David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

After he puts down the chalk, he slowly and precisely circles around himself, eyes down, arms airplaned. Once, twice, three times, in the middle of the stage, a purification ritual of some kind. Then he flicks his eyes open like floodlights on a sports field: “But he’s stubborn, the driver! Won’t give up! He’s looking for me, I can feel it, looking for my eyes, my ears. But me—I’m in my own bunker. I don’t turn my head to him, don’t give him any way to edge in. And the whole time my teeth are knocking to the beat, along with the windowpane. Fu-ne-ral, fu-ne-ral, I’m-on-my-way-to-a-fu-ne-ral …’Cause listen, guys, I told you, I’d never in my life been to a single funeral up till then, and that is rattling me a fair bit, because how the hell do I know what it’s going to be like?”

He pauses to examine the crowd. His demanding look turns defiant. I think he may be deliberately provoking them, daring them to get up and leave, to walk out on him and his story.

“Or a dead man,” he adds softly. “Never seen that either. Or a dead woman.”

“But look, amigos,” he continues, seeming surprised that no one else has walked out, “let’s not get all heavy with this funeral business, okay? We’re not gonna let it bring us down. By the way, did you ever think there might be relatives who only meet at weddings and funerals, and so each of them is convinced all the others are manic-depressive?”

The crowd laughs judiciously.

“No, seriously, I was even thinking—you know how they have restaurant reviews and movie reviews in the paper? Well, I say, why not shiva reviews? They can get a critic to go to a different shiva every day and write up how it was, what was the atmosphere like, were there any juicy stories about the deceased, how the family behaved, if there was any fighting over the inheritance, and they’d rank the refreshments, and the class of mourners—”

Rolling laughter throughout the club.

“And if we’re already in that vein, did you hear the one about the woman who goes to a funeral home and wants to see her husband before they bury him? So the undertaker shows her the husband and she sees they’ve put him in a black suit. By the way, this is not one of our jokes,” he clarifies, holding a finger up, “it’s translated from Christianese. So the woman starts weeping: ‘My James would have wanted to be buried in a blue suit!’ The guy says, ‘Look, missus, we always bury them in black suits, but come back tomorrow and I’ll see what I can do.’ She comes back the next day and he shows her James in a gorgeous blue suit. The woman thanks him a thousand times and asks how he got hold of this great suit. Undertaker says, ‘You won’t believe this, but yesterday, not ten minutes after you left, another deceased came in, more or less your husband’s build, in a blue suit, and his wife says his dream was to be buried in a black suit.’ Well, James’s widow thanks the undertaker again, she’s really emotional, tears in her eyes. Gives him a huge tip. Undertaker says, ‘All I had to do was switch the heads.’ ”

The crowd laughs. The crowd is back. The crowd gloats at the hasty departure of the shaved-head man from such a fabulous evening. “Everyone knows,” says a woman at a nearby table, “that he’s slow to warm up.”

“So this whole drive is starting to get to me. My head’s on fire from all the thoughts, everything’s grinding, pounding, a whole mishmash inside my head, I’m so full of thoughts I can’t find the way into my own mind. You know that thing where all your thoughts go flying around in one big fustercluck without any order, like before you go to bed? Just before you fall asleep? Did I shut the stove off or didn’t I? I’m gonna have to get that cavity filled in my top molar. That chick rearranging her bra on the bus, she made my day. That son of a bitch Yoav said payment terms are net ninety. Who even knows if I’ll still be here in ninety days? Can a deaf cat catch a mute bird? Maybe it’s a good thing none of my kids look like me. What are they thinking, chopping down trees without an anesthetic? Is a Chevra Kadisha driver allowed to put a bumper sticker on his hearse saying ON MY WAY WITH ANOTHER SATISFIED CUSTOMER? And what the hell was he thinking pulling Benayoun off the field ten minutes before the match ended? Can the notice say ‘Dovaleh and Life Call It Quits’? I really shouldn’t have had that mousse…”

Laughter—awkward, confused, but laughter. The rattling air conditioner pulls a fragrance of freshly cut grass into the room. There’s no telling what planet it has come from. The smell is intoxicating. Memories of my little childhood house in Gedera wash over me.

“The driver says nothing. One minute, two minutes, how long can he go on? So he starts up again like we’re deep into conversation already. You know those characters who have no one to talk to? They’re lonely, outcast? Those guys, they’ll vacuum it out of you if they have to. I mean, you’re their last chance, after you it’s just those crosswalks that beep for the blind. Say you’re sitting at the doctor’s office at seven a.m. waiting for the nurse who draws blood?” The audience confirms its familiarity with the experience. “Now you’re not even awake yet, haven’t had your morning coffee, and you need at least three cups to even pry open your left eyelid, and all you really want is to be left alone to die in peace. But then the old guy next to you, with his fly open and his junk all out and the dark brown urine sample in his hand—by the way, have you ever noticed the way people walk around the clinic with their samples?”

People trade experiences, they’re completely thawed out now, longing to heal. The medium giggles, steals embarrassed looks around, and he glances at her and a light passes over his lips.

“No, seriously, be serious for a minute. There’s the ones who walk with their jar like this, right? The guy walks down the hallway on the way to the sample window. You’re sitting on the row of chairs along the wall and he doesn’t look in your direction. He’s considering the lilies. He keeps the hand holding the sample on the other side of his body, as low as possible, am I right?”

The crowd confirms with squeals of delight.

“Like he actually believes that this way you can’t even see that at the end of his hand he just happens to have a plastic jar, and the jar just happens to contain a piece of poop. Now zoom in on his face, yeah? It’s like he’s not even a party to this transaction, you know? He’s just the messenger. He’s actually a courier for the Mossad, and his hush-hush job is to transport biological cargo for R&D. I swear, those are the ones I like torturing best, especially if it’s someone from the biz, an actor or a director or a playwright, one of those shits I used to work with when I was still alive. So anyway I jump right up at him with both arms out for a hug: ‘Well hello, Mr. Bean!’ Of course he pretends he doesn’t remember me, has no clue where I’ve even turned up from. But what do I care? I’ve long ago forgotten if it’s my dignity I lost or my shame. So I turn up the volume: ‘Hola, amigo! What brings Your Honor to our humble clinic? Oh, incidentally, I read in the paper that you’re cooking up a new masterpiece for us. Great news! We’re all so curious to find out what you’ve produced! Your work is such a pleasure because it always comes from the inside, right? From the gut!”

People are sputtering now, wiping away tears, hands slapping thighs. Even the stage manager hiccups a few laughs. The tiny woman is the only one not laughing.

“Oh, come on, what is it now?” he asks her after the hoots die down.

“You’re embarrassing him,” she says, and he gives me a helpless look: What are we going to do about her? That’s when it hits me: Eurycleia.