A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

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.

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.”