The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman by A. B. Yehoshua

whispering is so agitated, viewers are turning to look at them, and the priest’s soft hand rests again on the knee of the guest to hint that it’s rude to annoy people watching his movie. Moses leans forward, shocked—how could he have forgotten that Trigano decided to advance the plot through the machinations of an alluring deaf-mute girl?
    The camera moves away from the young man’s distant visual embrace and zooms in slowly on the village mayor, a vigorous man of about fifty, a professional actor who demanded and got the highest pay, and deservedly so, for here he is onscreen, ten years after his death, the picture of trustworthy authority. He looks patiently at a beautiful young woman, a deaf-mute who utters only noises and inscrutable syllables—which the Spanish dubbing replicates amazingly well—punctuating them with agitated hand gestures laced with charm and guile that are meant to inject into the sun-swept village the first spark of a carefully planned disaster.
    The village mayor, who has known the young woman since her childhood and who over the years has carefully observed her blend of beauty and disability, is presumably capable of interpreting her distress from her hand motions alone.
    â€œWhat were you telling him? Do you remember?”
    â€œThat we had to divert the express train to our station.”
    The sounds she is able to produce are desperate, those of an animal in distress, and in retrospect, the director understands that it was here, in this film, that the amateur actress began to turn into a professional, her beauty ripening in the process. She is no longer a skinny, androgynous girl, pale and embarrassed, as in
Circular Therapy,
but a determined young woman whose beauty is combined with emotional strength and the erotic expertise she brings to her part.
    Moses has not calmed down. “Who coached you in sign language? Me?”
    â€œYou? Come on. What do you know about sign language? And it’s not even real sign language—more like a private language. I took the gestures from Simona, Shaul’s older sister, who was mentally disabled and also a deaf-mute. She always tagged along with us when we were kids.”
    â€œHe never mentioned such a sister.”
    â€œMaybe he was ashamed, even though he loved her and took care of her. In any case, he wanted to immortalize her in the film, through me. Moses, it’s about time you realized things are hiding in your films that you didn’t know and didn’t understand.”
    Patience is running out all around, their whispering has become a public nuisance. The head of the archive gets up, grabs Moses by the hand like a schoolteacher, and leads him a few rows away, as if to say,
In a couple of days you’ll be back in Israel, where you can make as much noise as you like, but why disrupt a retrospective held here in your honor?
    It’s a good thing the director and actress have been separated, because now that Moses has been banished to the rear, the storm of memory subsides, and he skips what is spoken in the film, in words or unique sign language, and concentrates on the images of the village, the changing daylight, the little houses, the behavior of the residents: a woman who opens her shutters and takes chairs out to the porch; a horse-drawn wagon that climbs the road to the village, followed by five workers on foot; a noisy group of boys heading toward a fig tree; someone who suddenly stops walking and stands still in anticipation; a boy who runs to the bridge and places a piece of scrap iron on the railroad track. Now it’s clear to Moses why after this film he decided to leave teaching for good and exercise his talent through the screenplays of a brilliant and loyal student.
    With simple but effective editing, intimations of sunset filter into the frame, as Toledano, the artist of shifting light, captures every nuance. Now come the first flashes of the express train, winding its way