David Grossman: A Horse Walks Into a Bar

He leans forward and bends like he’s rounding his body over the story.

“And I start feeling like maybe it’s wrong that I’m thinking about her for so long without a break, but on the other hand I don’t want to stop in the middle, I’m afraid to weaken her. She’s very weak as it is. His turn will come soon. There has to be justice. Equal time, down to the second. She used to sit with her feet on the little ottoman, with a white robe and a white towel twisted around her head. Like a princess, she looked. Like Grace Kelly.” He turns to face us and his voice suddenly sounds different: the clear voice of a man simply talking to us. “Look, maybe it was only an hour a day, total, the time I had with her alone, until he came home. Maybe even less than an hour, maybe fifteen minutes, I don’t know, when you’re a kid time passes differently. But those were my best moments with her, so maybe I inflated them a little…” He chuckles. “I used to do all kinds of routines for her: ‘The food here is terrible, and the portions are so small!’ ‘I shot a moose once.’ And all the Israeli classics, too. She’d sit there with her cigarette like this, with her smile that’s half on you, half behind your head, and I don’t even know what she could understand from all my Hebrew and the accents and the slang, she probably missed a lot of it, but every single evening, for three or four years, maybe five, she would sit there and watch me, smiling, no one else but me saw her smile like that, I guarantee you, until suddenly she’d get sick of it all at once, in midword, didn’t matter where I was, I could be at the tip of the point of the punch line and I’d see it coming, I was an expert, her eyes would start escaping inward, her lips would tremble, her mouth moved sideways, so I’d rush to the punch line, try to round the corner, I’d sprint, but I could see her face close off right in front of my eyes, and that was it. The end. Nothing. I’m still standing there with the scarves on my head, holding a broom, feeling like a total idiot, a jester, and she’s flinging the towel off her head and putting out the cigarette. ‘What will become of you!’ she’d yell. ‘Go do your homework, go out and play with your friends…’ ”

It takes him three rotations around the stage to get his breath back, and during the lull I find myself wallowing in pain from a different place. If only I had a child from her, I think for the thousandth time. But this time it stabs me somewhere new, in an organ I never knew I had. If only I had a child who would remind me of her in some small way—in the curve of her cheek, in a single movement of her mouth. That’s all. I swear, I wouldn’t need anything more.

“Anyhoo, where were we?” he shouts hoarsely. “Where was I? Let’s go, nose to the grindstone, Dovaleh. We covered Be’er Ora, driver, cigarette, Mom, Dad…So we’re driving fast, the speedometer’s at seventy-five, eighty miles an hour, the chassis is starting to vibrate, but the driver won’t stop banging his fist on the wheel and shaking his head. Only time I’ve seen one of those bobbleheads driving instead of sitting on the dashboard. Every few seconds he gives me a twisted look, like I’m…like I have some, I don’t know, some disease…

“But me, nothing. Smoking. I take deep drags, burning my brains real good, all my thoughts. But on the other hand, if I smoke I can think about them without really thinking, because she smokes, too, and he does, she in the evening, he in the morning, and just from that thought the smoke from both of them blends together and my head fills with smoke, like there’s a fire in there, and I flick the cigarette out the window and I can’t breathe—I can’t breathe.”

He walks distractedly all over the stage, fanning his face. There are moments when I think he’s drawing strength from the story. Yet a second later I feel the story sucking all the vitality out of him. I’m not sure if it’s connected, but perhaps because of the way he moves with the story, something emerges in me, an idea: maybe I’ll write down for him, briefly, in bullet points, a description of this evening. I’ll just sit at home with my scribbled napkins and try to write down what happened here in an organized way.

For him to have. A souvenir.

“And suddenly he stops the truck, Jokerman. But not like delicately sliding over—no, he screeches the brakes like a bank robber!” He demonstrates, lurching forward and slamming back, his mouth gaping: “Steve McQueen in Bullitt ! Bonnie and Clyde! Onto the shoulder—no, wait, there’s no shoulder! This is forty-three years ago, they’d barely invented roads, people still clapped when they saw a car crash, asked for encores! Boom! The truck jolts, the two of us bounce up and bang our heads on this kind of canvas roof with a metal frame, we shout, our teeth are castanets, mouths full of sand, and when the truck finally comes to a stop he slams his head on the horn—just rams into it with his forehead. I’m telling you, maybe thirty seconds he sat there like that, ripped a hole through the desert. Then he lifts his head up and pounds one fist on the wheel so hard I’m afraid he’s going to shatter it, and he goes: ‘What do you say we go back?’

“ ‘What do you mean, back? I gotta get to Jerusalem.’

“ ‘But it’s not right that you don’t…,’ he starts stammering. ‘It’s against the…I don’t know, it’s against God even, or like the Torah. It’s wrong, I can’t keep driving like this, it’s making me feel bad, for real, it’s making me sick…’

“ ‘Keep driving,’ I tell him like my voice has already changed. ‘They’ll tell us in Be’er Sheva.’

“ ‘Fuck they will!’ He spits out the window. ‘Those shits, I got their number already. Bunch of pussies. Each one’s gonna try and make the other guy tell you.’

“Then he gets out to take a piss. I sit in the truck. Alone, suddenly. It’s the first moment I’ve been like that, with just myself, since the sergeant woman left me in front of the commander’s barracks. And immediately I can see—it’s not good for me, being alone. It crowds in on me. I open the door and jump down to pee on the other side of the truck. I stand there peeing and a second later he jumps into my head, my father, shoves himself in there, he does that more than she does—what does that mean and why is she growing weaker on me? I force her back in, but he comes with her, trailing her, won’t leave me alone with her for a second. What the fuck. I think about her hard, I want to see her the good way, but what do I get instead? I see the way she goes white when the radio says Israeli soldiers killed a terrorist, or there was an exchange of fire and a whole unit was wiped out by our forces. When she hears that, she gets up quickly and goes into the bathroom. Even if she already washed before that, she goes in and starts all over again, stays there maybe an hour, scrubbing the skin off her hands, using up all the hot water, and Dad gets annoyed and paces the hallway, fuming— Psssh! Psssh! At the hot water and at how she doesn’t support our army. But when she comes out he doesn’t say a word. Not a word. There, I’ve thought about him again, he won’t let me be alone with her for a second.”

He wanders around the stage. I think his feet are faltering slightly. The copper urn behind him imbibes and spits out his reflection over and over again feverishly.

“My mind is racing: what’s going to happen, how will things work out, what’ll happen to me, who’ll take care of me. Just as an example, you know, when I was about five he started teaching me soccer, I told you, not how to play, you must be kidding, he wasn’t interested in playing, but he taught me the facts, the rules, and results from the World Cup and the Israel Cup and tournaments and names of players in the national league, and then the teams from England and Brazil and Argentina, and Hungary, obviously, and the whole world, except Germany, of course, and except Spain because of the Expulsion, which he still hadn’t entirely forgiven them for. Sometimes when I’m doing my homework and he’s sawing his schmattes, he suddenly shoots at me: ‘France! Mondial ’58!’ And I shoot back: ‘Fontaine! Jonquet! Roger Marche!’ Then he says: ‘Sweden!’ And I say: ‘What year?’ And he goes: ‘Also 1958!’ So I say: ‘Liedholm! Simonsson!’ It was good times with him. Just so you know, the guy never went to a soccer match in his life. Thought it was a waste of time: Why do they have to play for ninety minutes? Why not twenty? Why not stop at the first goal? But he got it in his mind that I was small and weak, and that if I knew a lot about soccer the boys would respect me and protect me and not beat me up too much. That’s how his mind worked, always an ulterior motive, a trick up his sleeve, you never knew exactly where you stood with him—is he for you? Against you? And I think that’s how he brought me up, too, to believe that ultimately everyone watches out for himself. That was his mantra in life, the essence of the legacy passed down by Daddy-o to his tender son.