“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.”
He tries to disappear into the audience before the translation is over, but the hoarse voice of the theoretician stops him, adding a detail that perhaps escaped the filmmakers and that Kafka himself was probably unaware of. In ancient Egypt, the mongoose was considered a noble and holy animal, perhaps owing to its ability to trap and kill poisonous snakes. It was therefore entitled to be embalmed along with the Pharaonic families.
Moses is delighted. “Thank you, thank you. We didn’t know about ancient Egypt, and perhaps Kafka didn’t either. In any case, the historical dimension you have added to the animal can only deepen the understanding of our complex film.” And he motions to the projectionist to start the screening.
MOSES TRIES IN vain to recall the name, or at least the provenance, of the actor who played the rabbi in the film. He doesn’t appear in the credits because he had refused to have his name listed; during production, the animal was filmed separately and inserted in the editing room, and when the actor saw the final picture, with the full dialogue between him and the animal — whose role in the film transcended comedy and was anything but marginal — he complained that the animal had insulted him and demanded that his name be removed.
By contrast, Moses well remembers the origin of the animal and even the lovely name given it by the soundman: Susana. One of Amsalem’s porters stalked her for a few days in the desert near Beersheba, trapped her, and brought her to the set. She was a large mongoose with a long hairy tail and proved to be timid, as in Kafka’s story, though at this moment, as she fills the screen and looks out with big red eyes, flashing her thin, sharp teeth, she makes a terrifying impression. To accustom her to the camera and to learn her habits, the director and cinematographer would visit her cage, feed her, talk to her gently, and play with her. They filmed her mainly at night. The porter, who became her trainer, would attach to her neck a transparent plastic leash, invisible on film, and tug it carefully, so her moves would seem natural and willful, to lead her from the holy ark to the grille of the women’s gallery and back. A few days later, in the editing room, they would include her among the faithful at prayer, generally filmed in daylight.