The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman by A. B. Yehoshua Page A

of Jerusalem before the Six-Day War, including streets and buildings that no longer exist and vacant sites built up in later years, like the field where the president’s house went up; it is virgin land in this old film, strewn with rocks and thistles.
    The young woman descends the steps of a stone house and rings the doorbell, and Moses is shocked to discover himself opening the door—a thin young man with wild hair, naked to the waist, a pipe in his mouth. The priest casts him an impish glance.
Yes, it’s me,
nods the director, who hopes, but is far from sure, that this was the only time he cast himself in a film, since the shift from one side of the camera to the other undermines his control and authority. But in this beginner’s film his acting part was small and brief, and the Spanish voice they’ve given him sounds more like yelling. He thinks of asking de Viola to tell him what he is saying, but the priest is glued to the screen, and Moses doesn’t want to break the spell.
    Yes, even without the dubbed dialogue, it’s clear that the careless young man knows the visitor on his doorstep and doesn’t deny his promise to put her up at his house. Except someone got there before her, a woman emerging now from the bedroom in a flimsy bathrobe, a tenant, a lover, and the hostile look she shoots at the newcomer stops the girl cold. Humiliation and confusion flush her face, enhancing its beauty. Which is perhaps why the young man shows signs of doubt and regret, opens the door wide for the village girl to enter, and carries her suitcase into the hallway, and it seems this will be a story about two girls in a rented apartment, competing for the kindness of a mixed-up young man. But the lodger in the skimpy robe is unwilling to share her rights. She sends the young man to get the visitor a glass of water, and when he is gone a conversation ensues between the two women, of which Moses cannot recollect a word, but whatever is said, it is strong enough to convince the guest to give up her claim, enabling the screenwriter to derail the plot from a banal story into a strange and different one, a story that will struggle to be meaningful and credible.
    Moses’ performance is not over. As penance for breaking his promise to the girl, he carries her heavy suitcase in the harsh white Jerusalem light that Toledano favored in their early days, failing to understand how many subtle and important details he was bleaching out.
    To rest his arms, the young man places the suitcase on his head, taking a few hesitant steps that suggest, at least in the mind of the director, that he regrets that the extra room in his flat was not saved for this attractive young woman but rented instead to a bony, depressive tenant. Moses is shaken at the sight of his childhood street on the Spanish screen, and of his parents’ house, with some of its furnishings removed to give the camera room to maneuver.
    â€œWasn’t that your mother?” whispers Ruth as the camera slowly closes in on the woman of the house, indeed his mother, an impromptu actress in her own living room, which thanks to camera angles has never looked larger.
    In the 1960s, his mother took early retirement from public service so that her husband could be promoted into her job, and the free time tempted her to take part in her son’s directing adventure, first by reading the script and suggesting minor changes, then by persuading Moses’ father to offer their house as a filming location. In those years, the filmmakers preferred to cast amateurs, not merely to save money but also because professionals who’d been trained as stage actors were prone to theatrical excess. Perhaps out of gratitude to his mother for turning her house into a set for a dubious movie project, Moses gave her a part in the film. His mother rose to the adventure over the objections of his nervous father, and the opportunity provided by her son to become a fictional