The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (19 page)

“So there'll still be a prize?”

“If that's what they promised you.”

“Maybe, between a fabulous course and a heavenly course, you remembered who played the rabbi?”

“I tried, but I couldn't remember. I also can't figure out how we lost track of such a compelling actor.”

“Maybe he'll surprise us in the last movie tomorrow.”

“No, he won't be in tomorrow's movie. That one I remember in every detail and will never forget.”

“Meaning what?”

“Juan told me which film was picked for the screening before the ceremony. Believe it or not, it's
The Refusal.
”

“
The Refusal
? Interesting.”

“And this time they kept the original name.”

“Trigano wouldn't give up on this one, would he?”

“Even though you gave it a different ending . . .”

“Only for your sake . . .”

“
Partly
for my sake.”

She turns off the remaining light.

In the darkness he feels the blanket on his nakedness, and presses on.

“Who took my clothes off?”

“You did. You took them off before I ever got back, but apparently you were woozy and lay here naked, with no blanket. I had to move you over and cover you. But that went smoothly. When you're asleep, you're a darling, easy to control.”

F
ROM THE DEEP
well of time floats the face of a young schoolgirl, shaking him from slumber. The question of why she, the girl from north Tel Aviv, of all the characters in tomorrow's film, is the first to burst into his memory will not let him rest, urging him out of bed. It's four in the morning; the winter dawn is slow to arrive, yet he succumbs to his waking state. Stark naked, but trustworthy and careful, he checks on his companion, who is sleeping peacefully, then gathers up his clothing, gets dressed, puts on his coat, and pockets his passport and some paper money, but he leaves his hearing aids and wallet on the night table. Taking with him the pilgrim walking stick, he slips silently from the room.

“If my metaphysics tire you and hurt your pocketbook,” Trigano told him after even the little art house in north Tel Aviv refused to show
In Our Synagogue,
“and you think our collaboration could use something more emotional and popular, the next screenplay will be about the travails of a young woman, and to give it an epic dimension we'll start with her childhood. But to do that we need to find a girl who looks like her.”

Moses decides to take the stairs down, because if anything should go wrong with the elevator, who would come rescue him in the middle of the night? The stairwell is unlit at this hour, but the stairs are comfortably carpeted, and on the walls curving around them hang pictures, unintelligible in the darkness.

In the hotel lobby, two people doze in a corner in sleeping bags. Strange. Are they young backpackers who arrived late at night, discovered that the room they reserved was given to someone else, and were granted permission to sack out here and wait till morning? The cubbyholes behind the front desk are all empty of keys. The young woman who had brought the wine and cheese to his room is still on duty, and her face, fetching earlier that night, is now ever more radiant and unique.
If I were called upon to direct a movie in Spain,
thinks Moses,
I would come back here and get the inexperienced reception clerk to play a small part in my film, maybe the part of a reception clerk. Even if her appearance in the film totaled just a few seconds, her beauty would be preserved in the archive for generations.
He feels an urge to introduce himself to her as a film director and tell her that she may be unaware of her own beauty, but he resists. At that hour, such a compliment from a stranger could be construed by a young woman as harassment. Besides, could she believe that the old man standing before her is still active as an artist, planning for the future?

“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.

T
HE 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.

D
URING 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?”