Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  Apparently you have to revive the heart of those sleeping and awaken them, but with caution, like waking a sleepwalker. And because of this, as soon as such a person wakes, you must “dress him with the face taken away from him whilst he slept.” And how do you think Rabbi Nakhman recommends you go about it?—“ … as you would heal the blind. You must close him in so that he will not suddenly see the light, and you should reduce the light for him, so what he suddenly sees will not harm him. Also, for the one who has been asleep and in the dark for a long time, when you wish to show him his face and awaken him, you must dress his face with tales …”

  - Do you know what time it is? And who has to get up tomorrow at half-past six? And who will sleep away his day tomorrow with twelve straight hours of petty works?

  Yair

  Did you see that? As I was sealing up this letter, a shooting star flew across the skies! So quickly, quickly, what should I ask for (I don’t have a wish ready—have you any ideas)?

  What you wrote once—“Let us help each other be whatever and whoever we truly are.”

  August 13

  Oops—these days I’ve been so busy and tense and, mainly, tired—I almost forgot about our date! I remembered it just a minute ago (it’s today, right? You said Wednesday at half past four). So forgive me the unsatisfying conditions; not exactly in line with your plans, but at least I’m here on time. I mean, the second I remembered, I stopped the car with a loud screech on the side of the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (yes, in that very spot where you can see the whole forest, with all its possible shades of green on the right). Cars are flying by me, rocking the car, so my writing is a bit hiccupy. And instead of coffee and some rich cake, I’lldrink warm Coke out of the can with crumbs of Ido’s Bamba snack that I will gather from the backseat. What can you do? I am one of those horrible people, you know, who, in spite of his inconsiderateness, still listens to the tape of Verdi’s Requiemsent to him by his soul mate in his car’s fucked-up player (and by the way, thank you!).

  Come, let’s steal a few moments together. You made an interesting remark at the end of your last letter … I mean, your “now I will put my woman costume on for a little while”—the quick course in makeup you surprised me with before going to the lecture at the Cultural Center. Flip-flopping between the rose-pink lipstick and the more daring brown (did it match the angora?). Actually, I never imagined you wearing makeup. Somehow I thought you—never mind. I enjoyed it. It was a bit like with your clothes. You have an ironic, special grace when you squeeze into other women’s words. Strange women. Strange words—The soft eyeshadow and lip liner, and I’m lying on the bed behind you, watching you, with my hands crossed behind my head in the position of the ultimate self-satisfied chauvinist (yes, yes, I read you: that macho guy, that geverwho is so sure his wife undresses only for him).

  My eyes get a little shifty when I say the word gever;since you told me, I am constantly checking (but until you told me, I never noticed that I always preferred to use ishwhen I say “man”). But why do I feel, more and more, that the word “woman” is not so simple for you either, in your internal dictionary?

  And why do I ask? Because I know exactly what kind of motheryou are. I told you, your motherhood rises from you like hot steam each time you mention Yokhai. Or any other child. Yet those times when, here and there, you have said—and not a few times, by the way—“the woman that I am”—almost always, my bat ears pick up some light echo, a tiny, hollow space between you and the word—

  Enough. This is getting too heavy for a daytime rendezvous. Do you know what I really like best about your letters? The little things. More than anything. The coffee stain you decided to leave on the paper, for example. You wrote that it was a “stain of existence.” And it was through this stain that I was privileged to learn how you drink coffee—how you always start each cup when it is too hot. And then there are a few brief moments when it is exactly right—and then it cools down, bit by bit, but you stick with the cup you poured all the way to the end …

  Please, drink, drink.

  To think that, at this very moment, you too are sitting somewhere, present with me. Where did you choose to sit? In which café did you think I would be?

  Or the smell of your pages, I haven’t told you about that yet—it’s always the same, a thin scent of mint. Or the photograph you sent me of Anna, taken from behind. With her huge straw hat. And how, with these odd yearnings (toward a woman I don’t know!), I keep turning the photograph around, over and over, looking for her intriguing, birdlike face, the laughing sparkle in her eyes, and now and then kissing her gently on her split lip.

  You see, you truly succeeded (in bringing me into your reality without piercing our hallucination). But the moment it was the hardest to keep myself from flying to be by your side was when you asked me, What, you’ll never eat my soup?

  August 14

  Well, what do you know!

  What shocks me most is that I myself never noticed it. I thought it was only the chalk traces, the remains of an English children’s game, hopscotch left on the sidewalk …

  I don’t know why it makes me so blue—I feel some kind of muddy sorrow for myself, for my shortsightedness. I mean, I was there, wasn’t I? I was there, and you weren’t. And again, my recurring realization that I always miss the point. Right now, as I am writing this, your question—the one you asked after the master’s black monkey—returns to me: Why is it that I allow myself to be satisfied with crumbs from under the table of a great feast (“saving for yourself only the role of the handyman to a great love. That’s all you allow yourself”)—so, there it is. This too is now wrapped around my soul.

  And it was a glance—you just looked, the way you look at everything. You looked and saw it at once. You didn’t tell me whether you had already noticed it in the original photograph, or only after enlarging it—meaning, I wonder if that was why you decided to get the photograph enlarged. Sometimes, after a letter of yours, I tell myself that from this moment on, I will begin to live differently. I will slow down, read more slowly, listen more carefully to people’s words, so I will be able to rememberthem a year later. To linger. I don’t have to tell you how long I hold on to that resolve.

  Now I have to tell myself the story all over again, don’t I? To write about how I collapsed there, by the wall, and I couldn’t move—the man of the world, boom boom was turned to stone—not only because of the crow, but because of that chalk line that today, only today, goddamnit, five years late, I deciphered as a police sketch of a small, human figure. A child, probably. (It is a child, isn’t it? Don’t answer—it frightens me too much to know.) One hand lifted up, twisted in resistance—and the other rests by his side, already peaceful.

  Oh well. My internal struggle over my criminal neglect will be performed separately, and alone. It certainly justifies a committee investigation. But now I wish I could give you something—a gift equal in value, in return for this discovery. You complain that I am a cheap suitor who doesn’t give gifts. I will not give you little gifts. I’m sorry, you know that if I could, I would give you plenty. At least once a day I have to resist the urge to buy you something. And still, ask me for something. What can I do for you? What can I give you?

  August 16

  May I interrupt?

  I want to talk.

  I went out earlier (it’s almost three in the morning and soon I will begin to glide silently over the night skies and hunt little rodents). I stood and smoked. He wasn’t there anymore. Perhaps he despaired of me. I did try to produce him, but the only thing running through me were words. He crumbled into the words I used to write about him; how did you put it—the cruel choice between keeping muteness alive and vital and verbalizing it?

  I’m afraid it is no longer my choice.

  I thought about what would have happened if, in some fantastical way, he could have known Ido. And I also wondered whether Ido would have liked to be friends with the child I was. To my surprise, I answered that yes
, they’d get along quite well together, that perhaps there aren’t another two as well suited as Ido and the self I used to be (so why are he and I now so poorly matched?).

  Hey, can we talk about the kids? Shall we start a special advice section for matters of parenting and education, Don Juan’s Column on Children?

  Before we do, please know that I am the best father in the world. Really. Everyone who knows me thinks so. And until this past year, when my business started flourishing, I would spend a lot of time with Ido, every free moment I had. And I still take care of him with motherly dedication today. I feed him and dress him, breast-feed, and even at this very moment I feel my eyes tear up when I think about his glowing beauty. And I am endlessly destroying him. Oh, Miriam, what are we going to do? The delicate, exposed line of his chin, the way he remains lonely in every group of children, his fragile, loose smile? I molded him with my own bare cruelties—oh, really, what are we going to do? I used to know his every thought. My private language began with him; of course, we were using theirwords, but they were ours because I pulled them out of the core of my soul. I think almost every new word he learned until he was three was from me. I used to say, “There’s a bird, say it after me, ‘Bird,’” and he would look up at me, charmed, and say “Bird.” And only after he had repeated that word, spoken it aloud, was it truly his. As if I had chewed up the word and put it in his mouth. That was our ritual for every new word. There were even a few sounds I wanted him to pronounce in a certain way: a full sh,not a little whistly, like mine. Or a manly, throaty r (like Moshe Dayan’s—do you remember it?) … Don’t laugh at my nonsense—it was because of it that I felt as if I was serving him the first Lego bricks with which to build his world; that I was leaking myself into him, branding more of him with my identity, existing in him as I probably don’t exist anywhere else in the world. Do you understand? I suddenly sent out roots.

  What haven’t I done to exist in him? I used to stand by his bed while he slept, passing my hands over his face, finger-painting his dreams. I would whisper happy words into his ears, so they would penetrate into his dream-laboratory and, if needed, help to change his dream for the better. There was nothing I would not have done to make him laugh. And how we would laugh together …

  But that’s over. Finished. Go complain to the rank forces of life. I’m not complaining: it’s the way of nature, yes sir! But lately, he has been clotting over, closing off to me; and if I ever sent roots into him, they were torn out of me like the stinger of a male wasp. Now the wholeworld comes and pours words and names into him, and he has thoughts that I do not know about—and it is 100 percent fine by me, that’s the way of the world—and I should be happy that everything is normal, as it should be—but I no longer have ants in the palm of my hand, dancing out pictures over his face at night. I am, again, left with only myself. Do you mind my telling you about this? You wanted reality, didn’t you? Please accept reality then, tossed with chunks of specifics: he now fights with me—over everything. You would think that fighting me is his raison d’être these days—and what he fights about! What to wear in the morning, and what to eat at noon, and when to go to bed, and what TV show to watch—anything I offer him he rejects, and then insists on the opposite. And you have no idea how stubborn he is (considering that, until about six years ago, he was being stored in two separate locations)!

  And the more stubborn he is, the more decisive I get—it drives me absolutely crazy that such a little boy suddenly decided he knows better than his parents. So I barrage him with all my strength, with yells and insults. I’m like an insane rhinoceros; I attack this tiny child to force his surrender, run him over, squash him, humiliate him—it’s terrible, no? So I explain to myself, with iron-clad logic, that during the exercises of humiliating him and squashing his spirit, I am actually educating him to become more familiar with the most basic concepts of leading a proper life, blah blah blah. So the essence of the education is that I pass on to him the knowledge that you eventually must surrender to strength and stupidity, power and narrow-mindedness. Because this is the way of the world, and there is no other. And it is terribly important for him to learn this at a young age, so the world won’t break him when the stakes are much more painful.

  (How did you put it?—“Those are just your venom glands talking.”)

  Because what I want to teach him is exactly the opposite—I want him to fly high, spread his wings above me, and piss on the fears and the shame—and be himself and do exactly what his heart tells him to do. But this fucked-up hand has got me by the throat—my mother’s hand, my father’s fist, the long military arm of my family. I cannot believe what comes out of my own mouth during our fights. Things that, as a child, Iswore I would never repeat—and I still can’t hold them back, citing the passages of heritage with a frozen tongue—I could smash my own face in—why am I fighting my own child? Tell me, why can’t I let one child in this crappy dynasty grow up as he is, as I was, as I almost succeeded in being—fragile and delicate and daydreaming and without skin? Full of such a spectrum of ways of being? Why did I yell at him the time he was sobbing because we threw the old armchair out? Why do I make him eat meat when meat disgusts him? Why does it make me explode when he refuses to assume his proper place in the food chain, to accept the law of convention that “chicken” is not “dead bird”?! And I shove it into his tiny mouth with my fingers, the way my father did to me, every day!

  Say “Bird”: “Bird”!

  Maybe I’ll continue this tomorrow.

  No. Tomorrow the rain will come upon us and erase everything, and it’s flowing out of me in a flood now. I spare you most of the things that happen to me in my everyday life. My shell somehow functions—that’s the exact word for it—but the child watching me in my recent, sleepless nights had an aura of warmth—it shivered in a haze around his thin skin. It horrifies me to now understand what he was really like—how he never had a chance (like you said—a little china cup in an elephant’s cage). How vapors still steam off him from the terrible need to nestle close with another person, to really combine souls without hiding anything. He wants to give of himself—pour everything flickering there in the darkness of his imagination—not to let any parpurian emotion finish off his life over there, in the mass grave of the unknown idea. And you have no idea how many misunderstandings, how much rage and destruction of the good order these tendencies cause—such perversions the constitution of the tribe—

  His first years—how wonderful they were (I’m talking about Ido now). I gave him all of myself—and the more I gave, the more and more filled I was, a river of inventions and stories and the joy of living. I used to wake up at night and feel my heart well up with the warmth of loving him, and think, I had forgotten how much love existed under our skins. I had forgotten that specific feeling of a soul rising to the banks of the body, licking the landscape from the inside. Because I was a child full oflove—but see how that thought never crossed my mind with such simplicity. I never knew how to say that to myself, in that way, round, like a gift. I always thought of myself as a very hard child, a complicated, bad child, and—as they often explained to me, with a deep sigh, determining that sorrowful fact you have to somehow live through: I was a child who wasn’t quite—normal. Certainly not the one they had been praying for. A child forced to pity his parents every day, for their being obligated to raise such a strange creature who so shamed them—

  Enough.

  Listen, this letter brings me to—I mean, I really didn’t think this is where it would end up. I wanted to write to you about you, to guess you as you guessed me. To guess you as nothing less than a woman—not as a little girl (this is starting to look like a date between two pedophiles). And I, apparently, can’t do it yet. I can’t!

  August 17

  Just reporting that I fulfilled my end of the bargain this morning (regarding the return of the chalk line around the crow I promised you). And I read the story you asked me to read, and in a beautiful place, just as you wan
ted me to.

  I took the story to the dam. I found the old car seat, your usual chair—I identified a crab-apple tree (or is it a cane apple?). I called it by its name and we embraced emotionally. I crushed some sage, and a rotemor a lotemor a totem.

  I hope you are not upset at my little invasion into your territory. You have “taken me” here so many times to read my letters aloud, having soul-deep conversations with the dam and the empty dell—and after you decided to “officially” introduce me to your kin here, I figured it was about time to come and stand before them, pay my respects like a gever,like an ish.

  This place is beautiful in the winter—like a Norwegian fjord in the middle of the Jerusalem mountains? Really? It’s a little hard to try and picture that now; the huge dam cuts the valley in two, like a scar of surgery across a belly. The dam and the valley look pretty fake right now, in this dryness (but perhaps, as you said, they come true in the winter).

  Listen, I read the whole story, I even read it aloud. No wonder youhaven’t gone back to read it in years—the only comfort I can offer you is that it hurt me, too, but today it hurt in an entirely new way.

  You asked me to write it exactly, to report it without mercy. So.

  Do you remember the moment when Gregor’s mother sees him for the first time (after he has become an insect)? She looks at him, and he at her; she yells, “Help, for God’s sake, help!” and backs away, until she bumps into a table and sits on it (confused, half conscious).

  Before, when I read this story—the hardest part, in my opinion, was Gregor’s drawn-out, long, tortured death. But this morning, when I got to her repulsion, and “‘Mother, Mother,’ said Gregor in a low voice, and he looked up at her …”