Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  So that’s it? I’m inside, inside your home. You have a generous home, not just generous—like a river practically overflowing. And a little bit like the Old Curiosity Shop, just as you said. I learned it by heart, I even sketched it out on paper, so I could know just where the wall with the photographs is, and on which window the orange-and-red stained glass hangs, and where the blue glass vases from Hebron sit, and how the sunbeams break through them in the morning and fall and spread out on the embroidery with the filigree (what is that, exactly?), but mainly I saw you, your words, you suddenly wrote like—did you notice?

  Do you understand what I am talking about?

  This is in no way a criticism of you, it’s just a question, or let’s say the unwilling cock of an eyebrow: because you were extremely happy on the way from the dam, you rejoiced and I couldn’t help but get excited along with you. And in the house, how can I explain it? It seemed to me that, for a moment, you were somehow aflame …

  Quickly—quickly, moving from room to room, nearly breathless, agitated in a way not at all in your usual rhythm, and when I think about it now—not at all in your tone either, not your verbal muscle tone. It was as if you frightened yourself by bringing me into your privacy so suddenly. Or perhaps you only wanted to show me that anything I can do you can do as well?

  I’m such an idiot. What am I complaining about, I wish I could do that, too. Be as happy as a child, standing for the first time in front of a picture that has been hanging in the living room for years, or over a jar of pickles—be awed by a “large, pregnant” piece of pottery …

  I feel so relieved that I can now lean back and let you know—that almost from the start I felt a little ashamed before you, and mainly—too much of something (exaggerated and bubbling, et cetera, et cetera). Perhaps it was because you seemed so reserved to me that night, so self-sufficient, there was something so clear and crystal and ascetic about you, almost scolding me without even knowing me. And suddenly this crowded house.

  On the other hand, don’t be mistaken, it also relaxes me to know it, it proves another little one of my proofs about you and me. Perhaps not a very grand proof in itself, perhaps you won’t be happy about it, I’m not very proud of it myself, but suddenly it was because I found it in you as well—

  I hope you’re not offended. Truly, this is not a critique of your taste. I wish you to understand that it is not “taste” or “tastelessness” that is important to me now. Only the signs of our alikeness in everything, big or small; and the delicate, mysterious affair that we shall call “the right measure” I mean—a likeness like the one that exists, say, between two cups, broken in exactly the same place.

  Yair

  May 20

  It is, of course, impossible to write down all those moments throughout the day. But I liked the fact that you used the word “date” to describe it. We’re on a date.

  This morning, for example, in the daily traffic jam right before Ganot Interchange. A large Volvo driving in front of me with a little boy sittingin back who was waving hello to all the drivers. There were five of us in the cars around him, and none of us moved a facial muscle; we didn’t give him a single sign of being seen. The boy smiled hopefully for a little longer. There was something shy and fragile in his smile.

  My dilemma: If I was to wave back at him, he would immediately recognize that I am only pretending to be a grown-up. That I am the weak link in the chain tied around him. At that moment, he might start making obscene gestures at me, thus making me the joke of the jam. I could see in the vulnerable line of his mouth that he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to gain this kind of strength.

  I consulted you (that is to say, we had a date). I accepted your opinion. I smiled at him. I waved to him. I saw how his smile grew bigger with happiness, almost in disbelief that such a thing was happening to him … He immediately told his father, the driver, who looked at me through the rearview mirror for a long time. I looked away and saw what the other drivers were thinking of me.

  I also thought that if there had been a woman among us, she could have smiled at him and dismissed me from that duty.

  So again, for the second time today: Good morning to you.

  I am amused by your way of not answering my direct questions immediately. (Such as what I wrote about your home.) And I already know that in two or three letters I will get an indirect answer, or sometimes I won’t get any. I suppose this is your way of determining a path and rhythm for yourself, not letting me take the reins … But you asked a question, and contrary to all the hemming and hawing that came before it, I can respond quite simply: I certainly want another child. Another three, maybe. Why not? To walk down the street like a mother duck with her living, quacking train—that is the peak of prosperity. But in the present situation, since you’re asking, even one more will do.

  Do for what? It’s hard to say exactly.

  Perhaps—turn us into a family. Because we are not one yet.

  Well, that surprised even me. I’ll send it anyway.

  Y.

  It’s not that we don’t live together well, the three of us (I have to make you understand), but somehow, in the meantime, we are just three people 1who are getting on just fine, even in love with one another, in deep friendship (but—as you know, a triangle is always a very shaky geometric construction).

  (Almost midnight)

  And I wish I had a girl. There is nothing I would rather have. A soft little girl. A little honeysuckle. It’s also the thought of seeing just what kind of girl would come out of me; a legitimate feminine version of myself: and to see how all her parts coexist, elbows and breasts. And perhaps she, somehow, just by being, will know how to settle that old quarrel of which we have yet to speak, you and I.

  And there is, of course, also the will to know, in that way, through a little girl, the half of Maya’s life I don’t know.

  Maya—that really is her name. To love her all over again, from her genesis, as she grows up and matures—does that sound strange to you?

  If I only had a girl. I would name her Ya’ara, Honeysuckle. This little honeysuckle, look, my nymph gland is starting to leak uncontrollably. A girl with dark, soft hair crowning her temples, and green-eyed like Maya, and red-lipped, and how she bubbles over with happiness—because she will be happy, you’ll see, almost anything in the world will be cause for her to rejoice.

  But how will I know how to raise her without what is in me seeping into her, that which has already covered Maya’s innocent, open face with vague, tired skin, and has already sucked dry one child who used to be a glimmer of light.

  There, I wrote it.

  So yes, if you’re asking, the thought that I might not have another child kills me, and Maya is not willing yet. She probably has good reasons to hesitate, and I am compelled to be satisfied with suspicious, yearning looks at little girls in the street. I used to yearn for their mothers, and now … Well, I didn’t think we’d be speaking about such matters at all! I was certain that, at this point, we would already be celebrating in a realm of passionate hallucinations. That I would write you, for example, that even the smell of my sweat becomes sharper only by imagining that, in a little while, your fingers will be pressed to this page. And that even your telephone number, with the concave between the breasts hinted at in the 868, excites me. But I’m glad I can tell you about the rest—to describe thefat little legs my girl will have (when she wears her yellow dress!), and her naked peachy body when she showers in the sprinklers in the yard—

  Down, heart, down!

  Y.

  May 25

  Walking on a tightrope?

  I thought—a clown. But apparently there are more jobs in the circus. Does it really look like that to you?—that I suddenly came running, pushed the end of a rope into your hand, and said, “Hold it!”?

  You made only one little mistake: you said that it’s unclear to you just how I managed to convince, or at least plant the doubt in you, that if you let go I’d fall. But it isn’t a rope
, Miriam—it is scarcely a string, a word-web (and if you do let go, I will fall).

  And before everything, you have to understand that I have no wish to tell stories to other people. It’s only you that I want to write to, and it is only in your honor that this urge was suddenly aroused in me, just like that, with no warning, in the middle of life. Because I haven’t ever known this kind of passion, up to even the moment before I saw you; maybe when I was a child writing school essays, funny sketches, etc. And that earthshaking theory that suddenly came to you in the middle of the night and kept you from sleeping (it’s about time!) absolutely does not apply to me. I honor books too much to write one myself—it would be disrespectful. So don’t worry that what you imagined about me, even wished on me, might be salt on my wound: I have no wounds, and if there is one—it isn’t even open yet.

  It is only in connection with our relationship that I will, with great caution, put to use that word which is, yes, fatal to me as well: I hope I will, at the very least, learn how to be a true artistof this connection between us. I wouldn’t dare ask for more than that.

  Do you remember saying, not long ago, that in trying so hard to invent you I might not be able to find you? Well, I think you are starting to understand that in order to find you, I have to invent a little …

  Here, listen, this is how it was: the two of us, on that huge lawn, and everything around us was green, every shade of green was there. I am actually imagining the big lawn of Kibbutz Ramat Rakhel on the edge of Jerusalem, on the desert’s bank, do you know it? You are allowed to gothere and see. Invest some effort in me, why don’t you. Because I went there, yesterday, after getting your letter. I read it in front of the desert. I read it silently and aloud. I tried to hear your voice, its tune. I think you speak slowly—in your writing I can hear you lingering (a favorite word of yours!) on each and every word. There is something ripe and full about your speech. And I feel how it focuses me, as if it is carving something out of me—I wish I knew what it was. Sometimes I feel as if you know exactly—a lot better than I do—what you are aiming at there, when, for example, you say that you think I have this kind of fifth column in me and that, for some reason, I insist on being loyal to it, above all …

  Or what you mumbled at the end, when you were already half asleep; it wasn’t a very fatal mumble, but full of sweetness: look at how I’m writing to you, as if I’ve been used to chatting with you in my kitchen at night for twenty years.

  Can you already understand what I am creating you from?

  It is because of light little pats on the back like those that, yesterday, on the grass, in front of the desert, I gave myself up to the addiction of us. I actually saw us there, you and me. And how we slowly lost our concentration on what was written. A light breeze was blowing, and my newspaper rustled, and the pages of your book began to flip. I am talking about five in the afternoon, the sun still shone, and we both felt so fair in the light, nearly transparent. If one other person had walked by, the magic would have vanished, but it was just the two of us, and before we exchanged even one word, we were already entangled in the webs of our separate stories. You have your own story, and so do I, and it is amazing to feel how they are already rapidly weaving together. The way stories always do. Why, sometimes, in an ordinary moment on the street, you can feel your soul torn apart as it is stretched and pulled into the story of someone just passing by. Usually, the stories die instantly as well, having also been ripped apart, without those involved ever even knowing what they lost. A minor heartache remains, nothing more. Then quickly disappears. It lasts a couple of hours for me, though, sometimes, this kind of melancholy, as if I had undergone some kind of little spiritual abortion, the death of the story.

  (Are you with me? I felt I was losing you for a moment. Just at the height of our closeness, you shrank and withdrew. Perhaps I flooded over my banks once again? Or said something offensive?)

  Say: did you really put on the Zorbasoundtrack and dance the sirtaki in your living room? With me and Anthony Quinn? But why are you telling me only now? Why didn’t you give me that right after I told you about my dance in the forest?

  At least you said that a dead parpur fell on your page when you hid it from me. Go easy on me, go easy on me, open your white-knuckled fists just a little. It’s a shame you didn’t send any of those pictures of that clenched girl (you were probably the tallest girl, always standing in the third row of the photographs). It is even more a shame that I am not by your side when you wake up every morning, to unfreeze your fingers and stroke your knuckles. What are you holding so tightly in there?

  And what does it mean that you were “the good queen of the class” (is there an evil queen, too?).

  But enough heaviness, come, let’s have our date: suddenly, at exactly five o’clock, when we still were keeping our distance, a bizarre, terrifying noise sounded—try to imagine a rusty zipper suddenly being ripped open, running through the belly of the earth, across the entire lawn. And our glances flew right and left, frightened; and your eyes, big and brown and lovely, grasped hold of mine for a moment. And we pulled ourselves up straight, and stood, as if by the force of our gaze alone (Is that clear? Is this picture clear to you? I want you to see into my imagination, see it exactly!). I see you bending and stretching your long legs in an irresistible motion under your dress, your chiseled ankles, and you’re standing dizzy and loose like a gazelle, an uneasy gazelle, for just a moment—what really terrified you so when I wrote that we are both of us not alive? What’s hiding in this, Oh, Yair, where do I start?Just start. It will come by itself (you sighed a lot in the last few letters, did you notice?). Why, you are so alive to me, in the bounty that bursts from your full body, and generally, in your fullness. The fullness of you touching anything, the way you embroider me silently, string after string in your every living day, what are you talking about, you are so alive!

  And me. At the edge of the huge lawn, the would-be buck, but not very virile, no, not terribly endowed with horns, not very muscular, my thighs—just a clerky, narrow-chested, balding buck. This constant balding, how humiliating it is—and I too am looking, awestruck, at thesource of the noise, the destruction of the peace I had been savoring before I stole a glance at you. But are you at all interested in the continuation of the story now, after I have been pictured to you? Tell me the truth—if you are getting entangled in this kind of false romantic relationship, wouldn’t you prefer a real buck?

  All right, all right, I know I musn’t ask you questions of this kind. How you raged when I described myself as “not un-ugly”! You don’t give an inch in these things, do you? Not even as a joke: you don’t even know people to whose essence the word “ugly” applies? Really? Well, that could be. But you also refuse to accept such a thing as the regulation rules, the laws of men’s and women’s relationships … Tell me, how many years will pass before I succeed in opening your eyes?

  And that other matter, the one you mocked me for calling the Sanctity of the Bond—

  I had better shut up, hadn’t I?

  Come, look there, be with us—we were surrounded on all sides by this whistling whisper in the earth. We were both thinking of venom, the desecrated Garden. I don’t know if you know this feeling—something strange but also too familiar suddenly spreads through all living tissue in a blink—listen with me, listen well, whispers and whistles, encircling us like the excitement of obscene, ignorant gossip (srsrsrsrsrsrsr) … maybe this is why our hearts twitched in sudden fear, with guilt. Even your heart, Miriam, your pure heart; which no one in the world will ever scrutinize to discover what you do and with whom—admit it, admit how quickly the internal serpents bite, don’t they? They punish us for even the most heartfelt wishes, for sweet fantasies, and immediately I hear my father’s lips cluck, as when he told my mother how he caught the general deputy, his boss, kissing some woman soldier in his office—

  Enough, I am tired. I was deserted by the good spirit. See how hard it is for me to imagine a beginning. So man
y rocks and so much mud blocking the tunnel.

  (I will continue later.)

  Y.

  (Night)

  And suddenly, at that moment, the riddle within the earth was cracked. And a thousand jets of water took off from hidden sprinklers(well, it’s the best I can do), and the two of us screamed with a single shock, and we ran, who remembers where—just not, however, to the one logical place, not outside; what’s waiting for us there, anyway? And we smiled, and purposely made a mistake, we were attracted to and aimed at the wettest and most flooded spot, where all the jets of water became one, and we finally bumped into each other, surprised. And we held on to each other tightly, the poor refugees of a flood entwined, yelling much louder than was necessary—“We have to get out of here!” “At least give me your book so it won’t get wet!” “But we’re both in the same water!” and making a lot of noise together, but not actually moving anymore. Stopping slowly, and looking through the water that’s turning your lips a little blue, and shining in light flecks in your wonderful hair, brown and full and untamed, with a few thin silver strands (never dye! this is the last request of a man condemned to you: let it slowly turn silver!), and breathing too fast, and laughing at our stupidity, the way we were caught and got soaked like children, practically two children, and gargling the water filling our mouths. Our mouths are swimming with drunken words. See us in the splashes of water—we’re so shiny and clean, like two bottles, two bottles that survived with the messages still inside. Meanwhile, what do you notice about our outsides; for example, you are older than me, not by a lot. I think the gap in our ages bothers you a little, but I was never your student—I suddenly hear myself telling you that, and there’s no logic to it—only the urgent need to tell you immediately, in the water, that in front of almost every person, always, sometimes even with my son, I feel as if I am somehow the younger one, the one more lacking in experience, more milky, and you listen and immediately understand me, as if it is obvious that this is the first thing a man tells a woman when he meets her in water.