The soldier opens the car door, leaps out, and flees into the hills. What Mr. Badii is asking amounts to being an accomplice to a crime, since suicide is forbidden in the Quran. The camera gazes after the soldier as he grows smaller and smaller until he disappears altogether into the landscape, then it returns to Ershadi’s extraordinary face, a face that remains almost completely expressionless throughout the film, and yet manages to convey a gravity and depth of feeling that could never come from acting—that could only come of an intimate knowledge of what it is to be pushed to the brink of hopelessness. Not once in the film are we told anything about the life of Mr. Badii, or what might have brought him to decide to end it. Nor do we witness his despair. Everything we know about the depth contained within him we get from his expressionless face, which also tells us about the depth contained within the actor Homayoun Ershadi, about whose life we know even less. When I did a search, I discovered that Ershadi was an architect with no training or experience as an actor when Kiarostami saw him sitting in his car in traffic, lost in thought, and knocked on his window. And it was easy to understand, just looking at his face: how the world seemed to bend toward Ershadi, as if it needed him more than he needed it.

His face did something to me. Or rather the film, with its compassion and its utterly jarring ending, which I won’t give away, did something to me. But then again, you could also say that in some sense the film was only his face: his face and those lonely hills.

Not long after that, it became warm again. When I opened the windows the smell of cats came in, but also of sunshine, salt, and oranges. Along the wide streets, the ficus trees showed new green. I wanted to take something from this renewal, to be a small part of it, but the truth was that my body was increasingly run-down. My ankle was only getting worse the more I danced on it, and I was going through a bottle of Advil a week. When it was time for the company to go on tour again, I didn’t feel like going, even though it was to Japan, where I’d always wanted to travel. I wanted to stay and rest and feel the sun, I wanted to lie on the beach with Romi and smoke and talk about boys, but I packed my bag and rode with a couple of the other dancers to the airport.

We had three performances in Tokyo, followed by two free days, and a group of us decided to go to Kyoto. It was still winter in Japan. On the train from Tokyo, the heavy tile roofs went by, houses with small windows. We found a ryokan to stay at, with a room done up with tatami mats and shoji panels, and walls the color and texture of sand. Everything struck me as incomprehensible; I constantly made mistakes. I wore the special bathroom slippers out of the bathroom and across the room. When I asked the woman who served us an elaborate dinner what happened if something was spilled on the tatami mat, she began to scream with laughter. If she could have fallen off her seat, she would have. But the room had no seats at all. Instead, she stuffed the wrapping for my hot towel into the gaping sleeve of her kimono, but very beautifully, so that one could forget the fact that she was disposing of garbage.