by Eshkol Nevo
(Then I thought, This whole fucking year. I haven’t been the driver this whole fucking year.)
Your books are pretty sad. Why?
There are people whose wounds don’t scab over and heal. There’s a medical term for it, but right now, I don’t remember it.
Those people should never cut themselves, not even once. Because there’s a good chance they’ll die. From the bleeding.
I’m that way—with partings.
None of them scab over. I’m still in mourning over Rakefet Kovacs, my girlfriend in the fifth grade.
The tissue of my mind doesn’t close over the wound and heal it.
So it remains open, bleeding.
And new partings are added every year. More wounds bleeding sadness. There’s no way to avoid them. Because, what’s the alternative, to not love?
* * *
Before I started writing, that’s how I lived my life, bleeding sadness from the inside. All the time.
When I began to write, I found myself dividing my pain among the characters in the books I created. Each one received its dose of sadness, to be administered when needed. And in real life, I had some room left for happiness.
Once, people used to say things to me like: You’re pretty suntanned for a writer. Or: Where do you get your optimism from?
It worked for almost fifteen years.
And then, out of nowhere, or maybe out of everywhere, the dysthymia made an appearance.
I’ve already mentioned the bitch more than once in this interview, in response to other questions. So maybe it’s time to distinguish between it and its more famous older brother: depression.
In contrast to a depressed person, who has no desire to live in general, or to have sex in particular, a person with dysthymia sometimes displays the opposite symptoms: It’s actually the ongoing despondency and his difficulty in experiencing happiness in ways he had experienced it so easily in the past that lead him to search actively, sometimes even intensively, for new stimuli which, like sunbeams, might disperse the black clouds enveloping his consciousness.
In other words, a depressive person has already given up the hope of feeling and is already steeped in the darkness of submission. A dysthymic person, on the other hand, searches desperately, even in his dreams, for deliverance.
What is the best advice you ever received, and who gave it to you?
My mother.
Summer vacation, 1979. We had just moved to a new city again. And again, I had no friends. She saw me sprawled on the living-room couch and said: Go out to play.
What book influenced you in particular in your youth?
I took it out of my parents’ bookcase during the summer vacation between the ninth and tenth grades: An ugly cover. Yellowed, crumbling pages. And the text on the back cover wasn’t particularly enticing either. Nonetheless, on the first page I found a dedication written in a woman’s hand: To the Zorba in Eshkol.
Signed: N.
Beneath the signature she quoted: “I knew that over and above the truth there is another duty, much more important and much more human.”
Now that made me curious.
Who is the mysterious N who gave Zorba the Greek to my grandfather? (None of the names of his three official wives began with N.)
Moreover, what does “To the Zorba in Eshkol” mean? And what human duty is more important than the truth?
I began to read.
The protagonist, a writer by profession, comes to Crete and hires the services of a crude-spoken peasant named Zorba, who teaches him through mime and dance that joy is first of all physical. For me, as someone who grew up in a family that sanctified education and the written word, that idea was nothing less than revolutionary. Zorba advised me to dance and not hang back, to devour food and not poke at it with a fork, and to know a woman and not fantasize about her. I found myself underlining the strong sentences in the book. As if I wanted them to be guiding principles of my future life as a man: “Make a pile of all your books and burn them in a fire, then you will be able to understand.” “Have you ever scolded a fig tree for not bearing cherries?” “What would an intellectual say to a dragon?” “To be alive is to look for trouble!” “I do everything as if I am going to die any minute.” “There is a devil inside me and he’s shouting. And I do what he says.”
There’s a devil inside me too. Mischievous, sometimes wicked. And he shouted too. But until I met Zorba, I didn’t really listen to him.
* * *
Then, as an undergraduate, I took a course called Physiological Psychology.
We learned that high levels of dopamine and serotonin generate a feeling of happiness. And lower levels of dopamine and serotonin generate a feeling of depression. We learned about neurotransmitters and synapses and cortexes and amygdalae, and I wrote in the margin of my notebook: Zorba was right.
Occasionally, at various crossroads in my life, I asked for his advice.
Obviously, you can ask a literary character for advice. It’s just a question of how willing you are to suspend disbelief.
* * *
—
It was Zorba who encouraged me to propose to Dikla: The sexual attraction has been so strong, for so many years—he claimed—I never heard a better reason to get married.
He also urged me to leave the world of advertising. Look at the skin of your face, he said. That rash. What does it look like to you? Not like a delayed allergic reaction to the campaign you ran for that nothing, what’s his name?
* * *
—
I recently consulted with Zorba again.
We were sitting in the port. Drinking rum.
I gulped it down to get high. He sipped—held the liquid in his mouth to enjoy its taste, and only then let it slide down slowly and warm his insides.
His eyes glowed through his suntan: Disparaging, sad, restless. Ablaze with passion.
I told him what Ari had asked me to do. And I told him that ever since he’d asked me to do it, I’d been spending my nights tossing and turning: On the one hand, I knew that doing what Ari had asked would really be a kindness. On the other hand, every time I tried to imagine the situation, I couldn’t. On the third hand, it was a criminal offense, and even if Ari claimed it was all arranged, no loose ends—
Excuse me, Boss, Zorba growled at me in response, what is all this crap?
But, Zorba—
Why are you thinking so much? He shook his large, heavy head. You keep a scale in your head all day. You weigh things to the last gram. Hey, habibi, fuck the scale.
But—
Pardon me, but I once killed a man. Fifty years back. And I can’t get that bastard’s face out of my mind. A Turkish shell exploded on him. His whole stomach…was spread all over the ground. And he…he pointed to my gun and asked me to help him.
So you simply shot him?
I said it was simple, Boss? You heard me say it was simple?
No.
My heart broke when I pulled the trigger. It split into two parts, my heart.
Okay.
But sometimes you have to do something for someone else. You understand that, Boss?
Yes.
Criminal offense or not, a friend is a friend!
Okay, Zorba, don’t be angry.
Why should I be angry? Zorba said. And sipped some more rum. Then he smiled broadly and said, Otherwise, Boss, how are you?
As I was reading him the definition of dysthymia from my cell phone, he stopped me and said, Enough with all those big words, tell me in words a person can understand!
Okay, so…you know the kind of chills that make your scalp tingle when someone surprises you from behind, covers your eyes with his hands, and asks, “Who am I?”
So?
So dysthymia is the same thing. Only instead of a few seconds, it lasts for a few years. Excited antic
ipation combined with inevitable disappointment. Usually, people are excited with anticipation when they’re starting out on some kind of mission, but here, you have no desire or ability to carry out a mission, you anticipate nothing, maybe death, maybe your body smells the danger inherent in despair or the potential of jumping off a roof—
Stop, man. Give me some feelings. Not all this bullshit.
Okay. The mornings are usually the hardest. The chills I talked about are absorbed into your scalp and drip down from your neck to your back, and around noon, they solidify into a motherfucking anchor between your shoulders. Then some invisible hand starts to pull at that motherfucking anchor as if it wants to tear it out, but it actually cuts into your flesh and anchors the pain once and for all in your posterior heart—
“Posterior heart”? What is all this crap?
No one talks about it, but we have two hearts, one in the front and another behind it, in our back.
Let’s say that’s true. Go on.
So you go everywhere with that constant pain in your posterior heart, no rest, no moments of relief, not during the day and not at night, not after two glasses of rum and not after ten. After everything you try to do to ease the pain, you check to see if it’s still there, in your posterior heart, and fuck, it’s still there, and that’s what causes the most frightening chills of all, the knowledge that it won’t pass, it will never pass—
It will pass, of course it will—
And the worst thing is that you have no idea what started it all. There are a lot of obvious reasons, but you keep thinking that the real, deep reason, invis—
So go out to play.
What?
Go out to play, like your mother said. I don’t understand how you can whine to me here about pain in your posterior heart and still keep yourself closed up in a room all day.
But—
No buts. You won’t get over this until you go outside into the sun. To people. Fight with them. Hug them. Look them in the eye. Do what the devil shouts at you to do.
But for twenty years, Zorba…for twenty years I’ve been writing instead of living. I’m not sure I still have a devil—
So keep whining. No problem. Just don’t be surprised if your wife really leaves you after the bat mitzvah. Women want men with balls. That’s just how it is. It’s nature.
Wow.
Now take your last drink of rum—and get up. Do you dance?
No.
No! His hands fell in shock. Okay, so I’ll dance, Boss. Get out of the way, so I don’t run you down, eh? He leapt up, broke through the fences, threw off his shoes, his coat, his undershirt, rolled his pants up to his knees, and began to dance, his face still smeared with coal, blacker than black, the whites of his eyes glittering. Totally swept away by the dance, he clapped, skipped, spun in the air and landed on his knees, then skipped and glided in the air as if he’d been shot out of a cannon, then he suddenly leapt in the air again, as if determined to defeat the laws of nature, spread wings, and fly.
Is there anything you refuse to write about under any circumstances?
Later on, I discovered who it was that wrote that dedication to my grandfather. But I’ll keep that to myself. Maybe because, as N quoted, “over and above the truth there is another duty, much more important and much more human.”
I am a devoted reader of yours. I e-mailed you a year ago and you didn’t answer. Why?
I don’t want to answer your question now either. Because what can I write? That receiving compliments on previous books when you’re suffering from writer’s block only underscores how much you’ve deteriorated? That the dysthymia diminishes my strength and the only things I was able to write this year were speeches for Yoram Sirkin and answers to interview questions? That dejection combined with compliments produces tears? That yesterday, my best friend asked me again to help him die and I can’t bring myself to do it for him, even though he deserves my help?
That my eldest daughter, the apple of my eye, left for the Sde Boker boarding school, and although she has no problem letting her mother sleep at her place for three nights, she absolutely refuses to let her father visit her for a single afternoon?
That her boycott of me is so utterly devastating that nothing else in the world seems important to me?
That her leaving for boarding school destroyed the fragile balance we had at home, and since then, Dikla and I have been on shaky ground?
That I wish I was sure there isn’t a much simpler reason why we’re on shaky ground?
That my son, who usually has no problem leaving me in front of the school gate, asked me to walk him to his classroom this morning, and I told him that I didn’t have time because I had to send Yoram Sirkin a draft of his speech before the Herzliya Global Policy Conference by nine in the morning?
That my other daughter’s bat mitzvah is next month, and all the signs indicate that right after it, Dikla plans to tell me that she wants to separate—and then who will have time to answer readers’ e-mails, what with all the lawyers and mediators we’ll have to see?
But of course I won’t tell you all that. I’ll want to be the good guy and it’ll be important for me not to disappoint you. Readers create an image of a writer in their minds, and my readers, I’ve noticed, imagine me to be a good guy. You too, according to your e-mail (obviously I received it, and even read it, over and over again), imagine that I’m a great guy. The kind you can send an e-mail to, inviting him to have a beer with you sometime.
Sure, bro, anytime. Sorry I didn’t answer before. Your e-mail landed in my junk-mail folder by mistake. I just now fished it out and read it. Thank you for the kind words. They arrived at exactly, and I mean exactly, the right moment.
Did you ever decide not to publish a book you wrote?
The elevator opened straight into an empty office. I walked through the corridors, my book under my arm, and called out a few times: Is anyone here?
No answer.
Finally, about to give up and turn back, a bare foot emerged from one of the offices. Followed by an entire leg. Followed by the body of a man. Followed by the words: May I help you?
Yes, I’m the lecturer. We set a date, I mean. For a lecture.
You don’t say? On what subject?
Secrets from the writer’s desk.
The guy scratched the right side of his receding hairline and said, Wait a minute. And disappeared back into the room he’d come out of.
Long minutes passed. Once again, I thought about leaving. And then I reminded myself how much I would get paid for that lecture. I decided to stay.
The guy with the receding hairline finally returned, with another guy. Also barefoot. Both were unshaven and wearing athletic shorts.
I see that they didn’t update you, the second guy said.
Apparently not.
When did they ask you to lecture?
Around December.
No kidding, he said.
We shut down the company on May first, the first guy said. There was no sorrow in his voice. On the contrary, he said it almost cheerfully.
They fired the human resources girl, so there was no one to let you know, the second guy said.
Wait a minute, I said, if they shut down the company, then…what are you doing here?
The day-after crew, they said in unison.
The day-after crew?
It’s like when you split with a girl, the first man explained, and he seemed to be experienced at it—there’s the end, the actual split, and then the little things left to take care of after the end: bank accounts, joint property, that kind of stuff.
And why—I asked cautiously—did they shut down the company?
A Canadian firm developed the same technology at the same time and went on the market before us, the first guy said.
There’s a race to release, and we lost it, the second gu
y explained.
Ninety-five percent of start-ups fail, the first guy said. This is the fourth start-up I’ve worked for that closed down.
Maybe it’s because of you, the second guy said, chuckling, you’re the curse!
No, it’s you, the first guy said, and pushed the other guy lightly with his hand.
No, it’s you, the second retorted.
Then only you two are left? I asked, trying to pull them out of the loop.
No, of course not, the first guy said, there’s Ravit too. The administrative director. Should I wake her up?
Whatever you want.
She’ll be angry at us if she finds out there was a lecture and we didn’t wake her up.
Careful, bro, she might fire us, the second guy said. And they both started laughing wildly, too wildly.
They didn’t see Ravit come out. On her head, surprisingly, she wore the crown of feathers of an Indian shaman. It was weird, no question about it. But at that point, I still wasn’t a nonbeliever.
Do you have a presentation? she asked.
No.
She asked whether I needed a bottle of water and I nodded. She went to the drinks machine in the corner, plugged it in, dropped a coin into it, and came back with a bottle of red wine.
I pulled a chair over from one of the empty rooms, turned it around, and sat down, a leg on either side.
The two guys, Ravit, and the crown of feathers sat in a semicircle in front of me.
I took a long drink of wine.
The first guy looked at his watch and said: You have twenty minutes, tops. We have to wrap up by two.
Two is indoor soccer time, the second guy explained.