A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

She laughs. “Then come sit with me,” she says. “But first get me a blanket.”

“I’ll sit for just a minute,” he says and covers her shoulders with the blanket that lies folded beside her. “We should already have left for the airport, but Ruth has disappeared.”

Doña Elvira shrugs.

“She didn’t come back with you?”

It turns out Ruth went on her own in the Old Town, to look for more presents.

“And you came back on your own? When was that?”

“Less than an hour ago.”

“But she knows that we are supposed to leave at three for the airport.”

“And what time is it now?”

“One minute to three.”

“If she knows, why should you worry?” says Doña Elvira serenely. “In this city she is safe.”

“Why should I worry?” he challenges the old lady, as if he had entrusted her with a little girl, and he rushes to the front desk to see if there is a message for him.

But no message has been received.

He leaves the hotel and, skipping down the few steps, goes out into the great plaza, then hurries across to the first alley of the Old Town and stops. What now? Where to look?

She does have her passport and plane ticket with her, and she knows the time of the flight, and he has a fleeting suspicion that she is deliberately late, that she wants to part from him here at long last, this place where Trigano’s spirit has come and gone. As though the confession he has just made has risen from the depths of the cathedral and drifted to her in the Old Town, and she knows that there will be no role for her anymore in his work.

He goes back to the hotel. “What’s going on?” the student asks. “We’re late, and there’s traffic on the road to the airport.” Moses leans on the car. “We’ll wait a little longer. My actress seems to have a hard time saying goodbye to this wonderful place.”

“If she doesn’t get back,” says the student, “we have to remember to take her suitcase out of the trunk.”

“You’re right.” He grins at the future director and points to her suitcase, feeling vaguely vengeful. “Take it out now, and one of the walking sticks, and put them over there, and before we leave we’ll ask the porter to take them back into the hotel.” Suddenly he adds, “If you want to be a movie director, you ought to practice trips to the airport, because in every film today there’s at least ten minutes of driving to or from an airport.”

The student laughs.

It’s three thirty. No, he tells himself, this is no mistake or forgetfulness, but a deliberate act. She knows how anxious he is about time, knows about his punctuality, his sense of responsibility. However, the two of them are independent souls. Even when they are in bed together, they are like two actors supervised by a director and cinematographer and sound and lighting people.

“That’s it, we should go,” he says to the student as he finally accepts her absence. “Let me just leave her a message at the hotel.”

When he returns to the car he can see in the distance, in the waning afternoon light, the missing woman strolling through the great square.

“I thought there would be another cathedral farther down, so I kept going,” she says.

He gazes into her eyes.

Many times he told Toledano, and subsequent cinematographers he worked with, to point the lens straight into her eyes, to reveal, from within her yellow-green irises, the inner world of the character.

THE TAXI DRIVER seemed to recognize Moses’ companion, and the director gave him her address only, as if it were his as well. But when they reached her building in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, Moses said to the driver: “Hang on to my suitcase and walking stick until I get back. I have to help the lady, no elevator.”

“You need a hand?”

“No, thanks, I can manage.”

They climb the stairs slowly, turning on the timed stairwell light three times. The director lugs the suitcase up the stairs, slides it along the landings, and when they get to the fourth floor, he doesn’t leave Ruth until her door is opened and the apartment light switched on and he is sure that the world left behind three days ago has remained intact.

“Should I help you turn on the main valve?” he asks at the top of the stairs as they enter her apartment.

“No need,” she says, “I was too lazy to turn it off.”

“You want to get flooded again?”

“What can I do, it’s so hard to reach.”

Since the founding of the neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century, the apartment has been renovated many times, but its main valve is still buried deep in a kitchen cabinet, requiring getting down on one’s knees and crawling to reach it.

“That’s enough.” She hurries him off with a slight laugh. “The driver will think you ran away and left him with a stick and an empty suitcase.”

The timer in the stairwell has gone out again, leaving only backlighting from the apartment. On the flights from Santiago to Barcelona and then to Israel she slept peacefully. Before landing she added color to her cheeks with new cosmetics purchased between flights, so her face is radiant. And the passion that was blocked for the three days quivers inside the man who stands before her.

“One last thing… one more…”

“No.” She presses a finger to his lips. “No need for another test. Believe me, I’m healthy. And if I die, it won’t be your fault.”

He puts his hand on her forehead to feel her temperature, then his lips, to double-check, and holds her close. She smiles and kisses his eyes and forehead. They stand this way for a moment, embracing in the stairwell. Once he was taller than she was, but he has shrunk with the years and their height is now the same. Finally she enters the apartment and closes the door after her, but he lingers a bit by the adjacent apartment, its door decorated with colorful stickers. This is the studio where she gives acting classes to children. Despite everything, he comforts himself, there’s always something pure and lovely between us. We’ve accomplished something rare.

The driver’s head rests on the steering wheel in sleep so deep that Moses needs to knocks on the windshield to wake him, gently, so as not to scare him. The driver rubs his eyes vigorously, as if to tear away not just cobwebs of sleep but the remnants of a dream, and he gapes at Moses as if he were a new night rider with no baggage who happened into his cab.

“On TV there’s someone who looks like her.”

“That’s her,” Moses gladly confirms, “she’s the one.”

When they get to Moses’ high-rise, the driver wants to be paid for waiting time. “But why?” asks Moses. “You waited for me all of five minutes.” The driver checks his watch and also the meter. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he apologizes, “the dream confused my sense of time.” “Which dream?” The passenger is curious, but the driver is not about to disclose his dream to a stranger.

On the twentieth floor, in darkest night, in a beautiful apartment acquired with the profits of the film Potatoes, Moses can see Tel Aviv, wreathed in buildings and billboards, twinkling beyond a wall-to-wall window, and only a hint of faraway surf signals to the traveler that nature still exists in his home city. He turns on the main tap and the heat, puts the prize money in a drawer, and sheds his clothes. He stands in front of the window, a glass of wine in hand, and tries to estimate which floor the crosses would reach if the cathedral of Santiago were placed alongside his apartment building.

He goes into the bedroom and raises the blinds in the east window to enjoy the view from his bed of the distant lights of the Judean Hills. His thoughts during the two flights did not let him doze, but now he is determined to devote himself to deep sleep.