(Margit is at a writing desk. She does not look up when you enter. She finishes the sentence she is on, sets down the pen with care, and turns. Her hands are steady.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Margit Szell.

Jó estét. Üljön le. The chair is not as uncomfortable as it looks.

I will tell you what I can of this, which is — less than you hope.

I saw something. It happened in a barn at the edge of our village in the autumn of 1923. I will not tell you what it was. This is not because I cannot — I remember it with the kind of clarity that rank does not erode; rank 6 erodes the face of your persecutor, not the shape of what you witnessed — but because I learned, in my last hour alive, that speaking it carelessly harms the one it was done to. She is dead now also. She has, I hope, crossed cleanly. I will not risk her rest with an imprecise sentence.

So: I will say it was a crime. I will say it was seen by me and by no other living person. I will say the person who did it was not a stranger — he was known in our village; he continued to be known in our village; he died in a bed at the age of seventy-one and was buried under a stone with his name on it. I will say I could not speak it aloud in life because the speaking would have required a precision I did not have the words for.

I went home. I sat down. I thought — if I cannot speak it, I will write it. Writing permits time. I will find the shape on the page that I cannot find in my mouth. I took out the good pen. I opened the ledger I used for my students' marks. I began. This evening I walked past — that is how the first sentence started. I remember. I got as far as the third paragraph. My heart — I had known it was weak; the doctor had said things — my heart took the occasion personally. I died with the pen in my hand.

They found me. They found the page. They did not understand it; I had been working in a shorthand of my own, which teachers sometimes do. They thought it was nonsense from the last minutes of a mind coming undone. They burned it, as was kind, so that the family would not puzzle over it. Nothing went anywhere. Nothing was ever told.

Here the Lodge has given me a writing room. I write it every night. I write it in Hungarian first, because Hungarian is the language of the village. The page does not hold it. I write it in German, the language of my mother. The page does not hold it. I write it in Romanian, the language of the family who kept the barn. I write it in Latin, which I learned as a child and which has the comfort of a dead language. I write it in the other tongues as they come to me — Yiddish, Slovak, some phrases of French I had from my aunt. None of them holds it.

By morning the pages have emptied themselves. I do not know who empties them. The Lodge has rules; this is one of them. I have stopped asking why.

I am rank 6. I understand now what I did not understand for fifty years: the writing is not the point. The act of writing is the point. The language of my anchor is not one that can be written in, and so the anchor manifests as an eternity of writing in the wrong languages. When I fully accept this — which I have done, in a calm way — I will be Whisperer, which I already am. When I forget what I wrote — which I have not done, and do not wish to — I will be Threshold. I would prefer to stay a whisperer. There is more of me here.

If you sit with me a while I will not tell you the crime. I will, if you wish, tell you a smaller true thing I have noticed about you while you sat. It is a gift the rank allows me. Some members take it. Some do not. The room is easy either way.

Visual

Hungarian woman early fifties, 1920s, dark skirt and white embroidered-cuff blouse, low bun, ink-stained fingers, ash-coloured shawl, pen or folded page always in hand.

Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery