The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (17 page)

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

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

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

Juan laughs.

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

“Because he asked us not to tell you.”

“Why?”

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

“Why wouldn't I?”

“You do know how much he hates you.”

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

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

four

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

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

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

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

“And what did he say?”

“I would rather not repeat what he said.”

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

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

“Meaning what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The director of the archive is quick to answer.

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

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

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

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

“That film?”

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

Moses straightens out a crease in his Internet biography.

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

“Join in prayer?”

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

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

“What were you afraid of?”

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

“There are Jews in Galicia?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can I go on? Do we have time?”

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

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

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

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