Be My Knife

by David Grossman

  I’m freezing, even in my robe and a sweater, my entire body pricked with pins of chill. He also said we would deposit the decision for our separation into the hands of an outside force, something completely indifferent to us … and the strange sentence in his last letter, his wish for time to stop, for the summer to continue forever—and I, like some stupid—

  It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I even wonder how it is that I was so surprised, couldn’t guess it ahead of time.

  It still makes me wilt, like no other idea of his shriveled me. It transforms him into my enemy; he never was that, but now he is. A poor, desperateenemy, one who actually deserves compassion—but who uses unconventional weapons. I don’t want to write something in here that sounds so completely primitive, but I know, in my most private logic, that you don’t dosuch things—you don’t play around this way with someone’s feelings!!!

  After one day of high fever and shivers and nightmares. What an odd illness, so quick and concentrated, it left at dawn, as soon as it came (maybe I caught it from Y.? Or caught it from his rhythms, at least). Here, I too am already writing only the first letter of his name. Not because of the Sanctity of the Bond. Just out of weakness.

  It tears at me painfully to write about you in the third person. I try, but it is already rebelling against me, as if it is a horrible mistake … The words fade instantly, and there is none of the flush of life in them. Never mind. I’ll get used to it. I have to. But still, turn your face to me now, the face I have still never seen.

  The shock from the night before last, a complete despairing of the possibility that we will ever …

  I went over all your letters again. I saw all the times you didn’t answer me after I had asked if you had yet given up the guillotine. Why, I didn’t even know if you were still flirting with the idea of it for two months. Then came the moment, and I know exactly when it was … when you told me about the egg without a shell. I told myself then that I would stop nagging you with this question, because it was unnecessary. Since then, from letter to letter, I truly believed you had released yourself from your internal “deal.” That cruel, stupid—

  Yair, I know the deal is not just “stupid.” Believe me, I understand what you need to fight in order to escape yourself at last, to come to me; you need complete internal freedom. I also know, of course, how hard it is to recover, even as an adult, from those diseases from childhood that left scars.

  Perhaps—it occurs to me—perhaps you are even more afraid of the recovery. If it is so, say it, just tell me, and we can weep over it together, about the wretched feelings planted in us, that we are, ourselves, the disease. That if we dared to rebel and recover, perhaps our life’s breath would suddenly be taken away from us. Is that it?

  Always. It always is. That fear, the prophecy of the heart, that the disease or the falseness or the stain planted in us is our most basic element, our Luz …

  Why can’t you tell me something so horrible? It will bring us even closer to each other if you can simply come to me and tell me … and I would say yes … and, for a moment, perhaps we could breathe our relief together.

  Because I have no other person that knows me there, in that last curve of my soul, that much. Neither do you.

  But what was I thinking? What I believed would happen to me when I would be with you “there.” My profound pain springs from places that have nothing to do with you, from things you and I haven’t even started to discuss. We have only started the long journey …

  I imagine a storm, a volcanic eruption from your insides and mine, something sweeping and shaking, that exposes us, forces us to live in another skin (or even better than that—with no skin at all).

  I see the perfect bubble of a level rule, straight, complete, the innocence of both total knowledge and total abandon to that knowledge. A match between two. The two of us. Which neither of us can reach separately.

  This is the one (and only) pain in my life that you can solve or allay: the pain of my separateness from you. It was, until you, only a vague, dull pain. Perhaps I couldn’t even name it so clearly, perhaps it would erode and sink into the other burdens of life. But you came and gave it a name, and a vocabulary.

  On second thought, Yair, I’m not certain that you can ease even that pain. But at least our connection can “ground” itself in us, as you once called it. I do prefer to think about us participating, together, in the same “merciful surplus of strength,” full of grace, that Kafka speaks of in his diary, in the entry on September 19, 1917 (when he is wondering how he can “write to someone: I am unhappy”):

  “And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain; it is simply the merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being.”

  The one thought that does not cease: Where will the first rain catch me? At home? In the street? In front of my pupils? And where on my body will the first drop hit? My ear is alert at night for any sounds of pattering …

  Other possibilities are open to me: to rid myself of the torture, to not cooperate, to stop rubbing the wound of expectation.

  To my list of losses I am adding this morning, with a heavy heart—my internal freedom.

  Another day. You’re gone. I can’t stop looking at the sky. How is it that you managed to transform the whole world into two huge clamps slowly tightening around me? Enough, enough, enough (but “enough” is also “Yair, speak to me”). I’m picturing you differently these days. Look: you’re a clock mender. A dark, intriguing clock mender, sitting in a little suffocating alcove, full of tickings. There you are. A lonely man, burning with a tremendous urge that ebbs and flows like a wave constantly winding the gears of several clocks at once, setting them so they will sound out one after another according to some predetermined secret plan, ringing all night and all day, in the summer and winter, throughout the whole of time …

  You have some of that clock mender in you, don’t you? With the will and arrogance to set your falling in love, constant and ever-changing, so that you will always be surrounded by music (feminine?) that will ring and swing like a pendulum in you, hum inside you so there won’t be a single moment of unbearable silence, of a quiet in which one might hear time itself, God forbid, passing, escaping.

  Is that what we were? I was just a prop in some private ceremony (or is it a ritual?) of yours? Perhaps you change women every season of the year. This was your “Summer of Miriam.” And afterward, another woman’s winter will come. Perhaps, as part of your secret self-bureaucracies, you count out the time in between us with “moments” of women. I was just another clock hand, pointing out to you that another “hour,” another season, had passed, another woman …

  So then, perhaps, your conversation is not truly with us little miserable daughters of Eve, after all, but with His Majesty, Time.

  Get out of my life.

  Morning. I haven’t written for two days. A feeling of relief that I cannot fully understand. Touching the tips of my toes into the frozen waters of being able to live with this …

  A woman is here, crawling on the ground after being hit by a disaster. She isn’t even so sure what it was … certain moments of the day, she feels as if everything around her was erased. After that, it becomes clear that everything exists exactly as it did before, except she doesn’t. She barely moves her lips during her internal conversations. Strange how all this hardly hurts her. It’s better this way.

  She’ll be fine. She only has to really want, with all her will (oh), to be fine. She moves through her day precisely and economically, as if a huge cork is plugging up her heart’s mouth. She uses the illness from earlier this week as a good excuse for this dullness in her thoughts. Yokhai is home all of a sudden. So there are things to be busy with.

  Now she is reading the lines she just wrote. You can live with it.

  Bank—dry cleaners—two classes—glass mender for the latest broken window—meeting—another meeting—conversation with a physiotherapist—grocery—give my watch to the cl
ock mender to be fixed—comforting a mourner … What is he thinking of today, my green man of Mars?

  “Look at this woman. I guess it hurts her unbearably to touch reality.”

  At least the writing is still here.

  Like putting stones in a turbulent river.

  Slowly, slowly, perhaps, with hard work, a bridge can be built over which she can escape from this place.

  Yokhai has been home for three days now. They’ve stationed a construction waste container by his school gate. There is no one to talk to about it.I’ve been spending time with him, doing a little organizing, rehabilitating the skin of our home as much as Yokhai allows it.

  It’s hard to concentrate when he’s here.

  I arranged all the chairs in the house in a line for him. He is walking on them with surprising skill. It probably pleases him greatly, his organ of balance. This is how it was once scientifically explained to us … perhaps he is writing something in his constant movement. Perhaps there is some hidden meaning to the paper balls he rolls into the corners of rooms, to the door frames he touches …

  Don’t look for meaning.

  Going and coming back, so concentrated and serious, mysterious, ever-busy, and always fascinated by his internal life. He doesn’t even know I’m here …

  (But just now, when I hugged him, he hugged me back.)

  Night. Of course, small-minded people will tell me that it is a quarter past four in the morning right now; still, I had three hours of sleep. An unexpected gift! (And Anna, wherever she is, is laughing: you and your Pollyannaisms.)

  A brief flash of happiness … Ariela called to ask about what’s going on. During our conversation she told me that today she taught the part when Romeo leaves Verona for the first time and says that he had a good dream that night; one student burst in and said that he was able to sleep, he doesn’t understand how horrible it is …

  It stabbed me, as if I had betrayed something by sleeping.

  I have already spent two hours on the phone to City Hall. They transfer me from clerk to clerk. The last one, the manager, was nice at first, but it turned out that the contractor who stationed the waste container didn’t break any law, not one. Except for the law of one child. Then, lady, have the child come in the other gate, he shouted at me, and then he hung up on me. And Amos just called—they are renovating the building next door to the school and it will last for at least two months.

  I sit down. Yokhai certainly looks happy, pacing along his path,counting to himself. What will happen? Bambi, William, and Kedem are looking at him, bored. Sometimes I think that, in the same way he doesn’t perceive them at all, they too somehow don’t register his existence. Perhaps this is why I have some difficulty loving them with all my heart. What will happen now? Nilly touches him a lot more, rubs her back against him, plays with him—even more than she does with her kittens. He truly responds the most to her. Why don’t they make more of an effort with him? I love dogs so much, and of all of them, the ones I am least successful with are my own.

  The conversation with Amos was horrible. He asked me what we were going to do, and how we would handle this for two more months, and shouted that he has just started a new group, and it is actually on the right track, and I answered that I, too, as he knows, have a job, and we buzzed back and forth, and I got angry. We both didn’t raise our voices even half an octave, so as not to scare Yokhai. Here we are, the dogs have fallen asleep again. Maybe something in this house makes them fall asleep. I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel anymore. We hosted a couple of kids here a few weeks ago, the Herman boys. The dogs, all three of them, almost lost their minds with joy. I saw their bodies suddenly moving in new ways, heard voices I didn’t recognize from them. Puppies’ voices.

  Walking back and forth on the chairs, as if from strings in the sky. A moment before I blow up, I tell myself, How can I burden him with the troubles of those of us who walk the ground? To the place he is probably in right now?

  The thin and loose embroidery of things new to me … that is what I mourn above everything. With him, I finally succeeded in getting over my loathsome impulse to unstitch myself, my own black twin. I actually surprised myself, finding that I could weave more and more intricately, without immediately unstitching it. Without spoiling it for myself. A joy in living, and a love of living (and even a little love for myself!).

  So what is happening to me now? What is happening is this: Y. is becoming my knife.

  It happened today again. The moment he saw that orange bin he stuck his feet under the front seat and refused to allow anyone to take him outof the car. An hour and a half of efforts, of persuasion from his teachers, the principal, his favorite physiotherapist, to no avail. Temptations and threats and promises and bribes; Amos even ran to a toy shop and bought him a truck that looked a little like the container—and after that, he argued with the construction workers, threatening them and begging them—nothing. Yokhai simply refuses to recognize that this is the same school he has been studying at for four years now. I left work at eleven to be with him. I had to cancel three classes and one test.

  In spite of everything, I am fortunate. I mustn’t forget that, not for a moment. I’m thinking about the person with the lifeless face and fireless body sitting in front of me on the bus.

  We continue to study drought in my little circle tonight. Akiva decided that this would be our modest contribution toward hastening the coming of the rain. I sat among them wondering if I wasn’t forming some kind of fifth column inside this general wish for a coming downpour. Some kind of Jonah the Prophet, in his boat—except the other way around … Yu-daleh brought in a teaching from the Zohar: Rabbi Shimon once said that there is one gazelle in the land, and He the Most High does much for her. When she screams, the Blessed One hears her pain and accepts her voice. When the world needs mercy and water, she gives her voice, and the Holy Blessed He hears her, and then pities the world, as it is written, “as a deer longs for flowing streams” (Psalm 42). When she needs to give birth, and is held in, constricted on all sides, and bows her head between her knees and screams and throws her voice, the King of the World pities her and invites one snake to come upon her, which bites her groin, tearing through and opening that one place, and she delivers her calf immediately.

  I told them about the scared, trembling gazelle that almost bumped into me this morning in the fog, as I was on my way to the creek. They became excited: It is she! It is she!

  A telephone call at seven in the morning. It is the contractor who owns the waste container; he launched into an attack, shouting at me, Why areyou bothering my workers? Why have you been driving me crazy for a week? I’m working by the letter of the law, and if you make any more trouble for me, I’ll come to your house with a bulldozer … As he yelled, I started speaking to him quietly, even though I knew there was not a chance he was listening (I wonder, now, why did I speak. As if I had decided to, let’s say, present my case in front of some kind of mysterious court that probably passes judgment on such matters). Anyway, by the time I got to the blue gate in our garden, which we have not been able to paint for years so that he won’t get confused and scared, I noticed the man was no longer shouting. I don’t even know when he stopped shouting and started listening. I felt exposed and embarrassed … Look at what is happening to you, you gave up Yokhai’s disability check for years so they wouldn’t turn your boy into some “retard.” And now you’re using your troubles to influence a total stranger. The contractor was breathing, deep breaths. A strange silence surrounded him too. Then he told me that there is something he cannot tell me. If he spoke of it to anyone, he would have to kill himself, die by his own hands. But if I wait for him for one hour and then bring Yokhai to school, the container will be gone. And so it was.

  A lunchtime treat: Uncle Vanya, produced by our theater program. Some of the kids weren’t so great, but still, there were moments during which I loved this marvelous play even more than before.

  This time my big moment was
when Sonya suddenly stands up and starts delivering an enthusiastic speech about the importance of preserving the forest, because this is what her beloved is the most passionate about. In the darkness I wrote, quickly, along the whole length of my inner arm, under my sleeve: Yair, I wanted badly to tell you about yourself, your story was even more important to me than my own. And now I feel I have lost my story.

  But there … I am looking at my arm, and my skin is moving underneath the letters; it is warm, the flesh is breathing, and my body is alive.

  A thought that hasn’t let go of me: What was truly there in the first moment? If I hadn’t smiled that smile and hugged myself, what then …

  To think I was so very charming without making any kind of effort.

  What I gave him, that thing that spoke to him from deep inside me that, without my knowledge, revived him in this way; the thing between me and myself …

  I know it exists. It existed before he looked at me, too. It still exists, even if there is no one to look at it now. It is the good in me, and it cannot be destroyed. And thanks to that, I cannot be destroyed.

  If only I could give that to myself as well right now.

  Just like that. To release it … watch it spring out …

  This morning, at the bus stop by the junction into the village, an old, heavy, unkempt woman approached me. She apparently works as a cleaning lady for one of the families here. She said she has been watching me for quite some time, and that she likes my face and would like to tell me about something so as to hear my opinion about it.