Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  Y.

  By the way, don’t try so hard to remember who I was among all those people surrounding you that night. It is truly unimportant, you didn’t notice me at all. But if you insist—not tall (even perhaps shorter than you, I hope you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter in writing), skinny. Not a lot of investment was made in my material production, perhaps not too much thought, either. Not an Adonis, exactly, if you ask me, that is: not unugly. Now do you remember? A slightly gloomy face, a fair straggly beard? Pacing pointlessly and restlessly between the groups, and not sticking to any of them? Do you remember anyone like that? Some kind of hybrid between a sulky marabou and a Jew? In short: spare the effort, you won’t be able to remember, because there’s nothing here to forget.

  April 28

  You don’t feel sorry for me? Really?

  No pity?

  But what is so terrible about being a little bit of a teenager when I write to you? I’m a teenager and a complete baby, an old man and a newborn. I exist in so many moments of life when I’m writing to you, and I wish you, too, would have given me a little of the flame that you allowed yourself for a few moments (Only a few moments? Really, now?) when you went through that same horrible spell of adolescence. And how is it ever possible to pass through the tunnel of these dark years without a bit of yourself catching fire, why do you restrict yourself in your burnings today as well? All your ages, Crazy Yair Buys Everything, the entire stock of your thermal market, because understand this: the place I want us to reach doesn’t have enough vitality and energy yet. And if I distance myself from it, and look at it from the outside, it cools off for me, too. And when you doubt it, even with a tiny single remark, it freezes immediately. Do you think creating something from two people is easy?

  Since yesterday, I’ve been trying to understand what happened to you between the last letter and the one that is here. Which outside voice did you listen to? (It was Anna, wasn’t it? Then you told her. I am certain you have no person closer to you than she. She’s already turned me into a joke, hasn’t she?) Because if you didn’t, how can you explain your sudden withdrawal, demanding—with a kind of unnatural coldness, anxiously, tight-lipped-that I finally tell you about myself, about the self that is visible to the eye.

  I had hoped that we had already gotten past that. That you understood that my daily self is none of our business. Who’s even interested in that self? And what does it matter if Yair Wind is not in the phone book? He is not in that book! “Visible to the eye?” I told you, you didn’t even see me that evening, I was standing in your blind spot. Write to your blind spot. Look deep inside and you’ll see me signaling to you with two hands within it, within the pupil of your blind spot, Miriam, please—

  Did you notice, I’m not even trying to argue with your feelings: until I started writing to you, it was true, a precise description of me, all the symptoms of my disease. Even the “eloquence” that to you is always suspiciously smooth. I think I know what you’re talking about, your sensesor your suspicions aren’t so strange; that I am capable, almost without noticing, of depositing my poignant weaknesses into the hands of complete strangers, a strange and embarrassing trick of seduction, you say, and as if we’re not really dealing with lives at stake … I’m reading these precise, razor-sharp definitions and thinking, She is analyzing me as if she had never been excited by me, and she gets excited by me as if she is incapable of analysis. So who is she?

  And I have no intention of calling your home, thank you. And I was quite astonished that you became so enraged over my innocent proposal last week that you call your dear ones by whatever names you like. They have real names (I know) and you don’t intend to invent them all over again for me (of course) and why can’t I believe in the possibility of a simple, natural, open relationship between two human beings? And I was already so sure that by the end of this tsunami you were going to hang up the letter in my face forever and would never, ever in the world, ever again—and then you give me your home number?!

  I won’t call. Out of the simple reasons of the “Sanctity of the Bond” (somebody might be at home and hear), but mainly because even a voice is too real for the hallucination I want to have with you. It can be created only with written words, and a voice might pierce it, and then the whole world of reality will flow inside. The details and the numbers and the little sweaty molecules of life; certain subjects are too closely related to subjugation, within a second the entire ruling mob will flow through in a great tsunami and put out every spark. Why do you insist on not understanding this?

  It doesn’t matter, you’re incapable of faking it for even five lines: protected by your fortress of little disagreements and explanations, all so logical—as long as I play these childish spy games or stick to the foolish idea of a “guillotine” that will come down on us out of nowhere in a few months, you are unable to trust, with all your heart, in even the “sincere and emotional” things I’m telling you. On the other hand, you do notlike the corner into which, because of my illusions, you are slowly pushing yourself, the corner of a closed-off critic, a cold person. And in this manner you continue to stone me through at least another three corseted “I do nots,” in the voice of a teacher with a banana-shaped hairdo—but suddenly your lipstrembled and a little “I don’t” escaped, little and law-breaking. “And I thought you could already feel that I don’t get scared by true passion in my feelings and relationships, on the contrary, on the contrary …”

  See how each time I reach this punkish “I don’t,” my heart clenches with pleasure, each time, again (as if you had rolled down one silk stocking for me).

  No, tell me, honestly: Was I wrong? Was I wrong about you? Now, again, for instance, a gray wave rises and fills the pit of my stomach, maybe I was wrong and am actually tormenting you, because it is obvious that whoever isn’t in tune with the string I offered you will hear only the squeaks, the tin squeaks of my mailbox, or the little bureaucracy of adultery to which I exposed you above, the Sanctity of the Bond that undoubtedly sickened you.

  And of course, I had been thinking about whether I should take it out, or put it a bit more delicately, but I left it in, as you already know, because I want you to know about me—to know me, naked, in the little clerical work assigned by my miserable fears, and in my stupidity and in my shame, and in my ignominy. Why not? My “ignominy” is also me, it wants to be given to you, too, like my pride, with same amount of power; it wants, it needs, terribly.

  You know, sometimes when I’m writing to you, I have this utterly odd feeling—a completely physical one—that before I could ever actually speak to you, I would have to watch all my words leaving me in a long line, traveling all the way to you to turn themselves in.

  This word—“ignominy”—I have never written it before. It is here now, and it smells like a very old, very used slipper (actually, it smells of a home).

  Here, just because of a moment like this.

  It is frustrating to me that you are again clinging to the corners of the altar of solid logic—which is indeed a useful tool in life, but we are not in life, Miriam! This is the very secret I’ve been whispering in your ear for a month: we are neither of us alive! I mean, nowhere are the regulation rules of relationships in play, certainly not the usual system of law of men’s and women’s relationships. So where are we, anyway? What do I care where! Why name it? In any case, the name will be “theirs,” a translation.And I want a different code of law with you, which states that we will, both of us, set our rules and speak in our language, and tell our stories and believe in them with all our hearts. Because if we don’t have a single private place like this, in which all these beliefs become truth, even if only in writing—then our lives are not lives; even worse than that, our lives are just life … Will you sign it?

  Y. W.

  May 7

  Finally.

  And I had already despaired and almost given up.

  It’s a shame that we wasted more than a month, and you are right, we didn’t on
ly “waste” it—but we won’t give up, and we won’t feel remorse for anything. And now (a little late, of course) I am practically horrified by my egocentricity. I didn’t even take the time to consider what you need to give up in order to get close to me and to believe in me and in those rules of mine. I burn toward you so much that I was certain I could melt everything else away, logic, life circumstances, even our shared personality … It really is a wonder, then, Miriam, only now can I grasp what a wonder it is how you suddenly decided (so decisively, with your lips and your chin!) to throw all definite and logical explanations into the deepest pit in the fields around your home in Beit Zayit. And to come, even though … and, even though, allowing me to put your life in my hands.

  My unfamiliar hands that are shaking a little now from the weight of the responsibility.

  And how will I thank this mysterious friend of yours, who with a few words turned your heart toward me? But what exactly did he tell you about me, and who is he? A man with torn eyelids—and no other details, you didn’t explain anything. That’s fine, take it slowly, I’m getting used to your abstracted manner of speaking, when you seem certain that I understand, or when you don’t even care and you let yourself mumble freely, and then I know your soul is relaxed before me and that you are speaking to yourself in a reverie, a waking sleep …

  Anyway, don’t forget to thank him for me. Although it confuses me a little to know that you have such a close male “friend.” And that you canhave such detailed and open conversations with him. And I’m holding myself back so as not to ask you what you need me for if you have such a person, who succeeds in making you speak no matter what your mood, and who is always with you when you fall into your Josephan pit, abandoned by the world.

  Do you think you’ll ever want or be able to tell me what it’s like in there, too?

  And who throws you in there so easily (again and again and again), and who is not coming to pull you out?

  And what happens to you on those days of damnation (did you really mean that word?), when you are the pit itself after even Joseph himself left it?

  Strange, isn’t it? I guess I don’t really have any clue as to precisely what you meant, and I suppose that the two of us are giving the names “Joseph” and “pit” to two completely different things—even though I sometimes say a sentence of yours aloud, or just a combination of words, and feel an internal stitch being torn through the whole length of my soul.

  Write to me. Tell me. It’s a shame to lose a single day.

  Yair

  May 8

  I sent you one yesterday (did you get it yet?). But the conversation somehow continues into today: somebody called to make a business appointment with me. He wouldn’t come to where I work, and furthermore insisted that we meet in front of a department store (I meet more than a few crazy people in my line, but sometimes they do have interesting material). I asked how I would recognize him. He said he would wear black corduroy pants and a plaid shirt and—suede shoes … I stood there in the sun for almost an hour and didn’t see anybody who fit the description. And then, when I’d finally got fed up and was ready to leave, I looked down the block, and by the phone booth I saw a dwarf, the smallest dwarf I had ever seen, twisted, with a bent body and grotesque face. He was leaning on two tiny walking sticks and was dressed exactly as he had promised (and I couldn’t go near him).

  Afterward I thought, In my pocket I have your letter with that sentence that on the first reading seemed a little incomprehensible and abstractto me, about the kind of sorrow that you can’t share with anybody. It is exactly enough for one person.

  May 11

  Yes, of course, my dear, my marvel, with all my heart, what do you think? …

  There is suddenly more room between us. I actually felt your breath coming from beyond the page—your shoulders loosened up a little.

  Also because of the colors and the blooming and the smells that burst like a grand waterfall onto your pages. Until now you wrote almost entirely in black and white, and the fact that there were finally two there, two pages (you’re right: with two wings, you can finally take off and fly). And I find it wonderful that you chose to bring me to your home, not on the main road by which everybody comes, but from the distant dam of Ein Karem. And through the valley. And, it seems to me, past every flower and tree and brier, passing lizards and grasshoppers and stilts. I haven’t been led this way for years, like a sheep to pasture. But who could resist your charm, when you suddenly wake up and laugh, running in front of me, stroking every dandelion and mallow and every olive trunk. And look at the sage, how abundantly it flowers, and how generously it gives off its scent … Not to mention all the tordylium and pearl grass—tell me, who taught you all these private names and their smells, and the texture of their leaves and how to crush them, and the gallnuts and fritillary?

  It’s a good thing that I’m a quick reader. Even so, I could hardly keep up with you as you climbed and scaled the rocks. What are you running for? I didn’t imagine that your big soft body could move this way, like a lioness, you wrote, surprising … and a strong vital smell hovered above your words, the smell of sweat and earth and stamen. You are wonderful when you rejoice, when you’re rolling around in a field of poppies or throwing oat flowers at me (I’ll be throwing them back at you soon! Did you play that game, too—How Many Kids Will You Have?). A white-and-yellow daisy got caught in your hair. And for a moment I shrank with the misery of an amputated hand, because I couldn’t untangle it from your hair, and I couldn’t give you a boost to climb over the terrace. And all the scratches and stings I didn’t get, your sweat, which I didn’t get to lick—I’m only writing it and missing it. It’s a good thing youstopped in the village to chat with kindergarteners, all lined up. It gave me a moment to breathe. I noticed that you made certain not to tell me if one of the children belongs to you (by your description, one could think they were all yours). And generally, in your last two letters, it seems to me that you’re teasing me with riddles, hiding and reappearing, smiling secret intimate smiles. And it’s wonderful. I’m barely alive, but keeping up, through your secret passages between the houses and fences, all the way to the gate of your house, blue speckled with rust—why rust? maybe someone isn’t doing his job keeping the house up properly? Well, I didn’t say anything, and who can even think about that when you are spinning around to face me in a swirl of imaginary skirts, and for one moment, within the motion of your spin—I don’t know if you felt it—you came and spread out in all of your ages in front of me, and your brown eyes shone like the few words you whispered to me and like (oh dear, I feel a simile coming on) two pits in an opening loquat: would you like to come in?

  Yes, of course, my dear, my marvel, with all my heart—what do you think?

  (Morning)

  Tonight, in the middle of a deep sleep, it came to me—could it be that he is the same friend whose diaries you read every few days, so that you can know what he was doing on the same day a few decades ago? Who—as you already told me in your second letter—is your morning prayer?

  Please don’t be angry with my attempt to discover which private conversation of yours I slipped into. I was only playing a little detective game, and in the middle of the night I jumped out of my bed and checked a few dates and flipped through some pages, and here you are, on exactly the same day you suddenly returned to me, on the fourth of May. I found that this is what he wrote in the diary from 1915:

  “Reflection on other people’s relationship to me. Insignificant as I may be, nevertheless there is no one here who understands me in my entirety. To have someone possessed of such understanding, a wife perhaps, would mean to have support from every side, to have God.”

  And even if my wild guess was completely wrong, even if I steppedinto a too-private place, I would like to give you something in return, from the same day, from the same man:

  “ … Sometimes I thought she understood me without realizing it; for instance, the time she waited for me at the subway stat
ion—I had been longing for her unbearably, and in my passion to reach her as quickly as possible almost ran past her, thinking she would be at the top of the stairs, and she took me quietly by the hand.”

  Y.

  May 16

  You’re such an enigma.

  You don’t have to solve me, you tell me, just be with me. Here I am—and I am with you, as you walk through your yard, a little paradise you’ve created for yourself (when I climb the stairs to the porch with the bougainvillea shade, I finally recognized the purple leaves from the anonymous-intimacy letter). You had already flown inside. I was still in a bit of shock from that move—and then flooded, I was simply flooded with light and warmth, and also with the huge array of colors, the jungle of giant potted plants, the wool carpets and embroidered pictures and the piano and the walls crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I instantly felt safe. Even the clutter seemed familiar to me.