A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

The extras in Slumbering Soldiers were fast asleep when asked only to impersonate sleepers in front of the camera, but the artist returning home, exhausted by a demanding retrospective, still tosses from side to side. I so pleased the Spaniards with the strange sleeping in my old films, he grumbles in his big, comfortable bed, that they laid claim on my sleep too. The heart that soared at the edge of the West seems to require a sleeping pill back in the East.

But not even the pill puts him to sleep, and he tries, to no avail, to reimagine the thwarted passion and relieve it on his own, so he gets out of bed to unpack his suitcase and put away his things. Yet sleep will not come, and he glumly opens his e-mail, does a lot of deleting, listens to a voice message from his ex-wife, and then, as his eyelids begin to droop, he shuts down the channels of communication, closes the window blinds, burrows his head deep into the pillow, and whispers, “Sleep, that’s it, now you have no choice.”

And Sleep not only succumbs to the director but grows stronger and sweeter from hour to hour, and when he wakes up for a moment to scurry to the toilet, he knows he will find Sleep again, awaiting him loyally in the bed he left behind. Nonetheless, in the mist of consciousness hovers a vague irritation. No, this time it’s not the spirit of the screenwriter who secretly engineered his retrospective. Moses now, to his surprise, feels strangely fond of Trigano. Something else, insignificant but stubborn, is nibbling at his slumber. Again and again he returns to his film Circular Therapy, urgently needing to know if the three of them, he and the cinematographer and the set designer, really did succeed in splitting his parents’ home into three different houses with three separate front doors or whether he imagined it in Santiago out of faulty memory. But who remembers, and who cares? Toledano is dead, the set designer is forgotten, and why should Ruth remember? Sleep does not cancel the question but quiets it for the moment as it sweeps him into the abyss he desires.

BUT WHEN SWEET nothingness dissolves into a flicker of consciousness, he is frightened by the glaring eye of the clock on the wall. Can this be the right time, or has the clock broken in his absence? He raises the blinds and again finds night, only now the world is rainy and foggy, and the glowing advertisements sputter in the murk. Can it be that nearly twenty-four hours have passed since he went off to sleep?

He puts on lights and turns on the heat and heads for the kitchen to prepare himself a meal, which might rekindle the appetite trumped by the fatigue, and amid the cutting and mixing and boiling of water, he remembers how Susana disappeared in the middle of filming and the general panic over how to find a replacement, until Amsalem’s Bedouin found her hiding under the carousel in the playground and with threats and enticements wooed her back to the synagogue so she could do her job. In Kafka’s short story, the animal is old and has an amazing memory, whereas their mongoose was young and inexperienced, nervous, and devoid of memory and vision. A staffer from the biblical zoo in Jerusalem, recruited to coach the film crew in handling the animal, was impressed by how they’d already half trained the feisty young thing and suggested that at the end of the shoot they turn her over to his zoo, where her artistic experience might inspire other animals.

During the years of his marriage, Moses regularly shared the kitchen duties and became quite skilled at preparing dishes not requiring special expertise. Ever since he and his wife parted ways, although he has mostly eaten in restaurants, he has broadened his repertoire. So now, full of food and fully awake, he waits for dawn so he can tell himself, I’m back to my apartment and my routines, in the meantime activating the washing machine and again checking e-mail, this time not with an urge to delete but with a desire to be in touch. New correspondents have not appeared, apart from Yaakov Amsalem, who congratulates him on the Spanish prize and has an idea for a new film.

Why does every little far-flung prize get publicized in Israel? Can it be that awards from abroad muffle the injustice and corruption at home? Amsalem, my friend, he is quick to reply, congratulations are unnecessary. This is not a prize but a tiny investment in the next film. So please, keep it quiet, so as not to wake the dormant taxman.

He reconnects the telephone, which immediately signals that a message arrived during the big sleep. Again, his ex-wife, who in the clear and civilized voice he has always loved also offers her congratulations on the prize. If such a private woman has heard the news, there’s no other choice but to declare it to the revenue authorities.

On the kitchen table lie leftovers of the big dinner; he can’t bring himself to look at them. He shoves them in the fridge, washes dishes, and tidies up, but doesn’t consider going back to bed, so in advance of his normal schedule he showers, shaves his cheeks and trims his goatee, puts on clothes and shoes too, to feel he is indeed getting back to daily life. He rotates his cozy TV chair to face the big window, and while witnessing the first stirring of neighbors he pulls a screenplay from the ever-mounting pile on his table to see if some hidden spark might twinkle within.

But there seems to be no spark for now, and soon the script drops to the floor, and he, a lone spectator in an awakening world, snoozes. And the snoozing grows deep enough to dream, about cautious descent on broad stairs, following his ex-wife who supports her aunt, a big blond woman confined to a wheelchair before her death but who now, in the dream, has returned to life without a wheelchair, and she slowly, propped by his wife, goes down the stairs of a high school or college. He hurries after the two women, poised to catch hold of the aunt and steady her should she fall backward.

The educational institution is built on several levels on a hillside, like the high school in Jerusalem where the dreamer was a student and later a teacher, until he became a director. And the aunt, although limping, walks downstairs with determination, neither slipping forward nor tripping back, landing safely at the ground floor, where her niece leads her to the cafeteria, its walls lined with books, finally relieving Moses of his supervisory obligation. Free at last, he looks around for other stairs and finds a narrow flight, its steps ugly and pocked, leading down to a deserted cellar. He flings from the top of the stairs a bag filled with dirty laundry — underwear, socks, shirts — and as the bag flies downward, he regrets his recklessness; he has a washer and dryer at home, so why ask an educational institution to do his dirty laundry, which isn’t labeled with his name? But he can’t undo what’s done. The bag has disappeared, and he has to accept its loss. He retreats from the stairs, opens a wide glass door, and finds himself gazing into a green gully.

A pinprick of light on the eastern horizon beyond the bedroom window. The rain has slowed down, the fog has lifted. If the long sleep had such a drowsy epilogue, it means the Spaniards had not deprived him of sleep but given him some of their own. Has his retrospective really ended? Not knowing if the cameraman of Circular Therapy had been able to split his family home in three still bothers him. He moves the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, puts on a windbreaker, and takes, as he heads for his car, the walking stick.

BY THE TIME he gets to Bab-el-Wad he has to battle with the sunrise. Last night’s rain has cleansed the world, and the rays of eastern light glinting from the Judean Hills grow stronger in the purified air, blinding the driver. From time to time he lifts a hand from the wheel and shields his eyes to see the road. But since traffic is thin at this early hour, and he knows the way, he arrives safe and sound at the scene of his childhood — a stately Jerusalem neighborhood, conquered when the state was established, where a mossy, mysterious leper hospital was joined eventually by the residences of the president and prime minister. He parks his car near the imposing Jerusalem Theater, not far from the house where he grew up. Here, now, he completes his retrospective for himself alone. It was nearly twenty years ago that he sold the small handsome stone house, and he has not visited it since nor passed by, so he is prepared to find changes and additions, even a second story. Yet at first glance, everything is as it was. The same big, black iron door separating two exterior stairways, the same mailbox. The huge ceramic flowerpot that appeared in Circular Therapy stands on its base atop the fence and has changed its color. The house was purchased from him after his father’s death by a young couple, both lawyers, whose names are on the large mailbox. Do they still live here, or is the house rented to someone else? They had intended to add another floor, but it turns out that what was good enough for his parents was good enough for them, or else they failed in business.