The linguist pressed the button. The woman's voice came out of the recorder, low, with long vowels that Odia does not have and aspirated consonants that Odia does not aspirate, a rhythm unlike any language he had heard in the district. She sat on the veranda with her hands in her lap, legs crossed, her back against the mud wall. The wall had the color mud takes after years of drying in the sun. A sentence came out of the recorder. The woman listened. The sentence was her own voice. He had recorded it two hours earlier, when she had spoken three words in Gorum before noticing the recorder was on. Three words. The first Gorum words the linguist had collected in that village after four days of questions met only with refusal. She looked at the recorder. Not at the linguist. At the black box on the veranda floor, emitting her voice, her voice saying words she had spoken and now denied having spoken. Her mouth was closed. Her eyes held the recorder with the attention one gives to an object that should not exist.

He left at four in the afternoon. She stayed on the veranda. The recorder was gone, packed into his bag, but the place where it had rested was still visible, a rectangle of floor slightly cleaner where the dust had not settled. She looked at the rectangle. Children from the house next door were playing in the courtyard, their voices in Odia filling the space where two hours before her voice in Gorum had come out of the machine. Her granddaughter stepped out of the house, asked her something. In Odia. The woman answered in Odia. The girl was eleven and did not know her grandmother spoke another language. She would not learn. The grandmother would not tell her. The other women in the village would not tell her. The Gorum would remain in the mouths of those who denied it, until those who denied it were gone.

He had arrived on Monday carrying a bag, a recorder, an informed consent form translated into Odia, a list of eleven names. The village chief had identified them as Gorum speakers. Eleven people over fifty. Eleven people who, according to the chief, knew a language no one under thirty spoke anymore, a language no one under fifty admitted to speaking. The linguist knocked on eleven doors. At each one he asked the same question. At each one the answer was no. The no came in Odia. It was polite. It was the correct answer in the correct language, the language that worked, the language that opened the doors of the district office, the school, the hospital, the market. Gorum opened nothing. It was the language of the old, the language of a place that no longer existed, where rice had a different sound, rain had a different sound, tomorrow had a sound that Odia lacked entirely, a sound that perhaps carried a meaning Odia could not hold. He waited. Talked about the weather, the harvest, their children. Four days he waited for someone to let a word slip. On the third day the woman on the list said three words. She said them without thinking, the way one speaks in the language that lives beneath the language one has chosen to speak. The name of a tree, the verb meaning to rain, the word for tomorrow. The recorder was already running. He had not switched it on for her. It had been running for an hour, left on all day in hope of catching the words that escaped without permission.

That evening she sat in front of the house with her neighbor. The neighbor was the same age, bore the same face that belongs to women who have worked the land their whole lives, women the sun has worked in return. They spoke in Odia, about the rice, the rain, the neighbor's son who had gone to Berhampur for work. Then the neighbor said a word. Not Odia. The woman recognized it. She answered with another. Both words were Gorum. Neither acknowledged it. The conversation continued in Odia as though nothing had passed between them. But the two words had been spoken, and the evening air carried them past the courtyard, past the roof, past the hill where the tree grew whose name the woman knew in Gorum and would not say. No recorder caught them. No archive would hold them. No server in Berlin would assign them a catalog number. They would exist only in the memory of two women, in the evening, in the air, in whatever time remained for the women and the evening and the air.