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.