David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

This human tempest continues for perhaps twenty seconds until he stops abruptly. His body, without moving, seems to pull back, avoiding itself in disgust. Then he shrugs his shoulders and turns to walk offstage through the door he entered from at the beginning of the evening. He marches like a paper cutout, knees lifted high, elbows slicing the air. On the third step he tramples his glasses. He doesn’t stop; his shoulders lift briefly, then plunge back down. His back is to us, but I can picture the sneer at having just crushed his glasses, and the hateful whisper: Putz.

He’s about to walk off and leave us with an unfinished story. One leg and half his body are already out the door. He stops. Half of him is still here. He tilts his face back to us just slightly, blinks expectantly, flashes a pleading grin. I straighten up quickly and laugh out loud. I am fully aware of how I sound, yet I laugh again. A few other voices join me, feeble and frightened, but they’re enough to bring him back.

He turns and skips back merrily, like a girl in a meadow, and on his way he leans down and picks up his crooked glasses with their shattered lenses and perches them on his nose, where they look like a percentage sign. Two threads of blood dribble down from his nostrils to his mouth and onto his shirt. “Now I really can’t see you at all.” He beams. “You’re nothing but black blurs to me. You could all walk out and I wouldn’t even know!”

As I guessed, and as he himself knew, and perhaps hoped, a group of four gets up and leaves, shock on their faces. Another three couples follow. They abandon the club hastily, without looking back. Dovaleh takes a step toward the blackboard, but then waves his hand in resignation.

“The road flies by!” he yells, tailing the deserters with his voice. “The driver’s so worked up, his whole face is one big tic, blinking all over his body, hitting the wheel: ‘Can’t you at least tell me if it’s Dad or Mom?’

“I sit there saying nothing. Nothing. We keep driving. Loads of potholes. I don’t even know where we are or how much farther we have to go. The window pummels my ear, sun burns my face. It’s hard to keep my eyes open. I shut the left one, then right, alternating. The world looks different every time I switch. Then there’s a moment when I gather up all the strength I don’t have and I say: ‘Don’t you know?’

“ ‘Me?’ poor Jokerman shouts, almost losing the wheel. ‘How the hell would I know?’

“ ‘You were in the room with them.’

“ ‘Not when they said…And after that they started fighting with me…’

“I start to breathe. The driver doesn’t know. At least he wasn’t keeping it from me. I glance at him sideways and he suddenly looks like an okay guy. Kind of screwed up but okay, and he was trying so hard to make me laugh, and maybe he’s also stressed out by this drive, and by me, I mean, he has no idea what I might be capable of—I have no idea myself.

“And I also start thinking that now I really do have to wait until Be’er Sheva. Whoever comes to pick me up there has to know. They must have told them. I wonder if I should ask how far it is to Be’er Sheva. I’m getting hungry, too. I haven’t had anything to eat since morning. I lean my head back and close my eyes. That lets me breathe a little, because suddenly I have more time: between now and when the Be’er Sheva people tell me, I can pretend nothing’s happened and everything is just like it was when I left home, and I’m just taking a ride in a military truck to Be’er Sheva with a driver who’s telling me jokes, because—why? Because that’s what I feel like doing. Because there happens to be a joke contest today at HQ that I’m dying to see.”

In the distance, from the industrial area outside the club, a siren wails. One of the waitresses sits down at an abandoned table and stares at Dovaleh. He gives her a weary smile: “Come on, look at you, dollface! What’s up with you all again? Yoav won’t pay me if you walk out of here looking like that. Why the long face? Did someone die? It’s only stand-up comedy! Admittedly, this gig came out a little alternative, with some old-time army stories. And it’s been donkey years since then—forty-three years, guys! There’s a statute of limitations, and that kid has not been with us for ages, God bless his soul, I’m totally rehabilitated from him. Come on, smile a little, show me some consideration for once. For my need to make a living. For the alimony I gotta pay. Where are those law students?” He tents his hand over his crooked glasses, but the group left ages ago. “Okay,” he grumbles, “never mind, maybe they had to get to a kangaroo court somewhere. By the way, do you know what ‘alimony’ means in Latin? The literal translation into Hebrew is ‘method of extracting a male’s testicle via his wallet.’ Good stuff, heh? Poetic. Yeah, yeah, you can laugh…Me, I’m crying…There are women whose pregnancies don’t take, but me, my marriages don’t take. I want them, but they don’t take. It’s the same story every time. I make promises, I make vows, then I start up with my crap again, and then it’s the usual mess, hearings, property distributions, visitation rights…Did you hear about the rabbit and the snake who fell into a dark pit together? You didn’t hear about that either? Where are you living, guys?! So the snake feels the rabbit up and says, ‘You have soft fur, long ears, and big front teeth—you’re a rabbit!’ The rabbit feels the snake up and says, ‘You have a long forked tongue, you slither, and you’re slippery—you’re a lawyer!’ ”

He cuts off our feeble laughter with one finger held up. “Here’s a question for you, a little Zen Dovism: If a man stands alone in the forest and there’s not a single person or living creature around him, is it still his fault?”

Women laugh, men snicker.

“The driver starts banging his hand on the wheel, and he yells: ‘What the hell! How could they not tell you? How didn’t they tell you?’ I don’t answer. ‘Fuckin’ A,’ he says and lights a cigarette, his hands trembling. He gives me a crooked sideways glance. ‘Want one?’ I pull one out of the pack like it’s nothing. He lights it for me. My first real cigarette. It’s a Time, the brand all the kids smoke. At camp the guys wouldn’t give me any. ‘You’re still a kid,’ they said. Passed it back and forth over my head. Even the girls passed it over me, and now the driver just lights it for me, and the lighter has a naked girl taking her clothes on and off. I inhale, I cough, it burns, it’s good. I hope it burns everything. Hope it burns the whole world up.

“So now we’re driving and smoking. Silently, like men. If Dad could see me, he’d slap me right there and then. So now it’s her turn, quickly, doesn’t matter what. Think of how her face looks when she gets off the Taas bus in the evening, like she’s spent the whole day working for the angel of death, every day she’s like that, never gets used to it, and only after she showers the smell of bullets off her body does she become human again. Then she sits in her armchair and I do my shows. ‘The daily show,’ we call it, and I plan it out every day on the way to school and during school and after school. It’s a special show just for her, with characters, and costumes, hats, scarves, clothes I nick from the neighbors’ laundry lines, stuff I find on the street—after all, I am my father’s son.

“And it’s dark all around us, but me and her, we don’t need light. The little red light from the hot-water switch is enough. She does best in the dark, that’s what she says, and her eyes really do get bigger in the dark, it’s unreal. Like two blue fishes in the faint red glow. When you see her on the street with her scarf and boots, head down, you don’t know how beautiful she is, but inside the house she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. I used to do comedy sketch routines by the Gashash, and Uri Zohar and Shaike Ofir, and impersonations of the Theater Club Quartet. I’d use a broomstick for a microphone and I’d sing to her: ‘That Means You’re Young,’ and ‘My Beloved of the White Neck,’ and ‘He Didn’t Know Her Name.’ A whole show, every evening, for years, day after day, and he didn’t know about it. He never caught us. Sometimes he’d come in a second after we finished, and he’d smell something, but he couldn’t figure out what it was, and he’d stand there shaking his head at us like an old teacher, but that was it, never more, he couldn’t even have imagined what she was like when she watched me.”