September 2, 2026. You are twenty-three. The Tamiment reading room is on the tenth floor of Bobst, on Washington Square, and the tenth floor of Bobst is quieter in the first week of September than it will be for the rest of the year — the semester has not started and NYU has not come back.
Earlier, at the catalog terminal on the other side of the reading room, a man was typing search-terms and muttering. You caught one phrase. The time is out of joint. He did not know you could hear him. You returned to your own terminal.
You have been at this table since eleven. One more box. Box 14 of 18. The box carries letters cataloged as Shevchenko correspondence, 1968–1974, and the catalog number ends in two digits you have memorized because you have requested the number every day for four weeks.
The librarian at the desk is not the same librarian every day. Today's is a graduate student you have not seen before. She does not know you. She brings Box 14 without comment.
You open the lid the way you have opened it before.
The letters are in folders by year. You have read them. You are reading them again. The hand is Oksana's, but Oksana is writing to someone whose name you do not know, about a trip she took in 1971 that she never described to anyone who lived long enough to tell you.
Before you get to the 1971 folder you take out the one document you have returned to every day for four weeks and read once more. It is a photostat of a typed page your grandmother had clipped into the file. She needed it near her work. A list. A village in Kharkiv oblast, the name partly blurred where a stamp sat over it. Typing tight and narrow, slightly off-axis where the ribbon had been re-threaded once that morning. Two columns: surplus declared, surplus surrendered. Twenty-three households.
You have the names in your notebook in English because you have only Ukrainian enough to transliterate. You have not looked up any of the names. You are not supposed to look up the names. The names are the names.
At the bottom of the page, in a different hand from the typist's, a small note in Ukrainian: the register of the church was removed by the deacon on the night of the seventeenth. The deacon removed what the typist had just typed. The church register that would have named who died. The deacon did not succeed — somebody later found what the deacon had taken and typed it back up and filed it here.
I think about the deacon. I do not know his name. The document does not give his name. The deacon is one man in a parish in a village in Kharkiv oblast in 1933 who tried to take the register and did not succeed.
You put the photostat back in its folder. Oksana had clipped the folder with a paperclip that has rusted.
On the last page of the 1971 folder there is a sentence you had read four weeks ago and underlined in your notebook and forgotten you underlined.
The archive in Lviv has the second half.
I know what the second half is. I am not supposed to know. I did not know I knew until this morning.
You close the box at sixteen.
She takes the box without looking at you.
You take the Q train north and then the F east and then walk four blocks to your apartment. The walking is a thing your body needs to do.
The apartment is your apartment. It has your books in it and your cup in the sink and a note from Alina on the refrigerator about the electricity. The note has been there since Sunday.
You pack the bag you have been packing in your head for a week. Three shirts. Two pairs of jeans. Boots. A notebook. A book you are not going to read. The envelope from Joe at Bleecker that you have kept in the drawer since May.
I put the envelope in the bag. The envelope is a thing I carry now without knowing why.
The passport is on the table. You put it in the bag.
At night you do not sleep well. You sleep badly in a way that is not anxiety; it is the body knowing it will be on a plane in fourteen hours.
You eat something at four in the morning. A piece of bread. A piece of cheese.
You wash the dish. You put the dish away. The kitchen has been the same for two years.
You count the days since the last. Nine. You have what you need.
At JFK you do not look at the departures board except once. Lufthansa to Frankfurt to Lviv. Eleven hours then three. The flight is three hundred and ninety dollars. You bought it on short notice. Lviv is not a short-notice destination.
The plane is full. You are in a middle seat in row 41. The person on your left is reading a paperback in German. The person on your right is sleeping before the plane has left the ground.
You sleep without meaning to. You wake when the plane has already started its descent.
Lviv airport is small. The passport officer looks at your passport and at your face and at your passport again. He stamps it.
Tsili vizytu. Purpose of visit. Your Ukrainian is not good enough to answer without effort. You say research in English. He looks at you once more and does not ask again.
At the carousel your luggage arrives slower than everyone else's. You stand, you wait, you walk to the taxi rank fast because the last light is going and you have not yet slept for the night that is coming.
The taxi to the hotel is one hundred and forty hryvnia. You pay in the cash you got at an ATM in the terminal because the taxi will not take a card. The driver does not speak English. You show him the address of the hotel on your phone. He nods. He says New York? in English, the two words, and you say New York. He says Brighton Beach. You say yes. He says nothing else. The taxi starts.
The hotel is a building older than the wars. Three floors, a reception-desk with a bell, a woman in her sixties with her hair up in a bun who speaks enough English to check you in.
The room is on the third floor. It has a bed, a chair, a small desk, a window onto a courtyard. The courtyard has a cat.
You put the bag down. You do not unpack it. You sit on the bed. You do not take off your coat.
The archive is two tram stops from the hotel. It opens at eight tomorrow morning.
You lie back on the bed still in your coat and close your eyes and do not sleep and wait for the window to stop being the color of Lviv evening and start being the color of Lviv night.
Outside, a car idles across from the hotel for three or four minutes. Then it moves on. You do not get up to look. You think nothing.