“But we won’t go back and settle there.”
“I hope not. Not to stay, at any rate. Enough of the goddamn partnership.”
His tough talk seems to be about more than Palestinians and Israelis. Meanwhile, out of nowhere, reserve soldiers appear, looking for the rocket’s point of impact, and when they see two men standing calmly beside cars, they shout, Yalla, this isn’t the border with Tuscany, not a good place to hang out.
Not long thereafter you are stopped at a checkpoint at the entrance to a moshav called Na’arut, and from the strange and tormented faces of the youngsters surrounding your car, you understand this to be a whole village full of foster families. For a moment, as the barrier lifts, you are inclined to waive your entrée to the moshav and forget your wish to restore the connection with such a proud and difficult man. But your concern for the character who refuses to acknowledge her illness awakens a strange desire for a new film, and you push on.
“HE WAITED for you all evening but finally caved in and fell asleep. You want us to wake him?” The speaker is a thickset farmer surrounded by a pack of silent dogs licking his boots.
This is a good-sized farmhouse at the edge of the settlement, giving out onto fields and hedged by fruit trees, with a cowshed and goat pen and chicken coop in a muddy barnyard.
“No, don’t wake him,” says Trigano, “I’m staying the night anyway, but he will leave right after supper.” He introduces you politely as “an old teacher of mine, who left his students for the film business.” The farmer, a man of your own age, looks you over sympathetically and says, “But if the teacher should change his mind, we’ll find a bed for him.”
“He will not change his mind,” says Trigano.
“Of course not,” you confirm, bending over to the friendly dogs, who sniff and lick your shoes and trouser cuffs, and suddenly you have an idea: accept the farmer’s offer and stay the night to pursue the dramatic meeting. You can tell that despite the circumstances that forced Trigano to turn from an artist into a teacher, his vitality is undiminished, his wit and originality intact. If you get access to him and show compassion for his suffering, reconciliation will become more possible.
In the doorway waits the mistress of the house, a farmwoman around forty, built as solidly as her husband. The permanent look of wonder in her eyes and her slow movements suggest that she herself may have been cared for here and over the years worked her way up to caregiver. Your admiration for this place grows stronger by the minute and you greet her with a slight bow, introducing yourself by name and profession, apologizing for your unexpected visit.
As you cross the threshold you realize that this farmhouse is essentially a live-in clinic. The living room is now a dining hall, and on the walls, like pictures at an exhibition, flicker small screens with TV programs for youngsters and the not-so-young. Some of the residents gaze at you with longing, others huddle as if a cold wind has sharply blown in. Puppies trot from inner rooms and gather in eerie silence, as if their vocal cords have been plucked out.
“Uriel is sleeping,” the woman says, repeating her husband’s words. “He waited for you but caved in. Should we wake him for you?”
“No, no need,” says Trigano, hugging her, “I’ll be here till morning. Where should we sit? In the kitchen?”
“You said you were bringing a guest, so we set you a table in the arbor, and if it gets cold, we can light a stove in there.”
“The arbor is wonderful, and we’ll see about the fire.”
“How do you control all these dogs?” you inquire of the farmer.
“They control us.”
“How many do you have?”
“We stopped counting. Don’t worry, they’re not all ours. Dogs from the area invite themselves over to feast on our leftovers. This little bastard,”—he snatches a little white wiry-haired dog and waves it in the air—“is a regular guest who comes every night from Kibbutz Re’im for his supper.” He squeezes the dog lovingly before tossing it back to the pack.
Trigano is at the table, tearing hunks from a big loaf of bread. The farmer hauls out an electric light with a long extension cord and hangs it in the Italian honeysuckle that luxuriates in the arbor.
“Do you remember our first short film?” you ask Trigano.
“About the husband who masquerades as a dog.”
“Is there a print of it anywhere?”
“A few years ago I looked for it.”
“For the Spanish archive?”
“No, long before I knew such an archive existed, I wanted to show it to my students, to demonstrate how best to direct animals. You were not half bad with dogs, navigating intelligently between symbol and reality, and you succeeded, the devil knows how, in getting that dog to express the jealousy and despair of the cuckolded husband. But perhaps this came naturally to you,” he continues with a grin, “because during the shoot you would boast that in your previous life you had been a dog.”
“Me, a dog?” You turn red and laugh.
“That’s what you said, in your previous incarnation. Or maybe that you would be a dog in your next incarnation. I don’t remember exactly, but the fact is those incarnations helped you develop an intimacy with that dog, who was quite unusual.”
“A street dog, we got him from the animal shelter. But you gave him a name in the script?”
“Nimrod.”
“Nimrod, right.” You laugh again. “A smart dog but a bit disturbed.”
“After the filming you latched on to him, kind of adopted him, until you got tired of him and he ran away from you.”
“He didn’t run away, he was run over.”
“Ah, run over, you didn’t tell us that.” Trigano tries to catch you out. “Maybe you were ashamed to admit that you abandoned a loyal actor.”
“First of all,” you calmly reply, “he was not privately owned but a dog belonging to the production, and second, I didn’t latch on to him, he latched on to me. It’s amazing though that you remember what I told you more than forty years ago.”
“Yes, Moses, you’d be amazed, almost every word of yours.”
From the tone of the answer it appears that tonight, the weight of your every word will not apply in your favor but be turned against you. Therefore, you keep quiet and stare at a pair of ducks that waddle into the arbor and are applauded by the vigorous tail-wagging of dogs awaiting the remains of the meal. Vegetables fresh and cooked, spreads and dips in many colors, fried fish, and mysterious aromatic meat.
Your own appetite has faded, despite your self-imposed fast since noon to ensure full participation in the meal. The fork falters in your hand, its small morsel dropping back into the plate. The lighting set up by the farmer exaggerates the shadows, with the moon now out of view. And you don’t know whether the man who eats silently opposite you is expecting you to say something or waiting for you to go away.
How to begin?
“You know that at my retrospective in Santiago they screened Slumbering Soldiers? They changed the name of the film and called it The Installation.”
“Yes, over there they typically change the names of films.”
“At first I thought it was a meaningless title, but—”
“It’s not meaningless.”
“That’s right. It’s a good title. I understood that only after I got back to Israel and had an odd urge to go check out the places where we shot those early films. I even went to the desert, to the crater.”
His dinner knife halts in midair. “To that same wadi?”
“It was hard to find. The landscape had changed. New roads were carved out, and at first I thought the cliffs were different. But I didn’t give up, and I saw from a distance the location where we squatted for three weeks.”