Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  Quarter past five. It will be light soon.

  I finished copying out your letters three days ago, at this hour exactly. For a few minutes I sat there, feeling nothing. A little overwhelmed, a little drunk. I thought that from now on I would be able to write only with your words, and that closing this notebook was hard, almost unbearable for me. I also felt that I was waiting for my first heartbeat of sobriety, and it wasn’t coming. In its place, I was privileged with a sunrise of a kind I haven’t seen in years. Waves and waves of golden light streaming over Jerusalem, and I told myself it must be an omen.

  Right now, here it is, the sun. A little less dramatic today, but of course. Come on, let’s go for a walk.

  What perfume. Smell it, it’s the air you can have only at this hour, full of foggy smells and so cold! Every tree and rock is swaddled in its own cloud … and if I linger here another moment longer, I too will freeze and be swaddled, too. I’m taking you to the dam again, this time to show you a sight that even a slave swept away by the parted seas never saw. (Only my breath, my breath suddenly grew short, so I stopped to rest on a rock.)

  Your sentences and fragments of your sentences are humming in my head, like the sound of tracks after a long train ride. I could recite them to you by heart. I would prefer that you forget some of them, of course. In general, I do not want words standing between us anymore, and would rather simply be with you, in our bodies, no matter how. To be able to touch you and breathe in the scent of your sweat, to watch you do all sorts of things—making an omelet. Anything.

  Only when we meet will I tell you what happened to me since the conversation with Amos, and my whole week with your letters. How I argued with you as I copied those letters and how my heart went out toyou. How many packets of Kleenex I went through, because of the painful misunderstandings and the crazy understanding—Come, let’s continue, the sun will soon evaporate the clouds completely.

  But now I remembered—I forgot to lock the door and Yokhai sometimes grows restless at this hour. What a shame, what a pity, I wanted to go all the way to the dam with you, because it is deep there and you can dive under the clouds and walk—but I have to return, immediately—

  Nothing to worry about, I am here and he is asleep and I hadn’t forgotten to lock the door. I was just worried. I worried the moment before getting there, and it infuriates me, because I so wanted you to see just how I imagine the place where they match destinies to people—and then maybe you could get lost in it with me for a time. It also smells very special when the dry, thorny plants are moist; no other time of day smells like it. If I had had three more minutes there, or even one, I could have taken you there.

  At least I saw the sunrise; and so I have a secret oath with this day, someday we will go there together, when our time is more spread out.

  Look at me, sitting on the steps outside, trying to catch my breath, enjoying being just a body, living tissue performing its correct functions. Completely free from words like “pity” and “but” …

  (It’s already six, and I have to hurry inside. They pick up Yokhai at eight. I’ll see you later.)

  On the way here, I picked an early winter lemon, green and hard. The entire space of the classroom is already full of its scent. Thirty-three heads bent over examination pages; every once in a while a pair of eyes rises with difficulty and stares at me (I sometimes wonder how it must affect me, that I am gazed at for so many hours during the day) …

  One pupil whom I’m very fond of holds up a page on which he’s written, “Is rosemary season over?” in big letters.

  You already know I’m a little slow, certainly compared to you, but my mind has been getting clearer and clearer since yesterday, and I understand things that seemed so complicated in a much simpler way. For example—under no circumstances would I like to turn my back on what is between you and me, and I am willing to wait as long as you need. Because“what is between us,” between you and me, is worth waiting for. I feel as if there is time for us. Life is long, and even a bouquet of thirty saffron flowers is a wonderful bouquet. I also can see, Yair, that I don’t think you are the person who can heal what is wounded inside me; but perhaps, at this stage of my life, I don’t need a doctor as much as I need someone with the same sort of wound.

  A few more moments of such thoughts and it will have turned completely ripe and yellow (when I was in eighth grade, I once received an F on an algebra test, because I wrote that a prime number can be divided only by one and itself—and for an example of such a number I wrote: the scent of a lemon. By the way, you, in many ways, are also like the scent of a lemon).

  Every day, when my bus passes where you work, I pity you for having to work in such an ugly, smoky part of town. But if your window faces the street and you look out of it right now, you will see me writing through the bus window, and you will be happy. I didn’t tell you that I pass by your funny sign in that industrial area at least five times a week. How did it never occur to me? At no moment did I sense that this was the location from which your webs were being spun.

  And what would happen if I came to visit you? (Don’t worry, I would never come to you without an invitation.) To ask you to find one particular story for me? I will tell you that I can remember only one sentence from it, maybe “It is heartbreaking, the thought that you can see into a grown-up person that way” or “Who can resist the temptation to peek into another’s hell?” and immediately, your seven cavalrymen will leap onto their steeds, storming to the ends of the land, and begin to circle us in smaller and smaller arcs, until they finally stand with the their headlights facing us, point their fingers at us, and say, “You’re the story.”

  I immediately cradle myself with thoughts of us in those few, quiet, in-between moments. Could it be that you went abroad again? What will you bring back this time?

  I do envy you this—your freedom of movement through the world (it’s impossible for Amos and me to travel together, and I can’t go alone because of the very thought of a hotel room at night).

  On your next business trip to Paris, please go to the Rodin Museum; there is a sculpture there: The Poet and the Muse. Look at it. Twice. Then go to the museum shop and check to see if they are still selling the postcard of that sculpture. They once added a quotation under the photo of the sculpture (you know you are absolutely forbidden to count on me for exact quotations and who said what, but I think it’s Baudelaire): “Put down your lute, poet, and give me a kiss.”

  Buy it for yourself, from me.

  When I think about what gifts I would like to buy for you, I sometimes hear you scolding me: “And how, in your opinion, will I be able to bring this home? How will I explain it? What will I say?” Then I shrink and give up.

  But really, what do I care about how you will explain it? I’ll buy it, and you can do whatever you like with it.

  I told you before: I will take no part in these “bureaucracies” and in the endless secretive trafficking. If you decide to come to me, then it can only be in the open, without hiding and without lies, because I don’t know how to live in cracks.

  (But I just had an idea of what I could buy for you that you could bring home without fear: bread, butter, cheese, milk …)

  Maybe it’s because you tried in Tel Aviv, and without much success in my opinion, to write my “diary.” I’m having difficulties writing down my own thoughts, those that pass between me and myself; it is as if an echo has been added to each word, and I can’t decide: Does it feel good? Does it not feel good? (Ood ood ood … ?) You are the food that is good.

  Bambi, William, and Kedem lie around me. They’ve grown lately, swallowed up the space—there’s hardly any room for the humans in the house. Want a dog? You’ll see how happy it makes Ido.

  I told you why Amos bought them for me. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that they’ve remained poor orphans as they’ve grown up, and I always pity them a little for having gotten me as a moth—

  You have to hear what just happened: We had a blacko
ut. Pitch-black—listening to the commotion outside, I think there must be a blackout through the whole village. But this morning I lit a candle in myfather’s memory (it’s strange: this is the first time the anniversary of his death hasn’t been marked by rain); the remains of his candle now light up the house for me … Jessye Norman stopped in the middle of Dido and Aeneas. The refrigerator stopped. The clock. The heater. All the little comforts—and only my father’s candle lingers.

  I haven’t told you that he was the electrician of the house—he had golden hands (he used to tell me: “You don’t need brains to be an electrician—you need luck”). When I was at the university in Jerusalem, he used to make special trips from Tel Aviv to fix things in my apartment, he wouldn’t even let me change a lightbulb by myself. I guess he didn’t have much faith in my luck.

  I can’t remember the last time I wrote by candlelight—it instantly changes everything, makes you feel like writing in other words, using a quill and ink.

  My precious Yair,

  Do you remember when, in Tel Aviv, you wrote the letter in which I asked you to dive with me all the way to the place where you could have been an initial possibility of me?

  Do you know what I really want?

  Not for you to be me, not at all; but rather, for you to linger in that place of potential, not for too long, just one moment, before “deciding” who you really are, who, of the the two of us, you are going to be.

  So then, when you decide to be you, as of course you will, what will the point be if you aren’t exactly who you are (I am enough of myself already)?

  Just that you hesitate one moment before you become distinguished from me, at those imaginary crossroads between us.

  That hesitation—do you understand? It’s a whole world.

  And I have another wish (you’re allowed three): I hope, I pray, that we will always mourn the fact that each one of us chose to be exactly he himself, mourn it together in a tiny corner of our souls.

  (There, my father’s candle flickered a bit. Even he is confirming it.)

  … later, when the lights came back on, in the middle of doing the dishes, I felt some kind of “transmission” approaching. I started to walk, confused, around the house; I looked out every window and didn’t see anyone. I turned on the radio and heard an educational program aboutastronomy; some expert said, “The probability of an event occurring diminishes the more information it contains.”

  I immediately wrote it down, wet hands and all. Not that I understood it—but I could tell that something important is coded in it!

  It will be fine. I am certain of it.

  I don’t know why, I’m not searching for a reason. It will be fine. It will all work out for the best; maybe because of the smell of rain in the air that just passed by; the three dogs raised their heads and I felt the garden whistling and murmuring … A few weeks ago you said that you feel me in “three different places in the body.” I now feel you in a few more places (let’s say five, by my last count).

  The wonder is how I feel you in a place I thought was already completely dead in me, closed off by a scar.

  (To “sober” myself up a little, I immediately went back and reread a few choice passages from Tel Aviv.)

  So then? We had only three days together, on the “one and only walk we’ve managed to take on our three days together”? Cheap. Terribly cheap.

  Why can we not be spoiled with wide, relaxed time, spreading out over forever? Why couldn’t you dare to imagine a completely fantastical situation in which we are, for example, living together, even for a short time, in the same house? One ordinary and banal supper in our kitchen?

  The fiery heat of the revolving sword—I already told you: it’s you. You. The heat, and the sword, and the constant revolving. And you positioned yourself in front of every possible entrance to the Garden, so you would never be able to go back. I really wish I knew what it was, the horrible, shameful sin for which you were expelled. Was it something you did? Something you were? Were you too little, or too much?

  Too little and too much at the same time, but never exactly at the same time? That is probably your huge “betrayal” of them: you couldn’t match their “exactly.”

  I believe, with all my heart, that there is a place, perhaps not Eden, but a place we can be together. A place which is no larger than a pinhead, in reality, because of all the inevitable limitations—but which will bewide and open between us, and in it you can be you and everything you are.

  There is only one thing about which I am not yet sure, and this is what loosens up my hands … that, perhaps, you are not at all capable of believing that somewhere in this world exists a place where you can be yourself, and where you will be loved.

  (If this is so, you will never, ever, believe that someone is capable of truly loving you.)

  I’m not such a hero either. It only takes writing “our kitchen” to scare me, to make me have to walk around with a nervous stomach, as I have for a few hours now, as if I had signed my name to some blasphemy.

  I am, however, also incapable of going along with you, with how you are now castrating your imagination when you think of me (or write about me, or have fantasies about me). Because our imaginations created us for each other, so how is it that you (you!) fail to understand the extent to which it is our earth, our Luz …

  Perhaps during those three days we went to the Galilee?

  And slept in a little cabin in Metula?

  We made love the whole night and didn’t speak at all.

  Only silly talk.

  I told you that you give me shivers all down my spine, and you said, shreckles, like shivering in a forest of freckles. Then you kissed me between my eyebrows, and I massaged your entire body with only my eyelashes, and wrote words to you on your forehead with my fingers (but I wrote them backward so that you would be able to read them from the inside).

  In the beginning, we touched each other only as total strangers.

  Then we touched each other as others had taught us.

  Only afterward did we dare touch like you and me.

  I thought that when you are with me in this way, you are part of my home, as the word would be pronounced in my most internal language.

  I thought, the root of my soul, the root of your soul.

  It gave us so much pleasure …

  At midnight, in the middle of our sleep, you fluffed up the pillow under my head, and I mumbled that it didn’t matter, and you said, “But itdoes matter. Pillows are important, Miriam. The most important thing is for the pillow to be in the exact right place …”

  (And every time I write my name with your mouth, I understand something new.)

  And inside my confusion and my fear (of your silence not being just temporary or due to a sudden long journey, or just a horrible postal malfunction; that, perhaps, something is developing here that I never imagined possible between us)—

  I am still comforted, inside all this, by the thought that I received the “gospel” from Amos, because no one, no one knows better than he how to give the gift of love and how to accept it, as well.

  I am convinced that I can finally feel the emotion Amos named for me only because you stepped forward and gave yourself to me, with your full name (the most beautiful gift I received for my fortieth birthday). You understand, don’t you? If you hadn’t given me your name, I could never have felt that emotion, even if I heard its precise name one hundred times.

  I didn’t even tell you—I meant to tell you when we met, and not until then, when I would give you this notebook (I’m writing in it now, as if I have already given up on the possibility that we will ever meet)—

  Well, what?

  That I knew your name before you revealed it to me.

  Sarah, our secretary, was handing out the mail as usual and, when she came up to me, spat out nastily, “I don’t think he’s sent you anything today.” I was confused for a moment and asked, “Who?” And she said your name, your full name, the real one, adding that, by
the way, she didn’t know we were so close and told me that you and she have kids in the same kindergarten class (yes, it is she, the vital lady). You must understand, Sarah is always terribly alert to any kind of “dramas” that might be brewing in the teachers’ lounge, and I think she is particularly sensitive to me, trying to understand what exactly is going on there in my private life that apparently refuses to allow her to squeeze it into any kind of category.

  In short: she must have seen you, more than once, when you dropped off your letters, you perfect spy.

  When I blushed (all over my body, in a perfectly reasonable fashion for a sixteen-year-old girl), she started flowing over like a spring with gossip about you. I was probably too overwhelmed to silence her immediately, as she deserved; and it so happened that, against my will, and perhaps—a little—because I couldn’t withstand the temptation, I heard, in one moment, quite a few “stories.”

  Sarah, as you well know, has a big mouth. (Srsrsrsrsr …) And I eventually had to practically stand up and walk away for her to be quiet. I don’t want to hear about you from strangers!

  Talk, Yair.

  Come to me, be here with me. Let’s make up, we had such a fight this afternoon, and it is so hard for me to fight with you, it’s unbearable, especially with you gone. And it’s even worse to be alone with my anger at you, with Sarah’s whispers. I don’t want to write the details down in this notebook, what came over me, what I became in a blink—I don’t want to go there again. Not without you.

  I cleaned myself up and calmed down a little.

  I’m in the bath. I mean, Yokhai is in the bathtub and I am watching him, sitting on the toilet seat and writing to you. I hope you don’t mind. Isn’t it a bit late for him? you ask. Your voice always softens when you speak of him. Yes, it’s late. It’s late for me too, I can barely keep my eyes open. But he wet the bed again, and after I finished wiping him off, I thought, He can’t stay like that the whole night. You wouldn’t leave Ido that way. So even though I had given him his bath an hour ago, I brought him back here.