The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “Yes, I recognize him,” Ruth blurts out, “concentrate, look carefully, it’s Toledano himself.” “Not a chance,” retorts Moses, dismissing the possibility that the cameraman had become the one on camera. But Ruth remains firm, and even as he throws his arm around her to quash her outlandish recollection, she stubbornly clings to that man who loved her and is now bedridden, deprived of his original voice in the role of a dying man. “Yes, it’s him, it can only be him, take a good look, the actor you picked was afraid of the part, and Toledano volunteered, because Trigano would never agree to portray any character he created. Why do you insist,” she pleads, “on not recognizing him?”

  She’s right. The dying man’s eyes above the oxygen mask are the eyes of the deceased and unrequited lover, but then, who operated the camera? “Apparently you,” says Ruth, “and there was his assistant, what was his name?” “Nadav,” says Moses confidently, thrilled to retrieve the name of a person not seen in forty years. “Yes, Nadav,” she happily confirms, her memory merging with that of the director, the two jointly reconstructing the reality behind a forgotten film.

  Their longtime cinematographer portrays a man on his deathbed with such understated grace that Moses is nostalgic for his antiquated film, and even the Spanish dubbing sounds familiar. Now the screen is a bit blurry, perhaps from a faulty focus or a smudge on the camera lens that shook in the hands of the director serving as a surrogate cameraman. Though it occurs to Moses that the unprofessional shakiness actually improves the scene, adding a dreamlike dimension at the twilight hour, as an immense woman in a wheelchair tries to soothe the suffering of a dying man in the final moments of his life.

  And the viewers, who so far have patiently accepted the absurdities on the screen, must know, perhaps by some divine intuition, that it’s impossible that the dying man, the receiver of merciful care, will end this strange old film with his own death. A terminal patient with a conscience will not forfeit his role as a caregiver. The big woman leaves, and the audience applauds as the dying man sits bolt upright in bed, rips the oxygen mask from his face, and stares in agony at the slightly unsteady camera. The shaking, deriving from inexperience, fits the mood of the finale. The dead cameraman, beloved by all, comes back to life without surrendering his status as a dying man. In his white gown he wheels the intravenous poles and rushes out of his house, and even the critical and suspicious director cannot help but marvel at this terminal patient wandering like a ghost in the dead of night at the central bus station, clattering his IVs between dark silent buses, pushing them into a workingmen’s café, where a picture on a wall reminds Moses that this is his parents’ living room, now taking the role of a cafeteria thick with cigarette smoke and a bar stocked with colorful bottles, a dubious-looking bartender jovially mixing his concoctions. In the moonlight, from the garden of his childhood home, the camera tracks the silhouette of the innocent girl who gave up on the young man of the broken promise and then let down the woman she took care of and who now waits for the first morning bus to take her back to her village. The familiar cardboard suitcase is at her feet, and along with the flowered sundress, which is no less charming in moonlight, she wears a pretty scarf over her skinny shoulders. She is sad, and when she sees that the one who comes to care for her is himself dying, her despair grows, and she begins to weep.

  “When you were young and gay, it was so easy to get you to cry for the camera,” Moses can’t help teasing his actress, “and now it’s hard to get one tear out of you.” “What can you do.” She sighs. “With all the tears I’ve shed in real life, I don’t have any left for your movies, but don’t worry, in your next film, if I must, I’ll cry again.” He nods, saying nothing, not only because he doesn’t want to upset her with the news that there will be no role for her in his next film, but also lest he annoy the audience, hypnotized by the moonlight and the shaky camera. The dying man with his tangle of IV tubes becomes a heroic figure—a character who proves to the whole world, in whispering Spanish, that even in his last hour, a person can breathe hope into the heart of another. The embarrassed smile that breaks out in close-up on the young woman’s face arouses real tears in the eyes of the aging actress watching herself. And after the screen finally goes dark, and lights go on in the hall, Moses promises himself that when he returns to Israel, he will find a copy of the forgotten film and watch it in its original language to determine its true value once and for all.

  In the eyes of the audience scrutinizing the director, there may be wonder or bewilderment, but no antagonism or derision. He therefore hopes the questions will not deal with trivial points of realism or believability or with camera techniques, but with the ideas. Since the Spanish that replaced the original language did not allow him full mastery of the film’s details, he asks the director of the archive, who will moderate the discussion, to relay several questions together, figuring to avoid the ones not easily answered.

  To his surprise, the questions imply affection for this simple film, and Moses is careful not to undermine it with answers betraying his own ambivalence about his early work. Film teachers and students do not approach movies as consumers demanding satisfaction and enjoyment in exchange for the ticket purchased at the box office; for them, a film is first and foremost material for study and explanation. And since he realized at lunch that in this city of pilgrimage, people tend to seek a symbol behind every detail, he resolves to be tolerant even of allegorical speculation. When one of the older teachers offers a strange interpretation for the visible shaking in the last scene, Moses does not expose his unskilled hand operating the camera but praises the man for his perspicacity, adding that in hindsight he cannot be sure that was the intent. Though the students do center their questions on technical matters and not spiritual issues, the fact that an outdated film made by a group of amateurs in a young small country on a minuscule budget can hold its own after such a long time instills optimism in them too, these young people. And after the priest reveals that Moses’ mother played the first old woman, obvious questions arise, such as: Was it hard for you to direct your own mother? Did she follow your instructions? Why didn’t you try to include your father?

  Attention shifts to the actress, her fetching screen presence still lingering in the room. A young woman asks whether the smile that brightened her face at the end of the movie was genuine or produced at the director’s request. In other words, if the scene had happened in real life and not before a camera, and a white ghost dragging intravenous bottles had darted out of the darkness to console her, would she have welcomed it, or run away in terror? Ruth answers firmly, though in poor English. Yes, she would have happily welcomed the dying man, whose care that night would keep her in Jerusalem, and she would not flee the city in the morning.

  Then an old farmer speaks. His bald pate reddening with emotion, he asks if he is permitted to think that this dying man, who earned the trust of not only the girl on the screen but also himself as a spectator, will wrestle with death after the film is done and overcome it. Is such hope possible, and was it the intention of the filmmaker?

  “No, it wasn’t, but neither does it contradict it,” answers Moses. “The ending of a work of art is an absolute ending, and whoever imagines what happens next speaks only for himself.”

  The disappointed farmer slowly sits down, but several of his friends ask for permission to speak. Fearing the local farmers will lower the level of conversation, the priest urges them to keep their questions short, and he answers them himself hastily, and then, to bring the discussion to a close, he poses his own question to the honoree: “Do you yourself believe in the idea of the film you created? In other words, is everyone who receives care also a caregiver?”

  Moses is startled by the question but is quick to answer.

  “My screenwriter believed it, and in those days I respected his ideas and agreed to direct films based on them. After we went our separate ways, this idea seemed unrealistic to me, since there are invalids who are chronic and stubborn, concerned on
ly with themselves. But today, after watching this film of mine, which I had not seen for decades, I’m ready to give his vision another chance.”

  3

  THE ARCHIVE DIRECTOR has two options for the intermission before the next screening. They can further tour the film labs and classrooms, or they can rest in his office, which was once the apartment of the army base commander. It has a modest sofa on which one man can stretch out comfortably. As a devout believer in afternoon naps, Moses chooses the second alternative. In recent years, even on filming days, he has managed to arrange the working day to include an hour or so for a nap. Not even when shooting on location does he pass it up; he crawls, blanket in hand, under the production truck to grab a quick snooze in the oily darkness below the chassis, first making sure the vehicle is locked and the keys are in his pocket.

  How good to enter a quiet, spacious room, albeit slightly monkish in character, with logs burning in the hearth. The priest removes two woolen military blankets from the closet, shuts the blinds, disconnects the telephone, and locks the door from the outside.

  Moses goes immediately for the couch, but Ruth asks sheepishly if this time she could have it and he make do with the armchair. He is surprised, but he agrees. After all the excitement over her past beauty, she is probably depressed and seeks the consolation of curling into the fetal position.

  He covers her with the blanket and turns out the light, hoping to catch some sleep in the chair. The next film is about the army, and he has a vague recollection of long nature shots and of soldiers fast asleep. He closes his eyes, pondering his mother’s devotion to the role he entrusted to her. He knows a good many artists who avoid watching their past work. He, too, unless he must, watches his old films rarely. But it now would appear that because of the falling-out with Trigano, he went too far in completely ignoring them. For even in such a beginner’s film, he can see a few moments of beautiful directing, worth going back to for inspiration.

  Ruth’s breathing grows deeper. She once told him that sometimes, when sleep eludes her, she imagines that she is in front of the camera, and a cinematographer and director and soundman are watching over her sleep, protecting her—then she relaxes. Now Moses fills all those roles, and in her sleep, she reaches out her hand from under the blanket and touches the director who sits beside her. Age spots that have lately surfaced on her face and hands are visible even in the dim light. But it’s not a liver spot that will deprive her of a part in the next film; it’s that his obligation to her character has been exhausted. Her talents have found expression in every possible role, and in the last stage of a long and varied career like his, one must be wary of repeating oneself.

  The base commander’s armchair is stiff and upright, and the priest who inherited it has shunned, perhaps out of asceticism, even a small cushion, so Moses has no hope of dozing or resting. If he wants to be alert during the next screening, he will have to take off his shoes, curl up on the rug at the feet of his companion, and remove his hearing aids.

  As her breathing floats over him, so do melancholy thoughts about her future. If he has lately included her, now and then, in his travels, he does so not with an eye to the future, but as his debt to the past: as limited consolation for a career in slow decline. He remembers that Nehama, meaning “consolation,” was her original Hebrew name, given her by her father, the rabbi, who came to Israel from the Moroccan town of Debdou, and who ended up as a farm laborer, planting trees. Sometimes Trigano would tease his lover and call her Debdou. After they parted, she dropped the name Nehama and, on the advice of an actors’ agent, took a simple name, easy to remember, typically Israeli but also well established in the wider world.

  But Moses did not forget the original name of the shy, gentle girl whom the usher, his student, introduced as his girlfriend at the movie theater in Jerusalem. Sometimes, in rehearsals, or even during a shoot, as he tried to get a deeper, more credible performance from her, Moses would confront her with her original name, using it as a talismanic word to rescue her from artifice and mannerism and prompt her to broaden her acting with the flavor of the disadvantaged, confused girl who had never finished high school. At first she was angry that he had revealed to the whole crew the old name she’d left behind. But when he persisted, she was forced to listen, through her given name, to the true voice of her identity.

  He has no magic word to help her evoke shades of character she has not played in the past and so can help her only at a remove, recommending her to other directors. And because the cinematographer had also expressed his love through concern for her daily well-being, he feels he should take responsibility for the practical aspects of her life, in financial matters and health issues such as the blood test, which must not be neglected when they return to Israel. He covers his face and shuts his eyes tight, then hears soft knocking on the locked door.

  “Nehama”—he pats her arm—“wake up, de Viola is here.”

  Her forehead furrows, and her eyes open, shining after deep and satisfying sleep. She rises gracefully and stretches her limbs, folds her blanket and his too, puts on her high heels, and adjusts her blouse. She takes a comb and makeup from her bag and does her hair and face before the windowpane, then runs the comb through his white hair to make him look presentable too. The archive director unlocks the door and enters. “What is this,” jokes Moses, “you were afraid we’d run out without saying goodbye? I mean, it’s downright illegal to lock up an old man with an unstable prostate.” De Viola laughs. He serves the institute not only as archive director but also as priest, he explains; teachers and students take the liberty to enter his room at will, as they would a confessional booth. To ensure his guests a proper rest, he thought it wise to lock the door and also put up a Do Not Disturb sign. Two more films await them today, and judging by the reactions to Circular Therapy, there is great interest among faculty and students.

  En route to the small hall, they learn of a slight change in the original program. The screening of Slumbering Soldiers, whose title in Spanish is The Installation, has been postponed till tomorrow, and in its place the film known here as Obsession will be screened—it’s probably The Flying Pen, what else could it be? The switch has been made, says the priest, “to show the Spanish people that your early work deals with psychology, not just ethics.”

  “The same crowd?”

  “Mostly.”

  “And I thought they’d had enough, after that superficial film you insisted on starting my retrospective with.”

  But Juan de Viola firmly dismisses this self-criticism. “The film is not superficial, simply a first effort, and a first work of art, if motivated by a religious inspiration or at least a metaphysical one, will always possess a certain power.”

  “You insist on the religious issue,” protests Moses, “but you should know that neither I nor Trigano would define our work that way.”

  The priest is unfazed.

  “There are many people with a religious temperament who are ashamed to admit it. Don’t forget when you made the film. In the sixties, a strong secular outlook prevailed in the world, and religious faith was completely out of style. People like you camouflaged their longing for the absolute in foggy allegorical parables. But the world has changed since then, although not always, to my sorrow, for the better.”

  “And you see a religious aspect to my amusing little Obsession?”

  “Of course,” says the priest without hesitation.

  “And this one has also been dubbed?”

  “All of them.”

  “What is this? Again you’re forcing me to watch a film I already forgot and now can’t understand?”

  “When it comes to a creative artist, this is not necessarily a liability. Perhaps you can get some help from the younger memory of your companion.”

  “In this movie, if I remember correctly, her role was marginal.”

  “But in the film to be screened this evening,” declares the priest, “she’s the star.”

  4

  AG
AIN, APPLAUSE IN the little theater, more crowded now than at the previous screening. Young people sit on the stairs, and a few older women have arrived, apparently housewives who’ve finished their daily work.

  “You don’t have TV reception in your province,” whispers Moses, “so the locals come to see weird films in black-and-white?”

  “Mediocre television is readily available, but in recent years we have persuaded the local people to look for something more. The films we screen for them are usually old ones, but admission is free, and sometimes they get a chance to argue with the filmmakers, so some are willing to take the risk.”

  The director of the archive again introduces his guests, this time briefly, and the Israeli director insists on saying a few preliminary words. Again he cannot resist carping about their choosing such a crude early film from his many decades of work. Yes, he remembers the lighthearted spirit of the original film, but he wonders if it will hold up after all these years, especially when dubbed in Spanish.