Be My Knife Read online

  Y.

  And I know you can read my mind at this moment—how you said it was strange to you that I can remember every motion, moan, and beauty mark of the women who were with me—but couldn’t find myself in those memories.

  June 22

  When I’m with people (this came to mind tonight while I was bathing my son)—it doesn’t matter if they are strangers or those closest tome—I am always accompanied by one thought: I am impotent to do the one thing all of them do so naturally—putting down roots.

  Question: Tell me, idiot, why the hell are you sending these bits of trash? All your trifling thoughts and dime-store philosophies? Why do you have not one crumb of nobility or taste to tame your words, to guide you so that you don’t say everything?!

  Answer: It is the donkey foal in me, and it is the special impulse I have with her, more than with anybody else I ever knew, to say everything, even these dime-store philosophies of mine. It’s not even to tell her, sometimes it’s to have this flicker fly to her, like an unconscious relative whom you bring to the emergency room and just throw into the doctor’s hands you pray will be able to mend him. Tell her about the Möbius strip.

  Question: Are you crazy? So soon?

  Answer: What do you mean “so soon”? There’s no such thing as too early or too late, we’re on spherical time, remember? She said she was actually born for this kind of time …

  Come, lend me a hand, I will now tell you that one of the things I sometimes do is to think of him as old.I am talking about my son, about—let’s call him Ido. About my Ido.

  Maybe it’s to inoculate myself (against what—too much love for him?). I picture him old again and again. And it helps. It puts out every passion born of love and panic for him instantly.

  Notice: old. Not dead. I have my expertise in that one as well, of course. But dead is probably too simple and unequivocal for the torture I need. My son—old, stooped over, staring absently at the television in some institution for the likes of him, strings of spittle drooling from his mouth. Dead, because the spark lighting his eyes has already been turned off. It’s not simple to concentrate on such an image; try it, it requires the operation of extremely strong soul-muscles, the muscles along the spine of the soul, because the soul arches in terrible resistance against it and great strength is needed to force its surrender … Where were we?

  With my son, with the post-factum infant, my old son, a little man, all crabbed up with brown spots on his hands, infected with one of those diseases of his age, trying to remember something that slipped away—me, perhaps? Perhaps the twists of his memory suddenly rouse thoughts ofme? The two of us together in a good moment? When, this morning, a speck of dust got in his eye and I licked it out with my tongue? When I covered all the angles of the shelves in our house with foam rubber the day his head started to reach them? Or just when I loved him, terribly, in my own limited way?

  And perhaps he will get confused for a moment and think that he is my father?

  I hope so. I long for, wish, that somewhere in the infinite cosmos, where destinies are being stirred with people and every person touches the possibility of being any other person for a moment, there will be such a moment in which he will be my father (relieving the everlasting burden of the mysterious coincidence dictating that I must be his father, and not the other way around). I especially want everything to be over, ended, to be tucked into his bosom and to cuddle and mingle our flesh, ashes to ashes. I pray for it to be so, to be, in that same time, just another person like him, for him, who tried—a person who was in the world but, for one moment, burst and twitched in the space of life—

  I think: Maybe then, in the arbitration or the indifference of his old age, and also in the wisdom that he will gain, probably through the years of his fatherhood with the children he will have—would he wish to choose me again? What do you think, would he choose me?

  Speak to me.

  Sometimes it’s so hard to wait two or three days for a reply, because it hurts now.

  After I fantasized about my little honeysuckle Ya’ara, you said that you’re certain that I am also a very giving father to Ido, that I give more perhaps than many parents can give a child, and that I am probably not just “sucking him dry.” Thank you for trying to release me from that torment. I’m just terrified to tell you how much I do suck him dry, I am Yair-Sucking, I leave him a husk, even if I don’t intend it, by the very fact of my presence. But someday, in the year 2065, he will smile at me, with bald gums and glazed-over eyes, and tell me that it’s all right, he too understands now the instability of the verdicts imposed in our penal colony—that one time you are Franz Kafka—and another time you’re his father, Hermann …

  Sometimes I picture it to the very details. How he will summon my spirit, hold me between his fingers, and examine me against the yellowafternoon light, like a man holding some kind of unwanted, but harmless, object in his hands. And then I will cautiously move my fingers over his body, and over mine, like passing a finger over a Möbius strip, when the finger can’t distinguish whether it is passing from the inside to the outside.

  I think it is time for a commercial break.

  June 24

  It delights me that you like my “City Stories” so much. I was already thinking that, because of you, I am experiencing a lot more of those “moments” (really: the city speaks to me as it never did).

  Accept a fresh, fresh one: This very morning, in Ben Yehuda Street, near Atara Café, there was a clown who was also a magician, maybe you’ve seen him: a huge man, Rasputin-like, who performs a funny show with a guillotine. I know him, and it’s been a while since I’ve stopped to watch, but today I decided to look, maybe because you came back to the word “guillotine” in your long last letter, when you were depressed and exploded.

  The magician asked for a volunteer, and one guy from the audience, an American tourist, came and placed his head on the block. The magician made a fuss about measuring the hole for his neck, and cut a single hair of his on the blade, and placed a wicker basket in front of him, and everyone around was laughing. And then, when the magician raised the blade high, the guy suddenly sent both of his hands through the holes of the stocks and, without even thinking, in a very touching and instinctual way, pulled the basket toward him so his head “would fall” exactly into it.

  Everybody laughed, but I was so moved, as if you were there with me and I was showing you something of minethat I can’t explain in words.

  June 28

  I’m sending you a photograph that might make you happy.

  I found it (and not by chance) in an old scrapbook of The Weekly Word, your distant cousin Alexander. Excuse me, but I can certainly understand your parents’ hysteria—not only because he was six years older than you; there was something in his eyes, a wolfish expression …

  Look at his figure on the winner’s stand, for example. That smile (Ido have to admit that he seems quite impressive, even with the silly swim cap and medal—a kosher alpha male. Those shoulders! That chest! Those biceps!).

  Terrible, isn’t it? To see all this strength and arrogance, and think he doesn’t know that in five years he will be lying dead on streetcar tracks.

  I am trying to find any similarities between the two of you—this photo was taken that very same week—and I can’t find you in his face. So what do I find? What does it tell me? That your mother was right? In any case, I think I can see the surprising tenderness around his mouth and lower lip. So maybe even an experienced Casanova softens a little because it was your first kiss, and the only one with him?

  But there is another matter that stands out as slightly peculiar. I also checked the newspapers from the following Maccabiah Games three years later and found that he participated again with the Belgian contingent (but didn’t win any medals this time). According to my calculations, you were then sixteen and a half, meaning, not exactly an age at which you could be locked up at home or forbidden to meet him, or prevented in any possible way from participat
ing in taboo behavior (and he surely came to visit you at home to bring news from the family …). And I’ve been wondering how it is possible that after the great storm you described experiencing over him, the burning oaths you swore, the full year of dreams about him and the perfumed letters, and all that—how could you completely give up the chance of a reunion with him?

  I think—even though you were three years older, and must have understood by then that it had been just a momentary amusement for him, that he was not exactly the man of your dreams—but still, was there no spark of curiosity? Or the desire to come to him and say, Look at me now, see how I’ve grown, I’m not your little cousin anymore …

  (I don’t know why the thought of his final visit makes me so sad.)

  Speaking of kisses: send warm greetings to the beauty mark you said goodbye to when you started maturing … I will never forget that quickie of yours—it was overwhelming. Maybe someday, in another incarnation, I’ll kiss it as well.

  June 30

  What beautiful weather, Louise, what a bright sun! All my blinds are shut; I’m writing to you in the dark.

  This is how Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet. I stumbled upon it today, and in spite of that stinger (do I really quote other people constantly?), I saw a private sign of us in it.

  In the last two days I did a lot of thinking about your suggestion, your weird suggestion—ten years late, to my mind—to “go steady.” You made me return to a time not particularly loved by me. I’m not sure that I found a story to be an exact “mate” to yours, certainly not to the girl you were, the sober, clear-minded girl who assessed situations and took action, so it appears to me, decisively and without remorse … And to tell you the truth, Miriam, I am not quite convinced that that girl would have been interested in this boy as a boyfriend.

  I was around thirteen years old. I won’t describe what I looked like to you—it will make you angry, and why should I provoke forces greater than mine? But I guess I managed to draw some attention to myself after a retarded girl living in our neighborhood kidnapped me and performed surgery on me without anesthesia. Now, you’ll say that I am, as usual, describing everything in a dramatic, larger-than-life way, but this is exactly what she did to me. I don’t know how old she was, she couldn’t even speak, instead she kind of grunted, this masculine, hard, bullish girl, this miserable retarded girl I always made fun of. I used to ambush her and her father when he took her down from the house on their daily walk (he walked with a stick to protect himself from her in case she attacked, imagine that). And for several years I was the neighborhood leader of our organized mockery of her, I invented the most evil tortures for her and her poor father—writing slogans and drawing caricatures of her on the sidewalk—

  And you will ask, and justly so, why I made fun of her. Why, in spite of my own cowardice, did I draw everyone’s attention to her and only to her? The way I laughed at her—the amount of wit and poison I invested in it—don’t ask. Well, one day she managed to escape from her house. Her father fainted on the stairs. All the neighbors and their kids were called together to search for her, and the police showed up, and basically, it was a complete mess.

  I slipped from the crowd and walked to the end of the block, to an empty lot on which now stands a big hotel. There, in one of the most neglected corners, stood a heap of garbage, years of old mattresses and ovens piled up. And a small broken refrigerator, and other such detritus of the neighborhood. Behind it, by the fence, was a mess of bushes thatcreated a small dark hideaway. I thought only I knew of it, and liked to go there to isolate myself from the world.

  I had a feeling she would be there, that her animal instincts would lead her to that place which no sane man would enter. And, I swear, the moment I passed the line of light into the darkness, she leaped on me. In that same moment I also realized, with some kind of strange acceptance, that she was simply waiting for me.

  You know, I can’t remember when you asked me this—perhaps when you spoke of the lightning rod—if I have, ever in my life, properly cried for HELP!In a way that practically tears the throat apart, forces the eyes to bulge with terror and despair (hey, why did you ask me that?). Maybe I should have yelled like that, at that time when she dragged me in—but I was silent. This, Miriam, is what my story is about.

  She pushed me to the ground, lay on top of me, and, without wasting a moment, started rubbing her body on mine with a horrible strength. We were two flints striking together, over and over. I couldn’t move—it was as if I had lost consciousness—but I saw and heard everything. She was serious—and also feverish with the crazy idea raging inside her, the false idea that only I, of all people, could understand her exactly—and it wasn’t even a sexual thing; I mean, not sexual in the common, passionate way. It was a lot more complicated, dank, and dark than that. How can I put it—it was as if she were trying to crumble and mash into dust the materials from which we both were made—

  Should I go into more detail?

  I mean, all the materials, all her ores and mine. What for? I don’t know (I do know, I do know). To create us both, all over again—more precisely: to balance us out—or somehow to scrape away all her excess—and mine, too—and what was missing as well, in both of our bodies and souls, together (can you actually understand such a sentence? Does it make sense outside of my mind?). Simply to create us anew from the dust from which we were made. I swear to you, this is what was pecking about in her twisted mind—and only I understood it. Which is why I didn’t even yell for help. It was a matter between me and her. I can’t believe I’m even telling you about this.

  So what do you say now—could he have been, in his way, a “mate” to the girl you were? To that philosophical, opinionated lass?

  I remember she took my left palm in her rough hand, and ten, and twenty, and fifty times over, she shoved her fingers between my fingers.

  And then she did it with the right hand—shoulder to shoulder—chest to chest—stomach to stomach—systematically, in the most specific, meticulous manner—and her dead eyes were shining with her one grand idea. She didn’t even notice me, that was the amazing thing that completely hypnotized me. She had a score to settle with what I was, not with who. And the enlightened world would have found nothing logical in it—but in the dark I knew and felt that she was aiming with all her strength at my well-being as well. It was as if she was trying to shuffle the cards in our decks, hers and mine, hard, in order to—let’s say—deal them all over again, in a more just way, for both of us. Do you understand? She of all people could grasp, with some kind of genius, animal sense, how unhappy I was with what I had received from the taunting lottery of life, and that I too was desperately in need of mending. Are you still with me, Miriam? Just if you can give something like that to someone, and hope he will truly understand—tell me if a man can tell this to someone and hope she will truly understand, tell me if a man can tell this to a woman he is wooing, and if a husband could, one day, tell this to his wife over coffee.

  Y.

  July 5

  I went. I bought. I returned.

  A three-day jump, Amsterdam-Paris-Switzerland. Business. The successful pursuit of two rare collector’s items that were in hysterical demand in Zurich. Man of the world, boom boom.

  When the airplane took off from Lod, I felt an unexpected pang, and I discovered an umbilical cord between us that hurts when it is stretched.

  And what did I bring you from sparkling Paris? A sensational perfume? Jewels? Coy, tantalizing panties?

  My most terrible waking nightmare when I am in large European cities is the sight of little children of beggar women.

  Do you know what I’m talking about? Those Indian or Turkish women sitting on the streets and in the underground train stations who always carry a baby or a small child on their knees.

  Because I noticed, a long time ago, that the children are almost alwaysasleep. In London, in Berlin, in Rome. And I have a suspicion that the women put them to sleep on purpose, drug them, because a
sleeping child looks more miserable and is hence “better for business” …

  Once, in front of my regular hotel in Paris, a Turkish woman set up shop with such a child, and the next day I simply moved to another hotel.

  It isn’t only the cruelty that depresses me; mainly, it is the thought that these children are spending their lives asleep. To think of only one child (and there are hundreds of them) who lives for years, perhaps for his entire childhood, in London, or in wonderful Florence, almost without seeing it—and only in his sleep does he hear the footsteps of people, the noise of the cars, the pulse of the big city—and when he awakes, he is, again, only in the miserable hole where he lives.

  When I pass by such a woman in the street, I always give her something—and while doing so, I whistle a pleasant, happy tune with all my strength.

  I’m back.

  July 7

  Good morning, two letters of yours arrived today! I’ve been waiting so long for this moment when you couldn’t hold yourself back—and the minute you closed an envelope, ideas for another letter gathered inside you, instantly. One arrived in the morning, and the other with the afternoon delivery (the pleasures of a mailbox owner!). And they are both jolly and excited, one from home and the second—I guess your house got hot and stuffy—from your secret valley near Ein Karem. It was wonderful to finally meet you in completely new words (and a new skirt!), like breathing a stream of clear air … and to hear the surprise in your voice when you said you’ve been happy lately. That’s the first time the word has appeared in your letters—I immediately sent it to the lab for tests, and they verified its happiness (I’m just trying to figure out why it is that your happiness still seems so sad to me), and perhaps because of this word, something is happening to me as well today. An internal tide turning, I don’t know, perhaps because I’ve finally succeeded in making you happy.