When Nataliya had finished the last crumbs of her cake, I paid the bill and we left the café, the bell tinkling as the door closed behind us. At half past four, the grey winter afternoon had already turned to night. I offered Nataliya my arm, as the cobbled street was slippery with frozen snow. After only a few paces, I felt the warmth of her shoulder against mine through my heavy coat.

A damp, smoky mist hung in the air. From the courtyard of the Armenian cathedral came the mingled scents of wet masonry and stale incense. A motor scooter bumped over the cobblestones toward us, its headlight a weak yellow. Once it had passed, the street was deserted.

For a time, there was only the clopping of Nataliya’s high-heeled boots echoing from the walls. Then I heard coming toward us other boots, sounding in brisk, ragged unison, and a squad of militiamen, in fur hats and grey-green overcoats, swung around the corner in a loose march. I felt their eyes on us as they passed. The soldiers weren’t to know I hardly knew this woman, or that walking together was the greatest intimacy we had shared.

It was entirely by chance I was walking with Nataliya at all. I had come to L’viv, Ukraine, to look for traces of my grandmother Eva. Family lore had it that she fled this city after the first war. By 1920 she had certainly reached Singapore, where she married my grandfather. But these grandparents of mine both died before I was born, and all we had of them were a couple of stiff cabinet photographs, a British Army discharge record, and an exercise book, half full of pasted-in clippings from the Singapore Free Press and the Straits Times.

Buckled from glue, heat and damp, these pages of grainy newspaper cuttings were the closest connection I had with my grandparents. They first recorded the couple’s engagement, and then, with the faintly sad attention to detail usual in an expatriate community, their wedding, her dress, her bouquet, the reception at the Sea View hotel. Then followed clippings noting their involvement in the social affairs of the colony; she sang at a variety performance; he played rugger for Singapore against Johore. There was a record of the trial of a cheque-passer, in which my grandfather gave evidence. It was strangely moving to read words he had actually spoken. Then there were two accounts, one from each newspaper, of my grandfather’s funeral. He was thirty-nine.

The rest of the book was blank, the remaining pages as warped as the rest, but with nothing pasted over their faint, blue-ruled lines. Those last twenty-odd leaves were as much a part of our family history as the pages before them; a life cut short, a story undeveloped. Left a widow, my grandmother brought her baby daughter to Australia, and shortly thereafter died, of a broken heart, her daughter – my mother – told me.

My interest in Grandmother Eva only increased during my adolescence. Unsure of my identity like most teenagers, I wanted to know what I might have inherited from her. I developed the idea that I might understand myself better if I could find out more about her.

I decided that as soon as I finished my university entrance examinations, I would travel to Ukraine, in pursuit of my grandmother. It would be my first trip overseas as an adult. I flew out of Sydney on a hot, muggy Saturday morning in early December, a week after my eighteenth birthday.

I still remember how alien L’viv appeared during the taxi ride from the airport to my hotel. The street signs, the architecture, the tramcars, the way people dressed, all utterly unfamiliar, and faintly threatening. Still, it was more or less a European city, with archives and offices and church registries; I should be able to trace Grandmother Eva, if she had really lived here.

I had only a smattering of phrase-book Ukrainian, and I would need help dealing with the bureaucracy. I walked into the first translation bureau I saw in the city centre, explained about my search, and asked about interpreting services. The woman in charge asked me to wait, made a couple of phone calls, and five minutes later Nataliya arrived.

She came in from the snowy street wearing a heavy camel-coloured overcoat, a maroon scarf wound up to her chin, and knee-length brown boots. She looked to be in her early twenties, two or three years older than me. Her face was round, with porcelain-fair skin, a small nose, hazel-green eyes and a pale rose mouth. Her hair was cut in a bob and dyed reddish orange. She listened, nodding, to the woman in the bureau, who spoke to her in rapid Ukrainian, then turned to me. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked in strongly accented English.

I was taken aback. I’d only meant to ask whether interpreters were available and how much they cost. Evidently, my explanation hadn’t been understood. But whether I had sought it or not, now I had my own personal interpreter.

‘Martin Evans,’ I introduced myself. ‘Very glad,’ she said, shaking my hand vigorously, ‘and I am Nataliya.’  We went out into the street. There was a gusty wind, and even though the pavement was iced over, grit blew into my left eye. I rubbed it and blinked, but it stung and began to water.

‘Where do you wish to begin?’ Nataliya asked me, buttoning up her coat, her orange-dyed hair fanning across her broad, pale forehead. I didn’t know. I had intended to visit the city cemetery, but I’d also intended to do some research first, rather than wandering round peering at headstones at random. Things had moved too quickly for me, and now, distracted by my stinging eye, knowing this woman had been summoned expecting to work and be paid, I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t actually ready for her today. ‘Lykachiv Cemetery,’ I said.

‘Do you know where is grave?’ she asked.

‘No, but I know the family name.’ Nataliya’s expression did not change; she nodded calmly. ‘There are very many graves. You will see,’ she said.

We turned into a broad avenue. A line of tram tracks swerved to meet the footpath where a group of swaddled babushkas stood waiting under a concrete shelter. The old women looked at me, obviously a foreigner, with prickly suspicion.

The tram arrived, and we climbed up its dented metal steps and crammed ourselves inside. A thickset fellow with a boxer’s nose sprang up to offer Nataliya his seat. I stood next to her, hanging from a greasy leather hand-strap. A stocky conductress pushed her way through the crowd of passengers. She had the thin-lipped, lined face of a heavy smoker, and frizzy dyed-blonde hair stuck out from under her cap. ‘Two,’ I told her in my best Ukrainian, handing her the money. She looked down at Nataliya and back at me. ‘Two?’ she asked, as if there must be some mistake. ‘Yes, two,’ I said, nodding. Frowning, she tore off two flimsy paper tickets, pushed them into my hand, then elbowed past me to get to other passengers.

The windows of the tram were fogged up, but after three stops Nataliya signed that the next was ours. I found myself standing on a potholed footpath, with a sharp cold wind slicing into me. Three elaborate red-brick arches rose above a wide gate. We went inside.

My first impression was of whiteness; snow was piled everywhere, on the graves, on the paths, on the branches of trees. My second was of confusion. The cemetery had nothing of the orderly, laid-out arrangement I had imagined. It was more like a huge, neglected park that happened to be crammed with graves. Headstones stood amongst bare mossy tree trunks. Paths wove between iron-fenced plots, broken columns, and family monuments like small chapels. But what struck me most was the abundance of funeral statuary. White marble angels inclined themselves gently over the doors of mausoleum vaults; stone youths lay under fluted stone draperies; life-sized maidens, swathed in wisps of marble gauze, wept into their folded arms, their long, shapely limbs caked in snow. Beauty and melancholy went hand in hand.

‘Kwasniewska is the name,’ I told Nataliya, holding out a square of paper with my grandmother’s surname in block capitals. She glanced at it without expression. ‘Let us ask in the office,’ she said, pointing to a drab concrete hut.

In the office I learned, with Nataliya’s help, that there was no register of the older graves, and that many had been defaced or removed during the civil war, the second war and later again under the Soviets, who had bulldozed history they didn’t want remembered. My visions of going straight to a defined section of the cemetery and coming delightedly upon headstones bearing my grandmother’s family name dissolved. I looked around uncertainly. Nataliya, pointing with her chin, set off along a snow-lined gravel path, and I fell into step beside her.

We walked past graves in varying states of repair. A few had collapsed, leaving muddy depressions. Some headstones were worn nearly smooth or camouflaged with lichen. Others bore incised gold lettering, with fresh flowers lying on the snow showing their occupants had been recently remembered. I saw inscriptions in German, Polish, Ukrainian, even in Greek, with crosses in both the Catholic and the distinctive Orthodox shapes.

In summer this place would no doubt be serene, with trees in green leaf casting dappled green shadows on white marble, and soft grass and yellow flowers carpeting the ground between the graves. But today it was bleak. The sky, threatening more snow, was greenish-grey. A cold wind rattled the bare birches. Crows hopped from gravestone to gravestone calling to each other. I felt a very long way from home.

I asked Nataliya if the cemetery workers might know where a grave marked ‘Kwasniewska’ lay. ‘Probably no,’ she said, ‘because they do not understand Latin alphabet, and would not care about Polish graves. But if you give me fifty griven I will ask.’  I gave her two twenties and a ten. ‘Wait here,’ she said, ‘if they see your foreign face, they will ask more money before telling.’ She walked off determinedly, her round back in its caramel-coloured coat disappearing over a rise.

While I waited, I looked at the gravestones around me. These were modest, mostly polished granite, and bore dates from the 1960s and 1970s. Many had the faces of the deceased, copied from photographs, etched into them in black and white. Everyone looked gloomy, and seemed to have dark rings under their eyes. Many had died in their forties or fifties. I supposed life had been hard in the Soviet Union then.

Nataliya returned, her face bearing the same unruffled expression I’d begun to suspect it perpetually bore. ‘I talked to a man who says he is working here fifteen years, and knows every grave,’ she told me. ‘He says there is gravestone with name Kwasniewska, in the western part. He says next to a big Madonna, and it has statue of this woman Kwasniewska on top.’ I must have looked pleased, because Nataliya added in a cautionary tone, ‘He says this, but of course it is uncertain. Like most workers here he is alcoholic.’ A few white snowflakes drifted between us, giving Nataliya’s round, blunt face a faintly romantic appearance I’d not perceived before.

 She led me through a part of the cemetery where the paths bore no footprints. My boots sank into the deep unmarked snow. Soon my feet were wet, and I felt even colder. Still, if a member of my grandmother’s family warranted a statue on her grave, there must be a story here worth discovering.

Rounding a ragged row of dark pines we came upon a large stone Madonna, traces of blue polychrome still visible on her cloak. I hurried toward her. Right beside the Virgin, on a squared block of granite, stood a polished bronze bust of a high-browed, thoughtful-looking woman in a ruffled blouse. Snow had settled on her bronze lips. A plate beneath bore an inscription. I leaned forward. ‘Maria Konopnicka,’ it read, ‘1846-1910.’ There were no other statues anywhere nearby. ‘This must be the grave he meant,’ I said to Nataliya in disappointment. ‘Probably yes,’ she replied, ‘he said right next to the Madonna. I told you, they do not know Polish language, so one name is alike to another.’

I began to regret this whole quixotic and ill-considered enterprise. Even if this had been the resting-place of one of my relatives, what was the purpose in chasing around these long-dead forebears? What could it mean, really, to discover the grave of a person who died long before you were born, whose city you didn’t know and whose language you couldn’t speak?

We cast about the other monuments in the area. Even in this rearmost part of the cemetery, there were lovely, sombre statues, angels and nymphs, but I’d become numb to them. I was chilled and my head was aching. We walked along all the rows of graves between the Madonna and the rear wall, but none bore the name Kwasniewska.

The winter afternoon was closing in, and it was time to leave. I told myself it would be rude simply to pay off Nataliya at the cemetery gate, but in truth, I felt lonely and depressed, and I would have liked her company for a little longer. I asked if she would like a coffee before she went home, ‘on paid time of course,’ I added, to which she gave me a look that made me feel completely mannerless. We took the tram back to the centre, and she led me along the slushy, lamp-lit pavement to a café named Amadeus, wood-panelled, net-curtained and warm. We sat at a small round table in the corner, like friends rather than interpreter and client. My hands quickly lost their chill, and for forty minutes, sitting in this little café with Nataliya, I was entirely content.

I was beginning to find Nataliya quite captivating. I’d had girlfriends during my school years, one quite serious, and thought of myself as rather experienced. But Nataliya was no schoolgirl; she had the confidence and bearing of a woman. And to me, barely eighteen, and knowing only Australia, she was, I have to say, exotic, with her Slavic features and her charmingly accented English. I remembered standing in the cemetery with snowflakes floating between us. I’d only ever seen such things in films. And something about her reminded me of Grandmother Eva’s photo, as if Nataliya might be a channel back to the lives I had come here to trace.

Her perpetually bland expression only made me more intrigued. The only moment of animation I saw on her face all day was in the café, when her cake arrived, a large slice of Sacher torte with a pile of whipped cream. She smiled to herself like a big cat as she looked down at her plate, fork poised in hand. Her skin looked pale outside in the cold, but as the warmth of the café crept into us, her cheeks got pinker and pinker. Staring at her, I began to be convinced she was quite beautiful. I was sorry when she said it was time for her to leave. I attempted to persuade her to stay longer.

‘No, thank you, I must go home and feed my cat. But if you walk with me to bus stop, it will be good.’

Outside, we walked in the mist toward the orange-looking streetlights visible through the bare black trees. Once we turned onto the well-paved main boulevard, she took her hand from my arm. I was disappointed to lose the small gesture of intimacy.

The streetlights really were orange, giving the heaped-up snow an unearthly bluish colour. Women wearing headscarves and men in round fur hats were clustered around the bus stop. A yellow minibus chugged up to the curb, coughing out diesel smoke. Its doors sprang open to reveal it full of people. Nevertheless, another half dozen, including Nataliya, determinedly assaulted the steps and pushed inside. The door squeezed shut and the bus drove off.

I felt aimless once Nataliya had left. We had arranged to meet the next morning at the city archive, a blackened old merchant’s house in the main square. But now it was only five in the afternoon, already completely dark, and I had nothing to do. I strolled the length of the prospect to the baroque Opera Theatre and back, the Habsburg solidity of the buildings flanking it unsettled by an occasional Slavic onion dome. Eventually the cold got the better of me. I didn’t want to sit in a bar or restaurant alone. I bought a bottle of local vodka, a loaf of black bread and a wedge of cheese in a dingy corner shop. After carefully navigating two blocks of unlit pavement, I came to the high iron gates of Ivan Franko Park and took the path running uphill toward my hotel.

The park was deserted. Big black pine trees spread their branches over the white snow. I smelled coalsmoke and heard dogs barking. I was walking briskly, and near the bandstand I strode too confidently on the glassy path. My feet shot out from under me, and I landed flat on my back on the frozen ground, driving out all my breath. As I struggled to my feet, I saw the white circle of the moon above the peaks of the pines, with Venus just below it. The snow clouds had blown away. Hands on knees, I dragged in a few rasping breaths of cold air before continuing, more gingerly, towards the exit gates.

I got back to my hotel room cold, hungry and tired, feeling as if it were midnight. The plastic digital clock beside the bed showed ten past six.

After taking a hot shower and scrubbing myself dry with the hotel’s thin towels I felt a bit better. In a cupboard under the television I found two teacups, a bottle opener, and three small vodka glasses. Sitting by the window, I ate black bread and cheese and drank a couple of vodkas. After a while, I felt less upset about the day’s failure and more cheerful about the next day’s prospects, including the prospect of seeing Nataliya again. I sat looking out at the snowy park until the vodka made me groggy enough to sleep.

Over the next two days, with Nataliya’s help, I trawled through a series of dusty offices, all redolent of the former Soviet Union in their linoleum floors, wooden pigeonhole racks and the hostile attitude of their guardians. The sum of it didn’t come to much; there were three references to women named Kwasniewska, none of them my grandmother, although one might have been her aunt or sister. It was scarcely a successful visit, if I measured it by the results of my research.

But throughout this time the two-dimensional sepia image of my grandmother, my original motive for coming here, was increasingly overlaid by the figure of Nataliya. I was becoming used to the sound of her voice, the pattern of her accented speech, her square white hands with their pointed fingers. I kept reminding myself she was only accompanying me because it was her job, but, nevertheless, I found pleasure in our small personal interactions. We ate lunch together between visits to archives, we had coffee at the Amadeus before she went home each evening, and one morning she insisted we take the bus up to Castle Hill so I could see the city from there, surely not interpreter’s work at all. I knew it was absurd to imagine any romantic association with this woman who had told me nothing of her private life and had shown me no sign of warmth that couldn’t be explained by ordinary human civility, but I began privately to nourish the idea all the same. I was, in my defence, only just eighteen.

I had come to L’viv for ten days, and my return flight, via Warsaw, was the next Saturday. On Thursday I told Nataliya. ‘I will come with you to airport,’ she said firmly. I was surprised and pleased. I’d read that the rules of hospitality were different in eastern Europe, and perhaps if you’d worked with someone for a week it was proper to see them off when they left. And perhaps it was just good business practice, in case I might return, or recommend her interpreting services to other well-paying Westerners. I told myself all that, but I also harboured some hope that Nataliya was coming to the airport because she had become fond of me personally in some way she hadn’t yet disclosed.

That afternoon we went to the Catholic diocesan office where we went over the registers, but Nataliya’s demeanour displayed no greater affection than on that first chilly day we’d met. And on Friday, when we visited the Uniate cathedral registry, she left at noon, saying she had another appointment.

Saturday morning was cold and sunny. The snow covering the park sparkled, and from time to time slid in clumps off the weighted-down branches of the pines. I was sitting on a vinyl couch in the hotel lobby when Nataliya arrived. We rode to the airport in a hotel taxi, a heavy old black Moskvitch with sagging springs. Throughout the drive, she looked out her window at the sun shining thinly on the snowy city, and we said very little.

L’viv airport was a typical former Soviet airport; ugly, crowded, hard to negotiate, with no cafeteria, just a stand-up bar selling vodka and bad instant coffee. I checked in my bag, and we went outside and sat on a bench in the wintry sun. Nataliya was telling me about her sister who now lived in Chicago. I half listened, thinking more about what I wanted to say to her. Eventually I broke in on her tale.

‘Nataliya, I will have to come back here to finish my research. Can I see you when I do?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, shrugging and smiling faintly, as if she didn’t believe I’d be back at all, or didn’t care one way or the other. The rest of what I’d planned to say seemed silly after that, and anyway, it was nearly time to go through immigration. We stood; I moved to kiss her goodbye, and she let me brush her cheek before stepping back and raising a mittened hand in farewell. An hour and a half later, I was staring glumly at the shelves of duty-free vodka at Frederic Chopin Airport, Warsaw.

When I got back to Sydney, I sent Nataliya an email thanking her for her efforts, just to maintain some contact with her. She didn’t reply, and I could hardly write again saying the same thing. Then my first university term began, occupying most of my time and energy one way and another, and my thoughts of Nataliya receded.

But at the beginning of July, I received an email from her. She wrote, in her idiosyncratic English:

I read the email over three or four times. My first trip to L’viv hadn’t advanced my pursuit of my ancestry one bit. But now my quest gave me the opportunity, or the excuse, to return there. Certainly I would inspect these relics and talk to this Alina. But really, it was to see Nataliya again, Nataliya with her bobbed orange hair, calm round face, green-flecked hazel eyes. I wanted to hear her low contralto voice; I wanted to sit with her in the Café Amadeus and eat cake. I wanted to walk with her around the smoky misty streets in the city centre, and to stand once again with her on Castle Hill to see the copper-green church spires of the city below. These visions captivated me, so much that I forgot I hardly knew Nataliya at all. I took this discovery – her girlfriend Alina a distant relative of mine! – as a clear sign I was destined to see her again.

I wrote back saying I would prefer to visit L'viv than exchange emails, and I would come after my end-of-year university exams.

I booked tickets to L’viv at the end of November, planning to stay a fortnight. I began to think of an appropriate present to take Nataliya, something personal but not intrusively so.

In October I wrote again to Nataliya giving the date and time of my arrival, wondering privately if she might even come to the airport to meet me. I spent a good deal of time over my message, to strike the right note between a declaration of affection and an appropriate polite reserve. I ended up with a quite formal letter, but I made it clear enough I was coming back to see her personally.

I thought it an important communication, and I expected an immediate reply, but it didn’t come. I let it go a week, then another, checking my emails every morning. I didn’t like to draw the conclusion that my coming back to L’viv was completely unimportant to Nataliya. Perhaps she was away in the countryside. Perhaps her computer was down.

Exactly two weeks after my email, I received a reply. I hesitated for a moment; my whole life, I told myself, might turn on this message. Then I clicked it open. Nataliya had written:

A string of email addresses and phone numbers followed.

So tumbled down the house of cards I had built. A faint movement of air – the passage of an email through space – and it all fell flat, so swiftly and easily that it was obvious it had no substance in the first place. While I was daydreaming of returning to L’viv to see Nataliya, even deliberating about a present for her, she was arranging her wedding. Nevertheless, however foolishly, it stung me that she hadn’t at least written something like, ‘I’m sorry I won’t see you,’ after my careful letter with its unmistakable statement of affection.

Of course, Nataliya had absolutely no need to write anything of the sort. I’d created a fantasy about her out of loneliness and adolescent romanticism. And I knew that all along, but I’d chosen to rely on what I imagined were signs and portents and to disregard the facts in front of me.

I cancelled the plane tickets and my hotel reservation. I wrote to Nataliya congratulating her on her marriage and saying I had to repeat an exam and couldn’t travel after all, and perhaps Alina could scan the photo and letters and send them to me. See, even now you can’t tell the truth, I told myself. Then I persuaded myself that the truth – that I’d believed we might have something between us – would only embarrass Nataliya. But even that wasn’t true. The real truth was I was embarrassed for myself, because I had begun to regard myself as an adult, but I had just proved to have the emotional maturity of a fifteen-year-old.

Later, when I had finished my degree, I worked in several cities in Europe, but ended up accepting a position in Warsaw, where I met my wife Basia, a university tutor. We set up house in a small flat near the New Town Square and spent whatever free time we had in visiting the greater and lesser cities of Europe. One evening we were discussing a short trip to Ukraine; they had recently restored the train route from Warsaw through L’viv to the old Habsburg cities of Stanislau and Czernowitz. I told my wife about my efforts, a decade before, to trace my grandmother’s history in L’viv, (‘Lwow, please,’ said Basia) and about the freezing week I’d spent there with my very own interpreter traipsing through archives, registry offices and cemeteries. Basia listened to all this, then said, smiling, ‘And of course you fell in love with this exotic Slav creature.’

 ‘Not in love,’ I protested, ‘but you could say I was infatuated with her; I know it’s absurd, but I was only eighteen, and I’d never been outside Australia.’ And I went on to tell Basia, trying to make it as amusing as possible, about me sitting in Sydney daydreaming about Nataliya, only to learn by email she was getting married to an American all along.

‘The one consolation I have,’ I said, ‘is that I didn’t make myself completely ridiculous by blurting it all out to her. At least she never knew what I was thinking.’ Basia threw her head back and laughed, that treacly low-pitched laugh I loved so much. ‘Oh, Martin, you are priceless, you are as naïve as ever. She knew, you can count on it. She knew from day one. Women always know,’ she said, still chuckling as she reached for her drink.