David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

The crowd is silent. One woman holds up a hesitant hand like a pupil in class, then puts it back in her lap. At a nearby table a man gives his wife a confused look, and she shrugs her shoulders.

The man in the yellow jacket is approaching his boiling point. Dovaleh senses it and glances at him nervously. I call the waitress to clear my table—immediately. Can’t stand to look at these empty little dishes. I can’t believe I ate so much.

“So bottom line, we drive. Driver doesn’t talk. I don’t even know his name. Thin guy, kind of hunched, with a huge nose and giant ears and a face full of acne all the way to his neck. Loads more zits than I have. Neither of us talks. He’s got it in for me because they screwed him with this trip, and I’m certainly not saying anything—what can I say? It’s over a hundred degrees and I’m drenched in sweat. The driver turns the radio on, but there’s no reception, just noise, static, nothing but Martian stations.” Here he does a perfect imitation of poorly received stations rapidly switching, a gibberish of sentence fragments and snatches of songs: “Jerusalem of Gold,” “Johnny Is the Goy for Me,” “Itbah al-Yahud,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Even when the cannons roar our desire for peace shall never die!” “I wish they all could be California girls…” “Merci stockings—try them today!” “The Temple Mount is in our hands!”

Delighted laughter. Dovaleh drinks from his flask and looks at me as if he’s wondering what I think about the story so far, or maybe about the whole show. With a stupid, cowardly reflex, I shut my face off, erase my expression, and look away. He recoils as though I’d struck him.

—

Why did I do that? Why did I withhold my support at that moment? I wish I knew. I understand so little of myself, and in recent years less and less. When there’s no one to talk to, when there’s no Tamara probing, insisting, my inner channels get clogged up. I remember how furious she was after she came to court to watch me preside over a case of an abusive father. “You had no expression at all on your face!” she fumed afterward, at home. “The poor girl was pouring her heart out, she looked at you with pleading eyes, just waiting for you to show her a sign, any little sign of support, of understanding, one look to show her that your heart was with her, and you—”

I explained that it was precisely that face that I needed to show in court: even if inside I was exploding, I could not so much as hint at my feelings, because I had not yet made up my mind. And, I explained, that very stone face I gave the girl I later gave her father when he offered his version. “Justice must be visible,” I insisted, “and I promise you that all my empathy for the girl will be expressed in my verdict.” “But by then,” Tamara said, “it’ll be too late for what she needed when she talked to you in those horrible moments.” And she gave me a look I’d never seen from her before.

—

“But here’s the deal, Netanya,” he says, trying to sound cheerful, clearly attempting to get past my offense, and I can barely contain my own anger at myself. “Ah, Netanya!” He sighs. “Halcyon city! I just love sharing things with you. Where were we? Right. The driver. So I’m starting to sense that he’s feeling a little bad about how he treated me, and he’s trying to get a conversation going. Or maybe he’s just bored, and hot, and the flies. But me—what the hell do I have to talk with him about? And also, I don’t know if he knows. If they told him about me. If when he was in the room with the commander and the sergeant, they told him. And let’s say he does know, right? I still don’t know how to ask him. Besides, I’m not even sure I can stand being told, and me all alone to boot, without Mom and Dad—”

Now it bursts out. The shaved-head man in the yellow jacket pounds the table with an open hand, once, twice, slowly, his eyes fixed on Dovaleh and his face expressionless. Within seconds the club ossifies, and the only thing moving is that arm. Pound. Pause. Pound.

An eternity passes.

Very slowly, from the edges of the room, a tentative murmur of protest arises. But he persists: Pound. Pause. Pound. The stubby man with the broad shoulders joins in with his fist clenched, almost cracking the table with his slow punches. The blood rushes to my head. There they are. Those types.

They encourage each other with silent looks. That’s all they need. The murmur around them crescendos into a commotion. A few tables support them enthusiastically, some protest, most are wary of expressing any opinion. A thin smell of sweat permeates the air in the basement space. Even the perfumes smell acrid. The club manager stands there helplessly.

Intertable arguments spring up: “But he is putting jokes in, all the time!” one woman insists. “I’ve been keeping track, I’m telling you!” “And anyway, stand-up isn’t just about jokes,” another woman backs her up, “sometimes it’s also funny stories from life.” “Okay, I can live with stories, but his stories have no point!” a man my age yells while an artificially tanned woman leans on him.

Dovaleh turns to look at me with his whole body.

At first I don’t know what he wants. He stands on the edge of the stage ignoring the tempest, looking at me. He’s still hoping I’ll do something for him. But what can I do? What can be done against these people?

Then comes the thought of what I used to be able to do; of the powers I had in the face of such people. The authority I could wield with a wave of the hand, with a few words. The regal feeling, which I was forbidden to confess to, even in private.

The noise and shouts escalate. Almost everyone is involved in the commotion now, and there is the gleeful anticipation of a fight in the air. Still he stands there looking at me. He needs me.

It’s been a long time since someone needed me. It’s hard to describe the magnitude of the surprise that floods me. And the panic. I have a coughing attack, then I push the table away from me, stand up, and still have no idea what I’m going to do. I might simply walk out—what am I even doing in this thuggish place? I should have left an hour ago. But those two are pounding the tables, and there’s Dovaleh, and I hear myself shout: “Let him tell his story already!”

Everyone falls silent and looks at me with a mixture of horror and dread, and I realize I’ve shouted much louder than I meant to.

I stand there. Stuck. Like an actor in a melodrama waiting for someone to whisper his lines. But no one does. And there are no bouncers in this club to separate me from the crowd, no panic button under the table, and this is not the world in which I used to relish walking down the street as a commoner, knowing that in a few moments I would be a fate sealer.

I am breathing too fast but cannot control it. Eyes glare at me. I know my appearance is a little misleading—sometimes the prominent, lumpy forehead does the job just as well as the heft—but I’m not such a hero that I can stand behind my outburst if things really get dicey.

“Let him tell his story,” I repeat, this time slowly, emphatically, pressing each word into the air, and I move into a sort of head-butting stance. I know I look ridiculous, but I keep standing there, remembering what it feels like to fill my being to its brink. To be.

The man in yellow turns to look at me. “No problem, Your Honor, no disrespect, I’m with you, but I would like him to tell me what all this bullshit has to do with the two hundred forty shekels I threw away here this evening. Isn’t this some sort of misdemeanor, Your Honor? Aren’t you getting a whiff of false advertising?”

Dovaleh, whose eyes are shining at me with the gratitude a boy might feel toward an older brother coming to his defense, leaps in: “It is one hundred percent connected, my friend, it absolutely is! And now is when it gets most connected, I swear. Up to now it was just foreplay, you get me?” He gives the protester an ill-conceived man-to-man grin that makes him look away as though he’d seen an open wound. “Listen carefully, my friend: So I put my head against the window, and it’s an army-issue window, which bottom line means you can’t close it all the way, but you also can’t open it all the way, and the glass is just stuck there in the middle and it shudders, but I’m actually digging that, because it doesn’t just shudder, it goes apeshit! D-d-d-d-d-d! Horrible noise, I mean, a jackhammer drilling a fucking brick wall doesn’t make that kind of noise, so naturally I put my head on it, and within seconds it starts scrambling my brain— d-d-d-d-d! I’m in a blender! An air compressor! D-d-d-d-d-d! D-d-d-d-d! ”