Then they discover that I can’t be killed. I’m eternal, like nothing.
I didn’t tell you—when I was on the way back—maybe because of what happened, or because I hadn’t seen a human face in days—suddenly, all of a sudden, it all became clear to me.
Okay, hold on—slow down—okay.
I found a neglected coffeehouse. My mind was knotted up like intestines. I sat there for an hour and thought that somewhere in the universe there must be that other world we once talked about—a world of light. A worthy world. Where each person finds the one intended for him and each love is true love; and, as an added bonus, you live there for all eternity. I (you know me) immediately wondered about who would be incapable of living even there, so unfit for such generous and bountiful goodness, these damned ones who commit suicide there.
There I sat, gazing at the people walking by, occupied by different ideas about what the sentence for suicide would be in that world. How would I punish them? And, Miriam, it doesn’t matter where you are right now; lift up your eyes (I guess my fantasies of you always show you deep in thought, like the one time I saw you) and say, Could that be the reason? I mean, for the ugliness and strangeness and temporality, the cowardice and the interminable burdens, and the rest of our true Esperanto alphabet?
What I mean is, is here, where we are—is thisis the penal colony of that other world?—and has each person you see around you—man or woman, it doesn’t matter, old or young—at some point already committed suicide?
Look at the first man coming toward you now, right now, and tell me his face isn’t—even in one tiny single line—hiding a confession of participation in a crime. Any crime. (It might be hiding in the nose—in his loose, fallen lips—in his forehead—and, most of all, in his eyes.) This morning every person out there who passed me had one such line on his face—I saw it even in the most beautiful people.
Even in children. There was a group of them on the shore. I stood there gazing at these six- or seven-year-old kids—and almost every oneof them had on his face some possible first line of bitterness and complaint and guilt. (Mainly guilt.)
Sleep. What sleep? Who sleeps? You don’t come here to this shelter of ejaculation to sleep. Half past one, the middle of the night, and this building is full of life. A door is opening or being shut somewhere at every moment. Shuffling in the corridors twenty-four hours a day. Echoes of furtive laughter. (What are they laughing so much about?) I would kill to meet one of them in the hallway and shake him until he tells me exactly where this is all happening—where are the rooms with the Jacuzzis and the mirrors on the ceilings and the round beds?! When I left the hotel this morning, I saw a pair of these “tenants” for the first time. They came down with me in the elevator. We tried not to look one another in the eye. A man and a woman. Older tourists. They seemed so very conservative and upstanding that I almost fell for it.
How long has it been for you there, still on earth?
I will not leave this room again. I guess I’ve already gotten used to it in here. I noticed that I am more nervous on the outside. I am no longer absorbed by thoughts of whatever is going on behind the closed doors (quite banal doings, I imagine). It’s strange how it is possible to pass the time without even moving—dozing off, waking up, smoking, writing a few words to you, dozing off again—and ten hours have passed.
Thoughts—when they aren’t bumping into other people’s thoughts—are capable of racing to the end of the world in a flash—they can zoom out of your mind and return in a second.
But even this function has slowed down in the past few hours. Everything is slightly vague, indifferent; I’m not even hungry.
In order to read your tiny handwriting, sometimes I have to get really close to the wall. You should see me walking along and across these walls.
And if I called you, would you dare brave such a place? (My good little girl with the fifties face—I would never do that to you.)
I guess I fell asleep again for a moment. I woke up with my heart pounding. Three a.m. And to my right, in one of the more distant rooms, they are truly out of control (from here it sounds like big drums or pistons—a completely mechanical noise). You were with me until I fell asleep. I brought you here, I was lying down and talking to you aloud. We had a conversation (I don’t remember about what). Each time I spoke from your mouth, I recovered a piece of myself. For half a night you illuminated me like a candle.
A little concentrated entity is traveling inside my body, through my bloodstream. I don’t think about it most of the time, most of the time I don’t think about anything, but each time it passes through my heart, it opens its eyes and says Yair, with your voice.
According to my calculations, I should know by tomorrow or the day after if I’ve been infected. What’s strange is, I don’t really care. I swear. Most of the time I don’t even think about whatever reasons threw me in here. If someone asked me why I am here, I would have to concentrate to remember.
Why am I here?
Because I need to finish some important business.
What business?
I don’t know; I’ll know when it happens.
And what will you do in the meantime? Just lie like that, on that bed, for days on end?
Yes. What can I do?
I am sleeping in bed with Maya. She wakes me up and shows me that a tiny woman, the size of a nut, is lying between us, a whole, complete woman. I immediately start to make my excuses—I didn’t do it! I don’t even know her! And Maya says in a voice without anger and with even a little compassion, But look how closely she resembles you.
Maybe I will write a diary to pass the time in my remaining days. Not so long ago you called me “My dear diary.”
If I feel at all better tonight, I’ll go out. I deserve a little vacation from the monastery, don’t you think? (Why do I care so much about what you think?!)
At times I feel like an idiot for not really using this week. I do not understand what’s keeping me from going wild. Do I owe anything to anybody here?
On the other hand, even getting up for a piss is a major operation.
If I am actually infected—
What should I do, do you think, to save a part of myself in the few days I have left? What would you do if you knew you had only one week before you caught a disease with these particularcomplications?
I mean—(just a thought—the intellectual amusement of a potentially impotent man)—could one hope for a sudden new love to save me from the claws of disease? Or, at the very least, make it retreat a little?
No, it’s not in you. I probably won’t fall in love with you—that’s quite clear to me. What kind of love could we have? I mean, what we already have between us is too weighty to be love, isn’t it? I don’t think poorly of it, but over the last few days, I’ve had a feeling that we are somehow too densely packed to push ourselves into that single word “love.” Correct me if I’m wrong.
Correct me.
Those two on the other side of the wall are really molesting each other. I’m sure those are whipping noises. It’s been like that for a few hours now. No human voices—it’s as if they are whipping and getting whipped in complete silence—and I am the only one who shrinks at every blow. I can’t get used to it—it is as if every hit is the first. What were we talking about? The last page I wrote to you fell onto the floor. Good luck finding a needle in this haystack. I’ve eaten hardly anything since coming here. Previous years—huge feasts. It was part of the pleasure. Food is a man’s best friend, too. It surprises me—I am really not hungry at all—only a little weak, floating along in this way. It feels kind of nice—but if I stand up too quickly, I get dizzy. So I try not to stand up. Actually, I’ve been in bed most of the time since yesterday (or the day before?)—a pad of paper, a pen, waking up, writing a few lines down, falling asleep. In between times, someone might as well be performing an operation on me with full anesthesia—oh well, let it be.
In the window across from mine, above the pool bar�
��a guy and a girl, Japanese, very young—with no curtains. With open windows. They’ve been making love for a whole hour now. It is so beautiful, it isn’t even sexy.
I lie here, in the dark, watching. They are very much in love—and there isn’t a spot on their skin they don’t kiss. I desperately hope they continue on this way—because all the surrounding noises have stopped.
Terribly urgent—I suddenly remembered it. I want to give you one picture, a flicker of my memory—don’t ask questions—a picture of one sweet little child, with very short hair; you can see only his mobile, expressive face; and he is jumping around, talking, waving his hands, a bit monkeyish in his sweetness. He’s about five in the picture. A woman’s delicate hand is resting on his head. Ignore it.
It’s a very precious moment to me—it doesn’t matter why—simply accept it from me. A boy walking with his mother on the sidewalk, back from kindergarten. She is a young woman, tiny and slender, with short curly hair and a gorgeous smile—shy and bold and full of love. And her hand is on his head, presenting him to me with a small show of pride—this is her boy.
I know one doesn’t do such a thing, giving as a gift a picture that has been cut up, or half a photograph—but believe me, you are getting the prettiest part, and also the most beautiful moment I had with those two. There’s no point in enlarging the angle of the shot and seeing all the extraneous details—that, for example, another boy is walking by their side. He isn’t even part of the story, he is just another boy she is picking up from kindergarten that day, her son’s friend (why can’t I remove him from this picture?).
And why would you want to see the man with the birdlike face, sitting in the Subaru, the one that had been in the sprinklers, from whose trunk I took out the towel to dry your hair? The man is me. And the other boy accidentally looked up and saw what was in my face, which was apparently entirely exposed, full of joy pouring out to her and herboy. An ugly story, really, another usual scene from my film noir. Why am I telling you this?
My story with her, with that woman, was actually longer than the usual. I think I loved her. The boy’s name was G. His full name doesn’t matter, his sweet, serious name. She wasn’t married, and didn’t want to get married either—she had definite opinions in her opposition to marriage—but she had a little boy, and I (pathetic, self-deceiving in such affairs) enjoyed feeling a bit like his father from afar. Do you understand? I felt that this was the kind of boy she and I could have had. Don’t forget, he was my ideal child—a living child I could transport into my imaginary world.
I mainly loved the combination of those two—and how she raised him with wisdom, with courage. It’s not simple to raise a child alone—and until I met her, I always, with the sacred fury of marriage on my side, railed against women like her, who dared to produce a child by themselves, only to satisfy their maternal instincts, etc. She taught me how much greatness could be contained in such a situation. I was constantly amazed at how she alone was making a person in the world, with what totality and cleverness. Their pride in belonging to each other—the private language that was so completely theirs—a mutual sense of humor—and some kind of guarantee for each other. I felt as if I had a little secret family there, even though I had never seen the child, only in pictures.
Truly, why am I telling you this?
Because of how hard it is to break a habit? Or because I believe you will keep it better than I can?
One day she proposed that I meet him. We had just spent a great morning together, and she said, Why don’t you stay a little longer once and meet G.? And I said, Why not? What’s the worst that could happen? But, on the other hand, as you well know, my security officer was alerted: Why do I need him to see me? Who needs such a witness? So I suggested that I watch him from afar, without him seeing me. And N. looked at me and said, “You don’t have to, you know.”
Later I appeased her a little, and she agreed with my rationale—and we both started to get excited about that moment. I stayed a little longer than usual that day, and we had lunch together, and everything wasgreat. And when it was time, I went down to the car and waited, while N. picked G. up from kindergarten.
I saw her coming around the corner, slender, independent, standing out in sharp detail against the street, with her short curly hair and laughing eyes, wearing a thin gray sweater. She was walking with two kids, as I told you. For a moment I couldn’t tell which one was hers. Neither of them really resembled the pictures. The kids were walking and describing something to her enthusiastically. One of them bounced around her like a lamb. She smiled at me from the end of the street, walking toward me—smiling and shining in all her slenderness—and I had to take off my sunglasses and ask, with my eyes, Which one is yours? She laid a palm on the head of the child bouncing along at her side and made a face that said, “What kind of question is that?”
Please, accept this picture from me: a child, small for his age, alert and full of joy, full of life and wisdom, talking with large hand gestures. A child so funny and sweet—her hand resting gently on his head. My eyes sank into hers, into her pride and her complete happiness.
(The strange part was that of all of them, the other child, the stranger, noticed something—and stopped for a moment, following my gaze and hers. I could see him trying to understand, and some kind of cloud forming on his innocent forehead.)
If I had to choose one single moment, out of all the fucking, the lovemaking, the flirtations—
I’m sorry to drop this story onto you—but, again—who could I tell, if not you?
I have gotten used to talking to you aloud (have I already told you?), mumbling to you as if you were here. Talking in small, simple fragments
… Would you like a pillow? Give me some more blanket, scratch my back—no, higher—yes.
You ask, Why don’t we go for a walk? Breathe some different air? Look at this mess—at least let’s throw away those empty beer cans—come on, you can help yourself out of this, just a little.
And I tell you: It’s strange, I miss you more than I miss my family. And the girl in the room next to mine is really sobbing—you can’t decipher her words—or even tell what language she’s speaking in—but there is some kind of constant whimper—if I concentrate, I think I hear her begging him not to burn her with cigarettes. What hell.
I finally couldn’t take it anymore-I went out and looked for where the voices were coming from. It turned out they weren’t from the room next to mine—they weren’t even on my floor. Acoustic illusions were bouncing throughout the building. I got ambitious—I ran through all four floors, listening shamelessly by every door—I didn’t care about getting caught. I didn’t have a clue as to what I would do if I ran into somebody—but, why, people here were actually paying for things like that! I started thinking, It’s a ghost hotel, until, on the fourth floor, I heard very clear voices coming from one of the rooms—and nerve-racked as I was, I pushed the doorknob and entered. I saw the naked back of a man watching television—surrounded by maybe twenty empty beer cans scattered on the floor. The room looked exactly like mine—and the man didn’t hear me and didn’t move (the room smelled like maybe he was dead). When I returned to my room, so did the voices.
There’s something else. If I don’t tell you, you will never know, to the far reaches of my being, exactly whom you are dealing with. (What am I worth if I tell you? What am I worth if I don’t?) This kind of event pays you back—with high interest—for all the slime you scattered behind you in the world. Listen, forget it—have this written inside you:
I was at home with Maya, about two years ago. We were eating supper in the kitchen. With Ido. It was a nice, quiet evening, just the way I like it. The phone jangles—I walk down the hall to pick it up—and hear the voice of a woman telling me her name is T. and she is a friend of N.’s. I immediately remember who she is, and the pit of my stomach clenches a little. T. was the only witness to our affair—and why is she calling my home? She tells me in a tense voice that N. died yesterday
.
I’m silent. Maya and Ido are laughing behind me. He was learning how to whistle then (by sucking air inward), and Maya was trying to learn how from him—and on the telephone T. is asking me if I heard what she said. I say yes, and pulling together a slightly formal voice, I tell her that we don’t want a children’s encyclopedia.
Now she is silent. I remember that, in the remains of my mind’s clarity, I was wondering what would happen to G., he must have been seven or eight. Since I had broken up with N., she and I had kept no contact. She promised not to call or write and, of course, kept her promise. It’sterrible to say it now—but on my part, I mean, I practically wiped her out of me after we ended things.
Please understand—T., the woman on the phone, accused me of adultery and dishonesty throughout the entire course of our affair. She never told me directly, but I understood exactly how T. felt about me from a few disapproving silences. And even though I never met her, I felt that I always had to justify myself to her. (I was not a little occupied with what her opinion of me must be.)
And she says, I understand I must have called at an inconvenient time.
Maya calls out from the kitchen, Who is it? We always report our callers to each other—we don’t even have to report it at this point—most of the time we can tell who it is from the other’s “Hello.”
I say aloud, You know what—it wouldn’t hurt if you gave me a few details on this new encyclopedia.
Be My Knife Page 23