David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

I’ve been trying to remember the name since the minute it turned out the little lady knew him from childhood, and that she was tilting the direction of the whole evening. Eurycleia. Odysseus’s elderly nanny, who bathed his feet when he returned from his voyage disguised as a beggar. She was the one who saw his childhood scar and recognized him.

I write the name on a napkin in block letters. For some reason this little remembrance makes me happy. And immediately I ask myself what I can give him here. What can I be for him?

I order another shot of tequila. I haven’t drunk like this for years, and I have a yen for stuffed vegetables. And olives. A few minutes ago I didn’t think I could put anything else in my mouth, but it turns out I was wrong. The blood is suddenly pumping through my veins. It’s good that I came, really, it’s good, and even better that I stayed.

“And then, after a few miles…Are you with me?” He pokes his face out at us as if through the window of a driving car, and we, meaning the audience, laugh and confirm that yes, we’re with him, even though a few people around here seem surprised to find it so.

“Suddenly the driver goes, ‘Hey, kid, I don’t know if you’re in the mood for this now, but next month I’m representing our command in an IDF-wide contest.’

“I don’t answer. What am I supposed to say? At most I kind of grunt a hmmm under the mustache I don’t have. But a few seconds later I feel a bit sorry for him, I don’t know, maybe ’cause he looks so needy, so I ask him if it’s a driving contest.

“ ‘Driving?’ he exclaims. Then he rolls around laughing, baring his buckteeth: ‘Me, in a driving contest?! I’ve got seventy-three citations, dude! I spent six months inside, added on to my service. Get out of here…Driving! I’m talking about a joke contest.’

“And I go, ‘What?!’ Because I swear I thought I hadn’t heard right. And he says: ‘Jokes, where you tell jokes, they do a competition every year, with the whole army.’

“Honestly, I was kind of in shock. Where the hell did he come up with that all of a sudden? And all this time I’m sitting there expecting that any minute he’s going to tell me. You know? That he’ll realize what’s going on and he’ll tell me. And now he comes out with this business about jokes?

“So we’re driving. Not talking. Maybe he’s hurt that I’m not taking an interest, but really, I’m not in the mood. And now I also start to notice what a terrible driver he is, how he’s veering all over the place, onto the shoulders, into every pothole. Then I get the thought that my mother, if she was here, would probably tell me to wish him luck in the contest. I practically can’t breathe from that thought. I hear her voice, the music of her speech. I can actually feel her breath on my ear, and I say, ‘Best of luck with that.’

“ ‘There was maybe twenty guys in the tryouts,’ he says, ‘from all the bases, the whole Southern Command, and three of us made it to the finals, and then it was just me left to represent the command.’

“ ‘But how did they test you?’ I ask. Just for her, I ask, because what the fuck do I care how they tested them, but I know she’d feel sorry for him because of the teeth and the zits and the whole way he looks.

“ ‘They just did,’ he says. ‘I don’t know, you know, we came into this room with a desk and we told them jokes. By topic.’

“So now here’s the deal: I can tell the driver’s talking with me, but he’s somewhere else. His forehead is wrinkled and he’s got the chain from his dog tags between his teeth, and I’m getting ready for this maybe being a red herring, this whole contest story. Maybe now, when I’ve let my guard down, he’s suddenly going to stick me with it. Like a knife it’ll come.

“ ‘There was this one judge there, a reporter for Bamahaneh, ’ he goes on, ‘and one guy from the Gashash was there, too—it was Shaike, the big one who always laughs. And there were two other comedians for judges, too, I don’t know who they were. They throw us a topic and we do a joke.’

“ ‘Yeah, sure,’ I go. I can tell by his voice that he’s lying, and I’m waiting for him to finish up his crap and tell me already.

“ ‘So like they say: Blondes! And you have thirty seconds to deliver.’

“ ‘Blondes’?”

Dovaleh stares into space again, his reliable trick. His eyelids are halfway down, and his face is frozen in bewilderment at the corrupt nature of man. The more he does it, the louder the audience laughs, but the laughter is hesitant again, unraveling. I sense a slight despair rippling through the audience as people realize that the man onstage is going to insist on his story after all.

“Meanwhile, the truck’s dancing all over the road, and I know that means Jokerman is thinking, forgetting himself. Good thing the road is practically empty, there’s barely another car every fifteen minutes. With my right hand I look for the door handle, feel its spring, squeeze it back and forth. I start getting a thought.

“ ‘Look, kid,’ the driver goes, ‘you’re not in the mood for jokes now, but if you do feel like it…Maybe it could, I don’t know, make you feel better?’

“Better how? I think, and my head almost explodes.

“ ‘Look, just give me a topic,’ he says. He puts both hands straight on the wheel, and I can tell he’s not kidding. His whole face changes in an instant, and his ears are burning red. ‘Throw out anything you want, doesn’t have to be what we said, could be anything: mothers-in-law, politics, Moroccans, lawyers, fags, animals.’

“Now you have to understand, my friends—look, just focus on me for a minute—I’m stuck there for a few hours with an insane driver who’s taking me to a funeral and is about to tell me jokes. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in that situation…” A woman’s voice off to my left whispers, “We’ve been in that situation for an hour and a half.” Fortunately, Dovaleh doesn’t hear her or the muffled guffaws in response.

“For the first time,” he says very quietly, almost to himself, “for the first time I start to feel what it would be like to be an orphan, with no one watching out for me.

“So we’re still driving. The vehicle is an oven. Sweat drips into my eyes. Be nice to him, my mom says in my ear again. Remember that every person only lives for a short time, and you have to make that time pleasant for him. I hear her and my brain goes crazy on me with pictures of her, pictures from my memories of her, and real photos, too, of her and of him, although more him than her, ’cause she almost never agrees to have her picture taken, she screams if he so much as points a camera at her. My brain is pouring out pictures I didn’t even remember I remembered, pictures from when I was a baby, from my first six months, when I was alone with him. He used to take me everywhere. He sewed this little fabric sack thing, which was looped around his neck, there’s a picture where you see him shaving a client with me hanging on his body in the sack, peeking out with one eye under his face. She wasn’t with us then, I told you, she was here and there, she was at a convalescent home, that was what the official press release said.” He tugs at the skin under his eye with one finger. “Here and there around the cuckoo’s nest. Here and there at the vein tailor. But where were we, Netanya, where were we…

“Never mind, don’t strain yourselves. Suddenly all at once I got really cold in that car. Even though we were in the middle of a hamsin, I got cold all over my body. I started really shaking, teeth chattering, and the driver gives me a look and I’m convinced a thousand percent that he’s thinking: Should I tell him already? Shouldn’t I? Should I tell him now, or play with him a little longer? And then I got even more stressed out, because what if he really does tell me? What if he tells me right there in the car when I’m alone with him? So I quickly tried to think about other things, anything to not hear him, but what came to me was something I’d never thought before, as if my brain was in on the plot against me, throwing out ideas and questions, like whether you can cut the same exact place again, and how did it happen to her anyway, and what did it happen with, and was she alone at home when it happened. And the thoughts kept flooding in. Like, did he come home early from the barbershop while I was away at camp and, if not, then who picked her up from the shuttle? Who could pick her up like I did? And how did I forget to ask him about that before I went to Be’er Ora, and how did they get along on their own while I was gone?