A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  The audience is his now, dipping its feet in familiar waters. We were there for four days, Dovaleh and I, in the same platoon, and most of the time we slept in the same tent and ate at the same table. And we did not exchange a single word.

  “The counselors at this base, or commanders, I guess they were called, they each had their own particular strand of fucked-up-ness. Every one of them was like a rough draft of an actual human being. The real army wouldn’t take them, so they made them babysit a bunch of kids at Gadna camp. One guy was so cross-eyed he couldn’t see an inch ahead, the other was flat-footed, one dude was from Holon. Believe me, out of ten of them you could put together maybe one normal person.

  “Honey,” he turns to the medium with a sigh, “you’re turning my milk sour. Look at everyone else laughing! Don’t you think my jokes are funny?”

  “No.”

  “What?! None of them?”

  “Your jokes are bad.” Her eyes are on the table, and her fingers grip her purse straps.

  “Bad, as in not funny?” he asks tenderly. “Or as in, like, they’re mean?”

  She doesn’t respond immediately. “Both,” she says finally.

  “So my jokes are not funny, and they’re also mean.”

  She thinks for another moment. “Yes.”

  “But that’s what stand-up comedy is.”

  “Then it’s not right.”

  He gives her a long, bemused look. “Then why did you come?”

  “Because at the club they said stand-up, but I thought they meant karaoke.”

  They’re conversing as though no one else is in the room.

  “Well, now you know what it is and you can leave.”

  “I want to stay.”

  “But why? You’re not having fun. You’re miserable here.”

  “That’s true.” Her face turns gloomy. Every emotion that passes through her is immediately visible on her face. In fact, I think I’m spending as much time looking at her this evening as at him. I’ve only just realized it: I constantly look back and forth between them, gauging him by her responses.

  “Please leave, it’s going to get harder for you now.”

  “I want to stay.” When she purses her lips, the exaggerated circle of red lipstick makes her look like a tiny clown with hurt feelings.

  Dovaleh sucks in his sunken cheeks, and his eyes seem to get closer together. “Okay,” he murmurs, “but I warned you, honey. Don’t come crying to me later.”

  She stares at him, uncomprehending, then shrinks back.

  “Give it up, Netanya!” he howls in her direction. “So we get there after ten hours, they put us in tents, big tents, ten, twenty guys per tent, or maybe less? I don’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember anything anymore, don’t trust a word I say, seriously, my head is a sieve, I swear, back when my kids still knew they had a dad and they used to come visit, I’d say, ‘Whoa! Before you go any further, put your name tags on!’ ”

  Feeble laughter.

  “And down there, in Be’er Ora, they teach us all the things a proud young Hebrew boy needs to know: how to climb up walls in case we have to escape the ghetto again; how to slink, for the sewage pipes; how to drop, crawl, and fire, a procedure we called patzatzta, so the Nazis won’t understand and they’ll get bummed out. And they make us jump off a tower onto a canvas—remember that? And walk on a rope like a lizard, and day treks and night treks, and sweating and running around the base in horrendous heat, and shooting five bullets with a Czech Mauser and feeling like James Bond, and me”—he flutters his eyelids coquettishly—“the shooting makes me feel close to Mommy, it gives me a little taste of home, because my mom—did I tell you this? I didn’t? My mom worked for Taas. Yep, for the Israel Military Industries in Jerusalem. She was a bullet sorter, my sweet little mommy, six shifts a week. Dad set it up for her, someone probably owed him something and they gave her a job even with all her baggage. For the life of me I don’t know what was going through my dad’s head. What was he thinking? Nine hours a day, her, with bullets: ta-ta-ta-ta-ta!” He holds an imaginary submachine gun and fires in all directions, shouting hoarsely: “Be’er Ora, here I come! Think kitchen duty! Think giant cauldrons! And scabies! Scratching and itching like little Jobs! And diarrhea flowing freely because the chef, bless him, earned three stars in the Michelin guide to dysentery—”

  It’s been a few minutes since he’s looked me in the eye.

  “And in the evening there were parties and bonfires and sing-alongs and putting out fires the old-fashioned way—all they let me do with my dick was put out a firefly—and good times, and boys and girls, and yin and yang dancing the krakowiak, and I partied like you wouldn’t believe. I was the platoon’s funny guy, they laughed with me, they paid attention, they tossed me gaily around in a circle, ’cause I was little, I weighed nothing, and I was the youngest one there, I skipped a grade one time, never mind, not that I was the smartest, they just got sick of me and kicked me up. So at Gadna camp they made me their mascot, their good-luck Dovaleh. Before every exercise or firing range, each kid came over and gave me a little smack upside the head, but it was all in good spirits, it was all good. Bambino, that’s what they called me. It was the first time I had a decent nickname. Better than Boots or Rag-and-Bone.”

  —

  That was how I ran into him. I got to the base and went into my tent to unpack, and I saw three oversize kids throwing a big army duffel back and forth, with a boy inside screaming like an animal. I didn’t know the boys. I was the only one from my school who got assigned to that tent. I assume my Gadna teacher, who divvied us up, thought I’d feel equally out of place anywhere I went. I remember standing at the tent flaps without moving. I couldn’t stop watching. The three kids were in their undershirts, and their biceps glistened with sweat. The kid in the duffel bag had stopped shouting and was crying now, and they snickered without saying a word and kept tossing him back and forth.

  I put my backpack down on a bed that looked available near the entrance, and sat down with my back to the events. I didn’t dare interfere, but I also couldn’t leave the tent. At some point I heard a loud thump and I jumped. One of them must have dropped the duffel bag on the cement floor. It quickly opened up and a head of curly black hair emerged. I recognized him immediately. The kids probably saw something on my face, because they sniggered. Dovaleh followed their gazes and stared at me. His face was wet with tears. The encounter was beyond our comprehension, and in some ways beyond our means. We made no sign of mutual recognition. Even as photo negatives of ourselves, we were completely in sync. His scream had frozen in my throat, or so I felt. I held my head up high, looked away, and walked out, still hearing their cackles.

  —

  “And there was girls-and-boys stuff going on there, and fresh new hormones, still unwrapped, and the merry crackle of zits popping. I was still pretty green in that area, you know, I’d only just started my first experiments with myself, magazines and pictures and all that, and when it came to the main event I was really only on observer status, but man did I enjoy observing! That’s where I started building the observation tower that would last a lifetime.”

  He smiles. People smile at him. What is he selling them? What is he selling himself?

  —

  Shortly after our encounter, I met him in the mess hall. Since we were in the same tent, we were also at the same table, although, fortunately for me, on opposite ends. I loaded up my plate and looked at nothing else, but I couldn’t avoid seeing his classmates dump a whole saltshaker into his soup. He slurped it up cheerfully and made loud sucking noises, which had them all falling about laughing. Someone grabbed the baseball cap off his head and it flew back and forth across the table, got dipped into the occasional bowl of something, and finally landed back on his head and drizzled liquid down his face. He reached his tongue out and licked the drippings. Once in a while, through the jabs and the silly faces, his eyes met mine, indifferent and vacant.

  At the end of the me
al they stuffed half a banana in his mouth and he scratched at his ribs and made monkey howls, until the platoon commander ordered him to shut up and sit down.

  At night, when we all lay in bed after lights-out, the boys in the tent made him tell them the dreams he had about a girl in their class, who was particularly well endowed. He did. He used words I couldn’t believe he knew. But it was his voice, his flow of speech, his rich imagination. I lay motionless, almost without breathing, and knew for sure that if he hadn’t been in the tent it would have been me they’d be picking on.

  One boy from his class suddenly ran down the two rows of beds mimicking Dovaleh’s father, and another got up and started impersonating his mother. I pulled the army blanket up over my head. The boys laughed and Dovaleh laughed with them. His voice hadn’t changed yet, and it rang out with a strange freshness among their deeper tones. Someone said, “If I walked down Dizengoff with Greenstein, people would think I was with a girl!” A big wave of laughter flowed down the tent.

  After the second night, I begged my teacher to let me switch. On the third night I lay in a different bed, in a different tent, far from his, but I still felt the aftershocks. On the fourth night they assigned me to guard duty with a girl in my class, and I stopped thinking about Dovaleh.

  He was right: I blocked him out.

  —

  “At night everyone runs in the dark between the tents, and from every direction you hear aahh and oooh and Get your hand out, you idiot, and C’mon, let me. And Gross, what’s with the tongue? And Put your hand there, just feel it, and I really really can’t today, and My mom will kill me, and How the hell do you open all these hooks, and What is that, yuck, what did you squirt on me, and You bitch, you shut my zipper on it…”

  His audience surges and ebbs on waves of laughter. He still avoids my look. I wait. I’m ready. In a minute or two he’ll turn to me with a big grin: What a coincidence! Such a small world! The Honorable Avishai Lazar was there, too!

  —

  On the second morning I was sent from the firing range to bring the water canteen I’d left in my tent. I remember how nice it was to be alone suddenly, away from the noise and the yelling and the commands that filled up every inch of space, and what a relief it was to finally be without him, without the torture of his presence. The air was clear and there was a soothing freshness everywhere. (Now, as I write, the smell of the water and soap from the morning wash comes back to me, pooled in the little cement dimples of the tent floor.)

  I sat on my bed. The tent flaps were open and I could quietly look out at the desert, whose beauty stunned me and was something of a comfort to me. I tried to empty my mind. And it was then, perhaps because I let down my guard for a minute, that I started to feel, deep in my throat, a kind of crying I had never tasted before. It was a cry of grief, of terrible loss, and I knew it was about to rattle me uncontrollably.

  Suddenly Dovaleh walked in. He saw me and froze. He took a few uncertain, almost faltering steps to his bed and dug through his backpack. I fell on my bag and rummaged in it and buried my face in it. The big sob dried up at once. After a minute or two, when I didn’t hear anything, I thought he’d left and I looked up. He was standing next to his bed with his face to me and his arms at his sides. We exchanged dark, blunted looks. His lips moved; perhaps he wanted to say something. Or perhaps he was trying to smile, so I would remember him, remember us. I must have responded with a sign of warning, or aversion, or disgust. His face twisted and trembled.

  And that was all. When I looked up again, it was to see him walking away from the tent.

  —

  “And then, on the third day,” he shouts, “or maybe the fourth, who can remember? Who the hell can remember anything at all? My memory, of blessed memory…Anyway, we’re sitting on the ground in a circle and the sun’s beating down on us like a bitch. If there’s any shade at all, it’s only from the vultures waiting for us to drop dead already. The cross-eyed counselor is talking about camouflage or something, when suddenly a woman soldier runs out of the base commander’s barracks, she was a sergeant I think, and she gallops over to us, boom-boom-boom, a petite woman but with considerable heft, if you know what I mean, busting out of her uniform, legs like a doe, each one a whole doe—heh-heh—and a second later she’s at our circle, the drill cadet doesn’t even have time to say ‘Attention!’ and she barks, all out of breath: ‘Greenstein, Dov! Is he in this platoon?’ ”

  —

  I remember the scene. Not the soldier herself, but the way she sharply called out his name, which shocked me out of my daydream. His name sailed over me so unexpectedly that I almost jumped up in a panic and said it was me.

  —

  “Right then and there I could feel something rotten coming on. And all the kids in my class, my close friends, they all point at me and yell: ‘It’s him!’ Like they’re telling her: ‘That one! Take him, not me!’ With friends like that…right?” He laughs and avoids looking at me. “They wouldn’t have been much fun at a selektzia, you know? So the soldier girl says: ‘Come with me to the commander immediately.’ And this castrated voice comes out of my mouth: ‘But ma’am, Sergeant, what did I do?’ My friends think that’s hilarious: ‘But ma’am, Sergeant, what did I do?’ they all mimic me. Then they start shouting: ‘Are you gonna reprimand him for jacking off? Or for stinking up the tent?’ They rat me out with all kinds of lies, then they chant: ‘Throw Eraser in the slammer! Throw Eraser in the slammer!’ Yep, Eraser was another one of my nicknames. Why? I’m glad you asked! Because back then I had freckles, I don’t have them anymore, they faded, but I had loads of them—yes, that is correct, someone shat on the fan, thank you so much for the original explanation, table nineteen.”

  He turns his head slowly in the direction of the heckler, his regular gimmick, and glares at him with blank eyes. The club manager aims a spotlight on a thick-fleshed man with a shaved head wearing a yellow jacket. Dovaleh does not remove his gaze. His eyes are open just a slit. The audience bellows.

  “Well, good evening, Mr. Tony Soprano decked out in lemon meringue!” he says sweetly. “Welcome to our humble abode, and may you have a very crystal Nacht. I understand you’re in between medications at the moment, and just my luck, you had to choose this particular evening to get out for some fresh air!” The man’s wife laughs and pats his back, and he blows air loudly and shakes off her comforting hand. “It’s okay, brother, it’s all good, we’re just having fun with you. Yoav, give the gentleman a shot of vodka, on me, and don’t forget to slip in a couple of Xanax and some Ritalin…No, no, you’re all right, my man, at the end of the evening you’ll be awarded the Al-Qaeda Prize for emotional intelligence. I’m not laughing at you, brother, I’m laughing with you, okay? Just imagine that I’ve heard that joke about the fan a couple of thousand times before. We had one kid in class, you and him would have gotten on like a house on fire, he was just like you—spitting image.” He puts his hand around his mouth and whispers to us: “All the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the grace of a jockstrap—I’m kidding, sit down! It’s a joke! And every time that kid saw me, but every single time, for eight fucking years, he would ask if I wanted an eraser for the freckles. So that’s how the name Eraser stuck, see? There don’t happen to be any of my old classmates here tonight, do there? No? So I can keep on lying unchecked? Wonderful! Anyhoo, I get up and shake the sand off my ass—by the way, that was how the original Desert Storm started—and I walk away from my posse and follow her, and I know this is it, I’m done for. Right that second I had the feeling I wouldn’t be going back anymore. That this whole thing was over for me. My childhood, I mean.”

  He takes a sip from the flask. The club echoes with that indistinct but irritable pulsing. People are still waiting to see how the evening is going to develop, but his credit is running out. I sense their response in my body like rapidly dropping blood sugar. I remember: a moment before he answered the soldier and stood up, he sought me out and gave me a long, pleading look. I avoided his eye
s.

  “Talking about childhood,” he murmurs, “I was thinking, you know how everyone’s all up in arms about bullying these days? Well, I say, some kids just deserve to get bullied. Because if they don’t get the crap bullied out of them when they’re young, it’ll just get worse the older they get, you know what I mean?

  “Not funny? Oh, I see. Sophisticated audience, you guys are, with European standards. Okay, no problem, we’ll come at it another way, which I think might be more up your alley. Here’s a little psychological analysis plus emotional insight. Me, when I was a kid, I had the most accurate scientific gauge for knowing who was popular and who wasn’t. I call it the Shoelace Gauge. Let me explain. Let’s say a group of kids is walking home from school. Walking, talking, yakking, yelling. You know—kids. One of them crouches down to tie his shoelace. Now, if the group stops right away—but I mean every single one of them, even kids who were looking the other way and didn’t see him crouch down—if they all stop where they are and wait for him, then he’s in, he’s good, he’s popular. But if no one even notices him, and only sometime toward the end of senior year, like at graduation, someone goes, ‘Hey, anyone know what happened to that dude who stopped to tie his shoelace?’ Well, then you know that that dude—he’s me.”

  The little woman is perched on the edge of her seat, mouth open slightly, feet pressed tightly together. He gives her a glance while he takes a sip from his flask, then looks into my eyes, a long, deep look. For the first time since he started telling the story, he looks straight at me, and I have a peculiar sense that he’s taken an ember from the woman and passed it to me.