The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “I see you haven’t made much progress tonight in your math,” he ventures, indicating the equations in the open book.

  “Chemistry.” She sighs with a winning smile and a pair of dimples.

  “Chemistry?” He sighs back sympathetically.

  “And you, Señor Moses, are hungry again.”

  “No, not at all.” He can still taste the goat cheese. Neither does he crave the hotel’s Internet access, but he does have a yen to walk around and would like to know if the city is safe at night for a foreigner, who to be cautious has left his wallet behind, taking only his passport.

  “Best to leave the passport with me,” advises the desk clerk, “and take instead the business card of the hotel. Also leave the walking stick and take an umbrella, because it’s cold and rainy outside. But the city is holy at night too, and if you get lost, the cathedral will always lead you back to the hotel.”

  Beside the cubbyholes hangs a colorful woolen scarf, long and thick, and he asks with atypical audacity if it belongs to her or was left behind by a guest.

  “Both.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Somebody forgot it, and I use it on cold days.”

  “If it’s a scarf without a permanent owner, perhaps I could use it to keep warm in the cold?”

  She hesitates. She is probably aware of her own allure and senses that the elderly guest with the little beard and stubbly cheeks would like the feel of her, but she takes down the scarf anyway and hands it to him. “And if I’m not here when you get back,” she says, “leave it for me,” and she writes her name for him on a slip of paper.

  Unabashedly, as if the desk clerk has turned into a character in a movie now filming in Spain, he takes the scarf—which on closer inspection is a bit tattered—wraps it around his neck, and inhales its scent. He walks out of the hotel and likes how the damp milky fog shifts the shape of the plaza and hides the palaces, makes the cathedral appear to be floating. Recalling that the alleys of the Old Town lead to the promenade and the paved garden nearby, he steps up his pace and strides confidently to his destination.

  In recent years, Yair Moses has been on friendly terms with death, which sometimes talks back, either in muffled tones or a shriek, and on the strength of this friendship he is not afraid to wander alone in remote places, even in a foreign country. Now too he is undaunted by the echo of his lonely footsteps. The Old Town is quietly sleeping, its plazas desolate save for a single shop with the lights on, where a large woman with wild hair arranges souvenirs on the shelves. For a moment, he wants to stray from his path and go in, but the gentle patter of rain on his umbrella is too pleasant to interrupt. And the moon, which on the first midnight had welcomed them with its glow, lingers beyond the clouds and fog as a faint patch of whiteness, perhaps to be unveiled before the dawning of day.

  7

  THE OLD TOWN of Santiago is not as large or confusing as the Old City of Jerusalem, nor is it surrounded by walls, so the Israeli navigates it with ease, crossing a bridge over a gully and arriving at the promenade he had visited the day before with the young instructor. He has not come for a night view of the distant cathedral from this angle but rather to have another look at the sculptures that the art college students had installed in the park. First he examines the two angry middle-aged Marys holding on to each other, their spindly legs bolted to the ground. Now, with nobody else around, he knocks on them to ascertain what they are made of. Bejerano had interpreted this sculpture as a secular challenge to the marble sculptures of the cathedral and thus decided they were made of plastic. But now, as Moses drums his fingers on the coats and smooth faces of the two women, he can feel a sturdy material, some alloy more durable than the young man had suggested. Serious women such as these two would not stand a chance in a public park, exposed to wind and rain and mischievous children, if they were made of simple plastic.

  He moves on, heading for the skinny intellectual sitting on a park bench to find if he’s made of the same stuff as the women. But from a distance it would appear he has acquired a friend, as if in the past day a new sculpture was installed beside him.

  Moses slows his gait, his heart pounding, but the silhouette has heard his approach and stands tall—a heavyset homeless man, wrapped in a sheepskin cape, who emits a growl or a curse and vanishes into the darkness.

  Just like the movies. The director grins and takes the freshly vacated seat beside the bareheaded, cross-legged intellectual who peers at the world with boundless curiosity. Moses gingerly runs his hand along the stiff scarf that covers the man’s neck—or is it a long frozen beard?—feels his close-cropped head, and tries to remove his big round eyeglasses, but they are welded to his ears. There is no doubt, he confirms, those art college students cooked up serious material. Secular characters meant to challenge saints carved in stone require a solid foundation.

  The rain has stopped, but the breaking dawn sharpens the cold. He wraps the tattered woolen scarf tight around his neck and closes his eyes, again reaching out to the girl who unsettled his sleep. He suddenly worries that he may not see her tomorrow, that she ended up on the cutting-room floor. It’s hard to be certain.

  Toledano, who had known Ruth since kindergarten, considered himself best qualified to find an actress who could play her as a child. He scouted a few drama clubs at community centers and found the candidate in an upscale neighborhood of Tel Aviv. He managed to convince her father, a high-ranking army officer and war hero, to permit his young daughter to appear in a few scenes in the film, whose content was still mostly unknown even to the cameraman himself.

  Despite the very different background of the young girl, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Ruth, not only in her facial features and expressive eyes but in her dark skin tone and the timbre of her voice.

  Trigano’s cerebral screenplays had not previously called for children, and Moses wondered if he’d be able to direct an inexperienced girl playing a difficult part, but Ruth, excited by the cinematographer’s choice, took the girl under her wing and promised to coach her.

  He insists on not waiting till he sees the film to find out whether the girl beating on the doors of his memory, the forerunner of the film’s heroine, has remained in the final cut. He demands that his memory supply him an answer right away. That innocent girl would come to the filming chaperoned by her father, who worried that something edgy might be required of his daughter. It wasn’t simple to direct a young, unseasoned amateur under the watchful eyes of her father in brief scenes intended to give clear signals of a relationship with her teacher that was somewhere between love and enslavement. Ruth kept her promise and did her share. She helped to choose articles of clothing that were right for the girl’s character, and she showed her how to ignore the camera as well as her father’s steely gaze, which disconcerted the cast and crew.

  The Refusal was relatively well received by audiences and was even able to recoup a respectable fraction of its cost, but the fight that broke out during the shooting of the final scene, and the subsequent breakup with Trigano, distanced the film from the heart of its creator, and after it had made the rounds of theaters he was quick to deposit it in the Jerusalem film archive, in the knowledge he could always see it again. But years went by and he never did, and now his screenwriter had gone back to the film and brought it to the Spanish archive so they could transfer it to digital format and dub it in a foreign tongue.

  With no warning, the moon is freed from the last tuft of a stubborn cloud, and the skies are bathed in lunar brilliance that reveals secrets of the night. Moses can see now that the homeless man who relinquished his seat is not far away, leaning his head on the shoulder of the Mary with the outstretched hand, waiting for the director to abandon his post beside the intellectual.

  The two exchange sharp glances and Moses realizes that he read the fellow wrong. The tall, athletic man with a beard and bushy eyebrows, who wishes to retrace his steps and reclaim the bench, is not a homeless vagabond or beggar but a lone pilgrim who arrived
not as part of a group but on his own. By the looks of the cape, the unruly beard, the woolen leggings, and the knapsack, he is a true believer who chose to come to Santiago on foot, on a long and difficult path. But Moses, who sometimes talks with death, is not afraid of a man holding a large, thick staff with a huge clam shell affixed to the top—an authentic staff, not the kind for sale in souvenir shops. If he wants to harm me, he says to himself with a smile, maybe I deserve it, and he stands up and gestures graciously at the place no longer occupied. And if he were invited to make a movie in Spain, he would include, regardless of the plot, a pilgrim like this to walk around in silence before the camera.

  8

  DURING HIS NOCTURNAL outing, there’s been a change of personnel at the front desk, and he returns the scarf not to the young chemist but to a stern middle-aged clerk, who hangs it on its hook and discreetly points to a man sitting by the closed dining room door, leafing through a newspaper. Moses recognizes the teacher of cinematic theory, embalmed in his black suit. Apparently he has agreed, or perhaps requested, to serve as the escort of the Israeli director on the last day of the retrospective. But Moses decides to postpone his encounter and slips back to the attic.

  He takes off his shoes in the dark, quietly, so his footsteps will not wake the sleeper, and, remembering that the closet door squeaks, he drops his coat on the floor. But the eyes that opened as he entered do not close.

  “You’re awake?”

  “More or less.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the time you left.”

  “But I was careful.”

  “I’m not awake because of you.”

  “Really? Why not worry over me?”

  “You don’t need worrying over. Anyway, where were you?”

  “I walked around a little, to get away from this place. Past the Old Town there’s a promenade and sculpture garden of clever local characters. Rodrigo showed it to me yesterday, and tonight I had the urge to feel them so I could tell what they were made of.”

  He sits down on the bed, and cautiously, in the darkness, reaches for her hand. He counts her fingers one by one as if to be sure none is missing.

  “If I didn’t ruin your sleep, what did?”

  “Thoughts.”

  “For example?”

  “For example, the film today. The Refusal.”

  “You too? Funny, because ever since you said it would be closing the retrospective, I’ve been trying to remember what we did there. Do you remember it well?”

  “Yes. It’s the first film that centered on me alone from beginning to end.”

  “Even before the beginning, from preadolescence, from the childhood of the main character.”

  “Childhood?”

  “Childhood, girlhood. The young amateur we brought in who played you as a grade-school student. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about her tonight. I’m curious to see how I created your precursor.”

  “You won’t see a thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you cut all of her scenes from the final film.”

  “Oy,” cries Moses in sorrow, “she was cut in the end?”

  “You claimed at the time that the film turned out too long, and the producer was demanding cuts, so without asking or notifying anyone you took out all the early scenes in elementary school and began with my graduation ceremony.”

  “Your graduation?”

  “I mean the heroine’s.”

  Moses feels a need for self-defense. “I wouldn’t have cut it shorter just for the producer. There was surely some other reason, which I don’t recall at the moment. Trigano was sharp and clever with dramatic stories told in a limited time frame but was less convincing when it came to giving a character a strong background, like inventing a childhood for you that would add depth to what happened to you later.”

  “To me?”

  “I mean the heroine. But that girl, who in the end wasn’t in the movie, keeps me up at night like a ghost. What was it about her that I want so much to see? Was she especially attractive? Did she really look like you?”

  “Toledano, who discovered her, thought she looked like me as a schoolgirl, and there were people in the crew who saw a resemblance, but for me it was hard to see, which is natural. But she really was an impressive girl, smart and ambitious, and I invested a lot in her. In any case, you never had the patience to work with little kids or teenagers. There’s also something about you that seems to scare them.”

  Moses is amused. “What about me could be scary?”

  “When you are next to the camera, fixated on your goal, you’re not aware how alienated and hostile you become toward anything unconnected to the film. Although toward that girl, as I remember, you were a little more patient, maybe because her father the colonel was always at the rehearsals and shooting. That’s why you didn’t dare yell at her. Or maybe because you also thought she looked like me. Or because back then, every so often, you were a little in love with me.”

  “I’m always in love with you. Sometimes a little, and sometimes more. But what was her name?”

  “Ruth.”

  “Ruth?”

  “It was because of her that I added her name to my old one.”

  “Because of her? Why? You never said you changed your name because of her.”

  “I intended just to add it, but her name, the new one, swallowed up the old one.”

  “Why because of her?”

  “Because I was happy that a real Israeli like her, from a good, established family, was picked to represent the childhood of the heroine who gets into such trouble. Therefore, after you dropped her from my film, I decided to compensate her by adopting her name.”

  “Compensate her for what?”

  “For the fact that until the film’s premiere, she didn’t know she wasn’t in it. And that you didn’t see fit to inform her, and I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t know because you never, in any film, wanted to get near the editing room and always waited to see yourself in the finished film.”

  “Because it was hard to watch how you and the editors would cut us up, destroy our continuity, then paste us back together. And therefore, at the premiere, as I recall, not only she but I was astonished to see that you had dropped all the scenes of my youth.”

  “Again yours. Not yours. The heroine’s.”

  “No, mine too. Because I liked it that you chose such a perfect girl to portray me in my childhood.”

  “What do you mean, perfect?”

  “Perfect. Rooted. A real Israeli. Salt of the earth. Well connected. Because in those days I thought . . . and now too, really . . . I know that we—Trigano, Toledano, the lot of us—would always somehow stay a bit in the margins, so I was happy that you gave me a little sister, so to speak, a twin who could strengthen me.”

  “Again you?”

  “Me in the film.”

  “What is this, the movie gets mixed up with reality for you?”

  “Sometimes. And not for you?”

  “Never. The boundary between reality and imagination is always there for me.”

  “Because you never dare to stand in front of a camera, only behind it, because only from there can you be the one giving the orders.”

  9

  THE ROOM IS still dark and neither one can clearly see the face of the other. He holds her hand, separating her fingers one by one and pressing them together again, filled with desire for the actress whose childhood memories make her voice tremble.

  “She, the little Ruth, came to the premiere excited, and confident too; we all praised her acting during the filming. And you didn’t even bother to inform Amsalem that you had cut her out, and he sent her numerous invitations to fill up the theater. She arrived happy, surrounded by her family and girlfriends. At first I thought you’d changed the sequence and would go from present to past in flashbacks, but the film went on and on, and no trace of her. You simply erased her. And now you have the gall to say that you can’
t recall if she’s in the movie or not?”

  “I honestly didn’t remember. I honestly hoped to see her.”

  “You won’t. You wiped her out. That’s why she comes back at you like a ghost. To take revenge.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “Until the last minute she waited to see herself. And when the film was over and the lights came up and the congratulations began, I saw her sitting frozen in her seat, her father consoling her. But when I came over she was crying bitterly—she wanted to be an actress, she wanted to play my childhood me, she felt she’d played her part well, and now it was all lost. And though I had no idea how to explain to her what happened or why, she took it all out on me, as if I were complicit in eliminating her from the film. Her heart was broken, and mine broke along with hers.”

  “You’re breaking hearts left and right, but after all is said and done, what happened? This wasn’t the first or last time that more than a third of the material was cut in the editing process.”

  “Not so simple. I held her deep inside me while we worked on that film, and despite Trigano’s difficult script I led myself to believe that I was a natural extension of her, not of the girl in the movie, of the real girl I knew. I knew her family too, and I was even in their home a few times. You should know that when it came to that crazy scene with the beggar—it was because of her that I ran away.”