A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  Dovaleh glares at us with those befuddled eyes. He stretches the corners of his lips exaggeratedly and tries to force us to smile with him. No one smiles. He opens his eyes even wider and blinks quickly. His face is completely clownish now. He bobs his head up and down a few times and mouths silently: Not funny? Really? That’s it? I’m not funny anymore? I’ve finally lost it? He drops his head to his chest and conducts a silent exchange with himself, complete with hand gestures and hyperbolic facial expressions.

  Then he falls silent. Still.

  The little woman somehow knows what is coming before the rest of us do. She shrinks back and puts her hands over her face. The fist flies so fast that I hardly see it. I hear the click of teeth hitting one another, and his whole face seems to wrench away from his neck for an instant. His glasses fall to the floor. He doesn’t alter his expression. Just breathes heavily in pain. With two fingers, he props up the corners of his mouth: Still not funny? Not at all?

  The audience is frozen. The two bikers sit with their faces pulled taut and their ears pricked up, and it occurs to me that they knew this moment would come—that it’s the reason they came.

  Now he screams: “No? Not at all? No, no, no?” He slaps his face, ribs, stomach. The spectacle looks like a fight between at least two men. Within the whirlwind of limbs and expressions I recognize the countenance that has passed over his face more than once this evening: he is uniting with his abuser. Beating himself with another man’s hands.

  This human tempest continues for perhaps twenty seconds until he stops abruptly. His body, without moving, seems to pull back, avoiding itself in disgust. Then he shrugs his shoulders and turns to walk offstage through the door he entered from at the beginning of the evening. He marches like a paper cutout, knees lifted high, elbows slicing the air. On the third step he tramples his glasses. He doesn’t stop; his shoulders lift briefly, then plunge back down. His back is to us, but I can picture the sneer at having just crushed his glasses, and the hateful whisper: Putz.

  He’s about to walk off and leave us with an unfinished story. One leg and half his body are already out the door. He stops. Half of him is still here. He tilts his face back to us just slightly, blinks expectantly, flashes a pleading grin. I straighten up quickly and laugh out loud. I am fully aware of how I sound, yet I laugh again. A few other voices join me, feeble and frightened, but they’re enough to bring him back.

  He turns and skips back merrily, like a girl in a meadow, and on his way he leans down and picks up his crooked glasses with their shattered lenses and perches them on his nose, where they look like a percentage sign. Two threads of blood dribble down from his nostrils to his mouth and onto his shirt. “Now I really can’t see you at all.” He beams. “You’re nothing but black blurs to me. You could all walk out and I wouldn’t even know!”

  As I guessed, and as he himself knew, and perhaps hoped, a group of four gets up and leaves, shock on their faces. Another three couples follow. They abandon the club hastily, without looking back. Dovaleh takes a step toward the blackboard, but then waves his hand in resignation.

  “The road flies by!” he yells, tailing the deserters with his voice. “The driver’s so worked up, his whole face is one big tic, blinking all over his body, hitting the wheel: ‘Can’t you at least tell me if it’s Dad or Mom?’

  “I sit there saying nothing. Nothing. We keep driving. Loads of potholes. I don’t even know where we are or how much farther we have to go. The window pummels my ear, sun burns my face. It’s hard to keep my eyes open. I shut the left one, then right, alternating. The world looks different every time I switch. Then there’s a moment when I gather up all the strength I don’t have and I say: ‘Don’t you know?’

  “ ‘Me?’ poor Jokerman shouts, almost losing the wheel. ‘How the hell would I know?’

  “ ‘You were in the room with them.’

  “ ‘Not when they said…And after that they started fighting with me…’

  “I start to breathe. The driver doesn’t know. At least he wasn’t keeping it from me. I glance at him sideways and he suddenly looks like an okay guy. Kind of screwed up but okay, and he was trying so hard to make me laugh, and maybe he’s also stressed out by this drive, and by me, I mean, he has no idea what I might be capable of—I have no idea myself.

  “And I also start thinking that now I really do have to wait until Be’er Sheva. Whoever comes to pick me up there has to know. They must have told them. I wonder if I should ask how far it is to Be’er Sheva. I’m getting hungry, too. I haven’t had anything to eat since morning. I lean my head back and close my eyes. That lets me breathe a little, because suddenly I have more time: between now and when the Be’er Sheva people tell me, I can pretend nothing’s happened and everything is just like it was when I left home, and I’m just taking a ride in a military truck to Be’er Sheva with a driver who’s telling me jokes, because—why? Because that’s what I feel like doing. Because there happens to be a joke contest today at HQ that I’m dying to see.”

  In the distance, from the industrial area outside the club, a siren wails. One of the waitresses sits down at an abandoned table and stares at Dovaleh. He gives her a weary smile: “Come on, look at you, dollface! What’s up with you all again? Yoav won’t pay me if you walk out of here looking like that. Why the long face? Did someone die? It’s only stand-up comedy! Admittedly, this gig came out a little alternative, with some old-time army stories. And it’s been donkey years since then—forty-three years, guys! There’s a statute of limitations, and that kid has not been with us for ages, God bless his soul, I’m totally rehabilitated from him. Come on, smile a little, show me some consideration for once. For my need to make a living. For the alimony I gotta pay. Where are those law students?” He tents his hand over his crooked glasses, but the group left ages ago. “Okay,” he grumbles, “never mind, maybe they had to get to a kangaroo court somewhere. By the way, do you know what ‘alimony’ means in Latin? The literal translation into Hebrew is ‘method of extracting a male’s testicle via his wallet.’ Good stuff, heh? Poetic. Yeah, yeah, you can laugh…Me, I’m crying…There are women whose pregnancies don’t take, but me, my marriages don’t take. I want them, but they don’t take. It’s the same story every time. I make promises, I make vows, then I start up with my crap again, and then it’s the usual mess, hearings, property distributions, visitation rights…Did you hear about the rabbit and the snake who fell into a dark pit together? You didn’t hear about that either? Where are you living, guys?! So the snake feels the rabbit up and says, ‘You have soft fur, long ears, and big front teeth—you’re a rabbit!’ The rabbit feels the snake up and says, ‘You have a long forked tongue, you slither, and you’re slippery—you’re a lawyer!’ ”

  He cuts off our feeble laughter with one finger held up. “Here’s a question for you, a little Zen Dovism: If a man stands alone in the forest and there’s not a single person or living creature around him, is it still his fault?”

  Women laugh, men snicker.

  “The driver starts banging his hand on the wheel, and he yells: ‘What the hell! How could they not tell you? How didn’t they tell you?’ I don’t answer. ‘Fuckin’ A,’ he says and lights a cigarette, his hands trembling. He gives me a crooked sideways glance. ‘Want one?’ I pull one out of the pack like it’s nothing. He lights it for me. My first real cigarette. It’s a Time, the brand all the kids smoke. At camp the guys wouldn’t give me any. ‘You’re still a kid,’ they said. Passed it back and forth over my head. Even the girls passed it over me, and now the driver just lights it for me, and the lighter has a naked girl taking her clothes on and off. I inhale, I cough, it burns, it’s good. I hope it burns everything. Hope it burns the whole world up.

  “So now we’re driving and smoking. Silently, like men. If Dad could see me, he’d slap me right there and then. So now it’s her turn, quickly, doesn’t matter what. Think of how her face looks when she gets off the Taas bus in the evening, like she’s spent the whole day
working for the angel of death, every day she’s like that, never gets used to it, and only after she showers the smell of bullets off her body does she become human again. Then she sits in her armchair and I do my shows. ‘The daily show,’ we call it, and I plan it out every day on the way to school and during school and after school. It’s a special show just for her, with characters, and costumes, hats, scarves, clothes I nick from the neighbors’ laundry lines, stuff I find on the street—after all, I am my father’s son.

  “And it’s dark all around us, but me and her, we don’t need light. The little red light from the hot-water switch is enough. She does best in the dark, that’s what she says, and her eyes really do get bigger in the dark, it’s unreal. Like two blue fishes in the faint red glow. When you see her on the street with her scarf and boots, head down, you don’t know how beautiful she is, but inside the house she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. I used to do comedy sketch routines by the Gashash, and Uri Zohar and Shaike Ofir, and impersonations of the Theater Club Quartet. I’d use a broomstick for a microphone and I’d sing to her: ‘That Means You’re Young,’ and ‘My Beloved of the White Neck,’ and ‘He Didn’t Know Her Name.’ A whole show, every evening, for years, day after day, and he didn’t know about it. He never caught us. Sometimes he’d come in a second after we finished, and he’d smell something, but he couldn’t figure out what it was, and he’d stand there shaking his head at us like an old teacher, but that was it, never more, he couldn’t even have imagined what she was like when she watched me.”

  He leans forward and bends like he’s rounding his body over the story.

  “And I start feeling like maybe it’s wrong that I’m thinking about her for so long without a break, but on the other hand I don’t want to stop in the middle, I’m afraid to weaken her. She’s very weak as it is. His turn will come soon. There has to be justice. Equal time, down to the second. She used to sit with her feet on the little ottoman, with a white robe and a white towel twisted around her head. Like a princess, she looked. Like Grace Kelly.” He turns to face us and his voice suddenly sounds different: the clear voice of a man simply talking to us. “Look, maybe it was only an hour a day, total, the time I had with her alone, until he came home. Maybe even less than an hour, maybe fifteen minutes, I don’t know, when you’re a kid time passes differently. But those were my best moments with her, so maybe I inflated them a little…” He chuckles. “I used to do all kinds of routines for her: ‘The food here is terrible, and the portions are so small!’ ‘I shot a moose once.’ And all the Israeli classics, too. She’d sit there with her cigarette like this, with her smile that’s half on you, half behind your head, and I don’t even know what she could understand from all my Hebrew and the accents and the slang, she probably missed a lot of it, but every single evening, for three or four years, maybe five, she would sit there and watch me, smiling, no one else but me saw her smile like that, I guarantee you, until suddenly she’d get sick of it all at once, in midword, didn’t matter where I was, I could be at the tip of the point of the punch line and I’d see it coming, I was an expert, her eyes would start escaping inward, her lips would tremble, her mouth moved sideways, so I’d rush to the punch line, try to round the corner, I’d sprint, but I could see her face close off right in front of my eyes, and that was it. The end. Nothing. I’m still standing there with the scarves on my head, holding a broom, feeling like a total idiot, a jester, and she’s flinging the towel off her head and putting out the cigarette. ‘What will become of you!’ she’d yell. ‘Go do your homework, go out and play with your friends…’ ”

  It takes him three rotations around the stage to get his breath back, and during the lull I find myself wallowing in pain from a different place. If only I had a child from her, I think for the thousandth time. But this time it stabs me somewhere new, in an organ I never knew I had. If only I had a child who would remind me of her in some small way—in the curve of her cheek, in a single movement of her mouth. That’s all. I swear, I wouldn’t need anything more.

  “Anyhoo, where were we?” he shouts hoarsely. “Where was I? Let’s go, nose to the grindstone, Dovaleh. We covered Be’er Ora, driver, cigarette, Mom, Dad…So we’re driving fast, the speedometer’s at seventy-five, eighty miles an hour, the chassis is starting to vibrate, but the driver won’t stop banging his fist on the wheel and shaking his head. Only time I’ve seen one of those bobbleheads driving instead of sitting on the dashboard. Every few seconds he gives me a twisted look, like I’m…like I have some, I don’t know, some disease…

  “But me, nothing. Smoking. I take deep drags, burning my brains real good, all my thoughts. But on the other hand, if I smoke I can think about them without really thinking, because she smokes, too, and he does, she in the evening, he in the morning, and just from that thought the smoke from both of them blends together and my head fills with smoke, like there’s a fire in there, and I flick the cigarette out the window and I can’t breathe—I can’t breathe.”

  He walks distractedly all over the stage, fanning his face. There are moments when I think he’s drawing strength from the story. Yet a second later I feel the story sucking all the vitality out of him. I’m not sure if it’s connected, but perhaps because of the way he moves with the story, something emerges in me, an idea: maybe I’ll write down for him, briefly, in bullet points, a description of this evening. I’ll just sit at home with my scribbled napkins and try to write down what happened here in an organized way.

  For him to have. A souvenir.

  “And suddenly he stops the truck, Jokerman. But not like delicately sliding over—no, he screeches the brakes like a bank robber!” He demonstrates, lurching forward and slamming back, his mouth gaping: “Steve McQueen in Bullitt! Bonnie and Clyde! Onto the shoulder—no, wait, there’s no shoulder! This is forty-three years ago, they’d barely invented roads, people still clapped when they saw a car crash, asked for encores! Boom! The truck jolts, the two of us bounce up and bang our heads on this kind of canvas roof with a metal frame, we shout, our teeth are castanets, mouths full of sand, and when the truck finally comes to a stop he slams his head on the horn—just rams into it with his forehead. I’m telling you, maybe thirty seconds he sat there like that, ripped a hole through the desert. Then he lifts his head up and pounds one fist on the wheel so hard I’m afraid he’s going to shatter it, and he goes: ‘What do you say we go back?’

  “ ‘What do you mean, back? I gotta get to Jerusalem.’

  “ ‘But it’s not right that you don’t…,’ he starts stammering. ‘It’s against the…I don’t know, it’s against God even, or like the Torah. It’s wrong, I can’t keep driving like this, it’s making me feel bad, for real, it’s making me sick…’

  “ ‘Keep driving,’ I tell him like my voice has already changed. ‘They’ll tell us in Be’er Sheva.’

  “ ‘Fuck they will!’ He spits out the window. ‘Those shits, I got their number already. Bunch of pussies. Each one’s gonna try and make the other guy tell you.’

  “Then he gets out to take a piss. I sit in the truck. Alone, suddenly. It’s the first moment I’ve been like that, with just myself, since the sergeant woman left me in front of the commander’s barracks. And immediately I can see—it’s not good for me, being alone. It crowds in on me. I open the door and jump down to pee on the other side of the truck. I stand there peeing and a second later he jumps into my head, my father, shoves himself in there, he does that more than she does—what does that mean and why is she growing weaker on me? I force her back in, but he comes with her, trailing her, won’t leave me alone with her for a second. What the fuck. I think about her hard, I want to see her the good way, but what do I get instead? I see the way she goes white when the radio says Israeli soldiers killed a terrorist, or there was an exchange of fire and a whole unit was wiped out by our forces. When she hears that, she gets up quickly and goes into the bathroom. Even if she already washed before that, she goes in and starts all over again, stays th
ere maybe an hour, scrubbing the skin off her hands, using up all the hot water, and Dad gets annoyed and paces the hallway, fuming—Psssh! Psssh! At the hot water and at how she doesn’t support our army. But when she comes out he doesn’t say a word. Not a word. There, I’ve thought about him again, he won’t let me be alone with her for a second.”

  He wanders around the stage. I think his feet are faltering slightly. The copper urn behind him imbibes and spits out his reflection over and over again feverishly.

  “My mind is racing: what’s going to happen, how will things work out, what’ll happen to me, who’ll take care of me. Just as an example, you know, when I was about five he started teaching me soccer, I told you, not how to play, you must be kidding, he wasn’t interested in playing, but he taught me the facts, the rules, and results from the World Cup and the Israel Cup and tournaments and names of players in the national league, and then the teams from England and Brazil and Argentina, and Hungary, obviously, and the whole world, except Germany, of course, and except Spain because of the Expulsion, which he still hadn’t entirely forgiven them for. Sometimes when I’m doing my homework and he’s sawing his schmattes, he suddenly shoots at me: ‘France! Mondial ’58!’ And I shoot back: ‘Fontaine! Jonquet! Roger Marche!’ Then he says: ‘Sweden!’ And I say: ‘What year?’ And he goes: ‘Also 1958!’ So I say: ‘Liedholm! Simonsson!’ It was good times with him. Just so you know, the guy never went to a soccer match in his life. Thought it was a waste of time: Why do they have to play for ninety minutes? Why not twenty? Why not stop at the first goal? But he got it in his mind that I was small and weak, and that if I knew a lot about soccer the boys would respect me and protect me and not beat me up too much. That’s how his mind worked, always an ulterior motive, a trick up his sleeve, you never knew exactly where you stood with him—is he for you? Against you? And I think that’s how he brought me up, too, to believe that ultimately everyone watches out for himself. That was his mantra in life, the essence of the legacy passed down by Daddy-o to his tender son.