David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“Oh, great, so now the plan includes sitting shiva, too? They really thought of everything, didn’t they? Except they forgot to let me in on the plans. And while I’m listening to this information, all I can think is that I’m dying to sleep. Yawning all the time. Right in the sergeant’s face. I can’t control it. I clear some room for myself on the bed among all the stuff and I lie down and close my eyes and wipe out.”

He shuts his eyes and stands there motionless. With his eyes closed, oddly, his face looks more lucid and expressive, somehow more spiritual even. He fingers the hem of his shirt absentmindedly. My heart goes out to him, until he opens his mouth:

“You know those army cots, the ones that fold in on you in the middle of the night and swallow you up like a carnivorous plant? Your friends turn up in the morning and there’s no Dovaleh, no nothing, just your glasses and maybe a shoelace, and the bed is licking its lips and belching?”

A few giggles here and there. The audience isn’t sure it’s allowed to laugh at such a time. Only the two kids in leather give a long but soft belly laugh, a strange purr that scatters disquiet around the tables nearby. I look at them and think about how for twenty years, every single day, I soaked up radiation from people like them, until there came a moment, after Tamara, without Tamara, when I guess I couldn’t take it anymore and I started spewing it back out.

“Drill sergeant goes, ‘Get up! What the hell are you doing lying down?’ So I get up and wait. Like the second he leaves, I’m going back to sleep. Not for long, just until it all passes and we forget the whole thing and go back to the way it was before all this crap.

“And now he’s getting annoyed at me, but carefully annoyed. ‘Move,’ he goes, ‘stand here, let me pack up your stuff.’ I don’t get it. The sergeant is going to pack my stuff for me? That’s like…I don’t know…like Saddam Hussein comes up to you in a restaurant and says, ‘Might I interest you in some caramelized forest-berry soufflé I just whipped up?’ ”

He stops and waits for a response that is slow to come. He quickly diagnoses the audience’s quagmire: his story has annihilated the possibility of laughter. I can see how his thought process works. He quickly redraws the playing field, gives us permission: “Did you hear the one about the woman with a terminal illness, the name of which shall go unmentioned so as not to give it any subliminal advertising?” He cheerfully opens his arms for a big hug. “Anyway, the woman says to her husband, ‘I dreamed that if we have anal sex, I’ll get better.’ You don’t know this one? Are you living under a rock? Okay, listen. So the husband, he thinks this sounds a little weird, but a guy’ll do anything to make his wife better, right? So they get into bed that night, they do it doggy-style, and they fall asleep. In the morning the husband wakes up, reaches out to her side of the bed—it’s empty! He jumps up, convinced this is the end, but then he hears her singing in the kitchen. He runs in and finds his wife standing there making a salad, all smiles. She looks fantastic. ‘You won’t believe this,’ she says, ‘I slept great, woke up early, felt incredible, so I went to the hospital, they ran some tests, did a couple of X-rays, and they said I’m cured! I’m a medical miracle!’ The husband hears this and bursts into tears. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asks. ‘Aren’t you happy I’m better?’ ‘Of course I am,’ he says, sobbing, ‘but I can’t help thinking I could have saved Mom, too!’ ”

Some turn up their noses, but most like it. I do, too. It’s a good joke, there’s no getting around it. I hope I’ll be able to remember it. Dovaleh does a quick scan. “Good move,” he tells himself out loud, “you still have it after all, Dovi.” He pats his chest with his fingers spread wide, a gesture only slightly different from the earlier blows.

“So I stand up and the sergeant attacks my backpack. He picks up all the crap that’s scattered on the bed, and under the bed, he charges in like he’s storming a house in the occupied territories. Bam! Shoves it all in, crams the bag full without any order, no form, no thought, what’s Dad going to say when I come home with the backpack in this state? And the minute I think about that, my knees buckle and I fall onto a different cot.”

He shrugs his shoulders. Smiles weakly. I think he’s having trouble breathing.

“Okay, let’s get this show on the road, mustn’t irritate the audience, we’re instant-gratification kind of people, chop-chop! So I pick up the backpack and run after the drill sergeant, and from the corner of my eye I can see my friends on the quad looking at me like they already know something, like maybe they saw the eagles flying north: Amigos! ” He acts out the eagles’ cries in a heavy Russian accent. “There’s fresh blood in Jerusalem!”

—

I saw him follow the drill sergeant, his small body hunched under the weight of the backpack. I remember that we all turned to look at him, and it occurred to me that apart from the backpack he looked just the way he did when we said goodbye at the bus stop and he dragged himself begrudgingly to his neighborhood.

One of his classmates threw out some joke about him, but this time nobody laughed. We didn’t know why they’d come to take him to the commander, and I don’t know if by the time we finished the camp any of his classmates had found out what had happened or where they’d taken him. None of the commanders told us anything, and we didn’t ask. Or at least I didn’t. All I knew was that a soldier had come to get him, he’d gotten up and followed her, and a few minutes later I’d seen him trail the drill sergeant all the way to a waiting pickup truck. Those were the facts before me that day. The next time I saw him was when he walked onstage this evening.

—

“And the driver’s going pedal to the metal in neutral, all his pissed-off energy is concentrated in his foot, and he looks at me like he wants to kill me. I climb up, toss my bag in the back, and sit in the front next to him, and the drill sergeant says to him: ‘You see this nice boy? You’re not letting go of his hand until you get him to the Central Bus Station in Be’er Sheva and someone from HQ comes to take him from your hand to Jerusalem. Capeesh? ’ And the driver goes: ‘I swear on the Bible, Sarge, if they’re not there when I get there, I’m leaving him at lost and found.’ The sergeant pinches the driver’s cheek hard and grins right in his face: ‘Listen, Tripoli, don’t forget what I have on you, eh? You leave this kid there—I’ll leave my foot in your ass. If you don’t deliver him personally into the palm of their hand, that’s an unreturned equipment rap for you. Now go!’

“And me, just so you understand, all this is like I’m watching a movie with me in it. There I am sitting in an army truck, and there are two people I don’t know, both soldiers, talking about me, but in a language I don’t fully understand, and there’s no closed captions. And I keep wanting to ask the drill sergeant something, I really urgently need to ask him before we go, and I’m just waiting for him to stop talking for a second, but when he stops I can’t do it, the words don’t come out, they won’t join together, I’m scared shitless of them—those two little words.

“Then he looks at me and I think, Okay, now he’s going to tell me, here it comes. I’m preparing myself, my whole body slams shut. And he puts his hand on my head like a yarmulke and says, ‘May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.’ Then he slaps his hand on the side of the pickup the way you slap a horse to make it gallop, and the driver says, ‘Amen,’ and puts his foot on the gas, and we’re off.”