Be My Knife by David Grossman
Even—who’s the first to end a kiss.
So hold me tight, now (now!)! Lay your head on my shoulder—do you know about the one spot I dream to kiss on you—apart from the hidden beauty mark: the hollow of your shoulder, by your neck. I want to feel your heat, and your soft velvet skin—the vein that beats there, thus: the quiet, continuing beat of life springing up in you.
Come. Come under my wing, don’t say a word—just agree with me in your heart that you can paint a marriage this way as well: two people, watching each other, facing each other in a very long, terribly slow ritual—the execution ritual of your deeply loved one. And now I’m being called to come in for dinner—my fried egg, over easy, just how I like it, is ready. By the way, you wrote something that really amazed me—that Amos is the only person in the world with whom you would like to share what you are able to feel now thanks to our correspondence (!).
Sorry: I don’t believe you. It does sound pretty, but it’s impossible.
Not just pretty—it sounds great coming out of your mouth—so generous it could make you jealous: “ … I am certain Amos would understand precisely what excites me again, every time—that a strange man saw something in me that moved him so much he had to come and put his soul in my hand …”
It’s not that I can’t imagine it. What a joy it would be if we lived insuch a mended world, in which I could call out to Maya right now, Just a minute, My, I’m just finishing up a letter to Miriam! And she would ask, Miriam? Who is Miriam? And I would finish writing you, taking my sweet time, and sit down in my home, cut into my fried egg, and say that Miriam is a woman I have been corresponding with for almost half a year. She makes me happy. And Maya would smile at me, pleased that I am finally showing signs of happiness (thus destroying years of my carefully constructed reputation). And she would toss the salad with the big tongs and ask me to tell her more. What kind of happiness is it? How is it different from the happiness she brings me? And I would think a little, and then tell her that when I’m writing you, I feel something in me becoming alive, returning to life, reviving—do you understand, Maya? Even though, at times, I write her things that make me despise myself-I am living now, through her, with something that only she could manage to resurrect in me; that, if not for her, would simply be dead. You wouldn’t want anything to die in me, would you, My? This is what I would say while I cut thin slices of Swiss cheese and tomato and wrap them up together. And Maya would ask me to tell her more, and I would tell her, for example, that you collect teapots, and all your friends bring you teapots from around the world. They are all kept in the garage, however, in storage—and Maya would think about it for a moment, whether we have a unique teapot to give you. And I would have continued to tell her about you, and Maya’s eyes would glow at me with love and innocence, the way they did in the old days. She would lay her elbow on the table and rest her cheek in her palm, like a girl listening to a fairy tale—and I would continue to tell her—
Yair
(But then—she would have to tell me a new story about herself—something I don’t know.)
September 20
Hey, Miriam …
You have no idea what you have just given me.
Where do I begin? So many emotions are fighting inside me to be the first … When I was very young, I vowed to read all the books in theschool library that no one else read; and truly, for one year I read only books whose checkout cards were empty (I became acquainted with some hidden treasures that way); or the time I wanted to teach myself how to control my dreams, so I could receive orders and requests from people to meet all their dear ones who had died and wish them well as I slept; or the time I wanted to train a dog who would, each night, accompany one lonely man who wants to wander the streets for no reason—
You can’t imagine how often I am occupied with such nonsense, to this very day. I’m telling it to you in exchange for the tale you invented for me—the fantasy of how you were kind to me on the street that night, a night you were walking with your mother in a rare moment of grace you two had—in a flash flood, it brought me back to a forgotten passion to be kind, to give without keeping count. The desire to flood the streets with golden coins from my carriage—but have those coins made from myself, my flesh and blood—with no substitutions, right? To feel my soul spreading out with this generosity, how I give myself away, and nourish, and win over the principle of strangeness and miserliness of the soul and everything we already decided to call the Kremlin. I realized just how much our connection has made me be good—desire to give you only good; and even when I, here and there, get filthy in front of you, you only have to remember that it somehow still belongs to the same weird will burning my throat with the need to do you good, or just to do good. To wipe away all the mud and resentment collecting in the tunnels, come-comecomecomecome …
September 21
But what if I don’t deserve such a generous gift?
What if I lied?
Those two women, and what they said—or didn’t say—on the street that night—that was undeniably true; what if I wasn’t returning from a movie or an evening out with Shai? I mean, I told them at home that I was going out with Shai, always just with Shai. My father despised Shai, his ironic glance—called him “faggot” and sometimes also “the Fluorescent One” (Shai did have a kind of deathlike pallor spread out on his face), and he used to do impressions of his voice and his gesture of flipping a curl off his forehead, out of his eyes. Shai, Shai (you already know the story, but it feels so good to write his name down after all these years).
You should also know that I was already dating girls by this time—but I didn’t tell my parents, of course. Why? Just because. Maybe I already felt the need to fight for any privacy with all my strength—maybe because I started feeling some anxiety, thin as a lace curtain around me, about myself and exactly what I am. Nothing was ever verbalized or explained, of course, but there was some kind of nervousness fluttering about me, a doubt that used to freeze their hearts. Perhaps you have experienced it—when every sentence out of your mouth is stretched under the light to search for traces. Of what? It wasn’t made terribly clear, not then, and I didn’t understand it, nor did I want to tell myself those things about myself so explicitly. I suspected myself of it (who doesn’t at that age?), but along the way I started to feel the pleasure of frightening them—and would start scattering various insinuations, demolishing their world with vague hints. I would tell them, for instance, about a mature, mysterious friend I met at the library with whom I had long conversations about art. Or float the idea of Shai and me renting an apartment together in Tel Aviv after the army … and Mrs. Rubber Gloves would flash a medieval look at Mr. Brown Belt and hum that Shai is already a big enough loser in proportion to his size—and why does he still not have a girlfriend? And why can’t I ever hang out with someone just a little more normal, instead of spending all my time just with Shai, each of us in the other’s ass? So she would say, and having been silenced by terror, I would bleat out with childish innocence that girls don’t interest us at all—what really interests both of us right now, actually, is quitting school and joining an amateur theater company abroad. You should have seen the effect of those words on theirears—and never, ever in a million years, not under torture, would I ever tell them that I had been dating girls for a while now, normal females … because I started messing around with girls when I was very young, tiny Lolito that I was. I remember myself at the age of twelve—I would approach the girl—any girl, I was never too choosy—and, mustering a terrified self-confidence, would ask her out. Meaning, I would order her, in my limp way, to come with me to a movie. And after the movie I would, using my endless wiles of flattery and begging and self-humiliation, get her to make out with me. Why? Just because I wanted to, because I had to. It belonged to some bargain that she had almost no part in—in which she was only currency—or, worse yet, a receipt.
You’d be surprised if you knew how many girls agreed to be the soft,sweet-smel
I went to a movie that evening, not with Shai, but with a girl whose name I don’t remember. After we said our goodbyes, I went home. But instead of transferring at Jaffa Street and taking the bus back to my neighborhood, I entered Bahari Alley through the closed stands of the roasted-seed sellers and through the prostitutes.
Miriam, Miriam, let’s see if I am capable of opening that box: I was barely twelve, I still hadn’t gone further than stolen caresses and hasty kisses on lips that always sealed themselves together in front of me. I was holding 50 lirot in my hands, rolled up and sticky with my cold sweat, that I had spent several months dedicatedly stealing from the Holy Wallet, because for no small period of time had I planned, in cold blood, to do this. I would sit in class, studying language and the Bible, and see myself doing it. I would eat my Shabbat suppers with my family and see only this …
Shall we take a break?
Your story excited me so much, the true parts—the nightmare of your weeklong vacation in Jerusalem (how old were you? fifteen? sixteen?), as well as the imaginary meeting you hallucinated for me at the end. Little details—how ashamed you were, looking at your big shoes resting next to her tiny ones in the room at the pension; how you tried to separate the two pairs and she would constantly try to put them close together again. I’m thinking about the fruits budding in you then, late bloomer that you were, that seemed to her a final “proof” of your true promiscuous nature …
And more than anything, well, it’s clear … what she whispered to you that night before you returned home, that sentence has been gnawing at me constantly with its inner defeated music (like a line from a funeraldirge)—when Father asks us, we’ll say we had a wonderful time; when Father asks us, we’ll say we had a wonderful time …
It allowed me to suddenly grasp something I never thought of in this way, until now: how miserable my parents were because of me. Perhaps as miserable as I was. It never once crossed my mind how I humiliated them, how helpless they were. How did you put it?—raising your own orphan child is also terrible.
Miriam, you once told me you have this little game with me—each day you draw one letter of mine out of a bag and read it to discover what has changed in you and in me since the last time you read it.
So, I want to send you the rest of this story in a separate letter. Do you mind?
Y.
September 21
Are you still there?
I don’t know where I got the guts to do it. My whole body was shaking—why, courage itself was already a kind of betrayal. How is it possible for one child to dare to escape the gravity of his particular family and go all the way there. But maybe the most amazing treachery of all was that this twelve-year-old peanut stood up and allowed himself to feel such a strong emotion: lust. It’s called lust. Black lust of daybreak we drink it at nightfall.
In that moment, who could feel true lust? What lust?! Perhaps the only real, true lust I have ever known (the lust of guilt eternally searching for an available sin to mate with). I swear, I could compose a complete book of their positions, all the possible variations those two can get into. Only a natural continuation to “The Family Cookbook”; oh, Shai, where are you?!
Old men and young men were standing around; they all looked like the characters in cops-and-robber movies, just like the ones they would cut out of huge sheets of cardboard and place on the roof of the Orgil Cinema. I passed between them with my eyes to the ground, with the festive, frozen terror of a man sentenced to death. I thought, None of them could be Ashkenazi. I thought, This is my burial place. Someone slapped the back of my head and laughed that he would tell my yeshiva in MeaShearim. Pay attention, Miriam, this was the child you wanted to grace with your glance, to promise him he was a beautiful boy … At the end of the alley was a large back yard; men entered and left it hastily, their faces lowered. We would fantasize with choked whispers about what must be going on in there during class. Eli Ben Zikri was the only one who ever dared to actually run through the alley, and was considered a big hero because of it. And I enteredit. The smell of urine and gutter stood thick in the air, and I felt how polluted I was with every breath. Another boy, not much older than I, turned me with a push toward one of the walls. By that wall stood a big square woman in a very short, very shiny black skirt, probably a leather skirt, but I only remember the shine next to her exposed, and very thick, thighs. But not her face, because I did not dare look at her. Can you imagine it? Until the transaction was completed, I did not dare to raise my head, even once, to look at her.
I asked, How much? And she said thirty. And I, paralyzed, handed her all the bills rolled up in my hand and heard my father’s voice as he blew up about how terrible a merchant is the son he raised. Miriam—you’re allowed to skip the next chapter of this tale, but I have to tell it to you. I want to be clean.
Tall buildings surrounded the yard, the walls covered with huge tar stains, long tongues of tar—and in the dark garden itself in the back, I remember piles of old wood planks from construction sites, piles of garbage, and, here and there the red glow of cigarettes. From every corner crept whistles and breathing and the indifferent voices of the prostitutes talking among themselves as they did it. I remember how she pulled her skirt up in one rough motion, and I, who at the time saw the peak of my achievements as learning to flick open a bra strap with one hand—my sister Aviva’s bra, which I would stretch for practice on the old armchair—suddenly saw, in front of my eyes, the very thing. I got cold and sick, and I felt my soul shrinking, felt myself losing it for good, and I was thinking, That’s it—just see how low you have sunk.
(No, I was a much more dramatic boy than that—I remember these very words echoing in my heart: Now you are truly outside human society …)
She asked me why I didn’t take it out, and reached a brute’s hand to my little dick, which was trying to escape, screaming and retreating into thedepths of my underwear. She pulled it and shook it with all her strength, she rubbed and moved and squeezed it in her unpleasantly tough palm, and sadly, I left my body and watched myself from above and thought, It is impossible. You will never be mended.
Just a moment. Cigarette. I have to breathe. Why am I making such a big deal out of a visit to a whore? The whole thing was 50 lirot, big deal! Where were we?
We were with her, and she got angry and asked through her gum how long I thought she was going to wait for me, and then—listen to this—the rude geek asked her in a shaking voice if he would be allowed to kiss her once, there, on her breast … Skip it, Miriam, skip it, because it’s going to contaminate you now. Why am I even bringing you into this? Why do I have to pollute you with this? “He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin.” But I hadn’t the luck of the young Stephen Dedalus. How I envied him when I read that her lips “pressed upon his brain as upon his lips.” Mine only made some kind of contemptuous snort and pulled her bra down a little. I didn’t see anything—I felt warm, sweaty flesh being pushed in my face—my tongue was looking around and searching the surface of it—I remember how amazed I was when I felt a big, soft nipple, which I immediately clung to with all my being. A surge of warm love washed over me—because in that entire yard, full of hookers, I found one thing that deserved love, that was all love and purity, to which I couldn?
Yes, I know. It’s really funny. I sucked it, hailing it in my breath and moaning with gratitude—that amazing softness filling my mouth—even now, in this moment, I can remember how it felt, and how, in a half-faint, I imagined the nipple was like a little, round, juicy woman who had nothing to do with the prostitute. Just a soft, mature, solid little woman who may be, by occupation, a prostitute but initiates boys like myself in the mysteries of sex in a pleasant, homey way—and then the shock, when that pleasant lady suddenly hardened and shrank in my mouth like a piece of rough rubber, like a little night watchman, closed off and protected from everything around (you may laugh at me). The repulsion, and the complete despair—because if even this becomes closed off and clots and becomes a stranger—what is left to believe in? … And by then, slaps and fists were descending on me from above, and I will never forget her surprised shout of pain, echoing all around that enclosed,stinking world: Did you see the little asshole? Do you think I’m your mother?!
When I walked out of that alley, no one would have been able to guess what I had just gone through. If they had attached me to a polygraph test, it would have written out “Best Boy in Jerusalem,” as if some sharp surgeon’s scalpel had in one wave cut the filth of that moment out of me, the cruel kick that someone—probably the pimp—gave me from behind, who grabbed me by my shoulders and then threw me out as choked laughter crawled after me from every corner of the dark yard. I stumbled away from there, running, falling, stained. But five minutes later I was sitting on the bus home, under the lights of the city, among people who could not guess what had happened so close to them, how heavy the fee was that I had left there. I wore my face again, I was myself again, to the point of exaggeration and ridiculousness. I dressed my face with the tale everybody knows—I must have also blinked a lot, so my eyes would look myopic and helpless. So people would look at me and mock me in their hearts—and, in that way, things would go back to what they used to be, to the normal course of events between the world and me. That child popped out at me again a week ago, when I shaved off my beard. I shaved just to meet him—don’t ask. From the silly yearnings for him you aroused in me—I almost exploded from the insult of the weak face I saw staring back at me from the mirror. Still, I will make myself stay loyal to you. Not to myself: to you. And I promise never to cover it again with a hairy layer of epidermis.