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Chapter One

April 3
Miriam,

    You don't know me. When I write to you I don't know myself very well, either. I tried not to write, I did, I've tried for two days, but now I've broken down.

    I saw you at the class reunion a few days ago, but you didn't see me—I was standing over to the side. Maybe I was standing in your blind spot. Someone said your name, a few boys called you teacher, and you were standing with a tall man who must have been your husband. That's it, that's all I know about you—and even that's a little too much for me. Don't worry, I don't want to meet you in person or interfere with your day-to-day life in any way, but I would like you to agree to receive my letters. That is—to let me tell you about myself in writing every now and again. Not that my life is so interesting (it's not, and I'm not complaining), but I want to give you things I can't give to anybody else. Things I didn't think could be given, or that I ever would want to give to anyone. You know you're under no obligation, you don't have to respond (and I'm almost sure you won't), but in case you feel like giving me a little sign that you are reading, I rented a post-office box just for you. The number is on the envelope.

    There's no point to this if I have to explain it, so you don't have to bother responding, because then I was wrong about you, clearly. But if you are the woman I saw hugging herself, with a slightly crooked smile, I think you'll understand.

Yair W.

April 7
Dear Miriam,

    Ever since I got your letter, I haven't done a single thing—I can't—can't work, can't live my life, I've just been running circles around you, howling out your name. If you were here right now, I would hold on to you with all my strength; everything I'm feeling would tear us both to pieces (don't worry, I'm not terribly strong). And what's more, I promise to answer every question you asked; you deserve only the most honest answers just for writing me at all—and for writing what you did! You agreed! You weren't scared off by my restrained suicide note (which left two deep rings of tooth marks on the inside of my cheek). First, though, before anything else, I must tell you how we really met, you and I, and I don't mean the class reunion last week (you answered me! In one day! You didn't laugh at the lunatic who suddenly erupted at your feet). The reunion belongs to real life. What has reality got to do with us? What room, do you think, will it make for us?

    Where to start—if only I could start from all sides at once without feeling as though every word has too many letters, takes up too much time. I feel as if someone is perched on the point of my pen, turning Hebrew into French—I never imagined how hard it could be to explain, to force that feeling apart into words. You wrote that I reminded you a bit of the boy with the thousand-league boots; well, I wish I could just leap over the stage of logical explanations, so you could know everything right away, so you could take me, all of me, I could exist in you—open my eyes and see you smiling at me, saying, "It's all right, don't worry, begin." (I'll stop here. I have a feeling that every additional word will hurt my case with you. It's your turn.)

Yair

April 7

    (Just a few more words.) I sent that letter, came back, and still couldn't calm down—why should I?—oh, Miriam, please pay no attention to this fool who's been smiling uncontrollably since this morning. He's so happy. He wants right at this minute to take off his clothes, strip off his epidermis, everything, and stand before you bare, right down to the white kernel of his soul. I wish I could paint for you, bray for you, neigh, bark, even whistle for you everything roaring inside me (which reminds me—when I was about twenty, I looked for ways to be a secular version of one of the Righteous Thirty-six. This led to a plan to, at least once a week, sit down on the bus behind a solitary woman, preferably a woman in black widow's weeds—but you can't be picky—and, without letting her see me, quietly whistle a love song in her ear that could trip through the outer shell, into her inner ear, and touch everything that was asleep, despaired of, congealed) ...

    I'm not at all scared that we're strangers, by the way. On the contrary, tell me, what is more attractive and provocative than the possibility of taking something very precious—the most precious thing—a secret or weakness, or a thoroughly implausible request like the one I made of you, and deliberately placing it in the hands of a total stranger? And then to be tormented by so much shame and disgrace for allowing the beggar in me such a transparent delusion, so that for three days and three nights I spent every moment in self-imposed solitary confinement, a trap ... then, just as I was about to give up, stupid, spiteful, gloomy, and gray, all of a sudden your white hand—

    Look, maybe you can't see what excites me so terribly, but your warm, radiant letter, especially the P.S. at the end, that one line—it was as if you came and led me by the hand from shadow into light. That's how I felt, that you had given me your hand and led me across a watershed of light, it was so simple, as if it was completely natural for a person to do that for a stranger.

    (And now, a cold wave. Of all the times, now, just at this moment, and why? Because it was good? A cold wave rising from my stomach, a cold fist rolled up into a ball just under my heart—get acquainted with it.)

    Again, please understand I'm really talking about letters only, not a meeting, never a body. No flesh, not with you, your letter made that so clear to me: only words. It would ruin us, being face-to-face, it would immediately take us down into familiar territory. Also, of course, we will keep this strictly secret, we won't let anybody in on it, so that no one from the outside can use our secret words against us. Only my words meeting yours, so we can feel the rhythm of our breath slowly becoming one.

    It makes me so tired to write this way, not a usual fatigue, but after every few lines I really have to stop to take a breath, calm down.

Evening. I took a break. Recovered a little. It has been exactly ten hours since I found your white envelope in my box, with my name on one side and yours on the other (maybe I didn't need any more than that at first). And inside, on half a sheet (were you in a hurry?), your answer. I couldn't truly grasp what I was reading in that first moment. It was as if a dazzling glow radiated out of every word, even the most nebulous ones. The way that, if you plumb the depths of the word "I," there's a moment of understanding; and then a kind of dark gloom started to spread out from the center and draw me inside. Then, when I got to the P.S.: your thanks for my unexpected gift (you're thanking me!), and your heart, suddenly filled with yearning for itself as a child—well, there's nothing else to say at that moment, is there? The most significant thing has already been said.

    Listen, though—I once read that Our Sages of Blessed Memory had the idea that we have one tiny bone in the body, above the end of the spine—they call it the "Luz." You can't kill it, it doesn't crumble after death and can't be destroyed by fire. It is from this that we will be recreated at the Resurrection. I used to play a little game with myself—I would try to guess the Luz of the people I knew, divine the final thing that would be left of them, that indestructible thing from which they'll be reborn. And, of course, I searched for my own Luz as well, but nothing within me met all the necessary conditions. So I stopped asking and looking, I gave my Luz up for lost, until I saw you in the playground. All of a sudden that forgotten thought arose from the dead, and along with it the sweet and crazy notion came to me that maybe my Luz isn't in me after all, but in someone else.

April 7

    Me again. It's just before midnight, and this is the third letter today. Don't worry, you have no idea how many letters I haven't sent you today, because this is the first day we've shared, this day that your letter came to me and I answered. I can believe—until your next letter arrives, at least—that you are reading me exactly as I'm writing to you, half asleep, half daydreaming (I actually danced as I walked through work today), so I can murmur "Water, water" to you in my thin voice. My voice gets reedy when I think about you, Miriam, water, trickle water on me. I don't know why. Maybe because without the rough r, your name is mayim, water. And maybe because there can be no fertilization without liquid, I feel in my bones that we two need to be surrounded by lots of water, by waterfalls and rivers, simply so we can begin to exist.

    Did I exaggerate? Did I get carried away? I felt you flinch (really: your body made a face), or maybe I used some especially bruising word? You must guide me, explain to me where you hurt and where I have to be gentle. Or did I just flood over today and tire you out?

    Because writing to you does exhaust me, as I told you. I have never felt so dizzy from writing. Five lines, ten, and I really start to feel dizzy. It's nice, too, though, it reminds me of how I felt as a child, the first time I went out into the world after a long illness. Listen, maybe we should decide from the first that this correspondence won't go on for too long? Shall we say a year? Or until it becomes unbearably pleasant? Because if my body is telling me the truth right now, and as we know, the body doesn't lie—

    Oh, doesn't it, though? How many times have I lied with my body? How many times have I kissed and stroked, closed my eyes with a sigh and come like an explosion, and not meant anything special by it?

    How many times have you?

    Miriam, if what I feel for you is true, even a year might be too long for the two of us. We won't last longer, and we'll sow destruction in our wake, and it seems to me that we both have something in the world, outside ourselves, to lose. So I thought, All right, it's stupid, but maybe we'll decide on this from the beginning. We'll set some date, or wait until something specific occurs in the world, an outside event that has nothing to do with us but can be our private sign on the general calendar. What do you say, does that calm you down (it does give us some sort of framework)? That way, we can also know from the beginning that our separation is out of our hands and that we have to make everything happen before then. To be all or nothing, what do you think?

    You're gone again, you've cooled off and pulled back all of a sudden. I know I've been writing total nonsense, that I've ended our story before it could even begin, but wait! Don't make up your mind about me! Listen: it would be so easy for me to rip up this page and write everything over again without those miserable lines—to prevent the moment when I lose you to my own fear.

You see, I let it stand. Exactly as it is. I didn't erase a thing. Because the moment you answered me, I decided that everything that happens in me because of you will be yours. Inscribed in my body, and in yours. Every thought and desire, lust and dread, every baby, fetus, or abortion created in me will be yours. This is the core of my pact with you, and only with you: I hereby relinquish all my wooing masks, along with my self-censorship, all of my defenses—

    (What a relief, just to write those words.)

    Except that I just read what I wrote.

    I wish I could write to you in some other way; rather, I wish I were a man who wrote some other way. So many thick words, when, in fact, it could also be so simple, couldn't it? Just "My dear, tell me where it hurts." So I will shut my eyes tight and write quickly: I wish that two total strangers could overcome strangeness itself, the mighty, ingrained principle of foreignness, the whole overstuffed Politburo sitting so deep in our souls. We could be like two people who inject themselves with truth serum and at long last have to tell it, the truth. I want to be able to say to myself, "I bled truth with her," yes, that's what I want. Be a knife for me, and I, I swear, will be a knife for you: sharp but compassionate, your word, not mine. I didn't even remember that such a delicate, soft tone was allowed in the world, of a word with no skin (if you say it aloud a few times, you can feel salty hard earth as water starts pushing through its veins). You're tired, I will force myself to say good night.

Yair

April 12
Miriam,

    I knew it, don't say I didn't know and didn't warn myself.

    Is that truly what you felt? And to that extent?

    Well, as you can probably imagine, I didn't much enjoy that slap in the face. Giving with one hand and then taking with two, Scheherazade entwining herself with the idiot Sultan ... This morning I couldn't bear the suffering and express-mailed your first letter back to myself.

    Though you do understand, don't you? It was all out of the fear that—after I succeeded at tugging at your sleeve and keeping you for a moment by my side—my faint charm will expire and I will never have a second chance. And you must, must believe me—my true self will be revealed only in a second look, or a third. Under no circumstances in the glance you are giving me now.

    Anyway, Miriam (you have a warm name, it flows and checks in the same moment), stay with me just a little while longer, just until this unwilling seizure ends—you can scribble a few more desperate little notes about me in your diary in the meantime. Still, let me stay longer, during your lonely sleepless conversations with yourself, or with Anna (a friend of yours?), or with your cat and dogs. And then, maybe, not everything will be lost for us. After all, you did ask, it seemed with genuine concern, what it is that terrifies me so much, and how the same person who could dare make a wish so great from his life could also be so frightened of it.

    You can explain that to me. Please.

    Should I tell you how many times I have read your two letters? Do you want to laugh? At every hour of the day and night, in whispers and aloud. In the steaming water of the bathtub, over an open gas flame in the kitchen, and in the middle of a work meeting, my brow furrowed with seriousness, surrounded by ten people. My ridiculous attempts to be with you in every state of matter. I went to the toilets in the Central Bus Station of Jerusalem, especially for the pornographic scrawls and obscene graffiti, so they would blister and peel with shame when they heard your earnest words, the way you write without games, without pretense; even when you're disappointed, you write without protecting yourself even one little bit—just like that, you come to me, giving me your trust. Without even knowing me at all.

    Should I tell you more about myself? What is there to tell?

    Something in your writing reminded me—I once thought of teaching my son a private language. Isolating him from the speaking world on purpose, lying to him from the moment of his birth, so he would believe only the language I gave him. And it would be a compassionate language. What I mean is—I wanted to take him by the hand and name everything he saw with words that would save him from the inevitable heartaches. So that he wouldn't be able to comprehend the existence of, for instance, war. Or that people kill. Or that this red, here, is blood. It's a used-up kind of idea, I know, but I loved to imagine him crossing through life with an innocent, trusting smile—the first truly enlightened child.

    I don't have to tell you of my joy when he began to speak; you probably remember the wonder of a child first naming things. Although every time he learned a new word, one that is also a little "theirs," everybody's, even his first word, a beautiful word like "light"—my heart curdled around the edges, because I thought, Who knows what he is losing in this moment, how many infinite kinds of glamour he felt and saw, tasted and smelled, before he pressured them into this little box, "light," with a t at the end like a switch clicking off. You understand me, don't you?

    Oh yes, of course you understand the edges of your heart curdling. You might even be a modest expert in your way. I knew it from the first look. And I have, as well, apparently succeeded at dampening your spirit and curdling your heart in no small way.

    But was it really that bad? Really, truly? As if you had lost a precious thing that you yearned for up until the moment you had it?

    At least tell me what that precious thing was, so I'll know what was almost in me.

Yair

April 16

    You are right, of course, and I absolutely deserve a scolding (but not for a moment have I thought that you were made only of words). Who could imagine that you also have such a thin, biting, cutting sarcasm to you—I saw a hint of it in your shoulders and your back, something pinched and embittered, as if preparing for the next blow—or am I completely wrong?

    Or is it all my fault? Tell me, am I the thing pinching your spine? I know so well how I do it to myself, I just wish I wasn't doing the same thing to you ...

    Listen: today, across the street from my workplace—an industrial area, midmorning, at the harsh peak of light—I saw a blind man sitting at the bus stop. He had a bowed head, a stick squeezed between his knees. A bus stopped, and another blind man got off it. When he passed in front of the one on the bench, they both immediately pulled themselves up erect and their heads came together. I stood still—couldn't move. They groped and discovered each other, and for one moment it seemed as if they were tied together, clinging, frozen. It lasted no more than a second, in total silence, and after that moment they detached themselves and went their separate ways. But my skin was covered in goose bumps, the hair on my skin stood up in your name all over my body, and I thought, This is the way!

    So come on, come closer, I want to give you something real and intimate, don't run away, don't stiffen up, something very intimate to offset the "anonymity" you slammed at me, sitting on your porch as if you were in a full courtroom (a purple leaf fell, trapped between the page and envelope of your letter, and got squashed a little bit over your "intimacy-anonymity," blurring both words). Flex your muscles, Miriam, we said it was all or nothing.

When my wife and I were first dating, we took a trip to Mt. Carmel one Saturday morning. And we passed through a little patch of forest. It was very early, just a little bit after dawn. We talked, and we laughed. And I—who usually despise what is called the Beauty of Creation—could suddenly no longer contain within myself the wonder around me, and immediately stripped down and started running between the trees, naked and yelling and dancing. And Maya (we'll call her Maya between us, and you are also welcome to choose names for your dear ones as you wish) was astonished and stopped—maybe she was just put off by my nakedness, which she saw out in the open for the first time—and it isn't that lovely in the dark—and I heard her calling to me, quietly, begging me to stop. It was too late—I was already drunk with nature, and I leaped at her from all directions in a kind of a wild bridal dance, which looked pretty ridiculous, I guess. I invited her to join me and felt—for just a moment—that she wanted to—you see, I had never agreed to dance with her before, not at parties, or among people, and suddenly, here I could do it naked—I was possessed, I didn't do it on purpose. Just imagine, dancing and naked, corks popping with happiness. Perhaps it is impossible to be unbeautiful when you're happy. And Maya almost gave herself away, I felt it roaring inside her, roaring to me; she almost uprooted herself—but, at the last minute, stopped. Why did the policeman in your dream demand that you file charges against me for writing threatening letters?

    (And how it revived me all of a sudden when you told the nosy idiot that they actually look to you like letters threatening my own life. And maybe that's why you're staying with me.) And I was dancing in the forest. I wish I could dance like that now, at this point in my life. I danced, because in some wonderful way that cold wave of doubt failed to emerge in me—

    It did emerge. Of course it did, my gears work with clocklike precision, injecting venom from my glands into my bloodstream as soon as my heart expands for any reason. But that time, it just made me dance even harder. I don't know why, perhaps I felt as if I was making the right mistake for myself, for once; and even after Maya had already turned back and gone and sat in the car, I couldn't stop, running between the trees, dancing, the smell of the pines became so pungent my eyes watered. I was naked, surrounded by voices all around, birds and faraway barks and the buzz of insects; I smelled the earth and the caves and the ashes of summer bonfires, and I felt as if a huge cataract that had been covering me was peeling off my body. Only after I had simply collapsed from exhaustion did I gather my clothes and go back to the car. Her face was pale, and she didn't look at me; she asked me to put my clothes on because people might come by and we'd better go home right away because her parents were waiting for us to have breakfast with them. And suddenly her voice broke and she burst out crying. I started sniveling, too, I understood that this was the end of our young love. And I thought I couldn't stand breaking up with her, because I had never loved someone this way, with the same joy and simplicity and health as I loved her, and as usual, I had spoiled it from the beginning by exposing myself.

    So we sat in the car, each one to himself, and we actually wept quite bitterly, she's dressed and I'm naked. Our crying brought us closer, we nudged each other and laughed, and I started putting my clothes back on. And she helped me, dressing me, garment after garment, buttoning me, rolling up my sleeves. And I kissed her and licked her tears throughout, because I understood that she was crying over me but not leaving—mourning me and staying—and my heart swelled with gratitude. I knew I would never do anything like that to her again in my life, and I decided to protect her from myself from that moment on, because she couldn't live defenseless in the same world in which I was doing such things. She laughed through her tears and said almost the same things, that in order to defend her from me I would simply have to stay with her always. That was half a joke, but also a profound truth, the fatal logic of two, of a couple, and you ought to know that this kind of logic sometimes reveals itself to a couple only after a complete life together (I saw the man you stood with or next to). But we peeked into it somehow from the very first moment.

    I haven't thought of that moment in years. I was always a bit appalled to remember myself dancing the way I did. And the rest got blurred right along with it. We were just frightened children; but in spite of that, in a flash, we managed to establish a complex life contract with each other. We warned by law and were warned by law, and I am amazed to understand now how within one second we focused our gazes in such a manner that from that moment on they would turn only at the right angles needed to ensure that our love would always win, at any cost. And we also agreed on the cost. And we have never spoken about it, never. How can you suddenly speak about that in the middle of life, tell me.

    Tell me.

    I shouldn't have told you about that, should I? What have you got to do with the married life of a person you haven't even seen? I already feel the coldness of that mistake. Here I am, again, a clown—this is probably what it looks like to you, some man throwing everything he owns up into the air, and of course everything is scattered around him on the ground. Never mind, people love clowns—that is what my couple of great educators taught me (but consider, on the borders of your mind, think of me, let's say, like a man with a huge burn on his face deciding to enter a room full of people). Perhaps your way of thinking dictates that I should have waited until we knew each other a little better before telling you such a story, yes? I think along the same lines, but with you I'm not doing things according to my reflection but according to my distortion. And, at the same time, I don't want to wait, because our time together is different, spherical, every point on it is at the exact same distance to the center. And I won't apologize if I'm embarrassing you; this is not salon chatter. It is murder to erase one word to you—and everything I said here—I didn't plan any of it—and I will not erase a word!

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Be My Knife by David Grossman. Copyright © 1998 by David Grossman.
Translation copyright © 2001 Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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