The 1989 May outburst of the soft X-ray transient GS 2023+338 (V404 Cyg)

We reanalyse archival Ginga data of the soft X-ray transient source GS 2023+338 covering the beginning of its 1989 May outburst. The source showed a number of rather unusual features: very high and apparently saturated luminosity, dramatic flux and spectral variability (often on ~1s time-scale), and generally very hard spectrum, with no obvious soft thermal component characteristic for soft/high state. We describe the spectrum obtained at the maximum of flux and we demonstrate that it is very different from spectra of other soft X-ray transients at similar luminosity. We confirm previous suggestions that the dramatic variability was the result of heavy and strongly variable photoelectric absorption. We also demonstrate that for a short time the spectrum of the source did look like a typical soft/high state spectrum but that this coincided with very heavy absorption.