Day 5. The reading-room closes at seventeen. You do not go back to the hotel.
You want the city. You want Lviv as something other than a commute from a hotel-room to a reading-room. You have been here five days and have walked two streets more than the required streets. The body wants the walking.
You walk north from the archive. Krakivska in the early evening is all people walking the direction they have walked home every evening for twenty years. A tram clanks down the center of the street, full. Two old women with canvas shopping bags stand at the curb and do not look at the tram. The tram is not theirs.
The air at this hour in September is thin. Not cold yet. The thinness of air that knows cold is three weeks away. You are not dressed for it. You wear a denim jacket that is fine at two in the afternoon and is not fine at six. You put your hands in the pockets.
You pass a bookshop with a window display of new translations. A woman with white hair is inside taking a book off a shelf for a man waiting at the counter. A pigeon walks the sidewalk in front of you as if it has the same errand you have. You do not know your errand.
On Serbska Street you find a place with the word вареники in the window and a counter with three stools at it. No tables. A woman in an apron is working the burners behind the counter. A man in a lab coat is eating a plate of something at the right-hand stool. A woman older than the first woman is doing dishes at a sink in the back.
You sit at the left-hand stool. The woman in the apron looks up. She is sixty, maybe, with hair pulled back. Her hands move the way hands move that have worked the burners for thirty years and could work them blindfolded.
You point at the plate the man in the lab coat is eating. Oh ce, you say. This.
She nods. She does not ask how many.
The pierogi come on a white plate in a ring of nine. Sour cream in a small metal dish beside them. They are pork and potato. They are hotter than you expected. You eat.
They are better than the pierogi you have eaten anywhere. They are better than the ones my mother makes at Christmas, which is a sentence I will not say aloud anywhere to anyone but is a sentence my mouth has already made into the fact of what it is tasting. The dough is thinner. The filling is more. The sour cream is sour cream that has never been anywhere near a plastic tub.
The man in the lab coat finishes his plate. He puts seventy hryvnia down. The woman in the apron nods at him. He leaves. You are alone at the counter with the woman and the woman at the sink.
You eat six. You eat a seventh. You are full at the seventh. You stop. You leave two pierogi on the plate. You eat one more anyway because the eighth is smaller than the seventh was and your body is the body that has walked five days of reading-room-to-hotel-and-back and wants the food.
The bill is sixty hryvnia. You put eighty on the counter. The woman in the apron takes the eighty without comment and puts twenty-hryvnia coins back where the extra hryvnia would have been. She says smachnoho — enjoy — a minute late, after you have already eaten.
Dyakuyu, you say.
She nods.
You leave.
The tram stop on Horodotska has one bench. A man is on the bench already, sitting at the right end, a cap pulled low. You do not sit on the other end because the other end is cold in a way the man's end is not yet. You stand.
The tram is the number three. You have looked up the line; the three goes in the direction of your hotel with a change at the corner by the monument. You are waiting.
The wait is longer than the posted time. Twelve minutes. Fourteen. The cold becomes a thing. Your hands in your jacket pockets are not warm. Your ears are cold in the specific way ears get cold when there is no wind and also no heat. The city is moving around you at the register of a Tuesday evening that is not your Tuesday evening.
A young woman comes and stands near you. She is on the phone with someone she is not happy with. Her voice rises and falls in Ukrainian too fast for you to follow. You do not try to follow. You look down the track for the tram.
A man passes walking the other way wearing a coat that is right for the weather. Your body registers it. Not the way your body has registered the coats in New York and Istanbul and Moscow and on the train. The way a body registers a coat when the body is cold and someone else is dressed for the cold. Ordinary envy. Not alarm.
The tram comes. You get on. You pay. You find a seat by the window.
The window is a window in a tram in Lviv at nineteen-fifteen on an evening in September. You are in a city your grandmother was in before you were anyone. The city was not this city then. This city is this city. Cities are cities. Your grandmother would not recognize half of the buildings on this line and would recognize the other half before she recognized them.
You take your phone out.
Joe — I am in Lviv. The pierogi are very good. I thought of you. I do not know why.
You look at the text you have written. Your thumb is on the send-arrow.
You do not press.
Joe — the weather is turning. I will call when I am back in New York.
You do not press.
Joe — I do not know what to say.
You do not press.
You delete the drafts. All three. You put the phone back in your jacket pocket and you put your hand back in the pocket and your hand finds the phone and stays there.
You get off at the stop by the monument. You walk three blocks to the hotel. The hotel lobby has its two chairs and its little lamp and its woman at the front desk who has not looked up in five evenings.
The elevator to your floor is small. You ride up alone.
In the room you take off the denim jacket. You put the jacket over the chair. You run the hot water in the bathroom sink until it is hot. You run your hands under the hot water. You put your face under the hot water. You dry with the hotel towel that smells of the hotel detergent.
You sit on the edge of the bed.
Tomorrow is the ledger.
You brush your teeth. You turn off the lamp.
The city continues outside the window. The tram you rode is now on its return run. The pierogi-woman is closing her counter or not closing her counter. The man in the lab coat has gone home or gone to another meal. None of this is your business.
You sleep.