Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  It really is better this way, believe me. Why do you want to know how small, how banal I am in real life?

  That’s it. This is where our broadcast ends, and our little hallucinations. And everything. I am in Jerusalem again, tightly screwed back into my life—you do understand that I cannot continue this after what happened. Even I have some limit to my baseness. I can’t stand the thought of what you went through because of me, in those stinking places on the beach—it’s only proof of how any connection with me continues to soil everything.

  Miriam, Miriaaammm, oh, how I loved to roar out your name in the beginning. I’m now lying in the lowest cellar I have ever been in—I feel like a human roach. There is no punishment I deserve more than terminating my connection with you—it is the one judgment I can pronounce upon myself. I had almost written: “Who knows how long it will take until I’m myself again?”—but as you well know, who is that self, anyway, and who would even be interested in returning to it?

  Because at least twice a day during my time with you, he would squeeze his hand through a crack in the door and inquire whether his nightmare was over already and whether you were gone—and I have no doubt that as soon as tomorrow rolls around—What am I talking about? Tomorrow? Tonight, now, when I seal this envelope! And I will see him sitting in my chair, legs up on the table, grinning at me: Baby, I’m home!

  Enough, enough. Let’s finish it. It’s like the eulogy at my own funeral. In these past months you gave me the greatest gift I have ever received from anyone (I can only compare it to what Maya gave me when she agreed to have a child with me), and I’ve destroyed it. Oh well, I’m dedicatedly destroying what Maya gave me as well.

  I can’t describe in words what the thought of you getting up and leaving everything behind to come to Tel Aviv does to me. You were there for me; again, perhaps it seems only natural to you—you felt that I was in distress, and you sailed out to help—but it still moves me terribly to think that a person would do such a thing for another person—for me.

  And the thought tormenting me now is that I became so absorbed inmyself that I didn’t see you, didn’t guess that you were—that for two days we were perhaps a hundred meters away from each other—perhaps we even passed each other in touching distance—and I, what did I see? Only words.

  To think of you walking between the prostitutes on the beach, approaching them and asking them—or going into the hotels that rent by the hour along Allenby and ha-Yarkon—then returning to walk there at night as well; and the “health clubs” and “massage parlors”—investigating, insisting and arguing with those loathsome characters over there—and that guy who looked at you and started following you, weren’t you scared? Just imagine—a student of yours could have seen you—didn’t you realize how crazy you were to do such a thing—for me?

  My most terribly dear and wonderful Miriam—the horrible squeezing under my heart tells me that now is the moment I should have stood up and come to you and said, Let’s try, why not, maybe we can—Your Honor, Judge, perhaps you will be lenient and order reality to loosen up its jaws just a little, so we can escape from them, for just one moment, and be two human beings who wish to be alone. Why not? Two human beings who like each other. Who will it hurt if they take shelter in each other and curl up together for two hours a week in some shitty motel, so they can watch what happens to them and find out where they can go together? Actually, Your Honor, why does it have to be a shitty motel? Go easy this time—let it go—ignore them—treat it like the rehabilitation of the outlaw I am; why can’t you think of them meeting in a beautiful open space, on the seashore, in a glittering city, on the lawn of Ramat Rakhel against the desert, in the oak forest above the Kinneret …

  You asked at the end of your letter, What will become of us now?

  That’s right: What will become of us?

  Yair

  Just another moment. I can’t stop. It’s as if everything will end if I stop writing.

  I knew it from your response to my first letter—I knew you would take me to a very faraway place, over my horizon—and yet I still wentwith you—why did I go with you? After you wrote to me how thrilled you were by my letter, my first impulse was to cut it off immediately. Can you grasp what it means that this is what you wrote, at the beginning of all of this—without knowing who I was, without any games or pretense?

  It is so rare—believe me, trust the expert; and even then I told myself, She is too good and innocent for your games of self-immolation—be gallant for once in your life! Let this one go—even Jack must have taken mercy and spared one woman from his ripping—mustn’t he?

  You will probably object to this comparison, but in some strange way your integrity now seems very close to what you called my “fuss and mirrors.” It is not easily understood, your integrity—at least not by the common ruling laws of my swinish hypocrisy. It is a private integrity, made of your element alone, a battlefield created by the war of the strong forces within you that are constantly working together, mixing into one another. You touch all of it, and somehow don’t die of it. On the contrary. I wish I could learn this wisdom from you—but I don’t think I will ever be able to.

  Does this cause me sorrow? Yes. And shame, too. Perhaps you think I don’t even know what shame is. Please don’t take away my right to be ashamed.

  You know, all through the period of our correspondence I was faithful to you. I mean—this may sound pitiful to you, but still—I even lost the urge (well, almost) to look at each passing woman and fantasize about her or try my luck with her—and if I was momentarily tempted, I immediately felt how you (you, not Maya) shrank with pain. It is important to me that you know that there were no exceptions; this is not a simple matter with me. In this way, ten times a day, a huge surge of pride filled me for being yours. My pride over this, my “loyalty,” probably makes you sick; truly, what right do I have to it, as we are actually talking about retreating to our rear lines of loyalty here. And still.

  Miriam—this is my last letter. I will most likely not write to you again. You see? We never even reached the guillotine. We settled it on our own. If I wasn’t such a fool, I could have been happy with you; it doesn’t matter how—in any way the world would have allowed us to be happy. By the way, I’m looking at the date, and remember that it is your birthday this week, isn’t it? You’re forty years old this week. Three days ago, of course. You were probably waiting for me that day, hoping Iwould bring you a gift, that I would come to you as a gift; and all you got, eventually, was that heap from Tel Aviv. With the “Don’t come out” letter at the end for dessert.

  What should I wish for you on your birthday? Actually, I should wish you for yourself, because you are the most precious, rarest gift I can think of right now—I wish I had more courage, for your sake.

  No. I want to wish for something greater. Why compromise? I want a real wish. I wish, I wish time would stop—and that this past summer could continue forever—that I could elude the goddamn grip I have on myself—and be discovered, suddenly, in another place—in front of you, for example. But new, free, naked. Even for just one day. Even for one page of a letter. One blink of absolute freedom. Why not? Really? Otherwise, what am I worth?

  Yair Einhorn

  (Midnight.)

  (That’s it? All that noise and mystery for that kind of name?)

  I’m thirty-three years old. I live in Talpiyot—the address is on the envelope—in a new, crowded neighborhood of private bungalows. This is where I chose to build my home—it’s a kind of nouveau riche slum. What else? I run quite a large business, it’s called the Book Bunk, it’s actually right on the edge of the Jerusalem Forest, not too far from your house. I sell used books and search for rare books on commission. What else? Ask me, ask me, the turnstile is open. I have a staff of ten, including a book doctor and one young genius in a wheelchair who knows almost every book ever written in Hebrew and can recognize a book by a single sentence from it (he found your “dress his face with tales”). And th
ere are seven cavalrymen on motorcycles whom I saved from a pizza delivery business that went bankrupt and closed. I’ve turned them into deliverers of books and send them to customers’ homes all over the country. They leave black, burning stripes on the land, delivering every book and magazine that exists in the galaxy, from how-to guides about growing orchids, to Elvis Presley biographies, to volumes of Judaica and issues of the Dutch Royal House fan magazine.

  I make sure to bite a little piece of paper from every copy of Zorbathat rolls through my hands (well, I’m not as young as I used to be). And of course, I forever tip my hat to you for successfully, and without muchado, arranging the subscriptions to the Chinese newspaper for the only two interested readers in the country.

  I’m a bit winded—but I said everything, didn’t I? I did it.

  So what, then? Should we perhaps hum along a bit about daily affairs, to get over the embarrassment? It suddenly became uncomfortable, didn’t it? Someone exhaled a breath of reality. Should I tell you about my work? Why not, we’ve already yielded to the little sweaty molecules—do you want to hear what my workers receive as holiday gifts?

  Enough, Miriam. Give up on me. It was all fantasy—if there was any other solution, any other system at work in the world … I would pass almost everything I did or said through your eyes first, through your thoughts and your hungry mouth—If someone pissed me off at work or on the road, I used to think of you. I would roll your name under my tongue and immediately calm down. I never met a person into whose hands I wanted to deliver my soul in this way—nor did I ever think I would trust her to know how to put me together again, correctly. There are certain geniuses to whom you could give a jigsaw puzzle of a parrot—and they could put those pieces together to make a fish. I gave you a creep—and you made a human out of it—the same pieces, but somehow, always better.

  I should perhaps tell you that in recent past weeks I thought, with my usual denseness, that if I had a purpose in life, it was you—or it has something to do with you, or that through you, I will somehow reach it. There isn’t much reason behind this thinking, but this is how I felt—and you are the only person to whom I could write such words without feeling ridiculous. Now I will have to go back and look for this “purpose” in a different, and simpler, place—where it is probably easier for me to search under the light, or the Lila, the Liza, or the Lorelei. Pitful, aren’t I?

  It occurs to me that if, let’s say, I was kidnapped—or disappeared without a trace—and a detective came here and tried to understand or figure out who I was based on what everyone around me here knows, he could never find me. This is another thing I never learned until you—that I mainly live in what I’m not.

  I had hoped this profession would make me happier, and it doesn’t. The details are truly unimportant. I never told you how many jobs I had already tried, how many mistakes I have wallowed in. I thought I finally found my vocation—working with books, searching to find for people the stories from their childhood that they loved. What could be moresuitable for me? Apparently it isn’t. I am only almost happy here. It is still a secondhand pleasure.

  You have no idea how much I loathe books this minute. Why is it that none of the thousands of books that surround me can help me? And none of them tell our story.

  And none of them gave me what your letters gave me.

  Yair

  Miriam

  I trip up the very same way all over again. He ran off the school bus to me, spread his hands out by his sides, and whinnied happily … oh, he came home today in such a good mood. And as sometimes occurs, she was in him for a second. I saw her in him, trapped.

  Why am I writing in here? I don’t want to write in this notebook—a few words and I will rip this page out and leave it alone. But, just the way she was in him, she was so real today you could almost touch her. Perhaps he smiled her smile for a moment, or it was the angle of light on his face. I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know why I insist on hurting myself by writing in this notebook here when the house is full of empty pages. I swore I would not open this notebook until an answer came from him, and could only hold myself back for two days. Not even two days. A day and a half. It’s not much, but at least I know what condition I am in. I hoped I would be stronger; what will happen now? I think I’m a little bit scared. As if I had opened the cover of this and all his letters were roaring and bellowing and crying out to me. Enough, quiet.

  He is asleep. Fell asleep, exhausted. He will sleep until morning, and I will not be able to give him the Apenotin. He screamed and cried and bled so much … the insult of every fall … I wish I could fall asleep like that, wake up some other time. His forehead now has a new, large cut—and he’ll start scratching at it tomorrow morning. I barely made it out unhurt this time. Except for the usual hurt—if, at some point, I was asked to return the deposit, how would I show my face with all his scars? If I was quicker, less clumsy, I could at least dive under him and cushion his falls. Make use of my body.

  I’m just scribbling so as not to think, in order to resist the temptation of flipping back and going to meet him. You. You you. Where are you now? How could you not know of the gift awaiting you here from me? How did you not feel how I was with you for a whole week, word for word? The tens and hundreds of pages under this page … I feel like a nutshell on stormy waves writing you here. And now it occurs to me that maybe I should have added a foreword to the beginning of this notebook, or some kind of explanation at its end. But what would I write? What, of all things could I say? Perhaps what I told you once, that to discover a person and tell him something about himself he doesn’t know—that is a great gift of love to me. The greatest.

  I also was thinking of telling you that if you read your letters straight through, without mine, from first to last, you would learn many new things about yourself. Not only the “bad” things that you’re sometimes so eager to discover about yourself. Perhaps you will begin to see yourself with another’s eyes. Mine, for instance. But I will tell you all this only when we meet face-to-face. Now, please, don’t bother me, Yair, let me go—I have to write about something else here.

  He ran the length of the whole garden path to me, probably not understanding why I wasn’t running toward him with a “Who’s Coming to Me?” There is that little gap in the middle of the path where a brick is missing, Amos has been promising to fix it for two months and has no time. His leg caught in it, twisted, and—this is not an excuse. I usually never wait for him to reach that brick, I always get there before he does. Maybe it was because this kind of running is something that has never left him since he was two—he’s always been running, happy, free; we both would gallop toward each other, cheering. Also because he is always taken aback by my hug, not understanding who this woman is (why am I writing about this?). What happened today? What happened was, I saw him; I mean, I saw him in a way I must not see him—how his body janglesloosely, his feet and the length of his face when his glasses fell off—I truly mustn’t write about such things. I only thought that she was trying, trying so hard, and not succeeding at taking off—and felt a moment of uncontrollable anger. Not at him. Not at him? Yes, partly at him. Whatever inside him prevents her from shining out through him. It has been ten years and I’m still looking for codes, hints. “Anger at him” (and I attacked you for it). Yes. And anger at Amos about the brick. And anger at Anna, oh, I didn’t neglect her today. All these angers still don’t add up to a single answer.

  I stood there, and he got out of the van and ran, and there, the missing brick, and I saw the driver looking at him from behind.

  Yes.

  He was about to drive away, and stopped and looked; I saw the other three boys on the van, gazing out without seeing a thing. They’ve been riding together every day for four years and still don’t recognize Yokhai. He doesn’t recognize them either. And for some reason the driver lingered today for another moment and watched him run—a new driver, probably inexperienced, and his look, more than anything else—“the
way the eye is drawn to a disaster.” When he tripped where the brick was missing—by that time, I think I was so absent, not with him, not wanting to be allied with him, an enemy, I didn’t even move.

  I will not rip out this page. It will remain in your notebook, and you will receive it, too. You’ve already heard harder things than this from me. But now there is a new twist: I have never written this kind of letter to myself before.

  I should have ripped out the previous page. I see that it is leaving open a gap for others to follow, which is unwanted in my current condition. Some stormy weather here this afternoon; at least the house is cleaner than it has been in a long time. Then again, I’m back at this notebook, each word pulling out another after it. I wanted the only words in it to be yours, and spent a whole week copying them out, holding myself back from adding even a single word of mine, and now, look—a flood. But they aren’t the words I wanted you to hear, and not in my good voice.

  Because you haven’t sent even one line in response to what I told you in the last letter, that precious thing I told you. Not even a short, polite rejection.How could you? You could. I can’t. It terrifies me to finally understand how much I can’t.

  Good morning, it’s a new day. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I was rescued from that little whirlpool that sucked me in for a moment yesterday. You will read what I wrote in the previous pages, and we’ll both laugh at me together.