The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  Exhausted after rehearsal, I’d either walk to the sea or go home to watch a film until it got late enough to go out and meet people. I couldn’t go to the beach as often as I’d have liked, because the choreographer said that he wanted the skin all over our bodies to be as white as the skin on our asses. I’d developed tendinitis in my ankle, which made it necessary for me to ice it after dancing, and so I found myself watching a lot of films lying on my back with my foot up. I saw everything with Jean-Louis Trintignant, until he got so old that his imminent death began to be too depressing, and then I switched to Louis Garrel, who is beautiful enough to live forever. Sometimes, when my friend Romi wasn’t working, she came to watch with me. By the time I finished with Garrel it was winter, and swimming was out of the question anyway, so I spent two weeks inside with Ingmar Bergman. When the New Year started, I resolved to give up Bergman and the weed I smoked every night, and, because the title was appealing and it was made far from Sweden, I downloaded Taste of Cherry, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

  The film opens with the actor Homayoun Ershadi’s face. He plays Mr. Badii, a middle-aged man driving slowly through the streets of Tehran in search of someone, scanning crowds of men clamoring to be hired for labor. Not finding what he’s looking for, he drives on, into the arid hills outside the city. When he sees a man on the edge of the road, he slows the car and offers him a ride; the man refuses, and when Badii continues to try to convince him the man gets angry and stalks off, looking back darkly over his shoulder. After more driving, five or seven minutes of it—an eternity in a film—a young soldier appears, hitchhiking, and Badii offers him a ride to his barracks. He begins to question the boy about his life in the army and his family in Kurdistan, and the more personal and direct the questions are the more awkward the situation becomes for the soldier, who is soon squirming in his seat. Some twenty minutes into the film, Badii finally comes out with it: he’s searching for someone to bury him. He’s dug his own grave into the side of one of those bone-dry hills, and tonight he plans to take pills and lie down in it; all he needs is for someone to come in the morning to check that he’s really dead, and then to cover him with twenty shovelfuls of earth.

  The soldier opens the car door, leaps out, and flees into the hills. What Mr. Badii is asking amounts to being an accomplice to a crime, since suicide is forbidden in the Quran. The camera gazes after the soldier as he grows smaller and smaller until he disappears altogether into the landscape, then it returns to Ershadi’s extraordinary face, a face that remains almost completely expressionless throughout the film, and yet manages to convey a gravity and a depth of feeling that could never come from acting—that can come only from an intimate knowledge of what it is to be pushed to the brink of hopelessness. Not once in the film are we told anything about the life of Mr. Badii, or what might have led him to decide to end it. Nor do we witness his despair. Everything we know about the depth contained within him we get from his face, which also tells us about the depth contained within the actor Homayoun Ershadi, about whose life we know even less. When I did a search, I discovered that Ershadi was an architect with no training or experience as an actor when Kiarostami saw him sitting in his car in traffic, lost in thought, and knocked on his window. And it was easy to understand just by looking at his face: how the world seemed to bend toward Ershadi as if it needed him more than he needed it.

  His face did something to me. Or, rather, the film, with its compassion and its utterly jarring ending, which I won’t give away, did something to me. But, then again, you could also say that, in some sense, the film was only his face: his face and those lonely hills.

  Not long after that, it became warm again. When I opened the windows, the smell of cats came in, but also of sunshine, salt, and oranges. Along the wide streets, the ficus trees showed new green. I wanted to take something from this renewal, to be a small part of it, but the truth was that my body was increasingly run-down. My ankle was getting worse the more I danced on it, and I was going through a bottle of Advil a week. When it was time for the company to go on tour again, I didn’t feel like going, even though it was to Japan, where I’d always wanted to travel. I wanted to stay and rest and feel the sun, I wanted to lie on the beach with Romi and smoke and talk about boys, but I packed my bag and rode with a couple of the other dancers to the airport.

  We had three performances in Tokyo, followed by two free days, and a group of us decided to go to Kyoto. It was still winter in Japan. On the train from Tokyo, heavy tile roofs went by, houses with small windows. We found a ryokan to stay at, with a room done up with tatami mats and shoji panels, and walls the color and texture of sand. Everything struck me as incomprehensible; I constantly made mistakes. I wore the special bathroom slippers out of the bathroom and across the room. When I asked the woman who served us an elaborate dinner what happened if something was spilled on the tatami mat, she began to scream with laughter. If she could have fallen off her seat, she would have. But the room had no seats at all. Instead, she stuffed the wrapping for my hot towel into the gaping sleeve of her kimono, but very beautifully, so that one could forget the fact that she was disposing of garbage.

  On our last morning in Japan, I got up early and went out with a map, on which I had marked the temples I wanted to visit. Everything was still stripped and bare. Not even the plum trees were in blossom yet, so there was nothing to bring out the hordes with their cameras, and I’d got used to being mostly alone in the temples and the gardens, and to a silence that was only deepened by the loud cawing of crows. So it was a surprise when, having passed through the monumental entrance gate of Nanzen-ji, I ran into a large group of Japanese women chatting happily in singsong fashion on the covered walkway that led to the abbot’s residence. They were all outfitted in elegant silk kimonos, and everything about them, from the ornate inlaid combs in their hair to their gathered obi belts and their patterned drawstring purses, was of another age. The only exception was the dull-brown slippers on their feet, the same kind offered at the entrance of every temple in Kyoto, all of which were tiny and reminded me of the shoes that Peter Rabbit lost in the lettuce patch. I’d tried them myself the day before, shoving my feet into them and gripping with my toes while attempting to slide across the smooth wooden floors, but, after almost breaking my neck trying to climb stairs in them, I’d given up and taken to walking across the icy planks in my socks. This made it impossible to ever get warm, and, shivering in my sweater and coat, I wondered how the women didn’t freeze wearing only silk, and whether assistance was needed to tie and wrap and secure all the necessary parts of their kimonos.

  Without noticing, bit by bit I’d worked my way into the center of the group, so that when suddenly the women began to move in unison, as if in response to some secret signal, I was swept along, down the wide and dim open-air corridor, carried by the flow of silk and the hurried pitter-patter of tiny slippers. About twenty feet down the walkway, the group came to a halt and spat out from its amoeba-like body a woman dressed in normal street clothes, who now began to address the others. By standing on my tiptoes, I could just see over the women’s heads to the four-hundred-year-old Zen garden that was one of the most famous in all of Japan. A Zen garden, with its raked gravel and precise minimum of rocks, bushes, and trees, is meant not to be entered but to be contemplated from the outside, and just beyond where the group had stopped was the empty portico designed for this. But when I tried to make my way out by tapping shoulders and asking to be excused, the group seemed only to tighten around me. Whomever I tapped would turn to me with a bewildered look, and take a few quick little steps to the left or the right so that I could pass, but immediately another woman in a kimono would flow in to fill the void, either out of an innate instinct to correct the group’s balance or just to get closer to the tour guide. Enclosed on all sides, breathing in the dizzying stench of perfume, and listening to the guide’s relentlessly incomprehensible explanations, I began to feel claustrophobic. But before I could try to elbow my wa
y out more violently, the women suddenly started to move again, and by flattening myself against the wall of the abbot’s residence I managed to stay put, forcing them to move around me. They crossed the wooden floor in a chorus of scuffling slippers.

  It was then that I saw him making his way along the covered walkway in the opposite direction. He looked older, and his wavy hair had turned silver, making his dark eyebrows seem even more severe. Something else was different, too. In the film, it had been absolutely necessary to project an impression of his physical solidity, which Kiarostami had done by keeping the camera closely trained on his broad shoulders and strong torso as he drove through the hills outside Tehran. But even when Ershadi had got out of the car to gaze at the arid hills and the camera had hung back at a distance, he’d appeared physically formidable, and this had given him an authority that, combined with the depth of feeling in his eyes, had made me want to weep. But, as he continued down the covered walkway, Ershadi looked almost slender. He’d lost weight, but it was more than that: it seemed that the width of his shoulders had contracted. Now that I was seeing him from behind, I began to doubt that it was Ershadi. But just as disappointment began to pour into me like concrete, the man stopped and turned, as if someone had called to him. He stood very still, looking back at the Zen garden, where the stones were meant to symbolize tigers, leaping toward a place they would never reach. A soft light fell on his expressionless face. And there it was again: the brink of hopelessness. At that moment, I was filled with such an overwhelmingly tender feeling that I can only call it love.

  Gracefully, Ershadi turned the corner. Unlike me, he had no trouble moving in those slippers.

  I started to go after him, but one of the kimonoed women blocked my path. She was waving and gesturing at the group, which was now peering into one of the shadowy rooms of the abbot’s house. I don’t speak Japanese, I explained, trying to get around her, but she kept hopping in front of me, gibbering away and pointing with more and more insistence at the group, which had now begun to move down the hall toward the anterior garden—move with an almost imperceptible shuffle of their combined feet, as if, in fact, thousands of ants were carrying them along. I’m not with the tour, I said, making a little cross with my wrists, which I had seen the Japanese do when they wanted to signal that something was wrong, or not possible, or even forbidden. I was just on my way out, I said, and pointed toward the exit with the same insistence with which the woman in the kimono was pointing at the group.

  She grabbed my elbow and was trying to pull me forcibly back in the other direction. Maybe I had upset the delicate balance of the whole, a balance determined by subtleties that I, in my foreignness, would never understand. Or perhaps I had committed an unpardonable act by leaving the group. Again I had a feeling of impenetrable ignorance, which for me will always be synonymous with traveling in Japan. Sorry, I said, but I really have to go now, and, with a tug more violent than I’d intended, I freed myself of her hand and jogged toward the exit. But when I turned the corner there was no sign of Ershadi. The reception area was vacant except for the Japanese women’s shoes lined up on old wooden shelves. I ran outside and looked around, but the temple grounds were occupied only by large crows, which took clumsily to the sky as I ran past.

  Love: I can only call it that, however different it was from every other instance of love that I had experienced. What I knew of love had always stemmed from desire, from the wish to be altered or thrown off course by some uncontrollable force. But in my love for Ershadi I nearly didn’t exist beyond that great feeling. To call it compassion makes it sound like a form of divine love, and it wasn’t that; it was terribly human. If anything, it was an animal love, the love of an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and realizes that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.

  It sounds far-fetched, but at that moment I had the feeling that I could save Ershadi. Still running, I passed under the monumental wooden gate and my footfalls echoed up in the rafters. A sense of fear began to seep in, fear that he planned to take his life just like the character he’d barely played, and that I had lost the brief chance I’d been given to intercede. When I reached the street it was deserted. I turned in the direction that led to the famous pathway alongside the narrow river and ran, my bag slapping against my thigh. What would I have said to him if I had caught up to him? What would I have asked him about devotion? What was it that I wanted to be when he turned and at last his gaze fell upon me? It didn’t matter, because when I came around the bend the path was empty, the trees black and bare. Back at the ryokan, hunched on the tatami floor, I searched online, but there was no news about Homayoun Ershadi, nothing to suggest that he was traveling in Japan, or no longer alive.

  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 the man 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 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 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.

  She had seen Taste of Cherry five or six years ago, in London. Like me, she had been utterly moved by the film and by Ershadi’s face. Disturbed, even. And yet, at the last moment, she had been released into joy. Yes, joy was 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 her teenage years she and her father had grown distant, 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’d sat with her at her bedside the more she’d forgiven 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 d
octors 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, of spies, and of the struggle 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.

  It was during 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 the film, but she was 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 when 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 among those who remained.