A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “That really is extremely interesting to us all, sweetness. Would you like us all to leave the room for a moment so as not to disturb the delightful relationship emerging between you and yourself?”

  “What?” She shakes her head in alarm. “No, no, don’t leave.”

  She has a peculiar speech impediment. Her voice is childish and high pitched, but the words come out thickly.

  “Then tell us what you were writing to yourself.” Bursting with glee, he doesn’t give her time to reply: “Dear myself, I fear we shall have to bid each other farewell, for this evening, my little lamb, I have met the man of my dreams, to whom I shall bind my destiny, or at least my bed restraints for a week of extreme sex…”

  The woman stares at him and gapes slightly. She wears black orthopedic shoes and her feet do not touch the floor. A big red shiny handbag sits between her body and the table. I wonder if he can see all this from the stage.

  “No,” she says after thinking slowly, “that’s all not true, I didn’t write that at all.”

  “Then what did you write?” he yells, clutching his head in fake despair. The conversation, which at first he’d found promising, is becoming cumbersome, and he decides to break it off.

  “It’s private,” she whispers.

  “Pri-vate!” As he begins his retreat, the word captures him like a lasso and pulls him back to her by the neck. He dances backward, turning to face us with a look of horror, as though a particularly dirty word has just been launched into the air. “And what, pray tell, is the vocation of our exceedingly private and intimate madam?”

  A cool breeze blows through the audience.

  “I’m a manicurist.”

  “Well, I never!” He rolls his eyes, holds his hands out, fingers spread, and cocks his head to one side. “French manicure, please! No, wait: glitter!” He blows on his nails one by one. “Maybe a crystal pattern? How are you with minerals, sweetie? Dried flowers maybe?”

  “But I’m only allowed to do it in our club at the village,” she mumbles. Then she adds: “I’m also a medium.” Startled by her own boldness, she holds her red handbag up higher, erecting it as a barrier between him and her.

  “A me-di-um?” The fox in his eyes stops its chase, sits down, and licks its lips. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declares gravely, “I request your attention. We have here this evening an exclusive engagement by a manicurist who, although you may have thought her a small, is in fact a medium! Put your hands together! Put your nails together!”

  The audience complies uncomfortably. It seems to me that most of them would rather he let her go and hunt a more appropriate victim.

  He walks slowly across the stage, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. His entire being signals contemplation and open-mindedness. “A medium. You mean, you communicate with other worlds?”

  “What? No…For now I only do it with souls.”

  “Of the dead?”

  She nods. Even in the dark I can detect the vein in her neck throbbing.

  “Oh…” He nods with affected understanding. I can see him dive deep inside himself to bring up pearls of mockery and ridicule engendered by the encounter. “Then perhaps Madam Medium can tell us—wait, where are you from, Thumbelina?”

  “You’re not allowed to call me that.”

  “I’m sorry.” He retreats immediately, sensing he’s crossed a line. Not a total shit, I write on my napkin.

  “Now I’m from here, near Netanya,” she says. The pain of insult still strains her face. “We have a village here…for people like…like me. But when I was little I was your neighbor.”

  “You lived next door to Buckingham Palace?” he exclaims, drumming in the air, pulling out another faint trail of laughs. I caught him hesitating for a split second before deciding not to take a crack at “when I was little.” I find it amusing to track his unexpected red lines. Tiny islets of compassion and decency.

  But now I realize what she’s telling him.

  “No,” she asserts with that same rigidity, pacing the words out. “Buckingham Palace is in England. I know because—”

  “What’s that? What did you say?”

  “I do word searches. I know all the countr—”

  “No, before that. Yoav?”

  The manager turns a spot on her. In the twisted tapered mound of her graying hair there is a purple stripe. She’s older than I thought, but her face is smooth, ivorylike. She has a flattened nose and swollen eyelids, but still, from a certain angle, there is a vague, veiled beauty.

  She freezes at the pairs of eyes turned on her. The young bikers whisper excitedly. She arouses something in them. I know the type. Flowers of evil. Exactly the kind that used to make me lose my cool on the bench. I look at her through their eyes: her party dress, the rose in her hair, the smeared lipstick. She looks like a little girl dressed up as a lady, walking the streets, and she knows that something bad is about to happen to her.

  “You were my neighbor?” he asks hesitantly.

  “Yes, in Romema. Right when you came in I saw it.” She lowers her head and whispers, “You haven’t changed at all.”

  “I haven’t changed at all?” He snorts. “I haven’t changed at all?” He shades his eyes with his hand and examines her intently. The crowd follows, fascinated by the process unfolding before its eyes, the transformation of life material into a joke.

  “Are you sure it’s me?”

  “Of course.” She giggles and her face lights up. “You’re the boy who walked on his hands.”

  The room goes silent. My mouth is dry. I only saw him walk on his hands once. On the day I saw him for the last time.

  “Always on your hands.” She laughs and hides her mouth with her hand.

  “These days I can barely make it on my feet,” he mutters.

  “You used to walk behind the lady with big boots.”

  He gasps softly.

  “One time,” she continues, “at your dad’s barbershop, I saw you on your feet and I didn’t make out it was you.”

  People glance at their neighbors, unsure what they’re supposed to feel. He gives me a blustery, annoyed look. This was not in the program, he says over our private frequency, and it’s totally unacceptable. I wanted you to see me in my primal state, without any extras. Then he moves closer to the edge of the stage and gets down on one knee. Still with his hand at his forehead, he looks at her. “What did you say your name was?”

  “It doesn’t matter…” When she sinks her head between her shoulders, a little hump on the back of her neck sticks out.

  “It does matter,” he says.

  “Azulai. My parents were Ezri and Esther, both rest in peace.” She searches his face for a sign of recognition. “You for sure don’t remember them. We only lived there for a bit. My brothers went to your dad’s for their haircuts.” When she forgets herself, the speech impediment is more noticeable. As though something hot is stuck in her throat. “I was little, eight and a half, and you were maybe bar mitzvah, and always on your hands, you even talked to me like that, from down—”

  “That was just so I could peek under your dress.” He winks at the audience.

  She shakes her head vigorously and her tower of hair wobbles. “No, that’s not true! There was three times you talked, and I had a long dress, the blue-checkered one, and I talked to you, too, even though it wasn’t allowed—”

  “It wasn’t allowed?” He dives at the word with his claws drawn. “But why? Why wasn’t it allowed?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t!” he growls. “What did they tell you?”

  She shakes her head stubbornly.

  “Just tell me what they said.”

  “That you were a crazy boy,” she finally blurts. “But I did talk to you. Three times I did.”

  She falls silent and looks at her fingers. Her face glistens with sweat. At the table behind her, a woman leans over and whispers something in her husband’s ear. The husband nods. I feel utterly co
nfused. Dizzy. I write quickly on the napkin, trying to make order: The boy I knew. The boy she knew. The man onstage.

  “So you’re saying we talked three times?” He gulps down what appears to be some very bitter saliva. “Well, that’s just peachy…” He forces himself to regain his composure, throws a wink at the audience. “And I bet you remember what we talked about, too?”

  “The first time you told me we’d already met.”

  “Where?”

  “You said everything in your life was happening to you for the second time.”

  “After all this time, you remember me saying that?”

  “And you said we were children in the Holocaust together, or in the Bible, or with the cavemen, you couldn’t remember exactly, and that’s where we met the first time, and you were a theater actor and I was a dancer—”

  “Ladies and gen-tlemen!” he interrupts her, leaps to his feet and quickly walks away. “We have here a rare character witness on behalf of yours truly from when he was a kiddo! Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you? The village idiot, the crazy boy! You heard it. Hit on little girls, too! And on top of everything else he was living in fantasyland. We were in the Holocaust together, in the Bible…You tell me!” Here he bares his teeth in a bountiful grin that convinces no one. Then he gives me a quick dumbfounded look, as though suddenly suspecting I have a hand in the appearance of this little woman. I shake my head apologetically. What am I apologizing for? I really don’t know her. I never went to his neighborhood with him because every time I offered to walk him home he refused, made excuses, told long and complicated stories.

  “And I want you to know that that’s how it always was with me!” He’s almost screaming now. “Even the animals around the neighborhood made fun of me! Seriously, there was this black cat who used to spit every time I passed him. You tell them, sweetie pie!”

  “No, no.” While he talks to the audience, her short legs kick under the table as though someone is strangling her and she’s gasping for air. “You were the boy who—”

  “Wait, didn’t we used to play doctor and nurse, and I was the nurse?”

  “That’s not true at all!” she shouts, and with some effort gets off her chair and stands up. It’s hard to believe how minuscule she is. “Why are you like this? You were a good boy!”

  The room goes silent.

  “What’s that?” He snorts, and one of his cheeks suddenly burns as though it has been delivered an even-more-painful slap than the ones he gave himself before. “What did you call me?”

  She climbs back onto her chair and slouches there looking sullen.

  “You know, Thumbelina, I could sue you for damaging my bad reputation.” He slaps both thighs and laughs. He knows how to roll his laughter out from deep in his belly, but the audience, almost universally, refuses to roll along with him.

  She bows her head. Wiggles her fingers under the table in precise little movements. The fingers of one hand face the other, then cross over each other, then interlace. A secret dance with its own rules.

  —

  Deep silence. The show crumples in an instant. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes hard. People in the audience look away. An opaque distress spreads through the club, as though the whispered rumor of a distant disruption has made its way inside.

  He can see the evening dropping away from him, of course, and he immediately performs some kind of internal slalom. He opens his eyes wide and makes a happy face. “You are the most incredible, one-of-a-kind audience!” he yells, and goes back to darting around and clicking his silly cowboy boots. “My friends, you’re precious darlings, the lot of you…” But the unpleasantness he tries to blur unfurls around the closed space like a fart. “It’s not easy!” he shouts and spread-eagles his arms for a wide, empty hug. “It’s not easy getting to fifty-seven, and that’s after surviving, as we just heard, the Holocaust and the Bible!”

  The woman shrinks back, her head hidden deep between her shoulders, and he turns up the volume even louder, trying to drown out her silence.

  “The best thing about this age is that from here you can clearly see the sign that reads: HERE LIVE HAPPILY DOVALEH AND THE WORMS. Hello out there, my friends!” he thunders. “I’m so glad you came! We’re gonna have such a crazy night here! You’ve come from all over the country, I see guys from Jerusalem, from Be’er Sheva, from Rosh Ha’ayin…”

  Voices from the back of the hall shout back: “From Ariel! From Efrat!”

  He looks surprised. “Wait, you’re from the settlements? But then who’s left to beat up the Arabs? Just kidding! You know I’m kidding, right? Go ahead and grab your compensation right now. Take twenty million dollars so you can buy swing sets and gumballs for the cultural center in memory of Baruch Goldstein the murd—oops, I mean the saint, may God avenge his blood. Not enough? No problem! Take another acre and another goat, take a whole herd of goats, take the whole cattle industry, take the whole country, for God’s sake! Oh, that’s right, you already did!”

  The applause dies down. A few young people at the edge of the club, apparently another group of soldiers on furlough, bang on their tables.

  “It’s okay, boss! Yoav, my friend. Look at the face on him! What’s the panic, boss? I swear, there won’t be any more of that talk, I’m done, I said so, I promised, I gave you my word, I know, but it just slipped out, that’s it, no politics, no occupation, no Palestinians, no world, no reality, no two settlers walking down the Hebron Casbah. Oh, come on, Yoav, just one, just one last time…”

  I think I know what he’s doing and what he desperately needs now, but Yoav shakes his head firmly, and the audience doesn’t want politics either. The space fills up again with whistles and pounding fists and demands that he go back to the stand-up. “Hang on, people,” he urges, “you’re going to like this one, you’ll be crazy about it, guaranteed, just listen. There’s an Arab walking down the street next to two settlers in Hebron. We’ll call him Little Ahmed.” The whistles and stomping die down. A few smiles here and there. “All of a sudden they hear an army loudspeaker announcing curfew for Arabs starting in five minutes. The settler takes his rifle off his shoulder and puts a bullet through Little Ahmed’s head. The other one is a wee bit surprised: ‘Holy crap, my holy brother, why’d you do that?’ Holy Brother looks at him and goes, ‘I know where he lives, there’s no way he was gonna make it home in time.’ ”

  The audience laughs a little awkwardly. Some express their disapproval with loud exhalations, and one woman even boos. The club manager, though, giggles with a surprisingly squeaky voice, which leads to more relaxed laughter in the crowd.

  “You see, Yoavi?” he says gleefully. He can sense his ruse working. “Nothing happened! That’s the great thing about humor: sometimes you can just laugh at it! And if you ask me, my friends, that’s the lefties’ biggest problem—they don’t know how to laugh. I mean, seriously, have you ever seen a lefty laugh? I guarantee you one thousand percent you haven’t. They don’t even laugh when they’re alone, which they usually are. Somehow they just can’t see the humor in the situation.” He rolls out his belly laugh and the crowd starts flowing with him. “Did you ever wonder what the world would look like without lefties?” He throws a glance at Yoav and back at the audience, senses he’s been given a little more credit on his account, and charges ahead. “Just think how fun it could be, Netanya, my darling. Close your eyes for a minute and think about a world where you can do anything you feel like—anything!—and no one gives you a ticket. No tickets, no warnings, no points! No sour faces on TV, no ulcerous editorials in the paper! No fifty years, day and night, of drilling our heads with occupation schmoccupation. No self-hating Jews!” The crowd responds, they’re his, and he fuels himself with their heat, carefully avoiding the diminutive woman. “You feel like putting a little Palestinian village under curfew for a week? Bam—curfew! Day after day after day, however long you want…” Another glance at the manager: “Making fun of lefties isn’t politics, right, Yoavi? It’
s just a statement of facts, yeah? Great, so where were we? Oh yeah: You feel like seeing Arabs dance at the checkpoint? Bam! Just say the word and they dance, they sing, they undress. I just love the joie de vivre of that exotic nation! The special checkpoint ambience really makes them open up. They’re so endearing, with their checkpoint sing-alongs: Ko-hol od ba’leeee-vav pe-e-nii-maaaa!” The crowd is unsure how to respond to this rendition of the national anthem. “And the way they get in touch with their feminine side! Soldiers here, soldiers there, soldiers, fuck me everywhere!” He swivels his body, rotating his hips and buttocks to the rhythm, clapping slowly, deliberately: “Soldiers here, soldiers there, soldiers, fuck me everywhere!” His body is reflected in blurred ripples in the copper urn behind him. A few men join in, and the way he sings spurs them to make their own imitation of a sharp Arab accent. The soldiers sing loudest of all. Now three or four women join in, screeching, muffing the occasional word but making up for it with enthusiastic clapping. One of them bursts out in loud whoops. But the whole sing-along is not as it seems, I think. Not at all. The performer is mocking his audience, playing with them, and yet a moment later it seems that it’s the audience that is slyly pulling him into his own trap, and the interplay makes them both partners in some sort of evasive, fluid transgression, and now he divides the singers up into men and women and conducts them enthusiastically, blinking away false tears, and almost the entire room sings and cheers along with him, and then—I suspect he was aiming for exactly this murky sense of partnership that prickles deep in our guts and stirs up a sticky, messy pleasure both sickening and alluring—then the conductor gathers everyone’s voices into the palm of his hand with one sweep, and there is a moment of quiet, a musical pause, and I can practically feel him counting the beats to himself, one, two, three, four, and then he storms the front again: “You want to seal off a couple of wells before breakfast, my righteous friends? Well, along comes your fairy godmother and gives you her magic wand for a week—hell, for fifty years! Time for some retributive justice? Administrative detention for life? Human shields?” The audience joins in as he makes slow, rhythmic claps over his head and stomps his feet on the wooden stage and the sound echoes heavily throughout the club. “You wanna play a round of Expropriation Monopoly? Gin-Curfew-Rummy? Roadblock-Go-Fish? Simon says power on—power off! Sterile roads? Piss-on-the-produce-Ahmed-to-keep-it-fresh?” He grows more and more eager, his features sharper and more prominent, as though someone is tracing over them with a pen. “You can do it all!” he shouts. “It’s all allowed! So play, my little darlings, play out all your dreams! Just remember, my sweet ones, that the magic wand doesn’t work forever—it has a tiny little system malfunction. Oh, shit!” He rolls his eyes angrily and stomps his foot like a child: “Yes, the goddamn wand has a bug! But you already knew that, didn’t you, my sweet peas? Because it turns out”—he leans over from the edge of the stage and puts his hand to his mouth secretively—“that the fairy godmother is a fickle bitch. That’s how fairy godmothers are. She likes to switch things up every so often, which means that, after we’ve had our fun and games for a while, it’ll be us—surprise!—singing Biladi biladi at their roadblocks! Oh yeah, the Palestinians, they’ll make us sing their anthems, and we’ll chant their slogans: Khaibar, Khaibar ya Yahud jaish Muhammad say’ud! So sing along with me, my righteous friends! You free spirits, you! You free-range eggs, you! Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud…” The audience doesn’t fall for it this time—people bang their hands on tables and whistle and boo. The audience is no sucker. A tall young man with a shaved head, perhaps a soldier on leave, whistles with such gusto that he almost falls over in his chair.