A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

“Your graduation?”

“I mean the heroine’s.”

Moses feels a need for self-defense. “I wouldn’t have cut it shorter just for the producer. There was surely some other reason, which I don’t recall at the moment. Trigano was sharp and clever with dramatic stories told in a limited time frame but was less convincing when it came to giving a character a strong background, like inventing a childhood for you that would add depth to what happened to you later.”

“To me?”

“I mean the heroine. But that girl, who in the end wasn’t in the movie, keeps me up at night like a ghost. What was it about her that I want so much to see? Was she especially attractive? Did she really look like you?”

“Toledano, who discovered her, thought she looked like me as a schoolgirl, and there were people in the crew who saw a resemblance, but for me it was hard to see, which is natural. But she really was an impressive girl, smart and ambitious, and I invested a lot in her. In any case, you never had the patience to work with little kids or teenagers. There’s also something about you that seems to scare them.”

Moses is amused. “What about me could be scary?”

“When you are next to the camera, fixated on your goal, you’re not aware how alienated and hostile you become toward anything unconnected to the film. Although toward that girl, as I remember, you were a little more patient, maybe because her father the colonel was always at the rehearsals and shooting. That’s why you didn’t dare yell at her. Or maybe because you also thought she looked like me. Or because back then, every so often, you were a little in love with me.”

“I’m always in love with you. Sometimes a little, and sometimes more. But what was her name?”

“Ruth.”

“Ruth?”

“It was because of her that I added her name to my old one.”

“Because of her? Why? You never said you changed your name because of her.”

“I intended just to add it, but her name, the new one, swallowed up the old one.”

“Why because of her?”

“Because I was happy that a real Israeli like her, from a good, established family, was picked to represent the childhood of the heroine who gets into such trouble. Therefore, after you dropped her from my film, I decided to compensate her by adopting her name.”

“Compensate her for what?”

“For the fact that until the film’s premiere, she didn’t know she wasn’t in it. And that you didn’t see fit to inform her, and I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know because you never, in any film, wanted to get near the editing room and always waited to see yourself in the finished film.”

“Because it was hard to watch how you and the editors would cut us up, destroy our continuity, then paste us back together. And therefore, at the premiere, as I recall, not only she but I was astonished to see that you had dropped all the scenes of my youth.”

“Again yours. Not yours. The heroine’s.”

“No, mine too. Because I liked it that you chose such a perfect girl to portray me in my childhood.”

“What do you mean, perfect?”

“Perfect. Rooted. A real Israeli. Salt of the earth. Well connected. Because in those days I thought… and now too, really… I know that we — Trigano, Toledano, the lot of us — would always somehow stay a bit in the margins, so I was happy that you gave me a little sister, so to speak, a twin who could strengthen me.”

“Again you?”

“Me in the film.”

“What is this, the movie gets mixed up with reality for you?”

“Sometimes. And not for you?”

“Never. The boundary between reality and imagination is always there for me.”

“Because you never dare to stand in front of a camera, only behind it, because only from there can you be the one giving the orders.”

THE ROOM IS still dark and neither one can clearly see the face of the other. He holds her hand, separating her fingers one by one and pressing them together again, filled with desire for the actress whose childhood memories make her voice tremble.

“She, the little Ruth, came to the premiere excited, and confident too; we all praised her acting during the filming. And you didn’t even bother to inform Amsalem that you had cut her out, and he sent her numerous invitations to fill up the theater. She arrived happy, surrounded by her family and girlfriends. At first I thought you’d changed the sequence and would go from present to past in flashbacks, but the film went on and on, and no trace of her. You simply erased her. And now you have the gall to say that you can’t recall if she’s in the movie or not?”

“I honestly didn’t remember. I honestly hoped to see her.”

“You won’t. You wiped her out. That’s why she comes back at you like a ghost. To take revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“Until the last minute she waited to see herself. And when the film was over and the lights came up and the congratulations began, I saw her sitting frozen in her seat, her father consoling her. But when I came over she was crying bitterly — she wanted to be an actress, she wanted to play my childhood me, she felt she’d played her part well, and now it was all lost. And though I had no idea how to explain to her what happened or why, she took it all out on me, as if I were complicit in eliminating her from the film. Her heart was broken, and mine broke along with hers.”

“You’re breaking hearts left and right, but after all is said and done, what happened? This wasn’t the first or last time that more than a third of the material was cut in the editing process.”

“Not so simple. I held her deep inside me while we worked on that film, and despite Trigano’s difficult script I led myself to believe that I was a natural extension of her, not of the girl in the movie, of the real girl I knew. I knew her family too, and I was even in their home a few times. You should know that when it came to that crazy scene with the beggar — it was because of her that I ran away.”

“Because of her?”

“And I didn’t even know that you intended to cut her from the film.”

“I didn’t know either. But where’s the connection? Why her?”

“Because if she is me when I was young, and I am her as an adult, if she saw me on the screen in that sick scene Trigano scripted — and you standing there, demanding that I expose my breast and force a filthy old beggar to suck milk meant for the baby taken away from me — if she were to see that onscreen… As I faced that scene, I thought of her, the young actress, this pure and intelligent girl, and I thought how shocked and disappointed she would be, she and her whole family, when she saw this repulsive scene, and she might say to herself, Why did I get involved with this film in the first place? What possible connection could I have with such a disturbed woman?”

Moses speaks softly, as to a person who is ill: “What are you talking about? About characters in a film or about human beings?”

“Both.”

“Both? How does one mix the two up?”

“One does, if one lives the right way.”

“So in order to protect the ego of a spoiled, ambitious child from a good family, you ran away from the camera and killed our entire scene? And I even defended you. Maybe dropping that girl from the film was a good thing,” he says and regrets it immediately, considers how to soothe her, when the room phone rings. The reception clerk timidly informs Moses that the professor from the film institute is awaiting his presence in the lobby. “It’s okay, I’m awake,” Moses assures him, “I’ll be down soon.”

But instead of going down, he undresses, gets under the warm covers, tightly holds on to the real character, and kisses her as if asking for forgiveness and absolution. But as Ruth, surprised, yields in his arms, the phone rings again, the reception clerk announcing that the professor is now awaiting him in dining room.