Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

And sometimes, certain friends stopped coming. Perhaps the young man with black hair who left his hat under the chair at the back of the room, or the woman who was known for her good kotleti patties; they would be reduced to names I heard, still spoken at the table, but now turned into stories, or a telling expression on another’s face. Gradually, I forgot what they looked like. Sometimes even the names vanished from the air and were only scribbled on paper, handed across the table with a knowing look, before nervous hands tore up the paper and threw the pieces in the stove. Those people became slightly unreal to me. I knew that the men and women attached to those unspoken names were not dead, exactly. Yet they had disappeared from the two rooms that were my real world. Like characters in a long-lost book, I could scarcely picture them in prison or a labour camp or exile. Perhaps that was how I came to think, even when I was no longer a child, that those who disappeared were not gone forever, but went to some other place, in the present or the past or somewhere else entirely, where terrible truths hid.

Of all the dissident aunts and uncles in the apartment of my childhood, Oleg was the one I worried about most. I feared he wouldn’t return one day, like some of the others; that he’d disappear into the void of a name unspoken. Oleg was always full of smiles for me; wrinkles splayed from his blue eyes and over his forehead even when he was a young man. In his thin, veined hands he would always be holding something for me to read: a book or loose sheets of paper. Though the discussion at our kitchen table was rarely explicitly denied to me, I had a sense from an early age that they were communicating in ways I was missing, in a language I didn’t properly understand. As I grew older, and entered my teens, Oleg welcomed me into that world. When he handed me books, single sheets of onionskin paper, copies of the Chronicle of Current Events , smuggled journals and other banned authors (for I really felt he was introducing me to the person— Here is Brodsky ; There you go, meet Platonov ), it was as though he was acknowledging that I could understand, that I perceived the world around our kitchen table as a universe different to the Moscow outside and that I was, with them, something of an outsider.

I clung to those scuffed journals and blank-faced books, especially as a teenager—not so much for their censored content but because they came from him, and if I collected enough, had enough evidence of his many visits, then Oleg’s presence would be solidified somehow, and it would not be possible for him to disappear.

Iwas thirty-four and living in St Petersburg when my mother died. It was 1999 and for six years I had lived there, in Primorsky District where the streets are wide like grey rivers, so far from the city centre that the buildings suddenly end where the Gulf of Finland begins, as cliff edges meet the sea.

The phone rang at three in the morning. It was Oleg. He told me the news and said he would help organise the funeral. I hung up the phone, lit a cigarette and stood at the window in my bedroom. As though I was trying to remember her all at once, I saw my mother as I knew her when I was young, in the apartment where we had lived in Moscow; and then as a woman I didn’t know, a young dissident in the sixties, writing and publishing illegal articles. Her life in the underground. Emerging through those images, like film developing in a darkroom, was the face of my mother in the present, or as she had been the day before, when she was alive. A woman aged sixty-two. She’d spoken of doctors’ visits and some health problems, but I didn’t know—maybe she didn’t either—that things were serious enough for her to die. It was strange, but those old moments and images, like the apartment in Primorsky where I lived alone, were soundless. I thought of that nearly silent moment when a piece of music is almost over, the piano resonance is both there and not there, in a moment that is, perhaps, like the moment of comprehending death.

It was July, the height of summer, with a gold, bluish sky hiding the fact that it was really still night. From the sixth-floor apartment where I lived I could see the gulf as a broad quicksilver sheet through the window of my bedroom. My mother was born in Chudovo, a town partway between St Petersburg and Moscow. I’d visited once as a boy, but my grandparents had died when I was young so we hadn’t been there since. I would have to call the cemetery there. And buy a train ticket. I would have to go back to Moscow soon, too, to the apartment, and sort through whatever was left behind. It was reassuring, to have some noise come back to my mind as I thought of those practicalities, as things asked for my attention.

After staring at the gulf for a while I went to the other window, in the kitchen, where three pale grey and cream apartment towers formed a wall of rectangular windows. Like row upon row of mirrors, depending on the time of day those windows sent back countless images of my own apartment building, a grey day, or the sun. Seeing the odd yellow rectangle at night-time never failed to offer me a kind of distant company. But it was four in the morning, now, and they were all lightless.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I opened my mail that lay forgotten in a chair: a list of summer classes from the school where I taught Russian to foreigners; from the new bar on Korablestroiteley Street nearby a waxy, coloured advertisement sang of Baltika beer.

I lay on my bed but could only drift uneasily around sleep, so instead I spent the rest of the white night, and the start of the new day, sitting and smoking, or pacing from one window to the other.

In the early afternoon I made tea, ate some bread, then went out. In Primorsky I lived in a chosen solitude. If I left the apartment early enough, before the families had left for school or work, or later, after the old couples had gone for their walks, I could slip out, down the elevator, across the car parks and wide grey roads, board the marshrutka and sit at the back of the bus, unnoticed except to pass my coins to someone up front.

But that afternoon I felt like walking. As I crossed the dual lanes of Korablestroiteley, the sun beat down and the air was humid, heavy with fumes of the melting city. I cut through a few side streets. In a ragged yard around some old apartment buildings, four or five dogs, strays, barked as I passed by. Waiting at the Nalichnaya Street intersection, I heard faint music and bleary summer revelry float over from the bar on the corner.

I continued, passing over Smolenka River bridge, over Maly Prospekt, Sredny Prospekt. Eventually I reached the edge of Vasilyevsky Island. The air felt immediately clearer, close to the water, away from the concrete thicket of apartment blocks. The wide sunlight cast sharp shadows on the pavement and across the grand buildings painted beige, pink, pale yellow. A young couple walked with a pram covered by a white blanket against the sunlight. An older woman, round and blonde, stood in a girl’s dress, all blue dots and frills, on the embankment beside the Neva River. Her husband wore a naval shirt, blue and white striped, over his round belly and murmured something to her as an ancient-looking cigarette clung to his lip.

From Vasilyevsky I took a metro, with the idea that I would go to Moscow station to find out about train tickets. In the subway it was cool, a relief from the heat, though a warm, metallic breeze fluttered down as I rode the escalator up to the station exit.

As I crossed over a busy intersection onto Vosstaniya Square, I saw a beautiful bride at a memorial obelisk, probably ready to lay her bouquet there, like so many brides before her since the end of the war. A few other bouquets already wilted in the heat. With the groom at her side she posed for a photograph beside the granite body of the obelisk. I stopped at the edge of the square, caught by the sight of the bride. As she stood there, still and statuesque, an almost spectral white light reflected from her dress in the glare of the day. I couldn’t help thinking that the burst of red across her chest, from the bouquet in her hands, had the appearance of a grievous crime. The bridal couple smiled, almost grimacing in that intense sunlight, at the photographer who stood a few metres away.