Jess hesitated, as if surprised by the question, which had also surprised D’Arcy. It was clear that the older woman was considering how to respond. Then Jess stood up. “Perhaps if I fetch it for you. Will the cord reach?”

It was the kind of thing that would have any other documentary producer leaping up and stopping the recording, an old woman standing in the middle of the interview and pointing out the artifice of the microphone cords.

But D’Arcy liked it, the fleeting glimpse of uncertainty, so different to the artificial way everyone now saw the world, arranged just so by stylist-directed photographs. It was why she’d gone into film in the first place, rather than photography; film caught stretches of time, rather than just the one moment, so it was sometimes possible to catch the actual truth, instead of the ideal truth that had been frozen and downsized and trapped into a split second.

“It’ll reach,” D’Arcy said.

Jess returned with, surprisingly, a newspaper. D’Arcy had been expecting a copy of Vogue. She picked up the other camera and moved the lens over the yellowed pages of a 1946 copy of the New York Courier, one of the papers owned by World Media Group, and an article titled, “I’ve Got a Pistol and There Ain’t Nobody Going to Stop Me Having Her.”

The article detailed rapes by U.S. Army soldiers throughout World War II. It included photographs, grainy now with age, of sober women, eyes lightless, passive, as if anything they had would be gifted with resignation because they’d learned it was easier that way. D’Arcy read about a woman who’d been given what she’d thought was a pass excusing her from providing the U.S. Army with more food and shelter because she’d done her share, but that the note, written in English and not understood by the German woman, essentially exhorted the next soldier to take from the woman what the first man had also stolen. At the next paragraph, D’Arcy stopped.

“Will you read this aloud?” D’Arcy asked, passing Jess the newspaper and focusing on Jess’s face in close-up with the camera.

Jess didn’t respond immediately, watching D’Arcy, who hoped the camera would record exactly what she could see: a frightened woman whom age had made more arresting because her huge eyes were overcast with tragedy. Why did pathos render something more beautiful? D’Arcy wondered now.

Finally, Jess nodded and began to read. “A girl’s screams came from behind a locked door and an American voice ordered, ‘Stop clawing, you little bitch, or I’m gonna break your bloody neck.’ Banging and kicking, I bellowed, ‘Hey, quit that and open the door!’ The door opened—just a chink—as a man peered out to demand, ‘What the hell do you mean, squawking orders at me.’ With matter-of-fact brutality, he told me, ‘I’ve got a pistol and there ain’t nobody going to stop me having her or any other German gal I want. We won ’em, didn’t we?’ Then he slammed the door.”