David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“What were we talking about, Netanya? What else do I remember? Oh, sure, I remember loads, I’m just now realizing how much I remember. Too much. Like after I finished pissing I did just like he taught me, ‘Shake once, shake twice,’ and then it occurred to me that he taught me quite a lot of things just incidentally, without making a big deal out of it, like how to fix a blind and drill holes in the wall and clean out a kerosene heater and unclog a drain and make fuse wires. And I also thought about how sometimes I had the feeling he was dying to talk to me about things, not just about soccer, which he didn’t really care about—I mean about other things between a father and son, like his childhood memories, that kind of stuff, or thoughts, or just to come over and give me a hug. But he didn’t know how to, or maybe he was embarrassed, or maybe he just felt like he’d left me with Mom too much and now it was hard to change, and then I realize I’m thinking about him again instead of her, and my head starts spinning with all that crap and I can barely climb back into the truck.

“Good evening, Netanya!” he roars as if he’s only just burst onto the stage, but his voice is tired and raspy. “Are you still with me? Do you by any chance remember—who’s old enough in here to remember? When we were kids we had this toy, the View-Master? It was this little thing with slides, where you’d press down and the pictures would switch. That was from back in the golden age of cellulite,” he quips, “that’s how we saw Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots…”

Only two members of the audience smile—the tall silver-haired woman and me. Our eyes meet for a moment. She has a delicate face and thin-framed glasses.

“So that’s how you can see me now. Me and the driver in the truck, click. Around us the desert, click. Every so often a military vehicle comes toward us and then there’s that zoom when you pass each other, click. ”

A group of five young men and women sitting close to the stage look at one another, get up, and leave. They don’t say a word. I don’t know why they stayed this long, or what made them leave at this particular moment. Dovaleh walks over to the blackboard and stands there. I sense that this abandonment is more hurtful to him than the others. Shoulders hunched, he slams the chalk down on the board: line, line, line, line, line.

But then right at the exit door, one of the women stops, the one without a boyfriend, and despite her friends’ cajoling, she says goodbye to them and sits down at an empty table. The manager signals for the waitress to go over to her. She asks for a glass of water. Dovaleh lopes back to the board like a camel—a flicker of Groucho Marx—and makes a big show of erasing one of the lines. As he does so he turns his head back and gives her a big openmouthed grin.

“And all of a sudden, without thinking, I say to the driver: ‘Tell me a joke.’ And his whole body folds over like I’ve punched him. ‘Are you a sicko? A joke, now?’ ‘What do you care? Just one joke,’ I reply. ‘No, no, I can’t do it now.’ ‘Then how come you could before?’ ‘Before I didn’t know. Now I know.’ He doesn’t even turn his head. Afraid to look at me. Like he’s scared he’ll get infected. ‘Forget it,’ he says, ‘my head’s exploding enough already from what you told me.’ ‘Do me a favor,’ I say, ‘just one joke about a blonde. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s just you and me in the car, no one will know.’ But he goes, ‘No, swear to God, I can’t do it.’

“Well, if he can’t do it, he can’t do it. So I leave him alone. Put my head on the window and try wiping my brain out all the way, drrrr, no thinking, no being, no nothing, no she, no he, no orphan. Yeah, right. The second I shut my eyes my dad jumps on me, he’s turned into a commando now, doesn’t even wait a second. On Fridays, when Mom works the morning shift, he wakes me up early and we go out to the garden. I told you this, right? I didn’t? It was just ours, that garden, behind the building, tiny—maybe three by three. All our vegetables came from there. And we sit there wrapped in a blanket, him with his coffee and cigarette and his black stubble, me half asleep, kind of almost leaning on him as if I didn’t realize it, and he dips biscuits in the coffee and feeds them to me, and it’s completely silent around us. The whole building is asleep upstairs, no one’s moving in the apartments, and the two of us barely say anything.”

He holds one finger up so we can hear the silence.

“At that time of the morning, he doesn’t have the zzzzap in his body, so we look at the dawn birds and the butterflies and beetles. We throw biscuit crumbs for the birds. He can make birdcalls where you can’t believe it’s a human being whistling.

“Suddenly I hear the driver talking. ‘There’s a shipwreck, and only one person manages to jump off and swim. He swims, he splutters, he swims. Finally, when he’s totally worn out, he drags himself onto an island, and sees that he’s not alone: a dog and a goat managed to swim over, too.’

“I half open my eyes. The driver talks without moving his lips, you can barely understand him.

“ ‘A week goes by, two weeks, the island’s empty, no people, no animals, just the guy and the goat and the dog.’

“It sounds like the driver’s telling a joke, but it’s not a joke voice. He talks like his whole mouth is a pulled muscle.

“ ‘After a month the guy’s horny as all heck. Looks to the right, looks to the left, not a female in sight, only the goat. After another week, the guy can’t take it anymore, he’s gonna burst.’

“And I start thinking: Pay attention, this driver is telling you a dirty joke. What the hell is going on? I open another half eye. Jokerman’s got his whole body hunched over the wheel, his face is stuck to the windshield, dead serious. I shut my eyes. There’s something here that I need to understand, but who has the strength to understand, so I just draw a picture in my mind of the island with the guy and the goat and the dog, planting a nice palm tree, cracking open a coconut, hanging up a hammock. Deck chair. Beach ball.

“ ‘Another week goes by and the guy can’t take it anymore. So he goes over to the goat and pulls his junk out, but suddenly the dog gets up and goes, Grrrrr! Like he’s saying: Watch it, brother, don’t touch the goat! Well, the guy gets scared, packs it up, and thinks: At night the dog’ll go to sleep and I’ll make my move. It’s night, the dog’s snoring, the dude quietly crawls over to the goat. He’s just getting on her when the dog pounces like a panther, barks like crazy, his eyes are like blood, teeth like knives. So the poor guy—what choice does he have? Crawls back to sleep with blue balls up to his eyelids.’ ”

Dovaleh talks and I look around at the people. At the women. I glance at the tall woman. Her short-cropped hair is like a halo around her lovely, sculpted head. Three years. Since Tamara got sick. Total apathy. I wonder if women are somehow able to sense what’s happening to me, and if that’s the reason it’s been so long since I’ve picked up any sort of sign from a single one of them.

“You gotta understand that I’ve never heard anyone tell a joke that way in my life. He squeezes out every word like if God forbid he skips a single syllable they’ll disqualify his entry and revoke his joke-telling license for the rest of his life.”

Dovaleh imitates the driver down to the finest detail, his whole body hovering in front of us as he folds over an invisible wheel. “ ‘And it goes on like that another day, another day, a week, a month. Every time the guy gets anywhere near the goat, the dog jumps up: Grrrr! ’ ”