During the years of his marriage, Moses regularly shared the kitchen duties and became quite skilled at preparing dishes not requiring special expertise. Ever since he and his wife parted ways, although he has mostly eaten in restaurants, he has broadened his repertoire. So now, full of food and fully awake, he waits for dawn so he can tell himself, I’m back to my apartment and my routines, in the meantime activating the washing machine and again checking e-mail, this time not with an urge to delete but with a desire to be in touch. New correspondents have not appeared, apart from Yaakov Amsalem, who congratulates him on the Spanish prize and has an idea for a new film.
Why does every little far-flung prize get publicized in Israel? Can it be that awards from abroad muffle the injustice and corruption at home? Amsalem, my friend, he is quick to reply, congratulations are unnecessary. This is not a prize but a tiny investment in the next film. So please, keep it quiet, so as not to wake the dormant taxman.
He reconnects the telephone, which immediately signals that a message arrived during the big sleep. Again, his ex-wife, who in the clear and civilized voice he has always loved also offers her congratulations on the prize. If such a private woman has heard the news, there’s no other choice but to declare it to the revenue authorities.
On the kitchen table lie leftovers of the big dinner; he can’t bring himself to look at them. He shoves them in the fridge, washes dishes, and tidies up, but doesn’t consider going back to bed, so in advance of his normal schedule he showers, shaves his cheeks and trims his goatee, puts on clothes and shoes too, to feel he is indeed getting back to daily life. He rotates his cozy TV chair to face the big window, and while witnessing the first stirring of neighbors he pulls a screenplay from the ever-mounting pile on his table to see if some hidden spark might twinkle within.
But there seems to be no spark for now, and soon the script drops to the floor, and he, a lone spectator in an awakening world, snoozes. And the snoozing grows deep enough to dream, about cautious descent on broad stairs, following his ex-wife who supports her aunt, a big blond woman confined to a wheelchair before her death but who now, in the dream, has returned to life without a wheelchair, and she slowly, propped by his wife, goes down the stairs of a high school or college. He hurries after the two women, poised to catch hold of the aunt and steady her should she fall backward.
The educational institution is built on several levels on a hillside, like the high school in Jerusalem where the dreamer was a student and later a teacher, until he became a director. And the aunt, although limping, walks downstairs with determination, neither slipping forward nor tripping back, landing safely at the ground floor, where her niece leads her to the cafeteria, its walls lined with books, finally relieving Moses of his supervisory obligation. Free at last, he looks around for other stairs and finds a narrow flight, its steps ugly and pocked, leading down to a deserted cellar. He flings from the top of the stairs a bag filled with dirty laundry — underwear, socks, shirts — and as the bag flies downward, he regrets his recklessness; he has a washer and dryer at home, so why ask an educational institution to do his dirty laundry, which isn’t labeled with his name? But he can’t undo what’s done. The bag has disappeared, and he has to accept its loss. He retreats from the stairs, opens a wide glass door, and finds himself gazing into a green gully.
A pinprick of light on the eastern horizon beyond the bedroom window. The rain has slowed down, the fog has lifted. If the long sleep had such a drowsy epilogue, it means the Spaniards had not deprived him of sleep but given him some of their own. Has his retrospective really ended? Not knowing if the cameraman of Circular Therapy had been able to split his family home in three still bothers him. He moves the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, puts on a windbreaker, and takes, as he heads for his car, the walking stick.
BY THE TIME he gets to Bab-el-Wad he has to battle with the sunrise. Last night’s rain has cleansed the world, and the rays of eastern light glinting from the Judean Hills grow stronger in the purified air, blinding the driver. From time to time he lifts a hand from the wheel and shields his eyes to see the road. But since traffic is thin at this early hour, and he knows the way, he arrives safe and sound at the scene of his childhood — a stately Jerusalem neighborhood, conquered when the state was established, where a mossy, mysterious leper hospital was joined eventually by the residences of the president and prime minister. He parks his car near the imposing Jerusalem Theater, not far from the house where he grew up. Here, now, he completes his retrospective for himself alone. It was nearly twenty years ago that he sold the small handsome stone house, and he has not visited it since nor passed by, so he is prepared to find changes and additions, even a second story. Yet at first glance, everything is as it was. The same big, black iron door separating two exterior stairways, the same mailbox. The huge ceramic flowerpot that appeared in Circular Therapy stands on its base atop the fence and has changed its color. The house was purchased from him after his father’s death by a young couple, both lawyers, whose names are on the large mailbox. Do they still live here, or is the house rented to someone else? They had intended to add another floor, but it turns out that what was good enough for his parents was good enough for them, or else they failed in business.
Winter stillness in the street on a cold Jerusalem morning. The hour is early; his entering the garden to check camera angles would look strange. He returns to the car and fetches the Spanish pilgrim’s staff — a white-haired man with a walking stick will cut a friendly figure even before his intentions are clear. The morning paper has been stuck in the mailbox; he can wait till the owner comes out and ask his permission for a visit in the garden to verify an imaginary reality. But the owner tarries, and waiting in a cold empty street is an undignified waste of time. He opens an adjoining gate and enters a yard, which stood empty throughout his youth until a four-story apartment house was built there. On a narrow path alongside the stone fence separating the two properties, he walks around his parents’ home, and after cutting through a tangle of bushes, he reaches a corner from which as a child he enjoyed secretly watching his parents on the patio. Despite the hour, there is a risk that someone at a rear window may wonder about the unfamiliar old man standing in a far corner, so he huddles in the bushes, gets down on his knees, and grabs the edge of the stone wall, his eyes fixed on his former family home to calculate whether Toledano and the set designer with ingenious trickery had indeed managed to turn one house into three.
Why is he hanging around here? If a whole day could disappear so easily, why try to reconstruct so distant a reality? Wouldn’t it be better to stop struggling with an unreliable memory, even if the retrospective comes to an end with an open question? But he is a Jerusalemite to the marrow, able to rest his head comfortably on a stone wall as the vine on the stones caresses his face with a fragrant tendril, and his walking stick, its tip planted in the ground, steadies him as he gazes at his parental home.