Day four in Prague. November. You are twenty-three, and the cold has become a condition of the air now, not a visitor. You walk to Malostranské náměstí and take the 22 tram three stops because the walking in the stone streets is too long for the hour you have agreed, and your body — post-Lviv, post-ledger, post what is in your bag — is not the body you started out in. You step on just as the doors begin to close; they close behind you. The ticket is thirty crowns. A small hot hiss when the machine prints the time. You hold the cracked plastic against the pane and you do not look at the people in the tram and they do not look at you.
You get off at the bridge end and cross on foot. The Vltava is flat and grey. Someone's small dog is doing something at the base of one of the statues. You cross into Old Town by a route your phone suggests and then you do not look at your phone. The address is in your mouth. You walk the last block faster than you meant to; the cobbles are slippery because the cold is bringing moisture up; you slow at the building.
The building is older than its neighbors. Pre-war stone. The entrance is between two shops closed for renovation, plywood over the windows. You push the outer door. A single bulb in the hall, unlit. Smell of wet stone and the other smell, the older one — plaster that has been here since before Jana. You read the mail cabinets. Her name is on the third floor. You find the staircase and you begin.
The first turn is ordinary. Iron handrail, paint thinned where the hand has been. You put your palm on the rail. Your body is calibrating to the climb. Your scalp goes cool at the top of the first flight. It is not the Lviv scalp-cold — it is a cousin of it, a distant cousin, the one who arrives on an ordinary afternoon.
You turn onto the second flight and something changes.
Your palm leaves the rail.
Your palm goes to the wall.
You keep climbing. The body has not yet admitted what it has done. The wall is cold stone under the thinned paint. The stone is worn at the turn, at one specific turn, where four decades of feet have paused and set down for one breath not from exertion but from the arrival itself, and your palm finds the place where the wearing is deepest.
For a half-beat the angle in the photograph and the angle in the stone do not agree. Then they do.
I have climbed this once before.
You keep climbing. You do not stop. The scan in your bag moves against your ribs, and you do not take it out. You do not need to take it out. The staircase is the one in the photograph.
At the third-floor landing the door is plain, dark-green, a brass letterbox cut into its middle. A card in a slot. The name in the handwriting of a woman who still writes things by hand.
You knock.
She opens before you have finished. She has been standing near enough to hear your feet.
She does not look at your face first. She looks at your hands, then at the bag, then past you into the stairwell as if there could be someone else still climbing, and then at your face.
Jana, you say.
Ano, she says. Come in.
The flat is warm. The radiator is on. She has made tea already; the kettle is off the hob. She moves you to a chair and you take it. Her hand as she gestures does not tremor exactly — it shakes in the way that a woman's hand shakes who has been a woman a long time. She sits in the other chair, across the table. On the table: a student's notebook, closed, corrections in red pen. A Russian verb paradigm showing through the cover.
She pours the tea. You drink.
You have come a long way to arrive here, she says. Her English is accented Russian on top of accented Czech. She speaks slowly, not because of her English.
Yes.
You have Oksana's mouth. I had not expected that.
You do not answer. Light from the afternoon window crosses the student's notebook, the red ink, the margin. Your ankle knows the radiator behind it. The tea has a stem of something in it, bay-leaf or another herb you do not know.
She tells you what she has not said in any letter. She tells you what Oksana was reading in Prague in the autumn of nineteen seventy. She tells you the names of two of the women on the list. They were Oksana's classmates and mine in those years. She does not say the other three names. She tells you she is sorry she was seven years late sending Nina.
She does not say why.
She says, instead: The letter Oksana wrote I kept in a box in the cupboard. There were days I thought I would burn it. There were years I thought I was waiting because I was afraid, and then years I thought I was waiting because I was ill, and then years I thought I was waiting because the person who was supposed to receive it had died. When it became clear that you were still the person who was supposed to receive it, I sent Nina.
She stops speaking. She drinks her tea. You drink yours.
There is a question between you she is not asking. It is the question of whether anyone else knows you have come here. You do not answer it. You do not tell her about Joe. You do not tell her the photograph of me at age nine, the one my grandmother left for me, was taken from this staircase.
You stay forty minutes. She gives you bread with butter. She asks about your mother, whose name she knows but whom she has never met. She asks about your thesis. She does not ask about why you avoided Prague for six years.
When you stand to go, she stands with you. At the door she takes your hand and holds it a moment, not shaking, only holding. She looks at you.
Come back tomorrow, she says.
I will, you say.
You go down the stairs. The stone is warm at the specific turn now. I know the stone. You walk past the plywood shops and cross the bridge the other way. The dog is gone. Your phone says the mother is at the library and you sit on a bench at the Malostranská end and you call her.
Hello, she says. Her voice is inside the library. A cart, a colleague saying a name, the catalog printer. Vera.
Hello.
Are you all right.
Yes.
Where are you.
Prague. I have a coffee.
Good. I love you.
I love you.
Thirty seconds. She is at work. You do not tell her where you have been. You hang up. You sit with the phone in your hand a moment longer. The afternoon light across the river is already going grey.