similar to the Gorodotska Street area near the Dworzec Hotel. Soon after the tram later passed the Lychakowski Cemetery, where Polish people were interred. Of course, he would have gone there had he known it had this Polish connection but he didn't know and he didn't. Instead he stayed on the tram a few minutes more, to the end of the line. Here there were still blocks of flats but set apart from each other in their own grounds with gardens rather than courtyards and not lining the streets. It was rather a hilly area. Here there was also a large concrete and glass, Soviet -era building, which was described as a children's centre. In the open land around it there were indeed a few children engaged in some supervised sports-type activities. But not many for a sunny Saturday afternoon in September while the building itself, on several floors and the size of the town hall of a major city, seemed to be almost totally unpatronized though it was staffed and open to the public. There was a small cafeteria off the entrance hall where the cup of tea he bought gave him the distinction of being a sole customer.
He took a brief walk in this outer area of the city, on the edge of the Pogulyanka Park. It was now nearly five o'clock and returning to the city centre on the next tram seemed a natural thing to do. From there he started to trudge the twenty-five minute walk to the neighbourhood of his hotel. He was, notwithstanding the cup of tea, thirsty as well as hungry. He did not feel up to facing a restaurant meal and hoped to buy some orange juice, sausage rolls, fruit etc. for having a picnic in his hotel room. He had been in this situation before in Eastern Europe and for many years in many countries in the region supermarkets had been available in which to pick up some items that looked vaguely tasty and vaguely likely to add up a meal and pay for them at a checkout with little or no effort at speaking the language required. But not here. There seemed to be only the fairly small, non self-service shops taking up ground floor space in some of the tenement blocks that lined the streets. There were also pavement kiosks which did not appear to sell anything he was likely to want: apart from the one he first encountered, near the main station, they did not even sell tram tickets, he being told that that they could be bought on the trams themselves though in fact the latter had neither conductors nor ticket vending machines on board. He had walked twenty minutes or so when he came to a glass-doored chilled drinks cabinet usually found in shops, but this one was freestanding on the pavement. The doors of it could open to give access to a bottle of soft drink but there was no obvious means of buying it. There were a kiosk that looked closed and a cafe, respectively about eleven feet and about eight feet away. He thought that the cabinet was more likely to be linked with the cafe and he went in. As well as a cafe it seemed to sell sweets, drinks etc. to take away and he tried to buy a large carton of fruit juice. But the assistant started to pour some of it in to a glass – just what he didn't want. He attempted to explain, in Ukrainian cobbled together with Russian, that he wanted to buy the whole carton to take away but the assistant and about the only other customer just laughed in his face. He did however manage to elicit from the latter that the pavement cabinet pertained to the kiosk. He again went to the pavement cabinet and selected a bottle of apple juice and took it to the kiosk, which now showed some sign of life. He handed over a note of slightly higher value than the stated price, which the young woman inside took but said something angrily to him. He stood hesitantly clutching the can for a few seconds trying to work out what he might have done wrong when she marched out of the kiosk, opened and slammed the cabinet door shut with considerable force, marched back to the kiosk and shut the serving hatch door. Apparently he had not closed the cabinet door sufficiently tightly and how dare he thus waste forty seconds of her time and this dozy useless man certainly wasn't getting any change. To be fair, it couldn't be much of a job being in one of those kiosks maybe all day everyday and a dozy foreigner near the end of a dreary shift who couldn't be bothered or was too stupid to learn Ukrainian properly and probably had an easier life than she did could be the last straw.
In a way, tension between a shop assistant or kiosk attendant and a customer could occur anywhere. But the unpleasant sense of tension here was palpable. Behind the attractiveness of the buildings and the brides-and the general air of romance and albeit faded urban glamour he could not fail to notice that there was an undercurrent of run-down austerity, poverty and some tension which somehow would be bound to lead to some hostility towards people suspected of having a better life than they had. He was reminded of neighbouring East European countries thirty or forty years previously. By contrast, a general provisions shop in the same district, with its separate, staffed, non-self-service counters for different types of goods, did not create problems for him, the greater complexity of the transactions notwithstanding. The two assistants he spoke to were patient, polite, even friendly and he came out with a selection of sweet buns, apples and sausages which would ensure that his picnic doubled as a proper meal. The evening he spent in the room, with a mixture of reading the guide book of the Ukraine, scrolling through the various TV channels available, writing postcards and sitting around doing nothing as well as bag packing. As previously after leaving present-day Polish territory. he could get no emails nor much else he tried out of his cell phone and be hoped it was because he was he was in the Ukraine and not because it had conked out.
The next morning, Sunday, it was time to take leave of the hotel and catch the 10.12 train which would, or at any rate part of it would, eventually get to Trenin, Slovakia. Hand baggage over his shoulder and suitcase on its wheels he walked up the Gorodotska the six minutes it took to reach the Saint Elzbieta church, near the start of the third-of-a mile dual-carriageway that ended at the vast, domed station building. As he made to cross the road to reach the station avenue an attractive girl, whose manner was as friendly as the woman in the kiosk the day before had been hostile, handed him a 4-page newspaper entitled Nasha Ukraina Nash Lviv (Our Ukraine Our Lviv), the publication being a political and/ or social statement of some kind. A few minutes later, when about a third of the way along the straight avenue, it occurred to him that he could have tried asking her, in English, what the newspaper was about and that there was a sporting chance she would be willing to write to him in Birmingham and tell him about life in Lwów. Time was running out however and he decided to continue walking while he considered. He would now have a good ten minutes to spare to catch the train whereas if he went back to speak to her he would be down to four minutes or less. Anyway, he didn't go back, with various factors playing a role in the decision. At the station he stayed in the main booking hall until there were six minutes left: time to go to the platform. The train, coach after coach, stretched away out of sight round the curve of the platform. At the entry to each coach there was an attendant and three times the attendant concerned, on seeing his ticket booklet, directed him further along, until he came to the very front coach-number 15. There were by now less than two minutes left and he ran with his luggage, managing maybe seven miles an hour, to the very last passenger door. where he was finally allowed on. This coach was smarter than most and had Slovak railway livery, and he fancied that the attendant was himself a Slovak.
Up until this time he had felt it likely that he had been seriously overcharged by the ticket office clerk. The ticket, several pages long, seemed to be priced at the equivalent of about thirty pounds rather than the seventy he had been required to pay. But this underlying resentment, added as it was to the resentment at the loss of ten pounds at the hands of the self-styled Baptist, was largely dispelled by what the attendant had now ushered him in to. It had its own sliding door from the corridor and was similar in size to the sleeping compartments in the overnight sleeper from Kraków to this city, but the compartment was all for him. On the upper level was a bunk and a large space for storing luggage. On the lower level was an upholstered bench seat for daytime where four people could have sat. There was a washbasin, albeit with little or no water available from its taps, and a sophisticated control panel for the lights even though in pra
ctice only one rather dim light could actually be turned on. So, this was to be his home for the next seventeen hours. For the next couple of hours or so he settled down on his comfortable seat to enjoy the passing scenery. The whole area was, according to his Polish-produced map, within the area that had been in the pre-war Polish state. As the hours passed the train did not travel at great speed but probably a good fifty-five miles per hour, at which rate the journey would be over inside six hours, allowing for occasional stops at large towns and at the frontier. So how were the remaining eleven hours going to be tilled?
The landscape, always quite attractive, became increasingly wooded, with more moorland and mountains. There were also occasional industrial complexes, some run down if not closed down, presumably in deference to the free market capitalism which apparently applied here as almost everywhere else these days. Three hours and more now having passed it was time to stretch his legs. A tea or coffee would be
Lwów, Lviv, Lvov and Lemberg Page 5