Be My Knife A Novel
by Grossman, David; Almog, Vered; Gurantz, MayaEdition: Reprint
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2003-04-19
Publisher(s): Picador
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Summary
When the awkward, neurotic and childlike Yair, a seller of rare books, sees a beautiful woman across the room at a class reunion he feels compelled to write to her. So begins a love affair of words between two married, middle-aged adults, dissatisfied with their lives, yearning for the connection that has always eluded them. "Be a knife for me," Yair writes to Miriam, "and I, I swear, will be a knife for you." As they peel back their inhibitions, their correspondence unfolds into an exchange of their most naked confessions in a novel that is as passionate as it is spellbinding. David Grossmanis the author of six novels and three works of nonfiction. He lives in Jerusalem. ANew York TimesNotable Book An awkward, neurotic seller of rare books writes a desperate letter to a beautiful stranger whom he sees at a class reunion. This simple, lonely attempt at seduction begins a love affair of words between Yair and Miriam, two married, middle-aged adults, dissatisfied with their lives, yearning for the connection that has always eluded themand, eventually, reawakened to feelings that they thought had passed them by. Their correspondence unfolds into an exchange of their most naked confessions: of desire, childhood tragedies, joys, and humiliations. "A transformative work of art . . . As the love affair moves toward its denouement certain passages demand to be reread, as if one can't believe the pure, intuitive truth they contain."The New York Times Book Review "A transformative work of art . . . As the love affair moves toward its denouement certain passages demand to be reread, as if one can't believe the pure, intuitive truth they contain."The New York Times Book Review "Be My Knifeis an absorbing, lyrical, intricately woven look at love that delves deeply into the emotions of its characters and artfully challenges narrative conventions . . . Well-crafted . . . Grossman is a master . . . This is a rich, original, beautifully painful exposition of the basic human condition."Catherine Newton,The Fort Worth Star-Telegram "Be My Knifemay be the strangest saddest love story ever told . . . exciting . . . exquisite [and] piercingly sad."Los Angeles Times Book Review "A brilliant concoction by an outstanding Israeli novelist."The New York Times "A tour de force . . . Difficult, provocative, disturbing . . . The novel raises serious questions. Can a person be truly honest with another, or is dishonesty intrinsic to the relations between men and women? Is honesty even possible, given the self-deception we all engage in? The book poses a Rashomon-like situationeach person seeing the story differently."Miriam Sawyer, Rutherford (New Jersey) Public Library,MultiCultural Review "A beautiful and searing book . . . Grossman's prose is bewitching . . . Be My Knife starts as a slow, lyrical work, then draws the reader into Yair and Miriam's compulsions. For Grossman, love is as an obsession, a consuming and searing mirage, where lovers reveal what is raw and painful."The Denver Post "Novelist and journalist David Grossman has claimed a place in the front ranks of contemporary Israeli writers with his lyrical yet penetrating explorations of his fellow countryman's psyches . . . Fans of Jeannette Winterson or Virginia Woolf may enjoy the novel's verbal artistry and its acute attention to the shifting psychological states of love."Time Out New York "A literary concoction for readers with strong stomachs and exquisite taste."Chicago Tribune "Be My Knifecasts a spell . . . by fearlessly exam
Author Biography
David Grossman is the author of seven novels, most recently Someone to Run With, as well as two groundbreaking works of journalism, The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire; several children’s books; and a play. He lives in Jerusalem.
Table of Contents
“A transformative work of art...As the love affair moves toward its denouement certain passages demand to be reread, as if one can’t believe the pure, intuitive truth they contain.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Be My Knife may be the strangest, saddest love story ever told...exciting...exquisite [and] piercingly sad.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A beautiful and searing book...Grossman’s prose is bewitching....Be My Knife starts as a slow, lyrical work, then draws the reader into Yair and Miriam’s compulsions. For Grossman, love is as an obsession, a consuming and searing mirage, where lovers reveal what is raw and painful.”—The Denver Post
“Be My Knife may be the strangest, saddest love story ever told...exciting...exquisite [and] piercingly sad.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A beautiful and searing book...Grossman’s prose is bewitching....Be My Knife starts as a slow, lyrical work, then draws the reader into Yair and Miriam’s compulsions. For Grossman, love is as an obsession, a consuming and searing mirage, where lovers reveal what is raw and painful.”—The Denver Post
Excerpts
Be My Knife
Yair
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 ifyou 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 attentionto 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 Ihaven'tsent 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 ismayim,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 everythingover 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-upkind 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 atat 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 itseemed 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 idiotthat 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 thing, 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!
April 16-17
Can't sleep. I wish I could already know how the letter I wrote this morning makes you feel. And whether you'll continue to write to me after you read it. I am almost certain you won't. You'll consider it rude ofme to expose such aspects of my life. Well, I am quite pleased with myself for sending it anyway. Even with the full day of self-torture that went with it. And you were right that I'm looking for a partner to join me on an imaginary journey, but you were completely wrong when you said that I might not need a real partner. Exactly the opposite: I need a real partner for animaginaryjourney. As I'm writing these words, my heart thumps in a physically very real way, and in general, my heart beats true only when I imagine--now--again--thumping. Did you know there is such a bird, a thumper-bird, a parpur?
If you touch its chest--once--gently--its heart stops beating and it dies. One mustn't make a single wrong move with this bird, because any tiny mistake sends a delicate impact to its heart and it just stops beating. If I could only buy such a parpur, two actually--no: I would buy a flock and let them fly here, above what I'm writing you, so they could be living lie detectors, like the canaries that used to be sent into mines to discover gas leaks. Imagine, if you will: one false or inexact word, or one that is rude, or just indifferent--and a dead bird falls on the page. Then you'll see how I write to you.
By the way, I forgot to tell you that you offended me when you thought I might have mistaken you for someone else I saw that night. And I was even more offended by your difficulty in deciding which you would prefer--that I was mistaken or that I was right.
But you know what really broke my heart? When you described yourself to me to make sure. Because of how you somehow diminished yourself into one single sentence, in parentheses on top of that ("Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses ..."). If you really feel yourself to be in parentheses--at least let me squeeze into them as well and let the whole world remain outside. Let the world only be the element outside the parentheses that will multiply us on the inside.
Y.
P.S. Anyway--even though this journey isn't exactly smooth right now, rough going and twisting and turning from the beginning, I have to tell you something. Do you have any idea that my pupils dilate when I see a word of yours in another place, even when I stumble upon it in a newspaper or in a TV commercial ... because certain words are so obviously yours, your soul prints, and coming from any other human being theysound like speaking equipment, fragments of language, no more than that. And until there was you, I never imagined that meeting a stranger's language could be as exciting as the first touch of her body, and her smell, and the texture of her skin and hair and beauty marks. Do you feel the same way?
April 21
But how will I bring us together, to meet? You and me, how will I bring us together? Your letter arrived. It's on the table, blanched as a corpse. White reflects all the light beams, doesn't it? I will open it soon. Let me enjoy the doubt, let me spread a little optimistic color ... have I already told you that I keep seeing us submerged in green? Green keeps flashing through my mind when I think of you. Great, wide green. Here, the endless depths of an ocean; there, a dense European forest; there again, maybe just a large lawn (I should have warned you my dreams usually end grasshopper-high). You're sitting in the grass reading a book, and I, let's say, a newspaper. And there is a wide space between us, a huge lawn: two strangers, and how do you bring them together in an embrace instantly, without having to go through all the in-between stages and without reciting all the sentences that millions of men and women have chewed the flavor from, before them?
By the weight of it--one page, not more. I thought of writing what is written in there myself as preparation. But you forbade me to make my own decisions about what you think and feel. So maybe I'll write about a little daydream playing in my head for a few days now, a daydream about us. I wonder what you will think of it, this picture, quite a silly one of me and you and how we were deep in thought, reading--but because we were the only ones there on the grass, we became sharply aware of each other's presence. I was wearing jeans, as usual; you were in a black dress, a little loose and caressing your body from head to toe, and covered with stars and bright moons. If I'm not mistaken, there was also a delicate, breathing green scarf covering your shoulders. This is how I saw you at the reunion (a scarf? or a long silk shawl? every detail is important to me now). "The only thing I remembered was the green gown she wore," this is how the Seducer met Cordelia for the first time inDiary ofaSeducer,and maybe this scarf is the source from which all my green springs.
The green that, in a blink, was turned off by your husband's hugegray sweater, which he threw over your shoulders when you shivered. Do you remember that? Because I clearly remember some kind of quick attacking motion from his side that shocked me, while I stared at you, when I was still unaware of how I was staring at you. And he--that "he" from whom you by no means intend to hide our relationship, only because it would never occur to him to investigate what you do and with whom--suddenly, from the altitude of his titan's height, he threw the sweater over you like someone tossing a lasso over a runaway colt.
But what really made you shiver? Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses ... if those annoying parentheses hadn't been there, I would have laughed: is that how you see yourself? Only that? Why didn't you write about your magnificent stance, erect and soft at the same time; and about your radiant cheeks; and how is it that you didn't mention that your face has a kind of naïveté, light-complected and freckled, a bit anachronistic--don't take offense--like people from the fifties ...
And why didn't I immediately write words like the gold of the grain and farmland and butter. That you have a face that from a first or an indifferent or unkeen look seems almost modest compared to that wonderfully expressive body--I hope I'm not offending you--the face of a decent, good little girl, the handsome, responsible face of a class president. And suddenly the eye is hooked by something unexpected, the dark mole under your lips, the mouth itself, wide, trembling, and restless, which seems as if it has its own inner life. You have a hungry mouth, Miriam; tell me if anybody has ever told you that and I will immediately find another word--under no circumstances will I splash about in their words.
I swallowed your face that evening. I saw you for maybe five minutes, but for those five complete minutes you were branded into me, and I know your face by heart and by my heart in your mouth, and after you've heard all this, you will have to decide if that "queer moan" came truly because you thought I had mistaken you for another woman. Or if, perhaps, you moaned because she was you after all, because my fortunes chose you ... I will not help you waver, it has been three weeks since then and every new woman I see--no sooner do my eyes fall upon her than my mind returns to your image. Oh, how your face moved me. I, who always start from the body. But I didn't neglect the body, God forbid--I think you tried to blur its lines with yours ("quite tall" ...)--my pen is alreadyshaking in my hand with the thought that soon I will write your body, the beauty of your body and its generosity underneath your clothes. And also the slightly rigid roundness of your shoulders, I don't forget it, as if somebody is taking refuge in you and you are defending him.
And how you lowered your head, and how your body shivered a bit underneath that dress, and how, as if within a dream, in slow motion, you hugged your body to yourself as if you were sorry for it--it sounds strange, but that's how it seemed, as if you felt sorrow and compassion for it. And with one look I knew things about you--I'm probably annoying you again, arrogantly telling you about yourself with no hesitation--but I simply knew. Your face was open and disarmed at that moment, I have never seen a mature, grown human being so peeled of her epidermis. You could actually see every emotion passing through you immediately written upon your face--you're incapable of hiding anything. Do you know how dangerous that is? And where were you for that life lesson?
(Enough! I can't hold back anymore. Come, scowling, stern-faced messenger, come, you astringent pink slip, let's hear what you have to tell us.)
April 22
Miriam,
Before everything:
In the supermarket today, this evening--a child I didn't know asked me to give him three bars of chocolate from a high shelf. I reach my hand up to the shelf--and in the blink of an eye he is transformed into a sick child in whom an unknown disease resides, who has been taken care of and worried over for a few months. And now it seems he's going to be fine, he's on the road to recovery, and he suddenly starts gorging himself on chocolate, a chocolate attack; he's sleepless, gets out of bed at night, bingeing, and can't be stopped. And you don't feel good about taking away that one little pleasure when he's been going through such a difficult treatment--but the thing is, that child knows something. More than everyone--more than his parents, his doctors, even himself--he has some kind of internal premonition and is equipping himself with chocolatefor the long, cold journey that awaits him--I handed him the chocolate bars and he ran off happily.
Such a flicker of nonsense came to me as I was reaching up to the shelf, and I swore to remember it so I could tell you about it, I even scribbled it down on a little note. So what? I have ten of these a day, and I lose ten for good, and truly, it isn't an especially grand flicker, but if I hadn't written it down for you, I would have forgotten it, too. And that's a shame; still, it is a shame that even such a tiny flicker would die before it was born, for it is a living fragment of the soul. Of course, every person has hundreds of these, but no one would have come up with this stupid idea. And even if it did occur to someone--who is capable of telling another person about such a flicker? Have you ever heard somebody telling another person about his flickers?
And where did I find the nerve to tell you about such internal foolishness, something undoubtedly no more than a crackle of static from my brain?
Perhaps from your sudden understanding that if you stopped writing to me now, only because I drive you to distraction here and there, you might never forgive yourself for the rest of your life.
Look, Miriam, I've been reading your short letter over and over. Maybe I don't dare to understand it all the way through, but I think it says here in your miniature handwriting that it is clear to you if you turned your back on me now, before you even truly met me, you would feel as if you were denying the essence of your faith.
And I already know, by the way, you shouldn't have had to explain in such detail that this "essence of faith" has absolutely nothing at all to do with me--that it is completely between you and yourself, perhaps it is even, as you said, the Thing between you and yourself. But I'm also reading the strange cluster of strange letters you added to the bottom, that it sometimes gives you the shivers--that a stranger could notice in one quick glance that Thing between you and yourself, and without even knowing you, call it by its private name.
Yair
(Tomorrow already)
I mean, if I could only put some of these together, these soul-fragments, maybe I could see them as one complete mosaic and finallyunderstand something, a kind ofprinciplethat holds me together. Don't you think so? I'm talking about the things that have no first names, that accumulate on the bottom of the soul through life, layers of sediment and ore. If you asked me to describe them to you--I would have no words, only contractions of my heart, a passing shadow, a sigh. Someone hugs herself in the middle of a group of people and suddenly you are filled with yearning. Someone writes: you introduce yourself as a "stranger." But a complete stranger could not write to me this way ... and immediately my throat closes up. One drop leaking out from my loneliness gland. No more than that. But what is more real and important than that? Once, during a guard shift in the Sinai, Rilke explained to me that, in the depths, everything transforms itself into a law. Very nice, I told him, how reassuring to think that somewhere everything is tied to some kind of meaning, but this insight doesn't satisfy me anymore, Rainer Maria, my time is ending fast and even if I live for another thirty years, I will see only another thirty-one saffron flowers. Adds up to a pretty small bouquet, and I would like to see this constitution drafted before my own eyes, for once. Do you understand? Theconstitution, and I want an organized tour through those mysterious "depths," and I demand to know the private names of all the forms mentioned above, to call them by their names at least once, so they will answer me and finally, for once, be mine. Just not this permanent, consistent silence (that is in this instance, for example, with no describable cause, amid the daily mob, shattering my heart).
Y.
By the way, don't try so hard to remember who I was among all those people surrounding you that night. It is truly unimportant, you didn't notice me at all. But if you insist--not tall (even perhaps shorter than you, I hope you don't mind, it doesn't matter in writing), skinny. Not a lot of investment was made in my material production, perhaps not too much thought, either. Not an Adonis, exactly, if you ask me, that is: not unugly. Now do you remember? A slightly gloomy face, a fair straggly beard? Pacing pointlessly and restlessly between the groups, and not sticking to any of them? Do you remember anyone like that? Some kind of hybrid between a sulky marabou and a Jew? In short: spare the effort, you won't be able to remember, because there's nothing here to forget.
April 28
You don't feel sorry for me? Really?
No pity?
But what is so terrible about being a little bit of a teenager when I write to you? I'm a teenager and a complete baby, an old man and a newborn. I exist in so many moments of life when I'm writing to you, and I wish you, too, would have given me a little of the flame that you allowed yourself for a few moments (Only a few moments? Really, now?) when you went through that same horrible spell of adolescence. And how is it ever possible to pass through the tunnel of these dark years without a bit of yourself catching fire, why do you restrict yourself in your burnings today as well? All your ages, Crazy Yair Buys Everything, the entire stock of your thermal market, because understand this: the place I want us to reach doesn't have enough vitality and energy yet. And if I distance myself from it, and look at it from the outside, it cools off for me, too. And when you doubt it, even with a tiny single remark, it freezes immediately. Do you think creating something from two people is easy?
Since yesterday, I've been trying to understand what happened to you between the last letter and the one that is here. Which outside voice did you listen to? (It was Anna, wasn't it? Then you told her. I am certain you have no person closer to you than she. She's already turned me into a joke, hasn't she?) Because if you didn't, how can you explain your sudden withdrawal, demanding--with a kind of unnatural coldness, anxiously, tight-lipped-that I finally tell you about myself, about the self that is visible to the eye.
I had hoped that we had already gotten past that. That you understood that my daily self is none of our business. Who's even interested in that self? And what does it matter if Yair Wind is not in the phone book? He is not in that book! "Visible to the eye?" I told you, you didn't even see me that evening, I was standing in your blind spot. Write to your blind spot. Look deep inside and you'll see me signaling to you with two hands within it, within the pupil of your blind spot, Miriam, please--
Did you notice, I'm not even trying to argue with your feelings: until I started writing to you, it was true, a precise description of me, all the symptoms of my disease. Even the "eloquence" that to you is always suspiciously smooth. I think I know what you're talking about, your sensesor your suspicions aren't so strange; that I am capable, almost without noticing, of depositing my poignant weaknesses into the hands of complete strangers, a strange and embarrassing trick of seduction, you say, and as if we're not really dealing with lives at stake ... I'm reading these precise, razor-sharp definitions and thinking, She is analyzing me as if she had never been excited by me, and she gets excited by me as if she is incapable of analysis. So who is she?
And I have no intention of calling your home, thank you. And I was quite astonished that you became so enraged over my innocent proposal last week that you call your dear ones by whatever names you like. They have real names (I know) and you don't intend to invent them all over again for me (of course) and why can't I believe in the possibility of a simple, natural, open relationship between two human beings? And I was already so sure that by the end of this tsunami you were going to hang up the letter in my face forever and would never, ever in the world, ever again--and then you give me your home number?!
I won't call. Out of the simple reasons of the "Sanctity of the Bond" (somebody might be at home and hear), but mainly because even a voice is too real for the hallucination I want to have with you. It can be created only with written words, and a voice might pierce it, and then the whole world of reality will flow inside. The details and the numbers and the little sweaty molecules of life; certain subjects are too closely related to subjugation, within a second the entire ruling mob will flow through in a great tsunami and put out every spark. Why do you insist on not understanding this?
It doesn't matter, you're incapable of faking it for even five lines: protected by your fortress of little disagreements and explanations, all so logical--as long as I play these childish spy games or stick to the foolish idea of a "guillotine" that will come down on us out of nowhere in a few months, you are unable to trust, with all your heart, in even the "sincere and emotional" things I'm telling you. On the other hand, youdo notlike the corner into which, because of my illusions, you are slowly pushing yourself, the corner of a closed-off critic, a cold person. And in this manner you continue to stone me through at least another three corseted "I do nots," in the voice of a teacher with a banana-shaped hairdo--but suddenly your lipstrembled and a little "I don't" escaped, little and law-breaking. "And I thought you could already feel that I don't get scared by true passion in my feelings and relationships, on the contrary, on the contrary ..."
See how each time I reach this punkish "I don't," my heart clenches with pleasure, each time, again (as if you had rolled down one silk stocking for me).
No, tell me, honestly: Was I wrong? Was I wrong about you? Now, again, for instance, a gray wave rises and fills the pit of my stomach, maybe I was wrong and am actually tormenting you, because it is obvious that whoever isn't in tune with the string I offered you will hear only the squeaks, the tin squeaks of my mailbox, or the little bureaucracy of adultery to which I exposed you above, the Sanctity of the Bond that undoubtedly sickened you.
And of course, I had been thinking about whether I should take it out, or put it a bit more delicately, but I left it in, as you already know, because I want you to know about me--to know me, naked, in the little clerical work assigned by my miserable fears, and in my stupidity and in my shame, and in my ignominy. Why not? My "ignominy" is also me, it wants to be given to you, too, like my pride, with same amount of power; it wants, it needs, terribly.
You know, sometimes when I'm writing to you, I have this utterly odd feeling--a completely physical one--that before I could ever actually speak to you, I would have to watch all my words leaving me in a long line, traveling all the way to you to turn themselves in.
This word--"ignominy"--I have never written it before. It is here now, and it smells like a very old, very used slipper (actually, it smells of a home).
Here, just because of a moment like this.
It is frustrating to me that you are again clinging to the corners of the altar of solid logic--which is indeed a useful tool in life, but we are not in life, Miriam! This is the very secret I've been whispering in your ear for a month: we are neither of us alive! I mean, nowhere are the regulation rules of relationships in play, certainly not the usual system of law of men's and women's relationships. So where are we, anyway? What do I care where! Why name it? In any case, the name will be "theirs," a translation.And I want a different code of law with you, which states that we will, both of us, set our rules and speak in our language, and tell our stories and believe in them with all our hearts. Because if we don't have a single private place like this, in which all these beliefs become truth, even if only in writing--then our lives are not lives; even worse than that, our lives are just life ... Will you sign it?
Y. W.
May 7
Finally.
And I had already despaired and almost given up.
It's a shame that we wasted more than a month, and you are right, we didn't only "waste" it--but we won't give up, and we won't feel remorse for anything. And now (a little late, of course) I am practically horrified by my egocentricity. I didn't even take the time to consider what you need to give up in order to get close to me and to believe in me and in those rules of mine. I burn toward you so much that I was certain I could melt everything else away, logic, life circumstances, even our shared personality ... It really is a wonder, then, Miriam, only now can I grasp what a wonder it is how you suddenly decided (so decisively, with your lips and your chin!) to throw all definite and logical explanations into the deepest pit in the fields around your home in Beit Zayit. And to come, even though ... and, even though, allowing me to put your life in my hands.
My unfamiliar hands that are shaking a little now from the weight of the responsibility.
And how will I thank this mysterious friend of yours, who with a few words turned your heart toward me? But what exactly did he tell you about me, and who is he? A man with torn eyelids--and no other details, you didn't explain anything. That's fine, take it slowly, I'm getting used to your abstracted manner of speaking, when you seem certain that I understand, or when you don't even care and you let yourself mumble freely, and then I know your soul is relaxed before me and that you are speaking to yourself in a reverie, a waking sleep ...
Anyway, don't forget to thank him for me. Although it confuses me a little to know that you have such a close male "friend." And that you canhave such detailed and open conversations with him. And I'm holding myself back so as not to ask you what you need me for if you have such a person, who succeeds in making you speak no matter what your mood, and who is always with you when you fall into your Josephan pit, abandoned by the world.
Do you think you'll ever want or be able to tell me what it's like in there, too?
And who throws you in there so easily (again and again and again), and who is not coming to pull you out?
And what happens to you on those days of damnation (did you really mean that word?), when you are the pit itself after even Joseph himself left it?
Strange, isn't it? I guess I don't really have any clue as to precisely what you meant, and I suppose that the two of us are giving the names "Joseph" and "pit" to two completely different things--even though I sometimes say a sentence of yours aloud, or just a combination of words, and feel an internal stitch being torn through the whole length of my soul.
Write to me. Tell me. It's a shame to lose a single day.
Yair
May 8
I sent you one yesterday (did you get it yet?). But the conversation somehow continues into today: somebody called to make a business appointment with me. He wouldn't come to where I work, and furthermore insisted that we meet in front of a department store (I meet more than a few crazy people in my line, but sometimes they do have interesting material). I asked how I would recognize him. He said he would wear black corduroy pants and a plaid shirt and--suede shoes ... I stood there in the sun for almost an hour and didn't see anybody who fit the description. And then, when I'd finally got fed up and was ready to leave, I looked down the block, and by the phone booth I saw a dwarf, the smallest dwarf I had ever seen, twisted, with a bent body and grotesque face. He was leaning on two tiny walking sticks and was dressed exactly as he had promised (and I couldn't go near him).
Afterward I thought, In my pocket I have your letter with that sentence that on the first reading seemed a little incomprehensible and abstractto me, about the kind of sorrow that you can't share with anybody. It is exactly enough for one person.
May 11
Yes, of course, my dear, my marvel, with all my heart, what do you think? ...
There is suddenly more room between us. I actually felt your breath coming from beyond the page--your shoulders loosened up a little.
Also because of the colors and the blooming and the smells that burst like a grand waterfall onto your pages. Until now you wrote almost entirely in black and white, and the fact that there were finally two there, two pages (you're right: with two wings, you can finally take off and fly). And I find it wonderful that you chose to bring me to your home, not on the main road by which everybody comes, but from the distant dam of Ein Karem. And through the valley. And, it seems to me, past every flower and tree and brier, passing lizards and grasshoppers and stilts. I haven't been led this way for years, like a sheep to pasture. But who could resist your charm, when you suddenly wake up and laugh, running in front of me, stroking every dandelion and mallow and every olive trunk. And look at the sage, how abundantly it flowers, and how generously it gives off its scent ... Not to mention all the tordylium and pearl grass--tell me, who taught you all these private names and their smells, and the texture of their leaves and how to crush them, and the gallnuts and fritillary?
It's a good thing that I'm a quick reader. Even so, I could hardly keep up with you as you climbed and scaled the rocks. What are you running for? I didn't imagine that your big soft body could move this way, like a lioness, you wrote, surprising ... and a strong vital smell hovered above your words, the smell of sweat and earth and stamen. You are wonderful when you rejoice, when you're rolling around in a field of poppies or throwing oat flowers at me (I'll be throwing them back at you soon! Did you play that game, too--How Many Kids Will You Have?). A white-and-yellow daisy got caught in your hair. And for a moment I shrank with the misery of an amputated hand, because I couldn't untangle it from your hair, and I couldn't give you a boost to climb over the terrace. And all the scratches and stings I didn't get, your sweat, which I didn't get to lick--I'm only writing it and missing it. It's a good thing youstopped in the village to chat with kindergarteners, all lined up. It gave me a moment to breathe. I noticed that you made certain not to tell me if one of the children belongs to you (by your description, one could think they were all yours). And generally, in your last two letters, it seems to me that you're teasing me with riddles, hiding and reappearing, smiling secret intimate smiles. And it's wonderful. I'm barely alive, but keeping up, through your secret passages between the houses and fences, all the way to the gate of your house, blue speckled with rust--why rust? maybe someone isn't doing his job keeping the house up properly? Well, I didn't say anything, and who can even think about that when you are spinning around to face me in a swirl of imaginary skirts, and for one moment, within the motion of your spin--I don't know if you felt it--you came and spread out in all of your ages in front of me, and your brown eyes shone like the few words you whispered to me and like (oh dear, I feel a simile coming on) two pits in an opening loquat: would you like to come in?
Yes, of course, my dear, my marvel, with all my heart--what do you think?
(Morning)
Tonight, in the middle of a deep sleep, it came to me--could it be that he is the same friend whose diaries you read every few days, so that you can know what he was doing on the same day a few decades ago? Who--as you already told me in your second letter--is your morning prayer?
Please don't be angry with my attempt to discover which private conversation of yours I slipped into. I was only playing a little detective game, and in the middle of the night I jumped out of my bed and checked a few dates and flipped through some pages, and here you are, on exactly the same day you suddenly returned to me, on the fourth of May. I found that this is what he wrote in the diary from 1915:
"Reflection on other people's relationship to me. Insignificant as I may be, nevertheless there is no one here who understands me in my entirety. To have someone possessed of such understanding, a wife perhaps, would mean to have support from every side, to have God."
And even if my wild guess was completely wrong, even if I steppedinto a too-private place, I would like to give you something in return, from the same day, from the same man:
" ... Sometimes I thought she understood me without realizing it; for instance, the time she waited for me at the subway station--I had been longing for her unbearably, and in my passion to reach her as quickly as possible almost ran past her, thinking she would be at the top of the stairs, and she took me quietly by the hand."
Y.
May 16
You're such an enigma.
You don't have to solve me, you tell me, just be with me. Here I am--and I am with you, as you walk through your yard, a little paradise you've created for yourself (when I climb the stairs to the porch with the bougainvillea shade, I finally recognized the purple leaves from the anonymous-intimacy letter). You had already flown inside. I was still in a bit of shock from that move--and then flooded, I was simply flooded with light and warmth, and also with the huge array of colors, the jungle of giant potted plants, the wool carpets and embroidered pictures and the piano and the walls crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I instantly felt safe. Even the clutter seemed familiar to me.
So that's it? I'm inside, inside your home. You have a generous home, not just generous--like a river practically overflowing. And a little bit like the Old Curiosity Shop, just as you said. I learned it by heart, I even sketched it out on paper, so I could know just where the wall with the photographs is, and on which window the orange-and-red stained glass hangs, and where the blue glass vases from Hebron sit, and how the sunbeams break through them in the morning and fall and spread out on the embroidery with the filigree (what is that, exactly?), but mainly I saw you, your words, you suddenly wrote like--did you notice?
Do you understand what I am talking about?
This is in no way a criticism of you, it's just a question, or let's say the unwilling cock of an eyebrow: because you were extremely happy on the way from the dam, you rejoiced and I couldn't help but get excited along with you. And in the house, how can I explain it? It seemed to me that, for a moment, you were somehow aflame ...
Quickly--quickly, moving from room to room, nearly breathless, agitated in a way not at all in your usual rhythm, and when I think about it now--not at all in your tone either, not your verbal muscle tone. It was as if you frightened yourself by bringing me into your privacy so suddenly. Or perhaps you only wanted to show me that anything I can do you can do as well?
I'm such an idiot. What am I complaining about, I wish I could do that, too. Be as happy as a child, standing for the first time in front of a picture that has been hanging in the living room for years, or over a jar of pickles--be awed by a "large, pregnant" piece of pottery ...
I feel so relieved that I can now lean back and let you know--that almost from the start I felt a little ashamed before you, and mainly--too much of something (exaggerated and bubbling, et cetera, et cetera). Perhaps it was because you seemed so reserved to me that night, so self-sufficient, there was something so clear and crystal and ascetic about you, almost scolding me without even knowing me. And suddenly this crowded house.
On the other hand, don't be mistaken, it also relaxes me to know it, it proves another little one of my proofs about you and me. Perhaps not a very grand proof in itself, perhaps you won't be happy about it, I'm not very proud of it myself, but suddenly it was because I found it in you as well--
I hope you're not offended. Truly, this is not a critique of your taste. I wish you to understand that it is not "taste" or "tastelessness" that is important to me now. Only the signs of our alikeness in everything, big or small; and the delicate, mysterious affair that we shall call "the right measure" I mean--a likeness like the one that exists, say, between two cups, broken in exactly the same place.
Yair
May 20
It is, of course, impossible to write down all those moments throughout the day. But I liked the fact that you used the word "date" to describe it. We're on a date.
This morning, for example, in the daily traffic jam right before Ganot Interchange. A large Volvo driving in front of me with a little boy sittingin back who was waving hello to all the drivers. There were five of us in the cars around him, and none of us moved a facial muscle; we didn't give him a single sign of being seen. The boy smiled hopefully for a little longer. There was something shy and fragile in his smile.
My dilemma: If I was to wave back at him, he would immediately recognize that I am only pretending to be a grown-up. That I am the weak link in the chain tied around him. At that moment, he might start making obscene gestures at me, thus making me the joke of the jam. I could see in the vulnerable line of his mouth that he wouldn't miss an opportunity to gain this kind of strength.
I consulted you (that is to say, we had a date). I accepted your opinion. I smiled at him. I waved to him. I saw how his smile grew bigger with happiness, almost in disbelief that such a thing was happening to him ... He immediately told his father, the driver, who looked at me through the rearview mirror for a long time. I looked away and saw what the other drivers were thinking of me.
I also thought that if there had been a woman among us, she could have smiled at him and dismissed me from that duty.
So again, for the second time today: Good morning to you.
I am amused by your way of not answering my direct questions immediately. (Such as what I wrote about your home.) And I already know that in two or three letters I will get an indirect answer, or sometimes I won't get any. I suppose this is your way of determining a path and rhythm for yourself, not letting me take the reins ... But you asked a question, and contrary to all the hemming and hawing that came before it, I can respond quite simply: I certainly want another child. Another three, maybe. Why not? To walk down the street like a mother duck with her living, quacking train--that is the peak of prosperity. But in the present situation, since you're asking, even one more will do.
Do for what? It's hard to say exactly.
Perhaps--turn us into a family. Because we are not one yet.
Well, that surprised even me. I'll send it anyway.
Y.
It's not that we don't live together well, the three of us (I have to make you understand), but somehow, in the meantime, we are just three people1 who are getting on just fine, even in love with one another, in deep friendship (but--as you know, a triangle is always a very shaky geometric construction).
(Almost midnight)
And I wish I had a girl. There is nothing I would rather have. A soft little girl. A little honeysuckle. It's also the thought of seeing just what kind of girl would come out of me; a legitimate feminine version of myself: and to see how all her parts coexist, elbows and breasts. And perhaps she, somehow, just by being, will know how to settle that old quarrel of which we have yet to speak, you and I.
And there is, of course, also the will to know, in that way, through a little girl, the half of Maya's life I don't know.
Maya--that really is her name. To love her all over again, from her genesis, as she grows up and matures--does that sound strange to you?
If I only had a girl. I would name her Ya'ara, Honeysuckle. This little honeysuckle, look, my nymph gland is starting to leak uncontrollably. A girl with dark, soft hair crowning her temples, and green-eyed like Maya, and red-lipped, and how she bubbles over with happiness--because she will be happy, you'll see, almost anything in the world will be cause for her to rejoice.
But how will I know how to raise her without what is in me seeping into her, that which has already covered Maya's innocent, open face with vague, tired skin, and has already sucked dry one child who used to be a glimmer of light.
There, I wrote it.
So yes, if you're asking, the thought that I might not have another child kills me, and Maya is not willing yet. She probably has good reasons to hesitate, and I am compelled to be satisfied with suspicious, yearning looks at little girls in the street. I used to yearn for their mothers, and now ... Well, I didn't think we'd be speaking about such matters at all! I was certain that, at this point, we would already be celebrating in a realm of passionate hallucinations. That I would write you, for example, that even the smell of my sweat becomes sharper only by imagining that, in a little while, your fingers will be pressed to this page. And that even your telephone number, with the concave between the breasts hinted at in the 868, excites me. But I'm glad I can tell you about the rest--to describe thefat little legs my girl will have (when she wears her yellow dress!), and her naked peachy body when she showers in the sprinklers in the yard--
Down, heart, down!
Y.
May 25
Walking on a tightrope?
I thought--a clown. But apparently there are more jobs in the circus. Does it really look like that to you?--that I suddenly came running, pushed the end of a rope into your hand, and said, "Hold it!"?
You made only one little mistake: you said that it's unclear to you just how I managed to convince, or at least plant the doubt in you, that if you let go I'd fall. But it isn't a rope, Miriam--it is scarcely a string, a word-web (and if you do let go, I will fall).
And before everything, you have to understand that I have no wish to tell stories to other people. It's only you that I want to write to, and it is only in your honor that this urge was suddenly aroused in me, just like that, with no warning, in the middle of life. Because I haven't ever known this kind of passion, up to even the moment before I saw you; maybe when I was a child writing school essays, funny sketches, etc. And that earthshaking theory that suddenly came to you in the middle of the night and kept you from sleeping (it's about time!) absolutely does not apply to me. I honor books too much to write one myself--it would be disrespectful. So don't worry that what you imagined about me, even wished on me, might be salt on my wound: I have no wounds, and if there is one--it isn't even open yet.
It is only in connection with our relationship that I will, with great caution, put to use that word which is, yes, fatal to me as well: I hope I will, at the very least, learn how to be a trueartistof this connection between us. I wouldn't dare ask for more than that.
Do you remember saying, not long ago, that in trying so hard to invent you I might not be able to find you? Well, I think you are starting to understand that in order to find you, I have to invent a little ...
Here, listen, this is how it was: the two of us, on that huge lawn, and everything around us was green, every shade of green was there. I am actually imagining the big lawn of Kibbutz Ramat Rakhel on the edge of Jerusalem, on the desert's bank, do you know it? You are allowed to gothere and see. Invest some effort in me, why don't you. Because I went there, yesterday, after getting your letter. I read it in front of the desert. I read it silently and aloud. I tried to hear your voice, its tune. I think you speak slowly--in your writing I can hear you lingering (a favorite word of yours!) on each and every word. There is something ripe and full about your speech. And I feel how it focuses me, as if it is carving something out of me--I wish I knew what it was. Sometimes I feel as if you know exactly--a lot better than I do--what you are aiming at there, when, for example, you say that you think I have this kind of fifth column in me and that, for some reason, I insist on being loyal to it, above all ...
Or what you mumbled at the end, when you were already half asleep; it wasn't a very fatal mumble, but full of sweetness: look at how I'm writing to you, as if I've been used to chatting with you in my kitchen at night for twenty years.
Can you already understand what I am creating you from?
It is because of light little pats on the back like those that, yesterday, on the grass, in front of the desert, I gave myself up to the addiction of us. I actually saw us there, you and me. And how we slowly lost our concentration on what was written. A light breeze was blowing, and my newspaper rustled, and the pages of your book began to flip. I am talking about five in the afternoon, the sun still shone, and we both felt so fair in the light, nearly transparent. If one other person had walked by, the magic would have vanished, but it was just the two of us, and before we exchanged even one word, we were already entangled in the webs of our separate stories. You have your own story, and so do I, and it is amazing to feel how they are already rapidly weaving together. The way stories always do. Why, sometimes, in an ordinary moment on the street, you can feel your soul torn apart as it is stretched and pulled into the story of someone just passing by. Usually, the stories die instantly as well, having also been ripped apart, without those involved ever even knowing what they lost. A minor heartache remains, nothing more. Then quickly disappears. It lasts a couple of hours for me, though, sometimes, this kind of melancholy, as if I had undergone some kind of little spiritual abortion, the death of the story.
(Are you with me? I felt I was losing you for a moment. Just at the height of our closeness, you shrank and withdrew. Perhaps I flooded over my banks once again? Or said something offensive?)
Say: did you really put on theZorbasoundtrack and dance the sirtaki in your living room? With me and Anthony Quinn? But why are you telling me only now? Why didn't you give me that right after I told you about my dance in the forest?
At least you said that a dead parpur fell on your page when you hid it from me. Go easy on me, go easy on me, open your white-knuckled fists just a little. It's a shame you didn't send any of those pictures of that clenched girl (you were probably the tallest girl, always standing in the third row of the photographs). It is even more a shame that I am not by your side when you wake up every morning, to unfreeze your fingers and stroke your knuckles. What are you holding so tightly in there?
And what does it mean that you were "the good queen of the class" (is there an evil queen, too?).
But enough heaviness, come, let's have our date: suddenly, at exactly five o'clock, when we still were keeping our distance, a bizarre, terrifying noise sounded--try to imagine a rusty zipper suddenly being ripped open, running through the belly of the earth, across the entire lawn. And our glances flew right and left, frightened; and your eyes, big and brown and lovely, grasped hold of mine for a moment. And we pulled ourselves up straight, and stood, as if by the force of our gaze alone (Is that clear? Is this picture clear to you? I want you to see into my imagination, see it exactly!). I see you bending and stretching your long legs in an irresistible motion under your dress, your chiseled ankles, and you're standing dizzy and loose like a gazelle, an uneasy gazelle, for just a moment--what really terrified you so when I wrote that we are both of us not alive? What's hiding in this,Oh, Yair,where do I start?Just start. It will come by itself (you sighed a lot in the last few letters, did you notice?). Why, you are so alive to me, in the bounty that bursts from your full body, and generally, in your fullness. The fullness of you touching anything, the way you embroider me silently, string after string in your every living day, what are you talking about, you are so alive!
And me. At the edge of the huge lawn, the would-be buck, but not very virile, no, not terribly endowed with horns, not very muscular, my thighs--just a clerky, narrow-chested, balding buck. This constant balding, how humiliating it is--and I too am looking, awestruck, at thesource of the noise, the destruction of the peace I had been savoring before I stole a glance at you. But are you at all interested in the continuation of the story now, after I have been pictured to you? Tell me the truth--if you are getting entangled in this kind of false romantic relationship, wouldn't you prefer a real buck?
All right, all right, I know I musn't ask you questions of this kind. How you raged when I described myself as "not un-ugly"! You don't give an inch in these things, do you? Not even as a joke: you don't even know people to whose essence the word "ugly" applies? Really? Well, that could be. But you also refuse to accept such a thing as the regulation rules, the laws of men's and women's relationships ... Tell me, how many years will pass before I succeed in opening your eyes?
And that other matter, the one you mocked me for calling the Sanctity of the Bond--
I had better shut up, hadn't I?
Come, look there, be with us--we were surrounded on all sides by this whistling whisper in the earth. We were both thinking of venom, the desecrated Garden. I don't know if you know this feeling--something strange but also too familiar suddenly spreads through all living tissue in a blink--listen with me, listen well, whispers and whistles, encircling us like the excitement of obscene, ignorant gossip (srsrsrsrsrsrsr) ... maybe this is why our hearts twitched in sudden fear, with guilt. Even your heart, Miriam, your pure heart; which no one in the world will ever scrutinize to discover what you do and with whom--admit it, admit how quickly the internal serpents bite, don't they? They punish us for even the most heartfelt wishes, for sweet fantasies, and immediately I hear my father's lips cluck, as when he told my mother how he caught the general deputy, his boss, kissing some woman soldier in his office--
Enough, I am tired. I was deserted by the good spirit. See how hard it is for me to imagine a beginning. So many rocks and so much mud blocking the tunnel.
(I will continue later.)
Y.
(Night)
And suddenly, at that moment, the riddle within the earth was cracked. And a thousand jets of water took off from hidden sprinklers(well, it's the best I can do), and the two of us screamed with a single shock, and we ran, who remembers where--just not, however, to the one logical place, not outside; what's waiting for us there, anyway? And we smiled, and purposely made a mistake, we were attracted to and aimed at the wettest and most flooded spot, where all the jets of water became one, and we finally bumped into each other, surprised. And we held on to each other tightly, the poor refugees of a flood entwined, yelling much louder than was necessary--"We have to get out of here!" "At least give me your book so it won't get wet!" "But we're both in the same water!" and making a lot of noise together, but not actually moving anymore. Stopping slowly, and looking through the water that's turning your lips a little blue, and shining in light flecks in your wonderful hair, brown and full and untamed, with a few thin silver strands (never dye! this is the last request of a man condemned to you: let it slowly turn silver!), and breathing too fast, and laughing at our stupidity, the way we were caught and got soaked like children, practically two children, and gargling the water filling our mouths. Our mouths are swimming with drunken words. See us in the splashes of water--we're so shiny and clean, like two bottles, two bottles that survived with the messages still inside. Meanwhile, what do you notice about our outsides; for example, you are older than me, not by a lot. I think the gap in our ages bothers you a little, but I was never your student--I suddenly hear myself telling you that, and there's no logic to it--only the urgent need to tell you immediately, in the water, that in front of almost every person, always, sometimes even with my son, I feel as if I am somehow the younger one, the one more lacking in experience, more milky, and you listen and immediately understand me, as if it is obvious that this is the first thing a man tells a woman when he meets her in water.
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 you 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 ofNights 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.
This is the exact way I see the "performance" to which I've condemned myself before you with that letter; actually, with all of them. From the beginning. Don't know what happened to me. In one moment my heart overflowed and flooded into the wide spaces in my brain. What actually happened? I remember seeing you, there were people around you, there was a lively discussion and you didn't participate. Suddenly your lips sank and you smiled a strange smile, a sorrowful smile, no harder than that, the smile of a person who has found out that very minute that she has lost her last hope, the hope for her soul, no less, but who knows that from now on, this is the way it has to be, and that she will have to go on living with that loss ... and that was the moment I entered your life. A kind of odd, unhappy moment, but I didn't even have time to think about it, because in that moment I saw my name lying on the bottom of your smile and I leaped. On the other hand, perhaps my name wasn't written there, perhaps I so wanted you to know that I could see it and that you weren't alone that I jumped too quickly. This is not new for me, either; you should know, I have a long gloomy history of such unripe leaps--in work, and in my life, and in family matters, it was already happening in school, and in the army, and in letters to the editor--in any place I felt that something was being held back or blocked; no matter what the reason was, whether because of opacity or cowardiceor stupidity or simply because "you just don't do that." In such a moment, I always rebel, on purpose, out of spite (says my father)--not true, when I rebel it's a rescue mission--I thought you understood, it is you who first dared to write the word "wish"--and then I am flooded, at once, you saw it. And damn the name of the laws of nature and society that determine, let's say, that a certain person's soul must be satisfied with only its separate existence, alone, within his own skin.
Or alone, within his own pit.
It's silly to keep on explaining (and I can't stop), but it is always this way. Somewhere, very close, something is building up, someone is begging to burst out already, something that will suffocate if it doesn't crack, and even though I don't know its being, its choked scream is clear to me. You asked me what kind of music I listen to when I'm at home and when I am at work, and especially when I am writing to you. You asked as if you assumed that I am always surrounded by music. I'm sorry to disappoint you, I'm not very musical. I am, in my opinion, dysmusical (all in all, I went and bought theChildren's Cornerby Debussy and I listened to it in my car again and again, and, of course, Emma Kirkby singing Monteverdi, and perhaps someday I'll understand what you said). But I always listen to that scream and immediately understand it, not with my ears but with my stomach, my pulse, my womb, and you hear it, too. You heard me this way, so why, suddenly, don't you hear it?
Oh well, what's the point. Besides what you decide. For me, it's just important for you to know that I understand exactly what is happening inside me now, and what you think of me. Why, it's a regular torture, Miriam, that I am always both, the one standing with a stern face, arms crossed over my chest--and the one who is suddenly gutted and falls and falls, and while falling is still arguing with the stern one, screaming on the way to his doom, Let me live! Let me feel! Let me make mistakes!
But I am certainly, undoubtedly, the other one as well. What can you do? The pursed lips that spit out in disgust, You already know how it will end, you will return to me, crawling, as usual, says he dryly (he has symptoms of dehydration in his tissues). And the donkey foal continues screaming all the while--because, Miriam, maybe he will succeed just once--by mistake of course, because, by imperial decree, such acts of compassion could happen only by mistake. But maybe he will finally hit the target, just once--no! Touch the target, touch, touch one alien soul, actually touch, soul to soul, tissue to tissue. One single time, one soul outof the four billion Chinese in the world (in this situation, suddenly everyone seems Chinese) will crack open in front of him and yield its harvest--
And so he falls and screams in his breaking, reedy voice, which continues to change throughout his life.
Then again, it appears, of course, that around every such scream are ten wise, learned, moderate, and impartial men; and they consult and request to confirm whether we had crossed that bridge too soon--perhaps this was just one of your flimsy ideas (so they tell me, dryly, with dry lips)--one of those ideas that ripen only in nightly darkness and evaporate in the light of day, meaning--just another damaged crossbreed that might be born deformed and defective.
And I ... you should see me there. Actually, you did see it. This is what probably repulsed you. Because I know exactly how I look in those moments, when I plead with them for no less than to take complete pity on me. Why lie, Miriam? I know, in my deepest depths, that if it was in their power to do so, they would never approve of me either, just as you haven't ("is not entitled to official stamp of authorization," they would have determined). So I run between them, almost hysterical, begging them to consent to see what I am seeing, that at least one of them could see it as I do, because if one other can see it--just another one is enough, you don't need any more than that--suddenly it will exist and be, and be redeemed, and then something in me will be "authorized." But just try to explain something like that tothem.
And then I can't take it anymore (I am documenting the whole process for you here), and the moment of fuck-it-all arrives. The moment when I finally think, for example, What am I worth if I'm not sending these? My soul swells to you, and I'm flying, just as I flew to you, here, even now, it is me there, flying, continuing to fly to you, to whoever agrees to believe with me, look, laugh. It's me, the weak fuse in the network--every network, every bond, every touch, every tension, every friction--or any possible combination of me with those--and with you. And now, as I watch it sink and sputter between us, I am asking you, again, one final time, to believe in us. Perhaps we will touch a gold vein, by chance--we almost did, already, there were a few moments of light, and I have gotten used to your annoying High Court integrity (and also to your funny confusion of words when you're excited). And where will I again find such a childish, mature woman who is capable of meditatingon Adam and Eve's first lovemaking, taking such pleasure in how naturally they discovered what is good to do, and what happiness and delight it is to discover only by way of nature ...
You see, I remember everything. I may be destroying all evidence of your existence--I'm forced to, by the Sanctity of the Bond, and the rest--but you exist inside me in a way that scares me, because what am I going to do now, surrounded by this entire new existence that doesn't want me?!
Here I am before you: I am the donkey foal. I am the hole in the fence, the crack through which mistakes and treachery--and also bald ridicule--drip into the house. It has been this way since childhood, ever since I can remember myself I have been the hole, how unmasculine. And to whom else could I say such a thing? Believe me, believe that at least--in my moments of flight, moments of gliding, I am the most me, the me that is meant to be. And in a surprising manner, it is a moment full of happiness, generally--it is a full moment, it is everything together, and I wish I had a way to spend my entire life in such a moment.
And then, of course, there is the thump of the landing, and lots of dust around, and terrible silence, and I am sobering up from all that I was for a moment, cautiously looking around. And I start to freeze from the cold that surrounds me within and without, a cold that only clowns and fools know. So it is true that once or twice in my life it so happened that I was a living seed and a brilliant idea, but mostly--no more than spit. And if you want one, I am, for example, stuck in this time in my life like Heine in the grave of his mattresses with forty thousand books and pamphlets and magazines piling up around me. I had an idea, you see? A great idea ...
That's it. Sometimes you survive a glorious leap like Nakhshon and get credited in the Bible; mostly, you find out that the pool below you was empty. But always--even if you succeed--you're somehow terribly alone when you go back to all the rest, and to their appraising looks, that suddenly seem to you as if they're ahem-ing with their eyes. And my father would say to me, The whole body wants to pee, but you know what to take out to do the job.
This is how I feel now, and it destroys me, I can't stand such a look from you; because for a completely different glance of yours, I decided to jump headfirst, on three, whatever the dangers, "and not less than everything,"by the demands of T. S. Eliot's requirements. And now I'm eating myself up for not having been more cautious.
Because I could have written to you a sophisticated, caressing letter, and clouded my intentions, and seduced you slowly, and flirted with ease, and definitely have met body to body, by all the common rules of the adulterous games accepted and in play in the grown-up community. When I think of things I wrote to you, things I told you about my family, or things that, because of you, I told myself about my family, that horrible sentence about three people living together--I feel like castrating myself, tearing out my own tongue!
June 7
Enough, enough. What an unbearable night. (And to think that you might not even be capable of imagining my suffering!) I never told you how it started, exactly; I mean, I told you only so much. I think I've repeated that much at least thirty times by now, but I was only telling you about yourself, about what I saw in you. And I can't have this end without your knowing what was happening inside me in those moments.
So here it is, in short order, and then we can finish with it. One night, about two months ago, I saw you. You were standing in the middle of a large group that had gathered around you, and especially around your husband. A whole flock of respectable teachers and educators, and everybody sighed over how hard it is to succeed in the education racket, how long it takes to see the fruit of your labors. Someone--of course-mentioned Khoni and the Circle, and another tale, about the old man who planted a carob tree for his grandchildren, and your husband--excuse me, your "man" (although it seems to me that he certainly sees himself as a "husband")--was going on about some complicated genetic experiment he's been working on now for ten years. I can't be too precise about the details, because I wasn't really concentrating too hard on what he was saying. Please send him my apologies. The bitter truth is, his story was long and boring. A lot offactsin it, something about rabbit fertility, I think, and about the instinct, in times of stress, to draw the fetus back into the womb (?). Doesn't matter. In any case, everyone listened to him, with his infectious self-confidence and that special manner of speaking, slowly, authoritatively. A man like that knows the world will fall silentand listen, raptly, as soon as he opens his mouth. He uses a full range of facial expressions brilliantly, and has the self-possession of a mature male, what with those long cheeks and developed jawline and thick brow ... By God, you're lucky, Miriam. You got the best male of the herd. Darwin is saluting you from his grave. Of course, the two of you made a wonderful pair, clearly, scaling the high altitudes together--you see how I was still free there, meaning, free to make that mistake?
Then your husband let out a burst of laughter, and that was it: I remember how astonished I was by the strong, manly,sparklinglaughter that surged out of him. How I shrank from it--as if he had caught me doing something shameful. I don't even know what he was laughing about, or at whom, but everyone was laughing along with him; it was as if they wanted to, for a moment, dance among those commanding rays pouring from his beaming face. I looked at you by chance--perhaps because you were the only woman there, and I was searching for understanding from or protection in you--and I saw you weren't laughing. On the contrary, you shivered and hugged yourself; perhaps his laughter (which you probably love) revived some painful memory inside you. Or maybe it just horrified you as much as it did me.
So they kept talking, all extremely interested; what am I talking about--fascinatedby the conversation in that way they are all so very good at, but you weren't there anymore. It was amazing--I saw how you sneaked away from everyone without moving one step; you simply took advantage of the momentary diversion to disappear. And I also saw where you disappeared to. Something behind your eyes opened and closed, one flash of a secret door, and suddenly only your body was left standing there, sad, abandoned by you (that I will never be able to tell you about it again, your fair, soft body, butter and honey--). You dropped your head a bit, and held yourself in your hands, as if you were cradling your child-self, and your baby-self, and ripples and furrows of wonder started trembling on your forehead, like that of a girl hearing a long, complicated, sad story; yes, your whole face started sailing upon your face. And I unconsciously felt my heart reaching out to you in the dance of the donkey foal; there is probably still a gap where I am missing a rib from that moment, everything went crazy and so did I.
(Don't worry, I'll be leaving your life in a moment, last throes.) Now I can allow myself to remember how that large group of students swarmed around you immediately afterward--do you remember?
It's strange how I managed to erase it from my memory until now. They practically kidnapped you from the adults for the favor of having a photo taken with you--they almost carried you on their shoulders. And that one moment you passed by me, and I saw you were still daydreaming a little, but starting to make the effort to smile on the outside; it was a completely different smile, public, fluorescent--would you look at how completely I had forgotten about it?
But maybe I didn't forget it. Maybe it was this thrilling peep into your inner workings that let me know, immediately, that you would understand me?
Because it was a moment of "your ignominy." Without understanding it yet, I think I recognized it: this smile, a bit like a contraction. You were wearing an election-campaign smile for a moment ... What am I saying? You? An election campaign? Yes, yes, I am certainly never wrong about these things. So, even you? Elected over and over again, charming, yes, emblazoning yourself on the eyes of strangers. (And now I'm even sorrier that we won't continue this.)
And I don't know if you felt what came next, perhaps you hadn't yet fully recovered your senses. Your students, a herd of oafs and clods, teenagers, scrapers of facial scruff--how they all started fighting for the privilege of being the closest to you, so they could touch you, suckle a look or a smile from you, announce whatever terribly important problem was troubling them at exactly that moment. It was kind of funny to watch--
"Funny" is not the right word. Pity for the parpur. Because even the man standing to the side had, in that same moment a bizarre, unexpected impulse--it's actually embarrassing to recall--the same wild urge to open wide his fledgling mouth in a madness of sudden, terrible hunger--Me me, Teacher, me me ...
Enough. Enough. I'm humiliating myself even more with every word. Please, take a piece of paper, write a few words, just one will do--yes or no. I don't have the energy for a long letter from you now. Write "I'm sorry, I tried to get used to it, to you, I really did try hard, but I couldn't forgive your turmoil, your misleading statements."
Well, fine. We are agreed. At least we know where we stand. My heart will probably continue to shout out your name for a little while longer; and eventually, it will heal. Perhaps I'll return to Ramat Rakhel, or some other place out of town. Some place with no people, that can beours, at least long enough so I can yell out with all my strength, "Miriam! Miriam! Mir-yam!"
Yair
Don't worry, another day, or two, slowly, the letters will peel away, and the only thing left will be my clockwork scream to you-hee-haw, hee-haw!
June 10
It so happened that your letter arrived after I was already completely exhausted. I opened the mailbox, simply out of habit, the same way I've done tens of times in the last week, and your white envelope was there. I stood there, looking at it--and didn't feel a thing. Just tired. Perhaps afraid as well. Because I was hoping that I had already become used to thinking it was over. Frozen for good. And where would I find the strength to undergo all the aches of defrosting?
I read it, of course. Once, and again, and again. I still can't understand how I could fall apart so quickly over a break of a single week. Can you believe it--I felt as if you were gone for at least a month.
As if I was just waiting for an excuse to torture myself.
I've nothing to add today. I'm glad you're back, that we are together again. That you didn't even think of disappearing on me. Just the opposite.
And I'm still angry at you for not taking a moment to consider how much I would suffer. How could you, you, not know me? You could have at least sent a note before leaving, or a postcard from the Central Station at Rosh Pina. It would have delayed you by no more than ten minutes and saved me a lot of misery.
On the other hand, I am starting to grasp that if you had the choice, you probably wouldn't cause me suffering.
So, we can fade this letter out on an optimistic note--you probably had no choice.
June 10-11
This is still not a response, not a real response, not the response you deserve for that letter, for the depths that revealed themselves to me as Iread and reread it. Mostly because of how you released me gently, rope by rope, from the knots of the trap I set for myself. Sparing me any and all embarrassment over the Gastric Juice Concerto I played for you.
(They really let you leave work? Two weeks before the end of the school year?
And what do they have to say about it at home?
It's none of my business.)
I am, every time, mystified by the contrast between your sound, composed mind, the stable, calm motherhood within you--and the fluid tosses of your head, the unexpected leaps, unexpected even from you. I see you pacing through the oak grove above the Kinneret, erect and serious-looking, and hugging yourself hard, looking for your lost peace of mind, pushing me away again and again ...
What's that? It's just a smile. I remembered how in your first letters you said, time and again, that it was hard for you to believe that such a storm was created in me from one quick look at you ("And what if I don't have another side to my face, what if you only cut a picture of a woman out of the night for yourself?"). And then you slowly started to explain to yourself that it always begins like that, really--from a single look at a stranger. And now, what you wrote me from there on the rock, that only a "narrow-minded and material" sort of person could consider us strangers--earlier, when I woke up (it's half past three), I sat in the living room, in the darkness, curled up on the armchair. I was thinking about you and me, about what is happening so unexpectedly to us in the middle of our lives, and I was happy that I was, by chance, by myself a little at home, in complete silence. I invited you to be with me, and you came. I usually try not to think about you when I'm here, in my everyday life. I try to keep strictly to the law of the separation of governing bodies. I hesitate whether to tell you when I do always think of you, always--when I'm taking a shower, or when I'm, what to do, taking a piss. Yes, when I see it.
And I tried to figure out, between me and myself, whether I am at all capable of being a lightning rod for anyone--I saw that you were very much troubled by this, but it is difficult for me to give you a clear answer, one that is real, earnest--no one ever asked me such a thing. No one ever asked. And no one ever asked as directly as you, in such a cutting, single-minded way, and with such desire.
I guess they saw the answer in me right away.
But then again--do you remember when I wrote to you that the moment I saw you I felt, for the first time, a strong, clear desire to have another person inside me? So maybe this is an indirect answer to your question. I just asked myself, Is it still so? And I answered, Yes, even more. Much more.
Tell me, how is it that I am not scared of wanting such a thing--how can anyone let another person inside herself, anyway? Seriously, Miriam--tonight I suddenly grasped what an amazing thing it is, quivering with generosity and compassion, that a person can let another person penetrate even just her body! This completely natural thing suddenly seems almost abnormal! And people are doing it without thinking twice (so I hear), penetrating and letting themselves be penetrated--even a fuck is sometimes a cliché--or perhaps, in order to make such an intrusion possible, you must purposely not allow yourself that kind of understanding? Is that it?
Can you imagine--for a moment, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it anymore, those familiar swimming motions--do it regularly, I mean.
So, probably out of that slight panic, I dwelt on one of my favorite hobbies: I sat with my eyes closed and relived one of the fucks from my private collection--you are the first person I am telling this to (because you told me about Adam and Eve's first time, perhaps). It reminds me of how I would try to replay complete soccer games in my head as a child--and these days, what to do, fucks, my little adulteries, the most agreeable way to transcend norms, as Nabokov once put it to me during a long ride to the base in the Sinai.
I can't do it with all of them, of course--six or seven at most (it has been a few years since a new one has been added to the collection). The most special ones, the ones during which I was in the rarest and most desirable state of consciousness. Dreaming and awake at the same time, completely drowsy, and also open to receiving every move of her hand and body, and what she said, and how she breathed--and I can retrace the curve of her hips and the location of her beauty marks (where do you have them? I know about the one under your lip--in my opinion, it is actually a microfilm you are smuggling on your innocent face--but where do you have more?). I don't forget a detail in this silent reliving, and don't ask me how--I don't have a clue: I am like those chess geniuseswho can remember the moves of hundreds of games by heart. What do you know, Miriam? This might be my hidden genius, my grand crusade (my art...)?
Now I shall seal the envelope and the pleasure of waiting will begin.
Yair
(Morning)
I still want you to know whom you're dealing with. I think I went easy on myself tonight regarding the "lightning rod."
Because I ... I use all of my powers to keep myselfbalanced.Not a millimeter less or more than total precise balance. I'm not particularly proud to be writing this, but the foundation that has been laid for my emotional stability is the size of a peanut. Really. You saw what happened to me a week ago. It scares me, how easily I can lose it, collapse in a blink. It's also so easy for me to want to stop existing, give up everything.
And you're asking me if I can be a lightning rod for someone? Me? Why, everyone around me has to always perform at the peak of his health and normality, and yes, of course you were right about something when you wrote about Maya being my "mother-base." Yes, that's the way it is, and you can't shake it. And isn't it nice that all those closest to me keep so strictly to the mandatory entry code of membership that my small club requires.
That's it. I puked it out. The most pathetic in me. Miserable. Spoiled. A soggy mess. But it's important to me that you know. It sometimes amazes me how obedient they all are, how they subconsciously fulfill their requirements. All of them are born healthy, develop to maturity nicely, and are never tempted to fall prey to some incurable disease or defect. Nor do they die suddenly! There's no dying with me! Not even in old age--only after I go will they be allowed to even consider it! Even my parents are probably forced to stay alive only so they won't die during the springtime of my existence--we shouldn't even talk about my father, who for several years has been stuck in the guts of the end of his life, only because of my draconian laws.
You do understand that it isn't only death that has to obey me--any diversion, every break of the blessed routine is forbidden. If Maya, for instance, would happen upon the thought--even approach the notion--of falling in love with someone else, leaving me, leaving me to my pack ofjealousy-bloodhounds, it would be the end of me, as simple as that, a five-kilo sledgehammer on the heart of the parpur. That is my unwritten law: whoever wishes to be close to me commits to my soul. Because any common idiot can see how easy it would be to kill me. One look aimed and fired at me will do. I'm not joking: somewhere inside me I am convinced that whoever sees me, even strangers on the street, can, without knowing me, immediately know where it is possible to crack me open with one touch, to negate me with a word. And even though--apparently--all the people surrounding me these days don't do it, don't put me out of my misery for some reason, I don't quite understand, I'm a little suspicious--what are they conspiring over? And you too, yes, you over there, the unseen, the written one--keep us safe, take care of both of us, even in the places where I am at my most pathetic, where I'm only half a man--be doubly strong, you can do it, I can tell, you have the fortitude for that--be our bodyguard (it's interesting that in Hebrew it is "headguard," whereas in English it is "bodyguard")--
I'm not sure I'll send this mess. What did it spring from? I don't know why these streams of filth have been passing through me, after I felt so close to you last night. I'm thinking about what you said in your last letter, about the strange impulse I sometimes have to make myself ugly in your honor, that dream you had about the strange vegetable seller who is putting the rotten tomatoes on top. If it is true, then take this into consideration as well--because I do feel that I have given you something here that I have never before dared to give myself.
I have to send it, right?
June 11
(I didn't have to wait for even four hours. They must have crossed on their way. When you read mine, you'll probably understand how odd it is that you are responding to things you hadn't read yet.)
Miriam,
I think that our meeting in the sprinklers is the wrong story. This is not the way I want to reach you.
Not only because you laughed at me for refusing to believe in the banal wonder of a real meeting between two people, even on a bus, in a bank, at a reunion party, or simply in a vegetable market--but because somehow, really, two strangers sitting in the grass and finding themselvesembracing in water--somehow, after your letter, after you said I put too much effort into romanticizing reality ... I don't know, all of a sudden it seems boorish and forced to me, a water show full of hydrotechnic tricks. It doesn't suit you, nor is it in accordance with the softness with which I want to reach out to you, the quietness that surrounds you, and certainly not what you wrote in the last lines, that surprising explosion that I still don't know what to do with.
Still, it is still extremely important to me that you agree that "sprinklers" are also possible between us, and--that everything is possible between us: we'll have many of these first dates, and each time discover ourselves all over again. Why give up anything? Why give up "everything"? I wanteverythingwith you. You are the only person I can want everything with. Maybe, only through this excess, this waste, this "everything" can it slowly reveal itself to us--the elemental ore that can be created only between us, that can never be created between any other two people?
Of course you were right that reality itself is also a wonder and a miracle, I too am well practiced in saying such pretty things in a soft, veiled tone--if you'll excuse me--but don't forget that "reality" itself is, when it comes down to it, only a momentary coincidence on the surface of a huge sphere crackling with possibilities that will never be realized. And each and every one of them could have told us a completely different story about ourselves, played us differently. Why shouldn't we come to each other from the least expected places, from the dark side of the brain?
I want to havetendifferent affairs with you! Why not? Each one of them speaking--no, shouting out, for a completely different man in me. Men unfamiliar to me. This is why people try to connect with one another, isn't it? I'm asking you the same question you wrote me, exactly--if I would ever be brave enough to look deep into your eyes and read for you what you yourself cannot read there. I wish I could answer you with full confidence. I don't know (but is this why, in the very first moment, I stood in your blind spot?).
Am I asking too much? Perhaps. But why settle for less? We spend all our lives just "settling" anyway--and I want to touch everything with you, with wide, sweeping, generous motions, as if I knew it was for the last time in my life! And how is it that you were capable of stopping yourself in the same moment that you finally started to give part of yourself,from deep inside you--"my ignominies," you said, as if you were just joking, or trying on one of my words, but suddenly it became serious, didn't it? "And why don't you finally stop calling every insult thrown at you ignominies?!" Without warning, you became furious, but that word--I felt it cling to you, stick to you, as if you had to say it again, and again, and again, to shake it off you, but also to touch it, one more time--"What is the connection, anyway, between insults, wounds, and ignominies?" "Why do I keep feeling some strange pleasure in the way you keep confusing wounds with ignominies?" The more you repeated it, the more you said it, it fused to you, to your body, even closer, harder, and then you--
Explain it to me, Miriam--the war you are fighting that leaves you searching, at the end of some days, so desperately for a clear will to get up the next morning--what are you talking about, exactly? And where on earth did you get this crazy (and false) feeling that you are a person who should not create anything new in this world? I'm the person who keeps changing his face, is the consistently unstable, destructive force between us. Don't forget!
(Or perhaps, now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps it is some kind of illusion you are creating for me, the story you are choosing to tell me about yourself. But why would you tell me such a horrible story?)
Do you understand the kind of state you left me in by not explaining anything?--" ... and sometimes the feeling that every living thing, even the two little kittens Nilly gave birth to yesterday and, as is her way, left for me to nurse, even they are like stolen fire for the moments they are in my hands." And you immediately fell silent. There were quite a few empty lines toward the end of the page, and I didn't know how to fill them--my imagination went wild--and when you returned, summoned in front of me, your face was back to normal and you told me something small and irrelevant--if you'll excuse my teacherly remarks. I think you just wanted to end your letter politely. It is very nice that your son has now devoted himself to an operation so prestigious as counting to a million (a way not worse than any other to waste your life)--you finally told me, clearly, that you have a son--I was starting to worry--but how could youleaveme like that after mentioning those things?
Enough, enough--let's unclench our fists--our dark secrets are always less terrible than we imagine them--so give yourself to me, withoutwalls, without reservations--write to me, for instance. Tell me--in a completely separate letter--a one-sentence letter--tell me the first thing, the first thought, the first flicker flashing in your mind when you read this letter. (Yes, yes! Now! At this very minute! Write it down, put it in an envelope, and send it, even before your "official" reply, even before dealing with all the complications inherent with me within you.)--
June 14
Boom!
So now it's my turn?
After we come, we'll fall asleep, lying close together. Your back will be stuck to my belly, and I will squeeze my toes like clothespins on your ankles, so you won't fly away on me during the night, and we'll be like a picture from a nature book: a length cut of a fruit. I am the peel, you are the flesh.
Yair
P.S. I didn't believe you would dare so much.
June 17
And when we lie down together, I would like to close my eyes and gently touch the edge of your hairline somewhere under your navel (your belly button), so I can, with the tips of my fingers, feel the place, one of the places, that delicate silky place, where you changed from a child into a woman.
Y.
June 18
One out of turn:
Yesterday I walked down through Queen Heleni Alley. A child, nine or ten years old, was walking in front of me. We were alone. The alley was dark, and once in a while he glanced back and quickened his pace. But even when I walk slowly, I walk pretty quickly. I could feel his fear.I could remember this kind of fear well. And I wondered how I could put him at ease without embarrassing him. Then he tried to leap away--but he twisted his leg badly, and now he dragged it along behind him, whimpering in pain. This is how we walked, together, at a fixed distance, until we reached the end of the alley. He's limping outside, and I, inside.
Y.
The problem with these quickies, obviously, is that you're hungry again after an hour (although "sometimes, the way you touch me--it is one touch, the same I feel in that spot of pain and pleasure" will do for me for at least a week).
June 19
Have you written to me yet? Have you sent it yet? When does your box get emptied?
(Just a little exercise of my agitation muscles--don't want them to get flaccid. That way you can always recognize me.)
About those final assumptions of yours--you were triply wrong: I am not writing to you from prison. I am not sick and bedridden with some terrible disease. I am not even an Israeli spy for Damascus or Moscow on a brief vacation home before returning to the cold-I am all three.
What else? Not much.
A lot: your fingers trembling when you find my envelopes in your box in the teachers' lounge.
It's the same for me, what do you think? First I examine with a touch--how thick is the new letter? How much food will I have to savor over the next days and nights--
To answer your (surprisingly weird) question--hands and digital together (but why is that important anyway?).
Oh, I remember something I keep forgetting to ask you: do you have any--this is silly, I know, but anyway--do you happen to have any connection to a Chinese newspaper (completely in Chinese!), a weekly magazine published in Shanghai that I've started receiving lately out of nowhere--I didn't order it.
If you don't, forget the question.
This is not a letter. It is just a nightly humming, a whistle in the dark until you return to me.
(It never ceases to amaze me--how my desiccated life chose to expose a giant breast for me.)
Yair
June 21
An open mouth or a hole in a tree trunk? I'm struggling to decide--but so filled with joy--becausethere weren't any words there!
I didn't know you painted, too. The line and the black and the power of your touch.
I swear by my life: someday I will dance for you. I won't care if we are surrounded by people--I will just look into your eyes and I will dance.
But in the meantime, I need to write, don't I? So then, in honor of your black strokes:
A shrunken black monkey, let's say, scrambling over his mistress's belly.
Does that make any sense to you? No matter. We allowed ourselves the freedom to mumble. To me, it means: the master bought it for her at one of the fairs he passed through in his journeys. The master is always on a journey, the master's journey. The monkey is tame. It was bought for the lady's pleasure, but not for its own. God forbid--do you understand? It always has to remember its place--the place of the replacer, the guard, until the master returns (and perhaps there isn't any master at all).
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 sayeverything?!
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 asold.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 hurtsnow.
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 ofminethat 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 ofThe 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 participating 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 forHELP!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 noticeme, 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, forboth 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.
Because summer broke open inside me as well, you see. It's as if only now your magic spell of words allowed me, as well, to leave the dark andwindy cave we dug out together, with all our complexity and heaviness--"happy"--and as if you permitted me something, the summer broke open inside me--it's already July, imagine that, and I am only now waking up to summer, with its life forces and the shining, its natural roughness and the excitement of wanting so much so desperately--everything you described (how is it that you are still afraid of going back to painting in color? A person who can write like that ...). Look at me, me as well, touch me, I am suddenly so alive, burning and sending tendrils into the body of this summer, as if I myself were one of its "beating veins" you described--and I'm also focused on you today, like a laser beam--watch out! I'm not responsible for my actions today, don't even know what's happening to me--do you have any idea?
How about this: perhaps I will completely stop working and living in the outside world, in their so-called existence, and only write, and write, and write to you. I will describe how you look in every state and what it does to me when I look at you in every state, and I will sap myself of my essences, pour them into you until I am completely drained. A hanged man ejaculates in his last moment. I read about it once, and it has excited me ever since, a last will and testament of the body and soul together; this is exactly the kind of conversation I want between us, because we willdieon each other in a few months--you refuse to even listen to me about this, the "guillotine" turning your guts--but, to me, it is the heart and soul of our relationship, maybe because what is happening between us would never happen during the complete life of an ordinary couple-we can have the nectar of Queen's Honey and the blood of our rawest essence together at the same time--you are starting to feel it now, but I knew it from the beginning.
I thought the story of the retarded girl would put you off--but you, as usual, come and touch me, without gloves. So what, then? You, in no way, would ever want to redeal your cards and mine, but rather the opposite? Is that what truly attracts you to me, the fact that I don't have a full deck?
Well, fine, good--but touch me only in writing, leave me written--and I hope we both can have the power to fight off the barbed temptations of reality a little longer. Sex, not religion, is the opiate of the masses; and when we meet--because eventually, we will surrender--I'm feeling a bit fragile today--the heat is melting my most firm resolve. I hopewe won't--but perhaps in two or three weeks, if not tonight, we can--this predatory attack inflaming me here--It's that skirt you bought. You slipped it on, and had a body, your body, that body I almost succeeded in forgetting was resurrected in a blink, your legs moved inside your skirt, pretty and fresh--don't say, even as a joke, that "I forgot I even had legs"--and I remembered the curves of your ankles and finally grasped the secret conspiracy between the shape of a woman's ankles and the back of her neck ...
It's clear to you, isn't it? We will eventually surrender. When the sad, thick, heavy sweetness, the nectar of autumn, falls in layers in our hearts--Yair has begun to poetize, the nectar of summer is quite active in me today as well. Oh well, how long can you continue turning come into ink alone--and it is only your black-framed glasses that keep me from writing exactly what is going on in my head at this moment, now--and at what precise times I do picture you, and how--dressed, undressed, in the orange skirt with the side slit, the orange T-shirt that clings and caresses you when you are standing up, lying down, wildly, sweetly, in my car, your thin ankles clasped like a necklace around my back--I am dying for such a miracle to happen, for you to pop up in front of me in the street by chance--
Where were we?
I have no idea how to get up from my desk in front of my secretary, a nice little Beit Ya'akov Orthodox School graduate. You are probably asking yourself, What the hell does he want from me? Why is he driving me and himself crazy in this way--I have no idea. I just want it so much right now that it hurts. On the other hand, I'm
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