The Retrospective

by A. B. Yehoshua

  We have some time, the airport is not far away, he reassures himself, and he returns to Doña Elvira, who has not changed position but who now has her eyes open. She smiles and invites him to sit by her side. He is careful not to create the illusion that he has time for a real conversation, so he remains standing as he tells her about the confession taken by her son in the bishop’s private booth.

  The mother is not surprised by her son’s misdeed.

  “You made a mistake, Mr. Moses, by agreeing to confess to a monk who is not authorized to receive confession, and if Manuel also granted you absolution, you should know that it counts for nothing.”

  “I didn’t ask for absolution,” he says with a smile, “and I don’t need it.”

  But Doña Elvira continues her complaint. “Lately he has been playing around with the principles of his monastic oath and looking for needless provocations. The Dominicans will end up tossing him out of the order, and he’ll come back and live with me and be even more dependent on his mother.”

  Moses is touched by the candid and endearing complaint. “But my confession to Manuel is not a provocation, for I, as you recall, am not a Christian or even a believer, just a person.”

  “Not a Christian?” For a moment she seems confused, but her memory quickly recovers and locates the proper identity of the Israeli director. Yet she does not give up entirely. “Not a Christian, but why not a believer?”

  “Because that’s how God made me,” declares Moses with a triumphant look and a shrug of helplessness, “and I have neither the power nor the authority to change His will.”

  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.

  six

  Putting the Old House in Order

  1

  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.

  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.

  2

  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.

  3

  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.