Be My Knife Read Free

Although every time he learned a new word, one that is also a little “theirs,” everybody’s, even his first word, a beautiful word like “light”—my heart curdled around the edges, because I thought, Who knows what he is losing in this moment, how many infinite kinds of glamour he felt and saw, tasted and smelled, before he pressured them into this little box, “light,” with a t at the end like a switch clicking off. You understand me, don’t you?
    Oh yes, of course you understand the edges of your heart curdling. You might even be a modest expert in your way. I knew it from the first look. And I have, as well, apparently succeeded at dampening your spirit and curdling your heart in no small way.
    But was it really that bad? Really, truly? As if you had lost a precious thing that you yearned for up until the moment you had it?
    At least tell me what that precious thing was, so I’ll know what was almost in me.
    Yair
     
     
    April 16
    You are right, of course, and I absolutely deserve a scolding (but not for a moment have I thought that you were made only of words). Who could imagine that you also have such a thin, biting, cutting sarcasm to you—I saw a hint of it in your shoulders and your back, something pinched and embittered, as if preparing for the next blow—or am I completely wrong?
    Or is it all my fault? Tell me, am I the thing pinching your spine? I know so well how I do it to myself, I just wish I wasn’t doing the same thing to you …
    Listen: today, across the street from my workplace—an industrial area, midmorning, at the harsh peak of light—I saw a blind man sitting at the bus stop. He had a bowed head, a stick squeezed between his knees. A bus stopped, and another blind man got off it. When he passed in front of the one on the bench, they both immediately pulled themselves up erect and their heads came together. I stood still—couldn’t move. They groped and discovered each other, and for one moment it
seemed as if they were tied together, clinging, frozen. It lasted no more than a second, in total silence, and after that moment they detached themselves and went their separate ways. But my skin was covered in goose bumps, the hair on my skin stood up in your name all over my body, and I thought, This is the way!
    So come on, come closer, I want to give you something real and intimate, don’t run away, don’t stiffen up, something very intimate to offset the “anonymity” you slammed at me, sitting on your porch as if you were in a full courtroom (a purple leaf fell, trapped between the page and envelope of your letter, and got squashed a little bit over your “intimacy-anonymity,” blurring both words). Flex your muscles, Miriam, we said it was all or nothing.
     
     
    When my wife and I were first dating, we took a trip to Mt. Carmel one Saturday morning. And we passed through a little patch of forest. It was very early, just a little bit after dawn. We talked, and we laughed. And I—who usually despise what is called the Beauty of Creation—could suddenly no longer contain within myself the wonder around me, and immediately stripped down and started running between the trees, naked and yelling and dancing. And Maya (we’ll call her Maya between us, and you are also welcome to choose names for your dear ones as you wish) was astonished and stopped—maybe she was just put off by my nakedness, which she saw out in the open for the first time—and it isn’t that lovely in the dark—and I heard her calling to me, quietly, begging me to stop. It was too late—I was already drunk with nature, and I leaped at her from all directions in a kind of a wild bridal dance, which looked pretty ridiculous, I guess. I invited her to join me and felt—for just a moment—that she wanted to—you see, I had never agreed to dance with her before, not at parties, or among people, and suddenly, here I could do it naked—I was possessed, I didn’t do it on purpose. Just imagine, dancing and