A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  I laughed, too, and a faint vapor, warm and forgotten, came up from those days of ours. We said goodbye with a new sort of lightness, even an awakening of affection. And only then, perhaps because of our parting words, was I struck by an unexpected blow: I remembered what had happened to him, and to me, when we were in Be’er Ora together, at the Gadna camp. For a few seconds I simply froze in terror at my ability to forget.

  And at the fact that he hadn’t reminded me, not even with a single word.

  —

  “But you’ll have to wait patiently, my friends, because this is a story that, honest to God, I have never told in a show. Never told it in any gig, never told it to a single person, and tonight it’s going to happen…”

  The wider his grin gets, the gloomier his face. He looks at me and shrugs helplessly. His entire being conveys the sense that he is about to take a big and disastrous leap which he has no choice but to take.

  “So here you go: brand-spanking-new material, still shrink-wrapped. I’m not feeling the words yet, which means that this evening, ladies and gentlemen, you are my guinea pigs. I’m crazy about you, Netanya!”

  Again the inevitable applause and cheers. Again he takes a sip from the flask, and his extremely prominent Adam’s apple bobs up and down, and every single person notices the desperate thirst, and he can feel them noticing it. The Adam’s apple stops moving. The eyes look straight over the flask at the audience. With an embarrassment that is slightly surprising and almost touching, his voice climbs up into a screech: “Netanya, the abandoned project! Are you with me? Didn’t get scared off? Awesome, good for you, I need you to be with me now, I need you to hug me like I was your long-lost brother. You, too, medium. You surprised me this evening, I’ll admit it, you came at me from a place I’d already…A place where no white man’s foot has stepped for a long time…” He pulls up his pant leg, exposing a skeletal, bald shin of parchment skin and bones, and looks at it. “All right, well, no yellowing man’s foot. But still, I’m glad you came, medium. I don’t know what made you come here tonight, but you did, and you might have a professional interest in this story, because it involves a…how should I put it…it has a kind of ghost in it. Maybe you could even communicate with it, but I’m warning you—call collect!

  “Seriously now, this story is a difficult case, I’m telling you. A murder case, you might say, except it’s not clear who was murdered, if it can even be called a murder, and who got murdered for life.” He flashes a gaping, clownish grin. “And now, without further ado, I give you the wild and hilarious story of my first funeral!”

  He dances around the armchair, boxing at the air, jabbing, dodging with a quick feint, and punching again. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” he intones with a cantorial melody. From the audience come a few giggles, throat clearings signifying relaxation in anticipation of delight. But I find myself disquieted again. Extremely disquieted. Only five steps lie between my table and the exit.

  “My fiiiiirrst funeraaaaaal!” he proclaims again, this time with a circus ringmaster’s trumpeting. A lanky woman with straw hair at the edge of the room lets out a staccato burst of laughter, and he screeches to a stop and skewers her with his look: “For fuck’s sake, Netanya South! I say ‘funeral’ and you laugh? That’s your instinct around here?” The audience responds with more laughter, but he doesn’t smile. He circles the stage, talking to himself and gesticulating. “What is the matter with these people? What kind of a person laughs at something like that? But you saw it yourself. You killed! Seven point two magnitude on the Dovaleh Scale. I just don’t get these people…”

  He stops and leans on the back of the armchair. “I said ‘funeral,’ sister,” he drills at the lanky woman. “Is it too much to ask for some commiseration, honey? A pinch of compassion—have you ever heard that word, Lady Macbeth? Compassion! I mean, we’re talking about death here, lady! Put your hands together for death!” His voice suddenly ignites in a horrible roar and he runs across the stage with airplane arms and then claps rhythmically over his head, goading the audience to join: “Hands together for death!” People laugh awkwardly: the slogan grates on them, he grates on them as he scurries about the stage screaming. Their eyes begin to glaze over as they watch him, and by now I recognize the apparatus: he works himself up into a frenzy, and by doing so works them up, too. He inflames himself and ignites them, too. I can’t quite understand how it works, but it does. Even I can feel the vibrations in the air, in my body, and I tell myself that maybe it’s just hard to remain indifferent when faced with a man so thoroughly fused with the primal element inside him. But that doesn’t explain the roar trapped in my own gut, growing louder by the second. Here and there a few men join in—only men. Perhaps they’re doing it to silence him, to drown out his shouts with their bellows, but soon they’re yelling together with him. Something has seized them—the rhythm, the madness. “Hands together for death!” he screams, sweaty and breathless, his cheeks burning a sickly red. “Raise the roof!” he screeches, and the young people, especially the soldiers, clap their hands over their heads and roar with him, and he goads them on with mocking grins, and the two bikers screech as loud as they can, and now I can tell they’re a boy and a girl, maybe twins, and with their sharp features they look like two predatory puppies watching him, swallowing up his moves with their eyes. There’s a stirring among the couples sitting near the bar, too, and one guy is even dancing on his chair. A gaunt, sunken, gray-faced man waves his hands wildly, screaming, “Hands together for death!” The three bronzed old ladies are going wild, tossing their thin arms in the air and shouting and laughing so hard they’re in tears, and Dovaleh himself is erupting, he’s in a frenzy, barreling his hands and feet around, and the crowd is awash in laughter, swept up in the frantic lunacy, and there are sixty or seventy people around me, men and women, old and young, their mouths full of poisonous popping candy—it starts with an awkward hum, with sidelong glances, then something lights up in one person after the other, and the shouting makes their necks swell, and within a second they’re up in the air, balloons of idiocy and liberty, released from gravity, rushing to join the one and only camp that can never be defeated: Hands together for death! Almost the entire audience is screaming and clapping rhythmically now, and I am, too, at least in my heart—why not more? Why can’t I do more? Why not take a vacation from myself for once, from the cyanide face I’ve adopted these past few years, with my eyes always red from trapped tears. Why not jump up on a chair and erupt into shouts of hands together for death, the death that managed to snatch away from me, in six short fucking weeks, the one person I really and truly loved with a lust for life, with the joy of life, from the minute I saw your face, your round, light-filled face, with its beautiful, wise, pure forehead, with its roots of strong, dense hair, which I stupidly believed testified to your strong grip on life, and your broad, large, generous, dancing body—don’t you dare erase even one of those adjectives—you were such medicine for me, such medicine for the dry bachelorhood that had closed in on me, and for the “judicial temperament” that had all but replaced my personality, and for all the antibodies to life that had built up in my blood through all the years without you, until you came, everything about you came—

  You—I still have an actual physical aversion to giving the words final validity, in writing, even if it’s only on a napkin—who were fifteen years younger than me, and now eighteen, and more every day.

  You, who promised, when you asked for my hand, to look at me always with kind eyes. The eyes of a loving witness, you said. And no one has ever said anything lovelier to me.

  “Make babies with me, death!” he screams and jumps around like a genie out of the bottle, drenched with sweat, his face on fire. The crowd echoes him with screams and laughter, and he roars: “Death, death, you win! You’re the best! Take us, death, let us join the majority!” I roar with him in my bursting heart, and I swear I would get up and scream out loud with him, even though people know me here, even
despite My Honor. I would get up and scream with him and howl like a jackal at the moon and the stars and her little soaps still in the dish in the shower, and her pink slippers under the bed, and the spaghetti Bolognese we used to make together for dinner—I would do it if I just didn’t have to look at that disconsolate midget plugging her ears up with two fingers like an impervious thorn in my side.

  I slouch down, defeated.

  Dovaleh bends over and rests his hands on his knees, his mouth open in that skeleton smile of his, sweat dripping from his face. “Stop, stop,” he begs the audience, laughing breathlessly. “You’re so awesome, I can’t take it.”

  But now that he is dizzy and emitting hiccups of laughter, they sober up and quickly cool off, and they look at him with distaste. Silence spreads through the room, and in the silence it becomes clear to us all that this man is driving himself far beyond his own limits.

  That for him, this is not a game.

  They slump back in their chairs, breathing heavily. The waitresses start darting among the tables again. The kitchen door opens and shuts repeatedly. Everyone is suddenly thirsty, everyone is hungry.

  He is sick. I am struck by the certain knowledge. He is a sick man. Very sick, maybe. How could I have missed it? How could I have not understood? He even said it explicitly: the prostate, the cancer, and there were other heavy-handed hints, but still I thought it was another bad joke, or a way to squeeze out sympathy and perhaps a little leniency in our artistic judgment, not to mention in my verdict. After all, I must have rationalized, he’s capable of anything. I must have thought—if I thought at all—that even if there was a kernel of truth in his words, even if he had been sick once, his condition couldn’t be serious now, because otherwise he wouldn’t do the gig, he wouldn’t be up to it, either physically or mentally, would he?

  So how do I make sense of this? How do I explain the fact that I—with my twenty-five years of experience observing and listening, being attentive to every clue—was so blind to his condition, so self-absorbed? How did his frenetic chatter and nervous jokes affect me the way strobe lights affect an epileptic? How did I keep turning inward, to my own life?

  And how could it be that he, in his state, ultimately gave me what all the books I read and the movies I watched and the consolations offered by friends and relatives these past three years did not do for me?

  His illness was staring me in the face for the whole first hour of the show: the skeletal features, the horrific thinness. Yet I denied it, even though in some part of my brain I knew it was a fact. I ignored it, even when the pain grew sharper and sharper—the familiar pain of realization that soon this man who was dancing and dashing and constantly chattering would no longer be. Being! he shouted with a sly smile a few moments ago. What an amazing, subversive idea.

  “So, my first funeral…” He laughs and stretches out his thin arms. “Have you heard the one about the guys who die and get to the induction center in the sky, and they sort them into heaven or Netan—I mean hell? No, seriously, isn’t that the greatest fear—that in the end it’ll turn out the rabbis were right? That hell is a for-real place?” The audience snickers halfheartedly and people lower their eyes, reluctant to look at him.

  “Listen, guys, I’m talking all-inclusive hell, the whole shebang, with fire, and devils with horns, and those little rakes, the pitchforks, and the wheel of torture and boiling tar and all those gadgets Satan gets to use…I haven’t slept a wink just thinking about it these past few months, I swear, and at night it’s the worst, the thoughts just eat me up and I totally get what you’re thinking now: Son of a bitch, why did I have to go and eat those shrimp on that trip to Paris? And the pitas from Abu Gosh on Passover? And why didn’t we all vote for Torah Judaism?” He lowers his voice and booms: “Too late, scumbags—to the tar!”

  The crowd laughs.

  “Okay, so I was talking about my first funeral. And then you laughed, you shits, you heartless crowd—you’re as cold as an Ashkenazi in January. I’m talking to you about a kid barely fourteen years old. Dovik, Dovaleh, the apple of his mommy’s eye. Look at me now—see? Just like this, but without the bald head, the stubble, and the loathing of humanity.”

  Almost against his will he looks at the little woman, as if seeking her approval or denial. It’s hard for me to decide which of the two he would prefer, and I also note that it’s the first time he doesn’t look at me first.

  She refuses to look at him. Keeps her eyes away. And as she does every time he bad-mouths himself, she shakes her bowed head, and her lips move silently as he speaks. From my table it looks like she’s annulling everything he says with her own words. He debates whether or not to have another go at her. Something about her, I sense, makes his blood boil. His salivary glands are already releasing venom—

  He lets her be.

  For a split second, a fast, pale-faced, laughing boy walks on his hands down a dirt path behind an apartment block. He meets a very small girl in a checkered dress. He tries to make her laugh.

  “And that Dovaleh, may I rest in peace, was peanut sized, a pip-squeak—by the way, just so you know, at fourteen I was exactly the height I am now, and that was the end of that.” He gives the predictable derisive scoff. “And I’m sure you can tell, my trusted friends, that in the realm of verticality”—he slowly runs his hands down his body, from head to knees—“I somehow failed to achieve greatness, unlike in the fields of atom cracking and the discovery of the God particle, which, as is well known, I excelled at.” His eyes glaze over and he strokes his private parts affectionately: “Ah, the God particle…But seriously, in my family, on my father’s side, there’s this phenomenon where the men peak at around bar-mitzvah age and that’s it—freeze! That’s it for life! It’s well documented, and I’m pretty sure even Mengele studied us, or parts of us, especially the thigh and forearm bones. Yes, my people aroused the curiosity of that refined and introverted man. At least twenty guys from Dad’s family went through his lab, and every one of them discovered, with the kind doctor’s assistance, that the sky’s the limit.” He flashes a grin. “But only Dad, my father himself, the sly bastard, missed out big-time on the Mengele studies, because he immigrated to Israel as a pioneer thirty seconds before it all started over there. Mom ran straight into him, though, the doctor, I mean, and her whole family did, too. You could say, in fact, that in his own special way he was like our family doctor, you know? Not so?” He flutters his eyelids at the audience, which is becoming increasingly tight-lipped. “And just think about how even though the guy was so busy, with people coming to see him from all over Europe, climbing all over each other on trains to get to him, still, he found time to meet with every person individually. Although he absolutely refused to allow second opinions. You could see only him, and only for a short consultation: right, left, left, left…”

  Perhaps fifteen times or more, his head jerks left like a stuck hand on a clock. A rustle of grumbles and protests comes from the audience. People shift in their seats and exchange looks. But there are also hesitant chuckles, especially from the younger crowd. The two bikers are the only ones who allow themselves to laugh out loud. Their nose rings and lip rings glimmer. The woman at the table next to me throws them a look and gets up and walks out with a loud sigh. People stare at her. Her helpless husband stays seated for a moment, then hurries after her.

  Dovaleh walks over to a little blackboard on a wooden easel at the back of the stage, which I haven’t noticed until now. He picks up a piece of red chalk and draws a straight line, and next to it another line, shorter and bent. Giggles and whispers from the audience.

  “Imagine a Dovaleh that looks like this: kind of dumb, face just asking to be slapped, glasses this thick, shorts with a belt that comes up somewhere around the nipples—my dad used to buy them four sizes too big for me; he had high hopes. Now turn all that upside down and stand it on its hands. Yeah? Got it? See the trick?” He stops to consider for a moment, then throws himself to the ground, hands reaching out to t
he wooden floor. His lower body falters as he tries to hoist himself up. His legs flutter and he falls onto one side, cheek flattened against the boards.

  “Everywhere I went, that’s how I was. On my way to school with my backpack dangling in front, and inside the house, in the hallway, from the bedroom to the kitchen, back and forth a thousand times, until Dad got home. And in the neighborhood, through the yards, down the steps and up the steps, easy peasy, fall down, get up again, jump onto my hands again.” He keeps on talking. It’s disturbing to see him like that, sprawled there motionless, only the mouth alive, open, moving. “I don’t know where I got it from. Actually I do know, I was putting on a play for my mother, that’s where it started. I used to perform these sketches for her in the evening, before Figaro got home and we’d get all respectable. One day, I don’t know, I just put my hands on the floor, threw my legs up, fell over once, fell over twice, Mom clapped her hands, thought I was doing it to make her laugh, maybe I was, I spent my whole life trying to make her laugh.” He stops. Shuts his eyes. All at once he is just a body. Lifeless. I believe I hear another desperate murmur pass through the room: What is going on here?

  He gets up. Quietly gathers his body parts from the floor one after the other—arm, leg, head, hand, buttocks—like someone picking up scattered articles of clothing. A quiet laugh seeps into the audience, a kind I haven’t heard yet tonight. A soft laugh of wonder at his precision, his subtlety, his theatrical wisdom.

  “I could tell my mom was enjoying it, so I threw my legs up again, swayed, fell down, threw them up again, and she laughed. I actually heard her laugh. So I tried again and again, until I found my spot and my head got right. And I got calm, I got happy. All I could hear was the blood in my ears, and then quiet, all the noise stopped, and I felt like I’d finally found one place in the air of the world where there was no one except me.”

  He snickers awkwardly, and I remember what he asked me to see in him: the thing that comes out of a person against his will. The thing that only one person in the world might have.