Be My Knife Read online

  Listen, I have never written anything so odd, my whole body actually contracted and shook …

  Where were we? Don’t stop now, don’t lose these inner tremblings; our breath, it slows slowly, but we still don’t move apart, we’re still touching, and looking into each other’s eyes; it is a quiet, direct look, completely simple, in the midst of all the complications of situations like these; it issimple, like a kiss you give a child who comes to show you a fresh wound. It is heartbreaking, the thought that you can see into a grown-up person that way.

  We’re not laughing anymore. There is a long silence. Almost scary. Want to detach and cannot. And in your eyes and mine, more and more curtains are parting, revealing the depths, and I am thinking how similar a moment like this is to a moment of disaster—nothing will ever be the same. And we’re terribly exhausted, holding each other to keep from falling, and see our story in a sort of strange and sad clarity. The words are not important anymore, and the language doesn’t matter either; it could be written in Sanskrit, hieroglyphics, the hieroglyphics of chromosomes: see me as a child, see me as an adolescent, see the man I am. See what happened to me on the way here, how my story faded—where do I start, Miriam. I always think that there is no fragment of innocence left in me. Yet I came to you in innocence—from the first moment I began writing you, my words to you came out of a place completely new to me, like sperm kept for only one particular loved one, and the rest emerging from some other part of my body. But you probably want to go to sleep now, and so do I, even though I don’t have a chance tonight, not anymore. Another moment, then. Help me to calm down, give me your hand, even a finger will do for me now; I need that now, right now, for you to be a lightning rod for me.

  (Is that too much to ask from one person? At least stay until the ash from my cigarette falls.)

  Say, did I read you right? That a triangle is not such a shaky structure? And in “some contexts” it might even be a solid, satisfying structure? Even enriching? And also very fitting to human nature, “at least to my nature,” you wrote, and great curiosity was roused among the brief and concentrated audience of your words …

  Under the condition that it is equilateral, you added immediately, and all involved know they are sides of a triangle. (Are you scolding me? What have you already heard about me?)

  It’s too late to go into this now, and the ash is shaking tremulously at the end. I’ll wait patiently for your answer; but know that I am amused to see how in a few strokes of your pen you have created a new and privatebranch of science—poetic geometry. It is a pity, though, that you didn’t explain to me how it applies in life, this wonder you are wishing

  (it fell)

  May 30

  I can’t get enough of looking. The photo of the shadow on the hills opposite and the jets of the five o’clock sprinklers wearing all their shine, and mainly the bottle (what a photo!), the broken bottle on the rock …

  And that you got wet, Miriam, that you simply got up and walked into the cold shower, and stood in it for so long (I, by the way, couldn’t do it; in cold water I turn blue within seconds). What did you say at home later? How did you explain it? Did you bring clothes to change in, or did you just jump into the water without thinking?

  This moment doesn’t stop echoing in me, my written words splashing into living water. I have no skin left on my body from all the showers I’ve been taking the past few days; just don’t let go of my hand, let us continue to dive deeper and deeper together. Let us be in that place in which we will both be filled with the strong excitement of nakedness—because the water makes our clothes stick to our skin, so the shape of our bodies is revealed, your full, round breasts suddenly pop under a wet white shirt—and both our faces are washed and cleaned of all the fatigue and strangeness and indifference, and the denial of the essence of faith. All the adult epidermis that has scabbed over us throughout life. And I who could read what you were trying to make flesh, when you danced the sirtaki in your living room—you were telling me that you wouldn’t be rushing to dress me over at Mt. Carmel, that if you had seen the beauty I saw, you also perhaps would have joined me and danced in the same way. But I know! From the moment I saw you I felt the strength of that will in you; and don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the nakedness of passion right now—but about a completely different kind of nakedness, one you can hardly stand in front of without shock and a quick escape into clothes. The nakedness of peeled skin, this is what I’m looking for now; it is becoming clearer to me from letter to letter (nakedness—like one of the words you wrote on the back of the bottle photo).

  And you couldn’t even know this, but since I was a teenager, for years the thought of running naked in the streets has driven me crazy. To expose yourself—not to shock people, no, just the opposite. To be the first todo it for everybody else—imagine it, to take off all your clothes and jump in between people, bare (I, who am ashamed to take off my clothes on the beach, who can’t stand it when people see me putting a letter in a mailbox on the street—something terribly intimate is revealed in a person who sends his own letters, don’t you think?). That same I would die to be, even for a moment, a flicker of one soul in the fog of others’ indifference and strangeness, to yell one clear wordless yell to them, only my body gaping.

  And perhaps, after three or four such appearances all over town, maybe another person would join me all of a sudden—would you imagine this with me? Someone who will somehow have to ground my excitement into his own body. I can imagine the first one to catch it will be a madman, but after that, there will be others, I’m sure. And the first of them will be a woman, she will suddenly tear off her clothes and smile with relief and joy; people will point at her and laugh. She will suddenly begin to remove her armor of delicate fabric, and they will go silent at the sight of her body, and understand something. A long silence will pass. And suddenly, at once, that built-up electric tension, the exertion of hiding and covering and disguising, will discharge in a great explosion over their heads and a great storm will roll in. A woman, and another woman, and another man, and children, a lightning storm of naked bodies (I always like to imagine that moment). And immediately, the Modesty Squads will show up, special police officers with solderer’s glasses will speed through these centers of obscenity, equipped with thick tarps and asbestos gloves—because catching a naked person with bare hands is repulsive (I always think, a naked person will cut through dressed people like a knife; the clothed will shrink back as if from an infectious disease or an open wound). Think of it—people without clothes, there’s no point in pretending anymore, you can’t really hate a naked person (go fight a naked soldier). And you wrote that one word, “compassion.” That’s what makes my heart stretch out to you, that you can suddenly, during the simplest of everyday talk, light things up with a word.

  So, yes, Miriam, it will be so simple and honest and natural—the compassion in nakedness. (One minute, I hear a key at the door. Have to stop

  (False alarm. The cleaning lady.)

  But in the meantime, where were we, what are all my noble thoughts worth, in the meantime the entire world is dressed and armored andthere is only us, hugging and wet and shivering from the cold, or from whatever makes you shiver. And my eyes were in your eyes, and the true weight of a woman’s body was in my body, an alien soul fluttered freely in my soul, and I didn’t contract and spit it out like a pit stuck in my throat; on the contrary, I inhaled, breathed her into me more and more, and she enfolded my body within herself, and I understood the beautiful expression “the creatures of my torso” for the first time …

  And later (I’m a bit drunk on thoughts, do you mind?) both of us, hand in hand to my car, cheerful, but just a little cheerful, if only because of the dry knowledge, which had waited patiently and with vengeance outside the Isle of Water that we were for a moment, and is starting to sneak into our heart (that is also a great photo, the one of all the splashes of water coming together into a trunk of blue. It’s hard to believe that y
ou haven’t held a camera in your hands for seven years). And next to my beat-up Subaru (yes, of course it’s a Subaru), you let me dry your beautiful thick hair with the old towel that had been rolled up in the car. After I shake off everything that has clung to it since it was new: the grains of sand from family trips, twigs from the last Independence Day bonfire, and the stains of chocolate pudding and chocolate milk wiped off one particular small mouth, a quarter to five years old. If you really want the dirt on me—this same bold towel of mine treasures all manner of perfectly good stains from my life, my life which I like a lot, but—I wish now you could understand more—how my soul is constantly torn in two, help me! A devoted family man, and one capable of writing you such letters, and to whoever solves that correctly is promised eternal peace of the soul, even a temporary one will do.

  And your forehead is revealed to me again, out of the wild of your hair, and your brown eyes, wide open and serious and questioning me under your full eyebrows—and your eyes are terribly sad, I wish I knew why, and, anyhow, in every letter I feel how in an instant they are so ready to illuminate, to rise—your Giulietta Masina eyes (at the end of Nights of Cabiria, do you remember it?), and you’re asking me again with that look—Who are you? No idea. I want to be whatever your eyes will see in me, yes. And if you are not too frightened to look—then maybe I will be.

  And I hold your face gently in my hands. I’ve already said that you’re a bit taller than me, but when we are together we fit, and it doesn’t look ridiculous. I feel your warm face in my hands and think that almost allthe other faces I meet in my everyday life are made up of expressions that are only fragments of quotations of others’ expressions. But your face—and then I pull you to me and kiss your hungry and thirsty mouth for the first time, placing my lips exactly on your lips, soul to soul, and your mouth is very warm and soft, and you pull your upper lip a bit higher—you have that motion in you, I’ve seen it—and I of course will wonder for a moment if maybe I could sleep with you before I know your name—don’t forget that I’m still a man and have this rooster’s dream (which has yet to come true). But then, just because, against my self and my stupidity I quickly ask, What’s your name? And you say, Miriam. And I say, Yair. You murmur, with a cold, shivering smile, that you have a very thin skin; and I listen, with care, to what you whispered to me in that smile: that I have to treat you gently, not rudely, not as a stranger, not touch you with the same five sausage fingers that the world has probably sent to you more than once. More and more I fear this is what it has done to you. And my soul will yearn for you when you speak. When I write to you—even at this moment—my soul emerges from me when you smile, when you tremble, when you approach my body—because unlike most of the women who have approached me in my life, I know you will immediately press yourself to me with your all, with your wholeness, because you are so alive. And I mention this tiny fact to myself that has always attracted my attention; because, you see, women always held me in the beginning with only half their bodies, their half-body into my famished body; just one breast, to be precise (but I don’t know how they hold other men). And you, from the very beginning, break this little feminine law and announce with your body that you are loyal and committed only to the man I am and not to the force of all the women behind you.

  I already know how I will feel then, it is written in all my cells, how in that moment, finally, a new warm emotion will gently till the ground of my heart. I want it so much—and you? Write me what is happening now in your heart, which was filled with a longing for its young self. And all at once you pull me to you, harder, and kiss me with all your soul and all your heart, as if they will give and pour out into me; your entire being, created and encoded within your flesh, will open and be solved in me, bit by bit, until the whole thing melts, that Thing between you and yourself—that is now a little bit of the Thing between you and me. It is melting and fusing into one within my mouth and tongue and nose; and only then, we might be able to detach ourselves a little bit and look at eachother with craving eyes, and I will whisper, breathlessly, “Oh, Miriam, look, you’re all wet, how will you go home?”

  (I hope I dream about you tonight, I want to scream out your name in the middle of sleep, and then the secret will be out and I won’t hide you anymore! You are a woman who must be revealed!)

  Yair

  June 5

  Miriam, salutations:

  About six days ago I sent a letter to you at school, as usual, and have not since received a reply.

  I suppose it is just a matter of time. Perhaps you are busy toward the end of the school year with the report cards and all (already?), but I still thought I’d check to see if you sent any response. I am in a bit of a stupid state right now because of the ever-present possibility that you, for some reason, have decided not to answer me and to disappear. Maybe because of my last letter. Maybe because something in your life suddenly changed. But I am certain that even in such a case you would have written, wouldn’t you?

  I just started to worry a little bit—because I bring my letters to the mailbox at the school gate (perhaps you’ve already noticed that there’s no postmark), but maybe the internal mail system has problems and the letter never reached your box.

  If so, whom did it reach?

  Or perhaps there was something else that made you angry. I’m trying to think aloud—perhaps it is your claim that I am, again, slowly reassembling reality into a series of words and being completely satisfied with them, unstitching you here, embroidering you there.

  Well, as you can see, I am starting to make a mess, so please—so I can at least know how I figure in the hierarchy of your department of affections. Just do me a favor and don’t hesitate to write the whole truth; I mean, I can certainly understand, if that miserable letter did reach you, that you’ve decided that you don’t want to have anything to do with such a person. Here, I even wrote the words for you, to save you polite contortions, you don’t need to worry about me or to pity me—I am a lot stronger and tougher than it may seem to you (it really is hard to break me).

  Here, I’m inviting you to tell me everything you felt when you saw how I allowed myself to expose myself like this in front of you without knowing almost anything about you. Without a single thing connecting the two of us in reality, I suddenly jump and expose the armpits of my soul to you in an obscene striptease. Isn’t that what happened? Isn’t it? Admit it, why not, admit something for once!

  I mean, you stood at a distance in such a way, screening me with your arms crossed, with questioning suspicion, a bit frightened, and a bit amused with this one-man band that just marched through you. While I was completely dizzy from your last letter, with the photos from Ramat Rakhel. Perhaps you forgot the intimate things you wrote there, even the tiny fact that for the first time you wrote the word “us.” Yes, we are both people of words—and then your sudden realization that, perhaps, I am a person who actually suffocates inside words. Do you remember? (Because I remember every word.) Meaning that perhaps I feel a little “claustrophobia in ‘their’ words” and that perhaps, because of this suffocation, I sometimes gasp out this way, swallowing …

  This is the kind of relief I felt, as if you had come, giving me permission to breathe differently; and then, out of fugitive happiness, without shame, without guarding myself, and excited, and intoxicated from you, and from us—

  Listen. It’s a waste of ink. I’m letting you go.

  June 6

  One little addition, even though: just for you to know that if this is how you saw me, you were not alone. You might not have noticed but I was standing right there beside you from the first letter I wrote you, with my arms crossed high on my chest. What were you thinking? I was standing there on the side, too, of course I was, screening this eruption of mine exactly as you were—anyway, it’s important for me to tell you. All the rest is unnecessary, isn’t it?

  Then why can’t I stop?

  Write to me, anything that comes into your mind, just don’t leave me
this way; I went just now, again, for the fourth time today, to the mailbox.

  Enough of this, come on, you owe me at least this, that we should stand together for a moment, shoulder to shoulder, and look at it, and condemn it together for the last time, that internal organ of mine that suddenly burst out and made exception, a glandular dance.

  Stop! Two hand claps of the director and set change: let’s be, for one minute, like two camels, of all things; camels suit me right now, so why not? It came to me, I’m sharp and original even in my roughest moments—a camel-couple with long, humorless, camel-y faces, a pair of mature camels, a male and a female, sober and chewing on boredom and knowing full well our place in a caravan that’s progressing, heel by toe, just as it should. Until, suddenly, one bizarre donkey foal jumps out of the procession. Maybe it just looks like a foal. Maybe it is even a hybrid of a camel and a clown’s hat—nature made a mistake—with donkey’s ears and a little camel-y hunchback, and this infantile weirdo is breaking into a fool’s jig; get back, Miriam! because disgusting rivers are flowing out of all his orifices, grab a coat, a sweater at least (!), so that the shedding layers of his slightly overexcited soul will not soil you, for God’s sake.