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

through the hills, still some distance from the lonely village.
    Since in those days it was impossible to imagine a sleek Israeli train that would fit the film’s plot, they had to borrow one from a foreign setting that resembled the Israeli landscape. The cameraman and his assistant were therefore dispatched to Greece to collect footage of fast trains in the evening and at night, to be intercut in the film. Not that it was easy to find what they needed in Greece. For ten days and nights the two wandered among railroad tracks, staking them out to capture a passenger train from a good angle. They returned to Israel with a vast collection of shots of speeding trains, each different from the next, and of hills and gullies, and near the big train station in Piraeus, they also filmed railroad cars and locomotives wrecked in accidents and removed from service. The filmmakers spent long days in the editing room patching together from the bounty of Greek trains and wreckage one fast train, devoid of recognizable national markings—sort of a universal, symbolic train—destined for disaster at the edge of an Israeli-Jordanian village.
    The door to the hall opens, and in the rectangle of light stands a thin, tall man who scans the dark room and after brief hesitation heads down to the front, blocking the screen as he slips into a first-row seat. Moses’ heart is pounding. For a moment he imagines his former scriptwriter has joined the audience. He has the urge to get up and move forward to get a better look, but he controls himself, not wanting to create a further disturbance.
    Who is the composer of the ballet music that accompanies the young woman on her path to the little train station? In those days Moses got help from a young librarian in the music division of the National Library, a woman who found musical selections that could enhance plot and atmosphere. Trigano, however, objected in principle to the use of existing music. If we can’t commission our own, he said, better to have none at all. But when the film reached the editing room, it entered the exclusive domain of the director, and Moses was steadfast in his belief—partly because he was falling in love with the librarian—that music had the power to clarify the feelings and thoughts of the characters, especially in the case of a beautiful deaf girl called upon to convey to her accomplices and the audience a complicated criminal plan by means of hand gestures and facial expressions alone.
    The music now accompanies the girl along the tracks, continuing as she meets the young man who is in love with her and who at sunset returns the rail switches to their prior position and waves the green flag at the fast evening train on the main track, signaling its safe disconnection from the side track. The director senses that his heroine has won the sympathy of the audience in the big hall. Now she has to convince the man that any flag-waving is useless, that even if he waves the red flag to warn of danger, the train could not possibly stop in time. The young man looks bewildered, and there’s no way of knowing what he understands from her pantomime, but his passion hijacks his hands and flags, and he gives her the red one; and as the speeding locomotive draws near and he waves the green one as usual, the girl waves the red flag and keeps waving it as a warning at faces that fleetingly appear in the lighted windows of the train—the nameless faces of Greeks who will become Israeli in the editing room.
    Who is the composer?
he asks himself again, for the music is bound up with his growing love for Ofra, the young librarian who later became his wife; they eventually parted ways, but she is still the mother of his two children. That’s why he considers
Distant Station
to be a personal film, as if he too were a character walking the village streets.
    Is Ruth’s heart bound to this movie too? Sitting a few rows ahead, she seems to have forgotten