The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, but . . .”

“His name was Yakir.”

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

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

“He was difficult . . .”

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

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

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

Moses tries to make light of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The whole time?”

“I don't believe you forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He never mentioned such a sister.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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