A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “Long story short, I follow the soldier girl, and I get it into my head that either they’re going to punish me for something I did—but what could I have done? Me? The biggest klutz in the class, the biggest dork, the biggest sucker? A good boy…” He winks at the little woman and immediately looks for me. “Wait a minute, Judge, is that even a word anymore? Is that still on the market, ‘sucker’? It’s not a collector’s item?”

  There is no hostility in his voice or in his eyes, which confuses me. I confirm that the word is still in currency. He repeats it to himself quietly several times, and I get sucked into whispering it along with him.

  “Either that, or it’s something to do with my father. He got some bee in his bonnet, maybe decided something about this whole Gadna doesn’t sit right with him, it’s an affront to his dignity, or maybe he found out that Gadna has something to do with the Labor Party, and he’s a Beitar guy, or, most likely of all, he found the dirty magazines I hid behind the window blinds in my room and he’s summoned me for consultations. Could be anything. With him, you never really knew where the next punch was going to come from.”

  He stands at the edge of the stage, very close to the front row of tables, and shoves his hands into his armpits. Some of the people look up at him. Others sink into themselves with an odd, feeble gaze, as though they’ve given up following him and yet cannot look away.

  “And then I realize she’s talking to me, the sergeant. She’s walking quickly and saying I have to go home right now, there’s no time, I have to get to the funeral by four. She doesn’t turn her head back to me, like, I don’t know, she’s afraid to look at me, and don’t forget that all this time right in front of my eyes is her ass, which is quite the sight. Truth is, asses are generally a stimulating topic. You tell me, guys, hands to your hearts—I said to hearts, table thirteen! Between you and me, have you ever seen a woman who is satisfied with her ass? Even one single woman under the sun?”

  He keeps talking. I see his lips move. He waves his hands, he grins. A white, milky fog begins to spread through my head.

  “You know that thing where she stands in front of the mirror and looks back from this side, then from the other side—and by the way, when they’re talking about their own personal asses, women can rotate their heads three hundred sixty-five degrees, no problem, guaranteed! It’s scientific! It’s a rotation that only two other organisms in all of nature can perform: sunflowers and crankshafts. And then she turns around like this—”

  He demonstrates, almost slipping backward onto the tables. I look around. I see lots of holes. Little sinkholes opening wide to laugh.

  “She looks…she checks…And don’t forget she has this app in her head, Google Ass, which at any given moment compares her ass to the size it was when she was seventeen. And very gradually she gets this face, and it’s the face she only has in this one particular circumstance, in Latin it’s called an endemic face, or in English: ass-face. And then, like a queen in a Greek tragedy, she pronounces: ‘That’s it. It’s starting to fall.’ No! It’s worse! It’s dropping. You get that? She starts to sound like her ass’s social worker! Like the ass, of its own free will and with premeditated intention, is dropping out, retreating from society, turning its back on civilization, turning into a fringe ass. Any second now you’ll find it shooting up in the alleyway. And you, my fellow males, if you happen to be with her in the room at this particular moment, your best course of action is to zip it. Don’t say a word! Anything you say can and will be used against you. If you tell her she’s exaggerating, that it’s actually cute and attractive and pinchable and strokeable—you’re done for: you’re blind, you’re a flatterer, you’re an idiot, you don’t know the first thing about women. On the other hand, if you tell her she’s right—you’re a dead man.”

  He pants. The bit is over. Who knows how many times he’s done it before. His voice no longer fills out every word—some of the syllables he swallows. The crowd laughs. I still hope I misheard, that I missed something, that there was a joke that got past me. But when I look at the little medium, her face twisted in pain, I know.

  “Where were we? You’re such a lovely audience! Honestly, I’d like to take you home with me. Okay, so the ass is walking ahead of me, she’s in front and I’m in back, I have no clue what she wants from me, what all that babbling about a funeral was, and I’ve never even been to a funeral, haven’t had the opportunity, I come from a small family, as you know, we’ve covered that, mom and dad and kid, and we never had funerals, there weren’t any relatives left to die—it was just him and her. Wait, that reminds me of something. Since we’re on the topic of relatives, I read in the paper this week that scientists discovered that the closest creature to human beings, genetically, is some kind of blind worm that’s totally primitive. I swear! This worm and us, we’re like this! But I’m starting to think we might be the black sheep of the family, because, otherwise, explain to me why they never invite us to their parties?” He throws another left hook in the air. There is a heavy silence in the room. I believe what he said before is starting to sink in.

  “Okay, I get it, I see. Recalculating route. Where were we? Mom-dad-kid. No family. No relatives. We said that. Quiet and calm like the Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, there were a few things here and there, not that you really give that stuff any thought at that age, but I did have some awareness that my father was no spring chicken, and that actually he was the oldest of all the class dads, and I knew he had blood sugar, and heart, and kidneys, and he took pills, and I also knew, well, actually I could see, everyone could see, that his blood pressure was so high he was in a constant state of…I don’t know…Archie Bunker bickering with Edith. And Mom, too, even though she was much younger than him, she had all kinds of baggage from there that she carried around. I mean, she spent almost six months shut up in this tiny little compartment in a train car, like a closet for storing paint and grease where you couldn’t even stand or sit, it was good times, and apart from all that she also had on her wrist, on both wrists”—he holds his thin forearms up—“these delicate little stitches, the finest vein embroidery, which the top-rated needleworkers gave her at Bikur Holim Hospital. It’s interesting, actually, that we both had postpartum depression after I was born, except that with me it’s been going on for fifty-seven years. But apart from those little issues, which I’m sure every normal family has, the three of us were pretty much fine, and so what was this business about a funeral?”

  The audience, which has been increasingly subdued for the past few minutes, is now completely still. The faces are devoid of expression. Wary of committing. Maybe that’s how I look from the stage, too.

  “Where were we? No, don’t tell me! Me do it on my own! You know what the opposite of forgetting is at my age?”

  A few feeble voices: “Remembering?”

  “No: writing down. Okay, so soldier, officer, ass, train, embroidery…Right, so I’m behind her, walking slowly, getting even slower, wondering what it could be, it must be a mistake, why would they send me to a funeral? Why didn’t they pick some other kid?”

  He talks fast, holding back an outburst. His hands dig deeper and deeper into his armpits. I think he’s trembling a little.

  “So I walk and I chew over the thoughts slowly, then even more slowly, and I don’t get it, I just don’t get it, and all of a sudden I flip over and turn upside down and walk on my hands. I walk behind her, the sand’s hot as hell, it burns my hands, doesn’t matter, burning is good, burning is not thinking, things fall out of my pocket, change, phone tokens, gum, stuff Dad shoved in there for the road, little surprises, he always did that, especially after he hit me, never mind. I walk quickly, I run”—he holds his hands up over his head and walks them through the air, and I can see they really are shaking, the fingers trembling—“who’s gonna find me when I’m upside down? How can anyone catch me?”

  Deathly silence. It seems to me that people are trying to understand how—with what sleight of hand, through what trickery or mag
ic—they’ve been transported from the place they were in a few moments ago to this new story.

  I feel the same way. Like the ground is dropping away from under my feet.

  “And this girl, the soldier, she suddenly sensed something, maybe she saw my shadow upside down on the ground, and she turned around, I saw her shadow spinning. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ she yelled, but she was sort of yelling quietly. ‘Cadet, back on your feet this instant! Are you mad? Playing around at a time like this?’ But me? I just run around next to her, in front of her, behind her, my hands burn, they get pricked by thorns, stones, gravel, but I don’t flip back up. What’s she going to do to me? You can’t do anything to me when I’m like that, and there’s no thoughts that way, my head is full of blood, ears plugged, no brain, no one to think, no What the hell she’s not allowed to yell at me, no What does she mean ‘at a time like this’?”

  He walks very slowly, his hands still up in the air, step after step after step, and the tip of his tongue sticks out between his lips. The big copper urn behind him traps his body, sucks it into its curves, and divides it into waves until he extricates himself.

  “And by the way, I can see my pals, too, upside down, sitting right where I left them, listening to the instructor, learning about camouflage, which is a good skill to have in life, not even turning their heads to see what’s up with me—remember the Shoelace Gauge? I see them getting farther and farther away, and I know it’s me getting farther away, but bottom line: me and them are far apart.”

  —

  Liora, the girl from my class who was on guard duty with me at the north post the night before, I had loved passionately for almost two years and had never had the guts to talk to. Dovaleh knew I was in love with her. He was the only one in the world I’d told about her. The only one who knew to ask me about her, and to really extract from me, with his piercing Socratic questions, the understanding that I loved her. That this emotion that tortured me in her presence—and made me even more gloomy and aggressive—was love. When we were on guard duty together that night, at 3:00 a.m., I kissed Liora. I touched a girl’s body for the first time. My years of loneliness were over, and, one could say, my new life had begun.

  And he was with me there. I mean, I talked to her the way I talked with him. The way he taught me in our walkie-talkie conversations. And I had learned well: as soon as we got to the guard post, I asked her about her parents, and where they’d met, and then about her two brothers. She was amazed. It knocked her off-balance. I needled her patiently but stubbornly, and slyly, until she gradually told me about her older brother, who was autistic and lived in an institution and was almost never spoken of at home. I had been a star pupil and I was prepared for the encounter: I knew how to ask and I knew how to listen. Liora talked and cried, and talked and cried some more, and when I made her laugh she laughed through her tears, and I stroked her and hugged her and kissed her tears away. There was a spuriousness on my part that, to this day, I have trouble understanding completely. Some sort of skeleton-key trickery. I felt that I was aiming myself to the Dovaleh I knew, the beloved old Dovaleh. I was reviving him from inside myself for the benefit of this moment with Liora, letting his words flow out of my throat. And I was levelheaded enough to know that afterward I would once again erase him.

  That morning, when I sat on the sandy quad with my platoon and the sergeant came for him, I was drunk. Drunk on love and a sense of redemption and lack of sleep. I saw him get up and follow her, and I didn’t even wonder where he was going. Then I must have sunk back into fantasizing about Liora and the unbelievably soft texture of her lips and her breasts and the tufts of down in her armpits, and when I looked again I saw him walking behind the sergeant on his hands. I’d never seen him do that before and it had never occurred to me that he was capable of it. He walked fast, light, and because of the intense heat that roiled the air, his body seemed to radiate ripples. It was a wondrous spectacle. He suddenly looked free and cheerful, prancing on waves of air as if he were defeating the laws of gravity and becoming his own self again. My affection for him washed over me, and the torture of the last few days was wiped away.

  For one moment.

  But I couldn’t tolerate it. Him. His ups and downs. I looked away from him. I remember the movement clearly. And I sank back into my new intoxication.

  “So we keep running, her upright and me the other way, with thistles and sand and signs running in front of my eyes, and we get to the path with white stones that leads to the commander’s barracks, and I can hear yelling from inside: ‘You’re taking him right now!’ ‘Fuck if I’m going all the way there!’ ‘You get him to the funeral by four, that’s an order!’ ‘I’ve been back and forth to Jerusalem three times already this week!’ Then I hear someone else, and I recognize the voice immediately: it’s the drill sergeant, the one we called Eichmann—that was the nickname of choice back then for the compassionately challenged—and he’s yelling, too, and his voice is louder than all the others: ‘But where the hell is he? Where’s the orphan kid?’ ”

  He grins apologetically. His arms hang beside his body.

  I stare at the table. At my hands. I didn’t know.

  “My hands turn to butter. I fall over and lie with my head on the ground. And I lie there and lie there for I don’t know how long. And when I manage to lift my head, I see that I’m alone. Are you getting the picture? Yours truly splattered all over the desert sand, the sergeant chick is long gone, she took off, that chubby cheeks, that sweet little mitzvah tank, I guarantee you that girl did not have a poster of Oskar Schindler hanging over her bed.”

  I didn’t know. It never occurred to me. How could I have known?

  “Come on now, Netanya honey, stay with me. I need you to hold my hand. So in front of me are these kind of wooden steps leading up to the commander’s barracks, above me blazing sun and eagles, all around me seven bloodthirsty Arab states, and inside they’re yelling at each other like madmen: ‘I’m only taking him as far as Be’er Sheva! Someone from the command will have to take him from there to Jerusalem!’ ‘Okay, okay, you dumbass, I heard you, just take the kid already and go, we don’t have time for this. Go, I’m telling you!’ ”

  People straighten up a little in their seats and start breathing again, carefully. The story is rousing them now, together with the narrator’s newfound energy, and his gesticulations, the impersonations, the accents.

  Dovaleh, onstage, can feel the new spirit immediately, and he looks around with a grin. Each smile births another and they pop out like soap bubbles.

  “So I pick myself up from the sand and I wait, and the door opens, and a pair of red shoes stuffed with drill sergeant walks down the steps, and he goes: ‘Let’s go, buddy. My condolences.’ And he holds his hand out for a shake. Yikes—the drill sergeant is shaking my hand! He kind of snivels, like that’s his way of signaling muffled-sadness-slash-grief: ‘Sergeant Ruchama told you already, right? Sorry, buddy, this can’t be easy. Especially at your age. Just know you’re in good hands, we’ll get you there like clockwork, but we gotta run and grab your stuff now.’

  “That’s what the drill sergeant says, and me”—he opens his eyes wide in a terrifying dollish expression—“I’m in total shock, I’m not taking in anything, all I get is that I’m not going to be punished for anything, and I’m also realizing this is not the same douche-bag drill sergeant who’s been busting our balls all week. No, now he’s all fatherly: ‘Come with me, buddy, the ride’s waiting, buddy.’ Any minute he’d have said, ‘Thank you for choosing us, buddy, we know you had the choice of losing a parent on many other army bases…’

  “Okay, so off we go, me dragging like a doormat behind all six foot six of his dense matter, and you know how drill sergeants walk, like cyborgs—head up, legs as far apart as they can get ’em so people will think they must be hung like a horse down there, fists clenched, pecs flapping right to left with every step.” He demonstrates. “Drill sergeants, you know, they don’t walk—they sp
ell out the walk, isn’t that right? Was anyone here a drill sergeant in the army? No way, man! What unit? Golani? Wait, are there any paratroopers here? Awesome! Let’s go, guys, duke it out!” The crowd laughs. The two gray-haired men hold their glasses up to each other from afar.

  “By the way, Golani, d’you know how a Golanchik commits suicide?”

  The guy shouts back: “Jumps off his ego onto his IQ!”

  “Bravo, sir!” Dovaleh cheers. “Now would you mind not stealing my job?

  “Bottom line, we get to the tent and the drill sergeant stands aside—as in, to give me some privacy. I shove everything my dad packed for me into my backpack. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I was a mama’s boy but a papa’s soldier, and my dad pimped my gear out so I had everything a proper commando might need when he sets off for Operation Entebbe. Mom wanted to help, too, and she had a lot of experience with camping, as we’ve mentioned—although her camps were more of the concentration variety. Anyhoo, by the time the two of them had finished packing for me, I was equipped for any possible development on the international or regional front, including asteroid-induced jock itch.”

  He stops, smiles at some recollection that pops into his mind, perhaps the picture of his father and mother packing. He slaps his thigh and laughs. He laughs! An ordinary laugh, from inside, not the professional kind. Not the toxic, self-deprecating snicker. Just a person laughing. A few people quickly join in, as do I—how can I resist wading in with him for a moment of tenderness toward himself?

  “Seriously, you should have seen her and my dad’s packing show. Better than any stand-up routine. You’d have asked yourself: Who are these two weirdos and who’s the Einstein who invented them and why the hell can’t I get a brilliant mind like that to come work for me? And then you’d think: Oh, shit! He does work for me! Picture this: My dad comes in, goes out, runs back in, hurries out. The way he moved—you know those little flies that only go in straight lines? Bzzz bzzz! He keeps coming back from their bedroom with one more thing, puts it in the bag, arranges everything, packs it in, runs out for something else, towel, flashlight, mess kit, bzzz, cookies, bzzz, bouillon cubes, first-aid cream, hats, inhaler, talcum powder, socks…Crams it all in, tamps it into a perfect cube, doesn’t even see me, I don’t exist for him, it’s just him against the backpack, all-out war, toothpaste, bug repellent, that plastic thing for your nose so it doesn’t get sunburned, bzzz, runs out, runs back in, his eyes get even closer to each other…