I told him I sometimes wondered whether the experiences of these women would be buried again waiting to be dug up by later generations. I wondered if their words would be released into a future or lost to time.

Jacques Payac said, Violence is with us always. Do not let their words be lost.

Did I tell you about the evidence vaults where they keep the court records? I asked. Rows and rows of white file boxes on metal shelves in the basements. Below the earth. Orders. Telegrams. Radio transmissions. Scraps of rotting cloth, blindfolds, bindings, guns, ammunition. What do such relics mean?

Jacques shifted in his chair. Took off his leg.

I said, Always I have loved being in the world. But their stories. Each woman tells a fragment of that war. The true story and the story of the story must cleave. But there remains shame and silence.

Jacques said, You cannot write all of it.

I said, The women are not words transcribed on a page or images in pel and raster. They are flesh-chained and living. They called for help. No one came.

Jacques balanced his leg against his desk. Leaned back in his chair. He said, No one can undo knowing.

I thought, Locked in a basement vault full of files is the plea of a child, a flower girl at a wedding, Hana. Her mother’s moan silenced a courtroom. The transcript reads: My daughter wanted to live. No one helped her.

I said, There is only time’s erasing. The law carves incisions in old scars and makes a record, and still there is no healing.

Jacques’ stump was bothering him and I watched him massage it. I asked him for more work, said I wasn’t sleeping well, said I needed money, said I needed to settle down.

He said, Young man, you will not sleep until you write their stories. Get off your ass and put Joe de Pone to work.

I laughed and said, Don’t talk to me. I already wrote the story.

He raised his glass.

I asked, Has anyone ever mentioned the disappearance of Joe de Pone’s columns?

Not a single person. No one misses him.

Do you think anything makes a difference?

He said, As opposed to nothing? We have to care enough to imagine each other’s lives.

I said, Now the law has changed again. But we cannot hold shifting history any better than we can hold water in our hands.

When the law changes, he said, consciousness changes. Allow but a little consciousness.

I said, There are more women and more wars. What about them?

He said, I am thinking of the women you have written about.

There is no solace, I said. There is only forgetting.

He said, Not forgetting. The stories are there.

But it goes on.

He said, I have not forgotten what two light feet on the ground feel like or the touch of a lover on my leg before there was loss and pain. I have not forgotten the stories you have told me. Memory is caught in time. I respect consciousness. But I love time.