Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  Yair

  And he has already counted to three?

  Cheesecake with raisins for every two, and a huge backrub for every three?

  (When you lick his wrist again and again, until he calms down—how did you discover that this is what brings him out of the fit—is that also something you discover naturally?)

  My regards to your three gloomy Labradors. Regards to the palm tree. To the jasmine. The bougainvillea. The big cypress tree on which your husband’s bike—Amos’s bike—leans. Regards to all the private names.

  August 1

  I met Yokhai. I remember now. About a year ago I was accompanying Ido’s kindergarten class on a trip to Kibbutz Tzuba. We visited the chicken coop, and when we passed through the rows, one of the chickens by chance had laid an egg without a shell—and the woman working there—I have no idea why—took the egg and put it in my hand. My hand, of all the ones there.

  I don’t know if you ever held such a naked egg. It was still warm, and soft, and full of motion within the film that was wrapping it. I didn’t dare move. I was standing with my arm outstretched, my palm slightly cupped, and felt as if some exposed secret of my life was in my hand. I didn’t know then that it was a premonition of Yokhai.

  August 2

  Something keeps nagging at me. I still haven’t written to you how I felt when I understood, last week, what that letter had really been, theone in which you described your noisy crowded house for the first time, that house you now have suddenly erased.

  You know I don’t keep your letters, but I remember that house well. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I saw you in it, walked through it with you. Those weren’t just words to me (it suddenly occurs to me that you didn’t understand something important). Almost every word you wrote had a body and color and smell and sound. I am very serious with your words—perhaps you thought this has just been some sort of amusement for me, a word game?

  It really isn’t a simple thing for the Avraham Ofek painting of the woman and the cow to now disappear off the wall by the library-because from the moment you told me about it, I brought it into my life.(I mean exactly what I’m saying.) I looked it up and found it in a book, and I dove inside it, was absorbed by it. And I thought and thought, and didn’t give up until I figured out why you had hung it across from Yosef Hirsch’s Sadness.I don’t know a lot about paintings, but there is some conversation going on between those two—I think I was starting to hear it—and now they’re both gone. And Kandinsky’s little red ring is gone as well, as is Matisse’s Open Window,which excited you so much. I can imagine the photographs in the hallway are gone, too, because they were covered with fragile glass, Virginia Woolf’s portrait, for instance, and what about the Stieglitz man sweeping the street in the rain (I found that one, too, not long ago, in the catalogue from the Paris exhibition). Or Man Ray’s Half Beardphotographs … Did you fantasize all that? Even the piano you play every night?

  At least you left the painted tiles in the kitchen.

  Look—this may seem ridiculous to you—you’re the one living in a rough desert of a house, and I’m the one complaining that you took away words you had given me, just words, and I’m bargaining over them like a beggar.

  But there is another matter at hand here.

  I’m thinking about your symphony of colors. You, who for years have not dared to paint, certainly not in color—you painted in a symphony with colors—I wasn’t even sure of how these colors looked until you. You spoke of indigo and ocher and sapphire blue, the words themselves were so colorful—you wrote about silk curtains and angora wool, and you definitely wrote about wool from Astrakhan (!)—when you wrote that, I truly thought for a moment that you were just playing with me, paintinga palace of dreams for yourself … but I can’t resist a woman who can say “Astrakhan wool.” I don’t even know what this wool looks like, but you have no idea what these two words did to me … And not just these-almost every sentence you wrote sent me on a little journey of discovery, learning, feeling, smelling. Go ahead, laugh, but this is my limited, silly way of touching your excitement, the yearning that you exposed in that letter. I couldn’t understand what it was, then I thought it was heat, you were aflame—I was happy, even, for the crippled imagination we began sharing …

  But I think this is something completely different between you and me, which upsets me.

  I felt a pinch of sorrow and, yes, disappointment when I realized that you are open to the option of pretense as well.

  Do you understand? Your surprising flexibility in blurring reality and invention, quite a trick … It surprises me to discover, only now, how capable you are of living in your imagination, your internal power of persuasion (actually made from the same materials of which lies are made).

  Of course I don’t feel cheated (it was absurd for you to ask my forgiveness). You haven’t done anything forbidden. On the contrary. That was the tale you wanted to tell me about yourself. You probably also wanted to believe in it, very much, to see it written, alive, in words. Perhaps you also liked that it existed so fully in my own thoughts, that it had an existence in this world—and I believed in it—because that was the first rule of our constitution, do you remember?

  It occasionally gives me adolescent growing pains—but in the joints of my soul. And the strange feeling that I am learning something new and unexpected about you in every letter of yours—but I am also being separated from something else that I had thought or imagined about you. And there are days when I feel that I am perhaps still very far from knowing you as I wanted to. And it is already August.

  Yair

  Anyway, it is important to me that you know—what you described in that overflowing letter is still alive, it still exists for me. I don’t know how, but the piano, the books covering all your walls, the pregnant pot, the huge mobile brought from Venice … I only have to close my eyes and I immediately see what is and isn’t there at the same time.

  By the way, did you really bring the bird sculptures from the Kalahari, or did you just covet them and not buy them? And have you been to the Kalahari at all? I mean, did you really go there with Anna twenty years ago on your first trip abroad (what, even before the Mona Lisa and the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben?). To see the “grand velvetia plants” you had heard of only from reading your children’s encyclopedia?

  Is there an Anna at all?

  August 5

  No introductions, just a very urgent request for you to continue immediately, without pity, and without delay—

  You can’t imagine what you did when you wrote to him, when you simply skipped over me and went directly to him, because nobody had ever spoken to him in this way—and it’s not just what you wrote but how—because that child knew about worry and even softness and maternity; he’s had plenty of that, sometimes too much—but he has so little contact with that rare pleasure of being understood.

  And the relief I felt, of a suit of armor that suddenly realizes there is, still, a little knight inside after all.

  Listen—you’ve read the situation exactly: a very skinny little boy, with a small, bitter face. A boy who is always alert, and nervous as an old man, restless, and terribly passionate. Always moving through his life as if he has to prove something to somebody, always struggling for nothing less than his life. How did you know? How could a person actually know another person? And, you wrote, a partisan who still behaves as a family member, in a house. Yes, yes! Even those horrible words you wrote about his loneliness, which was unlike the usual loneliness of children. Every word of yours fell right into the place which has been preparing for them, waiting for years—not the usual loneliness of a child—instead, a loneliness that, perhaps, is felt by someone very sick, sick with a shamefuldisease (how weren’t you afraid to say the Holy Name?), correct, correct again! A boy who carefully resists the weakness of the illusion that he might actually give himself to someone, that the possibility of complete surrender exists, somewhere …

  It is as if you had come an
d tucked a note inside the cocoon I am, addressed to my true name. I was a soft, permeable container, a little bagpipe, and the entire world was playing me. I only write these words and Iimmediately feel the urgent need to smash someone’s face in. The world flooded over me like an ocean, retreated in waves and returned and filled and retreated. That was how it felt to be a child—this soft, infinite, stormy wave motion, all at the same time. Have you ever known such huge motion inside you? Maybe when you were pregnant, when you gave birth—and I was alwayslike that. Always. A constant manquake, a walking seismic disturbance.

  I am laughing right now (hysterically, like a hyena): how awful it is that all this is already over—and how awful that I can be so happy that it is over … because life is so much more tolerable now, it is easier to pass from moment to moment, and with time you even forget the fear of stepping on cracks, where an abyss of crocodiles no longer waits.

  You do understand, don’t you? You can decipher my internal mutterings—it was you who wrote to the “filament child,” you who guessed that it might be possible to discover a red coil feverishly transmitting light through transparent skin; and you probably know well, perhaps from your everyday experience, how oppressive this “bizarre rebel’s light” is when it burns inside a little boy.

  Yes. It drives me crazy, teases me, arouses all kinds of murderous urges to blow hard on him so as to put that light out, once and for all! Not like you—not like your last lines—you cupped your hand around him and blew softly, cautiously, even a little hopefully—to see just what would happen if, just once, they let him try to be fire.

  Just don’t stop now—not in the middle of this mouth-to-mouth.

  Yair

  August 6

  Look at his photo. It took me a whole day to find it. (Because of something that was in your letter.) I took it in London five years ago, and it comes with a little tale: I was there for business for a week, and one evening when I returned to my hotel, I saw a tiny crow that looked very sick (“a little crow, its feathers raised …”). He was huddled on the sidewalk, inside a white chalk line that had been almost entirely erased—probably the remains of some children’s game—his beak opening and closing as if he was speaking, and not just speaking—you should have seen him; as if proclaiming something with deep sorrow and umbrage, or giving some kind of incriminating testimony to an invisible authority …

  It could have been amusing as well—but I stepped out of the stream of people and leaned on a wall to the side, looked at it, and couldn’t continue walking. I was tired, perhaps slightly dizzy with hunger—and I couldn’t walk away from it. I thought I had to buy bread and feed it, but I was afraid of people looking at me. I walked away a few steps and felt him calling me back, it was piercing through me, and I returned and stood there. I felt it might be dangerous for me to stare at him, because I would slowly be sucked into him, get trapped and simply cease to exist. I have no idea how long it continued, perhaps only a few moments. He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, in between the legs of the people passing by, his feathers swollen with cold, and his bitter sad face, and his head—you see?—tucked into his side in complaint … People passed him carelessly, with that English gait measuring their steps. Most of them didn’t even look at him. And I, crouched by the wall, knew, with some strange acceptance, that in a moment I would collapse onto the ground and remain there.

  I forgot to mention that I was returning from an important meeting. I had just closed a huge deal, lots of money, man of the world, boom boom, wearing my fancy work costume. I knew it wouldn’t help me—nothing could help me—because the specter coming over me was much stronger. And it was right for me—for the black twin. And in the last moment of this hold, with my last remaining strength (I’m not exaggerating this time), I reached a hand into my bag, brought out my camera, and took his picture. It was an instinctive impulse that I still, to this day, cannot explain—it probably saved me, and I don’t know how—as if it gave me an electric shock right on the spot, as if that treacherous self-being of mine had found some crack through which it could suddenly evaporate.

  I have no copy of it. It’s yours.

  August 8

  Do you really want a laugh? Last night, after I finished reading your letter (for the fifth time, perhaps), I was locking up the front door before going to sleep—and for a moment I thought I saw something or someone standing inside one of the bushes in the yard. Little, very bright even in the dark. And in the first instant I was afraid it was Ido, and what was he doing there instead of being in bed? I went into a complete mad red alert,and then one second later I felt like a beanpod after somone has pulled its string and split it in half. Because I realized it was him.Do you understand? The child you saw in your imagination. The filament child—

  The kid who used to be—I’ve never told you—well, come along, make yourself at home. The kid who, at the age of eight, approximately, tried to kill himself in the shed. To commit suicide, as it is called, using the thin, all-purpose belt belonging to his father. And since no one had ever explained to him exactly how people die, he, with all his strength, stretched the belt tightly around his heart, ha ha. And lay on the floor, quietly awaiting his death. All of this because he saw how one neighbor, one Surkis from around the corner, standing in an undershirt, with his hairy back and cigarette in his mouth, drowned two kittens in a tin pail, just like that, shoving his hand under the water, talking to the kid’s father out of the corner of his mouth while the bubbles rose. And after a very long time on the garage floor, the most eternal time he ever felt, when he saw he wasn’t dying, he got up and went back home, and sat quietly, exhausted, at dinner with his parents and his sister. He heard them talking and performed all the movements of an eight-year-old child, and vaguely understood, and still understands, that even if he had died, they would never have discovered it.

  And this is the same kid who, at the age of ten, read Zorba the Greek.Because there was one teacher he loved who spoke of the book with such reverence, and tears shone in her eyes, and he had never seen such tears, not from another kid and certainly never from an adult. She had tears of longing, though he didn’t know that word (and would never have dared write it if you hadn’t written it first). And there were no books in his house—books collect dust, books are dirty, that’s what the school library is for, books—and he stole money from his father’s wallet, from the Holy Wallet, and went and bought a book from a bookstore for the first time in his life. He read it, and didn’t understand much, didn’t understand anything, really, only that it was too beautiful to contain, it was simply roaring with life, calling out his name. And with his huge overwhelming, he swallowed the whole book in about a year, and finished it exactly on his eleventh birthday. A little secret gift to himself.

  Not very pleasant, hm? Discreetly, at the cost of terrible stomachaches that conquered all medicines, every dose of cod-liver oil, finishing a page, shredding it into little pieces, chewing with dedication, and swallowing. A page a day, with three-hour breaks between the doses—a whole detailedbureaucracy ruling the ritual. Do you remember those books from Am Oved Press? With the discount for the labor unions of civilian army workers? The mustard-covered-the red-trim-bound-the somewhat—bitter? Three hundred and something pulpless pages. He gnawed this way for a year out of his verbal passion of the flesh. But, oh, Miriam, you should always be a little suspicious of him—he had already learned that behind every action lies more than one motive, and behind every noble idea peeps a rat’s tail. Because perhaps he ate Zorbaalso so that the house security would not discover, in their searches through the bottoms of his desk drawers, a new book with no satisfactory explanation for its presence there. For example, a book without the school library stamp?

  I mean—I tried to fake one, sure I tried (I’m not stupid): I drew—on the white page at the end of the book, I drew a big stamp that looked like a miserable fake—and tore the page out and couldn’t throw it into the trash—certainly not into the toilet, how can you th
row a page of Zorbainto the toilet? So, almost without thinking about it, I put it in my mouth and started chewing (I can remember it still: a strange, unpleasant, dusty taste, pages of hard labor). And I tried to write a dedication to myself from a friend, and couldn’t fake strange handwriting, and swallowed that page, too. And in this manner, totally by accident, I came up with this poetigastronomical idea …

  (I tried for a moment to read it with your eyes.)

  Oh, the effort that went into this deception, and how terrified I was, while reading it, that they would discover my ruse and the theft from the wallet. It was complete nonsense to think that they would give any thought to it, but just the knowledge that it was within the limits of the possible, within the limits of my family’s repertoire—

  I’m not going to tell you about my parents, no way. No parents. You’ve told me barely a thing about yours, and rightfully so: they have nothing to do with us, we were freed from their clutches long ago, at least I was (oh well, how many years can one drag out these wars?), and besides that—there’s hardly anything to tell. My parents are the most ordinary, even the most likable, couple of people you can imagine. They are reality incarnate. Mr. Brown Belt and Mrs. Rubber Gloves. There is no mystery to them—all their actions and thoughts are completely transparent, to the bone. And in general, they are no longer relevant to me. Ithink I told you—my father has, for the past two years, been hospitalized in a vegetable patch for his kind in Ra’Anana. My mother has taken charge of his care with the full authority of an army general. She transports pots of nutrition for him in buses and spends eight hours, daily, with him in complete silence, as she tirelessly washes and scrubs and shaves and trims him, and massages and the kneading and the feeding. She really blossoms in that environment. (Perhaps he does as well. I haven’t a clue. I haven’t seen him in a year and a half—what’s the point?)