Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  I also recognized your feeling that you are betraying her by talking to me about her; oy, I know, oy, Miriam, oy, the oy-ness of life. You always ask the hardest questions, and you’ve already seen that I have no answer except to sit and mourn together. And to bring up that question with you again—why does it have to happen this way, that you probably never learn to mine out the ore that you need most from your own insides?

  And how are you so good at giving what you never got?

  I have to leave soon (a parents’ meeting for the kindergarten class!), but there is so much more to say. You’re probably right that a meeting “in the middle of the road,” like the one I offered, would no longer be satisfying. That a true meeting between us can happen only if both of us walk the whole way to the other. I wish I could say that with the same certainty as you; I want to, more than I’ve ever wanted anything—but I don’t think I have ever walked such a long path.

  Slowly, all right?

  I’m reading your letter, thinking how simple and banal my story is compared to yours (though perhaps I tell it a bit more dramatically …); and afterward, I see that in the kernel of it, that bitter, crappy kernel—they are still very much alike. Then I think how many tens or maybe hundreds of times I have sold my story to impress someone (usually a woman). My Gloomy History. My Tapes. In recent years I’ve even stopped feeling nauseated when I do it. The one thing I haven’t stopped feeling, though, is that I tell it in order to escape, in the same way a lizard abandons its tail, to keep myself from being caught. And I want to giveyou my soul, because this is our pact: a soul for a soul. Perhaps, someday, when I finally grow up, I’ll be able to give you the gift you keep hoping to receive from me. And I will dress your face with that story.

  August 26

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You’re right, and I have nothing to say in my defense. Crazy days. Working and running around from morning to night. I hardly find the time to eat. I remember us, and I am with us (don’t worry), and I will write a real letter soon. Actually, I don’t really exist right now—hold up the bridge on your side (you’re probably more capable of it than I am anyway), and just let me remind you, even in the great moments of my modesty, I remained egocentric. I’m referring of course to that fantasy of yours, describing how we met on the street, you and I and your mother, that night I was returning home from the movies, remember?

  Y.

  By the way, regarding your question at the end, written in large letters (and why does this question occur to you now?)—there are a few answers.

  First (to the public): I started with it for no real reason, but because it was convenient during my military reserve service one winter, and it has stayed ever since.

  Second (should be printed in the Hedha-Khinhukh Teacher’s Magazine): Look, Miriam, of course I understand, lo - gi-cal-ly, what you were getting at in your excited little speech full of good intentions. And I wish I could reconcile with myself and look at myself with a favorable eye. Really, why not? Why, I too have at least “one person on the outside” who looks upon me with loving eyes, just like you, she even looks at me through rose-tinted glasses. She has been trying for years, with all her strength, and with all the love in her eyes, and still can’t do it. It’s a fact: she cannot make me shut those damning eyes in myself and convince me to see what she (probably) sees in me.

  Third (just for you): You do understand, don’t you? Because you were the child and the teenager who used to “switch uglinesses” in herself, moving them from the tip of her nose all the way down to her thighs …and you also wrote about the kind of physical discomfort that almost “seeps out of you,” so that you think everyone can see it. I’m familiar with that, too. And the feeling that some stainis hiding inside you, right? That’s my private name for it; and it has a full range of motion, this little stain, which is mine and not mine—it was implanted in me, but my body took to it admirably well. Where it chooses to be in any particular moment is exactly the same location as the encounter I once wrote to you about—when my body and soul meet in an internal whisper of a password …

  And isn’t it true that, in that particular moment, the entire rest of your body ceases to exist? All your nerves are stretching to that place of encounter, all your blood rushes to that location (what you described, how, as a girl, you felt so tall that every time you walked into a room full of people, you immediately tried to fall)?

  So, this is another answer to your question (asked in a slightly disagreeable nasal tone) “Why the beard all of a sudden?”

  Y.

  September 1

  Do you realize yet what you’ve done!

  Has she called you yet?

  But how could such a thing happen to you? Is it the pressure of the beginning of the school year, or what?

  I’m scared just to ask you what was written in the letter that was meant for me (has she received it yet … ?).

  On the one hand, you know, it’s all my worst fears coming true. On the other hand, it is almost amusing, the thought that if you are going to travel back a hundred years and have a love affair in letters, you have to expect a nineteenth-century mistake like this to happen.

  And from another way of looking at it, yes, from a third side … it brings me pleasure, for some reason—as if we now exist in an “objective” place. There is one witness from the outside—a living witness, existing, complete. Real. For what we are.

  I’m dying to know what she said—how did she react? She can keep a secret, can’t she? I know, I know—you can trust Anna, I know.

  But why didn’t you tell me she had gone away? Only the other day you quoted an entire conversation you had with Anna about the crazylove affair of those two (Vita Sackville-West and Violet?), and you said you had read her complete passages from the book. And I even remember what Anna said, that she has been looking for the power of such a crazy love all her life—and she spoke about the courage of being honest about the pain of matters involving emotion.

  But you didn’t even hint during the letter that the whole discussion was happening over a transatlantic connection—and it sounded so close, as if you were in the same room and could touch! Where exactly is she flying to in the world, and for how long? The way you miss her—you would think she’s been gone for years, just like that; does a woman go alone on a long journey across the world—and with a small child?

  The shock of the first moment—that suddenly you address me as a woman, inquiring as to how I’ve been feeling and if I’m terribly lonely, and if I miss you as much as you miss me …

  I felt such a strange shiver when you spoke to me this way—as if you had found a forbidden, hidden string and plucked it.

  I was, of course, smiling to myself over the differences between what you tell me (about Yokhai, for instance) and what you tell her. For example, you would never write to me about how much he weighs, and his height, and how many pairs of shoes you bought him for the winter.

  And you have never sent me a photo of him (may I keep it?).

  I understand Anna is very close to Amos as well. Apparently they are soul mates. From your letter, one would think that for a moment both of you know him with the exact same closeness and intimacy—I see the two of you almost clinging to him at the same time. (Did you notice?) Read the draft—I think you’ll find it interesting.

  It’s strange to legitimately peek this way into your other intimacies, formerly unreal to me. It is also a pleasure to eavesdrop on the private humor the two of you share. I only knew it as your humor before—thin and a bit sad—and it suddenly made sense—you have a partner. You can feel how it began to spring up between you from childhood, and grow, and become more and more intricate. Big Miriam and tiny Anna … And in general, you two are a huge sound box together (you’re probably not conscious of it). For example, you visited her parents this week, and her father was playing the piano, and Yokhai suddenly burst out crying—and I remembered how you cried at the Bronfman concert years ago, sitting next to Anna—and I s
uddenly read that when Anna gave birth to her son, Amos played her that Rachmaninoff concerto over earphones, andthen everybody there cried—I couldn’t understand why—the doctors and the midwife and the baby, and you and Amos as well, all that crying and laughter and music flowing for all of you together.

  Tell me, am I jealous?

  (Because it occurred to me that this is actually the first love letter I have ever received from you.)

  Yair

  September 3

  About Emma Kirkby and your description of what her voice evokes in you, a “braiding together” of the most profound sadness and joy, a rising fullness, that “reassuring heartbreak” you mentioned.

  When I heard how you speak to Anna—I mean, when I could isolate that thing in your written voice, I thought—

  Sometimes, when I hear your voice, in words, I feel a kind of whimper rising up in me, making its way through me—an internal voice heretofore unfamiliar to me: until you, I didn’t know it.

  Reassuring heartbreak? I don’t know. In my opinion, the voice takes me apart. It’s an unhappy voice, like slightly hysterical sobbing, like the whimper of a dog that hears a flute and goes mad. It stretches out from within me, against my will (the way the eye is drawn to a disaster); it nags and burdens me until sometimes I rage at you. When you wrote to the boy I was, for instance.

  Add this, too, to the “tuning of the instruments.”

  September 8

  No, I don’t know how I feel right now. And I’m irritated by the pitying, concerned (self-righteous) tone you assumed after dealing such a blow. A similar feeling to the one I experienced after you took your house away—and with one wave erased everything you had ever given to me with it as well. But of course, there is no comparison.

  It’s hard for me even to write to you right now. I don’t understand you, Miriam, and at this moment I don’t even want to understand you. Tell me how you can, without warning, punch me in the stomach this way?

  It’s the first time since we’ve started this correspondence that I’m almost appalled by you. Not from what you told me—what you told meseems like a bad dream to me. I might not write to you for a few days. I need some time.

  Please don’t write to me either.

  September 9

  I can’t be with it by myself.

  Once, in the army, during a guard shift—I was sneaking a read, all the while terrified that I would be caught with To the Lighthouse—and I remember how, contrary to all my rules of caution, I yelled as if I had just been burned. From the pain, of course, but mainly—I had just started the second part of the book—because of my rage at Virginia Woolf for, with a snap of her fingers, and in parentheses, letting me know that the wonderful Mrs. Ramsay, the love of my soul, had “died rather suddenly the night before.”

  That was nothing compared to what I felt with your letter in my hand. I was lucky to be alone in my car, in a parking lot, when I read it.

  What do you expect me to say? That you’ve amazed me again? That I was furious with you because you just don’t do that in matters such as this? I don’t know. Because, on the other hand, as the hours passed, I could also see that you stood by our crazy agreement far more loyally than I did—through all these months you were telling me your dreams and believing in them with all your heart, you were livingthem with passion and dedication and devotion, far beyond what I thought was possible or allowed. Far more than what I ever dared, in spite of all of my water-sprinkler games.

  But it hurts. It hurts like a fist in the stomach. And it doesn’t stop hurting. And every time I reread that letter that was supposedly “switched”—

  What more will you tell me in this way of yours?

  September 10

  I can’t stop thinking about how you continue to speak to her. Soul conversations and little daily chats. You quoted her to me in the first letter you wrote—and you took her on almost every trip of yours. She has been dead for ten years, and you still resurrect her, each and every day.

  How many years did you have together? I mean, ever since she approached you in Lushka Kindergarten and swore that you two would be friends forever, until her forever ended. Twenty? Twenty-five?

  And what about the child—was it born? Did he, at least, come out alive from the birth? (Is there a father in the story?)

  I don’t even quite understand my reaction, the depth of my shock—because I never knew her in life, only in your stories. A certain sequence of words. A tiny woman, witty and funny, and brave, who wore her heart on her sleeve (and a huge straw hat, and had a harelip, and was all bright flames of fire).

  You pictured her as a bird almost every time you wrote of her.

  I can now grasp how lonely you are. Yes, even with all those friends of yours, and the group of men you keep around you, and your girlfriends from the village and from work. And Amos. But the kind of friendship you had with Anna, this twinness, is something you receive perhaps once in a lifetime.

  It would be stupid to comfort you now; frankly, I feel as if I am the one in need of comforting, because I found out about it only yesterday. I haven’t felt this way in years—as if a very close friend of mine had died. I’m holding you tightly to me.

  Yair

  September 10-11

  Maybe I don’t understand you at all. Maybe you’re completely different than I thought. Because I am, after all, only peeking at you through cracks. Composing stories that could be complete fantasies. (What isn’t imaginary? What my body is telling you right now.)

  And that feeling as well, that everything you tell me about yourself—even what might seem to me, in the first look, like a complete contradiction in your personality; even what strikes me with a cruelty that doesn’t become you—I already know that when I look back on it, I will see how true and loyal it is to who you are, and how, in your depths, it ties together and becomes a law.

  Is this how I seem to you? (I think not.)

  Don’t go away. I need you with me now. There is so much more to talk about. We’ve only just started, each letter makes me realize how much we’ve only just started; I think even if we spoke for thirty years, Iwould always feel we had only just started. By the way, I was surprised when you invited me to come to the Ta’mon Café on Thursday nights to watch Amos play chess. I will not go, of course. I will be satisfied with your description. Sometimes I see someone who looks like him on the street, not young and not old, not tall and not short, with a little potbelly and a neat little beard, with gray hair, messy and wild under a beret.

  But I can never be sure: either he is not wearing the gray jacket with the elbow patches (in the summer, too?) or he doesn’t have the cap or he doesn’t have those unmistakable eyes—the bluest, clearest eyes you have ever seen in an adult.

  You write about him so beautifully, with warmth and softness, and with love; but I also feel a thin sadness spreading over your words. How can it be so easy for you to tell me that I would undoubtedly find you two quite an odd couple, that even the people closest to you don’t always understand what you are doing together? And it actually makes you happy that only the two of you know.

  But my heart felt the most pinched when you wrote me that when he made his living singing folk songs in Scotland thirty years ago—those must have been his happiest days. If Maya’s happiest years weren’t with me, I would feel a terrible loss. Truly defeated.

  But actually, Maya is not really very happy right now. She has been this way for a few months. She says it might be her work—because how sunny can your mood be when you’re researching the human immune system—but we both know it isn’t just that. She’s sad—she can’t concentrate—she’s floating in a bubble of depression. And I can’t help her right now, because I don’t understand myself. Wait for me a little longer, Maya.

  I just had a flash while I was—

  I’m eight years old, taking the morning bus to school. They are interviewing Arthur Rubinstein on the radio (it was the first time I heard his name). It was his birthday, and the i
nterviewer was asking him how he saw his life. And he answered, “I am the happiest man I have ever known.” I remember looking around me in amazement, almost panicked: I’m sure you know what people on the 7 a.m. bus look like—and he dared use that word, in that way, so freely …

  It was sometime around New Year’s—every New Year’s they would announce how many people were now in Israel—and I remember thinking so passionately that out of three million, there must be at least onehappy person—and I want to be that person! (And a week later, I was lying in my parents’ garage with a belt around my heart …)

  I just reread To the Lighthouseagain on a confused impulse, so I could mix the sadnesses together. Perhaps to be comforted a little. It’s not comforting. It’s the opposite of comforting. And the hardest part is having no one to share the feeling with. I bought Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto and listened to it over and over. Music does me good right now; “if they shouted loud enough, Mrs. Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face.”

  Y.

  Just one more thing, all right?

  Years ago I devised a special sight test for every woman I liked. To determine which one would be the “One Woman of My Life.” I thought we would look into each other’s eyes, and slowly bring our eyes closer, closer and closer, and even closer, until my eye touched hers—not the lashes, really touched—the eyelids, the eye itself, the pupils and moistures would touch. Tears will immediately come, of course, that’s how the body works. But we will not give up or surrender to the rules of reflex, to the body’s bureaucracy; until we rise, out of the tears and pain into the fragments of the vaguest, most ancient pictures of our two souls and float into our bodies. We will see the broken forms in each other. This is what I want, right now. That we will see the darkness in each other. Why not? Why compromise, Miriam? Why not, for once in our lives, ask to cry with another’s tears?