Be My Knife by David Grossman

Author:David Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466803718

Miriam, you once told me you have this little game with me—each day you draw one letter of mine out of a bag and read it to discover what has changed in you and in me since the last time you read it.

So, I want to send you the rest of this story in a separate letter. Do you mind?

Y.

September 21

Are you still there?

I don’t know where I got the guts to do it. My whole body was shaking—why, courage itself was already a kind of betrayal. How is it possible for one child to dare to escape the gravity of his particular family and go all the way there. But maybe the most amazing treachery of all was that this twelve-year-old peanut stood up and allowed himself to feel such a strong emotion: lust. It’s called lust. Black lust of daybreak we drink it at nightfall.

In that moment, who could feel true lust? What lust?! Perhaps the only real, true lust I have ever known (the lust of guilt eternally searching for an available sin to mate with). I swear, I could compose a complete book of their positions, all the possible variations those two can get into. Only a natural continuation to “The Family Cookbook”; oh, Shai, where are you?!

Old men and young men were standing around; they all looked like the characters in cops-and-robber movies, just like the ones they would cut out of huge sheets of cardboard and place on the roof of the Orgil Cinema. I passed between them with my eyes to the ground, with the festive, frozen terror of a man sentenced to death. I thought, None of them could be Ashkenazi. I thought, This is my burial place. Someone slapped the back of my head and laughed that he would tell my yeshiva in MeaShearim. Pay attention, Miriam, this was the child you wanted to grace with your glance, to promise him he was a beautiful boy … At the end of the alley was a large back yard; men entered and left it hastily, their faces lowered. We would fantasize with choked whispers about what must be going on in there during class. Eli Ben Zikri was the only one who ever dared to actually run through the alley, and was considered a big hero because of it. And I enteredit. The smell of urine and gutter stood thick in the air, and I felt how polluted I was with every breath. Another boy, not much older than I, turned me with a push toward one of the walls. By that wall stood a big square woman in a very short, very shiny black skirt, probably a leather skirt, but I only remember the shine next to her exposed, and very thick, thighs. But not her face, because I did not dare look at her. Can you imagine it? Until the transaction was completed, I did not dare to raise my head, even once, to look at her.

I asked, How much? And she said thirty.

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