A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

“Even now,” whispers Moses to Ruth, who is entranced by her night-walking character, “I can’t understand how I was talked into directing such a movie. How I agreed to build a whole film around the idea of sleep, of slumbering soldiers yet.”

“I also didn’t understand how he managed to drag you into this one. I was easy, I was ready to play any foolishness that came into his head. I had total faith in whatever he wanted. Look how I’m running barefoot over rocks and thorns for the three of you.”

“The three of us?”

“Not just the two of you — Toledano also insisted that in all the night shots I go barefoot, even when my feet weren’t in the frame. It’s a good thing that among the guys you brought was a nice older man, a former army medic. Every night after the filming, he would help me take care of the cuts and scratches. All you cared about was my savagery.”

“Savagery?”

“Yes, Shaul intended that I not be some pathetic Israeli Bedouin trudging by the roadside, but someone strong, wild… Sometimes, you remember, he would call me Debdou, the name of the Moroccan village I came from with my father. He would also insist, in jest or seriously, that my family had traces of foreign blood. The jaw, the height of my tall father of blessed memory, and especially the yellow-gray color of my eyes he thought could come only from a foreign Sahara tribe, because that color didn’t exist among the Jews… That’s how he would talk, the lunatic.”

And she suddenly bursts into loud laughter.

Looks of disgust and fury are directed in the darkness at the creators of this slow and impenetrable film. This time of his own volition, Moses scurries a few rows behind.

A foreign tribe… He laughs to himself in his new seat. I never grasped the extent of Trigano’s wishful thinking. There’s truth to her claim, that the chance to realize his assorted fantasies about the girl he loved was what got him into writing film scripts to begin with. So this is not just some pathetic Israeli Bedouin woman… He insisted the young nomad be free, not dependent on anyone, able to wander about, perhaps as a figure of reconciliation, between enemies who in the 1960s had begun to realize they were trapped in a vicious circle of bloodshed.

It’s now clear to Moses that the soldiers’ reckless slumber serves to protect their sanity from crazy adventurism. Like the sleep of the railroad supervisor in Distant Station, the slumber that spared the midget god from giving the stationmaster a clear answer — earning the acclaim of perceptive reviewers — maybe the prolonged sleep currently onscreen will also be praised, for people believe that slumber oscillates between nothingness and creativity.

Moses remembers that in those far-off days Trigano had a theory: that the energy of the young, industrious state fanned the hatred of its neighbors and fatigued the Jews who came from Arab lands. That might point to a connection between the sleep of the stationmaster in the previous film and the collective, addictive, reckless, and aimless slumber of the military men in this one.

Now and then one of the soldiers wakes up, wriggles slowly from his sleeping bag, goes for a snack or drink or to answer nature’s call, and on returning shoves aside his gear and weapon with such force that it suggests not only the rejection of military duty but erosion of the core of his identity. The Spanish mumbling between the soldier and the guard, who opens his sleepy eyes for a moment, sounds softer at night, if not more intelligible. Whatever they may be saying, Moses knows that the desert, with its shifting colors and sunsets and wailing winds, is meant to overwhelm the reserve soldiers in the absence of their longtime commander.

And so, in this brazen, pretentious script, the vacuum of authority may be filled by a young Bedouin woman, a powerful persona cloaked in black. Now she draws close, approaching the campfire, daring to come near the secret installation itself; the sleepy reservists, who had earlier perceived her as a fleeting reverie, now tolerate her veiled presence fully.

Each night she comes to the camp and with gentle silence wins the trust of the guards, who have no idea what she wants but enjoy her exotic female company and as family men are protective of her honor. Sometimes she brings along a black child, and sometimes an old woman trails behind her. One night she is accompanied by two sturdy men, who keep their distance. The veiled young woman, who only at night visits soldiers who also sleep by day, lays bare the prevailing anarchy.

As the filming progressed, the cinematographer and director came to appreciate the hidden mysteries of the veil, the concentration of female eroticism in those yellow-gray eyes. Moses’ gaze wanders in the hall to the aging Berber, and when he locates her a few rows in front, her head slung back, he is reminded that this movie ends badly. How could he have forgotten the reversal in the second half, a truly dramatic twist with not a trace of a double plot and a conclusion whose meaning depends on what one makes of the secret installation.

Moses recalls that after he read the first draft of the screenplay, he kept interrogating his former student about the symbolism of the installation. Trigano avoided an answer. The installation does not need any meaning, it can stay fluid and elusive, open to different and contradictory interpretations, somewhere between hope and despair, past and future.

Moses lowers his head and closes his eyes. He remembers agonizing over the meaning of the installation and worrying that its symbolism was diluted by vagueness. At night, after the day’s shoot, while the crew and the extras were absorbed in backgammon or card games, Toledano would offer creative, half-serious opinions about the installation to lift Moses’ spirits. Assume it’s a storage for nuclear waste, or an archive of top-secret documents, or a cache of illicit biological material that could wipe out humanity, and you’ll feel better. Once, he even suggested Moses imagine that hidden inside the installation were the ashes of the Golden Calf that was burned and ground into powder after the biblical Moses received the Ten Commandments — ancient vestiges of a failed identity. Entangled in practical problems, the director was unable to undertake such flights of abstraction. This was a desert production at the bend of a dry gully in the belly of a small crater, and it was not easy to bring in provisions and maintain a system of communications. Moreover, they had to provide security for the sleeping soldiers and the crew that staged and filmed their sleep. Because across the border with Jordan, a real enemy lay in wait, and because bands of fedayeen were known to infiltrate the area, the military authorities agreed to send an occasional patrol, and the actual young soldiers were fascinated by their elderly lookalikes lounging idly in front of a camera.

It was in those days that they first drew on the support of Yaakov Amsalem, a likable fellow of North African extraction, a wholesaler at the Beersheba produce market and lover of cinema who later went into real estate. Amsalem believed in Trigano’s ideas and even saw moneymaking potential, and he not only supplied fresh food but also volunteered to work as an extra.

Moses spots him on the screen, a beefy man in a rumpled army uniform. It was hard to film him as a sleeper, because his bubbly personality limited his capacity to lie still before the camera. Instead he happily took responsibility for tending the campfire, proving himself an able wood gatherer. Toledano instructed him to bring twigs that produced a purplish smoke, which imparted a devilish quality to the soldiers. Right now, such a haze fills the screen, and Moses again closes his eyes to intensify the memory of the smoke. Slowly, he sinks into the old, sweet fragrance of soft branches burning, their purple smoke painting the screen of his eyelids.