The Retrospective

Four. In Our Synagogue

“IN POINT OF fact,” Moses tells Juan de Viola in confidence, “when first I saw the list of my films you had selected, I suspected the ghost of Trigano behind this retrospective. But in the wake of our breakup, I’ve come to regard him as a failed artist, and it was hard to imagine that his faith in his early screenplays was so strong that he would go to an archive at the far edge of Spain to dub them in a foreign tongue.”

“As a distant descendant of Jews exiled from Spain — that is how he put it,” says Juan de Viola, “it was important to him to learn some Spanish and supervise his works in Spain.”

“Faith in the immortality of one’s art,” continues Moses, “even if unfounded, is understandable, but is it possible that he convinced you to hold a retrospective to force me to come and defend his delusions?”

“No, Moses, the opposite is true,” insists the director of the archive. “After we dubbed the films, including the one that disappeared from your official filmography, we asked Trigano if it was worth organizing a retrospective around them and inviting the director to reconnect with his old style.”

“And what did he say?”

“I would rather not repeat what he said.”

“I’ve put that loser way behind me, he can no longer upset me.”

“Funny how you define each other in a similar way.”

“Meaning what?”

“A failed artist,” whispers Juan, “that’s what he calls you. A director whose earliest achievements were not his own.”

Moses’ eyes narrow. He looks around to check if the scathing diagnosis was overheard in the room.

“A failed artist?” He laughs scornfully, resting his glass on a corner shelf. “That’s how he defines a man who has made so many successful films after breaking off with him?”

“And what if he said it?” The priest hurries to soften the blow. “If he is worthless in your eyes, why take what he says seriously? We here, all of us, at the institute and the archive, refused to accept his opinion and were keen to mount this retrospective. The four films we have seen in the past two days confirm that we were not mistaken.”

But Moses is overcome by gloom. He casts a baleful look at the sanctimonious little clergyman who has slandered him slyly yet again.

“Then why did you invite me? You could have done with his explanations of the films.”

The director of the archive is quick to answer.

“The writer can explain the intention, but only the director can justify the result.”

Moses takes his glass and refills it from the wine bottle on the desk. Silence has fallen in the room, as if to lay bare his humiliation. Doña Elvira, sitting on the sofa wrapped in Ruth’s blanket, smiles brightly, and her younger son, the Dominican, sitting beside Ruth, gives Moses a supportive look.

With his glass filled to the brim Moses returns to the director of the archive and says pointedly: “I don’t know of any film that was dropped from my filmography.”

“The one we are about to see, In Our Synagogue.”

“That film?”

“Here,” says the priest, pulling from his pocket a familiar wrinkled page with Moses’ picture. “It’s not mentioned here, unless it’s under a different name.”

Moses straightens out a crease in his Internet biography.

“It’s true, this film is missing for some reason, but why would its name be changed? It’s based on a Kafka story of the same title. It was Kafka’s aura that enabled us to let a small wild animal join in prayer.”

“Join in prayer?”

“Be present at all times in the synagogue,” Moses clarifies. “It’s a film I am proud of in every way, and if it was dropped from my filmography, it’s one more proof that the Internet is full of mistakes and nonsense.”

“Exactly.” The priest sighs. “But the public perceives it as an omniscient deity that demands our confessions. In any case, I’m pleased that you stand staunchly behind this film, because to be frank I was a bit wary and decided to show it by invitation only, to people for whom Kafka is a holy name.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“Apart from the fact that I didn’t find it in your filmography, I also didn’t want to find Jews in the audience.”

“There are Jews in Galicia?”

“You never can tell. There are crypto-Jews everywhere.”

“And what if there were Jews in the audience?”

“They might be offended by the participation of such an animal in the worship of God. We don’t need any protests.”

“The animal is not a participant in anything,” says Moses flatly. “It’s a free and independent animal. A metaphysical animal.”

“A metaphysical animal? Is there such a thing?”

“In any case, that’s how I tried to portray it.”

IT IS SUGGESTED to have dinner early, before the screening, lest the animal dampen the appetite, but in the end they stick to the original schedule. The length of the film is finite, but dinner can last indefinitely. Moreover, the elderly mother, weary from her flight, would prefer to see the film while she is still lucid.

The screening room is actually the archive’s recording studio, with the control room included to provide extra space. The screen is small and made of fabric, which rustles slightly in the drafty room.

Juan de Viola introduces the invited guests by name and occupation, the first being the same elderly teacher and theoretician who had, an hour before, with courage and generosity, decorated Slumbering Soldiers with commentary that might transmute a film left for dead into a forgotten masterpiece. The rest are teachers at the institute, vaguely remembered from the previous day’s luncheon, along with a few young people, advanced students. All told, Moses counts twenty strong, crowded around a one-time movie queen who has accomplished her life’s work and now devotes her time to contemplating the works of others. Beside her sits her son the monk, avidly translating Ruth’s words into modern Spanish for his mother, and the latter’s words into ancient Hebrew for Ruth.

Juan asks Moses if he would like to say a few introductory words. Moses hesitates. Dinner is being prepared, and introductions, which invariably prompt reactions, would delay the meal and cause the cooks to burn the food. Better the movie should stand on its own — strange, inscrutable, provocative — and if it incurs opposition, the expert theoretician will again offer his interpretation. And yet the insult, “failed artist,” pecks away at him, so he reconsiders, and although the lights have gone down he stands up and strides toward the screen. “Just a minute,” he says, “perhaps it’s worth saying a few words before the actual film obscures its good intentions. But there’s no need to turn up the lights, I can talk about a film in the dark.” And he invites the Dominican monk to translate his Hebrew into Spanish, so he can express himself more precisely and succinctly.

Manuel at his side, the screen behind him, he faces the silhouetted audience and the projector, its little red switch awaiting action. And there is Moses defending not only himself, but also the screenwriter who borrowed a burning coal from a literary genius.

“We in Israel became aware of Kafka in the fifties, in Hebrew translations of his novels and stories. In those years of ideological intensity, there was something refreshing in his symbolic, surrealistic, absurdist works, which seemed disconnected from time and place and wrapped in the mystery of a writer who died young, in the stormy, chaotic years between the World Wars. After a while, Kafka’s diaries and letters also began to appear in Hebrew, and we found detailed, intimate revelations about a secular Jew who grew up in a traditional home and whose complex identity was bathed in metaphysical yearning. But as opposed to those who interpret every line of his writings in light of his private life and sexual struggles and celebrate every Jewish detail exhumed from his biography, there were many readers, myself among them, for whom Kafka’s cryptic, radiant works transcended the specifics of his personality and inhabited the realm of the universal.

“Trigano, my screenwriter, was drawn to Kafka as a student in high school, when I was his teacher of history and philosophy, and found him to be a steady source of ideas and inspiration. One day he discovered, perhaps in a French translation, a little-known story of Kafka’s, one not yet translated into Hebrew. It was impossible to detach the story from Jewish identity or familiar experience, since the author, who often put clever animals into his stories — monkeys, dogs, mice, even a cockroach — this time, with ironical zeal, placed a small animal, a creature both calm and frightening, into a Jewish synagogue where the narrator himself is one of the worshippers; an animal whose silence, for once, adds new dimension to the riddle of Jewish existence, which is forever a threat unto itself. It is a strange story, unusual even within the corpus of this great writer. In this story he seems to relinquish his anonymity and deliver in first-person plural the testimony of a small Jewish community, in whose synagogue this old creature had lived for many years, an animal that carried inside it a rich Jewish historical memory and perhaps also the gift of prophecy.

“Here, ladies and gentlemen, is how the story begins. I still remember the opening by heart. ‘In our synagogue lives an animal approximately the size of a mongoose. It can often be seen clearly. It allows people to come no closer than a distance of two meters away. Its color is a bright blue-green. No one has ever touched its coat, so nothing can be said about its fur.’ What exactly drew my scriptwriter to this story, I don’t know, but I was swept up in his enthusiasm. A small symbolic animal in a narrative film seemed like a worthy adventure for a young director who believed that Kafka’s genius would protect him.

“Kafka’s story, however, has no narrative line, only the description of a situation, of the relationship of the worshippers to the animal, a relationship that continues from generation to generation. For according to the story, the animal is older than the synagogue and has a secret hiding place inside it, but the noise of the prayers prompts it to dart out of hiding — not to interrupt, but out of anxiety. It knows the noisy prayers are not directed its way, but it remembers something from the past, or is perhaps afraid of the future. In any event, to broaden its angle of vision, it sometimes hangs from the copper curtain rod of the holy ark or, more often, grasps the lattice that separates the upper women’s gallery from the men below and looks down. But unlike the men, who remain indifferent to it, the women worshippers are afraid of it, yet also attracted to it, and they even compete for its attention. Here we have another charming Kafkaesque paradox.”

Moses stops, hesitates, wonders how and why he got carried away by the details of a story that grows sharper in his memory. In the darkness he can make out the sparkle of his listeners’ eyes, but he has no way of judging their attention, so he poses a question to Juan.

“Can I go on? Do we have time?”

“There’s time, Moses, of course” comes the loud reply. “This is an educational institution, not a movie theater.”

“In that case,” the director continues, “to adapt a short and static story into a full-length film we had to do two things. First, create a plot with conflict and crisis; and second, choose an animal, one we could manipulate. The story supplies few details about the animal, apart from its remarkable longevity, its size like a mongoose’s, and its color, which might be natural or possibly a product of the dust and plaster of the synagogue. And since we could not produce a Kafkaesque animal, we naturally enough decided on an actual mongoose, though not an elderly one, hoping it could be trained. We painted its fur, as you shall see, the color of the synagogue wall, in keeping with the story, but added a few thin gold stripes as a mythological touch. For the benefit of the Israeli audience, we had to transplant the synagogue from the sad, fading Diaspora, unaware of the looming European catastrophe, to the new Jewish state, repository of Jewish hopes.”

Manuel translates rapidly, with great enthusiasm, apparently enjoying the opportunity to show off the Hebrew he learned in the order. Moses is so swept up in his introduction that it seems there will be no time left to show the film.

“To construct a plot, you have to choose a protagonist. Of course, it was possible to put the beadle of the synagogue at the center of the film, because it is he, more than anyone else, who maintains regular contact with the animal, especially at night when the animal is active and the synagogue is empty. But to render the story more meaningful, we preferred to make the rabbi the main character. We imagined a rabbi who had arrived in Israel with his flock from a distant Muslim land and established a synagogue where they could combine the old and the new. Then it turns out that a little animal, old and stubborn, had got there first, and its hideout is so ingenious that only if they destroy the building and put up a new one can they get rid of it. This, in short, is the issue: Do they destroy the synagogue, which was created with great effort and whose congregation may have scattered by the time it is rebuilt, or do they try to discover, in the sad, absurdist spirit of Kafka, some sort of coexistence between the worshippers and the animal? This is the heart of the matter, and I think I’ve already run on too long.”

He tries to disappear into the audience before the translation is over, but the hoarse voice of the theoretician stops him, adding a detail that perhaps escaped the filmmakers and that Kafka himself was probably unaware of. In ancient Egypt, the mongoose was considered a noble and holy animal, perhaps owing to its ability to trap and kill poisonous snakes. It was therefore entitled to be embalmed along with the Pharaonic families.

Moses is delighted. “Thank you, thank you. We didn’t know about ancient Egypt, and perhaps Kafka didn’t either. In any case, the historical dimension you have added to the animal can only deepen the understanding of our complex film.” And he motions to the projectionist to start the screening.

MOSES TRIES IN vain to recall the name, or at least the provenance, of the actor who played the rabbi in the film. He doesn’t appear in the credits because he had refused to have his name listed; during production, the animal was filmed separately and inserted in the editing room, and when the actor saw the final picture, with the full dialogue between him and the animal — whose role in the film transcended comedy and was anything but marginal — he complained that the animal had insulted him and demanded that his name be removed.

By contrast, Moses well remembers the origin of the animal and even the lovely name given it by the soundman: Susana. One of Amsalem’s porters stalked her for a few days in the desert near Beersheba, trapped her, and brought her to the set. She was a large mongoose with a long hairy tail and proved to be timid, as in Kafka’s story, though at this moment, as she fills the screen and looks out with big red eyes, flashing her thin, sharp teeth, she makes a terrifying impression. To accustom her to the camera and to learn her habits, the director and cinematographer would visit her cage, feed her, talk to her gently, and play with her. They filmed her mainly at night. The porter, who became her trainer, would attach to her neck a transparent plastic leash, invisible on film, and tug it carefully, so her moves would seem natural and willful, to lead her from the holy ark to the grille of the women’s gallery and back. A few days later, in the editing room, they would include her among the faithful at prayer, generally filmed in daylight.

But who played the rabbi? Moses can clearly see him in his mind’s eye even before he appears on the screen. A middle-aged man, tall and thin, in a black suit and hat, his dark eyes blazing. Might Ruth remember who he was? Was he just some amateur who happened to be around or a real actor?

Trigano, in his loyalty to the neglected south of Israel, originally situated the synagogue in one of the forlorn immigrant towns, but Moses was sick of the arid landscape and insisted on moving the synagogue to the seashore, near the home of the cinematographer. A dry, simple story needs to be irrigated with images of water, and the sea looks wonderful on camera at all hours of the day.

The first part of the film is preparation for Kafka’s parable. Members of the community are scattered among various synagogues but are nostalgic for the ritual flavor of their birthplace near the distant Sahara. And so they decide to establish a synagogue of their own. Lacking money and permits, they take over an abandoned building not far from the sea and pirate their electricity and water from a nearby nursery school. One day, a group of the men goes for evening prayers to the big synagogue in Tel Aviv, and at the end of the service, they steal from the ark two small Torah scrolls, then mask their identity by removing the red velvet Ashkenazic Torah covers and putting the scrolls into the round wooden cases typical of Sephardic communities. Only then do they send a delegation to a laborer planting trees by the roadside, their former rabbi, and implore him to serve again as their rabbi and cantor.

And as the rabbi makes his entrance, so too does Kafka’s creature. On the very first Sabbath, the longtime resident of the building shows up during prayer. The animal’s agility conceals her cowardice, and the congregants are cowed by her fearsome appearance. They can’t turn to the municipal authorities to provide professional animal trappers, lest it be found out that the synagogue is hooked up illegally to the electricity and water of the nursery school. So the worshippers, young and old, decide to deal with the animal themselves.

Here the screenwriter dipped his pen into Kafka’s story and added conflict and confrontation. In one camp are devout worshippers who demand the place be forcefully purged from the unclean beast, and in the other are the moderates, led by the rabbi, who wish to establish coexistence with the animal, in the spirit of Kafka. The film overflows with speechmaking and yelling, whose details Moses can’t remember and doesn’t try. He remains fixed on the rabbi, hoping to find a clue that will help him retrieve the actor’s name. Given his age then, he is probably no longer alive, but, dead or alive, the man has captivated Moses, and he tries to locate him in his memory. The actor dazzles him not merely with the excellence of his acting, but also with his delicate, fragile physicality. His face is dark and gentle, and his big black eyes shine with wisdom. For a moment he looks familiar. It seems the author from Prague, Kafka himself, has leaped out of his short story and turned into the rabbi of the film. How could I have let go of such a true actor? Moses despairs. I could have cast him in many complex roles in my later films.

HE GETS OUT of his seat and ducks down, dodging the beam of the projector as he makes his way in the dark to Ruth, then steers her away from the hall. “Who is the rabbi? I mean, who is the actor?” he pleads. “What was his name? How did we find him?” Although she too is impressed by the actor, whose performance invests grotesqueness with true spirituality, she cannot identify him either. “Did Trigano bring him to us?” “No,” she says. “If Trigano had brought him, I’d remember.”

“What about Toledano?”

“Toledano?” She fondly speaks the late cameraman’s name. “Maybe… because he would sometimes find you actors who were naturally gifted. But you can ask him only if you run into him in the afterlife.”

“Afterlife,” he says. “That’s a new one for you.”

She hesitates a moment, then breaks free and returns to the screening. But Moses doesn’t hurry back in. He walks around, looks at his watch. Tries and fails to open the door leading to the parade ground. Attempts in vain to hear the roar of the nearby ocean. Finally, lest he be accused of deserting his own work, he returns to the studio but remains standing by the rear entrance, monitoring the audience’s attention from behind.

The foes of the animal have invited to evening prayers an irate ultra-Orthodox Jew, who is frightened as the creature stares at him from atop the holy ark. He demands that the synagogue be purified of the abomination and consecrated again, threatening the congregants with excommunication if his ruling is not heeded. It’s easy enough to invoke religious law, but as a practical matter, it is impossible to expel the animal without killing her or destroying the synagogue, and the rabbi, who during the week continues to work as a laborer, refuses to harm her. At night, secretly and alone, he tries to discover her hiding place and to persuade her gently to leave his synagogue.

Thus begin nightly conversations between the rabbi and the mongoose, the rabbi talking and the animal responding with her eyes. He leans toward her now, falling onto his knees to beseech her, trying to cajole the animal to leave the synagogue and go into the big natural world that awaits outside. Actually, he speaks only to the camera, and his hand reaching to touch her fur is stroking the empty air, while the animal listening to him speak is not a free being capable of escape but a creature held in place by the invisible plastic leash, attentive to the lens of the camera that evokes from her big, sparkling eyes the elegant sadness of one who understands the rabbi’s request to leave his synagogue but who cannot allow herself to abandon the Jews to their fate.

Moses, standing in the rear, cannot see the faces of the audience. Two or three have left, and two others are whispering. There are also a few nodding heads, perhaps dozing, but the heads of the de Viola family, the old lady and her two sons, remain upright as, toward the end, the film gathers momentum.

The congregants, despite their love for the rabbi, abandon the synagogue, one by one. Someone takes the stolen Torah scrolls, another dismantles the holy ark, still another disconnects the electricity and water, and they all go in search of a new place of worship.

The building gradually reverts to a ruin, and the camera captures the waves licking its foundations. From time to time a few hikers visit the site. A pair of lovers spends a night there. The rabbi, still working with a hoe, no longer plants trees by the roadside but has been sent to dig wells in the hills. Toledano’s camera has apparently broken free now of both writer and director, following the rabbi who has lost his congregation as if his character holds the key to Kafka’s riddle. The film ends with a moment of rest for the laboring rabbi. He sits down among the rocks to eat his meager meal and watches as a large mongoose battles a snake. Thus hope is born from a strange, dark, and absurdist film, which Kafka could have barely imagined.

THE LIGHTS GO back on but are dimmer than before the screening, as if to allow people to make a getaway without revealing their reactions. But Moses is not interested in reactions. Yes, this is an immature film that was imposed on him, and it’s just as well that it was dropped from his filmography.

He stands in the corridor waiting for the mother and her two sons and Ruth, who is with them. The theoretician walks by and shakes his hand firmly. If he happens to be a member of the prize committee, Moses thinks, I’ll be going back to Israel empty-handed. Manuel fondly grasps the director and says in Hebrew: “May your hands be strong, you have done a great thing — you have forced Kafka to be optimistic.” Juan reinforces his brother’s words with a nod and invites his guests to sit awhile in his room before dinner, the final item on today’s agenda.

But Moses doesn’t want a dinner where conversation will inevitably make its way to the film just screened. “No,” he says apologetically, “attending a retrospective is harder for me than making a film, because I’ve lost control. If you want me clear-headed at tomorrow morning’s ceremony, please liberate me from this last supper and enjoy the company of my companion. With the aid of such an accomplished translator she will surely be able to explain anything that needs explaining.”

They readily agree to his request and quickly arrange his transportation, which makes him suspicious. By ten o’clock he has arrived at the Parador, where he is surprised to find the lobby empty save for three guests, whose boisterous laughter suggests their intoxication. He suddenly realizes that his fear of negative criticism has condemned him to go to bed hungry, and tomorrow’s generous breakfast will not compensate for the splendid farewell dinner planned by the priest and his staff. He asks the reception clerk, a pretty young woman, if food might be available at this hour, which is after all not terribly late. She is sorry, the dining hall is closed, the cooks have gone home. But she herself could prepare for him something light.

“Cold and simple food will satisfy me, señorita.”

She leaves behind the math textbook that she had been immersed in. Before long she brings to his room a bottle of wine and a loaf of black bread with a large hunk of goat cheese. Moses sits in front of Caritas Romana, lustily chewing fresh bread and cheese, whose pungency he offsets with slugs of wine straight from the bottle. He removes his shoes but not his clothes before getting into bed.

He glances at his watch; it’s past midnight and Ruth has not returned. There is of course nothing to worry about, she is under the aegis of two men of the cloth, but he keeps his clothes on, so if his presence is needed he can be prompt and presentable. He switches off the bedside light and turns over, like turning a page, in hopes that all his worries will vanish. But the new page in the book of sleep is more unsettling than the last one. For when he next opens his eyes he is startled to find the room lights dim, and himself naked under the blanket. By his side lies Ruth, quiet and content, leafing through the menu of the closing dinner.

“Tell me,” she says to the man awakening beside her, “what scared you so much about the film that you passed up a great meal?”

He pulls the blanket closer. He feels his head is glued to the pillow.

“The truth? This time I was afraid of real anger.”

“Anger over such an old film?”

“All of them are my children”—the director sighs—“even the weak and the pathetic ones. Kafka wrote a story about that, in the first person, called ‘Eleven Sons,’ and the most miserable son is the one he loves best, though he would not want to entrust his life to him. Indeed, Kafka felt most of his works were flawed, but he did not destroy them and instead deposited them with a friend, asking him to burn them after he died. But the friend refused, and rightly so. If Kafka truly wanted to burn his works, he would have done so himself.”

“But why did you think it would arouse anger? You know, the old man, the theoretician, gave his own little interpretation.”

“Good or bad?”

“An interpretation I didn’t understand. Any interpretation is good, no?”

“What else happened at the dinner? Why was it so long?”

“Spaniards are night people. They don’t get up at seven in the morning to listen to the news.”

Moses laughs. “And the food? It really was special?”

“A fabulous meal. Heavenly. What you missed tonight you’ll never have a chance to eat again.”

“And they talked about me?”

“Because you could do without them, they did without you. The cultural attaché from the Israeli embassy phoned from Madrid to apologize for not coming to tomorrow’s prize ceremony.”

“So there’ll still be a prize?”

“If that’s what they promised you.”

“Maybe, between a fabulous course and a heavenly course, you remembered who played the rabbi?”

“I tried, but I couldn’t remember. I also can’t figure out how we lost track of such a compelling actor.”

“Maybe he’ll surprise us in the last movie tomorrow.”

“No, he won’t be in tomorrow’s movie. That one I remember in every detail and will never forget.”

“Meaning what?”

“Juan told me which film was picked for the screening before the ceremony. Believe it or not, it’s The Refusal.”

“The Refusal? Interesting.”

“And this time they kept the original name.”

“Trigano wouldn’t give up on this one, would he?”

“Even though you gave it a different ending…”

“Only for your sake…”

“Partly for my sake.”

She turns off the remaining light.

In the darkness he feels the blanket on his nakedness, and presses on.

“Who took my clothes off?”

“You did. You took them off before I ever got back, but apparently you were woozy and lay here naked, with no blanket. I had to move you over and cover you. But that went smoothly. When you’re asleep, you’re a darling, easy to control.”

FROM THE DEEP well of time floats the face of a young schoolgirl, shaking him from slumber. The question of why she, the girl from north Tel Aviv, of all the characters in tomorrow’s film, is the first to burst into his memory will not let him rest, urging him out of bed. It’s four in the morning; the winter dawn is slow to arrive, yet he succumbs to his waking state. Stark naked, but trustworthy and careful, he checks on his companion, who is sleeping peacefully, then gathers up his clothing, gets dressed, puts on his coat, and pockets his passport and some paper money, but he leaves his hearing aids and wallet on the night table. Taking with him the pilgrim walking stick, he slips silently from the room.

“If my metaphysics tire you and hurt your pocketbook,” Trigano told him after even the little art house in north Tel Aviv refused to show In Our Synagogue, “and you think our collaboration could use something more emotional and popular, the next screenplay will be about the travails of a young woman, and to give it an epic dimension we’ll start with her childhood. But to do that we need to find a girl who looks like her.”

Moses decides to take the stairs down, because if anything should go wrong with the elevator, who would come rescue him in the middle of the night? The stairwell is unlit at this hour, but the stairs are comfortably carpeted, and on the walls curving around them hang pictures, unintelligible in the darkness.

In the hotel lobby, two people doze in a corner in sleeping bags. Strange. Are they young backpackers who arrived late at night, discovered that the room they reserved was given to someone else, and were granted permission to sack out here and wait till morning? The cubbyholes behind the front desk are all empty of keys. The young woman who had brought the wine and cheese to his room is still on duty, and her face, fetching earlier that night, is now ever more radiant and unique. If I were called upon to direct a movie in Spain, thinks Moses, I would come back here and get the inexperienced reception clerk to play a small part in my film, maybe the part of a reception clerk. Even if her appearance in the film totaled just a few seconds, her beauty would be preserved in the archive for generations. He feels an urge to introduce himself to her as a film director and tell her that she may be unaware of her own beauty, but he resists. At that hour, such a compliment from a stranger could be construed by a young woman as harassment. Besides, could she believe that the old man standing before her is still active as an artist, planning for the future?

“I see you haven’t made much progress tonight in your math,” he ventures, indicating the equations in the open book.

“Chemistry.” She sighs with a winning smile and a pair of dimples.

“Chemistry?” He sighs back sympathetically.

“And you, Señor Moses, are hungry again.”

“No, not at all.” He can still taste the goat cheese. Neither does he crave the hotel’s Internet access, but he does have a yen to walk around and would like to know if the city is safe at night for a foreigner, who to be cautious has left his wallet behind, taking only his passport.

“Best to leave the passport with me,” advises the desk clerk, “and take instead the business card of the hotel. Also leave the walking stick and take an umbrella, because it’s cold and rainy outside. But the city is holy at night too, and if you get lost, the cathedral will always lead you back to the hotel.”

Beside the cubbyholes hangs a colorful woolen scarf, long and thick, and he asks with atypical audacity if it belongs to her or was left behind by a guest.

“Both.”

“Meaning?”

“Somebody forgot it, and I use it on cold days.”

“If it’s a scarf without a permanent owner, perhaps I could use it to keep warm in the cold?”

She hesitates. She is probably aware of her own allure and senses that the elderly guest with the little beard and stubbly cheeks would like the feel of her, but she takes down the scarf anyway and hands it to him. “And if I’m not here when you get back,” she says, “leave it for me,” and she writes her name for him on a slip of paper.

Unabashedly, as if the desk clerk has turned into a character in a movie now filming in Spain, he takes the scarf — which on closer inspection is a bit tattered — wraps it around his neck, and inhales its scent. He walks out of the hotel and likes how the damp milky fog shifts the shape of the plaza and hides the palaces, makes the cathedral appear to be floating. Recalling that the alleys of the Old Town lead to the promenade and the paved garden nearby, he steps up his pace and strides confidently to his destination.

In recent years, Yair Moses has been on friendly terms with death, which sometimes talks back, either in muffled tones or a shriek, and on the strength of this friendship he is not afraid to wander alone in remote places, even in a foreign country. Now too he is undaunted by the echo of his lonely footsteps. The Old Town is quietly sleeping, its plazas desolate save for a single shop with the lights on, where a large woman with wild hair arranges souvenirs on the shelves. For a moment, he wants to stray from his path and go in, but the gentle patter of rain on his umbrella is too pleasant to interrupt. And the moon, which on the first midnight had welcomed them with its glow, lingers beyond the clouds and fog as a faint patch of whiteness, perhaps to be unveiled before the dawning of day.

THE OLD TOWN of Santiago is not as large or confusing as the Old City of Jerusalem, nor is it surrounded by walls, so the Israeli navigates it with ease, crossing a bridge over a gully and arriving at the promenade he had visited the day before with the young instructor. He has not come for a night view of the distant cathedral from this angle but rather to have another look at the sculptures that the art college students had installed in the park. First he examines the two angry middle-aged Marys holding on to each other, their spindly legs bolted to the ground. Now, with nobody else around, he knocks on them to ascertain what they are made of. Bejerano had interpreted this sculpture as a secular challenge to the marble sculptures of the cathedral and thus decided they were made of plastic. But now, as Moses drums his fingers on the coats and smooth faces of the two women, he can feel a sturdy material, some alloy more durable than the young man had suggested. Serious women such as these two would not stand a chance in a public park, exposed to wind and rain and mischievous children, if they were made of simple plastic.

He moves on, heading for the skinny intellectual sitting on a park bench to find if he’s made of the same stuff as the women. But from a distance it would appear he has acquired a friend, as if in the past day a new sculpture was installed beside him.

Moses slows his gait, his heart pounding, but the silhouette has heard his approach and stands tall — a heavyset homeless man, wrapped in a sheepskin cape, who emits a growl or a curse and vanishes into the darkness.

Just like the movies. The director grins and takes the freshly vacated seat beside the bareheaded, cross-legged intellectual who peers at the world with boundless curiosity. Moses gingerly runs his hand along the stiff scarf that covers the man’s neck — or is it a long frozen beard? — feels his close-cropped head, and tries to remove his big round eyeglasses, but they are welded to his ears. There is no doubt, he confirms, those art college students cooked up serious material. Secular characters meant to challenge saints carved in stone require a solid foundation.

The rain has stopped, but the breaking dawn sharpens the cold. He wraps the tattered woolen scarf tight around his neck and closes his eyes, again reaching out to the girl who unsettled his sleep. He suddenly worries that he may not see her tomorrow, that she ended up on the cutting-room floor. It’s hard to be certain.

Toledano, who had known Ruth since kindergarten, considered himself best qualified to find an actress who could play her as a child. He scouted a few drama clubs at community centers and found the candidate in an upscale neighborhood of Tel Aviv. He managed to convince her father, a high-ranking army officer and war hero, to permit his young daughter to appear in a few scenes in the film, whose content was still mostly unknown even to the cameraman himself.

Despite the very different background of the young girl, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Ruth, not only in her facial features and expressive eyes but in her dark skin tone and the timbre of her voice.

Trigano’s cerebral screenplays had not previously called for children, and Moses wondered if he’d be able to direct an inexperienced girl playing a difficult part, but Ruth, excited by the cinematographer’s choice, took the girl under her wing and promised to coach her.

He insists on not waiting till he sees the film to find out whether the girl beating on the doors of his memory, the forerunner of the film’s heroine, has remained in the final cut. He demands that his memory supply him an answer right away. That innocent girl would come to the filming chaperoned by her father, who worried that something edgy might be required of his daughter. It wasn’t simple to direct a young, unseasoned amateur under the watchful eyes of her father in brief scenes intended to give clear signals of a relationship with her teacher that was somewhere between love and enslavement. Ruth kept her promise and did her share. She helped to choose articles of clothing that were right for the girl’s character, and she showed her how to ignore the camera as well as her father’s steely gaze, which disconcerted the cast and crew.

The Refusal was relatively well received by audiences and was even able to recoup a respectable fraction of its cost, but the fight that broke out during the shooting of the final scene, and the subsequent breakup with Trigano, distanced the film from the heart of its creator, and after it had made the rounds of theaters he was quick to deposit it in the Jerusalem film archive, in the knowledge he could always see it again. But years went by and he never did, and now his screenwriter had gone back to the film and brought it to the Spanish archive so they could transfer it to digital format and dub it in a foreign tongue.

With no warning, the moon is freed from the last tuft of a stubborn cloud, and the skies are bathed in lunar brilliance that reveals secrets of the night. Moses can see now that the homeless man who relinquished his seat is not far away, leaning his head on the shoulder of the Mary with the outstretched hand, waiting for the director to abandon his post beside the intellectual.

The two exchange sharp glances and Moses realizes that he read the fellow wrong. The tall, athletic man with a beard and bushy eyebrows, who wishes to retrace his steps and reclaim the bench, is not a homeless vagabond or beggar but a lone pilgrim who arrived not as part of a group but on his own. By the looks of the cape, the unruly beard, the woolen leggings, and the knapsack, he is a true believer who chose to come to Santiago on foot, on a long and difficult path. But Moses, who sometimes talks with death, is not afraid of a man holding a large, thick staff with a huge clam shell affixed to the top — an authentic staff, not the kind for sale in souvenir shops. If he wants to harm me, he says to himself with a smile, maybe I deserve it, and he stands up and gestures graciously at the place no longer occupied. And if he were invited to make a movie in Spain, he would include, regardless of the plot, a pilgrim like this to walk around in silence before the camera.

DURING HIS NOCTURNAL outing, there’s been a change of personnel at the front desk, and he returns the scarf not to the young chemist but to a stern middle-aged clerk, who hangs it on its hook and discreetly points to a man sitting by the closed dining room door, leafing through a newspaper. Moses recognizes the teacher of cinematic theory, embalmed in his black suit. Apparently he has agreed, or perhaps requested, to serve as the escort of the Israeli director on the last day of the retrospective. But Moses decides to postpone his encounter and slips back to the attic.

He takes off his shoes in the dark, quietly, so his footsteps will not wake the sleeper, and, remembering that the closet door squeaks, he drops his coat on the floor. But the eyes that opened as he entered do not close.

“You’re awake?”

“More or less.”

“Since when?”

“Since the time you left.”

“But I was careful.”

“I’m not awake because of you.”

“Really? Why not worry over me?”

“You don’t need worrying over. Anyway, where were you?”

“I walked around a little, to get away from this place. Past the Old Town there’s a promenade and sculpture garden of clever local characters. Rodrigo showed it to me yesterday, and tonight I had the urge to feel them so I could tell what they were made of.”

He sits down on the bed, and cautiously, in the darkness, reaches for her hand. He counts her fingers one by one as if to be sure none is missing.

“If I didn’t ruin your sleep, what did?”

“Thoughts.”

“For example?”

“For example, the film today. The Refusal.”

“You too? Funny, because ever since you said it would be closing the retrospective, I’ve been trying to remember what we did there. Do you remember it well?”

“Yes. It’s the first film that centered on me alone from beginning to end.”

“Even before the beginning, from preadolescence, from the childhood of the main character.”

“Childhood?”

“Childhood, girlhood. The young amateur we brought in who played you as a grade-school student. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about her tonight. I’m curious to see how I created your precursor.”

“You won’t see a thing.”

“Why?”

“Because you cut all of her scenes from the final film.”

“Oy,” cries Moses in sorrow, “she was cut in the end?”

“You claimed at the time that the film turned out too long, and the producer was demanding cuts, so without asking or notifying anyone you took out all the early scenes in elementary school and began with my graduation ceremony.”

“Your graduation?”

“I mean the heroine’s.”

Moses feels a need for self-defense. “I wouldn’t have cut it shorter just for the producer. There was surely some other reason, which I don’t recall at the moment. Trigano was sharp and clever with dramatic stories told in a limited time frame but was less convincing when it came to giving a character a strong background, like inventing a childhood for you that would add depth to what happened to you later.”

“To me?”

“I mean the heroine. But that girl, who in the end wasn’t in the movie, keeps me up at night like a ghost. What was it about her that I want so much to see? Was she especially attractive? Did she really look like you?”

“Toledano, who discovered her, thought she looked like me as a schoolgirl, and there were people in the crew who saw a resemblance, but for me it was hard to see, which is natural. But she really was an impressive girl, smart and ambitious, and I invested a lot in her. In any case, you never had the patience to work with little kids or teenagers. There’s also something about you that seems to scare them.”

Moses is amused. “What about me could be scary?”

“When you are next to the camera, fixated on your goal, you’re not aware how alienated and hostile you become toward anything unconnected to the film. Although toward that girl, as I remember, you were a little more patient, maybe because her father the colonel was always at the rehearsals and shooting. That’s why you didn’t dare yell at her. Or maybe because you also thought she looked like me. Or because back then, every so often, you were a little in love with me.”

“I’m always in love with you. Sometimes a little, and sometimes more. But what was her name?”

“Ruth.”

“Ruth?”

“It was because of her that I added her name to my old one.”

“Because of her? Why? You never said you changed your name because of her.”

“I intended just to add it, but her name, the new one, swallowed up the old one.”

“Why because of her?”

“Because I was happy that a real Israeli like her, from a good, established family, was picked to represent the childhood of the heroine who gets into such trouble. Therefore, after you dropped her from my film, I decided to compensate her by adopting her name.”

“Compensate her for what?”

“For the fact that until the film’s premiere, she didn’t know she wasn’t in it. And that you didn’t see fit to inform her, and I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know because you never, in any film, wanted to get near the editing room and always waited to see yourself in the finished film.”

“Because it was hard to watch how you and the editors would cut us up, destroy our continuity, then paste us back together. And therefore, at the premiere, as I recall, not only she but I was astonished to see that you had dropped all the scenes of my youth.”

“Again yours. Not yours. The heroine’s.”

“No, mine too. Because I liked it that you chose such a perfect girl to portray me in my childhood.”

“What do you mean, perfect?”

“Perfect. Rooted. A real Israeli. Salt of the earth. Well connected. Because in those days I thought… and now too, really… I know that we — Trigano, Toledano, the lot of us — would always somehow stay a bit in the margins, so I was happy that you gave me a little sister, so to speak, a twin who could strengthen me.”

“Again you?”

“Me in the film.”

“What is this, the movie gets mixed up with reality for you?”

“Sometimes. And not for you?”

“Never. The boundary between reality and imagination is always there for me.”

“Because you never dare to stand in front of a camera, only behind it, because only from there can you be the one giving the orders.”

THE ROOM IS still dark and neither one can clearly see the face of the other. He holds her hand, separating her fingers one by one and pressing them together again, filled with desire for the actress whose childhood memories make her voice tremble.

“She, the little Ruth, came to the premiere excited, and confident too; we all praised her acting during the filming. And you didn’t even bother to inform Amsalem that you had cut her out, and he sent her numerous invitations to fill up the theater. She arrived happy, surrounded by her family and girlfriends. At first I thought you’d changed the sequence and would go from present to past in flashbacks, but the film went on and on, and no trace of her. You simply erased her. And now you have the gall to say that you can’t recall if she’s in the movie or not?”

“I honestly didn’t remember. I honestly hoped to see her.”

“You won’t. You wiped her out. That’s why she comes back at you like a ghost. To take revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“Until the last minute she waited to see herself. And when the film was over and the lights came up and the congratulations began, I saw her sitting frozen in her seat, her father consoling her. But when I came over she was crying bitterly — she wanted to be an actress, she wanted to play my childhood me, she felt she’d played her part well, and now it was all lost. And though I had no idea how to explain to her what happened or why, she took it all out on me, as if I were complicit in eliminating her from the film. Her heart was broken, and mine broke along with hers.”

“You’re breaking hearts left and right, but after all is said and done, what happened? This wasn’t the first or last time that more than a third of the material was cut in the editing process.”

“Not so simple. I held her deep inside me while we worked on that film, and despite Trigano’s difficult script I led myself to believe that I was a natural extension of her, not of the girl in the movie, of the real girl I knew. I knew her family too, and I was even in their home a few times. You should know that when it came to that crazy scene with the beggar — it was because of her that I ran away.”

“Because of her?”

“And I didn’t even know that you intended to cut her from the film.”

“I didn’t know either. But where’s the connection? Why her?”

“Because if she is me when I was young, and I am her as an adult, if she saw me on the screen in that sick scene Trigano scripted — and you standing there, demanding that I expose my breast and force a filthy old beggar to suck milk meant for the baby taken away from me — if she were to see that onscreen… As I faced that scene, I thought of her, the young actress, this pure and intelligent girl, and I thought how shocked and disappointed she would be, she and her whole family, when she saw this repulsive scene, and she might say to herself, Why did I get involved with this film in the first place? What possible connection could I have with such a disturbed woman?”

Moses speaks softly, as to a person who is ill: “What are you talking about? About characters in a film or about human beings?”

“Both.”

“Both? How does one mix the two up?”

“One does, if one lives the right way.”

“So in order to protect the ego of a spoiled, ambitious child from a good family, you ran away from the camera and killed our entire scene? And I even defended you. Maybe dropping that girl from the film was a good thing,” he says and regrets it immediately, considers how to soothe her, when the room phone rings. The reception clerk timidly informs Moses that the professor from the film institute is awaiting his presence in the lobby. “It’s okay, I’m awake,” Moses assures him, “I’ll be down soon.”

But instead of going down, he undresses, gets under the warm covers, tightly holds on to the real character, and kisses her as if asking for forgiveness and absolution. But as Ruth, surprised, yields in his arms, the phone rings again, the reception clerk announcing that the professor is now awaiting him in dining room.

“Damn,” grumbles Moses, trying to tighten his embrace, but Ruth pushes him away gently and says, “Go. I didn’t understand a word of what he said at dinner, but I felt he was making an effort. Don’t disappoint him.”

“And what will I understand? He speaks only Spanish.”

“Sometimes it’s better for an artist not to understand the interpretation of his art.”

THE DINING ROOM is still empty of guests, and Moses spots the theoretician right away. The man in his black suit sits at a table near a window slightly ajar, with only a carafe of coffee before him. Moses walks over briskly, apologizes for his tardiness, hoping to receive in return a simple “Good morning” in English.

But at this breakfast there is to be no English. So, thinks Moses, if another monologue in Spanish is in store, I may finally be able to eat a full meal in peace.

The Spaniard escorts his guest to the buffet, and the meal is full indeed. The theoretician of cinema recommends traditional dishes of the region of Galicia, apparently providing details of origin and history. Moses, as someone who attaches aesthetic importance to food in his films, dares to broaden his palate, filling his plate with foods that in the past repulsed him.

So starts the breakfast. Two waitresses attend the two guests, one talking and the other one eating. The theoretician consumes nothing but black coffee, and when Moses raises an eyebrow to ask why, the theoretician sighs and interpolates bits of his medical history in his interpretation of film.

Now, with the teacher sitting across the table and not in an audience, Moses can get a good look at him. Don Gomez is actually his junior, but his hair is sparse, and the redness of his eyes suggests a chronic malady or sleepless nights. His black suit is shiny from use, and threads dangle from his jacket in place of two missing buttons, suggesting the absence of a spouse or close friend to look after him. Ink stains on the fingers of his right hand indicate an intellectual who is still fearful of computers. If he were asked to make a film in Spain, Moses would invite not only the reception clerk and the pilgrim to go before the camera but also this man, to talk for thirty seconds about anything he wanted. He appears to have considerable acting talent, able as he is to carry on in a resonant voice to a man who doesn’t understand his language. And when Moses hears the names Kafka and Trigano repeated again and again and sees the Spaniard sketching in the air with his little hands the animal and sinagoga and talking about servicio militar and the desierto, and from there to the tren and accidente, it is clear that this scholar has delved deeply into his early works and is attempting a grand synthesis of them all. Guests now entering the dining room acknowledge with a curious smile the teacher’s histrionic performance. With great appreciation Moses sees Ruth entering. This means she had not sought to be rid of him when she shoved him out of bed, for here she is now, giving up her lazy morning to join in and help him endure the unintelligible. Before she sits down with them she helps herself to a little bowl of dry cereal and pours in some milk.

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK a student from the film institute arrives at the Parador and escorts the two guests to the municipal auditorium, for there, and not at the institute, will be held the screening of the last film in the retrospective of the early work of the Israeli director, for which he will be awarded a prize. Is the prize only for that film? Is it a consolation prize, Moses wonders, or an award of merit? Or a prize to encourage new projects? He is taken with the grandeur of the municipal auditorium, full of fine paintings and sculptures representing generations of connoisseurship. The screen, made of a sheer grayish fabric, hangs at the rear of the stage, failing to conceal adequately the colorful fresco behind it.

The invited guests, about a hundred in number, are a varied lot. Alongside a few dignitaries in dark suits sit teachers and students from the institute, and behind them elderly men and women from a local old-age home, some holding canes; the back rows are filled with municipal workers, clerks and secretaries and traffic inspectors, and Moses believes he recognizes a few of the whistling and pot-banging sanitation workers.

“You have certainly gathered a diverse crowd,” Moses says to Juan, who is quick to separate the two Israelis. He suggests that Ruth sit beside his mother, in the second row, and directs Moses to the front row, next to the mayor, who nods a friendly hello.

“Yes, for such ceremonies one must fill the hall,” Juan says apologetically. “The value of the prize is diminished if the applause is feeble.”

“Believe me, my dear Juan, the prize is important to me even if its value is merely symbolic.”

“But this prize is not symbolic, it’s real,” protests the priest, “even if it is awarded for films that are symbolic. Did the cultural attaché of your country not inform you? This is a prize of three thousand euros, and had my mother not been enlisted to contribute, the municipality, which suffers a continuous deficit, would have been hard-pressed to provide the sum.”

Moses turns red in the face. “Very generous of you, and moving. But I wonder if this is an award for merit, a consolation prize, or an award to encourage new projects.”

“Anything is possible,” says the priest. “When my mother gives you the envelope, she will explain the intention of the prize. She has told me nothing about what she plans to say.”

A light goes on in front of the screen, and Don Gomez Alfonso da Silva, small and grave, takes the stage.

“This is a serious man,” whispers Moses, “and though I don’t understand what he says, I feel he speaks of me with generosity and appreciation.”

“With generosity, and also with anxiety about the continuation of your work. Last night he watched your film by himself and got so deeply involved, he woke me up and asked to be allowed a few words before the screening.”

“Meaning I don’t need to give an introduction?”

“We’d be glad if you didn’t, because we don’t want to wear out an audience that is mainly not professional with too much intellectual talk.”

“Fine with me,” manages Moses, embarrassed.

“But in your words of thanks you can explain yourself at length in your mother tongue; my brother Manuel has volunteered to translate.”

“It would please me to speak in Hebrew. Anyway, what is your theoretician saying now?”

“He sees The Refusal as a transitional film in which the director relinquishes radical symbolism in favor of popular psychology.”

“Popular? Not really…”

“Don’t be too upset. Don Gomez is truly erudite; over the years, he was married to three different women, and each wife sharpened his thinking. These women came from different parts of Spain, and today he mingles various dialects in his speech and invents original expressions and images that amuse the audience, especially the old people. See how they laugh and enjoy him.”

Moses wearily leans his head on the back of his chair. The sleepless night is taking its toll. He closes his eyes and calculates the number of hours that remain before the return flight to Israel.

WHEN THE ISRAELI lifts his head and opens his eyes, he finds that Don Gomez has faded into darkness, and projected onscreen is young Ruth, dressed in her high school uniform at her graduation ceremony. This film, like its predecessors, is dubbed in Spanish, but as opposed to the others, in which actions and locations were the principal elements, contextualized by the dialogue, here the drama develops mainly by means of long verbal exchanges that deepen the relationships among the characters. Moses remembers the draft pages of the screenplay, written in crowded longhand by Trigano, where speech followed speech, with no provocative slumber in a desert crater or moonstruck hallucination in a remote village. The characters in this film interact at a kitchen table, or in a corner of a neighborhood café, or in a bus station at the edge of the city. At the end of the film, the main character does not find a dramatic location to give birth to her child but chooses a small illicit clinic near the produce market in south Tel Aviv.

“So how can we infuse your story with the mystery you crave so much?” Moses had wondered aloud after he read the draft. But Trigano was unperturbed. “We’ll look for that mystery in our next film, but now, after our defeat by Kafka’s elderly animal, we must invigorate our image with a simple human story, for which we might find actors funded by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.”

And indeed he found them, and after many years they reappear on the screen of the auditorium of the municipality of Santiago de Compostela: a man and a woman, both about forty, who play a married couple, both teachers. With great affection they embrace the young graduate, singing her praises to her long-suffering, working-class mother, a resident of the south of Israel, who reverently tucks her daughter’s precious certificate in her handbag.

The state paid the salaries of the actors playing the teachers and also provided a handsome grant to the production. Trigano tailored the fictional characters to the real ones. The pair were actors in the Hungarian theater, husband and wife, who escaped to Israel in the late 1950s after the failure of the Hungarian revolution. Their Jewishness was somewhat dubious, particularly the wife’s, whose facial features and tall stature testified to remote Asiatic ancestry. Trigano used to call them “the two Khazars given us for free by the Ministry of Absorption.”

But where were these Khazars today? Where had they gone, how had they aged? They were a good deal older than Moses. But now in the dark, on the limp screen by the gorgeous fresco, they are young and active as they portray bits of their own biography.

As two artists who arrived in the country from behind the Iron Curtain, they enjoyed special treatment and spent considerable time in a Hebrew-language program to train them for performance in Israeli theater. But their Hungarian accents proved to be a formidable obstacle, and even the expert in pronunciation assigned them had a hard time inculcating emphasis on the proper syllables. True, in humorous skits, such an accent was an asset, especially when juxtaposed against speakers with the lilt of Arab lands, but the pair considered themselves serious stage actors and expected to play dramatic and tragic roles in the Jewish State. The Ministry of Absorption tried to find them employment at government expense in movies, where the soundtrack might be manipulated to impart the right meter to their Hebrew. To make it easier for Moses to cast the two in the new film, Trigano invented for the actor the role of a history teacher, turned his wife into a teacher of art, and instead of two refugees from the communist regime they were made into Holocaust survivors whose time in the death camps had rendered impossible their hopes for a child who would bring them consolation.

This is the point of departure for the drama that develops between the pair of teachers and the pretty and gifted student, daughter of an underprivileged family, to whom Trigano awarded the same scholarship he had received as a youth. And not just the scholarship. He also saw fit in the screenplay to grant his girlfriend the matriculation certificate of which she was deprived when he convinced her to drop out of school and become an actress in his films. And because, when the time came, he also persuaded her to declare that she was Orthodox in order to avoid military service, he made it up to her by turning her into an outstanding soldier who becomes an officer. All these compensations, which he showered upon her in his imagination to atone for his domination in real life, were still not enough for him, so he resurrected her mother, who had died in childbirth, and it is she who now fills the screen, a widow dressed in black, listening to the two Khazars who try to ingratiate themselves with her so she will not obstruct their secret plan.

“How is the teachers’ Spanish?” Moses whispers to the director of the archive sitting beside him. “Is it correct?” “Not really,” he answers. “Trigano asked that their dubbing be given a foreign accent and the grammar sabotaged a little, and a Polish student who studied here last year showed the dubbers how to do it without making them sound ridiculous.” Indeed, the foreign accent and mistakes provoke no laughter in the municipal auditorium, which was also the case when the film was shown in Israel. From the start, the artful acting of the Khazars creates a mood of uneasiness.

The plan of the pair of teachers, the Holocaust survivors, is becoming clear. They’ve picked out the gifted student and try to convince her, as the film progresses, to give birth to a child they can adopt. After her graduation, they continue to cultivate their loving relationship.

Moses admits that the two played their parts professionally. In effect, they portrayed themselves and even subtly steered him and the cinematographer to bring out the best in them. It was no wonder that they were praised by critics and audiences alike, but after the partnership collapsed, there was no chance of persuading them to work again with Moses. Their loyalty was to Trigano.

In any case, the Spanish sounds alien to the spirit of his film. Some echo or other in the dubbing studio has amplified the artificiality of the speech. He removes his hearing aids, takes out their little batteries, and replaces them in his ears as plugs, to muffle the sound.

The Refusal is a quiet film, centering not on the two teachers but rather on a strong, impressive young woman whose inner journey is complicated but credible. This time Trigano created a worthy character. He gave his girlfriend not only fortitude but moral fiber and sent her to serve in an army base not far from Jerusalem. On weekend leaves, she chooses not to make the long trip to her mother’s home in the south but to stay with her former teachers, who have given her a room of her own in their apartment.

This is a drama of subterranean currents with lengthy close-ups, but still, the story unfolds steadily toward its goal. These two teachers know their student well, and from the time she arrived, in the tenth grade, a gifted girl from a poor town, they spotted her as a means to their own happiness. They are aware of her strong points and vulnerabilities, and cautiously, quietly, over breakfast and dinner, they will try to chart a path to her heart and to incline her toward granting their wish. They tell her about the war, show her pictures of the European world that was destroyed, photos of relatives and children lost. In precise, restrained language, without excessive pathos, they confess their barrenness. And the soldier, now an officer, slowly guesses what her former teachers want from her, pretending she doesn’t while giving them hope.

Step by measured step, the story Trigano devised for his loved one moves ahead, doled out gradually, with no sharp turns, building the tacit agreement, repellent and scandalous but with a mission — to provide a child to those whose world was destroyed, a descendant who will not disappoint them, because they have faith in the Israeli womb that will give it life. This absurdity, in the skillful script, wins the approval of the lonely widow, the mother of the heroine, who accepts that her gifted child, before starting a family of her own, will bring happiness to others.

And so, in this old film, on a makeshift screen in the auditorium of the municipality of a foreign city, a young woman officer still serving in the army becomes pregnant. But now Trigano changes the game. She is not an innocent and confused girl who falls prey to the desire of others but a self-confident, sensual young woman who, to mask the identity of the father, switches lovers promiscuously. The passing of seasons, one of Moses’ directorial specialties, is rendered in the slowly bulging belly of the young woman.

Trigano demanded the right to oversee the proper development of the pregnancy. He did not rely on the costumer or the makeup artist. In the breaks between filming he would lovingly rest his head on the soft pillow taped each morning to Ruth’s belly. But, unlike Trigano, the military authorities are not overjoyed. They advise this valued officer to terminate the pregnancy, but she refuses and so is discharged from service. And instead of accepting the adoptive parents’ invitation to move into their home and enjoy their care until the birth, she rents an apartment on the scruffy southern edge of Tel Aviv and waits there for her delivery date.

At this point, the mighty Israeli landscape enters the picture. Moses is struck by how Toledano’s old camera managed to wrap wind, waves, and sky around the heavily pregnant woman as she walks on the beach. Here begins the turnabout in her mind, a reversal that Moses had to convey with few words and many silences. Slowly the meaning of the mission she has undertaken becomes clear to her: even after the child is handed over to its adoptive parents, she will always, as its mother, be tied to it. And not only to it, but to them. She, too, will have to bear the burden of their memories.

From now on, a new, painful recognition comes into focus, devised by Trigano for the ending of the film in keeping with his personal ideology. In Jerusalem, the two future adoptive parents are preparing for the imminent birth, their anxiety mingled with excitement, retaining an obstetrician and a veteran midwife, splurging on overpriced baby gear to pamper the newborn, while in Tel Aviv, the heroine is in touch with a local agency and is offering her unborn child for immediate, anonymous adoption.

And so, when the hour arrives, with no one by her side and without a word to anyone, she disappears behind the iron door of a semi-legal clinic, a door whose color Toledano requested be changed from green to blue.

Moses feels the suspense among the Spanish audience as the birth, filmed in a studio, draws near. Trigano demanded that this time he not be barred from the set and that he even take part in the directing. But the childbirth scene was cut out in the editing room, where it seemed crude and inconsistent with the spirit of the film. Ruth had screamed and writhed more than she’d been asked to, and the blood did not look realistic. The transfer of the newborn to the social worker was filmed in a real hospital, in the maternity wing. The infant, who was a week old, was loaned to the production by the sister-in-law of the soundman, but only on condition that she play the social worker receiving the child for adoption. And though the woman had never stood before a movie camera, she played her role so naturally that Ruth broke uncontrollably into real tears. Who knows better than Moses about all the fake tears he got out of her in subsequent films. He is amazed how genuine and pained was her weeping in this one, so much so that the screen seems to tremble.

He turns around to find Ruth and sees that Doña Elvira, the experienced actress, also appreciates the dramatic quality of this crying and holds Ruth’s hand as if to congratulate and console her.

From here the film carries on to the end, but not to Trigano’s stormy ending. The pale new mother will not open her coat and undo her blouse in a gesture of generosity and despair. She will not breastfeed the aged actor from the National Theater. She will just keep walking and head to the beach.

Moses had to improvise these last moments of the film on the spot, and he made do with an atmospheric ending. The young mother is distressed not only over the child she has given up, but by the disappointment she has caused her two beloved teachers, the survivors of hell, who so believed in her, and she begins walking slowly but steadily along the beach, and when she vanishes in the distance, the audience in the dark is meant to believe that she is secure in her newly acquired freedom.

“THE HOUR IS late and the municipal workers must get back to work,” whispers de Viola to Moses amid the robust applause in the room. “Let’s try,” he suggests, “to make the ceremony short. There’s been more than enough talking at your retrospective.”

“Indeed.”

While the credits roll, employees of the mayor’s office bring a small table, cover it with a green cloth, place two chairs behind it, and set up a microphone and next to it a pitcher of water and two glasses. The names keep parading down the screen, albeit in smaller and smaller letters. People stand and stretch and start to chat, but the projectionist has yet to stop the film. And Manuel, picking up a signal from his brother to get things moving, steers his elderly mother in small steps to the table, where a city official shoves an envelope into her hand, at which point the director of the archive nudges Moses from his chair and invites him to the stage.

But on the makeshift screen, with remarkable persistence, continues the recitation of gratitude to all manner of institutions, large and small, and to private individuals, and artisans and drivers, restaurant owners and cooks, all of them engaged, often unknowingly, in the creation of this film. See, Moses says, congratulating himself, even in an early film I had many partners, overt and covert, who supported my art.

Doña Elvira speaks softly in Spanish, with Manuel translating line by line into formal Hebrew, and Moses gets the gist: The prize is not large, but it is presented with appreciation for a director who at the beginning of his career was unafraid of the absurd and metaphysical and allegorical, and we all know, going back to Luis Buñuel, how hard it is to inject authenticity and warmth into abstract ideas and wild, surrealistic dreams cloaked in a shaft of light cast upon a screen, and we thus owe a great debt to those courageous enough to take this difficult path.

Moses kisses her on both cheeks and offers a brief response:

“During my long life I have participated in any number of retrospectives of my films, in my homeland and abroad, but I know that these three days in Santiago de Compostela I shall remember till my dying day. Yes, Doña Elvira, beyond the manifest reality lurks a dark abyss, and we must rip open the screen and look straight into it, for only then will we know how best to handle what is known and apparently understood. But we must not become addicted to it, for then despair will sap our strength. Therefore a prize is also due those who loyally stick to the familiar and day-to-day, to draw from it joy and consolation.”

And Moses again warmly embraces the elderly actress, who whispers to him: “Your film touched me and made me think, but why was the ending so vague and empty of meaning?”

“The ending?” Moses smiles.

“Yes, the end. The very end.”

“The end,” Moses explains, “is always a compromise between what was and what will never be.”