Be My Knife Read online

  It depresses me, now that I wrote it down here.

  Sometimes I’m sorry that you and I didn’t meet in some other way, a simpler way; we could have started with some magnetic flirtation and then, only afterward, slowly begun to discover all the rest. Imagine that.

  I wish we could be together in a simple place now, I don’t care where—in an everyday place, a healthy place where people just meet. In the street. In an office. In a public park, wherever you like, wherever your breath is full: just to be, without uttering a single word, even if it is just a vegetable market, as you once mocked me by saying.

  Do you know what I do sometimes? I press down on my eyeballs with my fists and watch the sparkles. You once told me that this is how you comforted yourself when you were a child, in your Josephan pit. You produced light from yourself. I don’t feel abandoned right now, not at all, but I do feel as if I’m missing a part.

  Here’s the store, you see? A little vegetable market, like there used to be in the old days, cardboard and wooden boxes, old scales and black iron weights.

  And there you are, how good of you to be here. Standing with your back to me. Your head is bent a little over something, and I see your fair neck, with its long, delicate gradation of bones. You’re standing by the sweet potatoes. As simple as can be. You’re holding something in your hands. What is it? A very large potato, with a little dirt stuck to it. And you’re staring at it as if you were hypnotized. What happens next? I haven’t a clue. Whatever will be written back to me.

  I’m passing by you, behind you, once, again, approaching and retreating, approaching again, attracted to you. I can’t understand why you are so enthralled by a potato.

  You’re standing in the middle of the little store, you don’t see the other customers, you don’t hear the buses rumbling in the street, farting black smoke. All alone, focused so deeply on yourself. What is going on there, inside you? What do you have there, inside you? Take me with you, please—hide me in there as well. And I, left on the outside, jealous of the yams. I rudely peek into your hands and can see that it looks a little bit like a human face, the apple of the earth.

  And now what? I don’t have a clue, I’m just floating toward you.

  You notice I’m looking at you and smile with embarrassment; your painful smile, which I can feel even through your words. Always. As if every time, again, it needs to tear its way through your nerves.

  Smiling, and shrugging your shoulders in an apology, with the expression of someone caught doing something inappropriate, forgetting that it is everything around you that is inappropriate. With a wave of your hand, you motion to the others in the box, as if suggesting that I should choose one, too. I bow, and find myself in front of a pile of strange, ugly, twisted faces that at once, with no explanation, break my heart.

  Suddenly filth starts peeling off me, thick scabs of it falling off my body. How much of an animal I had become, Miriam, how rough, how filthy. How I was polluted.

  We’re both silent. At this point, not a single word has passed between us. People are crowding all around us—we’re blocking the aisle and they grumble. Never mind, we have a right to it, you said it at the beginning of all this—actually, it happened when you decided that this thing between you and me has a right to exist. I was so moved by that, when you gave yourself permission to be completely free with your feelings toward me.

  You look at me, surprised that I’m not hurrying to pick up a potato from the pile. I stand and look at you a little. And then, as if you suddenly recognized something in my gaze, something I myself don’t see, truly don’t see it—you reach out both of your hands and deliver the potato unto mine. I touch it lightly, not more than that, it’s still warm from your touch, it’s as warm as if it were human, and I make myself look straight into its mongoloid angel’s face, with its two wide, blemished cheeks, its eyes deep and black. Deep in a blind dream. It’s a burden.

  Why did you choose it? Why are you delivering it to me? I want to wake up, but not to lose you. And if I wake, I won’t be with you in this way any longer. I look straight into your hands. I see.

  Strange, Miriam, but this is what has written itself, from me to you. I’m not certain where it came from and why I am suddenly so depressed. As if I had just received some bad news. It’s completely senseless. I’m thinking about how much I wanted to make you laugh. And look what happens to me, I eventually create—this.

  I’m not sure I like it, this Law of Communicating Vessels which keeps all our waters level with one another.

  Shall we begin to correspond?

  July 24

  My darling,

  Just to let you know that I’m sitting behind your pages in complete silence, listening to you, and there is no way you are too heavy for me. Nor are you a burden. And certainly not too heavy to contain.

  Because I’m already inside you, Miriam—I’m finally inside your story.

  You, from the first moment, were more right than I was—the facts and details of your every day are your life, not “a mob.”

  I can’t stop thinking about what you said, that you have spent your entire life trying to turn what I call the “sweating mob” into something that is more. Because if you give up this struggle for even one hour, you yourself will immediately be transformed into a mob.

  How do you do it?

  I have the strong feeling that you are awake right now as well. Perhaps your dogs are jostling each other around you, nervous, asking each other, Why is she awake at such an hour? A decent woman should be asleep at such an hour. Not running back and forth between the balcony and the kitchen in the middle of the night. Did you really sniff their fur for traces of my scent? I told you, my soul almost left my body forever out of fear of them.

  Don’t notice me. Mumbling, napping on your shoulder, half dreaming. After these insane days I have the right to a little sleepy chat.

  I close my eyes and see a woman sitting by a table, writing. Night, and the fluorescent light in her kitchen buzzes above her. She turns it off and turns on a little lamp. Her face dips into the light as she leans forward, I can see only her strong jawline, her living, fragile mouth, her yearning mouth; and of course her messy hair, which she constantly tries to tame with rubber bands and combs and pins that always fall out. An open letter is lying on the table. She glances at it every once in a while, and goes back to writing, quickly, agitatedly; the excitement licks her like tongues of fire rising around her—and for a moment, it probably frightened her, because she tries to make a joke and save herself—Tell me, where haveyou seen any woman with the time to stand in a vegetable market these days concentrating profoundly on a potato?! But her lips are starting to tremble. She writes something—and erases it with all her strength, she has never erased anything so violently in all her other letters, and she stands up, and sits back down, announces that she has to go outside now and take a little walk. She stays. She tries to recruit a few more of the troops of her artificial anger, so she can distance herself from the page; she actually incites herself into a fiery rage—and you should know, it is very important that you know that a woman in a vegetable market, at least thiswoman, is always one big ball of anger when she goes shopping!

  And while writing those words, she bursts into tears that wet the page, and she writes me her story, fifteen pages, almost without lifting her pen once, and only by the end can she breathe again, even laugh a little, circle one tearstain—“Look, like a nineteenth-century romance novel.”

  Hey, Miriam.

  Remember how—right at the beginning of this—when you were experiencing a moment of complete exhaustion from me, you asked, Are you always like this? A flaming, revolving sword? Even in your everyday life? With everyone? And you were asking me how I could live like that within a family, and if Maya has a similar rhythm, or perhaps I need somebody who is completely the opposite of me to calm me down.

  This is exactly what I would ask you now: Are you always like this? How do all these attacks find room in your ti
ny house? And how were you able to hold all this back until now? I’m thinking about the woman I saw that evening in the schoolyard, and about the one who has been shaking me up for four months now, and I can only laugh at myself and at my own stupidity.

  I have nothing to add right now. I only wanted you to know that I understand now, and I am experiencing something I didn’t believe in when you told me about it—the feeling of joy and sorrow together, and exactly from the same place, just as you promised. You asked me what I see in you now that I know everything. I would have to write ten letters to describe everything I see … I will probably write them slowly; but now, I mean, at sixteen minutes to two—I only see one who, at the end of a long night of writing, rests her forehead against mine, with a terrible fatiguethat has collected in her, over years, probably—she looks into my eyes and tells me that, with that potato, I touched her with a direct, correct touch, in the place inside her where she is completely mute.

  I too will be quiet now. Good night.

  Yair

  July 25

  I have been telling myself, constantly, how good it was that I never asked anyone about you! Because when you asked me at the beginning to hear all the stories about you only from you, that no story about you that I hear should be, or turn into, “gossip,” I pretty much smiled to myself (what kinds of dirty stories can this one have to hide from me?).

  And I still insist on being pleased that I succeeded in persuading you not to meet in the flesh—body to body and ashes to ashes—because I have no doubt that if we had met, we never could have known each other in thisway. Because I would have had to seduce you immediately, to know you through my usual ignorant path to knowledge, a merchant bartering for perfumes and spices. Think what we would have lost, and what we would never have known.

  I’m not talking about the facts. I would have discovered those facts, the real, the everyday, even if we had a short but intense flirtation. You would have told me. You would have had to. Even as a part of the bureaucracy of adultery, I would have had to know them. But then I would never have known this sadness I am feeling right now, which I have been living with and holding on to for a couple of days now (mixed with a kind of longing, which I can’t quite understand).

  It isn’t only sadness. Everything about you, every emotion you arouse in me, caresses me day and night, fresh and new, and presses itself to me with its entire surface, and with the fullness of its breasts.

  When I told you about the private language I wanted to share with Ido, you responded that you want every piece of earth, every drop of water in the sea or flickering moment of a candle to have a private name of its own. I liked you so much in that moment. Maybe because it was the first time I saw how capable you were of drifting into your imagination: why, in the middle of the sentence, you began daydreaming about a world in which all the people in it would spend their days busily naming, naming, naming all the animals, vegetables, and minerals; naming wouldbecome the true essence of humanity. And you pulled me after you, hand in hand through your garden, from a single stalk of a weed to a single grain of soil, to a water drop and a beetle, as you gave each a funny private name—but I couldn’t understand what you were really saying to me then (How little I understood of you), and only can now, now that I know something about the years during which you prayed that every tree would be called only “Tree” and every flower—“Flower.” The years in which “to feel” was, for you, the same as “to live above your means.” I think I’m grasping what you are actually telling me—that perhaps you are finally starting to heal.

  I don’t know what my connection is to all this, and if I have contributed anything to this recovery. But it moves me to think that I am close to you as it is happening, because I think it has been a long time, a very, very long time, since someone was living through something so good when I was around.

  Y.

  I forgot the most important thing: in the name of whomever you want to make me swear to (with a festive seriousness that I think only exists in treaties between countries or pacts between children), in the name of your actually buying those dark orange sneakers (!), in the name of Amir Gilboah’s I Will Send You like a Doe,which you bought yourself as a gift from me—and especially in the name of your going and ordering new glasses—I swear to guard you as a friend.

  July 26

  I thought that in Hebrew—

  No, this is too formal.

  This morning, in the garage—maybe because you use the word so often—the thought came to my mind that motherhood, imahut,sounds like i-mahut,nonexistent, as in “i-mmaterial” or “i-rregular.” I can imagine that there are more than a few mothers who feel that their child empties them of themselves, sucks out their insides. But between you and Yokhai—

  Hey … that was the first time I wrote his name. His name is spreading through the whole of my mouth and my brain like the first momentafter tasting honey (with an added bitter sting). I could actually see him. And you with him. This wonder child, who is so full of the joy of living that people fall in love with him everywhere he goes—

  I’m reading what you’re telling me about him, and I can feel yourmotherhood in my body, like a warm spring rising and flooding from me to him, milky, pouring out. And how you wrap him up, surround him with infinite love. I swear, I was watching it through a magnifying glass and couldn’t find even a trace of bitterness inside you about what happened to him, nor any anger at him.

  When we were in the middle of our quickies, you once asked how it is possible for a person to start his life over and over again, just as a reply to another person’s call. I understood that question, as I reread you the day before yesterday. Not just “understood”: something deep inside my body moved a little, deep inside, beat in my body to you. (And then I remembered, of course, what Anna said; how, during her pregnancy, her heart moved to the pulse in her womb.)

  Waiting for your letter,

  Yair

  July 30

  Yes, that is what I wrote. I am sorry, I wasn’t thinking (but if I explain myself, it might hurt even more).

  First of all, you are right—it really does make you think, doesn’t it, how this combination of words could come out of me—accidentally—as something that doesn’t even demand proof or an explanation—“anger at him,” as if it were some natural law.

  Perhaps it is because I can easily imagine parents who would have been angry at their child even under much less extreme circumstances. Whom else are you going to blame—whom else is there, really, to be angry with? (No, I can’t even condemn them.)

  You are writing that the most difficult thing by far is to see such a child, who doesn’t even realize what he is missing out on, who will never have a family of his own. Who will not love, who cannot express emotions. But I know, if it were me, in some corner of my heart, there would also be anger at him. Perhaps not? Perhaps I too have this noble side that would be revealed only at a time of great testing? I’m afraid not. Still, perhaps? I don’t know. How can you know? You yourself said that younever imagined how hard it could be to stand in front of his isolation. The hopelessness—and the amount of strength—you found in yourself that you never knew about.

  I’m hurting you with my words, and probably also shaming myself in your eyes. Lightning rod … But we do have an agreement, don’t we? Everything. What’s the point of this if we don’t? And maybe, eventually, I will understand—and then, eventually, it will be possible for me to breathe there, in that lung …

  I experimented a little with your letter. I copied it out, changing the names of the bodies from female to male. Do you understand? I dressed myself with your story, and I tried to tell you about my son, Yokhai.

  After a page and a half, I couldn’t. Because of his attacks of rage. His fits. They broke me, and I couldn’t continue. When he becomes strange and scary, when suddenly a wild and crazy child takes over his body, a child who can shatter and demolish everything in the house. I know I could never stand that alienation. When ther
e is no possible way to reach him, when he becomes a blind force—I could never stand it. And you also need a lot of physical strength to stop him and hold him when he gets like that, don’t you? Where are you hiding all those muscles of yours?

  If I could have, I would have bought you a big house, large enough for your entire soul. I would fill it with all your big and little and hungry dreams, carpets and paintings and books and objets d’art in every size, from all around the world. I would have brought you sculptures of birds, and big vases of blue glass from Hebron, and huge pickle jars, and decorated mirrors, and lamps from China, and filigreed pillows. And I would have built the house with many windows, open and full of light, with stained glass in every color, without bars and nets.

  Because it is horrible to think of you in that empty house.

  I am slowly starting to roll through everything you have said to me, from the first letter. It will take me a while to grasp it, your story in its entirety. Listen: I was reading you too quickly, too urgently, too secretly. I’m afraid that too many things were lost en route. I’m thinking about heavy hints you dropped for me along the way that I, blocked off and indifferent and in my usual rush, completely missed. When you told me that “reality” constantly dripped into every one of your cells, and that you hadalmost no way to avoid it, not even in your imagination, or your dreams at night—

  No imagination. No dreams. And if you could let yourself get carried away, it would only be through artistic creations: painting, poetry, music, of course—but even then “reality” would soon come upon you and stab you, like a slave trying to escape (and with stolen fire in your hands). So what have you left for you, tell me, where have you been living?