The Schwartz is in you, Lonestar: "Seeing Ershadi" by Nicole Krauss

Best American Short Stories doesn't group its selections by topic or theme. They go strictly in order of the last names of authors. If they did group by stories that pair well together, like the O.Henry Anthology does, I can pretty much guarantee that "Seeing Ershadi" by Nicole Krauss would have been right next to "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott, which we've seen already. Both stories feature young women making questionable choices in men, women who then have chance encounters with art that change their entire trajectories. Both women spend a good chunk of the story trying to decode the meaning of the art they've come across, and both come across answers that were unexpected to them, but obvious in retrospect.

For "Ershadi," though, I wasn't sure throughout the story that the meaning was going to become apparent. Krauss bailed me out at the end by having a character straight-up tell the reader what the story meant, more or less. I love when writers do that.

The narrator (Karen, if you're reading, I think we've got another round in our BASS drinking game, because I didn't notice a name for the narrator) starts off in an unhealthy relationship with a man. It's not a romantic relationship, although the narrator's dedication to the relationship is just as strong as the craziest of crazy loves. She's dedicated to a ballet choreographer, whom she's wanted to work with for a long time. "I'd sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training" to make it into the company as dancer. Once in, she is as devoted as any teen in love: "I felt I was constantly on the verge of discovery. Until one day I realized that I had become fanatical--that what I had taken for devotion had crossed the line into something else." She even allows her devotion to the choreographer's vision for the ballet to invade her own body. She does not go out into the sun, although she'd like to take advantage of the beach while she stays in Israel where the ballet is headquartered, because the choreographer wants the dancers' bodies "to be as white as the skin on our asses." She eventually develops painful tendinitis in her ankle, forcing her to down Motrin like candy.

It's while she's laid up that she has her encounter with the film that will change her life. It's Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997). The way she describes the film, it sounds like a Farsi version of The Brown Bunny, but she apparently likes it. It's a lot of uncomfortably long shots of the actor Homayoun Ershadi, who wasn't really an actor but someone Kiarostami found on the street for the role. Ershadi drives around looking for someone to bury him. He's already dug the hole, and he's planning to take pills and kill himself. He just needs someone to bury him. 

She finds the film intriguing and says it "did something to me," but she doesn't declare what, because watching the movie isn't the real jarring encounter she has that changes her life. That happens when the ballet troupe goes to Japan. She's all lost and disoriented and ends up mistakenly in the middle of a temple somewhere, when she swears for all the world she sees Ershadi in the temple. His body has changed, but she can't forget his face after seeing a whole movie that was little else but his face. She finds herself, when faced with the hopelessness of his face, the hopelessness she takes to be genuine because Ershadi was not a practiced actor, "filled with such an overwhelmingly tender feeling that I can only call it love."

"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 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 sound far-fetched, but at that moment I had the feeling that I could save Ershadi"

No sooner does she feel love, though, than she gets derailed by a large group of women, and she can't find him again. When she flies back, she starts to think it was silly to think she found him there, and she doubts the whole thing.

She tells the story to her friend as a joke, and finds, beyond all belief, that her friend has also seen an apparition of Ershadi. This begins the second half of the story, which comes in at just about the geographical halfway mark of the text. There is an echo at this point in the musicality of the text to indicate that it is also a psychological new beginning. In the story's opening lines, the narrator says, in a doubled sentiment that "...I devoted myself...without reserve, applied myself without reserve." When Romi, the narrator's friend hears about what the narrator saw, her "large eyes became larger." We know we are entering a new phase of the story.

Romi is an actress, and she's a lot like the way the narrator thinks of Ershadi: "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....in her films she was only ever herself." So she's just a natural actress, not really dissimulating in her work as much as just revealing herself. 

Romi's encouner with Ershadi was this: she was staying with her dad in the final days of him dying with cancer after she'd recently been reconciled to him. She took a break one day when the hospice nurse was there to see a movie, and she picked Taste of Cherry. She felt the same intensity of Ershadi's gaze upon her, but it opened her up to the audience around her: "Romi felt aware of herself watching, and the others also watching." She is crying by the end, but happy. 

She gets in an unhealthy relationship with an ex after her dad finally dies, because she is numb and the rough sex--not the good kind of rough sex--at least makes her feel something. She is spinning through the channels one night after the rough sex and she sees Ershadi for a second. She mistakenly spins past him, and when she goes back, she can't find him. But that one second of his face is enough for her to realize that it's time for her to leave the bad relationship. 

The narrator is actually jealous of Romi's encounter with Ershadi, because Romi seemed to know what it meant, while the narrator is still trying to grasp at straws to figure out what it meant for her, what she was "supposed to do with it." 

The next day, she is sick, sick of taking so much Advil, and kind of sick of killing herself for the ballet. She leaves the company and goes back to NYU. Romi starts dating a rich man, whom she eventually marries. The two friends stay in contact, though the frequency wanes over the years, until one day, the narrator sees Ershadi's face on an ad for the movie that was playing at some art house somewhere. She contacts Romi, who replies a few days later, because she's busy with kids. She's getting divorced. And then she gives away what the whole story is about:

"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 that we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths."

Romi has realized this after re-watching the film and seeing Ershadi's character wasn't as saintly as she had first thought. But she kind of knew this realization all along. So did the narrator, really, although she thought she was missing the point. But she did, in fact, realize she needed to quit the ballet. "Sooner or later....I would have had to admit that in the blaze of my ambition I'd failed to check myself. I would have had to face how miserable I was..."

I've never seen Taste of Cherry, but I have seen this movie, in which the main character has an epiphany that's more or less the same as the one experienced by the narrator of "Seeing Ershadi." Also, I think this movie is probably just about as good as Taste of Cherry. 

The point

I've spent nearly this entire analysis just recounting the story rather than actually analyzing it, but that's because in this story, the key really is right there in the story itself. The secret isn't hidden. People fool themselves by going through life thinking the tools they need are some great secret, only unlockable by a magic talisman, but in fact, most of us probably know most of the answers already.

It is tempting to view this story primarily as a critique of the male gaze or of men who control women, since Ershadi's gaze takes such a prominent role in the story, and each woman is controlled by a man at some point. But I think that's just part of the story, not the main event. Men are one of the ill-chosen obsessions the women get into that derail them from their happiness. The other is art. Specifically, they have been distracted by a particular aesthetic, one which romanticizes a Byronic sensibility toward death. This romanticism tends to also idealize Byronic men. But by the end, they've seen through the romance of that ruse. They've chosen life, both of them having children now. The Byronic charm of men depends on women who, like the narrator, want to save them. But the antidote to that is just to watch the movie a second time, at which point its defects become apparent and the whole appeal wears off.