Be My Knife Read online

  But how can you?

  You can. (Believe, believe, believe.)

  I don’t know if she told you about this, but I made a small, painful bargain with her: I have to give up one word in my mother tongue for every new word she teaches me. She wants to tell me a story, you see. The new words are so I will understand it. And she keeps telling me that it is the story I need to hear the most—the story of complete self-abandonment and entry into another person. What do you think, Anna? Is it possible? Will I be able to?

  October 1

  Here. At this moment, you are there—on your balcony, facing Jerusalem’s forest. Under the bougainvillea shade. Your almost empty house is behind you—you are sitting with your face pointed to beauty. Floating in the twilight, in your most beloved hour of the day, which is the hardest hour for you to bear. And still, it is your most beloved. Soon Yokhai will return, and you will be absorbed in his care, from now until the medication puts him to sleep. Sometimes, when I’m at home alone,putting Ido to bed, I fantasize that you and I, together, are putting the kids to bed, in the comfort of our home and our habits.

  I think about you and Amos often: what you have to go through every day, and the profound friendship you share. The place belonging only to the two of you, that only he, of all men, can understand the language of. I feel like a stranger, and a bit like a child, beside your intimacy.

  Your togetherness and our togetherness, Maya’s and mine, don’t have too much in common. I think more life and passion exist between us than between you. But who knows? Perhaps you two have something I can’t begin to imagine.

  Today, almost every hour, I looked at the light through the blue stone you sent me. It really is a wonder; in it, in the twilight, for example, you can see two girls playing the piano using a book of duets. Your hands are soaring; you are full of life through the blue stone.

  I have, in the past week, adopted a little habit—to, every evening, at this hour, stop moving. Like right now. And to be with you in complete silence for just a few moments (I noticed a long time ago how you rise up within me in every moment I have to myself). After my third letter or thereabouts, you asked how we would ever manage to meet—not in one place, but at one time—because I am so edgy and impatient (and hasty, tsk tsk, you added); and you wondered if I really would ever be able to linger for even one moment in another person’s time, if I wouldn’t just feel claustrophobic in another person’s time.

  You see, I’m practicing.

  I’m discovering, for example, that in this hour the odors of the whole day hatch at once … as if they had to hide during the rest of the hours, compromise themselves, give up; there was always just one triumphant tyrant’s smell, and now—the grass, and the earth, the asphalt and the smell of laundry, and I’ve learned to recognize the scents of jasmine and ya’ara—in combination and each by itself, as one can smell them only at this hour.

  And each leaf has at least two shadows.

  I’m starting to write like you …

  You said that whenever I “decide” or “know,” it is coming from a tough, strange knowledge choked in my throat—and you feel in it somethingbranded in me by force and violence. You also said that I’m smart, but especially about the things I don’t know.

  Here, then—at this moment I have no idea what a pleasure it is to be wrapped up with you in the twilight.

  Hey, Miriam,

  Me

  October 2

  And here’s some late-breaking news—

  I’ve left home.

  Don’t get too excited, it’s only for a week and came about quite suddenly—but I wanted to announce a temporary address change and inform you of the possible difficulties of correspondence. A slightly complicated matter that would be tragic if it wasn’t so funny (and vice versa). The matter comes down to three words: saving my life. In six: the routine saving of my life. Do you have a minute?

  The truth is, I’m pretty tense about this. “This” began at about ten this morning. When work is at the peak of its insanity and I am under the most pressure—telephones and people around me, and every second someone else comes to me, to ask a question or consult or reveal his most private shameful secrets through a choked throat and sometimes with tears as well. A telephone call drops a bomb in the middle of this chaos—Ido’s kindergarten teacher, who asks me to come pick him up immediately. He has a high fever and is very swollen behind the cars, and the wheel of madness around me slowly … stops … I sit down, put my head in my hands, because what I have feared more than anything has come true—and what the hell do I do now? And Maya is in Safed, this is her day at the laboratory in Safed. A calculated plan of action crystallizes within me in a blink: I will run away. I will not pick him up. Let him stay in kindergarten until he grows old, or at least until Maya returns. She’s already had it, and anyway, it isn’t as dangerous in women. I remember now, with terror, the little bottle of vaccine I bought two years ago during one of the more recent epidemics and promised Maya to go to a nurse so she could inject me—but that bottle stayed in the refrigerator, and over time was pushed back to the notorious mustard region …

  Okay—so I leave the last instructions to my staff, spit out a panickedlast will and testament, gotta run, my boy is burning with fever, my little child is incubating his virus. Maybe he’s already contaminated me—and I suddenly feel that he’s been clinging to me more than usual since yesterday, and with more purpose—the kiss this morning when I dropped him off at kindergarten, the wild hug last night at bedtime—who knows what clever scheming instinct is acting in him, trying to eliminate any competing heirs, any rival mouths. I’m lucky to have had at least one child, thus paying off, with interest, my genetic debt to a tortured humanity—but what about the rest of my modest joys?

  This is how my day started, and who knows what fruit it will bear (at least the daywill bear fruit). Maya listened to me in silence, ignoring my panicked howls over the phone, and immediately enlisted her eminent self-control: she ordered me to take him to the doctor, she will cancel everything she planned to do today and come home on the next bus—and until then I’ll have at least three quality hours with the little Well Poisoner. Can you grasp the severity of the situation?

  I sank down in my chair, shrinking around the presumed area of disaster. Ami S., who works for me, encouragingly and helpfully informs me that if I am infected, it will be the most efficient method of birth control. I hope he suffocates. I hope he suffocates and is castrated. Ami S., who has four kids, boys and girls, and had the mumps when he was three years old, like every normal child except for me. Why, all my life I’ve been nervously prepared for exactly such an announcement. And now for the bitter truth (it is bitter, after all, even though you insist that not every truth has to be!): I chose this disease carefully for myself, when, at the tender age of three, I was the only one of all the nursery school children who managed to persuade the mumps germs to convert their religion and produce only scarlet fever! And since then—the interminable anticipation of a blade dropping on the source of all my happiness. There isn’t a medical article on the topic I haven’t read—there isn’t one pediatrician I haven’t pestered and interrogated on the dangers awaiting whoever didn’t get it in time, as a child—or didn’t force him to admit, with much prodding, that all his other colleagues were lying, and the percentage of adults who get infected and are thereafter excluded from the circle of fertility and RSA (routine sexual activity) in general is a lot larger than what those quacks publish in the New England Journal of Medicine.

  Does it sound like I’m laughing? Does this seem like a smile to you? It’s a twitch of frozen terror; my guts simply turn when I think, What if …

  But by the time you read this, I will be in Tel Aviv. (I just popped into work to tighten some final screws and write to you. I will immediately flee the infected city.) A room awaits me there, not too bad, in a small, homey family hotel by the sea. I come there once a year for a week. They’ve gotten used to me. There is a pleasant side to
my well-rehearsed terror of the mumps. And as you can see, I wisely choose to take advantage of them. In short—all the above was to tell you that if you write me this week, I will not receive the letter. It will have to wait until I return. It was also to torture myself more from the curiosity over what you couldn’t tell me about the last letter (I understand it is somehow connected to Yokhai, but what? What happened? And why did you become difficult and depressed all of a sudden? Please tell me). And I promise that if I have a free moment there, I will do my best to scribble some hot thoughts from Sin City!

  I will be leaving shortly. I am sitting down for the first moment today, and it is difficult for me to get up. I also simply enjoy writing you, so I can laugh at myself a little over this crazy day. (There is something else—a new feeling, I’m not quite sure what it is—freedom? Becoming myself again? Something like that.)

  Maya arrived home at two in the afternoon to find Ido screaming in pain and me breathing through wads of cotton dipped in aftershave as a disinfectant. I know she was thinking about the vaccination bottle growing slowly moldy in the refrigerator. The first mantra of married life (“I told you so!”) was already sparkling in her eyes. But I have explained to her before, and did again, that sometimes—in rare cases, but being the bitter exception is not uncommon for me—the vaccination itself might cause infection, and no sane man would, of his own free will, go out of his way so a doctor can inject him with germs of impotence. Weakened, indeed—but how can you know who exactly and by what they determine the standards?

  Maya didn’t smile. Maya doesn’t smile at my jokes much anymore. (You aren’t exactly rolling around on the floor screaming with uncontrollable laughter either, are you? Why is it that women always scowl when I’m even a little jolly?) But I long ago lost the competition against the earth’s gravity for control over the edges of Maya’s lips. Where did my happy, laughing girl go? Where is she?

  Where were we?

  I’m writing this and thinking, If only I could send this letter to her.

  She sat down at the kitchen table with Ido on her lap and asked me where I intended to go. I said that, as usual, I would go to my hotel in Tel Aviv, because I would not stay in Jerusalem as long as he was contagious. She took a deep breath and asked me how long I planned to stay away from home. I said that, as usual, at least until the swelling behind his ears went down. Meaning about four or five days, a week. As usual.

  It has somehow become an institution between us, my annual vacation from the epidemic. Nobody asks too many questions—but Maya’s eyes fade in front of me a little.

  Anyway, she helped me pack, and reminded me not to forget certain things, and by the time we reached the door, we were soft and buttery with each other again. She caressed me and asked me if it wouldn’t be so difficult for me to be alone this way, if I’m sure I have to run away so far again, because I haven’t caught it all these years, maybe I’m naturally immune to it (which I certainly might be). And I told her that it would be very hard for me to be alone, and invested a lot of emotion in my “very”—I swore it to her with all my heart, shit-heel that I am. We hugged again, and we felt true sorrow and even a little fear, because who knows whether, etc., and all the complications that go along with it. I’ve lived in deadly fear of these complications my entire life, and now I have managed to infect even Maya with the same fears. Despite her immunological education. She knows these complications are mainly in my head, but on the other hand, this year is the first time that Ido has really caught it—so isn’t that an interesting development.

  I said, Come on, why are you making such a big deal out of it, as if I were leaving for good (but every separation between us, even the most routine, always seems like an eternal goodbye for us). And I also mentioned that I would be back in a few days (and every meeting of ours has some of the awkwardness of a first date). And for a moment I almost stayed. But no, I left, I left, determinedly, feeling, deep in my heart, that I wouldn’t return the same man. Something is about to happen. Maya felt it, too—she can immediately feel it when wind is blowing in the sails of my manhood (and if she had, only once, said that she knows, she knows me—that we don’t even have to talk about it, let’s just start all over again,with a clean slate, and let each of us finally give everything we can to the other, because we have grown so much since)—

  Well, as you can see, I have very little trouble writing and writing and writing and passing the entire week in this manner—and perhaps that isn’t such a bad idea.

  A moment before I fly: I just made a little arrangement with the post office: they will transfer any letters in my mailbox to my hotel in exile (just don’t write your name on the envelope). So please, don’t abandon the one who was sent away!

  (Four in the afternoon, already on the boardwalk!)

  But …

  Even before going to the hotel, I went to the boardwalk, sat down on a white chair, and closed my eyes to the sun in front of me—and began to wonder what a person in my situation should do with such a week, such an ultimate week. To whom will he say goodbye with a gloomy moan of mourning—and whom will he meet, in the sore howl of heat? Should he jump on a fast airplane and fly to Frankfurt? Yes, yes, corrupt Frankfurt, above all! And no one will ever know he disappeared—who will know? A marvelous week—a secret niche in time. At the Frankfurt Airport is a huge hotel for travelers wishing to stay the night in the middle of long flights. It is there that a person in my situation could live, incognito, as a sexual exile for a whole week: each night he will come down to the crowded bar and will entertain one female passenger according to his predetermined game plan, as follows: On the first day, it will be a lady intending to depart for America the next morning; on the second day, let’s say a shapely lecturer from Melbourne University; on the third, he will celebrate with an Israeli who is returning to her country and homeland the next day; the night after, with a curvy black woman from the Ivory Coast. And he will continue in this manner, night after night—and if possible, in the mornings as well, because we mustn’t neglect, for example, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America (and Atlantis)—your-servant travels the face of the globe’s soft curves with his rough stick until hespreads his sperm throughout all the continents, among all races—and will then be able to lie peacefully with his ancestors.

  And while I was deep in thought, a herd of shameless women rose up from the waves and knocked on my closed eyelids with their knuckles—Open up for us, open up! And I laughed at them from underneath my eyelids: What’s with this burning, I only just arrived! Yair hasn’t started distributing himself today, you’ll have to come back …

  Listen, I can already tell that I’m having a hard time sitting still for even fifteen minutes—spikes, spikes. It’s not going to be an easy week for me. Hey, what do you say—perhaps instead of heading off to the hotel—I really don’t feel like being trapped in four walls—I will drop this infant into the mailbox over there on which someone spray-painted in huge letters SIVAN, WRITE ME ALREADY! And if you promise to join me without interfering, I will make a short cut from here straight to—

  6:30 p.m.

  Dizengoff! (Where else did you think a tourist from Jerusalem like myself would go?) Dizengoff Street—with exceptional generosity and warmth—for an hour, full of charms and the soft haze of twilight. And you know what was so strange about it, Miriam? There weren’t any men there. At all! Only me, with a thousand women. I staggered, drunk and dizzy, and was, in each moment, baptized into another religion with the cloud of perfume of each woman who passed me. Certain perfumes drive me crazy, on the spot. I can see the complete sexual histories of every woman there passing before my eyes. And I’m also certain that each one of them could hear the drumming beat of my heart’s groin—it happens, you know, in the fraction of a second between when you glance at a woman and when her scent hits you—between the lightning and the thunder. You should have seen me, shuttling between those women like a truck from the sperm bank. I hope my little enthusiasms are not making you
angry. And you aren’t offended by it or taking it personally in any way—it has nothing to do with you. It’s just a vacation for myself. Perhaps even from us. From the immense heaviness we have created in these few months together. Just, please, don’t be angry (and don’t return this letter to me sealed!). Indulge me this week. You went to the Galilee for a week—you took a vacation, too—as I remember.

  See, I’m starting to feel murky again. Again, the arguments I washoping we had already freed ourselves from. I was enjoying myself so much (until this moment). I’m going back to the boardwalk, to fuel up on a ray or two of the sunset, and the smells of the sea, and the burnished skin. You can join me, if you so desire.

  October 3

  Miriam, hello.

  I don’t know if you have already received the letter I’ve sent you from here. To tell you the truth (bitter, of course), I hope you didn’t, that yesterday’s triple punch somehow evaporated en route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

  Everything seemed a bit more delightful yesterday, somehow. The situation is that, once a year, when Ido gets anything resembling the symptoms, I escape to a particular hotel by the sea. As I have told you. A small hotel, owned by two elderly Viennese who keep it neat and clean, a kind of place in the style we used to enjoy in the days of his majesty Franz Joseph.

  All right. I’ll tell you everything in order. The moment I entered the building last night, I could see that something had changed tremendously. Behind the counter, instead of Mrs. Meier, stood a skinny fellow with the eyes of a thief and oily, slicked-back hair. One look and I realized that my oasis by the sea had changed owners. And, apparently, destinies as well (excuse me for using that word in this context).