David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“Well, now you know what it is and you can leave.”

“I want to stay.”

“But why? You’re not having fun. You’re miserable here.”

“That’s true.” Her face turns gloomy. Every emotion that passes through her is immediately visible on her face. In fact, I think I’m spending as much time looking at her this evening as at him. I’ve only just realized it: I constantly look back and forth between them, gauging him by her responses.

“Please leave, it’s going to get harder for you now.”

“I want to stay.” When she purses her lips, the exaggerated circle of red lipstick makes her look like a tiny clown with hurt feelings.

Dovaleh sucks in his sunken cheeks, and his eyes seem to get closer together. “Okay,” he murmurs, “but I warned you, honey. Don’t come crying to me later.”

She stares at him, uncomprehending, then shrinks back.

“Give it up, Netanya!” he howls in her direction. “So we get there after ten hours, they put us in tents, big tents, ten, twenty guys per tent, or maybe less? I don’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember anything anymore, don’t trust a word I say, seriously, my head is a sieve, I swear, back when my kids still knew they had a dad and they used to come visit, I’d say, ‘Whoa! Before you go any further, put your name tags on!’ ”

Feeble laughter.

“And down there, in Be’er Ora, they teach us all the things a proud young Hebrew boy needs to know: how to climb up walls in case we have to escape the ghetto again; how to slink, for the sewage pipes; how to drop, crawl, and fire, a procedure we called patzatzta, so the Nazis won’t understand and they’ll get bummed out. And they make us jump off a tower onto a canvas—remember that? And walk on a rope like a lizard, and day treks and night treks, and sweating and running around the base in horrendous heat, and shooting five bullets with a Czech Mauser and feeling like James Bond, and me”—he flutters his eyelids coquettishly—“the shooting makes me feel close to Mommy, it gives me a little taste of home, because my mom—did I tell you this? I didn’t? My mom worked for Taas. Yep, for the Israel Military Industries in Jerusalem. She was a bullet sorter, my sweet little mommy, six shifts a week. Dad set it up for her, someone probably owed him something and they gave her a job even with all her baggage. For the life of me I don’t know what was going through my dad’s head. What was he thinking? Nine hours a day, her, with bullets: ta-ta-ta-ta-ta! ” He holds an imaginary submachine gun and fires in all directions, shouting hoarsely: “Be’er Ora, here I come! Think kitchen duty! Think giant cauldrons! And scabies! Scratching and itching like little Jobs! And diarrhea flowing freely because the chef, bless him, earned three stars in the Michelin guide to dysentery—”

It’s been a few minutes since he’s looked me in the eye.

“And in the evening there were parties and bonfires and sing-alongs and putting out fires the old-fashioned way—all they let me do with my dick was put out a firefly—and good times, and boys and girls, and yin and yang dancing the krakowiak, and I partied like you wouldn’t believe. I was the platoon’s funny guy, they laughed with me, they paid attention, they tossed me gaily around in a circle, ’cause I was little, I weighed nothing, and I was the youngest one there, I skipped a grade one time, never mind, not that I was the smartest, they just got sick of me and kicked me up. So at Gadna camp they made me their mascot, their good-luck Dovaleh. Before every exercise or firing range, each kid came over and gave me a little smack upside the head, but it was all in good spirits, it was all good. Bambino, that’s what they called me. It was the first time I had a decent nickname. Better than Boots or Rag-and-Bone.”

—

That was how I ran into him. I got to the base and went into my tent to unpack, and I saw three oversize kids throwing a big army duffel back and forth, with a boy inside screaming like an animal. I didn’t know the boys. I was the only one from my school who got assigned to that tent. I assume my Gadna teacher, who divvied us up, thought I’d feel equally out of place anywhere I went. I remember standing at the tent flaps without moving. I couldn’t stop watching. The three kids were in their undershirts, and their biceps glistened with sweat. The kid in the duffel bag had stopped shouting and was crying now, and they snickered without saying a word and kept tossing him back and forth.

I put my backpack down on a bed that looked available near the entrance, and sat down with my back to the events. I didn’t dare interfere, but I also couldn’t leave the tent. At some point I heard a loud thump and I jumped. One of them must have dropped the duffel bag on the cement floor. It quickly opened up and a head of curly black hair emerged. I recognized him immediately. The kids probably saw something on my face, because they sniggered. Dovaleh followed their gazes and stared at me. His face was wet with tears. The encounter was beyond our comprehension, and in some ways beyond our means. We made no sign of mutual recognition. Even as photo negatives of ourselves, we were completely in sync. His scream had frozen in my throat, or so I felt. I held my head up high, looked away, and walked out, still hearing their cackles.

—

“And there was girls-and-boys stuff going on there, and fresh new hormones, still unwrapped, and the merry crackle of zits popping. I was still pretty green in that area, you know, I’d only just started my first experiments with myself, magazines and pictures and all that, and when it came to the main event I was really only on observer status, but man did I enjoy observing! That’s where I started building the observation tower that would last a lifetime.”

He smiles. People smile at him. What is he selling them? What is he selling himself?

—

Shortly after our encounter, I met him in the mess hall. Since we were in the same tent, we were also at the same table, although, fortunately for me, on opposite ends. I loaded up my plate and looked at nothing else, but I couldn’t avoid seeing his classmates dump a whole saltshaker into his soup. He slurped it up cheerfully and made loud sucking noises, which had them all falling about laughing. Someone grabbed the baseball cap off his head and it flew back and forth across the table, got dipped into the occasional bowl of something, and finally landed back on his head and drizzled liquid down his face. He reached his tongue out and licked the drippings. Once in a while, through the jabs and the silly faces, his eyes met mine, indifferent and vacant.

At the end of the meal they stuffed half a banana in his mouth and he scratched at his ribs and made monkey howls, until the platoon commander ordered him to shut up and sit down.

At night, when we all lay in bed after lights-out, the boys in the tent made him tell them the dreams he had about a girl in their class, who was particularly well endowed. He did. He used words I couldn’t believe he knew. But it was his voice, his flow of speech, his rich imagination. I lay motionless, almost without breathing, and knew for sure that if he hadn’t been in the tent it would have been me they’d be picking on.

One boy from his class suddenly ran down the two rows of beds mimicking Dovaleh’s father, and another got up and started impersonating his mother. I pulled the army blanket up over my head. The boys laughed and Dovaleh laughed with them. His voice hadn’t changed yet, and it rang out with a strange freshness among their deeper tones. Someone said, “If I walked down Dizengoff with Greenstein, people would think I was with a girl!” A big wave of laughter flowed down the tent.