The walk from the station down to the harbor is a walk of three-quarters of an hour if you take it slowly, and you take it slowly, because the body has been sitting for six days and the body wants the walking.
The streets go down. The streets are ochre and grey and rust. The buildings are post-Soviet in the specific way this city is post-Soviet — nothing has been torn down, and nothing has been kept — and shops are open, closed, boarded, open again in a sequence that does not obey a pattern you can read. A man is selling fish from a white Styrofoam cooler on the corner of a street whose name is in Cyrillic you do not read. The fish are fresh. The fish stare. The big ones are five hundred rubles. You do not buy. You walk past.
The sea becomes visible at a corner. You do not expect the moment you see it. You see it. The sea is larger than it should be in the way a sea is always larger than a landlocked body prepares for, and the sea is grey-blue, and the sea is at the end of a sequence of streets, and the sequence of streets now belongs to the sea.
You walk down to it.
The harbor.
There is a railing and a concrete walk and a low wall and beyond the wall the water. For thirty-three years no foreigner stood where you stand. The piers remember neither the closing nor the opening. Boats are at moorings. A ferry is pulling out further west. The air is the air of a port — salt, diesel, old rope, something fishy and something petroleum. You stand at the railing.
You have not cried since Istanbul. You do not cry now. The thing that has been forming is not a crying.
You stand.
The rail.
You find a place along the rail where the water is closest to the concrete. Where the concrete is low enough that if a body wanted to go over, it would not have to work to go over.
You do not know if this is where she went. You do not know if she went in here or a kilometre west or from a boat at anchor or with or without intention. The book your life has been writing about this woman has no paragraph in it that tells you which rail, which water, which minute. What you have is a date — May sixteen — and a city — this one — and a name — Nina — and a sentence she said, in Russian, to your mother's phone at 06:03 New York time, six weeks ago: ya znala tvoyu babushku. Oksanu. I knew your grandmother. Oksana.
You put both hands on the rail.
The rail is cold. The rail is the temperature of a rail at the edge of the Pacific in June at 19:40 on a day the sky has not warmed. The rail has paint on it, and the paint is chipped, and the chips are a specific size and green, and under the chipped green is a grey of metal.
Nina's hands were on this rail or another rail one kilometre west and Nina's hands are not on any rail now and your hands are on a rail where her hands might have been.
You look down.
The water moves. The water does what water does at a harbor rail. You look at the water for some minutes. The water does not look back.
Nina was a woman.
Nina was a woman who received documents from Jana in Prague. Nina was a woman who had been sent east with them. Nina boarded a train like yours and stood at a railing that was this one or near it.
Nina was a woman who put her hand on a rail that was this one or near it and the rail was cold. Nina was a woman whose breath went out into the air over the water and did not come back. Nina was a woman who knew how to read a ledger and how to disappear and which one she was doing at the railing she was not somewhere a notebook could hold.
The things that were not in the envelope she carried — the things that were not in the envelope Emre handed you in Istanbul — are somewhere. Not here. Not on her body, not on the train, not in Prague. The folder your grandmother left behind in Moscow in nineteen-seventy-one was not among the papers that came forward. It was left in Moscow. It has been in Moscow for fifty-five years. It is there or it is not there and Nina did not bring it and you did not retrieve it and Moscow kept it.
I know what she did not carry.
I know what Jana did not send.
I know what my grandmother left behind.
The light is going. The grey in the sky is taking on the first of the gold that the hour has. You have been at the rail for some minutes, or some longer. You do not know. The body knows.
An old man walks past on the concrete behind you. He has a dog on a leash. The dog is old too. The man and the dog do not look at you. You do not look at them. The old man coughs once, two coughs, and the two coughs go past you and are gone.
The ferry that was pulling out further west is further out now.
I have been east for six days and I have come to the water and the water does not know anything and the city does not know anything and the women I have met on the train and the men I have read at tables and the man with the scar on his hand who is somewhere in this city or on a plane out of it does not know anything that I can ask a question to.
My grandmother is dead and my mother is in a library at nine and there is a child in Denver who has a horse with six legs in a drawer I left open.
Your palms on the rail have gone numb.
Keep your face still.
The turn.
You put both hands back in the pockets of the coat. You push off the rail with your hips, the small push a body does to leave a railing, which is the same small push a body does to leave any edge.
You turn.
The city is behind the harbor and the harbor is behind you and you are now facing the hill.
The east is what you saw in the dining car at 01:34 and in the carriage at 10:17 and at the samovar at 14:40 and on the platform at Chernyshevsk and in the bed of a Dutchman named Pieter at 02:50 and in the water Nina was in at whatever minute she was in it.
The train has taken you as far as trains go for this part of the arc.
You walk up the street you came down.
The first building you pass is the fish-man, who is packing up the Styrofoam. The fish are in a grey plastic bag. The man nods to you. You nod to him. Neither of you speaks.
The next building is a closed bookstore with Cyrillic you do not read on the door and, below the Cyrillic, the hours. You look at the hours for no reason except that a closed bookstore is a closed bookstore.
The next corner. The next street. The hill.
I have been east.
I am going west.
I am twenty-three and I am walking up a hill and the body has been east and the body is going west.
The hill goes up. The sky is going gold.
You keep walking.