“Not important. Not much.”
“Every shekel counts. Don’t be embarrassed.”
Moses names the amount, and Amsalem is shocked. “That’s not a prize, that’s just a symbol,” he tells the director. “To fit the symbolic films you screened for them. With an amount like that, you sure mustn’t let the state stick its fingers in.”
A few years back, Yaakov Amsalem turned eighty, but he is still alert and forceful. Even though he kicks in only 3 percent of the production budget, mostly by providing food for the cast and crew, he considers himself one of the producers, a partner among partners. He walks on the set freely, demands from time to time to look through the camera. Above all, it’s important to him to pepper the director’s brain with the basics of human existence. Actually, he was the one who proposed the idea for the potato film, which was a surprising hit. Now he feels the time is ripe for a new film, and he wants to be in on it.
While driving out of Jerusalem, Moses tells him about the retrospective and mentions that Trigano had contrived it from behind the scenes. Amsalem has, in fact, lost touch with the man who ushered him into the film business, but he remembers Trigano’s old screenplays, which he had thought overblown, until Israeli reality began to catch up with them. Yes, odd that after many years, with some words he’d picked up from Ladino-speaking neighbors, Trigano finds this archive in Spain, at the end of the earth, and they honor him. And it’s just like him, Trigano, to ignore the director; why should he forgive him for an old insult? Back in those days, Amsalem knew the uncle well, the brother of Trigano’s mother, an unsuccessful wholesaler in the produce market but a decent man; he didn’t live much longer than Trigano’s father but while still alive devotedly helped raise the boy. Hasn’t he told Moses about the uncle before? Trigano loved him. He was a sweet man and had a good singing voice, but when he got emotional, he would stutter. Despite the stutter, he served as a cantor in the synagogue, if only at afternoon prayers, when the place was all but empty. The congregants loved him but feared the stutter would prolong the prayers and so would prod him to go faster. Who knows, maybe it was because of his uncle’s stutter and humiliation that Trigano invented that little animal, which would run around the synagogue and make a mess.
“Susana.”
“Yeah, Susana,” says Amsalem with a booming laugh. “Susana, that’s right.”
“But Trigano didn’t invent her, he borrowed her from a story by Kafka.”
“Kafka? Who’s Kafka?”
“A world-class writer, and even you, Amsalem, who dropped out of grade school should know who he is and remember his name.”
“If you say so, I’ll remember.”
“There are many animals in his stories, all interesting. By the way, I wonder what your Bedouin did with the animal after we finished shooting.”
“Do I know? He set her free, or ate her, or gave her to his dogs.”
“Because in ancient Egypt, and I learned this only in Santiago, a mongoose was considered a holy animal, embalmed just like the Pharaohs.”
“So maybe the Bedouin embalmed her, and when you come to see me in Beersheba on Saturday we can make a pilgrimage to her grave.”
“Who says I’m driving to Beersheba on Saturday?”
“It’s important not just for me but for you too. Come for lunch, and we’ll give you a room to rest in after the meal, so you won’t miss your nap. It will take you an hour at most from Tel Aviv to Beersheba on a Saturday, and there’ll be some interesting guests, a young couple, special people, who might help us get the next film going. Enough, friend, get over it, the retrospective is behind you, stop picking at it. We’re not young, and if we still have a little energy left, let’s look forward and not back.”
MOSES DOES NOT ignore the admonition of the veteran producer, even if the man holds only a 3 percent share of his films. Instead of going straight home, Moses visits his small office, to see what the world wanted of him in his absence. His secretary congratulates him on the prize, and he decides not to snap at well-wishers because of its small size but instead just nod humbly and offer polite thanks. Not much is new in the small office, which gets bigger during every new production but in between films only keeps the embers burning. He gathers up anything that seems vital, fills a plastic bag with screenplays and also novels and stories that seek adaptation to film. Finally he adds a few DVDs of short clips sent by actors or cinematographers who wish to impress him with their work. Then he invites the secretary to lunch to find out what’s new among his competitors.
When he gets back to his apartment, he removes the laundry from the dryer and folds it. He inspects the bed sheets that swallowed up a day of his life and decides to wash them too. For a moment he weighs whether to phone Ruth, but he chooses to leave her be, not to plant any false expectation of a new role. We’ve had more than enough of that, he thinks while making his bed with fresh sheets. After a short nap, he sits down to surf the Internet. He easily locates the story of Roman Charity and, despite the warning of the elderly expert, clicks on a bonanza of images of the daughter and father, whose essence was ably captured in that quick lecture by his bed at the Parador.
Now he takes a look at a few clips from actors and cinematographers, and at the same time, barely straying from the screen, he looks at script synopses, some no longer than a single page. As a high school teacher he perfected an efficient technique for checking homework and tests that resulted in instant evaluation of their quality. And because the world of film inspires many people to float glib ideas and fantasies on the assumption that others will make them work, he has learned how to skim and select, without fear that something good will elude him. So when Ofra phones as evening falls, to confirm their meeting, he looks with great satisfaction at the heap of discarded pages at his feet and says: “If there’s no choice, I surrender to you as always, but only for a short time.”
He sees Ofra at family events or social gatherings, where relatives and friends look on with approval and relief at their easy and amicable interaction. What had belonged to him he either took or discarded, and if some forlorn bit of mail insists on going to the address he left fifteen years ago, it’s fine if it waits for him with his grandchildren. As a matter of principle he is unwilling to be a guest in his former home, and when he sees the red mailbox he himself had installed many years ago at the entrance to the building, a fragment of his name still lingering there, he feels demeaned. The Spanish retrospective has apparently sapped his resolve. Amsalem is right when he says he should stay away from her. He eschews the elevator and slowly climbs from floor to floor, to see which of the old neighbors still live in the building. But when he gets to the fourth floor, he stops on the last stair. The thought that the wife of his youth awaits him alone in his former apartment arouses tension and trepidation.
It appears that Ofra has seen him from the window, for she opens the door before he reaches it. Yes, she too is surely emotional and confused and perhaps regrets insisting that he come over. Not looking at her directly, he mumbles hello, pulls her close, and plants kisses on her forehead and cheeks, so she’ll be intimidated from the start and not entangle the soul that is still tied to hers.
Disaffected but oddly satisfied, he observes his former domicile, which looks even sadder and messier than the last time he was here. Ofra grew up as a spoiled only child, and her parents would clean up her clutter with patient love that they bequeathed to her first husband. But now she must deal with not only her own chaos but also that of her husband, the artist, a musician who apparently believes that chaos stimulates creativity.