David Grossman: A Horse Walks Into a Bar

Smiles here and there. The little woman giggles and puts her hand over her mouth. “Grrrrr!” Dovaleh growls again, only to her, a variation on the drrrrr from before. She loves it. Her laughter rolls out like he’s tickled her. He looks at her tenderly.

“ ‘One day, the guy’s sitting there looking out at the sea in despair, when suddenly he sees smoke in the distance—another ship is sinking! And out of the ship jumps a blonde, and she is fully equipped: everything’s in the right place, plenty for him to work with. The guy doesn’t hesitate for a second—jumps in, swims all the way out, gets to the blonde. She’s almost drowning, he grabs her, drags her to the island, lays her down on the sand, she opens her eyes, and she’s gorgeous, she’s like a model, and she says: “My hero! I’m all yours. You can do anything you want to me!” So the guy looks around suspiciously and says quietly, in her ear, “Listen, lady, would you mind holding the dog for a minute?” ’

“But me—no, listen, Netanya!” He doesn’t even let us laugh properly, the way we all very much need to. “I suddenly burst out laughing so hard, I was literally screaming in that pickup because of all the…I don’t know…because my brain was so fried from the whole situation, or from not thinking for two whole minutes about what was waiting for me soon. Maybe also because someone older than me had told me a grown-up joke, he’d given me credit for being in the know. But then my brain kicks in with its crap, and I’m thinking what does it mean that the driver thinks I’m an adult already? Maybe I don’t want to be a grown-up so quickly?

“But the point is that I laughed until tears came from my eyes, I swear, the tears finally came, and I hoped that counted. And with everything so fucked up I start feeling like it’s actually good for me to think about the blonde who almost drowned, and about the dog and the goat, and I see them in front of my eyes on their hammocks with the coconuts, and it’s better than thinking about anyone I know.

“But the driver, I could see it was stressing him out to hear me laugh like a nutcase, maybe he was scared I was losing it, but on the other hand he was also tickled that I liked his joke, how could he not be, and he sat up straight and licked his teeth quickly, he had this kind of mannerism, actually he had all kinds of mannerisms, I still think of him sometimes to this day, the way he kept shifting his sunglasses on his forehead, or pinching his nose with two fingers to make it smaller. ‘Ben-Gurion, Nasser, and Khrushchev are flying in a plane,’ he says quickly before I can go cold on him. ‘Suddenly the pilot announces they’re out of fuel and there’s only one parachute…’

“What can I tell you, the guy was a walking jokebook. He knew a helluva lot more about jokes than about driving, that’s for sure. And I figured, What do I care? Let him go on like that all the way to Be’er Sheva, where they’ll tell me, they can’t not, that’s where the orphan thing will really start, but until we get there I have a reprieve, like I got pardoned, that’s how I felt, like I got a stay of execution for a few minutes.”

Dovaleh holds his head up and looks at me for a long time, nodding. And I remember how alarmed he was, horrified even, when I asked him on the phone if he was asking me to judge him.

“And the same goes for him, the driver. I think he was happy to keep going with the jokes, partly because of the stress about me, but maybe also because he just wanted to make me feel good. Either way, from that moment on he didn’t even take a breather, lit each joke with the last one, just filled me good and well with jokes, and honestly, I don’t even remember most of them, but a few stuck, and the guys sitting at the bar—Hey, guys! You’re from Rosh Ha’ayin, right? Oh, sorry, of course, Petach Tikva. Respect!—they’ve been with me for fifteen years at least. Cheers, muchachos! And they know that those are the two or three jokes I work into every show, whether I need to or not, so now you know where they come from, like that one about the guy who had a parrot who wouldn’t stop cussing? Listen to this, you’ll like this one. From the second he opened his eyes in the morning until he went to sleep, he let out the juiciest—

“What’s the matter?” he bites his lip. “Did I screw up? No, wait, don’t tell me I already told you that one tonight?”

People sit there motionless, eyes glazing over.

“You already told us about that parrot,” says the medium without looking at him.

“No, it’s a different parrot…,” he mumbles. “Just kidding! Psych! Sometimes I like to test the crowd to see if they’re awake. You passed! You’re an outstanding audience!” He grimaces and his face falls in fear. “Where was I?”

“With that Jokerman,” says the little woman.

“It’s the meds,” he says to her and sucks thirstily from his thermos.

“Side effects,” she says, still without looking at him. “I have them, too.”

“Listen, Pitz,” he says. “Guys, look, I’m almost done, just stay with me awhile longer, okay? So the driver’s churning out jokes and cracking himself up, and my head is one big fustercluck, the priest, the rabbi, and the prostitute, and the sheep who sings from the mohel ’s stomach, who accidentally switched backpacks with the lumberjack, and the parrot—the second parrot, I mean—and they all get mixed up with the whole day’s craziness, and I guess at some point I fell asleep.

“And when I wake up, what do I see? That we’re stopped in some place that is definitely not the Be’er Sheva Central Bus Station. Just a yard with chickens clucking around, and dogs scratching themselves, and doves in a birdcage, and next to the car stands this thin woman with a pile of black curls, and she’s holding a thin baby in a diaper. She stands next to my window looking at me like she’s seeing a two-headed beast. And the first thing I think is: What’s on that chick’s face? What’s she got painted on? And then I realize it’s tears. She has actual tears coming down in straight lines without stopping, and the driver stands next to her with a sandwich in his mouth, and he looks at me and says, ‘Good Morning, America! This is my big sister. She’s coming with us. Can you believe she’s never been to the Wailing Wall? But first we’ll get you where you need to go, don’t worry.’

“What the hell?! Where am I, what am I, what Wailing Wall—that’s in Jerusalem! Where’s Be’er Sheva? How did we get here?

“The driver laughs: ‘You were out cold half the way here. I put you to sleep like a baby with my jokes.’ And the woman says, ‘I don’t believe it—you’ve been torturing him with your one-liners, you dipshit? Aren’t you ashamed to tell him jokes in his state?’

“Despite the tears, she has a tough, irritable voice. And the driver says to her: ‘Even when he was asleep I told them. I didn’t leave him jokeless for a second. Man-to-man defense, I gave him. Now get in.’ She sits down in the back of the truck with the baby and a big bag. ‘We passed Be’er Sheva ages ago,’ he tells me, ‘I’m not letting you make this trip alone, kid. You got into my heart, I’m taking you door-to-door all the way home.’ ‘But do me a favor,’ his sister says, ‘no more jokes. And don’t look, I have to nurse him. Turn that mirror away—pervert!’ She gives him a little slap from behind, and I sit there like an idiot and think: Why the hell won’t they let my orphanhood start? They keep putting it off. Is it a sign that I’m supposed to do something? But what?”

He slowly walks to the red armchair and perches on the edge. You can see that his eyes, behind his cracked lenses, are looking inward. I scan the club on his behalf. Maybe fifteen of us are left. A few of the women stare at him with a look both distant and focused, as if they’re seeing through him to another time. It’s hard to mistake that look: they know him intimately, or once did. I wonder what made them come here tonight. Did he phone each one of them and invite her? Or do they always turn up at his shows when he comes through town?