Seeing Ershadi

I’d been in the company for over a year by then. It had been my dream to dance for the choreographer since I first saw his work, and for a decade all of my desire had been focused on getting there. I’d sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training. When at last I auditioned and he invited me to join his company, I dropped everything and flew to Tel Aviv. We rehearsed from noon until five, and I devoted myself to the choreographer’s process and vision without reserve, applied myself without reserve. Sometimes tears came spontaneously, from something that had rushed upward and burst. When I met people in the bars and cafés, I spoke excitedly about the experience of working with the choreographer, and told them that I felt I was on the verge of constant discovery. Until one day I realized that I had become fanatical. That what I had taken to be devotion had crossed the line into something else. And though my awareness of this was a dark blot on what had been, until then, a pure joy, I didn’t know what to do with it.

Exhausted after rehearsal, I’d either walk to the sea or go home to watch a film until it got late enough to go out and meet people. I couldn’t go to the beach as often as I’d have liked because the choreographer said he wanted the skin all over our bodies to be as pale as the skin on our asses. I’d developed tendinitis in my ankle, which made it necessary for me to ice it after dancing, and so I found myself watching a lot of films, lying on my back with my foot up. I saw everything with Jean-Louis Trintignant until he got so old that his imminent death began to be too depressing, and then I switched to Louis Garrel, who is beautiful enough to live forever. Sometimes, when my friend Romi wasn’t working, she came to watch with me. By the time I finished with Garrel it was winter, and swimming was out of the question anyway, so I spent two weeks inside with Ingmar Bergman. With the New Year, I resolved to give up Bergman and the weed I smoked every night, and because the title was appealing, and it was made far from Sweden, I downloaded Taste of Cherry, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

It opens with the actor Homayoun Ershadi’s face. He plays Mr. Badii, a middle-aged man driving slowly through the streets of Tehran in search of someone, scanning crowds of men clamoring to be hired for labor. Not finding what he’s looking for, he drives on into the arid hills outside the city. When he sees a man on the side of the road, he slows the car and offers him a ride; the man refuses, and when Badii continues to try to convince him, the man gets angry and stalks off, looking back darkly over his shoulder. After more driving, five or seven minutes of it—an eternity in a film—a young soldier appears, hitchhiking, on the side of the road, and Badii offers him a ride to his barracks. He begins to question the boy about his life as a soldier and his family in Kurdistan, and the more personal and direct the questions, the more awkward the situation becomes for the soldier, who is soon squirming in his seat. Some twenty minutes into the film, Badii finally comes out with it: he’s searching for someone to bury him. He’s dug his own grave into the side of one of those bone-dry hills, and tonight he plans to take pills and lie down in it; all he needs is for someone to come in the morning to check that he’s really dead, and then to cover him with twenty shovelfuls of earth.