Day two. Day three. Day four. The reading-room does not change. Bohdana at the desk with a pencil behind her ear. The placard at your chair with the number four. Three folders at a time.
Bohdana has been behind the TsDIAL desk for a long time — the way she moves between desk and stacks says decades, not years. Her pencil is the same wood and lead as archivists have kept behind their ears in this city for two generations, the kind that do not break when you press. She does not ask why you are reading the Shevchenko correspondence again. Archivists do not ask. The documents answer.
You have a rhythm now. You arrive at eight. You work until thirteen. You take tea in the glass-with-the-metal-holder at thirteen without asking. You work until sixteen. You walk back to the hotel. You eat the same dinner in the same dining-room at the hotel. You sleep.
On Day two Bohdana pauses at your table. She says a scholar's name in the Shevchenko circle. You nod. She brings a folder you had not requested and sets it at your place without comment.
Day two you read three more folders of 1971. Day three you read the 1972. Day four you read the 1968–1970 in one stretch. The folders are thinner.
You copy sentences into your notebook. You copy them in Ukrainian in your notebook and then — when you have eaten and are back at the hotel desk at night — you copy them in English below. The English is always rough. You mean it to be.
Day three morning. Bohdana passes behind your chair with the pencil behind her ear. She pauses — half a second, no more — to see what folder you have open. She moves on. You feel the pause. A thing you do not like rises in your chest. I do not need her pity. You write your next three notes smaller, tighter, without looking up. At thirteen she sets the tea at your place and asks if you want it stronger today. You say no. Stronger tea was the thing you wanted. The no was the thing you said.
On the afternoon of Day three your phone rings in the lobby. The rule is no phones in the reading-room. You have been keeping the phone in your bag at the chair. You step out when it vibrates.
In the lobby your half-sister is on the phone. Charlotte. Eight years old. Her voice is the voice of an eight-year-old calling from Denver at nine in the morning her time, sixteen in yours.
I drew a horse with one more leg.
You ask her how many legs.
Seven.
You do not know what to say. You say that is a good number.
I know, she says. I made the seven one on the back. Like a fin on a fish.
The horse now has six legs in the usual places and one on the back like a fin on a fish. A new drawing. The six-legged one is still in the drawer in East Seventh.
You say you have to go. You say you will call her when you are back.
Are you in the place, she asks.
I am in the place.
She does not ask where the place is. She says ok the way she says ok.
She hangs up.
You put the phone in your bag and go back to the reading-room.
Day four. Morning. Tea at thirteen arrives. Bohdana sets the glass at your place the way she sets it every day, two fingers on the metal holder. She does not move away immediately. She stands with her hand still on the holder for a second that is longer than the second it takes to set down a glass.
You have been here seven days, she says. Her English is careful and the sentence is precise in the way sentences are precise when the speaker has practiced the sentence before saying it.
You say yes. Seven.
She asks if the hotel is acceptable. You say it is. She asks if you are eating. You say you are eating. She nods. She looks at the three folders on your table the way a woman looks at three folders on a table when she is deciding whether to say a thing she has not said.
She sits down. There is a chair opposite yours. She sits in it. Her hands settle in her lap. She has removed the pencil from behind her ear and set it beside your glass.
My son, she says. He lives in Kyiv. He is thirty-two. She says the number in English and then in Ukrainian to herself, trydtsiat dva, as if checking it. He is in computers. Something with computers. I do not understand what he does. He tries to explain. I do not catch the words.
You say you have a sister who is eight. You say it. You have not said it in four days to a person who asked nothing.
Half-sister, she says.
Half-sister.
She nods. She thinks this over. The half is a word Ukrainian does not use. In Ukrainian you say sister or you say a different word. The half is English.
You ask about her son's wife, if he has one. She says he does. She says the wife's name, Halyna, and then the name of their cat, which is Shvets — shoemaker — because the cat, as a kitten, had the habit of sitting in one of her son's slippers. Bohdana does the slight shape a smile makes when a person is remembering a detail not for you but for herself, a detail she has remembered a hundred times. Her son is a man with a wife and a cat in Kyiv. She has not seen the cat.
He has not been here since June, she says. The last time he came it was before the news from the east.
She does not explain what she means by the news from the east. You do not ask.
She says she is reading a book by Oksana Zabuzhko. She says the name twice. She knows you will know the writer and she wants the pronunciation to be right in the reading-room — Oksana, the name that is also the name of your grandmother, pronounced here without the complication.
The book is about a museum, she says. About what the museum keeps and does not keep. About a woman who is the museum. She taps once, with the pencil she has picked up again, on the edge of your table. You would find it.
You say you will find it.
She stands. She puts the pencil behind her ear in the practiced motion that is her motion. She looks once at the three folders on your table — the 1968, the 1969, the 1970. She looks at them the way an archivist looks at folders in her own archive: as objects she has touched many times and does not think twice about touching again.
She goes back to the desk.
You pick up the tea. The tea has gone a half-shade darker. It is still warm enough.
You open the 1968.
Day four, afternoon, the 1968 folder.
A letter. Oksana's hand. A folded sheet, held flat for fifty-eight years. Addressed to Natalia. A sentence in the middle of the second page:
I will take the folder to him in Moscow in the spring of 1971. The staircase in the house is dark wood. The window on the third landing looks onto a Polish-or-Ukrainian sign I cannot read from this distance but will read when I am there. The child will wear the green velvet because the velvet fits her still and her mother is tired of sewing name-labels into collars.
Below the sentence, in pencil, in a different hand, small: Ask Natalia what happened after.
The pencil hand is your mother's.
I knew this.
I knew Oksana took the folder to Moscow in the spring of 1971.
I did not know the child in the velvet dress was me at nine. The dress I did not remember wearing. The staircase in the photograph.
The year on the page does not arrange itself.
I knew and I was right.
You close the folder. You sit with your hands in your lap. The other researchers at the other tables do not look up.
You do not make a note.
You request the photograph. Bohdana looks at your request and understands what you are asking for without asking. She goes to the stacks. She comes back with a separate folder and lays it at your place.
Inside the separate folder is the three-by-five.
I had known the three-by-five was in my bag at home for thirteen years. I had not known a copy of the three-by-five was in the Lviv archive.
You look at it for a long time.
Bohdana does not ask you anything.
You do not ask to photocopy yet. Not today. You will ask on Day six.
At sixteen you close the two folders and put them in the pile Bohdana collects.
You leave the reading-room.
I do not think about Joe on the walk to the hotel.
I think about the dress.