Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  Because summer broke open inside me as well, you see. It’s as if only now your magic spell of words allowed me, as well, to leave the dark andwindy cave we dug out together, with all our complexity and heaviness—“happy”—and as if you permitted me something, the summer broke open inside me—it’s already July, imagine that, and I am only now waking up to summer, with its life forces and the shining, its natural roughness and the excitement of wanting so much so desperately—everything you described (how is it that you are still afraid of going back to painting in color? A person who can write like that …). Look at me, me as well, touch me, I am suddenly so alive, burning and sending tendrils into the body of this summer, as if I myself were one of its “beating veins” you described—and I’m also focused on you today, like a laser beam—watch out! I’m not responsible for my actions today, don’t even know what’s happening to me—do you have any idea?

  How about this: perhaps I will completely stop working and living in the outside world, in their so-called existence, and only write, and write, and write to you. I will describe how you look in every state and what it does to me when I look at you in every state, and I will sap myself of my essences, pour them into you until I am completely drained. A hanged man ejaculates in his last moment. I read about it once, and it has excited me ever since, a last will and testament of the body and soul together; this is exactly the kind of conversation I want between us, because we will dieon each other in a few months—you refuse to even listen to me about this, the “guillotine” turning your guts—but, to me, it is the heart and soul of our relationship, maybe because what is happening between us would never happen during the complete life of an ordinary couple-we can have the nectar of Queen’s Honey and the blood of our rawest essence together at the same time—you are starting to feel it now, but I knew it from the beginning.

  I thought the story of the retarded girl would put you off—but you, as usual, come and touch me, without gloves. So what, then? You, in no way, would ever want to redeal your cards and mine, but rather the opposite? Is that what truly attracts you to me, the fact that I don’t have a full deck?

  Well, fine, good—but touch me only in writing, leave me written—and I hope we both can have the power to fight off the barbed temptations of reality a little longer. Sex, not religion, is the opiate of the masses; and when we meet—because eventually, we will surrender—I’m feeling a bit fragile today—the heat is melting my most firm resolve. I hopewe won’t—but perhaps in two or three weeks, if not tonight, we can—this predatory attack inflaming me here—It’s that skirt you bought. You slipped it on, and had a body, your body, that body I almost succeeded in forgetting was resurrected in a blink, your legs moved inside your skirt, pretty and fresh—don’t say, even as a joke, that “I forgot I even had legs”—and I remembered the curves of your ankles and finally grasped the secret conspiracy between the shape of a woman’s ankles and the back of her neck …

  It’s clear to you, isn’t it? We will eventually surrender. When the sad, thick, heavy sweetness, the nectar of autumn, falls in layers in our hearts—Yair has begun to poetize, the nectar of summer is quite active in me today as well. Oh well, how long can you continue turning come into ink alone—and it is only your black-framed glasses that keep me from writing exactly what is going on in my head at this moment, now—and at what precise times I do picture you, and how—dressed, undressed, in the orange skirt with the side slit, the orange T-shirt that clings and caresses you when you are standing up, lying down, wildly, sweetly, in my car, your thin ankles clasped like a necklace around my back—I am dying for such a miracle to happen, for you to pop up in front of me in the street by chance—

  Where were we?

  I have no idea how to get up from my desk in front of my secretary, a nice little Beit Ya’akov Orthodox School graduate. You are probably asking yourself, What the hell does he want from me? Why is he driving me and himself crazy in this way—I have no idea. I just want it so much right now that it hurts. On the other hand, I’m so convinced that we shouldn’t dip even one toe into reality—everything will melt and evaporate into a cliché—all the delicate, transparent webs from which we have woven ourselves, all this ephemeral beauty will be ground into flesh all of a sudden, and will be lost, one-two-three! Believe me. You can tell that I know whereof I speak—and I’m telling you, we will exist only in limbo, the space between us—even though, in your opinion, we have nothing to hide, not even from your loving husband. I can absolutely not understand that part. Why hurt him? Why the humiliation? He has already been betrayed and cheated in every possible way by everything we have together—without his knowledge, he has already been betrayed, robbed by the law of the preservation of joy in nature—I have to stop here again. Ashipment has arrived. Ah, all the times life has to pass through a coffee spout. I’ll continue this evening. I do actually want to continue to talk about this—

  July 10

  I cannot believe it. I am sitting here simply refusing to believe what you have done to me.

  What are you, a psychic? Do you have X-ray vision? What if that was the most wonderful letter I ever wrote to you? And aren’t you curious in the slightest? Have you no simple feminine curiosity? How could you withstand the temptation? (Or is it no temptation to you at all—me, that is?)

  I am trying to understand exactly what happened, how, exactly, your gears work: you received the morning letter, full of excitement over the summer and your new happiness, the one you read. But the letter I sent you later in the evening continuing the conversation—and it was, by the way, a tremendously funny letter, hilarious, even—you decided, for some reason, to return to me closed and sealed. Why? Because of what? The heat of the pages you felt through the envelope? The angle by which I wrote your name on the outside? And if I had sent you my soul, wrapped up in there, what then? Would you have sent that back as well?

  Your arrogance exasperates me. You’re terribly tough, have I ever told you that? Tough in a way that is unpleasant, even unfeminine! You know, I could tell from your first letters—but at that point your totality and the extreme seriousness with which you responded to everything I said and what was going on between us—I actually liked it. Then. And now it is as if the water level has sunk, revealing the rock beneath.

  And your inflexible clinging to principles! “Even a whisper from that place hurts me, pains me like betrayal, and I have to protect myself from it …” Betrayal, nothing less! One could think that we had signed some kind of mutual pact committing us to life and death, and not simply corresponded!

  Listen—what you’ve done is not so simple. And the more I think about it, the more I feel that it is you who have betrayed me. You, who amused herself for a few months with the harmless clown twitching near you; my letters were nothing more than a petit bourgeois turn-on for you, the secret flirtations of a decent housewife—but when it got too close, toohot, when you suddenly started to feel any emotion, a living, existing thump, you got scared and started screaming help! I am reading the little spermicidal note you attached to my sealed envelope, and simply cannot believe: now, after three months, it occurs to you to accuse me of always flirting, not with you, really, but with some “permanent temptation of dishonesty” that is in me. An “internal Don Juan complex”?! You, in general, use such anachro-puritan expressions I could die. I’m shocked you didn’t write “ LeDon duJuan”!

  And how! And with what confidence you allowed yourself to determine that even if I wanted to get rid of my ( automatic!) yielding to temptation, it probably wouldn’t let go of me, and that I take a constant mutated pleasure in mocking and making ugly everything truly precious and pure around me.

  Is it because of what I wrote toward the end of the first letter? It is, isn’t it? That remark about your husband, right? I imagine so. You clenched in front of me in that moment—I could feel myself stepping into your allergic regions. Fine. I’m sorry. Watch me—look, I’m apologizing! I’ll write a testimonial: your husband is not hum
iliated, not betrayed, robbed, or in any way hurt by the Law of the Preservation of Happiness in Nature. There it is, there you have it, signed over to you with the print of my criminal finger.

  And it’s true—what do I really know about him? What, in fact, do I know about the both of you and what you are to each other? And you’re right (in general, Miriam, you are completely in the right), because what do I know about relationshipsthat do not operate according to the normal laws of territorial battle and war over each millimeter of the other’s soul, to solely constantly surrender or be surrendered?

  And what do you know—about Pegasus and mermaids and the common unicorn?

  No, I have to hear from you: can you stand the pain of meeting the amateur Don Juan that I am? Is he not one of the “shuffled cards”? Is he not in need of “compassion” or “mending”? Sometimes I think, Perhaps you should have met only him. Perhaps he was the only one who could make you tremble with laughter and pleasure and breach the hardware of your principality.

  Perhaps it is this you find so hard to accept. That I truly, innocently,in every line I wrote you, never offered you a clichéd love affair, or a—excuse me—fuck! Maybe this was the unforgivable insult that lit the spark and suddenly aroused that exemplary girl, the good queen of the class, who never let herself run wild and burn through all her polite fire?

  She is the one who is so very offended right now, because again (as it was then, maybe?), the “boy” shows that he’s interested in her only as a “friend,” to talk with and to consult with, or to whisper in her ears his love and passion—none of which is for her! For someone else—for the shameless, lemony beauty of the summer? For the evil queen?

  What do you know, Miriam, perhaps the present boy, twenty-something years later, began to suspect a kind of hollow sound in that proud statement of yours, that you do not, do not get scared by true passion in your feelings and relationships. That, on the contrary, on the contrary, this passion is the flesh of your heart, the heart of your life …

  Whom are you cheating?

  July 11-12

  This might be my last letter. Read it carefully: it’s half past three, the middle of the night, and I am in my car, and everything has already happened—don’t ask me what I did. If this doesn’t help melt your hard heart, I’ll simply throw my hands up in the air and renounce you. And myself as well. I know, it’s a shame. SHAME!!!

  Could you hear that? You have no idea how close I am to you now. I mean, close. Outside your house. I’ve spent this entire night no more than twenty meters from you, approaching and retreating, and I was like the tiger who prowled around you in wide circles in your dream, but I am a tiger losing his mind from the despair of notdevouring you in the one way he is used to.

  Miriam—I ran around you tonight.

  That’s it. Seven times around your house, on that little road surrounding your group of houses.

  Your success in releasing me from my own mind in this way (you will soon hear how).

  Cigarette. My head is like a hive. The car stinks. Smoke sticks in arabesques to the windshield. Just thinking that I am so close to yourkitchen, from which you write to me, so close to the fluorescent light that trembles a little, the wooden owl on which you write all your “to-dos” and immediately forget. Even to your gecko, Bruria, who comes down to do her work exactly at midnight.

  I am here. The whole world is sleeping—shh, rapists snuggling, murderers cuddling in their beds, and only me in the whole night, around you. .I’m scared to tell you what else I did. Just tell me, are you starting to feel something? Are you turning and tossing in your sleep, incapable of understanding what is flowing up within you? It’s me—my madness is starting to affect you, foaming in waves around you; I practiced a pure religious ritual around you tonight, I circled Jericho seven times tonight, how did you not hear me gasping for breath? I hadn’t run like that in years, not since military training; my flaccid muscles, my body, which understood long ago that great pleasures wouldn’t come to it from our association. But I wanted it to suffer—hear me, I ran around you, I saw your house from all four sides, including the rusty gate and the bicycle that is leaning on the big tree in the yard and the bougainvillea shade. Your house is very small, it looks like a cabin covered in stone, a little run-down. The garden is almost bare, Miriam, there is one window broken in the back. Everything is very different from how you described it, and suddenly I think—what was it you said about your little family most likely not expanding?

  And at one point a light turned on in your house, and my soul almost left my body in fear and hope that it was you, how I prayed it was you standing in the window, looking out into the darkness—Who is running like this—my God, I can’t believe it, I must be dreaming—and you would suddenly understand, in one look, you would see everything I am, Don Juan, a stranger, a man walking a tightrope, and that confused soul writing to you; you would look into me and say, Come, Froggy, come, all of you.

  Luckily for me, you didn’t come out. You would have fainted if you had seen me this way, in my special condition. You would have thought it was just a pervert, a normal poor old pervert, surrenderingly paying his taxes to the bureaucratic gears of his glands. You would call the police, or even worse, your husband, who would beat the hell out of me, a man like that could eat three of me for breakfast.

  You probably can’t read my handwriting, it is even more disturbed than usual. By the way, I’ve asked my mother and you were right, they reallydid force me to write with my right hand instead of the left. How did you know? How do you know me better than I know myself? Look at me. Sitting in the car and shivering, and knowing that I have never done anything so complete for anyone. I don’t know what else to do, to make you believe that what I offered you I have never offered anyone else, no one. And I knew, from the first moment, that I didn’t want a little story on the side with you, I wanted a story. Perhaps you know what it is in scientific literature—the name for such a clear, burning will, the strange perversion, this need a person has to tell his story to one particular person and no one else. This is so strong in me, toward you. A section of my brain came back to life because of you—at the back, on the left side, behind my ear—it stretches and opens when I think: Miriam. And it is the same location of the reveries and dreams I had as a child. I spent most of my childhood there, underneath the ice. It has been years since I’ve been able to go there—I had even forgotten the way. What did you call it? The “memory-shredders.” Exactly. But I could remember just one thing—no stranger was ever allowed inside there, under no circumstances could anyone know I had such a section in my brain—don’t forget, I am a person born to parents—who, until the age of eighteen, lived in a family, family as principle and family as death camp—

  I’m scattered, this isn’t what I wanted.

  I am cold. Even though it is July—cold. When I ran, my whole skin crystallized with frost from the cold. And it was, by the way, completely different from the dance in the Mt. Carmel forest. There, everything was light and heat—and here, I was diving into a deep darkness, my skin couldn’t hold everything raging inside me. Tonight, I felt myself crossing my borders. I know what’s going through your mind right now: the watershed of darkness. True. A language already is being born, it’s good, but look how my emotions toward you make me fall apart, and that is exactly the opposite of what I have with Maya, so why should I have it at all?

  Especially in the last three laps, when I suddenly understood what I needed to do and why I really came here tonight. Don’t think I didn’t have a moment of hesitation—but it lasted no more than a moment, and I said, To hell with it, what are you worth if you won’t do this for her? You’ve decided to give everything that was created in you because of herto her, and I tried to argue with it, save myself—What if someone passes by and sees me like this, and calls the police, who arrest me? Then I laughed at myself—I’ve been a prisoner all my life, so why be afraid now? And so I sat in the car and took my clothes off, one piece after the
other, and the shoes and the socks, and then I was already a different person. It happened to me in the space of a few seconds, such a short border to cross—one moment you’re dressed, and the next: flesh, animal, less than an animal, as if the skin had peeled off you with your clothes, the epidermis, and the entire pile of skin underneath it. I left the car and felt how, all of a sudden, the entire night was attracted to me, came to me from the far ends of the valley, like to new prey, a new kind of prey you don’t even have to skin. It practically surrounded me, the night, clinging to me with violence, to every part of my body—I have never felt anything like this in my life, this abnormal fear, mixed with pleasure, and a little embarrassment, because it invaded each and every hole, this bastard night. It bit and chewed up pieces of me and went away with them, into the dark. And suddenly three dogs appeared, huge, as if from some Scottish folk song. I thought I was having a stroke. The kind of dogs used to lead the blind, I think; they stood and barked at me, angry, scolding barks. They shamed me, can you imagine it, I was ashamed in front of them, not as a person—as an animal; I was ashamed in front of them, like an inferior dog. Can you understand that? Could you tell anyone this? That when I started running, they were suddenly silent; even worse, they began to retreat, move away from me whimpering quietly, and disappeared into the darkness, and I was left completely alone. Only me, with myself. And it wasn’t very pleasant company. I was probably the most alone I have ever been. Do you know what I did then? I smelled my armpit, and found the smell of writing you, and I thought I was probably making the right mistake for myself for once. And I started running.