The Retrospective

Six. Putting the Old House in Order

THE TAXI DRIVER seemed to recognize Moses’ companion, and the director gave him her address only, as if it were his as well. But when they reached her building in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, Moses said to the driver: “Hang on to my suitcase and walking stick until I get back. I have to help the lady, no elevator.”

“You need a hand?”

“No, thanks, I can manage.”

They climb the stairs slowly, turning on the timed stairwell light three times. The director lugs the suitcase up the stairs, slides it along the landings, and when they get to the fourth floor, he doesn’t leave Ruth until her door is opened and the apartment light switched on and he is sure that the world left behind three days ago has remained intact.

“Should I help you turn on the main valve?” he asks at the top of the stairs as they enter her apartment.

“No need,” she says, “I was too lazy to turn it off.”

“You want to get flooded again?”

“What can I do, it’s so hard to reach.”

Since the founding of the neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century, the apartment has been renovated many times, but its main valve is still buried deep in a kitchen cabinet, requiring getting down on one’s knees and crawling to reach it.

“That’s enough.” She hurries him off with a slight laugh. “The driver will think you ran away and left him with a stick and an empty suitcase.”

The timer in the stairwell has gone out again, leaving only backlighting from the apartment. On the flights from Santiago to Barcelona and then to Israel she slept peacefully. Before landing she added color to her cheeks with new cosmetics purchased between flights, so her face is radiant. And the passion that was blocked for the three days quivers inside the man who stands before her.

“One last thing… one more…”

“No.” She presses a finger to his lips. “No need for another test. Believe me, I’m healthy. And if I die, it won’t be your fault.”

He puts his hand on her forehead to feel her temperature, then his lips, to double-check, and holds her close. She smiles and kisses his eyes and forehead. They stand this way for a moment, embracing in the stairwell. Once he was taller than she was, but he has shrunk with the years and their height is now the same. Finally she enters the apartment and closes the door after her, but he lingers a bit by the adjacent apartment, its door decorated with colorful stickers. This is the studio where she gives acting classes to children. Despite everything, he comforts himself, there’s always something pure and lovely between us. We’ve accomplished something rare.

The driver’s head rests on the steering wheel in sleep so deep that Moses needs to knocks on the windshield to wake him, gently, so as not to scare him. The driver rubs his eyes vigorously, as if to tear away not just cobwebs of sleep but the remnants of a dream, and he gapes at Moses as if he were a new night rider with no baggage who happened into his cab.

“On TV there’s someone who looks like her.”

“That’s her,” Moses gladly confirms, “she’s the one.”

When they get to Moses’ high-rise, the driver wants to be paid for waiting time. “But why?” asks Moses. “You waited for me all of five minutes.” The driver checks his watch and also the meter. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he apologizes, “the dream confused my sense of time.” “Which dream?” The passenger is curious, but the driver is not about to disclose his dream to a stranger.

On the twentieth floor, in darkest night, in a beautiful apartment acquired with the profits of the film Potatoes, Moses can see Tel Aviv, wreathed in buildings and billboards, twinkling beyond a wall-to-wall window, and only a hint of faraway surf signals to the traveler that nature still exists in his home city. He turns on the main tap and the heat, puts the prize money in a drawer, and sheds his clothes. He stands in front of the window, a glass of wine in hand, and tries to estimate which floor the crosses would reach if the cathedral of Santiago were placed alongside his apartment building.

He goes into the bedroom and raises the blinds in the east window to enjoy the view from his bed of the distant lights of the Judean Hills. His thoughts during the two flights did not let him doze, but now he is determined to devote himself to deep sleep.

The extras in Slumbering Soldiers were fast asleep when asked only to impersonate sleepers in front of the camera, but the artist returning home, exhausted by a demanding retrospective, still tosses from side to side. I so pleased the Spaniards with the strange sleeping in my old films, he grumbles in his big, comfortable bed, that they laid claim on my sleep too. The heart that soared at the edge of the West seems to require a sleeping pill back in the East.

But not even the pill puts him to sleep, and he tries, to no avail, to reimagine the thwarted passion and relieve it on his own, so he gets out of bed to unpack his suitcase and put away his things. Yet sleep will not come, and he glumly opens his e-mail, does a lot of deleting, listens to a voice message from his ex-wife, and then, as his eyelids begin to droop, he shuts down the channels of communication, closes the window blinds, burrows his head deep into the pillow, and whispers, “Sleep, that’s it, now you have no choice.”

And Sleep not only succumbs to the director but grows stronger and sweeter from hour to hour, and when he wakes up for a moment to scurry to the toilet, he knows he will find Sleep again, awaiting him loyally in the bed he left behind. Nonetheless, in the mist of consciousness hovers a vague irritation. No, this time it’s not the spirit of the screenwriter who secretly engineered his retrospective. Moses now, to his surprise, feels strangely fond of Trigano. Something else, insignificant but stubborn, is nibbling at his slumber. Again and again he returns to his film Circular Therapy, urgently needing to know if the three of them, he and the cinematographer and the set designer, really did succeed in splitting his parents’ home into three different houses with three separate front doors or whether he imagined it in Santiago out of faulty memory. But who remembers, and who cares? Toledano is dead, the set designer is forgotten, and why should Ruth remember? Sleep does not cancel the question but quiets it for the moment as it sweeps him into the abyss he desires.

BUT WHEN SWEET nothingness dissolves into a flicker of consciousness, he is frightened by the glaring eye of the clock on the wall. Can this be the right time, or has the clock broken in his absence? He raises the blinds and again finds night, only now the world is rainy and foggy, and the glowing advertisements sputter in the murk. Can it be that nearly twenty-four hours have passed since he went off to sleep?

He puts on lights and turns on the heat and heads for the kitchen to prepare himself a meal, which might rekindle the appetite trumped by the fatigue, and amid the cutting and mixing and boiling of water, he remembers how Susana disappeared in the middle of filming and the general panic over how to find a replacement, until Amsalem’s Bedouin found her hiding under the carousel in the playground and with threats and enticements wooed her back to the synagogue so she could do her job. In Kafka’s short story, the animal is old and has an amazing memory, whereas their mongoose was young and inexperienced, nervous, and devoid of memory and vision. A staffer from the biblical zoo in Jerusalem, recruited to coach the film crew in handling the animal, was impressed by how they’d already half trained the feisty young thing and suggested that at the end of the shoot they turn her over to his zoo, where her artistic experience might inspire other animals.

During the years of his marriage, Moses regularly shared the kitchen duties and became quite skilled at preparing dishes not requiring special expertise. Ever since he and his wife parted ways, although he has mostly eaten in restaurants, he has broadened his repertoire. So now, full of food and fully awake, he waits for dawn so he can tell himself, I’m back to my apartment and my routines, in the meantime activating the washing machine and again checking e-mail, this time not with an urge to delete but with a desire to be in touch. New correspondents have not appeared, apart from Yaakov Amsalem, who congratulates him on the Spanish prize and has an idea for a new film.

Why does every little far-flung prize get publicized in Israel? Can it be that awards from abroad muffle the injustice and corruption at home? Amsalem, my friend, he is quick to reply, congratulations are unnecessary. This is not a prize but a tiny investment in the next film. So please, keep it quiet, so as not to wake the dormant taxman.

He reconnects the telephone, which immediately signals that a message arrived during the big sleep. Again, his ex-wife, who in the clear and civilized voice he has always loved also offers her congratulations on the prize. If such a private woman has heard the news, there’s no other choice but to declare it to the revenue authorities.

On the kitchen table lie leftovers of the big dinner; he can’t bring himself to look at them. He shoves them in the fridge, washes dishes, and tidies up, but doesn’t consider going back to bed, so in advance of his normal schedule he showers, shaves his cheeks and trims his goatee, puts on clothes and shoes too, to feel he is indeed getting back to daily life. He rotates his cozy TV chair to face the big window, and while witnessing the first stirring of neighbors he pulls a screenplay from the ever-mounting pile on his table to see if some hidden spark might twinkle within.

But there seems to be no spark for now, and soon the script drops to the floor, and he, a lone spectator in an awakening world, snoozes. And the snoozing grows deep enough to dream, about cautious descent on broad stairs, following his ex-wife who supports her aunt, a big blond woman confined to a wheelchair before her death but who now, in the dream, has returned to life without a wheelchair, and she slowly, propped by his wife, goes down the stairs of a high school or college. He hurries after the two women, poised to catch hold of the aunt and steady her should she fall backward.

The educational institution is built on several levels on a hillside, like the high school in Jerusalem where the dreamer was a student and later a teacher, until he became a director. And the aunt, although limping, walks downstairs with determination, neither slipping forward nor tripping back, landing safely at the ground floor, where her niece leads her to the cafeteria, its walls lined with books, finally relieving Moses of his supervisory obligation. Free at last, he looks around for other stairs and finds a narrow flight, its steps ugly and pocked, leading down to a deserted cellar. He flings from the top of the stairs a bag filled with dirty laundry — underwear, socks, shirts — and as the bag flies downward, he regrets his recklessness; he has a washer and dryer at home, so why ask an educational institution to do his dirty laundry, which isn’t labeled with his name? But he can’t undo what’s done. The bag has disappeared, and he has to accept its loss. He retreats from the stairs, opens a wide glass door, and finds himself gazing into a green gully.

A pinprick of light on the eastern horizon beyond the bedroom window. The rain has slowed down, the fog has lifted. If the long sleep had such a drowsy epilogue, it means the Spaniards had not deprived him of sleep but given him some of their own. Has his retrospective really ended? Not knowing if the cameraman of Circular Therapy had been able to split his family home in three still bothers him. He moves the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, puts on a windbreaker, and takes, as he heads for his car, the walking stick.

BY THE TIME he gets to Bab-el-Wad he has to battle with the sunrise. Last night’s rain has cleansed the world, and the rays of eastern light glinting from the Judean Hills grow stronger in the purified air, blinding the driver. From time to time he lifts a hand from the wheel and shields his eyes to see the road. But since traffic is thin at this early hour, and he knows the way, he arrives safe and sound at the scene of his childhood — a stately Jerusalem neighborhood, conquered when the state was established, where a mossy, mysterious leper hospital was joined eventually by the residences of the president and prime minister. He parks his car near the imposing Jerusalem Theater, not far from the house where he grew up. Here, now, he completes his retrospective for himself alone. It was nearly twenty years ago that he sold the small handsome stone house, and he has not visited it since nor passed by, so he is prepared to find changes and additions, even a second story. Yet at first glance, everything is as it was. The same big, black iron door separating two exterior stairways, the same mailbox. The huge ceramic flowerpot that appeared in Circular Therapy stands on its base atop the fence and has changed its color. The house was purchased from him after his father’s death by a young couple, both lawyers, whose names are on the large mailbox. Do they still live here, or is the house rented to someone else? They had intended to add another floor, but it turns out that what was good enough for his parents was good enough for them, or else they failed in business.

Winter stillness in the street on a cold Jerusalem morning. The hour is early; his entering the garden to check camera angles would look strange. He returns to the car and fetches the Spanish pilgrim’s staff — a white-haired man with a walking stick will cut a friendly figure even before his intentions are clear. The morning paper has been stuck in the mailbox; he can wait till the owner comes out and ask his permission for a visit in the garden to verify an imaginary reality. But the owner tarries, and waiting in a cold empty street is an undignified waste of time. He opens an adjoining gate and enters a yard, which stood empty throughout his youth until a four-story apartment house was built there. On a narrow path alongside the stone fence separating the two properties, he walks around his parents’ home, and after cutting through a tangle of bushes, he reaches a corner from which as a child he enjoyed secretly watching his parents on the patio. Despite the hour, there is a risk that someone at a rear window may wonder about the unfamiliar old man standing in a far corner, so he huddles in the bushes, gets down on his knees, and grabs the edge of the stone wall, his eyes fixed on his former family home to calculate whether Toledano and the set designer with ingenious trickery had indeed managed to turn one house into three.

Why is he hanging around here? If a whole day could disappear so easily, why try to reconstruct so distant a reality? Wouldn’t it be better to stop struggling with an unreliable memory, even if the retrospective comes to an end with an open question? But he is a Jerusalemite to the marrow, able to rest his head comfortably on a stone wall as the vine on the stones caresses his face with a fragrant tendril, and his walking stick, its tip planted in the ground, steadies him as he gazes at his parental home.

At last the door opens. An old dog comes out of the house, begins sniffing among the plants and bushes. Slowly, in widening circles, the dog progresses toward Moses but, oddly, exhibits no excitement or wonder, not a growl or a bark. Moses clucks at him gratefully, and the old dog just perks his ears and wags his tail, then urinates and turns his head loyally toward his master, who has followed him outdoors: an elderly man in a bathrobe, with a little beard like Moses’ and a similar body type. The man takes down several wet items from the clothesline, then goes to fetch the newspaper. He does not hurry back inside but pauses on the doorstep, shielding his eyes for a better look. Can it be that in the back corner of the adjacent property, amid the bushes, is a male figure that resembles him? Now a woman appears from the house, skinny, with a mane of white hair and a watering can, and she begins dousing plants that were sheltered from the rain. Although twenty years have passed since the sale, Moses recognizes the woman lawyer who had bargained with him stubbornly over every detail. In light of this recognition, he is also sure now of the identity of the other man, also a lawyer, her husband. If he is right, the couple have not only maintained his old family home as it was, with all its defects, but also remained true to each other. Have they clung to the house because of its proximity to the president and prime minister, or because they believe that the enigmatic Belgian consulate, which dominates the top of the street like a secular cathedral, enhances the beauty of their own house?

In any event, concludes Moses, a talented if tragic cinematographer like Toledano could certainly have produced three different houses from this one. He might even have placed his camera here, in this very corner, and with delicate shifts left and right, up and down, convinced the audience that in each scene, the main characters were entering a different house in a different area. But was all this done merely to save money in a low-budget film, or was there also a symbolic intention, which only the screenwriter could explain?

The two lawyers summon the dog to the warmth of their home, but before entering, the animal turns its head toward Moses and emits a brief bark, as if to say: I smelled you, don’t you dare cross the fence.

Yes, here at Moses’ family home on a cold Jerusalem morning, his retrospective is finished, and now it’s time to return to routine. As he approaches his car parked in front, he sees that the doors of the theater are wide open, and the lights in the lobby are on. Young people in coats and scarves mill toward a makeshift counter to waken themselves with coffee and bagels. Someone recognizes him from a distance and calls his name. They are actors and singers and dancers, here for the dress rehearsal of a musical play for children to be staged during the Hanukkah vacation.

“A play? By whom, about what?” Moses asks.

“Based on Don Quixote, adapted to an Israeli setting.”

“More Don Quixote?” sniffs Moses. “Enough is enough, no? The eternal hero.”

Other actors recognize the director and flock to him as bears to honey. Among them, a tall young man with a little beard who will apparently dance the part of the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. A few of them have heard about the prize and congratulate him. “Small prize,” he says, thinking, That does it, I’ll have to declare it, but I can reduce it by deducting my expenses, maybe Ruth’s too.

A young and pretty actress, who years ago studied in Ruth’s class for children, brings him coffee and a bagel and asks what he’s doing in Jerusalem at such an early hour. Preparing for a new film? What’s it about? Has the cast already been chosen? Would he like to watch their rehearsal? No new film, just some vague ideas. He is too tired to attend the rehearsal. When the musical begins its run, he will bring his oldest grandson to see it and his sister too, Moses’ little granddaughter.

The group is called inside, and the lobby empties quickly. Moses gets ready to move on, but the cafeteria worker who is collecting the dishes says, “What’s the hurry? Finish your coffee.”

HE KNOWS THAT Hanan, the husband of his ex-wife, gets up late in the morning; at night he usually works on his music. To avoid exchanging pointless pleasantries with his successor, Moses phones Ofra during morning hours.

“I just got back from Spain and I’m returning your call,” he says to her on his mobile.

“How are you, my dear?” she asks.

“Doing my best.”

“I was so happy about the prize.”

“Be only a little happy, it’s a tiny prize.”

“In any case, it’s encouraging. They gave you a retrospective too.”

“A strange retrospective, drilling deep down. But you didn’t leave me a message because you wanted to encourage me.”

“Why not? Absolutely. But also to clarify something about Itay’s bar mitzvah.”

“Clarify what?”

“Not on the telephone, Yairi — let’s meet this evening.”

“Where?”

“At home.”

“Not at home. You know I don’t like being a guest in an apartment that used to be mine.”

“You’re not a guest. You are always the former owner and not a guest. And besides, Hanan is abroad and I’m alone.”

“Alone? Even worse. Better we should meet elsewhere.”

“Why?”

“Remember what happened a few years ago when we were alone in the apartment? I hassled you and lost my self-control and it ended in an ugly scene that hurt us both.”

“But that was years ago. You’ve gotten over me since then. I’m a woman of sixty-three.”

“Sixty-four.”

“Almost. And you’re pushing seventy.”

“I’m already there.”

“Then why get worked up about an old lady like me? You especially, always surrounded by beautiful actresses.”

“No beauties,” he growls, “it’s all fairy tales from the tabloids.”

“Perhaps not beautiful. But good, talented women who undoubtedly like you. Come on, this time let’s meet at home. It’s important to me, and you’ll control yourself. And I will too. Apart from Itay’s bar mitzvah, I have a few things here that require a good eye and smart advice.”

“Like what?”

“No, not on the phone. Come. Early in the evening. For an hour, no more.”

“Even an hour will be hard for me.”

“It won’t be hard. I promise you. We’ve both told the whole world that we’ve stayed good friends.”

“True. Which is probably my mistake.”

The first sounds of music waft from the theater to the lobby. Little by little, they interweave with the delicate lilt of a woman’s voice. Dulcinea. He smiles to himself, briefly tempted to drop in on the rehearsal, maybe discover new acting talent, but then decides no, give the play a chance to take shape, and if the reviews are good take the two grandchildren to see how Don Quixote can be revived in the twenty-first century. He walks out into the plaza and is blinded by the strong Jerusalem light. Conversations with his former wife are painful and exasperating; each time he feels a longing for her. He should not have given in. Following such an invasive retrospective, a meeting in close quarters with the wife of his youth, in their old apartment, will most likely be distressing. To his dying day, he will not be able to decide if his divorce was necessary. Years have gone by, and she has remarried, and he even likes her husband a little, a middling musician, younger than she is by three years, who still dreams of writing music for one of the former husband’s movies.

He starts the ignition, pulls away from the curb, and the car phone rings. It’s Amsalem, who has read the e-mail warning and pledges not to talk about the prize with anyone, but anyway, how much was it?

“Not important. Not much.”

“Every shekel counts. Don’t be embarrassed.”

Moses names the amount, and Amsalem is shocked. “That’s not a prize, that’s just a symbol,” he tells the director. “To fit the symbolic films you screened for them. With an amount like that, you sure mustn’t let the state stick its fingers in.”

A few years back, Yaakov Amsalem turned eighty, but he is still alert and forceful. Even though he kicks in only 3 percent of the production budget, mostly by providing food for the cast and crew, he considers himself one of the producers, a partner among partners. He walks on the set freely, demands from time to time to look through the camera. Above all, it’s important to him to pepper the director’s brain with the basics of human existence. Actually, he was the one who proposed the idea for the potato film, which was a surprising hit. Now he feels the time is ripe for a new film, and he wants to be in on it.

While driving out of Jerusalem, Moses tells him about the retrospective and mentions that Trigano had contrived it from behind the scenes. Amsalem has, in fact, lost touch with the man who ushered him into the film business, but he remembers Trigano’s old screenplays, which he had thought overblown, until Israeli reality began to catch up with them. Yes, odd that after many years, with some words he’d picked up from Ladino-speaking neighbors, Trigano finds this archive in Spain, at the end of the earth, and they honor him. And it’s just like him, Trigano, to ignore the director; why should he forgive him for an old insult? Back in those days, Amsalem knew the uncle well, the brother of Trigano’s mother, an unsuccessful wholesaler in the produce market but a decent man; he didn’t live much longer than Trigano’s father but while still alive devotedly helped raise the boy. Hasn’t he told Moses about the uncle before? Trigano loved him. He was a sweet man and had a good singing voice, but when he got emotional, he would stutter. Despite the stutter, he served as a cantor in the synagogue, if only at afternoon prayers, when the place was all but empty. The congregants loved him but feared the stutter would prolong the prayers and so would prod him to go faster. Who knows, maybe it was because of his uncle’s stutter and humiliation that Trigano invented that little animal, which would run around the synagogue and make a mess.

“Susana.”

“Yeah, Susana,” says Amsalem with a booming laugh. “Susana, that’s right.”

“But Trigano didn’t invent her, he borrowed her from a story by Kafka.”

“Kafka? Who’s Kafka?”

“A world-class writer, and even you, Amsalem, who dropped out of grade school should know who he is and remember his name.”

“If you say so, I’ll remember.”

“There are many animals in his stories, all interesting. By the way, I wonder what your Bedouin did with the animal after we finished shooting.”

“Do I know? He set her free, or ate her, or gave her to his dogs.”

“Because in ancient Egypt, and I learned this only in Santiago, a mongoose was considered a holy animal, embalmed just like the Pharaohs.”

“So maybe the Bedouin embalmed her, and when you come to see me in Beersheba on Saturday we can make a pilgrimage to her grave.”

“Who says I’m driving to Beersheba on Saturday?”

“It’s important not just for me but for you too. Come for lunch, and we’ll give you a room to rest in after the meal, so you won’t miss your nap. It will take you an hour at most from Tel Aviv to Beersheba on a Saturday, and there’ll be some interesting guests, a young couple, special people, who might help us get the next film going. Enough, friend, get over it, the retrospective is behind you, stop picking at it. We’re not young, and if we still have a little energy left, let’s look forward and not back.”

MOSES DOES NOT ignore the admonition of the veteran producer, even if the man holds only a 3 percent share of his films. Instead of going straight home, Moses visits his small office, to see what the world wanted of him in his absence. His secretary congratulates him on the prize, and he decides not to snap at well-wishers because of its small size but instead just nod humbly and offer polite thanks. Not much is new in the small office, which gets bigger during every new production but in between films only keeps the embers burning. He gathers up anything that seems vital, fills a plastic bag with screenplays and also novels and stories that seek adaptation to film. Finally he adds a few DVDs of short clips sent by actors or cinematographers who wish to impress him with their work. Then he invites the secretary to lunch to find out what’s new among his competitors.

When he gets back to his apartment, he removes the laundry from the dryer and folds it. He inspects the bed sheets that swallowed up a day of his life and decides to wash them too. For a moment he weighs whether to phone Ruth, but he chooses to leave her be, not to plant any false expectation of a new role. We’ve had more than enough of that, he thinks while making his bed with fresh sheets. After a short nap, he sits down to surf the Internet. He easily locates the story of Roman Charity and, despite the warning of the elderly expert, clicks on a bonanza of images of the daughter and father, whose essence was ably captured in that quick lecture by his bed at the Parador.

Now he takes a look at a few clips from actors and cinematographers, and at the same time, barely straying from the screen, he looks at script synopses, some no longer than a single page. As a high school teacher he perfected an efficient technique for checking homework and tests that resulted in instant evaluation of their quality. And because the world of film inspires many people to float glib ideas and fantasies on the assumption that others will make them work, he has learned how to skim and select, without fear that something good will elude him. So when Ofra phones as evening falls, to confirm their meeting, he looks with great satisfaction at the heap of discarded pages at his feet and says: “If there’s no choice, I surrender to you as always, but only for a short time.”

He sees Ofra at family events or social gatherings, where relatives and friends look on with approval and relief at their easy and amicable interaction. What had belonged to him he either took or discarded, and if some forlorn bit of mail insists on going to the address he left fifteen years ago, it’s fine if it waits for him with his grandchildren. As a matter of principle he is unwilling to be a guest in his former home, and when he sees the red mailbox he himself had installed many years ago at the entrance to the building, a fragment of his name still lingering there, he feels demeaned. The Spanish retrospective has apparently sapped his resolve. Amsalem is right when he says he should stay away from her. He eschews the elevator and slowly climbs from floor to floor, to see which of the old neighbors still live in the building. But when he gets to the fourth floor, he stops on the last stair. The thought that the wife of his youth awaits him alone in his former apartment arouses tension and trepidation.

It appears that Ofra has seen him from the window, for she opens the door before he reaches it. Yes, she too is surely emotional and confused and perhaps regrets insisting that he come over. Not looking at her directly, he mumbles hello, pulls her close, and plants kisses on her forehead and cheeks, so she’ll be intimidated from the start and not entangle the soul that is still tied to hers.

Disaffected but oddly satisfied, he observes his former domicile, which looks even sadder and messier than the last time he was here. Ofra grew up as a spoiled only child, and her parents would clean up her clutter with patient love that they bequeathed to her first husband. But now she must deal with not only her own chaos but also that of her husband, the artist, a musician who apparently believes that chaos stimulates creativity.

To make room for a grand piano, the harmony of the living room has been violated. The sofa was shoved in the wrong place, and a computer and printer are permanent guests at the dining table. Old newspapers, so hard to part with, are stuffed under the coffee table, which is decked out with plates of savory cookies and dried fruits. But when Ofra offers him coffee, he insists on making his own, to prove to her and to himself that till his dying day, he will not be thought of as a guest in a home that rejected him. Embarrassed, she tries to prevent him from entering the kitchen, and with good reason, since the disarray in the living room is but a pale prologue to the anarchy of the kitchen. He switches on the electric kettle with the cracked handle and chooses a yellowish cup he once loved, but its cleanliness is suspect so he takes a glass mug instead and waits for the water to boil. And she stands beside him, small and tense, smiling uneasily; her face is properly made up, but her hair, gone gray, is not dyed well, or maybe she has stopped dyeing it. The coffee jar is not in its assigned place; she has to find it for him. “You still don’t sweeten your coffee?” she asks softly. “Never,” he says and opens the fridge where, amid the scary proliferation of staples and leftovers, he sees not one milk carton but three. He will not ask the lady of the house which is the most recent but will check the expiration dates and then whiten his cup with the milk of his former wife.

In the meantime, her embarrassment has turned to affection. She beams as she watches the liberty he takes in her home, as if her former husband’s immersion in her chaos gives her hope. Her warmth almost tempts him to comment on the gray hair — is it laziness, or overstated feminism? — but he doesn’t. She is not his. And though the decline in the appearance of the woman who left him should perhaps gratify him, it actually pains, frightens him.

In the living room, she congratulates him again on the award, and in keeping with his decision, he is not quick to dismiss its value but rather smiles and thanks her. Next she shows interest in the retrospective and is happy to hear that Ruth went along. “How is she?” she asks. “She is not well,” he says, “neglects her health.” He mentions her refusal to repeat the blood test. “This is not okay; you have to convince her,” demands his ex-wife. “Why me? She has a son.” “You know what he’s worth,” she reminds him, because she knows Ruth’s story inside out and retains personal and family details long after he has forgotten them. He tells her about his encounter with his earliest films; she remembers them, of course, that was how they met, he would call on her at the National Library to help him select music for them. “There still may be some prints around here,” she says, “look in the storage room.” “No”—he recoils—“there’s nothing of mine still here.”

She has invited him over to talk about their grandson Itay’s bar mitzvah, scheduled for early spring. Itay and his parents decided to eliminate the big party and make do, after the synagogue ceremony, with a lunch for close family, perhaps on the assumption that Ofra and Moses would be writing the big gift checks anyway. Neither Galit nor Zvi has the energy for a big party. Zvi is still waiting for tenure at the hospital and takes on many shifts, and Galit’s salary, despite her tenured position, is the salary of a technician.

“Why, then, should they take on the burden of a big party with many guests? Because Grandpa promised to make a little film of it?”

“I suggested it once, with good intentions. Anyway, I’m a lousy cameraman.”

“I didn’t know it was possible to be a successful director and a lousy cameraman.”

“Anything is possible. So what’s your question?”

“Well, they were wondering how to make Itay happy with something real, not just being called to the Torah; in other words, to give him a truly enjoyable experience, and nowadays among his classmates there’s a trend of taking a bar mitzvah trip to Africa, so Galit and Zvi thought that a trip like that would be a wonderful thing for him, and for his sister and for them.”

“Of all the continents, it’s Africa they choose for the transition from childhood to maturity,” he remarks.

“They’re not thinking in educational terms. They’re thinking about an enjoyable trip in the outdoors, the animals and scenery. A trip to clear the head a little.”

“Itay’s or theirs?”

“Everyone whose head needs clearing.”

“But why Africa? If they’re passing up a party and taking a trip abroad, they should go to Europe. Give the boy a little culture. Show him cathedrals, museums, historical sites. Connect him with something aesthetic, not some lion or monkey that he could see in the safari park in Ramat Gan. And believe me, such a trip wouldn’t hurt Galit and Zvi either, two people who spend their lives cooped up in a hospital.”

“There’s plenty of culture here, without Europe.”

“You really think that?”

“I don’t know what I think, but that’s their wish and it should be respected. If you want to persuade them to change their travel plans, by all means, do it, but whatever happens, you have to help them.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know how big a present you were thinking of.”

“That’s an odd question.”

“Why? Is it a secret? It’ll come out sooner or later.”

“Two thousand shekels, something like that.”

“Perhaps you could increase it a little, help them with the trip? It’s an expensive trip.”

“Increase it? Thanks to our divorce, Itay will get two presents from us instead of one, from his grandpa and from his grandma.”

“He gets two presents but has lost a natural connection with a grandpa and grandma who are together.”

“Not my fault.”

“It is your fault. But let’s not get into that now, please. Let’s keep up the good mood.”

“Good mood. Fine. How much are you planning to give?”

“Three thousand. I have a small savings account I can go into. It’s not for Itay, it’s for Galit and Zvi, who are dying to get out in the world a little.”

“To Africa.”

“Africa is also in the world.”

“All right, I’ll try to increase it.”

“You did just get a prize.”

“Enough.” He raises his voice. “The prize is none of your business.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry.”

“And I still hope that I have permission to try to persuade them to change the itinerary from Africa to Europe.”

“Permission, sure. She’s your daughter and he’s your son-in-law. So they, at least, have to listen to you.”

He hears the scornful tone in her voice and turns a cold eye on the grand piano that wreaks anarchy in the living room.

“Tell me, was this piano here the last time I was?”

“There was a piano but not a grand.”

“Aha,” he says. “This piano turned the nice living room we had into a music warehouse.”

“Which is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, and which is why I wanted you to come here.”

She stands up and points to the wall separating the living room from the hallway, and asks if he recalls whether it’s original or part of the renovations they did when they moved in.

“It is original,” he declares, “we didn’t add any wall here. Why do you ask?”

“Because Hanan thought it might be a good idea to tear it down to expand the living room.”

“For an even bigger piano?”

“No.” She laughs. “This is the biggest. So it can move around here more easily. If we take down this wall, we can add the hallway to the living room.”

“You won’t be adding a thing,” he says, pleased to contradict her. “This is a retaining wall — if you take it down, you’ll bring down the upstairs apartment, and Schuster will sit in your living room.”

“He doesn’t live there anymore.”

“Or a different neighbor.”

“You sure?”

“Ask a contractor or architect, why me?”

“You planned the renovations.”

“That’s why I know what I’m talking about.”

“So what then?”

“Why tear down walls when all you have to do is reduce the chaos you’ve created here?”

“How?”

“Move the piano near the window, with the wing in the corner.”

“It won’t fit in the corner, there’s not enough room.”

“Says who?”

“That’s where the armchair goes.”

“Which one?”

“The pink one.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“It has sheet music on it.”

“Let’s remove it from there, and you’ll see that the corner will be happy to accommodate the entire back of the piano. There’s all this space going to waste.”

“Wait a second. It’s hard for Hanan to write music facing the window, the view distracts him and takes him where he doesn’t want to go. He writes, you know, very abstract music. Not romantic.”

“So he should close the window and shut the blinds.”

“He won’t have air.”

“He should write his music blindfolded.”

“You just want to find fault.”

“No, but I am curious about the self-indulgence.”

“It’s not self-indulgence. It’s art.”

“I’m also an artist, and I was never self-indulgent.”

“True, in that sense you were an easier husband.”

“So listen to me now too. In the living room, the solution is fairly simple. Your chaos makes me furious. I got so dizzy in your kitchen, I can still feel it.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not. When I left, the place was orderly. Now it’s this insane warehouse.”

“Because you didn’t teach me how to be neat.”

“Teach? You didn’t want to learn. You relied on me for everything.”

“Because you didn’t force me to be neat.”

“Was that possible?”

“Not force. But educate. You didn’t have the patience to educate me.”

“That’s true. I loved you too much, so I gave in to all your weaknesses.”

“So do you have an idea how to restore order?”

“Come, give me a hand. We have a chance since he’s not here. And believe me, I’m doing it for you. For some reason I still have a little bit of love for you.”

She blushes with an old, dreamy smile; she knows that he still loves her. She gets up to help him remove the computer and printer from the dining table, collect the cables, move the stack of musical scores from the armchair to the bedroom, and return the chair to its former place. He then releases the piano’s brakes and rolls it toward the window, carefully easing the closed wing deep into the corner, and on his initiative, without asking the owner, he places a vase on top to create, in his words, a melodious nook.

Her face is flushed now from the joint effort and the physical closeness with her former husband. And she is amazed how, with simple common sense and without tearing down a wall, he has successfully retrieved some of the beauty and order of the living room. “Don’t worry,” he says, “Hanan will get used to his piano’s new location. And in general,” he sermonizes, “artists who agonize and think that if they pamper their muse she will repay the kindness don’t understand that serious muses hate indulgence and self-indulgence.”

“Hanan is not self-indulgent,” she insists, defending the husband who is three years her junior. “He’s just in a difficult period.”

“In my difficult periods, I did not create this kind of chaos all around me.”

She looks down. “You did worse things,” she whispers, as if to herself.

“It only seemed that way to you, because you didn’t understand that a director is different from artists who work alone. He has personal responsibility to the characters realized in his work.”

“She was not a character,” she mutters, “she was a woman. But let’s drop it now, please. So many years have passed.”

“Yes, years have passed.”

And he remembers how this refined and fragile woman tried to hit him when he admitted he had betrayed her and how he forced her to make love, but it was the last time.

“You want me to help you straighten out the kitchen?”

“No,” she says nervously. “You’ve done enough. Thanks.”

Silence. He knows she would be grateful if he left her alone, but settled now in the pink armchair, the stack of music gone, he finds it hard to go.

“Even though so many years have passed,” he says, “you’d be surprised to hear that I sometimes dream about you. Perhaps hoping that, if not in reality, then in a dream, you’ll finally be able to understand what my art is about.”

“You still dream about me?” She sounds concerned.

“Once in a while.”

“And what do you dream? What are you doing to me in your dream?”

“I am not doing anything, just looking. This morning, after I heard your voicemail, you suddenly appeared to me in a little dream, that’s why I agreed to come here.”

“What did you dream?”

“That you were going down the stairs, a lot of stairs.”

“Where?”

“I can’t remember, but stairs, as you know, are not just stairs but also an erotic symbol, one that I sometimes use in a film when I want to tighten the bond between the hero and the heroine.”

“First time I’ve heard such a theory.”

“It’s true, ask Hanan. If he’s an intellectual, he’s surely heard of it. But don’t worry, in my dream you weren’t alone. You were with Aunt Sonia, so nothing very erotic could be going on.”

“Aunt Sonia?” She giggles like a child. “Nice that you brought her into your dream too.”

“I didn’t bring her, she came on her own, and not in a wheelchair — you both walked down slowly, you supported her and took care of her, and I was behind watching carefully, so if she fell I would catch her.”

“At least in dreams you are a generous person.”

“But now, telling it to you, I think I understand the dream. I think I brought her to protect you from the yearning I still feel for you. A pure and noble longing for, say, the big, beautiful birthmark on the back of your neck, above the spine. You couldn’t see it, so I had to bring you news of it now and then.”

Her eyes are closed. She sighs. Her face is weary. Wrinkles unfamiliar to him have been added in the years he hasn’t seen her. But when she speaks there’s a soft irony in her voice.

“I see that you still can’t get away from the retrospective.”

“Maybe. Is that a sin?”

“No sin. But you promised you would restrain yourself.”

“I’m not restrained?”

“Not really. The retrospective is still affecting you.”

She speaks without anger, without fear, relaxed and calm, her legs resting on the coffee table. She seems no longer in a hurry to have him leave.

And the sting of separation pierces his heart once more, he rises from the armchair, not heading for the door but approaching her, and he asks, with a smile, “I’m not entitled to a little reward for moving your piano and finding room for the wing and reducing your chaos?” She eyes him with gratitude. “What if for a second I took another look at your beauty mark, the one that you can’t see but that I loved from the moment I discovered it.”

Like an actress obeying her director, she slowly leans her head to expose slightly the nape of her neck, and he cautiously turns down the collar of her sweater, finds the spot, dark and oval and a bit worrisome, and brings his lips close and touches it with the tip of his tongue, and then puts the collar back in place and says firmly, “That’s it, I’m out of here, and don’t think I won’t try to talk Galit out of the barbaric idea to celebrate our grandson’s bar mitzvah among monkeys and lions.”

ON FRIDAY EVENING Amsalem again insists Moses come down to Beersheba. “There’ll be a few people at lunch we can persuade to invest in the new film, but they need to see who and how you are.” “Instead of seeing me,” replies Moses, “tell them to see my latest films.” “No,” objects Amsalem, “these are plain folks with too much money who know nothing about film but understand people, and so they want a sense of the dreamer before they start to fund his fantasies. Besides,” he adds, “my sister-in-law will be there, and she recently got divorced.”

“How old is she?”

“Forty-five. But I’m not thinking about her for you. I’m thinking about a young man with a baby, which I have a feeling would make a great story that hasn’t been seen before.”

“Everything has been seen,” says Moses, and gives him a tentative promise predicated on various conditions: how he feels, the weather, visiting grandchildren. But the next morning, as he lazes in bed with the newspapers, the producer again calls and tries to coax him to come. “A storm is coming,” protests Moses, “let’s postpone the visit till next Saturday?” “Only in Tel Aviv is a storm coming,” says Amsalem. “In the south the skies are blue, and the new highway will zip you to Beersheba in under an hour.”

Although the investments by the Amsalem-Tamir Company have never exceeded 3 or 4 percent of his films’ budgets, the wholesaler’s loyalty and faith inspire the director’s affection. For Amsalem, as opposed to the production companies and public film funds that support his projects, has a fundamental folksiness. The scent of the fruits and vegetables that made him rich stayed with him even after he broke into real estate, and despite his advanced age, he has lately begun wearing his hair in a small braided ponytail. Although Amsalem also disconnected himself from Trigano, Moses does not forget that it was the screenwriter who brought them together, and even if Trigano is gone from his life, the connection he left behind is not forgotten.

He phones his daughter to persuade her to switch Africa for Europe before he increases his bar mitzvah gift. She is taken aback. Though the Africa decision has been made, and they plan to order the tickets next week, she is willing to hear why Africa is anathema to her father. “Come, let’s talk about this in person, Abba, without Itay or Zvi. Not this morning, because people will be here. Tonight we’ll be at a concert. But tomorrow morning, at the hospital, I have a break between ten and eleven, and we can sit undisturbed in the cafeteria, and I’d also like to hear about your retrospective and the prize that Imma told me you got in Spain.”

“A small prize. Negligible.”

“The main thing is they honored you.”

He knows his son-in-law is touchy about his intervention in family matters, so he welcomes the idea of a private meeting at the hospital, especially because she could — he realizes — do an ultrasound of one or another of his internal organs and tell him what’s what.

The storm has not yet hit, but the darkening sky has further dulled the city’s spirit on this quiet Saturday, and he decides to trade the drizzle of Tel Aviv for the dazzle of the desert. And indeed, in one hour flat, following precise directions he receives en route, he finds himself looking for a parking spot amid the many cars circling the vegetable magnate’s villa.

Amsalem did not mislead him. Among the guests, merchants and middlemen and contractors, are some who are interested in his films, but first they want to get to know the director and learn where he’s heading in the next one. Before long he is sitting in the middle of a massive living room, sipping from a glass his host keeps refilling with a superior wine, providing answers to curious questioners who blend artistic naiveté and practical guile. Now and again unruly youngsters of various ages surge to the buffet, help themselves to the rich spread of savories and sweets, then lope back outside to play.

“So what’s the next picture?” asks a guest, whose financial worth Amsalem has already confided to Moses. “What’s cooking on your front burner?”

“The pot is still empty,” Moses says frankly, “and the fire’s still out.” He senses at once that he has made a mistake, for an artist who complains that the muse is snubbing him encourages people to shower him with suggestions and ideas, true stories or ones concocted on the spot. And when they see that Moses’ attention has faltered under the torrent of ideas, they press the host to bring a sheet of paper so they can write their names and phone numbers, should the director want further details. And Amsalem, old and experienced, who knows and loves his friends, is weighing his inclination to meet their request against the need to rein them in, and summons a boy, who sits alone sadly in a corner, rocking a baby carriage, to bring him paper to write down the names of those who do not want to be forgotten.

But the boy ignores the call and stays at his post. Instead, a most charming woman advances, her hair gathered in a colorful scarf. This is Amsalem’s sister-in-law, younger sister of his second wife. Moses had met her and her husband among the many people the producer invited to “his” films. Now he makes room for her beside him, and the holy Sabbath notwithstanding, she diligently writes down, in an oddly childlike hand, the names of those wishing to breathe life, and possibly money, into the dying ember. Can it be that the recent divorcée, pretty and sweet, her perfume pleasantly enticing, is why Amsalem insisted on getting him down here today? For if Amsalem had allowed himself, after the death of his first wife, the mother of his children, to marry a woman twenty years younger than he, why should Moses, ten years younger than Amsalem, not follow his example?

The sign-up is complete. Moses folds the page, sticks it in his pocket, promises to get back to them all, and invites the lovely scribe to join him at the buffet. As he piles food on the plate that the woman, Rachel Siko by name, has handed him, he takes the liberty to inquire where she lives and what kind of work she does, and naturally about her children, who, despite her religious proclivities, turn out to be but two in number, and still young. The older one, Yoav, celebrated his bar mitzvah not long ago, and he is the pale lad rocking the baby carriage in the corner and casting a longing eye at the buffet. Whereas the daughter, Meirav, who according to her mother is a ten-year-old beauty, is running around with the other kids. Moses listens politely and concludes that the children are too young; any permanent relationship is out of the question, only friendship. But the woman keeps talking about herself, fixing her radiant eyes on the listener, and with bold, near self-destructive candor, she tells him that in addition to her two children she has a grandson, seven months old.

“Grandson?” He tilts his head to make sure his hearing aid picked up the word correctly.

“Yes, a grandson. There in the carriage, with his father.”

“His father?” he asks. “Meaning your husband?”

“Not my husband, my son. Yoav, the boy sitting there.”

“The boy?”

“Yes, the young man sitting by the carriage and looking after his son. He is his father.”

“His father…” whispers Moses.

“Yes. And that’s the story my brother-in-law and I were thinking to propose for your next film… unless you’re already set on a different one.”

As Moses casts a horrified look toward the corner of the enormous room at the callow youth who sadly rocks his baby, he drops his plate, which shatters at his feet. But his conversation partner quickly calms him with “Mazel tov!” and bends over to pick up the pieces.

So, he wonders, fetching another plate, was it because of that bizarre story that Amsalem insisted he hustle down to Beersheba, or because of the woman telling it? Or both?

BUT THE STORY is interrupted, for Amsalem’s wife has enlisted her sister to help in the kitchen. Now Moses can recover and serenely amass his lunch upon his plate. He finds a seat at one of the small tables in the garden, and while eating he tries to decide who among the swirl of children racing around the empty swimming pool is the young beauty who became an aunt before entering junior high. An older couple, residents of Sderot, sits down at his table. They came to Amsalem’s house as a Sabbath respite from the rocket fire from Gaza. “But don’t the rockets,” asks Moses, “reach Beersheba as well?” Yes, they confirm, but only occasionally, with longer warning time, and besides, those who live outside of rocket range have not invited them to visit. They know who Moses is, Amsalem had invited them to the premiere of Potatoes, they loved it, even cried a little at the end. They have a big fruit and vegetable store in the produce market of Sderot and were pleased to see a story developed from such everyday material. The film he made was simple and realistic, they inform Moses, which is why it was so touching.

The boyish father enters the garden, carefully bearing a tray with plates full of food, as the grandmother, carrying the baby, scouts for a shaded table for the little family. Moses wants to join them but fears offending the greengrocers at his table. He signals to Amsalem, who circulates among the tables holding two bottles of wine, red and white. As red wine flows into his cup, the director whispers to the producer:

“Is this a true story or some fantasy of your sister-in-law’s?”

“Of course it’s true.” Amsalem is insulted. “I wouldn’t have dragged you down to Beersheba on a Saturday for a fantasy. You don’t lack for fantasies in Tel Aviv.”

“Where’s the baby’s mother?”

“You want to hear the whole story from my sister-in-law?”

“Give me the bottom line.”

“The baby’s mother is no longer here. I mean, she left Israel.”

“Who is she?”

“Was. I mean, still is. An American girl.”

“Actually American?”

“Also Jewish. Half, actually. From California. She came here with her father, who is a professor, geology or zoology. He came for a year to the desert research institute. She’s a year older than Yoav, but they put her in a lower grade because of the language. Even so she had problems, especially in Hebrew and Bible classes, because she knew next to nothing about being Jewish. But just so you know, Moses, I got to know her through my wife and sister-in-law, and she is a well-developed girl, both physically and personality-wise. Intelligent and cheerful, but neglected. Her father was always out in the desert doing his research, leaving her in an empty house, which became an open house where the kids, her group of friends, would hang out and have a good time, including our Yoav, whom she really liked. Just look at him, at the table over by the tree, a fine-looking boy — see? I’ll introduce him up close.”

“Why introduce?” Moses gets nervous.

“For the story… for a movie, maybe.”

“Wait… what is this? You’re going too fast… who said I want this story for my film?”

“Why not? It gives you a slice of life. You know there was a story like this in England? But there the youth are wild and violent. They were on television, two kids more or less the same age as Yoav who had a baby. The girl was big and heavy; the boy, the father, was like a little bird, a skinny English type, cultured… You didn’t happen to see it?”

“No, Amsalem. Wait…”

“I’m telling you. Believe me. If we don’t hurry with our movie, the Brits will beat us to it.”

“Let them. What’s going on? Why are you rushing?”

“I’m excited about the subject, the possibilities.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, problems of youth, too much freedom, permissiveness, alcohol…”

“But not here, not exactly. I still don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get?”

“Why they didn’t terminate the pregnancy.”

“Because this girl was essentially alone here, without her divorced mother, for whom the daughter was out of sight, out of mind, and with no family to understand what was happening. Her father, the professor, neglected her, spent too much time in the desert. By the time they realized she was pregnant, it was already late. Meaning that an abortion would have been too risky. So we all said, It’s not so terrible, let her give birth, then we’ll give up the baby for adoption. That’s what we all decided.”

“All of you were involved?”

“Yes, all of us. It’s such an unusual story, also from a family perspective. Though there were surely other boys who had slept with the girl, it was clear that our Yoav was the father. He was crazy about her, head over heels, and he took responsibility, though his father warned him to stay out of it. But his mother, my sister-in-law, defended her son, so her husband gave in.”

“And then what?”

“She gave birth… the delivery was not easy, she lost a lot of blood. For a minute there it was life-threatening, she was such a young girl. But at least her mother, who turned out not to be Jewish, came from America to be with her. But right after the birth, she and the zoologist and a sharp lawyer forced the girl back to America, so if the baby was adopted, his mother would not be able to stay in touch. So the baby’s American identity gets lost, but maybe when he grows up he can reclaim it.”

“Why wasn’t the baby put up for adoption?”

“Because the boy, the father, Yoavi — that’s the point — suddenly says he doesn’t want to give it up. If the baby stays with him, he believes, eventually the girl he loves will come back to him. Come back to her baby. In the meantime, he’s been trying, unsuccessfully, to stay in touch with her.”

“He loves her that much…” whispers Moses.

“What can you do? His whole life is ahead of him, and he’s caught up in this love for that crazy American girl. Now that she’s in America, he can’t get over her, and the love just gets stronger by the day. Meanwhile, he’s raising a baby with his mother. And who is this Yoav? Just a kid; he had his bar mitzvah two years ago. A real tragedy for him… So, Moses, we should let the English have a story like this? Why not grab it?”

“Why is it important to grab it?”

“As an educational film for our youth. To warn them. The Ministry of Education and also the Welfare Ministry could invest in it…”

Moses rests his head on his hand, takes a sip of water. He is uneasy with the transition from a tragic personal story to possible investment by a government ministry.

“Let’s talk later,” he says to the producer.

“Don’t worry,” says Amsalem, laying his hands on the shoulders of the greengrocers, who have listened raptly, “these are good friends, why shouldn’t they hear the story?”

The two nod their agreement.

“By the way, how was the roast beef?” continues Amsalem. “Want some more?”

“No,” says Moses. “If I want some more, I’ll help myself. You’re making me dizzy.”

“I don’t know why you’re dizzy — I suppose too much retrospective made you oversensitive. Have more meat before the cake and dessert. And before you go back to Tel Aviv, rest in the room I reserved for you. I know your siesta is worth more to you than all your friends.”

MOSES GOES TO the buffet, takes a fresh plate, and again inspects the meat dishes. But the story of the young mother has upset him and he puts the plate back, takes a bowl, and surveys the colorful desserts, then puts the bowl back, takes a red apple, sticks it in his pocket, and makes his way to the garden. The mother and son are sitting under an olive tree waiting for the little sister to finish her ice cream. He stops, puts a hand on the girl’s head, and bends over to look at the baby in the carriage. The tiny baby, light-skinned, flutters his hands. Moses touches the white scarf wrapped around his head. The father, tense, watches him, but Moses smiles and says, with the confidence of a veteran grandpa, “A sweet baby, but does he let you sleep?” “Not all the time,” says the boy, “in fact, hardly ever.” Moses takes a closer look at the boy. He is not much older than his own grandson, but he has already known a woman and sired a child and seems mature, serious. And Moses looks with warm encouragement at the young grandmother, whose allure has only grown in the sunshine. “Yes,” he says, “your brother-in-law told me the rest of the story, and I must admit, it is a truly unusual story.”

“That’s why we thought,” interjects the boy, “that my story could be the basis for a film of yours… with some changes, obviously.”

Moses is stunned by the clear willingness of the boy to turn his sin into a film, as if art could atone for his disgrace. Careful to say nothing hurtful, he mumbles softly, “Yes, maybe… but to make a decision I need more details. Like how your classmates have reacted, what they think about what you did or what happened to you…”

“At first they didn’t believe it. Then, when they saw it was real, they were scared, they didn’t want to get near her or me, and after the birth they were even more distant. It wasn’t so much them as their parents, they made us and the baby sound contagious. It was like a boycott. But now it’s not a boycott, now some friends, especially the girls, come to see the baby and want to help. They bring me assignments from classes I missed, and they volunteer to diaper him or give him a bath. Not just girls… boys too…”

“Wonderful,” says Moses, who is devising a scene in his mind, boys and girls getting a bath ready for the baby. “But what does your father say about all this?”

Silence falls. The boy’s face darkens.

“His father doesn’t say anything,” says his mother. “His father abandoned his son, abandoned us all.”

“Abandoned? Why? Religious reasons?”

“Religious? Why religious?”

“No reason… I thought… because I understand you are a bit Orthodox.”

“We are traditional, and if you are traditional you decide for yourself what is forbidden and what is permitted.”

“Beautiful, that’s how it should be,” declares Moses, getting carried away. “I noticed that despite your lovely headscarf you allow yourself to write on Shabbat.”

She seems confused. “Not just write…” she whispers, stopping there, not spelling out what else she does on the Sabbath.

“In any case, why did the father abandon the son?”

“From the start we had agreed that the baby would be given up for adoption. Because Yoav’s father is positive that the girl, the mother of the baby, won’t be coming back.”

“And you believe that she will,” volunteers Moses.

“I don’t know… But how can I not respect the love and loyalty of my son? Would it be right to dismiss his hope that because he is taking care of their baby, she might come back — to him, or even just to the baby?”

The youth gazes at his mother in gratitude, as if this is the first time he is hearing such a strong and clear statement of her support for him.

“And you still don’t believe that this story in our hands can be turned into a marvelous film,” mutters Amsalem, who has been standing behind them.

“I’ll understand once I’ve thought it through.”

“Bravo!” shouts the producer. “Get some rest and do some thinking.”

Amsalem steers him through the crowd to a little room connected to the house through the kitchen, tucked into a rear courtyard and exposed to the arid desert air. A little office of sorts, where Amsalem sequesters himself with account books and documents, most of which he does not care to make public. “The real accounting room,” as he calls it, is furnished with a desk and computer and shelves, and also a big reclining armchair where one may nap while the real and true accounts balance themselves.

“You want a blanket?” the host asks the guest. “Or should I turn on the heat?”

“Both,” says the director, “though I don’t want to fall asleep, just get refreshed.”

“Even if you sleep a little it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s more comfortable here than under my truck.”

“In the days when I would rest under your truck during the shoot I thought it was a way of reviving brain cells that had died that morning. Then I discovered that what dies doesn’t come back to life. If you can, please, have somebody bring me coffee, black, Turkish, strong, of the kind your first wife of blessed memory knew how to make.”

“The second one also knows. I wouldn’t marry a woman who didn’t know how to make good coffee.”

“She does seem like a wonderful woman. Her sister too. Though she is slightly odd.”

“Not odd, stubborn. She injected something religious into the argument with her husband over the baby, got God involved. I said to my wife, Get her off God, but my wife didn’t succeed. We also tried to convince her to give the baby for adoption but we couldn’t. She knows the mother won’t be coming back to Israel but is afraid to ruin the boy’s hopes and doesn’t realize that meanwhile, the baby is robbing him of his youth. Tell me, Moses, the truth: Isn’t this a good story?”

“Slow down, you’re overexcited. So far it sounds like a Bollywood picture.”

“Maybe the basic idea. But if we got a clever screenwriter, a bit crazy, like Trigano, he would upgrade the film from India to Europe, stir the pot and spice it up, maybe even have the lovesick and desperate boy threaten to harm the child, not seriously, but as a way of getting his loved one back.”

Moses closes his eyes.

“What made you think of Trigano?”

“No reason. You didn’t mention him when you told me about Spain?”

“I might have. You still in touch with him?”

“Not at all.”

“Now, for God’s sake, be a good host and get me some coffee. And let’s call a time-out.”

“As you wish. But do me a favor, don’t touch anything here. It’s all organized so that if one piece of paper is moved, I’m a dead man.”

THE HOST IS gone and a sweet silence fills his bookkeeping hideaway. Beyond the barred window, a view of skies as blue as if painted by a child. The power of the desert, thinks Moses. Eighty kilometers away you have rainstorms, and here, pure clear skies. Though the little room is warm, he has no intention of falling asleep, and while he waits for the coffee to revive him, he wraps himself in a checkered woolen blanket, eats the apple he stashed in his pocket, and studies the portrait of the king of Morocco hanging over the desk where Amsalem performs his tax evasions.

He is so accustomed to afternoon naps that despite his decision to rest and not sleep, his eyes snap open only when Amsalem’s sister-in-law, the young grandmother, enters, pulling the baby carriage while balancing a tray of coffee and cookies, the sounds of robust Israeli singing accompanied by accordion trailing behind her.

Moses suspects she took the coffee delivery upon herself so she could continue narrating her family story, but she surprises him with a strange request — she would like to leave the baby with him in this room. The young father wants to unwind a bit in a soccer game with the kids, and she would like to join the group singing in the living room, to lift her spirits a little, and if the baby starts crying he can call her. After all, Moses once had grandchildren this age, didn’t he?

“Four,” he proudly declares, “with more to come, I hope.”

“Good, then.” The woman smiles.

What’s good? He is baffled by the rather presumptuous request for him to babysit this problematic child — perhaps to tempt him to make a film that will alleviate the indignity. But he smiles kindly, helps the attractive woman find a suitable place for the carriage, and takes charge of the pacifier, making it clear that he will seek help at the first signs of yowling.

“Thank you, Yair.” Suddenly they are on a first-name basis. She hurries back to the singing, he closes the door after her. Before checking on the uninvited guest, he gulps several small cups of hot coffee. Now, wide awake, he takes a close look at the baby whose name nobody has bothered to tell him.

The baby is awake and gives the director a quiet, knowing look. Is the blue-black color of his eyes a joint venture of America and Israel or something temporary, likely to change? Moses considers whether to stick in the pacifier right away to head off a scream, or wait for one patiently so he can put a quick end to babysitting and restore the child to his grandmother, who didn’t leave him milk. He offers the baby the pacifier, and the little one hesitates before accepting it as consolation for the breast that had gone all the way to America. But even as he sucks at it avidly, he maintains a curious gaze at the unfamiliar old man who might make him a character in his next film.

Moses knows from experience that the pacifier will not prevent a round of wailing, nor will smiling or making funny faces. He leans over and picks up the baby in his arms, amazed how light he is.

He takes him to the window, to the vista of the gleaming desert in the noonday sun, carefully holding the child’s head lest it fall back, though he seems already able to hold it up on his own. The baby is quiet. Moses points at the blue skies stretched over the desert, and the pacifier falls out as the child gapes with wonder. A new, urgent idea crosses the director’s mind, and he replaces the baby in his carriage.

The baby, disappointed, produces a slight wail of protest, a clear enough sign for Moses, who will not do battle with any child. He picks him up again and carries him through the kitchen, its air thick with the smell of leftovers, to the front yard, looking for the young father, who is indeed there, a boy among boys, excitedly chasing a ball, and Moses suddenly laments the lost childhood of this lad trapped by love, and he retreats to the house with the baby in his arms and sternly scans the group of singers, and as he searches for the young grandmother, she hurries toward him, takes her grandson, and says, disappointed: “What happened? So fast?”

“Nothing I could do; you didn’t leave any milk, and besides, I have to be going, because I’m paying another visit on the way back.”

IT’S STILL EARLY afternoon, and Moses asks Amsalem, who escorts him to his car, if he remembers the location of the wadi where Slumbering Soldiers was filmed. Amsalem remembers, for it was he who supplied fresh food during the shoot. “It’s no more than forty-five kilometers from here, and the road has surely been improved.”

“It’s been more than forty years,” says Moses, “so find me the place on the map. When I saw the film in Spain I got all nostalgic for the Nabataean ruin we turned into a secret installation.”

“Let’s hope it hasn’t been razed.”

Moses takes out an old map from the trunk and follows Amsalem’s thick finger as it moves from the Ohalim junction by the Ohalei Kedar prison, to the Nokdim junction by Ramat Hovav, to the forest of Nahal Secher, to the Negev junction, then heads left from there to the old oil pipeline road that passes at the foot of Hyena Hill to the vicinity of Yeruham and then straight to the Big Crater, where it plunges down to Wadi Matmor. “This is where we made that crazy movie,” says Amsalem.

“Matmor?”

“Or maybe it was Hatira. When you get there you’ll remember, or just ask any Bedouin. If I didn’t have guests, I would gladly drive you, but since you’re already in Beersheba, why not go there? The roads are empty on Shabbat and the police don’t go there, you can speed down and back in an hour.”

Given such encouragement, Moses heads south and not north. He drives the route of Amsalem’s finger and finds that the late-afternoon road is indeed empty, taking a holy Sabbath nap. Here and there, an old pickup truck emerges from a distant Bedouin encampment. Sometimes Bedouins cross the road, raising a hand in greeting or just wanting to hitch a ride.

Yellow dominates the desert scenery, dotted here and there by reddish bushes and green shoots, encouraged by infrequent rain. The mountains in the distance look like a giant accordion, their foothills arranged like loaves of dough awaiting a blazing oven. The view is joined by the whistle of a new wind, which thickens the haze and fans the road with a fine coating of sand.

At the Negev junction he is uncertain about the turn onto the oil road; he slows down and looks for a human being who can assure him he is not lost. A small group of Bedouins, men standing and women sitting, are gathered by the shell of an old bus stop. He pauses for them to confirm the route, which they do, and they also take an interest in his destination. Wadi Matmor or Wadi Hatira in the Big Crater. Does any of them know the place? And if so, does anyone know if the old Nabataean ruin is still there? They pass the question back and forth, and finally a dark skinny man pushes his way to the car window and swears he knows the wadi and the ruin and is able to guide the driver there. But why?

“Just to see it.”

“And to stay?”

“No, just to look.”

In that case, the Bedouin offers his services as tour guide, but for a fee, since it is a long way. “Long?” Moses is apprehensive. “How long?” He waves the map. “Long,” insists the Bedouin. Long for him, for he lives not far from here. “A hundred shekels,” offers Moses. “A hundred each way,” counters the Bedouin, “you also have to come back.” Moses closes the window and shifts into drive. “Let’s go, a hundred shekels, final price.” The Bedouin knocks on the window. “Okay, a hundred and thirty, final price.”

Does he really know the place, or is he just pretending? It’s too late, though; the Bedouin hops into the front seat and signals to three veiled women, dressed all in black, to get into the back seat. “Only one,” shouts Moses, lifting one finger, regretting the whole business, “only one!” The Bedouin starts to bargain. “Two, only two.” “No.” Moses holds firm. “Not two, only one. We are coming back. The others can wait for you here. One woman, or none at all.”

The Bedouin considers this and finally gestures to one woman, the smallest, who like a quivering bird squeezes into the back seat with her bundle, only her eyes visible, sparkling in the rearview mirror.

Meanwhile, the day has darkened, with a big cloud drifting from the north and devouring the sun. According to Moses’ calculation there are only twenty kilometers to go, and though it’s early winter, and the days are shorter, there’ll be enough light for the round trip.

They drive along the old pipeline road, filling up the gas tank on the outskirts of Yeruham, and silence reigns in the car, but the eyes of the Bedouin woman scorch the nape of the driver’s neck. The Bedouin man indeed knows the way, and as soon as they begin their descent into the Big Crater and turn onto a dirt road, Moses recognizes a few bits of the route traveled by the officer in the open jeep on his way to impose law and order on the sleeping army unit. Dusk falls more quickly than he expected, and when they arrive at the spot where the Nabataean structure ought to be standing, darkness prevails throughout the Big Crater, except for beams of light that reach out to them from a watchtower near a double roadblock. Three reserve soldiers, who in their uniforms look like extras from his old film, except they are alert and tough and armed. They stop the car and order its three occupants to get out and stand in a line.

Before them is a sizable military base, well guarded, where no soldier sleeps without permission. Tents and buildings surround an inscrutable installation with an iron dome, which thrills the director in its resemblance to his original vision. Except the real installation is ten times bigger. Is this just a facility intended to provide early warning to the nearby nuclear plant, or is it a new reactor?

There is no one here willing to disclose the secret even if he knew it. In fact, it is the unexpected guests who are suspected of knowing something and coming to sniff around. They are requested to identify themselves. Even the woman is not exempt from reaching into her robes and producing her identity card. Moses tells the soldiers about the film that was shot here decades ago and is curious whether an ancient Nabataean ruin might have been swallowed by the facility at this base. His question is ignored; no one has heard of the film, but they still express respect for a director who proudly lists the names of two of his recent films. Yes, one of the guards has heard the titles.

If you’ve come to make a new movie here, we’re ready to be in it, they joke, and call their commander, an officer wearing a knitted skullcap, who considers what to do with the improbable visitors, deciding in the end to release the director and detain the Bedouin for further questioning. As for the woman, she can do whatever she wants.

Moses is upset and fights for the release of his tour guide. “What do you want from him? What did he do? He helped me get here. Besides, we didn’t go into your base, we’re in a public area, open to all citizens.”

The commander calms him down. “Don’t worry, we just want to get to know this man a little better.” “What’s to know?” screams Moses. “You can see, he’s an ordinary innocent person I happened to meet.” But the commander again calms him down. “Every person holds a surprise. No one is out to harm him. In the morning he will surely be set free. Meanwhile he’ll get food and lodging, but someone who understands Bedouins needs to find out how and why this man happened to take you to this place, and to clarify what he knows and what he doesn’t know. A few small questions before we let him go.”

As they take the man away, he remains composed and impassive, and he says to Moses, “No big deal, don’t get upset, I know them, this is nothing. But take the woman with you and bring her back to the place you took her from, and from there she can make her own way. Now, pay me what we agreed.”

Moses compensates for the inconvenience by paying him double and checks whether the woman, whose identity and status remain unclear, may sit in the front seat beside him so he doesn’t get lost. “No need,” says the Bedouin, “from the rear she can tell if you are going the right way.”

THOUGH IT IS not yet five in the afternoon, they drive in total darkness, the headlights revealing one dirt road, which takes them to the main road. In the darkness of the back seat sits not an actress but a real woman, a slender Bedouin whom a husband, brother, or uncle has left unsupervised, and she is relieved to drop her veil and gaze brightly at the world. Moses studies her delicate face in the rearview mirror and inhales her scent but is wary of speaking to her. Finally he dares, almost shouting: “Do you know a little Hebrew? You learned a little Hebrew?”

“A very little,” she answers in singsong, suddenly adding, “next to nothing.”

Maybe she knows more Hebrew than she lets on, he says to himself, but would rather concentrate now on the glittering lights of the world than be cross-examined by an old Jew. Yet Moses feels an urge to talk to her for the few kilometers they will be together, so he asks if she belongs to the al-Azama.

When she hears the Jew mention the name of the strongest and most famous tribe in the area, she flinches. “La al-Azama,” no, and hastily wraps her face in her veil. “Al-Jarjawi.” She defiantly pronounces the correct name.

He decides to back off and leave her foreignness free of interpretation. And from then on the ride takes place in silence, till he feels the woman’s light touch on the back of his neck, as the time has come and this is the place. “Here?” He is bewildered, for the place is entirely barren. “Here, here,” she asserts with utter confidence, and even before the car comes to a complete halt the rear door opens, and she escapes with a moan that might be Arabic or Hebrew, her dress flapping till she vanishes in the darkness.

The storm in Tel Aviv has abated, but the street is carpeted in twigs and leaves plucked by its force; water runs along gutters and collects in puddles. He turns on his apartment lights and heat and listens to his voicemail, but no one needs him. He looks at his e-mail but is too weary to answer or delete. He has an urge to surprise Amsalem with the real installation that sprang from the ruins of Trigano’s creative vision, but he resists. First I have to digest the truth myself before I share it with anyone else. He takes off his clothes for a shower and feels the scent of the Bedouin woman whispering to him. Has she reached her encampment yet? Or did she take advantage of the ride to join up with another tribe?

Slowly Ruth assumes her character, a temporary Bedouin in the small screening room of the Spanish archive, veiled and laughing, until she is shot by the commander. “Debdou,” he says to himself, Debdou, and the unfulfilled passion of the hotel room shoots through his body. He goes to the shelf that holds the twenty movies he has made since Trigano left him and pulls out the film that might be the only one he is still able to watch. He puts it in the video player and finds the scene he desires.

The film is not one of his best known or most highly praised, but it does have some strong scenes. Ruth was about thirty then, eight years after the break from Trigano, still finding her own way. In this scene she played a young woman waiting in a hotel room for an older married man who has expressed interest in her. The scene wasn’t long, not more than a minute, but once it became clear to her and the audience that she was waiting in vain, Moses had her remove her clothes and get into bed naked, then wrap herself in a sheet.

They had to reshoot the scene three times to get the right camera angle, the right light, and the precise mood. This was not the first time that Ruth had bared her body to the camera, and she usually did it easily and calmly. But in this scene, sadness and loneliness shrouded the breathtaking nudity. Maybe it was the small, neglected room contrasted with her beauty, or maybe the pensive, disappointed gaze directed at the camera.

In the studio, made to resemble a hotel room, Toledano and the soundman were with him. But because the scene was supposed to take place mostly in silence, Moses decided to remove the soundman and do the sound himself, thus making it easier for Ruth to undress. But Toledano, who had been in love with Ruth since childhood, grew more excited by the moment, as did the director, and thus it happened that the nudity, lasting no more than ten seconds, shimmered with intense eroticism even after Ruth was wrapped in the sheet.

Now the Bedouin woman disappearing in the darkness blends again with the actress of his film, and he himself stands before her naked, for he knows that he wants and can bring relief, and he does.