “Right.” “Okay. Great job, Mr. Adam, you’re a real stud. Except pay attention to how it says you knew her. It doesn’t say anything about understanding her, eh, girls? Am I right?” The women cheer, and a band of warmth rises up from them and floats over to surround him like an aura. He grins and somehow manages to encompass them all in a single wink, and yet I sense that each of them was winked at in a slightly different way.

“He just didn’t understand. My dad did not understand this beautiful woman who didn’t say a word all day, just sat there with her books and the door shut, didn’t ask him for anything and didn’t want anything and all his finagling and hustling didn’t even make a dent in her. Somehow, he managed to rent out the storehouse behind the barbershop to a family of four for two-fifty bucks a month— ta-daa! Then he buys a crate of velveteen pants that came in on a fishing boat from Marseille, with slightly defective zippers, and those things stank up our apartment for two years. Hallelujah! And she’d sit next to him at the kitchen table every evening, for years this went on, and she was a whole head taller than him, sitting there like a statue”—he reaches both arms out like an obedient pupil or a prisoner holding out his hands for the cuffs—“and he’d open up the ledger where he wrote down numbers like fly droppings with all kinds of code names he made up for his clients and his suppliers, the ones who were honest with him and the ones who screwed him. There was Pharaoh, and the Sweetheart of Sosnowiec, and Sarah Bernhardt, Zishe Breitbart, Goebbels, Rumkowski, Meir Vilner, Ben-Gurion…And he’d get all excited, you should have seen him, and sweaty, and beet red, and his finger would shake on the numbers, and this whole thing was just to prove to her, as if she was even arguing, as if she even heard anything he said, that in such-and-such years and so-and-so months he’d have enough money so we could move into a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in Kiryat Moshe.”

Looking up at the crowd, he seems to have forgotten where he is for a moment, but he quickly recovers and apologizes with a smile and a shrug.

“After ten hours on the bus we get to some place in the boonies, out in the Negev, or maybe it was the Aravah. Somewhere near Eilat. Let’s see…I’ll try and communicate with my late self…” He rolls his eyes, tilts his head back, and mumbles: “I see…brown and red mountains, a desert, and tents, and officers’ barracks, and a mess hall, and a ripped Israeli flag on a mast, and a puddle of diesel, and a degenerate generator on its last legs, and mess tins we used to get for bar-mitzvah gifts and we’d rinse them at the spigot with a filthy sponge and cold water so all the grease stayed on—”

The audience is his now, dipping its feet in familiar waters. We were there for four days, Dovaleh and I, in the same platoon, and most of the time we slept in the same tent and ate at the same table. And we did not exchange a single word.

“The counselors at this base, or commanders, I guess they were called, they each had their own particular strand of fucked-up-ness. Every one of them was like a rough draft of an actual human being. The real army wouldn’t take them, so they made them babysit a bunch of kids at Gadna camp. One guy was so cross-eyed he couldn’t see an inch ahead, the other was flat-footed, one dude was from Holon. Believe me, out of ten of them you could put together maybe one normal person.

“Honey,” he turns to the medium with a sigh, “you’re turning my milk sour. Look at everyone else laughing! Don’t you think my jokes are funny?”

“No.”

“What?! None of them?”

“Your jokes are bad.” Her eyes are on the table, and her fingers grip her purse straps.

“Bad, as in not funny?” he asks tenderly. “Or as in, like, they’re mean?”

She doesn’t respond immediately. “Both,” she says finally.

“So my jokes are not funny, and they’re also mean.”

She thinks for another moment. “Yes.”

“But that’s what stand-up comedy is.”

“Then it’s not right.”

He gives her a long, bemused look. “Then why did you come?”

“Because at the club they said stand-up, but I thought they meant karaoke.”

They’re conversing as though no one else is in the room.