Day six. You go back to Jana's building a day late. You had said you would come back tomorrow; you took the day you needed before you could come. The scan in your bag is still the scan; you have not slept with it out of the bag since you arrived in this city.
The street looks different. You know the shops now. You know the plywood, and the corner where the chestnut-seller had been, and the corner where the chestnut-seller has moved to on day six because it is closer to the tourist traffic. You walk the last block hoping Jana will give you a specific fact — a name, a date — that fills the gap in the photograph. She won't. She might. She has the photograph she has. You enter the building. You take the stairs without your hand on the rail. You have climbed them once before. At the specific turn on the second flight your palm finds the wall without your deciding and you do not stop and you do not make a sentence of it this time. The second climb is for the climbing, not the recognition.
Jana opens before you have knocked. She has been listening for your step on the stair.
You are a day late, she says.
Yes.
Good. She steps back. Come in.
She takes your coat from you. The heel of your right hand, as you offer the coat, has a small bruise that is shaped like an acorn — a bruise that was not there the last time you were in this flat. She does not look at it. She hangs the coat on the peg. She looks once at your face. She does not ask.
The flat is warmer today because the morning has already been burning in the radiator a while. Jana has put out the tea and has put out bread and has put out a small dish of jam that is plum. She has also put out a third place-setting, because you understand, once you see it, that she is not setting out a third setting for a third person but for some understanding that she prefers tables laid for three. You sit in the same chair you sat in two days ago.
The flat is warm in the pension-income way.
The student notebook is gone from the table. In its place is an older book face down.
I have been a teacher, Jana says, in answer to a question you have not asked. Before I retired I taught Russian at a language school near Wenceslas Square. Before that I taught at a grammar school. Before that I was supposed to teach at university, but the year I was supposed to begin was sixty-eight, and by the time the year was over I was no longer supposed to.
Oksana, you say.
Oksana was not at my university, Jana says, she was visiting mine and I was visiting hers, and we agreed at a conference in nineteen sixty-nine that if we were going to be friends we would be friends by letter as well, because she was going back to Moscow and I was staying. She came here once afterwards. Autumn of seventy. She stayed in this building in the flat that was then mine.
She does not say the same flat. She does not need to.
There was a child here that autumn, Jana says. A friend's daughter. Seven. Your grandmother taught her to read Pushkin in the afternoons. The book was red cloth, faded at the spine. She was Nina.
She picks up the older book on the table. She turns it face up. You recognize the title, or rather you recognize two of the words in the title, because your Russian is your grandmother's Russian filtered through twelve years of your own reading. Zapiski o golode. Notes on the Famine. Nineteen seventy-two. Not a thesis; not a public book. An academic offprint bound in a soft cardboard cover, slightly warped, pages yellowed at the edges. Jana's name in ink on the inside cover. Oksana's name, in Oksana's hand, underneath — for Jana, who reads more carefully than I write.
Jana opens to a page she has marked with a slip of paper.
She reads to you. First in Russian, slowly. Then in English, more slowly, because the translation is hers and she wants you to hear it.
A village is a number. A household is a number. The ration is a number. When the number of the ration is set against the number of the household it yields another number, which the ledger calls the surplus. If the ledger asks the village for surplus and the surplus is not there, the village is the problem. Not the number. Not the ledger. The village.
She closes the book on the page.
Oksana wrote this when she was twenty-three, Jana says. She was careful.
You hold the book. You hold it by the spine. The spine is worn in the way a book is worn when it has been opened to the same page many times over many years. You do not read the rest of the page. You do not need to.
You may keep it, Jana says.
I —
You may keep it. I kept it long enough. The letter, the book, the work. I was not going to send Nina and the book at the same time. It was bad enough to send Nina.
You put the book in your bag. You put it flat against the scan of the photograph. You close the bag.
Jana stands and steps to the sideboard, where a small cassette deck sits beside a framed photograph of a man, grey at the temples. She presses play. Modlitba pro Martu, she says — Kubišová, nineteen-sixty-eight, what he had recorded off Radio Prague before they stopped playing it. The song begins low and clean. She does not translate the prayer.
You eat bread with her. You drink the tea. The song plays through the eating. Jana asks you about a Ukrainian poet whose name you have to write out on a piece of paper because you cannot remember the transliteration in the moment. She tells you the poet is dead. She tells you the year. She eats half a slice of bread with jam.
When you stand up she walks you to the door. She does not hold your hand this time. She pats the cuff of your jacket where the sleeve is thinning at the hem. She looks at you.
Don't be late again, she says, and she smiles for the first time since you have known her. Next time you come to Prague.
I will not be late, you say.
You go down the stairs with the book in your bag, against the scan. The street outside is the same street, and I am not the same body that climbed the stairs up.