The Retrospective

Two. Circular Therapy

THEY ARE GREETED with applause as they enter. The screening room is small, but the guest prefers a small and crowded hall to a big one half empty. Every seat is taken, and several young people are sitting on the stairs. Can it be, wonders Moses, that everyone here is a student or a teacher? But then he notices a few heavyset senior citizens in the room. It turns out that the provincial administration extended support to the retrospective on condition that the film archive set aside seats for old people from the area.

De Viola begins with words of appreciation, and an announcement. The first two films will be shown in the small hall, but the third, The Train and the Village, will be screened in the evening in the big auditorium. As is customary, before the lights go down, the director is called upon to say a few words of introduction. Moses keeps it short, to lessen the burden of translation, not failing to mention his surprise at the decision to open the retrospective with such an early, rudimentary film, one made more than forty years ago and whose concept, let alone details, the director can barely remember. Therefore, he tells them, in everyone’s interest, it is best not to offer explanations that will turn out to be inaccurate. He also issues a warning: “Even if the film, in your opinion and also mine, turns out to be amateurish and full of holes, I will try to defend it to the best of my ability, but on condition that you will treat me with mercy.”

Laughter ripples through the room. The priest raises his hands in a display of piety and says, “Don’t worry, even though artists are not allowed to ask for mercy for the fruit of their imagination, compassion and forgiveness are plentiful around here.” He motions to dim the lights.

The opening credits appear in Spanish, replacing the original Hebrew. The editing facility in the cellar is clearly capable of high-caliber work. The screen is flooded with glaring, undiffused Israeli sunlight as the names of the filmmakers — actors, editors, set designers — drift among old buildings of Jerusalem. The name of the scriptwriter, Shaul Trigano, tarries long on the screen, fading only as the camera focuses on a noisy old Chausson, a clunky French-made bus popular in Israel in the 1960s; it was eventually retired from service, and the chassis were used as storerooms at building sites.

From the toxic black smoke belched by the bus emerges the name of the director, Yair Moses, also in Spanish transliteration; it is towed behind the Chausson as it pulls into the old central station. Moses is wondering if it was he who decided to stretch the screen time of his credit or if the Spanish film editor took it upon himself to immortalize the director’s name until the first passengers exit the bus.

And now he senses that the woman who sits beside him in the dark does not recognize herself in the village girl wearing the flowered mini-dress and straw hat and clasping a cardboard suitcase to her chest as she makes her way out of the bus station. He whispers, “See what a cute dress we picked out for you,” and she seems puzzled. But then a jolt of memory prevails, and she watches her character approaching passersby, asking directions in a voice not her own in a foreign tongue, and she turns to Moses, half smiling, half panicked.

Who would have thought that such an ancient film would be dubbed in Spanish, the Hebrew soundtrack a dim echo in the background? “What can we do about this?” he whispers to the archive director sitting to his right. “I can’t explain a film if I can’t understand a word that’s spoken.” “Of course you can,” the priest says to calm him, “it’s still your film, and even if you can’t recall the dialogue, you’ll be able to recognize the thrust of the film. And besides, my friend”—he touches the guest on the knee—“although the film you made at the beginning of your career may seem naive or primitive to you now, it nevertheless contains religious truth. It was not by accident that we chose it to open your retrospective.”

The words religious truth put Moses oddly at ease. Yes, why not? Perhaps it’s when you skip the dialogue that forgotten details of directing and cinematography come to light. He settles comfortably into his chair and grins at Ruth, who, having recognized her youthful self, leans eagerly forward, as if to embrace it. It is now clear that owing to its flimsy plot, the film will unfold at a snail’s pace and give its heroine plenty of time to reach her destination. But walking is not easy. She keeps shifting her suitcase from hand to hand; suitcases in those days did not have wheels, and Moses insisted that suitcases carried by his characters not be empty, to heighten the authenticity of the act. Toledano’s loving camera clings to the village girl who makes her way through the divided Jerusalem of the sixties — a provincial city but content within its clear boundaries, so that even an ugly concrete wall stuck in the middle of a street to mark a border between two countries doesn’t perturb the young woman walking by, accompanied by soft music. She pauses to read the Hebrew street signs, asking directions in Spanish. Moses takes note of inventive camera angles and interesting bits of montage that offer images of Jerusalem before the Six-Day War, including streets and buildings that no longer exist and vacant sites built up in later years, like the field where the president’s house went up; it is virgin land in this old film, strewn with rocks and thistles.

The young woman descends the steps of a stone house and rings the doorbell, and Moses is shocked to discover himself opening the door — a thin young man with wild hair, naked to the waist, a pipe in his mouth. The priest casts him an impish glance. Yes, it’s me, nods the director, who hopes, but is far from sure, that this was the only time he cast himself in a film, since the shift from one side of the camera to the other undermines his control and authority. But in this beginner’s film his acting part was small and brief, and the Spanish voice they’ve given him sounds more like yelling. He thinks of asking de Viola to tell him what he is saying, but the priest is glued to the screen, and Moses doesn’t want to break the spell.

Yes, even without the dubbed dialogue, it’s clear that the careless young man knows the visitor on his doorstep and doesn’t deny his promise to put her up at his house. Except someone got there before her, a woman emerging now from the bedroom in a flimsy bathrobe, a tenant, a lover, and the hostile look she shoots at the newcomer stops the girl cold. Humiliation and confusion flush her face, enhancing its beauty. Which is perhaps why the young man shows signs of doubt and regret, opens the door wide for the village girl to enter, and carries her suitcase into the hallway, and it seems this will be a story about two girls in a rented apartment, competing for the kindness of a mixed-up young man. But the lodger in the skimpy robe is unwilling to share her rights. She sends the young man to get the visitor a glass of water, and when he is gone a conversation ensues between the two women, of which Moses cannot recollect a word, but whatever is said, it is strong enough to convince the guest to give up her claim, enabling the screenwriter to derail the plot from a banal story into a strange and different one, a story that will struggle to be meaningful and credible.

Moses’ performance is not over. As penance for breaking his promise to the girl, he carries her heavy suitcase in the harsh white Jerusalem light that Toledano favored in their early days, failing to understand how many subtle and important details he was bleaching out.

To rest his arms, the young man places the suitcase on his head, taking a few hesitant steps that suggest, at least in the mind of the director, that he regrets that the extra room in his flat was not saved for this attractive young woman but rented instead to a bony, depressive tenant. Moses is shaken at the sight of his childhood street on the Spanish screen, and of his parents’ house, with some of its furnishings removed to give the camera room to maneuver.

“Wasn’t that your mother?” whispers Ruth as the camera slowly closes in on the woman of the house, indeed his mother, an impromptu actress in her own living room, which thanks to camera angles has never looked larger.

In the 1960s, his mother took early retirement from public service so that her husband could be promoted into her job, and the free time tempted her to take part in her son’s directing adventure, first by reading the script and suggesting minor changes, then by persuading Moses’ father to offer their house as a filming location. In those years, the filmmakers preferred to cast amateurs, not merely to save money but also because professionals who’d been trained as stage actors were prone to theatrical excess. Perhaps out of gratitude to his mother for turning her house into a set for a dubious movie project, Moses gave her a part in the film. His mother rose to the adventure over the objections of his nervous father, and the opportunity provided by her son to become a fictional character added joy and excitement to the last years of her life.

A long time has passed since her death, yet it pains Moses that Trigano’s script aged his mother beyond her actual years. They not only whitened her hair but also added wrinkles to her face that he is sure had never been there before. Yet she retains the wise humanity of a lonely old woman who offers shelter to a confused young woman in exchange for housework and personal services. This, as the film progresses, will prompt the old woman to evolve from a recipient of care into a caregiver, an angel of mercy for a woman more impaired than she is. Through the convolutions of the plot, that woman, despite her disabilities, will herself come to the aid of a dying man, who will assume a mission of his own and with superhuman effort postpone his death. With the remnants of his strength he will drag himself at night to a shabby cafeteria in the empty bus station, not to sip the last drink of his life, but to lift the spirits of the village girl who had come to the capital filled with hope and who now waits for the first bus to get her out of there.

For this was Trigano’s vision: everyone who receives therapeutic care can and must become a caregiver. And as this simplistic, seemingly unfounded idea circles in scenic waves of black and white, crafted long ago by a young director, the original title of the film flashes in Moses’ memory, and he whispers it to his companion.

THE FILM’S DIRECTOR sits in the last row, with de Viola beside him in the aisle seat; this way it won’t be hard for him to get to the stage at the end of the screening. Meanwhile, his heart beats faster at the sight of his mother, her voice faintly audible under the Spanish dubbing. She is giving instructions to the new lodger, who unpacks her suitcase in Moses’ childhood room and emerges in a lightweight shirt and shorts from a bygone era — very short and baggy, with an elastic waistband. She had arrived in Jerusalem only an hour ago, at the invitation of a young man who raised her hopes, and now, weary and dejected, she wields a mop and pail in the home of a sick old lady.

The two converse incomprehensibly, and the director notes that even at the dawn of his career, he could create a natural flow of dialogue. The Spanish dubbing is so sophisticated that it almost seems not to be the work of actors in a sound studio but that the Israelis had been hypnotized to speak another language. No wonder the audience feels at home with the foreign characters, and little Jerusalem, in the black-and-white of the 1960s, is perceived in the province of Galicia as a familiar and likable city.

Moses recalls that this early film was awarded a prize by the city of Jerusalem, but the prize didn’t help draw an audience, and after two weeks in the theater, it had to cede its place to a hard-hitting action movie. His father, who was distressed to see his wife as an actress, even more so to see her as an old lady with white hair, was unabashedly delighted that the film was no longer playing, but his mother was upset that not everyone she knew had seen her. She, who never shied from self-criticism, had become a fan of her fictional character, and repeatedly praised her son for the quality of his direction, perhaps to hint she was ready for another role.

Even had he wanted to find her another part in later films, it was not possible. Two years after the filming, his mother was diagnosed with the illness that forced her to struggle in reality and not just in the imagination of a writer or director. And now, in the small screening room of a former military barracks, as he watches her resurrection of sorts, so long after her death — a brief resurrection, since she is present in the film only through the first half — he cannot contain himself, and in a whisper he turns to the priest on his right: “There, that one… the old woman, she was my mother.” The director of the archive already knows — someone has told him, or he figured it out from the names of the actors — and he smiles and nods with approval at the audacious choice, and redirects Moses’ attention to a strange silhouette that appears on the right side of the screen — a flaw that escaped the film’s editor. A character unconnected to the plot is there, behind a curtain, and the cameraman did not notice the invader of the frame. Only after the film’s conversion to a sharper digital format is his father revealed, hiding behind the curtain to make sure that even as a film director, his son took pains to honor his mother.

“You really don’t remember what you talked about?” Moses quietly challenges his companion, who is fascinated by what she is saying, even if she doesn’t understand a word. Indeed, how quickly dialogue is erased from memory, and only random images remain, such as the young lodger leaning gracefully on a broom handle, her bare foot carelessly brushing its bristles. Moses wonders if it was inexperience that led him in his early days as director to depend excessively on the power of spoken language, unfazed by the likelihood that overlong dialogue with no action would tire viewers and sap their empathy. Nonetheless, all around him are foreigners sitting attentively, murmuring pleasure, without the slightest idea where the plot will take them.

“You really don’t remember what you said to her?” Moses persists in asking the actress, whose eyes sadly glisten, longing for lost youth. She shrugs, for she has acted in so many films and spoken so much dialogue, she says, who can remember. And yet, there is something she does recall. “In a minute you’ll see how I cook a meal for this old woman, also known as your mother. That’s what I do remember from this pitiful movie.”

Here, then, is the lodger in the kitchen, cutting vegetables, slicing bread, frying an egg, which looks like a goldfish, owing to an error in lighting. Can it be, thinks Moses with a chuckle, that he already had the yen to poke the camera into pots and pans, or was it the cinematographer’s idea?

The film unfolds at a sluggish pace, promising no dramatic developments yet able to sustain tension in the small hall. Is it the absence of the promise that commands continued attention? The old woman, listless and frail, eats the meal with trembling hands. When she drops her fork, she is too feeble to retrieve it from the floor, and the girl has to pick it up and rinse it off. This does not seem to be temporary weakness, and yet, after the young lodger clears the table, washes the dishes, and gets permission from the landlady to go to her room — where for a sweet second of screen time she appears in the nude — a metamorphosis takes place in the living room. The landlady rises energetically from her armchair, changes her clothes, puts on makeup, takes a basket and a cane, and, in keeping with Trigano’s vision, switches from suffering invalid to efficient caregiver. She makes her way through a crowded market, a slow-moving yet confident old woman, tracked with deep respect by the camera. She walks purposefully from stall to stall, bargaining with vendors and selecting bread, eggs, and vegetables, even a cut of red meat, and then she heads down a lonesome alley to an old house. She climbs narrow winding stairs to a peeling door with no name, a door that admits her again into that same house, his parents’ house, a place only Moses can identify, for through the skills of the cinematographer and set designer it has now become a different house, with no courtyard or garden, a dingy and neglected house with broken furniture and torn rugs, the residence of a big-boned woman confined to a wheelchair, waiting for help.

“Matilda… I can’t believe it!” Ruth laughs.

And the laughter extends, like a fishing line, into the well of time, and out comes a colorful, almost mythological character of indeterminate age and identity, a distant relative of Trigano’s, also imported from that immigrant town in the desert, who turned out to be a natural comedienne. Moses’ mother, a refined and cultured old woman, approaches her tentatively and carefully lays the basket of groceries in front of her rickety wheelchair, apparently on loan from a nearby old-age home, and in the dark hall the filmmaker hangs his head with embarrassment over what he has created, though after many years of experience in gauging audience reactions, he can see that his message, puerile but humane, retains its grip.

Not in a sudden recollection but simply by looking at the flow of images on the screen, he discovers that as a fledgling director, faithful to the script, he did not spare his mother the indignity of feeding the invalid and cleaning her, washing her underwear in the sink, and there is no way of knowing if these actions were in the script or added by the director’s inspiration. And perhaps also because he doesn’t understand a word of the dialogue that flows cheerfully between his mother and the woman in her care, his eyes mist over and he chokes up; it is hard to bear his mother’s humiliation. And like his father, who did not survive long after the death of his wife, he feels great compassion for the ghost of his mother, who plays her role with such devotion, and he rises from his seat. I’ll be right back, he reassures the director of the archive, and hurries for the exit.

The long corridor of the barracks is filled with the shadows of the short winter’s day, but since Moses had made a mental note of the men’s room door, he locates it easily in the faint light. He rinses his face and closets himself in a stall and, after emptying his bladder, sits on the lid of the toilet to weigh his options for this strange retrospective of old films that speak a foreign tongue. Was the promise of a small cash prize, to be awarded at the end of the retrospective, meant to mollify him? Though, really, why be upset? After all, he is not here to represent only his own work, but also the spirit of his nation’s rebirth. And Santiago is a city with an important cathedral. The hotel is opulent, the breakfast generous, and so far his companion is not unhappy. And even if the early films were based on the ideas of a young, opinionated, and unrealistic scriptwriter and are far from a full expression of Moses’ professional growth as demonstrated concretely over the years, he can defend them, provided he can still discern their intention.

He looks at his watch. His mother will soon complete her role, and her departure from the screen will alleviate the remorse of the merciless director. He returns to the hall; the audience is still caught up in the film. He slides carefully past de Viola, who gazes with amused wonder at the Matilda character, now begging the elderly caregiver not to leave her, but his mother covers the huge invalid with a blanket, and before exiting, to relieve the emptiness, she turns on the radio, and an old marching song resounds in the small hall of the former military barracks.

It’s a good thing that the Spaniards did not try to dub the words of the song, thinks Moses, for if they had, it’s doubtful Matilda could have mustered the strength to switch from invalid to caregiver. But empowered by the Hebrew marching song, still wedged in her wheelchair, she wheels herself with astounding expertise toward her own patient as the film shuns the rational choreography of people and objects. By means of clever cutting, the wheelchair moves as in a dream, along streets and stairs and courtyards to a country cottage, again his parents’ house, but this time the tiny residence of a dying man.

“Who was that?” Moses nudges Ruth, still delighted by the sight of Matilda. Ruth shrugs, unable to identify the actor with an oxygen mask on his white bloodless face, a jungle of intravenous bags hanging round his bed, tubes and needles feeding various regions of his body, and a microphone hidden among the IV drips that transmits groans and complaints in Spanish. But who is it? Moses shuts his eyes in the hope of teasing out the truth from behind the dubbing, the makeup, and the accoutrements of illness that fill the screen. For a tiny moment he suspects that it is he himself who, having no alternative, performed an additional role in his film. But surely he hadn’t brazenly misled the audience, turning the muscular young man who had earlier greeted the village girl into a mortally ill patient lying in bed in a white hospital gown. Surprisingly, despite the scary and depressing appearance of the dying man, a few giggles are audible from the audience. Perhaps this is because the big woman, expertly maneuvering her wheelchair, has transformed her passivity as a patient into the hyperactivity of an industrious caregiver. Or maybe the original text was not just dubbed in Spanish, but altered? In any event, it would seem that hidden comic elements, embedded in the script and direction, have improved with the passage of time, and a gloomy moral drama has turned on foreign soil into farcical entertainment.

“Yes, I recognize him,” Ruth blurts out, “concentrate, look carefully, it’s Toledano himself.” “Not a chance,” retorts Moses, dismissing the possibility that the cameraman had become the one on camera. But Ruth remains firm, and even as he throws his arm around her to quash her outlandish recollection, she stubbornly clings to that man who loved her and is now bedridden, deprived of his original voice in the role of a dying man. “Yes, it’s him, it can only be him, take a good look, the actor you picked was afraid of the part, and Toledano volunteered, because Trigano would never agree to portray any character he created. Why do you insist,” she pleads, “on not recognizing him?”

She’s right. The dying man’s eyes above the oxygen mask are the eyes of the deceased and unrequited lover, but then, who operated the camera? “Apparently you,” says Ruth, “and there was his assistant, what was his name?” “Nadav,” says Moses confidently, thrilled to retrieve the name of a person not seen in forty years. “Yes, Nadav,” she happily confirms, her memory merging with that of the director, the two jointly reconstructing the reality behind a forgotten film.

Their longtime cinematographer portrays a man on his deathbed with such understated grace that Moses is nostalgic for his antiquated film, and even the Spanish dubbing sounds familiar. Now the screen is a bit blurry, perhaps from a faulty focus or a smudge on the camera lens that shook in the hands of the director serving as a surrogate cameraman. Though it occurs to Moses that the unprofessional shakiness actually improves the scene, adding a dreamlike dimension at the twilight hour, as an immense woman in a wheelchair tries to soothe the suffering of a dying man in the final moments of his life.

And the viewers, who so far have patiently accepted the absurdities on the screen, must know, perhaps by some divine intuition, that it’s impossible that the dying man, the receiver of merciful care, will end this strange old film with his own death. A terminal patient with a conscience will not forfeit his role as a caregiver. The big woman leaves, and the audience applauds as the dying man sits bolt upright in bed, rips the oxygen mask from his face, and stares in agony at the slightly unsteady camera. The shaking, deriving from inexperience, fits the mood of the finale. The dead cameraman, beloved by all, comes back to life without surrendering his status as a dying man. In his white gown he wheels the intravenous poles and rushes out of his house, and even the critical and suspicious director cannot help but marvel at this terminal patient wandering like a ghost in the dead of night at the central bus station, clattering his IVs between dark silent buses, pushing them into a workingmen’s café, where a picture on a wall reminds Moses that this is his parents’ living room, now taking the role of a cafeteria thick with cigarette smoke and a bar stocked with colorful bottles, a dubious-looking bartender jovially mixing his concoctions. In the moonlight, from the garden of his childhood home, the camera tracks the silhouette of the innocent girl who gave up on the young man of the broken promise and then let down the woman she took care of and who now waits for the first morning bus to take her back to her village. The familiar cardboard suitcase is at her feet, and along with the flowered sundress, which is no less charming in moonlight, she wears a pretty scarf over her skinny shoulders. She is sad, and when she sees that the one who comes to care for her is himself dying, her despair grows, and she begins to weep.

“When you were young and gay, it was so easy to get you to cry for the camera,” Moses can’t help teasing his actress, “and now it’s hard to get one tear out of you.” “What can you do.” She sighs. “With all the tears I’ve shed in real life, I don’t have any left for your movies, but don’t worry, in your next film, if I must, I’ll cry again.” He nods, saying nothing, not only because he doesn’t want to upset her with the news that there will be no role for her in his next film, but also lest he annoy the audience, hypnotized by the moonlight and the shaky camera. The dying man with his tangle of IV tubes becomes a heroic figure — a character who proves to the whole world, in whispering Spanish, that even in his last hour, a person can breathe hope into the heart of another. The embarrassed smile that breaks out in close-up on the young woman’s face arouses real tears in the eyes of the aging actress watching herself. And after the screen finally goes dark, and lights go on in the hall, Moses promises himself that when he returns to Israel, he will find a copy of the forgotten film and watch it in its original language to determine its true value once and for all.

In the eyes of the audience scrutinizing the director, there may be wonder or bewilderment, but no antagonism or derision. He therefore hopes the questions will not deal with trivial points of realism or believability or with camera techniques, but with the ideas. Since the Spanish that replaced the original language did not allow him full mastery of the film’s details, he asks the director of the archive, who will moderate the discussion, to relay several questions together, figuring to avoid the ones not easily answered.

To his surprise, the questions imply affection for this simple film, and Moses is careful not to undermine it with answers betraying his own ambivalence about his early work. Film teachers and students do not approach movies as consumers demanding satisfaction and enjoyment in exchange for the ticket purchased at the box office; for them, a film is first and foremost material for study and explanation. And since he realized at lunch that in this city of pilgrimage, people tend to seek a symbol behind every detail, he resolves to be tolerant even of allegorical speculation. When one of the older teachers offers a strange interpretation for the visible shaking in the last scene, Moses does not expose his unskilled hand operating the camera but praises the man for his perspicacity, adding that in hindsight he cannot be sure that was the intent. Though the students do center their questions on technical matters and not spiritual issues, the fact that an outdated film made by a group of amateurs in a young small country on a minuscule budget can hold its own after such a long time instills optimism in them too, these young people. And after the priest reveals that Moses’ mother played the first old woman, obvious questions arise, such as: Was it hard for you to direct your own mother? Did she follow your instructions? Why didn’t you try to include your father?

Attention shifts to the actress, her fetching screen presence still lingering in the room. A young woman asks whether the smile that brightened her face at the end of the movie was genuine or produced at the director’s request. In other words, if the scene had happened in real life and not before a camera, and a white ghost dragging intravenous bottles had darted out of the darkness to console her, would she have welcomed it, or run away in terror? Ruth answers firmly, though in poor English. Yes, she would have happily welcomed the dying man, whose care that night would keep her in Jerusalem, and she would not flee the city in the morning.

Then an old farmer speaks. His bald pate reddening with emotion, he asks if he is permitted to think that this dying man, who earned the trust of not only the girl on the screen but also himself as a spectator, will wrestle with death after the film is done and overcome it. Is such hope possible, and was it the intention of the filmmaker?

“No, it wasn’t, but neither does it contradict it,” answers Moses. “The ending of a work of art is an absolute ending, and whoever imagines what happens next speaks only for himself.”

The disappointed farmer slowly sits down, but several of his friends ask for permission to speak. Fearing the local farmers will lower the level of conversation, the priest urges them to keep their questions short, and he answers them himself hastily, and then, to bring the discussion to a close, he poses his own question to the honoree: “Do you yourself believe in the idea of the film you created? In other words, is everyone who receives care also a caregiver?”

Moses is startled by the question but is quick to answer.

“My screenwriter believed it, and in those days I respected his ideas and agreed to direct films based on them. After we went our separate ways, this idea seemed unrealistic to me, since there are invalids who are chronic and stubborn, concerned only with themselves. But today, after watching this film of mine, which I had not seen for decades, I’m ready to give his vision another chance.”

THE ARCHIVE DIRECTOR has two options for the intermission before the next screening. They can further tour the film labs and classrooms, or they can rest in his office, which was once the apartment of the army base commander. It has a modest sofa on which one man can stretch out comfortably. As a devout believer in afternoon naps, Moses chooses the second alternative. In recent years, even on filming days, he has managed to arrange the working day to include an hour or so for a nap. Not even when shooting on location does he pass it up; he crawls, blanket in hand, under the production truck to grab a quick snooze in the oily darkness below the chassis, first making sure the vehicle is locked and the keys are in his pocket.

How good to enter a quiet, spacious room, albeit slightly monkish in character, with logs burning in the hearth. The priest removes two woolen military blankets from the closet, shuts the blinds, disconnects the telephone, and locks the door from the outside.

Moses goes immediately for the couch, but Ruth asks sheepishly if this time she could have it and he make do with the armchair. He is surprised, but he agrees. After all the excitement over her past beauty, she is probably depressed and seeks the consolation of curling into the fetal position.

He covers her with the blanket and turns out the light, hoping to catch some sleep in the chair. The next film is about the army, and he has a vague recollection of long nature shots and of soldiers fast asleep. He closes his eyes, pondering his mother’s devotion to the role he entrusted to her. He knows a good many artists who avoid watching their past work. He, too, unless he must, watches his old films rarely. But it now would appear that because of the falling-out with Trigano, he went too far in completely ignoring them. For even in such a beginner’s film, he can see a few moments of beautiful directing, worth going back to for inspiration.

Ruth’s breathing grows deeper. She once told him that sometimes, when sleep eludes her, she imagines that she is in front of the camera, and a cinematographer and director and soundman are watching over her sleep, protecting her — then she relaxes. Now Moses fills all those roles, and in her sleep, she reaches out her hand from under the blanket and touches the director who sits beside her. Age spots that have lately surfaced on her face and hands are visible even in the dim light. But it’s not a liver spot that will deprive her of a part in the next film; it’s that his obligation to her character has been exhausted. Her talents have found expression in every possible role, and in the last stage of a long and varied career like his, one must be wary of repeating oneself.

The base commander’s armchair is stiff and upright, and the priest who inherited it has shunned, perhaps out of asceticism, even a small cushion, so Moses has no hope of dozing or resting. If he wants to be alert during the next screening, he will have to take off his shoes, curl up on the rug at the feet of his companion, and remove his hearing aids.

As her breathing floats over him, so do melancholy thoughts about her future. If he has lately included her, now and then, in his travels, he does so not with an eye to the future, but as his debt to the past: as limited consolation for a career in slow decline. He remembers that Nehama, meaning “consolation,” was her original Hebrew name, given her by her father, the rabbi, who came to Israel from the Moroccan town of Debdou, and who ended up as a farm laborer, planting trees. Sometimes Trigano would tease his lover and call her Debdou. After they parted, she dropped the name Nehama and, on the advice of an actors’ agent, took a simple name, easy to remember, typically Israeli but also well established in the wider world.

But Moses did not forget the original name of the shy, gentle girl whom the usher, his student, introduced as his girlfriend at the movie theater in Jerusalem. Sometimes, in rehearsals, or even during a shoot, as he tried to get a deeper, more credible performance from her, Moses would confront her with her original name, using it as a talismanic word to rescue her from artifice and mannerism and prompt her to broaden her acting with the flavor of the disadvantaged, confused girl who had never finished high school. At first she was angry that he had revealed to the whole crew the old name she’d left behind. But when he persisted, she was forced to listen, through her given name, to the true voice of her identity.

He has no magic word to help her evoke shades of character she has not played in the past and so can help her only at a remove, recommending her to other directors. And because the cinematographer had also expressed his love through concern for her daily well-being, he feels he should take responsibility for the practical aspects of her life, in financial matters and health issues such as the blood test, which must not be neglected when they return to Israel. He covers his face and shuts his eyes tight, then hears soft knocking on the locked door.

“Nehama”—he pats her arm—“wake up, de Viola is here.”

Her forehead furrows, and her eyes open, shining after deep and satisfying sleep. She rises gracefully and stretches her limbs, folds her blanket and his too, puts on her high heels, and adjusts her blouse. She takes a comb and makeup from her bag and does her hair and face before the windowpane, then runs the comb through his white hair to make him look presentable too. The archive director unlocks the door and enters. “What is this,” jokes Moses, “you were afraid we’d run out without saying goodbye? I mean, it’s downright illegal to lock up an old man with an unstable prostate.” De Viola laughs. He serves the institute not only as archive director but also as priest, he explains; teachers and students take the liberty to enter his room at will, as they would a confessional booth. To ensure his guests a proper rest, he thought it wise to lock the door and also put up a Do Not Disturb sign. Two more films await them today, and judging by the reactions to Circular Therapy, there is great interest among faculty and students.

En route to the small hall, they learn of a slight change in the original program. The screening of Slumbering Soldiers, whose title in Spanish is The Installation, has been postponed till tomorrow, and in its place the film known here as Obsession will be screened — it’s probably The Flying Pen, what else could it be? The switch has been made, says the priest, “to show the Spanish people that your early work deals with psychology, not just ethics.”

“The same crowd?”

“Mostly.”

“And I thought they’d had enough, after that superficial film you insisted on starting my retrospective with.”

But Juan de Viola firmly dismisses this self-criticism. “The film is not superficial, simply a first effort, and a first work of art, if motivated by a religious inspiration or at least a metaphysical one, will always possess a certain power.”

“You insist on the religious issue,” protests Moses, “but you should know that neither I nor Trigano would define our work that way.”

The priest is unfazed.

“There are many people with a religious temperament who are ashamed to admit it. Don’t forget when you made the film. In the sixties, a strong secular outlook prevailed in the world, and religious faith was completely out of style. People like you camouflaged their longing for the absolute in foggy allegorical parables. But the world has changed since then, although not always, to my sorrow, for the better.”

“And you see a religious aspect to my amusing little Obsession?”

“Of course,” says the priest without hesitation.

“And this one has also been dubbed?”

“All of them.”

“What is this? Again you’re forcing me to watch a film I already forgot and now can’t understand?”

“When it comes to a creative artist, this is not necessarily a liability. Perhaps you can get some help from the younger memory of your companion.”

“In this movie, if I remember correctly, her role was marginal.”

“But in the film to be screened this evening,” declares the priest, “she’s the star.”

AGAIN, APPLAUSE IN the little theater, more crowded now than at the previous screening. Young people sit on the stairs, and a few older women have arrived, apparently housewives who’ve finished their daily work.

“You don’t have TV reception in your province,” whispers Moses, “so the locals come to see weird films in black-and-white?”

“Mediocre television is readily available, but in recent years we have persuaded the local people to look for something more. The films we screen for them are usually old ones, but admission is free, and sometimes they get a chance to argue with the filmmakers, so some are willing to take the risk.”

The director of the archive again introduces his guests, this time briefly, and the Israeli director insists on saying a few preliminary words. Again he cannot resist carping about their choosing such a crude early film from his many decades of work. Yes, he remembers the lighthearted spirit of the original film, but he wonders if it will hold up after all these years, especially when dubbed in Spanish.

Juan de Viola orders the lights turned off. When the credits appear on the screen, Moses notices that the lead actor is listed as codirector with him. Had Moses merely agreed to this, or was it done on his initiative? Despite the jovial feel of the production and the film’s moderate popularity among the young people, Moses himself had his doubts, so it could be that attaching the actor’s name as codirector was meant to relieve Moses of full responsibility. But what was it that bothered him about Obsession? The Spanish title now seems more fitting than the Hebrew one.

He was essentially forced to direct this picture. Trigano didn’t involve him in the writing process; he just handed him a finished script, written in collaboration with the editor of the student newspaper at Hebrew University — a handsome, talented young man Trigano had met in an introductory psychology course required for students in the humanities program. This young man came up with an idea for a film about the crazy power of Freudian symbolism. Trigano would write the screenplay, and the friend would secure funding, but on condition that he play the lead.

After the two managed to get financial support from the association of clinical psychologists, as well as a personal contribution from the teacher of the course, a woman of independent means, Moses had a choice: let the new partners run with an idea that he found peculiar and childish, or swallow his misgivings and preside as director over a fairly credible rendering of a preposterous notion. Fearing that if he refused, Trigano might drop him in favor of a young and gifted partner, Moses chose the latter alternative.

With perfect timing, a sudden burst of rain drums upon the roof of the small auditorium as the camera starts to wander through Jerusalem on a wintry night, this time focusing on the alleyways of a poor neighborhood, largely ultra-Orthodox yet tolerant of the secular young people living there. In a rented apartment, whose location Moses can’t quite recall, a raucous student party is under way, dominated by a tall young man with long hair who transfixes his listeners with tales of his travels in India. He takes from his pocket a large fountain pen that doubles as a flashlight, and from the innards of the pen he produces a tiny scroll of parchment with a colorful picture of a beautiful, naked Indian woman, wreathed by inscriptions, devout or perhaps lustful, in an unknown tongue. The pen is passed from hand to hand, and the students examine it with amused curiosity, opening and closing it, testing the little flashlight, examining the scroll to have a good look at the Indian woman and try to guess the meaning of the writing around her.

Moses cannot remember what was said or wasn’t in this party scene, but he is disinclined to listen to Pilar’s simultaneous translation. She sits at his side in place of de Viola, who has gone to prepare for evening Mass. Yes, now he understands the priest’s offhand remark: not knowing the language sometimes brings about new insights.

With no dialogue to distract him, he can see clearly not only the fakery of the main character who tries to pump up his manliness with a pen from the East, but the hollowness of the actor himself.

Is this what bothered him while they were making the film, so much so that he tried to disown it, despite its relative success? Could he actually sense that the charismatic young man who won Trigano over was morally damaged?

It wasn’t the man’s opinions or his smooth way with words that put Moses off. He was convinced that a man who believed in nothing could not, for all his cleverness and charm, penetrate the character of another human being and make it come alive. Moses refused to include the man again—“It’s him or me,” he told Trigano.

On the screen, the hour is late and the party is over, and on his motor scooter, the hero is giving a student, played by Ruth, a ride to her parents’ home in Jerusalem. At the door, he takes his leave with quick hugs and a cursory kiss, then continues on to his rented room in a house not far from the Old City, which in those pre-’67 days was off-limits, an object of longing. A bit tipsy, he undresses for bed, listening to an upbeat tune on a foreign radio station, and in his cozy pajamas, before going to sleep, he decides he wants to fondle the Indian pen one more time, take out the piece of parchment, perhaps decipher the message on the lips of the girl. But he discovers the pen has disappeared, and he searches for it frantically, but in vain. And instead of waiting till morning, he gives way to the panic that drives the plot and plunges him into the abyss.

Step by step, Trigano cleverly escalated the insane obsession. After the hero turns his room upside down, he gets dressed, grabs a flashlight, and returns to the cold empty streets he crisscrossed with the student. He walks slowly, inspecting the road and the sidewalks, ultimately arriving at the girl’s house, where he pounds on the door, wakes her parents, and insists that their daughter has pickpocketed his pen.

The search grows more delirious, and since the film’s hero, unlike the audience, doesn’t understand what the lost pen symbolizes, his madness becomes a tragicomic journey, offering glimpses of Israeli student life as each of his friends reacts to his behavior, some with anger and scorn, a few with compassion and readiness to help. Somehow this shoestring-budget film, eighty-five minutes long, evolved into a picaresque quest for the lost symbol, and Moses notices that despite the loony script, he made sure as director to maintain respect for the tormented character wallowing in humiliation, so as not to distance the audience from a man bent on surrender to obsession. But Trigano’s script failed to bring the film to the open and generous conclusion found in the greatest picaresque works. After the hero goes from student to student, trying vainly to discover who at that raucous party had secretly coveted his pen, he breaks into their apartments to search for his lost object. And since the inscrutable symbol has so deeply permeated the soul of the hero that the psychiatrist, who enters late in the film, cannot free him of the obsession, it’s only natural that the rigid, one-dimensional screenplay was given a radical ending that Trigano was unwilling to modify. And so, in the last scene, as the sun goes down, the hero lays his handsome head on a railroad track and waits.

The cheers at the end of the movie are more ardent and longer than at the previous screening, perhaps because of the young people in the crowd, while some of the older ones hurry to the exit before the lights go up. Ruth opens her bloodshot eyes and yawns. Moses wonders if there is any point to going onstage without the archive director at his side. The petite animation teacher who is to moderate will not be forceful enough to control the audience in discussing a film that contains a seed of perversion. He suggests combining this discussion with the one that is to follow the evening screening, especially since the railroad tracks that end the present film will open the next one.

Pilar appears relieved. She too is happy to avoid discussing a movie whose meaning is so obvious, and she hurries to the stage and announces the postponement of the discussion until the next screening. A few in the audience look disappointed; this time, many have wanted not only to ask questions but to attack. And Moses, who feels mildly guilty about avoiding the conversation, asks to attend the evening Mass conducted by the priest. For at the end of the retrospective, if he indeed decides to confess his professional sins to a film-savvy priest, he ought to know something about the confessor’s style of prayer.

It’s good to visit the little chapel where officers of the army barracks once prayed. In its modest way, its beauty and harmony are the equal of its mighty sister in Santiago. Hanging on the walls are pictures of beasts of prey of a sort not generally found in churches.

It’s crowded. The old people who just saw Obsession have come to purify themselves through evening prayer, and, who knows, maybe evening prayer in so charming a chapel is the actual purpose of their visit to the film institute. Juan de Viola wears a white robe and chants the liturgy in a pleasant voice, and from the yellowed marble altar, bedecked with wreaths of white roses, he nods his thanks to the Jews.

After the service, Moses expresses due admiration of the chapel and pleads with the priest to drop the idea of taking them to a fancy restaurant after the third movie. “Don’t strain your budget,” he says. “The fatigue and excitement of revisiting forgotten films will make it hard for us to focus on an expensive meal. We should eat early and satisfy our hunger with a quick hop to the cafeteria. We can postpone the banquet till tomorrow.”

Given no choice, Ruth agrees. During the break she slept on the sofa, and she napped in her seat during the screening, and she’s ready for fine restaurant food. But Moses knows that in a foreign city, with her poor English, she will have a hard time going without him.

The cafeteria is jammed. Have all these people come to see The Train and the Village? Moses enters the self-service line and picks up a cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic. Ruth makes do with black coffee. Soon her character will propel the plot of a provocative film, and she is getting ready to encounter her old self.

THE WOODEN FLOOR of the big hall creaks, and the room is nearly full. Some of the elderly faces are familiar from the afternoon screenings; the number of younger viewers has grown, and middle-aged couples have arrived in groups from neighboring villages.

This time Moses takes no issue with the choice of film. He remembers this one and is confident in the quality of the plot and its execution. The Train and the Village, whose original Hebrew title was Distant Station, is the fourth film he made with Trigano. The idea for the film cropped up during the final shooting days of Obsession, as they were looking for railroad tracks they could film. They found a stretch of the track to Jerusalem, which in those days ran along the old border with Jordan, downhill from a divided Arab village. It was a picturesque section of the route, where the tracks made steep switchbacks on a rocky mountainside. The train from Jerusalem to the coastal plain passed through only twice a day, at a drowsy crawl, which meant they could march their desperate hero again and again between the iron tracks until they carefully balanced his head on one of them, found the proper angle, and shot several takes. It was clear that showing the severed head was taboo, so Trigano suggested ending the film with a close-up of a bloody, mangled jacket on the tracks, the missing pen glistening nearby in the moonlight. Moses, however, firmly rejected any improvised alteration of the original script. We have to respect the written word, and any change requires consensus, he said. Besides which, the planned ending, in which the train has not yet passed and only its faint whistle blast is heard in the distance, does not belittle the hero.

Trigano’s disappointment with Moses’ adamant refusal to decapitate his friend was apparently the inspiration for a new film, set entirely in the train station of a remote mountain village, in which the tight linkage of love and death would be crystal clear. And with these very words, eros and thanatos, Moses guides the audience to the symbolic heart of the movie they are about to see. Galicians not familiar with the Israel of the 1950s and 1960s and its sleepy local trains will not realize that a sleek, luxury express train — in too big a hurry to stop at a desolate mountain station, a train that races by each evening with sublime indifference and blind trust in a long bridge suspended over a deep abyss — is a product of pure fantasy. But according to the movie’s internal logic — reveals Moses, to de Viola’s chagrin — it is no wonder that, for the forgotten villagers, such a train inspires longing, helpless anger, and the desire to deal the indifferent world a dose of disaster and pity, to which end they must shunt the train from the main track to a rickety siding, causing it to plunge into the ravine below. De Viola interrupts and censors the translation to prevent giving away the ending, but Moses is swept up in his revelations and is explaining to the audience that the village they are about to see is in effect two villages in one, on both sides of a border, and the portion inside the kingdom of Jordan had to be filmed with a telescopic lens — at which point the priest tugs at his sleeve. “Come, my friend,” he whispers, virtually shoving him from the stage, “it would be a shame to ruin the viewing experience with unimportant detail.” The technician turns out the lights, and Moses has to feel for the step with his foot.

This was the first of their films that called for many extras to portray the villagers and the passengers on the train. In the past they had been able to draw on friends, and as backup they had members of Trigano’s family, eager to immortalize themselves but also genuinely excited by the scriptwriter’s ingenuity. This time they had to look for paid extras, young and middle-aged and a few elderly, and mold them into a frustrated community stewing in the humiliation dealt them by the speeding evening train, a village whose forbidden, repressed fantasy would be unleashed by a young woman, sitting now beside him, overwhelmed by emotion.

In a morning fog pierced by first light, the camera follows an old, creaking freight train, wearily twisting up a mountain track. Now and again, the camera skips to the tiny mountain station, where awaiting the train is the veteran stationmaster, wearing a cap with a brim and holding two signal flags, one red and folded in a downward position, and the other green and unfurled, which he will soon wave at the locomotive. Moses remembers the man. A dour-looking actor from the Yiddish theater, he accurately played the loyal and reliable official who would in the end be turned by wily villagers into the person solely responsible for a calculated act of terrible destruction.

Although Moses praised the actor for his nuanced portrayal of his character, he could barely get a word from the man about the movie’s plot. Let’s wait till it’s done, the actor would say, elegantly dodging the question, we’ll see how it all comes together. Moses could sense that this Holocaust survivor was repelled by the Israelis’ fanciful catastrophe, and by the time the editing was complete, Moses had lost contact with the actor, who did not show up at the premiere. It was impossible not to interpret his absence as dissociation from the film, and especially from what his character had been dragged into. Moses once saw him walking in the street, straight-backed and gloomy, dressed all in black, as if he were still playing the tragic character of stationmaster in a godforsaken mountain village. He considered approaching him and telling him the reviewers had praised his performance, but he feared provoking the wrath of a man who had been led astray by the young people of his village.

But now, in the dawning light of the film’s first moments, not only he but all the dreamers and deluders of the village, all the innocents and the inveiglers, do not yet know how they will fit into the story concocted by the scriptwriter. And while the locomotive of the freight train sways with the screeching of brakes as it braves the curving tracks, the stationmaster rushes to lean his weight on the railway switches — two metal levers constructed by the set designer to give the illusion that only when they are manipulated can the freight train diverge from the main track and come to a safe stop at the station. Toledano insisted on shooting the face of the engine driver — a real one, who was flustered by the film crew awaiting him at the station. The camera also follows two sleepy workers, who now speak fluent Spanish, as they jump from a dark railroad car and begin uprooting weeds between the tracks.

“Were they real railroad workers or extras?” Moses whispers to Ruth, who predictably doesn’t have an answer.

Moses puts an arm around her, gently strokes her hair.

The light brightens, and the village awakens to a routine day. Men leave their homes, children go to school, women do laundry in a small artificial spring built for the occasion to give the village a primitive feeling — everything flows so smoothly that even the dubbing seems natural to Moses.

“The Spanish you planted in my movies is starting to grow on me,” he whispers in Juan de Viola’s ear. “Who knows, I might be tempted to make my next film in Spain, maybe in Santiago.”

The priest’s face lights up. “For that possibility alone, the retrospective was worth the effort.” And in a surprising gesture of affection, he brings the director’s right hand to his lips for a gentle clerical kiss.

Meanwhile on the big screen, the freight train crawls ahead, sounding its whistle, and in the station house a new character awakens, the stationmaster’s assistant, a dreamy youth who will later turn out to be unreliable and perfidious. He emerges disheveled from a tangle of sheets, stands in his underwear by the window, and surveys the village streets through big military binoculars, spying on the girl he loves with all his heart.

“How and why have I forgotten his name?” Moses whispers to the woman at his side.

“Because he was a rotten son of a bitch.”

“Yes, but…”

“His name was Yakir.”

“That’s right, Yakir. What happened to him? Where’d he disappear to?”

“I thought he was killed in a war but unfortunately I got him mixed up with someone else. A few years ago I ran into him on the street, but I avoided him. After what he did to me in the film—”

“He was difficult…”

“For you he was difficult, for me he was horrible. This animal dragged me into the bushes in the last scene, and you let him do it. He was a despicable person who exploited the opportunity you gave him to humiliate me.”

“I gave him?” Moses laughs. “Why me? I just followed the script.”

“But without pity… you didn’t spare me.” Ruth seethes as if they were discussing a scene to be reshot in a few minutes.

Moses tries to make light of it.

“Why should I be easy on a girl who charms the villagers to plunge an express train into a gorge just to attract a little attention from the world?”

“What do you mean, attention?” she protests. “You’re forgetting the empathy that we, the villagers, experienced, the compassion and concern, the devoted care we gave the injured passengers. That was my mission in the movie, all without speaking a word.”

“Without a word, how so? Look, here you are.”

Through the cinematic cunning of Toledano, who had the young man watch his loved one through binoculars — thus visually annexing the Jordanian half of the village — a girl appears on the screen, speaking with the village mayor in strange, jerky gestures.

Moses is enchanted by the shot. “Brilliant to reveal your character from far away, through movement alone.”

“But that’s how it is the whole time.”

“The whole time?”

“I don’t believe you forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“That you and Trigano made me not only deaf, but almost mute.”

Her whispering is so agitated, viewers are turning to look at them, and the priest’s soft hand rests again on the knee of the guest to hint that it’s rude to annoy people watching his movie. Moses leans forward, shocked — how could he have forgotten that Trigano decided to advance the plot through the machinations of an alluring deaf-mute girl?

The camera moves away from the young man’s distant visual embrace and zooms in slowly on the village mayor, a vigorous man of about fifty, a professional actor who demanded and got the highest pay, and deservedly so, for here he is onscreen, ten years after his death, the picture of trustworthy authority. He looks patiently at a beautiful young woman, a deaf-mute who utters only noises and inscrutable syllables — which the Spanish dubbing replicates amazingly well — punctuating them with agitated hand gestures laced with charm and guile that are meant to inject into the sun-swept village the first spark of a carefully planned disaster.

The village mayor, who has known the young woman since her childhood and who over the years has carefully observed her blend of beauty and disability, is presumably capable of interpreting her distress from her hand motions alone.

“What were you telling him? Do you remember?”

“That we had to divert the express train to our station.”

The sounds she is able to produce are desperate, those of an animal in distress, and in retrospect, the director understands that it was here, in this film, that the amateur actress began to turn into a professional, her beauty ripening in the process. She is no longer a skinny, androgynous girl, pale and embarrassed, as in Circular Therapy, but a determined young woman whose beauty is combined with emotional strength and the erotic expertise she brings to her part.

Moses has not calmed down. “Who coached you in sign language? Me?”

“You? Come on. What do you know about sign language? And it’s not even real sign language — more like a private language. I took the gestures from Simona, Shaul’s older sister, who was mentally disabled and also a deaf-mute. She always tagged along with us when we were kids.”

“He never mentioned such a sister.”

“Maybe he was ashamed, even though he loved her and took care of her. In any case, he wanted to immortalize her in the film, through me. Moses, it’s about time you realized things are hiding in your films that you didn’t know and didn’t understand.”

Patience is running out all around, their whispering has become a public nuisance. The head of the archive gets up, grabs Moses by the hand like a schoolteacher, and leads him a few rows away, as if to say, In a couple of days you’ll be back in Israel, where you can make as much noise as you like, but why disrupt a retrospective held here in your honor?

It’s a good thing the director and actress have been separated, because now that Moses has been banished to the rear, the storm of memory subsides, and he skips what is spoken in the film, in words or unique sign language, and concentrates on the images of the village, the changing daylight, the little houses, the behavior of the residents: a woman who opens her shutters and takes chairs out to the porch; a horse-drawn wagon that climbs the road to the village, followed by five workers on foot; a noisy group of boys heading toward a fig tree; someone who suddenly stops walking and stands still in anticipation; a boy who runs to the bridge and places a piece of scrap iron on the railroad track. Now it’s clear to Moses why after this film he decided to leave teaching for good and exercise his talent through the screenplays of a brilliant and loyal student.

With simple but effective editing, intimations of sunset filter into the frame, as Toledano, the artist of shifting light, captures every nuance. Now come the first flashes of the express train, winding its way through the hills, still some distance from the lonely village.

Since in those days it was impossible to imagine a sleek Israeli train that would fit the film’s plot, they had to borrow one from a foreign setting that resembled the Israeli landscape. The cameraman and his assistant were therefore dispatched to Greece to collect footage of fast trains in the evening and at night, to be intercut in the film. Not that it was easy to find what they needed in Greece. For ten days and nights the two wandered among railroad tracks, staking them out to capture a passenger train from a good angle. They returned to Israel with a vast collection of shots of speeding trains, each different from the next, and of hills and gullies, and near the big train station in Piraeus, they also filmed railroad cars and locomotives wrecked in accidents and removed from service. The filmmakers spent long days in the editing room patching together from the bounty of Greek trains and wreckage one fast train, devoid of recognizable national markings — sort of a universal, symbolic train — destined for disaster at the edge of an Israeli-Jordanian village.

The door to the hall opens, and in the rectangle of light stands a thin, tall man who scans the dark room and after brief hesitation heads down to the front, blocking the screen as he slips into a first-row seat. Moses’ heart is pounding. For a moment he imagines his former scriptwriter has joined the audience. He has the urge to get up and move forward to get a better look, but he controls himself, not wanting to create a further disturbance.

Who is the composer of the ballet music that accompanies the young woman on her path to the little train station? In those days Moses got help from a young librarian in the music division of the National Library, a woman who found musical selections that could enhance plot and atmosphere. Trigano, however, objected in principle to the use of existing music. If we can’t commission our own, he said, better to have none at all. But when the film reached the editing room, it entered the exclusive domain of the director, and Moses was steadfast in his belief — partly because he was falling in love with the librarian — that music had the power to clarify the feelings and thoughts of the characters, especially in the case of a beautiful deaf girl called upon to convey to her accomplices and the audience a complicated criminal plan by means of hand gestures and facial expressions alone.

The music now accompanies the girl along the tracks, continuing as she meets the young man who is in love with her and who at sunset returns the rail switches to their prior position and waves the green flag at the fast evening train on the main track, signaling its safe disconnection from the side track. The director senses that his heroine has won the sympathy of the audience in the big hall. Now she has to convince the man that any flag-waving is useless, that even if he waves the red flag to warn of danger, the train could not possibly stop in time. The young man looks bewildered, and there’s no way of knowing what he understands from her pantomime, but his passion hijacks his hands and flags, and he gives her the red one; and as the speeding locomotive draws near and he waves the green one as usual, the girl waves the red flag and keeps waving it as a warning at faces that fleetingly appear in the lighted windows of the train — the nameless faces of Greeks who will become Israeli in the editing room.

Who is the composer? he asks himself again, for the music is bound up with his growing love for Ofra, the young librarian who later became his wife; they eventually parted ways, but she is still the mother of his two children. That’s why he considers Distant Station to be a personal film, as if he too were a character walking the village streets.

Is Ruth’s heart bound to this movie too? Sitting a few rows ahead, she seems to have forgotten him. But even without seeing her face, he knows that, like the rest of the audience, she is aware of the female power of her hand movements and burning eyes, beyond the quality of her acting.

Yes, it was the scriptwriter Trigano who added the muteness, which was original and brilliant, even if inspired by an unfortunate sister. But Moses is pleased in retrospect that he directed it without hesitation and to the best of his ability. A beautiful young woman, deaf and mute from birth, somewhere between disabled and strange, wants the express train to stop at her home village, even if this leads to disaster. She will succeed in persuading others to follow, for a satanic idea expressed in sign language that may or may not be understandable is not the same as a satanic idea explicitly worded. In the end, it is a floating idea, and it’s hard to pin down who thought of it and intended it and who just imagined it and imputed it to others, so it’s easy to deposit it on the doorstep of the stationmaster, who at this moment, after the express train has gone by, looks suspiciously at the young woman approaching him. Are her hands and fingers really demanding that tomorrow, when the terrible tempest comes to pass, no one should come out to shift the switches?

And so the film unfolds on the screen in a hall where during the Spanish Civil War officers were instructed not to have mercy on their countrymen. Artificial wind, generated by the blower next to the camera, accompanies a little yellow railcar, and out steps the chief railway inspector, recruited to assist the stationmaster who was asked to stop a fast train that never stopped here before. How hard it had been to convince the management of Israel Railways to allow the actor to drive, for only a hundred meters, the single small car designed to check the condition of the tracks. The chief inspector here is not an ordinary man but in effect a pagan god, an evil higher power who doesn’t need a maintenance worker to drive him. But the Israel Railways people stubbornly refused to allow someone unlicensed to operate a railcar belonging to the state. And especially because the actor recruited by Trigano, a distant relative of his, a wedding singer and comedian, a dwarfish man of sixty with a red, pockmarked face, seemed unreliable to Israel Railways before he ever uttered a word. There was no alternative but to wear out the maintenance worker assigned to the railcar. With an empty camera, they filmed him ferrying the actor over and over, and then persuaded him to take a rest for just one ride and let the actor drive the railcar himself. So the tiny god and wedding singer was able to zip around a curve on a drizzly day and hop from the railcar into the station house. Moses feels an urge to walk down a few rows to whisper in the priest’s ear, You see, Juan de Viola, though we were sworn secularists, we still tried to enlist divine intervention to prevent a needless disaster, but we didn’t succeed. We came to realize that God too lends a hand to absurdity.

But Moses stays in his seat and watches the chief inspector. The latter sits and seems indifferent to the obsequious conduct of the loyal stationmaster, who breaks into a stutter as he reveals the existence of a plot to sabotage the fast train. The little man listens, sips slowly from his teacup, sighs, yawns, and finally rests his heavy head on the table like a child and closes his eyes. The director can remember how he made sure the camera stood patiently still and drank deeply of the slumbering comedian, who was thrilled to play God, and kept asking, What should I say in his name? “Don’t say a word,” Trigano said, calming him. “In this film God is silent, he only sleeps. Close your eyes and doze off, snore a little and give a sigh, the camera will do the rest.”

The authority figure, giving no answer one way or another, confers by his silence the permission to execute the plot. And now, in place of the dumbfounded stationmaster, who closeted himself at sundown inside the tiny station, villagers stand by the rails, torches in hand, poised for their encounter with an arrogant train that will veer from its regular track. Since fewer extras than anticipated were available to the production, they had to hustle them down as agitated onlookers, and then transform them from local residents into passengers, after the crash, rip their clothes, smear them with grime, pour red liquids on them, to ensure their credibility as they screamed in agony. In the artificial lighting intended to improve on the moonlight and stars, Moses can see that he too was forced to abandon his post beside the camera and join the extras as a passenger writhing in pain. The camera closes in on his face as he lies among bushes in torn clothing, his face horribly gashed, waiting for the deaf girl to lavish mercy on his suffering. “As a living actor, you have no future,” joked the film editor when they looked at the scene on the editing table, “but as a dying one, you’re a big success, especially when a girl is stroking your head.”

Yes, the beauty of the deaf girl lights up the screen, and the stationmaster’s assistant does not wait long to exact his due for the wicked plan that came off well. Though in years to come the violent scenes in his films grew more and more audacious, one might still wonder about the license given here to the actor to express his lust. He wrests the girl savagely from the wreckage of the train, takes her up a dirt path, and drags her into the bushes, and though she knows that is the price of her exhilarating vision, she fights the arms that seize her, screams with her hands and fingers, and finally lets loose the wail of a wounded animal. Moses wonders if this brutal scene was simply to be faithful to the script or whether some strange desire was also a factor.

The lights in the hall come on. Moses scans the first few rows to locate the person who looked like Trigano. But if such a person had been there at all, he escaped before the lights went up.

At first the applause is stuttering and embarrassed, but gradually it becomes louder and rhythmic. As it continues, de Viola rises and invites Ruth to join him. He looks toward the rear to invite the director as well, but Moses is in no hurry to get up and gestures to the actress to go first. As she is led to the stage, the audience redoubles its applause, with scattered cries of Brava!

Ruth is nervous, and de Viola, to allow her time to compose herself, gives a lengthy introduction in Spanish. But when he cedes her the floor, her English is replete with Hebrew words in critical places. Then a man gets up — a Jew, or a former Israeli of the sort found everywhere and always — and offers his assistance in translation from Hebrew to Spanish.

There is relief as the Hebrew is freed from the filter of broken English. But even now, Ruth’s words are confused and almost childish, suggesting that not only as a character in a film but as a woman, she is defending her former lover’s notion that destruction and disaster improve and refine mankind. When the priest, smiling gently, tries to modify her remarks, she persists, her hands waving exuberantly, her eyes ablaze, as if at any moment she will revert to sign language. Now Moses raises his hand, to the relief of the moderator, who invites the director to the stage to restore order to the chaos created by the actress. And despite the temptation to continue in Hebrew, Moses prefers to speak in English, which allows him to digress more easily from moral dilemmas to tricks of the movie trade.

The hour is late. The aged farmers in the audience slip from the hall one by one, but the young people won’t let matters rest. They demand to know if the director subscribes to the views of the actress. Moses is wary of an imprecise answer, so he speaks compellingly of obligation and regret and atonement, and how these alone can yield true compassion, as opposed to the self-pity that masquerades as sympathy for others. And he promises the inquisitive young people further discussion. The retrospective, after all, continues tomorrow.

“YOU SEE,” HE says to Juan on their way to the hotel, “it is a wise man who knows the limits of his strength and declines in advance a meal in a good restaurant.” “Wise or otherwise,” answers Juan, “tomorrow you will not be able to shirk your duty. A distinguished lady, far older than you, will be making a special trip from Madrid to honor the conclusion of your retrospective with her presence.”

It is almost midnight, and again the empty square is spread out before them in splendid gloom. “You don’t want another little look at our cathedral before bedtime?” jokes the priest. “Why not?” says Ruth, still energized by the film. “No, the night is so short,” Moses firmly interjects. But before they part, he expresses genuine appreciation, first for the fine hotel accommodations and generous hospitality, and for the quality of the dubbing and the high level of questions from the audience. He is especially grateful to the host for his excellent and efficient handling of the retrospective, yet he must ask that the pace tomorrow be a bit slower, and without giving the priest a chance to promise anything, he turns to the reception desk and collects the room key and the two pilgrim walking sticks.

How good to return to the calm of the spacious, pleasant attic, which is made up for the second night’s sleep. The sheets have been changed, and little chocolates in gold wrappers glitter on the big pillows.

But Ruth, suddenly cold and distant, dives fully dressed onto the bed, in fur jacket and boots, quickly unwraps a chocolate, and pops it whole into her mouth.

Moses removes his two hearing aids and tucks them in their box. Then he steals a look at the picture of the old prisoner steadfastly suckling at the pure white breast. He still refrains from saying anything about the picture to his companion, who is watching him with something akin to hatred.

He undoes his necktie and takes off his shirt.

“You could have asked whether I also wanted to decline the dinner.”

“I assumed you wouldn’t want to go without me.”

“Then you could have stayed with me, even if you weren’t hungry.”

“Again you ignore the age difference between us. When you’re my age, and I am no longer among the living, you’ll understand better how one feels at the end of a long and tiring day.”

She closes her eyes.

“In the morning, a big breakfast, but if you’re still hungry now, you can have my chocolate.”

She reaches for his pillow, takes the chocolate, and puts it in her mouth.

Now, as he stands naked to the waist at the foot of their bed, he feels that in the many years since Distant Station, not only has her spirit remained fundamentally unchanged, but her older body has preserved the contours of the young actress, walking up the hilly path.

“How did you feel about yourself in the film?”

“I really liked what I saw.”

“As always.”

“More than ever.”

“When you spoke, for a moment I felt you really believed disasters are a good means of true communion among people.”

“You planted the idea in me when we made the film.”

“You can actually remember what I told you then?”

“More or less, but what I do remember clearly is you didn’t pay me.”

Moses is surprised, breaks into hearty laughter.

“Suddenly you remember?”

“This evening, in the dark, I remembered.”

“In our early films none of us got paid. We worked in partnership, in a cooperative venture. We shared expenses and would share equally in the profits, if there were any.”

“I don’t remember you including me in your cooperative.”

“But you belonged then to Trigano… to Shaul.”

“Belonged? What an awful word.”

“What I mean is, you were included in the screenwriter’s budget. You lived together, you were like a little family; whatever he got from the film was automatically yours too.”

“Nothing was automatic. It was unjust and unfair. Tonight I saw that the character who carried the whole film was me. Without my sign language, nobody in the village would have lifted a finger. So even if you thought that Shaul and I were a little family, you should have paid me separately.”

“I should’ve?”

“Who else?”

“Okay, then, I’ll pay you now. I’ll compensate you for all the injustice. Especially now that I’ve seen how exquisitely you played a character in sign language—”

“Which you didn’t even remember was in the film. Apparently you are worn out in spirit as well as in body.”

“I told you.”

She says nothing, regards him with hostility.

“When I saw you watching your hands and fingers waving on the screen this evening, I asked myself if you could still understand them.”

“Mostly.”

“And if I spoke to you now in sign language, could you understand?”

She is surprised, even suspicious, as Moses makes broad hand motions and points at the bed.

She immediately gets what he means, perhaps because she guessed his intent from the start, and sits up to make room for her own gestures, which signal an emphatic no. And as a sly spark flashes in her eyes, she gives a few animalistic grunts, as if to say, It’s not me you want, it’s the character you saw in your films, but even if you can get yourself satisfaction from the character you created on the screen, from me, tonight, you won’t get a thing.

Is that what was actually said to him in sign language at midnight in a hotel that was once a hostel for pilgrims, or was it convenient for him to interpret the signs that way? But since, according to the established convention between them, they could be together only if both sent the same clear signals, he shuffles to the bathroom, locks the door, and starts to fill up the big tub. As he waits, he examines his image in the mirror. Time has turned his hair white but has not yet bared his skull. And he hopes that the wrinkles that proliferate around his eyes offer a touch of humanity and not just an intimation of mortality. He gets into the tub and enjoys the water that lightens his bulk. He washes his hair vigorously, as if that could darken it. And when he returns to the room, clean and fragrant, he finds that his companion has turned out the lights, and to outwit her hunger she has let sleep swallow her whole, coat, boots, and all.

For a moment he wonders if he should wake her, remove her clothes so she can sleep more soundly. But he decides not to touch her, lest she think he intends to violate a clear sign just given him. On second thought, he decides to remove her boots, so they will not soil the white quilt cover. She moves slightly, feels his hands loosening the laces, sighs, and appears to struggle, but does not wake. Finally he manages to pull off the boots, and he removes her woolen socks too. White feet in the darkness, small and tired. Suddenly the young woman materializes from the first film of the day, standing in his family home, fearful and demoralized in baggy white shorts, leaning on a broom, and her pale, delicate foot strokes his hair. Was it the left foot or the right that Toledano’s camera caressed more than forty years ago? he wonders as he gathers both her feet to him, kisses each one gently, and rests them carefully on the bed.