But—I tried to object—
He ignored me and said, I have to ask you for something.
I said, Of course, anything—
And he said, Bro, I need you to help me die. When was the last time you lied?
I drove back from the hospital. The last things Ari said were: “We’ll do it at my place. It’s safer”; “There’s a nurse here who likes me. She’ll get the stuff for us. I made arrangements with a private doctor who’ll come afterward and sign the death certificate”; “All you have to do is give me the injection.”
Those words had upset me so much that I took a wrong turn on the way home and suddenly found myself in Kiryat Ono. In the middle of a neighborhood of high-rises. At the first traffic light, I tried to type in my home address. But Waze warned me that I’m not supposed to type while driving. “I’m not the driver,” I lied to it. “I’m not the driver.”
(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.
