I didn’t hear back from Romi for weeks, and then finally her answer arrived. She apologized for taking so long. It was strange, she said. She hadn’t thought of Ershadi for years, until three months before, when she’d decided to watch Taste of Cherry again. She’d recently left Amir, and on nights when she couldn’t sleep in the new apartment, with its unfamiliar smells and noises from the street, she would stay up watching movies. What surprised her was how differently Ershadi’s character struck her this time. While she’d remembered him as passive, nearly saintlike, now she saw that he was impatient and often surly with the men he approached, and manipulative in the way he tried to get them to agree to what he wanted, sizing up their vulnerabilities and saying whatever was necessary to convince them. His focus on his own misery, and his single-minded desire to carry out his plan, struck her as self-absorbed. What also surprised her, because she didn’t remember it, were the words that appear for a moment on the black screen before the film begins, as all films in Iran must: “In the name of God.” How could she have missed that the first time? she wondered. Of course she’d thought of me as she lay in the dark and watched—of that year when we were still so young and spoke endlessly of men. How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths. She told me about a film she wanted to write when she finally got the time, which followed the story of a dancer like me. And then she told me about her boys, who needed her for everything, it seemed, just as the men in her life had always needed her for everything. It was good, she wrote, that I had a daughter. And then, as if she had forgotten that she had already moved on to other things, as if we were still sitting across from each other deep in one of our conversations without beginning, middle, or end, Romi wrote that the last thing that had surprised her was that when Ershadi is lying in the grave he’s dug and his eyes finally drift closed and the screen goes black, it isn’t really black at all. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling.

Future Emergencies

Future Emergencies