A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  During this lull, the woman with the silver hair and thin glasses looks over at me. Our eyes interweave for a long and slightly surprising moment.

  “Friends, any chance you know why I’m telling you this story tonight? How we even got onto this?” He breathes heavily, his face burns an unnatural red. “It’ll be over soon, don’t worry, I can see the light.”

  He takes his glasses off and glances at me. I believe he is reminding me of his request: that thing that comes out of a person without his control. That’s what he wanted me to tell him. It cannot be put into words, I realize, and that must be the point of it. And he asks with his eyes: But still, do you think everyone knows it? And I nod: Yes. And he persists: And the person himself, does he know what this one and only thing of his is? And I think: Yes. Yes, deep in his heart he knows.

  “The driver took me home to Romema, but when I got out of the truck a neighbor yelled out the window: ‘Dovaleh, what are you doing here? Go quickly to Givat Shaul, you might still make it!’ So we tear over from Romema to Givat Shaul, to the cemetery, it’s not far, maybe fifteen minutes. We drive like crazy, speeding through red lights. I remember it was quiet in the car. No one said a word. And me—”

  He stops. Takes a deep breath.

  “In my heart, in my black heart, I started doing my reckoning. That’s how it went. It was time for my accounting. My rotten little accounting.”

  He pauses again, sinks deeper and deeper into himself.

  When he resurfaces, he is rigid and clenched.

  “Douche bag. That’s what I am. You remember that. Write it down, Your Honor, factor it in when you get to the sentencing stage. Yeah, you guys look at me now and you see a nice guy, a jolly old fellow, a laugh riot. But me, since that day, and to this day, I’ve always been a barely fourteen-year-old douche bag with shit where his soul should be, sitting in that truck doing his rotten accounting, and it’s the most fucked-up, twisted accounting a person can make in his life. You won’t believe what I put into that tally. I sneaked in the tiniest, dirtiest little things for those few minutes while we drove from my house to the cemetery. I totaled up the two of them and our whole life together in a petty cash account.”

  His face looks like someone is wringing it out with an iron hand. “And to tell you the truth? Up until that moment I didn’t even know what a son of a thousand bitches I was. I didn’t realize what kind of filth I had inside me until I became nothing but filth from top to bottom, and I learned what a person is and what he’s worth. In a few minutes I grasped it all, I got it, I calculated it, my brain did the whole calculation in half a second—plus this, minus that, another minus, one more, and that’s it, it’s for life, and it doesn’t come off and it won’t ever come off.”

  His hands grip and twist each other. In the prevailing silence, I force myself to try and remember, or at least guess, where I was in those moments, at four o’clock in the afternoon, just as the military vehicle pulled up to the cemetery. Maybe I was coming back from the shooting range with the platoon. Or maybe we were practicing formations on the parade court. I need to understand what happened earlier that day, in the late-morning hours, when I saw him come back from the tent with the backpack, then follow the drill sergeant to the truck. Why didn’t I get up and run to him? I should have run over to him, walked him to the truck, asked what happened. I was his friend, wasn’t I?

  “The driver flies, his whole body’s pressing the wheel. Pale as a ghost. People in the cars next to us look at me. People on the street look. I could tell they all knew exactly where we were going and what was going through my heart. How did they know? I didn’t know it myself yet, certainly not everything, because all that time I still kept doing my accounting, and every few seconds I’d remember another thing and another thing and I’d add it to my fucking list, my selektzia, right, left, left, left…”

  He chuckles apologetically. Halts his head jerks with his hand.

  “For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how all these people on the street knew what I’d decided before I myself knew, and how they knew what a shit I was. I remember one old guy spat on the sidewalk when we drove past him, and a religious guy with sidelocks literally ran away from me when the driver stopped to ask him how to get to Givat Shaul. And a woman walking with her little boy turned his head away from me. It was all signs.

  “And I remember that the driver, all the way to the cemetery, didn’t look me in the eye or even turn his face halfway to me. His sister had all but disappeared. I couldn’t hear her breathing. The baby, too. And it was because of the baby being so quiet that I starting wondering what was going on, what had I done, and why was everyone being like that?

  “ ’Cause I realized something bad had happened on the last leg of the drive, from home to here, or maybe even from the minute I’d left Be’er Ora. But what? What had happened? And what did everyone want from me? I mean, it was just thoughts, just flies buzzing around my brain, and nothing could happen from thoughts, no one can control their thoughts, you can’t stop your brain, or tell it to think only this or only that. Right?”

  The room is quiet. He doesn’t look up at us.

  As if he is still afraid of the answer.

  “And I couldn’t understand it, I just couldn’t, but I didn’t have anyone to ask. I was alone. And all that stuff made a new thought settle down in my head: This must be it. It must have already happened. I’ve already given the verdict.”

  He stretches his arms up, then down, then out to the sides, searching for a way to breathe. He doesn’t look at me, but I can feel that now, perhaps more than at any other moment this evening, he is asking me to see him.

  “And the thing is, I didn’t know how it got that way at all. I couldn’t pinpoint where it had happened that I’d decided. I quickly tried to reverse what I thought, I swear I did, honestly, and anyway, what the fuck? Why the hell did I end up deciding that way? The whole time I’d had something completely different in my mind, my whole life I’d had something different, but then without even thinking—who the hell gives these things a second thought?” His voice cracks into a panicked scream. “And now this, all of a sudden? Why did I flip-flop at the last minute and decide the most opposite from what I really wanted? How could a whole lifetime flip over on me in one second just because of the stupid, random thoughts of a stupid kid…”

  He plunges into the armchair.

  “Those few moments,” he murmurs, “and the whole drive, and the whole fucking accounting…” He turns his hands over slowly and examines his palms with a curiosity that embodies a lifetime. “Such dirt on me, such pollution…God, all the way to my bones…”

  —

  If I’d only stood up and run to him before he got into the truck and left. Even though it was in the middle of a lesson. Even though the sergeant was with him and would probably have yelled at me. Even though I have no doubt—and I guess I didn’t have any then either—that everyone would have made fun of me for the rest of the camp. They’d have made me their punching bag. Instead of him.

  —

  He holds his head in his hands, pressing his temples. I don’t know what he’s thinking about now, but I pick myself up from the sandy quad and run to him. I can vividly remember the route. The path lined with whitewashed stones. The parade lot with the flag. The big army tents. The barracks. The sergeant shouting at me, threatening. I ignore him. I get to Dovaleh and walk beside him. He notices me and keeps walking, crushed under the weight of the backpack. He looks stunned. I reach out and touch his shoulder, and he stops and stares at me. Maybe he’s trying to figure out what I want from him after everything that happened. What’s the status between us now? I ask him: What happened? Where are they taking you? He shrugs his shoulders and looks at the drill sergeant and asks him what happened. And the drill sergeant answers him.

  And if he doesn’t answer, I ask Dovaleh again.

  And he asks the drill sergeant.

  And we do that until he answers.

  —
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  “Sometimes I think the filth of that reckoning hasn’t worked itself out of my blood to this day. And it can’t. How could it? That kind of filth…” He searches for the right word, his fingers milking it out of the air: “It’s radioactive. Yeah. My own private Chernobyl. A single moment that lasts a lifetime, still poisoning anything I come close to, to this day. Every person I touch.”

  The club is silent.

  “Or marry. Or give birth to.”

  I turn and glance at the girl who was about to leave but stayed. She is weeping into her hands. Her shoulders shake.

  “Go on,” whispers a large woman with a mane of curls.

  He stares out hazily in the direction of the voice, nodding wearily. Only now do I realize something invaluable: he has not given a single hint, this entire evening, that I was there with him at the camp. He hasn’t turned me in.

  “What more is there to tell. We got to Givat Shaul, and that place is a conveyor belt, a factory, three funerals an hour, bam-bam-bam, how you gonna find the right one? We parked on the sidewalk, left the sister and her baby in the pickup, and me and the driver took off in a mad rush all over the place.

  “And don’t forget it’s my first funeral. I didn’t even know where to look or what to look for or where the person who died is supposed to be, where’s he gonna come from suddenly, and whether you can see him or if he’s covered. I saw people standing around in groups, each group in a different area, and I didn’t know what they were waiting for or who was in charge or what we were supposed to do.

  “Then I saw this Bulgarian redhead, and I knew he worked with Dad, he supplied lotions and shampoos, and next to him was a woman who worked at Taas, a shift manager who Mom was dead scared of, and a little behind them I saw Silviu, Dad’s partner, with a bunch of flowers in his hand.

  “I told the driver that was it and he stood still, gave me some distance, said something like ‘Be tough, kid.’ And the truth is, it was hard for me to leave him. I don’t even know his name. If he happens to be here tonight, could he raise his hand? He’ll get a free drink on the house, eh?”

  Judging by his strained, stubborn look, he seems to honestly believe it’s a possibility.

  “Where are you?” He snorts. “Where are you, my righteous comic brother, who told me jokes the whole way and lied about the joke contest? I looked into it a while ago. I’m doing some housecleaning, you know, tying up loose ends. I asked around, made some inquiries, I googled, I looked through old issues of Bamahaneh, but there was no such thing, ever, no joke contest in the army, he just made it up for me, that sneaky Jokerman. Wanted to soften the blow a little. Where are you, my good man?

  “Now stay with me, don’t let go of my hand for a second. The driver went back to the pickup, and I walked over to the people standing around. I remember walking slowly, like I was stepping on broken glass, but my eyes raced around like crazy. There’s a neighbor from our building, the lady who always fights with us ’cause all the rags we hang out to dry drip on her laundry, and now she’s here. And there’s the doctor who does cupping on Dad when he has high blood pressure, and there’s the woman from Mom’s shtetl who brings her books in Polish, and there’s that guy, and there’s that other woman.

  “There were maybe twenty of them. I didn’t know we knew so many people. Hardly anyone spoke to us around the neighborhood. Maybe they were from the barbershop? I don’t know. I didn’t go near them. I couldn’t see him or her. Then a few people caught sight of me and they pointed and whispered. I let the backpack slide off my body. I didn’t have the strength to carry anything anymore.”

  He hugs his body.

  “Suddenly a tall guy with a black-broom beard from Chevra Kadisha comes over to me and says, ‘Are you the orphan? Are you the Greenstein orphan? Where were you? We’ve been waiting for you!’ He grabs my hand, hard, like he wants to strangle it, and pulls me with him. As we walk, he sticks a cardboard yarmulke on my head—”

  Dovaleh locks onto me now with his eyes. I give him everything I have and everything I don’t have.

  “He rushed me to this stone building, took me inside. I didn’t look. I shut my eyes. I thought maybe Mom or Dad would be there, waiting. Thought I’d hear my name. In her voice or his. But I didn’t hear anything. I opened my eyes. They weren’t there. Just a big religious guy with his sleeves rolled up rushing along the side of the room carrying a shovel. The one with the beard dragged me across the room and through another door. I was in a smaller room now, with big sinks on one side, and a bucket and some towels or wet sheets. There was a long sort of trolley with a bundle laid on it, wrapped in white fabric, and then I realized that was it: there was a person in there. The guy says to me: ‘Ask for forgiveness.’ But I—”

  Dovaleh drops his head to his chest, hugging himself tightly.

  “I didn’t move. So he poked his finger into my shoulder from behind: ‘Ask for forgiveness.’ I said, ‘Ask who?’ And I didn’t look in that direction, except that suddenly I got a thought in my head that it actually wasn’t a very long bundle, so maybe it wasn’t her—it wasn’t her! Maybe I was just scared, my mind playing tricks on me. And then I felt happier than I’ve ever felt in my life, before or since. It was a wild happiness, like I myself had been saved from death. He shoved me on the shoulder again: ‘Go on, ask for forgiveness.’ So I asked again: ‘But from who?’ And then the penny dropped and he stopped prodding me and asked, ‘Don’t you know?’ I said I didn’t. And he panicked: ‘They didn’t tell you?’ Again I said no. He crouched down to my level, and I saw his eyes opposite mine, and he said, quietly and gently, ‘But this is your mother here.’

  “And then what do I remember? I remember…I do, I wish I didn’t remember so much, maybe there’d be space left in my mind for other things. The Chevra Kadisha guy quickly takes me back to the big room, and the people I’d seen outside were gathered in the room now, and when I walked inside the crowd parted, and I saw my father leaning on his partner’s shoulder, he could barely stand on his own feet, he hung like a baby on Silviu and didn’t even see me. And I thought…what did I think…”

  He takes a deep breath. Far deeper than the depth of his body.

  “I thought I should go up and hug him. But I couldn’t go, and I definitely couldn’t look in his eyes. People behind me said, ‘Go on, go to Dad, go on already, kaddishel, you have to say the prayers,’ and Silviu whispered to him that I was there, and he looked up and his eyes opened wide like he’d seen the Messiah. He let go of Silviu and wobbled over to me with his arms open and he shouted and cried out her name and my name together. He looked suddenly old, wailing in Yiddish in front of everyone about how it was just the two of us now, and how could such a catastrophe have befallen us, and why did we deserve it, we never hurt anyone. I didn’t move, I didn’t take a step toward him. I just looked at his face and thought what an idiot he was for not understanding that it could have been the complete opposite—one single millimeter this way or that and it could have been the opposite. And I thought: If he hugs me now or even just touches me I’ll hit him, I’ll kill him, I can do it, I’m all-powerful, everything I say comes true. And the second I had that thought, my body flipped me upside down. Flung me up, threw me on my hands, the yarmulke fell off, and I heard everyone breathing and it went quiet.

  “I started running away, and he ran after me, and he still didn’t understand and he shouted in Yiddish for me to stop, to come back, but it was all upside down with me, I made everything upside down. I could see from the bottom how all the people made way when I walked through them, and I left the room and no one had the guts to stop me. He ran after me and yelled and cried, until he stopped in the doorway. I stopped, too, in the parking lot, and we stood there looking at each other, me this way and him the other way, and then I saw for real that he wasn’t worth anything without her, and that all his power in life came from her being with him. He turned into half a human in that one instant.

  “He looked at me, I saw his eyes slowly get closer to
gether, and I had the clear sense that he was beginning to understand. I don’t know how, but he had animal instincts about that kind of thing. You’ll never convince me he didn’t. In that one second, he grasped everything I’d done on the way, my whole lousy accounting. He read it all on my face in one second. He held both hands up, and I think—no, I’m sure—he cursed me. Because what came out of his mouth was a shout I’ve never heard come out of a human being. It sounded like I’d killed him. And I fell down that very minute. My hands buckled and I flattened on the asphalt.

  “People in the parking lot looked at us. I don’t know what he said to me, what the curse was, maybe it was all in my head, but I saw his face and I could feel it was one hell of a curse, and at that point I still didn’t know it would hold up my whole life, but that’s how it was, everywhere I went, anywhere I ran.

  “Listen to this: that was the first time it went through my mind that maybe I hadn’t understood anything, and that he really was prepared to lie on that gurney in her place. When it came to her, he didn’t do any accounting. He really did love her.”

  His body goes limp. “Well, of course…,” he murmurs and fades away for a long minute.

  “Then he did this to me with his hand—he gave up on me. He turned and went back inside to continue the funeral, and I got up and ran through the people and the cars, and I knew then that that was it, I wouldn’t be going home. Home was shut for me.”

  He slowly puts the flask down by his feet. His head droops forward as it did when he began the story.

  “Where could I go? Who was waiting for me? I spent the first night in the school basement, and the second night in the synagogue storeroom, and on the third night I crawled home with my tail between my legs. And he opened the door for me. He didn’t say a word. He made me dinner as usual, but without talking, either to me or to himself.”