David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“It’s about time!” a short, broad-shouldered man shouts. A few more voices join in: “Where are the jokes? What’s going on here? What is this crap?”

“One sec, bro, I’ve got a new shipment coming in any minute, you’ll like this, I guarantee it! I just wanted to…What was I…I’m all confused now, you got me off course. Listen, dude, listen to me closely, you’ve never heard anything like this. My father, he had an arrangement with a shoe shop on Yafo—you know Yafo Street in Jerusalem? Bravo, you citizen of the world, you! So this place had him mend stockings for women in Me’a She’arim and those other neighborhoods. It was another one of Captain Longstocking’s start-ups, another way to make a few shekels on the side. I’m telling you, that man could’ve sold shoes to a fish!”

Feeble laughter. Dovaleh wipes the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. “Listen closely now. He used to bring stockings home every week to mend, piles of them, forty, fifty pairs each time, and he taught her how to darn them, that was another of his skills, he could fix ladders in nylons, can you believe it?”

He’s talking only to the short, broad-shouldered man now. With one hand he makes a pleading, supplicating gesture: Wait a sec, bro, you’ll get your joke hot out of the oven any minute now, it’s almost done. “He bought her a special needle with a little wooden handle thingy…Oh, man, it’s all coming back to me now, you brought it all back to me, I love you, you’re my hero! So she’d put the stocking over one hand, and she’d darn eye after eye in the ladder with that needle until there was no ladder left, and she’d do this for hours, sometimes all night, eye after eye—”

He’s hardly paused for a breath these last few minutes, racing to get to the finish line before the audience’s patience runs out. The room is quiet. Here and there a woman smiles, perhaps at a distant memory of those old-fashioned nylons. But no one laughs.

“Look how it’s all coming back…,” he murmurs apologetically.

A man’s voice grunts through the silence: “Listen, buddy, bottom line—are we gonna get any comedy here tonight or not?”

It’s the man with the shaved head and the yellow jacket. I had a feeling he’d be back. The other man, the one with the massive shoulder span, backs him up with a grunt. A couple of supportive voices chime in. A few others, mostly women, try to shush them, and the man in yellow says: “Seriously, people, we came for some laughs and this guy’s giving us a Holocaust memorial day. And he’s making jokes about the Holocaust!”

“You are absolutely right, my friend, and I do apologize. I’m gonna make it right for you. Now what was I thinking…Oh yeah, I have to tell you this one! A guy visits his grandma’s grave on the anniversary of her death. A few rows away he sees a man sitting next to a grave crying, shouting, ‘Why? Why? Why did you have to die? Why were you taken from me? What is my life worth now that you’re gone? O cursed death!’ Well, after a few minutes the grandson can’t resist and he goes over to the guy: ‘Excuse me for disturbing you, sir, but I’m really touched by your expression of sorrow. I’ve never seen such profound grief. Could I ask whom you are mourning? Was it your son? Your brother?’ The guy looks at him and goes, ‘Of course not—it’s my wife’s first husband.’ ”

Big laughs—decidedly exaggerated considering the joke—and here and there some forced applause. It’s heart-wrenching to see how eager people are to help him salvage the evening.

“But wait, there’s more! I’ve got enough stock to last till midnight!” he shrieks, and his eyes dart around. “Guy calls up someone who went to high school with him thirty years ago and says, ‘I have tickets for the cup final tomorrow, wanna go?’ The other guy’s surprised, but a free ticket doesn’t come along every day, so he says yes. They get to the match, they sit down, great seats, awesome atmosphere, they have fun, they yell, they curse, they do the wave, see some great moves. At halftime the friend says, ‘Listen, dude, I have to ask—didn’t you have anyone closer than me, like a relative, to give the ticket to?’ Other dude says, ‘No.’ ‘And you didn’t want to bring, I don’t know, your wife?’ ‘My wife’s dead,’ he says. Guy from high school goes, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Then what about one of your closer friends? Or someone from work?’ ‘Believe me, I tried,’ the guy says, ‘but they all said they’d rather go to her funeral.’ ”

The crowd laughs. Cheers fly over to the stage, but the guy with the big shoulders cups his hands over his mouth and booms: “Ixnay on the funerals already! Give us some life!” This rakes in quite a few cheers and claps, and as Dovaleh looks at the audience I can feel that for the past few minutes, even with all the jokes and the fireworks, he’s been absent. He is turning more and more inward, and he seems to be slowing down, and that’s not good, he could lose the crowd. He could lose the whole evening. And there’s no one to protect him.

“No more funerals. Got it, bro. You make a good point. I’m taking notes, learning on the job. Listen, Netanya, let’s lighten things up, yeah? But I still have to tell you something a little bit personal, some might say intimate, because I feel like we’ve really clicked. Yoav, can you just turn up the air? We can’t breathe in here!”

The audience claps enthusiastically.

“So here’s the deal. I was walking around town here before the show, checking out escape routes, like in case you decided to kick me off the stage”—he chuckles, but a weight hangs at the edge of the laugh, and everyone knows it—“and all of a sudden I see an old guy, maybe eighty, all dried up like a raisin, sitting on a street bench crying. An old man crying? How can I not go over? He might be in a will-changing mood. I walk up to him softly and ask, ‘Sir, why are you crying?’ ‘What else can I do?’ the old man answers. ‘A month ago, I met a thirty-year-old woman. She’s beautiful, adorable, sexy, and we fell in love and moved in together.’ ‘That’s awesome!’ I say. ‘So what’s the problem?’ Old guy says, ‘I’ll tell you. We start every day with two hours of wild sex, then she makes me some pomegranate juice for the iron, and I go to the doctor’s office. I come back, we have more wild sex, and she makes me a spinach quiche for the antioxidants. In the afternoon I play cards with the guys at the club, I come home, we have wild sex into the night, and this is how it goes, day after day…’ ‘Sounds fantastic!’ I tell him. ‘I’d like me some of that! But then why are you crying?’ Old guy thinks for a minute and says, ‘I can’t remember where I live.’ ”

The crowd erupts. He gauges it like a hiker testing the steadiness of a river rock, and even before the last cheers die down, he charges ahead: “Where were we? Drill sergeant…Cyborg…” He mimics the stiff gait again and flashes an ingratiating smile that knots up my stomach. “So the drill sergeant’s breathing down my neck: ‘Let’s go, gotta hurry, we can’t have you being late, God forbid, you can’t miss it.’ And I go, ‘Miss what, sir?’ And he looks at me like I’m retarded. ‘They’re not going to wait all day for you,’ he says, ‘you know what funerals are like, especially in Jerusalem with all their religious laws. Didn’t Ruchama tell you you have to be at Givat Shaul at four?’ ‘Who’s Ruchama?’ I sit on my cot staring at the sergeant. And I swear to you, I’ve never seen a drill sergeant from up close like that, except maybe in National Geographic magazine. And he says, ‘They called from your school to inform you, the principal himself called and said you have to be at the cemetery at four.’ And I still don’t understand what he’s telling me. All these words they keep saying to me, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time in my life. Why would the principal be talking about me? How does he even know who I am? What exactly did he say? And there’s another question I need to ask, but I’m too embarrassed, I don’t know how you ask something like that, especially when it’s the drill sergeant, a guy I really don’t know. So what comes out instead is that I ask why I have to pack my bag. He looks up at the tent roof like he’s totally given up on me. ‘Kiddo,’ he says, ‘don’t you get it yet? You’re not coming back here.’ I ask why. ‘Because the shiva,’ he says, ‘will only be over after your pals are done here.’