A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  His voice gets raspy. He takes a sip from the flask.

  “Why the saw? Who asked that? Oh, well hello there, table twelve! You’re a teacher, aren’t you? I can tell from your accent. Why the saw, you ask? But all the rest sounds plausible, does it, Miss Teacher? Three hundred pairs of velveteen pants from Marseille reeking of fish, which turned out to have the zippers on the back—that makes sense? And sending a kid of barely fourteen off like that without—”

  His eyes are bloodshot. He makes a long exhalation with his cheeks puffed out and shakes his head from side to side. My own throat starts to burn. He drinks again. Big, fast gulps. I must remember what I was doing all that time in Be’er Ora while he was on his way to a funeral. But how can you remember details like that after so much time?

  Nevertheless, I take myself out of this place. I have to put some order into things. I exhort myself. No discounts. With all my might I try to revive within me the boy I was then, but he keeps crumbling in my consciousness, refusing to be held, to exist, to be subjected to this investigation. I don’t give up. I put all my strength into those minutes. They’re not easy, these thoughts. Dovaleh still isn’t talking. Maybe he senses that I’m not listening to him. But I force myself to at least ask the requisite questions: Did I think about him every few hours, after he left the base? I don’t remember. Or once a day at least? I don’t remember. When did I realize he wasn’t coming back? I don’t remember. How did it not occur to me to find out where he’d been taken? And did I feel relieved that he was gone, or glad, even? I don’t remember. I don’t!

  All I know is those were the first days of my love for Liora, which dulled any other emotion or thought. I also know that after camp I did not go back to the math tutor. I informed my parents that I wasn’t going back under any circumstances. I spoke firmly, with a boldness that alarmed them. They gave in, they folded, they blamed it on Liora’s bad influence.

  He stretches his arms out to the sides as far as he can, and his smile stretches with them. “But I’ll tell you, Miss Teacher, you’ll be surprised to learn that the saw actually did have a purpose. Because Daddy-o the tycoon dabbled in the fabric business. Yes, yes, with his own two hands he created his own brand in the field of recycled textiles, schmattes-dot-com. He bought and sold rags, a noble occupation for his free time, during lunch hour at the barbershop, another prestigious enterprise…”

  There’s been a rustle in the audience for a few moments. It’s hard to tell exactly where it’s coming from. Almost everyone I look at seems fascinated by the story and by the storyteller—fascinated despite themselves, perhaps, sometimes with an expression of aversion, even terror. Yet there is a hum, as if from a distant hive, that has been rising from the crowd for a few minutes.

  “He used to drive around Jerusalem’s neighborhoods on his Sachs moped buying rags, old clothes, shirts, pants…” He can hear it too now. His voice crescendos into the familiar ragman call: “Alte zachen!” He bribes the crowd unabashedly, feverishly, desperately: “Blaaan-kets, liiiiin-ens, tooooo-wels, coooom-for-ters, diiiiiiia-pers…After he washed them, he’d sort them out by fabric and size.” The hum is now a murmur coming from all around the club, lapping in from every direction. “And what he did then—listen up, my friends, I’m getting to the point, don’t go anywhere—he’d sit on the floor in the jeans room and deal out the rags like a deck of cards, superquick, one for you, one for you, chop-chop, a pile of this kind and a pile of that kind, it was a real undertaking, don’t look down on it, and then he’d run the shirts and pants and coats from top to bottom on the saw and cut out the dregs, all the buttons and zippers and clips and buckles and snaps, they’d all fall onto the mesh—but don’t worry, those he sold to a tailor in Mea Shearim, nothing was wasted in his universe—and then he’d pack up the rags in bundles of a hundred, I used to help him with that, I liked it, we’d count together, Acht un neintzik, nein un neintzik, hundert! And we’d tie the rags up together really tight with twine, and off he’d go to sell them to auto shops, printing houses, hospitals…”

  The murmur dies down. The kitchen din stops, too. There is a deep silence, like the flash of nothingness before a huge rupture. Dovaleh is so immersed in the story that he apparently doesn’t notice something simmering, and I’m afraid someone will actually hurt him, throw a glass or a bottle or even a chair at him. Anything could happen now. He stands downstage, too close to the audience, his arms hugging his narrow chest, a distant, transparent smile caressing his face: “Every single evening I’d sit there next to Mom with her needle and nylons and do my homework and watch him use the saw. I remember the way he moved, and how his eyes got rounder and blacker, until he looked up and gazed at Mom and within a second he’d come back from wherever he’d been, back to being a human being, and there’s Mom, hey Mom, look, Netanya…”

  All at once, the club erupts. People stand up. Chairs are pushed back, an ashtray drops to the floor with a clang. Mumbles, grumbles, sighs of relief, and then voices roll in from outside that do not belong here, wild laughter, car doors slamming, groaning engines, and screeching tires. Dovaleh trots over to the board, the chalk in his hand flies like a conductor’s baton. Five, eight. Ten. More and more, at least ten tables gone. It wasn’t a coordinated move. Something ripened all at once in people, and they stream out like hurrying refugees, bottlenecking at the door. The man with the thick shoulders who pounded his table before passes by me and grunts at his wife: “Can you believe how he’s using us to work out his hang-ups?” She answers: “Yeah, and what about the lokshen? And don’t forget the used nylons! We got a full-on storytelling circle!”

  Three minutes later most of the audience is gone, and the little club with its low ceiling seems to be panting in shock. Those of us still seated watch the last of the departees with a dulled weariness, some condemning, others jealous. But there are a few, not many, who sit up straighter in their chairs and turn back to Dovaleh expectantly, with renewed energy. He himself, his back to the exits, finishes marking the last red lines on the board, which now look like a madman’s doodle. He puts the chalk down and turns to face the sparsely populated club, and to my surprise he looks relieved.

  “Remember the driver?” he asks, as if the last few minutes have not occurred at all. He replies on our behalf: “Yeah, we remember. So meanwhile the driver does not stop telling jokes. More and more of them, and I don’t even hear him, I don’t even laugh out of politeness anymore, I can’t do it. But he’s a rock, the performer from hell, nothing can break him, he can have a thousand people walk out of his car in the middle of a drive and he’ll keep on telling jokes. I look at him from the side and see how his face has changed. It’s tough now, dead serious, and he doesn’t turn to me, doesn’t try to catch my eye, just joke after joke after joke. And I’m thinking: What the fuck? What is his problem?

  “This whole situation, what can I tell you, the drive, the driver, the drill sergeant who actually used the word ‘orphan,’ which is something that hasn’t even entered my mind yet—hasn’t penetrated at all! Keeps flying off me like a tripped circuit breaker. An orphan is someone who gets old all of a sudden, isn’t it? Or some kind of cripple. An orphan is Eli Stieglitz from the ninth grade, whose dad worked at the Dead Sea factories and a crane fell on him and Eli talked with a stutter ever since. Does that mean I’ll start stuttering, too? What sound does an orphan make? Is there a difference between an orphan without a father and an orphan without a mother?”

  His hands are tightened into fists that he holds up in front of his mouth. People lean closer to hear better. There are so few of us. Scattered around the room.

  “And believe me, Netanya, I don’t want anything in my life to change. I’ve had things good up to now, the best in the world. Our apartment suddenly seems like heaven, even though it’s small and dark and you can suffocate from the smell of rags and velveteen and all his cooking. I even liked that smell suddenly. Okay, so it sucked ass, and it was a nuthouse, and yes, I got beat up generously, okay, big deal, ever
yone got hit, so what, who didn’t get hit back then? That’s the way it was in those days! They didn’t know any better! Did it do us any harm? Didn’t we turn out just fine? Didn’t we become human beings?”

  His eyes are glazed. He looks as though the events were happening now, right at this minute.

  “That’s how families are. One minute they hug you, the next they beat the crap out of you with a belt, and it’s all from love. Spare the rod, spoil the child. ‘Believe me, Dovchu, sometimes a slap is worth a thousand words.’ And there you have my father’s compendium of jokes in its entirety.” He wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and attempts a smile. “Where were we, my little chickadees? What’s up with you? You really do look like battered children. You’re making me want to give you a back rub and sing you a lullaby. Did you hear the one about the snail who goes to the police? You didn’t? You didn’t hear this one either?! So the snail walks into a police station and says to the desk sergeant, ‘Two turtles attacked me!’ Desk sergeant opens up a file and says, ‘Describe exactly what happened.’ Snail says, ‘I don’t really remember, it all happened so fast.’ ”

  The audience titters cautiously. I do, too. Not just from the joke. The laughter now is mostly an excuse to breathe.

  “So listen, my hand is on the door handle this whole time. And the driver, without looking at me, he goes—”

  The little woman suddenly squeaks cheerfully. He looks at her: “What happened, medium? Did I start being funny?”

  “Yes, the joke with the snail is funny!”

  “Really?” His eyes open wide with joy.

  “Yes! Because of how he said it all happened so fast…”

  He peers at her over his glasses. I know he’s running through possible quips: Anyone ever tell you you’re like a bank safe? You both have a ten-minute delay mechanism…But he just smiles at her and throws his hands up. “You’re one of a kind, Pitz.”

  She straightens up, her short neck growing longer: “That’s what you told me.”

  “That’s what I told you?”

  “Once I was crying, and you came down the street—”

  “Why were you crying?”

  “ ’Cause they hit me, and you said—”

  “Why did they hit you?”

  “Because I weren’t growing, and you came behind the house by the gas balloons—”

  “On my hands?”

  “Of course. And you said I was one of a kind, and that if I cried ’cause of them, then you see it upside down, and it’s like I’m laughing ’cause of me.”

  “You still remember that?”

  “I have a long memory as compensation,” she explains and nods three times.

  “And now for something completely different!” he declares, but his shout is restrained this time, perhaps so as not to startle her. “Suddenly the driver slaps his forehead and goes: ‘I can’t believe what an idiot I am! You’re probably not in the mood for all this joking around now, right? I just wanted to clear your head so you could forget for a while, but I shouldn’t be like this, I’m sorry, okay? Forgive me? No hard feelings?’ So I say, ‘It’s okay.’ Then he says, ‘You should sleep now. I’m done. Not another word out of me all the way to Be’er Sheva. Zip!’ ”

  He gives us another reenactment of the drive: his body bobs up and down, bouncing on potholes, leaning right and left with the curves. The passenger’s eyes slowly close, his head droops onto his chest over the bumpy road. Suddenly he startles: “I wasn’t sleeping!” And immediately drips back slowly into sleep. He is subtle and accurate, a master of his art. The small crowd grins: it has been given a gift.

  “And then, a second before I manage to fall asleep, the driver goes: ‘Kid, can I ask you one more thing?’ I don’t answer. So much for sleeping. ‘I just want to know,’ he says, ‘are you purposely stopping it?’

  “ ‘Stopping what?’

  “ ‘I don’t know…It. Crying.’

  “Right then and there I snap my mouth shut. I’m literally biting down. Not talking to him. I’d rather he tell another lousy joke than interfere. So we drive. Except that he, as you’ve already learned, is not one to give up easily. A minute later he asks me again if I’m holding it in or if I just don’t feel like crying.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t understand it myself anymore. The driver was right: I should be crying, that’s what orphans do, isn’t it? Or half orphans, I guess. But I have no tears, I have nothing, my body is like a shadow, no feelings at all. And also, how can I put this…It’s like nothing can really start until I actually know. Isn’t that so?”

  He stops to wait for an answer from us, the remnants of his audience.

  “Only my eyes,” he goes on softly, “are on the verge of exploding the whole time, but not from tears. No tears. From pain, just deadly pain pressing against my eyes.”

  With the knuckles of both fists he crushes his eyes under his glasses. He rubs them for a long time, hard, like he’s trying to poke his eyes out of their sockets.

  “ ‘In my family, may he rest in peace, there was a brother who died,’ the driver tells me. ‘Five years old, he drowned. And even though I never knew him, I always cry over him.’

  “And he really did start crying the minute he talked about him. The tears ran down his face in a straight line. ‘I don’t get how you can be like that,’ the driver says, and he can barely talk, he’s sobbing like a kid. And I look at his tears, and he doesn’t wipe them away, and the stripe wets his cheek and drips down onto his uniform shirt, and he doesn’t wipe it, not with his hand or anything. The tears just flow unrestrained, as much as he wants. But not with me. It’s like something in my brain is stopped up, stuck, I have a brain clog, but if the something could break free, then I could start. And this whole time, don’t forget, I keep thinking that maybe he knows something, maybe he picked something up when he was in the commander’s barracks, and why doesn’t he tell me, and why don’t I just ask him and be done with it, it’s just two words, for God’s sake, why don’t I just shut my eyes hard and throw the question out and come what may?

  “Hey, guys! Guys!” he suddenly raises his voice and waves his arms, and people in the audience—all of us, really—flinch as if we’d been shaken out of a dream. We laugh awkwardly. He takes the red handkerchief out of his pocket and mops his sweat, then pretends to wring out the handkerchief, whistling to himself. “You know what I was thinking? The human brain…It never stops working for a second. It works weekends, holidays, even Yom Kippur. Lousy labor contract that brain negotiated—what was it thinking? But what was I going to…Oh, yeah. Imagine there’s a country somewhere in the world where the legal system works like this: the judge sits there, bangs his gavel, and declares: ‘The defendant will now rise!’ ” He straightens up, stands stiffly, and slides me a look. “ ‘The court finds you guilty of armed robbery, and hereby sentences you to thyroid cancer.’ Or, let’s say, a panel of three judges finds you guilty of rape and sentences you to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Or they say this: ‘The court is informed that the prosecution has entered a plea bargain with the defense, and so instead of that German dude, Alzheimer, the defendant will only undergo a stroke. And for tampering with evidence he’ll get an irritable bowel.’ ”

  The shrunken audience laughs halfheartedly and he gives us a sly sideways look. “You know how the minute you get a disease, especially if it’s a really juicy one, the kind with excellent potential to develop, I mean, to degenerate, then every person you run into tries to prove to you how it’s actually not that bad? On the contrary! They all know someone who heard about someone who’s been living with MS or liver cancer for twenty years, and their lives are awesome! Never been better! And they make such a big deal convincing you how awesome and cool and super-duper it is that you start thinking you must have been an idiot not to get you some of that sclerosis ages ago! You could have had such a fabulous life together! You could have made such a great couple!”

  With these words
he breaks into a tap-dancing routine that ends with a “Ta-daaam!” and his arms spread wide, kneeling on one leg, sweat pouring down his face. No one in the audience is capable of clapping. People swallow drily and look at him with bewildered eyes.

  “Okay, so we’re off again. We’re on the road, Jokerman and your disloyal servant—fuck, I’m so disloyal.” He tries to get up from his bent knee, succeeding on the third try. “We’re hot, we’re dry, we have flies in our eyes, flies in our mouths. You know what? I take back what I said before: I don’t think about that drive very much. I mean, not when I’m awake, only once in a while I get these flashbacks, the windowpane and the way my head rattled on it. Or how I kept seeing the driver covering his teeth with his lips. Or how there was a tiny hole in the upholstery of my seat, which I stuck my finger in almost the whole way, and it was foam rubber, and you’ll laugh but I’d never seen that stuff before, ’cause in my house we had straw mattresses, and I liked the feeling of the foam rubber, and the whole time I was in the pickup I felt like it was some kind of magic substance from another place, this noble matter that was protecting me, and I imagined that the minute I took my finger out of the hole everything would fall in on me. That kind of crap is what stuck in my mind about that drive, to this day, and when it comes back it’s usually at night, in my dreams, and then it’s feature length, and it’s kind of funny that it happens almost every night, can you imagine how boring that is— Yo, projector! Why do you keep showing the same movie?! And then the driver, without looking at me, suddenly goes: ‘But you haven’t told me yet who—’ ”