She had seen Taste of Cherry five or six years ago in London. Like me, she had been utterly moved by the film and Ershadi’s face. Disturbed, even. And yet, at the last moment, she had been released into joy. Yes, joy would be a better word for what she had felt, walking home from the theater in the twilight to her father’s apartment. He was dying of cancer, and she had come to take care of him. Her parents had divorced when she was three, and during her childhood and teenage years she and her father had grown distant, and very nearly estranged. But after the army she had gone through a kind of depression and her father had come to see her in the hospital, and the more he sat with her at her bedside, the more she forgave him for the things she had held against him all those years. From then on, they had remained close. She had often gone to stay with him in London, and for a little while even attended acting school there and lived with him in his apartment in Belsize Park. A few years later his cancer had been diagnosed, and a long battle ensued that looked to have been won, until at some point it became clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it had been lost. The doctors gave him three months to live.

Romi left everything in Tel Aviv and moved back to her father’s apartment, and during the months that his body began to shut down she stayed by his side, rarely leaving him. He had decided against having any more of the poisonous treatments that would have prolonged his life by only a matter of weeks or months. He wished to die with dignity and in peace, though no one ever really dies in peace, as the body’s journey toward the extinction of life always requires violence. These large and small forms of violence were the stuff of their days, but always mingled with her father’s humor. They took walks while he could still walk, and when he couldn’t anymore they spent long hours watching detective series and nature documentaries. Seeing her father’s transfixed expression in the glow of the TV, it struck Romi that he was no less deeply invested in these stories, the stories of unsolved murders, spies, and the uphill battle of a dung beetle trying to roll its ball of manure over a hill, now that his own story was quickly drawing to a close. Too weak to get out of bed to go to the bathroom at night, he would try anyway, and then Romi would hear him collapse on the floor and would go and cradle his head and pick him up, because by then he was no heavier than a child.