For years I wanted a studio. I wanted to say things like, “I’m coming from the studio.” “I’ll call you from the studio.” But it seemed to be the sort of thing that happened to other people, not to the ones who grew up in a port city and were taught not to spend a penny unless they really had to. Who needs a studio anyway, I convinced myself. Amos Oz wrote in the toilet.
Nevertheless, whenever someone, a colleague, told me he was going to his studio, my heart constricted, as if it had been encircled by a tight elastic band. And involuntarily, the word rolled around in my mouth. The tip of my tongue tapped lightly on the roof of my mouth with the first two syllables and the third spread my lips: stu-di-o.
More than a year ago, I rented a studio in the moshav Givat Chen. I had no choice. I swear by everything dear to me.
The building next to ours was being renovated, and the horrendous noise of the drills and hammers kept me from concentrating. Also, my eldest daughter—before she left for boarding school at Sde Boker—didn’t really go to school, and to drown out the racket coming from outside, she played Enrique Iglesias at full volume every morning in her room. Slowly, the walls began to close in on me. A feeling of unease settled in between my stomach and chest and refused to move. I think that was when my dysthymia began, even though I still didn’t know that there was such a thing as dysthymia. So I thought, I need a change of scene, and took my laptop to the office of a psychologist who worked mainly in the evening. I agreed to all the demands she said were preconditions, asking only that, in the contract, we change the definition from “office” to “studio.”
After moving my laptop to the studio, I added a few books, for atmosphere. I hung a painting I’d received as a gift from a Holocaust survivor, which Dikla said was too sad to hang in the living room, and placed Mayan’s picture on the shelf. Walking distance from the studio was a grocery store that sold fresh, salty bagels. And olives. I like olives when I’m writing. There was an orange tree outside the studio and the landlady said I could pick the fruit. In the studio itself, there was a coffee corner with instant coffee, Turkish coffee, and a fridge with milk in it.
Everything was ready.
Givat Chen—so I learned from the sign at the entrance I passed every morning—was named after the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. No one talks about it, it’s not very nice to tarnish the image of our national poet, but Bialik hardly wrote anything after immigrating to Israel. Apparently, as he once wrote, his little twig had fallen, leaving him without bud or flower, fruit or leaf, and for ten years, he produced only nine poems, which are not among his best. Was the house they built for him in Tel Aviv too beautiful? Too comfortable? Did people’s adoration rob him of the freedom every artist needs? And perhaps all his literary activities, the journals and book publishing, left him no time to stare into space, and without that, without allowing empty space to be empty, how can you replenish yourself? Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe he took on more and more literary activities to avoid being alone with his unable-to-write self? I picture him telling his wife, Manya, before going to sleep that another day had passed without his having produced a poem worthy of the name, and the weary look in her eyes as she listens to him: Really, Chaim Nachman—she thinks but doesn’t say—how long can I listen to the same song?
He waits, eyes open to the darkness until she falls asleep, and then leaves the house to walk the few blocks to Ira Jan. She’s a passionate woman, an artist who is still impressed by him, and after they have sex, he waits with eyes open to the darkness until Ira Jan falls asleep, then goes to another woman, the third—we can assume he had a third woman—to lay his bald head on her lap so she can stroke it as she sings to him in Yiddish. But all that bed-hopping in Tel Aviv is no help at all, it changes nothing, because the page waiting for him on his desk the next morning is blanker than usual.
I spent long months in my studio in Givat Chen. I read my students’ texts. I spoke on the phone. I answered e-mails. I went to the grocery store and came back with olives. I picked oranges and squeezed them. I stared at the picture of Mayan, the girl who was killed on Death Road and in whose backpack my book was found. I listened to entire David Bowie albums on YouTube. I read medical articles about dysthymia. I told people, “I’ll call you from the studio.” “Let’s meet at my studio.” I even tried to do yoga on the psychologist’s yoga mat and threw my back out. Maybe it’s the dysthymia that has nailed me so firmly to reality. Maybe other forces have been at work here.
In the end, I decided to go back home.
Go back home.
The tip of my tongue waited patiently to tap lightly on the roof of my mouth as my lips alternately opened and closed around those three words. Do you think about your reading public when you write?
Me? Are you kidding? Absolutely not. It’s irrelevant. And I have no time for it. My mind is so filled with the characters’ vacillations and the plot twists that there’s no room for extraneous thoughts. I categorically deny—
Only sometimes, like a streaker dashing onto the field in the middle of a soccer game, a powerful sense of anxiety about money bursts into my mind:
