The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  In the meantime, her embarrassment has turned to affection. She beams as she watches the liberty he takes in her home, as if her former husband’s immersion in her chaos gives her hope. Her warmth almost tempts him to comment on the gray hair—is it laziness, or overstated feminism?—but he doesn’t. She is not his. And though the decline in the appearance of the woman who left him should perhaps gratify him, it actually pains, frightens him.

  In the living room, she congratulates him again on the award, and in keeping with his decision, he is not quick to dismiss its value but rather smiles and thanks her. Next she shows interest in the retrospective and is happy to hear that Ruth went along. “How is she?” she asks. “She is not well,” he says, “neglects her health.” He mentions her refusal to repeat the blood test. “This is not okay; you have to convince her,” demands his ex-wife. “Why me? She has a son.” “You know what he’s worth,” she reminds him, because she knows Ruth’s story inside out and retains personal and family details long after he has forgotten them. He tells her about his encounter with his earliest films; she remembers them, of course, that was how they met, he would call on her at the National Library to help him select music for them. “There still may be some prints around here,” she says, “look in the storage room.” “No”—he recoils—“there’s nothing of mine still here.”

  She has invited him over to talk about their grandson Itay’s bar mitzvah, scheduled for early spring. Itay and his parents decided to eliminate the big party and make do, after the synagogue ceremony, with a lunch for close family, perhaps on the assumption that Ofra and Moses would be writing the big gift checks anyway. Neither Galit nor Zvi has the energy for a big party. Zvi is still waiting for tenure at the hospital and takes on many shifts, and Galit’s salary, despite her tenured position, is the salary of a technician.

  “Why, then, should they take on the burden of a big party with many guests? Because Grandpa promised to make a little film of it?”

  “I suggested it once, with good intentions. Anyway, I’m a lousy cameraman.”

  “I didn’t know it was possible to be a successful director and a lousy cameraman.”

  “Anything is possible. So what’s your question?”

  “Well, they were wondering how to make Itay happy with something real, not just being called to the Torah; in other words, to give him a truly enjoyable experience, and nowadays among his classmates there’s a trend of taking a bar mitzvah trip to Africa, so Galit and Zvi thought that a trip like that would be a wonderful thing for him, and for his sister and for them.”

  “Of all the continents, it’s Africa they choose for the transition from childhood to maturity,” he remarks.

  “They’re not thinking in educational terms. They’re thinking about an enjoyable trip in the outdoors, the animals and scenery. A trip to clear the head a little.”

  “Itay’s or theirs?”

  “Everyone whose head needs clearing.”

  “But why Africa? If they’re passing up a party and taking a trip abroad, they should go to Europe. Give the boy a little culture. Show him cathedrals, museums, historical sites. Connect him with something aesthetic, not some lion or monkey that he could see in the safari park in Ramat Gan. And believe me, such a trip wouldn’t hurt Galit and Zvi either, two people who spend their lives cooped up in a hospital.”

  “There’s plenty of culture here, without Europe.”

  “You really think that?”

  “I don’t know what I think, but that’s their wish and it should be respected. If you want to persuade them to change their travel plans, by all means, do it, but whatever happens, you have to help them.”

  “With what?”

  “I don’t know how big a present you were thinking of.”

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “Why? Is it a secret? It’ll come out sooner or later.”

  “Two thousand shekels, something like that.”

  “Perhaps you could increase it a little, help them with the trip? It’s an expensive trip.”

  “Increase it? Thanks to our divorce, Itay will get two presents from us instead of one, from his grandpa and from his grandma.”

  “He gets two presents but has lost a natural connection with a grandpa and grandma who are together.”

  “Not my fault.”

  “It is your fault. But let’s not get into that now, please. Let’s keep up the good mood.”

  “Good mood. Fine. How much are you planning to give?”

  “Three thousand. I have a small savings account I can go into. It’s not for Itay, it’s for Galit and Zvi, who are dying to get out in the world a little.”

  “To Africa.”

  “Africa is also in the world.”

  “All right, I’ll try to increase it.”

  “You did just get a prize.”

  “Enough.” He raises his voice. “The prize is none of your business.”

  “Sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “And I still hope that I have permission to try to persuade them to change the itinerary from Africa to Europe.”

  “Permission, sure. She’s your daughter and he’s your son-in-law. So they, at least, have to listen to you.”

  He hears the scornful tone in her voice and turns a cold eye on the grand piano that wreaks anarchy in the living room.

  “Tell me, was this piano here the last time I was?”

  “There was a piano but not a grand.”

  “Aha,” he says. “This piano turned the nice living room we had into a music warehouse.”

  “Which is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, and which is why I wanted you to come here.”

  She stands up and points to the wall separating the living room from the hallway, and asks if he recalls whether it’s original or part of the renovations they did when they moved in.

  “It is original,” he declares, “we didn’t add any wall here. Why do you ask?”

  “Because Hanan thought it might be a good idea to tear it down to expand the living room.”

  “For an even bigger piano?”

  “No.” She laughs. “This is the biggest. So it can move around here more easily. If we take down this wall, we can add the hallway to the living room.”

  “You won’t be adding a thing,” he says, pleased to contradict her. “This is a retaining wall—if you take it down, you’ll bring down the upstairs apartment, and Schuster will sit in your living room.”

  “He doesn’t live there anymore.”

  “Or a different neighbor.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ask a contractor or architect, why me?”

  “You planned the renovations.”

  “That’s why I know what I’m talking about.”

  “So what then?”

  “Why tear down walls when all you have to do is reduce the chaos you’ve created here?”

  “How?”

  “Move the piano near the window, with the wing in the corner.”

  “It won’t fit in the corner, there’s not enough room.”

  “Says who?”

  “That’s where the armchair goes.”

  “Which one?”

  “The pink one.”

  “What’s it doing there?”

  “It has sheet music on it.”

  “Let’s remove it from there, and you’ll see that the corner will be happy to accommodate the entire back of the piano. There’s all this space going to waste.”

  “Wait a second. It’s hard for Hanan to write music facing the window, the view distracts him and takes him where he doesn’t want to go. He writes, you know, very abstract music. Not romantic.”

  “So he should close the window and shut the blinds.”

  “He won’t have air.”

  “He should write his music blindfolded.”

  “You just want to find fault.”

  “No, but I am curious about the self-indulgence.”

  “It’s not self-indulgence. It’s art.”


  “I’m also an artist, and I was never self-indulgent.”

  “True, in that sense you were an easier husband.”

  “So listen to me now too. In the living room, the solution is fairly simple. Your chaos makes me furious. I got so dizzy in your kitchen, I can still feel it.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “I’m not. When I left, the place was orderly. Now it’s this insane warehouse.”

  “Because you didn’t teach me how to be neat.”

  “Teach? You didn’t want to learn. You relied on me for everything.”

  “Because you didn’t force me to be neat.”

  “Was that possible?”

  “Not force. But educate. You didn’t have the patience to educate me.”

  “That’s true. I loved you too much, so I gave in to all your weaknesses.”

  “So do you have an idea how to restore order?”

  “Come, give me a hand. We have a chance since he’s not here. And believe me, I’m doing it for you. For some reason I still have a little bit of love for you.”

  She blushes with an old, dreamy smile; she knows that he still loves her. She gets up to help him remove the computer and printer from the dining table, collect the cables, move the stack of musical scores from the armchair to the bedroom, and return the chair to its former place. He then releases the piano’s brakes and rolls it toward the window, carefully easing the closed wing deep into the corner, and on his initiative, without asking the owner, he places a vase on top to create, in his words, a melodious nook.

  Her face is flushed now from the joint effort and the physical closeness with her former husband. And she is amazed how, with simple common sense and without tearing down a wall, he has successfully retrieved some of the beauty and order of the living room. “Don’t worry,” he says, “Hanan will get used to his piano’s new location. And in general,” he sermonizes, “artists who agonize and think that if they pamper their muse she will repay the kindness don’t understand that serious muses hate indulgence and self-indulgence.”

  “Hanan is not self-indulgent,” she insists, defending the husband who is three years her junior. “He’s just in a difficult period.”

  “In my difficult periods, I did not create this kind of chaos all around me.”

  She looks down. “You did worse things,” she whispers, as if to herself.

  “It only seemed that way to you, because you didn’t understand that a director is different from artists who work alone. He has personal responsibility to the characters realized in his work.”

  “She was not a character,” she mutters, “she was a woman. But let’s drop it now, please. So many years have passed.”

  “Yes, years have passed.”

  And he remembers how this refined and fragile woman tried to hit him when he admitted he had betrayed her and how he forced her to make love, but it was the last time.

  “You want me to help you straighten out the kitchen?”

  “No,” she says nervously. “You’ve done enough. Thanks.”

  Silence. He knows she would be grateful if he left her alone, but settled now in the pink armchair, the stack of music gone, he finds it hard to go.

  “Even though so many years have passed,” he says, “you’d be surprised to hear that I sometimes dream about you. Perhaps hoping that, if not in reality, then in a dream, you’ll finally be able to understand what my art is about.”

  “You still dream about me?” She sounds concerned.

  “Once in a while.”

  “And what do you dream? What are you doing to me in your dream?”

  “I am not doing anything, just looking. This morning, after I heard your voicemail, you suddenly appeared to me in a little dream, that’s why I agreed to come here.”

  “What did you dream?”

  “That you were going down the stairs, a lot of stairs.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t remember, but stairs, as you know, are not just stairs but also an erotic symbol, one that I sometimes use in a film when I want to tighten the bond between the hero and the heroine.”

  “First time I’ve heard such a theory.”

  “It’s true, ask Hanan. If he’s an intellectual, he’s surely heard of it. But don’t worry, in my dream you weren’t alone. You were with Aunt Sonia, so nothing very erotic could be going on.”

  “Aunt Sonia?” She giggles like a child. “Nice that you brought her into your dream too.”

  “I didn’t bring her, she came on her own, and not in a wheelchair—you both walked down slowly, you supported her and took care of her, and I was behind watching carefully, so if she fell I would catch her.”

  “At least in dreams you are a generous person.”

  “But now, telling it to you, I think I understand the dream. I think I brought her to protect you from the yearning I still feel for you. A pure and noble longing for, say, the big, beautiful birthmark on the back of your neck, above the spine. You couldn’t see it, so I had to bring you news of it now and then.”

  Her eyes are closed. She sighs. Her face is weary. Wrinkles unfamiliar to him have been added in the years he hasn’t seen her. But when she speaks there’s a soft irony in her voice.

  “I see that you still can’t get away from the retrospective.”

  “Maybe. Is that a sin?”

  “No sin. But you promised you would restrain yourself.”

  “I’m not restrained?”

  “Not really. The retrospective is still affecting you.”

  She speaks without anger, without fear, relaxed and calm, her legs resting on the coffee table. She seems no longer in a hurry to have him leave.

  And the sting of separation pierces his heart once more, he rises from the armchair, not heading for the door but approaching her, and he asks, with a smile, “I’m not entitled to a little reward for moving your piano and finding room for the wing and reducing your chaos?” She eyes him with gratitude. “What if for a second I took another look at your beauty mark, the one that you can’t see but that I loved from the moment I discovered it.”

  Like an actress obeying her director, she slowly leans her head to expose slightly the nape of her neck, and he cautiously turns down the collar of her sweater, finds the spot, dark and oval and a bit worrisome, and brings his lips close and touches it with the tip of his tongue, and then puts the collar back in place and says firmly, “That’s it, I’m out of here, and don’t think I won’t try to talk Galit out of the barbaric idea to celebrate our grandson’s bar mitzvah among monkeys and lions.”

  6

  ON FRIDAY EVENING Amsalem again insists Moses come down to Beersheba. “There’ll be a few people at lunch we can persuade to invest in the new film, but they need to see who and how you are.” “Instead of seeing me,” replies Moses, “tell them to see my latest films.” “No,” objects Amsalem, “these are plain folks with too much money who know nothing about film but understand people, and so they want a sense of the dreamer before they start to fund his fantasies. Besides,” he adds, “my sister-in-law will be there, and she recently got divorced.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Forty-five. But I’m not thinking about her for you. I’m thinking about a young man with a baby, which I have a feeling would make a great story that hasn’t been seen before.”

  “Everything has been seen,” says Moses, and gives him a tentative promise predicated on various conditions: how he feels, the weather, visiting grandchildren. But the next morning, as he lazes in bed with the newspapers, the producer again calls and tries to coax him to come. “A storm is coming,” protests Moses, “let’s postpone the visit till next Saturday?” “Only in Tel Aviv is a storm coming,” says Amsalem. “In the south the skies are blue, and the new highway will zip you to Beersheba in under an hour.”

  Although the investments by the Amsalem-Tamir Company have never exceeded 3 or 4 percent of his films’ budgets, the wholesaler’s loyalty and faith inspire the director’s affec
tion. For Amsalem, as opposed to the production companies and public film funds that support his projects, has a fundamental folksiness. The scent of the fruits and vegetables that made him rich stayed with him even after he broke into real estate, and despite his advanced age, he has lately begun wearing his hair in a small braided ponytail. Although Amsalem also disconnected himself from Trigano, Moses does not forget that it was the screenwriter who brought them together, and even if Trigano is gone from his life, the connection he left behind is not forgotten.

  He phones his daughter to persuade her to switch Africa for Europe before he increases his bar mitzvah gift. She is taken aback. Though the Africa decision has been made, and they plan to order the tickets next week, she is willing to hear why Africa is anathema to her father. “Come, let’s talk about this in person, Abba, without Itay or Zvi. Not this morning, because people will be here. Tonight we’ll be at a concert. But tomorrow morning, at the hospital, I have a break between ten and eleven, and we can sit undisturbed in the cafeteria, and I’d also like to hear about your retrospective and the prize that Imma told me you got in Spain.”

  “A small prize. Negligible.”

  “The main thing is they honored you.”

  He knows his son-in-law is touchy about his intervention in family matters, so he welcomes the idea of a private meeting at the hospital, especially because she could—he realizes—do an ultrasound of one or another of his internal organs and tell him what’s what.

  The storm has not yet hit, but the darkening sky has further dulled the city’s spirit on this quiet Saturday, and he decides to trade the drizzle of Tel Aviv for the dazzle of the desert. And indeed, in one hour flat, following precise directions he receives en route, he finds himself looking for a parking spot amid the many cars circling the vegetable magnate’s villa.