A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

“Okay, I’ll wait for you,” agrees the young man, who seems amused by two older Israelis eager to take a Sabbath-morning stroll on a desolate railroad track near his village. “But to get back into Palestine”—he grins—“you’ll have to undergo a security check and pay a fee.”

“We’ll pay the fee”—Moses chuckles—“on condition that you not budge from here.”

The young man finds a big rock, sits down, and opens the sports pages. Meanwhile the director and the actress make their way single file along the tracks, first he in the lead, then she, stepping on the gray concrete railroad ties, trying to find the spot where the imaginary train plunged into the imaginary abyss. But it’s not so simple to reconstruct a reality that was imaginary to begin with, and the actress trips and the heel of her shoe gets stuck in a gap between the rail and one of the ties. Moses quickly grabs her and sets her aright, pausing a second before kneeling to pry out the shoe and fit it back on her bare foot. Holding her in his arms, in the here and now, he can feel the tenderness of the woman who took part in so many of his films. And even as she smiles at him with gratitude, she wants to be released from his embrace. Perhaps she suspects that it’s not her the old director desires, but rather the lithe, dark young woman whose lover had demanded she portray the character of an inscrutable deaf-mute.

“So what are we actually doing here?” Ruth asks.

Moses finds it hard to explain his urge to reconnect with the shooting locations of his early films. Does he just want to get the feel of them, or does he want to repair them?

“Can they be repaired?”

“It’s impossible,” admits the director. “But one can try calming the old anger.”

“Not anger, just disappointment.”

“And even if just disappointment,” he insists, “disappointment hurts no less.” This is why he has brought her here, to soften the disappointment.

“To soften it? How?” Her eyes flash mild disdain.

Maybe, as they walk near the village that is again beyond the border, she will understand why Distant Station could only have ended with a scene of violent rape. Even a foreign audience in a distant land was sympathetic to the film.

“The sympathy of the audience doesn’t compensate for the humiliation of the actor.”

“Hold on. I didn’t write the screenplay, I only interpreted it.”

“An extreme interpretation, far beyond what was only hinted in the script.”

“But Trigano was there with us and could have restrained me.”

“He couldn’t, because of the agreement that you could change nothing in the script once it was done and that he would not meddle in the directing once it began. His hands were tied.”

“Tied even when I, as you claim, degraded you?”

“Fine, maybe the agreement didn’t stop him, maybe that was just his excuse. But understand this: your creative partnership with him was thanks to your normalcy, your sense of proportion, on the assumption that you, as director, would impose credibility and restraint on his wild imagination, that you would calm the disquiet raging inside him, clarify the symbols that raced around in his soul. But then, as we’re filming the last scenes of Distant Station, he suddenly sees that your flexibility is not so simple. That it has a different mindset, broader margins, than he expected. He understood that the bourgeois values you brought from your Jerusalem were less stable than he imagined and that normalcy could also be violent and cruel. That’s why he didn’t want to interfere with the rape scene. He liked the idea of going to extremes with you… to dare more. With me, or through me…”

“With you. Mainly with you.” Her words have moved him. “We all knew how close a bond he had with you.”

“It wasn’t just a bond, Moses, it was much more than a bond, much more than the love of a man for a woman. Love wasn’t enough for him. It had a purpose beyond itself. To turn me into a symbol, into a character.”

“A character?” he says disingenuously. “In what sense?”

“A character,” she continues confidently, “a character who, because of her own uniqueness and regardless of the part she is playing, is able to force people to think a little differently about the world. And despite what happened in Distant Station, I took it upon myself to be a character, not just because of Trigano, but because I saw that you were on his side, supporting him and loyal to him. But when you both sent me out into the street after I handed over the baby, and you expected me to force an old dirty beggar to nurse from me, and you degraded me in front of the girl who was me in the past, I felt that if I didn’t stop, the two of you would push me even farther. Because love that tries to go beyond a woman and make her into a character, a symbol, is a love gone wrong.”

They keep walking carefully along railroad ties. Moses listens in silence.

“That’s why I tried to stop the momentum of the final scene. I wanted to test your reaction.”

“You only tried?”

“Yes, I only tried. But instead of offering a solution — perhaps promising that through the camera work you would inject some compassion into the scene to shield me from the weirdness — you simply switched sides and joined my refusal. You canceled the scene so fast that neither I nor you had a chance to reconsider.”

“I was quick to support you, to protect you.”

“Yes, but the support was so ferocious that it insulted Trigano, wounded him.”

“Because of his pride, his delusions of grandeur. He was sure my ‘normalcy’ would defer to him and accept everything he fed you.”

“You were ready to do that scene. That was not the point.”

“Then what was the point?”

“You created in him, and in me as well, an impression that you supported me because you wanted me for yourself, wanted to take me away from him. But you didn’t really want me — you certainly didn’t love me then.”

Moses kicks a small stone. “That’s true.”

“So you should have appeased him, suggested a compromise, calmed my anxiety, most of all. You could have tried harder and found a way to remedy the scene that was scaring me. Why didn’t you try to make peace between me and him? You were the director, you were the strong one. You were the native Israeli, you controlled the production. You should never have allowed him to cut off ties with you and with me. But you wanted to exploit the argument to be rid of him once and for all, so you wouldn’t have to keep dealing with his crazy ideas.”

In that case, he realizes with a shudder, the picture of Caritas Romana by the bed at the Parador had hit a deep nerve after all, though she hadn’t said a word.

“Yes,” he confesses, “I did want to break away from him, or at least keep my distance for a while. I was afraid he was leading me down a blind alley.”

THEY HEAR DISTANT buzzing, the sound of a saw or a lathe, but it gets louder, closer, and the walkers on the tracks, who assumed they were protected by the Sabbath from any trains, freight trains included, are surprised as a little yellow railcar barrels toward them from around a bend, shrieking like a bird of prey. Moses grabs Ruth by the arm and pulls her aside. “You can’t even rely on the chief rabbi in this country,” he grumbles.

The two exchange a grin as an old man in coveralls, bald and heavyset, brakes the railcar and hollers: “What’s going on? How’d you get here? This isn’t a hiking trail! Get out of here or I’ll call the police forces.” It’s hard to pin down his nationality; he says “police forces” as if he’s a bi-national with double protection. Moses jests, “Is it not the Sabbath, sir? You want us to inform the religious authorities that Israel Railways rides on Shabbat?” Except the railroad man doesn’t get the joke. He climbs down from the railcar and waves his hands. “ Yalla, kishteh, scat,” he commands in three languages, then gets back in the car, blows the whistle, and heads for the coastal plain.