"What do you talk about?" she said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "What we remember. What we were doing when—" He stopped. He looked at his hands in the dark. "What we were doing before."
"Before what?" she said.
He looked at her. In the dark, his sharp eyes caught what little light there was and reflected it back, the way old people's eyes sometimes did. "Before the trouble," he said. "We talk about what we were doing before the trouble. It is important to remember."
She stood in the courtyard and listened to the voices of the village talking in the dark. After a while she went back to her room. She lay on the cot. She did not sleep for a long time. The voices continued outside — the texture of many people remembering many things, all at once, in the dark, for hours.
At some point before dawn she slept. She dreamed nothing. When she woke, the village was beginning its morning in the specific way of villages that began their mornings with the first light — fires being lit, the sound of water being drawn from the well, the resumption of the grain-pounding rhythm, the ordinary sounds of a real place doing its ordinary things.
She lay on the cot and listened to it and told herself it was a real place and these were real people and she had a job to do and she would do it and then she would leave and she would understand the camera when she had better light and better equipment and she would understand the voices when she had more context and she would understand all of it from a distance.
From inside it, understanding was harder. That was what she told herself.
