It was around this time, the time that her father could no longer make it even the short distance to the bathroom, and the round-the-clock nurse had to throw him over her large Ukrainian shoulder, that, at the nurse’s insistence, Romi pulled on her coat and left the house for a few hours to go to see a film. She didn’t know anything about it, but she had been drawn to the title, which she had seen on the marquee on a trip to or from the hospital.

She took a seat toward the back of the nearly empty theater. There were only five or six people there, Romi said, but, unlike when the theater is full and everyone disappears around you as the screen comes alive, she felt acutely aware of the presence of the others, most of whom had also come alone. During the many wordless stretches of the film, stretches in which one hears car horns and the sound of bulldozers and the laughter of unseen children, and the long shots when the camera rests on Ershadi’s face, Romi felt aware of herself watching, and the others also watching. At the moment she understood that Mr. Badii was planning to take his life and that he was looking for someone to bury him in the morning, she began to cry. Soon after that, a woman stood up and walked out of the theater, and this made Romi feel a little bit better, since it created an unspoken bond between those who had remained.

I wrote that I wouldn’t give away the end, but now I see that there is no way around it, that I will have to, since it was Romi’s belief that if the film had come to a normal end, what happened to each of us later almost certainly would not have happened. That is, if, after presumably swallowing the pills and putting on a light jacket against the cold, Mr. Badii had just lain down in the ditch that he’d dug, and everything had grown dim as we watched his impassive face watching the full moon sail in and out from behind the smoky clouds, and then, as a clap of thunder sounded, when it had grown so dark that we could no longer see him at all until a flash of lightning illuminated the screen again and there he was, still lying there, staring out, still of this world, still waiting, as we are still waiting, only to be plunged into darkness again until the next bright flash in which we’d discover that his eyes have at last drifted closed, and then the screen turned black for good, leaving only the sound of rain falling harder and harder, until finally it crescendoed and faded away—if the film had just ended there, as it seemed to have every intention of doing, then, Romi said, it might not have stayed with her.