Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  So come on, come closer, I want to give you something real and intimate, don’t run away, don’t stiffen up, something very intimate to offset the “anonymity” you slammed at me, sitting on your porch as if you were in a full courtroom (a purple leaf fell, trapped between the page and envelope of your letter, and got squashed a little bit over your “intimacy-anonymity,” blurring both words). Flex your muscles, Miriam, we said it was all or nothing.

  When my wife and I were first dating, we took a trip to Mt. Carmel one Saturday morning. And we passed through a little patch of forest. It was very early, just a little bit after dawn. We talked, and we laughed. And I—who usually despise what is called the Beauty of Creation—could suddenly no longer contain within myself the wonder around me, and immediately stripped down and started running between the trees, naked and yelling and dancing. And Maya (we’ll call her Maya between us, and you are also welcome to choose names for your dear ones as you wish) was astonished and stopped—maybe she was just put off by my nakedness, which she saw out in the open for the first time—and it isn’t that lovely in the dark—and I heard her calling to me, quietly, begging me to stop. It was too late—I was already drunk with nature, and I leaped at her from all directions in a kind of a wild bridal dance, which looked pretty ridiculous, I guess. I invited her to join me and felt—for just a moment—that she wanted to—you see, I had never agreed to dance with her before, not at parties, or among people, and suddenly, here I could do it naked—I was possessed, I didn’t do it on purpose. Just imagine, dancing and naked, corks popping with happiness. Perhaps it is impossible to be unbeautiful when you’re happy. And Maya almost gave herself away, I felt it roaring inside her, roaring to me; she almost uprooted herself—but, at the last minute, stopped. Why did the policeman in your dream demand that you file charges against me for writing threatening letters?

  (And how it revived me all of a sudden when you told the nosy idiotthat they actually look to you like letters threatening my own life. And maybe that’s why you’re staying with me.) And I was dancing in the forest. I wish I could dance like that now, at this point in my life. I danced, because in some wonderful way that cold wave of doubt failed to emerge in me—

  It did emerge. Of course it did, my gears work with clocklike precision, injecting venom from my glands into my bloodstream as soon as my heart expands for any reason. But that time, it just made me dance even harder. I don’t know why, perhaps I felt as if I was making the right mistake for myself, for once; and even after Maya had already turned back and gone and sat in the car, I couldn’t stop, running between the trees, dancing, the smell of the pines became so pungent my eyes watered. I was naked, surrounded by voices all around, birds and faraway barks and the buzz of insects; I smelled the earth and the caves and the ashes of summer bonfires, and I felt as if a huge cataract that had been covering me was peeling off my body. Only after I had simply collapsed from exhaustion did I gather my clothes and go back to the car. Her face was pale, and she didn’t look at me; she asked me to put my clothes on because people might come by and we’d better go home right away because her parents were waiting for us to have breakfast with them. And suddenly her voice broke and she burst out crying. I started sniveling, too, I understood that this was the end of our young love. And I thought I couldn’t stand breaking up with her, because I had never loved someone this way, with the same joy and simplicity and health as I loved her, and as usual, I had spoiled it from the beginning by exposing myself.

  So we sat in the car, each one to himself, and we actually wept quite bitterly, she’s dressed and I’m naked. Our crying brought us closer, we nudged each other and laughed, and I started putting my clothes back on. And she helped me, dressing me, garment after garment, buttoning me, rolling up my sleeves. And I kissed her and licked her tears throughout, because I understood that she was crying over me but not leaving—mourning me and staying—and my heart swelled with gratitude. I knew I would never do anything like that to her again in my life, and I decided to protect her from myself from that moment on, because she couldn’t live defenseless in the same world in which I was doing such things. She laughed through her tears and said almost the same thing, that in order to defend her from me I would simply have to stay with her always. That was half a joke, but also a profound truth, the fatal logic of two, of a couple,and you ought to know that this kind of logic sometimes reveals itself to a couple only after a complete life together (I saw the man you stood with or next to). But we peeked into it somehow from the very first moment.

  I haven’t thought of that moment in years. I was always a bit appalled to remember myself dancing the way I did. And the rest got blurred right along with it. We were just frightened children; but in spite of that, in a flash, we managed to establish a complex life contract with each other. We warned by law and were warned by law, and I am amazed to understand now how within one second we focused our gazes in such a manner that from that moment on they would turn only at the right angles needed to ensure that our love would always win, at any cost. And we also agreed on the cost. And we have never spoken about it, never. How can you suddenly speak about that in the middle of life, tell me.

  Tell me.

  I shouldn’t have told you about that, should I? What have you got to do with the married life of a person you haven’t even seen? I already feel the coldness of that mistake. Here I am, again, a clown—this is probably what it looks like to you, some man throwing everything he owns up into the air, and of course everything is scattered around him on the ground. Never mind, people love clowns—that is what my couple of great educators taught me (but consider, on the borders of your mind, think of me, let’s say, like a man with a huge burn on his face deciding to enter a room full of people). Perhaps your way of thinking dictates that I should have waited until we knew each other a little better before telling you such a story, yes? I think along the same lines, but with you I’m not doing things according to my reflection but according to my distortion. And, at the same time, I don’t want to wait, because our time together is different, spherical, every point on it is at the exact same distance to the center. And I won’t apologize if I’m embarrassing you; this is not salon chatter. It is murder to erase one word to you—and everything I said here—I didn’t plan any of it—and I will not erase a word!

  April 16-17

  Can’t sleep. I wish I could already know how the letter I wrote this morning makes you feel. And whether you’ll continue to write to me after you read it. I am almost certain you won’t. You’ll consider it rude ofme to expose such aspects of my life. Well, I am quite pleased with myself for sending it anyway. Even with the full day of self-torture that went with it. And you were right that I’m looking for a partner to join me on an imaginary journey, but you were completely wrong when you said that I might not need a real partner. Exactly the opposite: I need a real partner for an imaginaryjourney. As I’m writing these words, my heart thumps in a physically very real way, and in general, my heart beats true only when I imagine—now—again—thumping. Did you know there is such a bird, a thumper-bird, a parpur?

  If you touch its chest—once—gently—its heart stops beating and it dies. One mustn’t make a single wrong move with this bird, because any tiny mistake sends a delicate impact to its heart and it just stops beating. If I could only buy such a parpur, two actually—no: I would buy a flock and let them fly here, above what I’m writing you, so they could be living lie detectors, like the canaries that used to be sent into mines to discover gas leaks. Imagine, if you will: one false or inexact word, or one that is rude, or just indifferent—and a dead bird falls on the page. Then you’ll see how I write to you.

  By the way, I forgot to tell you that you offended me when you thought I might have mistaken you for someone else I saw that night. And I was even more offended by your difficulty in deciding which you would prefer—that I was mistaken or that I was right.

  But you know what really broke my heart? When you described yourse
lf to me to make sure. Because of how you somehow diminished yourself into one single sentence, in parentheses on top of that (“Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses …”). If you really feel yourself to be in parentheses—at least let me squeeze into them as well and let the whole world remain outside. Let the world only be the element outside the parentheses that will multiply us on the inside.

  Y.

  P.S. Anyway—even though this journey isn’t exactly smooth right now, rough going and twisting and turning from the beginning, I have to tell you something. Do you have any idea that my pupils dilate when I see a word of yours in another place, even when I stumble upon it in a newspaper or in a TV commercial … because certain words are so obviously yours, your soul prints, and coming from any other human being theysound like speaking equipment, fragments of language, no more than that. And until there was you, I never imagined that meeting a stranger’s language could be as exciting as the first touch of her body, and her smell, and the texture of her skin and hair and beauty marks. Do you feel the same way?

  April 21

  But how will I bring us together, to meet? You and me, how will I bring us together? Your letter arrived. It’s on the table, blanched as a corpse. White reflects all the light beams, doesn’t it? I will open it soon. Let me enjoy the doubt, let me spread a little optimistic color … have I already told you that I keep seeing us submerged in green? Green keeps flashing through my mind when I think of you. Great, wide green. Here, the endless depths of an ocean; there, a dense European forest; there again, maybe just a large lawn (I should have warned you my dreams usually end grasshopper-high). You’re sitting in the grass reading a book, and I, let’s say, a newspaper. And there is a wide space between us, a huge lawn: two strangers, and how do you bring them together in an embrace instantly, without having to go through all the in-between stages and without reciting all the sentences that millions of men and women have chewed the flavor from, before them?

  By the weight of it—one page, not more. I thought of writing what is written in there myself as preparation. But you forbade me to make my own decisions about what you think and feel. So maybe I’ll write about a little daydream playing in my head for a few days now, a daydream about us. I wonder what you will think of it, this picture, quite a silly one of me and you and how we were deep in thought, reading—but because we were the only ones there on the grass, we became sharply aware of each other’s presence. I was wearing jeans, as usual; you were in a black dress, a little loose and caressing your body from head to toe, and covered with stars and bright moons. If I’m not mistaken, there was also a delicate, breathing green scarf covering your shoulders. This is how I saw you at the reunion (a scarf? or a long silk shawl? every detail is important to me now). “The only thing I remembered was the green gown she wore,” this is how the Seducer met Cordelia for the first time in Diary of a Seducer,and maybe this scarf is the source from which all my green springs.

  The green that, in a blink, was turned off by your husband’s hugegray sweater, which he threw over your shoulders when you shivered. Do you remember that? Because I clearly remember some kind of quick attacking motion from his side that shocked me, while I stared at you, when I was still unaware of how I was staring at you. And he—that “he” from whom you by no means intend to hide our relationship, only because it would never occur to him to investigate what you do and with whom—suddenly, from the altitude of his titan’s height, he threw the sweater over you like someone tossing a lasso over a runaway colt.

  But what really made you shiver? Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses … if those annoying parentheses hadn’t been there, I would have laughed: is that how you see yourself? Only that? Why didn’t you write about your magnificent stance, erect and soft at the same time; and about your radiant cheeks; and how is it that you didn’t mention that your face has a kind of naïveté, light-complected and freckled, a bit anachronistic—don’t take offense—like people from the fifties …

  And why didn’t I immediately write words like the gold of the grain and farmland and butter. That you have a face that from a first or an indifferent or unkeen look seems almost modest compared to that wonderfully expressive body—I hope I’m not offending you—the face of a decent, good little girl, the handsome, responsible face of a class president. And suddenly the eye is hooked by something unexpected, the dark mole under your lips, the mouth itself, wide, trembling, and restless, which seems as if it has its own inner life. You have a hungry mouth, Miriam; tell me if anybody has ever told you that and I will immediately find another word—under no circumstances will I splash about in their words.

  I swallowed your face that evening. I saw you for maybe five minutes, but for those five complete minutes you were branded into me, and I know your face by heart and by my heart in your mouth, and after you’ve heard all this, you will have to decide if that “queer moan” came truly because you thought I had mistaken you for another woman. Or if, perhaps, you moaned because she was you after all, because my fortunes chose you … I will not help you waver, it has been three weeks since then and every new woman I see—no sooner do my eyes fall upon her than my mind returns to your image. Oh, how your face moved me. I, who always start from the body. But I didn’t neglect the body, God forbid—I think you tried to blur its lines with yours (“quite tall” …)—my pen is alreadyshaking in my hand with the thought that soon I will write your body, the beauty of your body and its generosity underneath your clothes. And also the slightly rigid roundness of your shoulders, I don’t forget it, as if somebody is taking refuge in you and you are defending him.

  And how you lowered your head, and how your body shivered a bit underneath that dress, and how, as if within a dream, in slow motion, you hugged your body to yourself as if you were sorry for it—it sounds strange, but that’s how it seemed, as if you felt sorrow and compassion for it. And with one look I knew things about you—I’m probably annoying you again, arrogantly telling you about yourself with no hesitation—but I simply knew. Your face was open and disarmed at that moment, I have never seen a mature, grown human being so peeled of her epidermis. You could actually see every emotion passing through you immediately written upon your face—you’re incapable of hiding anything. Do you know how dangerous that is? And where were you for that life lesson?

  (Enough! I can’t hold back anymore. Come, scowling, stern-faced messenger, come, you astringent pink slip, let’s hear what you have to tell us.)

  April 22

  Miriam,

  Before everything:

  In the supermarket today, this evening—a child I didn’t know asked me to give him three bars of chocolate from a high shelf. I reach my hand up to the shelf—and in the blink of an eye he is transformed into a sick child in whom an unknown disease resides, who has been taken care of and worried over for a few months. And now it seems he’s going to be fine, he’s on the road to recovery, and he suddenly starts gorging himself on chocolate, a chocolate attack; he’s sleepless, gets out of bed at night, bingeing, and can’t be stopped. And you don’t feel good about taking away that one little pleasure when he’s been going through such a difficult treatment—but the thing is, that child knows something. More than everyone—more than his parents, his doctors, even himself—he has some kind of internal premonition and is equipping himself with chocolatefor the long, cold journey that awaits him—I handed him the chocolate bars and he ran off happily.

  Such a flicker of nonsense came to me as I was reaching up to the shelf, and I swore to remember it so I could tell you about it, I even scribbled it down on a little note. So what? I have ten of these a day, and I lose ten for good, and truly, it isn’t an especially grand flicker, but if I hadn’t written it down for you, I would have forgotten it, too. And that’s a shame; still, it is a shame that even such a tiny flicker would die before it was born, for it is a living fragment of the soul. Of course, every person has hundreds of these, but no one would have come up with this stupid idea. And even if i
t did occur to someone—who is capable of telling another person about such a flicker? Have you ever heard somebody telling another person about his flickers?

  And where did I find the nerve to tell you about such internal foolishness, something undoubtedly no more than a crackle of static from my brain?

  Perhaps from your sudden understanding that if you stopped writing to me now, only because I drive you to distraction here and there, you might never forgive yourself for the rest of your life.

  Look, Miriam, I’ve been reading your short letter over and over. Maybe I don’t dare to understand it all the way through, but I think it says here in your miniature handwriting that it is clear to you if you turned your back on me now, before you even truly met me, you would feel as if you were denying the essence of your faith.

  And I already know, by the way, you shouldn’t have had to explain in such detail that this “essence of faith” has absolutely nothing at all to do with me—that it is completely between you and yourself, perhaps it is even, as you said, the Thing between you and yourself. But I’m also reading the strange cluster of strange letters you added to the bottom, that it sometimes gives you the shivers—that a stranger could notice in one quick glance that Thing between you and yourself, and without even knowing you, call it by its private name.

  Yair

  (Tomorrow already)

  I mean, if I could only put some of these together, these soul-fragments, maybe I could see them as one complete mosaic and finallyunderstand something, a kind of principlethat holds me together. Don’t you think so? I’m talking about the things that have no first names, that accumulate on the bottom of the soul through life, layers of sediment and ore. If you asked me to describe them to you—I would have no words, only contractions of my heart, a passing shadow, a sigh. Someone hugs herself in the middle of a group of people and suddenly you are filled with yearning. Someone writes: you introduce yourself as a “stranger.” But a complete stranger could not write to me this way … and immediately my throat closes up. One drop leaking out from my loneliness gland. No more than that. But what is more real and important than that? Once, during a guard shift in the Sinai, Rilke explained to me that, in the depths, everything transforms itself into a law. Very nice, I told him, how reassuring to think that somewhere everything is tied to some kind of meaning, but this insight doesn’t satisfy me anymore, Rainer Maria, my time is ending fast and even if I live for another thirty years, I will see only another thirty-one saffron flowers. Adds up to a pretty small bouquet, and I would like to see this constitution drafted before my own eyes, for once. Do you understand? The constitution, and I want an organized tour through those mysterious “depths,” and I demand to know the private names of all the forms mentioned above, to call them by their names at least once, so they will answer me and finally, for once, be mine. Just not this permanent, consistent silence (that is in this instance, for example, with no describable cause, amid the daily mob, shattering my heart).