Day seven. The last day of your access.
You are at the reading-room at eight. Bohdana is at the desk. She has a pencil behind her ear. She has had a pencil behind her ear for seven mornings.
She looks at your face and does not say anything.
You hand her the slip you filled out last night at the hotel desk. One request — the separate folder with the photograph. She knows which folder. She does not ask.
Odyn kadr, she says. One frame.
You do not know if she means the photograph is only one frame or that the photocopy is only one frame. You think she means both.
She goes to the stacks.
She brings the folder to your table and then she brings a small machine — not a photocopier, a scanner, the kind an archive uses on documents that cannot be put face-down on a bed of glass. She sets the scanner at the edge of the table. She shows you how to set the photograph on the platen and where to stand so your shadow does not cross.
Forty hryvnia per scan, she says. Pay at the desk on the way out.
You thank her in Ukrainian the way your grandmother said thank-you, which is not the way graduate students in Kyiv say thank-you but is the way Oksana said it.
Bohdana smiles very slightly and returns to the desk.
You open the folder. The three-by-five is where it was three days ago. The velvet dress. The dark wood staircase. The window on the third landing with the sign you cannot read. The adult behind you, out of focus, legs only, the trousers that were the trousers you know from the other photograph in Oksana's album that is in a drawer at the house in Denver.
I am looking at the face the body has called mine.
You do not cry. You have already done the crying-that-is-not-crying last night.
You set the three-by-five on the platen. You stand where Bohdana showed you to stand. You press the button. The scanner scans. A small sound, a small light.
The scan appears on the scanner's small screen.
You slide a USB drive into the port. The scanner copies the file.
You put the three-by-five back in the folder.
You take the USB drive out.
You hold the drive in your hand and feel its small weight.
You did not scan the ledger — you had the forty hryvnia for it, and you chose the photograph.
You request two more things. A letter from 1973 you did not read on Day four because you ran out of time, and a 1987 letter Oksana wrote to your mother, which is in the miscellaneous-personal folder at the end of the correspondence series and which you have not opened. Bohdana brings both. At her desk she slides her earbuds in. The left cord trails; the leak is piano, a voice you know from Carmen's bar. Your eye closes a half-second. Your hand on the page does not move. You read them. Oksana is writing to Natalia again in the 1973. The letter does not say what you hoped it would say. The letter says something else. You copy three sentences.
The 1987 is different. One sheet, airmail, the thin paper airmail was. The ink is Oksana's pen and the hand is less steady than the 1970s hand — Oksana at fifty-nine, writing to your mother at twenty-five, across the ocean to a kitchen in Albany where your mother was already eight months into the job at the library she will keep for forty years. The letter is ordinary:
Yana my girl — the peppers came in yesterday and I did two jars with what you showed me from the American recipe. Ivan's wife next door gave me the glass jars because she has been using the new ones. Please do not worry about the winter. I have the coat and I have the woman downstairs who walks with me when the ice is bad. Mykola wrote from Moscow, briefly, well enough. My hands are what they are. The flat is warm. I have sewn the label into the new blanket — the yellow one — and it is in the package that went this week. I am well. Do not worry. K.
The K is the letter Oksana used in place of her full name when she signed to her daughter.
You read the 1987 twice. You do not copy it.
At fifteen the reading-room's last folder-retrieval for the day closes. You do not request another.
The last half-hour passes faster than the hours before it did. You are aware of the clock. You read the letter twice. You do not copy it a second time because there is no time.
At fifteen-thirty Bohdana comes by your table and takes the folder and the letter.
You have been good company, she says in English. I hope you find what you came for.
I hope I already have, you say.
She does not ask what you mean.
Where next, she asks.
New York, you say.
She nods once. Well. She does not ask more. She goes back to the desk.
Under the pencil-cup on her desk is a photograph-corner with a child's face in it. You have not seen it in seven days. The corner is the edge-scrap of a photograph someone removed or cut. Bohdana keeps it between her hands all day — not visible, but there. An archivist does this: keeps a fragment of someone's gone-person in a pencil-cup next to the desk where she returns documents to the stacks.
At sixteen the reading-room closes. You pay forty hryvnia at the front desk. You put the USB drive in the small inside pocket of your bag where the envelope from Joe has been since September.
You walk out of TsDIAL for the last time. You do not turn to look at the building. You walk north along Prospekt Svobody because north is the direction of the hotel and the direction of the airport tomorrow.
The chestnut trees have turned a little more than they had turned seven days ago.
A woman at the corner is selling kvass from a metal urn. She has been there every morning you have gone in.
At the hotel you do not go to the dining-room. The woman with the hair in the bun is not at the desk. A younger woman, her daughter possibly, nods when you pass through the lobby.
In the room you take the USB drive out and set it on the small desk. You do not plug it into anything. You do not open the file. You will not open it until you are back at Tamiment.
You take the envelope from Joe out of the bag. You put it back in the bag. You do not open it. You will not open it. You did not come to Lviv for what is in it; you came to Lviv for what is on the scan.
For one second my hand remembers a small cold weight it is not touching now.
You sit on the bed.
You have the three-by-five as a scan. You have the ledger in your memory. You have the letter to Natalia. You have the three sentences in your notebook. You have the mother's pencil annotation still behind your eyes. You have the grandmother's hand still in your hand.
I have what I came for.
You close your eyes.
Tomorrow is the flight back.