The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Juan de Viola orders the lights turned off. When the credits appear on the screen, Moses notices that the lead actor is listed as codirector with him. Had Moses merely agreed to this, or was it done on his initiative? Despite the jovial feel of the production and the film’s moderate popularity among the young people, Moses himself had his doubts, so it could be that attaching the actor’s name as codirector was meant to relieve Moses of full responsibility. But what was it that bothered him about Obsession? The Spanish title now seems more fitting than the Hebrew one.

  He was essentially forced to direct this picture. Trigano didn’t involve him in the writing process; he just handed him a finished script, written in collaboration with the editor of the student newspaper at Hebrew University—a handsome, talented young man Trigano had met in an introductory psychology course required for students in the humanities program. This young man came up with an idea for a film about the crazy power of Freudian symbolism. Trigano would write the screenplay, and the friend would secure funding, but on condition that he play the lead.

  After the two managed to get financial support from the association of clinical psychologists, as well as a personal contribution from the teacher of the course, a woman of independent means, Moses had a choice: let the new partners run with an idea that he found peculiar and childish, or swallow his misgivings and preside as director over a fairly credible rendering of a preposterous notion. Fearing that if he refused, Trigano might drop him in favor of a young and gifted partner, Moses chose the latter alternative.

  With perfect timing, a sudden burst of rain drums upon the roof of the small auditorium as the camera starts to wander through Jerusalem on a wintry night, this time focusing on the alleyways of a poor neighborhood, largely ultra-Orthodox yet tolerant of the secular young people living there. In a rented apartment, whose location Moses can’t quite recall, a raucous student party is under way, dominated by a tall young man with long hair who transfixes his listeners with tales of his travels in India. He takes from his pocket a large fountain pen that doubles as a flashlight, and from the innards of the pen he produces a tiny scroll of parchment with a colorful picture of a beautiful, naked Indian woman, wreathed by inscriptions, devout or perhaps lustful, in an unknown tongue. The pen is passed from hand to hand, and the students examine it with amused curiosity, opening and closing it, testing the little flashlight, examining the scroll to have a good look at the Indian woman and try to guess the meaning of the writing around her.

  Moses cannot remember what was said or wasn’t in this party scene, but he is disinclined to listen to Pilar’s simultaneous translation. She sits at his side in place of de Viola, who has gone to prepare for evening Mass. Yes, now he understands the priest’s offhand remark: not knowing the language sometimes brings about new insights.

  With no dialogue to distract him, he can see clearly not only the fakery of the main character who tries to pump up his manliness with a pen from the East, but the hollowness of the actor himself.

  Is this what bothered him while they were making the film, so much so that he tried to disown it, despite its relative success? Could he actually sense that the charismatic young man who won Trigano over was morally damaged?

  It wasn’t the man’s opinions or his smooth way with words that put Moses off. He was convinced that a man who believed in nothing could not, for all his cleverness and charm, penetrate the character of another human being and make it come alive. Moses refused to include the man again—“It’s him or me,” he told Trigano.

  On the screen, the hour is late and the party is over, and on his motor scooter, the hero is giving a student, played by Ruth, a ride to her parents’ home in Jerusalem. At the door, he takes his leave with quick hugs and a cursory kiss, then continues on to his rented room in a house not far from the Old City, which in those pre-’67 days was off-limits, an object of longing. A bit tipsy, he undresses for bed, listening to an upbeat tune on a foreign radio station, and in his cozy pajamas, before going to sleep, he decides he wants to fondle the Indian pen one more time, take out the piece of parchment, perhaps decipher the message on the lips of the girl. But he discovers the pen has disappeared, and he searches for it frantically, but in vain. And instead of waiting till morning, he gives way to the panic that drives the plot and plunges him into the abyss.

  Step by step, Trigano cleverly escalated the insane obsession. After the hero turns his room upside down, he gets dressed, grabs a flashlight, and returns to the cold empty streets he crisscrossed with the student. He walks slowly, inspecting the road and the sidewalks, ultimately arriving at the girl’s house, where he pounds on the door, wakes her parents, and insists that their daughter has pickpocketed his pen.

  The search grows more delirious, and since the film’s hero, unlike the audience, doesn’t understand what the lost pen symbolizes, his madness becomes a tragicomic journey, offering glimpses of Israeli student life as each of his friends reacts to his behavior, some with anger and scorn, a few with compassion and readiness to help. Somehow this shoestring-budget film, eighty-five minutes long, evolved into a picaresque quest for the lost symbol, and Moses notices that despite the loony script, he made sure as director to maintain respect for the tormented character wallowing in humiliation, so as not to distance the audience from a man bent on surrender to obsession. But Trigano’s script failed to bring the film to the open and generous conclusion found in the greatest picaresque works. After the hero goes from student to student, trying vainly to discover who at that raucous party had secretly coveted his pen, he breaks into their apartments to search for his lost object. And since the inscrutable symbol has so deeply permeated the soul of the hero that the psychiatrist, who enters late in the film, cannot free him of the obsession, it’s only natural that the rigid, one-dimensional screenplay was given a radical ending that Trigano was unwilling to modify. And so, in the last scene, as the sun goes down, the hero lays his handsome head on a railroad track and waits.

  The cheers at the end of the movie are more ardent and longer than at the previous screening, perhaps because of the young people in the crowd, while some of the older ones hurry to the exit before the lights go up. Ruth opens her bloodshot eyes and yawns. Moses wonders if there is any point to going onstage without the archive director at his side. The petite animation teacher who is to moderate will not be forceful enough to control the audience in discussing a film that contains a seed of perversion. He suggests combining this discussion with the one that is to follow the evening screening, especially since the railroad tracks that end the present film will open the next one.

  Pilar appears relieved. She too is happy to avoid discussing a movie whose meaning is so obvious, and she hurries to the stage and announces the postponement of the discussion until the next screening. A few in the audience look disappointed; this time, many have wanted not only to ask questions but to attack. And Moses, who feels mildly guilty about avoiding the conversation, asks to attend the evening Mass conducted by the priest. For at the end of the retrospective, if he indeed decides to confess his professional sins to a film-savvy priest, he ought to know something about the confessor’s style of prayer.

  It’s good to visit the little chapel where officers of the army barracks once prayed. In its modest way, its beauty and harmony are the equal of its mighty sister in Santiago. Hanging on the walls are pictures of beasts of prey of a sort not generally found in churches.

  It’s crowded. The old people who just saw Obsession have come to purify themselves through evening prayer, and, who knows, maybe evening prayer in so charming a chapel is the actual purpose of their visit to the film institute. Juan de Viola wears a white robe and chants the liturgy in a pleasant voice, and from the yellowed marble altar, bedecked with wreaths of white roses, he nods his thanks to the Jews.

  After the service, Moses expresses due admiration of the chapel and pleads with the priest to drop the idea of taking them to a fancy restaurant after the third movie. “Don’t strain your bud
get,” he says. “The fatigue and excitement of revisiting forgotten films will make it hard for us to focus on an expensive meal. We should eat early and satisfy our hunger with a quick hop to the cafeteria. We can postpone the banquet till tomorrow.”

  Given no choice, Ruth agrees. During the break she slept on the sofa, and she napped in her seat during the screening, and she’s ready for fine restaurant food. But Moses knows that in a foreign city, with her poor English, she will have a hard time going without him.

  The cafeteria is jammed. Have all these people come to see The Train and the Village? Moses enters the self-service line and picks up a cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic. Ruth makes do with black coffee. Soon her character will propel the plot of a provocative film, and she is getting ready to encounter her old self.

  5

  THE WOODEN FLOOR of the big hall creaks, and the room is nearly full. Some of the elderly faces are familiar from the afternoon screenings; the number of younger viewers has grown, and middle-aged couples have arrived in groups from neighboring villages.

  This time Moses takes no issue with the choice of film. He remembers this one and is confident in the quality of the plot and its execution. The Train and the Village, whose original Hebrew title was Distant Station, is the fourth film he made with Trigano. The idea for the film cropped up during the final shooting days of Obsession, as they were looking for railroad tracks they could film. They found a stretch of the track to Jerusalem, which in those days ran along the old border with Jordan, downhill from a divided Arab village. It was a picturesque section of the route, where the tracks made steep switchbacks on a rocky mountainside. The train from Jerusalem to the coastal plain passed through only twice a day, at a drowsy crawl, which meant they could march their desperate hero again and again between the iron tracks until they carefully balanced his head on one of them, found the proper angle, and shot several takes. It was clear that showing the severed head was taboo, so Trigano suggested ending the film with a close-up of a bloody, mangled jacket on the tracks, the missing pen glistening nearby in the moonlight. Moses, however, firmly rejected any improvised alteration of the original script. We have to respect the written word, and any change requires consensus, he said. Besides which, the planned ending, in which the train has not yet passed and only its faint whistle blast is heard in the distance, does not belittle the hero.

  Trigano’s disappointment with Moses’ adamant refusal to decapitate his friend was apparently the inspiration for a new film, set entirely in the train station of a remote mountain village, in which the tight linkage of love and death would be crystal clear. And with these very words, eros and thanatos, Moses guides the audience to the symbolic heart of the movie they are about to see. Galicians not familiar with the Israel of the 1950s and 1960s and its sleepy local trains will not realize that a sleek, luxury express train—in too big a hurry to stop at a desolate mountain station, a train that races by each evening with sublime indifference and blind trust in a long bridge suspended over a deep abyss—is a product of pure fantasy. But according to the movie’s internal logic—reveals Moses, to de Viola’s chagrin—it is no wonder that, for the forgotten villagers, such a train inspires longing, helpless anger, and the desire to deal the indifferent world a dose of disaster and pity, to which end they must shunt the train from the main track to a rickety siding, causing it to plunge into the ravine below. De Viola interrupts and censors the translation to prevent giving away the ending, but Moses is swept up in his revelations and is explaining to the audience that the village they are about to see is in effect two villages in one, on both sides of a border, and the portion inside the kingdom of Jordan had to be filmed with a telescopic lens—at which point the priest tugs at his sleeve. “Come, my friend,” he whispers, virtually shoving him from the stage, “it would be a shame to ruin the viewing experience with unimportant detail.” The technician turns out the lights, and Moses has to feel for the step with his foot.

  This was the first of their films that called for many extras to portray the villagers and the passengers on the train. In the past they had been able to draw on friends, and as backup they had members of Trigano’s family, eager to immortalize themselves but also genuinely excited by the scriptwriter’s ingenuity. This time they had to look for paid extras, young and middle-aged and a few elderly, and mold them into a frustrated community stewing in the humiliation dealt them by the speeding evening train, a village whose forbidden, repressed fantasy would be unleashed by a young woman, sitting now beside him, overwhelmed by emotion.

  In a morning fog pierced by first light, the camera follows an old, creaking freight train, wearily twisting up a mountain track. Now and again, the camera skips to the tiny mountain station, where awaiting the train is the veteran stationmaster, wearing a cap with a brim and holding two signal flags, one red and folded in a downward position, and the other green and unfurled, which he will soon wave at the locomotive. Moses remembers the man. A dour-looking actor from the Yiddish theater, he accurately played the loyal and reliable official who would in the end be turned by wily villagers into the person solely responsible for a calculated act of terrible destruction.

  Although Moses praised the actor for his nuanced portrayal of his character, he could barely get a word from the man about the movie’s plot. Let’s wait till it’s done, the actor would say, elegantly dodging the question, we’ll see how it all comes together. Moses could sense that this Holocaust survivor was repelled by the Israelis’ fanciful catastrophe, and by the time the editing was complete, Moses had lost contact with the actor, who did not show up at the premiere. It was impossible not to interpret his absence as dissociation from the film, and especially from what his character had been dragged into. Moses once saw him walking in the street, straight-backed and gloomy, dressed all in black, as if he were still playing the tragic character of stationmaster in a godforsaken mountain village. He considered approaching him and telling him the reviewers had praised his performance, but he feared provoking the wrath of a man who had been led astray by the young people of his village.

  But now, in the dawning light of the film’s first moments, not only he but all the dreamers and deluders of the village, all the innocents and the inveiglers, do not yet know how they will fit into the story concocted by the scriptwriter. And while the locomotive of the freight train sways with the screeching of brakes as it braves the curving tracks, the stationmaster rushes to lean his weight on the railway switches—two metal levers constructed by the set designer to give the illusion that only when they are manipulated can the freight train diverge from the main track and come to a safe stop at the station. Toledano insisted on shooting the face of the engine driver—a real one, who was flustered by the film crew awaiting him at the station. The camera also follows two sleepy workers, who now speak fluent Spanish, as they jump from a dark railroad car and begin uprooting weeds between the tracks.

  “Were they real railroad workers or extras?” Moses whispers to Ruth, who predictably doesn’t have an answer.

  Moses puts an arm around her, gently strokes her hair.

  The light brightens, and the village awakens to a routine day. Men leave their homes, children go to school, women do laundry in a small artificial spring built for the occasion to give the village a primitive feeling—everything flows so smoothly that even the dubbing seems natural to Moses.

  “The Spanish you planted in my movies is starting to grow on me,” he whispers in Juan de Viola’s ear. “Who knows, I might be tempted to make my next film in Spain, maybe in Santiago.”

  The priest’s face lights up. “For that possibility alone, the retrospective was worth the effort.” And in a surprising gesture of affection, he brings the director’s right hand to his lips for a gentle clerical kiss.

  Meanwhile on the big screen, the freight train crawls ahead, sounding its whistle, and in the station house a new character awakens, the stationmaster’s assistant, a dreamy youth who will later turn out to be unreliable and
perfidious. He emerges disheveled from a tangle of sheets, stands in his underwear by the window, and surveys the village streets through big military binoculars, spying on the girl he loves with all his heart.

  “How and why have I forgotten his name?” Moses whispers to the woman at his side.

  “Because he was a rotten son of a bitch.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “His name was Yakir.”

  “That’s right, Yakir. What happened to him? Where’d he disappear to?”

  “I thought he was killed in a war but unfortunately I got him mixed up with someone else. A few years ago I ran into him on the street, but I avoided him. After what he did to me in the film—”

  “He was difficult . . .”

  “For you he was difficult, for me he was horrible. This animal dragged me into the bushes in the last scene, and you let him do it. He was a despicable person who exploited the opportunity you gave him to humiliate me.”

  “I gave him?” Moses laughs. “Why me? I just followed the script.”

  “But without pity . . . you didn’t spare me.” Ruth seethes as if they were discussing a scene to be reshot in a few minutes.

  Moses tries to make light of it.

  “Why should I be easy on a girl who charms the villagers to plunge an express train into a gorge just to attract a little attention from the world?”

  “What do you mean, attention?” she protests. “You’re forgetting the empathy that we, the villagers, experienced, the compassion and concern, the devoted care we gave the injured passengers. That was my mission in the movie, all without speaking a word.”