The invited guests, about a hundred in number, are a varied lot. Alongside a few dignitaries in dark suits sit teachers and students from the institute, and behind them elderly men and women from a local old-age home, some holding canes; the back rows are filled with municipal workers, clerks and secretaries and traffic inspectors, and Moses believes he recognizes a few of the whistling and pot-banging sanitation workers.
“You have certainly gathered a diverse crowd,” Moses says to Juan, who is quick to separate the two Israelis. He suggests that Ruth sit beside his mother, in the second row, and directs Moses to the front row, next to the mayor, who nods a friendly hello.
“Yes, for such ceremonies one must fill the hall,” Juan says apologetically. “The value of the prize is diminished if the applause is feeble.”
“Believe me, my dear Juan, the prize is important to me even if its value is merely symbolic.”
“But this prize is not symbolic, it’s real,” protests the priest, “even if it is awarded for films that are symbolic. Did the cultural attaché of your country not inform you? This is a prize of three thousand euros, and had my mother not been enlisted to contribute, the municipality, which suffers a continuous deficit, would have been hard-pressed to provide the sum.”
Moses turns red in the face. “Very generous of you, and moving. But I wonder if this is an award for merit, a consolation prize, or an award to encourage new projects.”
“Anything is possible,” says the priest. “When my mother gives you the envelope, she will explain the intention of the prize. She has told me nothing about what she plans to say.”
A light goes on in front of the screen, and Don Gomez Alfonso da Silva, small and grave, takes the stage.
“This is a serious man,” whispers Moses, “and though I don’t understand what he says, I feel he speaks of me with generosity and appreciation.”
“With generosity, and also with anxiety about the continuation of your work. Last night he watched your film by himself and got so deeply involved, he woke me up and asked to be allowed a few words before the screening.”
“Meaning I don’t need to give an introduction?”
“We’d be glad if you didn’t, because we don’t want to wear out an audience that is mainly not professional with too much intellectual talk.”
“Fine with me,” manages Moses, embarrassed.
“But in your words of thanks you can explain yourself at length in your mother tongue; my brother Manuel has volunteered to translate.”
“It would please me to speak in Hebrew. Anyway, what is your theoretician saying now?”
“He sees The Refusal as a transitional film in which the director relinquishes radical symbolism in favor of popular psychology.”
“Popular? Not really…”
“Don’t be too upset. Don Gomez is truly erudite; over the years, he was married to three different women, and each wife sharpened his thinking. These women came from different parts of Spain, and today he mingles various dialects in his speech and invents original expressions and images that amuse the audience, especially the old people. See how they laugh and enjoy him.”
Moses wearily leans his head on the back of his chair. The sleepless night is taking its toll. He closes his eyes and calculates the number of hours that remain before the return flight to Israel.
WHEN THE ISRAELI lifts his head and opens his eyes, he finds that Don Gomez has faded into darkness, and projected onscreen is young Ruth, dressed in her high school uniform at her graduation ceremony. This film, like its predecessors, is dubbed in Spanish, but as opposed to the others, in which actions and locations were the principal elements, contextualized by the dialogue, here the drama develops mainly by means of long verbal exchanges that deepen the relationships among the characters. Moses remembers the draft pages of the screenplay, written in crowded longhand by Trigano, where speech followed speech, with no provocative slumber in a desert crater or moonstruck hallucination in a remote village. The characters in this film interact at a kitchen table, or in a corner of a neighborhood café, or in a bus station at the edge of the city. At the end of the film, the main character does not find a dramatic location to give birth to her child but chooses a small illicit clinic near the produce market in south Tel Aviv.
“So how can we infuse your story with the mystery you crave so much?” Moses had wondered aloud after he read the draft. But Trigano was unperturbed. “We’ll look for that mystery in our next film, but now, after our defeat by Kafka’s elderly animal, we must invigorate our image with a simple human story, for which we might find actors funded by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.”
And indeed he found them, and after many years they reappear on the screen of the auditorium of the municipality of Santiago de Compostela: a man and a woman, both about forty, who play a married couple, both teachers. With great affection they embrace the young graduate, singing her praises to her long-suffering, working-class mother, a resident of the south of Israel, who reverently tucks her daughter’s precious certificate in her handbag.
The state paid the salaries of the actors playing the teachers and also provided a handsome grant to the production. Trigano tailored the fictional characters to the real ones. The pair were actors in the Hungarian theater, husband and wife, who escaped to Israel in the late 1950s after the failure of the Hungarian revolution. Their Jewishness was somewhat dubious, particularly the wife’s, whose facial features and tall stature testified to remote Asiatic ancestry. Trigano used to call them “the two Khazars given us for free by the Ministry of Absorption.”
But where were these Khazars today? Where had they gone, how had they aged? They were a good deal older than Moses. But now in the dark, on the limp screen by the gorgeous fresco, they are young and active as they portray bits of their own biography.
As two artists who arrived in the country from behind the Iron Curtain, they enjoyed special treatment and spent considerable time in a Hebrew-language program to train them for performance in Israeli theater. But their Hungarian accents proved to be a formidable obstacle, and even the expert in pronunciation assigned them had a hard time inculcating emphasis on the proper syllables. True, in humorous skits, such an accent was an asset, especially when juxtaposed against speakers with the lilt of Arab lands, but the pair considered themselves serious stage actors and expected to play dramatic and tragic roles in the Jewish State. The Ministry of Absorption tried to find them employment at government expense in movies, where the soundtrack might be manipulated to impart the right meter to their Hebrew. To make it easier for Moses to cast the two in the new film, Trigano invented for the actor the role of a history teacher, turned his wife into a teacher of art, and instead of two refugees from the communist regime they were made into Holocaust survivors whose time in the death camps had rendered impossible their hopes for a child who would bring them consolation.
This is the point of departure for the drama that develops between the pair of teachers and the pretty and gifted student, daughter of an underprivileged family, to whom Trigano awarded the same scholarship he had received as a youth. And not just the scholarship. He also saw fit in the screenplay to grant his girlfriend the matriculation certificate of which she was deprived when he convinced her to drop out of school and become an actress in his films. And because, when the time came, he also persuaded her to declare that she was Orthodox in order to avoid military service, he made it up to her by turning her into an outstanding soldier who becomes an officer. All these compensations, which he showered upon her in his imagination to atone for his domination in real life, were still not enough for him, so he resurrected her mother, who had died in childbirth, and it is she who now fills the screen, a widow dressed in black, listening to the two Khazars who try to ingratiate themselves with her so she will not obstruct their secret plan.