The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  Santiago de Compostela

  Circular Therapy

  The Slumbering Soldiers

  In Our Synagogue

  Confession

  Putting the Old House in Order

  Virtual Mapping of the Heart

  Supper with Your Former Screenwriter

  Roman Charity

  Sample Chapter from FRIENDLY FIRE

  Buy the Book

  Read More from A. B. Yehoshua

  About the Author

  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2011 by Abraham B. Yehoshua

  English translation copyright © 2013 by Stuart Schoffman

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published as Hesed Sefaradi by Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2011.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-547-49696-2

  eISBN 978-0-547-50167-3

  v4.0315

  Translator’s Note

  In Hebrew, the title of this book is Hesed Sefaradi. Hesed (with a guttural h) eludes precise translation and connotes compassion, kindness, love, and charity; a fair equivalent is the Latin caritas. Sefaradi means “Spanish” but also “Sephardic,” referring specifically to Jews whose ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492 and more broadly to “Oriental” Jews from Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The double meaning helps the reader get the picture.

  one

  Santiago de Compostela

  1

  ONLY AT MIDNIGHT, when they arrive at the massive, stark stone-paved plaza, bare of any statuary or fountain, its only ornament a boundary of heavy iron chains, does the director sense that his companion’s anxiety is finally beginning to wane. By the time two silver-haired bellmen hurry down the front steps of the former royal hospice for pilgrims, now the Parador hotel, the actress, who made the trip at his request, is beaming with gratitude. But after the luggage is collected, their host, undeterred by the lateness of the hour and obvious fatigue of his guests, insists on hauling them to the heart of the square so they may marvel in the stillness of the night at the famous cathedral, between whose yellowed towers saints and angels stand erect, as if in their honor. In strange but fluent English he recites the names of its builders and luminaries, taking personal pride in the size of the square that draws throngs of believers, determined to prove to his guests that the holiness of the place they have come to is in no way inferior to the holiness of the land from which they came.

  Indeed, given the grandeur of the cathedral and the elegance of the adjacent hotel, the director, Yair Moses, is pleased he did not refuse the embassy’s request and has journeyed despite his age to this remote region to attend a retrospective of his films, not just as a passive guest of honor but as an active participant. Again, as in recent years, he mourns the absence of his cinematographer, who would surely have shouldered his camera by now and in the wintry glow attempted to capture the entire cathedral, or at least the pale moonlight cast upon the iron chains, or even the shadow of the broad stone steps leading into the Old Town. And if the director complained, as he used to do, about the waste of valuable film stock, the cameraman would have smiled and said nothing, since it was proven time and again that shots with no clear purpose, unconnected to plot or character, could be intercut in the editing room to enhance the imagery, and also to add, even in a purely realistic film, the mystical and symbolic touches sought by his former screenwriter.

  Toledano, the cinematographer, were he still alive, would not stand still for the host’s pedantic explanations—which will have to be cut short—but would hang back and satisfy his camera, surreptitiously or otherwise, with the profile of her face, or the contour of her body, or even its silhouette. His love for Ruth had led to his death.

  Perhaps it’s because of her that the director has been thinking often of Toledano, all these years after his death. For the actress, object of the cameraman’s unrequited love, has become Moses’ occasional companion, or, more precisely, a “character” given him for safekeeping. Here she is beside him, wearing a ratty fur coat, bent over and a bit clumsy but still attractive despite signs of age, and her friendly attentiveness, which looks real even when it isn’t, now stimulates the flow of words that need cutting off.

  “Yes, sir”—the guest grabs the arm of the host, whose name has already escaped his memory—“your cathedral is indeed worthy of admiration. And I hope that tomorrow morning it will still be here, so in our three days as your guests there shall be plenty of time to come back and marvel.” And the director of the Archive of Cinematic Arts, a short man conceivably of Celtic stock, moon-faced and bald, smiles and humbly but firmly repeats his name, Juan de Viola, and warns against the illusion of “plenty of time.” The program of the retrospective, which the guests have yet to receive, is full; each day, at least two films will be screened, and of course there will be discussions and meals. Not only at the film archive but also at the institute itself, there is great interest in the art of cinema in the Jewish State.

  2

  AT SOME RETROSPECTIVES, two separate rooms are reserved for the director and the actress, because their Internet biographies are vague regarding the true nature of their relationship. Nonetheless, there are hosts who, based on knowledge or rumor or simply a wish to save money, provide only one room at the hotel. When two rooms are offered, the director and the actress take both and use them as they please, but if only one is available, they accept the verdict.

  In this historic hotel, where every nook bespeaks an aesthetic effort to convert its pious past into elegant comfort, the guests have been given a large room on the top floor, an attic with wooden beams that support the ceiling with perfect symmetry. The furniture is old but polished to a high gloss, and the velvet curtains are festooned with silken tassels whose color matches the soft carpet. The armoires are enhanced by artful carvings, and inside them, wide shelves lie in wait alongside a wealth of padded clothes hangers. There are no twin beds, but the double bed is generous in size, made up in fresh linens with rustic embroidery. The bathroom is spacious too, its tiles scrubbed clean and fixtures chic and clever, apart from a huge old bathtub with feet, preserved perhaps as a medical exhibit, for its style and girth suggest that in the distant past it held two ailing pilgrims, not one. The discerning eyes of Ruth—who grew up in an immigrant town in the south of Israel and is always eager to stay in places that don’t remind her of her deprived childhood—confirm the beauty of the room, and without delay she gets undressed and curls up under the big quilt, ready to succumb to undisturbed slumber.

  Moses—a man of middling height who in recent years has developed a potbelly, unprecedented in his family, that he counterbalances with a small, intellectual goatee—is pleased with the room and the ample dimensions of the double bed though concerned by the overbooked schedule of the retrospective. Despite the lateness of the hour, he does not rush to join the sleeping woman but takes off his shoes and moves about silently, allowing her to sink into deeper sleep. Lately he has been treating her with special tenderness—he has yet to inform her that there will be no role for her in his next film. Though it is well past midnight, he cannot rely on fatigue and takes a pill designed to alleviate anxiety. He would like to lower the heating but fails to find the thermostat, so he opens a window to let in the winter air, only to discover that the ancient cathedral had not b
een content with its vast stone-paved plaza and had sprouted to its rear another square of significant size at whose center, on a tall pedestal, stands a stone angel brandishing a sword at the visitor.

  Moses joyfully gulps the chilly air before shutting the window and closing the dark velvet curtains so the light of dawn will not wake them, and carefully, without touching the sleeping body, he slides under the big duvet. Ruth’s family doctor has urged her, more than once, to repeat a blood test whose results were worrisome, but, despite Moses’ nagging, she keeps postponing the test. Yet when the date was set for this retrospective, Moses thought it preferable for the bloodletting to occur after their return from Spain. If it turns out there is a real problem, there’ll be time enough to deal with it later on; for the moment, it’s best to take advantage of the trip to quiet the anxiety, his more than hers.

  He turns off the room’s remaining light, for only in pitch-darkness can sleep overpower his imagination. But on the wall by the bed, close to the ceiling, one stubborn point of light stays on, apparently intended to illuminate the picture hanging below it in a gilt frame or to draw attention to it, and as he deliberates the need to get up and struggle with so faint a light, he feels the sweet pull of exhaustion and curls into fetal position, stealing a glance in the darkness at two mythological characters—a bald man, his upper body naked, sitting or kneeling at the feet of a bare-breasted nymph. Then he takes off his glasses, removes his hearing aids, and falls asleep.

  It was Ruth who first diagnosed his hearing loss; she noticed that in public appearances he was raising his voice and giving answers not always pertinent to the questions. Although such responses might be appreciated by courteous people who’d been touched by his films in the past, the younger generation, whose questions are more precise and demanding, are less inclined to accept irrelevant answers. Sometimes a member of the audience will rise kindly to the occasion, restating the question and perhaps supplying an answer, but such assistance, even if well intended, does not enhance the dignity of any lecturer.

  Moses was thus persuaded to acquire hearing aids, which, though minuscule, cannot entirely escape the notice of keen-eyed observers, thus calling attention to his age. When he sticks the pinkish gadgets in both ears, they emit a brief tune—as if to say, At your service—and immediately amplify the hubbub of the surrounding world. Now and then, they chirp and hum as they please, perhaps because a stranger’s hearing aid has sent them a friendly signal or because some clandestine military radar is checking their identity. When one of the batteries runs down, it announces its demise with an insistent, continuous ring that can’t be ignored, and thus in social situations or in the middle of a lecture, he has to remove the device and replace its battery.

  All in all, the hearing aids have been good to Moses. When he is directing, the dialogue between him and the actors and crew is clearer now, and at public events he appears focused and relaxed. In an odd way, these tiny devices have taught him that deafness is not merely a physiological issue but a psychological one too. When he forgets to stick them in his ears, he can occasionally still pick up subtle overtones in the speech of others. His prostate, which has become enlarged in recent years, has taught him a similar lesson. He and it are able to ignore each other for many hours, even after the consumption of liquids, but sometimes, for no apparent reason—the stimulus of a new idea or an emotional reaction, or a slow descent in a narrow elevator—the prostate can threaten its master without warning. In which case, if the toilet is far away or its location is unknown, there may be no choice but to dart behind a parked car or find a hidden spot among the trash bins and gas canisters of a nearby apartment building. Once, in desperation, he slipped into a private garden, where the owner lay in wait and rebuked him. “What if I were just a stray dog,” protested Moses with a smile, “would you insult a dog?” “But you’re not a dog,” retorted the man with a sneer, “and you couldn’t be if you tried.” Moses zipped up his trousers and retreated in silence, though he could have told him that at the beginning of his directing career, he and his screenwriter Trigano had made a thirty-minute surrealistic film about a jealous husband who fears his wife is cheating and so, to follow her, he masquerades as a dog. To their great surprise, the film turned out to be more than a comical sketch. The ingenious script and nuanced camera work, along with the right music, enabled the dog who played the jealous husband to exhibit credible human gestures. He still drifts through Moses’ thoughts—a big yellowy mutt, hairy and melancholy, looking more like a hyena than a dog, with drooping ears suggesting spaniel ancestry. The dog was so faithful to the director’s commands that it seemed his canine soul had absorbed the obsessions of the jealous husband. After the filming, the dog stayed on with the director—a strange companion, loyal, tormented, as if Moses had actually succeeded in imbuing him with human spirit, until in the end he recklessly crossed a road and was run over by a car.

  3

  THOUGH THE DARKNESS is total, the clock does not disappoint. It’s 7:30 A.M., not 5:00. Sleep overcame consciousness and vanquished anxiety, and if during the night a strange dream had flickered, it didn’t bother the dreamer. Yair slips out of bed and tries not to disturb his surroundings as he makes his way to the bathroom. His companion, asleep but not oblivious, instinctively occupies part of the vacated territory.

  From the bathroom window, he can see people walking by the walls of the cathedral. Today is the first day of the retrospective, and it would be nice to rest a bit more before the commotion begins. Random rays of sunlight that have filtered onto the big bed cast a golden glow on the actress’s bare feet, protruding from the quilt. Moses covers them, then carefully inspects the reproduction hanging on the wall. The stolen glance at night was superficial and misleading. Perhaps the picture represents some obscure mythological tale, not of an old man’s lust for a young woman but rather of a hungry and desperate person. The old, muscular man is plainly a prisoner: his hands are tied behind him, and his naked, dirty feet have just been released from the stocks that rest nearby. His jailers have starved him so badly that he is drawn to the merciful breasts of a young nursing woman, who delicately guides his bald, sunburned head to the whiteness of her bosom.

  Moses looks for the name of the artist and finds only two words in ornate script: Caritas Romana, meaning “Roman Charity,” and as if struck by a flash of distant lightning, he wonders whether Trigano knew of this strange and brazen painting hanging randomly in a hotel room in the Spanish province of Galicia. Is it conceivable that in the dawning light, by sheer coincidence, here in Santiago de Compostela, he has uncovered a secret source that long ago sparked the imagination of his former screenwriter? He was a talented young man, a near genius, but also fanatically inflexible, and because of one dropped scene, he had broken off relations with not only Moses but also his own lover, the actress, thus imposing her on the director—if not as an obligation, at least as a source of worry. Could this mythological picture have inspired Trigano to devise the crazy, provocative ending of their last film together?

  The location chosen for the scene was a rundown back street not far from the fishermen’s pier in Jaffa. The drizzly weather that day complemented the somber tone of the film. The cinematographer and the soundman, the makeup artist and the lighting man, were ready to roll, and despite the out-of-the-way location, a sizable crowd had gathered to watch. In the early 1970s, shooting a feature film on location was rare in Israel, and passersby were enchanted as if by magic. Moses has not forgotten that morning after all these years, for on that day the creative covenant between him and his screenwriter fell apart. On the street corner, on a stool, sat an elderly beggar dressed in rags—a well-known thespian from the National Theater. It was particularly important for Moses that in the final scene, it was not some anonymous extra playing the part, but a familiar and respected actor who would surprise the audience in the role of a miserable beggar and be engraved in their memory. The actor, however, demanded that his character be given a touch of intellectual
flair, perhaps a top hat and not a mere cap to receive donations, or a pipe whose smoke would slither from his lips. As the final directions were given, Moses could sense the old actor’s anticipation of sensual contact with a young woman’s breasts, not least because the scene would doubtless be shot several times, with the most shocking yet plausible version to be achieved in the editing room. Despite its boldness, the scene wasn’t difficult to stage. A young woman departs a private maternity clinic after leaving her newborn for adoption and wanders the streets anguished and forlorn, and when she sees the old beggar, she opens her coat, takes out a breast, and nurses him.

  It’s because of the nasty fight that broke out that morning that small details stick in the memory. The long old coat Ruth wore. Her face made up to look sickly and tormented. A rusty iron door on an abandoned house, meant to be the entrance to the clinic. But most memorable is the distress of the young actress. Toledano reshot her exit from the clinic door, hoping to strengthen the credibility of her action, but Moses sensed that something was amiss. Her gestures became more hesitant and hollow, as if her whole being was in rebellion against the scene written for her by her lover, the screenwriter. At first Moses assumed she was embarrassed by the presence of curious onlookers and suggested they film the breastfeeding behind a partition. But it became clear that it wasn’t the gaze of strangers that unsettled her, since she had stripped for the camera before, and even craved it, Moses thought. Nor was she repulsed by the touch of the old actor’s lips on her breast. Her spirit rebelled against the absurdity of a young woman who, right after giving up her child for adoption, feels impelled to breastfeed an old stranger. Knowing Trigano, she decided to dodge the scene decisively, without getting tangled up in words. As she approached the street corner, tracked by the camera, she suddenly dashed into the cab of the production truck, locked the doors, and rolled up the windows.