It was then that I saw him making his way along the covered walkway in the opposite direction. He looked older, and his wavy hair had turned silver, making his dark eyebrows seem even more severe. Something else was different, too. In the film, it had been absolutely necessary to project the impression of his physical solidity, which Kiarostami had done by keeping the camera closely trained on Ershadi’s broad shoulders and strong torso as he drove through the hills outside Tehran. Even when Ershadi got out of the car to gaze out at the arid hills and the camera hung back at a distance, he’d appeared physically formidable, and this had given him a strength and authority that, combined with the depth of feeling in his eyes, had made me want to weep. But now, as he continued down the covered walkway, Ershadi looked almost slender. He’d lost weight, but it was more than that: it seemed that the width of his shoulders had contracted. Now that I was seeing him from the back, I began to doubt that it was Ershadi. But just as disappointment began to pour into me like concrete, the man stopped and turned, as if someone had called to him. He stood very still, looking back at the Zen garden, where the stones were meant to symbolize tigers, leaping toward a place they would never reach. A soft light fell on his expressionless face. And there it was again: the brink of hopelessness. At that moment, I was filled with such overwhelmingly tender feeling that I can only call it love.
Gracefully, Ershadi turned the corner. Unlike me, he had no trouble moving in those slippers. I started to go after him, but one of the kimonoed women appeared to block my path. She was waving and gesturing toward the group, which was now peering into one of the shadowy rooms of the abbot’s house. I don’t speak Japanese, I explained, trying to get around her, but she kept hopping in front of me, gibbering away and pointing with more and more insistence at the group, which had now begun to move down the hall toward the anterior garden—move with an almost imperceptible shuffle of their combined feet, as if, in fact, thousands of ants were carrying them along. I’m not with the tour, I said, making a little cross with my wrists, which I had seen the Japanese do when they wanted to signal that something was wrong, or not possible, or even forbidden. I was just on my way out, I said, and pointed toward the exit with the same insistence with which the woman in the kimono was pointing at the group.
She grabbed my elbow and was trying to pull me forcibly back in the other direction. Maybe I had upset the delicate balance of the whole, a balance determined by subtleties that I, in my foreignness, would never understand. Or perhaps I had committed an unpardonable act by leaving the group. Again I had the feeling of impenetrable ignorance, which for me will always be synonymous with traveling in Japan. Sorry, I said, but I really have to go now, and with a tug more violent than I’d intended, I freed myself of her hand and jogged toward the exit. But when I turned the corner, there was no sign of Ershadi. The reception area was vacant except for the Japanese women’s shoes lined up on the old wooden shelves. I ran outside and looked around, but the temple grounds were occupied only by large crows, which took clumsily to the sky as I ran past.
Love: I can only call it that, however different it was from every other instance of love I had experienced. What I knew of love had always stemmed from desire, from the wish to be altered or thrown off course by an uncontrollable force. But in my love for Ershadi I nearly didn’t exist beyond that great feeling. To call it compassion makes it sound like a form of divine love, but it wasn’t that, it was terribly human. If anything, it was an animal love, an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and understands that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.
It sounds far-fetched, but at that moment I had the feeling that I could save Ershadi. Still running, I passed under the monumental wooden gate, and my footfalls echoed up in the rafters. A sense of fear began to seep in, the fear that he planned to take his life just like the character he’d barely played, and that I had lost the brief chance I’d been given to intercede. When I reached the street, it was deserted. I turned in the direction of the famous pathway alongside the narrow river and ran, my bag slapping against my thigh. What would I have said if I had caught up to him? What would I have asked him about devotion? What was it I wanted to be when he turned, and at last his gaze fell upon me? It didn’t matter, because when I came around the bend the path was empty, the trees black and bare. Back at the ryokan, hunched on the tatami floor, I searched online, but there was no news about Homayoun Ershadi, nothing to suggest that he was traveling in Japan, or no longer alive.
My doubt only grew on the flight back to Tel Aviv. The plane glided above a great shelf of cloud, and the farther it got from Japan, the less possible it seemed that it had actually been Ershadi, until at last it seemed absurd, just as kimonos and Japanese toilets and etiquette and tea ceremonies, which had all possessed irrevocable genius in Kyoto, at a distance grew absurd.
The night after I got back to Tel Aviv, I met Romi at a bar. I told her about what had happened in Japan, but in a laughing way: laughing at myself for believing for even a moment that it was actually Ershadi I’d seen and run after. As I told the story, her large eyes became larger. With all of the drama of the actress that she is, Romi lifted a hand to her heart and called the waiter to refill her glass, touching his shoulder in the instinctive way she has of drawing others into her world, under the spell of her intensity. Eyes locked with mine, she removed her cigarettes from her bag, lit one, and inhaled. She reached across the table and laid her hand over my hand. Then she tilted her chin and blew out the smoke, all without breaking her gaze.
I don’t believe it, she said at last in a throaty whisper. The exact same thing happened to me.
I began to laugh again. Crazy things were always happening to Romi: her life was swept along by an endless series of coincidences and mystical signs. She was an actress but was not a performer, the difference being that at heart she believed that nothing was real, that everything was a kind of game, but her belief in this was sincere, deep, and true, and her feeling for life was enormous. In other words, she didn’t live to convince others of anything. The crazy things that happened to her happened because she opened herself to them and sought them out, because she was always trying something without being too invested in the outcome, only in the feeling it provoked and her ability to rise to it. In her films she was only ever herself, a self stretched this way or that by the circumstances of the script. In the year that we had been friends, I had never known her to lie.
Come on, I said, you’re not serious. But as she was never less than completely serious, even while laughing, Romi, still gripping my hand across the table, launched into her own story about Ershadi.
She had seen Taste of Cherry five or six years ago in London. Like me, she had been utterly moved by the film and Ershadi’s face. Disturbed, even. And yet, at the last moment, she had been released into joy. Yes, joy would be a better word for what she had felt, walking home from the theater in the twilight to her father’s apartment. He was dying of cancer, and she had come to take care of him. Her parents had divorced when she was three, and during her childhood and teenage years she and her father had grown distant, and very nearly estranged. But after the army she had gone through a kind of depression and her father had come to see her in the hospital, and the more he sat with her at her bedside, the more she forgave him for the things she had held against him all those years. From then on, they had remained close. She had often gone to stay with him in London, and for a little while even attended acting school there and lived with him in his apartment in Belsize Park. A few years later his cancer had been diagnosed, and a long battle ensued that looked to have been won, until at some point it became clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it had been lost. The doctors gave him three months to live.
Romi left everything in Tel Aviv and moved back to her father’s apartment, and during the months that his body began to shut down she stayed by his side, rarely leaving him. He had decided ag
ainst having any more of the poisonous treatments that would have prolonged his life by only a matter of weeks or months. He wished to die with dignity and in peace, though no one ever really dies in peace, as the body’s journey toward the extinction of life always requires violence. These large and small forms of violence were the stuff of their days, but always mingled with her father’s humor. They took walks while he could still walk, and when he couldn’t anymore they spent long hours watching detective series and nature documentaries. Seeing her father’s transfixed expression in the glow of the TV, it struck Romi that he was no less deeply invested in these stories, the stories of unsolved murders, spies, and the uphill battle of a dung beetle trying to roll its ball of manure over a hill, now that his own story was quickly drawing to a close. Too weak to get out of bed to go to the bathroom at night, he would try anyway, and then Romi would hear him collapse on the floor and would go and cradle his head and pick him up, because by then he was no heavier than a child.
It was around this time, the time that her father could no longer make it even the short distance to the bathroom, and the round-the-clock nurse had to throw him over her large Ukrainian shoulder, that, at the nurse’s insistence, Romi pulled on her coat and left the house for a few hours to go to see a film. She didn’t know anything about it, but she had been drawn to the title, which she had seen on the marquee on a trip to or from the hospital.
She took a seat toward the back of the nearly empty theater. There were only five or six people there, Romi said, but, unlike when the theater is full and everyone disappears around you as the screen comes alive, she felt acutely aware of the presence of the others, most of whom had also come alone. During the many wordless stretches of the film, stretches in which one hears car horns and the sound of bulldozers and the laughter of unseen children, and the long shots when the camera rests on Ershadi’s face, Romi felt aware of herself watching, and the others also watching. At the moment she understood that Mr. Badii was planning to take his life and that he was looking for someone to bury him in the morning, she began to cry. Soon after that, a woman stood up and walked out of the theater, and this made Romi feel a little bit better, since it created an unspoken bond between those who had remained.
I wrote that I wouldn’t give away the end, but now I see that there is no way around it, that I will have to, since it was Romi’s belief that if the film had come to a normal end, what happened to each of us later almost certainly would not have happened. That is, if, after presumably swallowing the pills and putting on a light jacket against the cold, Mr. Badii had just lain down in the ditch that he’d dug, and everything had grown dim as we watched his impassive face watching the full moon sail in and out from behind the smoky clouds, and then, as a clap of thunder sounded, when it had grown so dark that we could no longer see him at all until a flash of lightning illuminated the screen again and there he was, still lying there, staring out, still of this world, still waiting, as we are still waiting, only to be plunged into darkness again until the next bright flash in which we’d discover that his eyes have at last drifted closed, and then the screen turned black for good, leaving only the sound of rain falling harder and harder, until finally it crescendoed and faded away—if the film had just ended there, as it seemed to have every intention of doing, then, Romi said, it might not have stayed with her.
But the film did not end there. Instead, the rhythmic chanting of marching soldiers drifts in, and slowly the screen comes to life again. This time, when the hilly landscape comes into view, it’s spring, everything is green, and the grainy, discolored footage is shot on video. The soldiers march in formation onto the winding road in the lower left corner of the screen. This new view is surprising enough, but a moment later a member of the film’s crew appears, carrying the camera toward another man, who is setting up a tripod, and then Ershadi himself—Ershadi, whom we just saw fall asleep in his grave—casually walks into the frame, wearing light, summery clothes. He takes a cigarette from his front pocket, lights it between his lips, and without a word hands it to Kiarostami, who accepts it without pausing his conversation with the DP, and without so much as looking at Ershadi, who in that moment we understand is connected to him through a channel of pure intuition. The shot cuts to the soundman, a little farther down the hill, crouching down out of the wind in the high grass with his giant microphone.
Can you hear me? a disembodied voice asks.
Down below the drill sergeant falters and ceases his shouting.
Bâlé? he says. Yes?
Tell your men to stay near the tree to rest, Kiarostami replies. The shoot is over. The last line of the film is spoken a few moments later as Louis Armstrong’s mournful trumpet starts to wail, and the soldiers can be seen sitting and laughing and talking and gathering flowers by the tree where Mr. Badii lay down in the hope of eternal rest, though now the tree is covered with green leaves.
We’re here for the sound take, Kiarostami says.
And then it is just that huge, beautiful, plaintive trumpet, without words. Romi sat through the trumpet and credits, and, though tears were streaming down her face, she felt elated.
It was not until some time after she had laid her father in the ground, and shoveled the dirt into his grave herself, pushing away her uncle, who tried to pry the tool from her, that Romi recalled Ershadi. So many intense things had happened to her since she walked home full of joy in the twilight that she hadn’t had time to think about the film again. She had stayed on in London to take care of her father’s things, and when there was nothing left to take care of, when everything had been finalized and squared away, she remained in the nearly empty apartment for months.
During the days, all of which passed in the same way, she lay around listlessly, unable to apply herself to anything. The only place she could feel any desire was during sex, and so she had started seeing Mark again, a man she had dated during the year she was at acting school. He was possessive, which is part of why their relationship had ended in the first place. And now that she had been with other men since they’d broken up, he was even more jealous and obsessive, and wouldn’t stop pushing her to tell him what it had been like with them. But the sex they had was hard and good, and she found it bracing after the months of feeling like she had no body, when her father’s failing body was the only body there was.
At night, after Mark came home from work, Romi would go to his place, and in the darkened bedroom he would scroll through pornography until he found what he was looking for, and then would fuck her from behind as she lay on her stomach and they watched two or three men penetrating one woman on the massive screen of his TV, pushing their dicks into her pussy and her ass and her mouth, everyone breathing and moaning in surround sound. Just before he came, Mark would slap Romi hard on the ass, thrusting himself into her and calling her a whore, enacting some ancient pain that drove him to believe that the woman he loved would never remain true to him. One night after this performance Mark had fallen asleep with his arms around her, and Romi had lain awake, for, exhausted as she always was, she couldn’t sleep. Finally she shimmied out from under him and crawled around on the floor in search of her underwear. Having no desire to stay, and no desire to go, she’d sunk back down on the edge of Mark’s bed and felt the remote under her. She switched on the TV and surfed the channels, passed over the stories of mother elephants and bee colonies that she had watched with her father, over the cold cases and the late-night talk shows, until she pushed the button once more and there, nearly filling the enormous screen, was Ershadi’s face. For a second it appeared larger than life in the otherwise dark room, and then it was lost again, because her thumb had continued its restless search before she realized what she was seeing. When she flipped back, she couldn’t find him. There was nothing on about film, or Iran, or Kiarostami. She sat there, startled and bewildered in the dark, and then slowly a sense of longing came over her like a wave, and she started to laugh for the first time since her father had died, and she knew it was ti
me to go home.
There was no choice but to believe Romi. Her story was so precise that she couldn’t have made it up. Sometimes she exaggerated the details, but she did it believing the exaggerations, and this only made her more lovable, because it showed you what she could do with the raw material of the world. And yet, after I went home and the spell of her presence wore off, I lay on my bed feeling sad and empty and increasingly depressed, since not only was my encounter with Ershadi not unique, but, worse, unlike Romi, I’d had no idea what it meant, or what I was supposed to do with it. I had failed to understand anything, or take anything from it, and had told the story as a joke, laughing at myself. Lying alone in the dark, I started to cry. Sick of the pain throbbing in my ankle, I swallowed a handful of Advil in the bathroom. The pills swilled in my stomach with the wine I’d drunk, and soon enough nausea overtook me, and then I was kneeling on the bathroom floor, throwing up into the toilet.
The next morning, I woke to banging on the door. Romi had had a sense that something was wrong and had tried to call, but I hadn’t picked up all night. Still woozy, I started to cry again. Seeing the state I was in, she went into high gear, boiling tea, laying me out on the couch, and cleaning up my face. She held my hand, her other palm resting on her own throat, as if my pain were her pain, and she felt everything and understood everything.
To Be a Man Page 9
