David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“You can see the stress on our face.” He raises his voice even more. “The stress of having to make people laugh at any cost, and how we basically beg you to love us.” (These lines, too, I imagine, are selected pearls from our phone call.) “And that is precisely the reason, ladies and gentlemen, why I would now like to welcome, with great excitement and deference, from the country’s highest seat of justice, Supreme Court justice Avishai Lazar, who came here this evening unannounced, in order to publicly support our pathetic, miserable art! Ladies and gentlemen, the Supreeeeeme Court!”

And the treacherous jester stands at attention and clicks his heels together, then bows deeply in my direction. More and more people turn to look at me, some applaud with mindless obedience, and I stupidly mumble: “District, not Supreme. And anyway, I’m retired.” He lets out a warm, rolling laugh and forces me to pretend I’m smiling with him.

I knew all this time that he wouldn’t let me get out of here easily. That the whole business, the invitation and the ridiculous request, was a trap, his private revenge, a trap I walked into like an idiot. From the minute he announced it was his birthday—a detail he did not mention at all when we spoke—I started to feel the suffocation. The waitress, a paragon of bad timing, brings me the check. The whole audience stares. I try to figure out how to respond, but it’s all a little too quick for me, and in fact since the evening began I’ve been feeling how slow my lonely life is, how sluggish it makes me. I fold the check, slip it under the ashtray, and stare at him.

“So anyway, I’m talking about a simple soul.” He swallows down a little smile and motions for the club manager to send me another beer, on him. “A rookie soul, no upgrades, no bling, your basic regular soul, just the soul of a man who wants to eat well and drink a little and get high and come once a day and fuck once a week and not have to worry about anything, but then it turns out the fucking pain-in-the-ass soul has demands up the wazoo! It’s even got its own union rep!” He holds his hand up again and counts on his fingers: “Heartache— one ! And pangs of conscience— two ! And messengers of evil— three ! And nightmares and tossing and turning from the fear of what’s going to happen and how it’ll go down— four !”

People nod sympathetically, and he laughs. “I swear to God, the last time in my life I didn’t have any problems was when I still had a foreskin.” The crowd roars with laughter. I shove handfuls of nuts in my mouth and grind them like they were his bones. He stands in the middle of the stage, directly under the spotlight, eyes closed, nodding as if he were articulating an entire philosophy of life. Here and there a few claps ring out, accompanied by sudden, crude screams of “Wooh!” Especially from the women. This man, I think, is not handsome or exciting or attractive, but he’s figured out how to touch people in exactly the places that turn them into a rabble, into riffraff.

As if he can read my mind, he hushes the audience with his hand, his face crumples, and I see in him the absolute opposite of what I just thought: the very fact that they agree with him, that someone, whoever it is, agrees with him about something, seems to provoke in him aversion and even disgust—that grimace, those wrinkled nostrils—as if all these people sitting here are crowding in on him, trying to touch him.

“Now is the time, ladies and gentlemen, to give thanks to the one person who brought me this far, who was willing to stick by me unconditionally, even after I’d been left and dumped and abandoned by women and children and colleagues and friends”—he throws me a pinprick glance and bursts out laughing—“and even by my school principal, Mr. Pinchas Bar-Adon, let us all unite in prayer for the ascension of his soul—he’s still alive, by the way—who kicked me out of school at age fifteen straight into the College of Street Sciences and went so far as to elucidate on my report card—listen closely, Netanya— ‘An aged cynic like this boy I have never encountered during my entire career.’ Powerful stuff, heh? Trenchant! And after all that, the only one who never walked out on me and never abandoned me and never left me in the field was only me myself. Yep.” His hips sway, and he runs his hands up and down his body seductively. “Take a good look, my friends, and tell me what you see. I’m serious, what do you see? Human dust, not so? Practically zero matter, and with a nod and a wink to the hard sciences, I might even say antimatter. You can tell this is a case of a man headed for the scrapyard, right?” He chuckles, throws me a wink, flattering me, perhaps asking that, despite my anger, I keep my promise.

“But just look, Netanya! Look at what it means to be loyal, devoted, for fifty-seven pretty lousy years. Look what it means to be dedicated and diligent in pursuit of the failed project of being Dovaleh! Or even just being !” He darts across the stage like a windup toy, cackling: “Being! Being! Being!” He stops and slowly turns to the room with the gleaming face of a crook, a thief, a pickpocket who got away with it. “Do you even grasp what a stunning idea it is to just be ? How subversive it is?” He puffs his cheeks out and makes a soft pffff, like a bubble bursting. “Dovaleh G, ladies and gentlemen, aka Dovchik, aka Dov Greenstein, particularly in the files of the State of Israel versus Dov Greenstein re: alimonial misdemeanors.” He looks at me with tormented innocence and wrings his hands. “Good Lord, it’s amazing how much food those kids eat, Your Honor! I wonder how much child support a father in Darfur has to pay. Mr. G, ladies! The one and only in the fucking universe who is willing to spend a whole night with me for free, which to me is the purest, most objective measure of friendship. That’s how it is, el audienco ! That’s how this life turned out. Man plans; God fucks him.”

—

Twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays at three-thirty, we would finish our lesson with the tutor, a forlorn religious man who never looked us in the eye and had a nasal, barely intelligible way of speaking. Stunned from the stifling air in his house, crazed by the smells of his wife’s cooking, we would walk out together and immediately break away from the other boys in the group. We’d walk down the middle of the quiet neighborhood street, where cars seldom passed, and when we got to the number 12 bus stop, next to Lerman’s corner store, we’d look at each other and concur: “On to the next one?” We’d walk past five or six bus stops like that until we got to the Central Bus Station, which was near his neighborhood, Romema, and there we would wait for my bus to Talpiot. We’d sit on a crumbling stone wall overgrown with weeds and talk. Or, rather, I would sit; he was incapable of sitting or standing in one place for more than a couple of minutes.

He asked questions and I answered. That was our division of labor, which he established and I was seduced by. I was not gregarious; on the contrary, I was a taciturn, introverted boy with a slightly ridiculous—so I imagine—halo of toughness and darkness, which I didn’t know how to shake off even if I’d wanted to.

Perhaps through my own fault, or perhaps because my family moved around so much for my father’s business, I never had a soul mate. Here and there I had buddies, brief friendships forged in schools for kids of diplomats and expats. But since we’d come back to Israel and moved to Jerusalem, to a neighborhood and a school where I knew no one and no one made any effort to get to know me, I had become even more solitary and prickly. And then this little joker popped up, and he went to a different school and didn’t know that he was supposed to be intimidated by me and my prickliness, and he was quite unimpressed by my lugubrious affectations.