Be My Knife Page 19

  When I reached my neighborhood, I was already, of course, concentrating intensely on the beautiful, reconciling things flooding my vision. I remember, for example, thinking that I would be a sailor someday and sail to distant lands, blue and green and full of light—and I would see only beautiful landscapes—and there wouldn’t be anything around me, just the wide expanse of the sea, wide and clear. And while I was deep in my hallucination, two women passed by me, one young, one old. And they said what they said, that I wasn’t sure they said. Perhaps they only mumbled, “What a villainous boy.” I don’t know.

  And it wasn’t you, Miriam. Not you, and not your mother. Thank you for your tremendous efforts, for reliving that horrible week with her for my sake, without your father to protect you and separate her from you. I know how difficult it was for you to go back there. I was with youduring those endless nights, in the double bed in the pension. You were crying on one side of the bed—she was silent on the other—and incapable of offering even a hand to comfort you.

  Without your even saying it, I know you brought me, in the last night of your story, to the only moment, probably, in those years, when the sky actually opened up for you. I am amazed again—how could you be so generous and wise and unreserved at such a young age? How did you understand exactly how miserable and humiliated she was to have to make such a request to you? When Father asks—and how much strength did it take you to reach your hand out to her, over the mountains of darkness, and to tell her, “Mother, let’s go.”

  The movie of this keeps playing in my mind: you and she, in that empty street in the middle of the night, your arms linked (I only now grasp—that hand, the pregnancy, paralysis, her right arm …)—terrified by the sudden intimacy, and excited and mute and appalled, clutching each other’s arm and shaking all over.

  What touched me more than anything—in the middle of that storm of emotions that shook you as you wrote, you remembered how important it was to me that it will be the young one, “the modern one,” who tells me (what she might not have said in the first place).

  But no—you would have given me one look and known exactly where I was returning from in that moment, and how lost I already was. Just explain it to me—because I don’t completely understand—how is it possible that I was such a child?

  I feel terribly murky inside myself right now.

  Y.

  September 22

  Did you happen to watch TV this evening?

  I saw a program I really thought was made for you. It was the kind of show you like to watch. And it also reminded me of my “wide expanse of the sea.” They showed a tribe living on an island in the Pacific—and all the nouns in their language are divided, not into male and female, but into “that which comes from the air” and “that which comes from the yam, sea.”

  (And I was thinking about another island, where words also are dividedinto “that which comes from Y-air” and “that coming from Miryam.”)

  September 24

  You turned the kaleidoscope only slightly—and the whole picture rotated. But the mighty force it takes for just this slight turn!

  Your letter arrived on a hard, annoying day. The horrible, despairing news combined with some ambiguous internal bad mood. Anyone who passed by me irritated me. In the middle of the day, I left everything. I raced to the post office and prayed for your white envelope in my box. And then, all of a sudden—how did you describe it, when you were telling me about falling in love with Amos—“For me, the sunshine was healed.”

  What? So, you didn’t save me that night on the street—exactly the opposite? I saved you? How? With what? What, in my miserable state, did I have to give you? …

  How do you do that? How do you know how to give such grace, and with such delicacy and secret words. I read it over and over—and this wave from within nearly takes me apart. I apparently forgot, completely, even between me and myself; I didn’t let myself remember that the power of lusting, wanting this way—the power that twisted in me to the extent that it drove me to a prostitute—it is not a mutation, and it isn’t shameful. You’re right. It’s passion and heat and creation and life …

  You came down into my Josephan pit, you turned the pit, like a kaleidoscope, with ten sentences, no more—and deposited a little, fluttering ignominy of yours into my hand. You close my five fingers around it and say, Take care of it And it is suddenly you, not me, who was the weak one there on the street, who betrayed himself. You who agreed not to notice that exactly in this particular week he will return to the country, the beautiful Alexander—and you allowed them to smuggle you quickly out of Tel Aviv, bribe you with a weeklong vacation in Jerusalem?

  Well, I can imagine it was still a great temptation. Your first time in a real hotel, and the first vacation in your life with your mother, just the two of you, and everything you were hoping would finally happen between the two of you. Perhaps you are, as usual, too hard on yourself (what could have possibly developed between you and him?)—but when you wrote of the disgust that welled up in you, when you allowed yourselfto understand for what price you sold your passion—and how passionate you really were to have to make that deal—I thought, Maybe now we can seriously consider your proposal for the girl you were and the boy I was to “go steady.”

  And if I had to choose only one moment from all your letters, I would pick the little word sketch you wrote at the bottom—how we passed each other in the street, one by the other, like a brother and sister chained in two lines of prisoners marching in opposite directions. And how you sucked and vacuumed into yourself, from that distance, that one power of mine: the power to lust. So you could have it for along the way, and for the whole life to come; and that because of it, I was, to you, a beautiful boy.

  Yair

  Don’t be frightened by the stain (it’s embarrassing, but sometimes happiness can burst out of my body in the form of a sudden nosebleed).

  September 25

  Miriam, I had a dream …

  I swear I did—not just a fragment or vague memory—a complete, intricate dream. It has been years since I’ve been able to remember a dream!

  Do you want to hear it? You have no choice: you’ve described at least four to me in complete detail. You once said the best gift you can give yourself is an interesting dream. And also that, since Yokhai, you have stopped dreaming (whereas they have now returned to me).

  This is how it went: I’m standing with three others in an open field—a woman and a man, very old, and another woman, younger than they. Perhaps my parents and my sister, but their faces remain blurry.

  There are a few more people around us, people I don’t know, dressed in thick clothes. Farmer’s clothes. They walk the four of us to some kind of bathhouse or big shower (as I write this, it occurs to me to tell you; I mean, don’t be scared—this is not a Holocaust dream. I know how sensitive you are to that).

  The “shower” is located, for some reason, in an open field, a little green pasture. The strangers start a stream of water, water starts pouringdown from four tall taps over our heads—the water is very hot, steaming—immediately the whole field is full of steam. And these people bow strangely to us and disappear, leaving us alone.

  We take off our clothes, each one of us in a different corner of the field; we move slowly, calmly, without shame about undressing in front of one another (and without a will to watch as well). We lay our clothes neatly on small wooden chairs, like chairs for first-graders, and then march together and stand under the taps.

  It always horrifies me when I read about how the Nazis made complete families strip together. I think not about the huge, horrible death that came a few minutes afterward but about the embarrassment and shame of these people who were forced to take off their clothes together: men and women who didn’t know one another, fathers in front of their children’s eyes, and adults in front of their parents’ eyes. (Or what you said about Kafka and the Holocaust. Lucky indeed. Just imagine a man like him there. It’s unbearable to even think abo
ut.)

  So, just to tell you how it ended: We shower in tranquillity, with pleasure, it lasts a long time. We soap ourselves down in a serious manner, with long, graceful motions and some respect for this ritual.

  That’s the whole dream.

  After writing it down, I’m a little disappointed. I probably forgot most of it. What is this, compared to your stormy, complicated dream panels? You understand, though—I really felt that I was in that shower all night. I wonder how long a dream like that could last, anyway.

  Still, I’m yearning to return and be in that dream. It was as if we weren’t human beings in that dream, or at least, not “human beings” in the normal sense of the word: we had a kind of nobility, like, let’s say, four beautiful horses bathing in a stream. Each one concentrated only on his own cleanliness.

  Should I send this? Or shouldn’t I?

  Y.

  I’m glad I waited—tonight’s harvest looks of higher quality:

  I’m walking with my father in the Mamila area of Jerusalem, in front of the cement wall that stood there until ‘67. In the dream, it is still standing, but you could probably already pass through it into the Old City. It really doesn’t matter, though. My father and I are traveling down a curvy,complex path and arrive at the Italian hospital. There, my father tells me that we have to say goodbye. It seems like a regular old everyday goodbye. I don’t know if he’s very sick and about to enter the hospital or if he’s going to continue on his way, but a sudden, heavy burden comes between us. My father walks away from me. He turns around suddenly—as if he had just remembered something important—and he stretches his hand out toward me. He is actually holding a hand out to me. Even from far away it is a gesture of love and tenderness.

  I rush to him, take his hand. I want to hold it a moment longer. But he pulls his hand away quickly and says apologetically, Look at what your pen did to me, and sucks blood from his finger. I’m eaten up with remorse for hurting him and start to mumble an apology—but he’s already far away. Gone.

  It was strange (strange is not the word)—

  It was exciting to meet my father again in the dream. I haven’t seen him in a long time. His walk, his face … and there was something embarrassed and helpless in his stance before me …

  September 27

  Greetings, my dear Anna,

  We’ve never met, but I have a feeling we can address each other as friends. I feel as if I’ve known you a long time.

  When I began corresponding with Miriam, she once asked me, with a smile, if I had already heard “all the stories about her.” She asked me to promise to believe only what she told me about herself. So that we would never have gossip between us.

  She seemed so innocent and domestic to me (I know, she certainly is also that) that the very idea that there were “stories” floating around about her amused me.

  But something just happened that—Yesterday afternoon, after I put my daily letter into the school mailbox, I had to drive someone home. “Had to” because I very much wanted to be alone after that particular letter. But I had no choice: I know this woman who works at the school, vaguely (we have kids in the same kindergarten). She is a small and vital woman. And very decisive. We drove. We got stuck in traffic. She, for some reason, was very eager to talk; for a moment I even had the strange feeling that she was actually rolling the conversation along a very specificpath. Because—I don’t understand how this happened—she mentioned Miriam and Amos, and then your name came up as well, of course. As did the whole mess.

  To be more precise: I discovered that “the entire city of Jerusalem was talking about you” and that “the whole mess stank to high heaven.” (The story was passionately accompanied by hand gestures and clichéd euphemisms.) I also learned that a few parents and someone from the Ministry of Education demanded that Miriam be dismissed from the school because of the “scandal,” and only the furious protests of students and other parents kept her from being fired.

  Can you imagine how I felt? I could barely keep driving. I didn’t know anything about it. I’ve been corresponding with Miriam for half a year and she didn’t tell me. Perhaps she feared I wouldn’t understand, or that I would be shocked by her (?).

  My dear Anna, when I was a little boy and my mother or father began to sizzle and fume around me, I had a patented trick: I used to seal myself up from the outside world. And then I would start to tell myself a story. It was always the same story, about a creature named Angelus. Only I could create him, by turning my little wristwatch to the sun (or any other source of light)—and he was there, a little round stain of light dancing on the wall. Storms would bluster outside me, around me; and I would secretly make Angelus move across the walls, and talk to him inside me; I would roll him over the grimacing faces in front of me, and on their bodies, too, and on their foreheads, building annexes of light in them; and the entire time my heart spoke to him, using large, beautiful words that used to bring me a real feeling of elevation in the midst of their poison.

  Yesterday he returned. In a moment’s brilliance, he arrived to rescue me—I strolled with him along the car’s roof, on the woman’s dress, on her ignorant face. She blathered on, and with all my strength I focused myself and told Angelus about you, Anna. That you lived with Amos and loved him with all your heart—and he loved you. How can you not love Anna?—Miriam has said to me more than once. Angelus was sauntering along in his light—it has been perhaps twenty years since we met like this; I’ve been through so many wristwatches since we were first together—but he has remained exactly the same. I explained to him that at one particular moment—if you can measure such events in time—itso happened that your Amos and your Miriam fell in love with each other.

  Maybe it happened when Miriam went to Parice—no, to Paris, to save that Yehoshua who was so dear to her. You know how once in a while she likes to feel like a knight-errant, saving someone in distress. Once she arrived there, she discovered he didn’t need any saving. On the contrary, Yehoshua was living the wild life. She apparently broke down a little at that, and you commanded Amos to go and bring her back.

  Maybe it happened when you met the Dutch U.N. officer, who borrowed books from the British consul library, and lived with him in a small hut near the Cremisan Monastery for half a year (as you can see, I’ve been thoroughly brought up-to-date), leaving Amos alone at home in Jerusalem.

  But I’d rather think that it happened during the most ordinary moment. A vegetable market moment. When she was at your house, for example, preparing supper with you as usual. You were making strawberries and cream; and they were cutting vegetables together for a salad. And Miriam began to talk about something that had happened that day in class, or enthusiastically describing how light falls on the poplar leaves. Or maybe she was standing silent for a moment, not moving, diving into herself. And Amos looked at her and felt his heart expanding and melting away.

  I was covered in sweat when my unwanted hitchhiker left the car, so great was the effort to be only with Angelus.

  A triangle is a rather stable form, Miriam once told me. And satisfying. And even enriching. On the condition that all sides know that they are sides in a triangle, she added.

  Anna, I need you to help me. I have no clue about how it really was among you three. Did the three of you live together, or did Amos shuttle back and forth between the two of you; what did you know? What didn’t you know? When did they tell you? And how did you feel then—and weren’t you even slightly jealous of your best friend?

  Miriam said that if I refused to believe in the possibility of such “poetic geometry” (a name I gave it) in this world, then I would never feel everything I am capable of feeling. She didn’t mention a specific case, she was just responding to my thesis regarding the “usual system of law” of men’s and women’s relationships.

  I am starting to see how much I will need to explain and interpret and translate for you—even as close as you are to Miriam—so you will understand exactly what we said, she and I.<
br />
  She also, at that point, slapped me with sparks—you know her, fire bursts out of her sometimes—informing me that I am brave with words and cowardly in my life, and that, to her, true courage is surrender to whatever your soul brings to you.

  And Amos is a very brave man, the bravest and the most honest she has ever met.

  A whole day and half a night has passed since this discovery. A lot of coffee has been flowing through the channels of my body. I still have to know—what did you really feel? Because you must have seen it start to bud between the two people you loved most. How did you handle the pain of what must have been an implicit slur on you? How do you continue to love them both without dying a hundred times a day from pain and jealousy? I know how Miriam would have answered me—that, on the contrary, despite all the inevitable pain, you loved them both even more.