I said 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 watch 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 had 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 same 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 a 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 a sound take, Kiarostami says.
And then it is just that huge, beautiful, plaintive trumpet, without words. Romi sat through the trumpet and the 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 had 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 time 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 was 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 as though she had no body, as though her father’s failing body were 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 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 control 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 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 time 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.
Two months later, I quit the company. I enrolled in graduate school at NYU, but stayed on in Tel Aviv through the summer, and flew back only days before the start of the semester. Romi had met Amir by then, an entrepreneur fifteen years older than her, with so much money that he spent most of his time looking for ways to give it away. He wooed Romi with the same singular drive he applied to everything he wanted. A few days before my flight, Romi threw a goodbye party for me at our favorite restaurant, and all the dancers came, and our friends, and most of the boys we’d slept with that year. Amir didn’t come because he was busy, and the following day Romi left for Sardinia on his yacht. I packed up my things alone. I was sad to leave, and wondered if I’d made a mistake.
For a while, we stayed in close touch. Romi got married, moved to Amir’s mansion on a cliff above the Mediterranean, and got pregnant. I studied for my degree, and fell in lov
e, and then out of it a couple of years later. In the meantime, Romi had two children, and sometimes she sent me photos of those boys, whose faces were hers and seemed to borrow nothing from their father. But we were in touch less and less, and then whole years passed in which we didn’t speak at all. One day, soon after my daughter was born, I was passing a cinema on Twelfth Street and I felt someone’s gaze, and when I turned I saw Ershadi’s eyes staring out at me from the poster for Taste of Cherry. I felt a shiver up my spine. The screening had already passed, but no one had taken down the poster. I took a photo of it and that night I sent it to Romi, reminding her of a plan we’d once hatched to go to Tehran—me with a fresh American passport without Israeli stamps, and her with the British one she had through her father—to sit in the cafés and walk the streets that were the setting of so many films we loved, to taste life there, and lie on the beaches of the Caspian Sea. We were going to find Ershadi, who we imagined would invite us into the sleek apartment he had designed himself and listen while we told him our stories, and then tell us his own while we drank black tea with a view of the snowcapped Elburz Mountains. In the letter, I admitted to her the reason that I’d cried the night she told me about her encounter with Ershadi. Sooner or later, I wrote, I would’ve had to admit that in the blaze of my ambition I’d failed to check myself. I would have had to face how miserable I was, and how confused my feelings about dancing had become. But the desire to seize something from Ershadi, to feel that reality had expanded for me as it had for her, that the other world had come through to touch me, had hastened my revelations.
I didn’t hear back from Romi for weeks, and then finally her answer arrived. She apologized for taking so long. It was strange, she said. She hadn’t thought of Ershadi for years until three months ago, when she’d decided to watch Taste of Cherry again. She’d recently left Amir, and on nights when she couldn’t sleep in the new apartment, with its unfamiliar smells and noises from the street, she would stay up watching movies. What surprised her was how differently Ershadi’s character struck her this time. While she’d remembered him as passive, nearly saintlike, now she saw that he was impatient and often surly with the men he approached, and manipulative in the way he tried to get them to agree to what he wanted, sizing up their vulnerabilities and saying whatever was necessary to convince them. His focus on his own misery, and his single-minded determination to carry out his plan, struck her as self-absorbed. What also surprised her, because she didn’t remember it, were the words that appear for a moment on the black screen before the film begins: In the name of God. How could she have missed that the first time? she wondered. Of course she’d thought of me as she lay in the dark and watched—of that year when we were still so young and spoke endlessly of men. How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths that we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths. She told me about a film that she wanted to write when she finally got the time, which followed the story of a dancer like me. And then she told me about her boys, who needed her for everything, it seemed, just as the men in her life had always needed her for everything. It was good, she wrote, that I had a daughter. And then, as if she had forgotten that she had already moved on to other things, as if we were still sitting across from each other, deep in one of our conversations without beginning, middle, or end, Romi wrote that the last thing that had surprised her was that when Ershadi is lying in the grave he’s dug and his eyes finally drift closed and the screen goes black, it isn’t really black at all. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Pity and Shame
from Tin House
Hard lot! encompass’d with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors;
I’m called, if vanquish’d, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s.
—W. Cowper, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity”
At first Mr. Cowper just lay there like a heap of bedclothes, laundry for the wash. His face was so blank it was like it was erased off a slate. Doc Mac said he was concussed and he’d probably get over it and probably survive, awful as his injuries looked. Mostly there was nothing to do for him but get him to drink water or beef broth when he’d take it, and use the bedpan.
It had been Pete’s idea to take in a lodger, but then he’d complained all week about living in two rooms instead of four. Now that the man was there all the time and she had to be up nights to look after him, Pete was ugly about it, spite of the good pay Doc got her for nursing. He stayed out a lot. When he was home he’d come in and watch what she did like he was suspicious. One night she was giving the bedpan, he kept crowding her till she finally had to say, “I need some room, Petey.” He pressed closer. Annoyed with him, she said, “Guess you’ve seen one of them before.”
“Some bigger’n that,” he said.
“Come on, honey, I’m on the job.”
“Not much of a job.”
“More than you got,” she said.
After she said it she realized it had another meaning than the one she’d meant, and felt her face get red. She didn’t know how Pete took it, but either way it was unkind.
“Yeah, what the hell, I’m going,” he said. And he went.
“I could use a hand with this,” Doc Mac said. “Where’s Pete at?”
“I can do that,” she said. He let her show him she could keep the hold he needed while he adjusted the splint.
“Radius is back in line, we’ll get that scaphoid tucked back where it belongs,” Doc said. “It’ll take a while.”
She liked how he said “we.” He was a tough thin man like a dried-out leather whip, but he always spoke pleasantly. She didn’t know what some of the words he used meant, but she could figure it out, or if she asked, he’d answer. It was not an arrangement she was used to, but she liked it.
“How did the night go?”
“He was awful restless. Hurting. He hollered some.”
“Coming to, I hope. Feeling what happened to him.”
“I wish I could do more for him.”
“Get some breakfast for yourself. Sounds like you had a long night.”
“I don’t mind,” she said, not knowing why she said it, but it was true.
“God intended you for a nurse, Mrs. Tonely.”
She watched him washing and salving places where the rocks had torn up Mr. Cowper like he’d been dragged by a runaway horse.
“My name isn’t Tonely,” she said. “I’m Rae Brown.”
He nodded, working away. “That don’t change what I said about God’s intentions.”
Embarrassed all round, she tried to explain. “Well, my aunt Bess was sick for a long time after an operation, and I was looking after her. And my stepdad had these carbuncles I had to learn to treat.”
He nodded again. “Just what I said. —Look there. No infection. So far . . . But you get time off to eat, you know.”
“I will,” she said.
He was a kind man. She wished she could tell him about last night. It had disturbed her. Mr. Cowper had been quiet for a while, so she fell asleep in the chair, and then she woke because somebody was calling out. The voice was strange, like it came from a long ways off, out in the woods or in the hills, somewhere else. It was a name he was calling, Cleo, Cleo. His voice wasn’t loud, but pleading, like he was saying, please come, please come, but not really hoping for it. A heartbroken voice in the darkness. The night was silent, getting on toward morning, everything finally quiet at the saloon. She was nearly asleep again when he called out once more in that soft desolate voice, “Cleo!” This time a rooster answered him from across town with a little bugle call broken off short. She got up from the chair and went over to the bed and put her hand on his sweaty hair, whispering, “It’s all right, it’ll be all right,” wanting to comf
ort that sorrow that came from far away and maybe long ago while he lay here a stranger among strangers. Things were so hard. And no way to talk about them.
Pete hadn’t earned anything since the Bronco Saloon let him go last March. She’d kept the money from her cleaning for Mr. Bingham and the church, and then the two weeks’ advance rent from Mr. Cowper, in a Twinings tea tin. When she needed some cash for groceries she found it had all had gone with Pete. It wasn’t a big surprise, but it was a hollow feeling. She told herself Mr. Bingham wouldn’t put her out of the house so long as she could pay the rent or work it out, and now she had good pay for boarding Mr. Cowper and nursing him.
That night, though, a bad thought came to her as she drowsed in the old rump-sprung armchair near the bed. Where did Mr. Cowper keep his money?
She couldn’t worry about it then, in the middle of the night. But she did. Next day as soon as she’d got him looked after she went into the other room of the two he’d sub-rented from her and Petey two weeks ago and looked around. She felt like a criminal, but she looked into his coat pockets, and at the pocketbook she found there, which had twelve dollars in it. She checked the little chest of drawers where he’d put his shirts and stuff. There was nothing else of his in the room but some books and papers on the worktable, and under the table the little humpback trunk that was all his luggage.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 20
