Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  September 14

  Hello,

  That’s all. Hello.

  It’s no good, only being able to write you when I’m dead tired (this life—who the hell wrote these rules?). I’m pretty much starting to get sick of running around. It isn’t just me—Maya, too. Almost everyone I meet. Especially people our age—work, the kids, there’s no time for anything. Even you, yes you, yes, the Great Lingerer … a while ago I wrote out your schedule for each day of the week for myself, including work and afternoon meetings, Yokhai’s treatments and visits to your mother,and Alexander Technique lessons, and dinner and dishwashing, and everything else I know. And I was amazed by how little spare time you have for yourself—just a few moments in a day. At least your nights are free.

  And I was thinking that this activity doesn’t suit you—it’s as if some foreign body were drowned into your softness (if I am allowed to quote back to you what you said about my sense of humor).

  So what is he really thinking about us, your man from Mars who’s watching?

  What you asked me to tell you—it’s a bit late tonight to start such a tale (have you heard about the wise Chinese man who said, “I don’t have the time to write a short letter, so I will write a long one”?); perhaps, on the other hand, it is good that I tell a story like this when I’m tired.

  The truth is, I don’t like to remember my friendship with him. The more I miss him, the more appalled I am by the friendship we had then, how distant and unapproachable it seems. We were both smart, weak little kids, unpopular (as the verdict is pronounced among Ido’s generation). We were mocked and ostracized by the other kids—and we ostracized ourselves a little as well. I think we enjoyed being special and cursed. We invented, for instance, a private language of hand gestures—we were very adept and could chat with it during class. We were laughed at for this as well, of course—can you imagine what it must have looked like, he and I and our finger signs?

  We had secret nicknames for our classmates, and would compose mocking songs about them, about the teachers. You can already guess, I’m sure, that we both (yes, he as well) were familiar, from personal experience, and thanks to the superb education we received at home, with the basic article of the constitution stating that each person possesses one quality deserving mockery. And we passed that knowledge on …

  So we advanced our image as a double-headed creature with a multi-hemisphered brain—we developed the arrogant, bold speaking patterns of a couple—we used very manly language, that is, and used to hold public contests in writing “simultaneous poetry” in the style of the Dada poets. We swallowed Hegel and Marx without understanding a thing (we onlylearned about the golden era of radical sixties Matzpen socialism from the adults, and heard about it with terrible envy—I can’t recall whether your name was ever mentioned). We also had a sense of something like a style—and, of course, we truly felt (without ever saying it aloud) a bit like two English boys who were meant to be sent to a boarding school and got stuck instead in the public school of a working-class neighborhood.

  At the age of fifteen, we wrote our own “Modest Proposal” about producing electricity from inferior human beings; this is how we defined it, crippled, stupids, retarded, and so on (I’m sorry, I know, and still: me, everything). “The Family Cookbook” came a year later, and established and dishonored our names at school for all eternity: it was a collection of Jewish recipes, easy to prepare (and cheap, too, because the ingredients were always at home). From the menu I recommend to my gourmet friends Mother’s Stomach-Lining Soup, and Cheek Dumplings à la Papa, stuffed with bitter bile …

  It is important that I stress in this disgraceful yet inconsequential report that the more power we accumulated the more popular we became with the girls. This was a refreshing development for us: by the time we reached sixteen, we were already surrounded by a small but excited circle of groupies. We would make them read moldy books we’d borrowed from the YMCA library, and then test them, and give them hell, until they earned our good graces. There was a time we would woo girls with a plan predetermined by a secret code—one by one, we would go after girls, so that the first letters of their first names, put together, would actually spell out the name of the girl we really loved, one Khamutal, over whom we didn’t even dare masturbate out of sheer love.

  It continued in this way until we went into the service. Six years. Six witty years, Shai would say. Six gritty, shitty years, I would immediately respond. We were obsessed with word games. We could destroy a person’s very foundations within five minutes, through a simple Ping-Pong game with his name. (I’m writing to you and thinking, If everything had ended differently, if we had succeeded in remaining together into our adult lives—after the wild irresponsibility of youth and cowardly cruelty—what a good friend I could have had.)

  All right, boys, enough sentiment. We were recruited on the same day, and although we believed in pacifism and demonstrated against the occupation and all that, we were overjoyed when the draft cards arrived. I think both of us could sense the poison in our friendship. The fact thatthe rough army decided we were fit material was a sign that, in spite of everything, and underneath all the affected rot, we were actually just like everybody else.

  In short, the long arm of the IDF separated us. Shai served in the Golani infantry brigade and I—underweight—was assigned to be a clerk. Each of us, for the first time in years, stood alone in front of our peers; we sobered up very quickly, or more accurately, we were forced into sobriety. We buried all our cleverness deep in our kit bags. And we learned to speak in those other languages—but mainly we learned to shut up. And then, in one of the glorious campaigns of our forces in Lebanon, Shai was severely wounded. His mother called me from the hospital, before she even called his grandparents. And I told her that, of course, on my first weekend off, I would go see him.

  After a few, horrible, soul-filthy weeks—I have no other words to describe what happened inside me each and every day I did not go to see him. I didn’t even go home on my days off, just so I wouldn’t have to see him. It was impossible to keep it up, so I forced myself go to Tel Hashomer.

  What do I remember? I remember the long corridor, and the geranium plants hanging from the ceilings. And the crippled guys flying by me on their wheelchairs with special skill—you can imagine how I felt walking in that hallway, so permit me to be brief. Someone was getting up for me at the end of the corridor. A thin body, with a shaved head, only one good eye wide open in his face, with no eyebrow above it. And there was also a horrible mouth, slightly pulled to the side in some kind of permanent skeleton’s giggle. He was leaning on crutches; one of his legs had been amputated above the knee.

  I approached him cautiously. We stood and looked each other in the eyes. In the eye. We thought, An eye for an eye; we thought, Seeing eye to eye; we thought, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we thought, The eyes have it—all our poisoned brilliances were running between us, and died on the edge of his naked eyelid. He started to laugh—or cry; to this very day, I don’t know, with that mouth—and I was possessed by hysterical laughter and pretended to be crying.

  I have nothing to say in my defense. I simply couldn’t get over it. That’s a longtime habit with me, huh? Also the fact that our friendship and our uniqueness was always at the exact point of the tip of the syringe of mockery.

  Dear Miriam, after the donkey-foal letter, you said you wanted to hug me. How can you hug me? I couldn’t hug him. I couldn’t lie and tell him he was a beautiful boy. We both stood, with our faces turned aside and our shoulders shaking; all the years of our friendship, with its truly beautiful moments and our silent knowledge of each other, and mainly with the notion that our meeting at the age of twelve might have been a rare gift that our crappy luck had smuggled into our lives to us—it was all erased.

  That’s the story.

  What was I thinking yesterday?

  That it’s a pity you and I can’t be friends. Just friends, like the good friendship between two
men. Honestly, why aren’t you a man?! That would have solved so many problems: meeting every two or three weeks in some coffeeshop or steakhouse, throwing back beers, talking about fucking, business, politics; going to a soccer game in Gan Sacher on Friday afternoons; taking family trips together on Saturdays. Easy.

  I remember how he lifted the remains of his face and looked up at the ceiling—there is no language that has words to describe the expression on his face, as if, in that moment, he accepted, surrendered with some horrible intellectual integrity to the verdict we both pronounced when we were friends—that if you’re fucked up in some way, it’s probably your fault. If you were punished, you deserved it. You deserve everything you are; you are an exact punishment for yourself, no more, no less.

  His face shook in front of me—he no longer had the facial features to express everything going on inside him. After that, he turned around and we went our separate ways, without even a goodbye. It was many years ago—I know he went through a lot of surgery and physical therapy and looks pretty okay. I also heard that he got married, had one child, and they’re expecting a second.

  He truly was an unusually intelligent and bitter child. Hardly a week passes when I don’t think about him, and still—do you see? I cut him out of my life, too. (Look at me—a hybrid of the Scorched Earth Strategy and the Salami System.)

  Y.

  September 17

  Come to the kitchen, come to my kitchen. I already know yours well. It’s the evening, and I had a somewhat happier day, the first one since youtold me about Anna. I want you here with me for a moment, I think we’re allowed that after five months and seventeen days exactly since we met (today!).

  I’m in our yard, a square meter of grass with a water sprinkler. Surrounded by an obedient ring of chrysanthemums. This should be an autumn evening according to the calendar. But the air is warm, thick, clotted, and close. Doesn’t it feel as though winter is refusing to arrive this year? (I don’t care.) I am lounging here on a comfortable Keter lawn chair, under the guise of writing a reply to an angry customer to whom I mistakenly sold the wrong story—and feel you around me. I have a feeling, somehow, that today you won’t fight me over this bold invitation into the depths of my house. That is, at least, what I am hoping for. Because with you I never know when the scolding will come …

  (For example: “Sometimes you suddenly belch in front of me this way after you write a terrible, horrible thing—a salami belch, and really, I feel like simply killing you!”)

  Okay, I took my scolding for my hit-and-run treachery, my insistence on disguising myself as a primitive for you … undoubtedly I earn this scolding, and also the torch you turn on my innocent and momentary wish that we had a boy’s friendship—a man’s.

  Hey, you shouldn’t work yourself up over my nonsense—they are just words. I swear, I am not constantly trying to detach “that fact of your being a woman” from our relationship. And God forbid you should castrate yourself (!?) just so you can “truly fulfill this wish” of mine. Come, enough fighting. I like saying it to you, come; immediately a small, warm wave washes over my heart. You know, I can now think about you in every room of my house, not only in the shower; it’s as if I have finally found, in the past few weeks, the place where you can exist without invading any other territory. Where do you think of me?

  Consider such an hour in the evening. Our kitchen is busy now, and Ido is sitting in his royal chair, with all the treasures of Ali Baba and Ali Mama spread out in front of him. Containers of yogurt and milk and cottage cheese and chocolate spread and spaghetti and sliced apples with cinnamon sprinkled on top—of course, just the way you prepare them for Yokhai (and thank you for the idea!). Maya is at the stove, cooking something or grilling chicken wings for tomorrow. Our kitchen is so sweet in these moments—this is what I always think to myself, always, with the same amazement of discovering Eden. Sometimes I say it to myself,under my breath, so Maya won’t hear me; she laughs at my sentimentality, but I have to say it, because, in the same moment, I am there but also not there. You know this feeling, you said it yourself—you are always, always standing outside the house at the same time you are in it, resting your hands against the windowsill and looking in.

  Then I look inside—and miss, in advance, what will, at some point, surely be destroyed and demolished—torn apart—things are always getting torn. Especially because of me, may my name be erased. (I once read that in ancient Chinese, the word “family” is written this way: painting a “house” with a pig standing inside it.)

  But today, everything is dipped in goodness. Peek inside, see how merry the overcrowded table of plenty is, with the glorious detritus of life—the crusts I cut from Ido’s bread slices, the egg stains on his lips and cheeks (and on the floor all around him), the rings of chocolate on the tablecloth, and the olive pits and the basket of large, beautiful fruits, so full of tropical passion, in our house; our house, in the suburbs. Our forks and our spoons and our knives—the cup with the broken handle, the cup with the crack—the “Number 1 Mom” mug next to the “Number 1 Girlfriend” mug—and the ugly yellow teacup, the only one left from a set of twelve we received for our wedding … only he remains and refuses to break. Maya and I have a deal—during a really bad fight, we are allowed to break one of these cups—but this one has survived for over three years. It is even surviving this recent period. What does that actually mean?

  The colorful spice rack, and the bread box, slightly open, like the mouth of a dreaming grandfather—that’s how I wish I could be, immediately! And the notes; and the news articles I cut out and stick on the fridge for Maya, instructions for the Heimlich maneuver and reports about infants swallowing detergents and updated statistics about common accidents that occur in the house—and disasters that occur outside—from going too fast, eating too much, immoderate living. And Maya smiles in front of me, her simple and beautiful face lights up. Her beloved, homey body, which I love a lot more than my own, wrapped up in a sweatsuit, the twin of my blue one, an anniversary gift her parents gave us years ago. Her parents, who love me as their own son. If—God forbid—we ever broke up, we would continue to pretend to be together, so we wouldn’t break their hearts. And she passes me the pressure cooker and the fat Polish pot, placing the orange plastic Tupperware with rice leftovers from yesterday on the marble counter; deftly pouring the soupfrom the day before yesterday into the Polish pot after she empties out the cabbage which is now in the little cracked one—and what was in the little cracked one? Goulash leftovers, let’s say, which she pours into the pot we bought on our honeymoon in Italy. We once cooked soup in it on the banks of the Arno (and don’t confuse it with the pot we bought on our trip to France!). While all the containers calm themselves down after the hectic activity, we reorganized the refrigerator together, moving the fresh dairy products to the back. I lean over her, she twists to slide through the space under my arm—our kitchen dance—not to be confused with the jig of the donkey foal. Over our years together, we have combined with each other into one—I sometimes feel as if we both had a sex change into a third sex—the married sex. And once these two bodies had already mixed and blended and dissolved into each other, they became the starting point, origin of passion—and not the means for its satisfaction. We did become one flesh. It’s really terrible.

  You have no idea how filled with joy I was when we were both teaching Ido how to tie his shoelaces and discovered that each of us ties his laces differently.

  By the way, thank you for your advice about Shai—but it’s a lost cause. It is true that we have both grown up since then—but it still wouldn’t work. He and I know, with our shared, internal, crippled logic (you’ll be annoyed by this, but still), that our separation, forced and unnecessary, is also a well-deserved punishment—and the continuation of our relationship, in a very private way. No one understands this better than Shai.

  Now, shall we return to the kitchen?

  After we took the cracked pot out of there and put in the little p
otissimo, a good space became available—so Maya rescues a plastic container from the freezer marked Potato Burekas, with the date they were made, and puts it on that middle shelf in the refrigerator. That shelf is almost empty, and a bit loose. I fixed it. That’s why you can’t put any heavy stuff on it—that’s how Maya will explain it someday to her second husband, the wrestler, the blacksmith, the talented refrigerator technician. And we both stand there a moment, taking a break from this exhausting activity—and filled with a quiet, harsh satisfaction I find hard to describe in words—it is so rough, so deep, it fills the whole of me so completely, to the tips of my nerves—and Maya’s. Those nerves, as if they were bent, rounded by the combined internal heat flowing through us—thosenerves might look like scorpion tails in a mating dance, or a devouring dance, and both swell and pulse together in idiotic pride for this modest specialty of ours that we develop day by day to the perfection and purity of the essence of Togetherness. So, Miriam, this is the situation: and it is only now so clear to me, in writing this, that my life with Maya, our love, is so stable and defined that it is impossible to add a new element that is too large (like myself, for instance).

  Isn’t that the way it goes? Two people loving each other for better or worse, corked up in the jar of marriage. And every deep breath of mine takes something from her in the petty, unwilling accounting that goes on with the person you love the most. Eventually, everything turns into an account, a balance sheet, believe me (even though you refuse to). Not only who earns how much, and who works harder at home and on the outside, and who takes more initiative in bed. Even the genes you donate to the family piggy bank are being counted somewhere. Who the kid resembles more, and which of you is aging faster, and who’s lagging behind and not participating.