The Tender Station

Janina had named her radio. She called it The Witness.

It sat on the kitchen shelf between the jar of plum jam and the photograph of her mother, who had died in 1987 and again in 2001 when the photograph was damaged in a flood and had to be reprinted from a negative that was itself beginning to fail. Her mother's face was becoming approximate. Janina did not mind. She had never trusted precision in matters of the dead.

The Witness was an old radio. Two dials, one green eye. It received stations from Warsaw, London, Luxembourg, and Paris, and it received other things that Janina did not have names for. Between stations there were black holes where the sound faltered. She believed these were solar systems speaking to her, crackling and warbling, sending important information she could not decipher.

She was sixty-eight years old. She lived alone in a village that was becoming approximate, the way the photograph was becoming approximate. Houses emptying. Roads narrowing. The Czech border visible from her upstairs window on clear days, which was most days, because the weather god favoured her region for reasons she did not understand.

Each morning Janina turned the dial on The Witness and listened for the black holes between stations. She had a notebook in which she wrote down what she heard, or what she thought she heard. The entries were short:

*Tuesday: a low hum, then a word that sounded like "stay." Stay where? In the house? In the body? In the habit of living? I do not know. I wrote it down.*

*Wednesday: silence, then a burst of what might have been applause, then silence again. Applause for what? For whom? I am not performing.*

*Thursday: a woman's voice saying something in a language I do not speak. The tone was urgent. I wrote it down even though I could not translate it. The tone was the message.*

Her neighbour, Big Foot's successor, a man Janina called The Commandant, found her notebook one afternoon when he came to deliver firewood and she was in the bathroom. He read three pages. He closed the notebook and placed it back on the table. Later he told his wife: the old woman is writing down what the radio says between stations. His wife said: leave her alone, she's not hurting anyone. The Commandant said: I didn't say she was hurting anyone. I said she's writing it down.

Janina knew he had read the notebook because she had placed a single dog hair across the cover, and when she returned the hair was on the floor. She did not mind. She had nothing to hide. She was listening to the universe and writing down what she heard. This was not a secret. It was a practice.

One evening in November, The Witness picked up a station Janina had never heard before. The signal was strong, clearer than Warsaw or London. A woman's voice, speaking slowly, with great care:

*"The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me."*

Janina sat down. She turned up the volume.

*"My mom is sitting beside our old radio, and it's the kind with a green eye and two dials."*

Janina looked at The Witness. Green eye. Two dials. She looked at the photograph of her mother, becoming approximate on the shelf. She looked at the radio again.

The woman on the radio continued:

*"When I later asked her about that sadness, my mother would say that she was sad because I hadn't been born yet, yet she already missed me."*

Janina turned off the radio. She sat in the kitchen with the jam and the photograph and the silence. She did not cry. She was not a woman who cried. She was a woman who went to ground, who barked at the ceiling, who listened to black holes between stations and wrote down what she heard.

She opened her notebook and wrote:

*Thursday, November 16: a woman on a new station described a photograph of her mother sitting beside a radio with a green eye and two dials. The woman's mother was sad because she was missing someone who had not arrived yet. I turned off the radio. I am still in the building.*

She closed the notebook. She placed a fresh dog hair across the cover.

Outside, the weather was beautiful. The Sun was dazzlingly bright, still red from the effort of rising. The hunters were in the forest. She could hear the shots bouncing off the wall of the trees, amplified by the morning air.

She did not go out to confront them today. She stayed in the kitchen with The Witness and the jam and the photograph and the silence between stations, which was not silence at all but the sound of the universe trying to reach a woman who had gone to ground and was listening.