A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “I’m telling you, he was unparalleled at these things: organizing, planning, taking care of me. He was a pro, he was in his element. Do you even understand how stressful it is when you’re three and your dad makes you take a different route to preschool every day to confuse the enemy?”

  Laughter.

  “No, seriously, when I was in first grade the guy used to stand outside my classroom interrogating the other kids: ‘Is that your bag? Did you pack it yourself? Did anyone give you anything to deliver?’ ”

  Hearty laughter.

  “Then my mom turns up with a big wool coat, I don’t know whose it was, it reeked of mothballs. Why the coat, Mom? ’Cause she’d heard it was cold at night in the desert. So he takes it from her very gently, like this, and goes, ‘Nu, Saraleh, yetz ist zimmer, di nar zitz unt kik,’ which means ‘It’s summer now, you just sit and watch.’ Like hell she’d sit and watch! A second later she’s back with boots. Why? Because! Because after you’ve walked barefoot through snow for more than thirty miles, you don’t leave home without them.” He waves his ridiculous boots at us. “You have to understand, this woman had never seen a desert in her life. From the second she got to Israel she only left home to go to work, and she had a regular route like a cuckoo in its clock, apart from that episode where she went all Goldilocks on the estates around Rehavia, but we won’t go into that. And always with her head down and the schmatte over her face so no one could see her, God forbid, chop-chop alongside the walls and fences so no one would snitch on her to God and He’d find out she existed.”

  He stops for a sip. He wipes his glasses on the hem of his shirt, stealing a few seconds of respite. My tapas finally arrive. I’ve ordered far too much, enough for two. I ignore the looks. I know this is no time for a feast, but I have to steady my blood sugar, so I scarf down the empanadas and grilled mullet and ceviche and pickled mushrooms. Turns out that once again I ordered the dishes she likes, which will undoubtedly give me heartburn. She laughs: Well, if this is the only way, it’ll have to count as a kind of meeting. I wolf everything down and turn bilious. It’s not enough, I tell her with my mouth full. This make-believe game we play is not enough for me; I’m not satisfied with one-player ping-pong, or with having to sit here on my own with his story. You and your new boyfriend…I almost choke, and the wasabi prickles my nose and brings tears to my eyes. She quickly turns her impish smirk into a million-dollar smile and coquettishly responds: Don’t say that! Death isn’t my boyfriend yet. We’re just friends. Maybe friends with benefits.

  “Where were we?” he mumbles. “What was I saying? Oh, right, my mother. She couldn’t do anything. None of the homemaking things, the mom things,” he grumbles, veering off onto an internal detour. “Couldn’t do laundry, couldn’t iron, definitely couldn’t cook. I don’t even think she made an egg her whole life. But my dad did things no other man does. You should have seen the way he kept the towels neatly folded and stacked in the linen cupboard, and the drapes with perfect pleats, and the polished floor.” He wrinkles his forehead and his eyebrows actually collide. “He even ironed our underwear, for all three of us. I’ll tell you something that’ll make you laugh—”

  “It’s about time!” a short, broad-shouldered man shouts. A few more voices join in: “Where are the jokes? What’s going on here? What is this crap?”

  “One sec, bro, I’ve got a new shipment coming in any minute, you’ll like this, I guarantee it! I just wanted to…What was I…I’m all confused now, you got me off course. Listen, dude, listen to me closely, you’ve never heard anything like this. My father, he had an arrangement with a shoe shop on Yafo—you know Yafo Street in Jerusalem? Bravo, you citizen of the world, you! So this place had him mend stockings for women in Me’a She’arim and those other neighborhoods. It was another one of Captain Longstocking’s start-ups, another way to make a few shekels on the side. I’m telling you, that man could’ve sold shoes to a fish!”

  Feeble laughter. Dovaleh wipes the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. “Listen closely now. He used to bring stockings home every week to mend, piles of them, forty, fifty pairs each time, and he taught her how to darn them, that was another of his skills, he could fix ladders in nylons, can you believe it?”

  He’s talking only to the short, broad-shouldered man now. With one hand he makes a pleading, supplicating gesture: Wait a sec, bro, you’ll get your joke hot out of the oven any minute now, it’s almost done. “He bought her a special needle with a little wooden handle thingy…Oh, man, it’s all coming back to me now, you brought it all back to me, I love you, you’re my hero! So she’d put the stocking over one hand, and she’d darn eye after eye in the ladder with that needle until there was no ladder left, and she’d do this for hours, sometimes all night, eye after eye—”

  He’s hardly paused for a breath these last few minutes, racing to get to the finish line before the audience’s patience runs out. The room is quiet. Here and there a woman smiles, perhaps at a distant memory of those old-fashioned nylons. But no one laughs.

  “Look how it’s all coming back…,” he murmurs apologetically.

  A man’s voice grunts through the silence: “Listen, buddy, bottom line—are we gonna get any comedy here tonight or not?”

  It’s the man with the shaved head and the yellow jacket. I had a feeling he’d be back. The other man, the one with the massive shoulder span, backs him up with a grunt. A couple of supportive voices chime in. A few others, mostly women, try to shush them, and the man in yellow says: “Seriously, people, we came for some laughs and this guy’s giving us a Holocaust memorial day. And he’s making jokes about the Holocaust!”

  “You are absolutely right, my friend, and I do apologize. I’m gonna make it right for you. Now what was I thinking…Oh yeah, I have to tell you this one! A guy visits his grandma’s grave on the anniversary of her death. A few rows away he sees a man sitting next to a grave crying, shouting, ‘Why? Why? Why did you have to die? Why were you taken from me? What is my life worth now that you’re gone? O cursed death!’ Well, after a few minutes the grandson can’t resist and he goes over to the guy: ‘Excuse me for disturbing you, sir, but I’m really touched by your expression of sorrow. I’ve never seen such profound grief. Could I ask whom you are mourning? Was it your son? Your brother?’ The guy looks at him and goes, ‘Of course not—it’s my wife’s first husband.’ ”

  Big laughs—decidedly exaggerated considering the joke—and here and there some forced applause. It’s heart-wrenching to see how eager people are to help him salvage the evening.

  “But wait, there’s more! I’ve got enough stock to last till midnight!” he shrieks, and his eyes dart around. “Guy calls up someone who went to high school with him thirty years ago and says, ‘I have tickets for the cup final tomorrow, wanna go?’ The other guy’s surprised, but a free ticket doesn’t come along every day, so he says yes. They get to the match, they sit down, great seats, awesome atmosphere, they have fun, they yell, they curse, they do the wave, see some great moves. At halftime the friend says, ‘Listen, dude, I have to ask—didn’t you have anyone closer than me, like a relative, to give the ticket to?’ Other dude says, ‘No.’ ‘And you didn’t want to bring, I don’t know, your wife?’ ‘My wife’s dead,’ he says. Guy from high school goes, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Then what about one of your closer friends? Or someone from work?’ ‘Believe me, I tried,’ the guy says, ‘but they all said they’d rather go to her funeral.’ ”

  The crowd laughs. Cheers fly over to the stage, but the guy with the big shoulders cups his hands over his mouth and booms: “Ixnay on the funerals already! Give us some life!” This rakes in quite a few cheers and claps, and as Dovaleh looks at the audience I can feel that for the past few minutes, even with all the jokes and the fireworks, he’s been absent. He is turning more and more inward, and he seems to be slowing down, and that’s not good, he could lose the crowd. He could lose the whole evening. And there’s no one to protect him.

 
“No more funerals. Got it, bro. You make a good point. I’m taking notes, learning on the job. Listen, Netanya, let’s lighten things up, yeah? But I still have to tell you something a little bit personal, some might say intimate, because I feel like we’ve really clicked. Yoav, can you just turn up the air? We can’t breathe in here!”

  The audience claps enthusiastically.

  “So here’s the deal. I was walking around town here before the show, checking out escape routes, like in case you decided to kick me off the stage”—he chuckles, but a weight hangs at the edge of the laugh, and everyone knows it—“and all of a sudden I see an old guy, maybe eighty, all dried up like a raisin, sitting on a street bench crying. An old man crying? How can I not go over? He might be in a will-changing mood. I walk up to him softly and ask, ‘Sir, why are you crying?’ ‘What else can I do?’ the old man answers. ‘A month ago, I met a thirty-year-old woman. She’s beautiful, adorable, sexy, and we fell in love and moved in together.’ ‘That’s awesome!’ I say. ‘So what’s the problem?’ Old guy says, ‘I’ll tell you. We start every day with two hours of wild sex, then she makes me some pomegranate juice for the iron, and I go to the doctor’s office. I come back, we have more wild sex, and she makes me a spinach quiche for the antioxidants. In the afternoon I play cards with the guys at the club, I come home, we have wild sex into the night, and this is how it goes, day after day…’ ‘Sounds fantastic!’ I tell him. ‘I’d like me some of that! But then why are you crying?’ Old guy thinks for a minute and says, ‘I can’t remember where I live.’ ”

  The crowd erupts. He gauges it like a hiker testing the steadiness of a river rock, and even before the last cheers die down, he charges ahead: “Where were we? Drill sergeant…Cyborg…” He mimics the stiff gait again and flashes an ingratiating smile that knots up my stomach. “So the drill sergeant’s breathing down my neck: ‘Let’s go, gotta hurry, we can’t have you being late, God forbid, you can’t miss it.’ And I go, ‘Miss what, sir?’ And he looks at me like I’m retarded. ‘They’re not going to wait all day for you,’ he says, ‘you know what funerals are like, especially in Jerusalem with all their religious laws. Didn’t Ruchama tell you you have to be at Givat Shaul at four?’ ‘Who’s Ruchama?’ I sit on my cot staring at the sergeant. And I swear to you, I’ve never seen a drill sergeant from up close like that, except maybe in National Geographic magazine. And he says, ‘They called from your school to inform you, the principal himself called and said you have to be at the cemetery at four.’ And I still don’t understand what he’s telling me. All these words they keep saying to me, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time in my life. Why would the principal be talking about me? How does he even know who I am? What exactly did he say? And there’s another question I need to ask, but I’m too embarrassed, I don’t know how you ask something like that, especially when it’s the drill sergeant, a guy I really don’t know. So what comes out instead is that I ask why I have to pack my bag. He looks up at the tent roof like he’s totally given up on me. ‘Kiddo,’ he says, ‘don’t you get it yet? You’re not coming back here.’ I ask why. ‘Because the shiva,’ he says, ‘will only be over after your pals are done here.’

  “Oh, great, so now the plan includes sitting shiva, too? They really thought of everything, didn’t they? Except they forgot to let me in on the plans. And while I’m listening to this information, all I can think is that I’m dying to sleep. Yawning all the time. Right in the sergeant’s face. I can’t control it. I clear some room for myself on the bed among all the stuff and I lie down and close my eyes and wipe out.”

  He shuts his eyes and stands there motionless. With his eyes closed, oddly, his face looks more lucid and expressive, somehow more spiritual even. He fingers the hem of his shirt absentmindedly. My heart goes out to him, until he opens his mouth:

  “You know those army cots, the ones that fold in on you in the middle of the night and swallow you up like a carnivorous plant? Your friends turn up in the morning and there’s no Dovaleh, no nothing, just your glasses and maybe a shoelace, and the bed is licking its lips and belching?”

  A few giggles here and there. The audience isn’t sure it’s allowed to laugh at such a time. Only the two kids in leather give a long but soft belly laugh, a strange purr that scatters disquiet around the tables nearby. I look at them and think about how for twenty years, every single day, I soaked up radiation from people like them, until there came a moment, after Tamara, without Tamara, when I guess I couldn’t take it anymore and I started spewing it back out.

  “Drill sergeant goes, ‘Get up! What the hell are you doing lying down?’ So I get up and wait. Like the second he leaves, I’m going back to sleep. Not for long, just until it all passes and we forget the whole thing and go back to the way it was before all this crap.

  “And now he’s getting annoyed at me, but carefully annoyed. ‘Move,’ he goes, ‘stand here, let me pack up your stuff.’ I don’t get it. The sergeant is going to pack my stuff for me? That’s like…I don’t know…like Saddam Hussein comes up to you in a restaurant and says, ‘Might I interest you in some caramelized forest-berry soufflé I just whipped up?’ ”

  He stops and waits for a response that is slow to come. He quickly diagnoses the audience’s quagmire: his story has annihilated the possibility of laughter. I can see how his thought process works. He quickly redraws the playing field, gives us permission: “Did you hear the one about the woman with a terminal illness, the name of which shall go unmentioned so as not to give it any subliminal advertising?” He cheerfully opens his arms for a big hug. “Anyway, the woman says to her husband, ‘I dreamed that if we have anal sex, I’ll get better.’ You don’t know this one? Are you living under a rock? Okay, listen. So the husband, he thinks this sounds a little weird, but a guy’ll do anything to make his wife better, right? So they get into bed that night, they do it doggy-style, and they fall asleep. In the morning the husband wakes up, reaches out to her side of the bed—it’s empty! He jumps up, convinced this is the end, but then he hears her singing in the kitchen. He runs in and finds his wife standing there making a salad, all smiles. She looks fantastic. ‘You won’t believe this,’ she says, ‘I slept great, woke up early, felt incredible, so I went to the hospital, they ran some tests, did a couple of X-rays, and they said I’m cured! I’m a medical miracle!’ The husband hears this and bursts into tears. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asks. ‘Aren’t you happy I’m better?’ ‘Of course I am,’ he says, sobbing, ‘but I can’t help thinking I could have saved Mom, too!’ ”

  Some turn up their noses, but most like it. I do, too. It’s a good joke, there’s no getting around it. I hope I’ll be able to remember it. Dovaleh does a quick scan. “Good move,” he tells himself out loud, “you still have it after all, Dovi.” He pats his chest with his fingers spread wide, a gesture only slightly different from the earlier blows.

  “So I stand up and the sergeant attacks my backpack. He picks up all the crap that’s scattered on the bed, and under the bed, he charges in like he’s storming a house in the occupied territories. Bam! Shoves it all in, crams the bag full without any order, no form, no thought, what’s Dad going to say when I come home with the backpack in this state? And the minute I think about that, my knees buckle and I fall onto a different cot.”

  He shrugs his shoulders. Smiles weakly. I think he’s having trouble breathing.

  “Okay, let’s get this show on the road, mustn’t irritate the audience, we’re instant-gratification kind of people, chop-chop! So I pick up the backpack and run after the drill sergeant, and from the corner of my eye I can see my friends on the quad looking at me like they already know something, like maybe they saw the eagles flying north: Amigos!” He acts out the eagles’ cries in a heavy Russian accent. “There’s fresh blood in Jerusalem!”

  —

  I saw him follow the drill sergeant, his small body hunched under the weight of the backpack. I remember that we all turned to look at him, and it occurred to
me that apart from the backpack he looked just the way he did when we said goodbye at the bus stop and he dragged himself begrudgingly to his neighborhood.

  One of his classmates threw out some joke about him, but this time nobody laughed. We didn’t know why they’d come to take him to the commander, and I don’t know if by the time we finished the camp any of his classmates had found out what had happened or where they’d taken him. None of the commanders told us anything, and we didn’t ask. Or at least I didn’t. All I knew was that a soldier had come to get him, he’d gotten up and followed her, and a few minutes later I’d seen him trail the drill sergeant all the way to a waiting pickup truck. Those were the facts before me that day. The next time I saw him was when he walked onstage this evening.

  —

  “And the driver’s going pedal to the metal in neutral, all his pissed-off energy is concentrated in his foot, and he looks at me like he wants to kill me. I climb up, toss my bag in the back, and sit in the front next to him, and the drill sergeant says to him: ‘You see this nice boy? You’re not letting go of his hand until you get him to the Central Bus Station in Be’er Sheva and someone from HQ comes to take him from your hand to Jerusalem. Capeesh?’ And the driver goes: ‘I swear on the Bible, Sarge, if they’re not there when I get there, I’m leaving him at lost and found.’ The sergeant pinches the driver’s cheek hard and grins right in his face: ‘Listen, Tripoli, don’t forget what I have on you, eh? You leave this kid there—I’ll leave my foot in your ass. If you don’t deliver him personally into the palm of their hand, that’s an unreturned equipment rap for you. Now go!’