Both of them are bothered by their environment, but for different reasons. Old Man says: we’re used to being alone, this is very strange! But on top of that she feels a trace of embarrassment, not exactly because people are seeing her with him, with that eccentric Old Man, but because she is witness to the way he is treated, and she knows she can’t do anything to defend him.

She would like him to tell her more details. What happened when he was arrested. Where exactly they took him. What they asked him. What they did to him. Soon’s knowledge only comes from fragments, unconnected things she heard here and there, barely audible phrases caught by accident, through closed doors, from the kitchen, in mangled phone conversations; plus there’s what she was told directly, which she knows is only partial, and as such, a lie. Corruption of minors, she heard, although later she learned that expression wasn’t used anymore. These days the phrase is crimes against sexual freedom. It sounds strange, because Soon didn’t even know that she had sexuality, much less any freedom regarding it. For her it was all—is all—incomprehensible. She blushes at the mere thought that they asked him the same questions as her. Was there touching? Did he take pictures of you? Did he ask you to take your clothes off—some or all of them? Did he take his clothes off? Did he show you videos or photos of other children? Or of other adults committing obscene acts? The policeman who asked the questions treated her gently, but he didn’t beat around the bush. Her mother, sitting beside her, translated for her in a low voice. Obscene means dirty, things you shouldn’t do with your body, things that make you ashamed or feel bad. No, no, no, Soon said, disturbed. But, what about the things she wrote in her notebook …? She went silent. Why had she written such things? Should she admit she made them up? Was that the same thing as admitting she’d committed an obscene act? Soon was silent, holding back her tears, and that only emphasized—no doubt about it—that she was hiding something.

Don’t be scared, her father told her later, and then she heard him whisper to her mother: she’s protecting him, that dirty old man. That pervert. That degenerate.

(But Old Man hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t either, really. She’d only written it. Her round, childish handwriting had turned dangerous, accusatory.)

Old Man toys with the paper napkins. He tears them into strips, rolls them around his chubby fingers and makes rings out of them, one on each finger. They’d asked him the same questions as her, surely, but in a different, cruder tone, without meeting his eyes, and he’d had no mother there to translate. He refused to give a statement, she’d heard them say. A guilty silence, his, because not to talk is to confess. He who is silent concedes.

Old Man isn’t going to give her the details. He’s not going to tell her anything about those days. He would love to go back to talking about birds. That’s the only thing he says. He misses it! Does Soon know that just a few days ago they found a new species of finch? There were only three hundred of them left in the world, so few that they were unclassified! Incredible, because their color is extraordinary, pure blue, a clean, sharp blue. They could have gone extinct and no one, never ever, would have recorded their existence in the world!