Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

I left the kitchen and stood at the front window of the dacha , slowly drinking tea. There was a desk, a chair and little else in the front room. An ideal writing room, I thought. Over a view of pale road and countless birch trees, the clouds grew darker still. Heavy drops gathered speed, a liquid canter at the window. For a few minutes the rain eclipsed all other sounds with its heavy fall, but soon left an unlikely silence.

Like St Petersburg, Repino was much further north than Moscow. In that gaping midsummer day, twilight came well after midnight. A bare hour of semi-darkness coated the trees in blue before treading an unseen boundary to another day. I walked through the house. The thinning curtains, the whitewashed walls, made the dusty and near-empty rooms glow. I slept little.

In the morning I went outside early. The grass was wild and overgrown, flattened here and there by a few pots and wet with yesterday’s rain. In the yard behind the house were the remains of a vegetable garden, some lettuce or cabbage hanging on. From where I stood in the backyard, to my right was a house, to my left a grassy, empty block, and ahead of me, the forest.

I heard children’s voices drifting, hitting at the walls of the houses or the underside of leaves high in the air. Clusters of berries hung in a mass of red beside the house next door. Behind the neighbour’s house, a mysterious city of greenhouses and small sheds extended towards the encroaching forest. Green shrubs pressed against the hazy windows of the greenhouses, their reaching twigs entwined with disintegrating brown plants so that it was difficult to tell the living from the dead. The sheds had disordered roofs of grey corrugated iron and tall grass guarded the doors. Wooden boards painted yellow, green and sky-blue lay fallen, crushing the stems of the overgrown lawn. Loose paths, grey and pebbly, bowed aimlessly.

I walked to the edge of the yard, where there was a low, sagging wire fence dividing the dacha from the neighbour’s property. As I moved closer to the ancient trees, they almost completely obscured the sky. The air was humid and heavy, full of mosquitoes.

A tall man stepped out of one of the greenhouses. At a guess he was aged in his seventies, with tousled grey hair and a wide wrinkled face, thick eyebrows. He held up one arm in a slow wave and walked over.

I wasn’t sure I felt like talking, but he was approaching so I had to say something. Hello, I called out.

He squinted, nodded.

Pasha, I said. He shook my hand but didn’t say his name.

You’d be a city boy, he said.

Yeah, Petersburg.

Same as us, he said, nodding to his unseen family in the house. Here with the wife and grandkids.

I’m in Primorsky, I said. Pretty quiet place.

We’re on Vasilyevsky Island too. Not as far out. You’re almost swimming out there—a grin cracked his face—nearly in the water.

I grinned too. Yeah, nearly swimming.

Come on over. He waved an arm again, then turned and walked towards a small shed.

I stepped over the fence. Twigs cracked under my feet. He went into the shed and I followed. Musty green, plants and dust. Lots of bottles lined up in a row. The neighbour was hunched over in one corner; jostling bottles released precise clinks and echoes.

My father’s recipe, said the neighbour as he turned around and brushed off a stray leaf, a few dusty roots that clung like webs to the tall bottles. Home-brew, samogon . My father called it his secret samogon . Used to hide the bottles in the forest near our house when I was growing up. I’m not originally from the city. He’d bring one out every now and then, careful not to let the local committee know, if you see what I mean. The neighbour pointed his thumb to the air, meaning them, up there , wherever the authorities were. My mother and Oleg had always done the same and I felt a vague, old longing, thinking of them.

The neighbour held up a bottle at eye level, as if speaking to it. Clear as a tear , he said. That’s what my father would say. You don’t want it cloudy. They’re some of the few memories I have of the man. Of my father. He’d walk in with a bottle, huge grin on his face. And now look at all these bottles here. They say it’s legal now to make your own, but you never know. Seems I’ve inherited my father’s secretive ways.

The neighbour winked. The wrinkles on his face deepened with his smile, his wheezy laugh. He held out the bottle; I smiled with him and took it.

Homemade, I said, feeling the cool, dusty glass. Haven’t had any of this for a while. Sometimes my mother’s friends brought over samogon when I was young.

He’d turned his back and I saw through the gloom that there was a little table in the shed. He was pouring us a drink each. We held up our glasses, nodded, threw back the drink. The shot released a wave of memory. I felt hollow and thought of my mother, dying alone in Moscow. Then I saw that afternoon as a twelve-year-old, sharing secret brandy with Dmitry. I had no idea what had happened to him. He’d moved suburbs before high school.

Dusty brown light filtered through the window in the shed. It was only morning and I wondered how I’d step outside and last the rest of the day. In the next moment, years from my previous thought, the neighbour moved out of the shed and I followed him.

Come for dinner tonight, Pasha, he said, and I heard myself say yes.

We parted ways in the humid air. The neighbour walked towards his house, holding against his chest two bottles of samogon —a liquid as invisible and incapable of freezing as memories. Beating away a few mosquitoes, carrying the bottle the neighbour had given me, I walked back between the leafy city of greenhouses, over the defeated fence, to lie down in the shade of the trees where the forest began.

In the afternoon, I took a long walk along the dusty road running in front of the house. Soon I reached the forest I had walked through the day before. I felt as though I’d arrived at the dacha a long time ago. Following the map I’d brought with me, I passed through thinner, scrubby trees and sandy dirt and eventually reached the water. I scanned my eyes from one end of the coast to the other, taking in the unending plane of sand and sea. The beach was empty. Where traces of tide left a watery glaze, the sand reflected a couple of clouds in the blue sky. The water, part of the Gulf of Finland, was the same that I could see through the bedroom window of my sixth-floor apartment in Primorsky. Looking out across the blue, I stood in awe of how close I was to another country. That the air, a life, a day, could be so different just over there, a sudden transformation at some point over the invisible border with Finland.

Yura’s wife Piia was Finnish. He sometimes said he loved that she was from somewhere else; other times he wondered if the gap between their experiences was too vast. I said I didn’t know if it was better to be with someone who had felt similar things. They seemed a good match, though.

Standing there at the water’s edge, I was reminded of another ill-defined border between Finland and Russia, where the two countries met in the waters of Lake Ladoga. The lake wasn’t far from where I was, in the north. I knew that it sometimes froze over, as if time stopped, and it became possible to cross the blurry threshold. This had happened in the war when the lake became the Road of Life. With Leningrad staggering in a German ring, each winter for two and a half years, Ladoga offered the only way out of the besieged city, like a frozen link between two worlds, or between death and life. And yet it wasn’t solid, safe earth, but more of an imagined place. And so sometimes the false ground broke and trucks with Leningraders fleeing death or, driving the other way, with supplies bringing life were taken beneath the splitting ice. Lives stopped in the chasm, neither leaving nor arriving. It made me shiver, to think of that ice, and the wartime darkness of those night-time attempts to cross the tenuous, illusory land.