The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “I have praised her. By the way, does Uriel usually need to be fed, or is this a treat on a special night?”

  “A treat, but I’m helping. He knows how to eat, but needs a bit of prodding.”

  “What kind of work does he do here?”

  “He works in the packing house of the moshav, sorting fruits and vegetables. He has a good eye for potatoes and onions, sees what will go bad quickly and what will keep longer. They’re so happy with him, they even give him a small salary, right?”

  “Two hundred shekels,” Uriel burbles cheerfully.

  “Is treatment here expensive?”

  “The state will subsidize anyone willing to get treatment in a place close to the border.”

  “That doesn’t eliminate anxiety for his well-being.”

  “Obviously. On the other hand, the caregivers here are good and dedicated, and there are plenty of bomb shelters.”

  The whole time, he keeps feeding his son, who opens his mouth wide like a baby bird and tilts his head from side to side, his eyes fixed on you, listening to your conversation. You flash him smiles but don’t speak to him, for you are afraid of saying something that will embroil you in an answer you won’t understand. It turns out your smiles disturb him; he tugs at his father’s ear and whispers at length, in choppy bursts, and his father nods his head vigorously to signify both understanding and agreement.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s worried about you, wants you to stay here. He says we should make a bed for you.”

  “Ah, Uriel, how good of you to be concerned about me.”

  “Yes, from the care and love that he gets from everyone, he has learned how to give to others. By the way, apart from the wadi of Slumbering Soldiers, did you look for any other locations from those films?”

  “Yes, my parents’ house. But I looked only from the outside, to figure out how we managed to turn it into three separate houses.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “No. I also took Ruth to that Jordanian village Toledano annexed and we went down to the railroad station and the tracks and the wadi of the train wreck. Because when I saw the film in Spain, it seemed like the station wasn’t a real one, that we built it, like the installation in Slumbering Soldiers.”

  “No, it was a real train station.”

  “Right, but today you won’t find it. The people in the village took it apart stone by stone. But the stretch of track built by the Turks is alive and well. And the railcars are still running, and the train to Jerusalem still crawls by but doesn’t stop. You see, Trigano, in the twenty-first century, your international express is still an Israeli fantasy.”

  “Which makes it doubly powerful.”

  Silence.

  “Did you also go to Kafka’s synagogue?” He snickers.

  “It’s gone. You tore it down in your script, no? But I have faith that the old animal found herself another synagogue, where she still runs around between the ark and the women’s section. But the women of today aren’t scared of her.”

  Now at last you share a laugh.

  “When I saw that mongoose on the screen at the Spanish archive,” you go on, “I was impressed all over again by Toledano’s talent for catching her at exactly the right moment.”

  “Don’t dismiss your own role in taming the shrew,” Trigano says with a thin smile. “You do have a talent for directing animals. Maybe that should be your true calling in the few years you have left, a director of animals.”

  “It’s too late,” you say, keeping your cool. “I’m too old to start a new career, especially without Toledano’s help. He could have become an important cinematographer, had it not been for Ruth driving him crazy.”

  “He drove himself crazy.”

  His son listens, smiling, as if sensing the irony between the lines.

  You pour yourself some wine and stare at the food still left on the table, weighing where to begin.

  “At the film institute, when I saw the Kafka movie,” you say, “I asked myself why you picked that story. Even though it’s an abstract Kafka story, with no defined time or place, it’s still about an old synagogue in Eastern Europe, in a very old community drenched in memories of pogroms and foreshadowing Holocaust terror. By the way, who played the rabbi? A wonderful actor.”

  “Really wonderful.”

  “How did he end up in our film? I never saw him again anywhere on the screen. It wasn’t you who brought him in?”

  “No, I don’t think so . . .” He’s avoiding the question.

  “There were moments he looked like Kafka himself.”

  “Maybe he was Kafka himself,” he says, not smiling.

  “Another thing, why did you move the animal to an Israeli synagogue? I tried to explain the intention to the Spanish, but I don’t think I succeeded.”

  “Why do you struggle to explain to other people things you yourself don’t understand?”

  You patiently ignore his words and continue.

  “And you had no desire, after you dubbed our films, to visit the places where we shot them?”

  “One place. I go there sometimes, but you forgot about it long ago.”

  “You mean—”

  “That’s right. A green iron door by the old port in Jaffa. The gate of the pitiful clinic.”

  “There I didn’t go.”

  “Why not? It’s the door I go back to. Sometimes it suddenly changes color, then returns to the original.”

  “The door did stay in the film. You see the heroine coming out of it sadly after giving up the baby for adoption. Only her scene with the beggar Yehuda Gafni was canceled.”

  “And you insulted him too, and profoundly, when you canceled that scene.”

  “What could I do? He was pissed off because I took away a steamy scene where he was to suck the breast of a young woman.”

  “No, Moses. Please. Don’t reduce everything to your own level. That was an important scene that you didn’t understand, and don’t even today, and you had no problem dropping it so cavalierly, not asking permission from the one who invented it.”

  “Please”—you are angry now—“don’t twist what actually happened. It wasn’t me. The woman you had such a deep connection with is the one who was disgusted by the scene you wrote for her. I am not a director who is prepared to crush the heart of an actor to satisfy the disturbed imagination of a writer.”

  “And in all the movies you’ve made since, you of course never imposed any kinky situation on your characters.”

  “I tried not to. But today, the actors are swept up in the mood of the times and have grown daring and uninhibited, so they pull me to all kinds of places.”

  “After you killed the scene and fired the actor, I went to his house to apologize. You know what he said?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t say a thing. He just cursed you.”

  “I’m not surprised. Though he actually should have cursed Ruth, not me.”

  “No, just you.” Trigano tightens his lips. “You were the one in a hurry to ruin it all, never giving me a chance to talk her into it.”

  “But how could you do that? Didn’t she lock herself in the truck and refuse to look at you?”

  “That was none of your business. She was mine, not yours.”

  “Yours? What do you mean? Private property?”

  “No, no. You saw, I could relinquish everything private and personal I had with her. What I mean is that I created her character, shaped it from within her, gave it substance and motivation and words. And if at the end of the film she rebelled, then what the hell drove you to get between us? Why didn’t you let me stifle her rebellion?”

  “Stifle? There’s an awful word.”

  “Then find a nicer one. You knew how important that woman was for my work.”

  “But if that’s the meaning of mine for you, then she was also mine, and as a director I had to protect her credibility as an actress.”

  “Stop piling up excuses. You simply u
sed her rebellion to take her for yourself.”

  “Not guilty. And the many years have proven how wrong you are. I didn’t want her for myself, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have dared tear her away from you. But the two of us, you and I both, had no idea what her rebellion was really about. It was not on account of the sick scene you wrote for her, but because she feared the reaction of the girl who played her young character in the film.”

  “What girl?”

  “You forgot? In your original script was a girl who played the heroine in her childhood. You wrote her a few scenes in school, her youth group, her teachers’ home. We had nearly ten minutes of her already edited, but then, who knows why, we decided to cut her out.”

  “You mean the girl Toledano found?”

  “Who looked like her.”

  “She didn’t look like her, couldn’t have looked like her. The resemblance was all a fantasy of Toledano’s. I remember her. The general’s daughter, north Tel Aviv. From the self-styled Israeli aristocracy. A little female Moses.”

  “Female Moses?” You’re shocked.

  “Forget it. Yes, I know who you mean. In fact, I suggested cutting her out in the editing.”

  “Ah, you . . .”

  “Don’t you remember? Not just because the film got cumbersome. She was a mistake from the start. She didn’t belong there. I remember her well. A shallow little spoiled Moses type.”

  “Again Moses? What is this? Have you lost your mind?”

  “What do you care.”

  “Her name was Ruth.”

  “Ruth? No way. I mean, I don’t remember.”

  “But that was her name. It was out of guilt toward her that Ruth decided to take the girl’s name for herself. During production, it was Ruth who coached her and invested time, as if she had discovered a little sister. She was so happy that a real homegrown Israeli would play her as a child and perhaps upgrade her own identity. So when it came time for the last scene with the beggar—and at that point she didn’t yet know we were cutting the girl from the picture—she was afraid that if the girl saw this rough scene, it would frighten her away. That’s the real reason for her rebellion. She didn’t want to disappoint the girl.”

  “To disappoint the girl?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “She told me, in Spain.”

  “Aha.” He laughs triumphantly. “If that’s the real reason for the havoc this woman wreaked all around her, it’s clear why she didn’t have the nerve to tell me herself. And if this was indeed the reason, then thank you, Moses, for coming down here.”

  “Thank me? Why?”

  “Because now I can truly be at peace.”

  “At peace in what way?”

  “Knowing it was good and right and necessary to make that final break with her. Because that sort of concern for her image, for what others would think of her character, would have made it impossible for me to keep taking her to places I wanted to go. It’s good that I broke with her. Sooner or later she would have ruined me.”

  You feel how worked up and confused he is, but you don’t let up, you plunge headlong into the storm to defend yourself.

  “Think anything you like, be at peace or not, that’s your business, but one thing is clear: I didn’t reject a scene you wrote in order to separate you two.”

  At first he seems hesitant, slow to answer. He has stopped feeding his son, who sits in his wheelchair with mouth wide open, waiting.

  “Yes, I admit it,” he finally answers, “I made a mistake. You have no love for her, there is no genuine connection between you, and even if you sometimes sleep in the same bed, you have no influence on her. You had to come all the way to a man like me, who hates you and considers you worthless, to influence her in such a small matter.”

  “You see?”

  There is suddenly a hope that this trip, to a danger zone on a winter’s night, might not be in vain after all.

  “Yes,” he repeats proudly, “I made a mistake. Back then I wasn’t strong or clear-eyed enough to end my partnership with you, so I took the excuse of personal jealousy, instead of realizing the fundamental difference between you and me and accepting the fact that you didn’t have it in you to be a true partner, a partner over time, in the vision that burned inside me. But you can take comfort, Moses, that after the break with you, I also began to understand that it was not just a matter of your own blinkered vision, but something bigger. When I looked for somebody to replace you, various other collaborators but similar to you, Moses, from the same species of human that people here describe with that expression I hate, ‘salt of the earth’—in other words, dedicated and responsible Israelis, progressive in their minds and logical in their thinking—I saw that this salt of the earth was sick of its saltiness and especially repelled by the saltiness of others; people like me, for instance. At the same time, those whose backgrounds and natures were ostensibly similar to my own were still wallowing in resentments and paralyzed by perennial feelings of deprivation that kindled a vague yearning for the grandfather trilling the old prayers or the grandma feeding them stuffed peppers. So I gave up writing scripts for good and started teaching. I want to try to plant a few of my own seeds in the mental furrows of random Israelis, in the hope that over time, something different might grow here. Yes, after I became a teacher myself, I was able truly to forget you.”

  “And Ruth too.”

  “I told you. A glimpse of her in a movie poster could get me worked up for days, but all in all I felt sorry for her, for the path you were taking her down, and I didn’t want to punish her in my heart. That way I could respond to a loving and understanding woman, who gave me three solid children. First and foremost Uriel, my special son, who nullified her once and for all in my heart.”

  “But he doesn’t nullify me.”

  “What nullifies you are the movies you make. And if I needed any further proof that leaving you was the right thing to do, I understood it in Spain. Three years ago, when I sent our old films to the archive in Santiago, I received to my surprise a warm letter from Juan de Viola, who invited me there to coach the Spanish actors in the dubbing. I came to watch the films scene by scene, line by line, and I was able to see that your quick surrender by the green door was not an accident, and not out of sudden pity for a panicky actress. It happened because your powers are limited and the salt-of-the-earth Jerusalemite was looking for something sweet. In retrospect I saw that even when you tried your best to direct my artistic passions, you didn’t understand what you were directing.”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “Not so fast. It’s pointed at not just you, but me. Yes, me. You were not the only one who did not fathom what I was striving for; I myself was confused. Fantasy and surrealism blurred my thinking and I didn’t always realize where I was.”

  “And what were you striving for, do you think?”

  “To strike out against metaphysical terror. To reduce its authority. Not to attack religion as such, the rituals and prayers, all that small stuff, which do no harm so long as they give people comfort or provide structure for anxious souls. But those souls must not be dragged into the fear of something hidden and invisible, of a God who is abstract, jealous, and aggressive. I directed my arrows at God. Against the awe of God’s majesty. I thought that if I was incapable of destroying that supremacy, I could at least play tricks on it, make it hazy, mock it, put it to sleep, expose its wickedness, its instability, inject into it elements that contradict its holiness—pagan, absurd elements—put strange animals beside it. Because maybe even then, as a young man, I felt that the rational identity of the salt of the earth, his hedonistic secular culture, is basically a thin, brittle crust that at a time of crisis or conflict crumbles before the terrifying power of transcendence.”

  “And it was there of all places, in the dubbing studio of the archive in Santiago, that this epiphany came over you . . .”

  “Which has only grown stronger since then.”
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  “Grown stronger how?”

  “No.” He suddenly withdraws. “It’s impossible to explain such a complicated and fragile idea at such a late hour, especially to a person who is tired and hasn’t eaten all day and needs to worry about making his way home. Even if I find you a bed here, there’s no way you’ll fall asleep. So take my advice: get up and hit the road.”

  “You may be right. It is late, and we’re both tired. And the drive back does worry me. So let’s stop here and continue our conversation in Tel Aviv.”

  “No Tel Aviv, no conversation or meetings. Even this one was unnecessary from my standpoint, which is why it’s the last one.”

  “And what about your epiphany?”

  “It stays with me.”

  7

  YOU STAND UP and take your car keys from the table, and you head for the big house, followed by the wiry-haired white dog from Kibbutz Re’im. You go through the main hall, where all the screens on the walls have gone blank, and through the hallways between the rooms, but this time you enter one of the bathrooms, remove your jacket and shirt in semidarkness, and douse your half-naked body with cold water to invigorate it. After changing batteries in your hearing aids to refresh them too and petting the dog who waited patiently beside you, you head back to the arbor. From the doorway you hear a reedy wail.

  “What happened?”

  “Uriel has you mixed up with his grandfather, my wife’s father, who is no longer with us. He was upset to see you disappear.”

  “But I didn’t disappear, Uriel, here I am.” You lean over the young man and dare to wipe gently a tear from his pallid face.

  “See.” Trigano strokes his son. “It’s not so easy to say goodbye to this grandpa. He keeps talking.”

  And you go on to describe Amsalem’s investment offer for a new film, on the condition that Trigano write the script.

  “That vegetable dealer? He’s still hanging around?”

  “He’s no longer a vegetable dealer, now he’s a successful building contractor.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Over eighty. But fresh and youthful. After all, you were the one who introduced him to us.”