David Grossman: A Horse Walks Into a Bar

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.

“Look,” he burst out, “is this an act, or are you such a big shot that you won’t even…How can you not remember?!”

No one had spoken to me like that for a long time. It was a breath of fresh air, purifying the disgust I felt toward the hollow deference that usually surrounded me, even three years after retiring.

“How can you not remember something like that?” he kept fuming. “We took a class together for a whole year with that Kalchinski guy in Bayit va-Gan, and then we used to walk to the bus together.”

It slowly started to come back. I remembered the little apartment, dark even at midday, and then I remembered the gloomy teacher, tall and thin and hunched, who looked like he was holding up the ceiling with his back. There were five or six of us boys, all useless in math, who came from a few different schools to take private lessons with him.

He kept up a torrent of speech, reminding me of long-forgotten things. He sounded hurt. I listened and yet I didn’t. I lacked the strength for these emotional upheavals. I looked around the kitchen seeing things I had to fix, or paint, or oil, or caulk. House arrest, as Tamara used to call the endless list of chores.

“You blocked me out,” he finally said, incredulous.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and only when I heard myself say it did I realize I had anything to be sorry for. The warmth of my voice was revealing, and from that warmth there emerged a fair-skinned, freckled boy with splotches on his cheeks. A short, skinny boy with glasses and prominent lips that were defiant and restless. A boy who talked quickly and was always slightly hoarse. And I remembered instantly that despite his fair skin and pale pink freckles, his thick curly hair was jet black, a contrast of colors that had made a great impression on me.

“I remember you!” I exclaimed. “Of course, we used to walk together…I can’t believe I could have…”

“Thank God,” he sighed, “I was starting to think I’d made you up.”

—

“And gooood eeeevening to the stunning beauties of Netanya!” he bellows as he resumes his dance across the stage, clicking his heels. “I know you, girls! I know you all too well. I know you from the inside…What was that, table thirteen? You have some nerve, you know!” His face darkens and for a moment he seems genuinely hurt: “Hitting a shy, introverted guy like me with such an invasive question. Of course I’ve had Netanya women!” He gives a full, round grin. “Beggars can’t be choosers, times were hard, we had to make do…” The audience, men and women, slap their hands on the tables, booing, whistling, laughing. He crouches on one knee opposite a table of three bronzed, giggling old ladies with blue-tinted hairdos made up mostly of air. “Well hello, table eight! What are you beauties celebrating tonight? Is one of you becoming a widow at this very second? Is there a terminal man taking his final breath in the geriatric ward as we speak? ‘Go on, buddy, keep going,’ ” he cheers on the imaginary husband. “ ‘One more push and you’re free!’ ” The women laugh and pat the air with affectionate scolding. He dances around on the stage and almost falls off the edge, and the audience laughs louder. “Three men!” he yells, holding up three fingers. “An Italian, a Frenchman, and a Jew sit in a bar talking about how they pleasure their women. The Frenchman says: ‘Me, I slather my mademoiselle from head to toe with butter from Normandy, and after she comes she screams for five minutes.’ The Italian says: ‘Me, when I bang my signora, first of all I spread her whole body from top to bottom with olive oil that I buy in this one village in Sicily, and she keeps screaming for ten minutes after she comes.’ The Jewish guy’s mute. Nothing. The Frenchman and the Italian look at him: ‘What about you?’ ‘Me?’ says the Jew. ‘I slather my Golda with schmaltz, and after she comes she screams for an hour.’ ‘An hour?’ The Frenchman and the Italian can’t believe their ears: ‘What exactly do you do to her?’ ‘Oh,’ says the Jew, ‘I wipe my hands on the curtains.’ ”

Big laughs. Men and women around me exchange lingering spousal looks. Suddenly ravenous, I order a focaccia and grilled eggplant with tahini.

“Where was I?” he says joyfully, following my exchange with the waitress out of the corner of his eye; he seems happy that I ordered. “The schmaltz, the Jew, the wife…We really are a special people, aren’t we, my friends? You just can’t compare any other nation to us Jews. We’re the chosen people! God had other options but he picked us!” The crowd applauds. “Which reminds me, and this is kind of a huge thing—that’s what she said—I’m really fed up with the new anti-Semitism, you know? Seriously, I was finally getting used to the old kind, you could even say I was becoming ever so slightly fond of it, you know, with those charming fairy tales about the Elders of Zion, those bearded old hook-nosed trolls sitting around together, munching on tapas of leprosy with cilantro and plague, exchanging recipes for quinoa braised in well poison, slaughtering the occasional Christian child for Passover—Hey, guys, have you noticed the kids are tasting a little astringent this year? Anyway, we’ve learned how to live with all that, we got used to it, it’s like part of our heritage. But then these guys turn up with their new anti-Semitism and…I don’t know…it doesn’t sit well with me. I gotta say I even feel a little aversion toward it.” He presses his fingers together and shrugs his shoulders with genuine awkwardness. “I don’t know how to say this without offending the new anti-Semites, God forbid, but for fuck’s sake, people, don’t you think your attitude is just a little bit grating? ’Cause sometimes I get the impression that if, let’s say, an Israeli scientist came up with a cure for cancer, right? A medicine that would finish off that cancer once and for all? Well, then I guarantee you the next day people all over the world would start speaking out and there’d be protests and demonstrations and UN votes and editorials in all the European papers, and they’d all be saying, ‘Now wait a minute, why must we harm cancer? And if we must, do we really need to completely annihilate it right off the bat? Can’t we try and reach a compromise first? Why go in with force straightaway? Why not put ourselves in its shoes and try to understand how cancer itself experiences the disease from its own perspective? And let’s not forget that cancer does have some positives. Fact is, a lot of patients will tell you that coping with cancer made them better people. And you have to remember that cancer research led to the development of medications for other diseases—are we just going to put an end to all that, in such a destructive manner? Has history taught us nothing? Have we forgotten the darker eras? And besides’ ”—he adopts a contemplative expression—“ ‘is there really anything about man that makes him superior to cancer and therefore entitled to destroy it?’ ”