David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

I realize there’s something missing in the picture: the two young bikers’ table is empty. I didn’t see them leave. I guess after his barrage of punches they assumed that was the most they’d get.

“So I sit there with my face to the windshield. Dying of fear that my eye will roam to the backseat. I mean, at least she was sitting in the back, but this new thing where every other woman starts breast-feeding in public…? I mean, think about it, it’s not funny at all, you’re standing with a woman, she looks totally normal, normative, as they say, and she’s got her baby on her hip, and never mind that to you he looks eight years old, he’s already got stubble—”

His voice sounds hollow, almost toneless.

“—so you and she are just chatting about current affairs, discussing the quantum theory of relativity, when all of a sudden, without batting an eyelid, she pulls a breast out of her sleeve! A real breast! Manufacturer certified! And she sticks it in the baby’s mouth and keeps on talking to you about the electromagnetic particle accelerator in Switzerland…”

He’s saying goodbye. I can feel it. He knows this is the last time he’s going to tell these jokes. The girl who was about to leave but came back leans her head on one hand and gazes at him vaguely. What’s her story? Did she go home with him after a gig one night? Or maybe she’s one of his five children, and this is the first time she’s hearing his story? And the two bikers in black—were they somehow connected to him as well?

I remember what he told us before, about how he used to play chess with people walking on the street. They each had a role, even though they didn’t know it. Who knows what complicated chess game he’s conducting simultaneously here tonight?

“And the girl, his sister, keeps nursing the baby, and at the same time I hear her digging around in her bag with one hand, and she says to me: ‘I bet you haven’t had anything to eat all day. Give me your hand, kid.’ I reach my hand back and she puts a wrapped sandwich in it, and then a peeled hard-boiled egg and a little screw of newspaper with some salt for the egg. As tough as she looks, her hand is really soft inside. ‘Eat,’ she says. ‘How could they send you off like this with nothing to put in you?’

“I scarf down the sandwich, and it has delicious, thick salami and spicy tomato spread that burns my mouth, and it’s good, it kicks me awake, puts me back in the game. I sprinkle salt on the egg and finish it off in two bites. Without talking, she passes me a savory cookie and takes a family-sized bottle out of her bag—I swear, this chick was Mary Poppins—and gives me a cup of orangeade. How she does all that with one hand, I cannot understand, and how she manages to feed the baby and me at the same time, I understand even less. ‘The cookies are a little dry,’ she says, ‘wash them down with the orangeade.’ I do everything she tells me.”

Dovaleh’s voice—what’s happening to it? It’s hard to make out the words, but in the last few minutes the voice itself is thin and floating, almost like a child’s.

“And the driver, her brother, reaches his hand back, too, and she puts a cookie in it. And he reaches back again, and again. I feel like he’s doing it to make me laugh because she won’t let him tell me any jokes. We drive without talking. ‘No more cookies,’ she says, ‘you’re being greedy, leave some for him.’ But he keeps holding his hand out, and he winks at me with his mouth full, and she slaps him on the back of the neck and he shouts ‘Ouch!’ and laughs. When my father gives me that slap, after he cuts my hair, I both anticipate it and slightly fear it. A stinging little slap, after the cotton ball with the aftershave. He does it with the tips of his fingers, and then he whispers in my ear so the clients won’t hear, ‘Handsome cut, mein leibn, my life.’ And now it’s her turn. Good things about her. But what’s best to think about her now? What would help most? I’m suddenly afraid to think about her. I don’t know, she’s gone colorless on me. What am I doing wrong? I force her back in. She doesn’t want to come. I tug hard, pull her in with both hands, I have to have her in my mind, too. It can’t be just him. Don’t give up! I yell at her. Don’t surrender! I’m almost sobbing, doubling my whole body over against the car door so the driver and his sister won’t see, and here she comes, thank God, sitting in the kitchen with a pile of nylons to darn. And there I am sitting next to her doing my homework, and everything’s normal, and she hooks eye after eye with the needle, and every few eyes she stops, forgets herself, stares into space, doesn’t see the darning or me. What is she thinking about when she does that? I never asked her. A thousand times I was alone with her and I never asked. What do I know? Almost nothing. Her parents were wealthy, I know that from Dad. She was an excellent student, she played the piano, there was talk of recitals, but that was it, she finished the Shoah when she was twenty and she’d spent six months of the war in a single train car, I told you that. They hid her there for half a year, three Polish train engineers in a little compartment on a train that ran back and forth on the same tracks. They took turns guarding her; she told me that once, and she gave this crooked laugh I’d never heard before. I must have been twelve or so, and it was just me and her alone at home, and I did a show for her when she suddenly stopped me and told me the whole story in one go, and her mouth twisted sideways and she couldn’t straighten it out for a few seconds, this whole part of her face spilled to one side. After six months they decided they’d had enough of her. I don’t know why, don’t know what happened one fine day when they got to the last stop and those louses threw her out straight onto the gatehouse ramp.

“Should I go on?” he asks in a strained voice. A few heads nod.

“I can’t remember the exact order, a lot of things get mixed up in my mind, but for example there’s always the way I hear his sister in the backseat saying to herself quietly, ‘God help us,’ and I generally get the feeling that the sister, her mind is working all the time. Grinding away. She has thoughts about me and I don’t know what they are. Before, when she stood outside the truck looking in, I saw two deep, black grooves down her forehead. I sink deeper in my seat so I won’t be in her eyes. I can hear the baby sucking the whole time, and every few sucks he sighs like an old man, and that stresses me out. They’re taking care of him, protecting him, giving him what he needs, so why is he sighing? Then out of nowhere the sister says, ‘Your dad, what’s his job?’

“ ‘He has a barbershop. Him and a partner.’ I don’t know why I told her about that. I’m an idiot. Any second I might have told her how Dad likes to joke about the partner being in love with Mom, and how he plays around with his scissors right in front of the partner’s nose, pretending that’s what he’ll do to him if he catches them together.’

“ ‘And Mom?’ she asks.

“ ‘What about Mom?’ I say, and now I’m getting a little cautious.

“ ‘Does she work at the hairdresser, too?’

“ ‘Of course not, she works at Taas, sorting ammo.’ All of a sudden I feel like she’s playing chess with me, each of us making our move and waiting to see what the other one will do.

“ ‘I didn’t know they had women in Taas,’ she says.

“ ‘They do,’ I answer.

“She doesn’t say anything. So I don’t either. Then she asks if I want another cookie. I start thinking maybe the cookies are a move, too, and I’d best not take one, but I do take one and immediately I know it was a mistake. I don’t know why, but it was a mistake.