I asked a fourth person the same question in the space of about twenty minutes, and she answered it, and then her face did something small and tired that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.
The question was harmless. I wanted to know why a particular building on the edge of the settlement was half built and had been for a long time. Scaffolding grown over, one wall finished, nothing else. I was curious. I am always curious about half built things.
The first person had shrugged. The second had said something short that I did not follow. The third had pointed vaguely and changed the subject with a speed I noticed and then ignored. The fourth answered properly, in a flat voice, and I understood at once that the previous three had all been telling me the same thing, which was that this was not a question people here enjoyed being asked by a stranger.
Three deflections are an answer
That is the rule I took away and it is the most useful one I have. A shrug is not a non answer. A change of subject is not a failure to understand my accent. Somebody pointing vaguely and looking away is not somebody who lacks information.
I had been treating every deflection as noise to be routed around by finding a better informant. I was, in effect, polling the settlement until I found somebody whose sense of politeness was weaker than the collective preference not to discuss it. That is not research. That is wearing people down.
Now, two deflections and I drop it. Not drop it for the day. Drop it. If it comes up on its own later, fine. If not, I do not need to know why a building is half built, and the honest reason I wanted to know is that it would have been a good detail, which is a reason that serves me and nobody else.
The difference between a question and a request
Something I got wrong for a long time is that I thought of questions as free. Directions cost nothing. Opening hours cost nothing. Where do you buy bread costs nothing.
But questions vary enormously in what they ask of the person answering. Where is the bus stop costs a gesture. Why did that family leave costs the answerer a decision about what to say to a stranger about their neighbours, and possibly a small worry afterwards about whether they said too much. The second one looks the same in my mouth and is not the same in their hands.
I now sort questions roughly by who has to think. If answering requires the other person to weigh anything, it is a request, not a question, and I only get to make it if I have some standing, which usually means time spent, and often means I should not be making it at all.
Curiosity that is really collecting
The uncomfortable version of this: a lot of my questions were not curiosity. They were collecting. I wanted the detail because the detail was interesting, and interesting to me meant usable, and usable meant something I could carry away and put down somewhere else.
You can feel the difference in your own chest if you are honest about it. Real curiosity is content with a partial answer. Collecting wants the whole thing and gets faintly frustrated when it does not arrive. I was frustrated after the third deflection. That frustration was the tell, and I ignored it for years because it felt like diligence.
The half built building is still half built, presumably. I do not know why. That is a completely acceptable state of affairs and it took me an absurd amount of time to be able to write that sentence without feeling like I had failed at something.
The other stop signal
There is a second point at which I now stop, and it is different. It is when I notice that somebody has become my person.
This happens easily. You find one individual who speaks a language you share, or who is patient, or who simply answers, and then every question for the next four days goes to them. They keep answering, because they are decent, and the cumulative load is invisible to me because each individual question is small.
I did this to a man who ran a place I ate at twice a day. By day three I had asked him about buses, weather, a road, a market day, where to wash clothes, and whether a route was passable, and it was only when I saw him visibly bracing as I walked in that I understood I had converted a person into a service desk.
The rule I use now is that I do not ask the same person two consecutive things unless they have opened the conversation. If I need something else, I wait, or I go elsewhere, or I do without.
Not asking is also information
The thing I did not expect is that stopping made the second half of that week better rather than thinner.
Once I stopped generating questions, I noticed I had been treating conversation as a retrieval mechanism, and that this had made me quite bad company. When I stopped, people talked to me about entirely different things, none of which I would have thought to ask about, most of which I have forgotten, and one of which was a long account of a dog.
The half built building sat there through all of it. On my last morning a man I had never spoken to before said something to me about it, unprompted, while we were both waiting for the same thing. I understood about a third. I did not ask a follow up.
What I try to hold on to
The test I use is simple and slightly harsh. If I imagine the person answering my question and then thinking about it again that evening, does that seem fine? For where is the bus stop, obviously fine. For why is that building half built, asked four times by somebody who is leaving on Thursday, not fine.
The number of questions I actually need turns out to be small. Water, transport, whether a thing is open, whether a path exists. Almost everything else I wanted was for me, and the polite fiction that curiosity is a compliment is one I had been leaning on hard.