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.