A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “And me, just so you understand, all this is like I’m watching a movie with me in it. There I am sitting in an army truck, and there are two people I don’t know, both soldiers, talking about me, but in a language I don’t fully understand, and there’s no closed captions. And I keep wanting to ask the drill sergeant something, I really urgently need to ask him before we go, and I’m just waiting for him to stop talking for a second, but when he stops I can’t do it, the words don’t come out, they won’t join together, I’m scared shitless of them—those two little words.

  “Then he looks at me and I think, Okay, now he’s going to tell me, here it comes. I’m preparing myself, my whole body slams shut. And he puts his hand on my head like a yarmulke and says, ‘May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.’ Then he slaps his hand on the side of the pickup the way you slap a horse to make it gallop, and the driver says, ‘Amen,’ and puts his foot on the gas, and we’re off.”

  The crowd is silent. One woman holds up a hesitant hand like a pupil in class, then puts it back in her lap. At a nearby table a man gives his wife a confused look, and she shrugs her shoulders.

  The man in the yellow jacket is approaching his boiling point. Dovaleh senses it and glances at him nervously. I call the waitress to clear my table—immediately. Can’t stand to look at these empty little dishes. I can’t believe I ate so much.

  “So bottom line, we drive. Driver doesn’t talk. I don’t even know his name. Thin guy, kind of hunched, with a huge nose and giant ears and a face full of acne all the way to his neck. Loads more zits than I have. Neither of us talks. He’s got it in for me because they screwed him with this trip, and I’m certainly not saying anything—what can I say? It’s over a hundred degrees and I’m drenched in sweat. The driver turns the radio on, but there’s no reception, just noise, static, nothing but Martian stations.” Here he does a perfect imitation of poorly received stations rapidly switching, a gibberish of sentence fragments and snatches of songs: “Jerusalem of Gold,” “Johnny Is the Goy for Me,” “Itbah al-Yahud,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Even when the cannons roar our desire for peace shall never die!” “I wish they all could be California girls…” “Merci stockings—try them today!” “The Temple Mount is in our hands!”

  Delighted laughter. Dovaleh drinks from his flask and looks at me as if he’s wondering what I think about the story so far, or maybe about the whole show. With a stupid, cowardly reflex, I shut my face off, erase my expression, and look away. He recoils as though I’d struck him.

  —

  Why did I do that? Why did I withhold my support at that moment? I wish I knew. I understand so little of myself, and in recent years less and less. When there’s no one to talk to, when there’s no Tamara probing, insisting, my inner channels get clogged up. I remember how furious she was after she came to court to watch me preside over a case of an abusive father. “You had no expression at all on your face!” she fumed afterward, at home. “The poor girl was pouring her heart out, she looked at you with pleading eyes, just waiting for you to show her a sign, any little sign of support, of understanding, one look to show her that your heart was with her, and you—”

  I explained that it was precisely that face that I needed to show in court: even if inside I was exploding, I could not so much as hint at my feelings, because I had not yet made up my mind. And, I explained, that very stone face I gave the girl I later gave her father when he offered his version. “Justice must be visible,” I insisted, “and I promise you that all my empathy for the girl will be expressed in my verdict.” “But by then,” Tamara said, “it’ll be too late for what she needed when she talked to you in those horrible moments.” And she gave me a look I’d never seen from her before.

  —

  “But here’s the deal, Netanya,” he says, trying to sound cheerful, clearly attempting to get past my offense, and I can barely contain my own anger at myself. “Ah, Netanya!” He sighs. “Halcyon city! I just love sharing things with you. Where were we? Right. The driver. So I’m starting to sense that he’s feeling a little bad about how he treated me, and he’s trying to get a conversation going. Or maybe he’s just bored, and hot, and the flies. But me—what the hell do I have to talk with him about? And also, I don’t know if he knows. If they told him about me. If when he was in the room with the commander and the sergeant, they told him. And let’s say he does know, right? I still don’t know how to ask him. Besides, I’m not even sure I can stand being told, and me all alone to boot, without Mom and Dad—”

  Now it bursts out. The shaved-head man in the yellow jacket pounds the table with an open hand, once, twice, slowly, his eyes fixed on Dovaleh and his face expressionless. Within seconds the club ossifies, and the only thing moving is that arm. Pound. Pause. Pound.

  An eternity passes.

  Very slowly, from the edges of the room, a tentative murmur of protest arises. But he persists: Pound. Pause. Pound. The stubby man with the broad shoulders joins in with his fist clenched, almost cracking the table with his slow punches. The blood rushes to my head. There they are. Those types.

  They encourage each other with silent looks. That’s all they need. The murmur around them crescendos into a commotion. A few tables support them enthusiastically, some protest, most are wary of expressing any opinion. A thin smell of sweat permeates the air in the basement space. Even the perfumes smell acrid. The club manager stands there helplessly.

  Intertable arguments spring up: “But he is putting jokes in, all the time!” one woman insists. “I’ve been keeping track, I’m telling you!” “And anyway, stand-up isn’t just about jokes,” another woman backs her up, “sometimes it’s also funny stories from life.” “Okay, I can live with stories, but his stories have no point!” a man my age yells while an artificially tanned woman leans on him.

  Dovaleh turns to look at me with his whole body.

  At first I don’t know what he wants. He stands on the edge of the stage ignoring the tempest, looking at me. He’s still hoping I’ll do something for him. But what can I do? What can be done against these people?

  Then comes the thought of what I used to be able to do; of the powers I had in the face of such people. The authority I could wield with a wave of the hand, with a few words. The regal feeling, which I was forbidden to confess to, even in private.

  The noise and shouts escalate. Almost everyone is involved in the commotion now, and there is the gleeful anticipation of a fight in the air. Still he stands there looking at me. He needs me.

  It’s been a long time since someone needed me. It’s hard to describe the magnitude of the surprise that floods me. And the panic. I have a coughing attack, then I push the table away from me, stand up, and still have no idea what I’m going to do. I might simply walk out—what am I even doing in this thuggish place? I should have left an hour ago. But those two are pounding the tables, and there’s Dovaleh, and I hear myself shout: “Let him tell his story already!”

  Everyone falls silent and looks at me with a mixture of horror and dread, and I realize I’ve shouted much louder than I meant to.

  I stand there. Stuck. Like an actor in a melodrama waiting for someone to whisper his lines. But no one does. And there are no bouncers in this club to separate me from the crowd, no panic button under the table, and this is not the world in which I used to relish walking down the street as a commoner, knowing that in a few moments I would be a fate sealer.

  I am breathing too fast but cannot control it. Eyes glare at me. I know my appearance is a little misleading—sometimes the prominent, lumpy forehead does the job just as well as the heft—but I’m not such a hero that I can stand behind my outburst if things really get dicey.

  “Let him tell his story,” I repeat, this time slowly, emphatically, pressing each word into the air, and I move into a sort of head-butting stance. I know I look ridiculous, but I keep standing there, remembering what it feels like to fill my being to its brink. To be.

  The
man in yellow turns to look at me. “No problem, Your Honor, no disrespect, I’m with you, but I would like him to tell me what all this bullshit has to do with the two hundred forty shekels I threw away here this evening. Isn’t this some sort of misdemeanor, Your Honor? Aren’t you getting a whiff of false advertising?”

  Dovaleh, whose eyes are shining at me with the gratitude a boy might feel toward an older brother coming to his defense, leaps in: “It is one hundred percent connected, my friend, it absolutely is! And now is when it gets most connected, I swear. Up to now it was just foreplay, you get me?” He gives the protester an ill-conceived man-to-man grin that makes him look away as though he’d seen an open wound. “Listen carefully, my friend: So I put my head against the window, and it’s an army-issue window, which bottom line means you can’t close it all the way, but you also can’t open it all the way, and the glass is just stuck there in the middle and it shudders, but I’m actually digging that, because it doesn’t just shudder, it goes apeshit! D-d-d-d-d-d! Horrible noise, I mean, a jackhammer drilling a fucking brick wall doesn’t make that kind of noise, so naturally I put my head on it, and within seconds it starts scrambling my brain—d-d-d-d-d! I’m in a blender! An air compressor! D-d-d-d-d-d! D-d-d-d-d!”

  He illustrates the way he leaned on the window. His head starts shaking, gently at first, then faster and stronger, until his whole body is convulsing, and it’s a wondrous sight: his features blend together, expressions cross over one another in flight like cards in a deck being shuffled. His limbs flutter and dance as he jerks around the stage, tossed from one edge to the other, then he flops onto the floor like a Raggedy Ann and lies there panting, the occasional spasm jolting his arm or leg.

  The crowd resumes laughing. Even the rabble-rousers chuckle, almost despite themselves, and the little medium grins.

  “I’m telling you, it was a blessing in disguise, that drrrr,” he projects. He gets up, dusts his hands off, and smiles heartily at the man in yellow, then at the guy with the shoulders. The two of them are still resistant, with the same dubious mockery on their faces.

  “Drrrr! Can’t think anything, don’t feel anything, every thought gets crushed into a thousand pieces, I’m thought-paste, drrrr!” He jiggles his shoulders at the little woman and she bounces and guffaws and pearly tears roll down her cheeks. The few people who notice seem to relish the little subplot. “Pitz,” he says to her, “I remember you now. Your family lived upstairs from the widow with the cats.”

  She beams at him: “I told you I was.”

  “But the driver—he’s no sucker!” he yells and stomps his feet and shoots an Elvis arm up: “He’s on to the windowpane trick, he’s seen it before, other passengers have done the window-Parkinson’s act. So he starts talking to me, all casual like, points out other vehicles on the road: ‘That’s a Dodge D200 on its way to Shivta. That’s an REO taking supplies to Bahad One. That’s a Studebaker Lark from Southern Command, Moshe Dayan had one in the war. See that? He’s flashing his lights at me, he knows me.’ But me, what the hell do I have to say about that? Nothing. Zip. So he takes a different tack: ‘Did they seriously just come over and tell you, just like that?’

  “Nothing from me. Drrrrr…Thought-blender. Takes me half a sec to pulverize his question into paste, mashed brain. Then suddenly my father jumps up with his lokshen noodles. I have no idea why that picture decided to pop into my mind right then. Just give me a second on this, okay? After all, it’s a pretty impressive thing that my father turns up with his lokshen all of a sudden, because why do you think he did that? Maybe it’s not a good sign? Maybe it is? What do I know. I shut my eyes tighter, bang my head against the window harder, best thing I can do now is not think, not think about anything or anyone.” He grips his head with both hands and his head rocks between them, and he yells at us as if he’s trying to drown out the noise from the pickup truck and the rattling window. “This is something I figured out from the very first minute, Netanya. That what I need to do right now is flip the circuit breaker in my brain! It’s not good for me to think about him. Not good for my father either, and basically not good for anyone to be inside my brain right now.”

  He smiles sweetly and opens his arms for another hug. He gets a few confused laughs. I beam at him with every muscle in my face, to fortify him for the road ahead. I don’t know if he can see my smile. How inadequate are the expressions our faces offer us.

  “Okay, so what’s up with the lokshen? I’m glad you asked! You’re an amazing crowd, you guys! A caring and sensitive crowd! So listen. You have to hear this. Once a week, after he gets done with the ledgers, he makes noodles for the week’s chicken soup. I swear, true story. So all of a sudden in the truck my brain shows me a movie, don’t ask me why, brains will be brains, don’t expect them to be logical. Here, it’s like this, this is how his hands move when he makes the dough, and this is how he rolls it out paper-thin—”

  Almost without changing a single note on his face or body, he slides into character. I’ve never seen his father, only a crude imitation of him that night in the tent at Be’er Ora, but the chill that runs down my spine tells me it’s him; that is how he really is.

  “And he runs with the dough looped over his arms to hang it on their bed to dry, walks quickly back and forth, zipping around the house, and everything he does he also says it out loud, a running commentary to himself: ‘Now take the dough, now put the dough on the lokshenbrat, now take the volgerholtz and make the dough rolled out.’ ”

  There are some giggles, because of the accent, because of the impersonation, because of the Yiddish, because of Dovaleh’s own barreling laughter. But most of the audience sits looking at him without any expression, and I’m beginning to sense that this gaze is the audience’s most effective weapon.

  “This guy, I swear, the whole time you’re at home with him, you hear him talking to himself, giving himself instructions, there’s a constant hum coming from him. Honestly, he’s a funny guy. Unless he happens to be your father. And now imagine me—me, yeah? You see me? Hello! Wake up! This is your Dovaleh talking! The star of your show! Nice city, Netanya. So I’m like in some crazy movie sitting in the middle of the desert and I suddenly see him right in front of me, my father, like he’s right there with all his gestures and his talking, and he takes a knife and cuts the rolled-up dough really fast like a machine, whack whack whack, and the lokshen fly out from under the knife, and the knife is a hairsbreadth from his fingers, and he never once gets cut. Cannot happen! My mom, by the way, was not an authorized user of knives in our home.” He produces a grin that he stretches as wide as possible, then a little wider. “For example, she was allowed to peel a banana only in the presence of a surgical team. Every single implement would wound her and make her bleed.” He winks at us and slowly runs a finger over each forearm, where he had earlier marked what he called her vein embroidery. “And suddenly, what do I see, Netanya?” His face is flushed and sweaty. “What do I see?” He waits for an answer, summoning it with his hand gestures, but no one responds. The crowd is stone cold. “I see her! Mom!” He gives an obsequious snort, aimed mostly at the two exasperated men. “Are you digging me, guys? It’s like my brain right away throws pictures of her at me, too—”

  The man in the yellow jacket stands up. He slams some money down on the table and yanks his wife up by the arm. Strangely, I feel almost relieved: this is more like it. We’re back to reality. Back in Israel. The couple makes its way out, watched closely by the audience. The man with the broad shoulders obviously wants to join them. I can see the battle raging under his turtleneck shirt, but he seems to feel it would be beneath him to be a follower. Someone tries to stop the couple, urging them to stay. “Enough is enough,” the guy hisses. “People come here to have a good time, it’s the weekend, you wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur.” His wife, her thick short legs teetering on stilettos, smiles helplessly and tugs her skirt down with one hand. When the man’s look meets the medium, he hesitates for a sec
ond, lets go of his wife, walks past a few tables to her, and leans over and says gently: “I suggest you leave too, ma’am. This guy is not right, he’s taking us all for a ride. He’s even making fun of you.”

  Her lips tremble. “That’s not true,” she whispers, “I know him, he’s just doing make-believe.”

  That whole time, onstage, Dovaleh watches the developments with his thumbs stuck in his red suspenders, nodding as though gleefully memorizing the man’s words. As soon as the couple leaves, he hurries to the small blackboard and draws two more red lines; one of them is long and thick, topped with a pinhead.

  After he puts down the chalk, he slowly and precisely circles around himself, eyes down, arms airplaned. Once, twice, three times, in the middle of the stage, a purification ritual of some kind. Then he flicks his eyes open like floodlights on a sports field: “But he’s stubborn, the driver! Won’t give up! He’s looking for me, I can feel it, looking for my eyes, my ears. But me—I’m in my own bunker. I don’t turn my head to him, don’t give him any way to edge in. And the whole time my teeth are knocking to the beat, along with the windowpane. Fu-ne-ral, fu-ne-ral, I’m-on-my-way-to-a-fu-ne-ral…’Cause listen, guys, I told you, I’d never in my life been to a single funeral up till then, and that is rattling me a fair bit, because how the hell do I know what it’s going to be like?”

  He pauses to examine the crowd. His demanding look turns defiant. I think he may be deliberately provoking them, daring them to get up and leave, to walk out on him and his story.

  “Or a dead man,” he adds softly. “Never seen that either. Or a dead woman.”