A woman, forty-three, at a desk in a borrowed room in Malá Strana. Third-person, past tense. One afternoon.
She worked at the desk by the window because the light there was better than the light anywhere else in the room. The room was on the second floor of a house owned by a woman she had met twice, briefly, in Moscow in 1967. The woman was in Bratislava for three weeks. The room had a bed, a desk, a chair, and a small blue carpet worn to canvas at the door. She was grateful for the room. She had not brought much — a coat she had been wearing for eleven years, two dresses, the book she was working on.
The book was a pre-publication copy bound in plain boards, sent from Moscow in July. She had been annotating for four months. She had one more month. Her eyes were tired at forty-three in the way eyes got tired when they had been reading small type under lamps for most of a life. She had a reading-lamp on the desk now even at three in the afternoon because the window faced north and the light, good as it was, never sufficed.
She wrote with a pencil, not a pen. The pencil was German. She did not know how the pencil had found its way to her. The pencil was sharp.
The page she was on had the columns. The columns had been typed by a man in the ministry in Kharkiv in the winter of 1933 and had been typed again by a typist in Moscow in 1970 who worked for the publisher. Between the two typings the columns had been rearranged by another man in another ministry so the numbers read differently from how they had read when they were first put down. She had cross-checked the columns against the typescript she had carried from Kyiv in a bag inside a suitcase inside another bag. The numbers did not match. The numbers did not match because numbers like these never matched when they were asked to match.
She wrote in the margin.
The margin was a narrow column of white paper at the right-hand edge of the page. The pencil found the margin. Her hand was steady.
Verify the columns.
She wrote the line without deciding to write it. The line was a line she had been carrying since Kharkiv, where she had been five, in a room that smelled of the flour her mother had put into bread and then, for three months, did not have. The line was older than her hand. The hand was writing a line the woman was catching up to.
She wrote the second line.
The columns hold only what they can.
Outside the window, on the street below, a tram passed going south. The Number 22, a tram she had ridden once since she had been in the room, to the outer edge of the Third District to meet a man who had not been there. The man had been a Russian friend of the woman from Bratislava. The man had not come. The man would not come. She had known this and had gone anyway because going was the thing you did when a man who was not going to come had said he would come.
The tram-bell was brief and she did not look up.
She wrote.
Every number in the surplus-column is a household that was asked to surrender what it did not have.
She paused after surrender and then wrote what it did not have because the sentence needed both parts.
Her daughter was eight that autumn, in New York, living with the aunt of a friend of hers who had agreed to keep the child for a year while Oksana finished the work. She was at a public school in Queens. She had not written a letter in three weeks but had written a letter in the four weeks before that. Her last letter was on the desk under the lamp, folded once, the envelope with the American stamp on it open at the top. Oksana had not read the letter again today. She would read the letter tonight.
She wrote.
Read the margins. The margins are where the ledger admits it knows.
She looked at the sentence. She did not cross it out. She added the next one.
A grandmother counting aloud at a counter is reading the margins.
She said the word grandmother in her head in Ukrainian. Baba. The word made her breath shorter for one count. The hand on the pencil did not move. The baba who had counted aloud at a counter in Kharkiv in 1932, and who had been her own mother's mother, and who had died three weeks after the counter had stopped being a counter and had become only the wood that a counter had once been.
She looked at the window. The light had shifted a quarter-hour. The leaves on the linden in the courtyard were a yellow that had not been there a week ago. In the apartment across the courtyard a man in his sixties was standing at his kitchen window drinking from a glass. He did not know she was looking.
She stood up. Her knee was not a knee that liked to have been folded for three hours. She walked to the window and put her hand on the cold glass. The cold went into her palm. The cold was the cold of October in Central Europe, which was a cold she had known under several roofs, in several cities, in several decades.
She did not think about the work. She watched the man in the kitchen opposite finish his glass and set it down somewhere she could not see.
She turned from the window. She sat at the desk again. Her hand found the pencil.
She wrote.
A number is the shape a village takes when someone in a ministry needs it to fit on one line.
She was tired. The hand was not tired. She wrote one more line before she would stop for the tea she had been going to make forty minutes ago.
Her thumb presses the dough at a corner; the corner does not close.
She did not know, when she wrote that sentence, that forty-nine years later a girl not yet born would find the sentence and would stand at a kitchen counter in Denver and would know the gesture before she knew the word.
She did not know. The sentence went down anyway.
She got up. She went to the small kitchen at the other end of the apartment. She put the kettle on. She waited for the water.
The book was on the desk. The lamp was on. The pencil lay beside the book with its sharp end pointing toward the window.
The tram passed again, going north now.
She made the tea.