“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. In Our Synagogue
“IN 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.”
IT 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.