A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “Okay, you’re right, you’re right!” He holds up his hands in surrender and laughs with nothing but affection and grace. “And why think about all that stuff anyway? There’s loads of time until that happens, and Yoav is absolutely right—no politics! It’s not gonna happen until our kids are grown up anyway, so it’s their problem. And who told them to stick around here eating up what we shit out? So why get annoyed about it now? Why all the fighting and arguing and civil warring? Why think about it? Why think at all? Hands together for not thinking!” Pale green tendons bulge on his neck as he cheers. “Hey, Yoavi! Why not give us some more light so we can see what’s going on here? Flood it! Yeah, flood the room…Hey there, honeys, so nice of you to drop by! I gather Adi Ashkenazi’s gig was sold out, eh? Listen, are you hot? How can you not be hot? Look at me dripping all over the place up here.” He sniffs his armpit and inhales deeply. “Ahhhh! Where are the musk traders when you need them? Turn the AC up, dude! Waste some money on us for once! It’s on me! Where were we?”

  He is agitated and unfocused. The hurricane of incitement doesn’t seem to have helped him overcome what that tiny little woman did to him. I can sense it. The crowd can sense it.

  “We covered the bug in the wand…Biladi biladi…Our screwed kids…Would the stenographer please repeat the last few sentences…” He zigzags across the stage and slips a troubled look at the little woman sitting with her head down. His face stretches into a toxic jeer. I’m beginning to identify the expression. A flash of internal violence. Or perhaps outward violence deeply buried.

  “A nice boy, eh? A good boy…,” he murmurs, and his face twists as if his heart were being trampled. “You’re a riot, I swear! Where’d I come up with you? Is this what I get for my birthday, a soothsayer? What’s up with you, Netanya? You couldn’t bring a bottle of Dom Pérignon? You had to go all original on my ass? I mean, think about it, performers of my caliber around the world, they get a hot naked chick jumping out of a cake, you know? This one could maybe jump out of an Oreo! Just kidding, don’t make that face, come on, dolly, it’s all in good humor, don’t cry, no…Oh, come on…No, sweetie…”

  She’s not crying. Her face is contorted in pain, but she doesn’t cry. He stares at her, and his face unknowingly reflects hers. He goes over to the armchair and sits down. He looks exhausted, defeated. Someone carps: “Let’s go, wake up!” A thin man in a blue tracksuit calls out, “Come on, let’s get this show on the road! Are you gonna do group therapy with her now?” That gets a lot of laughs. People start to rouse, as if from a strange dream. A woman sitting at a table near the bar calls out: “Why don’t you have a swig of milk?” Her friends clap, and from a few tables around the room come bursts of laughter and calls of encouragement. Dovaleh pricks up one finger, feels around behind the armchair, and pulls out a big red flask. Some members of the audience are already laughing delightedly, and I try to understand these people who come to his shows for the second or third time: What is he giving them?

  So utterly threadbare—what is it that he has to give?

  Maybe it’s a good thing I stayed, I think with a strange tingle of excitement. It’s a good thing I stayed to see this after all.

  He waves the flask around. In big black handwritten letters, in English, it says: MILK. The audience cheers. He slowly opens the lid, takes a sip, licks his lips greedily, and grins: “Ah…The taste of yesteryear, as the whore said when she sucked off the old man.” He drinks again, quickly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he puts the flask on the floor between his feet and sits on the armchair awhile longer. He gives the little lady a long look and shakes his head, looking baffled. He leans forward with his whole upper body, drops his head to his knees and his arms alongside his legs. You can hardly detect the movement of his body breathing.

  The room is very quiet again; the air suddenly feels dense. The thought that he might never get up passes, I think, through everyone’s mind. As though each of us feels that somewhere out there, in some distant and capricious courtroom, a coin has been flipped that could come down either way.

  How did he do that? I wonder. How, in such a short time, did he manage to turn the audience, even me to some extent, into household members of his soul? And into its hostages?

  He’s in no hurry to get up out of this strange position. On the contrary, he sinks deeper and deeper. The sparse braid falls over his skull now, which from this angle—with his body hunched over—looks incredibly tiny and old, much older than his age, almost shriveled.

  I look around carefully, so as not to break a single thread. Most of the people are leaning forward, staring at him, transfixed. One of the young bikers slowly licks his lower lip. It’s practically the only movement I detect.

  When he finally pulls his body out of the depths of the armchair and gets to his feet and straightens up and faces us, there is something new in his face.

  “Wait, hold up, quiet! Stop everything and start over. Start the whole evening from scratch! It was all a mistake! Delete! Backspace! It’s not that you didn’t get it—you guys are awesome. It’s not you, it’s me. I didn’t get how big of a break I’ve been given. My God…” He holds his head in both hands. “You won’t believe what’s going to happen here tonight, Netanya! O Netanya, city of diamonds, you’re a lucky-ducky audience. You are going to be given a miracle here this evening. You’ve hit the jackpot!” He talks to the audience, but his eyes are stabbing at mine, trying to tell me something urgent, something too complicated for a look. “Yours truly has decided, after thorough consideration and in consultation with the Gato Negro generously diluted by the manager with tap water—more power to you, Yoav, my love—anyway, I’ve decided…What have I decided…Let’s see…I’m getting tongue-tied. Oh yeah: I’ve decided, as a personal token of my appreciation for you coming out to celebrate my birthday, even though a little bird whispered to me—the whisper, by the way, is because she lost her voice, bird flu—that you might have actually forgotten that it was my birth…”

  He’s treading water. Distracting us while he digests a complicated idea that has come to him, planning his next move.

  “But you came anyway, and because of that generosity, because you came out en masse to party with me, I have spontaneously decided to give you a little souvenir tonight, something from the heart. That’s the kind of guy I am. Generosity is my middle name. Dov Giving Greenstein, that’s what it’ll say on my tombstone. And underneath that: HERE LIES GREAT POTENTIAL. And a bit farther down: ’98 SUBARU AVAILABLE, MINT CONDITION. But between you and me, my friends, what do I have to give you? Money, as we’ve established, I have none of. Nothing but the shirt on my back—and I barely even have a back. And I have five kids, but I don’t have any of them, and my biggest achievement in life is that I produced a family that is large and united—against me. Bottom line, Netanya, you get it—I have nothing. But I’m still going to give you something that I’ve never given anyone else. Untarnished. A life story. Yeah, those are the best stories. I’m into this, I’m into this—what’s wrong, table six? What’s the panic, dude? It’s just a story, you won’t have to work your brain gland too hard, you won’t even notice you have one. It’s just words. Wind and chimes. In one ear, out the other.”

  He looks at me again. His eyes drill into me urgently, pleadingly.

  —

  “I want you to see me,” he said on the phone that night after I’d apologized profusely for my attack. “You just have to sit there for an hour and a half, two hours tops, depends how the evening goes. We’ll get you a table on the side so no one bothers you. Drinks, food, a cab if you want one, it’s all on me, and I’ll pay whatever you ask for the job.”

  “Wait, I still don’t understand what this job is.”

  “I told you. If you want, you can record me, take pictures on your phone, I don’t care. As long as you see me.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then, if you feel like it, give me a call and tell me what you saw.”

  “Look, what do you
need this for?”

  He thought for a good thirty seconds.

  “For nothing. For me. I don’t know. Listen, I know this is coming out of nowhere, but I suddenly felt like, this is it. It’s time.”

  I laughed. “Let me understand. You want me to critique your performance? Or do you just want to know how you look? Because either way, I’m not the right guy for the job.”

  “No, of course not…Why would you say…” He snickered. “Believe me, I’m well aware of how I look.” He took a deep breath and let it out quickly, as though he’d been rehearsing this text for a long time. “I would like to hear, if you’ll agree, to hear from a man like you, Avishai, from someone trained to do this, I mean, someone who’s spent his whole life looking at people and reading them in an instant, down to their root—”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” I interrupted, “you’re getting a little carried away.”

  “No, no, I’m just trying to…I know what I’m saying. I used to read about the cases you tried when they covered them in the papers. I followed the news, and they quoted your rulings, and things you said about the defendants and about the lawyers, and your words cut like a knife. I haven’t heard much recently, but I remember you had some big cases where the whole country…And believe me, Avishai, Your Honor, not sure what to call you, I have an eye for that stuff. It was like reading a book sometimes.”

  His naïveté amused me. More than amused. I thought about my rulings, which I honed and polished down to every last sentence, and in which I would occasionally—with moderation, of course, unassumingly—work in a juicy metaphor or a quote from a poem by Pessoa, or Cavafy, or Nathan Zach, or even my own poetic imagery. And suddenly I was filled with pride in those forgotten gems.

  A picture flickered inside me: Tamara, about five years ago, sitting in the kitchen, one leg folded under her body, a mug of hot water with fresh mint on the table, a sharpened pencil tapping her teeth with a sound that drove me crazy, going over my pages “with a fine-tooth comb for sentimental adjectives and fiery images and other excesses to which Your Honor is prone.” (Me in the living room, pacing back and forth, waiting for her verdict.)

  “So that’s what you want from me?” I laughed. I had to take a breath suddenly. “You want a personal verdict? Privatization of the justice system? House call from a judge? Not bad…”

  “Verdict?” He sounded astonished. “What do you mean, verdict?”

  “Oh, is that not it? I thought maybe you wanted to tell me something, so that I could—”

  “But why would you say ‘verdict’?” A cool, cutting breeze blew through the phone. He swallowed. “Just come to my show, look at me for a while, really that’s all, and then tell me—but don’t take any pity on me, that’s the main thing—give me two or three sentences, I know you can do that, there’s a reason I chose you…” He snickered again, but I heard doubt in his voice now.

  I knew for sure that wasn’t all. There was something hiding, perhaps even from him. I asked a few more questions, tried from this angle and that, whet my blade as much as I could, but it didn’t help. He was absolutely incapable of clarifying beyond the vague desire that I should “see” him. The conversation started getting circular. I could sense the gradual fading of his innocent, childish hope that even after forty-some years of separation we would still share that deep, instant understanding.

  “Let’s say…,” he murmured when I was already formulating my refusal. “Let’s say you sit there and watch me for an hour, hour and a half, that’s it, I told you, depends how the evening rolls, and then you pick up the phone, or you could send it by mail, I don’t care, it’d be nice to get a letter from someone other than a debt collector, one page, even a few lines would be fine, maybe even one sentence. I mean, you’re capable of crushing someone in one sentence—”

  “But on what? About what?”

  He giggled again, embarrassed. “I guess I want you to tell me what this thing I have is…No, never mind, forget it.”

  “Go on…”

  “I mean, you know, what does someone get when they see me? What do people know when they look at me…at this thing that comes out of me. Are you following?”

  I said I wasn’t. The dog looked up, smelling the lie.

  “Okay.” He sighed. “I’ll let you go to bed. I guess this isn’t going to work.”

  “Wait, go on.”

  And it was then that something in him cracked open and started to flow: “Say I walk past someone on the street, he’s never seen me, doesn’t know me from Adam. First look—bam! What does he pick up? What gets recorded about me in his mind? I don’t know if I’m explaining myself…”

  I stood up and began to pace around the kitchen with the phone.

  “But I have seen you before,” I reminded him.

  “It’s been years,” he said immediately. “I’m not me, you’re not you.”

  I remembered: his blue eyes, which were too large for his face and, together with his prominent lips, gave him the appearance of a strange duckling with sharp features. A quick, pulsing particle of life.

  “That thing,” he said softly, “that comes out of a person without his control? That thing that maybe only this one person in the world has?”

  The radiance of personality, I thought. The inner glow. Or the inner darkness. The secret, the tremble of singularity. Everything that lies beyond the words that describe a person, beyond the things that happened to him and the things that went wrong and became warped in him. That same thing that years ago, when I was just starting out as a judge, I naïvely swore to look for in every person who stood before me, whether defendant or witness. The thing I swore I would never be indifferent to, which would be the point of departure for my judgment.

  “I haven’t been a judge for almost three years,” I was suddenly driven to say. “I’ve been retired, I suppose, for three years.”

  “Already? What happened?”

  For a moment I seriously considered telling him. “I took early retirement.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Not much. Sit around at home. Some gardening. Reading.” He said nothing. I sensed his caution, and I liked it. “What happened,” I explained, to my own surprise, “was that my verdicts were becoming a little too caustic for the system.”

  “Oh.”

  “Aggressive,” I scoffed. “The Supreme Court was overturning them wholesale.”

  I also told him that I had a few outbursts at some bald-faced lying witnesses, and at defendants who had done horrible, despicable things to their victims, and at their lawyers who kept torturing the victims with their cross-examinations. “My mistake,” I went on, as though I were used to talking with him on a daily basis, “was when I told one particularly well-connected and well-promoted lawyer that I thought he was the scum of the earth. That really sealed the deal.”

  “I didn’t know. I haven’t been following the news recently.”

  “These kinds of things are done quietly and quickly in our system. Three or four months and the whole thing was over.” I laughed. “You see, sometimes the wheels of justice do turn quickly.”

  He didn’t respond. I was a little disappointed at my inability to make a comedian laugh.

  “Every time I saw your name somewhere,” he said, “I would remember how we were, and I was interested in what you were doing, where you were. I wondered if you even remembered me. I watched you climb the ladder and I really was happy for you, honestly.”

  The dog let out a soft, almost human sigh. I can’t bring myself to have her put down. So much Tamara—smell, voice, touch, look—is still embodied in her.

  There was a silence between us again, but now it was different. I thought: What do people see in me on first impression? Can they still see what I was until not long ago? Is there any imprint left from the love I knew? A rebirth mark? I hadn’t been in these regions for a long time, and the thoughts confused me and starting tilling things over in me. I still had the feeling I was making a mistake, but perhaps
, for a change, it was a mistake that was right for me. I said: “If I do this, and I’m still not sure that I will, you need to know that I won’t take pity on you.”

  He laughed. “You forget that that was my condition, not yours.”

  I said his idea sounded a bit like someone hiring an assassin to take himself out.

  He laughed again. “I knew you’d be right for this. Just remember—one shot, straight to the heart.”