David Grossman: A Horse Walks Into a Bar

He touches his forehead lightly. Here and there a few men and women distractedly hold their hands up to their own foreheads. I do, too. There is a moment of peculiar silence. People are lost in themselves. My fingers read my forehead. It’s not easy for me, this touch. In recent years I’ve been steadily losing my hair, and there’s wrinkling. Furrows appearing. Like something is tattooing my forehead from the inside, limning straight lines and diamonds and squares. The forehead of a goring ox, Tamara would say if she saw it.

“Come on, come with me,” he says, waking us up gently. “Come on, I’m getting back into the truck. She hands me a cloth diaper and tells me to wipe my face. The diaper is freshly laundered. It smells good. I put it over my face like a bandage”—he spreads his hands over his face—“and now it’s her turn. I’ve left her alone for too long. Good things, good things about her. How she rubs Anuga hand cream into her skin, and the whole house fills with the smell, and her long fingers, and how she touches her cheek when she thinks and when she reads. And how she always holds her hands folded against one another so you can’t see where they sewed her up. She’s even careful around me, I’ve never been able to count whether she has six scars or seven. Sometimes it’s six, sometimes seven. Now it’s his turn. No, hers again. That’s more urgent. She keeps disappearing. She doesn’t have a drop of color. Completely white, like she hasn’t an ounce of blood in her body. Like she’s already given up, maybe lost faith in me because I didn’t think hard enough about her. Why aren’t I thinking harder? Why is it so hard for me to call up pictures of her? I want to, of course I want to, come on—”

He stops. His head is straight up and he has a tortured expression. A dark shadow slowly climbs up from inside him across his face, opens its mouth wide, takes in air, then dives back down. At that moment a thought ripens inside me: I want him to read what I’m planning to write this evening. I want him to have time to read it. I want it to be with him when he goes there. I hope that, in some way which I do not fully understand or even believe in, this thing I write will have some kind of existence there, too.

“But then the way she was always embarrassing me…,” he mumbles. “Always making scenes, screaming at night, crying at the window till the whole neighborhood woke up. I didn’t tell you about all that, but it does need to be taken into account, it must be considered before handing down the verdict, and this is something I began to comprehend at a pretty young age: that she’s best for me when she’s at home, when she’s shut up in the apartment with just me, and it’s only me and her and our talk and our shows, and the books she used to translate for me from Polish. She read me Kafka for kids, and Odysseus and Raskolnikov…” He laughs softly. “At bedtime she’d tell me about Hans Castorp and Michael Kohlhaas and Alyosha, all the treasures, and she adapted them for my age, or usually not—adapting was not her strong suit—but things got hardest when she went out. The second she got anywhere near the door or the window I’d be on alert, I had actual heart palpitations, and awful pressure right here, in my belly—”

He puts his hand on his stomach. There is a longing in that small movement.

“What can I tell you, my head was exploding from the two of them, both together, her, too, because all of a sudden she finally woke up on me, like she realized her time was almost up and we’d be there soon and it was her last chance to influence me, so she started yelling, begging, reminding me of all kinds of things, I can’t remember what they were, and then he brought up even more things, anytime she said one thing he’d come up with another two, and she’s pulling me this way and he’s pulling the other way, and the closer we get to Jerusalem, the crazier they get.

“Plug them up, plug them up,” he mutters feverishly, “plug up all the holes in my body. If I shut my eyes they come in through my ears, if I shut my mouth they come in through my nose. They’re shoving, yelling, driving me mad, like little kids, they scream at me, they cry—Me, me, me, pick me!”

His words are barely intelligible. I get up and move to a table nearer the stage. It’s strange to see him from so close. For an instant, when he looks up, the spotlight creates an optical illusion, and a fifty-seven-year-old boy is reflected out of a fourteen-year-old man.

“Then suddenly, I swear, this is not imaginary, I hear the baby talking into my ear. But not like a baby talks, no, he was like someone my age or even older, and he says to me, just like this, very considered: ‘You really have to make up your mind now, kid, because we’ll be there soon.’ And I think: I can’t really have heard that. I pray to God that the driver and his sister didn’t hear it. I shouldn’t even have thoughts like that, God can strike you dead for something like that. And I start yelling: ‘Can’t you shut him up! Shut him up already!’ Then everything goes quiet, and the driver and his sister don’t say anything, like they’re scared of me, and then the baby makes one single shout, but a regular baby’s.”

He takes another gulp from the flask and turns it over. A few drops drizzle onto the floor. He signals to Yoav, who goes over to the stage with a sour face and refills the flask from a bottle of Gato Negro. Dovaleh urges him to pour some more. The little group sitting at the bar, his longtime fans from Petach Tikva, take advantage of his distraction to slip away. I don’t think he even notices. A dark-skinned man in an undershirt comes out of the kitchen, leans on the empty bar, and lights a cigarette.

During this lull, the woman with the silver hair and thin glasses looks over at me. Our eyes interweave for a long and slightly surprising moment.

“Friends, any chance you know why I’m telling you this story tonight? How we even got onto this?” He breathes heavily, his face burns an unnatural red. “It’ll be over soon, don’t worry, I can see the light.”

He takes his glasses off and glances at me. I believe he is reminding me of his request: that thing that comes out of a person without his control. That’s what he wanted me to tell him. It cannot be put into words, I realize, and that must be the point of it. And he asks with his eyes: But still, do you think everyone knows it? And I nod: Yes. And he persists: And the person himself, does he know what this one and only thing of his is? And I think: Yes. Yes, deep in his heart he knows.

“The driver took me home to Romema, but when I got out of the truck a neighbor yelled out the window: ‘Dovaleh, what are you doing here? Go quickly to Givat Shaul, you might still make it!’ So we tear over from Romema to Givat Shaul, to the cemetery, it’s not far, maybe fifteen minutes. We drive like crazy, speeding through red lights. I remember it was quiet in the car. No one said a word. And me—”

He stops. Takes a deep breath.

“In my heart, in my black heart, I started doing my reckoning. That’s how it went. It was time for my accounting. My rotten little accounting.”

He pauses again, sinks deeper and deeper into himself.

When he resurfaces, he is rigid and clenched.

“Douche bag. That’s what I am. You remember that. Write it down, Your Honor, factor it in when you get to the sentencing stage. Yeah, you guys look at me now and you see a nice guy, a jolly old fellow, a laugh riot. But me, since that day, and to this day, I’ve always been a barely fourteen-year-old douche bag with shit where his soul should be, sitting in that truck doing his rotten accounting, and it’s the most fucked-up, twisted accounting a person can make in his life. You won’t believe what I put into that tally. I sneaked in the tiniest, dirtiest little things for those few minutes while we drove from my house to the cemetery. I totaled up the two of them and our whole life together in a petty cash account.”