Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

In Anya’s room I saw the postcard of the unnamed German town on the windowsill, resting against the glass as though it was a substitute for the mustard-yellow building seen through the real window. She had another print taped to the wall. I walked over, hands in pockets, and looked at it closely.

Sveshnikov, she said, nodding. I love his work—though I don’t know if love’s the right word for that kind of art.

After a moment she said, I admire him.

I knew Boris Sveshnikov’s works. He had spent years in Vetlosian, one of the labour camps in the Urals. At first he wasn’t able to get hold of materials to paint or draw, but eventually, on changing camps due to a friend’s help, he was able to access paper and pen to keep his art going. His works were marked by their melancholic faces bathed in tense, stormy colours, the elongated, reaching hands of pearly green, the cloaked grey figures, skeletal yet somehow still alive.

The print on Anya’s wall showed a city view formed of teal, dark purple, aquamarine and light pink square dashes, almost like rainbow-coloured fish scales. A female face looked on from a strange perspective, as if the artist was standing with her on a hill somewhere above the city. Her lips and eyebrows were thin and her eyes were clouded with greenish shadows. The title was Recollection . I couldn’t see any roads, but the longer I stared, more faces emerged from the city. There was an eerie sound to it in my mind, like a musical violence inside the image.

It’s odd, said Anya, with a serious expression now familiar to me. After he was released, Sveshnikov’s style changed. The drawings he did in the camp were very realistic—depictions of torture, or dead bodies lying on the ground while people walking by look the other way. But his later paintings are more surreal, almost distorted. The figures look less and less like any recognisable human form.

I think I’ve seen some of those, I said. Sveshnikov said he didn’t paint for any political reason, he painted for the grave.

Anya nodded slowly. But maybe because his art changed so much, she said, that’s what was political about it, even if he didn’t want it to be.

We were quiet for a moment. I thought it was almost as though, during his time in the camp, the rules of expression had undergone a mutilation of their own in the deep recesses of the artist’s mind.

Since Gorbachev’s call for openness, the press had begun to carry revelations, memories, stories—horrors in an endless stream—and Anya told me that she had become obsessed with these stories of the past.

My mother hates it, she said. She can’t understand why I would want to read it all, let alone why I’d want a picture like Sveshnikov’s in my room. Whenever I ask her about her own past, she insists there’s nothing to tell. I’ve got no stories , she says. But she lived through Stalin’s years. Everyone’s got a story. This whole city’s a story.

I watched Anya as she went to stand by the window, looking at the postcard or maybe just through the glass at the building opposite. She lit a cigarette and turned around.

My father’s is a more complicated story, she said. Slowly a thin smoke plume dissolved in front of her. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

I walked over, touched her hair, soft blonde reeds, repeating the motion as though committing the act to memory. To be in a room of our own, Anya’s bedroom, had a silence and freedom about it. Usually you found a few minutes at a friend’s university dorm or the living room divan in the apartment where you grew up—having that place of our own felt like an entirely new space, almost a new life.

Aweek after my mother’s funeral, I took a train from St Petersburg in the direction of silence and the dacha . It was August 1999. Lenin’s bronze arm still reached out over the square at Finland Station. As the train left the city behind and the railroad cut through forests, the tracks were enfolded by walls of deep green. There were few towns along the way. As we passed into the Kurortny District, some grey wooden buildings and old farm plots emerged here and there like the remnants of a village wiped away by a storm the previous day or half a century before.

Scenes appeared like set pieces. A grey-haired woman waited at a bus stop that had lost its walls except for one, on which was scrawled Mama, Happy Birthday! in green paint. An old couple entered a wooden house so slowly they might have been approaching it for hours already. At an unknown train station, someone stood tossing crumbs to a flock of pigeons while the birds all flapped their wings, stepping to and fro like a confused crowd. Then each view disappeared as if it had never been.

Through the window I saw clouds gathering weight and darkening. A few heavy flecks of rain hit the glass. In the seat across from me, two women tied plastic bags over their shoes as we gained on Repino station.

Less than an hour after leaving the city, I stepped out onto the platform at Repino. As the train pulled away, I saw rows of passengers sitting still as though frozen, their faces indistinct through the rain-blurred glass. At the station’s edge, the forest began immediately. I knew the sea was nearby. I had seen the Gulf of Finland as a serrated blue ribbon on the map folded somewhere in my belongings. The eastern arm of the Baltic Sea, it joined Finland, Estonia and Russia in uncertain watery borders. I had read that below the waters, on the silent sand of the gulf floor, was one of the largest known ship graveyards. Since the gulf sea was especially cold, and the salt levels low, some two thousand broken vessels were preserved down there as if time didn’t bother with them.

Near the station was a small shop, a few houses and a weary-looking bistro. Two boys in Adidas tracksuits shared a cigarette beside the grey road. I went to buy a newspaper and some food. A man with clumpy brown hair stood speaking to the cashier. He held a plastic bag, a newspaper under his elbow, but stood to one side, continuing to talk as though not ready to leave. The new prime minister, they were saying. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

The woman nodded and held up a newspaper, her polished purple nails tapping at the edges of the page. And maybe president for him next year, so I hear. Out with old Yeltsin before he falls over, in with a strong man again, please, said the woman, and she rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, where plasterboard sagged like the billowed sail of a boat. I picked up a paper and read the first lines: In one year, for the first time in the country’s history, the first president of Russia will transfer power to a fresh, newly elected president , Yeltsin said. In any case, he will be your president, respected Russians, he who has won in honest and clean elections. He went on to speak of his trust in the new prime minister.

I bought bread, jam, a few apples. I decided not to buy a newspaper and left the produkti shop soon after.

Walking on, after half an hour or so I reached the outskirts of town, where the roads were frayed at the edges with crumbling tar. There was one bus stop, still and lonely as though abandoned. I left the main street and followed a wide dirt road into a forest. A few houses seemed to watch my passage, like timid forest beasts, through the tall pines and draping willows. The leaves dripped. I read again the instructions scribbled on the paper in my hand, looked up and saw that I had reached the small dacha where I was to stay. The house had vertical weatherboards of the lightest green, almost white. I found the key hidden underneath a red brick, as Sergei Ivanovich had told me it would be.

I opened the front door and, feeling heavy with city heat, I let my two bags fall to the floor. The dacha was cool and smelt of dust, so I left the door open and took a few steps in. The wooden floorboards were softly worn. There was a sense of peace in walking through rooms I knew nothing about. I didn’t know the front window view or how it might change across the seasons, and I didn’t know the scents in the thin cotton bedsheets. In the kitchen there were three unmatched chairs, a somehow diminished number, which held no mark of past occupants. On the walls were several small paintings, of valley views, the Neva River in another time. A few books on a high narrow shelf. There were no photos. On the kitchen table were two empty vases. As I moved them to a shelf, the glass felt cold. There was no samovar but I found a heat coil, a glass, then warmed water for tea.