Be My Knife by David Grossman

other place out of town. Some place with no people, that can be
ours, 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 I
read 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,