A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

“Elisha.”

“I didn’t dare to say he reminds me of Trigano, it’s been so many years since I’ve seen him.”

“Yes, there is something… You’re not imagining it.”

“You see, I’m not yet completely senile. Let’s go back to the studio. I’m eager to see you directing that scene. Will you ask the kids to touch physically, or does their love remain hanging in the air?”

“Kids today touch each other with ease. With love and also violence. Aren’t you planning some serious touching in your next film?”

“Don’t put the cart before the horse.”

IN THE STUDIO, the two students have shed their clothes and are dressed in white robes. Elisha continues to brood in his corner, warming his hands on a cup of tea. But the drama coach gets him on his feet and tells him to put on a robe too.

“Why?” he complains. “You said that today I’m here only to watch.”

“Yes, watch, but not as an outside observer. If you’re dressed like them, you’ll participate with your body and not just by looking and inflame the jealousy in your heart at both brother and lover. This will help build the character you’ll be playing tomorrow.”

The boy shrugs, skeptical, but goes to the corner, picks out a big embroidered robe, puts it on over his clothes, and returns to his place.

Ruth stacks pillows by the window and seats the Hasmonean lad on them, gently angling his head to the sky, and she asks the girl in love to remove her shoes, stand barefoot in the corner, and call in a whisper: “Simon, where art thou?”

The scene progresses, and regresses, and Ruth doesn’t just instruct but demonstrates the gestures and expresses the feelings, moving from character to character. She knows the script from memory, she is free to act and explain at the same time, and toward the end of the scene, after Simon’s heart acknowledges his love and succumbs, she asks the boy and the girl to draw closer, to touch and stroke, to put a head on a shoulder, and encourages them to venture a gentle kiss on the forehead and cheek. The children are embarrassed. “Ruth,” they protest, “the kids will laugh at us; we know them.” But the coach dismisses their concerns. In her youth, her school had put on My Glorious Brothers, and when the giggling began, the principal stifled it at once.

The day wanes and grayness descends, auguring rain. But Ruth still does not turn on the light — she takes advantage of the darkness to deepen the feelings of her actors. The visitor in his corner is fascinated by real and imaginary intimacies between the two youngsters and glances at the sorrowful doppelgänger of the young Trigano, who closely studies his two friends to cultivate pain and despair for tomorrow.

She is deliberately tormenting and abusing that boy, he thinks, a strange, fleeting thought.

When the rehearsal is over he is careful not to applaud, and his mind has already wandered to Amsalem’s idea. Can the story of the sudden parenthood of two children be told with psychological realism, or does such deviant subject matter need a different key, and if it does, who will find it?

The young actors in their white robes move about the dark studio like ghosts. Moses feels they are looking to him for a reaction, but he smiles and keeps silent. The next rehearsal is scheduled for tomorrow, and the students get dressed, put on their backpacks, and say goodbye.

The actress collapses on the pillows by the window.

“Nice work,” praises the visitor, “you give me hope.”

“Hope for what?”

“For the new film, about the children who suddenly become parents.”

“Why a movie like that?” she says with eyes closed, her face pale.

“Why not? It’s a contemporary drama, in the spirit of the age. A period that’s full of sex and violence among kids.”

She opens her eyes, looks at him.

“That’s the spirit of the age?”

“That’s what they say, that’s what I hear.”

Silence. He tries again.

“It’ll be like your Glorious Brothers, only a different kind of glory, more like infamy.”

“That’s what you and Amsalem are plotting?” A shadow of derision in her voice.

“And what do you think?”

She doesn’t answer. She is exhausted, can’t keep her eyes open, and he knows she’d be happy if he just left, but he wants to stay, go back into her apartment.

“Let’s go out and eat…”

“No, I’m dead, I’m going to bed, and don’t you dare mention the blood tests.”

“Not another word. May I invite myself to the next rehearsal? I want to see pain and despair in Judah Maccabee, that little Trigano. You seem to be picking on him.”

“Could be.”

“Please let me drop in on the next rehearsal?”

“No, Moses, I’m sorry. You could tell the kids were excited by the presence of a film director. You’re confusing them with possibilities that kids acting in a school play don’t need. If you want to see the final results, you’ll have to come with all the parents.”

“Which parents?”

“The parents of these children and their grandparents too. Why not? You have a grandson their age.”

He nods, says nothing. As darkness pervades the studio, he recalls the musty smell of the confessional booth in the cathedral. There, behind the leather lattice, opposite the monk who spoke to him in ancient Hebrew, his heart opened wide. He had forgotten to tell the monk about the time he nearly married her. He didn’t, and not because he feared the revenge of Trigano, but because he was afraid of shackling himself to a character who would appear and reappear in his work. But that happened anyway, without his marrying her.

He stands up, absent-mindedly reaches for the pointed walking stick he bought her in Santiago, approaches the woman sprawled by the window, and says: “They were like a dream, the three days in Santiago.”

“How so?” She is surprised. “I remember every minute of the retrospective they put on for you and, actually, for me too.”

“Of course,” he affirms warmly, “it was a retrospective for us both.”

“Why a dream, then?”

“Because our three nights in one bed passed by like a dream.”

“The dream was yours, Moses, and in a dream you have no right to get near me.”

“Why? Because you saw the rape scene in the wadi and your old anger came back?”

“Not anger, disappointment,” she explains. “I understood that with the savage violence against the deaf-mute girl you made Trigano’s darkest fantasies come true. So I was disappointed in you, in the young man you were then, a teacher and educator who was prepared to throw away his values and surrender to someone else’s story — to hand over a young woman, barely an actress, to an actor who used the camera as an alibi for his lust. And Trigano, who was at your elbow the whole time to protect his script, was pleased with your submissiveness as a director, which encouraged him to go to extremes with me in his screenplays from then on.”

He turns around, puts on his jacket, and goes back to Ruth, who has wrapped herself in a light blanket as if determined to stay on her pillows and not return to her apartment lest Moses try to follow.

“So if you were right, if the retrospective in Spain was not only mine but also yours, let’s go down together to the abandoned station and see what became of our railroad tracks.”

“Why?”

“Why not? The old border is gone, and the Arab village Toledano annexed with his camera is now under Israeli control. We can get a new angle on the place we shot the film.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because we have to finish the retrospective before we can start thinking about a new film. And that’s why you have to come with me. Down there in the desert, in the darkness, I was alone with the Bedouin and his wife, but this time we’ll be there in daylight, we’ll walk by the tracks, and even go down in the wadi where I failed you as a human being.”