The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Moses remembers that in those far-off days Trigano had a theory: that the energy of the young, industrious state fanned the hatred of its neighbors and fatigued the Jews who came from Arab lands. That might point to a connection between the sleep of the stationmaster in the previous film and the collective, addictive, reckless, and aimless slumber of the military men in this one.

  Now and then one of the soldiers wakes up, wriggles slowly from his sleeping bag, goes for a snack or drink or to answer nature’s call, and on returning shoves aside his gear and weapon with such force that it suggests not only the rejection of military duty but erosion of the core of his identity. The Spanish mumbling between the soldier and the guard, who opens his sleepy eyes for a moment, sounds softer at night, if not more intelligible. Whatever they may be saying, Moses knows that the desert, with its shifting colors and sunsets and wailing winds, is meant to overwhelm the reserve soldiers in the absence of their longtime commander.

  And so, in this brazen, pretentious script, the vacuum of authority may be filled by a young Bedouin woman, a powerful persona cloaked in black. Now she draws close, approaching the campfire, daring to come near the secret installation itself; the sleepy reservists, who had earlier perceived her as a fleeting reverie, now tolerate her veiled presence fully.

  Each night she comes to the camp and with gentle silence wins the trust of the guards, who have no idea what she wants but enjoy her exotic female company and as family men are protective of her honor. Sometimes she brings along a black child, and sometimes an old woman trails behind her. One night she is accompanied by two sturdy men, who keep their distance. The veiled young woman, who only at night visits soldiers who also sleep by day, lays bare the prevailing anarchy.

  As the filming progressed, the cinematographer and director came to appreciate the hidden mysteries of the veil, the concentration of female eroticism in those yellow-gray eyes. Moses’ gaze wanders in the hall to the aging Berber, and when he locates her a few rows in front, her head slung back, he is reminded that this movie ends badly. How could he have forgotten the reversal in the second half, a truly dramatic twist with not a trace of a double plot and a conclusion whose meaning depends on what one makes of the secret installation.

  Moses recalls that after he read the first draft of the screenplay, he kept interrogating his former student about the symbolism of the installation. Trigano avoided an answer. The installation does not need any meaning, it can stay fluid and elusive, open to different and contradictory interpretations, somewhere between hope and despair, past and future.

  Moses lowers his head and closes his eyes. He remembers agonizing over the meaning of the installation and worrying that its symbolism was diluted by vagueness. At night, after the day’s shoot, while the crew and the extras were absorbed in backgammon or card games, Toledano would offer creative, half-serious opinions about the installation to lift Moses’ spirits. Assume it’s a storage for nuclear waste, or an archive of top-secret documents, or a cache of illicit biological material that could wipe out humanity, and you’ll feel better. Once, he even suggested Moses imagine that hidden inside the installation were the ashes of the Golden Calf that was burned and ground into powder after the biblical Moses received the Ten Commandments—ancient vestiges of a failed identity. Entangled in practical problems, the director was unable to undertake such flights of abstraction. This was a desert production at the bend of a dry gully in the belly of a small crater, and it was not easy to bring in provisions and maintain a system of communications. Moreover, they had to provide security for the sleeping soldiers and the crew that staged and filmed their sleep. Because across the border with Jordan, a real enemy lay in wait, and because bands of fedayeen were known to infiltrate the area, the military authorities agreed to send an occasional patrol, and the actual young soldiers were fascinated by their elderly lookalikes lounging idly in front of a camera.

  It was in those days that they first drew on the support of Yaakov Amsalem, a likable fellow of North African extraction, a wholesaler at the Beersheba produce market and lover of cinema who later went into real estate. Amsalem believed in Trigano’s ideas and even saw moneymaking potential, and he not only supplied fresh food but also volunteered to work as an extra.

  Moses spots him on the screen, a beefy man in a rumpled army uniform. It was hard to film him as a sleeper, because his bubbly personality limited his capacity to lie still before the camera. Instead he happily took responsibility for tending the campfire, proving himself an able wood gatherer. Toledano instructed him to bring twigs that produced a purplish smoke, which imparted a devilish quality to the soldiers. Right now, such a haze fills the screen, and Moses again closes his eyes to intensify the memory of the smoke. Slowly, he sinks into the old, sweet fragrance of soft branches burning, their purple smoke painting the screen of his eyelids.

  6

  WHEN HE OPENS his eyes, the smoke and the campfire and the installation and the soldiers have disappeared. The desert too has faded, and night is replaced by a strong afternoon sun as an airplane lands at the tiny airport of Tel Aviv. In a quick series of shots, the commander comes into view, a vigorous man about fifty with graying hair who projects authority as he returns in his private plane from a business trip abroad. Moses smiles to himself as he recognizes the head of the village from Distant Station, and he suddenly recalls the name of the actor: Shlomo Fuchs, known to everyone as Foxy, no longer among the living. Yesterday he convincingly collaborated in plunging a passenger train into an abyss, and today he will play a more complicated part that entangles him in a hasty killing.

  His wife does not seem at all happy to have him home, as written in the script or perhaps as embellished by the actress. The moment he enters, she hands him the reserve call-up notice that arrived in his absence, as if urging him to perform a duty to the nation before he begins to pester her and impose order in the household. After a quick lunch with his grown children, the new protagonist does not further impede the plot; he readies himself to go down to the desert and join his soldiers.

  The montage is brisk but believable. In his bedroom he puts on his uniform and straightens his officer’s stripes. From under the double bed he pulls out a submachine gun and a kit filled with black magazines, and he is ready and able, as always, to go to battle.

  It was the cinematographer and not the writer who called for the commander to drive himself to the desert in an army jeep with no doors or roof, enabling the camera to follow him from far and near, emphasizing the loneliness of the authority figure as he aims to end the anarchy. As close-ups of a determined brow and silvery locks tossing in the wind are intercut with long shots of a green jeep meandering among desert cliffs, the commander nears the remote crater, and Moses can feel that the jeep’s journey in daylight and darkness, taking no more than a minute of screen time, has aroused expectation in the hall, mingled with vague trepidation. But he also remembers how Toledano tortured them for hours to get that one pure minute, how he repositioned the crew again and again around the jeep, which at one point broke down, and how he kept switching lenses and angles, waiting for changes in the light and movements of the clouds, all to make his visual dream come true.

  The jeep descends silently, headlights off, into the crater, where the installation flickers with reflections of a dying campfire. The commander does not confront the peacefully slumbering guards or try to wake his troops, but rather strolls through the little encampment lost in thoughts and plans, surveying the surrounding cliffs and making mental notes of lookout points, a suitable location for a firing range, hillsides for combat exercises, an open space for lineups. It is only when he climbs on a rock to find a place for his soldiers to practice digging trenches that he catches sight of a thin black figure watching him from afar.

  The one soldier he finally wakes up is the bugler, who henceforth will accompany him with staccato blasts. All of a sudden the slow, quiet film is filled with loud speech and urgent action. Commands, shouts, complaints, laughter,
and cursing whose rapid dubbing in Spanish reminds Moses of Italian movies about World War II. On top of guard duty, training exercises, and nighttime lineups, the screen is gradually dominated by the relationship between the older commander and the young Berber.

  Despite the discipline and order imposed by the commander, the young woman continues her visits, as if she too has a stake in the installation. And despite the commander’s strict order to banish her, she manages to outwit the guards and slip close again and again. But unlike the guards, who were indifferent to her presence and never bothered to interrogate her, the commander grows increasingly angry over her nightly appearances, and since he himself has no idea what sort of installation he is guarding, he assumes that she knows nothing about it either, that her stubborn visits at night are only meant to demonstrate that she is an equal partner of the Jews, an ally in ignorance. The commander decides to eradicate this presumptuous partnership at its root.

  Trigano’s intention to end the film with the killing of the young woman worried Moses. If you have a mature citizen, a family man and successful businessman, called up for a short stint of reserve duty and thrust into a situation of no clear and present danger, he said to Trigano, it will take an extreme directorial feat to convince an audience that his murderous rage is believable. But Trigano would not give up on the death of his Berber. Only after their final breakup did Moses understand that it was probably the writer’s great love for Ruth that impelled him to drag her in his scripts into situations of loss and humiliation, so the evil realized on the screen would return to real life drained of vitality, which was his way of protecting her. Meanwhile, between scenes, a unique friendship developed between the two lovers and Foxy, whom the scriptwriter and the actress fondly dubbed the “killer officer.”

  With a pang of discomfort, Moses watches two members of the audience slipping sheepishly out of the hall. True enough, he wasn’t sure whether to stage the murder at night or by day, or whether the girl should be aware of the threat or remain proud and aloof until the moment she died. And the fatal shot—should it be at close range or from far away? Should she die theatrically, or should he make do with a modest bloodstain on her garment? Trigano began to make suggestions, but Moses objected to his interference and in the end banned him from the filming of the scene. “Just as I don’t hover over your desk when you’re writing, I don’t want you standing behind the camera while I’m directing,” he told him firmly.

  Did the cinematographer’s fervor for Ruth also render the director suspect in her lover’s eyes? The cameraman and his assistant pleaded with Moses to keep the scriptwriter at a distance, as “his wiseass intellectualism will only trip us up.” But in the Spanish screening room, in the company of maybe a dozen foreign viewers, Moses can suddenly feel the pain his young collaborator suffered when he was prevented from witnessing his loved one’s murder.

  “We’ll tie you up at dawn on a cliff,” said the cameraman to the actress, “but in your death you’ll be even more beautiful than in life.” Indeed, on the day before the filming, the cinematographer climbed onto an east-facing cliff just before sunrise to check the light from every angle. The following evening, he sent his assistant and the soundman up with the equipment. In the dead of night he led the two actors and the director to the spot, and there applied makeup, his own concoction, to the actress and waited for the glimmer of dawn to illuminate the contours of her face, which would appear uncovered for the first time when the impact of the bullet to her heart knocked off her veil.

  All the scenes leading to this one had already been shot: the repeated expulsions of the Bedouin woman from the installation, the rebukes and warnings, including a forced march back to her family’s encampment. Her father had warned and threatened her and would have also tied her up, except he knew she would escape and return to the Israeli watchmen, believing that she too belonged at the secret installation.

  The final pursuit of the Bedouin girl by the officer had been filmed over and over, in daytime and at night, leaving only the final showdown on the rim of a cliff—a respectable citizen, an angry and exhausted commander, versus a young and delicate but strong-minded woman, whose joyful laughter now heightens the screen. Moses knows this laughter was not in the original script but was born of his inspiration. Laughter meant to trigger the rage of the officer, who apparently imagines that the woman is trying to seduce him and fears that he might succumb to the passion of this desert creature. He pulls the pistol from his pocket and fires in the air, but the laughter, free and young and mocking, demands another bullet to silence it, and a third bullet so the actress, persuasive and credible in her pain and collapse, will not rise again.

  When Trigano saw the scene in the editing room, he had to admit that it had gone well. The sunrise, enhanced by artificial lighting, gave a mysterious greenish tinge to the bloody confrontation, with the young actress dropping to her knees before breathing her last. “You produced a glorious absurdity, like Camus in The Stranger,” Trigano complimented the cinematographer and director while still resentful over being barred from the set. He of course knew about Toledano’s deep feelings for Ruth, who was their shared childhood love, but he never regarded him as a true rival. Now, for the first time, he suspected that his former teacher’s heart might be joining them.

  But the movie doesn’t end there. It goes on for another twenty minutes, which had been erased from the director’s memory. For the script is determined not to let the officer get away with it, but requires him to cover his victim with stones, dismantle his gun, and throw the pieces into the abyss, and only then to return to his soldiers and snuggle into his sleeping bag. And since the wandering girl had an independent way of life, it takes several days for her family to notice her absence. In the meantime, the killer officer has tightened the disciplinary screws on his soldiers, concocting new military chores and tedious ceremonies. A flagpole is erected and a flag raised to the sound of the bugle. At the pre-dinner lineup he reads out passages from the Bible in a clear, charmless voice, as if giving orders, and if he thinks someone isn’t listening, he tosses pebbles at him. After the meal he sings long-forgotten Zionist songs, accompanied by a harmonica-playing soldier. And though at the morning lineup every soldier is checked for unshaved stubble, the commander has grown a beard, so when two military policemen arrive looking for him, they need to check the photograph against his face more than once before slapping on the handcuffs and putting him into the same green jeep that he, the authority figure, had driven down to the desert.

  The director, watching his long-neglected work, is duly impressed by the precise mix of haughtiness and insanity on the prisoner’s face. Was this expression a product of scrupulous directing, or did it arise from within the actor? Or could it be the fading of the original print, which sat abandoned for many years in an anonymous drawer? But Moses well remembers the closing scene and is still proud of it. The installation twinkles in the light of the dwindling campfire, while the guards have all returned to their deep soldierly slumber.

  7

  THE APPLAUSE IS guarded but lasts long enough not to qualify as insulting. When the lights go on, one member of the audience gets up from his seat, turns to Moses, makes a two-fingered V for victory, bellows a brief Bravo!, and flees the hall. Yes, better an abridged reaction than a tiresome ritual of Q&A, says Moses to himself, but Bejerano insists on proper procedure and rises to invite the director to the stage to fulfill his duty at the retrospective held in his honor.

  Moses sighs discreetly and heads down the aisle. He spots Ruth, her eyes teary. He hugs her warmly, strokes her hair. “See,” he says with affection, “we gave you a nice powerful death back there. Believe me, that kind of scene makes it worthwhile to transfer the movie to DVD so Israelis too can appreciate what we did with primitive equipment forty years ago.”

  She nods and grasps both the director’s hands, squeezing hard. Does she feel a new threat, is that why she is so upset about her death scene? As he gently works free of her g
rip, an old man gets up, skinny and hunched, clad in a black suit and red bow tie. This is Don Gomez, explains Bejerano to Moses, a distinguished member of the faculty who years ago served as dean, a theoretician of cinema whose articles are published in important journals. And because the Israeli film has prompted new thoughts, Don Gomez asks his young colleague for permission to come to the stage and say a few words.

  Moses approves the request at once. The straightforward and independent reaction of a theoretician is preferable, in his view, to any other discussion. He gestures grandly to the elderly teacher, who removes his hat and goes onstage while Moses stays with Ruth, holding her hand to calm her, asking that Rodrigo translate.

  Translation is not simple. The erudite old man has many thoughts, not all of them germane to Slumbering Soldiers, and he takes advantage of the right of first response to deliver a learned lecture to his assembled friends.

  Rodrigo tries at first to translate faithfully the complex thoughts of Don Gomez, rapidly expressed in a hoarse voice tinged with pathos. But the limits of his English become quickly apparent, and he gives up. “Leave it be,” says Moses, “listen to him and tell me if his overall position is positive or negative.” “Absolutely positive,” the young Spaniard hastens to assure him. “He was very impressed by your military installation and the system of symbols it generated, and he also appreciates the courage it took to make a film with such an airy plot, free of dramatic effects.” “In that case”—Moses settles into his chair—“I have no further need of translation. For a veteran like me, the main thing is a friendly review and not the reasons that justify it.”

  8

  ONLY AT 5:30 are they liberated from the hall. The scholarly old man lost track of time, and the discussion heated up and ran on forever. Meanwhile, Pilar came in to inform Rodrigo that the plane from Madrid carrying Juan de Viola’s mother and brother has been delayed and that the screening of the film based on the Kafka story would be postponed for two hours at least; the guests should rest in the office of the director of the archive.