A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  “But look, amigos,” he continues, seeming surprised that no one else has walked out, “let’s not get all heavy with this funeral business, okay? We’re not gonna let it bring us down. By the way, did you ever think there might be relatives who only meet at weddings and funerals, and so each of them is convinced all the others are manic-depressive?”

  The crowd laughs judiciously.

  “No, seriously, I was even thinking—you know how they have restaurant reviews and movie reviews in the paper? Well, I say, why not shiva reviews? They can get a critic to go to a different shiva every day and write up how it was, what was the atmosphere like, were there any juicy stories about the deceased, how the family behaved, if there was any fighting over the inheritance, and they’d rank the refreshments, and the class of mourners—”

  Rolling laughter throughout the club.

  “And if we’re already in that vein, did you hear the one about the woman who goes to a funeral home and wants to see her husband before they bury him? So the undertaker shows her the husband and she sees they’ve put him in a black suit. By the way, this is not one of our jokes,” he clarifies, holding a finger up, “it’s translated from Christianese. So the woman starts weeping: ‘My James would have wanted to be buried in a blue suit!’ The guy says, ‘Look, missus, we always bury them in black suits, but come back tomorrow and I’ll see what I can do.’ She comes back the next day and he shows her James in a gorgeous blue suit. The woman thanks him a thousand times and asks how he got hold of this great suit. Undertaker says, ‘You won’t believe this, but yesterday, not ten minutes after you left, another deceased came in, more or less your husband’s build, in a blue suit, and his wife says his dream was to be buried in a black suit.’ Well, James’s widow thanks the undertaker again, she’s really emotional, tears in her eyes. Gives him a huge tip. Undertaker says, ‘All I had to do was switch the heads.’ ”

  The crowd laughs. The crowd is back. The crowd gloats at the hasty departure of the shaved-head man from such a fabulous evening. “Everyone knows,” says a woman at a nearby table, “that he’s slow to warm up.”

  “So this whole drive is starting to get to me. My head’s on fire from all the thoughts, everything’s grinding, pounding, a whole mishmash inside my head, I’m so full of thoughts I can’t find the way into my own mind. You know that thing where all your thoughts go flying around in one big fustercluck without any order, like before you go to bed? Just before you fall asleep? Did I shut the stove off or didn’t I? I’m gonna have to get that cavity filled in my top molar. That chick rearranging her bra on the bus, she made my day. That son of a bitch Yoav said payment terms are net ninety. Who even knows if I’ll still be here in ninety days? Can a deaf cat catch a mute bird? Maybe it’s a good thing none of my kids look like me. What are they thinking, chopping down trees without an anesthetic? Is a Chevra Kadisha driver allowed to put a bumper sticker on his hearse saying ON MY WAY WITH ANOTHER SATISFIED CUSTOMER? And what the hell was he thinking pulling Benayoun off the field ten minutes before the match ended? Can the notice say ‘Dovaleh and Life Call It Quits’? I really shouldn’t have had that mousse…”

  Laughter—awkward, confused, but laughter. The rattling air conditioner pulls a fragrance of freshly cut grass into the room. There’s no telling what planet it has come from. The smell is intoxicating. Memories of my little childhood house in Gedera wash over me.

  “The driver says nothing. One minute, two minutes, how long can he go on? So he starts up again like we’re deep into conversation already. You know those characters who have no one to talk to? They’re lonely, outcast? Those guys, they’ll vacuum it out of you if they have to. I mean, you’re their last chance, after you it’s just those crosswalks that beep for the blind. Say you’re sitting at the doctor’s office at seven a.m. waiting for the nurse who draws blood?” The audience confirms its familiarity with the experience. “Now you’re not even awake yet, haven’t had your morning coffee, and you need at least three cups to even pry open your left eyelid, and all you really want is to be left alone to die in peace. But then the old guy next to you, with his fly open and his junk all out and the dark brown urine sample in his hand—by the way, have you ever noticed the way people walk around the clinic with their samples?”

  People trade experiences, they’re completely thawed out now, longing to heal. The medium giggles, steals embarrassed looks around, and he glances at her and a light passes over his lips.

  “No, seriously, be serious for a minute. There’s the ones who walk with their jar like this, right? The guy walks down the hallway on the way to the sample window. You’re sitting on the row of chairs along the wall and he doesn’t look in your direction. He’s considering the lilies. He keeps the hand holding the sample on the other side of his body, as low as possible, am I right?”

  The crowd confirms with squeals of delight.

  “Like he actually believes that this way you can’t even see that at the end of his hand he just happens to have a plastic jar, and the jar just happens to contain a piece of poop. Now zoom in on his face, yeah? It’s like he’s not even a party to this transaction, you know? He’s just the messenger. He’s actually a courier for the Mossad, and his hush-hush job is to transport biological cargo for R&D. I swear, those are the ones I like torturing best, especially if it’s someone from the biz, an actor or a director or a playwright, one of those shits I used to work with when I was still alive. So anyway I jump right up at him with both arms out for a hug: ‘Well hello, Mr. Bean!’ Of course he pretends he doesn’t remember me, has no clue where I’ve even turned up from. But what do I care? I’ve long ago forgotten if it’s my dignity I lost or my shame. So I turn up the volume: ‘Hola, amigo! What brings Your Honor to our humble clinic? Oh, incidentally, I read in the paper that you’re cooking up a new masterpiece for us. Great news! We’re all so curious to find out what you’ve produced! Your work is such a pleasure because it always comes from the inside, right? From the gut!”

  People are sputtering now, wiping away tears, hands slapping thighs. Even the stage manager hiccups a few laughs. The tiny woman is the only one not laughing.

  “Oh, come on, what is it now?” he asks her after the hoots die down.

  “You’re embarrassing him,” she says, and he gives me a helpless look: What are we going to do about her? That’s when it hits me: Eurycleia.

  I’ve been trying to remember the name since the minute it turned out the little lady knew him from childhood, and that she was tilting the direction of the whole evening. Eurycleia. Odysseus’s elderly nanny, who bathed his feet when he returned from his voyage disguised as a beggar. She was the one who saw his childhood scar and recognized him.

  I write the name on a napkin in block letters. For some reason this little remembrance makes me happy. And immediately I ask myself what I can give him here. What can I be for him?

  I order another shot of tequila. I haven’t drunk like this for years, and I have a yen for stuffed vegetables. And olives. A few minutes ago I didn’t think I could put anything else in my mouth, but it turns out I was wrong. The blood is suddenly pumping through my veins. It’s good that I came, really, it’s good, and even better that I stayed.

  “And then, after a few miles…Are you with me?” He pokes his face out at us as if through the window of a driving car, and we, meaning the audience, laugh and confirm that yes, we’re with him, even though a few people around here seem surprised to find it so.

  “Suddenly the driver goes, ‘Hey, kid, I don’t know if you’re in the mood for this now, but next month I’m representing our command in an IDF-wide contest.’

  “I don’t answer. What am I supposed to say? At most I kind of grunt a hmmm under the mustache I don’t have. But a few seconds later I feel a bit sorry for him, I don’t know, maybe ’cause he looks so needy, so I ask him if it’s a driving contest.

  “ ‘Driving?’ he exclaims. Then he rolls around laughing, baring his buckteeth: ‘Me, in a driving contest?! I
’ve got seventy-three citations, dude! I spent six months inside, added on to my service. Get out of here…Driving! I’m talking about a joke contest.’

  “And I go, ‘What?!’ Because I swear I thought I hadn’t heard right. And he says: ‘Jokes, where you tell jokes, they do a competition every year, with the whole army.’

  “Honestly, I was kind of in shock. Where the hell did he come up with that all of a sudden? And all this time I’m sitting there expecting that any minute he’s going to tell me. You know? That he’ll realize what’s going on and he’ll tell me. And now he comes out with this business about jokes?

  “So we’re driving. Not talking. Maybe he’s hurt that I’m not taking an interest, but really, I’m not in the mood. And now I also start to notice what a terrible driver he is, how he’s veering all over the place, onto the shoulders, into every pothole. Then I get the thought that my mother, if she was here, would probably tell me to wish him luck in the contest. I practically can’t breathe from that thought. I hear her voice, the music of her speech. I can actually feel her breath on my ear, and I say, ‘Best of luck with that.’

  “ ‘There was maybe twenty guys in the tryouts,’ he says, ‘from all the bases, the whole Southern Command, and three of us made it to the finals, and then it was just me left to represent the command.’

  “ ‘But how did they test you?’ I ask. Just for her, I ask, because what the fuck do I care how they tested them, but I know she’d feel sorry for him because of the teeth and the zits and the whole way he looks.

  “ ‘They just did,’ he says. ‘I don’t know, you know, we came into this room with a desk and we told them jokes. By topic.’

  “So now here’s the deal: I can tell the driver’s talking with me, but he’s somewhere else. His forehead is wrinkled and he’s got the chain from his dog tags between his teeth, and I’m getting ready for this maybe being a red herring, this whole contest story. Maybe now, when I’ve let my guard down, he’s suddenly going to stick me with it. Like a knife it’ll come.

  “ ‘There was this one judge there, a reporter for Bamahaneh,’ he goes on, ‘and one guy from the Gashash was there, too—it was Shaike, the big one who always laughs. And there were two other comedians for judges, too, I don’t know who they were. They throw us a topic and we do a joke.’

  “ ‘Yeah, sure,’ I go. I can tell by his voice that he’s lying, and I’m waiting for him to finish up his crap and tell me already.

  “ ‘So like they say: Blondes! And you have thirty seconds to deliver.’

  “ ‘Blondes’?”

  Dovaleh stares into space again, his reliable trick. His eyelids are halfway down, and his face is frozen in bewilderment at the corrupt nature of man. The more he does it, the louder the audience laughs, but the laughter is hesitant again, unraveling. I sense a slight despair rippling through the audience as people realize that the man onstage is going to insist on his story after all.

  “Meanwhile, the truck’s dancing all over the road, and I know that means Jokerman is thinking, forgetting himself. Good thing the road is practically empty, there’s barely another car every fifteen minutes. With my right hand I look for the door handle, feel its spring, squeeze it back and forth. I start getting a thought.

  “ ‘Look, kid,’ the driver goes, ‘you’re not in the mood for jokes now, but if you do feel like it…Maybe it could, I don’t know, make you feel better?’

  “Better how? I think, and my head almost explodes.

  “ ‘Look, just give me a topic,’ he says. He puts both hands straight on the wheel, and I can tell he’s not kidding. His whole face changes in an instant, and his ears are burning red. ‘Throw out anything you want, doesn’t have to be what we said, could be anything: mothers-in-law, politics, Moroccans, lawyers, fags, animals.’

  “Now you have to understand, my friends—look, just focus on me for a minute—I’m stuck there for a few hours with an insane driver who’s taking me to a funeral and is about to tell me jokes. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in that situation…” A woman’s voice off to my left whispers, “We’ve been in that situation for an hour and a half.” Fortunately, Dovaleh doesn’t hear her or the muffled guffaws in response.

  “For the first time,” he says very quietly, almost to himself, “for the first time I start to feel what it would be like to be an orphan, with no one watching out for me.

  “So we’re still driving. The vehicle is an oven. Sweat drips into my eyes. Be nice to him, my mom says in my ear again. Remember that every person only lives for a short time, and you have to make that time pleasant for him. I hear her and my brain goes crazy on me with pictures of her, pictures from my memories of her, and real photos, too, of her and of him, although more him than her, ’cause she almost never agrees to have her picture taken, she screams if he so much as points a camera at her. My brain is pouring out pictures I didn’t even remember I remembered, pictures from when I was a baby, from my first six months, when I was alone with him. He used to take me everywhere. He sewed this little fabric sack thing, which was looped around his neck, there’s a picture where you see him shaving a client with me hanging on his body in the sack, peeking out with one eye under his face. She wasn’t with us then, I told you, she was here and there, she was at a convalescent home, that was what the official press release said.” He tugs at the skin under his eye with one finger. “Here and there around the cuckoo’s nest. Here and there at the vein tailor. But where were we, Netanya, where were we…

  “Never mind, don’t strain yourselves. Suddenly all at once I got really cold in that car. Even though we were in the middle of a hamsin, I got cold all over my body. I started really shaking, teeth chattering, and the driver gives me a look and I’m convinced a thousand percent that he’s thinking: Should I tell him already? Shouldn’t I? Should I tell him now, or play with him a little longer? And then I got even more stressed out, because what if he really does tell me? What if he tells me right there in the car when I’m alone with him? So I quickly tried to think about other things, anything to not hear him, but what came to me was something I’d never thought before, as if my brain was in on the plot against me, throwing out ideas and questions, like whether you can cut the same exact place again, and how did it happen to her anyway, and what did it happen with, and was she alone at home when it happened. And the thoughts kept flooding in. Like, did he come home early from the barbershop while I was away at camp and, if not, then who picked her up from the shuttle? Who could pick her up like I did? And how did I forget to ask him about that before I went to Be’er Ora, and how did they get along on their own while I was gone?

  “ ‘Wildlife,’ I say quickly to the driver. It comes out in a shout. And the driver says, ‘Wildlife…Wildlife…’ And even that word gives me a zap in the heart. Maybe it was a bad sign that I said it. Everything seems like a sign suddenly. Maybe even breathing is a sign.

  “ ‘I’m on it,’ the driver goes. His lips move, and I can see his brain starting to work. ‘Okay. Got one. A little baby koala bear stands on a branch, spreads his arms out, jumps off, crashes on the ground. Picks himself up, climbs all the way back up, stands on the branch, spreads his arms, jumps off, and crashes. Picks himself up again, climbs up, does the whole thing over and over again. This goes on and on, and the whole time two birds are sitting over on the next branch watching him. Finally the one bird says to the other, Look, we’re going to have to tell him he’s adopted.’ ”

  The audience laughs.

  “Ah, you’re laughing! Nice city, Netanya. I wouldn’t say you’re exactly rolling around, but laughter was certainly registered. It’s too bad you weren’t in the car instead of me, you would have made the driver happy. Because me, I just sit there without laughing or anything, just shaking like a dog in the corner of the pickup, and my first thought is why is he telling me a joke about parents and their misfit kid? But the driver, the second he finishes telling the joke, he starts laughing himself. But I mean, he really g
oes at it. Sounds like a donkey braying. Honestly, his laughter is way funnier than the joke. Maybe that’s why they took him for the contest. I didn’t laugh, and I could tell he was disappointed, but he wasn’t about to give up. I couldn’t get over how he didn’t give up. How can someone be so dense? I thought.

  “ ‘Okay, here’s one that kills me,’ he says. ‘Every time I tell it I have to stop myself from cracking up, ’cause they disqualify you for that. A horse walks into a bar and asks the barman for a Goldstar on tap. The barman pours him a pint, the horse downs it and asks for a whiskey. He drinks that, asks for a tequila. Drinks it. Gets a vodka shot and another beer…’ This driver guy is prattling on with his thousand and one nights, and all I want is to get away from him, and my head is bouncing against the windowpane, and through the shaking I suddenly hear this voice from a distance, from the desert, and it’s hard to hear exactly, but it’s a bit like a song Mom used to sing me when I was little, three or four, I guess. I have no clue where it came from, I swear it wasn’t from me, I hadn’t thought of that song for years, she used to sing it when I couldn’t fall asleep, or when I was sick, she’d pick me up, rock me back and forth, Ay li luli lu, schlaf mein tiare schepseleh, mach tzu di kleine eigelech…”

  The room falls silent. The little tune evaporates like a curl of smoke.

  “Now think about him.” He shakes himself off and sternly presses on. “Good things, good things, think good things about him, where, what, here, got it, soccer players, run the players through my mind by team, first Israeli teams, then Europeans, then South Americans. I was a champ at that, thanks to him, so whatever comes to mind that’s fine. From age five, from when I went into first grade, he started teaching me about soccer. He put his heart and soul into it. Okay, enough, now it’s her turn. But she’s not coming. He keeps jumping into my head again. Every time I think something about her—there he is. What now? Standing in the kitchen frying an omelet, maybe that’s a good sign, a sign that he’s at home and everything’s okay with him, and then I catch myself: How is that a good sign, you dumbass? How could you possibly think that’s a good sign? Then he looks up from the omelet at me and grins like you grin for a camera, and he does his trick, he flips the omelet in the air and holds his other hand up high like a conductor, and suddenly it looks like he’s sucking up to me a bit, but why would he do that? What could he need from me now? It’s got nothing to do with me. But he keeps looking at me like it is about me, and I beg him to go away, to stop scaring me, what does he want from me? I wish he would at least not come alone, I don’t want either of them coming on their own now. But noooo—not only doesn’t he leave, he gets even more stuck there. Now he shows me himself in the jeans room, I told you about that place, and there’s a table there with a square mesh and a long saw stuck to the table vertically—”