Seven Signs of the Lion by Michael M. Naydan

Author:Michael M. Naydan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

A MORNING AT STEFANYK LIBRARY

R aya had agreed to take Nicholas to Lychakiv Cemetery the next day if her sister decided not to visit their mother that day. She called at 9 a.m. to let him know she was free and could. He also wanted to get a library card at Stefanyk Library off of Copernicus Street so he could check out some books in the library. Nicholas decided to kill two rabbits with one shot as they say in Ukrainian. He met Raya at the freshly painted light yellow stucco building at 10:45. Actually, he was five minutes late because he forgot his cell phone when he left his apartment in a hurry and had to run back to get it.

Raya was there waiting for him at the turn from Copernicus Street onto Stefanyk Street, intuiting which direction he would be coming from, and went through the process of getting a library card and looking up a few things in books in the main reading room that basically had one wall lined with books on shelves and the rest of the room filled with lacquered oak desks and chairs. The library had been spruced up rather nicely through the donations of the Antonovych family from the US, and the floors were nicely lacquered in a dark stain. The walls both inside and out had been freshly painted. The outside stucco walls were a subdued yellow color that made the building stand out amid more drab gray surroundings.

Nicholas wanted also to take a look at some old manuscripts in the manuscript reading room too. He had heard some unique things were there, but that particular reading room was closed that day, so it would have to wait for another time. The entire process of getting the library card took only about ten minutes. So there was hope that the remnants of the old Soviet bureaucracy were dead and gone.

“Want to go to the Skrypka concert?” Nicholas asked Raya as they stepped outside the building. “I noticed a poster on my way over here. We can stop by at the Opera House on our way to Lychakivka.” When she realized the date would work for her, they stopped by the box office, which was about a fifteen-minute walk from the library.

The tickets for the lead singer of the supergroup VV (the initials in translation stood for the Wails of the Aquarian – Vopli vodopliasova) were expensive by Ukrainian standards. Two-hundred hryvnas or forty dollars for the best seats. Raya insisted that Nicholas not buy them. A week’s salary for one ticket was the thought that probably was in her mind. So she told him she was quite happy with the balcony seats for eighty hryvnas each. Then they walked over to the beginning of Lychakiv Street to catch the tram to the cemetery, an obligatory stop for visitors to this city of spirits.

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