Church. At first Dyem, somewhat previous as he was behaving, seemed likely a plausible person, likely to be helpful in getting the information sought and it seemed fair to offer a reasonable payment towards the sum mentioned. He suggested they have tea at a cafe. Dyem agreed and identified a nearby place. As they sat with their lemon teas at a pavement table he suggested and Dyem agreed that they get the financial matter sorted out first. He said that he did not have forty pounds available and offered a ten pound note plus a Ukrainian Hrivna note worth about eight pounds. Dyem, taking only the British note and without a 'thank you'. made it clear that he was not satisfied and insisting on the need for forty pounds. Dyem asked him to go a cash machine to withdraw the remaining money and got more and more insistent. Dyem had not so far made any physical threat but the trend seemed in that general direction. If it came to violence there was a fair chance of getting the worse of it and anyway it was unpleasantness better avoided. He got up from the table and ran up to the main road and up to the Post Office, which would close in half an hour. Dyem was not in pursuit and he forced himself to go in and write out the postcards and buy stamps for them at the counter, speaking the few words of Ukrainian he had mugged up for the purpose. Now he had only to go to the box outside and post them: something, however modest, accomplished. Well no: the postbox had no bottom member and the cards simply dropped on to the pavement. The clerk took the cards and straightaway proceeded to close the office. Now for a cup of tea and biscuit or something in the hotel room while looking at the guide book.
There was on the face of it no need to go to Reception to ask the friendly, helpful but seeming to him slightly patronizing hotel staff for the room key because the hotel had adopted the electronic card entry system. The hotel's restaurant faced on to Gorodotska Street but his room overlooked a courtyard behind the street frontage. There were two room blocks, A and B, and the number he had only existed in Block A. Yet the card was for a Block B room. He had not at first realized this and also was not at that stage fully familiar with the route through the labyrinthine corridors and staircases. Altogether it took three quarters of an hour, including two forays from Reception escorted by staff, to get from outside in the street to inside in the room. Thus finally inside he made himself a tea, had the apple and biscuit yielded in a search of his pockets and started perusing the guide book. The latter referred to another hotel -the Hotel Lviv-as being used by Polish tour groups. The description of the place was not entirely flattering, he was tired and inclined towards a quiet evening in, but he knew what he needed to do. After a shower he sallied forth again on the half-hour walk to the hotel referred to.
The hotel Lviv was a modernist-style Soviet-era concrete building on the Chornovolya, a main road leading north from the centre. The hotel was not difficult to find, but the entrance to it was. After walking twice round the street block that the hotel occupied he came to its spacious restaurant. The place was a third or so full now at seven thirty in the evening and would not become appreciably busier as the evening progressed. He took up a position at a table with his back to the wall and overlooking the entrance doors. At the least he hoped to get in to some conversation with the waiter or waitress who served him. The meal, with coffee and ending with a low-priced measure of what was described as the local vodka, passed pleasantly with the gentle and rather nostalgic music from a small dance band playing at the other end of the room, some sixty feet away. A more relaxed feeling began to take over from his earlier sense of scurrying about getting nowhere. But it became increasingly apparent not least given the level of background sound, that he was not going to manage to have a quiet talk with the waitress about daily life in Lwów. However, he was becoming aware that, nearer to the band, there were a fairly large group of people that seemed to know each other yet were not so concentrated at one table that it would be impossible to sit in amongst them. Since this was a public restaurant there seemed to be no reason why one should not do so. With the meal over and armed with his still half-full glass of 'vodka du pays' he sat at a table at the fringe of the group. There were men and women, ages ranging from the twenties to the seventies, and some Polish was being spoken. It was quite a pleasant atmosphere but there seemed no legitimate or obvious way of moving from the 'fact on the floor' of his physical infiltration to social infiltration and after twenty minutes he downed the remainder of his vodka and left the room. However, the route in to the street led through a sort of ante room where people were lingering a little. One older man he recognised as having sat his table and to have spoken in Polish. He bid this man good night as he put on his outdoor jacket-and the man invited him to stay a moment before going. He could not remember all that was said-after all his knowledge of Polish, the language in which the conversation was conducted, was good only when compared with his still more limited knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian. But he understood enough to get the sense of what the man was saying: the group was there to celebrate the birthdays of two of their number, they were a mixed group of Polish and Ukrainian native speakers and they got along all right together. He shook hands with the man and walked the half-hour back to the Dworzec Hotel at half past ten at night feeling that some progress had been made. It had been a long day and he slept right through to 8 a.m. next day.
The next day was Saturday and there was a weekend, more leisurely atmosphere. There was no doubt as to what had first to be done: go to the railway station and buy a ticket, and generally sort out the morrow's journey over the border to the Slovak town of Trenin. It was no more than about two hundred and sixty miles but a complicated journey with two or three changes was likely. He assumed at the least he'd arrive by the late evening of Sunday and that he'd have to work out the best train to catch from Lwów. It seemed that the fare, judging by prices he'd seen in Lwów, shouldn't be that high. He was wrong on all counts. The train went all the way to Trenin (leaving at twelve minutes past ten in the morning), there was no choice of train. It would not arrive till three o'clock on the Monday morning, a journey of seventeen hours-and the ticket working out at seventy pounds sterling, was far from cheap. His expectations regarding refreshments on the journey were also to prove wide of the mark. It was while queuing up for this ticket that he came across the only other British people he encountered in Lwów.
It was now ten thirty, warm and sunny. After taking some photographs of both the fine interior and the impressive exterior of the station he caught a tram to the city centre. He had passed the Lwów History Museum on Market Square the day before and now, as planned, went in. There were some groups going round with guides. The guide of one of these groups was speaking in Polish and he joined it. After the tour of the museum there was a chance to have an individual conversation with the guide. The museum showed, in its furnished and decorated apartments and coat of arms exhibited, a Polish element of the city's history. From the conversation he understood her to be, like the man whom he had met the night before, a member of the Polish minority in the city who was satisfied with life in Lwów.
The museum featured a spacious and elegant inner courtyard, with balconied upper floors of the building surrounding it. He found himself in the middle of someone's wedding reception. Not wishing to intrude on a private function he mounted the steps to the first floor, overlooking the courtyard. Here, however. there was a second wedding reception taking place and he immediately came upon the bride and groom posing in contrived abandon for a photograph. He withdrew from the scene and from the museum complex itself, back in to Market Square. Here there were at least three more wedding parties, like as not with the newlyweds also posing in contrived abandon. As the gentle tones of a street musician wafted across the square it occurred to him that, museum and station apart, he had not been inside any of the fine buildings he had viewed from the outside. The Ratusz (Town Hall) itself was being renovated and he went in to the Latin Cathedral, a mainstay of the urban backdrop, on Cathedral Square, between the main Square, and the Prospekt Svobody. The building was in neo-Gothic style, dating fro
m the eighteenth century. It soon became apparent that notices and inscriptions of any kind were in Polish, and that Polish was the language spoken there. There was a small kiosk at the entrance selling religious tracts etc., also postcards of the cathedral and city and in the circumstances he felt no compunction at all in speaking in Polish to buy some postcards. It seemed clear that the Cathedral was very much Polish and at the same time operating without let or hindrance in what was now an almost totally Ukrainian-populated city.
The sunny afternoon was wearing on and he was anxious to see more of the rest of the city, where most people lived. He took a tram, more or less at random, from near the Diana statue, equipped as he was with one of the tickets bought on arrival in Lwów. He remembered after a short while that the ticket needed to be stamped in the stamping machine provided, and did it just before an inspector got on and checked the ticket. For a mile or so the street was lined with tenement flats, with side streets off likewise,
Lwów, Lviv, Lvov and Lemberg Page 4
