When he returns to the car he can see in the distance, in the waning afternoon light, the missing woman strolling through the great square.
“I thought there would be another cathedral farther down, so I kept going,” she says.
He gazes into her eyes.
Many times he told Toledano, and subsequent cinematographers he worked with, to point the lens straight into her eyes, to reveal, from within her yellow-green irises, the inner world of the character.
Six. Putting the Old House in Order
THE TAXI DRIVER seemed to recognize Moses’ companion, and the director gave him her address only, as if it were his as well. But when they reached her building in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, Moses said to the driver: “Hang on to my suitcase and walking stick until I get back. I have to help the lady, no elevator.”
“You need a hand?”
“No, thanks, I can manage.”
They climb the stairs slowly, turning on the timed stairwell light three times. The director lugs the suitcase up the stairs, slides it along the landings, and when they get to the fourth floor, he doesn’t leave Ruth until her door is opened and the apartment light switched on and he is sure that the world left behind three days ago has remained intact.
“Should I help you turn on the main valve?” he asks at the top of the stairs as they enter her apartment.
“No need,” she says, “I was too lazy to turn it off.”
“You want to get flooded again?”
“What can I do, it’s so hard to reach.”
Since the founding of the neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century, the apartment has been renovated many times, but its main valve is still buried deep in a kitchen cabinet, requiring getting down on one’s knees and crawling to reach it.
“That’s enough.” She hurries him off with a slight laugh. “The driver will think you ran away and left him with a stick and an empty suitcase.”
The timer in the stairwell has gone out again, leaving only backlighting from the apartment. On the flights from Santiago to Barcelona and then to Israel she slept peacefully. Before landing she added color to her cheeks with new cosmetics purchased between flights, so her face is radiant. And the passion that was blocked for the three days quivers inside the man who stands before her.
“One last thing… one more…”
“No.” She presses a finger to his lips. “No need for another test. Believe me, I’m healthy. And if I die, it won’t be your fault.”
He puts his hand on her forehead to feel her temperature, then his lips, to double-check, and holds her close. She smiles and kisses his eyes and forehead. They stand this way for a moment, embracing in the stairwell. Once he was taller than she was, but he has shrunk with the years and their height is now the same. Finally she enters the apartment and closes the door after her, but he lingers a bit by the adjacent apartment, its door decorated with colorful stickers. This is the studio where she gives acting classes to children. Despite everything, he comforts himself, there’s always something pure and lovely between us. We’ve accomplished something rare.
The driver’s head rests on the steering wheel in sleep so deep that Moses needs to knocks on the windshield to wake him, gently, so as not to scare him. The driver rubs his eyes vigorously, as if to tear away not just cobwebs of sleep but the remnants of a dream, and he gapes at Moses as if he were a new night rider with no baggage who happened into his cab.
“On TV there’s someone who looks like her.”
“That’s her,” Moses gladly confirms, “she’s the one.”
When they get to Moses’ high-rise, the driver wants to be paid for waiting time. “But why?” asks Moses. “You waited for me all of five minutes.” The driver checks his watch and also the meter. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he apologizes, “the dream confused my sense of time.” “Which dream?” The passenger is curious, but the driver is not about to disclose his dream to a stranger.
On the twentieth floor, in darkest night, in a beautiful apartment acquired with the profits of the film Potatoes, Moses can see Tel Aviv, wreathed in buildings and billboards, twinkling beyond a wall-to-wall window, and only a hint of faraway surf signals to the traveler that nature still exists in his home city. He turns on the main tap and the heat, puts the prize money in a drawer, and sheds his clothes. He stands in front of the window, a glass of wine in hand, and tries to estimate which floor the crosses would reach if the cathedral of Santiago were placed alongside his apartment building.
He goes into the bedroom and raises the blinds in the east window to enjoy the view from his bed of the distant lights of the Judean Hills. His thoughts during the two flights did not let him doze, but now he is determined to devote himself to deep sleep.
The extras in Slumbering Soldiers were fast asleep when asked only to impersonate sleepers in front of the camera, but the artist returning home, exhausted by a demanding retrospective, still tosses from side to side. I so pleased the Spaniards with the strange sleeping in my old films, he grumbles in his big, comfortable bed, that they laid claim on my sleep too. The heart that soared at the edge of the West seems to require a sleeping pill back in the East.
But not even the pill puts him to sleep, and he tries, to no avail, to reimagine the thwarted passion and relieve it on his own, so he gets out of bed to unpack his suitcase and put away his things. Yet sleep will not come, and he glumly opens his e-mail, does a lot of deleting, listens to a voice message from his ex-wife, and then, as his eyelids begin to droop, he shuts down the channels of communication, closes the window blinds, burrows his head deep into the pillow, and whispers, “Sleep, that’s it, now you have no choice.”
And Sleep not only succumbs to the director but grows stronger and sweeter from hour to hour, and when he wakes up for a moment to scurry to the toilet, he knows he will find Sleep again, awaiting him loyally in the bed he left behind. Nonetheless, in the mist of consciousness hovers a vague irritation. No, this time it’s not the spirit of the screenwriter who secretly engineered his retrospective. Moses now, to his surprise, feels strangely fond of Trigano. Something else, insignificant but stubborn, is nibbling at his slumber. Again and again he returns to his film Circular Therapy, urgently needing to know if the three of them, he and the cinematographer and the set designer, really did succeed in splitting his parents’ home into three different houses with three separate front doors or whether he imagined it in Santiago out of faulty memory. But who remembers, and who cares? Toledano is dead, the set designer is forgotten, and why should Ruth remember? Sleep does not cancel the question but quiets it for the moment as it sweeps him into the abyss he desires.
BUT WHEN SWEET nothingness dissolves into a flicker of consciousness, he is frightened by the glaring eye of the clock on the wall. Can this be the right time, or has the clock broken in his absence? He raises the blinds and again finds night, only now the world is rainy and foggy, and the glowing advertisements sputter in the murk. Can it be that nearly twenty-four hours have passed since he went off to sleep?
He puts on lights and turns on the heat and heads for the kitchen to prepare himself a meal, which might rekindle the appetite trumped by the fatigue, and amid the cutting and mixing and boiling of water, he remembers how Susana disappeared in the middle of filming and the general panic over how to find a replacement, until Amsalem’s Bedouin found her hiding under the carousel in the playground and with threats and enticements wooed her back to the synagogue so she could do her job. In Kafka’s short story, the animal is old and has an amazing memory, whereas their mongoose was young and inexperienced, nervous, and devoid of memory and vision. A staffer from the biblical zoo in Jerusalem, recruited to coach the film crew in handling the animal, was impressed by how they’d already half trained the feisty young thing and suggested that at the end of the shoot they turn her over to his zoo, where her artistic experience might inspire other animals.