A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  Dovaleh’s voice—what’s happening to it? It’s hard to make out the words, but in the last few minutes the voice itself is thin and floating, almost like a child’s.

  “And the driver, her brother, reaches his hand back, too, and she puts a cookie in it. And he reaches back again, and again. I feel like he’s doing it to make me laugh because she won’t let him tell me any jokes. We drive without talking. ‘No more cookies,’ she says, ‘you’re being greedy, leave some for him.’ But he keeps holding his hand out, and he winks at me with his mouth full, and she slaps him on the back of the neck and he shouts ‘Ouch!’ and laughs. When my father gives me that slap, after he cuts my hair, I both anticipate it and slightly fear it. A stinging little slap, after the cotton ball with the aftershave. He does it with the tips of his fingers, and then he whispers in my ear so the clients won’t hear, ‘Handsome cut, mein leibn, my life.’ And now it’s her turn. Good things about her. But what’s best to think about her now? What would help most? I’m suddenly afraid to think about her. I don’t know, she’s gone colorless on me. What am I doing wrong? I force her back in. She doesn’t want to come. I tug hard, pull her in with both hands, I have to have her in my mind, too. It can’t be just him. Don’t give up! I yell at her. Don’t surrender! I’m almost sobbing, doubling my whole body over against the car door so the driver and his sister won’t see, and here she comes, thank God, sitting in the kitchen with a pile of nylons to darn. And there I am sitting next to her doing my homework, and everything’s normal, and she hooks eye after eye with the needle, and every few eyes she stops, forgets herself, stares into space, doesn’t see the darning or me. What is she thinking about when she does that? I never asked her. A thousand times I was alone with her and I never asked. What do I know? Almost nothing. Her parents were wealthy, I know that from Dad. She was an excellent student, she played the piano, there was talk of recitals, but that was it, she finished the Shoah when she was twenty and she’d spent six months of the war in a single train car, I told you that. They hid her there for half a year, three Polish train engineers in a little compartment on a train that ran back and forth on the same tracks. They took turns guarding her; she told me that once, and she gave this crooked laugh I’d never heard before. I must have been twelve or so, and it was just me and her alone at home, and I did a show for her when she suddenly stopped me and told me the whole story in one go, and her mouth twisted sideways and she couldn’t straighten it out for a few seconds, this whole part of her face spilled to one side. After six months they decided they’d had enough of her. I don’t know why, don’t know what happened one fine day when they got to the last stop and those louses threw her out straight onto the gatehouse ramp.

  “Should I go on?” he asks in a strained voice. A few heads nod.

  “I can’t remember the exact order, a lot of things get mixed up in my mind, but for example there’s always the way I hear his sister in the backseat saying to herself quietly, ‘God help us,’ and I generally get the feeling that the sister, her mind is working all the time. Grinding away. She has thoughts about me and I don’t know what they are. Before, when she stood outside the truck looking in, I saw two deep, black grooves down her forehead. I sink deeper in my seat so I won’t be in her eyes. I can hear the baby sucking the whole time, and every few sucks he sighs like an old man, and that stresses me out. They’re taking care of him, protecting him, giving him what he needs, so why is he sighing? Then out of nowhere the sister says, ‘Your dad, what’s his job?’

  “ ‘He has a barbershop. Him and a partner.’ I don’t know why I told her about that. I’m an idiot. Any second I might have told her how Dad likes to joke about the partner being in love with Mom, and how he plays around with his scissors right in front of the partner’s nose, pretending that’s what he’ll do to him if he catches them together.’

  “ ‘And Mom?’ she asks.

  “ ‘What about Mom?’ I say, and now I’m getting a little cautious.

  “ ‘Does she work at the hairdresser, too?’

  “ ‘Of course not, she works at Taas, sorting ammo.’ All of a sudden I feel like she’s playing chess with me, each of us making our move and waiting to see what the other one will do.

  “ ‘I didn’t know they had women in Taas,’ she says.

  “ ‘They do,’ I answer.

  “She doesn’t say anything. So I don’t either. Then she asks if I want another cookie. I start thinking maybe the cookies are a move, too, and I’d best not take one, but I do take one and immediately I know it was a mistake. I don’t know why, but it was a mistake.

  “ ‘Eat up,’ she says, sounding very pleased with herself. I put the cookie in my mouth and chew and I feel like throwing up. ‘Do you have any brothers and sisters?’ she asks.

  “And by the way, we’ve long finished with the desert. There’s green fields now, and regular cars, civilian ones, not army ones. I try to guess by the road signs how much longer to Jerusalem, but I don’t know anything about all these intercity roads and I can’t even figure out if we have an hour left, or half an hour, or three hours, and I don’t want to ask. The sandwich and the egg keep repeating on me with the cookies.

  “Let me tell you guys a joke,” Dovaleh begs now, as if to say: I need a joke urgently, just a little one to sweeten my mouth. But two women at two different tables shout almost in unison: “Keep telling the story.” They glance at each other awkwardly, and one gives her husband a sideways look. Dovaleh sighs, stretches, cracks his knuckles, takes a deep breath.

  “And then the sister just throws out at me like it’s nothing: ‘And how are things for you with Dad? You get along, you two?’

  “I remember my stomach turned over right then and there, and I just cut myself out of the place: I’m not here. I’m not anywhere. I’m not even allowed to be in any place. And you should know—open parentheses for a sec—that I have a thousand tricks for not being, I’m a world champion at not being, but all of a sudden I can’t remember a single one of my tricks. I’m not kidding you. When he used to hit me, I’d practice stopping my heartbeat. I could get it down to twenty or thirty a minute, like I was hibernating, that’s what I was aiming for, that was the dream. You’ll think this is funny, but I also practiced spreading the pain out from the place that got hit to the other parts of my body, so it would be evenly divided—you know, equitable distribution of resources. While he was hitting I would imagine a column of ants coming to take the pain from my face or my stomach, and within seconds the ants would crumble it apart and move the crumbs to parts of my body that are more indifferent to pain.”

  He sways back and forth slightly, lost in himself. The light from above engulfs him in a misty veil. But then he opens his eyes and gives the little lady a long look, and then—he’s doing it again—he moves his gaze to me with that same measured gesture, passing a flame from one candle to another. I still don’t understand what he means by doing that, or what he’s asking me to take from that woman, but I feel that he needs a token of approval from me, and I confirm with my eyes that he and she and I are holding some triangle of thread here, which perhaps one day I will understand.

  “But his sister is just like him. Won’t give up. ‘I couldn’t hear you,’ she says and puts her hand on my shoulder, ‘What was that?’ I grip the door handle hard. What the hell is she doing putting her hand on me? And what’s with all these questions? Maybe the driver does know something and he told her? My brain starts working overtime: How long was I actually asleep in the truck outside their house until they woke me? She had enough time to make the sandwiches and the hard-boiled eggs and the drinks, so maybe he stood next to her in the kitchen and told her everything? Even things I still don’t know? I feel nauseous again. If I open the door right here, I can roll over on the road, I’ll get a little banged up, but then I’ll run into the fields and they won’t find me until after the funeral, and then everything will be over and I won’t have to do anything, and anyway who said I have to do anyt
hing, and where did I get this idea that it’s all on me? ‘We’re okay,’ I tell her. ‘We get along, but it’s better with Mom.’

  “Don’t ask me why those words came out. I never told anyone in the world what things were like in our home, not ever, not even kids in class, not even my best friends, they didn’t hear a word out of me, so what the hell am I doing pouring my heart out to a stranger? To a woman whose name I don’t even know? And anyway, what business of hers is it who I get along with and who I’m not so hot with? I feel awful. My eyes go dim. I start thinking—don’t laugh now—that maybe there was something in her cookies that makes you talk, like in a police interrogation, until you confess.”

  Sleepwalking terror on his face: he’s there. All of him is there.

  “And the driver says to her quietly, ‘Leave him alone, maybe he doesn’t wanna talk about that now.’ ‘Of course he does,’ she says. ‘What else do you think he can talk about at a time like this? About monkeys in Africa? About your lamebrain jokes? Isn’t that right, kid? Don’t you want to talk about it?’ She leans over and puts her hand on my shoulder again, and I smell something familiar, but I can’t place it, some kind of sweet perfume coming from her, or maybe it’s from the baby, and I breathe it in deeply, and I tell her yes.

  “ ‘I told you,’ she says and tugs his ear hard, and he shouts ‘Ouch!’ and grabs his ear, and I remember thinking that, even though they fought a lot, you could tell they were siblings, and it sucked that I didn’t have any. And the other thing that’s in my head the whole time is that she knew her brother who died, the one the driver never knew. How can she manage to hold both of them in her mind?”

  He pauses and looks at the little lady. She yawns repeatedly, rests her head on both hands, but her eyes are wide open and she watches him with intention and effort. He sits down at the edge of the stage with his legs dangling. The blood from his nose has congealed on his mouth and chin and painted two stripes on his shirt.

  “I remember everything suddenly. That’s what’s amazing about this evening. I want you to know. You’ve done a great thing for me today by staying. I suddenly remember everything, and not in my sleep but like it’s happening right now, this minute. For example, I remember sitting in the truck thinking that until we get there I have to be like an animal that doesn’t understand anything about human life. A monkey or an ostrich or a fly, just as long as I don’t understand any human speech or behavior. And I mustn’t think. The most important thing now is to not think about anyone and not to want anything or anyone. Except that maybe I can think a few good things. But what would be considered a good thing now? Good for him? Good for her? I’m dead scared of making the tiniest mistake.”

  With effort he manages a crooked smile. His upper lip is very swollen, and his speech is getting more and more slurred.

  “Where was I…,” he murmurs. “Where was I…”

  No one answers. He sighs and goes on.

  “I suddenly got the idea of thinking about a soft-boiled egg. Don’t look at me like that. When I was little I couldn’t stand eating soft-boiled eggs, the runny stuff made me gag, and the two of them would get mad and say I had to eat it, that all the vitamins were in that part, and there was yelling and slapping. Where food was concerned, by the way, she had no qualms about hitting. In the end, when nothing else worked, they’d tell me that if I didn’t eat my egg they’d leave the house and never come back. But I still wouldn’t eat it. So they’d put their coats on and pick up the key and stand in the doorway saying goodbye. And scared as I was to be left alone, I still didn’t eat it. I don’t know where I got the guts to stand up to them, and I argued, too, playing for time, and I just wanted it to stay like that forever, with them standing next to each other and talking to me, both the same way…”

  He smiles to himself. He seems to be shrinking, his legs swinging in the air.

  “So this is what I’m thinking about the soft egg: that maybe it’s something I should see, just that, over and over and over again until we get there, like a movie with a happy ending. I happen to look in the rearview mirror and I see that his sister’s eyes are full of tears again. She’s sitting there crying quietly. And then it really all comes up at once—the salami, the cookies, everything. I yell at the driver to stop—now! I jump out and puke my guts out on the front tire. I vomit out everything she fed me and it doesn’t stop, there’s more and more. My mother always holds my head when I throw up. First time in my life I’m throwing up on my own.”

  He touches his forehead lightly. Here and there a few men and women distractedly hold their hands up to their own foreheads. I do, too. There is a moment of peculiar silence. People are lost in themselves. My fingers read my forehead. It’s not easy for me, this touch. In recent years I’ve been steadily losing my hair, and there’s wrinkling. Furrows appearing. Like something is tattooing my forehead from the inside, limning straight lines and diamonds and squares. The forehead of a goring ox, Tamara would say if she saw it.

  “Come on, come with me,” he says, waking us up gently. “Come on, I’m getting back into the truck. She hands me a cloth diaper and tells me to wipe my face. The diaper is freshly laundered. It smells good. I put it over my face like a bandage”—he spreads his hands over his face—“and now it’s her turn. I’ve left her alone for too long. Good things, good things about her. How she rubs Anuga hand cream into her skin, and the whole house fills with the smell, and her long fingers, and how she touches her cheek when she thinks and when she reads. And how she always holds her hands folded against one another so you can’t see where they sewed her up. She’s even careful around me, I’ve never been able to count whether she has six scars or seven. Sometimes it’s six, sometimes seven. Now it’s his turn. No, hers again. That’s more urgent. She keeps disappearing. She doesn’t have a drop of color. Completely white, like she hasn’t an ounce of blood in her body. Like she’s already given up, maybe lost faith in me because I didn’t think hard enough about her. Why aren’t I thinking harder? Why is it so hard for me to call up pictures of her? I want to, of course I want to, come on—”

  He stops. His head is straight up and he has a tortured expression. A dark shadow slowly climbs up from inside him across his face, opens its mouth wide, takes in air, then dives back down. At that moment a thought ripens inside me: I want him to read what I’m planning to write this evening. I want him to have time to read it. I want it to be with him when he goes there. I hope that, in some way which I do not fully understand or even believe in, this thing I write will have some kind of existence there, too.

  “But then the way she was always embarrassing me…,” he mumbles. “Always making scenes, screaming at night, crying at the window till the whole neighborhood woke up. I didn’t tell you about all that, but it does need to be taken into account, it must be considered before handing down the verdict, and this is something I began to comprehend at a pretty young age: that she’s best for me when she’s at home, when she’s shut up in the apartment with just me, and it’s only me and her and our talk and our shows, and the books she used to translate for me from Polish. She read me Kafka for kids, and Odysseus and Raskolnikov…” He laughs softly. “At bedtime she’d tell me about Hans Castorp and Michael Kohlhaas and Alyosha, all the treasures, and she adapted them for my age, or usually not—adapting was not her strong suit—but things got hardest when she went out. The second she got anywhere near the door or the window I’d be on alert, I had actual heart palpitations, and awful pressure right here, in my belly—”

  He puts his hand on his stomach. There is a longing in that small movement.

  “What can I tell you, my head was exploding from the two of them, both together, her, too, because all of a sudden she finally woke up on me, like she realized her time was almost up and we’d be there soon and it was her last chance to influence me, so she started yelling, begging, reminding me of all kinds of things, I can’t remember what they were, and then he brought up even more things, anytime she said one thing he’
d come up with another two, and she’s pulling me this way and he’s pulling the other way, and the closer we get to Jerusalem, the crazier they get.

  “Plug them up, plug them up,” he mutters feverishly, “plug up all the holes in my body. If I shut my eyes they come in through my ears, if I shut my mouth they come in through my nose. They’re shoving, yelling, driving me mad, like little kids, they scream at me, they cry—Me, me, me, pick me!”

  His words are barely intelligible. I get up and move to a table nearer the stage. It’s strange to see him from so close. For an instant, when he looks up, the spotlight creates an optical illusion, and a fifty-seven-year-old boy is reflected out of a fourteen-year-old man.

  “Then suddenly, I swear, this is not imaginary, I hear the baby talking into my ear. But not like a baby talks, no, he was like someone my age or even older, and he says to me, just like this, very considered: ‘You really have to make up your mind now, kid, because we’ll be there soon.’ And I think: I can’t really have heard that. I pray to God that the driver and his sister didn’t hear it. I shouldn’t even have thoughts like that, God can strike you dead for something like that. And I start yelling: ‘Can’t you shut him up! Shut him up already!’ Then everything goes quiet, and the driver and his sister don’t say anything, like they’re scared of me, and then the baby makes one single shout, but a regular baby’s.”

  He takes another gulp from the flask and turns it over. A few drops drizzle onto the floor. He signals to Yoav, who goes over to the stage with a sour face and refills the flask from a bottle of Gato Negro. Dovaleh urges him to pour some more. The little group sitting at the bar, his longtime fans from Petach Tikva, take advantage of his distraction to slip away. I don’t think he even notices. A dark-skinned man in an undershirt comes out of the kitchen, leans on the empty bar, and lights a cigarette.