A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “More?” he asks, almost shyly.

  “How ’bout a joke or two, dude?” someone calls out, and another man grunts: “We came to hear jokes!” A woman shouts back at them: “Can’t you see he’s the joke today?” She rakes in a whole avalanche of laughs.

  “And I had no problem balancing,” he goes on, but I can see that he’s hurt, his lips turn white. “In fact, I’d always felt a little shaky when I was the regular way, on my feet, almost like I was falling, and I was scared the whole time. There was this beautiful tradition in our neighborhood: Hit the Dovaleh. Nothing serious, here a slap, there a kick, a little punch in the stomach. It wasn’t malicious, just, you know, technical, the way you stamp a time card. Have you hit your Dovaleh yet today?”

  A sharp look at the woman who made fun of him. The audience laughs. I don’t. I saw it happen in Be’er Ora, at the Gadna camp, for four whole days.

  “But when I was on my hands, you know, no one beats up a kid walking upside down. That’s a fact. Let’s say you want to slap an upside-down kid—well, how are you gonna get to his face? I mean, you’re not gonna bend all the way down to the ground and slap him, right? Or say you wanna kick him. Where exactly would you do that? Where are his balls now anyway? Confusing, eh? Illusory! And maybe you even start to be a little afraid of him. Yeah, ’cause an upside-down kid is no joke. Sometimes”—he sneaks a look at the medium—“you even think he’s a crazy kid. Mom, Mom, look, a boy walking on his hands! Shut up and look at the man slitting his wrists! Ouch…” He sighs. “I was a total nutcase. You can ask her what a joke I was around the neighborhood.” He jerks his thumb in her direction without looking at her. She is listening as though weighing every word, and she keeps shaking her head firmly: no.

  “Jesus, how much more…” He throws his hands up and looks at me, for some reason, and again I think he is holding me responsible for her presence here, as though I had intentionally summoned a hostile witness.

  “She’s getting under my skin,” he says to himself out loud. “I can’t do this, she’s messing up my pacing, I’m trying to construct a story and this woman…” He massages his chest, hard. “You guys listen to me, not to her, okay? I really was screwed up, I didn’t know how to play the game, not any game. What are you shaking your head at, little lady? Did you know me better than I knew myself?” He’s getting irritated now.

  This is no longer a show. There is something here, and the audience is drawn to it, although anxiously, and apparently people are willing to give up on what they came here for, at least for a few minutes. I try to overcome the paralysis that grips me again. I try to wake myself up, to prepare for what is coming. I have no doubt that it’s coming.

  “Here’s an example. Some guy comes up to my dad one day and tells him I was doing this or doing that and I was walking on my hands. Someone saw me on the street walking upside down behind my mom. And just so you understand—parentheses—ours truly’s job was to wait for her at five-thirty at the bus stop when she got back from her shift and walk her home and make sure she didn’t get lost, didn’t end up in places, didn’t sneak into castles and dine at kings’ feasts…just pretend you understand. Good city, Netanya.” The crowd laughs, and I remember the “senior official” and the way he kept glancing nervously at the Doxa on his thin wrist.

  “And there was another bonus, which was that when I walked on my hands no one noticed her, see? She could walk around all day long with her face on the ground and the schmatte on her head and the rubber boots, and now suddenly no one looks at her all crooked like she always thinks they do, and the neighbors don’t say things about her, and men don’t peek at her from behind shutters—they’re all just looking at me all the time and she gets a free pass.” He talks fast and hard, determined to thwart any attempt to stop him, and the audience rustles, responding physically to the invisible tug-of-war between them and him.

  “But then Old Daddy Shatterhand gets wind of me walking around upside down and doesn’t think twice before beating the crap out of me, along with all his regular talk about how I’m an embarrassment to his name, how because of me people make fun of him behind his back, how they don’t respect him, and if he hears I’m doing it again he’ll break my hands, and for good measure he’ll hang me upside down from the chandelier. When he got angry, Daddy-o, he’d get all poetic on my ass, and the real kicker was the combination of poetic imagery with the look in his eyes. Seriously, you’ve never seen anything like it.” He snickers; the snicker does not work out well. “Picture black marbles. Got that? Little black marbles except they’re made of iron. Something was wrong with those eyes, they were too close together, too round. I’m telling you, you look into those eyes for two seconds and you feel like a little animal is flipping the whole evolution thing over on you.”

  Since the snicker failed, he dispatches his infectious belly laugh to the front lines and resumes scurrying across the stage, trying to reelectrify his movements. “So what did you do, Dovaleh? That’s what you’re probably asking yourself now, I know you’re worried: What did little Dovaleh do? I went back to walking on my feet, that’s what I did. Like I had a choice? You don’t mess with my dad, and in our house, if you haven’t yet figured this out, there was monotheism: no God but him. Only his will held, and if you dared make a peep, out came the belt—whack!” He whips the air and the tendons on his neck protrude and his face twists in a flash of terror and hatred, but his lips form a smile, or a glower, and for a moment I see a little boy, the little boy I knew, who apparently I didn’t know—increasingly I realize how little I knew; what an actor he was, good Lord, what an actor, even then, and what an enormous effort of playacting our friendship was for him—a little boy trapped between the table and the wall as his father lashes him with a belt.

  He never told me, never even hinted, that his father beat him. Or that he got beat up at school. Or that anyone was capable of hurting him at all. On the contrary: he looked like a happy, well-liked boy, and his light, optimistic warmth was what drew me to him, with magical threads, out of my own childhood and my own home, where there was always something cold and murky and somewhat secretive.

  He keeps stretching out his stage smile, but the little woman flinches at the whipping hand, as though she were the one hit with the belt. When she lets out a barely audible sigh, he quickly spins around at her with furious dark eyes like a snake about to bite. And suddenly she looks larger, this stubborn, odd little woman, a self-appointed warrior battling for the soul of a boy she knew decades ago and of whom almost no trace remains.

  “Okay, Dad says no walking on hands, so I don’t. But then I start thinking, What now? How do I save myself? You know what I mean? How do I not die from all this uprightness? How do I be? That’s how my mind worked back then; I always had this restlessness. Okay, so he wants to see me walk like everyone does? Fantastic, I’ll walk like he wants me to, I’ll stay on my feet, I’ll be a good little boy, but I’m going to follow the rules of chess when I walk, okay?”

  The audience stares at him, trying to figure out where he’s going.

  “For example”—he giggles, employing a complex mimicry of his own face to cajole us to laugh with him—“one day I’d walk only diagonally, like the bishop. The next day only straight, like the rook. Then like the knight, one-step-two-step. And I saw people like they were playing chess with me. Not that they knew it, of course, how would they? But they each had their role, the whole street was my board, the whole school yard at recess…”

  Again I see the two of us walking and talking. He circles around me, making me dizzy, popping out here, emerging from there. Who knows what game of his I was taking part in?

  “I’d come up to my dad like a knight, say, while he was sawing the rags in the jeans room—never mind, trust me, there’s a universe somewhere where that sentence makes sense—and I’d position myself right on the floor tile where I could defend my mother, the queen, and I’d stand there between him and Mom, and I’d say to him silently: Check. And I’d w
ait a few seconds, give him time to make his move, and if he didn’t step onto another tile in time, it was checkmate. Isn’t that loopy? Wouldn’t you laugh at that kid if you knew what was going on in his head? Wouldn’t you wonder what this fuckup wasted his childhood on?”

  He slams these last words at the little woman. He doesn’t even look at her, but it’s the voice meant for her, and she straightens up and shouts out in a desperate, horrible voice: “Stop it! You were the best one! You didn’t say ‘midget’ and you didn’t take me to the warehouse, and you called me ‘Pitz,’ and ‘Pitz’ was good, don’t you remember?”

  “No.” He stands before her, arms hanging limply at his sides.

  “And the second time we talked you brought me in your mouth a picture of Isadora Duncan from the paper, and I still have it in my room. How can you not remember?”

  “I don’t remember, lady,” he murmurs, embarrassed.

  “Why do you call me lady?” she whispers.

  He sighs. Scrubs the sparse islands of hair on his temples. He senses, of course, that the whole show is starting to tilt again. He is out on a limb that is getting heavier than the whole tree. The crowd can feel it, too. People look at one another and shift restlessly. They understand less and less what it is that they have unwillingly become partners to. I have no doubt they would have gotten up and left long ago, or even booed him off the stage, if not for the temptation that is so hard to resist—the temptation to look into another man’s hell.

  “I’m all good! Dovaleh rides again!” he booms, and widens his mouth into that false, seductive smile. “Just picture our little Dovi, with his rainbow of zits, a fireworks show, his voice still hasn’t changed, he still hasn’t touched the tip of a nipple, but his left hand is suspiciously muscular ’cause what he lacks in size he makes up for with horniness…”

  He prattles on, juggling words. For a few minutes now I’ve felt a hole in my stomach. A pit. A sudden gnawing hunger that I have to cork immediately. I order some tapas and ask the waitress to bring them out as soon as possible.

  “Remember that age when you’re an adolescent and everything in the world makes you wicked horny? Like you’re sitting in geometry class and the teacher says, Look at the two legs of this isosceles triangle…And all the guys in class start breathing heavily and drooling…Ahhh…Or she goes, Now put a vertical line into the center of the circle…” He shuts his eyes and makes sucking, licking moves with his lips and tongue. The audience titters, but the tiny woman glares at him, and her look is so pained that I can’t decide whether the sight is heart-wrenching or ridiculous.

  “Long story short, my class goes down south to this place called Be’er Ora, near Eilat, for Gadna camp—remember those? Where they prepared the future soldiers of Israel?”

  Here it comes. Almost parenthetically. For two weeks, since our phone conversation, I’ve been waiting for him to get here. To drag me with him into that abyss.

  “Remember the Gadna days, my good friends? Anyone know if they still make high schoolers do those camps? Yes? No? Yes?”

  The emptiness of a long fall.

  Five steps between me and the door.

  The sweetness of the revenge I am about to be subjected to.

  Just deserts.

  “I’ll bet you a million dollars those lefties did away with Gadna, right? I don’t know, I’m just guessing, I know they can’t stand it when anyone has any fun, especially when it’s like military education for kids—yuck! Are we in Sparta or are we in Israel?!”

  He keeps turning up the flames beneath himself. I know it already, I recognize it. I straighten up in my chair. He won’t catch me unprepared.

  He continues in an excited whisper: “We set off on the road! Five a.m., still dark, our parents drop us off half asleep at the Umschlagplatz—just kiddiiiiing!” He slaps his wrist. “I don’t know how that slipped out, it must be the Tourette’s. Each kid is allowed one backpack. They call our names out, load us on the trucks, we say goodbye to our parents, then we sit there for ten hours on backbreaking wooden benches. We sit facing each other so no one misses when they puke, each kid’s knees touching someone else’s—I got Shimshon Katzover’s, which were nothing special. We sing our imbecilic hymns and youth movement anthems. You know, all the good ones, like She screws her leg out every night, she drops her teeth into a glass…” A few women start singing along enthusiastically, and he gives them a chilling look. “Hey, medium,” he inquires without looking at her, “could you maybe put me in touch with myself at that age?”

  “No, I’m only allowed to do it in the club at our village, and only with people who died.”

  “That should work out perfectly, then. And by the way, I didn’t want to go to that camp at all, just so you know. I’d never left home for a week, never been apart from them for that long. There’d never been any reason to. Going abroad wasn’t done back then, definitely not by our sort. Overseas, for us, was strictly for extermination purposes. And we didn’t travel around Israel either—where would we go? Who was expecting us? It was just the three of us, mom-dad-kid, and when we stood there by the trucks that morning, honestly, I got a little spooked. I don’t know, something about the whole thing just didn’t sit well, like I had some kind of sixth sense, or maybe I was afraid, I don’t know, to leave them alone with each other—”

  —

  He went to Be’er Ora with his school, and I went with mine. We weren’t supposed to be in the same camp. His school was signed up for a different base (Sde Boker, I think), but the organizers had other ideas, and we found ourselves not just at the same camp but in the same platoon and the same tent.

  —

  “So I tell my dad I don’t feel well, he has to take me home, and he says, ‘Over my dead body.’ I swear that’s what he said, and I got even more stressed out and then the tears started, and I wanted the ground to open up…

  “I mean, when I think about it now, it’s so weird that I cried in front of everyone. Picture it: I was almost fourteen, a pretty major nerd, but my dad was the red-faced one. He got annoyed at us, because when my mom saw me cry she started, too; she always did that, whenever there was any crying she would join right in. He hated to see her cry, he always teared up when it happened, he was emotional, especially with her, there’s no question about it, he really did love her, Daddy-o, in his own way, as they say, but he loved her, I admit it, he did, maybe like a squirrel or a mouse who finds a pretty piece of glass or a colorful marble and can’t stop looking at it…” He smiles. “Remember those awesome marbles they used to have? Remember that one with the butterfly inside? That’s the kind of marble she was, my mother.”

  A few men in the audience remember, as do I, and one tall woman with cropped silver hair. We’re all the same age, more or less. People throw out names of other marbles: cat’s-eyes, aggies, oilies. I contribute—meaning, I draw on the green napkin—the Dutch variety with the flower inside. The younger audience members titter at our enthusiasm. Dovaleh stands there grinning, soaking up the heartfelt moment. Then he flicks an imaginary marble straight at me. The tenderness and warmth on his face confuse me.

  “It was something unreal, I’m telling you. Because for him, or at least this is how it seemed, my mother was a gift from heaven. She was something really precious he’d been given to protect, but like at the same moment they also said: Watch it, mister—you’re just the caretaker, got it? You’re not going to really be with her, so keep your distance. You know what the Bible says—oh, by the way, Netanya, the Bible is awesome! Such a page-turner! I give it a big thumbs-up. If I wasn’t such a restrained individual I might even call it the book of books. And it’s full of dirty bits! So anyway, right off the bat the Bible says, ‘And the man knew Eve his wife,’ right?” A few voices answer: “Right.” “Okay. Great job, Mr. Adam, you’re a real stud. Except pay attention to how it says you knew her. It doesn’t say anything about understanding her, eh, girls? Am I right?” The women cheer, and a band of warmth rises up from them and floats
over to surround him like an aura. He grins and somehow manages to encompass them all in a single wink, and yet I sense that each of them was winked at in a slightly different way.

  “He just didn’t understand. My dad did not understand this beautiful woman who didn’t say a word all day, just sat there with her books and the door shut, didn’t ask him for anything and didn’t want anything and all his finagling and hustling didn’t even make a dent in her. Somehow, he managed to rent out the storehouse behind the barbershop to a family of four for two-fifty bucks a month—ta-daa! Then he buys a crate of velveteen pants that came in on a fishing boat from Marseille, with slightly defective zippers, and those things stank up our apartment for two years. Hallelujah! And she’d sit next to him at the kitchen table every evening, for years this went on, and she was a whole head taller than him, sitting there like a statue”—he reaches both arms out like an obedient pupil or a prisoner holding out his hands for the cuffs—“and he’d open up the ledger where he wrote down numbers like fly droppings with all kinds of code names he made up for his clients and his suppliers, the ones who were honest with him and the ones who screwed him. There was Pharaoh, and the Sweetheart of Sosnowiec, and Sarah Bernhardt, Zishe Breitbart, Goebbels, Rumkowski, Meir Vilner, Ben-Gurion…And he’d get all excited, you should have seen him, and sweaty, and beet red, and his finger would shake on the numbers, and this whole thing was just to prove to her, as if she was even arguing, as if she even heard anything he said, that in such-and-such years and so-and-so months he’d have enough money so we could move into a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in Kiryat Moshe.”

  Looking up at the crowd, he seems to have forgotten where he is for a moment, but he quickly recovers and apologizes with a smile and a shrug.

  “After ten hours on the bus we get to some place in the boonies, out in the Negev, or maybe it was the Aravah. Somewhere near Eilat. Let’s see…I’ll try and communicate with my late self…” He rolls his eyes, tilts his head back, and mumbles: “I see…brown and red mountains, a desert, and tents, and officers’ barracks, and a mess hall, and a ripped Israeli flag on a mast, and a puddle of diesel, and a degenerate generator on its last legs, and mess tins we used to get for bar-mitzvah gifts and we’d rinse them at the spigot with a filthy sponge and cold water so all the grease stayed on—”