"Unidentified?"
Sister Madeleine Roy moved the photograph closer to the camera.
"It says unidentified sisters."
"That's what the archive has."
She looked offended.
"They're not unidentified. I ate breakfast with them."
That was the beginning.
The photograph was from 1958.
Fifty-four women stood on the steps of a mother house, four rows, white veils bright enough that the photograph had lost detail around the edges.
On the back, somebody had written only a year and the name of a feast day.
The archive catalogue said:
GROUP OF UNIDENTIFIED SISTERS, 1958.
Sister Madeleine is ninety-three.
Her congregation once had more than seven hundred women.
Now there are six.
"Six who can answer the telephone," she said. "There are two more in care, but don't call them about photographs."
She joined at eighteen.
The photograph had been taken three years later.
I asked whether she was in it.
"Of course. Third row. Don't you see me?"
I did not.
She pointed with a pen at the screen.
"There. Beside Sister Pauline. Pauline had the ears."
I enlarged the photograph.
"What ears?"
"Exactly. They made her put the veil lower."
Then Sister Madeleine started naming them.
Not slowly.
Quickly.
Sister Pauline Beaulieu. Sister Cecile Fournier. Sister Marguerite Leduc. Sister Therese-Anne Gagnon.
She gave me twenty-three names before I stopped her.
"How do you remember this?"
She looked irritated again.
"They were people."
I deserved that.
So I stopped asking whether she remembered and started asking who they were.
That changed everything.
One ran a surgical floor.
One taught Grade Three for thirty-two years.
One was sent north and came back speaking enough Cree to make the other sisters jealous.
One managed the kitchen and could feed three hundred people without appearing to count anything.
One had a terrible singing voice and was always placed beside somebody strong at choir.
One had tuberculosis and disappeared from community life for almost two years.
One could repair a radio.
One was the only person a certain superior was afraid of.
"Why?"
Sister Madeleine smiled.
"Because Sister Agnes knew the accounts."
I wrote that down too.
Then we reached a woman in the back row.
Sister Madeleine stopped.
"That's Marie-Claire."
She did not give the religious name first.
"You called her Marie-Claire?"
"Before."
Before religious life.
They had entered within weeks of each other.
Marie-Claire was sent to a small hospital where the congregation staffed the maternity floor.
Sister Madeleine went into teaching.
For almost forty years they lived in different houses.
"But you knew her?"
"I knew her when she was eighteen. That's different."
She said this as though I should understand immediately.
I do now.
Old people are sometimes the only surviving witnesses to the person someone was before the role swallowed the name.
Before Mother.
Before Father.
Before Sister.
Before Monsignor.
Before Bishop.
The archive can tell you what offices they held.
Sometimes one elderly person can tell you who was funny.
I asked how many photographs were like this one.
The archivist, who was sitting off camera, answered.
"Boxes."
Sister Madeleine turned toward her.
"How many boxes?"
"I don't know."
"That means too many."
They argued for a minute about whether the photographs had been scanned.
Many had.
That was not the problem.
The image had survived.
The knowledge had not been attached to it.
A digitized photograph of fifty-four unidentified women is a preserved object with a disappearing meaning.
I asked Sister Madeleine how many sisters could identify the women in this particular photograph.
"Me."
"Only you?"
"Maybe Claire."
She considered it.
"If Claire has a good day."
"Anyone else?"
"They're dead."
No drama.
Just inventory.
We went back to the picture.
At number thirty-one, Sister Madeleine became unsure.
"Don't write that yet."
She leaned close enough that I could see only one eye and part of her glasses.
"That's either Sister Berthe or Sister Yolande."
She studied it.
"No. Berthe had the long face. That's Yolande. Write Yolande."
"You're sure?"
"Don't annoy me."
I wrote Yolande.
Then she told me what Sister Yolande had done.
For twenty-six years she taught children who were considered too difficult for ordinary classrooms.
"She didn't call them difficult."
"What did she call them?"
"Children."
There are sentences that make an archive larger.
That was one.
The congregation's official history records its schools, hospitals, missions, superiors, foundations, anniversaries and buildings.
It does not record the way Pauline hid her ears under the veil.
It does not record who could repair a radio.
It does not record that Marie-Claire was Marie-Claire before she was Sister Marie-Claire of the Sacred Heart.
It does not record that Yolande refused to call children difficult.
And without somebody asking now, it never will.
We were forty-eight minutes into the interview when the archivist brought out another photograph.
Smaller.
A hospital corridor.
Seven sisters and two lay nurses.
No date.
Nothing written on the back.
Sister Madeleine stared at it.
"Oh."
That was the first time in the hour she sounded old.
"You know them?"
"Some."
She named three.
Then four.
At the fifth she stopped.
"I know that face."
She could not retrieve it.
We waited.
She tried again.
Nothing.
"Give me the next one. It'll come."
We moved on.
It did not come.
At the end of the interview she was still angry about it.
"Send me that photograph."
"I will."
"Large. Don't send me one I need a microscope for."
The next morning an email arrived from the archivist.
Sister Madeleine had remembered.
Sister Bernadette Malo.
Pediatrics.
Twenty-one years.
I added the name.
Then I looked again at the first photograph.
Fifty-four women.
Yesterday they had been unidentified.
Now they had names.
Some had schools. Some had hospital wards. Some had bad singing voices. One had ears. One knew the accounts. One refused to call children difficult.
Nothing about the photograph itself had changed.
Only somebody had asked the last person who knew.
Near the end, I asked Sister Madeleine whether it bothered her that so much had not been written down.
"Written down by who? We were busy."
"Does it bother you now?"
She looked at the photograph again.
"Yes."
Then she pointed at the back row.
"Because when I die, you people will call them unidentified again."
There is the emergency.
Not someday.
Not after an archive is built.
Now.
The photograph already exists.
The history already exists.
The person who can connect the two is ninety-three.