David Grossman: A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“—you understand,” a few voices from the bar jubilantly complete his flourish.

“Nice city, Netanya.” Even when he laughs, his look is calculating and joyless, seeming to monitor the conveyor belt on which the jokes emerge from his mouth. “And the three of us, I mean the biological matter of our family, we squeezed into the room and a half that was left, and by the way, he wouldn’t let us throw out a single page of that party newsletter: ‘Mark my words, this will become the bible of future generations!’ he used to say, wagging his finger, and his little mustache would perk up like someone had electrified his balls. And there, on exactly that date, nine months before I hatched and forever upended the ecological balance, what do you think yours truly came across? The Sinai Campaign, on the nose! Do you see where I’m going with this? Isn’t it some crazy shit, you guys? Abdel Nasser announces he’s nationalizing the Suez, the canal is slammed shut in our face, and my dad, Hezkel Greenstein of Jerusalem, five foot two, hairy as an ape, and with lips like a girl’s, doesn’t even take one second to consider before he goes off to open her up! So really, if you think about it, you could say that I’m a retaliatory operation. You know what I mean? I’m payback! You dig me? We had the Sinai Campaign, the Battle of Karameh, Operation Entebbe, Operation whatever-the-fuck-else, and then we had the Greenstein Campaign, which is still partially classified, so I cannot divulge all the details, but we happen to have here tonight a rare recording from the war room, though the audio is of mediocre quality: ‘Spread your legs, Mrs. Greenstein! Take this, Egyptian tyrant!’ Badaboom-ching! Sorry, Mom! Sorry, Dad! My words were taken out of context! I have betrayed you yet again!”

He slaps himself in the face again, savagely, with both hands. Then once more.

I’ve had a metallic, rusty taste in my mouth for a few seconds. People near me pull back in their chairs, eyelids fluttering. At the table next to me a woman whispers something sharply to her husband and picks up her purse, but he puts his hand on her thigh to hold her back.

“Netanya, mon chéri, salt of the earth—by the way, is it true that if someone on the street around here asks you what time it is, chances are he’s a narc? Just kidding! Joke!” He shrinks his whole body down, crowding his eyebrows in, and his eyes dart around. “There isn’t someone from the Alperon family here by any chance, is there, so we can pay him our respects? Or the Abutbuls? Any of Dedeh’s guys? Beber Amar isn’t here? One of Boris Elkush’s relatives? Maybe Tiran Shirazi is honoring us with his presence tonight? Ben Sutchi? Eliyahu Rustashvili…”

Feeble claps gradually chime in, which seem to help people break out of the paralysis that gripped them a moment earlier.

“Now don’t get me wrong, Netanya, I’m just making sure, just doing reconnaissance. You see, whenever I have a gig somewhere, first thing I do is log on to Google Risk.”

He suddenly tires, as if emptied out all at once. He puts his hands on his hips and breathes quickly. He stares into space, his eyes congealed in his face like an old man’s.

—

He called me about two weeks ago. At eleven-thirty at night. I had just come back from walking the dog. He introduced himself with a certain tense and celebratory anticipation in his voice, which I did not respond to. Confused, he asked if it was me, and whether his name didn’t sound familiar. I said it didn’t. I waited. I loathe people who quiz me like that. The name rang a bell, but it was faint. He wasn’t someone I’d met through work, of that I was certain: the aversion I felt was a different kind. This was someone from a more inner circle, I thought. With a greater potential for harm.

“Ouch,” he quipped. “I was sure you’d remember…” He chuckled heavily, and his voice was slightly hoarse. For a moment I thought he was drunk. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll keep this short and sweet.” And here he giggled: “That’s me: short and sweet. Barely five-two on a good day.”

“Listen, what do you want?”

There was a stunned silence, then he asked again if it was me. “I have a request for you,” he said, abruptly focused and businesslike. “Hear me out and decide, and no big deal if you say no. No hard feelings. It’s not something that’ll take up a lot of your time, just one evening. And I’m paying, obviously, however much you say, I won’t haggle with you.”

I was sitting in the kitchen, still holding the dog’s leash. She stood there weak and sniffling, looking up at me with her human eyes as if surprised that I was still on the phone.

I felt oddly exhausted. I had a sense that there was a second, muted conversation going on between me and this man, which I was too slow to pick up. He must have been waiting for an answer, but I didn’t know what he was asking. Or maybe he’d made his request and I hadn’t heard. I remember looking at my shoes. Something about them, the way they pointed at each other, brought a lump to my throat.

—

He slowly walks toward a worn, overstuffed red armchair on the right side of the stage. Perhaps it, too—like the big copper urn—is left over from an old play. He collapses into it with a sigh, sinks farther and farther down until it threatens to swallow him up.

People stare at their drinks, swirl their glasses of wine, and peck distractedly at their little bowls of nuts and pretzels.

Silence.

Then muffled giggles. He looks like a little boy in a giant piece of furniture. I notice that some people are trying not to laugh out loud, avoiding his eyes, as though afraid to get mixed up in some convoluted calculus he is conducting with himself. Perhaps they feel, as I do, that in some way they already are embroiled in the calculus and in the man himself more than they intended to be. He slowly lifts his feet, displaying the high, almost feminine heels of his boots. The giggles grow louder, until laughter washes over the entire club.

He kicks his feet and flutters his arms as if drowning, yells and sputters, and finally uproots himself from the depths of the armchair, leaps up, and stands a few steps away from it, panting and staring at it fearfully. The audience laughs with relief—good old slapstick—and he gives them a threatening glare, but they laugh even harder. He finally deigns to smile, soaking up the laughs. That unexpected tenderness softens his face again, and the audience responds. The comic, the entertainer, the jester, savors the reflection of his smile in his viewers’ faces; for a moment one can almost imagine he believes what he sees.

But then once again, as though incapable of tolerating the affection for more than a second, he stretches his mouth into a thin, disgusted line. I’ve seen that grimace before: a little rodent gnawing on himself.

—

“I’m really sorry for bursting into your life like this,” he said in that late-night phone call, “but I guess I was hoping that thanks to some, you know, devotion of youth”—he sniggers again—“after all, you could say we started out together, but you know, you went your own way, and you did a great job, big respect…” Here he paused, waiting for me to remember, to finally wake up. He could not have imagined how stubbornly I was holding on to my comatose state, or how violent I could be toward anyone who tried to sever me from it. “It’ll take me a minute to explain, tops. So worst-case scenario, you’ve given me a minute of your life. Cool?”

He sounded like a man of my age, but he used a younger generation’s slang. Nothing good was going to come of this. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Devotion of youth… Which youth was he referring to? My childhood in Gedera? The years when we moved around because of my father’s business, from Paris to New York to Rio de Janeiro to Mexico City? Or perhaps when we returned to Israel and I went to high school in Jerusalem? I tried to think fast, to find my escape route. His voice towed a sense of distress, shadows of the mind.