The Retrospective

Three. The Slumbering Soldiers

LATER THAT NIGHT, when he gets up to go to the toilet, he sees she is still wearing her coat. In the dim light of Roman Charity he sits down close to her, careful not to touch her, and explains in a fatherly tone that such uncivilized sleep will not leave her rested. And she, without opening her eyes, mumbles that even uncivilized sleep can be restful, but nevertheless lets him peel off the coat and then, in utter exhaustion, curls up beneath the quilt and goes back to sleep.

But when he wakes up in the morning, her singing in the shower is louder than the roar of the water, and her hungry voice propels him from under the covers, in words not unlike his own: “Let’s get down there fast, before other people eat it all.”

As he emerges from the bathroom, she is dressed and made up, looking at the reproduction that hangs on the wall. But there is still no sign that the scene that repulsed her so in her youth and caused her to rebel against her lover triggers any memory. Moses, however, resolves not to give up. If not today, then tomorrow, he says to himself. I will not let her leave Santiago without reconnecting her to the repulsion that inflicted years of obligation and worry on me.

“Something wrong?” She is troubled by his look, but he waves her off, echoing her warning: “Let’s hurry down, before others leave us hungry.”

A new escort has been assigned for the second day of the retrospective. He waits now at the entrance to the dining room, the young teacher, handsome and refined, who at yesterday’s lunch complained about the absence of abstraction and symbolism in the later films of the Israeli. His name is Rodrigo Bejerano, and although his English is not as lush or fluent as Pilar’s, his thoughts are more complex and interesting. Moses invites him to breakfast.

Bejerano teaches the history of Spanish cinema at the film institute, but his field crosses borders; he is also an expert on French and Italian films of the postwar period. And he admits to being surprised by the three Israeli films screened yesterday.

“Why?”

The Spaniard tries hard to find the right words. “The determinism of the absurdist plot,” he says finally. “I couldn’t believe that in the end, Mr. Moses, you would actually plunge the train into the abyss.”

“It was not I,” says the disingenuous director, “it was the village people.”

“Still…”

“So what could we do? Be content with just a threat?”

“Yes, why not? There is great strength in restraint, in a threat that merely hovers, an irrational threat that one can imagine but that does not spill blood quickly and sow destruction easily… After all, in that period, not long after World War Two, you were not alone in this genre. Not only in Europe, but even in the Far East and Middle East, there blew an absurdist and surrealist wind. Take for example Egypt, your close neighbor. A few months ago we screened some old Egyptian films, underground films, surrealistic, but their grotesque and absurd elements were gentle, much less violent than yours.”

“The Nile relaxes them,” suggests Moses. “The Egyptians are always certain of their water sources; their surrealism as a result is less vulgar.”

The Spaniard’s eyes open wide, then he smiles, as if he’s heard a joke, but when the Israeli’s expression remains serious, he tries to digest the answer, and a moment later he asks Moses if he really thinks the absurdist genre reflects national character or geography.

“No doubt about it,” says Moses, putting down his knife and fork to avert the temptation to talk with his mouth full. “Don’t forget, we belong to an ancient people; for us, absurdity and surrealism are second nature, and so, when our art blends reality with a surrealistic spirit, or just bends it in an absurd direction, it needs a shot of violence, an overdose of imagination, because only then can art be distinguished from the absurd reality. You want only a free-floating threat? Our daily lives are filled with threats, which is why we cannot limit ourselves in a film to the threat to a speeding train — we have to actually throw it off the cliff.”

The young teacher closes his eyes to ponder the answer, his handsome face burnished by the glow of the copper pots and pans hanging on the wall. And then — after Moses picks up knife and fork — Bejerano wears a mischievous look as he challenges the director with a new hypothesis.

“If so, is it also possible to interpret the naturalistic detail in your recent films as a sort of inverted surrealism, a surrealism of calm reality?”

Moses chuckles with satisfaction.

“Let’s assume… maybe… why not? That interpretation is yours and remains your property. I never get involved in interpretation of my films and I am willing to allow any interpretation, provided it’s not an attack in disguise.”

Ruth is silent, dreamlike, not following the conversation. She is no longer eating what she piled on her plate in the first ravenous minute and has pushed it half full to the center of the table. Now she seizes her tea with both hands, presses the warm cup to her cheek, its pallor only thinly veiled by makeup.

In her absent-mindedness, can she still appreciate the delicate beauty of the young man sitting opposite her, or does this sort of thing no longer interest her? Over the years of their collaboration, Moses learned to gauge every shift in her mood. Even when she was not in front of the camera, or in his field of vision, he felt he knew what was on her mind. And now, in the dining room, despite the lusty singing in her morning shower, he can sense a depression setting in. Is the picture of Roman Charity slipping into her consciousness, an old memory giving rise to new melancholy?

“And today?” he asks Rodrigo. “Which films are being shown today?” The young man, unlike Pilar, does not need to pull a list from his pocket but quotes from memory the Spanish titles of the two films designated for today, quickly improvising their English titles.

Moses also asks about the film to be screened the next day, but Bejerano doesn’t know; de Viola had given him only the list for today. In any case, the final decision is based on the experience of the day before — the reactions of students and teachers, the nature of the discussions, and the level of interest displayed by the wider audience. For the institute is not just an art-film house but a center of learning, and a retrospective here is not only part of the students’ curriculum but also — please forgive the presumptuousness — an opportunity for the artists themselves to reconnect with their past and understand it better.

A waitress in a purple apron arrives and asks Moses to go to the reception desk after breakfast for a brief word. He assumes it has to do with the picture hanging by his bed, and since he would rather receive the information with Ruth not present, he doesn’t wait till the end of the meal, but agrees to go at once, asking Ruth to guard his near-empty plate.

His assumption is correct. The quick response of the hotel staff to an unusual request by a guest apparently stems from its tradition of caring for weary pilgrims. The clerk on duty, after seeing the picture for himself, located in a nearby town his former art history teacher, and to the best of his ability described on the telephone its content and style. On the strength of his report, the teacher offered a strange story of the picture’s background and even suggested the names of several possible German or Italian painters but said she could determine the identity of the artist only after actually seeing the painting. There are two options: invite the expert to the hotel, or send her the picture and hang another, less troubling one in its place. Moses immediately rejects the second possibility, and reminds the man that the picture does not bother him at all, quite the contrary; it connects with an important private memory…

“A private memory?” The hotel clerk is somewhat taken aback by the leap into the modern era.

“I mean the memory of a film I once made.”

In the end it is decided to bring in the art teacher, who can probably arrive within three hours.

On returning to the dining hall, he finds that Ruth has vanished. “She said,” the Spaniard explains, “that she forgot to take her medicine, and also that she would not be visiting the museum, but not to worry.”

“Why should I worry?” says Moses. Noticing the long line that has formed, he decides against another visit to the buffet, reaches for his companion’s plate, and slowly finishes off her leftovers.

“The three films you screened yesterday,” he goes on, “were very early ones. I had no idea your retrospective would dig so deeply into my youth. And if you surprised me, the director, you surprised her, the actress, all the more. To meet her young self, and in a foreign language, would naturally excite her and also exhaust her. It’s best she should rest this morning and be ready for the screenings this afternoon.”

Bejerano nods but adds that perhaps he is also to blame for her leaving; he may have worn her out with all his talk. Not often does a man get to sit face to face with an actress he has seen the night before in the full flower of her youth, and realize that despite the years, she has lost none of her magic.

Moses grabs the young man’s hand with affection. “Your words are very generous, and even more if you actually believe them. If you get a chance to tell her how you feel, it will help her self-confidence, which naturally enough has faded in recent times. But don’t torture yourself thinking she went back to the room because you talked too much. She loves conversation, and she enjoys listening to people talk, but her headaches are real, especially when she forgets to take her medicine. By the way, what did you talk about?”

“I talked. She listened. She asked what I thought of yesterday’s films, and I told her frankly that despite understandable weaknesses, typical of such early films, I was pleased to find them free of a certain annoying flaw found in many films today. I mean the doubling of the plot in the last third of the movie.”

“Doubling of the plot?” Moses is intrigued. “I can guess what you mean, but please, tell me.”

“A film begins,” says the young Spaniard, trying to formulate a thought precisely in his halting English, “I mean a realistic film, serious, psychological, with a believable plot.” A film about human relationships, about people with a real problem that demands attention and a decision that is painful and not simple. The suspense is genuine, subtle but clearly defined. However, past the halfway point, the film drops off, not because the original problem has been resolved, but because the filmmakers, or more exactly the producers, were afraid the audience would be bored. There is a sense of an ending to the film, and there should be, because a work of art, as opposed to life, has a clear shape, but in the meantime the screenwriter and director have run out of ideas. They cannot drill to a deeper layer in the relationships that have been formed. And the producer begins to complain that the product he has in hand is good for only sixty or seventy minutes, but what happens after that? So then, instead of developing new aspects of the existing conflict, they spread a layer of glue on the story to attach an additional plot — ghosts arise, long-lost relatives come to visit, painful family secrets are exposed, or one of the characters gets cancer. No, this is not the same old deus ex machina of the Greek plays, a god brought down from the skies with a butcher’s knife to slice through the complications that the characters can’t manage to resolve. This is actually an additional plot, connected to the other one with crude, implausible threads, to please the distributors of the film.

“Outstanding. A sharp diagnosis.” Moses applauds. “And in my early films, you say, you found no tendency toward a double plot.”

“Not yet. The plot line is clear and unified, though very simple, maybe a bit primitive, but not doubled in any way.”

This young and handsome Spaniard — I like him a lot, thinks Moses. He is thoughtful, honest, open, and it will be possible to get information out of him that the sly little priest shrouds in secrecy.

“Let’s have another cup of coffee and see if there’s some double plot on the buffet, and have a taste of that. Then we’ll go to the museum, and perhaps again to the cathedral. When I arrived I said to de Viola that we’ll have plenty of time here, but the plenty will too soon be over.”

“Three days in a city like Santiago de Compostela is a quick trip, but if your time is running out, my time will make it better.”

MOSES GOES TO get his jacket and finds the room is dark, except for a bedside lamp by which Ruth, relaxed in her nightgown, is leafing through a booklet of photos of the city.

“Good thing you decided to go back to bed.”

“Only because you said last night that uncivilized sleep isn’t restful.”

“Precisely”—he is gratified that she remembers—“which is why you need to rest before the exhausting encounter with two films we made in our childhood.”

“Exhausting?”

“Because it’s harder and harder for me to understand what we made then and why.”

“Hard? For you?”

“Even for me. Because, as you know, for me the plot is not enough, not in my films or in the films of others. And in those first screenplays, the real power was not in the story, not even in the strange situations, but in the sharp dialogue that he… Trigano… wrote. That’s where his wild imagination really shone.”

Only rarely does he explicitly mention in her presence the man who drove her away, and her face catches fire, and she seems about to respond but thinks the better of it and returns to the photo brochure.

“You still have a headache?”

“Who told you I had a headache?”

“The Spaniard, the teacher.”

“Aha.”

“So how is it?”

“Going away… Soon it’ll be gone.”

“I’m sorry I told you to postpone the blood test.”

“And I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

“Why?”

“Because I have no intention of letting anybody take my blood ever again. So don’t be sorry. I’m healthy.”

“Of course you’re healthy,” mumbles Moses, sensing the old resentment. It was imprudent of him to take her to the retrospective before clarifying in advance what would be screened. The gap between past and present would likely be painful for her. He glances at Roman Charity and notices that the little light above the picture is off. Did the bulb burn out, or did Ruth find the hidden switch? He still resists directing her attention to the painting. She should make the connection on her own.

“As a matter of fact,” he says, “the handsome young man, our escort Bejerano, an intelligent and honest man, told me that he didn’t get around to telling you that despite all the years that have passed, you still have the allure that was evident in yesterday’s films.”

“Why didn’t he get around to it?”

“Because all his talk about the double plot drove you away from the table.”

“Why should it drive me away? Your recent films are filled with double plots and I tolerate them anyway.”

“Double plots in my films?” He laughs to mask the sting. “In what sense? Tell me.”

“Not now.” She switches off her bedside lamp. “We still have plenty of time together here…”

“Not that much,” he mumbles, and puts on his jacket.

A freezing wind gusts through the huge, empty square.

“Thanks to your Israeli presence,” says Rodrigo, “we have been blessed with perfectly clear skies.”

“But very cold days,” Moses adds.

“That’s not a bad thing. Cold and dry sharpens the thoughts; rain and snow dull them.”

Rodrigo suggests going first to the museum situated beneath the cathedral. Not a large museum, nor in his view an important one, but since it is included in the schedule, best to get it over with before it is flooded with tourists. And instead of making another visit to the cathedral, he suggests taking advantage of the sunny morning and going to the promenade on the far side of the Old Town.

Is this teacher, wonders Moses, trying to save him money? For he stubbornly argues with the museum director, demanding that he not make the guest of honor and laureate of the retrospective pay for admission. Moses quickly takes out his wallet and pays for them both. The museum director offers, perhaps by way of compensation, to show him around, but Moses declines. He who pays to get in deserves an exemption from the erudition of an enthusiastic guide.

Rodrigo is right; even at first glance, the sculptures are mediocre and the paintings boring. No need to impersonate art lovers strolling through the exhibits. Moses picks up his pace and makes for the exit. “Already? Your visit is over?” The museum director is dismayed, and even as Rodrigo tries to apologize, Moses turns and asks him if he happens to have heard of Caritas Romana. He has found a reproduction hanging in his hotel room but without the name of the artist. And with his hands and lips he acts out the scene of the old man and the bare-breasted woman.

The museum director has heard of this motif in Renaissance art but does not exactly remember the story behind it. Perhaps the reproduction is on loan from the museum archive and listed in the catalog.

“The museum exhibits pictures in the hotel?”

“We have dozens of reproductions gathering dust in our storeroom, so it makes sense to lend them for a nominal fee to the Parador, which routinely rotates the pictures for the sake of bored chambermaids, or regular guests who are pleased to find something new each time they visit. Yes, there are still people who are not indifferent to the pictures hanging by their beds in a hotel, even when they stay for only one night.”

“True,” says Moses. “Like me.”

He hurries Rodrigo to the square and gladly accepts the suggestion that they go to the promenade for a view of the cathedral on a clear day from another, more distant vantage point. They walk briskly through the alleys of the Old Town, passing squares and fountains and gates, arriving at a grassy expanse with a broad promenade from which the cathedral, in all its sculpted glory, may be seen. Above it, like the veil of a floating bride, hover wisps of morning fog that the bright sunshine has yet to dispel. Farther along the promenade, in a pleasant little garden paved with white marble, stand two stern-faced women arm in arm: one in a fiery red coat with a folded black umbrella in her hand, staring ahead with steadfast grimness, and her companion, a flamboyant woman in a headscarf and shiny blue robe, looking sideways and extending her hand toward the sky as if asking a question. Their thin, straight legs are firmly fixed to the pavement with bolts, needing no further means of support.

“What’s this?” asks Moses.

“These pieces are left over from a whole sculpture garden that students from the art college set up years ago as a kind of fantastical secular response to the seriousness of the cathedral and its statues of the saints.”

“But who are these figures?”

“They are called the Two Marys, but they are not saints. If you keep walking, you’ll see another sculpture on the bench.”

Indeed, a few steps farther on, sitting upright with legs crossed at the edge of a public bench, is the figure of a skinny, gray-haired intellectual with a long pointy beard, clad in a gray suit, peering intently into the far distance through oversize eyeglasses.

“What’s he made of?”

“Mostly rigid plastic. Like the clothes of the Two Marys.”

“And he manages in the cold and the heat?”

“Does he have a choice?” jokes Rodrigo. “Go on, feel him…”

But Moses declines to reach out to the weird intellectual.

A group of students, boys and girls, sit on a nearby lawn with books and notebooks, apparently studying together for an exam. Some of them spot Rodrigo and rush over to greet him. “Yes,” he explains to Moses, “they are my high school students, that’s actually my main job.” And as he banters with his students, he does not fail to introduce them to an important foreign film director who has fond memories of the days when he, too, was surrounded by students.

An Israeli retrospective at the archive of the film institute? Yes, they think they may have heard something of it. The sight of the youngsters chatting with a beloved teacher spurs the suspicion that flickered at the museum. Trigano? Who else could have informed the Spanish archive about early Israeli films? Who other than the scriptwriter is still loyal to those ragged old movies? The cameraman is dead, the soundman left the country, the editors dissolved into other films. Only the writer could try to augment the value of his forgotten work in a faraway film archive, thus also tarnishing what his director had later done without him.

But how did the films get here? Did Trigano ship them over, or bring them himself? The possibility that his scriptwriter had preceded him here as a pilgrim captures Moses’ imagination, so much so that the former collaborator who tore their partnership to shreds hovers in his mind’s eye alongside the kings and saints arrayed in the heights of the distant cathedral.

Does this explain the mischief of the little priest, who every morning sends him a different escort with a new list of films? Trigano doubtless told him about their breakup and advised him to conceal his visit and also not to tell the director in advance what they planned to screen in the retrospective, lest he refuse to come.

The students have returned to the books and notes they left on the grass, except for two fawning girls who find it hard to leave the handsome young teacher.

Yes, Moses is ready to believe that with a bit of tugging, the thread in his hand can be woven into a fuller hypothesis. For if the writer brought the films himself, he also helped with the dubbing. All of this in secret, so that Trigano could construct a hidden reproach to the man who rejected him.

The teacher eventually succeeds in breaking free of the two girls, and he hurries to apologize with a sigh that is also one of satisfaction.

“May I ask you a personal question?” says Moses.

“By all means…”

“Are you married?”

The young man’s laughing face reddens.

“No… but it’s probably time.”

“Because I was also like you, a young teacher in the upper grades of high school, and though I wasn’t as handsome as you, I still felt I was a constant topic in the thoughts of my students.”

Rodrigo laughs. “It’s also a teacher’s job to nourish the imagination of his students.”

“May I ask something else?”

“Please.”

“Was there a visitor recently here at the archive, an Israeli?”

Rodrigo doesn’t remember any Israeli. But Moses persists. “A man around sixty, thin, dark skin, named Shaul Trigano. He wrote screenplays many years ago.”

The Spaniard closes his eyes, plumbing his memory. But for naught. Trigano is a name clearly accessible to the Spanish ear, and yet, no, he doesn’t remember any Trigano.

But Moses has a feeling that even if the Spaniard doesn’t remember the name, he knows who he is, so he presses on and tries to portray the wanted man, picturing the young Trigano in his mind and improvising an up-to-date character, blending all possible changes visited by time since last they met.

The Spaniard turns away and lowers his gaze in one final effort, but he remains faithful to his earlier response. No, there was no Israeli recently at the institute, though of course he cannot claim to know everyone who visits here.

AS MOSES ENTERS the hotel, the desk clerk points to an old woman who is waiting for him. This is the art history teacher enlisted from a neighboring city; she has arrived early. Though she is long retired, she is pleased to oblige the desk clerk, her diligent student, who has proven that after all these years he has not forgotten her. Moses introduces himself, overcome with feeling for this sprightly old lady with the intelligent face and snow-white hair. For a moment it seems his mother has sprung from the film screened the day before and come back to life to educate him.

Carefully he takes her wrinkled hand, fragile as a sparrow, and briefly explains his request and its background.

“Would you like to go up to your room to see the picture, or should we ask that it be brought down here?” she says.

He hesitates, but decides for the room. If the picture was removed from the wall, defects might be discovered in the frame or glass that would have to be fixed before it could be re-hung by his bed. He would also feel uncomfortable hearing the explication of a risqué painting in the hotel lobby, amid the guests coming and going. But as they step out of the elevator on the fourth floor, he suddenly realizes he should warn Ruth of their arrival, even though the visitor is an old woman. He knocks on the door and waits, then inserts the key in the lock.

The dark room looks the same as he had left it, disorderly and unventilated, stuffy with the smell of sleep, and Ruth is wrapped in her blanket like an embryo. This is strange, even worrisome. Sleeping this long is rare for her. Without turning on the light he kneels by the bed and gently touches her face, to wake her and let her know that a visitor is joining them, an art expert, who has meanwhile slipped into the room with feline agility and now faces the reproduction, turning on the little picture lamp affixed to the wall.

The dim light is enough to awaken the sleeper, who opens her eyes and requires a moment to recall where she is. In confusion, she smiles at her companion, who returns an embarrassed grin as he gestures at the old woman with the magnifying glass, scouring the picture for the signature of the artist.

“The picture? Why?”

“To explain the background of the painting to us… the story behind it… who the old man is, and why he is nursing at the breast.”

“The old man?”

“The prisoner, the one kneeling on the ground.”

“The prisoner?”

Has that memory vanished entirely? Can it be that no chord was struck as she stood and stared at the picture that morning, then went back to sleep? Had she truly banished from her mind her little artistic mutiny, to erase the humiliation of abandonment by her lover? Or was she only pretending, to test Moses? With genuine puzzlement he studies the actress, the outline of her breasts beneath her thin cotton nightgown inspiring both compassion and desire. “I’ll explain later,” he whispers, “but say hello, because this woman is an art expert who has made a special trip.”

The actress is bewildered and amused at the sight of the expert whom Moses has parachuted into a room cluttered with clothes and blankets, but she doesn’t get out of bed, merely props herself up, turns on the reading light, and nods a greeting to the elderly white-haired woman, who gives a little bow in return. From the gleam in her eye it appears she has already identified the artist.

“Matthias Meyvogel,” she declares, “no doubt about it. Seventeenth century, born in Zeeland — not New Zealand — a Dutchman who worked in Rome; very little is known about him. From the painting he would appear to be a great admirer of Rembrandt, from whom he copied the sitting position of the prisoner Cimon, and the strong light on his naked back—”

“Just a minute, madam,” implores Moses, still unnerved by the expert’s resemblance to his mother, “please slow down. You say ‘Cimon,’ as if I’m supposed to know who that is, but first of all, what is the act of charity here? And in what way is it Roman?”

“Oh, do forgive me, it didn’t occur to me that you had never heard of Caritas Romana. For it is a truly wonderful and important story that has inspired dozens of writers and artists, if not hundreds.”

“An Italian story?”

“Not Italian, Roman. Rome is greater than Italy, and the original story comes from ancient Rome, one of the thousand stories published in A.D. 30 by Valerius Maximus in his collection Facta et Dicta Memorabilia—in other words, ‘acts and sayings that must be remembered.’ The story is about a young woman named Pero who fed her father from her own breast.”

“Her father? The old man, this prisoner, is her father?”

“Of course, he’s only her father,” the art historian says to calm the Israeli who thought the suckling man was a stranger. “He is Cimon, and he was sentenced to die by starvation, so his daughter came to him in secret and nursed him so he wouldn’t die. In the end, the jailers caught her, but they were so impressed by her daring and unique devotion that they had mercy on the father and set him free. That’s the kernel of the story, which inspired many paintings back in ancient times. For example, when they dug Pompeii out of the ashes of Vesuvius, they found a fresco with this motif. Valerius Maximus himself admitted that such paintings were more powerful than his story. People stop and stare in amazement at this picture — they cannot take their eyes off it, they see it come alive. Even you, sir, a citizen of the twenty-first century, were so agitated by the painting that you sent for me.”

“But is this a copy of an original painting from ancient Rome?”

“No, surely not. The story enticed many important painters over the centuries, and each one expressed it in his own way. Rubens, who painted it at least twice; Caravaggio, Murillo, Pasinelli, and a great many others before them and after.”

“Before them — you mean the Middle Ages?”

“No, in the Middle Ages the motif almost disappears, but it was revived and flourished during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.”

“Maybe because of the overt eroticism.”

“Precisely so. In the medieval period, they questioned the honesty of the compassion and mercy of the daughter nursing her father. Perhaps she was exploiting his misery, in an oedipal fashion, I mean…”

She bursts into hearty laughter.

“Oedipal?” Moses chuckles. “What did they know in the Middle Ages about the Oedipus complex?”

“They didn’t know the term, but they felt the essence of it, the same longing. After all, the truth does not need a label in order to be real. Therefore the eroticism tangled up in this act of kindness deterred, and perhaps frightened, the artists of the Middle Ages, as much as it aroused artists of the Renaissance and Baroque and later, into the nineteenth century. Yet each one dealt with the erotic aspect in a different fashion, depending on his personality, his natural inclinations, and his courage vis-à-vis his surroundings.”

“For instance?”

“In many paintings, the artists made sure that the daughter looked off to the side, so as not to see the face of her nursing father, out of respect for him or out of shame or not to reveal other motives, his and perhaps hers too.”

“Hers?”

“Hers too. Why not? We are talking about human beings who are alive and complicated, not figures made of cardboard. But in some other paintings, such as the one hanging here, or one by Rubens, for example, one sees that Pero is unabashedly studying the face of the old man she is nursing. It all depends, of course, on the father’s situation.”

“In what sense?”

“If he is depicted as feeble and dying, she is allowed to look at him directly, because it is clear to the viewer that his approaching death neutralizes any erotic intent on either side. The daughter may therefore permit herself a gentle gaze, or even support the head of the dying man. But when the father is strong and muscular, as in your painting, or one by Rubens, she must be very careful. Look, for example, sir, at Cimon here. Despite the baldness and the beard, I wouldn’t take him for more than fifty, and a man like that is able to desire and take pleasure, is he not?”

“Why not.”

“And therefore, when such men are being nursed, it is important that they be tied up, either their feet or, usually, their hands, like the man in your picture.”

“My picture, my picture.” Moses laughs in protest. “Please, dear lady, it’s not mine, it belongs to the hotel.”

“Of course it does, but while you are staying here, this fellow is hanging beside your bed. If his hands are tied behind his back, it means the artist wants you to know that the erotic possibilities of the situation are limited, or at least under supervision, and therefore the merciful gaze of his daughter, as depicted here, may be construed as pure, even though one can never really know the line that divides compassion from passion.”

“That says it all, señora.”

“Excuse me, sir, but might I inquire as to your profession? They did tell me over the telephone, but at my age I easily forget things that are not directly connected to my field of interest.”

“I am a motion picture director. And my companion here in the bed is a wonderful actress, a veteran of many of my films and those of others.”

“Very pleased to meet you, madam,” says the expert, and again bows politely, wedged between the bed and the wall. And Moses makes a mental note that this image — a hotel room in faint light, strewn with blankets and clothes and an open suitcase, with a tiny old lady who resembles his mother speaking to a woman in a flimsy nightgown lazing under the covers — needs to be fully re-created in one of his future films, perhaps even his next. And again the question flashes — is it possible that Trigano was familiar with a painting on this theme?

“As I was saying,” the art expert continues, “these are very delicate issues.”

“Very delicate,” agrees Moses, “and also complicated.”

“And in Caravaggio’s marvelous painting The Seven Acts of Mercy,” the expert carries on, “as with Perino del Vaga, who influenced Caravaggio, the daughter nurses the father through the bars of his prison cell, and thus, even if the man is strong and active, he is nevertheless neutralized. A magnificent painting like Caravaggio’s can even hang in a church. But in most renderings, the Roman Charity enables the daughter to be in closer contact with the father, sometimes to touch his head and shoulders, and in bolder paintings to expose her beautiful shoulders and bare the non-nursing breast. Such things generally occur only on the condition that the father’s hands are bound, although, for example, in the painting by the American artist Rembrandt Peale, early nineteenth century, only one of the father’s feet is attached to the wall by a long chain, whereas the hands are free, and one of them touches the thigh of the daughter, and they both look aside fearfully, as if to check whether someone can see them, and such a thing might justifiably raise all sorts of suspicions and speculations. Yet there are artists who, to dispel any suspicion, gave Pero a baby, to demonstrate that she is indeed, first and foremost, a nursing mother, and she includes her poor father as a second child, and only as a child.”

“The baby is her alibi,” says Moses, beginning to tire.

“Precisely, sir, you got it exactly.”

Moses turns with a smile to Ruth, still recumbent in bed, her hair scattered on the pillow, her pretty eyes glistening with tears that express her thanks for the cautious yet elegant way her companion chose to revive a banished memory that never vanished.

“But I am obligated to tell you,” expounds the expert, suddenly raising her voice, “that there are painters who gave themselves unbridled license. They preserved the heart of the story but shamelessly, gratuitously stripped not just the miserable father but the gracious daughter of clothes, thus taking a story of compassion and kindness to a most disgusting place. It’s best I not burden you with any additional names, but you know as well as anybody that art has no boundaries.”

“None, as perhaps it should be…”

The old woman tilts her head with mild disapproval and forges on.

“In any event, a moral artist places the act of kindness at the center, adding the erotic touch only to deepen compassion and devotion, not to contradict them, and certainly not to replace them. There needs to be a proper balance among the elements: the man, the father, his age and his physical condition. And if the man, the father, is in good shape, the binding of his hands and feet, that is to say, the extent to which he is immobilized, is crucial. So too with the nursing daughter: What is she is looking at? How does she expose the feeding breast? How much of her body is unclothed in the painting? A balance among all these should give us a human picture that is also a moral one. All this is quite apart from the quality of the composition, the perspective, the finish of the details, and the colors.”

“And this picture, my picture, the hotel’s picture, maintains this balance, in your opinion?”

“Yes, all in all it is a worthy painting; the compassion and kindness are clear.”

Moses’ head is spinning. He fears the expert will not let him go, leaving him little time for a proper lunch. He takes her hand, warmly expressing his gratitude.

“Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, you are a marvelous teacher. You have provided a superb summary of the story of Roman Charity in such a short time, and if more questions arise, I can surely find the answer on the Internet here at the hotel.”

“Oh no,” she cries, “please, no, not the Internet. It is full of mistakes and foolishness. Anywhere but the Internet, please. If you need more details, sir, I am at your service. I have plenty of time. And although I am older than you”—she blushes, a mischievous twinkle in her eye—“I can still, like Pero, feed you and your companion additional information.”

FOLLOWING A FAST lunch in the cafeteria, the Spaniard steers his guests to the small screening room. The crowd has shrunk. “See,” remarks Moses with bitterness, “people have grown weary of my immature films and quite rightly prefer a nice winter siesta. What can I say, my friend, I fear I will leave this retrospective deflated.” But Rodrigo dismisses the complaint. The smaller audience stems from scheduling conflicts, not disapproval. He recognizes in the audience a number of wise and sensitive people, and the quality of the attendees makes up for their dearth. He escorts Moses onto the small stage.

But a few “wise and sensitive people” do not compensate for the thinness of the crowd. Besides, the director cannot shake off the suspicion that this retrospective was engineered by Trigano to compel him to defend the writer’s fantasies. Can he even remember the film they are about to show? Did it have a well-defined plot? What he recalls is a static, dreamlike atmosphere; a short, vague, hallucinatory film. A rocky desert crater in winter, filmed at night in freezing cold. He whispers to his young escort, who is ready and waiting to translate: “Believe me, I don’t have much to say.” But Rodrigo, who has not yet seen the film and has heard only a brief description from the archive director, whispers back: “If so, perhaps explain the historical context, say a few words about the function of the army reserves in Israel, for although we are located in a famous barracks, we have not been at war for seventy years.”

Moses complies, folds his arms on his chest, closes his eyes, and retrieves the distant sixties. In a deep, low voice, he describes to the Spanish audience a period that now seems almost like a time of peace: no terror attacks or assassinations, battles or revenge operations. A small democracy in the Middle East, still in its infancy. Jerusalem divided but serene. The army dormant. Peaceful Galilee towns populated by obedient Arabs, and the country’s borders marked by little tin signs.

And as he talks he notices, in one of the half-empty rows, Ruth shaking her head in disagreement. But Moses keeps at it, swept up in his private idyll, insisting on days of peace and stability, a period that has passed and will never return. It is from this point of departure that he asks the small audience to understand his antiquated film, for only a hibernating army can give rise to peace. And as Rodrigo struggles to translate, stumbling over the last sentences, Moses distractedly leaves the stage, motioning to the hidden technician to turn off the lights.

Only as the first images appear does the director realize that the color has vanished from his memory. He was sure this film was shot in black-and-white, and here it is in color. “Did you remember,” he tests the woman by his side, “it was in color?” “Of course,” she answers at once. “I loved this messy movie, I still think it’s one of the decent films you made, even if it went nowhere.”

“Decent?” He is thrown off by the word. “What do you mean, decent?” “In other words, modest,” she whispers, putting a finger to his lips to hush him as the first bit of dialogue is spoken. Moses studies her with affection. The morning sleep did her good: color has returned to her cheeks, and the spark to her eyes. The link he imposed on her memory between Roman Charity by their bed and the film scene she refused in Jaffa seems not to trouble her. On the contrary, it revives her spirit. Will we, he wonders, in the limited time remaining here, find passion as well?

After three dubbed films he is used to the Spanish. Without understanding a word, he at least finds it natural on his actors’ lips. Ten men about forty years old, from cities and towns, factory workers and teachers and clerks, leave their families to go to an army camp and sign for weapons and equipment, because, after assuming they’d been forgotten, they were called up for reserve duty. With practiced hindsight, Moses zeroes in on the film’s weakness. The color erects a barrier between the realistic opening and the fantastical and hallucinatory things to come. Too much detail in the scenes showing the reservists leaving their homes, saying goodbye to wives and children, getting their equipment, telling jokes. A film that seeks to convey intimacy with soldiers who abandon their mission and spend long days in deep sleep must, from the start, go with shades of black, white, and gray alone, the colors of dream.

Sluggishly moving onscreen are older men, heavy and balding, who have not made peace with the reserve duty they have been dealt. Slack-shouldered and befuddled, they shed civilian clothes and put on old uniforms, examine with revulsion the gear and weapons from the past war, and shake years of dust from army blankets, and the director wonders if in these opening scenes, one can already see the seeds of his obsessive attention to detail. He recalls that he intended to ask the actors to improvise freely before the camera, drawing on their experience as reserve soldiers. But Trigano stood firm, fiercely defending his script: Only what is written will be spoken, with nothing added.

Was the quick transition from colorful city scenes to the monotonous yellow desert detrimental to the film? In a very long shot, the small truck carrying the reservists looks like an ant inching into a pothole on a heat-bleached road. It cautiously makes its way down the slope of a small crater to an ancient Nabataean ruin, which the cameraman and set designer came upon when scouting locations. To convert it into a military installation whose nature and purpose no one could guess, they wrapped it in shiny silver sheets, adding a profusion of colorful cables that suggested a giant prehistoric beetle. To ensure the site’s safety and security, the reservists get down from the truck and go to work, unloading cartons of field rations, setting up the water tank towed by the truck in a patch of shade under a desert bush. Since their longtime commander is late to arrive, a replacement is designated at the last moment, a minor bureaucrat in civilian life who spreads a blanket on the ground and goes to sleep.

In light of the film’s failure at the box office and the disappointment among more than a few of the director’s friends, Moses now asks himself why he had not insisted that the screenwriter strengthen the film with a solid plot, beyond the provocative allegory of slumber at a secret military installation. But now that history has debunked the illusion of peace, a group of soldiers who slumber with a clear conscience in front of a vital military installation is a strong image, at least for the director who considers it anew at a screening in a distant land.

Moses insisted that the reservists in the film all be amateur actors, and he recruited them himself from local drama clubs, preferring men who had served in combat units and knew their ways, so their sleep would make a strong, realistic impression. Right now they’re examining the installation, which they must guard without ever being told what it is, and as they ponder its purpose they also prepare for their first night under the stars and light a campfire.

It’s quite likely, Moses muses, that some of these amateurs, who were then ten or fifteen years older than he was, have since died, and those who are still alive may or may not remember the bizarre movie that must have frustrated them when it became clear that the script afforded no gripping conflict or complex situations, no opportunity to hone their acting skills, that it merely demanded their presence, day after day, night after night, in front of a camera that absorbed their slumber. Like actual reservists, they left work and family, agreeing to go down to the desert without pay for a few days of shooting, and now they were asked merely to act fatigued. He and the cinematographer had tried to cover up the feeble plot with flames and flying sparks and faces flickering in the silver cover of the installation, along with unforgettable shots of the desert by day and by night. Will this audience appreciate their beauty?

Moses attempts to assess the reaction of the few viewers scattered among the rows of seats. True, he does not yet hear whispering, coughing, or fidgeting, but he assumes the audience will be indifferent to this film and perhaps hostile. He steals a glance at Ruth, whose eyes are fixed on the screen in anticipation of her entrance as an elusive Bedouin woman, dressed in black and wearing a veil, spying on the sleeping soldiers. After Ruth’s impressive role as a deaf-mute in Distant Station, Trigano was tempted to bestow a new disability on his beloved, making her lame or even blind, but Moses vetoed it and they compromised on a veiled Bedouin woman who slips through the night like a ghost.

THE BOND BETWEEN the scriptwriter and his beloved grew stronger during the shoot in the desert. Since they knew each other from childhood, their relationship had earlier resembled love between cousins, but after the success of Distant Station they came to believe that their partnership also involved an artistic mission, and the fact that a former teacher had made it a reality heightened their self-importance, and their love as well. And so, during the filming of Slumbering Soldiers, Trigano never once left the location, yet he made sure not to intervene in the directing or cinematography, for he knew that everyone, by the terms of the agreement, would be faithful to his script. But at night, when cast and crew rolled up the silver sheeting and went to sleep inside the ancient Nabataean structure, the screenwriter and actress would disappear with their sleeping bags behind a nearby hill, their laughter echoing within earshot.

But the little screen at the film institute doesn’t feature broken memories, only an old movie driven by its own obsessions. The melancholy moon, whose countenance Toledano managed to capture on the silvery cover of the installation, whitens the faces of the reservists, grown men who nibble the leftovers of their meal before spreading their sleeping bags on the ground and zipping them closed in a way that makes it possible for the camera to move from soldier to soldier. Even the guards who are to patrol the premises are too lazy to leave the campfire. Their conversation dies down, their eyes gradually close. And then, at the top of the crater, appears the thin silhouette of the Bedouin woman, who moves silently as if moonstruck. And for the first time in the film — which so far has been free of background music — the sound of a flute, which from now on will accompany the performance of the veiled woman in black.

“Even now,” whispers Moses to Ruth, who is entranced by her night-walking character, “I can’t understand how I was talked into directing such a movie. How I agreed to build a whole film around the idea of sleep, of slumbering soldiers yet.”

“I also didn’t understand how he managed to drag you into this one. I was easy, I was ready to play any foolishness that came into his head. I had total faith in whatever he wanted. Look how I’m running barefoot over rocks and thorns for the three of you.”

“The three of us?”

“Not just the two of you — Toledano also insisted that in all the night shots I go barefoot, even when my feet weren’t in the frame. It’s a good thing that among the guys you brought was a nice older man, a former army medic. Every night after the filming, he would help me take care of the cuts and scratches. All you cared about was my savagery.”

“Savagery?”

“Yes, Shaul intended that I not be some pathetic Israeli Bedouin trudging by the roadside, but someone strong, wild… Sometimes, you remember, he would call me Debdou, the name of the Moroccan village I came from with my father. He would also insist, in jest or seriously, that my family had traces of foreign blood. The jaw, the height of my tall father of blessed memory, and especially the yellow-gray color of my eyes he thought could come only from a foreign Sahara tribe, because that color didn’t exist among the Jews… That’s how he would talk, the lunatic.”

And she suddenly bursts into loud laughter.

Looks of disgust and fury are directed in the darkness at the creators of this slow and impenetrable film. This time of his own volition, Moses scurries a few rows behind.

A foreign tribe… He laughs to himself in his new seat. I never grasped the extent of Trigano’s wishful thinking. There’s truth to her claim, that the chance to realize his assorted fantasies about the girl he loved was what got him into writing film scripts to begin with. So this is not just some pathetic Israeli Bedouin woman… He insisted the young nomad be free, not dependent on anyone, able to wander about, perhaps as a figure of reconciliation, between enemies who in the 1960s had begun to realize they were trapped in a vicious circle of bloodshed.

It’s now clear to Moses that the soldiers’ reckless slumber serves to protect their sanity from crazy adventurism. Like the sleep of the railroad supervisor in Distant Station, the slumber that spared the midget god from giving the stationmaster a clear answer — earning the acclaim of perceptive reviewers — maybe the prolonged sleep currently onscreen will also be praised, for people believe that slumber oscillates between nothingness and creativity.

Moses remembers that in those far-off days Trigano had a theory: that the energy of the young, industrious state fanned the hatred of its neighbors and fatigued the Jews who came from Arab lands. That might point to a connection between the sleep of the stationmaster in the previous film and the collective, addictive, reckless, and aimless slumber of the military men in this one.

Now and then one of the soldiers wakes up, wriggles slowly from his sleeping bag, goes for a snack or drink or to answer nature’s call, and on returning shoves aside his gear and weapon with such force that it suggests not only the rejection of military duty but erosion of the core of his identity. The Spanish mumbling between the soldier and the guard, who opens his sleepy eyes for a moment, sounds softer at night, if not more intelligible. Whatever they may be saying, Moses knows that the desert, with its shifting colors and sunsets and wailing winds, is meant to overwhelm the reserve soldiers in the absence of their longtime commander.

And so, in this brazen, pretentious script, the vacuum of authority may be filled by a young Bedouin woman, a powerful persona cloaked in black. Now she draws close, approaching the campfire, daring to come near the secret installation itself; the sleepy reservists, who had earlier perceived her as a fleeting reverie, now tolerate her veiled presence fully.

Each night she comes to the camp and with gentle silence wins the trust of the guards, who have no idea what she wants but enjoy her exotic female company and as family men are protective of her honor. Sometimes she brings along a black child, and sometimes an old woman trails behind her. One night she is accompanied by two sturdy men, who keep their distance. The veiled young woman, who only at night visits soldiers who also sleep by day, lays bare the prevailing anarchy.

As the filming progressed, the cinematographer and director came to appreciate the hidden mysteries of the veil, the concentration of female eroticism in those yellow-gray eyes. Moses’ gaze wanders in the hall to the aging Berber, and when he locates her a few rows in front, her head slung back, he is reminded that this movie ends badly. How could he have forgotten the reversal in the second half, a truly dramatic twist with not a trace of a double plot and a conclusion whose meaning depends on what one makes of the secret installation.

Moses recalls that after he read the first draft of the screenplay, he kept interrogating his former student about the symbolism of the installation. Trigano avoided an answer. The installation does not need any meaning, it can stay fluid and elusive, open to different and contradictory interpretations, somewhere between hope and despair, past and future.

Moses lowers his head and closes his eyes. He remembers agonizing over the meaning of the installation and worrying that its symbolism was diluted by vagueness. At night, after the day’s shoot, while the crew and the extras were absorbed in backgammon or card games, Toledano would offer creative, half-serious opinions about the installation to lift Moses’ spirits. Assume it’s a storage for nuclear waste, or an archive of top-secret documents, or a cache of illicit biological material that could wipe out humanity, and you’ll feel better. Once, he even suggested Moses imagine that hidden inside the installation were the ashes of the Golden Calf that was burned and ground into powder after the biblical Moses received the Ten Commandments — ancient vestiges of a failed identity. Entangled in practical problems, the director was unable to undertake such flights of abstraction. This was a desert production at the bend of a dry gully in the belly of a small crater, and it was not easy to bring in provisions and maintain a system of communications. Moreover, they had to provide security for the sleeping soldiers and the crew that staged and filmed their sleep. Because across the border with Jordan, a real enemy lay in wait, and because bands of fedayeen were known to infiltrate the area, the military authorities agreed to send an occasional patrol, and the actual young soldiers were fascinated by their elderly lookalikes lounging idly in front of a camera.

It was in those days that they first drew on the support of Yaakov Amsalem, a likable fellow of North African extraction, a wholesaler at the Beersheba produce market and lover of cinema who later went into real estate. Amsalem believed in Trigano’s ideas and even saw moneymaking potential, and he not only supplied fresh food but also volunteered to work as an extra.

Moses spots him on the screen, a beefy man in a rumpled army uniform. It was hard to film him as a sleeper, because his bubbly personality limited his capacity to lie still before the camera. Instead he happily took responsibility for tending the campfire, proving himself an able wood gatherer. Toledano instructed him to bring twigs that produced a purplish smoke, which imparted a devilish quality to the soldiers. Right now, such a haze fills the screen, and Moses again closes his eyes to intensify the memory of the smoke. Slowly, he sinks into the old, sweet fragrance of soft branches burning, their purple smoke painting the screen of his eyelids.

WHEN HE OPENS his eyes, the smoke and the campfire and the installation and the soldiers have disappeared. The desert too has faded, and night is replaced by a strong afternoon sun as an airplane lands at the tiny airport of Tel Aviv. In a quick series of shots, the commander comes into view, a vigorous man about fifty with graying hair who projects authority as he returns in his private plane from a business trip abroad. Moses smiles to himself as he recognizes the head of the village from Distant Station, and he suddenly recalls the name of the actor: Shlomo Fuchs, known to everyone as Foxy, no longer among the living. Yesterday he convincingly collaborated in plunging a passenger train into an abyss, and today he will play a more complicated part that entangles him in a hasty killing.

His wife does not seem at all happy to have him home, as written in the script or perhaps as embellished by the actress. The moment he enters, she hands him the reserve call-up notice that arrived in his absence, as if urging him to perform a duty to the nation before he begins to pester her and impose order in the household. After a quick lunch with his grown children, the new protagonist does not further impede the plot; he readies himself to go down to the desert and join his soldiers.

The montage is brisk but believable. In his bedroom he puts on his uniform and straightens his officer’s stripes. From under the double bed he pulls out a submachine gun and a kit filled with black magazines, and he is ready and able, as always, to go to battle.

It was the cinematographer and not the writer who called for the commander to drive himself to the desert in an army jeep with no doors or roof, enabling the camera to follow him from far and near, emphasizing the loneliness of the authority figure as he aims to end the anarchy. As close-ups of a determined brow and silvery locks tossing in the wind are intercut with long shots of a green jeep meandering among desert cliffs, the commander nears the remote crater, and Moses can feel that the jeep’s journey in daylight and darkness, taking no more than a minute of screen time, has aroused expectation in the hall, mingled with vague trepidation. But he also remembers how Toledano tortured them for hours to get that one pure minute, how he repositioned the crew again and again around the jeep, which at one point broke down, and how he kept switching lenses and angles, waiting for changes in the light and movements of the clouds, all to make his visual dream come true.

The jeep descends silently, headlights off, into the crater, where the installation flickers with reflections of a dying campfire. The commander does not confront the peacefully slumbering guards or try to wake his troops, but rather strolls through the little encampment lost in thoughts and plans, surveying the surrounding cliffs and making mental notes of lookout points, a suitable location for a firing range, hillsides for combat exercises, an open space for lineups. It is only when he climbs on a rock to find a place for his soldiers to practice digging trenches that he catches sight of a thin black figure watching him from afar.

The one soldier he finally wakes up is the bugler, who henceforth will accompany him with staccato blasts. All of a sudden the slow, quiet film is filled with loud speech and urgent action. Commands, shouts, complaints, laughter, and cursing whose rapid dubbing in Spanish reminds Moses of Italian movies about World War II. On top of guard duty, training exercises, and nighttime lineups, the screen is gradually dominated by the relationship between the older commander and the young Berber.

Despite the discipline and order imposed by the commander, the young woman continues her visits, as if she too has a stake in the installation. And despite the commander’s strict order to banish her, she manages to outwit the guards and slip close again and again. But unlike the guards, who were indifferent to her presence and never bothered to interrogate her, the commander grows increasingly angry over her nightly appearances, and since he himself has no idea what sort of installation he is guarding, he assumes that she knows nothing about it either, that her stubborn visits at night are only meant to demonstrate that she is an equal partner of the Jews, an ally in ignorance. The commander decides to eradicate this presumptuous partnership at its root.

Trigano’s intention to end the film with the killing of the young woman worried Moses. If you have a mature citizen, a family man and successful businessman, called up for a short stint of reserve duty and thrust into a situation of no clear and present danger, he said to Trigano, it will take an extreme directorial feat to convince an audience that his murderous rage is believable. But Trigano would not give up on the death of his Berber. Only after their final breakup did Moses understand that it was probably the writer’s great love for Ruth that impelled him to drag her in his scripts into situations of loss and humiliation, so the evil realized on the screen would return to real life drained of vitality, which was his way of protecting her. Meanwhile, between scenes, a unique friendship developed between the two lovers and Foxy, whom the scriptwriter and the actress fondly dubbed the “killer officer.”

With a pang of discomfort, Moses watches two members of the audience slipping sheepishly out of the hall. True enough, he wasn’t sure whether to stage the murder at night or by day, or whether the girl should be aware of the threat or remain proud and aloof until the moment she died. And the fatal shot — should it be at close range or from far away? Should she die theatrically, or should he make do with a modest bloodstain on her garment? Trigano began to make suggestions, but Moses objected to his interference and in the end banned him from the filming of the scene. “Just as I don’t hover over your desk when you’re writing, I don’t want you standing behind the camera while I’m directing,” he told him firmly.

Did the cinematographer’s fervor for Ruth also render the director suspect in her lover’s eyes? The cameraman and his assistant pleaded with Moses to keep the scriptwriter at a distance, as “his wiseass intellectualism will only trip us up.” But in the Spanish screening room, in the company of maybe a dozen foreign viewers, Moses can suddenly feel the pain his young collaborator suffered when he was prevented from witnessing his loved one’s murder.

“We’ll tie you up at dawn on a cliff,” said the cameraman to the actress, “but in your death you’ll be even more beautiful than in life.” Indeed, on the day before the filming, the cinematographer climbed onto an east-facing cliff just before sunrise to check the light from every angle. The following evening, he sent his assistant and the soundman up with the equipment. In the dead of night he led the two actors and the director to the spot, and there applied makeup, his own concoction, to the actress and waited for the glimmer of dawn to illuminate the contours of her face, which would appear uncovered for the first time when the impact of the bullet to her heart knocked off her veil.

All the scenes leading to this one had already been shot: the repeated expulsions of the Bedouin woman from the installation, the rebukes and warnings, including a forced march back to her family’s encampment. Her father had warned and threatened her and would have also tied her up, except he knew she would escape and return to the Israeli watchmen, believing that she too belonged at the secret installation.

The final pursuit of the Bedouin girl by the officer had been filmed over and over, in daytime and at night, leaving only the final showdown on the rim of a cliff — a respectable citizen, an angry and exhausted commander, versus a young and delicate but strong-minded woman, whose joyful laughter now heightens the screen. Moses knows this laughter was not in the original script but was born of his inspiration. Laughter meant to trigger the rage of the officer, who apparently imagines that the woman is trying to seduce him and fears that he might succumb to the passion of this desert creature. He pulls the pistol from his pocket and fires in the air, but the laughter, free and young and mocking, demands another bullet to silence it, and a third bullet so the actress, persuasive and credible in her pain and collapse, will not rise again.

When Trigano saw the scene in the editing room, he had to admit that it had gone well. The sunrise, enhanced by artificial lighting, gave a mysterious greenish tinge to the bloody confrontation, with the young actress dropping to her knees before breathing her last. “You produced a glorious absurdity, like Camus in The Stranger,” Trigano complimented the cinematographer and director while still resentful over being barred from the set. He of course knew about Toledano’s deep feelings for Ruth, who was their shared childhood love, but he never regarded him as a true rival. Now, for the first time, he suspected that his former teacher’s heart might be joining them.

But the movie doesn’t end there. It goes on for another twenty minutes, which had been erased from the director’s memory. For the script is determined not to let the officer get away with it, but requires him to cover his victim with stones, dismantle his gun, and throw the pieces into the abyss, and only then to return to his soldiers and snuggle into his sleeping bag. And since the wandering girl had an independent way of life, it takes several days for her family to notice her absence. In the meantime, the killer officer has tightened the disciplinary screws on his soldiers, concocting new military chores and tedious ceremonies. A flagpole is erected and a flag raised to the sound of the bugle. At the pre-dinner lineup he reads out passages from the Bible in a clear, charmless voice, as if giving orders, and if he thinks someone isn’t listening, he tosses pebbles at him. After the meal he sings long-forgotten Zionist songs, accompanied by a harmonica-playing soldier. And though at the morning lineup every soldier is checked for unshaved stubble, the commander has grown a beard, so when two military policemen arrive looking for him, they need to check the photograph against his face more than once before slapping on the handcuffs and putting him into the same green jeep that he, the authority figure, had driven down to the desert.

The director, watching his long-neglected work, is duly impressed by the precise mix of haughtiness and insanity on the prisoner’s face. Was this expression a product of scrupulous directing, or did it arise from within the actor? Or could it be the fading of the original print, which sat abandoned for many years in an anonymous drawer? But Moses well remembers the closing scene and is still proud of it. The installation twinkles in the light of the dwindling campfire, while the guards have all returned to their deep soldierly slumber.

THE APPLAUSE IS guarded but lasts long enough not to qualify as insulting. When the lights go on, one member of the audience gets up from his seat, turns to Moses, makes a two-fingered V for victory, bellows a brief Bravo! and flees the hall. Yes, better an abridged reaction than a tiresome ritual of Q&A, says Moses to himself, but Bejerano insists on proper procedure and rises to invite the director to the stage to fulfill his duty at the retrospective held in his honor.

Moses sighs discreetly and heads down the aisle. He spots Ruth, her eyes teary. He hugs her warmly, strokes her hair. “See,” he says with affection, “we gave you a nice powerful death back there. Believe me, that kind of scene makes it worthwhile to transfer the movie to DVD so Israelis too can appreciate what we did with primitive equipment forty years ago.”

She nods and grasps both the director’s hands, squeezing hard. Does she feel a new threat, is that why she is so upset about her death scene? As he gently works free of her grip, an old man gets up, skinny and hunched, clad in a black suit and red bow tie. This is Don Gomez, explains Bejerano to Moses, a distinguished member of the faculty who years ago served as dean, a theoretician of cinema whose articles are published in important journals. And because the Israeli film has prompted new thoughts, Don Gomez asks his young colleague for permission to come to the stage and say a few words.

Moses approves the request at once. The straightforward and independent reaction of a theoretician is preferable, in his view, to any other discussion. He gestures grandly to the elderly teacher, who removes his hat and goes onstage while Moses stays with Ruth, holding her hand to calm her, asking that Rodrigo translate.

Translation is not simple. The erudite old man has many thoughts, not all of them germane to Slumbering Soldiers, and he takes advantage of the right of first response to deliver a learned lecture to his assembled friends.

Rodrigo tries at first to translate faithfully the complex thoughts of Don Gomez, rapidly expressed in a hoarse voice tinged with pathos. But the limits of his English become quickly apparent, and he gives up. “Leave it be,” says Moses, “listen to him and tell me if his overall position is positive or negative.” “Absolutely positive,” the young Spaniard hastens to assure him. “He was very impressed by your military installation and the system of symbols it generated, and he also appreciates the courage it took to make a film with such an airy plot, free of dramatic effects.” “In that case”—Moses settles into his chair—“I have no further need of translation. For a veteran like me, the main thing is a friendly review and not the reasons that justify it.”

ONLY AT 5:30 are they liberated from the hall. The scholarly old man lost track of time, and the discussion heated up and ran on forever. Meanwhile, Pilar came in to inform Rodrigo that the plane from Madrid carrying Juan de Viola’s mother and brother has been delayed and that the screening of the film based on the Kafka story would be postponed for two hours at least; the guests should rest in the office of the director of the archive.

“Why don’t you lie down here,” says Moses to his companion, “on the sofa; my head is spinning from our crazy movie, I need to walk it off. Also, tomorrow night we’ll be on our way back to Israel, and it’s still not clear to me what this institute is and how the archive works, I need to sniff around a bit. Lock the door, or you might be surprised by some young filmmaker eager to confess to his priest.”

Again, he yearns for that Berber girl who has come back to life, and he embraces her gently, runs his lips lightly over her forehead and neck, and says, “Just know you were and still are an extraordinary actress”—and quickly goes to hunt through the halls. He cannot find the men’s room and heads outside into a huge parking lot. Winter clouds have darkened the late afternoon, so he doesn’t fear for the good name of his native land as he urinates between two cars, casting his gaze skyward. Soon the rain will wash away the little puddle, leaving not a trace of his visit. In addition to the white lines marking the parking spots, he notices, there are blurry lines painted on the asphalt, long and diagonal, yellow and red — traces of bygone drills of infantry soldiers or armored corps or artillery. He will ask de Viola what happened here during the civil war. The Spaniards have indeed become a peace-loving nation; they have blithely converted a military facility to an arts institute. When we filmed Slumbering Soldiers, Moses wonders, did we actually believe that our wars would someday be over?

He marches along one of the red stripes. A cold wind pelts his face with drops of rain, but he soldiers on to the middle of the field, stands there at attention, perhaps at the spot where the base commander had surveyed his troops, and imagines he hears the roar of the ocean. But the strong wind chases away his illusions of grandeur and he has to retrace his steps.

He returns to the institute by an entrance that leads to a lower floor, where he finds the postproduction labs he visited yesterday, the big editing room with the latest equipment, and the sound studio, with happy voices inside. This must be where they dubbed my films, he thinks. Carefully he opens a door and finds a room with two projectors and recording equipment and two technicians managing them. At a round table sit young people with script pages in their hands, among them two Asians, an older man, and a young woman. The dubbing director, perched in a high chair and orchestrating the activity, greets the visitor and identifies him by name.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” mumbles the director, pleased to be recognized. “I just wanted to know if this is where my films were dubbed.”

“Here, Mr. Moses, there is no other place. I hope that the voices we transplanted into your characters sound right.”

“Definitely.”

“These are our actors, students at the institute. And the gentleman there is a famous screenwriter from Vietnam, Mr. Ho Chi Minh, and the lady is his interpreter.”

“Ho Chin Lu,” corrects the writer, rising from his chair.

“Of course. For the next month we will be preparing a retrospective of Vietnamese films about love affairs between men from the North and women from the South, and vice versa, from the time of their endless wars.”

“Interesting and also important.”

“Amazing films, difficult and painful. What can you do, wars provide great film material.”

“Damn wars,” snaps Moses.

“Of course. But they must not be forgotten.”

“No doubt,” mutters Moses, and draws closer to the dubbers. “When you dubbed my films,” he says to the group, “was there an Israeli here to advise you?”

“Your screenwriter.”

“In other words—” says Moses, his heart pounding.

“Of course, Shaul Trigano. About a year ago he was here in the studio for quite a while. He explained a lot of things, acted them out, made us laugh. A sharp man. Very original.”

“So Trigano was here?”

“It wasn’t you who sent him, sir?”

“No, no… the idea was all his.”

“A blessed idea… We were very taken by your early films… especially the one based on the Kafka story.”

“In Our Synagogue.”

“Did Kafka really write this story about Jews in Israel?”

“About Jews in general.”

He roams the floors and corridors until he finds the room Ruth was supposed to have locked herself into. Its door is open, and lights and voices welcome him. De Viola has brought the guests from Madrid, opened a bottle of red wine in their honor, and all of them, Ruth and Rodrigo included, are laughing, glasses in hand. Moses bows slightly to the mother, Doña Elvira, a beautiful actress, age ninety-four, who has come to grace the retrospective with her presence, joined by her younger son, Manuel, a tall Dominican monk, about forty-five years old, a golden cross dangling on his white robe.

“Welcome to our abode.” He greets Moses in the classical Hebrew the Dominican order encourages its monks to study.

“What’s this?” Moses addresses the mother. “Religion has conquered your family?”

“What can one do”—she sighs—“today, religion conquers all.”

Juan laughs.

Wine is poured for Moses and he clinks glasses with everyone, takes a sip, and turns with a smile to the director of the archive. “They just told me in the lab that Trigano was here a year ago and that he helped with the dubbing. But if he is the hand behind my retrospective, why conceal it from me?”

“Because he asked us not to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because he knew you would not want to follow him here.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You do know how much he hates you.”

“Still?” Moses sighs heavily. He turns to Ruth, who averts her eyes.

“Still…” whispers the priest. “And believe me, my dear Moses, that we, who do not wish to be emotionally involved in your conflict, are nonetheless grieved by any strife between brothers.”