Day one. You wake at six because the hotel has a pipe that clangs at six and by six-ten the pipe has stopped and by six-fifteen you are standing at the window in the coat you slept in.
Breakfast in the hotel dining-room is a plate: bread, butter, a slice of cheese you do not recognize, a tomato, a small pot of plum jam, a cup of coffee that is stronger than the coffee at Bleecker. Forty hryvnia on your bill. The woman in her sixties with her hair in a bun pours the coffee herself because the other girl has not come in.
You eat.
Prospekt Svobody, morning.
The tram to the archive is tram number two. You do not take the tram. You walk. The walk is what your body needs.
The tram passes you. A man with a canvas bag slung across his chest passes you going the other way. A woman with two children passes you, one child in a stroller, the other holding her hand. The tram passes you again. A taxi idles at the light across the street with its window down; from the dashboard speaker a rock song plays loud enough to catch — Okean Elzy, the Vakarchuk chorus the city has been singing for years now. The light changes. The taxi goes.
The leaves on the chestnut trees have started to turn but have not turned. The light is the light of a city that is cold at seven-thirty in September and will be warm by eleven.
You walk faster than the tram for a block and a half, then you slow. The archive does not open until eight; you do not want to stand at the door. Your breath is visible once, then gone.
The street remembers its old name in the width of the buildings set back from the pavement, in the order of the arcades. Prospekt Svobody is the spine of Lviv — Habsburg-width streets still holding the name of the imperial order that named them Franzjosefstrasse before Svobody was freedom. You walk the spine. Your feet need the spine. Your body needs to register where you are before the archive does.
TsDIAL is on a side street. You find it. You have looked at the map enough times to know the side street without looking at the map.
TsDIAL is housed in a building whose stones were laid for something else before they were laid for records. The stairs to the second floor have marble treads worn by footsteps that were not archive-visitors once. You walk up where others walked up on different errands.
The reading-room is on the second floor. You register at the front desk. Your passport. A card to fill out. The woman at the front desk gives you a placard with a number on it — you are number four today. The placard goes on the table at your chair so the archivists know where to bring folders.
The access fee is three hundred hryvnia for a week of reading-room use. You pay in cash. The receipt is a slip of paper with a stamp.
The rules are on the wall in Ukrainian and in English. No photographs. No pens at the tables. Only pencils. Folders are to be returned to the archivist at the end of each day. Cross-references arrive with the folder. A bag-check on the way out.
You read the rules. You have read rules like these before.
At eight you sit at a table by the window. Bohdana is at the desk. You know her name already.
Bohdana Mykhailivna, she said.
Vera.
She did not ask your surname. Or she did ask your surname and you gave it and she did not repeat it.
She brings three folders to your table. She sets them at your place and goes back to the desk.
You open the first folder.
The first folder is 1971. The archive is the side of Oksana's life your grandmother never described to you because your grandmother was dead before you had the Ukrainian to ask. You read the folder's letters in the order the archive has filed them.
Two of the letters are in Oksana's hand. They are to a woman named Natalia whose last name is blotted in the archive's index — the archive has a policy about living correspondents. Natalia was a cousin of your grandmother by marriage or by choice, you are not sure which. Oksana writes to Natalia about a trip. The trip is a visit to an apartment in a city whose name is not in these letters but is in my body because my grandmother once described the room.
You copy three sentences of the Ukrainian into your notebook.
The second folder is institutional. The third folder you put aside.
At thirteen Bohdana comes by to ask if you want tea. You do. She brings tea in a glass with a thin metal holder.
Vy rozumiyete. You understand, she says. Not as a question.
You do not know what she means. You nod.
At sixteen the reading-room closes. You walk back to the hotel. You take tram number two this time because the sun has gone down and the cold is the cold you did not bring the right coat for.
At the hotel desk the woman with the hair in a bun gives you your room-key. Someone was asking for you earlier today, she says, in English, the way she says things in English — slowly, a little wrong at the edges. You ask what they looked like. She thinks. She does not remember. She goes back to her crossword.
The tram is not crowded. A woman in her seventies is reading a paperback in Russian. A student is on a phone in Ukrainian. The two languages share the tram without looking at each other. She turns the page.
At the hotel you take a bath. The tub is smaller than the tubs at home. The water is hot enough.
In the bath you think about the three sentences you copied and about Natalia and about the apartment in the city whose name Oksana did not write down.
You do not think about Joe. You have not been thinking about Joe since the flight began. I have been thinking about Oksana. Oksana is what I came for.
You dry off. You put on the shirt you slept in.
You sit at the small desk. You open your notebook. You copy the three sentences again, in English this time, below the Ukrainian. The translation is rough. You know it is rough.
You close the notebook. You close your eyes.
Day one is ending.