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

this terminal patient wandering like a ghost in the dead of night at the central bus station, clattering his IVs between dark silent buses, pushing them into a workingmen’s café, where a picture on a wall reminds Moses that this is his parents’ living room, now taking the role of a cafeteria thick with cigarette smoke and a bar stocked with colorful bottles, a dubious-looking bartender jovially mixing his concoctions. In the moonlight, from the garden of his childhood home, the camera tracks the silhouette of the innocent girl who gave up on the young man of the broken promise and then let down the woman she took care of and who now waits for the first morning bus to take her back to her village. The familiar cardboard suitcase is at her feet, and along with the flowered sundress, which is no less charming in moonlight, she wears a pretty scarf over her skinny shoulders. She is sad, and when she sees that the one who comes to care for her is himself dying, her despair grows, and she begins to weep.
    â€œWhen you were young and gay, it was so easy to get you to cry for the camera,” Moses can’t help teasing his actress, “and now it’s hard to get one tear out of you.” “What can you do.” She sighs. “With all the tears I’ve shed in real life, I don’t have any left for your movies, but don’t worry, in your next film, if I must, I’ll cry again.” He nods, saying nothing, not only because he doesn’t want to upset her with the news that there will be no role for her in his next film, but also lest he annoy the audience, hypnotized by the moonlight and the shaky camera. The dying man with his tangle of IV tubes becomes a heroic figure—a character who proves to the whole world, in whispering Spanish, that even in his last hour, a person can breathe hope into the heart of another. The embarrassed smile that breaks out in close-up on the young woman’s face arouses real tears in the eyes of the aging actress watching herself. And after the screen finally goes dark, and lights go on in the hall, Moses promises himself that when he returns to Israel, he will find a copy of the forgotten film and watch it in its original language to determine its true value once and for all.
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    In the eyes of the audience scrutinizing the director, there may be wonder or bewilderment, but no antagonism or derision. He therefore hopes the questions will not deal with trivial points of realism or believability or with camera techniques, but with the ideas. Since the Spanish that replaced the original language did not allow him full mastery of the film’s details, he asks the director of the archive, who will moderate the discussion, to relay several questions together, figuring to avoid the ones not easily answered.
    To his surprise, the questions imply affection for this simple film, and Moses is careful not to undermine it with answers betraying his own ambivalence about his early work. Film teachers and students do not approach movies as consumers demanding satisfaction and enjoyment in exchange for the ticket purchased at the box office; for them, a film is first and foremost material for study and explanation. And since he realized at lunch that in this city of pilgrimage, people tend to seek a symbol behind every detail, he resolves to be tolerant even of allegorical speculation. When one of the older teachers offers a strange interpretation for the visible shaking in the last scene, Moses does not expose his unskilled hand operating the camera but praises the man for his perspicacity, adding that in hindsight he cannot be sure that was the intent. Though the students do center their questions on technical matters and not spiritual issues, the fact that an outdated film made by a group of amateurs in a young small country on a minuscule budget can hold its own after such a long time instills optimism in them too, these young people. And after the priest