Lift Your Chin

Notes: The Trunk

Sunday, 7 December 2025. Arat Kilo, Addis Ababa. Evening.

Writing this on the back step because the house is full of my mother's cousins and the smell of onions, and because if I do not write it down tonight I will start to tell it differently tomorrow. My grandfather used to say that. He said a story is like bread: the first day it is itself, and by the third day everyone has added butter.

Facts first.

Today Abba and I carried the trunk down from the room above the old garage. It is green tin with brass corners, and it was heavier than a trunk of clothes, heavier than a trunk of books. My father said, "He kept rocks in it. I always knew." He was joking, but he sat down on the bottom stair after we set it on the floor and did not get up for a while.

Inside: shoeboxes. Thirty-one of them, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string that broke when I touched it. Each box labeled in my grandfather's square capitals, the letters he used for the studio sign. ADDIS 1961-63. ADDIS 1964-66. ASMARA 1962. ASMARA 1964-65. DJIBOUTI 1967-69. HARGEISA 1970-71. And on, up to 1972, when my father was born and the travel stopped.

Inside each box: negatives in glassine sleeves, the paper gone the color of weak tea. Hundreds to a box. I held one up to the bulb in the stairwell and saw a girl in a white dress with her hair pinned high, laughing at something to the left of the camera. Black where she was white. White where her eyes were. Sixty years old and still laughing.

Studio Tsehay. Girma Wolde, Proprietor. Portraits, Weddings, Passports, Children. Most of Addis over fifty has heard of it. The sign hung above a door in Piassa from 1960 until 1989, the gold sun on blue with rays like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. But this is not the studio work. These are the road years. From 1961 to 1972, Girma alone at first and then Girma and Senait together, packed a camera, a tripod, a folding backdrop and a box of chemicals, and they went where people were: Asmara, Djibouti, Hargeisa, and every town the trains and buses could reach between them. They set up in rented rooms, hotel courtyards, the back of a tailor's shop. They photographed whoever came. Weddings, babies, men in new suits, girls with new braids, old women who had never been photographed in their lives.

Two thousand negatives at least. Possibly more. I have not counted.

That is the fact part. Here is the part I keep turning over.

The sleeves are marked. In the top right corner of each one, in pencil, small, a single letter. Most say S. Some say G. I thought at first S meant sold, a print sold, and G meant something else, a gift, a giveaway, but then I found sleeves marked S where the print would never have been sold, a picture of a goat, a picture of a street with nobody in it. So I do not know.

---

Tuesday, 9 December. Bole, my flat.

Called Ubah. Told her about the trunk. She came over after her shift at the radio station and we spread the Hargeisa box on my kitchen table on a clean sheet, and she put on cotton gloves without being told, because that is Ubah.

"These are my city," she said. She held one up to the window. A street, a row of shops, a man on a bicycle with a goat across the handlebars, both of them looking at the camera with the same expression. She started laughing so hard she had to set the negative down.

"That is the face my grandmother makes when the price is wrong," she said.

Ubah Jama, twenty-nine. Sound recordist. Born in Hargeisa, came to Addis at eighteen to study and stayed. She has worked on four of my commissions: two water-project films, one hospital fund-raiser, one cooking program that nobody broadcast. She has the best ears I have ever worked with and she will not let me record anything in a room with a refrigerator running. She calls me "director" when she is annoyed and "Meron" when she is not.

"You know what you have here," she said. Not a question.

"A trunk."

"A film."

I said I had thought of that.

"You have not thought of it," she said. "You have been afraid of it. It is different."

We looked at the Hargeisa negatives until eleven. On one of them, a market stall, a woman's shadow lies across the ground in the bottom corner. The shadow of whoever was standing behind the camera. Long, with the sun low. The shadow has a scarf. My grandfather never wore a scarf in his life.

I have marked the sleeve with a paper flag. It says S.

---

Friday, 12 December.

Things I know about my grandparents, in a list, because lists are how I stop panicking.

Girma Wolde. Born 1936 in Dire Dawa, where the railway workshops were. Son of a railway clerk. Went to Addis at sixteen to work for an Armenian photographer in Piassa, sweeping, then printing, then shooting. Opened Studio Tsehay in 1960 at twenty-four with a loan from an uncle and a camera bought secondhand. Died November 2019, at eighty-three, in the room that is now my father's study. Told the same stories every Sunday for my whole childhood: the night in Asmara the generator failed in the middle of a wedding, the camel in Hargeisa that ate a backdrop, the heat in Djibouti that curled the paper. Always the same words in the same order. If you changed a word he would correct you.

Senait Tewolde. Born 14 March 1944 in Asmara. Daughter of a tailor. Met Girma in 1962, when she was eighteen and he came to Asmara with his camera to photograph a wedding at her father's shop. Went with him. Married him in 1964 in Addis. Worked in the studio. Raised my father. Raised half of me, if I am honest about it, while my mother taught school. Eighty-one. Will be eighty-two in March.

She is still herself. Mostly. She knows all of us. She knows the price of teff and which of the neighbors' sons are no good. She does not always know what day it is, and sometimes in the afternoons she speaks to my grandfather in the next room as if he has gone out for cigarettes. The doctor says it is slow and may stay slow. The doctor says the old memories are stored in a different cupboard from the new ones, and the new cupboard is the one with the loose door.

What she says about the road years, when asked: "I carried the bags."

That is all. Every time. I carried the bags.

---

Same night, later.

Told my father I want to make a film about the trunk. Not a commission. Mine. Find the people in the photographs, the ones who are still alive, and sit with them, and ask them what the day was like. What they wore and why. Who did their hair. Who was standing outside the frame. Who they lost and who they married. Let the old faces speak to the young faces.

He was quiet. Then he said, "You'll need money."

"I have some. And I'll find more."

"You'll need your grandmother."

"I know."

"She won't want to."

"I know that too."

He rubbed the back of his neck, the way his father used to. "Start with the coffee," he said. "Don't start with the camera. Start with the coffee."

Working title, written on the inside of the Addis 1961 box lid in my own handwriting so I cannot pretend I did not decide: Lift Your Chin.

It is what she used to say to me before school photographs. Not Girma. Her.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 01: Senait, Arat Kilo

TRANSCRIPT 01
Subject: Senait Tewolde, 81
Place: the sitting room of the family house, Arat Kilo, Addis Ababa
Date: Sunday, 14 December 2025, late morning
Present: Meron Dawit (MD), interviewer and camera; Ubah Jama (UJ), sound
Language: Amharic, with some Tigrinya; translated by MD
Notes: Subject agreed to be filmed "while I make the coffee, not after." Camera on tripod, wide, from the door. Lavalier refused. Ubah used the boom from the hall.

[00:00:04]
SENAIT: Is it on? The red light. Is that on?

MD: It's on, Emama.

SENAIT: Then I am going to roast. You can talk if you want. I'm not going to stop for you.

[00:00:21]
[Sound of green beans poured into the flat iron pan. Charcoal brazier lit earlier; UJ notes the hiss.]

MD: Tell me what you're doing. For people who don't know.

SENAIT: People who don't know. Who doesn't know coffee?

MD: People far away.

SENAIT: Then they should come here. [Pause.] Fine. These are the green beans. I washed them already, three times, you rub them in your hands in the water until the water comes clean. Now they go in the pan over the coal, and you move them, you never stop moving them. The old women, my mother's friends in Asmara, they said if you stop moving the beans you will burn them and also your marriage. I don't know about the marriage. The beans, yes.

[00:01:40]
MD: How do you know when they're done?

SENAIT: You listen. Your friend with the stick knows. Ask her.

UJ: [off] They start to crack.

SENAIT: They crack. Then the smoke. Then the color, like a horse. A brown horse, not a black horse. Black horse is too far.

[00:02:55]
[Smoke rising. Subject carries the pan around the room, waves the smoke toward MD with her hand. This is the custom: the guest is invited to smell the roasted beans. MD coughs. Subject laughs.]

SENAIT: There. Now you are welcomed. Put that in your film.

[00:03:30]
MD: Emama, I want to ask you about the trunk.

SENAIT: I'm grinding.

[Sound of the mortar. Wooden pestle, iron mortar. Steady.]

MD: The trunk from above the garage. With the negatives.

SENAIT: I know which trunk. There is only one trunk.

MD: You've seen it?

SENAIT: I packed it. In 1989, when we closed the shop. He wanted to throw out the road boxes and I said no, and he said they are only negatives, nobody wants negatives, and I said put them in the trunk. So. They went in the trunk.

[00:04:52]
MD: Why didn't he want them?

SENAIT: Ask him.

MD: Emama.

SENAIT: [Pause. Grinding stops, then starts.] He thought the studio pictures were the real work. Passports. Weddings in the good room with the painted backdrop of the lake. That was the business. The road was the road. You do the road when you are young and have no money, and then you stop.

[00:05:40]
MD: What do you remember about the road?

SENAIT: I carried the bags.

MD: You always say that.

SENAIT: Because it is true. There was a bag for the camera and a bag for the tripod and a box for the chemicals, and the backdrop rolled up on a pole, like a flag. He carried the camera. I carried everything else. Ask anybody.

[00:06:18]
[Subject pours the ground coffee into the jebena, the round clay pot with the long neck. Water already in. Sets it on the coal.]

SENAIT: Now we wait. You know how long?

MD: Until it boils.

SENAIT: Until it boils three times. You let it come up, you take it off, you let it come up. The first boil is impatience. The second boil is the coffee thinking. The third boil is the coffee.

[00:07:05]
MD: Did he say that?

SENAIT: Who?

MD: Grandfather. It sounds like him.

SENAIT: He said nothing about coffee. He drank it. I said it.

[00:07:30]
[Subject arranges the small handleless cups on the tray. Six cups. Places the incense on the coal; a curl of frankincense. Fresh grass on the floor under the tray, which Hirut, MD's mother, cut from the yard at seven this morning.]

MD: Do you remember Asmara in 1962? When you met him?

SENAIT: [Long pause.] There was a wedding. My father's shop was on the avenue, near the cinema, and the family of the bride used the shop because the bride's uncle was my father's best customer. And the young man from Addis came with his camera. He had one shirt. White. He washed it every night in my father's basin and hung it on the cutting table. My father was furious. My mother was charmed. I was eighteen, I was nothing, I swept the threads.

MD: And then?

SENAIT: And then. And then the bride's sister fainted from the heat, and he said, "Someone hold the light," and I held the light.

[00:09:12]
MD: Hold the light how?

SENAIT: There was a board, covered in silver paper. You hold it to throw the sun into the faces, so the shadows don't eat them. I held it. He said, "Higher." I said, "If I hold it higher it will catch her ear, she has a big ear." He looked at me. He moved her. He said, "Hold it where you think." I held it where I thought.

[00:09:50]
[Coffee boils. Subject lifts it, waits, sets it back. UJ notes: subject's hands steady.]

MD: That's the first time you heard him say that?

SENAIT: Say what?

MD: "Hold it where you think."

SENAIT: Did I say he said that?

MD: Just now.

SENAIT: Then he said it.

[00:10:44]
[Third boil. Subject pours from height, one long stream into each cup, without stopping between cups, so the grounds stay in the pot. Does not spill. MD notes: this is the hardest thing in the room to film and the easiest thing for her to do.]

SENAIT: The first cup. Abol. You know this.

MD: I know.

SENAIT: Then say it for the people far away.

MD: The first cup is abol. Then the pot is filled with water again and boiled, and the second cup is tona. Then once more, the third cup, baraka. Three rounds. You don't leave before the third.

SENAIT: Good. You can go to school now.

[00:11:30]
MD: Emama. The sleeves have letters on them. S and G. Do you know what they mean?

[Long pause. Subject drinks.]

SENAIT: Your coffee is getting cold.

MD: I'll drink it. What do the letters mean?

SENAIT: Ask your grandfather. He wrote them.

MD: The handwriting on the S's isn't his.

[00:12:15]
[Subject sets the cup down. Looks at the camera directly for the first time. Holds it. UJ, later: "She knew exactly where the lens was the whole time. She was just choosing not to look."]

SENAIT: Is that thing still on?

MD: Yes.

SENAIT: Turn it off.

MD: Emama.

SENAIT: Turn it off, and drink your coffee, and tonight we will see.

[00:12:31]
[Recording stopped by MD.]

---

MD note, written same day: Did not turn it back on. We drank all three rounds. She asked Ubah about her mother, and about whether the rain had come in Hargeisa yet, and whether the camel milk in Addis was any good, and Ubah said no, it was terrible, and Emama laughed and said, "Everything here is terrible, that's why we stay." She did not mention the letters again. When we left she held my wrist at the door and said, "Asmara first. If you go, you go in the right order." I asked what the right order was. She said, "The order we went."

She has never once in my life told me about the order they went.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 02: Mulugeta, the Azmari House

TRANSCRIPT 02
Subject: Mulugeta Asfaw, 78, azmari (singer and masinko player)
Place: a back room of the Seven Strings, an azmari house off Bole Road, before opening
Date: Thursday, 18 December 2025, 5:40 p.m.
Present: MD, interviewer and camera; UJ, sound
Language: Amharic; translated by MD
Notes: Found through the photograph. Ubah showed a print of negative ADDIS 1964-66 / 211 to the owner of the Seven Strings, who said, "That is the old man. He still plays Thursdays." In the print: a young man of perhaps nineteen, very thin, in a white shirt buttoned to the neck, holding a masinko upright on his knee like a rifle at a parade. Sleeve marked S.

[00:00:10]
MULUGETA: Is this the picture? Give it to me. [Holds the print at arm's length. Then very close. Then at arm's length again.] Oh. Oh, this boy. Look at him. He thinks he is a king.

MD: Is it you?

MULUGETA: Of course it is me. Who else has ears like that? [Laughs.] My mother said God gave me big ears so I would hear the money coming.

[00:00:48]
MD: Do you remember the day?

MULUGETA: I remember the shirt. The shirt was my brother's. He was taller than me, so I tucked it until it came out of my knees. You can see? Here. That is my brother's shirt pretending to be my shirt.

MD: And the place?

MULUGETA: A wedding. In Kazanchis, in a courtyard with a lemon tree. I was hired with my teacher, old Tekle, who was very famous then and is dead now. He played and I carried his instrument and his umbrella and sang the parts he was too tired to sing. That day he got sick from the meat, too much raw meat, and he sat under the lemon tree with his head in his hands, and I had to play the whole wedding alone. Nineteen years old. I was so frightened my bow was shaking.

[00:02:10]
MD: For people who don't know, can you say what an azmari does?

MULUGETA: [Turns to the camera, grand.] An azmari is a newspaper with one string.

[UJ laughs off camera.]

MULUGETA: It is true. We go to the weddings and the houses and the bars, and we sing about the people in the room. If a man is very rich, we sing that he is very generous, until he becomes generous. If a man is very stingy, we sing that he is very generous anyway, but we sing it in a way that everybody knows. We sing about the bride's beauty and the groom's luck. We tease. We praise. We make the verses up while we are standing there, out of nothing, out of what we see. That is the skill. Not the voice. Anybody can have a voice. The skill is the eye.

[00:03:15]
MD: And they pay you how?

MULUGETA: You don't know this? Your grandmother didn't teach you anything. [He takes a folded note from his pocket and presses it flat against his own forehead.] Like this. The guest comes up and puts the money on the forehead of the singer, and it sticks there with the sweat, and you keep singing. A good night, you go home looking like a tree in autumn. Leaves all over.

[00:04:02]
MD: Tell me about the photographer.

MULUGETA: Which?

MD: The day of this picture. Who took it?

MULUGETA: [Studies print.] There were two of them. A young man, and a girl. Very young, the girl. Your age? No. Younger than you. Very serious face.

MD: Do you remember anything about them?

MULUGETA: The man had a big silver board. Like a door made of the foil from cigarette packets. And he stood with it, like so, holding the sun. The girl was behind the camera. She was the one with her head under the cloth.

[00:04:50]
[MD notes: this is the first time anyone has said this. Ubah looked at me over the boom. I did not move.]

MD: You're sure? She was behind the camera?

MULUGETA: Sure? Sixty years. I am not sure of my own name. [Pause.] But yes. I am sure. Because I was standing like a soldier with the masinko, very proud, and her voice came out from under the black cloth and said, "Lift your chin. You are a musician, not a policeman." And everybody in the courtyard laughed, and I was so angry I lifted my chin to show her, and that is the picture. You see? Look at the chin. Up. That chin is angry.

[00:05:40]
MD: Did she say anything else?

MULUGETA: She said, "Now play something." I played. She took another one while I played. Do you have that one?

MD: I'll look.

MULUGETA: Look. I would like that one. My grandchildren have never seen me young with an instrument. They have seen me old with an instrument, which is a different animal.

[00:06:30]
MD: Can you show me the masinko? For the people who don't know.

MULUGETA: [Lifts the instrument from its case. Diamond-shaped body, goatskin face, one string of horsehair, a bow curved like a new moon.] One string. People from outside see this and they say, "Only one?" I say, "How many mouths do you have?" One string, but you can do everything. You press the string with the side of your finger, not the tip, like this. You never press it to the neck. You float.

[Plays a short phrase. UJ notes: recorded at 48k, clean, no refrigerator.]

[00:07:50]
MD: Can you make up a verse? About the photograph?

MULUGETA: For money?

MD: [Pause.] Yes.

[MD steps into frame and presses a note to his forehead. He laughs so hard he must stop and wipe his eyes. Then he plays and sings. MD's translation follows; it is rough, it loses the rhymes, which were very good.]

MULUGETA: [Singing, translated.] Here is a girl from far away / who came to my door with a box / she says I am in the box / I say I am not that small / she says, look, it is you / and it is me, it is me, with my brother's shirt / still trying to be taller than the day.

[00:09:15]
[Silence. UJ checks levels.]

MULUGETA: You see? Out of nothing.

MD: That was beautiful.

MULUGETA: It was all right. [Puts the masinko on his knee.] Your grandmother. The girl under the cloth. That was her?

MD: I think so. I don't know.

MULUGETA: You should know. It's your grandmother.

MD: She says she carried the bags.

[00:09:50]
MULUGETA: [Long pause. Looks at the print again.] Then she carried the bags. And she also took my picture. A person can do two things. I am a singer and I also fix bicycles on Saturdays. Nobody calls me a bicycle man. They call me a singer. [Pause.] But if you asked my wife, she would tell you the bicycles paid for the house.

[00:10:30]
MD: What do you want people to know? When they see this picture of you?

MULUGETA: That I was frightened. Look at me. Nineteen, alone, Tekle sick under the tree, three hundred people in the courtyard. I had never played a whole wedding by myself. And that girl looked at me and saw that I was standing like a policeman because I was frightened, and she made a joke so that I would be angry instead. Angry is better than frightened for a musician. Angry, you play loud. [Taps the print.] She knew that. That is not carrying bags. That is the eye. Same as the verse. You see what is in front of you and you make it into something before it goes away.

[00:11:45]
MD: Is there anything else?

MULUGETA: Yes. Tell her I played the whole wedding. Until two in the morning. Tekle woke up at midnight and listened from under the tree and didn't come back in. He let me finish. After that I was an azmari. That was the day. That was the day I became what I am, and she was there, and I didn't know her name. Tell her.

[00:12:10]
[End of recording.]

---

MD note: Found negative 212, the next sleeve. Him, playing, bow blurred, mouth open in the middle of a word. Sleeve marked S. Ubah made a print at the lab in Kazanchis the next morning and we took it back that Thursday night. He held it up while he sang and the room put money on his forehead until he looked like the tree he promised.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 03: Dawit, the Darkroom Closet

TRANSCRIPT 03
Subject: Dawit Girma, 53, civil engineer, son of Girma Wolde and Senait Tewolde
Place: the room above the garage, Arat Kilo, where the trunk was kept
Date: Sunday, 21 December 2025, afternoon
Present: MD (interviewer and camera; also his daughter); UJ, sound
Language: Amharic and English, mixed; translated by MD where needed
Notes: My father asked to be interviewed "properly, like a stranger." He wore his good jacket. My mother laughed at him from the doorway until he shut the door.

[00:00:05]
DAWIT: Do I look at you or at the camera?

MD: At me.

DAWIT: Then why is the camera there?

MD: So other people can see you looking at me.

DAWIT: That's very strange. All right. Go.

[00:00:30]
MD: Tell me what this room was.

DAWIT: This was the darkroom. Well, the darkroom was there. [Points to a narrow door, now a cupboard of paint tins and an old fan.] That closet. Two meters by one. He took out the window and bricked it up and put a red bulb in the ceiling, and that was the darkroom from 1972 until I left for university. The studio in Piassa had a big darkroom, a proper one. But this was where he did the road negatives. The private ones. He never printed the road negatives at the shop.

[00:01:20]
MD: Why not?

DAWIT: I don't know. I thought it was because they were old. He said they were done, finished, there was no money in them. But he came up here at night. Sometimes very late. I was a boy, my bedroom was under this room, and I would hear him walking. Three steps this way, three steps that way. And the water running in the tray.

MD: What did it smell like?

DAWIT: [Without hesitating.] Vinegar. The stop bath. Vinegar and something sweet, the developer. And his cigarettes, before my mother made him stop. If you told me to close my eyes and you put that smell in front of me, I would be ten years old. I would be in my pajamas on the stairs.

[00:02:30]
MD: Did he let you in?

DAWIT: Once or twice. You had to be very quiet and you couldn't open the door, ever, or you would ruin everything. That was the great terror of the house, the door. "Don't open the door." It was the first sentence I learned. Before "mother." [Laughs.] He showed me how the picture comes up in the tray. You put the white paper in the liquid, and you rock it, and nothing, nothing, nothing, and then the face comes up out of the white, like somebody swimming up to you from the bottom of a lake. I was very frightened the first time. I thought he was doing magic. I asked him who the man was. He said, "A man in Asmara. Long time ago." I said, "Who took his picture?" And he was quiet. And then he said, "Your mother has the eye. Go to bed."

[00:03:45]
MD: "Your mother has the eye."

DAWIT: Yes.

MD: Did he explain?

DAWIT: No. He changed the subject. He was very good at changing the subject. He would start telling you about a camel. There was always a camel. [Pause.] I thought it was a compliment. Like when people say, "She has an eye for fabric." I thought he meant she knew what looked good. I never thought he meant anything else.

[00:04:30]
MD: Did she ever come up here?

DAWIT: Not that I saw. She didn't like it up here. When he was in here at night, she sat downstairs and sewed. She mended everything in that house. My school trousers had more of her stitches than trouser. [Pause.] Sometimes she sat on the stairs. Not inside. On the stairs, near the door. I thought she was waiting for him.

[00:05:15]
MD: Tell me about him. The way you remember him.

DAWIT: [Long pause.] He was a very correct man. Shoes polished every morning, the brush and the tin by the door. He spoke to the people at the studio like they were ministers. Passport photographs, he would spend ten minutes on a passport photograph. "This picture will go with you to every border. It should be a good picture." He was proud, but not loud. He was funny on Sundays only. He had five stories and he told them the same way, always, every word in its place, and if you said, "Abba, last time it was a goat, not a camel," he would stop and correct you. "It was a camel." [Smiles.] It was always a camel.

[00:06:30]
MD: Did he tell stories about Emama on the road?

DAWIT: Only that she carried things. "Your mother carried the whole studio on her head from Asmara to Hargeisa." That was his line. And she would say, "Not on my head," and he would say, "On your head, I saw it," and that was the joke. Every time. Forty years of the same joke.

[00:07:10]
MD: Do you think it was true? That she only carried things?

DAWIT: [He looks at the closet door for a long time. UJ notes: room tone, a bird on the roof, a car horn far away.] I think I never asked. That's what I think. I'm an engineer. I build roads. You know how many times I have been told, in thirty years, that a road was finished when it wasn't? You go and look and the drainage isn't there. Underneath, where nobody sees. [Pause.] I never went and looked underneath with my own parents.

[00:08:20]
MD: What would you want to know?

DAWIT: Whether she was happy. On the road. Before me. Because after me, she stopped. They both stopped. The studio in Piassa, the house, school fees, me. I was the reason the road stopped. [He laughs, but not much.] Nobody ever said so. But I can count. Born April 1972. Last box, 1972.

MD: Abba.

DAWIT: I'm not upset. I'm just saying what the numbers say.

[00:09:15]
MD: Is there anything up here she would want? That you think she'd want?

DAWIT: [Gets up. Out of frame. Sound of a tin box, a lid. Returns with a small wooden box, the kind used for pencils, with a sliding lid.] This was in the closet, behind the fixer bottles. I found it when we cleaned out after he died. I didn't know what it was.

[He opens it. Inside: a loupe, a fine sable brush, a dozen small glass pots with dried color at the bottom. Red, rose, two greens, a blue, brown.]

MD: Tinting colors.

DAWIT: They used to paint the black-and-white prints by hand. Cheeks, lips. The sky. For the weddings people wanted color, and there was no color, so you made it.

MD: Who did the tinting?

DAWIT: [Pause.] I always assumed he did.

[He turns the box over. On the bottom, scratched with a pin, very small: S.T. 1962.]

[00:10:40]
DAWIT: [Quietly.] Well. There you go. Underneath.

[End of recording.]

---

MD note: My father carried the tinting box downstairs and put it on the low table beside her chair without saying anything, and went to wash his hands. She was dozing. When she woke she saw it, and picked it up, and opened the little glass pots one by one and looked at the dried colors in them. She did not say anything either. Then she took out the sable brush and put it in the breast pocket of her cardigan, where she keeps her reading glasses, and went back to watching the news.

The brush is still there. She moves it from cardigan to cardigan.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: The Order of Cities

Sunday, 28 December 2025. Bole.

Counted. It took four evenings, Ubah reading the sleeves aloud and me making marks on a legal pad in groups of five, like a prisoner in a cartoon.

Two thousand three hundred and fourteen negatives. Thirty-one boxes. One thousand four hundred and two sleeves marked S. Nine hundred and twelve marked G.

Ubah said, "Director, that is not a small number."

I said I knew it was not a small number.

She said, "If S means what we think, your grandmother took more than half of the pictures in this trunk."

I said we did not know what S means.

She looked at me the way she looks at me when I tell her the generator noise will not be audible under the music.

---

Wednesday, 31 December.

Things Emama has told me this week, unprompted, in no order. Written down within an hour each time.

That in Asmara you buy bread in the morning still warm, and the bakers wrap it in newspaper, and you read the news off your bread on the way home.

That the wind in Djibouti is not a wind, it is the inside of an oven with the door open.

That in Hargeisa there was a woman who sold incense from a mat by the river, who laughed with her whole face, and that the river had no water in it.

That my grandfather snored "like a bus going uphill" and she had to sleep with cotton in her ears for forty years.

That I am holding my spoon wrong.

When I asked her more about the woman by the river, she said, "Which river?" and then, "Is your mother home yet?" and then nothing.

---

Saturday, 3 January 2026. Merkato.

Shopping list for the road, dictated by my grandmother from her chair: a new jebena, small, for traveling, because I cannot visit people's houses with nothing, and a hotel coffee is an insult. Roasted barley, for the road. Berbere from the woman she still trusts, not the man, the woman. Two netela, the thin white cotton shawls with a colored border, as gifts, one for "whoever is still alive in Asmara" and one for "whoever is still alive in Djibouti." Cardamom for Hargeisa. "They like cardamom in the tea. Take good cardamom, not the dust."

Merkato on a Saturday is the largest market I have ever been in and I was born here. Ubah came. She is better at it than me. She has a way of saying "No" with her eyebrows that makes the price fall by a third.

The berbere woman is in the spice lanes in a stall so narrow she must sit sideways. Huge sacks open at the mouth: the red berbere, the yellow turmeric, the dusty green of the dried rue, a smell that goes straight up your nose into the top of your head and sits there. When I said my grandmother's name, the woman put her hand on her chest.

"Senait from Arat Kilo? With the photographer?"

I said yes.

"She took my mother's picture. In 1967. At the market, in front of this stall, before it was this stall. My mother kept it in a frame by the door until she died. The picture is still there."

I asked who took it, my grandmother or my grandfather.

The berbere woman looked at me as if I had asked whether the sun was hot. "Senait," she said. "He talked to my father. She took the picture. Everybody knew that."

Everybody knew that.

Gave her a card. She gave me a kilo of berbere and refused to let me pay, and wrapped it in two bags, and then a third bag, "for the airplane."

---

Thursday, 15 January. Asmara. Night.

We are in a guesthouse above a hardware shop on a side street off the avenue. The owner's wife made us tea with too much sugar and a plate of biscuits and asked three times whether we had eaten.

The air is thin and clean, two thousand three hundred meters up, cooler than Addis, and smells of eucalyptus and bread. At nine at night the avenue was full of people walking. Not going anywhere. Walking. Couples, old men in jackets with their hands behind their backs, girls in threes with their arms linked, families with babies in strollers. Up the avenue under the palm trees to the end and then down again. Ubah said, "Is there an event?" I said I thought this was the event.

Emama used to talk about this, the walk in the evening. I thought she was exaggerating. She was not exaggerating.

Shots wanted: the palms from below, at dusk. The old buildings, the curves of them, the balconies like the bows of ships. The lit doorways of the bars with their silver espresso machines. Feet. Lots of feet.

Tomorrow we go to the address.

---

Friday, 16 January. Asmara.

The address Emama gave me, the tailor's shop on the avenue near the cinema, is now a shop that sells shoes. I stood outside it for a long time with the camera on my shoulder not filming anything. Then I went in. The shoe man was polite and knew nothing about any tailor. He said the building had been many things.

Ubah, meanwhile, had gone next door into a bar called the Aurora for coffee, because she is practical, and came out three minutes later with a young man in a white apron who had flour on his forearms.

"This is Robel," she said. "His grandmother owns the bar. His grandmother is eighty-one. His grandmother has lived on this street since 1960."

Robel Mehari, twenty-six. Works the espresso machine at the Aurora in the mornings and helps in his grandmother's bakery room behind it in the afternoons, and races bicycles on Sundays with a club that meets on the road out toward the mountains. Very fit, very polite, a slow smile. Shook my hand and bumped my right shoulder with his right shoulder, the Asmara greeting, and I bumped back too hard and he laughed.

He looked at the print I was carrying, the one of the bride's family in the tailor's shop, 1962, sleeve marked G.

"My grandmother will know these people," he said. "My grandmother knows everybody. It is her main occupation. The bar is only a hobby."

He made us macchiato in the small glasses, the milk and coffee in layers, and stood at the end of the counter watching our faces when we drank it, like a cook watching someone taste soup.

"Well?" he said.

Ubah said, "It is the best coffee I have had in a month."

"In a month," Robel said, disappointed.

I said it was the best coffee I had ever had in a bar, which is true, and that my grandmother's coffee is in a different category because it comes with a lecture.

"Then we are the same," he said. "My grandmother also gives the lecture."

He has arranged for her to see us tomorrow. Upstairs, at four, "after the afternoon rush and before the evening walk, because she will not miss the walk, not even for a film."

---

Same night.

Called home. Emama was asleep. My father said she asked twice today whether I had got to Asmara safely and once whether I had remembered to take a sweater, "because the mornings there would freeze a goat."

I had not taken a sweater. I am wearing Ubah's.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 04: Abrehet, Above the Aurora

TRANSCRIPT 04
Subject: Abrehet Kidane, 81, owner of the Bar Aurora
Place: her flat above the bar, a side street off the avenue, Asmara
Date: Saturday, 17 January 2026, 4:05 p.m.
Present: MD, interviewer and camera; UJ, sound; Robel Mehari, grandson, in and out with a tray
Language: Tigrinya, with some Italian words for the pastries and the machine; translated by MD with help from Robel
Notes: Subject received us in a blue dress, earrings, and a cardigan. Insisted that the camera show the balcony and the bougainvillea "because otherwise people will think we live in a box." Through the floor, the hiss of the espresso machine and voices from the bar.

[00:00:12]
ABREHET: First you eat. Robel.

[Robel brings a tray: small pastries filled with cream, a plate of biscuits shaped like rings, three macchiato.]

ABREHET: You know these? No? In Addis they don't know anything. These we learned from the old bakeries on the avenue. My husband learned from an old man who learned from an older man. Sixty years I have made these. Eat. No, the one in front. That is the good one.

[00:01:05]
MD: Thank you. Emama, my grandmother, sends you this.

[MD gives the netela. Subject unfolds it slowly, examines the border, the weave. Holds it to her face.]

ABREHET: From Senait. [Long pause.] From Senait Tewolde. Who sat in the third row of the school with me and cheated from my paper in arithmetic. [Laughs.] She was terrible at arithmetic. She could not add the price of three loaves. But she could draw. She drew the teacher on the back of her book, so exact, the teacher's nose, the teacher's mustache, that the teacher took the book and kept it. Did you know that?

MD: No.

ABREHET: No. Nobody knows anything.

[00:02:20]
MD: Can I show you a photograph?

[MD gives subject the print: ASMARA 1964-65 / 37. A young woman of about twenty, seated in a carved chair in a room with a patterned floor; beside her standing, a young man in a dark suit with very wide lapels. Her hair is set in high waves. She is wearing a dress with a white lace collar. She is not smiling, but her eyes are. Sleeve marked S.]

ABREHET: [She holds it in both hands. She does not speak for some time.] Robel. Robel, come here. Look. Your grandfather.

ROBEL: [off, then in frame] That's Grandpa?

ABREHET: That is your grandfather the day we were engaged. Look at his ears. You have his ears, poor boy.

ROBEL: He looks like a schoolboy.

ABREHET: He was twenty-three. He looked like a schoolboy and he talked like a minister. [To MD.] 1964. In my parents' front room. My mother put that chair in the middle of the room because it was the best chair, from Italy, carved, and she said, "This chair is in the picture or there is no picture." [Laughs.] You see the chair is more in focus than me?

MD: You're in focus.

ABREHET: My nose is in focus. [Pause.] Who did the hair?

MD: I was going to ask you.

ABREHET: My aunt. My aunt Lemlem, with hot irons heated in the charcoal. I smelled like a burned cake for three days. Worth it.

[00:04:10]
MD: Do you remember who took the picture?

ABREHET: [Immediately.] Senait.

MD: You're sure?

ABREHET: Of course I'm sure. She was my friend. She came back from Addis that year with the photographer, married, a grand lady from the capital with a camera, and everybody on the avenue wanted her to come to their house. Everybody. And I said, you must come to mine first, I am your oldest friend, and she came first.

MD: And my grandfather?

ABREHET: He was there. He stood with the silver board. And he did the talking to my father, about the money, about the prints. He was a good talker. A gentleman. But he didn't touch the camera that day. She did everything. She moved the chair. She moved my mother out of the window. She moved my hand from here to here. [Demonstrates: from the lap to the arm of the chair.] She said, "Abrehet, you hold your hands like you are hiding a stolen biscuit." [Laughs until she coughs.] I was. I had a biscuit in my hand.

[00:05:30]
[Robel brings water. UJ notes: the machine downstairs has started again; evening rush.]

MD: Did people know she took the pictures? People on the avenue?

ABREHET: [Considers.] People here knew. We knew her. Senait was one of us, from Geza Banda, from the tailor's house. When she looked at you, you knew she was looking. You could feel it, here. [Taps her own cheek.] But people who didn't know her, people who just saw the pictures later, I think they thought the man did it. The man is the photographer. Studio Tsehay, Girma Wolde. His name on the stamp on the back. [Turns the print over.] You see? His name.

[On the back of the print, a blue ink stamp: STUDIO TSEHAY, G. WOLDE, ADDIS ABABA.]

ABREHET: Only his name.

[00:06:40]
MD: Did she mind?

ABREHET: [Long pause.] Senait never said what she minded. That was her way. Even as a girl. If you broke her pencil, she said nothing and drew with the broken piece. [Pause.] But I'll tell you something. In 1965, the second time they came, she showed me how the camera worked. In this flat. My parents' flat then. She put the cloth over my head and made me look at the glass, and I saw the street upside down in it, the whole avenue, the palms, upside down, very bright. I screamed. She laughed. She said, "That's how it really is, Abrehet. Everything is upside down until somebody decides." [Pause.] I never forgot that. Everything is upside down until somebody decides.

[00:07:55]
MD: Can you tell me about the bar? How it started?

ABREHET: You don't want to hear about the bar.

MD: I do.

ABREHET: [Pleased.] Well. My husband, the boy with the ears, wanted a bar. Every man on the avenue wants a bar. So in 1970 we bought the lease on the old place downstairs, and the machine came with it, the big silver one, from before. That machine is older than my son. It has outlived two of my husband's brothers and my husband. It makes coffee every morning at six. Robel, how many cups a day now?

ROBEL: [off] Three hundred? On a Saturday more.

ABREHET: Three hundred. And people come in the morning for the macchiato and the pastry, standing at the bar, five minutes, they don't sit, and they go to work. And in the evening they come for the walk, and they stop, and they have another one, and they talk about everyone who passes. That is what a bar on the avenue is for. Coffee and talking about everyone who passes. [Pause.] If you want to know anything about anyone in this city, you sit in a bar on the avenue for one month.

[00:09:30]
MD: What did people say about my grandparents? On the avenue?

ABREHET: That he was handsome and she was proud. That the father, Tewolde the tailor, never forgave the photographer for taking his daughter away to Addis. That she came back twice and both times the father made the photographer a suit. [Laughs.] For free. He was so angry he made him a beautiful suit, both times, the best wool, and he wouldn't take money. That is a Tewolde kind of anger. He makes you a suit.

[00:10:20]
MD: Is there anything you want to say to her?

ABREHET: [Looks at the camera. Straightens the netela on her shoulders.] Senait. You owe me two biscuits and one arithmetic exam. [Pause. The laughter goes out of her face.] And I am still here. On this street. The bar is still here, the machine is still here, my nose is still here. Your sister Tsega is still here, on the hill. Come and walk with me once more before we are both too old to walk. That's all.

[00:11:05]
[Subject stands. Interview ends. She says she must go down; the evening walk is starting.]

---

MD note: She went down and walked. We filmed her from across the avenue, arm in arm with a woman her own age in a green coat, the two of them very slowly passing under the palms in the last of the light, stopping every ten steps to greet someone. A bump of shoulders. A hand on a cheek. Robel, behind the bar, watched her through the window the whole time.

Tsega Tewolde, my grandmother's younger sister, lives on the hill above Geza Banda. Abrehet sent Robel to tell her we are here. Robel came back and said Tsega would see us Monday, and that she had said, "Tell the girl to bring her grandmother's face."

I asked him what that meant.

"I think," he said, "she means you."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 05: Tsega, the House on the Hill

TRANSCRIPT 05
Subject: Tsega Tewolde, 77, seamstress, younger sister of Senait Tewolde
Place: her house on the hill above Geza Banda, Asmara; the front room, which is also her workroom
Date: Monday, 19 January 2026, from 11:00 a.m.
Present: MD, interviewer and camera; UJ, sound; Robel Mehari, who walked us up and stayed in the courtyard
Language: Tigrinya; translated by MD
Notes: Treadle sewing machine by the window, black with gold lettering worn to nothing. A dressmaker's dummy wearing half a dress. Pins in a pincushion shaped like a tomato. On the wall, framed, three photographs, one of which I recognize from the trunk: ASMARA 1962 / 4. Subject opened the door, looked at my face for a long time without speaking, and then took my chin in her hand and turned my head to the left and to the right, as if checking a hem.

[00:00:15]
TSEGA: You have her forehead. Not her mouth. The mouth is from somebody else.

MD: My mother, I think.

TSEGA: Then your mother has a stubborn mouth. Sit.

[00:00:40]
[Subject sits at the treadle machine, not in the armchair. MD notes: she seems to think more easily with her feet on the treadle, though she does not sew. She rocks it slowly, without thread, the whole interview. UJ: "a soft wooden creak every two seconds, like a clock." Left in.]

MD: Can you tell me about your father's shop?

TSEGA: [Long pause.] Tewolde Haile, tailor. Suits for men, dresses for women, uniforms for the schools. The shop was on the avenue, a long room, with the cutting table in the middle like a bed for a giant. He had two machines and three apprentices and a radio. He listened to the radio all day and argued with it. My mother brought his lunch at one o'clock, every day, in a basket with a cloth over it. Zigni and bread. The zigni so hot you cried. He ate standing up at the cutting table and never spilled on the cloth. Not once. Forty years.

MD: What was he like?

TSEGA: Proud. Very funny when he wanted to be, and he did not often want to be. He had a saying. When an apprentice cut wrong, he would hold up the cloth and say, "The cloth remembers every cut." Meaning, you can sew it back, you can hide it, but the cloth knows. [She runs her palm along the bed of the machine.] I say it to my own girls now.

[00:02:30]
MD: And Senait? As a girl?

TSEGA: She swept the threads. That was her job, and mine after her. And she drew. With his chalk. The tailor's chalk, the flat pieces, white, blue, yellow, that you mark the cloth with. She drew faces on the scraps. On black wool the white chalk is like light. She drew everybody who came into the shop. My father would come in from lunch and there would be the face of his best customer on a scrap of wool on the floor, and he would shout, "That's good wool!" and then he would pick it up and look at it, and put it in his drawer.

[00:03:20]
MD: He kept them?

TSEGA: [She gets up. Opens a drawer under the cutting shelf. Brings out a flat bundle wrapped in tissue paper, the tissue yellowed. Unfolds it on her knees. Inside: a square of black wool, perhaps twenty centimeters, and on it, in faint white chalk, half smudged, the face of a man with a heavy mustache and a tape measure around his neck.]

TSEGA: Our father. She did it when she was fifteen. He kept it in the drawer for thirty years, and when he died it came to me. You cannot fix chalk. It goes. Every year it goes a little more. I never unfold it. [Pause.] I unfold it for you.

[UJ notes: absolute silence in the room except the treadle. MD's camera moves in very slowly.]

MD: It's him.

TSEGA: It's him. Better than the photographs. The photographs, he is posing. Here, he is shouting at the radio. [She smiles.] You see? The mouth is open. She caught him shouting.

[00:05:10]
MD: Tell me about 1962. When the photographer came.

TSEGA: I was fourteen. I remember everything. The wedding of the Gebre family, in the shop, because the bride's uncle was my father's best customer. The young man from Addis with one white shirt. [Laughs.] My sister has told you about the shirt?

MD: She has.

TSEGA: Every night in my father's basin. My father said, "That man will wash himself to death." [Pause.] On the third day, after the wedding, when the young man was packing, he let Senait look into the camera. Just to look. He was showing off, I think. Showing the pretty tailor's daughter his machine. And she looked into it and she said, "Can I take one?" And he laughed, and he said, "One. Film is expensive." And she turned the camera around. To me.

MD: To you?

TSEGA: [Points to the wall. Framed photograph ASMARA 1962 / 4. A girl of fourteen in a school dress, in a doorway, squinting into the light, a broom in one hand, startled.] Me. With the broom. In the doorway of the shop. I didn't even have time to put down the broom. [Pause.] It is the first picture my sister ever took. He developed it later, in Addis, and sent it with a letter. In the letter it said, "Your sister made this. She has the eye. I would like to ask your father something." That was how he asked. Through a picture of me with a broom.

[00:07:20]
MD: What did your father say?

TSEGA: He said no. Then he said no again. Then my mother talked to him for three weeks, every night, and he said, "If she goes, she goes married, and she comes back to visit, and he wears a suit I make." [Laughs.] You have heard about the suits.

MD: From Abrehet.

TSEGA: Abrehet talks too much. She is right, but she talks too much.

[00:08:30]
MD: Tell me about after. When she was gone.

TSEGA: [The treadle stops. Starts again.] She came back in 1964 and 1965. With the camera. She photographed half the avenue. Then they went south and east, to the coast, to the far places, and the letters came from far places with strange stamps. Then they stopped traveling, and the letters came from Addis only. Then a boy was born, your father. Then the letters came less. [Pause.] A letter a year. Then a card at the New Year. Then.

MD: Then?

TSEGA: Then life. You know. Mothers die. The roads are long. People are proud. She didn't come for our mother in 1979. It was not easy to travel then, it was not her fault, I know it. I knew it then. But I was the one who washed our mother and sat with her. And I was angry. And I wrote her a letter that was not kind. And she did not answer it. And so. [Pause.] And so forty-six years. A card at the New Year. Sometimes.

[00:10:15]
[MD notes: I did not know this. I stopped asking questions. Ubah lowered the boom slightly. Subject kept the treadle going.]

TSEGA: You didn't know.

MD: No.

TSEGA: Of course you didn't. Nobody tells the children the stupid things. [Pause.] I don't want you to think she is a bad sister. She is not. She is proud like our father. She makes you a suit instead of saying sorry. Every year at the New Year, the card. Every year, in the card, folded very small, money. For forty years. I never spent it. It is in a tin. [Laughs, wipes her eyes.] You see, I am also proud. I make her a suit by not spending her money.

[00:11:40]
MD: Do you want to send her something? Through me?

TSEGA: [Long pause.] Is the red light on?

MD: Yes.

TSEGA: Then I will say it to her here. [She turns on the stool to face the lens directly. Sits very straight. Hands folded on the machine. UJ, later: "She looked like a woman having her passport picture taken."]

TSEGA: Senait. It is Tsega. It is January and it is cold in the mornings and the bougainvillea on the wall of our old school is still there, very red, nobody cut it. Abrehet is still talking. I have the chalk picture of Abba and it is going, a little more every year, and I would like you to see it before it is gone. I have your money in a tin. All of it. I am not going to spend it. I am going to give it back to you, and you are going to be angry, and we are going to have a fight like we had when you broke my comb in 1957, and then we are going to eat. [Pause.] I was wrong to write that letter. Not wrong to be sad. Wrong to write it. The cloth remembers every cut. But you can still sew it. [Pause.] Your granddaughter has your forehead. Lift your chin, sister. Look at the camera. I know you are looking.

[00:13:50]
[Subject turns back to the machine. Treadle stops.]

TSEGA: Now you eat. There is zigni and it is too hot and you will cry and that is how you know it is right.

[End of recording.]

---

MD note: We ate in her kitchen, the four of us, Robel too. The zigni was too hot. I cried. Tsega said, "Good." Robel ate three helpings and Tsega watched him the way the old women of this city watch young men eat, as if counting the bites against some ledger they keep in their heads.

Afterward she gave me a flat tin box that had once held sweets. I did not open it. I know what is inside.

She also gave me a piece of flat blue tailor's chalk, old, worn to a curve on one edge. "Hers," she said. "From the shop. I have kept it. She'll know it." I have put it in my breast pocket next to my pen. I keep touching it to make sure it is there.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: The Recognition Table

Wednesday, 21 January. Asmara.

Abrehet's idea, and Robel's arrangement. For three afternoons we set up in the back room of the Aurora with a long table and the prints laid out in rows, every face from the Asmara boxes that we had printed so far, two hundred and six of them, and a sign in Robel's careful lettering in the window: DO YOU KNOW THESE PEOPLE? COME AND LOOK. COFFEE IS FREE IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE.

"That will empty the bar," I said.

"Then we will know a lot of people," Robel said.

---

Same day, 7 p.m.

Forty-one people came. I have written down their names in the notebook with the numbers of the prints they knew.

An old man in a gray suit, very upright, with a stick, who walked slowly down the whole table and back without speaking and then put his finger on a print of a little boy in shorts on a bicycle much too big for him. "Me," he said. "1965. My father's bicycle. I fell off it eleven seconds after this." He wanted to know who had taken it. I said I thought it was my grandmother. He said, "The tailor's girl? Yes. She shouted at me to stop wobbling. I wobbled." He took the print home. I let him. We have the negative.

Two sisters in their seventies who found their mother in a wedding group and began arguing at once about whether the hat in the picture was the blue hat or the green hat, and kept arguing all the way out the door.

A woman who found no one she knew and stayed anyway for an hour, looking, because, she said, "These are the faces of the street when I was a girl. I want to look at them. I don't need to know them."

A man of about sixty who found his father, who had died when he was four. He did not have a photograph of his father. He has one now. He did not say anything at all. He sat in the corner of the room for a long time with the print face down on his knee, and then turned it over, and then face down again. Robel brought him a macchiato and did not charge him and did not speak to him, and I thought that Robel's grandmother has taught him well.

---

Thursday, 22 January.

Sixty-three people. A line out the door by four. Abrehet held court at the end of the table in her blue cardigan, the netela on her shoulders, identifying people before their own children could. "That's Haile from the pharmacy. That's his first wife, before the second wife, God help him."

Ubah recording room tone and voices for the soundtrack. She has a way of disappearing with the boom into a corner so that people forget it.

In the evening we went out with the old Sunday racers from Robel's club, the men in their sixties and seventies who still ride. Six of them on old steel frames in wool jerseys with their club colors faded to pastels. They ride slowly now, they said, up and down the avenue on a weekday evening "to keep the legs remembering." I filmed them from the back of Robel's cousin's truck. One of them, a retired schoolteacher, found himself in a print yesterday, a racer of nineteen with a cap backward, sweat-shining, holding up a trophy the size of a teapot. Sleeve marked S.

"She stood in the road," he said. "In the middle of the road, at the finish, with the camera. Everyone shouting at her to move. She didn't move. She got the picture. We nearly rode over her."

---

Friday, 23 January.

Ubah, late, in the guesthouse kitchen, cotton gloves on, going through the Asmara sleeves with a flashlight. She has been doing this every night. She is counting something.

"Director."

"Meron."

"Meron. Look." She laid out two rows on the table. On the left, ten negatives marked G. On the right, ten marked S. All portraits, all from Asmara, all the same years.

"Now look where they stand," she said.

On the G negatives, the subject sits in the center of the frame, square on, the way the studio portraits look, the way passport photographs look. Correct. Balanced.

On the S negatives, the subject is a little off center, almost always to the left, and there is something in the right of the frame. A doorway. A window. A hand coming in. A bicycle wheel. A shadow. The faces are turned very slightly, as if someone just said their name.

"They are different photographers," Ubah said. "Not the same person on two days. Two people."

I said, "We knew that."

"No," she said. "We guessed that. Now we know it. You can see it with your eyes. I could pick the S out of a box blindfolded."

She is right. I have been staring at these for six weeks and I didn't see it.

---

Saturday, 24 January. Last day in Asmara.

Went with Robel to the market at the edge of the old town where the metalworkers make things out of other things: oil drums cut and beaten into charcoal braziers, car springs into hoes, tins into lamps. The noise is tremendous, a hundred hammers on a hundred pieces of iron, but rhythmic, almost music. Ubah stood in the middle of it with her headphones on and her eyes closed and smiled like someone at a concert.

Bought a small brazier for Emama, hammered from a drum that once held cooking oil. You can still read a word of the old lettering on the side. The man who made it, very old, with forearms like rope, asked what it was for. I said, for my grandmother's coffee. He said, "Then I will make the legs longer, so she doesn't have to bend." He made the legs longer while we waited.

Then the last walk. All four of us, Abrehet on Robel's arm, Ubah and me behind, up the avenue under the palms and back, slowly, stopping, greeting. At the end Abrehet held my face in both her hands and said, "Bring her back. Or bring me there. I am not particular."

At the guesthouse, packing, I took the blue chalk out of my pocket and drew on the back of my hand, without thinking, a small sun with rays.

Tomorrow, back to Addis. Tuesday, the train east.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: The Train East

Monday, 26 January. Arat Kilo.

One night at home between cities. Gave Emama the brazier from Asmara. She turned it around in her hands, read the bit of oil-drum lettering on the side, and laughed out loud, the first real laugh I have heard from her in weeks. "They are still making these from rubbish," she said. "Good. The good things are always made from rubbish." She had my mother set it in the corner by her chair where the old one used to be, and asked for coal, and roasted a small handful of beans on it right then, at nine at night, which she has not done in a year.

Did not give her the tin from Tsega. Did not show her the film of Tsega. Not yet. My father agrees. "Let her have the brazier tonight," he said. "One thing at a time."

She asked about Abrehet. I said Abrehet sends her love and says she owes her two biscuits and an arithmetic exam.

Emama said, "That is a lie. It was one biscuit."

Then she said, "Did you see the walk?"

I said yes, every night.

She was quiet. Then, "We walked it the night before I left. Me and my father. Up and back. He didn't say anything the whole way. At the end he bought me a macchiato and put his hand on my head." She touched the top of her own head. "Here."

Then she asked what day it was, and I told her, and she asked again ten minutes later.

---

Tuesday, 27 January. On the train.

The new station on the edge of the city, early, gray light, the platform full of people with enormous bags, sacks of grain, a crate of chickens complaining. We have the camera case, the sound bag, two backpacks, a jebena wrapped in a towel, and Emama's last instruction: "In Dire Dawa, find the house with the green gate behind the old station. Your grandfather was born behind the green gate. It may not be green."

The train runs east all day across the long country, down from the highlands. Out the window the land changes like someone turning the pages of a book too fast: green terraces and eucalyptus, then dry hills, then the long plain with acacia trees flat on top like tables, then red earth and camels standing in the shade of a single tree, all of them together, as if they had agreed on it.

Ubah slept for three hours against the window with her headphones on and woke up and said, "I have been dreaming about mixing levels."

A woman across from us, traveling to Dire Dawa to see her daughter, shared roasted chickpeas from a paper cone and asked what the camera was for. I told her. She asked to see a picture. I showed her one from the Djibouti box, a fisherman holding a fish almost as long as he is, both of them grinning, if a fish can grin. She said, "My uncle looked like that. Every fisherman's uncle looks like that." She was right.

---

Same day, evening. Dire Dawa.

Hot, wide streets, trees along them, low houses painted in colors that have faded into other colors. The old railway station, from the days of the first line, with its arched windows and a clock that is not right. Three-wheeled taxis everywhere, blue, buzzing like hornets.

Found the street behind the old station. There are four gates. None of them is green. One of them is very pale blue with older green showing through where the paint has worn off around the latch, where hands have opened it for seventy years. I knocked. A man in his forties opened it, holding a baby. I explained, badly. He did not know any Wolde. His family had lived there since 1985. But he let me stand in the courtyard and film the gate from the inside, and the baby watched me with total seriousness, and the man said, "So your grandfather learned to walk here." I said I supposed so. He said, "Then he fell down here too. Look, the step is very high." The step is very high.

Called home from the courtyard. Emama on the phone. I said I was standing behind the green gate. She said, "Is it green?" I said it was a little green. She said, "Good," and then, "He fell on that step and cut his eyebrow. The scar was here." I know the scar. I never knew where it came from.

---

Wednesday, 28 January. Djibouti. Night.

The train crossed into Djibouti in the early afternoon and the world went flat and white and brown and the light became something else, harder, a light that takes the color out of things. Then the city, low and bright, and the sea.

Heat. Even in January, which they tell me is the cool month. When we stepped out of the station Ubah said, "Ah," the way you say it when you open an oven, and then, "My grandmother was right about this place."

The guesthouse is near the old town, the European quarter with its white buildings and deep arcades, where the shops keep their shutters half closed against the sun. We walked out at sunset to the big square with the arches, Place Ménélik, where the men sit in the arcades over small glasses of tea and the boys sell cigarettes one at a time from a tray, and there is a breeze from the harbor that makes everyone sigh at once.

Dinner at Fatouma's, which is what everyone calls the place, though the sign says something else. It is a single room with plastic tables near the fish market, open to the street on one side, with a clay oven along the back wall, a great round mouth of fired clay. Fatouma Daher, forty-six, in a green dress and a black scarf, runs it with her two sons and an aunt who sits at the door taking money and commenting on everyone.

Fatouma is the niece of Omar Bouh, eighty-one, retired harbor pilot, whose wedding portrait is negative DJIBOUTI 1967-69 / 140, and whose name we have because, in the upper corner of that print, on the wall behind the couple, there is a framed certificate with the words PILOTE DU PORT and a name.

Ubah wrote to the port association. The port association wrote to Omar's son. Omar's son wrote to Fatouma. Fatouma wrote back: "My uncle says come and eat first."

Everybody in this film says come and eat first.

What we ate: fish split open down the back and rubbed with a red paste of chili and garlic and cumin, then slapped against the inside wall of the clay oven where it clings and cooks in the blast of heat, then pulled out with a long hook and laid on a tray of flatbread that has also been baked against the oven wall, blistered and soft. You tear the bread and take the fish with it. Hot, salt, smoke, the sweetness of the bread. Fatouma stood over us to see our faces, as Robel did with the coffee in Asmara, as Tsega did with the zigni, as my grandmother does with everything.

"Well?"

Ubah, mouth full, made a sound I have never heard her make.

"Good," said Fatouma. "Tomorrow, fah-fah. You will die."

---

Same night, later.

Fatouma sat with us after the room emptied. Her sons were washing the trays in the back and singing along to a cassette, I think a cassette, it had the wobble.

She asked about the film. I told her: the trunk, the letters, the S and the G.

She said, "My uncle has a newspaper. He keeps it in a plastic sleeve in his drawer. From 1969. His wedding picture is in it. He shows it to everybody. Every guest who comes to his house for fifty years. It is his great pride. I think you should see it."

I asked what newspaper.

"It's gone now," she said. "It was a picture weekly, in French, from the sixties. It closed long ago. Phare. Like a lighthouse." She made a circle with her hand. "It sold in the square. My uncle bought ten copies."

---

Thursday, 29 January. Morning.

Note to self before the interview. What I know. What I don't.

Know: in the Djibouti boxes, 1967 to 1969, there are three hundred and eighty negatives. Three hundred and two marked S. Seventy-eight marked G. The highest share of S in any city.

Know: Omar's wedding portrait, 140, is marked S.

Don't know: why Emama, who will talk about Asmara bread and Hargeisa incense and the snoring, says nothing at all about Djibouti except the wind.

Fatouma says her uncle is a talker. "Bring water. He'll go for hours."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 06: Omar, the Harbor Pilot

TRANSCRIPT 06
Subject: Omar Bouh, 81, retired harbor pilot
Place: the roof terrace of his house in the old Somali quarter, Djibouti, under a canvas awning; the harbor visible beyond the rooftops
Date: Thursday, 29 January 2026, from 4:30 p.m.
Present: MD, interviewer and camera; UJ, sound and translation; Fatouma Daher, niece, bringing tea
Language: French and Somali, mixed; translated by UJ and MD
Notes: Subject is tall, very thin, white-bearded, in a long white shirt and a wrapped cloth, with a navy captain's cap he says he has worn "every day since the day I retired, so that people know I used to be important." A brass ship's telescope on a stand by the parapet. A pair of binoculars on a string around his neck. He offered both to me before we sat down, "so you can see the ships."

[00:00:20]
OMAR: You see that one? The blue one with the white house on the back. Container ship. Forty thousand tons. Look at her. She's coming in too fast. [Takes the binoculars, looks.] No. All right. She's fine. The young pilot knows. [Lowers binoculars.] Forty-three years I took them in. When I see one coming, my hands still want to do it.

MD: What does a harbor pilot do? For people who don't know.

OMAR: The captain knows the sea. The pilot knows the harbor. Two different animals. The captain brings the ship from Singapore, from Marseille, from anywhere, he knows the oceans, he knows the stars, he knows his ship. But the harbor has its own mind. The sandbank that moves after the big wind. The current along the jetty at four o'clock. The place where the bottom comes up to meet you. So when the ship arrives, outside, I go out on a little boat, very small, bouncing, and I climb up the side of the big ship on a rope ladder. [Mimes it, grinning.] Rope. Wooden steps. Up the side of a cliff of steel, the sea going up and down underneath you. Then I go to the bridge and I say good afternoon to the captain and I take his ship. For one hour, two hours, the ship is mine. I talk to the tugs, I talk to the helmsman. I put her against the quay like you put a baby in a cradle. Then I give her back, and I go down the rope, and I go home.

[00:02:40]
MD: Were you ever afraid? On the ladder?

OMAR: Every time. [Laughs.] Every single time for forty-three years. The day you are not afraid on the ladder is the day you fall. My father told me that. He was a fisherman on a dhow from Tadjoura. He said, the sea is a very old woman, she is kind to you if you are polite, but she never forgets a rude man.

[Fatouma brings tea: red, sweet, with cardamom and a little ginger, in glasses. And a plate of small fried pastries filled with meat.]

[00:03:50]
MD: May I show you a photograph?

OMAR: My photograph? You have my photograph? [MD hands him the print, DJIBOUTI 1967-69 / 140. A young couple: a tall man in a white uniform jacket with brass buttons and a cap held under his arm, and a young woman in a dress of patterned silk with a long scarf draped over her hair and shoulders, gold at her ears and throat. She is looking not at the camera but up at him. He is looking at the camera, trying not to smile, and failing.]

OMAR: [Long silence.] Amina.

[He holds the print in both hands, his thumbs on the very edges, the way you hold something that might break. UJ notes: he does not speak for nearly forty seconds. We kept rolling.]

OMAR: My wife. 1967. The fourteenth of September. We were married that morning. I was twenty-three. She was nineteen. She died in 2015, in this house, downstairs, in the room with the window to the sea. Forty-eight years. [Pause.] Look at her. She's laughing at me. You see? She's not looking at the camera, she's looking at me, because I'm trying to be serious and I can't be serious, I'm too happy, and she knows. She always knew when I was pretending.

[00:05:30]
MD: Do you remember the day the picture was taken?

OMAR: I remember everything. It was in the rented room behind the square where the photographers from Addis were working. Very hot. They had a fan on the floor that made a noise like a goat with a cough. The backdrop on the wall was a painted garden, flowers and a fountain, very faded, and I said to Amina, "This is the only garden we will ever have," and she hit me. [Laughs.] You see her hand? On my arm? She just hit me. That's why she's laughing.

MD: Who took the picture?

OMAR: [He looks at me then. Straight. The binoculars swing on their string.] You know who took it. You came all this way. You know.

MD: I want you to say it.

OMAR: Senait took it. The photographer's wife. Girma held the board. Senait was under the cloth. She said to me, in French, very bad French, she had only learned a little, she said, "Captain, you are allowed to smile, it's your wedding, not your funeral." [He smiles now, in the same way, failing not to.] And Amina laughed and hit me and Senait took the picture. One picture. She only took one. She said, "That's it. That's the one." And she was right.

[00:07:15]
MD: You knew them well? My grandparents?

OMAR: For two years they were here, on and off. 1967, 1968, 1969. They would come in the cool months and go back to Addis in the hot months. I knew them very well. My mother fed them. Your grandmother got very sick the first summer, she stayed too long into the heat, a fever, and my mother took her into our house and nursed her for three weeks with goat broth and wet cloths. Girma slept on our roof. On this roof. [He pats the parapet.] Under the stars, with the camera case for a pillow, because he was afraid someone would steal it. So we were like family. [Pause.] Then 1969. Then they didn't come back.

MD: Why not?

OMAR: [Long pause. He looks out at the harbor. The blue ship has turned.] It is getting late for the light. Your friend's microphone is tired. Come back on Saturday. I will show you the newspaper. Then you can ask me why.

[00:08:40]
MD: Can I ask one more thing today?

OMAR: One.

MD: What do you want people to know? When they see this picture?

OMAR: [Lifts the print toward the lens.] That she was nineteen and she was laughing at me. That is all. If you put this in your film, and somebody sees it, in Addis, in America, wherever, I want them to know that a girl of nineteen was laughing at a nervous young man on the morning of her wedding in a hot room in front of a painted garden. And that he stayed nervous for forty-eight years. And that it was a good life. [Pause.] And that the photographer was a woman. Put that too.

[End of recording.]

---

MD note: Fatouma walked us down the stairs. At the bottom she said, "You see? Hours." It was not hours. It was twenty minutes. But I felt as if I had been up there all day, on a rope ladder.

Fah-fah tonight. Goat broth, very hot, very peppery, with chunks of meat on the bone and green chili and coriander, and bread to tear and dip. Fatouma said it is what you give to people who are tired or sick or sad or newly arrived. I said it was the soup her grandmother gave my grandmother when she had the fever. Fatouma stopped with the ladle in the air. "Then this is the second time," she said, and filled my bowl again.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 07: Omar, the Lighthouse Paper

TRANSCRIPT 07
Subject: Omar Bouh, 81 (second session)
Place: the roof terrace, Djibouti; later the room downstairs with the window to the sea
Date: Saturday, 31 January 2026, from 10:00 a.m., before the heat
Present: MD, interviewer and camera; UJ, sound and translation; Fatouma Daher
Language: French and Somali; translated by UJ and MD
Notes: Subject came up the stairs carrying a flat object wrapped in a cloth, held against his chest with both arms. Set it on the table under the awning and did not unwrap it for some time. Fatouma had brought tea and a plate of dates and the sweet fried dough she makes in the mornings, dusted with sugar.

[00:00:30]
OMAR: First I tell you, then I show you. If I show you first you will look at the paper and not listen to me.

MD: All right.

OMAR: [Settles. Adjusts the captain's cap.] In 1969, in March, a man came to the rented room behind the square. A Frenchman, from the picture weekly. Phare. You know this paper?

MD: Fatouma told me.

OMAR: A good paper. Pictures of everything. Boats, weddings, football, the camels at the market, the governor's dog. Everybody bought it on Saturday in the square. And the man had seen the photographs in the window of the rented room, the ones they put up to bring in customers, and he wanted twelve of them for a page. "The Faces of Our City." He would pay good money. Girma was very happy. Senait chose the twelve.

MD: She chose them?

OMAR: She chose them. I was there, I was helping carry the prints, I had nothing to do, I was newly married and my wife had sent me out of the house because I was in the way. [Laughs.] Senait laid out maybe sixty prints on the bed in the rented room and walked up and down and picked twelve. Very fast. This one, this one, not that one. She picked mine. Mine and Amina's. I was so proud. I nearly fainted.

[00:02:40]
MD: And then?

OMAR: And then the paper came out. The fifteenth of March. A Saturday. I bought ten copies in the square at seven in the morning, I ran to the rented room with all ten under my arm, I was shouting. Senait was sitting on the step with her coffee. I gave her a copy. I said, "Look! Look! Page six!"

[He unwraps the cloth now. Inside, a clear plastic sleeve, and inside that, a newspaper folded to a double page, the paper brown and soft as cloth, but whole. Across the top, in large French letters, the title of the page. Twelve photographs in three rows of four. In the second row, third from the left: Omar and Amina, small, gray, unmistakable. Underneath the photographs, a single line of small type.]

OMAR: Read the line. Underneath.

MD: [Reading.] "Photographs: G. Wolde, Studio Tsehay, Addis Ababa."

OMAR: Yes.

[00:04:20]
MD: What did she do? When she saw it?

OMAR: [Long pause.] Nothing. That was the thing. She did nothing. She looked at the pictures for a long time. She smiled at mine. She touched it, like this, with her finger, on Amina's face. Then she read the line. And her face did not change at all. She folded the paper very neatly, in four, and put it under her coffee glass on the step so it wouldn't blow away. And she said, "Omar, would you like some coffee?" That's all. [Pause.] I was young. I didn't understand. I thought, she's not happy, why is she not happy, she's in the newspaper. Then I understood. She was not in the newspaper. Only her pictures.

[00:05:30]
MD: And my grandfather?

OMAR: He came out of the room and saw it, and he read the line, and he went white. Here. [Touches his own lips.] White around the mouth. He did not say anything to her. He put on his good suit, the suit the tailor in Asmara made him, in the heat, in March, in Djibouti, wool, and he went to the newspaper office. Senait went after him. I went after both of them, because I am a fool.

MD: What happened at the office?

OMAR: I waited outside in the street. I saw through the window. The Frenchman at his desk, Girma standing, Senait behind him by the door. Girma talking a long time, with his hands, very polite, very serious. The Frenchman laughing. Shaking his head. Then he said something to Girma, smiling, and pointed at Senait, and Girma's face went the way it went on the step.

MD: Do you know what he said?

OMAR: She told me later. [Pause.] He said, "Monsieur, your wife is lucky to have a husband who is so proud of her." And then, "But nobody would believe it. A girl from the highlands, with a camera like that? People would think it's a joke. And there are no corrections for jokes."

[00:07:15]
[UJ notes: Fatouma, who has heard this story many times, according to her later, put down the teapot and sat on the parapet.]

MD: What did Senait do?

OMAR: She walked out. Straight past me in the street, she didn't see me. She walked to the square and sat in the shade of the arcade on the stone and she didn't move for an hour. Girma stayed in the office a long time. When he came out he didn't have anything. No correction. He sat down next to her on the stone, in his wool suit, sweating. They didn't speak. I stood in the square like a lamp post. Then they got up and went back to the rented room and packed.

MD: They left?

OMAR: Three days later. On the train. They never came back to Djibouti. Never. Not once. [Pause.] Girma wrote to me for years. Letters, every year, a page. Asking about my wife, my children, the harbor. Senait never wrote. But in every letter Girma wrote one line at the end. "Senait sends greetings to your mother and to Amina." Every letter. Until my mother died, and then, "Senait sends greetings to Amina." Until Amina died. [Pause.] And then the letters stopped, because Girma also died. And I didn't know where to write.

[00:09:30]
MD: Omar. The letters on the negatives. The S and the G.

OMAR: [He nods slowly. Looks at the harbor a moment. Then back.] Yes. I know about the letters. [Pause.] The first summer, when she was sick with the fever in my mother's house, in the room downstairs, Girma brought her the boxes of negatives so she would have something to do with her hands. Lying in bed with the wet cloth on her forehead, sorting negatives. And I saw her with a pencil, writing on each one. S. S. G. S. Very small. And I said, "What is that?" And she said, "This one is mine. This one is his. He makes me do it." I said, "Why?" She said, "Because he says one day someone will count."

[Long silence. UJ, later: "I could hear the director's heartbeat through the boom. Not really. But nearly."]

MD: "One day someone will count."

OMAR: That's what she said. He made her do it from the first day. From Asmara. He wrote the G on his and she wrote the S on hers. He insisted. Every negative. Because he knew. He knew already, in 1962, that people would see his name on the stamp and think it was all him. And he couldn't change the stamp, because the studio was in his name, and a studio in a woman's name, in those years, nobody would come. So he did the only thing he could do. He made her sign the dark side.

[00:11:40]
MD: [Quietly.] I counted.

OMAR: How many?

MD: Two thousand three hundred and fourteen. Fourteen hundred and two are hers.

OMAR: [He takes off the captain's cap. Holds it on his knee. Very still. Then he begins to laugh, softly, his shoulders moving.] You see. Somebody counted. Fifty-seven years. [Wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.] Fifty-seven years and the granddaughter comes on the train and counts.

[00:12:30]
[Interview moves downstairs. Subject wanted to show the room. A long narrow room, whitewashed, a bed with a blue cover, a window open to the harbor, the sea moving light on the ceiling.]

OMAR: Here. This is where my mother nursed her. And this is where Amina died. Same room. Same window. [Pause.] When Amina was sick at the end, she asked for the newspaper. She held it on the blanket. She said, "Omar, do you remember the girl who made me laugh?" I said yes. She said, "Somebody should tell people." I said, "Who would I tell?" [Looks at the camera.] Now I'm telling.

[00:13:40]
MD: Is there anything you want to say to her? To Senait?

OMAR: [Looks into the lens for a long moment.] Senait. You were right. That's the one. [Pause.] My mother's goat broth is still being made. Fatouma makes it now. You will never come here again, I think, you are too old and I am too old and the heat is still the heat. So I am sending you the paper. [He hands the plastic sleeve to MD.] One of the ten. I have nine more. [Pause.] Under the line where it says his name, I have written yours. In pen. Like he did on the dark side. It is not a correction. It is just true.

[End of recording.]

---

MD note: In blue ballpoint, beneath the small printed line, in a careful old hand that leans backward: and Senait Tewolde, who took them. Omar checked against our prints later on my laptop, peering, the binoculars still around his neck, and frowned, and said he would have to be more exact. Eleven of the twelve sleeves are marked S. The twelfth, a group of dockworkers at noon, is G.

"He was a good photographer too," Omar said, tapping the dockworkers. "Just not as good. And he knew it. That's the most important thing a man can know."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: Salt

Sunday, 1 February. Djibouti.

Fatouma's elder son, Ali, twenty-two, drove us west at dawn in his uncle's pickup to the salt lake, because, Fatouma said, "You cannot come to Djibouti and see only my kitchen and my uncle's roof." Ubah in the middle, me at the window with the camera, Ali driving with one hand and eating a date with the other and telling us about his plans to open a second restaurant with a menu of only fish.

The road runs through country like the surface of a burnt pan: black rock, rust-red rock, gray dust, no green at all. Then the land falls away and there is the lake, far below sea level, a blue so bright it does not look like water, ringed by white. Salt. Miles of it. Thick, crusted, ridged like frozen waves, so white in the sun you cannot look at it without your eyes watering.

Ali says that in the old days the caravans came here, long lines of camels, to cut slabs of salt and carry them up into the highlands to trade, and that some still come, not many. We saw no caravans. We saw two men with a pickup and shovels, filling sacks, and a boy selling salt crystals in small cloth bags, perfect cubes and strange white flowers of salt that grow on sticks left in the water.

Bought six of the flowers. One for each person in this film who has been kind to us so far. Then realized it was more than six, and bought six more.

Walked out onto the crust. It crunched like snow. Ubah recorded the crunch for a long time with her eyes closed, and then made me walk back and forth while she recorded my footsteps, "for when you need the sound of somebody walking a long way."

---

Same day. Evening.

Called home. My father answered. I told him about the newspaper. About the Frenchman. About one day someone will count.

Long silence on the line.

He said, "Wait." I heard him walking through the house, the stairs, the creak of the upstairs floor. He said, "I'm in the room above the garage." Then: "I'm going to look underneath."

He called back two hours later.

In the darkroom closet, behind the shelf where the fixer bottles stood, there is a board in the wall that is loose. He has walked past it his whole life. Behind the board, a flat envelope, gray with dust, addressed in his father's hand, in French, to the editor of Phare, Djibouti. Stamped. Never posted. Or posted, and returned: there is a second stamp, smudged, and a word in French written across the front in another hand that my father photographed and sent me and that Ubah says means "refused."

Inside, two pages. A letter. My father read it to me over the phone, translating slowly, his own French from school very bad.

I will copy it out when I am home and have it in front of me. But the line he read twice was near the end. "I am asking you to print one sentence. Not for me. For the photographs. They should know whose hands they came from."

My father said, "He went back. Later. He wrote it later, after they left." He said, "The date is 1971."

Two years after. From Hargeisa? No: the return address is the studio in Piassa. He wrote it from Addis, two years later, and it came back, and he put it behind the board in the darkroom, where he walked three steps this way and three steps that way, at night, for the rest of his working life.

My father said, "Don't tell her on the phone."

I said I wouldn't.

---

Monday, 2 February.

Last fah-fah. Fatouma would not let us pay for anything, ever, the whole week, and we have had a fight about it every night, and tonight I lost again. Her aunt at the door, who comments on everyone, said to me as we left, "You argue like your grandmother. She also lost."

I said, "You knew her?"

The aunt said, "I was twelve. She took my picture with my brother's bicycle. She made me sit on it. I couldn't ride. I fell off. She took the picture while I was falling." She laughed so hard she had to hold the door frame. "I have it at home. I'm in the air."

I looked for it on the laptop tonight. There it is, DJIBOUTI 1967-69 / 233. A girl in midair beside a tipping bicycle, arms out, mouth an O. S.

---

Tuesday, 3 February.

Fatouma packed us food for the flight to Hargeisa in a plastic tub inside two plastic bags inside a cloth: the spiced rice with lamb they make here, skoudehkaris, fragrant with cardamom and cinnamon and clove, with little pieces of meat that fall apart, and a jar of the red chili paste "for your grandmother, who will say it's not hot enough, and she will be wrong."

At the door, Omar was waiting in his captain's cap. He had walked from his house, slowly, with a stick. He gave Ubah his old binoculars. He said, "For the sound girl. So she can see what she's hearing." Ubah, who does not cry, cried.

He shook my hand and held it. "Tell her the ships still come in," he said. "Tell her somebody else takes them now. Tell her it is all right."

Ubah has the binoculars around her neck on the plane. She keeps lifting them to the window and looking at clouds.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: Hargeisa

Tuesday, 3 February. Hargeisa. Night.

Ubah's city. You can tell from the way she walks out of the airport: faster, taller, with her chin up, which I will not point out to her because she would say I am stealing her life for my film.

Her mother, Sahra, met us. A small woman in a long patterned dress and a deep red scarf, who hugged Ubah so hard Ubah's headphones fell off her neck, and then held me at arm's length and said in English, "You are the director," and then in Somali something to Ubah that made Ubah roll her eyes. Ubah translated later: "She said you look too thin to be in charge of anyone."

The house is in a neighborhood of walled compounds on the slope above the dry riverbed. A metal gate painted blue, a courtyard with a lemon tree and a goat tied to it, a long low house with a veranda, and many, many people. Ubah has, as far as I can count, four brothers, three sisters, eleven nephews and nieces, and an indeterminate number of cousins who appear and disappear like sparrows. Every one of them shook my hand. The children touched my camera case as if it might be warm.

Tea: shaah, boiled in the pot with the milk already in it, with cardamom and cinnamon and clove and a lot of sugar, poured from a height into glasses so that it foams. I took out the cardamom from Merkato and gave it to Sahra. She opened the bag, smelled it, and nodded at me with real respect for the first time. "Good," she said in English. "Not dust."

My grandmother will be so pleased.

---

Wednesday, 4 February.

Breakfast: canjeero, the soft spongy pancakes, thinner and sourer than our injera, stacked on a plate, torn and eaten with ghee and sugar, or with liver and onion fried with green pepper. Ubah's youngest brother, Bashir, who is nine, showed me how to tear it properly. Apparently I tear it like a foreigner.

Then the city.

The money-changers in the market street, sitting behind great stacks of banknotes piled on the pavement like bricks at a building site, in the open, doing sums on calculators while they chat with each other. Ubah says nobody would dream of taking a note from the piles. I filmed the piles for ten minutes. A changer in a blue cap asked if I wanted to change money. I said I was only filming. He said, "Then change a little, so the film is true." I changed a little.

The livestock market at the edge of town in the late afternoon: camels, hundreds, standing in groups in the dust with their legs folded or not folded, and goats and sheep, and men in long cloths and checked shirts walking among them with sticks, examining teeth and humps and knees, bargaining in long rolling sentences that Ubah says are half poetry. "A good camel trader," she said, "can insult your camel for ten minutes and never repeat himself."

The dry riverbed at dusk: wide, sandy, pale, crossed by footpaths and the tracks of trucks, with acacias along the banks. Children playing football in it. In the rains, Ubah says, the water comes down all at once, brown, fast, and fills it from bank to bank in an hour, and everybody goes to the bridge to look. Then it goes away again.

The river with no water in it. My grandmother said that.

---

Same day, night.

After dinner (goat with rice and banana, which you eat together, a bite of each, which I did not believe until I tried it), we laid the Hargeisa box out on the long carpet in the sitting room under the strip light. Three hundred and forty-four negatives, from 1970 and 1971. The prints we have made so far, ninety-eight of them, in rows.

The whole family came to look. Ubah's grandmother came last. Khadra Ismail, seventy-four, Sahra's mother. Tall even now, very straight, in a cream dress and a brown scarf, with henna on her fingertips faded to orange and a wide face that is always about to laugh. She lives in the next compound and comes through the gate in the wall between them.

She walked slowly along the rows the way the old man in Asmara did. Stopped. Bent. Picked up a print.

The market stall. The one with the shadow of the woman in the scarf lying across the bottom corner, the one I flagged in my kitchen in December. A mat by the riverbank, with clay burners and little cloth bags and glass bottles laid out on it in careful rows, and a young woman sitting behind them, cross-legged, laughing with her whole face at whoever is holding the camera.

Khadra said something in Somali. The room went quiet, then burst into noise all at once, the children shrieking, Sahra with her hand over her mouth.

Ubah turned to me. Her face was very strange.

"She says, 'That is me,'" Ubah said. "She says, 'That is me, and that is the woman from Asmara, on the ground.'"

The shadow.

My grandmother told me, on the last day of December, sitting in her chair in Arat Kilo, that in Hargeisa there was a woman who sold incense from a mat by the river, who laughed with her whole face. The woman with her whole face is Ubah's grandmother.

Ubah and I have known each other for six years. I sat on the carpet. She sat beside me. We looked at each other for a long time and neither of us said anything sensible.

Khadra said, through Ubah, "Why are you both sitting on the floor like that? Get up. I will tell you on Monday. Tonight I am too surprised. Monday. And bring my brother."

---

Thursday, 5 February.

Ubah all day very quiet. Recording the house: the goat, the gate, the call of the man who comes past at noon selling water from a donkey cart, the children doing homework at the long table, the clink of tea glasses. I asked if she was all right.

"I brought you here for the city," she said. "I didn't know I was bringing you here for my grandmother."

I said neither did I.

She said, "When I was little she told me about a woman with a box who made her laugh so hard she knocked over a bottle of oil. I thought it was a story. She tells a lot of stories. My grandmother would tell a story to a wall if the wall stood still."

---

Friday, 6 February.

Ubah's great-uncle, Yusuf Ismail Guled, eighty-eight, Khadra's elder brother. A poet. In his day, Ubah says, one of the poets people stopped in the street to hear. He composed for weddings, for the radio, for disputes between families that needed settling, for anything. He has, people say, thousands of lines in his head: his own, his teachers', poems a hundred years old. He can recite for hours without a pause.

He does not, Ubah says, always remember what he had for breakfast, or that his son came to see him yesterday, or which of his great-grandchildren is which. "The new things fall out," she said. "The old things are made of stone."

We visited for an hour this afternoon to arrange the interview. He sat on a mat on his veranda in a white cap and a gray jacket over a long cloth, thin as a stick, eyes milky at the edges, and held my hand in both of his for a long time and asked me three times where I was from. Each time I said Addis Ababa, and each time he said, "Ah, the city in the clouds," and patted my hand.

When Ubah told him we had photographs from 1970, he stopped patting.

"The woman from Asmara," he said. Ubah translated. "With the box on legs. She came in the year of the late rains."

He knows which year she came by which rains were late. He does not know what day it is.

Wednesday, he said. Come Wednesday. "In the morning, when my head is clean."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 08: Khadra, the Incense Mat

TRANSCRIPT 08
Subject: Khadra Ismail, 74, retired seller of incense and perfumed oils
Place: the courtyard of her compound, Hargeisa, under the lemon tree, on a mat
Date: Monday, 9 February 2026, from 9:30 a.m.
Present: MD, camera; UJ, interviewer, sound and translation (Subject asked that her granddaughter ask the questions); Sahra, daughter, at the edge of frame
Language: Somali; translated by UJ
Notes: Subject laid out the mat exactly as in the photograph. Clay burners, small cloth bags, three glass bottles of perfumed oil. "So you can see what it looked like." She lit one of the burners. Coal, then a pinch of incense from a bag: dark resin, sugar, perfume, cooked together into small brown pieces that hiss and melt on the coal. Smoke, sweet, heavy, like a room after a wedding.

[00:00:10]
KHADRA: Is it working? The machine?

UJ: It's working, Ayeeyo.

KHADRA: Then ask me. You know what to ask. You are the one who knows everything now.

[00:00:30]
UJ: Tell us what you sold.

KHADRA: [Gesturing along the mat.] This is the household incense. Every family makes its own, but the lazy families buy from me. [Laughs.] You take the resin, the good resin, and sugar, and perfume, and some other things that I am not going to tell you because your film will go everywhere and then everyone will make it. You cook it in a pan until it is like dark toffee. You break it in pieces. Then at home you put a piece on the coal in the burner, like this, and the smoke goes into the clothes, into the hair, into the curtains. A house that smells good is a house where somebody cares.

[Subject lifts the burner. Waves smoke toward MD and the camera. MD notes: my grandmother did exactly this, with coffee smoke, in December. Same gesture. Same wrist.]

UJ: And the oils?

KHADRA: Perfume oils. For weddings, for visiting. A dab on the wrist. One dab, not like the young people now who pour it on like they are washing a car.

[00:02:15]
UJ: Ayeeyo, the photograph.

[MD hands her the print: HARGEISA 1970-71 / 58. Sleeve marked S.]

KHADRA: [Holds it. Laughs.] Look at me. Nineteen. Look at that face. I thought I was very beautiful. I was right. [Laughs harder.] Your grandfather, Ubah, the first time he saw me was at this mat. Did you know that? A year after this. He came to buy incense for his mother and stayed two hours and bought nothing. Then he came back every day for a month and bought one piece each time. He spent all his money a piece at a time. He was very bad at business. Very good husband.

[00:03:30]
UJ: The woman who took this. What do you remember?

KHADRA: Everything. [Pause.] It was 1970. The year the rains came late. There were two of them, from Addis, a man and a woman, staying in the guesthouse by the market, and they put a cloth on a wall and photographed people in front of it for money. Everybody went. Half of Hargeisa. People who had never seen a camera. Old men in their best cloths, holding their sticks very straight, like this. [Demonstrates, very stern.] And the woman, who had a face from the highlands, very fine, very serious, would say something to make them laugh, and click. Always just when they laughed.

UJ: What did she say? Did she speak Somali?

KHADRA: Ten words. Twenty. Very badly. That was the joke. She would say a word wrong and everybody would laugh at her, and click. [Laughs.] She was clever. She knew they would laugh at her. She let them.

[00:05:00]
UJ: And this picture? Here, at the mat?

KHADRA: She came to buy incense. Not to take a picture. Just to buy. She sat down on the ground in front of the mat, there, where you are, Meron, and smelled everything, every bag, every bottle. She asked me how I made it. I didn't tell her either. [Laughs.] She said in her twenty words, "You are a poet of smoke." I didn't know what she meant. I laughed so hard I knocked the oil bottle and it went everywhere on the mat, and then she stood up very fast and took the camera from her bag, a small one, not the big one on legs, and pointed it down at me. Click. [Pause.] Her shadow fell on the mat. I remember that. I remember thinking, her shadow is in my oil.

[UJ notes: Subject points, in the print, to the shadow in the corner.]

KHADRA: There. That's her. That's all of her in the picture. Her shadow, in my spilled oil.

[00:06:50]
UJ: Where was the man? The photographer?

KHADRA: At the guesthouse, I think, with the big camera and the queue of old men. He did the cloth on the wall. She went walking. She took the pictures of the streets, the market, the river, the camels, the children, the women at the well. He did the people who paid. She did the people who didn't pay. [Pause.] That is what everyone said. The man takes your picture. The woman takes your life.

[00:07:40]
UJ: Did you see her again?

KHADRA: Many times. The two years they came. She came to the mat every few days. She bought incense for herself, a little, and for her mother-in-law, she said, in Addis, who complained of everything. [Laughs.] She sat with me. We didn't talk much, we didn't have the words. She would sit and watch the people go past along the riverbed, and sometimes she would lift the small camera, click, and sometimes not. I asked her once why she didn't take a picture of something. She said, "I am looking first. Pictures are what you take when looking is not enough." [Pause.] I have thought about that for fifty years.

[00:09:00]
UJ: Ayeeyo. Did you know she was Meron's grandmother? When I started working in Addis? When I talked about Meron?

KHADRA: How could I know? You said, "I work with a girl who makes films." You didn't say, "I work with the granddaughter of the woman who spilled your oil." [Laughs. Then grows serious.] But I will tell you something. When you were small, I told you about the woman with the box. You remember?

UJ: I remember.

KHADRA: I told you because I wanted somebody to know. Nobody in this city knew her name. I didn't know her name. I only knew she was from Asmara and she married a man from Addis and she made me laugh. So I told you, so that when I was gone, somebody would still know there was a woman. [Pause.] And now you have brought her granddaughter to my mat. [She reaches across and takes MD's hand. Holds it on her knee.] This is how it goes. You tell the children the story, and you don't know why, and fifty years later the story walks in the gate.

[00:10:50]
MD: [In Amharic, then UJ translating.] Is there anything you want to say to her?

KHADRA: [Looks at the camera. Straightens her scarf. Lifts the burner with the incense still smoking and holds it toward the lens.] Asmara woman. I still have the bottle. The one I knocked over. It is empty, but I kept it. I kept it in a box with my wedding gold. When my husband asked me why, I said, it is the day I learned I was beautiful. [Pause.] You were right. I was a poet of smoke. My granddaughter is a poet of sound. Your granddaughter is a poet of pictures. We are a very good family, the three of us. We should have been introduced sooner.

[End of recording.]

---

MD note: The bottle exists. She brought it out from the house in a tin box, wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Small, green glass, with a glass stopper, empty, with a faint dark stain still in the bottom. She held it up to the light and then held it next to the print, so that I could film them both together: the bottle full on the mat in 1970, falling; the bottle empty in her hand in 2026, still.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 09: Yusuf, the Poem With a Name

TRANSCRIPT 09
Subject: Yusuf Ismail Guled, 88, poet
Place: the veranda of his son's house, Hargeisa, on a mat, facing the courtyard
Date: Wednesday, 11 February 2026, from 8:15 a.m.
Present: MD, camera; UJ, interviewer, sound and translation; Khadra Ismail, his sister, beside him; his son Abdi, in the doorway
Language: Somali; translated by UJ. Note on the poem: Somali poetry is built on alliteration, every line carrying the same opening sound. UJ's English translation tries to keep one sound throughout, so as to give some idea of how it works; it is a translation of the sense and the shape, not of the music, which cannot be carried across.
Notes: Subject in a white cap, gray jacket, a long cloth, a walking stick across his knees, a glass of tea he did not touch. Clear, slow speech. Morning light from the left.

[00:00:20]
YUSUF: Who are you?

UJ: Adeer, it's Ubah. Sahra's daughter. Khadra's granddaughter.

YUSUF: [Looks at her a long time.] Ubah. Yes. You went away to the city in the clouds.

UJ: I did.

YUSUF: And who is this?

UJ: This is Meron. My friend. From Addis. We came on Friday. And Monday. We are making a film.

YUSUF: [Turns to MD. Holds out his hand. MD takes it.] Welcome. Where are you from?

MD: Addis Ababa.

YUSUF: Ah. The city in the clouds.

[00:01:30]
[MD notes: this is the fourth time we have done this introduction in a week. He is courteous every time, and every time new.]

UJ: Adeer, we brought photographs. From 1970 and 1971. From the woman from Asmara.

YUSUF: [Something changes in his face. He sits up. Sets the stick down on the mat.] The woman with the box on legs. She came in the year of the late rains. Then she came again in the year after, when the rains were early and the riverbed flooded on the second day and took a man's cart and two goats. The man got out. The goats did not. [Pause.] You have her pictures?

UJ: We have one of you.

[00:02:40]
[MD hands him the print. HARGEISA 1970-71 / 301. A man of perhaps thirty-four, thin, in a white cloth and a jacket, sitting on a low stool in an open doorway, his hand lifted in the middle of a gesture, mouth open, eyes fixed on something past the camera. Behind him, in the dark of the room, the shapes of other men, listening. Sleeve marked S.]

YUSUF: [Holds it close to his eyes, then far, the way all the old people have done with these prints. Then he laughs, a high, delighted laugh.] I am talking. Of course I am talking. When was I not talking?

KHADRA: Never.

YUSUF: Never. [To UJ.] This is the house of Ahmed the trader, by the market. In the evening the men came there to drink tea and listen. I was reciting. She came in very quietly and sat at the back by the door, a woman, alone, with a little camera, and nobody minded, because she was a guest and a stranger and she sat very still. And then I came to the best part, and she stood up. Click. [He mimes, very fast.] And sat down again. Like a bird taking a seed.

[00:04:30]
UJ: What were you reciting?

YUSUF: My own poem. About my father's camels. About a dry year when he walked them to the coast and back and lost not one. You want to hear it?

UJ: Yes, Adeer.

[Subject recites. Four minutes and ten seconds without pause. UJ notes: voice stronger than his speaking voice, rhythmic, rising and falling, every line opening on the same sound, the men in the courtyard stopping to listen, the boy at the gate standing still. MD notes: I understand none of the words and all of it. His hands move with it. At the end he sits back and drinks his tea for the first time.]

[00:09:10]
UJ: [Quietly.] That was beautiful, Adeer.

YUSUF: It is a good poem. I made it in 1962. You know how many times I have said it since?

UJ: How many?

YUSUF: I don't know. A thousand. And every time the same. Every word. [Taps his temple.] This doesn't change. [Pause.] Yesterday changes. I don't know what I ate. Abdi tells me I ate rice. I believe him. [Laughs.] But 1962 I know. Every word.

[00:10:20]
MD: [Through UJ.] Can you tell us how the poems are kept? How they're passed on?

YUSUF: [Turns to MD. Pleased to be asked.] In the old days there was no paper. Or there was paper and nobody had it. So a poem lived in people. A poet makes a poem. A reciter learns it, word for word, every word, and walks with it to the next town, to the next well, and recites it. And somebody there learns it, and walks with it. A good poem goes from here to the coast in a month. Faster than a letter. [Pause.] And the most important thing, the first thing, the thing a boy learns before he learns any poem: you never say a poem without its name. You say, "This is the poem of so-and-so, son of so-and-so," and then you say it. Always. Every time. A poem without the name of its poet is a stolen camel. Everyone knows whose it is. Everyone knows you are a thief.

[00:11:50]
[MD notes: Ubah stopped translating for a moment here and looked at me over the boom. I nodded for her to go on. She went on.]

UJ: Adeer. The woman from Asmara. Did you ever make a poem about her?

YUSUF: [He does not answer for a long time. His sister puts her hand on his arm. He looks at the print in his lap.] Yes.

[00:12:40]
YUSUF: The second year. 1971. She gave me this picture. She gave a picture to everybody she took, she didn't take money for the ones she took walking, only the ones the man took at the wall. She brought it to Ahmed's house and gave it to me in front of the men, and I looked at it, and I saw on the back of it a blue stamp with letters, and I asked Ahmed's son, who could read the foreign letters, what it said. He said, "It says the man's name. The photographer from Addis." [Pause.] And I said, "But the man didn't take this. She took it. I saw her." And everyone in the room laughed. They thought I was joking. And she sat by the door very still with her hands in her lap and didn't laugh. [Pause.] So I asked her, "What is your name?" And she told me.

UJ: What did she say?

YUSUF: "Senait." [Pause.] She said, "Senait, of Asmara." And I said, "Then I will make a poem with your name in it, so it doesn't get lost." And she said, in her twenty words, "Why?" And I said, "Because a picture without its name is a stolen camel." [Laughs.] She laughed then. That was the only time she laughed in Ahmed's house.

[00:14:30]
UJ: Do you remember it? The poem?

YUSUF: [He looks at her as if she has asked whether he remembers his mother's face.] Every word.

[Subject recites. One minute and forty seconds. UJ's English translation follows, made over two evenings with Khadra's help, keeping one opening sound in every line, as in the original.]

YUSUF: [Translated by UJ.]

This is the poem of Yusuf, son of Ismail, son of Guled.

Senait of Asmara, I saw you sit at the stall of the smoke-seller,
silent as a sentry, your shadow laid down on the sand by the riverbed,
a scarf on your hair the color of sky before the sun has come up,
a small box held to your chest the way a mother holds a sleeping son.
Strangers stood straight for the stranger, stiff as the stakes of a fence,
the old men starched in their best cloths, too solemn to smile.
So you spoke them your seven wrong words and they split with laughing,
and in their laughing you stole them, softly, the sly one,
and set them down safe in the silver that time does not spoil.
Say, who saw them? The stamp says a man. A stamp is a stone with one song.
I say Senait. I set her name in this song so the song does not stray.
Seasons will slide from the hills, the riverbed swallow its flood and spit it out sandy,
my sons and their sons will sit where I sit and stumble on half that I said,
but say this one straight, say it whole: the one who looks first is the one who sees.
Senait saw. Senait set it down. Say her name with the song, or stay silent.

[00:16:50]
[No one speaks. In the courtyard, a goat. The boy at the gate. UJ, later: "I have never translated anything harder, and I have never translated anything I was more sure of."]

YUSUF: [Drinks his tea.] It is not my best poem. My best poem is the camels. But it is a true poem. And it has her name.

[00:17:30]
MD: [In Amharic, then UJ.] Did people learn it? Did it travel?

YUSUF: A little. Some of the men in Ahmed's house learned it that night. One of them took it to Berbera. One of them, I heard, took it to Djibouti. [Laughs.] Poems go where they want. Then the years came, and people forgot it, because it was a small poem about a woman with a camera, not about love or rain or camels. But I didn't forget it. [Taps his temple.] It's in the stone part.

[00:18:15]
UJ: Adeer. Meron is Senait's granddaughter.

YUSUF: [Turns to MD. Looks at her face. A long time.] Who?

UJ: Senait. The woman from Asmara. In the poem. This is her granddaughter.

YUSUF: [Slowly. Then all at once.] Ah. [He reaches out and takes MD's face in both his hands, the way Tsega did, the way Abrehet did.] Then the poem worked. You see? The name didn't get lost. It went into the stone and stayed there, and now her granddaughter comes. [To UJ.] Tell her. Tell her I kept it. Tell her the stamp was wrong and the poem was right.

MD: I'll tell her.

YUSUF: [Lets go. Picks up the stick. Looks at MD with polite interest.] Welcome. Where are you from?

[MD notes: I told him Addis Ababa. He said, "Ah, the city in the clouds." Ubah had to stop the recording for a minute. So did I.]

[End of recording.]

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: What Memory Keeps

Thursday, 12 February. Hargeisa.

We went back to Yusuf's this morning to film him in his courtyard with the light behind him, for the opening of the Hargeisa section. He did not know us. He welcomed us as strangers, kindly, asked where I was from, called Addis the city in the clouds. Ubah, without asking, without explaining anything, said, "Adeer, will you say the poem of the woman from Asmara?"

He said it. Every word the same as yesterday. Ubah checked it afterward against the recording with her headphones on, line by line, mouthing along. Not one word moved.

Then he asked, "Who was she? The woman in the poem? I don't remember."

And then, a moment later, "She took my picture in Ahmed's house. In the year of the early rains."

The doctor in Addis said the old memories are stored in a different cupboard. I thought it was a nice thing doctors say. It is not. It is a fact you can film. Yesterday is gone and 1971 is standing in the courtyard in full sun.

---

Same day. Afternoon.

Things I have learned about memory, for the film, for myself.

That people remember what they wore before they remember what they said. Mulugeta's brother's shirt. Abrehet's aunt's hot irons. Omar's brass buttons. Khadra's green bottle. The body keeps the cloth.

That they remember what they ate. Every single person has fed us before speaking. Every single person has watched our faces while we ate. That is not a coincidence. That is how you find out whether someone will listen.

That they remember the people outside the frame better than the people in it. The sick teacher under the lemon tree. The mother moving the chair. The Frenchman shaking his head. The photographer's shadow.

That the old people do not need the photograph to remember. They need the photograph to be believed.

---

Friday, 13 February.

Ubah's cousin Deeqa was married in the evening. We were invited, which in this family means compelled.

A hall at the edge of town hung with fairy lights and swags of gold cloth. The women in one great glittering room in dresses of every color, sequins, gauze, long scarves shot with metal thread, gold at the ears and throat and wrists, hands painted with henna in patterns like vines and lace, all the way up to the elbow. The bride on a raised seat in white and gold, very still and very grand, looking about fourteen and also about forty.

The music. A keyboard player and a singer and a drum, and then the older women took over and began a song of their own, call and answer, clapping, one woman's voice leading and the whole room coming back at her. Ubah says the women's wedding songs are teasing and praising both at once, the way Mulugeta's verses are, and that the lines about the groom's family were "not entirely polite." Khadra, at seventy-four, danced with her granddaughters, slowly, with the side-to-side step and the lifted hands, laughing her whole-face laugh, and when she saw me filming she pointed at the camera and shouted something, and the room shouted back.

Ubah translated, wiping her eyes. "She said, 'The granddaughter of the Asmara woman is here! Make her dance or she'll steal you!'"

They made me dance. I was terrible. They were delighted.

Halwa afterward, the sticky sweet one, amber-colored, glossy, shining with ghee and cardamom, served in small pieces with tiny cups of black coffee spiced with ginger. I ate four pieces. Sahra said, approvingly, "Now you are less thin."

---

Saturday, 14 February.

In the courtyard in the late afternoon Ubah recorded her grandmother singing a lullaby to Bashir, who is nine and much too old for lullabies and did not complain. Khadra sang it with her hand on the boy's back, low, and the boy's eyes closed against his will.

Ubah's translation, afterward, sitting on the step: Sleep, little camel, the well is far, but your mother knows the way. Sleep, little camel, the stars are the herd, and none of them is lost.

"She sang that to my mother," Ubah said. "She sang it to me. I didn't know it was about camels. I thought it was about me." She pressed the playback and listened again with her eyes closed. "Maybe it's the same thing."

I asked whether she has recorded her grandmother before.

"Never." She said it fast. "I've recorded everybody in Addis. Generators, ministers, water pumps, a hospital choir. Not once my own grandmother. I was always going to. Next time. Next visit." She took off the headphones. "Your grandmother has the letters on the negatives. My grandmother had nothing. Only me, and I never pressed the button."

I asked if she would let me interview her, on Monday, before we leave. On camera. The person who holds the boom, for once, in front of it.

She said no.

Then, an hour later, while we were packing the sound bag, without looking at me, she said, "Monday. In the morning. Before I change my mind."

---

Sunday, 15 February.

Last full day. Khadra gave me a bag of her household incense, the old recipe, cooked yesterday in her kitchen in a pan blackened with use. "For the Asmara woman," she said through Ubah. "It is the same recipe. She will know it. She smelled it for two years."

Yusuf's son came by with a sheet of paper in an envelope. His father had asked him to write the poem down. In Somali, in a clear schoolteacher's hand, and at the top, before the first line, as in the recitation, the name of the poet, son of, son of. And beneath that, a new line, in the son's hand: Given to Senait's granddaughter, February 2026, so that it has her name in two places.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 10: Ubah, the Other Side of the Boom

TRANSCRIPT 10
Subject: Ubah Jama, 29, sound recordist
Place: the courtyard of her mother's house, Hargeisa, on the step of the veranda
Date: Monday, 16 February 2026, 7:50 a.m.
Present: MD, interviewer and camera; Bashir Jama, 9, holding the boom, under protest and with instructions; Sahra, in the kitchen doorway
Language: English and Amharic, mixed, with Somali words; transcribed by MD
Notes: Subject set her own levels, twice, and then a third time. Told Bashir: "If you let it dip into the frame I will tell everyone at school you cried at the wedding." Bashir did not let it dip.

[00:00:05]
UBAH: This is terrible. I hate this. I don't know where to look.

MD: Look at me.

UBAH: You're behind the camera.

MD: Then look at the camera.

UBAH: [Looks at the lens. Looks away. Laughs.] No. I can't. I'll look at the goat.

[00:00:30]
MD: Tell me your name and what you do.

UBAH: Ubah Jama. I record sound. For films, for radio, for anything that makes a noise and needs somebody to listen to it properly. [Pause.] Is that enough?

MD: Tell me where you grew up.

UBAH: Here. This house. That goat's grandmother. [Laughs.] My father is a mechanic. He has a garage by the main road, trucks mostly, the big ones that go to the coast. When I was small he took me to the garage on Fridays and put me on an oil drum, and the trucks would come in and he would ask the driver to start the engine, and he would stand there with his eyes closed, listening. And then he'd say, "The third cylinder." Or, "The fan belt is singing." And he would be right. Every time. He could hear what was wrong inside an engine he had never seen.

MD: He taught you?

UBAH: He didn't teach me. I sat on the drum and copied him. I closed my eyes. After a year I could hear the fan belt singing too. [Smiles.] He was so proud. He told everybody, "My daughter has a mechanic's ears." He wanted me to be a doctor. He said, "With those ears you will hear what is wrong in a person's chest." [Pause.] I went to Addis to study medicine. I lasted one year.

[00:02:45]
MD: What happened?

UBAH: The university had a radio station. Students. One room, one mixing desk, two microphones, very old. I went in one day because I heard someone doing it wrong through the wall. The hum. There was a hum on everything they recorded, a ground hum, and nobody could hear it. I went in and said, "You have a hum," and they said, "What hum?" [Laughs.] I fixed it in ten minutes. Then I never left. My father didn't speak to me for four months.

MD: And then?

UBAH: And then my mother put the phone to the radio when one of my programs was on, and he listened, and the next day he called me and said, "The sound is very clean." That was all. "The sound is very clean." That's my father saying sorry. [Pause.] Like your grandmother's father with the suits.

[00:04:00]
MD: Why sound? Not pictures?

UBAH: [Thinks.] Because people forget sound is there. A picture, you see it, you know you are seeing it. Sound, you don't notice until it's wrong. If the sound is right, the person watching the film never thinks about me. They just feel that they are in the room. [Pause.] That's the job. Being in the room so well that nobody knows you are in the room.

MD: Do you mind that? Nobody knowing?

UBAH: [Long pause. She looks at the goat.] I used to say no.

MD: And now?

UBAH: [Laughs, not much.] You want me to say it on camera.

MD: Only if it's true.

UBAH: It's true. [Pause.] I have worked on eleven films. Three of them left my name off the credits. Not on purpose. Nobody did it on purpose. The list was too long, or they put "sound by the production" or they spelled it wrong so it was somebody else. One of them, the hospital film, the director thanked his driver at the end and not me. His driver. [Laughs.] I didn't say anything. That's what you do. You don't make trouble about your name. You're the sound girl. You're lucky to be there.

[00:06:10]
MD: [Quietly.] Ubah.

UBAH: I know. I know. When Omar told us about the newspaper I had to go and stand on the stairs. I wasn't crying. I was very angry and I didn't know who at. Some Frenchman who is dead. My hospital director. Myself. [Pause.] Your grandmother folded the paper and put it under her coffee glass. I would have done the same thing. That's what made me angry. That I would have done exactly the same thing.

[00:07:20]
MD: What do you think the letters are? The S and the G? Now that we know?

UBAH: [Without hesitating.] A credit list. The first one. Two thousand three hundred and fourteen credits, each one a single letter, on the dark side of the film, where only somebody who loved the work would ever look. [Pause.] Your grandfather couldn't put her name on the stamp. So he made her put it on every negative. That's not nothing. That's a man who knew. And then he tried the letter to the newspaper, and they sent it back. And then he hid the letter behind a board. [Pause.] I think he was ashamed he couldn't fix it. And she was ashamed she didn't fight. And they were ashamed together, very quietly, for fifty years, in the same house. And the negatives were in the trunk the whole time, saying the truth to nobody.

MD: Until.

UBAH: Until you counted. [Pause.] Until we counted. I read out the letters. You made the marks.

MD: We counted.

[00:08:45]
MD: And your grandmother? What did you think when she picked up that print?

UBAH: [She puts her hand on her chest. Holds it there.] I thought my heart had stopped. Really. I heard it stop. Then it started again and it was too loud. [Laughs.] I thought, this is a story she told me when I was six. A woman with a box who made her laugh so hard she knocked over a bottle. I didn't believe it. I thought it was one of her stories. She has a hundred. A djinn in the well. A camel that could count. A woman with a box. [Pause.] And the woman with the box was the grandmother of the person I work with every day.

MD: Did it change anything? For you?

UBAH: [Long pause.] It made me listen to the other stories again. The djinn in the well. The camel that could count. I thought, which of these is also true? Which of them is a real person with no name? [Pause.] I'm going to record them. All of them. Before I go back. That's what I decided. On the step on Saturday, after the lullaby. I'm going to record every story she has, even the djinn.

[00:10:10]
[MD notes: Bashir, holding the boom, said something in Somali. Ubah laughed and answered him.]

MD: What did he say?

UBAH: He said, "Can I be in the film if I hold this?" I said only if he holds it properly for another five minutes. [To Bashir.] You see? This is how it starts. Bribery and boom poles.

[00:10:40]
MD: Is there anything you want people to know? When they watch this?

UBAH: [Looks at the lens, finally. Holds it.] That the people outside the frame are also in the picture. The person holding the light. The sick teacher under the lemon tree. The mother who brought the chair. The boy holding the boom. [Bashir straightens.] The grandmother who told the story to a six-year-old so that somebody would remember there was a woman. [Pause.] If you see a photograph and it's very good, somebody was standing just there, out of sight, making it good. Ask who. That's all. Ask who. And write it down. [Pause.] And spell it right.

[00:11:30]
MD: How do you spell it?

UBAH: [Laughs. Then slowly, letter by letter, to the camera.] U, B, A, H. J, A, M, A. Sound.

[End of recording.]

---

MD note: Promised her, at the airport, standing in the line with the binoculars around her neck and the sound bag on her shoulder, that her name will be the second card in the film, after my grandmother's. Before mine.

She said, "That's not how it works, director."

I said it is how it works in my film.

She said, "Then put my father too. For the ears."

I will.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: The Cut

Friday, 20 February. Arat Kilo.

Home Tuesday night. Gave Emama the things.

The incense first. I lit a piece on the brazier from Asmara, the one with the long legs. She was sitting in her chair half asleep with the television on. The smoke went up and across the room toward her, and she opened her eyes and sat forward, and breathed it in, and said, very clearly, "The river with no water."

I said, "Yes."

She said, "The girl at the mat. The one with the oil."

I said, "Her name is Khadra. She's Ubah's grandmother."

My grandmother looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "Ubah's grandmother," and then, "Of course she is," as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world that the girl at the mat should turn out to be the grandmother of the woman with the boom who drinks coffee in her kitchen.

Then she asked whether I had brought cardamom back, and I said I had taken cardamom there, and she said, "Then you've done it backward," and went back to the television, and kept the incense smoking until it was gone.

The salt flowers she put on the windowsill. The halwa she ate in one sitting. The chili paste from Fatouma she tasted on the tip of her finger and said, "Not hot enough," exactly as Fatouma said she would, and I laughed so hard my mother came in from the kitchen to see what was wrong.

The rest I have not given her. Tsega's tin. Tsega's chalk. Omar's newspaper. Yusuf's poem. My grandfather's letter. They are in a box on my desk at the flat with the films. My father and I agreed: she will see the film first. Then the things.

---

Sunday, 22 February.

My grandfather's letter, copied out. My father's translation from the French, with Ubah's corrections. I am putting the whole thing here so it is somewhere.

Addis Ababa, 9 June 1971.

To the Editor, Phare, Djibouti.

Sir. In March 1969 your paper printed twelve photographs from my studio under the title The Faces of Our City. I thank you again for printing them. They were well printed. The paper was good.

Under the photographs you printed my name. This was not correct. Of the twelve photographs, I made one. The other eleven were made by my wife, Senait Tewolde, who was standing in your office on that day behind me by the door. When I asked you then to print her name, you told me that nobody would believe it.

I have thought about that for two years. I find that I believe it. I was there. I held the light.

I am not asking for money. I am not asking for an apology, which would be of no use to anyone now. I am asking you to print one sentence, in any issue, in any corner of any page, as small as you like. Not for me. For the photographs. They should know whose hands they came from.

With respect,

Girma Wolde, Studio Tsehay, Piassa, Addis Ababa.

---

Across the front of the returned envelope, in a different hand, the one word. Refused.

My father says that "I held the light" is the most his father ever said about anything in his life. My father had to go out to the yard for a while after he read it to me the second time.

---

Wednesday, 25 February.

Editing. Twelve hours a day at the flat. Ubah comes in the evenings and does the sound, and we argue about everything, and she is usually right, and when she is wrong she says, "Fine, director," and I know I have won and lost at the same time.

The structure, at last, written on the wall in marker on a long strip of paper:

Open on the trunk. Hands. String breaking. The first negative held up to the bulb.

Then the coffee. Emama roasting, in December. "I carried the bags."

Then the cities in the order they went. Asmara: Abrehet, Tsega, the recognition table, the walk. Djibouti: Omar, the ladder, the newspaper, the room with the window to the sea. Hargeisa: Khadra, the mat, the bottle, Yusuf and the poem. And Addis in between, threaded through: Mulugeta with his brother's shirt, my father in the darkroom closet. And the letters, S and G, counted.

Then home. Then whatever she says. If she says anything.

I don't know how it ends. That is the part I keep turning over at three in the morning. A documentary ends with whatever happens. I cannot write her a last line.

---

Saturday, 28 February.

Robel on a video call from the back room of the Aurora, with the silver machine hissing behind him and the noon customers shouting orders. He has been to see Tsega. Tsega has agreed to be on a call on the fourteenth, the birthday. Abrehet has also agreed, though nobody asked her. "She says she is coming to the call whether you invite her or not," Robel said. "She is buying a new cardigan."

I asked how Tsega seemed.

"Nervous," he said. "She has been sewing for three days without stopping. She is making something. She won't say what."

---

Tuesday, 3 March.

Fatouma sent a video, filmed on her son's phone. Omar on his roof under the awning, in his captain's cap, with the harbor behind him and a ship coming in. He is holding the plastic sleeve with the newspaper. He speaks for a minute and twenty seconds. He says the thing about the ships still coming in. He says Fatouma is making goat broth "right now, for nobody, because she is thinking of you." At the end he lifts the binoculars, the second pair, the ones he did not give to Ubah, and looks at the ship, and says, "Too fast," and then, "No. She's fine."

Mulugeta called the house himself and spoke to my father and invited himself to the birthday with his masinko. "I will make her a verse," he said. "She can pay me with coffee."

The berbere woman from Merkato, whose name is Werkitu, sent a message through my mother's cousin that she will bring her mother's photograph, the one by the door, so that it can be in the room.

The guest list for an eighty-two-year-old woman who says she carried the bags is now longer than my parents' wedding.

---

Wednesday, 4 March.

Showed my father the rough cut. Ninety-four minutes. He sat in my desk chair at the flat with his hands folded, very still, the way his father sat in photographs. When Omar said, "And that the photographer was a woman. Put that too," my father put his hand over his eyes and kept it there until the end of the Djibouti section.

At the end he said, "She needs to see it before the birthday. Not at the birthday. Before. Alone. With you. So she can decide what she wants to say."

I said what if she doesn't want to say anything.

He said, "Then that's what she wants to say."

Tuesday the tenth, then. In the evening. Just the three of us. The laptop on the low table by her chair. The brush from the tinting box in her cardigan pocket, as always.

I am more afraid than I was on the first day with the trunk.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: The Viewing

Tuesday, 10 March. Arat Kilo. Very late.

Writing this at the kitchen table, in the dark, with one lamp, because I cannot sleep and I do not want to wake anyone, and because I promised myself on the back step in December that I would write things down the night they happened, before they gain butter.

Seven in the evening. My mother took the cousins out to her sister's on purpose. My father brought the laptop and set it on the low table by Emama's chair on a stack of two books so the screen would be at the height of her eyes. He made her tea. He put a blanket on her knees, which she removed. I sat on the floor beside her chair, the way I used to when I was small and she was watching the news and I was supposed to be doing my homework.

She said, "What is this?"

I said, "It's the film. The one I've been making. About the trunk."

She said, "Is it long?"

I said, "An hour and a half."

She said, "Then I need the toilet first." And went, slowly, on her stick, and came back, and sat, and said, "Now."

---

Things she did, in order. I wrote them on my hand in pen while it played, because I did not want to take my eyes off her, and because I did not want to turn on a light.

At the first shot, the trunk, the string breaking: nothing. She was looking at my father's hands on the screen, not the trunk. She said, "Your father needs to cut his nails."

At the coffee in December: she watched herself roast, and she said, "I'm moving the pan too slowly. That's why the beans were uneven." Then, at "I carried the bags," she made a small sound in her nose that could have been a laugh.

At Mulugeta with his brother's shirt: she leaned forward. When he said, "Lift your chin. You are a musician, not a policeman," she said aloud, at the same time as him on the screen, "Not a policeman." Word for word. Then she sat back and put her hand over her mouth.

At my father in the darkroom closet, saying "Your mother has the eye": she turned and looked at my father, who was standing behind her chair. He did not look back at her. He looked at the screen. She turned back.

At Asmara: the palms, the evening walk. She said, "They've painted the cinema." Then, "Is that Abrehet? She's old." Then, "She's wearing my netela." When Abrehet said, "You owe me two biscuits and one arithmetic exam," she laughed out loud, really laughed, and said, "One biscuit," to the screen, and then, quieter, "She's still there. On the street."

Then Tsega.

I had been afraid of this part since January.

When Tsega's face came up, in the front room on the hill with the treadle machine, my grandmother went completely still. She did not speak. She watched her sister rock the treadle with no thread. She watched her unfold the tissue, and the square of black wool, and the faint chalk face of their father with his mouth open, shouting at the radio. She reached out and touched the screen, on the chalk, with one finger, and the laptop wobbled on its books and my father put his hand out to steady it.

She watched Tsega talk about the letter. About their mother. About the money in the tin.

Then Tsega turned on the stool and looked straight into my lens and said, "Senait. It is Tsega."

My grandmother said, "Stop it."

I stopped it.

She sat for a long time with the frame frozen on her sister's face. Then she said, "Again. From where she says my name."

I played it again. All of it. The bougainvillea on the school wall. The chalk going a little more every year. The money in the tin. The fight about the comb in 1957. "I was wrong to write that letter." "The cloth remembers every cut. But you can still sew it." "Lift your chin, sister. Look at the camera. I know you are looking."

She was looking.

When it finished she said, "Again."

I played it a third time. She did not cry. Her face did not move at all. Her hands, in her lap, held each other.

Afterward she said, "It was a red comb. From the market. I sat on it by accident. I did not break it on purpose." Then, "She was always very dramatic about that comb." Then she said, "Go on."

---

Djibouti.

The heat on the screen. Omar's roof. The ladder. She listened to him describe the rope ladder up the side of the ship and said, "He was always telling that. Even when he was twenty-three and had climbed it four times." She watched him hold the wedding portrait in both hands, and say Amina's name, and she said, "Amina," quietly, at the same time.

When he unwrapped the newspaper, she took the sable brush out of her cardigan pocket and held it in her fingers. She did not do anything with it. She held it like a pencil, as if she were about to write.

When he read out the printed line, she closed her eyes.

When he said, "She folded the paper very neatly, in four, and put it under her coffee glass," she opened them, and said, "It was a cup, not a glass. He has that wrong."

She watched him tell about the office, and the Frenchman, and the square, and the stone in the shade where she sat for an hour. She did not interrupt. When he got to the letters, S and G, the fever, "He says one day someone will count," she turned away from the screen for the first time and looked at the wall, at the place where the old brazier used to stand, for a long while. I paused it. She said, without turning back, "Don't stop it. I can hear."

When Omar said, "I counted," it was my voice saying it on the screen, and she turned and looked down at me on the floor. She said, "You?"

I said, "Me and Ubah."

She said, "How many?"

I said, "Fourteen hundred and two."

She said, "That's not right."

My heart went into my shoes. I said, "Emama?"

She said, "I took more than that. Some of his G's were mine. When I was sick with the fever, he took the pictures in Djibouti for three weeks, and they were terrible, and I took them again when I was well, and he had already marked the sleeves. He never changed them. He said it was only fair if one of us got some wrong in his favor, because the stamp had got all of them wrong in his." She looked back at the screen. "So it's more. Go on."

---

Hargeisa.

The money-changers. The camels. The dry river. She said, "The river with no water," again, the way she had over the incense.

When Khadra picked up the print of the mat, and the room in Ubah's family's house erupted, my grandmother said, "That's the girl. That's the girl with the oil." When Khadra said, "Her shadow is in my oil," my grandmother laughed and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and said, "She knocked the whole bottle over. I had oil on my shoes for a month."

Then Yusuf.

The old man on the mat with the stick across his knees, asking Ubah who she was, asking me where I was from. My grandmother watched him without moving. When he recited the camel poem, four minutes and ten seconds, she listened with her head on one side, the way she listens to the radio.

When he said, "A poem without the name of its poet is a stolen camel," she said, "Yes. He said that. In the trader's house."

Then the poem. Ubah's voice in English over his voice in Somali, line under line. Senait of Asmara.

She heard her own name in it four times. I counted afterward. She said nothing during it at all.

At the end, when he took my face in his hands and said, "Tell her I kept it. Tell her the stamp was wrong and the poem was right," my grandmother said, very quietly, "I forgot his name. I never forgot there was a poem."

---

Home. The last section, which I have not finished, which is only the trunk again, and the room above the garage, and my father's hands holding up the returned envelope with its one word on it.

My father had not told her about the letter. Nor had I. She saw it on the screen for the first time. I had cut in the reading of it, my father's voice, slow, in Amharic, then my voice reading Ubah's English. I held the light.

When it was done the screen went black. I had not made an ending.

She sat in the dark of the screen for a long time. My father turned on the lamp.

She said, "Where is he?"

My father said, "Who, Emama?"

She said, "Girma. He should see this. Is he back yet?"

My father knelt down by the chair and took her hand and said, "He's not back, Emama. He's been gone a long time."

She looked at him. I watched her come back. It took a long time, the way it takes a long time for a face to come up in the tray, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then all at once.

"Yes," she said. "I know." And then, "He wrote that letter."

"Yes," my father said.

"He never told me," she said. "Fifty-five years." She held the sable brush up between her fingers and looked at it. "He never told me, and I never asked him why he went up to the closet at night."

Nobody said anything.

Then she put the brush back in her pocket, and said to me, "Tomorrow. In the morning. Bring the camera. Make the coffee yourself, I want to see if you've learned. I will talk."

And went to bed.

My father and I sat in the sitting room until one. We didn't turn on the television. At some point he said, "She said 'tomorrow.' She knows what tomorrow is." I said yes. He said, "She hasn't known what tomorrow is in a year."

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript 11: Senait, the Second Morning

TRANSCRIPT 11
Subject: Senait Tewolde, 81 (second session)
Place: the sitting room, Arat Kilo, Addis Ababa
Date: Wednesday, 11 March 2026, from 8:40 a.m.
Present: MD, interviewer and camera, also making the coffee; Dawit Girma, at the door; Ubah Jama, sound
Language: Amharic and Tigrinya; translated by MD
Notes: Subject asked for Ubah by name at seven this morning. "The sound girl. Ubah. Khadra's girl. Is she coming?" Ubah came in a taxi in twenty minutes with the sound bag over her pajama top. Camera on the tripod, wide, from the door, as in December. Subject agreed to a lavalier, this time, and clipped it to her own cardigan, beside the brush.

[00:00:12]
SENAIT: You washed the beans?

MD: Three times.

SENAIT: Show me your hands. [MD holds out her hands.] They're dry. You didn't wash them three times. You washed them twice and lied about the third.

MD: [Laughs.] I washed them three times, Emama.

SENAIT: Fine. Roast.

[00:00:40]
[MD roasts on the Asmara brazier with the long legs. Subject watches every movement. UJ notes: the hiss of the beans, the coal, the subject's breathing on the lavalier, a bird in the yard.]

SENAIT: Faster. You're not stirring soup. Move them. Move them. Listen for it.

MD: They're cracking.

SENAIT: Now the smoke. Now look at the color. What color?

MD: Brown horse.

SENAIT: Not yet. That's a donkey. Wait. [Pause.] Now. Off.

[00:02:10]
[MD carries the pan around the room and waves the smoke toward her grandmother. Subject breathes it in, eyes closed.]

SENAIT: All right. Not bad. A little burned on one side. Your grandfather burned them too. He never had the patience. He would stand there with the pan like it was a camera and he was waiting for the light. [Pause.] Grind.

[Sound of the mortar.]

[00:03:00]
SENAIT: You want me to tell you about Djibouti.

MD: I want you to tell me whatever you want to tell me.

SENAIT: That's a director's answer. Ubah, she's being a director again.

UJ: [off] She does that, Emama.

SENAIT: [A small laugh.] Grind it finer. [Pause. Then, slowly.] I will start in Asmara. It is the correct order.

[00:03:40]
SENAIT: I was eighteen. He came with his one shirt. Tsega has told you. On the third day he let me look in the camera, to show off, and I turned it around and took Tsega with the broom. And when he made the print in Addis, he looked at it a long time, he told me later, and he said, "This girl sees." That's all. "This girl sees." And he wrote to my father.

[Pause.]

SENAIT: When I came to Addis, married, at twenty, in 1964, he gave me the camera on the first day in the studio. Not to hold. To use. And he took a pencil and wrote a G on the corner of a sleeve, and gave me the pencil, and said, "When it's yours, you write S." I asked why. I thought it was for the accounts. He said, "Because they will put my name on the stamp. Everybody will. You can't stop the stamp. But the film knows. One day someone will count." [Pause.] He said it first. Omar told you it was me. It was him. I only said it to Omar because I wanted to hear it in my own mouth.

[00:05:30]
MD: Did you believe him? That someone would count?

SENAIT: No. [Pause.] Yes. Some days. When I was young, yes. When I was older, no. When you put the trunk above the garage I thought, there, that's the end of it. Two thousand pictures in the dark. Nobody counts the dark.

MD: Then why did you tell him to keep it? In 1989?

SENAIT: [She looks at the camera directly. Holds it.] Because I was not sure.

[00:06:20]
[MD pours the water into the jebena and sets it on the coal.]

SENAIT: Now, Djibouti. [She settles in the chair. Folds her hands.] The fever was the first year. In Omar's mother's house. Halima. A big woman, very loud, she slapped me on the back every time she passed my bed as if I was a carpet with dust in it. She gave me the goat broth three times a day, and she sat with me at night and sang, and I didn't understand one word. [Pause.] When I was well, Girma had done three weeks of pictures and they were terrible. He had no patience for the people who didn't pay. He put everybody in front of the painted garden and said, "Still," and took it. I went out again and took them in the streets. I didn't change his letters. Let him have a few.

MD: You said that last night.

SENAIT: Did I? Then it's true. [Pause.] Then 1969. The newspaper.

[00:07:30]
SENAIT: Omar brought it running. Ten copies. Shouting. He was such a boy. He put it in my hands on the step, and I looked at the pictures, and they were good. They were printed well, the Frenchman had good paper. Amina laughing at him. The girl with the bicycle. The old fisherman. My pictures. And under them, his name.

[Pause.]

SENAIT: I knew it would be his name. I wasn't stupid. It was on the stamp. It was on the sign. It was on everything. I knew. [Pause.] But I had never seen it printed in a newspaper, under my pictures, with a thousand copies in the square. It's different, to know a thing, and then to see it in print. In print it becomes the truth. That is what print is for.

MD: Omar said you folded it and asked him if he wanted coffee.

SENAIT: What else would I do? Shout? On the step, in the street? [She shakes her head.] If I had shouted, Meron, you know what they would have said? In 1969? "Look, the photographer's wife is jealous of her husband." That's what they would say. Everybody. "She wants his name." So I folded it. I gave Omar coffee. [Pause.] In a cup. Not a glass.

[00:09:00]
[First boil. MD lifts the jebena off.]

SENAIT: Good. Wait. [Pause.] Then Girma came out and saw it and went white, and put on the wool suit my father made him, in March, in that heat, and went to the office. And I went after him. I don't know why. To stop him. To watch. And I stood behind him by the door while he asked the Frenchman to print my name. Very polite. Very correct. He talked for ten minutes. He said, "My wife made eleven of these. She is standing there." And the Frenchman looked at me. At me, by the door. Up and down. And he smiled. And he said Girma was a lucky man to have such a wife, and that I was a lucky woman to have such a husband who was proud of me, and that nobody would believe it.

[Pause.]

SENAIT: That's the part. Not the name. I knew about the name. It's that he looked at me and smiled and said nobody would believe it, to my face, while I was standing there with my hands that made the pictures. [She holds up her hands. Looks at them.] Like I was a nice story Girma had told him. Like I was a joke.

[00:10:40]
MD: So you went to the square.

SENAIT: I went to the square and sat on the stone in the shade, and I thought: I will never make a picture in this city again. And I didn't. We left on the Tuesday. I never went back. I never wrote to Omar. I couldn't. Every letter to Omar would have been a letter to Djibouti. Girma wrote for both of us. [Pause.] I was ashamed.

MD: Of what?

SENAIT: That I didn't shout. That I folded the paper. [Pause.] And I was ashamed of being ashamed, because what did I do wrong? Nothing. I made pictures. [She shakes her head.] It goes round and round like that. Fifty years. You don't know, at your age, how long a thing can go round.

[00:11:50]
[Second boil.]

SENAIT: And Girma didn't tell me about the letter. The one with "refused." He wrote it two years later, from Addis. He never said. [Pause.] I knew he went up to the closet at night. Three steps, three steps. I sat on the stairs. I thought he was printing. I thought maybe he was printing my pictures and looking at them and being sad that his were not as good. [She laughs.] I was a little proud of that. That's the truth. I sat on the stairs, a little proud. And he was up there with that envelope behind the board.

MD: What would you have said? If he had told you?

SENAIT: [Long pause.] I would have said, you fool. You should have sent it again. And again. Every year. Like Tsega's card. Like my money in her tin. [Pause.] We are all such fools, our family. We make suits.

[00:13:00]
[Third boil. MD pours from height, one stream, into the six cups. Splashes the tray slightly on the fourth cup.]

SENAIT: You spilled.

MD: A little.

SENAIT: A little is spilling. Your grandfather spilled too. I never spilled. [She takes the first cup.] Abol.

[She drinks. A long pause.]

[00:13:40]
MD: Emama, can I ask you about Hargeisa?

SENAIT: [Brightens.] Hargeisa was the best. After Djibouti, Hargeisa. I didn't want to work any more after Djibouti, and Girma said, one more city, one, a new one, where nobody knows us. And we went. And nobody knew us. And I walked. Every day I walked with the small camera, and I took what I wanted, and I didn't take money, and I didn't care about the stamp, because the people I took, I gave them the pictures. In their hands. They knew who gave it to them.

MD: Khadra.

SENAIT: The girl at the mat. I didn't know her name. I am ashamed of that too. Fifty years, "the girl at the mat." [Pause.] I sat with her for two years and never asked her name, because I only had twenty words and I was afraid to use them wrong. And she never asked mine. We just sat. [She laughs.] Her granddaughter is in my kitchen every week and I didn't know.

UJ: [off, quietly] She says you're a very good family. The three of you.

SENAIT: [Turns toward Ubah's voice.] She said that?

UJ: She said you should have been introduced sooner.

SENAIT: [Laughs, wipes her eyes.] She's right.

[00:15:20]
MD: And the poet?

SENAIT: The poet. Yusuf. [She says the name carefully, as if trying it on.] I forgot his name. Fifty years. I remembered his face. Thin, with the stick, talking with his hands. I remembered the trader's house. I remembered him asking my name in front of all the men, and saying he would put it in a poem so it wouldn't be lost, and I said "Why?" and he said, "A picture without its name is a stolen camel." [Pause.] I laughed. In that room, I laughed. For the first time since the stone in the square. [Pause.] I never knew if he made it. I thought maybe he forgot. People say they will make you a poem and they forget. I never knew it was real.

MD: It's real.

SENAIT: I heard it. Last night. [Pause.] Thirteen lines.

MD: Fifteen.

SENAIT: Thirteen of them I heard. Two I was crying.

[00:16:40]
[Second cup. MD refills from the pot.]

MD: Why did you stop? In 1972?

SENAIT: [Without hesitating.] Because I wanted to.

MD: Abba thinks it was because of him.

SENAIT: [Turns her head to the door, where her son is standing.] Dawit. Come here.

[Dawit comes into frame. Kneels beside the chair.]

SENAIT: You think I stopped because of you?

DAWIT: I can count, Emama. Born April 1972. Last box 1972.

SENAIT: [Takes his face in her hands, as Tsega took mine, as Yusuf did.] You can count, but you can't read. I stopped because I had taken eleven years of other people's children. Weddings, babies, girls with new braids, boys on bicycles too big for them. Two thousand faces. I wanted to look at one. [Pause.] I put the camera down because I wanted to look at you without anything in between. That's all. Nobody made me. Your father asked me ten times to go back on the road. I said no ten times. [She lets go.] Stop counting things that don't need counting. Count the ones that do.

[Dawit stays kneeling. Does not speak. His hand on the arm of the chair. Hers over it.]

[00:18:30]
[MD notes: here the subject paused for a long time and looked at the door. Then she said, "Is he coming?" My father said, "Who, Emama?" She said, "Girma. He was going to bring the bread." My father said, "Not today." She said, "All right," and looked at the coffee, and was quiet. Then she came back. I have left this in the film. She asked me to. Later. She said, "Leave it in. That's also me."]

[00:19:40]
MD: Emama, "I carried the bags." You always said that.

SENAIT: [Smiles. The whole of her face.] I did carry the bags.

MD: But—

SENAIT: But the camera was in one of the bags. [Pause.] It was true. Everything I said was true. I just didn't say all of it. [Pause.] That is the difference between a photograph and a story, Meron. A photograph, everything that was there is there. A story, you choose. I chose "I carried the bags" because it was easier than the rest. Fifty years. It was easier.

[00:20:30]
MD: Is there anything you want to say? To anyone? To the people in the film?

SENAIT: [Long pause. She picks up the third cup.] Baraka. [Drinks.] To Tsega, I will say it myself, on Saturday. Not in a film. To her face, even if her face is in a telephone. [Pause.] To Abrehet: it was one biscuit. [Laughs.] To Omar: tell him he was always too loud on that roof, and tell him I'm sorry. To Khadra: tell her I still have oil on my shoes. To the poet: tell him I heard it. Tell him the name didn't get lost. [Pause.] To Mulugeta, the boy with the masinko: I knew he was frightened. That's why I made the joke.

MD: And to Grandfather?

SENAIT: [She looks at the camera. Then past it, to the window, to the yard, to the room above the garage. A long time.] To Girma. [Pause.] You held the light. Very well. Always where I asked. That's all I want to say. You held the light.

[00:22:10]
[She sets the cup down. Looks straight into the lens. Lifts her chin. Holds it.]

SENAIT: There. Is it on?

MD: It's on.

SENAIT: Good. Now turn it off. Your coffee is getting cold.

[End of recording.]

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes: The Third Cup

Saturday, 14 March. Arat Kilo. My grandmother's eighty-second birthday.

Writing this in the room above the garage, where the trunk was, on the floor, with the house still noisy underneath me at midnight and the smell of incense and coffee and berbere coming up through the boards. I have the camera beside me with the battery dead. I filmed until there was nothing left in it.

---

Who came. In the order they arrived, because she taught me the correct order matters.

Werkitu, the berbere woman, at nine in the morning, three hours early, with her mother's photograph from beside her door in its frame wrapped in a shawl, and a kilo of berbere, and her two daughters. She set the photograph on the low table by Emama's chair. A woman in her forties in 1967, in front of a stall heaped with sacks, arms folded, a look on her face that says the price is the price. Emama looked at it and said, "She bargained with me for an hour over a kilo of shiro. I took her picture so she would stop."

Mulugeta, at eleven, in a white shirt that fit him, with his masinko in its case and his grandson, a boy of fifteen, carrying it. When he saw my grandmother in her chair he stopped in the doorway and stood up very straight, like a policeman, and she looked at him and said, "Lift your chin. You are a musician." And he laughed so hard his grandson had to hold the case.

Ubah, with her mother. Sahra had flown from Hargeisa on Thursday, "because my mother told me to go and look at the Asmara woman for her and report." Sahra brought a bag of Khadra's incense, a second bag, and a small box wrapped in silk. Inside the box: the green glass bottle. Empty. Stoppered. With the dark stain in the bottom. And a note in Ubah's handwriting, dictated by Khadra on the phone: For the Asmara woman. Keep it until I come and get it. Then we will fill it.

My mother's cousins, all of them. My mother's colleagues from the school. The neighbors, including the two sons who are no good, who carried chairs. A man from the old studio building in Piassa who had been Girma's last apprentice, in 1987, a boy then, gray now, who brought nothing and stood in the corner and cried quietly when the film started and could not explain why.

---

Noon. The coffee.

My grandmother did not let me make it. She sat in her chair with the Asmara brazier beside her on its long legs and roasted the beans herself, from the chair, moving the pan without stopping, faster than I can, and carried the smoke around the room on her stick with my father walking beside her holding her elbow. She waved it at every guest. She waved it twice at Mulugeta, "because he's a musician, they need more." She waved it at the camera.

Fresh grass on the floor under the tray, cut by my mother. Incense on the coal, Khadra's recipe, the smell of the river with no water.

The first cup. Abol. Everyone took it. Nobody left.

---

One o'clock. The call.

Robel had set it up from the back room of the Aurora on a laptop propped against the silver machine, which I could hear hissing the whole time. Ubah had wired our laptop to the television in the sitting room so that everyone could see.

The screen came on. The back room of the Aurora, the long table where we had laid out the recognition prints, and at it, side by side, Abrehet in a new cardigan, yellow, and Tsega in a dark dress with a white collar, very straight, her hands folded on the table. Robel's face appeared huge in the corner for a moment, checking the angle, and then vanished.

Abrehet said, at once, loudly, "It was two biscuits."

My grandmother said, "One."

And that was the first thing they said to each other, the sisters and the friend, after forty-six years of cards at the New Year. Not hello. An argument about biscuits.

Then Tsega said, "Senait."

And my grandmother said, "Tsega."

Then nothing, for a long time. The silver machine hissing in Asmara. The coffee pot ticking on the coal in Addis. Forty people in my parents' sitting room not breathing.

Tsega lifted something into the camera's view. Black cloth. A jacket, small, a woman's, beautifully cut, with a narrow collar and covered buttons. Her three days of sewing.

"It's for you," Tsega said. "I made you a suit."

My grandmother began to laugh. Then she began to cry. Then she did both, with her hand over her mouth, and Tsega in Asmara was doing the same, and Abrehet between them put an arm around Tsega and with the other hand pointed at the camera and said, "You see? Tewolde anger. She makes you a suit."

When she could speak, my grandmother said, "I broke your comb by accident. I sat on it."

Tsega said, "I know. I've always known. I was very dramatic."

My grandmother said, "You were." Then, "I'm sorry about Mother."

Tsega said, "I'm sorry about the letter."

My grandmother said, "Keep the money in the tin. Spend it on a ticket. Come here. Or I'll come there. Robel can carry me up the hill."

Robel's voice, off screen: "I can do it."

Then Tsega unfolded the tissue on the table in the back room of the Aurora, and the square of black wool, and held it up close to the lens so that the whole television in Addis was filled with it: my great-grandfather in faint white chalk, mouth open, shouting at a radio that has been gone for fifty years.

My grandmother reached into the pocket of her cardigan, past the sable brush, and took out the piece of blue tailor's chalk I had brought her from Tsega, which I had given her that morning, and which she had said nothing about. She asked my mother for a piece of black cloth. My mother found one, the lining of an old jacket. And in front of everyone, in front of the camera, with the call still running, my grandmother drew on it, fast, without lifting her hand much, the way she drew the teacher on the back of her book in the third row with Abrehet.

Tsega's face. Not as it is now. As it was on the doorstep of the shop in 1962, fourteen, squinting, with the broom.

She held it up to the camera. In Asmara, Tsega looked at it and put both her hands flat on the table.

"It's me," she said. "With the broom."

"It's you," said my grandmother. "I took it twice."

---

Two o'clock. The film.

We showed it on the television, ninety-four minutes, with the ending still missing, and the call still running in a corner of the screen so that Asmara could watch too. Omar's video message after Djibouti, the ship, too fast, no, she's fine. Fatouma, at the end of it, holding up a bowl of goat broth to the phone and saying, "This is for the fever." My grandmother saying, aloud, to the screen, "Halima's broth."

At Yusuf's poem, Ubah stood and read the English aloud in the room, over his voice on the screen, so that everyone could hear it twice. Her own translation, fifteen lines. My grandmother, at the end, said, "Fifteen," and looked at me, and I nodded.

The second cup. Tona.

---

Three o'clock. Mulugeta.

He took the masinko out of its case and sat on a chair by the window and tuned the single string with his ear against the neck, and played, and then he sang. A verse for her, made up there in the room, out of nothing, out of what he saw. My translation of it, rough, as before, losing the rhymes:

Here is a woman who said she carried the bags / and everyone believed her, because she is a woman who tells the truth / but she did not say what was in the bags / in the bags were two thousand people / and every one of them is in this room today / wearing their brother's shirt / and lifting their chin.

People pressed money to his forehead until he looked like a tree in autumn, exactly as promised. My grandmother pressed the first note. She had to stand to do it. My father held her elbow. She stood, and pressed it, and he sang her name.

---

Four o'clock. The last thing.

My father went upstairs and came back with Girma's small camera, the one from the road, the one Khadra saw her lift at the mat. He had taken it to the old apprentice in February, who had cleaned it and fixed the shutter and found, somewhere in Piassa, one roll of black-and-white film that would fit it. My father had not told me. He put it in my grandmother's hands.

She turned it over. Checked the shutter. Wound it on. Her hands knew it all. I watched her hands remember before her face did.

Then she looked up at the room. Forty people. Werkitu with her mother's photograph. Mulugeta with money all over his forehead. Sahra with the green bottle. Ubah with Omar's binoculars around her neck and the boom in her hand. My mother, my father. Tsega and Abrehet on the television, with Robel's face peering in from the side. The apprentice in the corner.

"Everybody," my grandmother said, "move to the left."

Everybody moved to the left.

"Not you," she said to my father. "You stay there. Where you are. Hold the light."

There was no light to hold. My father looked around, and then picked up the tray, the round brass coffee tray, and tipped it to the window, and caught the afternoon sun in it, and threw it across the room into the faces.

"Higher," said my grandmother.

He lifted it.

"There," she said. "Where you think."

She lifted her chin, and put her eye to the camera, and the room laughed at something, Abrehet I think, and she pressed the button.

---

Midnight. Here. Above the garage.

The third cup was poured at five. Baraka. Everyone took it. Nobody left before. That is the rule.

The roll is in my pocket. One frame used. Tomorrow my father and the apprentice and I will develop it in the closet, under the red bulb, with the vinegar smell, with the door closed, nobody opening it, and I will rock the tray and watch the room come up out of the white. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then everyone.

I already have the sleeve. A new one, from the old box of empty ones in the trunk. Before I came up here I took a pencil and wrote in the top right corner, small, a single letter.

Fourteen hundred and three. Not counting the ones he got wrong in his favor.

I have my ending. The title card, white on black, the first thing after the last shot:

Lift Your Chin.

Photographs by Senait Tewolde. And by Girma Wolde, who held the light.

Sound by Ubah Jama. With thanks to her father, for the ears.

Somebody counted.

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.