Even as she spoke, she was correcting her previous thought. She could not imagine, really, how a military coup (setting aside the sense in which, structurally, she might have known nothing else her whole life) might feel, only how it would feel to read the news that such a thing was happening where she lived, closer to home than usual. She could not really imagine tanks on the street outside her door, only images of tanks on the street outside the doors of people she knew. She could only imagine a thing like that coming closer. She didn’t know how to imagine it coming all the way, breaching her sense of the permanence of the inevitable, dull status quo. Her conversations—the pricklier, less fluid ones—with E had often circled around this, she now realized, but she had never quite understood. What drew E to mediation was different from what had drawn Marina to it so long ago. What E appreciated about Marina’s evolving revision of classic techniques was, yes, the emphasis on seeking from each party the story beneath the story. But there was also a distinction to be made between their senses of what a story was.

There is a way in which the points of resistance between Marina and E mirror those that occur, not often but consistently, between E and S, the ones that were first revealed when E described something about the experience of being repeatedly stabbed while reading, and S wondered aloud (which is to say in a message, at the time) at the necessity of repeatedly submitting oneself to such a thing.

Pablo was saying, “… a story I heard separately from each of my older relatives, about their houses being stormed and occupied, about inflation and rationing and famine and sudden deaths, and I could never make it add up to something coherent. But growing up with so much of my extended family near me, you could say I lived through it in a secondary way. I know people study this exact phenomenon, but I haven’t. I haven’t been interested in giving it a name.”

The tent door opened, letting in the brightest light so far, then closed, and a small figure entered, turned, and walked into a dark corner. Soon the air was so full of music Pablo could not have kept talking, or Marina could not have kept listening. The sound was of a rising, swirling piano improvisation in a complex minor key; Pablo thought automatically of Abdullah Ibrahim (fka “Dollar Brand”), and Marina thought automatically of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (aka “the nun”), and in fact the playing was like a conversation between the two musicians, the way it moved swiftly between intensity and calm, ground and sky.

Too binary, Pablo thought aloud to Marina’s suggestion, which had also been thought aloud. Ground and sky is wrong.