I didn’t know what else to say. Or do.
Take care of yourself, I called to him, and immediately regretted the words. I mean, that’s what it was all about. He couldn’t.
He kept walking, but after a few meters, he stopped and turned back to me.
I really do write stories, he said. Don’t think I lied to you. How do you cope with the loneliness involved in writing?
I think I’ve already answered that question. It seems that basic issues tend to keep bothering you.
But if there is a way to escape from the hall of mirrors, it’s to devote yourself totally to others. Or in my case, to teach. To be a teacher.
For three hours, twice a week, I have the opportunity to be with other people and their stories. To listen to them, stimulate their imaginations, help them free themselves and blossom. At this point in my life, it’s my true salvation. What exactly do you teach in your writing workshop?
What is beauty
The wife of the hostel owner
In Puerto Viejo
Sweeps the area in front of the hammocks every morning.
—
What is conflict
The wife of the hostel owner
In Puerto Viejo
Where we’re staying on our honeymoon
Sweeps the area in front of the hammocks every morning.
—
What is conflict development
The wife of the hostel owner
In Puerto Viejo
Where we’re staying on our honeymoon
Sweeps the area in front of the hammocks every morning.
She gives me a look.
—
What is plot
The wife of the hostel owner
In Puerto Viejo
Where we’re staying on our honeymoon
Sweeps the area in front of the hammocks every morning.
She gives me a look and signals me to follow her.
—
What is a turning point in the plot
The wife of the hostel owner
In Puerto Viejo
Where we’re spending our honeymoon
Sweeps the area in front of the hammocks every morning.
She gives me a look and signals me to follow her.
In one of the hostel rooms she shows me black-and-blue marks and asks if we can help her get away. Is it really possible to teach someone to write?
He died a day before the last meeting of the workshop. I’m already saying this now, so there won’t be any illusions. I don’t remember who spoke before him when the members of the group took turns introducing themselves. I think it was a retired teacher who said something about how much she loved to read. In any case, his turn came after hers. His bald head was tanned, crisscrossed by veins and capillaries. Later I thought that men have it easier as far as that’s concerned. He said: Good evening, my name is Shmuel. I have cancer and the doctors give me another few months to live. A month ago, my daughter said I should try to write. And that was the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me. I’ve been writing constantly for a month already. I write day and night. I write with one hand and hold the IV with the other. I just can’t put my pen down.
And what do you expect from the workshop? I stuck to the routine question.
I want to finish at least one story here, he said. A story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
He did all the homework exercises I gave. And came to every meeting. Since that workshop in a northern town was funded by the State Lottery, the participants didn’t have to pay a penny. Which meant that no one felt obligated to attend regularly. Except for Shmuel. Who appeared every week, five minutes early, with a pad of yellow paper, a blue Pilot pen, an extra Pilot pen, and a dusty tape recorder to tape the session.
Most of the time, I felt I was speaking mainly to him. And he came up to me at the end of every class, leaned on his cane, and asked me to explain a point that wasn’t clear enough to him. Or he came to disagree with me. It was especially difficult for him to accept that it was possible, sometimes even desirable, to use colloquial language in a literary text. Forgive me, but what you suggest means forcing the language into prostitution, he claimed. But your characters don’t speak a language that was natural to them, they all sound just like the narrator, I persisted. Who said that was bad? he persisted right back. Isn’t it like that in Agnon? And Amos Oz?
In the end, we reached a compromise. I suggested to him that when young people—only young people—in his stories speak to each other, he would allow them to speak the Hebrew that is natural to them. Fine, he said, but without words like…like…I can’t even say them aloud!
At the end of the eighth lesson, I reminded him that he’d wanted to complete one story during the workshop and asked whether he wanted us to focus on one of the homework exercises he had already done and work on it.
He ran his hand over his bald head, slowly, as if there were still hair on it, and said that it was difficult for him to give up on a story. There are so many to tell and so little time, and whenever he’s drawn to a new story, he always abandons the one he’s already begun.
That’s perfectly all right, I told him. But if you change your mind and decide to choose a text and develop it…you should hurry, because the workshop ends after two more meetings.
—
At the beginning of the ninth session, he handed me some pages and said: This is what I’d like to develop.
While the others were busy with an exercise I gave them, I couldn’t resist and read the pages. It was a short story about a father helping his beloved only daughter with the final preparations for her wedding. I don’t remember specific sentences. All I remember is that he managed to convey beautifully the ambivalence of the situation. And that something about the daughter’s speech
