“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.