I watch her descend the rusty iron ladder up to an attic above our prim and neat house, white cement blocks with bright blue trim. It is almost-Greek blue but not quite, because this is too far northeast to be Greece. This is Ukraine. The rusty iron ladder bends under the weight of her Croc-sandaled, woolen-socked feet. Up she goes into the attic. Was I supposed to follow her? Who knows? That crazy dog sniffs at the glittery pink slippers I had placed upon my backpack, which is considered here to be an ugly, black eyesore. It unmistakably marks me as a foreigner.

“Get away,” I say in English. He irritates me. I should try to have more sympathy for him, but instead of welcoming me with a snarl (as he did when I first arrived) he now jumps up on me, muddying my coat, my pants. “This will take forever to clean,” I groan thinking of the necessary time to be spent bending over the bathtub scrubbing and wringing out my clothes and callusing my hands. He sniffs my backpack; I know what he’s thinking. He might bolt off with my glittery slippers. I refuse to chase this dog around the backyard, dodging chickens. “Go away, you kook,” I say in English.

She has reached the attic and from where I’m standing I can’t see any of it. I want to see it, but am I supposed to follow her? Attics are supposed to be dusty, neglected places like the off-limits balcony-space behind the church’s reverberating organ pipes. You aren’t even supposed to sit up there unless it’s Christmas or Easter and there’s no more space. Conversely, attics are supposed to be places for knick-knacks to sit and wait until Christmas or Easter when they take up temporary residence in hallways and on side tables.

“Pashlee” – she says in Russian. This is some verb of motion I should already know. It means something like: let’s go, come on, came, come, begin to come, start the ending of your action to come. I hear this word all the time; I should know what it means by now. I pashlee up the ladder, the rusty iron ladder. It’s not completely affixed to the edifice of the house. It doesn’t worry me, but it sways a bit. I climb up gingerly. My fingers against rust, up and up. I can feel the slight give of the ladder. I reach the landing and step into the attic and it smells like how potpourri is supposed to smell. It smells like how an elderly relative from the rustic, French countryside would smell if I had an elderly relative from the rustic, French countryside. There are flowers and apricots and unbeknownst plant bits drying. They are drying on linens draped across the dirt floors. They are drying on linens draped across lounge chairs that hail from Elvis’ beach party films, except these lounge chairs have never been accessories to bikini-clad fun. These lounge chairs are dressed like Halloween ghouls bearing up dried apricot corpses. I’ve discovered where the dried apricot that appears in my huge bowl of oatmeal each morning comes from.

The large space is bisected by a huge, wooden pillar. In front of the pillar are almost-neat stacks of the type of heterogeneous mix of almost-junk, almost-trash that make an attic an attic. However, these articles are distinct murmurs from the former Soviet Union. Russian hieroglyphics are dully splayed across the covers of dusty books. I want to look closely at what is here, but I don’t want to stare. To the right there is a blue bicycle. It is the color of the house’s trim. I wonder if it’s Nadia’s bicycle. I wonder how long this upended bicycle has sat here. Behind the pillar are clotheslines. Four clotheslines. I don’t know where they are anchored. Bed-linens, my bed-linens, the pillowcase that I have slept on, the beautiful pillowcase embroidered with distinctly Ukrainian flowers (if anything can be called distinctly Ukrainian), hang on the clotheslines above the dried plant bits whose scent innocuously haunts this space.

She is talking to me in normal Russian, which is entirely too fast. I understand every other word, which is enough to think I understand. I just nod and say yes. I think she is explaining to me that – now I (informal) hang laundry here because the winter weather will be very cold outside, on the street (I was wondering how one dries clothes in the snow). Here in the attic (so she says in Russian) here, here (soo-da, soo-da) you (informal) hang clothes; weather will be bad – I am one-quarter listening and three-quarters looking at the way the light filters into this attic through this window and the window’s metal grating, twisted and braided. I love the way this grating wraps and weaves through its glass labyrinth.

“Da?” she insists. I should have been listening more attentively, but I am busy wondering about the way the attic looks when real sunlight beams through this window and its grating. Now, in November, grayness unremittingly holds the sun by its neck. Its seeming-death-gasps will cease and submit to darkness around four in the afternoon. However, it is not quite this time and the faint light crawling in through this window is enough to allow me to imagine this attic pierced by a more beautiful summer light.

“Da,” I say, hoping that was the right response. I understand enough to be pretty positive about what’s going on. She starts taking the linens down from the line. Nay mo-kree – (not wet) – she is saying. “Da,” I say robotically, wondering if I should help. I stand awkwardly because mostly I want to look around – to look at this window more, to look at this bike and the way it sits upturned on its seat. How many wheels does it have? I don’t know. I don’t look up; I look down and see that the floors are hard-packed dirt. She is taking down the linens saying something I really don’t understand.

My eyes find a baby carriage. I think about my grandmother’s baby carriage, which for all my life has nestled Amish dolls, faceless and vapid, in wicker and wrought-iron bars. I wonder about my great-grandmother pushing my grandmother as a baby in that baby carriage in a Depression-era Ohio that I don’t know. I wonder about the streets and the trees. Surely there are trees, red-leafed, shedding listlessly as the leaves that fall outside now. This baby carriage is not like that one. It stands carmine in the corner. Its rods gleam aluminum. Maybe this was Nadia’s baby carriage.

“Pashlee,” I hear. Time to go. I offer to take the linens but I am dismissed with a “nay nada.” I turn to descend the rust ladder; I pashlee. Pashlee, pashlee, it sounds like a command straight from ballet class. Relevé! Rond de jamb! Pashlee! I flex and point my feet, but the articulation is lost in translation from canvas slippers to leather boots. I jump down the last step, landing in third, and look up to observe how she will manage to one-arm the linens down the slightly swaying ladder. This is not because I doubt her ability. Rather, I observe how to be less awkward for the soon-to-come time when I must descend the ladder with my articles of clothing…

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