Day six. You are at the reading room at eight, the first person through the door.
Bohdana is at the desk. A pencil behind her ear. She has been behind that desk longer than she has been on either side of it.
The TsDIAL reading-room has the air of a room that was other rooms first. The door frame is thicker than a standard wall. The window is high. The parquet is older than the cataloging system.
You hand her your requests. Three folders yesterday; three today. She looks at the slips and says something about the cross-reference system that you do not catch in full. She says it in Ukrainian, then in English.
Cross-references arrive with the folder.
You nod.
The first folder is thin. Clippings mostly, from the Lviv daily in 1972. You copy three dates into your notebook. You do not understand why the dates yet. You write them anyway.
The second folder is thicker. Oksana's handwriting on two of the letters — you know the hand before you read the words. The words are not about her. She is writing to someone about something else. You read them anyway.
The third folder is institutional. Reports. The typewriter is the same kind the other institutional folders used. You do not get what the report is reporting. You make a note to come back.
At ten-forty Bohdana brings a fourth folder to your table. You did not request it.
Cross-reference, she says. To the second folder. A name you wrote down yesterday.
She leaves the folder. She goes back to the desk.
The fourth folder is heavier than the others. The spine has been bound. There is a cross-reference card glued inside the cover. In Ukrainian in one hand and in English in another. The English hand is more recent.
You open the fourth folder.
A ledger. Bound. Spine-creased. Carbon-copy era. Month, account number, recipient name, amount. No letterhead. Nothing identifying the operation. Whoever made the book did not want a future reader to have an easy time.
You read the first page. Amounts in deutsche marks that were converted later to something else. You know the accounts because you have been reading the accounts for three days now. Nina's operation.
The second page. The third page.
On the fourth page there is a name.
It is not a Ukrainian name. It is a name you know. It has been in your restaurant for three years.
I have seen this name every week for three years.
Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offense and leave it on the table in September light.
You are still sitting. Your hands have gone flat on the table. You did not put them there. Your breath is waiting for a thing your mind is not ready to ask it to wait for.
The taste in your mouth is a taste you knew at nine.
I have known this for seven years without knowing I have known it.
This name will live in you the rest of your life.
The scalp is cold. Your pulse is visible in the notch of your collarbone. Your left foot adjusts under the table without your telling it to. Your shoulders compress.
You keep reading the page. You read it without reading it. The name is there. The account is there. The routing is what you already knew. The amount is monthly.
Monthly for three years.
Thirty-six entries.
You turn the pages and count them and the count does not stop where you want the count to stop.
You do not stand. You do not close the folder. You read the same page four more times. Then you turn the page. Then you turn it back. Then you do not turn it.
Somewhere Bohdana is moving between the desk and the stacks. She passes behind your chair. She sees the folder is open and you are not writing in your notebook. She does not stop. She goes back to her cart.
Eleven-twenty. Eleven-forty. Noon. You do not go to lunch.
The light through the high window has moved one finger to the right along the edge of your table.
The cold on your neck has the shape of a corner your grandmother turned at five in Kharkiv, a corner you have never walked, a corner your body has found before your mind has.
Your hair has risen at the back of your neck. The room has one body in it that it did not have at eleven-forty.
A man at the table behind your left shoulder has been reading a folder of his own. You do not turn to see him. You did not see him come in.
The linen of his shirt is wrong for Lviv September. That is the one thing you register as your eyes move and do not move.
He stands. You hear the chair scrape on the parquet.
He does not go toward the desk. He goes around your table. His shoulder passes two inches from yours. He reaches across. His hand is on a document that is not the ledger. A document you had set aside an hour ago, facedown. A photograph-provenance card with a smudge on the upper right where someone had pressed their finger years ago.
His fingerprint joins the smudge.
Your hand moves one inch toward the ledger, your palm going to cover the page. The hand stops before it arrives. It returns to the table. The move is smaller than you are; you have done it before it happens.
He does not touch the ledger. He has what he came for. His eyes are on your ribs where the shirt is flat. You feel his reading through the cloth. You know what he is reading. You know he knows what he is reading.
Your right hand wants to go to the place where the shirt is flat. It does not. The hand knows before you do that touching the place would answer him.
You do not turn your head. You do not lift your eyes from the ledger.
He lets the card go. He turns. He walks back the way he came.
The door to the reading room closes behind him.
You still do not turn.
You close the ledger. You close the folder. The carbon-copy paper makes a small sound under your hand that you hear for the first time because the reading room is silent.
You do not write in your notebook.
At fourteen-fifty Bohdana announces that the last folder-retrieval of the day will be at fifteen. You do not request another folder.
At sixteen the reading room closes. You stand. Your body stands. You gather your things. You put on your coat.
You have not eaten since morning. Your hands know the weight of your bag and the specific balance of what is in it. You have not written in your notebook since ten-forty.
You leave the folder on the table. Bohdana will reshelve it.
The stairs down from the reading room go one flight to the main hall. The stone echoes. You are alone in the stairwell. You put your hand on the railing the way you have put your hand on the railing at the Bleecker restaurant for the last year.
I am the one he came for.
Outside the archive is Lviv in September light. You step onto the sidewalk. You do not know which direction the hotel is. You turn left. Turning left is a thing a body can do when a body does not know which direction is home.