Be My Knife Read online

  And Maya in the kitchen says, “By the time he learns to read, it will already be out of date.”

  I make a “let’s hear him out” gesture. Ido tries to say, “En-cy-clo-pe-di-a,” and they both laugh—and the kitchen sails away from me.

  T., who waited through this cozy conversation patiently, said quickly, with disgust, that N. had passed away yesterday at Hadassah Hospital after having been very ill for half a year. I didn’t even know she had gotten sick. She had died twenty minutes away from me. I didn’t feel anything—and there had been hours when my soul had touched her soul.

  I also thought about how faithfully she had kept her promise—she didn’t call me even once, even when she got sick—she didn’t even write. She was so strong, so faithful to me—and I was such a jerk for giving her up as I did. And I actually knew so little about her.

  I could have never told you this story, couldn’t I? Couldn’t I? I have this stupid belief that if I tell you, nothing like it will ever happen to me again, in my life.

  I wanted to know what had happened to her during those years—what would happen to her child now. I asked a few more empty questions, verbal dung for the satisfaction of my listeners. T. ignored it, quickly gave me the details about the funeral, and hung up. And I hung up the phone because we weren’t interested in buying encyclopedias. I returned to the kitchen, and M. asked me if I had fallen for another one.I. showed me his whistle. And I? I sat down to my supper, and talked and laughed and whistled inward and outward, and felt like those Nazis who would come home to their families after work.

  My hand hurts from writing. The blinds are shut, so I can forget, for a moment, if it is day or night. I don’t know how you will feel about this story. But look at it this way—you were gracious to me—you were the pit in the ground into which I could, once, yell out this secret. I’ve never even told myself about it since it happened.

  Listen, I’ve probably been looking for you for years, and in my search I wasted so much, constantly making too many mistakes by following the paths of too many coincidences. It’s becoming clearer to me that I’ve been looking for you for a long time—like a man in a smoke-filled room looking for a window. I guess everything was upside down. I’ve always thought coincidence was my original sin—and also my most recurring sin—because my most important decisions have been made without any strong intentions—and certainly without this “lingering” of yours. In the past few days, though, I am starting to realize that perhaps it is the other way around: Coincidence is not my sin but my punishment.

  It’s a rather horrible punishment. You know what? It is the most horrible punishment. It proliferates, it spreads everywhere. A person, for example, thinking about a child—it even doesn’t matter whose child—it could be his own son—and he suddenly asks himself, How can it be possible? That a child, a wonder of creation, is born of an encounter that is not fated—and is preventable—between two

  (Does it ever occur for you—you write a sentence that, a moment earlier, you had no knowledge of? Not in this way, never to that extent—suddenly a short, terse verdict is laid in front of you—with no possibility of appeal.)

  Miriam,

  A few minutes ago (it’s now seven in the morning)—I heard a noise. I jumped out of bed (I guess I had fallen asleep for a little bit)—I was convinced that they had come to rob me, or rape me (anything is possible here), and saw that someone had pushed some paper under the door.

  Your letter.

  Finally, from light-years a way—I think it came in the mail a couple of days ago and has lain on the check-in counter since (the envelope is covered with scribbles and doodles and phone numbers in many different handwritings). It’s a shame it didn’t reach me earlier—it would have helped me a lot, saved me. I haven’t opened it yet. I can’t. I’m afraid I will not be able to stand such joy in my present condition. I’m also a little afraid of what is inside, that thing you were wondering about telling me. I don’t think myself capable of handling anything too heavy right now. Maybe I’ll take a small nap and later—

  But I’m already feeling different—completely different (as if they returned my ID card to me).

  One more moment—I want to suck all the sweetness from the moment before.

  A new yearning for home has awakened within me. I phoned Maya and we talked. Everything is fine—Ido has already recovered. He hasn’t had a fever for a few days now and is just a bit swollen. I ironed out my soul a little, and hers—I heard the noises of home in the background. She told me she had come to Tel Aviv to look for me. I didn’t say anything. Neither did she. Suddenly we sighed together—at least that was something good, our joined sigh. I was filled with affection for her—we are good friends. I might not have given her her due in these letters. It is still hard to talk about her to you—too many voices mixing together. But in life, in reality, she is my best friend—you know that, don’t you? She is the light and the heat, the bloodstream and the tissue of my life. She truly is my daily joy. It is all so complicated.

  I told her I couldn’t come back yet. She was silent again. I told her that something was happening to me here, it got a little convoluted, I went somewhere I didn’t mean to go—and now I have to continue to untangle the mess. I made it clear to her that it was something with myself. She said, Take your time. I told her it wouldn’t take long, just a few more days. She said that if it was important to me, she would manage. I thought about how generous she is, and how horrible I would have been to her, and how much I would have argued with her had our positions been reversed.

  After that, I dialed your number, and hung up before you could pickup the phone. But even the ringing was enough to make me feel better—that I was still capable of creating a sound you would hear.

  I’m going to read your letter.

  Just a moment.

  Hey, Miriam …

  Too heavy to contain, too dense to contain, too tense to contain—and yet, still—look at what a huge space you have cleared for me inside yourself—me with all my elbow angles poking you.

  I wanted to simply jump into a taxi now, at this moment, at ten at night, to fly to you and hold you close, with all my strength, to stroke your face, comfort you. I wanted to lie with you, so I could be as close as possible to the story, to the place of that story, of you and Amos and Anna. And Yokhai.

  You can probably guess the nausea I feel over some of the things I wrote to you over the past months unintentionally, innocently, rudeness, stupidity—without paying attention, with the cruelty of a baby crushing a chick—they all rise up in my throat.

  My spoiled nonsense about the mumps—and what would youdo if you had a disease with such complications … How the hell could you stand me?

  I wish you could feel how much I am with you now, in body and soul, more than ever—practically reigniting a huge engine inside me. I’m coming back, Miriam. I don’t want to remember where I have been these past few days, to what depths I sank. I want to wake up to life, to give you all my genetic material, what I am, for better or for worse, with my words. The microscopic double helix of my DNA spiraling through every sentence of mine to you. I’m writing wretched nonsense, I know, because now I want to bring you even my stupidity, and my enthusiasm, my cowardice, and my treachery—and the miserliness of my heart. But I also have two or three good things in me that could mix with all of your goodness. Let my fears mate with yours, our disappointments and failures—only yesterday I wrote how insulting it is to think of a child being born by the non-fatal combination of a man and a woman. And you never, not once, told me how many times that similar combination of words had floated in your mind—when a child was not born. Whydidn’t you tell me? You hid such a thing from me for six months—what were you afraid of?

  Maybe you didn’t trust me—didn’t feel I could be a lightning rod for your sorrow and pain—or thought I wasn’t worthy. Is that it? I was unworthy to hear such a story of yours? That’s it, isn’t it? I’m reading between your lines, and it insults me a
nd stings me to the edge of despair—until now you weren’t sure whether you should tell me. Perhaps you were frightened that I would pollute such an amazing tale of purity. You hesitated so much over whether I could be trustworthy—

  Miriam, if you have any feeling left toward me, a shred of goodwill, help me—don’t make it easy on me—now— now—be my knife. Ask me how it is possible that still, even now, I have to suppress a miserable urge to run immediately from the disaster area each time you expose another one of your wounds in front of me. I, of course, will deny it—and tell you that, on the contrary, your mothering of Yokhai is even more wonderful to me now that you’ve told me; and that ever since you told me, I have felt the new enormous power you possess, and it pulses in three different places in my body—deep in my mind, on the left side—in the fireball under my heart—and in the root of my dick—and if you draw a line connecting the three, you will have a precise portrait of me at in this moment—

  This is what I will say. And you will yell, Enough, enough! Because you know already that when I write this way, this enthusiastically, I am lying; I am again intimate only at shouting distance. Save me from myself, please. Look straight into my eyes and ask me again, as you did in the letter, if the muscles in the back of my soul are not arching away right now—if you aren’t suddenly becoming too heavy for my amorphous delusions to hold. Ask me more than that. Ask me if I understand what I truly feel when you pull your stitches out in front of me like this. Don’t make it easy on me—defend me from my black twin, because I can’t do it alone. I can’t defeat him. Demand that I understand what I feel when this wound of yours gapes in front of me, mercilessly, sucking me in and closing over me—ask me if I even know how to feel another person’s pain. And do I know where it is supposed to hurt—the hurt he feels—do I understand in what part of the body it hurts? Do I really believe, in the depths of my heart, that it is possible to ache with another’s pain, or is it,in my eyes, just a social convention, a shared lie, an empty cliché. Another person’s pain. I repeat the word “pain” the way Yokhai repeats words he doesn’t understand—you said that in this particular way of stepping into puddles he is trying to bring this thing he is not certain of into his own existence, into existence outside himself. Pain, pain, pain.

  I have to go out, buy—something. I’ve been living on yogurt and beer for almost a week—and finished the yogurt this morning. I will not survive another night without solid food, and they’ll be closing the night grocery store on Ben Yehuda in fifteen minutes. You know what really makes me feel despair? You told me something so serious, so difficult, and I am still incapable of being who you really need—a man who knows you as you are with yourself, between you and yourself. I haven’t reached the secret you are. Please, don’t go easy on me, please tell me—

  Yair, Yair, come and feel my body, right now, all of it;make me overcome the embarrassment of little words that are giggling like girls, tell me to become rounder, become fuller; feel how I spread in you into the farthest reaches that don’t exist in your flesh, that are only possibilities in you—whisper to me to feel your breasts, their roundness and softness, at the exact point of gravity that pulls them downward and to the sides, the part of the breast that’s always highlighted in paintings. Ask me to loosen my shoulders and smile— Loosen them. Even though mine are pretty tense as well, ten years of Alexander and they’re still tense. Go on, keep going, all the time, for eternity, tell me again and again— Loosen up, loosen up, feel how your face slowly becomes soft and round; be delicate, don’t be afraid of that word. Perhaps you could have been a happier man if you had dared to be a bit more delicate, allowed yourself to be filled with your own delicacy—it is in you, it’s right for you, it’s your hidden spring, don’t shut it down with stones. And tell me, Come and flow into my body; inscribe words into my veins throughout the length of my body, down my legs and between them—so I can feel, for once, what it feels like when it is yours, not only what you desire. But you are so tense. Yair, maybe it is because I am tense now, as if preparing for pain, because … now, my belly … I am asking you to fill my belly, my soft, empty …

  Don’t stop. You mustn’t protect me, not in this place we are in—that’s our contract, isn’t it, Yair? We’re hand in hand, and tonight we write everything.Words of truth. (How do you like to say in your high-flown language “Kosht Imrei Emet”—a sheaf of truths?) Write, write whatever comes to your mind, and my mind … fill my belly from within, search in me for that spot, my blind spot, that you once named without even noticing—“my body and my soul, recognizing each other once again, I can actually hear the whisper of the internal password (srsrsrsrsr … ). ” Imagine for a moment how my hopes collect there, in a puddle, from month to month, that then transforms into a dagger of sorrow and despair, gloom of the soul and gloom of the body.

  Remember then how you saw me for the first time on that evening; now that you finally understand why I was so miserable, what I was despairing over at the moment you looked at me—the private, sad visit I received that day.

  The void of “almost.”

  Don’t leave the room—be with us. My words are coming out of your mouth, it is so strange … Your will excites me, and embarrasses me in an indescribable way—but don’t you remember, this is the exact one and only story I wanted to tell you: the story of a complete entering into the other, not to get lost in him, and certainly not to give up yourself, but in order to experience, just once, a stranger, I mean, another in you …

  I can now, with all my body and soul, feel your desire for it, Yair—and your fear as well. They are both raging within you, as they always, always do with you. You touch my pain with your bare hands for a moment, and I can feel how precious it is to you and that you truly do not want me to be alone in it. And the moment after, you ricochet to the farthest reaches … Just don’t come out of me, because if you leave me now, you will never return. You will run to the ends of the earth, and you will never want to remember what is starting inside you now, with me … your soul, slowly, painfully opening up this way to another person. Just don’t stop writing—hold on to your pen with all your remaining strength. You’re shaking with tension, but as you write, you hit more roots in me … Don’t be afraid, not even from that thought you had once, a million years ago, or was it two days—you wanted to wake up without your memory, after an accident, or an operation, and start remembering our story, step by step, and tell it to yourself from the beginning, without knowing for even one moment whether you were the man or the woman in the story.

  I also wish you could remember yourself as a woman—or as not-man andnot-woman—the you before everything, before definitions and genders and words and the sexes; perhaps, in this way, you will also arrive—as if by coincidence—at my initial potential, at the possibility of being me.

  If you reach it, you will truly know how I am standing in front of you now; bent over a little, tense. You were so amazed by my motherliness—from the first moment, you practically sucked my maternity out of me—and the more you sucked, the more I flowed, and the more I flowed, the thirstier I was for it—and I never knew, never tried, and never dared to tell myself this tale with such intensity.

  You can guess how I feel, now that you know the reality of the situation, the cold facts. But what can I do, Yair? I am probably not the most rational person when discussing this matter, my nonexistent motherhood.

  And Darwin is not saluting me from his grave.

  And you are right. It is very, very difficult to create something from two people.

  But you are so truly a mother to me! This is not something that could ever change—it is your being, Miriam; and I could never think of you without feeling it (I all of a sudden understand—“Amos has a child from his first marriage.” I never made the connection …) I can’t stop thinking about those moments in the delivery room when she felt that something had gone very wrong in her body, and you promised her, immediately promised, you both promised—such a promise.


  And how you are counting to a million with him. All the way to a million.

  You know, perhaps there was such a moment in the spaces of time and entities, a fraction of a second when you could have been me, my possibility … What do you say? Can you believe there is truly such a place, can one ask such a wish from your Kremlin? No, don’t turn on the light, the light here is too red … write in the dark. Your handwriting was very shaky in the last moments, a weeping hand. Do you remember how hurt I was when you never asked me what is my Luz? Time and time again I asked you to guess it, and you completely ignored me (you certainly know how to ignore certain questions), andeventually I gave up, and then I hadn’t continued to ask even myself, and I lost the question.

  But now, write, tell me:

  More and more, I think that my Luz is my yearning.

  And what is yours?

  Do you really want to know? No, you don’t.

  You’re silent. You’re suddenly refusing to be written. The magic is gone. I know what you’re thinking, it’s written all over your face: “ … and how is it that a person who so hungers for the love and love’s nectar that it practically shouts out from his every word—how is it that he insists on stuffing himself with snacks …” I read it, I read it. It was an especially unnecessary section of your last letter. Let’s leave it for now—it’s a pity to spoil this. Don’t try to change everything about me—and don’t take that, in particular, away from me, because, in spite of your misgivings, it is certainly a Luz.

  Don’t leave, Yair, don’t drop your pen; play your false game for me just one minute more, even though the muscles in the back of your soul are twisting away in you until the pain is unbearable. I know it well, you have made me feel things I almost couldn’t endure, too. But now, as you sit with yourself in that room, perhaps lonelier than you have ever dared to allow yourself to be, I want you to write it once, for your eyes only—why you are doing this to yourself—and how it is that you are willing to allow strangers to enter your most wounded place.