The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “Why don’t you lie down here,” says Moses to his companion, “on the sofa; my head is spinning from our crazy movie, I need to walk it off. Also, tomorrow night we’ll be on our way back to Israel, and it’s still not clear to me what this institute is and how the archive works, I need to sniff around a bit. Lock the door, or you might be surprised by some young filmmaker eager to confess to his priest.”

  Again, he yearns for that Berber girl who has come back to life, and he embraces her gently, runs his lips lightly over her forehead and neck, and says, “Just know you were and still are an extraordinary actress”—and quickly goes to hunt through the halls. He cannot find the men’s room and heads outside into a huge parking lot. Winter clouds have darkened the late afternoon, so he doesn’t fear for the good name of his native land as he urinates between two cars, casting his gaze skyward. Soon the rain will wash away the little puddle, leaving not a trace of his visit. In addition to the white lines marking the parking spots, he notices, there are blurry lines painted on the asphalt, long and diagonal, yellow and red—traces of bygone drills of infantry soldiers or armored corps or artillery. He will ask de Viola what happened here during the civil war. The Spaniards have indeed become a peace-loving nation; they have blithely converted a military facility to an arts institute. When we filmed Slumbering Soldiers, Moses wonders, did we actually believe that our wars would someday be over?

  He marches along one of the red stripes. A cold wind pelts his face with drops of rain, but he soldiers on to the middle of the field, stands there at attention, perhaps at the spot where the base commander had surveyed his troops, and imagines he hears the roar of the ocean. But the strong wind chases away his illusions of grandeur and he has to retrace his steps.

  He returns to the institute by an entrance that leads to a lower floor, where he finds the postproduction labs he visited yesterday, the big editing room with the latest equipment, and the sound studio, with happy voices inside. This must be where they dubbed my films, he thinks. Carefully he opens a door and finds a room with two projectors and recording equipment and two technicians managing them. At a round table sit young people with script pages in their hands, among them two Asians, an older man, and a young woman. The dubbing director, perched in a high chair and orchestrating the activity, greets the visitor and identifies him by name.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” mumbles the director, pleased to be recognized. “I just wanted to know if this is where my films were dubbed.”

  “Here, Mr. Moses, there is no other place. I hope that the voices we transplanted into your characters sound right.”

  “Definitely.”

  “These are our actors, students at the institute. And the gentleman there is a famous screenwriter from Vietnam, Mr. Ho Chi Minh, and the lady is his interpreter.”

  “Ho Chin Lu,” corrects the writer, rising from his chair.

  “Of course. For the next month we will be preparing a retrospective of Vietnamese films about love affairs between men from the North and women from the South, and vice versa, from the time of their endless wars.”

  “Interesting and also important.”

  “Amazing films, difficult and painful. What can you do, wars provide great film material.”

  “Damn wars,” snaps Moses.

  “Of course. But they must not be forgotten.”

  “No doubt,” mutters Moses, and draws closer to the dubbers. “When you dubbed my films,” he says to the group, “was there an Israeli here to advise you?”

  “Your screenwriter.”

  “In other words—” says Moses, his heart pounding.

  “Of course, Shaul Trigano. About a year ago he was here in the studio for quite a while. He explained a lot of things, acted them out, made us laugh. A sharp man. Very original.”

  “So Trigano was here?”

  “It wasn’t you who sent him, sir?”

  “No, no . . . the idea was all his.”

  “A blessed idea . . . We were very taken by your early films . . . especially the one based on the Kafka story.”

  “In Our Synagogue.”

  “Did Kafka really write this story about Jews in Israel?”

  “About Jews in general.”

  He roams the floors and corridors until he finds the room Ruth was supposed to have locked herself into. Its door is open, and lights and voices welcome him. De Viola has brought the guests from Madrid, opened a bottle of red wine in their honor, and all of them, Ruth and Rodrigo included, are laughing, glasses in hand. Moses bows slightly to the mother, Doña Elvira, a beautiful actress, age ninety-four, who has come to grace the retrospective with her presence, joined by her younger son, Manuel, a tall Dominican monk, about forty-five years old, a golden cross dangling on his white robe.

  “Welcome to our abode.” He greets Moses in the classical Hebrew the Dominican order encourages its monks to study.

  “What’s this?” Moses addresses the mother. “Religion has conquered your family?”

  “What can one do”—she sighs—“today, religion conquers all.”

  Juan laughs.

  Wine is poured for Moses and he clinks glasses with everyone, takes a sip, and turns with a smile to the director of the archive. “They just told me in the lab that Trigano was here a year ago and that he helped with the dubbing. But if he is the hand behind my retrospective, why conceal it from me?”

  “Because he asked us not to tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knew you would not want to follow him here.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You do know how much he hates you.”

  “Still?” Moses sighs heavily. He turns to Ruth, who averts her eyes.

  “Still . . .” whispers the priest. “And believe me, my dear Moses, that we, who do not wish to be emotionally involved in your conflict, are nonetheless grieved by any strife between brothers.”

  four

  In Our Synagogue

  1

  “IN POINT OF fact,” Moses tells Juan de Viola in confidence, “when first I saw the list of my films you had selected, I suspected the ghost of Trigano behind this retrospective. But in the wake of our breakup, I’ve come to regard him as a failed artist, and it was hard to imagine that his faith in his early screenplays was so strong that he would go to an archive at the far edge of Spain to dub them in a foreign tongue.”

  “As a distant descendant of Jews exiled from Spain—that is how he put it,” says Juan de Viola, “it was important to him to learn some Spanish and supervise his works in Spain.”

  “Faith in the immortality of one’s art,” continues Moses, “even if unfounded, is understandable, but is it possible that he convinced you to hold a retrospective to force me to come and defend his delusions?”

  “No, Moses, the opposite is true,” insists the director of the archive. “After we dubbed the films, including the one that disappeared from your official filmography, we asked Trigano if it was worth organizing a retrospective around them and inviting the director to reconnect with his old style.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “I would rather not repeat what he said.”

  “I’ve put that loser way behind me, he can no longer upset me.”

  “Funny how you define each other in a similar way.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “A failed artist,” whispers Juan, “that’s what he calls you. A director whose earliest achievements were not his own.”

  Moses’ eyes narrow. He looks around to check if the scathing diagnosis was overheard in the room.

  “A failed artist?” He laughs scornfully, resting his glass on a corner shelf. “That’s how he defines a man who has made so many successful films after breaking off with him?”

  “And what if he said it?” The priest hurries to soften the blow. “If he is worthless in your eyes, why take what he says seriously? We here, all of us, at the institute and the archive, refused to accept his opinion and were keen to mo
unt this retrospective. The four films we have seen in the past two days confirm that we were not mistaken.”

  But Moses is overcome by gloom. He casts a baleful look at the sanctimonious little clergyman who has slandered him slyly yet again.

  “Then why did you invite me? You could have done with his explanations of the films.”

  The director of the archive is quick to answer.

  “The writer can explain the intention, but only the director can justify the result.”

  Moses takes his glass and refills it from the wine bottle on the desk. Silence has fallen in the room, as if to lay bare his humiliation. Doña Elvira, sitting on the sofa wrapped in Ruth’s blanket, smiles brightly, and her younger son, the Dominican, sitting beside Ruth, gives Moses a supportive look.

  With his glass filled to the brim Moses returns to the director of the archive and says pointedly: “I don’t know of any film that was dropped from my filmography.”

  “The one we are about to see, In Our Synagogue.”

  “That film?”

  “Here,” says the priest, pulling from his pocket a familiar wrinkled page with Moses’ picture. “It’s not mentioned here, unless it’s under a different name.”

  Moses straightens out a crease in his Internet biography.

  “It’s true, this film is missing for some reason, but why would its name be changed? It’s based on a Kafka story of the same title. It was Kafka’s aura that enabled us to let a small wild animal join in prayer.”

  “Join in prayer?”

  “Be present at all times in the synagogue,” Moses clarifies. “It’s a film I am proud of in every way, and if it was dropped from my filmography, it’s one more proof that the Internet is full of mistakes and nonsense.”

  “Exactly.” The priest sighs. “But the public perceives it as an omniscient deity that demands our confessions. In any case, I’m pleased that you stand staunchly behind this film, because to be frank I was a bit wary and decided to show it by invitation only, to people for whom Kafka is a holy name.”

  “What were you afraid of?”

  “Apart from the fact that I didn’t find it in your filmography, I also didn’t want to find Jews in the audience.”

  “There are Jews in Galicia?”

  “You never can tell. There are crypto-Jews everywhere.”

  “And what if there were Jews in the audience?”

  “They might be offended by the participation of such an animal in the worship of God. We don’t need any protests.”

  “The animal is not a participant in anything,” says Moses flatly. “It’s a free and independent animal. A metaphysical animal.”

  “A metaphysical animal? Is there such a thing?”

  “In any case, that’s how I tried to portray it.”

  2

  IT IS SUGGESTED to have dinner early, before the screening, lest the animal dampen the appetite, but in the end they stick to the original schedule. The length of the film is finite, but dinner can last indefinitely. Moreover, the elderly mother, weary from her flight, would prefer to see the film while she is still lucid.

  The screening room is actually the archive’s recording studio, with the control room included to provide extra space. The screen is small and made of fabric, which rustles slightly in the drafty room.

  Juan de Viola introduces the invited guests by name and occupation, the first being the same elderly teacher and theoretician who had, an hour before, with courage and generosity, decorated Slumbering Soldiers with commentary that might transmute a film left for dead into a forgotten masterpiece. The rest are teachers at the institute, vaguely remembered from the previous day’s luncheon, along with a few young people, advanced students. All told, Moses counts twenty strong, crowded around a one-time movie queen who has accomplished her life’s work and now devotes her time to contemplating the works of others. Beside her sits her son the monk, avidly translating Ruth’s words into modern Spanish for his mother, and the latter’s words into ancient Hebrew for Ruth.

  Juan asks Moses if he would like to say a few introductory words. Moses hesitates. Dinner is being prepared, and introductions, which invariably prompt reactions, would delay the meal and cause the cooks to burn the food. Better the movie should stand on its own—strange, inscrutable, provocative—and if it incurs opposition, the expert theoretician will again offer his interpretation. And yet the insult, “failed artist,” pecks away at him, so he reconsiders, and although the lights have gone down he stands up and strides toward the screen. “Just a minute,” he says, “perhaps it’s worth saying a few words before the actual film obscures its good intentions. But there’s no need to turn up the lights, I can talk about a film in the dark.” And he invites the Dominican monk to translate his Hebrew into Spanish, so he can express himself more precisely and succinctly.

  Manuel at his side, the screen behind him, he faces the silhouetted audience and the projector, its little red switch awaiting action. And there is Moses defending not only himself, but also the screenwriter who borrowed a burning coal from a literary genius.

  “We in Israel became aware of Kafka in the fifties, in Hebrew translations of his novels and stories. In those years of ideological intensity, there was something refreshing in his symbolic, surrealistic, absurdist works, which seemed disconnected from time and place and wrapped in the mystery of a writer who died young, in the stormy, chaotic years between the World Wars. After a while, Kafka’s diaries and letters also began to appear in Hebrew, and we found detailed, intimate revelations about a secular Jew who grew up in a traditional home and whose complex identity was bathed in metaphysical yearning. But as opposed to those who interpret every line of his writings in light of his private life and sexual struggles and celebrate every Jewish detail exhumed from his biography, there were many readers, myself among them, for whom Kafka’s cryptic, radiant works transcended the specifics of his personality and inhabited the realm of the universal.

  “Trigano, my screenwriter, was drawn to Kafka as a student in high school, when I was his teacher of history and philosophy, and found him to be a steady source of ideas and inspiration. One day he discovered, perhaps in a French translation, a little-known story of Kafka’s, one not yet translated into Hebrew. It was impossible to detach the story from Jewish identity or familiar experience, since the author, who often put clever animals into his stories—monkeys, dogs, mice, even a cockroach—this time, with ironical zeal, placed a small animal, a creature both calm and frightening, into a Jewish synagogue where the narrator himself is one of the worshippers; an animal whose silence, for once, adds new dimension to the riddle of Jewish existence, which is forever a threat unto itself. It is a strange story, unusual even within the corpus of this great writer. In this story he seems to relinquish his anonymity and deliver in first-person plural the testimony of a small Jewish community, in whose synagogue this old creature had lived for many years, an animal that carried inside it a rich Jewish historical memory and perhaps also the gift of prophecy.

  “Here, ladies and gentlemen, is how the story begins. I still remember the opening by heart. ‘In our synagogue lives an animal approximately the size of a mongoose. It can often be seen clearly. It allows people to come no closer than a distance of two meters away. Its color is a bright blue-green. No one has ever touched its coat, so nothing can be said about its fur.’ What exactly drew my scriptwriter to this story, I don’t know, but I was swept up in his enthusiasm. A small symbolic animal in a narrative film seemed like a worthy adventure for a young director who believed that Kafka’s genius would protect him.

  “Kafka’s story, however, has no narrative line, only the description of a situation, of the relationship of the worshippers to the animal, a relationship that continues from generation to generation. For according to the story, the animal is older than the synagogue and has a secret hiding place inside it, but the noise of the prayers prompts it to dart out of hiding—not to interrupt, but out of anxiety. It knows the noisy prayers
are not directed its way, but it remembers something from the past, or is perhaps afraid of the future. In any event, to broaden its angle of vision, it sometimes hangs from the copper curtain rod of the holy ark or, more often, grasps the lattice that separates the upper women’s gallery from the men below and looks down. But unlike the men, who remain indifferent to it, the women worshippers are afraid of it, yet also attracted to it, and they even compete for its attention. Here we have another charming Kafkaesque paradox.”

  Moses stops, hesitates, wonders how and why he got carried away by the details of a story that grows sharper in his memory. In the darkness he can make out the sparkle of his listeners’ eyes, but he has no way of judging their attention, so he poses a question to Juan.

  “Can I go on? Do we have time?”

  “There’s time, Moses, of course” comes the loud reply. “This is an educational institution, not a movie theater.”

  “In that case,” the director continues, “to adapt a short and static story into a full-length film we had to do two things. First, create a plot with conflict and crisis; and second, choose an animal, one we could manipulate. The story supplies few details about the animal, apart from its remarkable longevity, its size like a mongoose’s, and its color, which might be natural or possibly a product of the dust and plaster of the synagogue. And since we could not produce a Kafkaesque animal, we naturally enough decided on an actual mongoose, though not an elderly one, hoping it could be trained. We painted its fur, as you shall see, the color of the synagogue wall, in keeping with the story, but added a few thin gold stripes as a mythological touch. For the benefit of the Israeli audience, we had to transplant the synagogue from the sad, fading Diaspora, unaware of the looming European catastrophe, to the new Jewish state, repository of Jewish hopes.”